The Veiled Detective (17 page)

“And you think that he will look in the paper this evening in the hope that someone has advertised its find.”

“Indeed I do. He will be so overjoyed that the fellow will never suspect a trap.”

“A trap,” I repeated, with some alarm.

“Why, yes. We’ll have him cornered and have the truth out of him in a jiffy.” He opened a drawer and withdrew a pistol. “Have you arms?”

“I have my old service revolver and a few cartridges.”

“You had better clean it and load it. He will be a desperate man; and though I shall take him unawares, it is as well to be ready for anything.”

I went to my bedroom and followed his advice, although I dreaded the idea of having to use the weapon. I had thought that I had left those days behind. But, I reasoned, if I was to be a close companion of a private detective, there would no doubt be moments of danger, and it was necessary that I should be prepared. With that thought in mind, I carried out my task with alacrity.

When I returned with my pistol, I found Holmes scraping upon his violin. He ignored me for some moments and then put his instrument aside.

“My fiddle would be much better for new strings,” he remarked. “Put the pistol in your pocket. When the fellow comes, speak to him in a normal fashion. Don’t frighten him by staring at him too much or acting oddly. Then leave the rest to me.”

“It is seven o’clock now,” I said, glancing at my watch.

“Yes. He will probably be here in a few minutes. He will want to be certain to be the first to make the claim. Open the door slightly. That will do. Now put the key on the inside. Thank you.”

Holmes had begun speaking in a hushed staccato fashion and his face was slightly flushed. His cool reserve was evaporating as the excitement
and potential danger we were about to face began to take hold. Nervously, he snatched a book up from the mantelpiece. ‘This is a queer old tome I picked up at a stall yesterday —
De Jure inter Gentes
— published in Latin at Liege in the Lowlands in 1642. Charles’s head was still firm on his shoulders when this little brown-backed volume was struck off.”

I nodded politely. I knew he was attempting to divert his mind with idle intellectual conversation, but the tone of his voice clearly indicated that he was failing.

“On the flyleaf, in very faded ink, is written
ex libris Gulielmi Whyte
. See?”

He held the book out for me to see, and his hand was shaking.

“I wonder who William Whyte was,” he continued, returning the book to the mantelpiece. “Some pragmatical seventeenth-century lawyer, I suppose. His writing has a legal twist about it.”

He was interrupted by a sudden jangling of our doorbell downstairs.

“I’ve instructed Mrs Hudson to send all callers up,” he whispered, moving to the door.

“Does Doctor Watson live here?” asked a clear voice from below.

We heard Mrs Hudson’s injunction to the stranger to come up to our rooms, and then heard his heavy tread upon the stair. Shortly after, there was a knock at our door.

“Come in,” I called.

At my summons, our visitor entered. I had to steel myself from giving a cry of surprise, for here standing before us was the man whom Sherlock Holmes had described to us in detail that morning in Lauriston Gardens. Dressed in the shabby garb of a cab-driver, our visitor was over six feet tall, with a florid visage and wearing scuffed and muddy square-toed boots.

Holmes flashed me a look of triumph.

The stranger glanced between the two of us.

“Which one of you is Watson — the one who found the ring?”

I stepped forward. “I am Doctor Watson.”

The man stepped towards me and shook my hand warmly. “I can’t thank you enough, sir. That ring means the world to me.”

I was somewhat taken aback by his effusion, and momentarily felt lost for words, but Holmes intervened.

“My name is Holmes and I am acting in conjunction with my friend here. And you are...?”

“Hawkins... Edward Hawkins.”

“Really?” said Holmes. “Well, Mr Hawkins, you must realise that we cannot just hand the ring over to any Tom, Dick or Hawkins who comes along to claim that it is his. We must have some proof of ownership.”

Hawkins eyes narrowed. “Proof? And how may I provide that?”

Holmes smiled. “Come, come. We do not doubt you, Mr... Hawkins, but perhaps you could describe the circumstances concerning the loss and to whom the ring really belongs?”

“
Really
belongs?”

“Well, it is a
lady’s
wedding-ring, after all... your wife’s?”

Hawkins nodded awkwardly. It was clear that he had not anticipated such an interrogation when retrieving the ring.

“Watson, be so good as to pour our visitor a sherry, and you, sir, take a seat by the fire while you tell us your tale.”

I did as I was bidden while Hawkins, with a shambling reluctance, sat where Holmes had indicated. Holmes passed the sherry to him, which he gulped down in one go.

“Now, sir, how did you come by your loss?”

“I don’t rightly know. I’d been drinking in the White Hart last night, and probably had too much for my own good, and I reckon as I was making my way home it must have fallen out of my pocket.”

“But why were you carrying your wife’s wedding-ring in the first place?” I asked, as Holmes manoeuvred his way behind our visitor’s chair.

Hawkins stared distractedly for a moment and then, heaving a sigh, he began to present his explanation.

“It is a keepsake, gentlemen. My wife is dead this many a year, and that ring is all I have to remind me of her.”

“Very good, very good!” crowed Holmes sarcastically. “Close to the truth — but I am afraid, not close enough.”

Hawkins began to rise from the chair, but Holmes came up behind him and clapped the pistol to the side of his head.

“Sit down, sir,” he said. “Now, let’s do away with all these fairy-stories, shall we? Watson, let me introduce you to Mr Jefferson Hope, the murderer of Enoch Drebber.”

“W
ho the devil are you?” Hope’s face was suffused with anger, but he remained seated, his hands grasping the edge of the chair until his knuckles shone white.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It will mean nothing to you.”

“Are you the police?”

“No. Iam an unofficial consulting detective. In this instance Iam working for the police, but above all Iam interested in justice.”

“Justice! Pah! There ain’t no justice in this world. If there was, I wouldn’t have had the need to come after Drebber and Stangerson.”

“You admit, then, that you murdered Enoch Drebber?” Iasked.

“I admit nothing. Fate saw to it that he died instead of me. That was a kind of justice, Isuppose.”

“Be so good as to tell us what happened last night,” said Holmes, moving around to face Hope, his gun still trained on him.

A strange smile lit upon our visitor’s face. There was no merriment in it, just a dark sardonic bitterness which unnerved me.

“It will be a pleasure,” he said. “I’ve kept so much pain bottled up
inside me, gentlemen, it will do me good to spill some now. I’ve nothing to lose by it. I have been trailing Drebber and his associate, Stangerson, around this globe for many a year. They were rich, I was poor, so it was no easy matter for me to follow them. They always managed to keep one step ahead of me until they landed in London.”

“Why were you following them?” asked Holmes.

“I sought revenge, of course. It won’t matter much to you why I hated these men; it’s enough to say that they were guilty of the death of two fine human beings — a father and a daughter. She was the woman I loved and who loved me back. We were to be married, but they took her from me and forced her into a sham of a marriage; forced her to marry Drebber.
Mormons!
”

He spat the single word out as though that alone would explain the cause of his pain and grievance. After a pause, he continued. “This broke poor Lucy’s heart, and she died. I took the marriage ring from her dead finger and I vowed that Drebber’s dying eyes should rest upon that very ring, and that his last thoughts should be of the crime for which he was being punished. I had no redress in the law, so I determined that
I
should be judge, jury and executioner, all rolled into one. If you have any drop of humanity in your souls, gentlemen, you would have done the same, if you’d been in my place.”

Holmes, his face an impenetrable mask, remained silent. I wondered if my companion sympathised with the plight of this wretch, as I did. My heart went out to him.

“When I got to London, my funds were almost exhausted and I had to take on work to survive. Driving and riding are as natural to me as walking so I applied at a cab-owner’s office, and got some employment. I was to bring a certain sum to the owner each week, and whatever was over I might keep for myself. There was seldom any excess, but I managed to scrape along somehow. The hardest job was to learn my way about, for I reckon
of all the mazes that ever were contrived, this city is the most confusing. But I stuck at it with the help of a map, and I reckon I got on pretty well.

“I won’t bore you with how I came to trace my two gentlemen, or how I bided my time, because I know you are eager to learn about last night.” The strange dark grin came again. “They had got wind of me, knew I was close behind them, and so were about to leave London, but they missed their train. Stangerson beached up at Halliday’s Private Hotel, near Euston, while Drebber was entertaining himself. I managed to pick him up as my fare. He was drunk. He had a craze for drink — and women. In the end, they were his downfall. I took him to the empty house in Lauriston Gardens. I’d managed to get a key for the place after one of my clients dropped it in my cab.”

“How did you poison him?” I asked.

Hope shook his head. “Don’t imagine I killed him in cold blood. That would be a bleak kind of justice indeed. Oh, no, I had long determined that he should have a chance in the matter, limited though it might be. Among the many billets that I have filled in America during my wandering life, I was once a janitor and sweeper-out of a laboratory at York College. One day the professor was lecturing on poisons, and he showed his students an alkaloid, as he called it, which he had extracted from a certain South American arrow poison. According to him, it was so powerful that a mere grain of the stuff meant death. I spotted the bottle in which this preparation was kept, and when they were all gone, I helped myself to a little of it. I was a fairly good dispenser, so I worked this alkaloid into little soluble pills. Each of the deadly pills I placed in a small box. I also had an identical box containing similar pills made without the poison. I determined that at the time when I had my chance my gentlemen should each have a draw out of one of the boxes, while I took a pull from the other. As I did not know which box contained the poisoned pills, our fates were in the lap of the gods. From that day I
always had my pill-boxes with me, and last night the time had finally arrived when I could use them.

“If either of you two gentlemen has longed and pined for something to come about, so much so that your insides ache with the need of it, you will have some idea of how I felt when I took Enoch Drebber into that empty house. Twenty years I had waited, and now...” Hope leaned forward in the chair, his eyes glazing over as he slipped back in time to that fateful evening. “I lit a candle to give us light, but my hands were trembling and my temples throbbing with excitement. In that terrible gloom I sensed the presence of my sweet Lucy and her father. They were with me there, with me at the end. I held the candle close to my face. ‘Now, Enoch Drebber,’ I said. ‘Who am I?’

“He gazed at me for a moment with bleared drunken eyes, and then I saw horror spring up in them, convulsing his whole face. He knew me all right. I was the dreaded demon from his past. He staggered back with livid features, and I saw perspiration break out on his brow. I could not help but laugh, and I did, loud and long. He must have thought he was trapped with a madman.

“‘What do you want with me?’ he asked, in a pathethic, child-like voice.

“‘You dog!’ I cried. ‘I have hunted you from Salt Lake City to St Petersburg, and you have always escaped me. Now, at last, your wanderings have come to an end, for either you or I shall never see tomorrow’s sun rise.’ He shrunk further back as I spoke, and I could see on his face that he thought I was in some sort of mad fit. I reckon that I
was
for a time. The pulses in my temples pounded like sledgehammers, and I believe I would have had a fit of some kind if the blood had not gushed from my nose and relieved me.

“‘I come to take revenge on my dear Lucy. Lucy Ferrier, the woman you killed,’ I cried, locking the door and shaking the key in his face.
“Punishment has been slow in coming, but it has overtaken you at last.’ I saw his coward’s lip tremble as I spoke. He would have begged for his life, but he knew well that it was useless.

“‘Would you murder me?’ he whimpered.