The Case of the Dead Detective
Chapter Eleven
I slept after Holmes departed and revisited a place where I had not been for many years. It always started the same, with a feeling of dread, of walking endless miles over an unfamiliar landscape, knowing that however fast I ran, I would not make it in time. My final destination varied: for a long time, it had been to the edge of a precipice with the tumbling, fermenting waters of the Falls crashing into the depths below me. Then gradually, as a new tragedy replaced the old, it had been to a bedside and a golden vision of a woman who had passed beyond sleep to the realm of eternal dreams.
This night it changed again, this time to sun-drenched countryside, heavy with the scent of early-flowering lilac and languid as late spring gave way to summer. I was warm, though not uncomfortably so, and mostly from my exertions than the heat of the day. There was somewhere I had to be, that was the one thought in my mind. I pressed on, down lanes lined with hedgerows as tall as a man, so that I was hemmed in on either side by thick, green, impenetrable walls of birch and bramble and strangling ivy.
Onwards I went, knowing that time was against me, until finally a homestead came into view, set in a sea of green without another dwelling or living soul in sight. The gate was open and down the gravel path I went to the green door of the house. It stood slightly ajar, giving a glimpse into a spartan interior, smelling honey-sweet and flavoured by the clumps of lavender growing by the path around which the bees hummed contentedly. I entered, already knowing what I would find. The chair by the fire, a book dropped to the floor, a figure slumped against the cushions, a man who had died alone.
Except he was not alone. There was someone else, someone leaning over him, doing what I could not see. In my turmoil, I called to him, demanded that he give an explanation of himself. He straightened slowly, as one who has trouble with his back and is mindful of old injuries.
"We've been expecting you," he said.
He turned. I staggered back, horrified at seeing my face replicated in his. He was not me, or if he was, then he was a composite of those dark facets of the soul that we all harbour, drawn from the recesses in which we store our resentments, our loathings, our bitterness, our pain and our malice. He took a step towards me, this hateful vision, and on his hands I saw the blood still wet and glistening, dripping from his fingertips to form letters: L E S. And then the corpse in the chair opened his eyes, his gaze imploring, his mouth gaping like that of fish stranded on the shore, and calling my name over and over.
Mercifully, at that point, I awoke. Sunlight streamed through the bare patches in the curtains, throwing pale patterns onto the carpet. A glance at my watch told me it was half past seven. I had had little sleep, but with dreams of that calibre it was enough. I had been left disturbed and it was a long time before I could check my hands. They were dry and clean, unsullied by the blood of friends and colleagues. Whether I could say the same for my conscience was another matter.
What did not stop with my wakefulness was the voice that continued insistently to call my name. With it came a hammering at the door that convinced me I was not still dreaming. Shrugging on my dressing gown, I went to see what had caused a disturbance at such an early hour.
Outside on the landing, the landlord, Mr Parsons, somewhat dishevelled and with his shirt tails hanging out of his trousers, was apologetic for getting me out of bed, but as he informed me, an incident had taken place in the night and a doctor was required.
"Isn't Dr Arbuthnot available?" I said to this.
"'Fraid not, sir," said Parsons. "You see, it's him what's had the accident."
"An accident, you say? What happened?"
Parsons scratched at his unshaven chin. "I couldn't rightly say, Dr Watford. All I know is that Mrs Mackintosh, his housekeeper, came knocking about five minutes ago and said that the doctor had had a fall and would I wake you."
I thought to ask how she knew I was at the Red Lion, but dismissed it on the grounds that there was not much that was not noticed or went unremarked in such a small village. The more observant villagers would have known where I was staying before I did.
"Very well," I said. "I'll be down as soon as I'm dressed."
"Do you want me to wake that son of yours?"
It was too early for the weary task of correcting the man as to his erroneous assumption. I told the landlord to let George sleep, closed the door and began to hunt around for my clothes.
"Holmes?" I said out loud. "Are you there?"
There was no answering reply or sudden chill or stirring of the curtains to herald his returning presence. I gathered he was still with his ghostly compatriots, conferring in the bar over whist and darts. The image that brought to mind was an amusing one, for although Holmes possessed that admirable quality of being able to make the most of any situation in which he might find himself, there were certain places where he was most as ease. In the snug of the Red Lion with a jolly headless cavalier, a grey nun given to hysterical fits and the inn's deceased landlord was most definitely not one of those places.
As if in answer to my thoughts, Holmes's voice cut through my reverie. "What do you find so amusing at this early hour?" he asked, materialising by the door.
"You, as a matter of fact. Did you enjoy your evening?"
I fancied I saw the trace of a scowl on his face. "It was profitless waste of time," said he. "You should have seen them, Watson. A more pathetic gathering it has never been my misfortune to encounter. Filling their nights with idle pursuits and their days in repose to what end? They achieve nothing."
"Who said that they have to achieve anything?"
"I say," Holmes declared. "I have purpose. Would that the same could be said of them."
"Talking of your purpose, there's been a development in the night. Dr Arbuthnot has had an accident."
He moved from darkness to light as irritation was replaced with renewed interest. "Fatal?"
"No, I believe not."
"You know my opinion on the nature of coincidence, Watson. Now we must ask ourselves did he fall or was he pushed? Fool that I am!" he said with passion. "I should have stayed close by and witnessed his actions after your departure. Instead I was forced to absent myself on the grounds of diminished ability." He sighed, the force of it betraying the depths of his annoyance. "Have they asked for your assistance? It was to be expected. However, I am not sure that your attendance is advisable."
"On what grounds?"
"This assault on Dr Arbuthnot proves that something is afoot. It may be that you have been recognised, Watson, possibly by the same person who penetrated my alias. They feared what Dr Arbuthnot might tell you and so have tried to dispose of him. My concern is that they may try the same tactics on you."
"Your concern is noted and appreciated," I replied. "But I fail to see what danger attends my treating Dr Arbuthnot. This person isn't likely to try anything in broad daylight."
"At least take young George with you."
It was a good suggestion, but for one significant drawback. "My ears took a hard enough beating yesterday. Let the boy sleep. We can manage. That is if you are coming?"
Holmes looked mildly offended that I should imagine otherwise.
"After what happened to you the last time you were at Dr Arbuthnot's house, I had to ask. Did you question Mr Hopgood and his associates about your... lapse?"
"That is an accurate a word as any for it," said Holmes. "According to Hopgood, I suffered an emotional response to something in the doctor's house."
"How very disturbing for you."
"Yes, I had quite forgotten how unpleasant a doctor's consulting room could be."
"Actually, I meant your having 'an emotional response'."
"I have never been immune to the condition, Doctor," said he icily. "One learns to rationalise one's feelings, however. The technique is not too difficult to learn. All things viewed in detachment – whether hunger, fear, cold or any other associated response – must be stripped down to their essentials. For example, one is hungry, therefore one must eat. Failing that, the information must be set aside until such time as one is at liberty to indulge."
"It wasn't hunger that drove you from Arbuthnot's house. You seemed quite perturbed."
"By the nature of the response, not the emotion itself. Do you remember that patient of yours who lost his sense of smell?"
"Quite clearly. I never discovered the cause."
"Nor why it came back just as mysteriously. I seem to recall you telling me that he had said he would have been happier had it stayed away, for the world smelled a lot less sweeter than he remembered. I find I have some sympathy with the man. To experience a strong emotion again after so long a time was, I fear, disquieting. Its intensity was..." He searched for the word. "Overwhelming."
"And it has been a long time since you were overwhelmed."
"Not to such an extent. If memory serves, I became somewhat heated when you were shot in the case of Killer Evans. I even made several highly extravagant claims as to what I would have done had Evans killed you."
"If you call that 'somewhat heated'," I said, gathering up my coat, "I should hate to ever see you in the grip of some uncontrollable passion."
"You would wait a long time," he declared, "for it will never happen now."
"Not even if you get me shot again?" I said, smiling, with my hand on the doorknob.
"Once a lifetime is enough for any man," said Holmes, leading the way through the now open door. "In any case, I have never understood why it is necessary to become irrational to prove that one cares. Or why it should be necessary to prove it at all."
It was typical of Holmes to wait until he was dead to come out with such a statement, as much as it had taken a blood-letting on my part to show that my years of faithful service had counted for something over and above the duties of biographer and whipping boy combined. At such a moment, rare as it was, it was best to let it lie in quiet gratitude and docket it away for those occasions when the rougher edge of his temperament was at the fore. Questioning him would only break the spell, and this was all the more welcome because it had not been preceded by an injury on my part.
In companionable silence, we made our way to Dr Arbuthnot's home and surgery, to find Mrs Mackintosh waiting for us, or in fact me, the only visible member of our party. For all his assurances, Holmes hesitated before crossing the threshold and thereafter his sense of restlessness was palpable. Arbuthnot was on the upstairs landing, lying at the bottom of stepladder beneath a hatch that gave access to the loft. The hatch was still open and the fresh chill breeze of morning was blowing steadily down on the unconscious man.
"Do you think you could close that?" I suggested to the housekeeper. "It is rather draughty here."
"Would've done if I could've reached it," said she.
"So you don't know what the doctor went up there to get?"
Her dour expression barely faltered. "I didn't ask and he didn't say. It's not my business to pry. He might have had a woman up there for all I know. More than likely, it was a bottle."
"Why don't you have a look?" I murmured to Holmes under my breath. "This business with the ladder might have been nothing more than an elaborate ruse."
"What was that?" asked the housekeeper.
"A fuse," I replied. "I was wondering if Dr Arbuthnot had gone up to change one."
"I doubt that," said she. "The doctor can't abide heights. He gets dizzy just standing up, though if you ask me, if he did less imbibing he might be able to do a bit more abiding."
It was not for me to comment on my patient's personal preferences, although it was evident from the smell of alcohol still lingering on the man's breath that drink had played a part in his current calamity. Mrs Mackintosh had taken the trouble to make him comfortable by placing a pillow under his head and a blanket over his middle and legs. Other than that, he was much as he had been when discovered, and from what I could see, it did not lend any great weight to our theory that his fall had not been an accident.
Firstly, his position married with that of a man who had taken a fall from a ladder with the resulting injuries. He was unconscious, and I suspected a concussion in addition to the broken collar bone and fractured left radius that I could feel beneath his skin. Secondly, why go to the trouble to erect a ladder and fabricate a fall when there was a serviceable stair not three feet away? Thirdly, if the intention had been to kill him, why not finish the job?
By the time I had done what I could for Arbuthnot and put through a call to the cottage hospital at Hampton Deverall to inquire if the ambulance was on its way, Holmes had completed his inspection of the loft and had joined me downstairs, having taken great pains to examine each of the stair treads on the way down.
"Did you find anything?" I asked when Mrs Mackintosh was safely out of earshot in her kitchen.
"Cobwebs and spiders," said he disconsolately. "Much like our theories about Dr Arbuthnot's accident, the investigation has fallen on stony ground. There is nothing to tell me whether the doctor had a visitor after you left last night. All I can say with any certainty is that Arbuthnot was coming down, not going up, for there were definite traces of dust on his shoes."
"He had completed his business in the loft?"
"Or had come down to collect something to take up with him."
"So, he might have removed something, hidden it somewhere in the house and then gone back to shut the loft hatch, only to fall and knock himself unconscious."
"A reasonable supposition."
"What was it?"
He regarded me archly. "Despite your many claims as to my talents, Watson, mind-reading has never been one of them."
"What I mean to say was didn't the nature of items up there give you any indication as to what the mystery object might have been? Were there no files? Yours perhaps?" Holmes shook his head. "No shapes left in the dust where something had once stood?"
"I was able to follow Arbuthnot's footprints to a large packing case, which showed signs of recent disturbance. The contents were singularly uninteresting. Several bonnets, dresses, three or four purses--"
"Women's clothing?"
"His mother's, I should say, from the style. It tells us nothing, other than that what was in the case or was about to be placed there is absent. Well, there is nothing for it other than to wait until Arbuthnot is in a fit state to be questioned. I suggest we proceed with your suggestion of locating the surviving members of Swinson's family."
"While I am here," I said firmly, "I would like to try to find your file. I still want to see the report of the second doctor who confirmed your death. And while Dr Arbuthnot is out of the way, this seems like the ideal opportunity. It would save me the trouble of a trip to Brighton. Now, where would he have put them?"
"May I help you?"
I was stooped over a bulging, paper-stuffed cabinet trying to work out how to prise open the lock when a girlish voice stopped me in my tracks. I turned to find a blonde young woman, not much above twenty, striking rather than pretty, petite and plainly dressed in skirt, blouse and cardigan. This demure appearance was deceiving, however, for beneath the curls and smiles lurked the thwarted ambition of a would-be Field Marshal.
"You must be Miss Wills," I said affably.
"And you must be that doctor from the General Medical Council who upset Dr Arbuthnot last night," said she, confirming my every conclusion about her. "Mrs Mackintosh told me that you called yesterday evening. If you have business with the Doctor, you had best wait until he is well and not take it upon yourself to go rifling through his papers. Those notes are confidential, you know."
"I did not mean to pry, Miss Wills. I had hoped to complete my business and leave without upsetting the Doctor any more."
She fixed me with a steeling, unsmiling stare. "You couldn't upset him any more if you tried, Doctor. He told Mrs Mackintosh that you accused him of malpractice."
"I did not say that."
She swept past me and took a seat, rather boldly to my mind, in the doctor's armchair behind his desk, where she began to sort through his correspondence. "Rest assured that I shall be writing to the GMC about your conduct. Dr Arbuthnot is a good man and does his best, considering the patients he has."
"Trying, are they?"
Her freckled nose wrinkled in displeasure. "They come to him for advice and then won't follow it. They always think they know best. Look at that Mrs Crabtree--"
At the mention of his former housekeeper, Holmes started forward, his face suddenly pale and his eyes wide and alert.
"Dr Arbuthnot kept telling her to take it easy, what with her varicose veins and blood pressure. Instead she insisted on eating a pot of honey every day, because she said that the old gentlemen she had worked for had kept bees and, since she'd never seen a sick bee, honey couldn't be bad for you."
"Did you tell her that?" I murmured while Miss Wills sliced open an envelope and examined the contents.
"I might have mentioned that honey was once considered efficacious in the treatment of certain diseases," said Holmes. "I deny that I ever recommended consuming a pot a day. That was on her own responsibility."
"The Doctor told her that it would make her ill if she kept doing it, but of course she knew better. Then one day last winter she was eating bread and honey, and it went down the wrong way and she choked. Still, she wouldn't be told."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said, as much for Holmes's benefit as Miss Wills. The news that another tie to his mortal existence had been severed appeared to have come as a shock.
"That Mr Escott she used to work for was the same," Miss Wills went on. "Twice Mrs Crabtree called out Dr Arbuthnot when he had one of his turns, and twice he sent him away without so much as a thank you."
"What was the nature of these 'turns'?" I inquired, trying not to show too much interest.
"It was his heart," said she.
"That was Dr Arbuthnot's diagnosis?"
"Yes, but I could have told him that. Even Mrs Crabtree knew what was wrong with him. Perhaps if he hadn't kept himself to himself like he insisted on doing, someone might have found him sooner and been able to save him. But there's no telling these people. Dr Arbuthnot is a saint for tolerating them if you ask me. What can you do with ignorant folk like that?"
Dead former housekeepers, pots of honey and some funny goings-on in the loft! It all sounds highly suspicious. And it's going to get worse in Chapter Twelve!
