The Case of the Closed Compartment
Author's Note
The following story is based on true events surrounding the murder of Thomas Briggs in 1864. In order to properly fit the story into the accepted Holmes timeline, I have moved the case forward 19 years to take place in 1883 The details of the case have been largely left unchanged, only the ending has been tampered with. A google search for "Briggs murder 1864" will yield several websites with Victorian newspaper articles giving the details of the case.
For those of you who aren't as familiar with the history of the railroad, in 1864 trains were still a very new invention and many people feared them. The Briggs murder was the first murder to take place on a train in England and the second train murder to take place in the world (a Chief Justice was murdered in his compartment in France 4 years earlier.)
One of the important features of trains at the time was that the compartments were isolated with no walkway linking them. Think of the Hogwarts Express. That train has separate compartments with a walkway that allows passengers to move from compartment to compartment while the train is moving. Trains in 1864 did not have the walkway linking the compartments. As soon as the train was moving a passenger was locked into his compartment for the duration of the journey. This was still true of trains in 1880, the walkway wasn't invented until 1890, thus moving the murder forward 20 years doesn't interfere with the important particulars of the case.
I owe the idea for this story to Dr. Dew's "train class." In a way it would be remarkably fitting to dedicate this completely pointless story to Dr. Dew's completely pointless class. However, I hope that the following story will be a hundred times more entertaining than that class ever was. If it is not, forgive me, and review and tell me so.
And now, on to the story!