Trollheart

IV: Abandon All Hope

I arose the next morning to find Holmes gone. This was no surprise and nothing new. My friend was constantly vanishing, visiting this haunt or that, tracking down informants or running down theories. I set off for my practice, and was walking by the Church of St. Margaret's when to my utter astonishment who should I see coming out of the grounds but Holmes! I believed this was the first time I had seen him in a church, and the first since he had been forcibly and rather comically dragged there by the soon-to-be-husband of Irene Adler, to stand as witness to their wedding.

Not wishing to embarrass him into admitting that he had obviously had to reach out to a higher power for inspiration and help, I kept my distance, but even from where I stood I could see a frown of distaste and dismay written upon his hard, stern features. He drew something from his pocket, and I saw it was his notebook. He looked at it, wrote something down, replaced it.

Then, looking around in case he was observed, he hurried away. I hailed a cab and continued on to my practice, confident he had not seen me.



It was late in the evening when Holmes walked in the door. He looked drawn, weary, sick at heart. I moved towards him, but he waved me back with his usual irritated look, and collapsed into his chair. Gratefully, he lit his pipe for the first time that day, inhaling and then with exceeding pleasure blowing out the thick smoke rings. For a few moments, he just sat like that, watching the smoke drift slowly up to the ceiling, a haunted look in his eyes.

“Watson,” he said to me in his most serious voice, “I do believe that if there is a Hell, we have ourselves manufactured it, right here on Earth.”

I was unsure how to respond to this, so merely waited for him to continue, as it was evident he would. He sighed.

“In all the places I have spent my worst hours – waiting in the cold and rain to catch my quarry, lurking in an opium den in the hope of picking up information, even that time I felt the cold hand of death literally on my throat at the conclusion of the case of the Reigate Squire, as you so poetically named the adventure in Acton, nay, even the horror I felt when exposed to the effects of the devil's foot smoke in Cornwall, nowhere do I believe I have spent a more horrible time than I have passed today. I am not ashamed to admit to you that my very soul shrivelled within me at the sights to be seen within those high, forbidding walls.”

I poured out some brandy from the decanter and took it to him. He smiled, accepted the glass and, to my considerable surprise, drained it at a draught, his fingers so tight on the vessel that for a moment I feared it would burst in his hand.

“But where have you been, Holmes?” I could not fathom what could engender such despair in his bosom.

“The word for Hell,” he said slowly, “is Pentonville.”

Now I understood. He inhaled deeply again, puffing out the smoke almost as if in an attempt to purge his body of any of the air he would have inhaled while at the grim prison.

“You have been to see Mrs. Liebert.” It was the only answer. He nodded, looking away from me.

“I noted yesterday that our criminal justice system needs a serious overhaul,” he reminded me, “if not a complete root-and-branch change. I can think of no part of it which more sorely needs that change than our prison system, with special emphasis on that hell hole.”

There was a cold supper laid out on the table. He rose, unfolding his long legs like a stork, and made his way over to the table, where I joined him. I had of course eaten by now, but I was reluctant to leave him eating alone at the table. For one of the first times in his life, I felt Sherlock Holmes craved, aye, needed company, and I was certainly not about to deprive him of it.

“How did you find her?”

Between bites of cold meat and hot tea, he related to me the story, or at least as much as he could bear to tell me. Holmes had of course visited prisoners before, usually to question them, advise them or just to get an impression from them which would help him to come to a conclusion as to their guilt or innocence. But in the sixty cases which I have committed to print, and the hundreds more which I have not, he had rarely seen a woman in prison. There had of course been lady clients, even some accused of murder, but these had usually been exonerated quickly enough that a prison visit was not necessary. Besides, Pentonville had only recently been opened, and this was the first time he had been through its doors. I got the distinct feeling he would be in no hurry to repeat the experience.

“She bears up well.” I could see the lie in his eyes, but allowed him his small subterfuge. I am not a man easily shaken, as my readers may know, but the idea of a gentle woman spending time in a cold, dirty cell in that awful fortress was enough to make me feel quite ill. “She refuses to change her story, even though it is patently obvious to even the least imaginative man that she is trying to protect someone. If I can just discover who that is, we will be some way towards proving her innocence. However -” he brightened slightly; looking over the rim of his teacup at me, I could see the elated sparkle return to his eyes that always appeared when things were starting to fall into place, when the darkness was beginning to be shot through by even the faintest shafts of light.

“However?” I prompted, as he had stopped talking and seemed to be lost in thought. He shook himself, returning from whatever convoluted avenue of logic or deduction he had been proceeding down.

“She did clear up some points for me, despite herself, even if she would prefer, in her determination to assume the blame, that she had not helped me. I was able to confirm, for instance, that her husband did not smoke. She gave me this information, presumably as it seemed irrelevant, and perhaps she believed she might be, as they say of the railways, switching me to the wrong track. It is an important point, though. You will readily understand why?”

Of course it was obvious, but I knew Holmes liked to ensure I was following his logic, and was on, so far as I could be, or any man could, the same track as he, that we were, to use an old phrase, singing from a similar hymn sheet.

“We know she doesn't smoke,” I said, filling my own pipe. “Quite apart from it being most unladylike, she has the same asthma her sister suffers from. And if her husband does not partake, and the fire was not lit...”

“Exactly!” Holmes leaned back, a sandwich in one hand. “Then where did the smell of smoke which was marked on the butler entering the room come from? He desposed that it was thick and cloying, as if a man had just been smoking a pipe or cigar. I was able to detect its presence clearly an hour later when I was called in, though I doubt a man of less sensitivity to and experience with tobacco could. So who was smoking?”

“There were only two people in the room,” said I thoughtfully, and he watched me as a master watches a promising pupil, all but guiding me along, willing me to the conclusion. “Neither smoked. There was a smell of smoke. Therefore...” I clicked my fingers. “Holmes! There was a third person in the room!”

He grinned, nodded. “There must have been,” he agreed. “It is the only logical solution, and you know how I love my logic, Watson.”

Unwilling as I was to poke a hole in that logic and deflate his theory, I had to ask the obvious question.

“Then where did they go? There was no possible way they could escape. The room remained locked from the inside until Carter the butler forced it open, and he stationed Thompson at the door until the police arrived. Assuming the footman remained at his post, nobody could have slipped past him.”

“Indeed. I interviewed this footman, Thompson, and I found him to be a fine, upstanding fellow, a lad of the most unimpeachable character. I feel I can vouch for his having told the truth when he swore he did not move from his station, and that nobody came out of the room. Which leaves us with only two possibilities. Either the third person was still in the room, and somehow contrived to escape after the investigation, which seems to me next to impossible. There were constables everywhere, both at the door of the room, in the room and stationed outside. The day was by now well on its way to becoming the afternoon, and the servants were bustling around the house, for the work of a domestic does not stop because the master has met his end.”

He shook his head, dabbed at his lips and returned to his armchair, where he lit a second pipe. I moved to my own chair.

“No, Watson, I cannot discount it of course, but the balance of probability seems to indicate it unlikely. We are left, then, with the other option.”

“Which is?” I really could not see that there was another option.

“Which is,” he declared, “that the third actor in our tragic little play found another means of exiting the house.”

I tried not to scoff, but a snort did escape me. He looked up sharply.

“What means?”

“I have not yet,” he admitted, with a somewhat dark look in my direction, “worked that out. But consider, Watson. The door was guarded. The windows were locked, and showed no signs of having been opened, as Chambers had been coming in to do so when she found the door locked. Once the body was discovered, Lestrade ordered them left shut, no doubt thinking somewhat along the same lines as myself. The room, though large, has few if any hiding places, and I can't for the life of me think where someone might conceal themselves.”

I regretted it immediately, but it seemed so absurd to me that I spoke without thinking.

“Perhaps it was the West End Ghost!”

He gave me a severe look, one which made me squirm in my chair and take a sudden and deep interest in the price of corn in the Times.

“I think,” he said icily, “had you been witness to the deplorable conditions under which Mrs. Liebert is now forced to live, as she awaits her fate, you might not be quite so flippant, Doctor!”

There was cold rage in his face, and for a moment I actually thought he was going to rise and strike me. I felt ashamed at his words.

“You are of course correct, Holmes,” I said penitently. “It is no time for levity.”

“The other point Mrs. Liebert cleared up for me,” he went on, ignoring my apology, “is quite singular too. It turns out she is left-handed.”

“I see.”

“No, you do not.”

“No,” I admitted. “I do not. Please explain.”

“It's elementary,” he told me with that quiet tolerance he used when explaining things which he himself felt needed no clarification. “When Mrs. Liebert was discovered, she was in a faint. The knife which killed her husband was in her hand.”

“Yes?” I still failed to see the significance. Holmes, with that air of the showman he often used when revealing things, smiled thinly.

“Her right hand.”

“Good Heavens!”

The implication could not be clearer. He nodded.

“There are only three possible explanations, Watson. One is that Mrs. Liebert is what they call ambidextrous. You of course as a doctor are familiar with the term?”

“Certainly. One is either left or right handed, but a person who is ambidextrous is neither.”

“Precisely. They favour neither the right nor the left hand, and can use either as easily as the other. You or I, Doctor, both being right-handed, would find it a challenge indeed to write, or play billiards, or even open a door with our left hand. Our brains tell us that the right hand is the one to use, and it is an automatic response. It is of course easily proven.”

And so saying, he caught up an apple from the bowl next to him and tossed it to me. I caught it with my right hand.

“So! A right-handed person will always catch with the right hand, while one who favours the left would automatically raise the other hand. An ambidextrous person could use whichever he or she chose.”

“And you have confirmed Mrs. Liebert not to be such a person?”

“A very simple experiment assured me she favours her right hand. And so we have option two, which is that having stabbed her husband to death, Mrs. Liebert then sat or collapsed in the chair in which she was found, but before fainting changed hands, moving the knife from her left – the one she would have used had she, for purely the sake of argument, stabbed him – to her right.”

“That seems unlikely,” I admitted.

“It is more than unlikely,” Sherlock Holmes declared. “I say it is so far beyond the reach of logic and human nature that it is next to impossible. So now, Doctor, I ask you to recall once more that most favourite of my maxims, which is that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“And the improbable,” I asked, “the truth here is?”

Holmes put down his pipe, steepled his fingers, looked up at the ceiling again.

“As we have established beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a third person in the room, and that surely this person can be assumed to be the killer of Mr. Liebert, does it not then follow that this unknown person would have tried to implicate his wife in the deed by placing the knife in her insensible hand?”

“By Jove, Holmes!” I ejaculated, standing up and advancing to offer him my hand. “You're right! You've done it again!”

Holmes looked at my hand with the same distaste he viewed any human contact, and shook his head.


“I have done nothing, my friend,” said he with a sigh, “other than put together an alternative version of the events. It fits the clues, but at the moment we have no way of proving that it does. We have no evidence, and no jury in the land would entertain such an appeal. No, Watson. We need to gather the threads until we can weave them into a tapestry that will show conclusively that Mrs. Liebert is innocent of her husband's murder, and to do that we will in all likelihood have to deliver the true murderer into the hands of the law. I fear nothing less will shake our friend Lestrade's conviction that he has his man, or in this case woman, and that the case is closed.”

A certain light seemed to enter his eyes, banishing for a moment the tiredness.

“Some of my other enquiries, Watson, have borne better fruit. Will you come with me to the Diogenes Club? I must see my brother.”

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018