Sherlock Holmes and the Sixty Steps, page 7
“Well, Mr. Holmes,” said Lestrade, once we four had settled down, “not only have you astonished us yet again, but we now have three villains in custody for the price of one.”
“I had my own reputation to think of as well as yours. Otherwise, Sherlock Holmes would have been proven to be an ass for having got himself mixed up in a story concerning spectral hounds, and Scotland Yard’s reputation would continue to decline.”
“How on Earth did you come to suspect Dr. Mortimer, of all people, so quickly?” asked Barrowclough.
“I have a question too,” I added, “who is this shadowy Miss Dorothy? We have heard nothing of her yet.”
“Very soon you shall know everything there is to know about Dorothy.”
“Cherchez la femme!” said Lestrade with a wink, beginning to revel in the gaiety of the occasion.
Holmes laughed. “Oh, there was a femme fatale behind this all right, and a very shrewd and dangerous one too, but I am afraid it is not your Miss Dorothy.”
“Then who is she?” I asked.
“I am afraid there is no such person,” replied Holmes with a smile.
“But who –”
“Let us begin at the beginning,” said my friend. “And I think we must start, Watson, by admitting to our two colleagues here that you and I hardly covered ourselves in glory last year in Devonshire. We were remiss in several respects, not least that, on the night of Sir Henry’s attempted murder, we completely failed to anticipate such an elementary factor as the possibility of a deep fog on the moor, and we were nearly undone by it. We undoubtedly saved Sir Henry’s life on that occasion, having first endangered it by our own folly of consenting to his crossing the moor when we knew that the hound was loose on it. We also failed, and I must blame myself for this and set it down against our present success, to properly understand the ambivalent role of that self-effacingly humble M.R.C.S. as he called himself, Dr. Mortimer. No one was better placed than he to play the false friend to Sir Henry and yet the warnings were there if only we had read them. With the benefit of hindsight, I could point to a plethora of statements and actions from Mortimer which sit at odds with his status not only as a medical man and a man of science, but also as a friend to the Baskervilles.”
“I distinctly recall you saying at the beginning that the Baskerville case was ‘full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes’!” I said pointedly.
“Touché, Watson! In truth, I failed to observe most of them myself. To begin with, Mortimer breached a cardinal rule on client confidentiality when he told Rodger Baskerville of Sir Charles’s heart condition – knowledge which allowed the former literally to terrify Sir Charles to death. As not only a scholar of craniology but also an authority on atavism, how could he possibly have failed to recognise Rodger Baskerville’s physical resemblance to the family portraits in Baskerville Hall? Watson will tell you that it was quite the first thing that struck me when I walked through the door; how could he have failed to observe the symptoms of what he himself called ‘the old masterful Baskerville strain,’ that is to say, in plain language, an atavistic propensity to violence? Why did he not recognise the extreme racial differences between the apparently blood-related Stapleton ‘siblings’ – the neutral tinted Rodger and Beryl, the dark South American beauty who posed as his sister. Each on its own should have been suggestive but taken together these characteristics should have been quite conclusive In fact, to do Watson justice, he noticed and commented upon it at the time. As a ‘man of science’ Mortimer constantly pressed the claim of the supernatural and told us that several people had seen a creature upon the moor which corresponded with this Baskerville demon. The only explanation for this is that he must have been part of the plot from the outset, and that the cunning which I had originally ascribed to Rodger Baskerville was, in reality, Mortimer’s.”
“But why on Earth did he drag you into the case at all, Mr. Holmes?” asked Barrowclough.
“I believe his arrogance drove him to do it. He presumably felt that no one, not even I, could touch him, and after he had arranged Sir Henry’s death on the moor, he would have been able to say, ‘I took the case to very highest authority in the land—Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself, but even he was unable to prevent it.’ I mean, of course, the highest private authority,” my friend added, with a placatory glance at Barrowclough and Lestrade.
“At first, I believed he was a mere co-conspirator; however, I began to develop a more audacious theory, albeit one for which I had no manifest supporting evidence at that stage, which was that Laura Lyons had a long time ago been disabused of Beryl’s pretended status as Rodger’s sister by none other than Mortimer, and that these two were now in league. I am sure that when she discovered that she had been betrayed and saw that the plot on the moor had failed, she was then taken up by Mortimer whose supposed wife, incidentally, no one ever seems to have seen. No doubt the two became intimate, and from that point onwards Rodger would do all the dirty work and run all the risk while the other two sat aside. Between them, they could easily dispose of him at some stage, probably on the journey to America, and posthumously dispossess him of the estate which, of course, included the Canadian wealth too. I must confess I did not realise any of this on our arrival in Scarborough. But one thing above all stood out when I thought about what Mortimer had told us in the police station. He made a fatal error on one very minor point, which was initially lost on me as one dramatic event after another crowded in on us in quick succession: the realisation the murdered man was Sir Henry, the sudden disappearance of the two witnesses, the probable flight of Baskerville to London; all these pushed my detached tranquil contemplation aside for the moment. However later that night, when I slowly turned everything over in my mind it became obvious that at least part of Mortimer’s version of events was a complete fabrication.”
“How exactly?” asked Barrowclough.
“I had some assistance.”
“From Dr. Watson?”
“No, from a man you will know well: Bradshaw! Hence why I directed your attention there. Not only could Mortimer not possibly have heard the news since that news had not travelled even as far as London, as you discovered yourself when you crossed the threshold at Baker Street.”
“Dash! What a fool I was – I ought to have spotted that.”
“Mortimer could also not possibly have travelled up from Devonshire in the time he stated as there are, as I soon discovered, no trains from mid Devon that would bring him to Yorkshire so quickly. ‘I came straight up by the first train,’ he said. He would have had to have read a London newspaper to discover the murder, then pack his bags, then find a trap to take him to the station; half the day would have been gone by then – impossible! The next day I checked at the Columbia Hotel – he had already been there for a couple of days. Once I discovered Mortimer’s deception, I began to formulate a theory of his part in the conspiracy.”
“But you had no proof at that point,” said Barrowclough.
“Precisely. I can tell you that one of the first things I try to do is do refute my own theory with an alternative explanation of the facts. I assure you, Inspector, as a habit of mind it will always repay the effort. A possible theory remained that Mortimer’s behaviour could be ascribed to his protective attitude to Sir Henry; that he was secretly, in order not to upset or alarm his friend, keeping a careful watch on this couple; perhaps after their deaths he realised that this furtiveness may not have exactly put him in a good light when it came to a charge of murder. That may hypothetically have been one reason that he did not disclose the full facts to us right away. Nevertheless, I noticed Mortimer’s rather suspicious reaction to my suggestion that Sir Henry’s murderer may have had an accomplice and, as my suspicions were already aroused, I asked you, in the letter I left at the police station, to keep a watch on him and especially note any visit he made to a post office or messenger office. After my departure it appears that Mortimer somewhat relaxed his precautions.”
“And walked straight into the trap which we had laid for him!” said Barrowclough. I thought the “we” was rather fine but said nothing to dispel the spirit of the occasion.
“It will be obvious by now that it was Rodger Baskerville and Laura Lyons, in disguise, who carried out the murder on the cliffs. The rest will naturally fall into place: their ‘disappearance’; the ruse with the umbrella; the direction Mortimer gave you on the likelihood of the murderer having have been James Desmond, and of whom he gave you such a clear account, despite somewhat disingenuously claiming that he knew little about the Desmonds. I will not rob you of the pleasure of the telling of the next part Barrowclough.”
“I read the note which you left for me, and I followed Mortimer one day, then Sergeant Hicks followed him the next, just to make sure he didn’t keep seeing the same face.”
“Excellent!”
“Mortimer did nothing suspicious for a day or two. He went walking on the promenade, went to the spa for an afternoon concert, took a day trip to Whitby– “
“Whence, no doubt, he sent that note informing you that they had seen the man they had identified on the cliff path in Whitby.”
“Of course! I saw him go into a post office but thought nothing of it at the time. However, he did arrange a rather hasty burial of the remains of his late friends in Scarborough, and not in the family vault in Devon, which I did think was rather odd. The funeral took place as soon as was legally possible.”
“I believe that was because he did not want to return to Baskerville Hall again,” said Holmes. “His reasons for doing so are not entirely clear, but it is certain that he wanted to get away on the earliest possible boat. I have a vague idea that the butler, Barrymore, a far shrewder man than he looks as I have learned from Watson, may have begun to have suspicions about Mortimer and I think he simply wanted to avoid him.”
“Hicks followed Mortimer one day to the post office in the outlying village of Burniston where he picked up some mail. Now that was suspicious, because he had to pass three post offices in town to go there. Secondly, the mail was sent to him under a false name. We were unable to ascertain the address of the sender, but the letters were postmarked Poplar, East London. I spoke to the postmistress in Burniston, whom I knew well, and impressed it upon her that should this gentleman return, she was to contact me immediately and on no account to forward any letters or send any telegrams from him until I had seen them first. I made sure that she understood that this was in connection with the murders on the cliff – the difficult part was in getting her to keep her mouth shut, but I warned her that she must not speak a word to anyone. When Mortimer returned the next day, she did exactly as she was asked. Hicks and I were there within the hour, and that is how we obtained the address of the place where Baskerville and his woman were staying: a commercial hotel called the Steam Packet in Naval Row not far from Poplar High Street – under false names, of course. We arrested him as he was leaving the Columbia Hotel. He had the boat and train tickets in his case, but what was curious was that he had boat tickets for three people from London, via St. John’s to Quebec, but only two train tickets, for a male and a female, again under false names, from Quebec city to Calgary. So I wired to tell you that.”
“And this is where your Miss Dorothy makes her entrance, Watson. Mortimer had, in point of fact, been quite legitimately conducting the Canadian affairs on behalf Sir Henry for some time. Indeed, I had already suspected that that was precisely where he was heading–”
“And not as we had originally thought to Costa Rica?” Lestrade asked.
“No. I believe even Rodger realised that he had finally burned his boats in South America, although you will recall that Mortimer attempted to misdirect us with some nonsense about Baskerville inveigling himself back into Costa Rican society. Sir Henry was a modest man as you recall, and when he said he had been farming in Canada, he did not mention that he owned the entire chain of production from growing and harvesting the grain on his farm on the prairies, transporting it to the railroad towns, right down to selling it at the wheat pit in Chicago. The value of Sir Henry’s wheat business would bring the value of the estate up to one and a half million pounds! So, I had good reason to believe that Mortimer was making not for Costa Rica, my dear Watson, but for the Canadian prairies; in fact, for the headquarters of the Baskerville Grain Company in the town of Dorothy, Alberta.”
“So that is how Barrymore had heard the name!”
“When I spoke to the postmistress at Grimpen, she apprised me of the details of the Mortimer’s mail traffic, and it was obvious then that he had been running the business quite openly. It struck me as strange that Mortimer had sought to conceal that from us. The obvious reason was that he was preparing to escape there after the murder. The postmistress had omitted to tell me the name of the town – she had merely mentioned Alberta, which is a very large province – so when I asked her to be more specific, she replied with that rather terse telegram which you found, Watson.”
I must confess I felt rather foolish at this simple explanation, but Holmes’s next astounding statement soon dispelled my chagrin.
“When I then wired to the manager of the Baskerville Grain Company, a Mr. Paul Hammond, he told me quite definitely that he had had a visit from Sir Henry’s English cousin, Rodger, earlier in the year! I was convinced he must have been mistaken so I wired again. No, there was no mistake whatever. A chap called Mortimer had been helping to run the affairs from England for a while, he said, but wasn’t he only a country doctor after all who had no head for business. So, Mortimer had wired to inform him that Sir Henry wanted to share the inheritance within the family and would be transferring the business to his beloved long-lost cousin, Rodger, whom he would be sending over. He asked Hammond if, when Rodger arrived, could he please make him familiar with the business, show him around the grain elevators, introduce him to the people and so on and so forth. As you might imagine this put my head in a spin; but I rallied and wired yet again for a description of this cousin, Rodger. It came back, ‘Very tall, thin, ascetic looking, a long nose, prematurely round-shouldered,’ and so on.”
“Nothing like Baskerville!” I exclaimed.
“No, but it fits Dr. Mortimer exactly.”
“What the deuce!” expostulated Lestrade. “Was Mortimer up to tricks with the funds in Canada?”
“Not at all. It would have ruined the entire scheme if either Sir Henry, or Hammond, had had the slightest suspicion of that. No, even though by this point Sir Henry’s only involvement was in reviewing the quarterly accounts, which could easily have been falsified or substituted, Mortimer’s dealings there were scrupulously honest. He never took a single cent from the business and for good measure, he also gave Hammond to understand that he would be retained as the manager once the business was transferred to Rodger, and he gave the rest of the staff a sizeable increase in salary. The game was this: Mortimer went to Dorothy in May this year and passed himself off as Rodger with the intention that, after the murder, he would return as the bereaved, but soon to be richly endowed, relative. What could be more natural? Of course, Canada being a British Dominion, it should make the entire process of claiming the estate much more straightforward than, say, Costa Rica, and he now had a number of quite respectable citizens in Dorothy who would be prepared to absolutely swear to his identity as Rodger Baskerville.”
“Surely it cannot have been so simple?” asked Lestrade.
“I am afraid it was. And had it not been for this young man having had the foresight to visit me in London,” he indicated Barrowclough, “the plan may well have succeeded. On Saturday, I received Barrowclough’s telegram which informed me of the address to which Mortimer had sent a note to the two fugitives. It was on Lestrade’s list and had already been visited by the police, who for some reason did not manage to elicit the fact that there had been two new arrivals. I immediately dispatched some of my Irregulars – that’s to say, for your benefit Barrowclough, some young gentlemen of the street who occasionally carry out some surveillance work for me – to the scene. They set up watch and were told to follow our two friends wherever they went with the proviso that, if they split up, both would be trailed. However, they barely left the hotel and then only to correspond with Mortimer. It was odds on that they were waiting for a boat from Brunswick Wharf which was only a few hundred yards away, though I could not be certain, but when I discovered there was a sailing to Quebec – voilà! Barrowclough’s note later confirmed that they had tickets for the boat. I decided to borrow the cab from our friend, Jacobs, who had assisted us once before in the Soho case. I had just enough time to leave a note for my trusty Watson, scribble one to Scotland Yard, dash over to Brompton Road for Jacobs’s cab, then be back to the docks. I waited in the area just off Poplar High Street near the Steam Packet, confident that Baskerville would send for a cab to take him to the dock.”
“What if Baskerville had already arranged a cab?” asked Lestrade.
“It was possible, but unlikely, as he would not have wanted to give anything away in advance, not even the remote chance of some loose-tongued jarvey talking about the fare he was going to pick up. In any event, had Baskerville not taken my cab, I would still have been able to follow him a few score yards behind and I should have caught up with him as he arrived at the dockside. As it happened, he sent one of our boys, who appeared to be playing innocently in the street outside, to fetch a cab for him, and the rest you saw and heard.”
