We ran – well, Holmes and Polly ran, and I limped – through the rain across town towards the Church of Our Lady of the Roses. My wound was now throbbing. I wish I had taken Dr Macready up on his offer of medication.
At last, the church was in sight. And there, thankfully, Holmes espied a constable on his rounds. Gripping my arm, he whispered, ‘Ask him to see Polly home safely. Tell him to wake up Hadley and say that Sherlock Holmes has been seen at the church and to come at once.’
Holmes carried on and I did as he asked. Regretting the need for this, I vouched for Polly’s honour with the young fellow and asked him to accompany the girl to her sister’s, so as to avoid the horror of the Spinning House. He was more than happy to do so.
‘I’m not so fond of those proctor’s men, myself,’ he said. ‘Bulldogs, we call ’em. Come, little lady.’ Polly rolled her eyes at ‘little lady’ but waved a thank-you to me.
‘But before that, please! Tell Inspector Hadley that Sherlock Holmes has been seen at the Church of our Lady of the Roses. And to come at once,’ I urged.
‘I’ll not be waking up the Inspector—’
‘Sherlock Holmes … who escaped from gaol earlier today!’
‘Oh, that fellow!’ cried the man, not realizing it was Holmes who had just left us. ‘By God, then, I’ll do it! Come along, young lady!’
I caught up with Holmes just outside of the Church of Our Lady of the Roses. The rain continued to beat a tattoo on the stone pavers and the garden soil. A small lantern high on the stone church wall sent a faint glow out over the rose garden, where the delicate flowers danced and vibrated under the heavy downfall, some knocked from their fragile stems into the growing puddles of water.
As we passed the church en route to the outer building which housed the two clergymen, I could see glowing lights coming from the basement clerestory windows and heard the sounds of banging and a few shouts. Two men ran past us with ropes and buckets. A rubber hose extended out of one of the windows, spewing water into the already soaked and pooling flowerbeds.
‘Where are Father Lamb and Deacon Buttons?’ shouted Holmes to one of them.
‘The father is down below, no idea about Buttons!’ cried one.
I glanced at my watch. It was two-thirty in the morning.
‘Picked a fine time to disappear!’ shouted another. ‘And with the father gone to London yesterday! We’ve a flood on our hands!’
‘We’ll send for help,’ said Holmes. He grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘Quick, to Buttons’ room!’
Shortly we stood dripping at the entry to his small quarters. We knocked on the door and it swung open. Empty. I started to step inside, but Holmes blocked my entry.
‘Wait, Watson. We must disturb nothing. Go and fetch some candles, please. A lantern. As much light as you can gather.’
I scavenged quickly, returning with several candles I discovered in Lamb’s spartan room down the hall, and two more from a niche nearby. Holmes had lit the paraffin light on Buttons’ desk, then quickly lit all the candles and placed them around the room. One near the window guttered and went out. I noticed the window was open a crack and the rising storm was seeping into the room.
‘Holmes, shall I close the window?’
‘No! And keep back – out of the room.’ I paused at the threshold. Holmes ran to the window, and noting something on the sill, said, ‘Stay there, in the hall, Watson.’ He left the room and returned after five very long minutes. I waited nervously, hoping that Father Lamb would not appear to confront us.
Buttons’ quarters, at first glance, were unremarkable. All seemed to be in order. The bed had been made to near military perfection. Clothes hung neatly in the open armoire, shoes aligned below it. Holmes would learn nothing here, I feared.
My friend returned shortly, his knees muddied, boots caked with mud. ‘Find anything?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Stay in the doorway. Touch nothing.’
He took off his boots and left them at the door, although his wet socks left prints behind on the stone floor. He began a process I had witnessed many times before. I thought of it as his strange dance of detection, in which he moved with great animation and a kind of electrified focus, examining minutely even the most prosaic and benign objects, and from them piecing together a complete and detailed sequence of events.
As usual, I was relegated to the position of observer – and in this case, lookout. If a crime had been committed here, I could as yet see nothing of it.
Holmes took out his lens and worked his way around the small, neat room.
From the doorway, the desk, like everything else, looked pristine. Holmes ran his finger across the top, sides and back, examined and smelled the inside of the drawer. He picked up the bottle of purple ink Buttons had used in the doll incident, now paired next to the original black bottle on the desk. ‘Half empty,’ he remarked. ‘Cap is cracked.’ He flipped through a Bible with numerous small bits of paper marking pages. Noting something on the wall, he scraped it with a fingernail. Then he picked up a candle which had been knocked from its holder and lay on the desk.
The deacon’s small carpet-bag stood upright in the same corner. Empty.
Holmes spent a long time on the bed. Folding back the coverlet, he removed a small card from his pocket, gently brushed something into it, folded it, and replaced it in his pocket. He smelled the pillow, examined the coverlet in minute detail, removed it and examined between the sheets. He moved the bed away from the wall and carefully inspected the newly uncovered area.
At the washstand, he picked up a water-jug. ‘Ah!’ he said, then ran his hands along the back of the desk chair, the arms of the chair, the desk and its drawers. He dropped to the floor, crawled to the corners, looked under the bed and desk, and finally got up, dusting off his clothing.
The window remained open and a steady spray of small droplets pattered against it, some wetting the sill and the stone floor directly below. Holmes re-examined the sill, the lock, the edges of this window, nodding and murmuring something unintelligible as he did so.
It took no incisive deductions on my part to see that some invisible history was playing out vividly in his mind.
He turned to look at me and exclaimed in surprise. He dashed across the small room towards me and minutely examined an area of the wall abutting the doorframe. ‘Your pocketknife, Watson,’ he commanded. ‘I have forgotten mine.’
I complied. He scraped something from the edge of the doorframe. ‘Aha!’ The scrapings went into a second small card which he folded and placed in his pocket.
The armoire came last. Deacon Buttons’ few clothes hung neatly. Three pairs of shoes were perfectly aligned along the bottom. Holmes picked up each in turn, exclaiming over the last, ‘Hmm. This pair is damp, the others are dry.’
He frowned, perplexed, then moved to the centre of the room and remained there for some time, unmoving, with one finger to his lips.
It was coming on to four in the morning. My energy was flagging and the wound in my leg was now shouting for attention. ‘Holmes?’ I ventured. I would need to sit down soon.
He shook his head ruefully.
‘It is a singular case, Watson. A kind of obsession. Miss Wyndham arrived with a plan, I would estimate. Either she asked Buttons to pawn the rings, or … he took them from her. Somehow things went terribly wrong.’
‘I would never think Buttons capable of hurting the girl.’
Holmes shrugged. ‘Great violence was done in this room.’
‘I don’t see it. But of course, I am standing out here.’
‘Watson, it is obvious! Candle wax spattered on the wall. Broken glass in that corner over there, cleaned up but not fully. Dents on the arm of that chair. Picture it, Watson! I found evidence that the girl was in his bed. Her scent on the pillow. A hair. And that ironstone water-jug. Cracked along the edge with a smear of blood.’
‘The head wound!’
‘Precisely. And the ink bottle! The ink!’
‘What of the ink?’
‘The bottle was thrown – there – at the door about head height. The cap cracked, some ink spattered. The ink was then cleaned off the wall, leaving a small amount, here, in the moulding. Whoever cleaned up did so quickly, missing much. Even the police might deduce that a fight raged here.’
‘Or I would, had I been allowed into the room!’
Holmes smiled up at me. ‘Yes, even you, Watson. Dillie put up a tremendous fight. She was overcome, and the killer pushed her naked, unconscious body out of this window and into the garden just below.’
‘The killer? You mean Deacon Buttons, then, do you not? Or do you mean Leo Vitale? Or Eden-Summers?’
‘I do not know yet.’
‘But how can you tell that she was put out through the window?’
‘Because I was looking for it. Another hair, caught on the edge of the sill, just there. And a tiny smear of blood on the clasp. Outside I saw an indentation in the earth just below, where the body landed. This was under an eave, and so the rain had not entirely washed away the imprint. Although the footprints nearby are indicative but not conclusive. One appears to be Vitale’s. But damn this rain! I cannot be sure.’
Vitale’s!
Holmes continued to stare around the room, willing more information.
‘I suppose the mud was washed off in the river as I saw none in the autopsy,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand why the killer would dump her body out of the window?’
‘Simple. It was safer than carrying her through the corridor and risking running into someone. The window faces away from the church and towards the river. It would not be seen. Remember, this was between four and six a.m. There was no moon last night. It would have been quite dark. And raining. There are no buildings or roads with a nearby view of this place.’
I shook my head at the image. ‘Appalling.’
Holmes said. ‘It was as I feared. Poor Dillie underestimated whatever fury was unleashed here. She did not read the signs.’
‘Perhaps there were no signs, Holmes.’
‘She accepted rings from two suitors, Watson. Then asked a third young man to pawn them. Consider what she said or did to induce him to do this in the middle of the night?’
‘But … Buttons, then? The deacon was so eager to have you on the case,’ I continued.
‘Well, he was eager to find her. And he lied to us – twice.’ Holmes retrieved his boots from the hall and sat at Buttons’ desk to put them on.
‘But where is the fellow now?’ I asked. ‘And where is Hadley? I would have thought the police would be here by now.’
Holmes stiffened suddenly and looked up from his own boots. ‘The shoes.’ I followed his gaze to the armoire. ‘Watson! The shoes!’
‘What about them?’
‘There are three pairs there! Three pairs are all he owns. I noticed on our last visit: two there, and one pair on his feet. Wherever Buttons is, he is barefoot. I fear for the young man. If he is not the killer, he is perhaps dead as well.’ Holmes stood abruptly and continued to scan the room. ‘Why? And where would he go without shoes … in this pouring rain?’
Thunder cracked and a flash of lightning flooded the room for a brief moment.
My eyes closed and a flash to my childhood trauma came unbidden. A pair of ladies’ shoes, lined neatly up by the river, under a tree. Green, with ribbons. My mother’s shoes.
‘Swimming,’ I said.
Holmes stopped moving and stood perfectly still.
‘My God, Watson, sometimes you surprise me!’ He ran to the window and looked out. ‘Of course! Look!’
I joined him at the window. Through the sheets of silver rain, barely lit by the new moon, I looked across the field to the dark, rushing Cam. Silhouetted in front of it was a ghostly white shirt only dimly visible against the black of the glittering river, and seeming to float in the air was the figure of a man. He moved, and a halo of light, curly hair was caught in the glow of a streetlamp.
Deacon Buttons.