As Sherlock Holmes’s fame spread around the world, he received a steady stream of correspondence from more than a dozen nations. Most came from individuals seeking his help in solving some arcane mystery. The genesis of the story that Watson provisionally entitled ‘The Adventure of Baron Galtür’ was different. It lay not in the failure of the Austrian police to solve a crime, but in Baron Galtür’s insistence that they had arrested the wrong man.
Holmes’s attention to the case was drawn by a letter, postmarked Interlaken, that reached Baker Street on 25 February 1887. ‘Interesting,’ Holmes said to Watson as he picked up the envelope and examined it. ‘You will note from the crinkling of the paper that this envelope has been steamed open after posting.’ Either it contained matters of political significance, he went on, or it was written by someone in prison.
He was correct, of course. The letter was written by an Austrian nobleman, Frederich Hoffbilt, Baron Galtür, who had been detained in His Imperial Majesty’s prison, Interlaken, pending trial for murder. The notes that Watson took from his letter to Holmes, which the doctor said was written in formal, rather old-fashioned and stilted English, are easily summarized.
The baron had been arrested for killing a young aristocrat, Egmont von Wasptakker. He admitted that the evidence against him, although circumstantial, was overwhelming; and yet he insisted to ‘the most esteemed and honourable of detectives’ that he was, ‘in the name of Almighty God Himself and of His Holy Mother Maria, innocent of this terrible crime’.
The letter concluded by beseeching the Englishman – the baron’s ‘only hoping’ – to contact the Viennese lawyer who was acting on his behalf: the man, ‘a respectable servant of justice’, had been instructed to pass on to Holmes full details of a case that was ‘the breaking of my heart as was already done to that of my beloved daughter, Elizabeth’.
Holmes considered the letter carefully for a while and came to two conclusions. First, the baron was almost certainly not guilty of the murder of which he stood accused: if he were indeed guilty, he would not be calling upon the services of a detective renowned for his unfailing ability to uncover the truth. Second, as Holmes could not spare the time to travel to Austria, he relished the unusual challenge of tackling a case by correspondence. Watson said it could not be done, Holmes bet him five guineas that it could, and the pair shook hands on the wager.
On receipt of a request from Holmes, the baron’s Viennese lawyer replied with an excellent, fifteen-page account of the murder and its attendant circumstances. In a short paragraph at the beginning, he said he would try to be wholly objective so that the London detective could see for himself how desperately incontrovertible the evidence against his client appeared to be.
The baron’s family had lived in the remote Austrian village of Galtür since the time of the Emperor Charles V. They owned large estates there and had the reputation of being fair if somewhat paternalistic landlords. The baron’s wife had died eighteen years ago, shortly after the birth of their only child, Elizabeth. Frederich Hoffbilt had not remarried but channelled his affection on to his daughter who, under his watchful but loving eye, had grown up into a very beautiful young lady.
In the summer of the previous year, 1886, a pair of young brothers from Vienna had rented one of the baron’s hunting lodges as a base from which to go walking in the mountains. Though the names would mean nothing to Holmes, the lawyer explained, they carried great weight in Austria. George and Egmont von Wasptakker, distant cousins of the ruling Habsburg dynasty, were wealthy, privileged and used to getting their own way. In terms of status and influence, they towered over a provincial nobleman. The lawyer confessed that the disparity of influence made his task all the harder.
On reading this, Watson noted, Holmes muttered something about Magna Carta and all men being equal under the law.
By the end of their stay in Galtür, George and Egmont were clearly smitten by the charms of Elizabeth Hoffbilt, and spent a good deal more time hanging around the baron’s castle than walking on the hills. During the autumn, much to her father’s annoyance, Elizabeth received several letters from both young men. They reappeared in the district shortly before Christmas and, when the baron said his hunting lodges were no longer available, took rooms at an inn just four hundred yards from his castle. They had come, they said, to engage in the increasingly fashionable sport of skiing. As the lawyer wryly noted, the sport they were actually engaged in was a good deal older.
At this point the account offered a brief character sketch of each of the two young suitors. The twenty-one-year-old George was serious-minded, scholarly, moral and deeply religious. The lawyer waxed unusually poetic in his description, saying the passionate young man had ‘pursued the fair Elizabeth like a medieval knight, sworn to fight the fiercest dragon to win the hand of the fair maiden upon whom his heart was set’. He attended mass regularly and was considering a career as a university professor. Though handsome in a dark, chiselled manner, he gave the impression of being over-earnest and somewhat humourless.
Egmont, two years younger than his brother, could hardly have been more different. He was charming, with bright blue eyes, fair hair and a quick, mobile face. The lawyer intimated that, back in Vienna, Egmont consorted with a group of wealthy young army officers whose only interests were in drinking and chasing girls. Moreover, it was rumoured that he had privately sworn to marry three young ladies, but had not honoured his promise to wed one of them. From the moment they first met, Baron Galtür had made his dislike of the young profligate quite clear. Unfortunately, this had only served to make Egmont even keener in his pursuit of Elizabeth.
Matters came to a head in early February when the family doctor broke his oath of confidentiality and informed the baron that his daughter was ‘with child’. When questioned, Elizabeth confessed that Egmont, whom she loved dearly and wished to marry, was responsible for her condition: the couple had been meeting in secret almost every night since his return to Galtür. So he could get into the castle undetected, she had given him a key to the servants’ entrance.
On hearing his daughter’s confession, fury mingled with despair in the nobleman’s breast. The weather was unusually mild for the time of year and, without pausing even to pull on a coat, he hurried through the melting snow to the isolated inn where the two brothers were staying. The confrontation between the father and the lover can easily be imagined: the older man demanded that Egmont marry his daughter immediately; the latter played it cool, saying there was no proof that he was responsible for Elizabeth’s pregnancy – could it not have been his brother, George, who was even keener on the girl than he was? – and adding that any marriage would require the approval of his parents, who would almost certainly not accept ‘a provincial nobody, no matter how beautiful’ into their family.
At this the baron lost all self-control. He yelled at Egmont, calling him a vile and heartless puppy and swearing to kill him. The threat was shouted loudly enough to be clearly heard by George, whose suite was next door, and by Jan Flugger, the innkeeper. When questioned by the police the following day, both men gave precisely the same account of what had happened.
It was already getting dark when the baron stormed out of the inn. The temperature had dropped markedly, transforming the water trickling from the eaves into pointed, glassy stalactites, and turning the snow to a crystal carpet that crunched beneath his feet. Shortly after he reached his castle, it snowed heavily until around midnight. A severe frost then set in, and the temperature remained below freezing for the next five days.
It was Egmont’s custom to have his breakfast served in his room no earlier than eleven o’clock each morning. When, at about 11.15, Jan Flugger collected a tray of bread and fruit and knocked at Egmont’s door, there was no reply. As this was not uncommon, he put down the tray, pushed open the unlocked door and peered inside. He was immediately struck by how cold the room was. The window was wide open and, as might be expected, the fire had burned itself out many hours before and even the ashes were cold. Flugger coughed politely and advanced towards the bed. His guest appeared to be still asleep, lying on his back with his arms flung wide across the bedclothes. It was not until the innkeeper drew back the curtains that he noticed the blood – Egmont von Wasptakker was dead, killed by a single thrust of a sharp spike that had pierced his carotid artery.
Galtür had only one policeman, an elderly and corpulent officer who had never been confronted by a murder. However, he did have the wit to order no one to approach the inn or the baron’s castle, for in the fresh snow he had noticed footprints indicative of four journeys between the two venues – evidence that might be of interest to the detectives summoned from Interlaken. The impressions certainly did interest them, as did something else they noticed in the Great Hall of Baron Galtür’s castle.
There were two very clear sets of footprints. One, confirmed by matching the boots of the deceased to the frozen indentations, had been made by Egmont. They showed him walking, sometime after midnight, from the inn to the servants’ entrance of the castle and back again. The second set of prints was made by the baron walking from the front door of his castle to the inn and then returning home, for the marks accurately matched a pair of his footwear.
From this evidence, the Interlaken detectives deduced that Egmont had gone to visit Elizabeth after the snowstorm had stopped and then returned home. The baron, seething with anger at the young man’s insolent continuation of his relationship with his daughter, had followed him back to the inn, killed him, and retreated to his castle. And the murder weapon? Careful examination of the weaponry displayed on the walls of the baron’s great hall revealed that one of the bayonets had recently been wiped clean. All the others were covered in dust.
The only piece of evidence in the baron’s favour, concluded the lawyer, was that the wretched Elizabeth, now beside herself with grief, had sworn that Egmont had not visited her that night. The detectives dismissed this, saying that either she was lying or the baron had been waiting for Egmont by the servants’ door and had driven him off before he could meet up with his lover.
‘Strange as it may seem, my dear Watson,’ said Holmes after he had read the letter three times, ‘I believe the poor girl was telling the truth.’
After giving the matter further thought, he wrote a long reply to the baron’s lawyer suggesting what had really happened on the night of the murder. Four weeks later he received a letter from the baron himself. It thanked him ‘from the deepest region of my heart’ for furnishing his lawyer with the line of enquiry that had led to his client’s release and the discovery of the true villain.
What could Holmes have said in his letter to the Viennese lawyer?
Find the answer/s here.
