So, here is the end of Case 8. I know it was not the most interesting one – neither was it for Holmes, I assure you, but as said, I have been very busy recently and I had not had the time to think it over properly, as so many other things were on my mind and I am well aware that there are a couple of loose ends left, which at the moment I cannot wrap my head around.

Anyhow, I hope you still liked it, though I have the feeling it is more of a miss, but, I will try and make the next case a bit more interesting, though that will mean that it will take me two to four weeks to present you the next chapter. But really, I don't much like to give you something that is not really sound. So, presumably the next couple of evenings I will spend watching crime documentaries and hope I'll find some inspiration, for that is another thing I am currently lacking somewhat.

So, hopefully, you enjoy this chapter and please leave me a review, I really appreciate them.

The Saunderson Mystery – Part 5

Harriet:

We arrived home by early afternoon, having taken a light lunch on our way back. The solution had been surprisingly simple and still, somehow all three of us were dissatisfied with it. Not that we did not believe that all had happened exactly as Dr Colebrooke had told us, but there still seemed to be a mystery there. First of all, there was still the deceased man's puzzling will, then the empty account-books and last but not least the question, why a man who had earned his wealth by hard work had felt so immensely guilty about it, that he thought himself to be cursed and that being the reason for all the bad things that had happened to him – the deaths of his wives, his illness, and his loneliness.

With a cup of tea in hand, each sat down, contemplating about these very questions, but it was not till Sherlock jumped up from his armchair to scribble a note onto a telegram form, that we started to speak about what had come to pass.

"What are you doing, son?" Aldwin asked, looking as if waking from a daze.

"Try and find out something about Saunderson's past, of course."

"Whom do you send the telegram to?" I inquired curiously.

"Claims are registered, so I thought I might inquire at the registry, after all, they will know where exactly Saunderson's claim was and whether something might have happened while he was working it, that might justify his odd behaviour almost thirty years later."

This sounded plausible enough.

xxx

The remainder of the week, however, passed rather quietly. Sherlock was busy with a couple of minor cases which kept him occupied enough to not be driven up the walls and he spent many hours with researching and digging through archives, though on occasion he would grumble about them being too simplistic for his taste. And indeed, none of them is worth mentioning here, for all, there was to do for my husband, was to find conclusive evidence for crimes that had already been all but solved.

My father in law had moved into Baker Street, for the time being, taking Tom under his wing and so I was free to fulfil a few social obligations which till then I had put off. Not that I was too keen on them. I, much as my husband, was not a person to mingle too much in society, and still, there was a charity bazaar I had to attend and I had not visited with my neighbours in quite a while, nor the Watson's. I was well aware that for some ladies, calling on their neighbours was the highlight of their day, but I had never been any good at small-talk and truth be told, I usually dreaded them.

The Friday after our excursion to Mr Saunderson's cottage, Sherlock Holmes came home astonishingly early, which meant back home to our abode in Chiswick and informed me, that he had taken the liberty of asking the Watson's for dinner that evening, as well as his brother and father, of course. Smiling I kissed his cheek, assuring him, though a bit of an advance would have been welcome, that it was no bother at all.

"Good, for I have quite an interesting story to tell you, my dear," he smiled back.

I was all curiosity at this, but he would not be persuaded to say another word, though I was certain that it had to do with the Saunderson case.

"Hm, I like it, when my wife is all wound up in anticipation of what I have to say, for there are not many wives that actually listen to what their husbands have to say," he teased, taking off his boots in the hallway where I had met him.

"I wonder why that is, my dear. Could it be, perhaps, because men rarely have to say something that is of much interest?"

"Possibly," he mused. "Truth be told, I do wonder what some men speak to their wives about, for as far as I have gathered, talking about business is deemed a topic unsuitable for ladies, and speaking about the household is of little interest for most men. So really, what do couples speak about?"

"How would I know?"

My thoughts strayed to Anne Fraser and her husband and sure enough, there was little they had in common and rarely had I found them sitting together talking to one another. Moreover, I sometimes had the feeling that they never saw much of each other during the whole course of a day, safe for their meals. What a dreary prospect! Dr Watson and Mary, though, were another matter, there real affection was between them and I had not yet met the two together not engaged in an animated conversation about this or that.

"By the way, Sherlock, do the Watson's know your father has arrived?"

"No."

"I thought as much. You cannot help it, can you?" I laughed, shaking my head.

"What do you mean?"

"You just have to surprise people, is what I mean."

His face assumed an innocent expression before he, too, started laughing.

"By the way, how are you today, my love?" he asked when we both had regained our composure and he, at last, had put on his house shoes.

"Quite well, thank you. And you?"

"Fantastic. I have a wife who loves me and does not scold me for inviting friends on a short notice, who is interested in what I do for a living, shares my interests and is so immensely pretty that every time I see her she takes my breath away. - No, don't contradict me. You are lovely, my dear, inside and out."

As always when my husband complimented me, I was greatly touched and did not quite know what to say. Before I had met him, it normally had irked me when I was complimented on my looks, as I refused to be seen as merely a pretty face, while on the other hand, I was also well aware that I was not a classic beauty at any rate anyway, as I was neither delicate nor overly elegant. But with Sherlock, I knew he meant what he said and I appreciated his praise even though on occasion it embarrassed me greatly.

To say Martha was very pleased that we would have guests for dinner, would be a blatant overstatement, but my husband had done a thorough job and had ordered something to be brought around and so all there was to do was to set the table and heat the stove to warm up the meal, which consisted of a thick soup, a joint of roast gammon with vegetables and potatoes and an apple pie, nothing too special, but after all it was the company that made an evening, was it not?

And sure enough, everyone arrived overly punctual, and the introductions were made and the evening was indeed a merry one.

"You have really raised a remarkable man, Mr Holmes," Mary said to Aldwin, even before the soup was served.

With a smile he replied, looking at Mycroft: "No, I have had the pleasure of raising two remarkable men actually."

"Uncle..."

"No, I am proud of you both."

Mycroft Holmes looked a little ashamed, but it was fairly obvious that he was also flattered.

"You must tell us, how Holmes behaved as a child. I am most curious, I have to admit." Watson carried on his glass of wine half-way to his mouth.

"Oh, where do I start? Mycroft was the studious one, he never got into much trouble, something that could not be said about Sherlock. He was always in at the deep end with his inquisitiveness and inventiveness. One instance comes to mind, where he and your brother," there he looked at me, "had set out to rescue a damsel in distress. The next morning it turned out it had been a maid and stable boy meeting for a tete-a-tete in the woods. They attacked them with their slingshots and I tell you, the young lad looked as if he had gotten into a fight."

"But we did rescue a maiden," Sherlock chuckled.

"Yes, perhaps you did. At least for that one night, you saved her reputation."

"In the woods you say? Not our woods, surely?" I inquired.

"Oh, it was on your father's grounds. We camped there."

I almost choked on my drink as I recollected the tales I had heard from my nursemaid when a child.

"What's wrong, Hattie?"

"Only that I am sure that your actions that night have led to the telling of a very intriguing ghost story about a violent ghost haunting the woods, who would beat people up to scare them away."

Sherlock and Aldwin Holmes both looked at me open-mouthed.

"Really?"

I nodded.

"Oh dear!"

"I never liked going into our copse on my own, out of fear I would meet the ghost, seems for the first part of my life I shared a roof with one half of him and am now married to the other."

"And, are you scared of me?"

"No, not at all. In broad daylight, you seem positively harmless."

"Hm, shame. Harmless you say?" Sherlock replied with mock thoughtfulness. "And there I thought I was feared by everybody around me. This is too unlucky."

Everybody started laughing.

"Oh, and then he took off with my handcart one day to race it down a steep hill. It was a well thought out plan, only that he forgot one minor detail... - that once at the bottom he would need to break. Oh dear, you cannot imagine how he looked when he came back home, for he had ended up in a pig wallow."

"I heard mud is quite beneficial to one's health," Dr Watson remarked dryly, enjoying himself thoroughly.

"That might very well be, but have you any idea how long it took to scrub him clean?"

"Well, presumably as long as it took my nursemaid to get me clean after I fell into our farm's cesspool."

"Oh dear? Do I want to know what you were up to?"

"Well, next to it was the best of our cherry trees and of course the one branch which had not been harvested as it was too difficult to reach was the one that was hanging over the cesspool and I was determined to get at them."

"And, did you?"

"No, the branch broke off, which is why I ended up in the slurry."

"You two are really two peas in a pod."

"Just imagine if one day they'll have children of their own!" Mary exclaimed.

"Ah, there is little danger of falling into a cesspool in town." her husband replied, though hardly suppressing a laugh.

"That might very well be, but they'll find other things to climb into, fall off of and race down on, I am sure," Mycroft said with a side glance at his younger brother.

Thus the conversation carried on and by the end of dinner, all of us had laughed so much that our sides hurt. We did not separate afterwards as was customary, but all ventured into the sitting room at once, and at last, I recalled that my husband had another tale to tell as yet.

"Ah yes, and a remarkable tale it is. Watson, you might recall the death of Mr Saunderson, though it was ruled as a natural one?"

"No, I don't think I have heard that name before," his friend replied.

"But I remember having read the name," Mary interjected. "Was he not a well-known philanthropist?"

"Yes, he was. Now I know what has haunted him so much so, that he gave away all his money, for I had a reply from the officials in California and after that, it was fairly easy to reconstruct what must have happened."

"And?"

"It is true that Saunderson had a claim and to a certain extent it is also true that he made his money in the gold-fields over yonder, but not by the way he had liked people to believe he had acquired his wealth. Watson, you do recall the Boscombe-Valley Case?"

"For sure I do."

"Here it is a fairly similar tale, though Saunderson was a bit more cunning, cheating people out of their hard work by offering to bring the gold to the mint, and every time he did so, he would take an inconspicuous amount for himself, on top of his pay, of course, and surely but surely, like that, he got richer and richer. Eventually, however, that was not enough anymore, for he saw that others surpassed him in fortune still, and so he set out to steal it from them. I have found news articles about a very mysterious disease that took many lives and co-incidentally, though I doubt it was much of a coincidence, just at the time when Saunderson left, so did the illness."

"But how could he have done it?"

"I venture to say with mercury. It is easy to get at in a field of gold mines, for it is frequently used there to separate the gold from the ore, while at the same time it is deadly poisonous."

"How does it affect the body?" Mycroft asked.

"It is not the mercury itself that is the problem, but the fumes evaporating from it. They can affect the brain and make you as mad as a hatter, which is where the saying stems from, and eventually make your organism stop to function properly, resulting in heart failure, spasms and strokes." I replied. "So what I would like to know is, how you think he made use of it?"

"Ah, well, there I can only guess, and that is something I don't quite like doing, but I dare say that he made sure that the quicksilver was in a place where it was bound to evaporate, say the fireplace or oven of his co-miners. Or perhaps their lamps. It is inconspicuous enough, for a relatively small dose suffices."

"That is devious!" Aldwin cried out.

"But what does it have to do with his behaviour shortly before his death?" I dug deeper.

"Very simple, he did not think about the effect the poison would have on him and his own family, for his first wife was the daughter of one of the neighbours over in America, and so she died the same gruesome death her father and mother died, only not quite as soon. His second wife, whom he married shortly after his first had died, so she could take care of the baby, for he had a little daughter, but sure enough, both his second wife, the daughter and his son, who was but a couple of weeks old, also died. In a sense, one could say that he really was cursed, for he had done all this himself and killed the ones he loved the most in this world only to gain wealth and fortune. After his second wife's death he returned to England and changed his life, but not only had he by then lost all his family, his own health started to decline from the constant contact with the poison."

"His weak heart!" I cried out.

"Exactly. And so, when the doctor could not help him anymore, he turned to religion instead."

"But what about his empty ledgers?"

"Very simple, he could not write. He could draw the letters, but could not make them out, it was beyond him to do so."

"The testament!"

"Exactly. When his lawyer, I actually spoke to the man, recommended he should make a will, he did so, by copying random words onto a sheet of paper. Some sentences, strangely enough, do make sense, others don't at all and hence the mystery about his bequest was born."

"That was quite a tragic tale," Mary stated quietly when there was not much more to say.

"Yes. Personally, I think one of the greatest evils in this world is gold."

"No, Sherlock, greed." Mycroft corrected him. "Human greed is the real problem."

For a while, no-one said a word, till Aldwin, a twinkle in his eyes, went over to the piano and opened it.

"Come, boys, it has been far too long since we have played something together, is it not?"

My brother in law looked somewhat sheepish and then, seemingly glad to recollect that he had not brought his instrument, said: "Yes, but..."

Grinning Sherlock held up the flute, exchanging a conspiratorial glance with his father and soon the gloomy thoughts which for a moment had occupied us were gone as Dr Watson, Mary and I were treated to a small concerto.