16th May 1898
WOUNDED ZULU WAR HERO WALKS FREE
Robert Foxon, the self-made ivory magnate and former sergeant in the Second Warwickshire Regiment, who still bears the wounds from his distinguished service in the Zulu War of 1879, has been exonerated by a court-martial of all charges relating to the unfortunate deaths of native women and children.
Mr Foxon had been accused of ordering the shooting of some forty inhabitants of a Zulu village near the Buffalo River. Two men who served in his company made statements to the effect that they had taken part in the shootings at Sergeant Foxon’s orders, but an affidavit sent by an officer, a Major Macpherson, now resident in Lahore, India, absolved him of any involvement in the regrettable incident.
Major Macpherson, who in 1879 was a lieutenant with the Warwickshires, attested that Foxon had become separated from his company in the disorder following a temporary setback at the hands of the savage forces, and had been many miles away at the time of the occurrence. His deposition spoke movingly of how Sergeant Foxon had, “abandoned his position along with his hopes of Victory, though never his Duty.”
The Major’s conclusion was that Sergeant Foxon’s men, leaderless and lost, had acted under their own initiative and that no blame could attach to their absent sergeant. The two who went on to testify against him were, he could only conclude, motivated by malice. The court-martial’s verdict agreed with this assessment, and exonerated Mr Foxon, who walks away today a free man, without a stain on his character.
While simple decency demands that the full force of the law should be brought to bear against those who bear false witness, it is to be hoped that this unfortunate affair will further serve as an instructive moral lesson against those who would see men persecuted for decisions taken on the spur of the moment and under great strain at time of war.
In such cases, a vindictive zeal for vengeance in the guise of justice must be sternly rebuked, and understanding extended to the heroic men of the British Army, whose occasional lapses from the most rigorous application of the moral principles that would apply during peace-time are a small price to pay for their staunch and tireless defence of our great nation against her enemies.
The Honourable Christopher Bastion’s townhouse was a compact but desirable residence from the early part of the century, perfect for a well-heeled bachelor. We found it set back in a side-street, a moment’s walk from both the bustle of Piccadilly proper and the soothing calm of Green Park.
The police constable on the door was at first inclined to be obstructive, the word from Mycroft having not apparently penetrated to his rank. But he was soon overruled. “Mr Holmes and Dr Watson!” cried an energetic young man, bounding from the house and shaking our hands, and I was pleased to recognise Inspector Stanley Hopkins. In deference to the heat of the day, he had exchanged his habitual tweed suit for a lighter one in grey. “I am surprised to see you here, though I know you would not have come without good cause. I suppose it is about the late Mr Bastion?” He sounded doubtful, and understandably so if the suicide was as far beyond question as Mycroft had led us to believe.
Stanley Hopkins was one of the most promising of the younger generation of Scotland Yard inspectors, an ambitious detective who embraced the modern developments in policing methods, such as fingerprint identification and crime-scene photography, that baffled and vexed old-timers like Bradstreet and Athelney Jones. He was also a keen student of Sherlock Holmes’ techniques and methods, and had called on our help on many occasions. Holmes had taken a lively interest in Hopkins’ career, as had I. Though pleased to see him here, I was equally surprised that the Yard had tasked one of its most able officers with investigating Bastion’s suicide.
“Please come in, both of you,” said Hopkins, ushering us through the front door. “The body hasn’t yet been moved, as I called in a photographer to record the scene. It might seem excessive, but I thought it best to be meticulous given the importance of the deceased.”
“I’m sure you’re always meticulous, Inspector,” I told him.
Hopkins grimaced. “I wish we’d all been more so when we were transporting Zimmerman. You know about Zimmerman the spy? I see you do. His death was a real loss to our investigation, though I’m not so keen to mourn him as I am this poor fellow. Although, of course, Mr Bastion had succeeded in quite destroying his life already.”
A pair of uniformed police stood in the hall, and Hopkins introduced them. “These are Sergeant Douglass and Constable Fratelli, who have been helping me in this matter. We’ve been assigned to Bastion’s case since the beginning, you know, since it arose from our arrest of Zimmerman. It was the letter we found in his possession that put us on to Bastion in the first place.”
“I should have surmised as much,” Holmes murmured to me, “when Mycroft told us that the police had been speedy and efficient. Hopkins is one of the few capable of such.”
The young Inspector led us through into the cosy, book-lined study where the Honourable Christopher Bastion had met his end. That distinguished civil servant lay slumped across his desk, a fountain-pen in his right hand. His head was turned to face the door, and I could see that he had been a handsome man, in his middle fifties with a fine beard, once fair and now mostly a distinguished grey. He wore a shirt and tie; his jacket hung on a peg by the door. As we drew closer I saw that to his left lay a small bottle, now empty, whose contents had stained the dark cherrywood of the desk top. I smelled the distinctive odour of almonds which always accompanies prussic acid, and shuddered.
A man I recognised as the photographer regularly employed by Hopkins for his crime-scene work was packing his equipment into a sturdy wooden case, helped by a tall, thin servant who I guessed to be Bastion’s valet. The latter’s face was downcast and tear-stained.
“This is Probert,” Hopkins told us, calling the valet over. “I wouldn’t have asked him to stay in the room with the body, but he’s insistent on helping us in any way he can. Probert, these are Mr Holmes and Dr Watson. They’ll be working with us on this case.”
“Good morning, Probert,” said Holmes, shaking the servant’s hand energetically. “Can you bear to tell us once more how you came to find Mr Bastion like this?”
Probert blinked rapidly as the tears threatened to come again. “I left him last night, sirs, reading late.” His voice was deep and Welsh, and husky with emotion. “He often liked to, and lately he’d been quiet and melancholy, like. You know something of his troubles, sirs, I dare say. I made bold enough to warn him about that young hussy, Miss Felice, but he wouldn’t have none of it, and look at him now …” His voice began to crack.
“What was he reading?” Holmes asked sharply, stemming the threatened flow of emotion.
Probert collected himself. “Why, a book of poems in Latin, sir. Very fond of them he was, Ovid and Virgil and them. He read some out loud to me. He had a lovely reading voice, although I couldn’t understand a word, of course.” Probert looked around the room. “See, there’s the book, on the floor by the desk. Normally very tidy he was, but …” Words seemed to fail him.
“Quite so,” said Holmes, bending to inspect the book. It was, I saw, a volume of Catullus. “So you left him in the study last night. Was he dressed as he is now?”
Probert seemed to falter again, and swallowed. “Just the same, sir. His bed hasn’t been slept in either. I went in to wake him this morning and he wasn’t there. Well, that alarmed me, knowing he was in the house, like. I keep the keys, you see, the household not being big enough to need the services of a butler, so I knew he hadn’t gone out. Not that he would have anyway, so late at night. So I came down to see whether he’d fallen asleep here, not that that was a habit of his, sirs, I promise you. And when I opened the door—”
His face began to crumple again, but once again Holmes stepped in with a question. “The door was closed?” he asked. “Is that how you left it? And the windows, as they are now?”
“Yes, sir. All as I left them. It was a close night, but I’d shut the windows. Mr Bastion complained of the heat, but he relented, like, when I reminded him how much he detested the smell from outside. And then I’d shut the door on him when I went to bed.”
“Were the doors of the house locked?”
Probert looked most affronted. “Of course, sir. I lock them every night, and last night was no exception. Why would it be?”
“And this morning you found him exactly thus? You moved nothing?”
“No, sir. I mean, I could see straight away he was dead, and like I say he’s been so … out of spirits … it wasn’t hard to guess why. I was so upset I had to sit down for a moment, right there in the doorway. But then I thought of how it would look if the maid found me like that, so I stood up and went over to him. I took his wrist just in case there was a pulse, but he was cold. And then I saw the note …”
A handwritten rectangle of notepaper lay, I now saw, close to Bastion’s outstretched right hand.
“You picked it up to read it?” Holmes asked the manservant.
“Well, yes, sir, I did do that. But then I put it back just where I found it. I realised right away I’d have to call the police, and they always say to keep things like they are, don’t they, sir? I did right there, sir, didn’t I?”
“You did very well, Probert,” said Hopkins. “Nobody could reproach you for having left him alone. You weren’t to know he’d do something like this.”
“No, sir.” Probert was crying again now, the tears running down his cheeks. “I didn’t think he’d be so stupid, begging your pardons, sirs. Excuse me, I—” And he left the room, quite suddenly.
“He must have been touchingly fond of his master,” I observed, “to be so affected by his passing.”
Holmes’ mouth quirked in amused irritation. “Try not to be quite so sentimental, Watson. Such a scene as this would unnerve anybody.”
Not in the least unnerved, he afforded the body a casual glance before checking the study windows, which gave onto a small but well-kept rear garden and mews. Holmes’ interest was in the catches, however. “Firmly fastened,” he pronounced after a moment’s inspection. “These locks are of a modern brand, and normally reliable. Mr Bastion was careful of his security.”
“It’s the same throughout the house,” said Hopkins. Used to Holmes’ ways, he added mildly, “We have checked all the windows, you know. Will you tell Mr Holmes what you found, Fratelli?”
“All secured just the same, sir,” said Constable Fratelli. “No sign of forced entry anywhere. And Mr Probert has the keys, like he said.”
“He has them now,” Holmes pointed out. “That does not prove that he had them for the whole of last night. Where does he keep them when asleep?”
“On a hook beside his bed, sir,” said Fratelli. “I suppose one of the other servants could have crept in and took them, but I don’t see why they should.” His scepticism was polite, but clear. Thus far we had seen no reason to imagine that anyone had been in the house that night other than the staff and Bastion himself.
The photographer finished his packing and was shown out by Fratelli. Sergeant Douglass remained with his superior as Holmes finally turned his attention to the deceased. “Some pinkish discolouration and a characteristic odour of bitter almonds,” he announced, peering at Bastion’s face. “The fingers of the left hand slightly blistered where he held the bottle. A chemical analysis will confirm it, of course, but I have little doubt that this is indeed a case of cyanide poisoning. Watson, do you concur?”
I agreed that all the visible indications were consistent with that diagnosis.
Holmes turned to the note, first examining it where it lay on the polished surface of the desk. “I suppose Probert has confirmed that this is his employer’s writing?” he asked Hopkins, who nodded. “A sad apologia for a life,” Holmes added, a little dismissively, after reading it through. “I should like to see the letter that was found with Zimmerman also. Inspector, do you know where it has ended up?”
“I believe it’s still with the Foreign Office,” said Hopkins. “Bastion’s minister was Sir Hector Askew. I could contact his office and ask for an appointment for you.”
“I dare say my brother can arrange that,” my friend replied.
He passed me the dead man’s final communication, and I read it, shaking my head sorrowfully. I found it poignant that a life could end on—and in—so impersonal a note, as if the public service to which the better part of it had been dedicated had left Bastion no pride at the end but in his neglected decorum.
Holmes had not stood idle, and was rooting through the drawers of the desk. He withdrew an appointment-book, which he flipped through swiftly. “No meetings noted for last night,” he observed, “and nothing mentioning Zimmerman by name or initial, though that is only to be expected. A good many appointments with ‘A.’, though—presumably the soi-disant Miss Adorée Felice—mostly in night clubs or restaurants, few of them reputable.”
A thought seemed to strike him and he set the appointment-book alongside the letter, leaning in closely to scrutinise the handwriting. Then he dropped abruptly to his hands and knees and began to examine the floor between the door and the desk. However, he soon desisted with a sigh. “Hopeless,” he said. “A carpet retains marks imperfectly at the best of times, and there are far too many tracks of servants and policemen and photographers to detect anything else.”
“What are you expecting to find, Mr Holmes?” Hopkins asked curiously. “Have you some reason to suppose there’s been foul play? I’d say it was certain that Bastion killed himself, or as close to certainty as anything comes in police-work. What makes you suspect otherwise?”
“I suspect the fountain-pen,” declared Holmes. “Bastion clutches it still, yet he must have written the letter before taking the prussic acid. It is a fast-acting poison and he would not have had the leisure afterwards. But in that case, why did he continue to hold the pen while unstoppering the bottle and drinking? It would have been quite inconvenient, and he had no further use for it.”
“Perhaps,” I speculated, “he thought of some amendment to the letter after taking the poison, but didn’t have time to make it before he lost consciousness.”
“Or he simply clutched at the nearest object during his final moments,” suggested Hopkins sensibly. “Who knows what impulses drive a dying man?”
“Indeed,” said Holmes. “One so rarely gets the opportunity to consult them on the matter,” he added macabrely.
“If there are to be any surprises, Mr Holmes, I’d be rather grateful if you were to give me some warning,” said Hopkins. “Our Commissioner is taking quite a close interest in this case. Between ourselves, he seems a little agitated about it.”
“It seems to me that Bastion took the only option,” I said. “The honourable way, as far as such a thing was still available to him. That can’t reflect badly on the force, surely? As you say, he was the architect of his own downfall.”
“That’s certainly my hope. The Commissioner has reasons to be sensitive about this whole business, though. Bastion is— that is, he was—an old schoolfriend of Lord Loomborough, the minister in charge of the police.”
“Lord Loomborough,” noted Holmes. “Well, there’s a coincidence. We saw him this morning at the Diogenes Club, Watson—do you remember? He was sitting in the next bay along from his colleague Lord Caversham, ignoring him entirely of course, with the eminent biologist Scaverson dozing away in the next.” Of the three gentlemen Holmes mentioned, I had recognised only the Earl of Caversham, whose son Lord Goring we had assisted in the matter of a murder the previous year.
“Yes, I understand he’s a member,” Hopkins said. “The late Mr Bastion was not, though they had other clubs in common. I don’t know whether they were close friends, but they were at Eton together also. The Commissioner’s concerned that their relationship might lead the Minister to become personally involved. His Lordship’s shown a sight more interest in the details of our operations than his predecessors, I have to say.” He sighed. “You’re fortunate that the politics of policing aren’t something that much troubles you, Mr Holmes.”
But Holmes was abstracted, tapping his fingers in a rapid rhythm against the wood of the desk. “What troubles me, Hopkins, is this tableau. The pen seems altogether too perfect a touch. Does it not strike you so?”
Hopkins’ honest face frowned. “To be frank, no. You know how I respect your methods, Mr Holmes, and you know I won’t rest if a shadow of a doubt remains, but if there’s any shadow in this case I’ve yet to see it. We know nobody broke in. All the signs confirm that the deceased succumbed to poisoning from prussic acid, administered by his own hand. The note alone would more than satisfy a coroner. I see no reason not to accept that Bastion committed suicide, and continue our investigation into the late Zimmerman’s other contacts.”
“A sad comedown,” I observed, “from his position beside the seat of power.”
Holmes stared distractedly at Bastion’s straight-backed desk chair, and then his brow wrinkled. Once again he fell to his knees, drawing his magnifying-glass like a pistol.
The chair was elderly rather than antique, worn well from being sat in often, and becoming a little loose at the joins. Perhaps Bastion shared Holmes’ dangerous habit of leaning back on two of its legs to cogitate, which I have noticed causes similar loosening. Indeed, I worry that one day a distinguished client will seat himself on an item of furniture that Holmes has thus abused once too often, and that it will collapse beneath him into its constituent timbers.
In this instance, where one side of the slatted seat-back met the seat, a few strands of thread had become caught in the loose joining. Holmes removed them carefully with a pair of tweezers, then set them down on the blotting-pad on the desk. He passed his magnifying-glass to me—Hopkins had his own. We saw that the strands were coarse wool, of a greenish-brown colour.
“Tweed,” said Hopkins, who habitually wore the stuff himself. “I suppose he had a tweed jacket.”
We all looked at the jacket that hung by the door. It was of a black cotton cloth, distinctly better suited for Summer wear than was the warmth of wool.
“I imagine he did,” said Holmes, “though it would be unusual for a gentleman to wear it in town. One might as well wear a deerstalker hat,” he added with a faint smile. “Still more so to wear it in his study, I think. This chair was repaired and revarnished a month or so ago, from which I conclude that Bastion used it often, and not gently. These threads have no varnish on them. They were left there recently, but the weather has been excessively clement for some time now. There has been no occasion to force Bastion to wear an unseasonal tweed jacket indoors.”
Hopkins exchanged a glance with me. Both of us, I could see, feared that Holmes was overreaching himself here. But, having been proven wrong so often in the past, we were each reluctant to say so.
Holmes crossed to the clean and empty grate, where clearly no fire had burned since the Spring. He gave it a swift perusal, then asked abruptly, “How is the hot water for the house supplied?”
Hopkins blinked in surprise, then responded in the time-honoured fashion of a senior policeman caught out by a difficult question. “Sergeant?”
Sergeant Douglass checked his notebook. “There’s a boiler in the cellar, sir, coal-burning. Some of the lads looked at the coalhole earlier for any signs of ingress, but there’s bolts on the inside there, too.”
“Come, Hopkins!” exclaimed Holmes, and hurried from the room.
Hopkins frowned at me. “What’s he …?” he began to ask, but Holmes barked, “You too, Watson!” and the pair of us hurried after him like the faithful hounds we were.
In the stifling cellar, Holmes hauled open the heavy iron hatch on the front of the boiler and seized a pair of coal-tongs. The fire inside was burning low, warmth radiating from the cylinder tank above it. Holmes knelt down yet again, heedless of the heat on his face or the coaldust on his trousers, and started poking about among the flames.
“Aha!” he cried triumphantly, and used the tongs to lift a blackened scrap of fabric from the fire. He rushed with it to the cellar steps and up into the kitchen, trailing smoke behind him. I shut the boiler hatch with a familiar sigh, and followed.
Holmes had spread out the material on the tiled floor of the kitchen. It had not stopped smoking, and smelled unpleasantly of singed wool. In the sunlight, it was evident that it was a few square inches of charred tweed.
“There are more scraps in there,” Holmes assured us. “Not much remains, but enough that we may be confident that the jacket Bastion wore was burned there. Something else, too.” He hefted the tongs and started back down the steps.
“But why would he have been wearing a tweed jacket?” Hopkins asked, bewildered. “Probert said he complained about the heat.”
“Call Probert,” Holmes instructed him shortly from below. “Have him await us in the drawing-room, with a constable on hand, and search his room. Bastion’s wardrobe also. Watson, I need you to have a closer look at the body. Pay particular attention to the wrists, if you please.”
Bewildered, I returned to the study, where Fratelli had arrived with a stretcher. He and another constable were beginning to lay out the body, but I asked them to desist for a moment while I did as Holmes had asked.
A few moments later, I was sure of what Holmes had had in mind. The clues were subtle, a slight reddening of the skin rather than any obvious weals, but Bastion’s wrists were chafed. It was a sign that any but the most scrupulous medical examiner might have overlooked or dismissed, in the absence of any stronger reason for suspicion.
The chafing could well have come from a rough fabric like tweed, but only if it were forcibly rubbed against the skin. Simply wearing it would not have sufficed. It seemed that Bastion’s arms had been constrained by something outside the tweed jacket, and that he had struggled against it.
“Good God,” I breathed in realisation, and looked up to see Holmes and Hopkins standing at the door. Holmes’ face was blackened from the soot as he bared his teeth in a terrifying grin of triumph.
In the tongs he held a short and singed, but clearly recognisable, length of rope.
NOTE FOUND WITH THE BODY OF THE HONOURABLE CHRISTOPHER BASTION
To those who survive me—
Over the past weeks, the reasons I have to prefer the continuance of Life to its alternative have by turns shown themselves false. Though the action I am about to take, along with my life and my leave of it, occasions me no greater unhappiness than I already suffer, I am aware that it will bring distress to my family and other connexions, and that I regret. I must particularly apologise to the servants who will doubtless discover my body, this not being an experience I should care for myself.
I ask my elder brother Julian and his children to preserve the Honour of the Family—as I have failed to do—and I hope that he, my younger brother Rupert and our dear Mother may yet forgive me the disappointment I now occasion them.
Pray for my soul, if you can find it in your own to do so.
In sorrow,
Christopher Bastion
Holmes’ fingers were tapping at the desk again, a fast measure of the sort I associate with dances from the Southern Americas.
“So the murderer brought a jacket with him,” Inspector Hopkins said, puzzling the matter through. “Or more likely he found it here among Bastion’s things. The cotton one wouldn’t do, though. It had to be a thicker cloth, like tweed, so that the rope-burns would be almost undetectable as such. Obvious marks would have shown that violence was done. He made Bastion wear it, somehow—at gunpoint, I suppose—and forced him to write the letter. Then he tied him up, and administered the poison while he struggled. He wouldn’t swallow that stuff under duress, after all, even if the alternative was shooting. Why should he? He’d be dead either way.”
“Unless his state of mind were genuinely suicidal,” I ventured.
Unexpectedly, Holmes laughed. “A provoking waste of the murderer’s effort if it was. But no, he could hardly have relied on that. Almost anyone would struggle against such a fate.”
“Then,” Hopkins went on eagerly, “once Bastion was dead, the killer removed the rope and jacket, burned them both to hide the evidence, then posed him as if he’d just written the letter.”
I shook my head. “How diabolical.” Then, considering the matter further, I added, “They took a chance, though, even so. What if Bastion had refused to write the note? The murderer could hardly do that for him. And I suppose he must have dictated it to him word by word, to make sure he didn’t smuggle in some secret message to show he was being murdered. After all, Bastion was a resourceful man when not being led astray by his appetites, and he must have known some spy-craft.”
“An intriguing thought, Watson,” said Holmes. “At first sight I detect no sign of any code or cipher, but the question will bear further investigation. May I keep it, Inspector?”
Hopkins shrugged. “It’s been photographed in situ. We’ll need it for our records eventually, and of course if it becomes important as evidence, but you’re welcome to it for now.”
“But how did they get in, Hopkins?” I asked. “I thought your men eliminated all the doors and windows. Not to mention the coal-hatch.”
“That problem, at least, is elementary,” murmured Holmes.
“Oh, yes,” Hopkins agreed at once. “It can only be Probert. He has access to Bastion’s clothing, and he keeps the house-keys. Either he killed his employer himself, or he allowed someone else into the house who did.”
I was shocked. “But he seemed so upset at his master’s death.”
Holmes tutted. “Come, Watson. We have both known murderers who were the most consummate actors, and others who felt actual grief for their victims. It is clear enough that Probert was involved, even if he was coerced by another. I suggest we put the question to him.”
We found Probert waiting in the drawing-room as Holmes had instructed, with a solidly built policeman—introduced to us by Hopkins as Constable Vincent—standing meaningfully at hand. Where Bastion’s study had been comfortably functional, with unshowy furniture and paper files on display alongside the books, the drawing-room was obviously intended to impress. Portraits hung on the flock-papered walls, and a bust of one of Bastion’s ancestors sat in an alcove above the fireplace. Under its stern gaze, the manservant sat trembling on a velvet chaise-longue.
His face was as white as a snowcloud. Holmes—whom I had persuaded at least to wash his own face before the interview, so that he would appear somewhat less demonic—sternly tossed the charred remnants, the rag of tweed and the twist of rope, at Probert’s feet.
He said, “I do not think I need to tell you the trouble you are in, my man. If you cannot give us a satisfactory account of what occurred last night, you will certainly hang. You may hang in any case, but if you tell us the truth it is at least possible that someone more culpable will swing alongside you. But you must begin now.”
“Oh, sirs, forgive me,” babbled Probert. “For lying, I mean— no man can forgive the rest, nor God either, I’m afraid—O God! I’m so afraid. It was my niece, you see, little Lucy, my sister Nancy’s girl, God rest her—she’s in service in Cardiff and they told me they’d taken her there, that she’d die if I didn’t do what they said, and—”
“Probert!” snapped Holmes, and held up a hand. The valet subsided into tremulous silence. “We can learn nothing from this stream of blather. Pray tell us the facts, and in the correct order if you please. Start from the beginning. Who are ‘they’?”
Probert gaped. “I never knew their names, sir. They called round yesterday while Mr Bastion was out at the Ministry. Two big, burly lads, dressed like salesmen. They said they were selling tea, with samples. Mr Bastion’s always wanting to try new blends, so I let them in.”
“What were their appearances?” Holmes asked crisply. “Their accents? Their ages?”
“Oh, both in their late twenties, they could have been,” the valet said, screwing up his eyes to bring them to mind. “One fair, one dark with muttonchops—not black, but dark brown, like. Brown serge suits they were wearing, double-breasted with black buttons and lapels, and brown bowler hats. They talked like Londoners, as far as I could tell.”
“So far, so anonymous,” Holmes observed grimly. “Please proceed.”
“Well, as soon as they were inside I could tell they were up to no good,” said Probert. “They started moving ornaments around, making offensive comments about the servants’ cleanliness and the master’s taste. I could tell they were wrong ones then. But no-one else was in except the maid, and I wasn’t going to call on her to help, was I?” He faltered, staring at us in appeal, but nobody reassured him on this point.
He continued, “Well, after a bit they got to the point, like. They knew who I was, and they knew about my family. They knew my only living relation—apart from her father, my brother-in-law, who I’d be glad to see the back of, to be honest with you, drunkard that he is—was young Lucy. She’s my goddaughter as well as my niece, and she’s meant the world to me since her Mam died. She’s only seventeen, sirs, and housemaid to a very respectable family in Cardiff, like I said. They told me that some friends of theirs had her in their house, they showed me a lock of her hair—”
“How did you know that it was hers?” Holmes interjected.
Probert shook his head convulsively. “I asked myself that afterwards, Mr Holmes. It was brown and curly like hers, but of course you’re right, it could have been anybody’s. At the time, though, I believed them—and afterwards, well, would you have taken the chance?”
I said, “Did you not think to send a telegram to Cardiff, man, to ask after your niece and confirm their story?”
“It all happened so fast, sir. The idea didn’t come to me till later, once all the Post Offices were closed.”
“Find out at once,” Hopkins ordered Constable Vincent, who left the room with alacrity once Probert had supplied the address. “Please go on, Probert.”
“Well, the men looked round the house, sir, even going down into the cellar. Then they told me they’d be coming again that night, after Mr Bastion was asleep, to take away some share certificates they reckoned were in his study, and they said if I knew what was good for me and for little Lucy, I’d leave the servants’ door unlocked for them. They told me to expect them at one in the morning, and to lay out a thick outdoor jacket in the kitchen. I said that Mr Bastion wouldn’t have retired by then, night owl that he was, but they said that was all the better, as he could show them where the papers were. All I had to do was let them in and keep out of their way.”
“And you complied, of course,” Holmes scoffed.
“Like I said, sir, I didn’t see that I had a choice, not if I wanted to keep Lucy safe. They said they only wanted the shares, you see—I knew Mr Bastion had money troubles, and I thought they were from his creditors. And if so, well, it was only what he owed, wasn’t it?” A faint look of disapproval entered Probert’s expression, and I wondered whether he harboured that Puritan streak that I have found common among his countrymen. A belief that Bastion had brought this trouble upon himself would have made it easier for him to betray his master in this way.
Holmes was asking, “Did Mr Bastion in fact keep share certificates in his study, to your knowledge?”
“Well no, sir, but he didn’t confide in me about everything. I only know about his money difficulties because he sent me to the bank to collect some of his savings.”
“So you left the servants’ entrance unlocked, as instructed, and left the tweed jacket to hand. Why did you suppose it would be needed?”
Probert quailed. “I hadn’t a clue, sir. I thought perhaps they planned to take him to see their employer, whoever he owed money to. But I didn’t want to speculate, sir, nor argue either. I just did what I was asked.”
“Thus making yourself, by your own admission, a willing accessory to kidnapping at the very least,” Holmes sighed, with a glance at me. “And did the men arrive at one o’clock?”
Probert looked even more ashamed than before. “Sir, I couldn’t bear to listen. I left the door unlocked, took a sleeping-draught and went to bed. I wanted to sleep through it all, you see, and hope that all was well in the morning.”
“And instead you awoke to find your master killed,” Holmes concluded remorselessly. “Well, Probert, I am not surprised that you were upset. The realisation that the crime you were in fact an accessory to was murder cannot have been a pleasant one.”
“I thought … I still hoped perhaps, that he’d killed himself,” Probert admitted. “I thought perhaps losing the last of his money had been the final straw, like. I wasn’t sure of it until you showed me the rope.”
He broke off into sobs, and none of us felt especially inclined to comfort him.
After the manservant had been arrested and taken away, Hopkins confided to Holmes, Douglass and myself, “On the whole I believe him, even so. He’s a craven specimen, not a malicious one, and I don’t think he has the wit to invent such a convoluted story. My guess is it’s true, as far as it goes.”
“We cannot be certain until we find the men he described,” Holmes observed.
“That’s true, of course. I mustn’t become complacent, especially after you’ve proved my first assumption wrong.”
“Nonetheless,” Holmes admitted, “I too believe that there is more to this crime than a simple matter of a servant killing his master. We have no indication of any grievance against Bastion on Probert’s part, and your men’s search found no gun or other weapon in his room.”
“He could have disposed of it somehow,” I said. “Thrown it into the Thames, perhaps.”
“Then why not rid himself of the rope and jacket in the same way?” Holmes asked rhetorically. “Perhaps indeed a gun will appear yet—I recommend a thorough search of the house, Hopkins,” he added, as if the Inspector would not have considered such a measure without his expert advice “—but in the meantime we should look out for two burly murderers in serge suits.”
Holmes then asked to be taken to see the address in Hackney where Zimmerman, the spymaster who was believed to have recruited Bastion, had been based. Mycroft had assured us that no expense would be spared, so we sent Constable Fratelli to procure us a cab. “You won’t see very much there, though,” Hopkins warned us meanwhile. “We’ve cleaned out his effects. If you want material evidence you’ll need to come to the Yard.”
“I intend to do so,” said Holmes, “but even so, I should first like to see the location of the arrest. Was anything of interest found on Zimmerman’s body, after his ill-fated escape attempt?”
Hopkins shook his head. “Nothing but the clothes he stood up in, and those were ordinary enough—an inexpensive suit, bought off the peg at a local tailor’s.”
“And the body itself?”
“We looked for anything that might distinguish it, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. All we can say is that, before the horses trampled him, he was a healthy man in his thirties, with no signs of serious injury or illness in his past. I suppose if I were to die suddenly and anonymously they’d say the same,” reflected Hopkins ruefully.
“‘Zimmerman’ was a code name, of course?”
“So we assume. He was reclusive and never left his room, and the German for room is Zimmer, you know. His agents, or their messengers, met him there, and all his food and other goods were delivered.”
Holmes frowned. “That is most remarkable. I presume the body has been disposed of by now? Quite so. Well, it is a pity, but not to be helped.”
Our cab had arrived, and Hopkins accompanied us to the house. As we travelled from the gentility of Mayfair through Holborn and into the altogether less salubrious surroundings of the East End, the Inspector apprised us of how he had come to be involved in the events surrounding Zimmerman’s death.
If Hopkins’ reputation as one of the brightest of Scotland Yard’s rising stars was based partly on the murder investigations with which Holmes had assisted him early in his career, it was also well earned by his own merits. It seemed that his more recent work had involved a series of assignments to cases considered out of the ordinary by his superiors. In recent months he had investigated a particularly vicious blackmailer, an outbreak of counterfeiting, and more recently a series of arsons across the capital which had done great damage and claimed several lives.
It was this last case that had led Hopkins to Zimmerman, after one of the victims, Konrad Wendt, was identified as an agent in the service of a foreign government. The spymaster was now presumed to have organised the entire prolific arson spree merely to rid himself of this troublesome rival. Hopkins and his superiors had considered the idea of waiting and watching Zimmerman to identify the members of his spy ring, but felt that the risk of alerting him to their presence and causing him to abscond was too great, leading to the speedy apprehension Mycroft had told us about.
The cabman called to tell us that we had arrived, and we alighted to find ourselves outside a grimy terrace in one of the better parts of the East End. At one end stood a grocer’s shop, at the other an unprepossessing public house.
Another policeman, introduced to us as Constable Kean, now stood guard at the door of the house where Zimmerman had rented his rooms—in case, Hopkins told us, any of the spy’s colleagues might come looking for something that they thought the police search might have missed. Constable Kean accompanied us inside, together with the landlady, who stood with her arms folded as if we were imposing upon her time, though nobody had asked her to be present.
The rooms were sparse and meagre, with the only furniture remaining being a hard wooden bed, a table and chair. The fireplace where the frenzied Zimmerman had been found burning his papers had, to Holmes’ disappointment, been swept thoroughly clean, though Hopkins assured him that the ashes had been sifted and all surviving fragments of paper recovered. Over the landlady’s voluble protests, Holmes prised up a loose floorboard, but found the space beneath it empty. He replaced it with a dissatisfied sigh and began to knock listlessly at the walls.
For my part I was struck by how mean and miserable a life Zimmerman must have led, confined by necessity to the four walls of such a room, lit dimly through its coke-smeared windows even on so bright a day as this. This morning we had visited Mycroft Holmes, enthroned in luxury and comfort at the Diogenes Club, while here a man who was his professional counterpart had lived in squalid isolation.
The landlady, an unedifying specimen of cockney womanhood but garrulous enough in the presence of money, acknowledged that she, too, had known her tenant as Mr Zimmerman. Asked to describe him, she shrugged and said unhelpfully that “he looked like other folk, I suppose.” In the months he had been lodging with her she had rarely or ever known him to leave his room, yet he was no hermit, receiving visitors at all hours of the day and night. “And queer enough some of them was,” she noted derisively. “Covering round with scarves and such in the middle of Summer, like they didn’t want no-one to recognise them. Who did they think they were, then, eh, the Duke of Wellington?” She admitted that her lodger had, however, paid his rent regularly and on time, “which is more than what I can say for some.”
Hopkins reassured her patiently, and I sensed for the umpteenth time, that the police would continue to cover the rent for as long as the investigation continued. This seemed to mollify her, though Holmes’ sudden move to dismantle the bed had the opposite effect. Again, though, he found nothing, and left Constable Kean to reassemble it. “I can only compliment your men on the thoroughness of their search, Hopkins,” he told him peevishly. “If there are any clues remaining here after so long, they are beyond my ability to detect.”
We returned with the Inspector to Scotland Yard, where we were told by Constable Vincent that a deputation from the Cardiff police force had found Lucy Evans, Probert’s niece, going peaceably about her domestic duties at her employers’ house, and that beyond her understandable distress at the news of her uncle’s arrest she had experienced nothing untoward over the past few days. We could be thankful for that, at least.
While Hopkins set about instigating a search for the men whom Probert had described, Vincent led us into the room where the late Zimmerman’s effects had been stored. Holmes nodded with approval, and pitched himself into searching through the neatly ordered piles and throwing them into utter disarray.
He quickly confirmed what Hopkins’ men had already established, that there was little here to connect the spy with Bastion. Apart from the civil servant’s letter to Zimmerman, now in the hands of Sir Hector Askew, none but the most routine correspondence had been found, and nothing else bearing Bastion’s name. The only papers here were invoices for goods and services, playbills and advertisements and the like, old newspapers and some recent issues of Punch magazine. There were a few, very conventional, books—some novels of Dickens and Scott, the poems of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and a volume of Shakespeare. Holmes flipped through them in search of any indication that they might have been used to generate a book-code, but if they had then our spy was too wily to have left traces of the fact. The police had spoken to the tradesmen whose invoices were represented, cobblers and stationers and grocers and the like, who all told the same story of receiving orders via a messenger and delivering their goods to Zimmerman care of his landlady.
It did appear as if Zimmerman had gone through a great quantity of tobacco, and his liquor cabinet had also been better stocked than one might have expected for a man in his situation. The better, I assumed, for plying his informants and agents with. He had few clothes—as I supposed befitted a man who rarely went outside—some of which had been retrieved from his regular laundry by the police on the basis of the receipts they had found. Like the clothes he had died in, all were cheap, though not of especially poor quality, and none had been tailored for his wear.
Finally, Holmes turned his attention to the charred scraps carefully preserved from the ashes in the spy’s hearth. There, too, he found precious little encouragement. The signs suggested that Zimmerman had destroyed the most sensitive materials first, reasonably enough, but a few fragments remained. The most intact appeared to be records of financial transactions, but even there, where one might optimistically have hoped for names, or at least for code names, Zimmerman had frustrated us once again by using an arbitrary system of non-alphabetical symbols that bore no relation to any scheme we could identify.
“A most anonymous man,” Holmes observed. “Indeed, a very dull one in most respects, his only points of interest being the pains he took to remain anonymous. I assume that the body was photographed, Hopkins?”
“Oh yes,” the Inspector said, “though it’s no help as far as his face is concerned. Those horses gave his head quite a hammering.”