A Study in Sherlock

YOU’D BETTER GO IN DISGUISE Alan Bradley

How long had he been watching me? I wondered.

I had been standing for perhaps a quarter of an hour, gazing idly at the little boys in sailor suits and their sisters in pinafores, all of whom, watched over by a small army of nannies and a handful of mothers, waded like diminutive giants among their toy sailing boats in the Serpentine.

A sudden breeze had sprung up, scattering the fallen leaves and bringing the slightest of chills to an otherwise idyllic autumn afternoon. I shivered and turned up my collar, the hairs at the back of my neck bristling against my jacket.

To be precise, the pressure of my collar put a stop to the bristling which, since I had not noticed it until that moment, made the feeling all that much more peculiar.

Perhaps it was because I had, the previous week, attended Professor Malabar’s demonstration at the Palladium. His uncanny experiments in the world of the unseen were sufficient to give pause to even the greatest of sceptics, among whom, most assuredly, I do not count myself.

I must admit at the outset to an unshakeable belief in the theory that there is a force which emanates from the eye of a watcher that is detectable by some as-yet-undiscovered sensor at the back of the neck of the person being watched; a phenomenon which, I am furthermore convinced, is caused by a specialized realm of magnetism whose principles are not yet fully understood by science.

In short, I knew that I was being stared at, a fact which, in itself, is not necessarily without pleasure. What, for example, if one of those nattily uniformed nannies had her eye upon me? Even though I was presently more conservative than I once had been, I was keenly aware that I still cut rather a remarkable figure. At least, when I chose to.

I turned slowly, taking care to pitch my gaze above the heads of the governesses, but by the time I had turned through a casual half circle they were every one engaged again in gossip or absorbed in the pages of a book.

I studied them intently, paying close attention to all but one, who sat primly on a park bench, her head bowed, as if in silent prayer.

It was then that I spotted him: just beyond the swans; just beyond a tin toy Unterseeboot.

He was sitting quietly on a bench, his hands folded in his lap, his polished boots forming a carpenter’s square upon the gravelled path. A solicitor’s clerk, I should have thought, although his ascetic gauntness did not without contradiction suggest one who laboured in the law.

Even though he wanted not to be seen (a fact which, as a master of that art myself, I recognized at once), his eye, paradoxically all-seeing, was the eye of an eagle: hard, cold, and objective.

To my horror, I realized that my legs were propelling me inexorably towards the stranger and his bench, as if he had summoned me by means of some occult wireless device.

I found myself standing before him.

“A fine day,” he said, in a voice which might have been at home on the Shakespearean stage, and yet which, for all its resonance, struck a false note.

“One smells the city after the rain,” he went on, “for better or for worse.”

I smiled politely, my instincts pleading with me not to strike up a conversation with an over-chatty stranger.

He shifted himself sideways on the bench, touching the wooden seat with long fingers.

“Please sit,” he said, and I obeyed.

I pulled out a cigarette case, selected one, and patted my pockets for a match. As if by magic a Lucifer appeared at his fingertips, and, solicitously, he lit me up.

I offered him the open case, but he brushed it away with a swift gesture of polite refusal. My exhaled smoke hung heavily in the autumn air.

“I perceive you are attempting to give up the noxious weed.”

I must have looked taken aback.

“The smell of bergamot,” he said, “is a dead giveaway. Oswego tea, they call it in America, where they drink an infusion of the stuff for no other reason than pleasure. Have you been to America?”

“Not in some time,” I said.

“Ah.” He nodded. “Just as I thought.”

“You seem to be a very observant person,” I ventured.

“I try to keep my hand in,” he said, “although it doesn’t come as easily as it did in my salad days. Odd, isn’t it, how, as they gain experience, the senses become blunted. One must keep them up by making a game of it, like the boy, Kim, in Kipling. Do you enjoy Kipling?”

I was tempted to reply with that exhausted old wheeze, I don’t know, I’ve never kippled, but something told me (that strange sense again) to keep it to myself.

“I haven’t read him for years,” I said.

“A singular person, Kipling. Remarkable, is it not, that a man with such weakened eyes should write so much about the sense of sight?”

“Compensation, perhaps,” I suggested.

“Ha! An alienist! You are a follower of Freud.”

Damn the fellow. Next thing I knew he’d be asking me to pick a card and telling me my auntie’s telephone number.

I gave him half a nod.

“Just so,” he said. “I perceived by your boots that you have been in Vienna. The soles of Herr Stockinger are unmistakable.”

I turned and, for the first time, sized the man up. He wore a tight-fitting jacket and ragged trousers, an open collar with a red scarf at his throat, and on his head, a tram conductor’s cap with the number 309 engraved on a brass badge.

Not a workman—no, too old for that, but someone who wanted to be taken for a workman. An insurance investigator, perhaps, and with that thought my heart ran suddenly cold.

“You must come here often,” I said, giving him back a taste of his own, “to guess out the occupations of strangers. Bit of a game with you, is it?”

His brow wrinkled.

“Game? There are no games on the battlefield of life, Mr.—”

“De Voors,” I said, blurting out the first thing that came to mind.

“Ah! De Voors. Dutch, then.”

It was not so much a question as a statement—as if he were ticking off an internal checklist.

“Yes,” I said. “Originally.”

“Do you speak the language?”

“No.”

“As I suspected. The labials are not formed in that direction.”

“See here, Mister—”

“Montague,” he said, seizing my hand and giving it a hearty shake.

Why did I have the feeling he was simultaneously using his forefinger to gauge my pulse?

“… Samuel Montague. I am happy to meet you. Undeniably happy.”

He gave his cap a subservient tip, ending with a two-fingered salute at its brim.

“You have not answered my question, Mr. Montague,” I said. “Do you come here often to observe?”

“The parks of our great city are conducive to reflection,” he said. “I find that a great expanse of grass gives free rein to the mind.”

“Free rein is not always desirable,” I said, “in a mind accustomed to running in its own tram tracks.”

“Excellent!” he exclaimed. “A touch of metaphor. It is a characteristic not always to be found among the Dutch!”

“See here, Mr. Montague,” I said. “I don’t know that I like—”

But already his hand was on my arm.

“No offence, my dear fellow. No offence at all. In any case, I see that your British hedgehog outbristles your Dutch beech marten.”

“What the devil do you mean by that?” I said, leaping to my feet.

“Nothing at all. It was an attempted joke on my part that failed to jell—an impertinence. Please forgive me.”

He seized my sleeve and pulled me down beside him on the bench.

“That fellow over there,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t look at him directly—the one loitering beneath the lime. What do you make of him?”

“He is a doctor,” I replied quickly, eager to shift the focus from myself. The unexpected widening of my acquaintance’s eyes told me that I had scored a lucky hit.

“How can you tell?” he demanded.

“He has the slightly hunched shoulders of a man who has sat by many a sickbed.”

“And?”

“And the tips of his fingers are stained with silver nitrate from the treating of warts.”

Montague laughed.

“How can you be sure he’s not a cigarette smoker and an apothecary?”

“He’s not smoking and apothecaries do not generally carry black bags.”

“Wonderful,” exclaimed Montague. “Add to that the pin of Bart’s Hospital in his lapel, the seal of the Royal College of Surgeons on his keychain, and the unmistakable outline of a stethoscope in his jacket pocket.”

I found myself grinning at him like a Cheshire cat.

I had fallen into the game.

“And the park keeper?”

I sized up the old man, who was picking up scraps of paper and lobbing them with precision into a wheeled refuse bin.

“An old soldier. He limps. He was wounded. His large body is mounted upon spindly legs. Probably spent a great deal of time in a military hospital recovering from his wounds. Not an officer—he doesn’t have the bearing. Infantry, I should say. Served in France.”

Montague bit the corner of his lip and gave me half a wink.

“Splendid!” he said.

“Now then,” he went on, pointing with his chin towards the woman sitting alone on the park bench closest to the water. “Over there is a person who seems quite ordinary—quite plain. No superabundance of clues to be had. I’ll bet you a shilling you can’t supply me with three solid facts about her.”

As he spoke, the woman leaped to her feet and called out to a child who was knee-deep in the water.

“Heinrich! Come here, my sweet little toad!”

“She is German,” I said.

“Quite so,” said Montague. “And can you venture more? Pray, do go on.”

“She’s German,” I said with finality, hoping to bring to an end this unwanted exercise. “And that’s an end of it.”

“Is it?” he asked, looking at me closely.

I did not condescend to reply.

“Let me see, then, if I may succeed in taking up where you have left off. As you have observed, she is German. We shall begin with that. Next, we shall note that she is married: the rings on the usual finger of the left hand make that quite clear, an opinion which is bolstered by the fact that young Heinrich, who has lost his stick in the water, is the very image of his pretty little mother.

“She is widowed—and very recently, if I am any judge. Her black dress is fresh from Peter Robinson’s Mourning Warehouse. Indeed, the tag is still affixed at the nape of her neck, which tells us, among many other things, that regardless of her apparent poise, she is greatly distracted and no longer has a maid.

“In spite of having overlooked the tag, she possesses excellent eyesight, evinced by the fact that she is able to read the excruciatingly small type of the book which is resting in her lap, and without more than an upward glance, keep an eye upon her child who is now nearly halfway across the basin. What do you suppose would bring such a woman to a public park?”

“Really, Montague,” I said. “You have no right—”

“Tut, my dear fellow. I am merely exercising the possibilities. In truth, I have barely scratched the surface. Where were we? Oh, yes. German. Indubitably German. But from which region in particular?

“Let us begin with young master Heinrich. What was it she called him? ‘My sweet toad,’ wasn’t it? An expression which, although not restricted to Baden, is nevertheless much more commonly to be heard there than in other parts of the country.

“Very well, then let us for the moment hypothesize that the young widow is from Baden. How may we test that rather broad assumption?

“Let us dwell for a moment upon her teeth. Surely you noticed, as I did when she called out to her child, that she showed a very fine, strong set of teeth, remarkable however, not for their completeness or their pleasing alignment, but rather for the fact that they are pinkish: a rare, but nonetheless documented phenomenon which arises only in those who have been accustomed to drink, from birth, the iron-rich waters of certain spas.

“As I know from my own remarkable cure in those waters, one of those with the highest content of ferric matter is at Mergentheim. Yes, I should say we could not go far astray if we pegged the lady as a Swabian from Baden. That and her accent, of course.”

I couldn’t restrain a laugh.

“Altogether far-fetched,” I told him. “Your hypotheses, as you call them, leave no elbow room for reality. What if, for instance, she is mourning her father? Or her mother? Or her great-grandmother, for that matter?”

“Then her name would not have been splashed all over the front pages of this morning’s newspapers as the wife of a murder victim.”

“What?”

“Tragic, but nevertheless quite true, I assure you.”

He reached with two fingers into his vest pocket and extracted a double-columned clipping which he proceeded to unfold and flatten on his knee.

“Shocking death in Buncombe Place,” he read aloud. “Police were called at an early hour this morning to Number Six, Buncombe Place by Mrs. Frieda Barnett, who had, moments before, found her husband, Welland Barnett, aged fifty, of the same address, dead in the drawing room in a pool of his own blood. The victim had received a number of stab wounds to the back of his neck, any one of which might have proved fatal, according to the police surgeon at the scene …

“They oughtn’t really to put that in,” he interrupted himself. “Not until autopsy and inquest are complete. I’m quite sure that heads will roll—if it is not indelicate to express such an opinion.”

I couldn’t find words to respond, and Montague went on with his reading.

“The deceased was described as a man of regular habits, and had no known enemies, according to Mrs. Barnett, who is left to mourn with her only child, Heinrich, aged four years …

“They always go for the heart, don’t they, these scandal sheets—like the bullets at a military execution. Where were we—oh, yes, her child …”

Montague paused to look out at the little boy who had now fished his stick from the water and was giving the surface a good wet thrashing by way of repayment.

“ … her only child, Heinrich, aged four years,” he went on. “Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard has given it as his opinion that robbery may have been a motive, inasmuch as a small silver key of peculiar design was missing from its customary place upon the victim’s waistcoat chain, according to Ellen Dimity, the Barnetts’ cook. Inspector Gregson declined to give further information until investigations are complete, although he has requested that any person or persons who might have further information bearing upon this crime, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Would you like to read it?”

He offered the paper, but I shook my head.

“No thank you. I find such things upsetting.”

“Indeed,” he said, “as do I. Which is precisely why I made my way to Number Six, Buncombe Place, and begged my old friend Gregson to let me have a look round.”

“Inspector Gregson? You know him?”

Montague chuckled, a surprisingly shrill cackle that ended in a suppressed cough.

“Old lags have friends, too,” he said. “Surprising, isn’t it, the people you meet in a park?”

I said nothing because there was nothing to say.

“The thing of it was,” he went on, as if I had asked him to, “the position of the wounds, which were high on the back of the neck. Welland Barnett was an exceedingly tall individual, over six feet in height—as much as six foot three or four, by my own measurement of his prostrate body. Am I upsetting you?”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve not yet eaten today, and I’m afraid it’s telling.”

“Ah, then. Presently we shall step round to the Hart and Hurdy-Gurdy for a pig’s knuckle and a pint of Burton. Then we shall be fit for whatever lies ahead.”

I gave him a weak smile.

“And then there was the widow,” he said, glancing at the woman in black who sat, again motionless, upon the bench, her gaze fixed firmly upon the ground.

“How peculiar, don’t you think, that she should leave the house under circumstances in which drawn drapes and smelling salts are most often the order of the day?

“But perhaps it was the child—perhaps she wanted to get young Heinrich as quickly as possible away from that house of death. But no, the good Gregson assured me that the child had put up quite a fuss—what you might call a scene, in fact—over being dragged into the street and involving, in the end, more of the neighbors than it ought.

“Gregson could not detain her, of course. She had given her account of finding her husband’s body; her words had been taken down in the prescribed form; the house had been searched; the body was in the process of being removed.

“Why, then, would she leave?”

I shrugged.

“Who could know?” I said. “There are as many reasons as stars in the heavens. It is pointless to guess.”

“Guess?” Montague’s voice and his eyebrows shot up. “Where murder’s afoot the guess is disallowed. The facts must be driven home one by one like nails into the shoe of a horse. Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Do you hear them, Mr. De Voors?”

“No,” I replied, “but then I’ve never been given over greatly to imagination.”

“Then I shall help you,” he said. “Imagine this: imagine that on a fine day in autumn a woman leaves the house in which her husband has just been brutally murdered, and sets out with her only child, for a park that is somewhat more than a mile away.

“Why not the park that is directly across the street from where she lives? Why not the one in the next block—or the next?

“The child has no sailboat, but only a stick which he picked up near the gate. I saw it with my own eyes. So it is not the water which is the attraction. It is, in the second place, distance. She did not wish to be observed. She came here, as I knew she must have done. Where else may one with a child become invisible but in the city’s largest park?”

“The second place, you say? Then what is the first?”

“I should have thought it obvious,” Montague said. “She came here to meet someone.”

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Who?”

“You,” said Montague, folding the clipping and returning it to his pocket. “Before you arrived, I watched the lady fiddling with the key. She fished it from her bag a half-dozen times to make sure she still had it. When you finally appeared—you were late, by the way, judging by the number of times she consulted her watch—she made a point of not looking at you. More to the point, you did not look at her. Quite astonishing, when you come to think of it: such a fine figure of a woman seldom remains unogled by a gentleman of your … ah …”

“This is preposterous,” I said.

“Is it?” he asked, his voice as level as a gaming table. “In spite of the evidence to the contrary?”

“What evidence?” I could not resist asking. The fellow was trying to rack up a score against me.

“Your height, of course,” he said. “You would be quite capable of stabbing in the neck someone as tall as Welland Barnett—not that that means anything in itself. But then we come to your behaviour: you circled any number of times round the bench upon which the lady is sitting, but you did not approach. At first, it was because of the nanny—that one with the curly red hair who was begging to borrow her pencil to fill in one of those new-fangled crosswords that are becoming all the rage. Then it was the retired tea broker who perched beside her for a maddeningly long time as he fed the pigeons. After that, the two police constables who strolled by. No, sir, she has simply not had the opportunity to hand over the promised key, a key which quite clearly, even at this distance and with my no-longer-perfect vision, is one of those used to unlock a box at the National Safe Deposit Company in Victoria Street.

“As to your relationship to her, it is best not to enquire, except that it ended in a pretty little plot involving a worthwhile amount of money and, if I am not mistaken, a life insurance policy. It is an old story: the Freudian practitioner; the female patient who is trapped in a loveless marriage; the sympathetic talk (‘transference,’ I believe you call it); the temptation; the fall …”

“This is outrageous,” I said, my voice rising. The governesses were by now staring at us openly.

“And then,” Montague said, almost as an afterthought, “there is the blood upon the instep of your right shoe. I saw it when you crossed your legs.”

I leaped to my feet and looked round wildly. There sat Frieda, still staring at the ground as if in a trance. Had she even noticed my predicament?

“Watson,” he said in an altogether different voice, “I believe this is where you come in. Pick up his rolled newspaper. Be careful of the knife.”

The doctor, who had been standing all the while casually under one of the limes, came forward, and there was suddenly in his hand an ancient but no less dangerous looking military pistol. He held it shielded by his black bag in such a way that it could be seen only by Montague and myself.

“Keep quite still,” Montague said. “My medical friend is somewhat out of practice in the small-arms department. The thing has a hair trigger, and we don’t want any nasty accidents, do we?”

“Ah, constables!” he said, as the strolling policemen made their appearance. “Right on the second, as usual. We’ve been expecting you. There’s someone here your superiors will doubtless be pleased to see. Who knows? There might even be a promotion in it.”

“You devil,” I spat. “You’re no more Samuel Montague than the man in the moon. You’re Sherlock Holmes!”

As the constables, one on each side, seized me by the arms, he stood up, put one heel to the instep of his opposite foot, and made a little bow.

“By the way,” he told them, “the lady on the second bench is Mrs. Barnett. Inspector Gregson will be forever in your debt if you should mention to him the curious silver key which you will undoubtedly find in her handbag.

“Come, Watson,” he said to the doctor, “the incomparable Evelyn Laye is at the Gaiety and we have just time enough to fortify ourselves with roast beef at Simpson’s. The thespian art is one which does not always receive sufficiently hearty applause.”

As they dragged me away, I couldn’t resist taunting him over my shoulder.

“What will you do, Holmes, when you’ve brought to book the last criminal in London? You’ll have no more excuse to dress up in your fancy disguises!”

I’ll admit my fury had got rather the better of me. As we passed in front of her, Frieda—poor, dear, weak Frieda, with the now-that-you-mention-it pinkish teeth—didn’t give me even so much as an upward glance.

“Elementary,” I heard him call out as we passed beneath the limes and walked towards the iron gates. “Elementary, my dear fellow. I have my eye on a cottage in St. Mary Mead.”

Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mysteries have been translated into thirty-one languages. Bradley has retreated to a Mediterranean island, taking with him only his wife, his books, and two cat assistants. As a boy, he was introduced to the Holmes tales by a favorite uncle, who faithfully reread them every fifth year. He is also the coauthor (with the late Dr. William A. S. Sarjeant) of the controversial Ms. Holmes of Baker Street, in which the authors prove that Sherlock Holmes was a woman. Bradley may have changed his view since.

The last official record of Holmes’s life is the story “His Last Bow,” published in 1917 in the collection of the same name. It tells of Holmes’s war service as an undercover agent and is written by an unknown author (although it appeared under the byline of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle).