I pulled out carefully. I was going to be careful for a long time. The Sarge had been right about one thing: Barney had been a dope. The fact that he’d also been my friend didn’t matter anymore. The debt had been paid.
In the meantime, I had a lot to be careful for.
The Doctor’s Case
I believe there was only one occasion upon which I actually solved a crime before my slightly fabulous friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I say believe because my memory began to grow hazy about the edges as I entered my ninth decade; now, as I approach my centennial, the whole has become downright misty. There may have been another occasion, but if so I do not remember it.
I doubt that I shall ever forget this particular case no matter how murky my thoughts and memories may become, and I thought I might as well set it down before God caps my pen forever. It cannot humiliate Holmes now, God knows; he is forty years in his grave. That, I think, is long enough to leave the tale untold. Even Lestrade, who used Holmes upon occasion but never had any great liking for him, never broke his silence in the matter of Lord Hull — he hardly could have done so, considering the circumstances. Even if the circumstances had been different, I somehow doubt he would have. He and Holmes baited each other, and I believe that Holmes may have harbored actual hate in his heart for the policeman (although he never would have admitted to such a low emotion), but Lestrade had a queer respect for my friend.
It was a wet, dreary afternoon and the clock had just rang half past one. Holmes sat by the window, holding his violin but not playing it, looking silently out into the rain. There were times, especially once his cocaine days were behind him, when Holmes would grow moody to the point of surliness when the skies remained stubbornly gray for a week or more, and he had been doubly disappointed on this day, for the glass had been rising since late the night before and he had confidently predicted clearing skies by ten this morning at the latest. Instead, the mist, which had been hanging in the air when I arose, had thickened into a steady rain, and if there was anything that rendered Holmes moodier than long periods of rain, it was being wrong.
Suddenly he straightened up, tweaking a violin string with a fingernail, and smiled sardonically. ‘Watson! Here’s a sight! The wettest bloodhound you ever saw!’
It was Lestrade, of course, seated in the back of an open wagon with water running into his close-set, fiercely inquisitive eyes. The wagon had no more than stopped before he was out, flinging the driver a coin, and striding toward 22IB Baker Street. He moved so quickly that I thought he should run into our door like a battering ram.
I heard Mrs. Hudson remonstrating with him about his decidedly damp condition and the effect it might have on the rugs both downstairs and up, and then Holmes, who could make Lestrade look like a tortoise when the urge struck him, leaped across to the door and called down, ‘Let him up, Mrs. H. — I’ll put a newspaper under his boots if he stays long, but I somehow think, yes, I really do think that — ‘
Then Lestrade was bounding up the stairs, leaving Mrs. Hudson to expostulate below. His color was high, his eyes burned, and his teeth — decidedly yellowed by tobacco — were bared in a wolfish grin.
‘Inspector Lestrade!’ Holmes cried jovially. ‘What brings you out on such a — ‘
No further did he get. Still panting from his climb, Lestrade said, ‘I’ve heard gypsies say the devil grants wishes. Now I believe it. Come at once if you’d have a try, Holmes; the corpse is still fresh and the suspects all in a row.’
‘You frighten me with your ardor, Lestrade!’ Holmes cried, but with a sardonic little waggle of his eyebrows.
‘Don’t play the shrinking violet with me, man — I’ve come at the run to offer you the very thing for which you in your pride have wished a hundred times or more in my own hearing: the perfect locked-room mystery!’
Holmes had started into the corner, perhaps to get the awful gold-tipped cane, which he was for some reason affecting that season. Now he whirled upon our damp visitor, his eyes wide.
‘Lestrade! Are you serious?’
‘Would I have risked wet-lung croup riding here in an open wagon if I were not?” Lestrade countered.
Then, for the only time in my hearing (despite the countless times the phrase has been attributed to him), Holmes turned to me and cried: ‘Quick, Watson! The game’s afoot!’
On our way, Lestrade commented sourly that Holmes also had the luck of the devil; although Lestrade had commanded the wagon-driver to wait, we had no more than emerged from our lodgings when that exquisite rarity clip-clopped down the street: an empty hackney in what had become a driving rain. We climbed in and were off in a trice. As always, Holmes sat on the lefthand side, his eyes darting restlessly about, cataloguing everything, although there was precious little to see on that day . . . or so it seemed, at least, to the likes of me. I’ve no doubt every empty street corner and rain-washed shop window spoke volumes to Holmes.
Lestrade directed the driver to an address in Savile Row, and then asked Holmes if he knew Lord Hull.
‘I know of him,’ Holmes said, ‘but have never had the good fortune of meeting him. Now I suppose I never shall. Shipping, wasn’t it?’
‘Shipping,’ Lestrade agreed, ‘but the good fortune was yours. Lord Hull was, by all accounts (including those of his nearest and — ahem! — dearest), a thoroughly nasty fellow, and as dotty as a puzzle-picture in a child’s novelty book. He’s finished practicing both nastiness and dottiness for good, however; around eleven o’clock this morning, just’ — he pulled out his turnip of a pocket-watch and looked at it — ‘two hours and forty minutes ago, someone put a knife in his back as he sat in his study with his will on the blotter before him.’
‘So,’ Holmes said thoughtfully, lighting his pipe, ‘you believe the study of this unpleasant Lord Hull is the perfect locked room of my dreams, do you?’ His eyes gleamed skeptically through a rising rafter of blue smoke.
‘I believe,’ Lestrade said quietly, ‘that it is.’
‘Watson and I have dug such holes before and never struck water,’ Holmes remarked, and he glanced at me before returning to his ceaseless catalogue of the streets through which we passed.
‘Do you recall the “Speckled Band,” Watson?’
I hardly needed to answer him. There had been a locked room in that business, true enough, but there had also been a ventilator, a poisonous snake, and a killer fiendish enough to introduce the latter into the former. It had been the work of a cruelly brilliant mind, but Holmes had seen to the bottom of the matter in almost no time at all.
‘What are the facts, Inspector?’ Holmes asked.
Lestrade began to lay them before us in the clipped tones of a trained policeman. Lord Albert Hull had been a tyrant in business and a despot at home. His wife had gone in fear of him, and had apparently been justified in doing so. The fact that she had borne him three sons seemed in no way to have moderated his savage approach toward their domestic affairs in general and toward her in particular. Lady Hull had been reluctant to speak of these matters, but her sons had no such reservations; their papa, they said, had missed no opportunity to dig at her, to criticize her, or to jest at her expense . . . all of this when they were in company. When they were alone, he virtually ignored her. Except, Lestrade added, when he felt moved to beat her, which was by no means an uncommon occurrence.
‘William, the eldest, told me she always gave out the same story when she came to the breakfast table with a swollen eye or a mark on her cheek: that she had forgotten to put on her spectacles and had run into a door. “She ran into doors once and twice a week,” William said. “I didn’t know we had that many doors in the house.” ‘
‘Hmmm,’ Holmes said. ‘A cheery fellow! The sons never put a stop to it?’
‘She wouldn’t allow it,’ Lestrade said.
‘Insanity,’ I returned. A man who would beat his wife is an abomination; a woman who would allow it an abomination and a perplexity.
‘There was a method in her madness, though,’ Lestrade said. ‘Method and what you might call
‘an informed patience.’ She was, after all, twenty years younger than her lord and master. Also, Hull was a heavy drinker and a champion diner. At age seventy, five years ago, he developed gout and angina.’