Chapter Twenty-Nine

The next day, Lestrade visited Baker Street once again.

On this occasion, however, he arrived more sedately and accepted a whisky and a seat by the fire. At first, he seemed uncomfortable to be in Baker Street as a guest. He sat stiffly and silently in his chair, glass balanced on his knee and his bowler still gripped in one hand. It was Holmes, unexpectedly, who cajoled him to relax a little and gradually, and perhaps under the influence of a second whisky, he settled back and became more animated in his speech.

We talked for a short while of recent news, then Holmes stretched out his long legs, lit his pipe, and offered the explanation he had promised.

“Do you remember Potter saying that the urchins of the streets come and go and nobody can say where or when? That is not entirely true, as he would have known. It is true that we do not value them, but they do value themselves. Not a single street Arab disappears in this city, but his friends know it. I set Wiggins and his associates about the task of tracking down any of their kind who had vanished on the day after the murder of Miss McLachlan. They found no one for whom they could not account, but Wiggins did discover something connected to another matter I had placed before him.

“It seems that three days after the murder, a carriage drove into Linhope Street and picked up Mrs. Soames, the landlady who was so concerned for her elderly tenant’s safety. You will be interested to know that a young woman was observed already to be in the carriage. You will, I think, be even more interested to learn that on the doors of the carriage were emblazoned the twin horns of the roebuck.”

“Alistair McLachlan!”

“The very same,” Holmes confirmed. “Initially I had instructed Wiggins to take part in the search for the girl and had discounted the younger brother entirely. However, after hearing of your meeting with him, I asked Wiggins instead to watch out for any unusual activity at the McLachlan house. He rightly assumed that the family carriage leaving in the dead of night counted as such an activity.”

“All well and good, Holmes, and obviously in hindsight you were correct, but nothing that McLachlan said in our meeting struck me as suggestive of guilt. Quite the opposite, in fact. What did you see at second hand that I, who was actually present, did not?”

“I believe I remarked at the time that I had no faith in your ability to judge personality without supporting evidence. Any man may commit any crime, in my experience. As to Mr. McLachlan particularly, I was immediately struck by two things. First, the certainty with which he proclaimed your innocence. No man could possibly be so certain about a matter so important on so brief an acquaintance. The only explanation was that he either knew the identity of the real killer, or knew for a fact that it could not be you.”

“And the second thing?”

“McLachlan called the girl Mary. Not Parr, as one might expect from a notorious degenerate describing the poor girl he has ruined for his sport. No, he knew and used her Christian name instead. There is an intimacy there which spoke of strong feeling.”

“I see,” I said. “But news of this carriage journey came to you only some time later, long after the event?”

“It was. I had no way of ascertaining where the carriage had gone and, after our abrupt removal from Major McLachlan’s house, no way in which to find out. Of course, I went to the back door in the guise of a destitute man looking for work, hoping to obtain the information from a servant, but the door was slammed in my face. Clearly, the major, or Murray more likely, had warned the staff to be on their guard.

“I did, however, have one avenue open to me.”

“McLachlan’s address in Paris!” I exclaimed, recalling the card I had given Holmes.

“Quite correct, Watson. It was for that reason that I had to leave you so abruptly. I had no way of knowing how long McLachlan would stay in the same hotel, so I rushed to catch the first boat to France. As it happened, he had moved on by the time I arrived in Paris, and it took me several days to track him down to a small pension in the Rue Blomet.”

“What did he say? I assume that Mary Parr was not present?”

“She was not, and McLachlan denied even knowing her name. He simply repeated that he was happy to write on your behalf to the courts, pleading for clemency and stating his own belief that you were innocent, but he could not help with my search for a missing maid.”

“Could you not have brought Lestrade along? He might have been able to convince the French police to arrest McLachlan.”

“On what charge? Besides, even if somehow he had been convicted of a crime, it would have brought us no nearer the real killer, and your exoneration. Better instead to wait, and hope that his murderous mistress would attempt to join him in Paris. It is to that hope which Lestrade and I have clung for this past year.”

“There has been a notice with her description posted at every port for twelve months now,” Lestrade added. “Mr. Holmes was sure that Mr. McLachlan had her hidden away somewhere, waiting for you to be hanged and any interest in the case to disappear.”

“I was not sure, Lestrade,” Holmes chided the inspector. “I merely hoped. It was for that reason that we could not tell you, Watson. Imagine the tension you would have felt, every day hoping for news and yet none arriving.”

I understood his reasoning, and was thankful to both of them for the pains they had taken to clear my name. But one question still nagged at the back of my mind.

“Why did you assume that the maid had killed Miss McLachlan? Why not Alistair McLachlan himself?”

“Do you have so little faith in me, Watson? It was obvious from very early on that the killer was a woman. Sarah McLachlan may have wandered somewhat in her wits, but she remained a lady, and would hardly have thought it proper to appear dressed for bed in front of a strange man. From there, the strong likelihood was that the girl who bade you treat her ailing grandmother and the murderer must be one and the same.” He stopped, and tilted his head in consideration. “I would have arrived at this conclusion earlier, had I not erroneously assumed that Potter acted in good faith. His insistence that you – or someone of similar stature – was to blame, caused me to wonder whether two people were involved, the girl to settle the victim and a man to carry out the deed. But if that was the case, why did Miss McLachlan not struggle? Of course, once I had the opportunity to examine the room in which she was killed, I was satisfied that only one person had been present, and confident that that person was female.”

“Due in some way to the recovery of the knife, and the manner in which it was hidden? Or was there something which you did not pass on to Lestrade and me?”

“On the contrary, I relayed everything that I saw. Only the conclusions I presented were incomplete. I said that a man had crouched down to look out of the window – you recall the fingerprints on the glass? – but as we knew a girl had been in the room, the obvious conclusion was that it was she who had left her imprint. The discovery of the murder weapon where it should not have been simply confirmed my theory.”

“Where it should not have been?” All Holmes had said made perfect sense, but I was in no mood for riddles. Holmes, I think, recognised this, for he hurried to reply.

“On the scaffolding. You recall that I did not initially find the knife, but had to descend and re-ascend the structure via a different ladder? I had calculated the distance that both a man and a girl would be able to cast a bag containing a dagger of the type required to inflict the wounds we saw. The far ladder represented the distance conceivably reached by the toss of a man of average strength, the nearer that of a girl as described by you. As soon as I had confirmed that there was no knife at the far point, I knew that I had been correct all along, and that Potter had been mistaken.”

“Ingenious,” I said with approval, then frowned as a thought occurred to me. “But why then were you so interested in the loafers who helped Constable Howie break down the door?”

“As I said, I was initially led astray by Inspector Potter. I have only myself to blame. I assumed that he was simply mistaken in his belief that you were guilty and, leading from that flawed assumption, that another man must be involved. At that stage it did not cross my mind that he could be misleading us deliberately.”

“You wondered if the smallest man might have been the killer?”

“Exactly. It was improbable, I admit, but if he were of sufficiently diminutive size, it was conceivable that he, and not the girl, had left the fingerprints, thrown the bag, and murdered Miss McLachlan. In the end, he did indeed prove to be an imposter, but not the sort I had hoped.”

“I admit that I wondered whether you thought the little man an assassin, hired by one of your enemies,” Lestrade piped up, with a smile.

“You have evidently taken to reading fiction, Inspector,” Holmes chuckled. “Had I known, I would have advised against it. A limited intellect can only hold so much information before it begins to confuse the real and the imaginary.”

“Holmes!” I chided my friend. “Lestrade has been invaluable in recent weeks. He deserves better than to be insulted.”

I fancy I saw a flicker of contrition cross Holmes’s face. “My apologies, Lestrade,” he said contritely, “I spoke in jest. But I hardly think it likely that any enemy of mine would employ a hired killer in order to carry out so convoluted a strike against me. Far simpler to walk up behind me in any London street and shoot me in the back – or lure me to a convenient waterfall and cause me to fall!”

He laughed, but I repressed a shudder at the thought, and turned the conversation to a less morbid topic. Sometimes Holmes’s sense of humour left much to be desired.