Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

6

The powers of memory exhibited by Sherlock Holmes would have been worth a whimsical monograph of the kind that only he could write. How any human being could have so encyclopaedic a recollection of so many divers facts was beyond me, and I no longer sought the answer. Once he had tried to explain it by saying that the only thing necessary was a passion for knowledge which made it impossible to forget. Then he tried to define it as a system, in which knowledge of one thing led by association to two more—and so on by geometrical progression. It seemed far simpler to accept that once his indomitable memory learnt a fact, he never forgot it.

None of this prepared me for the next day’s bombshell.

On the morning after our return from Bly, I was later than usual coming down to breakfast. Holmes was seldom an early riser and I was not surprised to see the Morning Post unopened. But his knife, fork and plate had been cleared away. Therefore he had gone out even before the paper was delivered. Once the game was afoot, as he called it, there were nights when his head hardly touched the pillow before he was up and about again.

I finished breakfast and was reading the county cricket scores in The Times. The rasp of a wheel rim against the kerb indicated that a cab had pulled up. Slow and hollow hoofbeats signalled the driver’s return to the Regent’s Park rank. I waited to hear Holmes’s key in the lock and his footsteps on the stairs, while I followed the report of yesterday’s match at Bath between Middlesex and Somerset. As time ran out—ten to make and the match to win!—Hereward Douglas had hit a stylish half century for the visiting team.

Why was there still no sound on the stairs? I got up and drew back the curtain a little, looking up and down the street for any sign of Holmes. He was a hundred yards away, towards the park, in conversation with half a dozen of the ugliest little ragamuffins I ever saw. Four boys and two of their sisters, no doubt. This unsightly group was a detachment of his “Baker Street Irregulars,” as he called them. They were his spies in enemy territory. While they watched and listened, gathering intelligence or shadowing a quarry on our behalf, our opponents never gave them a second glance. He was either describing the details of their next assignment or arguing over their extortionate demands for payment.

The prestige of working for Mr Holmes, the Baker Street Detective, always carried the day with these little bandits. Several coins now passed from his purse to the tallest boy of the group. The balance would follow upon completion of their task. He turned back and strode towards the freshly polished brass of Mrs Hudson’s doorstep.

Vigorously, as if he had just woken from a good night’s sleep, he came up the stairs two at a-time and into our sitting-room. Action and activity were his great restoratives. His cap went skimming onto the hat-stand. He threw himself down in his fireside chair and greeted me with a broad smile. Then he drew a sheet of paper from his breast pocket.

“We have it, Watson! I shall be surprised if a competent Queen’s Counsel cannot argue Miss Victoria Temple out of Broadmoor by next week.”

He produced a sheet of paper.

“What is that?”

“A transcript from Somerset House. Their doors were open at eight-thirty and I was the first applicant across the step. This is a transcript of the death certificate of poor young Miles Mordaunt—or rather the details which I have copied from it. Still appended to it was a post-mortem report.”

“How does it help Miss Temple? She has already admitted killing him. If she was so deranged that she did not know what she was doing or did not know it to be wrong, she will remain insane but guilty under English criminal law.”

“I shall take the liberty of calling that into question.”

“How?”

He sighed.

“Because she never killed anyone. The great pity, Watson, is that I was not invited to attend Miss Temple’s trial. I could have saved the lawyers on both sides so much trouble.”

On these occasions, he was quite insufferable.

“What trouble, for God’s sake?”

“She was found guilty of suffocating the child. But the postmortem evidence here shows that the primary cause of death was cardiac arrest. Not suffocation.”

“Cardiac arrest at the hands of Miss Temple? What of it? All deaths—including all those occasioned by murder—end in cardiac arrest. The question is how they are brought about!”

He beamed at me and clasped his hands.

“Like everyone else, I had first believed Miss Temple’s confession in her journal. She hugged a delicate boy tightly enough and long enough to suffocate him. Without her intervention, any slight initial diphtheritic infection would not have killed him at that point and might well have yielded to treatment. Her conduct was what the law calls the novus actus interveniens, the new act which changes the course of events.”

This legal subtlety was merely an irritation and I told him so. His smile grew a little warmer as he continued.

“Our simple rustic coroner never went further than the story in her journal. Miss Temple had confessed to murder, therefore it must be so. My dear Watson, I have also been through the post-mortem report of the fever hospital, separately and minutely. As a result, I am quite convinced that Miss Temple could not have murdered Miles Mordaunt because the child she hugged to herself was already dead. There were too many mind-doctors at her trial and too few specialists in contagious diseases.”

He had a trick up his sleeve, but for the life of me I could not see what.

“It will not help her, Holmes! Let us suppose she frightened a delicate child violently enough to cause heart failure. By legal precedent, it is unlawful killing to frighten a victim to death, even by impersonating a ghost. What else is her nonsense of an evil spirit at the dining-room window but such an act?”

He relaxed his smile.

“The boy was in the very early stages of diphtheria.”

“We already know that. The very early stages would not kill him. They will certainly not exonerate Miss Temple.”

He shook his head indulgently.

“I believe, my dear friend, that an item of your medical training has escaped your memory for a moment. It certainly eluded the simple country physician at Bly. The equally simple coroner’s jurors were content to believe Miss Temple’s confession in her journal. Accordingly, they returned a verdict of homicide against her.”

“What is your alternative?”

“Curiously, while diphtheria may take its course over several days or a week, it can also kill at once and without warning. It can even kill without any previous symptoms.”

This was too much.

“I have treated diphtheria for twenty years and I have never met with such a case!”

He stood up without replying and walked across to the long bookcase, extending from floor to ceiling. Its rows of scrapbooks and volumes of reference made up his library.

“Nor, perhaps, have you ever heard of Professor Stresemann. If you are not too weary after yesterday’s journey, let me show you the relevant section in his admirable volume on forensic pathology, Das Lehrbuch für Gerichtsmedizin. Among others, he cites two recent cases of patients feeling a trifle feverish, as Miles Mordaunt did. Like him, they were not apparently suffering from any serious or specific illness. The idea that they were in the grip of diphtheria would have seemed alarmist. They resembled precisely the reported state of Master Mordaunt. Nothing was done. Both victims were found dead a few hours later with no previous suspicion that they had contracted the disease.”

“Impossible!”

He drew his volume from its shelf and continued his explanation as he turned to the page.

“The only reason, my dear fellow, that you have never known such a case is that diphtheria was not diagnosed. Like the boy, Stresemann’s cases were in the early stages of the infection which might still have yielded to treatment. A diphtheritic deposit had gathered in the throat but that would not have had time to be fatal. However a further autopsy revealed unexpected diphtheritic deposits in the bronchi. These deposits travelled suddenly and rapidly from the throat down the bronchi, the congestion created by this then causing cardiac failure. Everything in the case of the poor child at Bly corresponds with Professor Stresemann’s description and findings.”

Not for the first time, my friend’s random erudition was a cause of personal annoyance. I tried to cut him short,

“A delicate and under-developed child of ten was seized by a healthy and well-built woman in her twenties, certainly capable of overpowering him and depriving him of air.”

He shook his head.

“There is no evidence of that whatever except in her journal, which Miss Temple completed in the short period before her arrest and with her mental balance in question. She is no diagnostician and would not know the first thing about a diphtheritic deposit. She convinced herself that she must have smothered the child and worked backwards from there! It was diphtheria which killed him!”

“You think so?”

“She came round from her hysterical absence, as the French call it. The live child she had been hugging before was now dead in her arms. Therefore she concluded that she must have caused his death. Oh, she believed it, I am quite sure. Having passed judgement on herself, she then did her best to get herself hanged, as if seeking expiation. Her journal and her statements are totally uncorroborated. To say the least, she wrote the final pages in a state of extreme mental confusion. She sincerely believed that the boy’s soul had been carried off by Peter Quint as an agent of the devil. It was her fault, for which she sought punishment. Such a confession should never have been allowed in evidence! Miles Mordaunt was in all probability dead from a blow to the heart by the dislodgement of diphtheritic deposits before she took him in that last embrace.”

“Impossible to prove!”

He handed me Stresemann’s book.

“Impossible to disprove, rather. Ironically, the post-mortem evidence does not incriminate Victoria Temple. If she had never kept that journal, she might not even have been a suspect. If you do not object, however, we will keep this to ourselves for the moment.”

“While Miss Temple remains in Broadmoor?”

“For the shortest possible time. As the great military strategist Clausewitz remarked, a wise commander fights the right battle, at the right time, and in the right place. That moment is approaching but it has not quite arrived. There is still murder at the heart of this case but it is not the murder of Miles Mordaunt and certainly not of his little sister.”

“Who else can it be?”

He was not yet to be drawn. For much of that day he sat in an easy chair smoking his pipe, or droning on his violin, or lounging with a handful of Boxer cartridges and his hair-trigger revolver, elaborating with bullet pocks our patriotic VR—for Victoria Regina—on the opposite wall. Life, it seemed, was returning to normal.

It was almost dusk. Streaks of late sunlight across the carpet were deepening to a tawny orange. There came an erratic hammering at the front door, followed by a scampering on the stairs. His Baker Street Irregulars had returned. He took half a dozen sheets of paper from them and studied the contents. Then he threw back his head and began to chuckle. The chuckle grew to laughter, as if at the most preposterous tale he had ever read.

He was still laughing as the six young scamps, each clutching a half-sovereign, scrambled back down the stairs and disappeared, shouting, into the street.