Antidote to Sorrow -- Part 3
December 26th, 1893
It had struck me when I was out at Harrods that keeping poor Alice and Mrs Glenny hostage here for Christmas Day away from their families, to wait on one man who had no intention of marking the season at all, was neither kind nor rational
.
I sent Alice off in a cab to her parents on Christmas Eve. Mrs Glenny had been harder to persuade to leave. I would not have turned her out of the house with nowhere to go, of course, but I knew she had a sister and niece living at Cheapside whom she confessed to being eager to see. Still she refused to go any earlier than Christmas morning.
“I shall be out most of the day,” I told her, while we were arguing over it. It did not even occur to me at the time that I was lying. In fact, once the house was empty I intended to spend yesterday by the fire, drinking more than I ought and listening to the gramophone. I am not sure I would have bothered even to get dressed, were it not for the possibility some emergency might summon me to a patient’s bedside.
When the doorbell rang just before noon, I assumed that was what had happened.
I felt that, while properly concerned for anyone needing a doctor’s attention on Christmas Day, I ought to be grateful for having something to do. But at first I did not even move from the sofa. I lay still, and only opened my eyes a crack, gazed dully at the fire for a moment, then closed them again.
But the ring came again, though more hesitantly this time, and conscience levered me up from the cushions and herded me to the door.
I was astonished beyond expression to find Lestrade standing on the step.
I should not so nearly have lost touch with him. But for so long I had no time for anything but Mary. I did not even manage to attempt a greeting, just stood and gaped at him stupidly. He was almost shockingly unchanged, perhaps a little less dapper and more careworn than I remembered, though even that might have been merely the dismal cast of a drab winter’s day.
Lestrade cleared his throat and set his shoulders in a faintly defiant way, as if he expecting some sort of altercation, or thought himself at risk of being laughed at, and said, “Dr Watson. I thought I’d look in, as I was passing.”
But of course he was not there because he happened to be passing.
“Come in,” I stammered. Then I added, “Merry Christmas,” compelling him to say the same to me, though I think he had meant to avoid it.
Lestrade wiped his boots vigorously and unnecessarily on the mat. “I’m glad you’re setting things straight about Mr. Holmes,” he said. “The barefaced cheek of that letter. I had a high mind to - well, if there was any justice we’d have him for libel, but-” he sighed.
One cannot libel the dead.
“I should have written the truth long ago,” I said. “Then he would never have had such a chance.”
Lestrade looked thoughtfully at an engraving on the wall. “I’ve had to write up a lot of reports over the years,” he remarked. “Not your kind of writing, of course - not the same thing at all,” he said hastily, as if I might have been offended by the comparison. “But I know how... when it’s something very bad, something you were close to ... I know it must have been very hard to do, is what I mean.”
“It’s out in the Strand tomorrow,” I said, rather than address how it had been. Then a thread of Mendelssohn drifted into the hall and I realised suddenly that I had left the door to the living room open and there was no polite way to keep Lestrade out of it. He has not been under my roof often, but he knows his way around and naturally he headed there, saying, “Oh, have you got one of those gramophones, then?”
I followed him, starting feebly, “Please excuse the . . .”
Lestrade took in the drawn curtains, the settee shoved close to the fire, the tumbled nest of blankets upon it in which I’d been lying a moment before, the rail of clothes standing at an untidy angle against the sideboard. “You’re sleeping down here?” he asked, and I heard him trying, halfway through the question, to iron the note of shocked incredulity out of it.
I looked away from him. “When my wife was ill, it often wasn’t practical for me to sleep in our bed, so I . . . and now . . . well.”
I stopped, realising how miserably transparent the rest of it was. Although it isn’t only what I saw in that room, in that bed, that keeps me out of it. It is the memory of lying there beside her when she was well, her lovely hair spread over my chest, one of her feet stroking idly up my calf or tucked warm underneath it. It may not have been quite so obvious to Lestrade that I also possess a perfectly adequate guest room - bachelor quarters for one - and I avoid that too. Not that there is anything left in there, one might look at that blankly comfortable space and never guess what it once contained, who lay in the crisp white bed, thinking ... no one will ever know what. And that is unbearable in its own way too. I know I must get things back into proper order; Mrs Glenny’s hints on the subject are growing ever more pained. I did make an attempt at it, a few weeks ago, but finding Mary’s letter rather stopped me in my tracks. I have not so much as opened the door to the bedroom again.
Besides, I generally return from my rounds so exhausted that I am simply grateful not to have to mount the stairs.
Lestrade became carefully expressionless, and steered me back into the hall and shut the door. “Well, I brought along a decent bottle of sherry,” he said briskly, “But that’ll keep until later. Come on, Dr Watson, ”
Mary had told me not to reject help. I am afraid I scarcely needed the advice; I could not have sent Lestrade away. And I did not like that; I wanted at least to be capable of refusing him. Thankful as I was for this Christmastide rescue, it was humiliating to need it so badly. My camp by the fireside had seemed a small, hidden enclave of warmth and quiet, and now through Lestrade’s eyes, I saw it as the wretched burrow of a wounded animal.
Lestrade hurried me down Airlie Gardens, away from it. “We’ll get a ’bus on the High Street,” he told me. “There are a couple of decent pubs round Piccadilly that stay open.”
“Lestrade - this is so kind of you, but someone else must have claims on you today,” I said. I felt rather abashed at not knowing the answer. I knew only that he was still a bachelor, but otherwise nothing of his home life. I did not want to think that all the time I’d known him, he might have been entirely alone in the world.
Lestrade pursed his lips. “I had a nice family Christmas last year,” he said broodingly, “and that’ll last me for a good while yet.”
I had to laugh a little at the grimness of his tone and he looked guilty. “My sister’s a good girl... in moderate doses. Her husband drives me round the bleeding bend, though.”
We fell silent as we crossed the park. It was a natural enough quiet at first but inevitably it changed -- I could feel Lestrade struggling for something to say to me, a stifled, restless silence I have experienced too many times already. And I had no words of my own with which to help him, not even to say I understood. It was the silence in the house, pursuing us even through the streets and out across the park’s icy grass.
Still, we weathered it through, and silence is better than some of the things that have had been said to me in the last few months. The new chaplain at St Mary Abbots told me after the service that I must not grieve. God took her for the best. I actually smiled and thanked him mechanically, and did not realise until hours later how angry I was. Mrs Graham on the other hand -- a trying patient at the best of times with her myriad imaginary ailments -- became the first woman I have ever been tempted to strike when she said to me that at least consumption is a gentle death, isn’t it, like a flower fading.
The ’bus driver and conductor were celebrating the season as best they could -a few sprigs of holly were tied to the guardrail; the conductor had to set down mug of beer to take our sixpences, while the driver had his little daughter sitting up beside him. They were sharing mince pies while the passengers filed aboard. The little girl had fine yellow hair, escaping from a wool cap. I could not look at them with wholly uncomplicated pleasure, but there was pleasure, nevertheless, in witnessing the tenderness between them, as the man handed his daughter the reins for a moment and so that he could tuck the blanket she was wrapped in more tightly around her and brushed some crumbs of pastry from her lap.
Lestrade, on the other hand, glanced up at the man’s face and was startled out of tongue-tied awkwardness. He hissed, “That’s Pete Barnsley - he used to be a regular of ours.”
I made a questioning noise, though more from automatic courtesy than genuine interest.
“In and out of the lock-up,” said Lestrade. “Last I heard he’d got two years for brawling. To be honest, when we never picked him up again after that I never took it for a good sign - I thought the drink’d finish him rather than the other way around, and probably before too long. Well, that’s a nice thing to see at Christmas - I’m glad to be wrong. ”
I looked again at the driver and the child beside him. The man’s straight back, his steady hands on the reins.
“Are you sure?”
“I couldn’t forget Barnsley,” said Lestrade, grinning at the memory. “He’d be smashing windows and throwing punches when we picked him up, but by time we’d got him into the van, he’d turn into the nicest, friendliest drunk you ever saw. He used to sing ‘Molly Malone’ in the cells. And he told Gregson he had a beautiful soul.”
The idea of anybody saying such a thing to poor Gregson startled the loudest laugh I’ve heard from my own lips in months. I asked, “How is Gregson?” , and Lestrade began to summarise almost three years’ worth of Yard gossip -- an anthology of marvellous, ridiculous stories, from Constable Murcher’s unfortunate run in with a vat of blue dye to the elderly shopkeeper who had beaten a would-be robber about the head with her own false leg. It lasted all the way to Piccadilly, where Lestrade startled the driver as we disembarked with a “Merry Christmas, Pete”.
The Blue Posts was rather desolate, despite the honest efforts of the staff-- only a few other lonely souls were dining there in solitary corners. Lestrade and I too were silent again over the food, but it was a far more solid, comfortable quiet. We had both decided against the cheerless-looking imitation of a Christmas dinner in favour of more work-a-day fare, and I watched my friend put away his Welsh rarebit in the rapid, businesslike, extremely thorough way he does everything else, and no longer felt only grateful and overwhelmed but intensely glad to see him.
Afterwards we wandered aimlessly south towards Westminster. The winter sky was no less dreary but the Houses of Parliament look grand in every season, and the river was at full tide, coursing dark and strong. Lestrade was telling me about a new young detective called Hopkins. “He’s green as a gooseberry but bright, yes; he’ll do well once we’ve worn a bit of the nonsense out of him. And I rather think you and Mr Holmes get the credit for him joining the force -- he’s read every story of yours, Doctor, he made sure everyone knew that about ten minutes into his first day.”
I didn’t answer at once. I thought of that unknown young man reading The Final Problem over breakfast the next day, along with thousands of others, and I wished, for a moment, that I could take all of it back, erase all those hundreds of pages, that I’d never written a word.
No, that is all wrong, I thought. Wishing to extinguish what is left of him - no, I should be proud: that in my words, as well as in all the lives he saved or changed, he still lives, at least a little.
But it has been such a mocking kind of shadow-company, that creature with nothing in its veins but memory and ink. And however lifelike it may perhaps remain to anyone else, to me that last story has left it forever embalmed in the act of falling.
“What are you working on, now, then?” I asked, realising I’d been silent too long.
Lestrade rubbed his hands together and acquired the sombre yet important look of the criminal investigator with an interestingly dreadful case. “Ah. You’ll’ve been following this Molesey Mystery, I expect?”
“No,” I replied, and Lestrade looked quite disproportionately aghast - almost as dismayed as he had when he’d seen my sitting room. I felt I had to reassure him, and besides I did feel vague stir of amused interest at the grandiose alliteration, so I amended: “Well - yes. Arsenic poisoning, I know that much. Tell me about it.”
So Lestrade began another story, and in the course of it, we strayed across to New Scotland Yard itself. I had never yet been inside it. I looked up at its smart exterior of banded red brick and white stone, with a certain nostalgia for all the comings and goings there once were beneath the soot-stained clock and weathervane of the old headquarters, but I was glad to see Lestrade had a larger and more comfortably appointed office than the dark little den in which we used to find him.
Lestrade coaxed a little fire to life, took out the bottle of sherry he’d been carrying in his pocket all this time, and continued to talk.
The case involved a large family spread over three households and as Lestrade talked I found myself reaching for pencil and paper to scribble down a list of names, a family tree, and finally a crude summary of events and details.
I shall reproduce some of my jottings here, in case I should happen to think of anything:
Adelaide Maitland m Albert Grenfell
_______________________________|__________________________
| | |
Isobel Grenfell Graham Grenfell Kitty Grenfell
m m
Alan Stentham Helen Meyers
Others:
Peter Waldrop M.D (doctor, family friend)
Anne Bicknell (housekeeper)
Adelaide Grenfell had been a formidable woman - not precisely wealthy, it seemed, but, despite being deserted by her husband for another woman in her youth, she had maintained a handsome house and a certain position in the town of Molesey in Surrey. Her younger daughter Kitty was a spinster, who remained beneath the maternal roof and under the maternal thumb. Her other two children lived in attractive properties on the same street. Mrs Grenfell had been disappointed in their marriages- her elder daughter, Isobel, had married Alan Stentham, a bluff, jovial former commissioner, already retired, whom she considered a boor. Her son Graham had scandalised her by abandoning the law to attempt a career on the stage. He had not become a new Barrymore, but he had had just enough success to win a discontented American bride, who had not settled well, having expected an exciting life in London rather than strained suburban gentility next door to a tyrannical mother-in-law. All three Grenfell children, though none was now below thirty-five, remained afraid of their mother - Kitty never daring to offend her, while Isobel and Graham were prone to fitful displays of rebellion then long relapses of cowed capitulation. They could not afford to antagonise their mother too far, being often in need of financial assistance. All three had been well provided-for on coming of age, but only Kitty retained any of her portion - Alan Stentham had run through all his wife’s money in reckless speculations, and Graham’s choice of career had always been a financially risky one.
Back in November of last year, her son-in-law Alan Stentham had died suddenly, after a few days of illness. Whatever his widow’s feelings had been, the rest of the family had quite openly considered the tragedy a blessing in disguise - there would be no more unexpected and his death left her free to marry the family’s preferred candidate, the local doctor, who was widely thought to be in love with her.
Months passed, and Kitty Grenfell, the youngest daughter, began to complain of feeling unwell. Then, after an impromptu lunch party, she fell seriously ill. She was not the only casualty-a family friend, the housekeeper and the cat all suffered vomiting and pain. Only Mrs Grenfell, who never touched Edwards’ Desiccated Soup which Kitty regularly favoured, was unscathed. The guest, the housekeeper and the cat all recovered. But Kitty Grenfell died.
A mere month after the funeral, Mrs Grenfell herself fell ill, after taking her daily tonic, and died, insisting she’d been poisoned. At last, as they should have been far earlier, the police were called, the bodies of Stentham and Kitty Grenfell exhumed, and found, like Mrs Grenfell’s, to be riddled with arsenic.
I snorted with amazement when I heard the conclusions of the original inquests, which had kept the police away for so long. Mr Alan Stentham was supposed to have died from heart failure brought on by hatlessness while fishing and poor Kitty Grenfell from influenza contracted by excessive bicycling.
“I know!” agreed Lestrade “Give me a hair to go on and I’d bang up the coroner.”
“The murderer must certainly have counted himself extremely lucky.”
“Or herself,” said Lestrade. “Poisoning’s mostly a pretty feminine way of killing, in my experience.”
“I don’t know about that, in general. But Mrs Stentham, then, you think? I suppose it does look like that.” Both Isobel Stentham and Graham Grenfell had received modest financial benefits from the loss of their sister and mother, but one could see no advantage in Mr Stentham’s death to any member of the family but Isobel.
“Nine times out of ten it looks like that because it is like that,” said Lestrade, a little sententiously. “Though Gregson’s half convinced himself it was the housekeeper.”
I looked at my scribblings. “Mrs Bicknell?” She had, it was true, served the soup and had had ready access to Mrs Grenfell’s tonic-bottle. “But she ate the soup as well.”
“Well,” Lestrade said, apparently in the spirit of justice to his colleague: “A clever killer might do that, mightn’t they - to divert suspicion? She had only a stomach upset. And the Stenthams were just over the road - she could have got at his beer.”
“But why should she do it? She hasn’t made her fortune out of this, has she?”
“No, indeed. It looks very black against, Isobel Stentham” agreed Lestrade, then sighed. “And yet not quite black enough. None of the evidence goes quite far enough to bring a charge. I can’t see how we’re going to prove it, unless something makes her confess -- and why should she? She clammed up for a good while, but she’s saying it must have been her brother, now. And the brother’s accusing everyone.”
We talked over -- and eventually dismissed - the possibility it might have been the unhappy American wife, or the amorous doctor. Statements and notes seemed to disgorged themselves from cabinets and dockets, until every spare surface around us had been colonised by papers. It had been dark for several hours when we realised at last how late it was getting. A little reluctantly, I stood up to go, and thanked him again. “Nothing to thank me for, Dr. Watson. I’ve had a fine Christmas day in your company,” said Lestrade warmly. “I hope you didn’t mind me bending your ear.”
“You know I didn’t,” I said.
“It was good to talk the whole thing through,” said Lestrade, sighing. “I feel I’ve got the whole thing that much more clear in my mind, now. Something’s got to turn up to pin it down... ”
I took a cab back to Kensington, thinking of nothing - almost nothing -- but Lestrade’s Molesey Mystery. I barely noticed the silence welling in the rooms of the house. Though climbing up to the cloistered bedrooms was still more than I could face, when I fell asleep on the sofa as usual, I was still puzzling over it.
Such a strange and terrible case. Whoever the murderer was, why kill Mrs Grenfell just a month after her daughter? She was an old, unwell woman, whose constitution must have been weakened by the shock of her daughter’s death - why not wait, at least a while? Isobel Stentham had received a modest legacy from both her mother and sister - but neither sum was sufficient to have greatly altered her way of living. From everything Lestrade had told me, there seemed no pressing reason why she should have needed a relatively small sum so desperately - especially when a third murder so soon after the second was almost certain to attract the attention of the police at last. As for Graham Grenfell, his financial problems appeared to have been somewhat more pressing than his sister’s -- but killing his brother-in-law would have done nothing at all to alleviate them. And he too, must have been mad to suppose a third poisoning would go unnoticed. And none of the possible candidates appeared to be mad.
If someone had simply wished to destroy the Grenfell family -- murder as many of them as possible and leave the survivors crushed beneath the weight of mutual suspicion -- they could not have done a better job of it.
I fear I am thinking like a writer, not a detective; it is one thing to invent a story that accounts for all events I know of, but quite another to find, in all that mass of data, the thread that once pulled will unravel the whole knot.
And yet is it not an assumption being imposed upon the data -- that the motive must have been financial?
Suppose it were not - or at least, not exactly?
I wonder if -
December 27th, 1893
TELEGRAM
ADELAIDE GRENFELL’S DESERTING HUSBAND STOP HIS SUBSEQUENT LIFE QUERY - JW
December 28th, 1893
TELEGRAMS
ALREADY INVESTIGATED STOP DEAD HEART ATTACK 1883 - GL
MISTRESS STILL LIVING QUERY OTHER CHILDREN QUERY APOLOGIES BOTHERING YOU WITH QUESTIONS - JW
December 30th, 1893
TELEGRAMS
MISTRESS louise simons ORIGINALLY GOVERNESS GRENFELL CHILDREN stop DEAD childbed 1870 stop THREE DAUGHTERS stop - GL
DAUGHTERS ALL ACCOUNTED FOR query - JW
January 1st, 1894
TELEGRAMS
Eldest daughter Jane Simons STOP Living Streatham STOP Youngest Susan Simons dead consumption 1884 STOP Second in service not yet traced - GL
Second daughter married QUERY Appearance QUERY How old QUERY Apologies --JW
January 2nd 1893
TELEGRAM
NO APOLOGIES STOP SECOND DAUGHTER FOUND STOP TOOK ELDER SISTER TO MOLESEY IDENTIFIED HOUSEKEEPER GRENFELL RESIDENCE STOP ANNE SIMONS MARRIED NAME ANNE BICKNELL CONFESSED MURDERS STOP YOU KNEW IT DIDN’T YOU -- GL
January 3rd, 1894
I met Lestrade at the Blue Posts again this evening - this time it was full and lively. Lestrade, looking at once pleased and rather put out, already had a drink waiting for me when I came in. “Well, that was a clever idea you had,” he said. “Lucky,” he added, almost involuntarily, “but still very clever.”
Besides whatever mixed feelings he may have had over my contribution, I think he was a little annoyed Gregson had turned out to be right about the housekeeper, even if he was a long way from finding the reason or the proof.
“I was only a fresh pair of eyes,” I said. “You would have found out who she was before long. I didn’t know it was Mrs Bicknell, though when you started telling me about the daughters I did wonder. But I was thinking about how the Grenfell family was nearly annihilated, and then I thought of the father and wondered if that was really so ... And I suppose I thought of that Baskerville case. I didn’t expect the outcome to be so dramatic.”
“It was that, all right,” agreed Lestrade. “It was hard on the other sister - Jane Simons. They hadn’t spoken since the youngest died, it seems - what a way to have a family reunion.”
The Grenfell patriarch had largely lost interest in his second, illegitimate family by his death in 1883. His mistress had died in childbed thirteen years before, and by then he had long since abandoned any pretence at supporting his children as gentlewomen. At his death, his money had been divided among his estranged wife and their children - this was the inheritance that Isobel Stentham and Graham Grenfell had so swiftly burned through. Grenfell’s daughters by Louise Simons had not received a penny. His youngest child died only a year after her father, at her sister’s dwelling, aged only fourteen years.
Lestrade showed me a copy of Anne Bicknell’s confession.
“...and I don’t care what you or Jane say, and I don’t care what happens to me now, why shouldn’t they have a taste of what we went through? That family ruined us. They had all that money from Father and they just trifled it away, and then they fancy themselves poor because they can’t live in Belgrave Square. Mrs Grenfell always knew who I was, though she wouldn’t have Miss Kitty know it- she thought she was being charitable having me scrub her stairs and clean her privy and paying me a pittance with my own Father’s money. If we’d had a penny of what they got from Father we could’ve looked after poor Susie proper. She could have had a decent doctor to see her and she’d be here today.”
They gave me the strangest feeling, those lines - an uneasy amalgamation of pity and guilt and anger, and there in amongst all of it was an absurd desire to tell this murderess that one cannot simply pay for consumption to go away. One may try and try and spend and spend and watch it all make no difference at all.
“A sad case,” I said, handing him back the paper.
“Aren’t they always, one way or the other?” said Lestrade. “But take heart, Doctor. There’s no knowing who else she might have harmed, and now she won’t have the chance. And Isobel Stentham spent hours comforting Jane Simons - at least they know they’re a family, now.”
I nodded. And Isobel Stentham and Graham Grenfell have their names clear, I reflected.
“Perhaps you’ll write it up for the papers?” suggested Lestrade. “It’d make quite a story.”
The small glow of pride went suddenly cold in my chest. I said, “No.”
[Pages torn out]
>>Part 4
It had struck me when I was out at Harrods that keeping poor Alice and Mrs Glenny hostage here for Christmas Day away from their families, to wait on one man who had no intention of marking the season at all, was neither kind nor rational
.
I sent Alice off in a cab to her parents on Christmas Eve. Mrs Glenny had been harder to persuade to leave. I would not have turned her out of the house with nowhere to go, of course, but I knew she had a sister and niece living at Cheapside whom she confessed to being eager to see. Still she refused to go any earlier than Christmas morning.
“I shall be out most of the day,” I told her, while we were arguing over it. It did not even occur to me at the time that I was lying. In fact, once the house was empty I intended to spend yesterday by the fire, drinking more than I ought and listening to the gramophone. I am not sure I would have bothered even to get dressed, were it not for the possibility some emergency might summon me to a patient’s bedside.
When the doorbell rang just before noon, I assumed that was what had happened.
I felt that, while properly concerned for anyone needing a doctor’s attention on Christmas Day, I ought to be grateful for having something to do. But at first I did not even move from the sofa. I lay still, and only opened my eyes a crack, gazed dully at the fire for a moment, then closed them again.
But the ring came again, though more hesitantly this time, and conscience levered me up from the cushions and herded me to the door.
I was astonished beyond expression to find Lestrade standing on the step.
I should not so nearly have lost touch with him. But for so long I had no time for anything but Mary. I did not even manage to attempt a greeting, just stood and gaped at him stupidly. He was almost shockingly unchanged, perhaps a little less dapper and more careworn than I remembered, though even that might have been merely the dismal cast of a drab winter’s day.
Lestrade cleared his throat and set his shoulders in a faintly defiant way, as if he expecting some sort of altercation, or thought himself at risk of being laughed at, and said, “Dr Watson. I thought I’d look in, as I was passing.”
But of course he was not there because he happened to be passing.
“Come in,” I stammered. Then I added, “Merry Christmas,” compelling him to say the same to me, though I think he had meant to avoid it.
Lestrade wiped his boots vigorously and unnecessarily on the mat. “I’m glad you’re setting things straight about Mr. Holmes,” he said. “The barefaced cheek of that letter. I had a high mind to - well, if there was any justice we’d have him for libel, but-” he sighed.
One cannot libel the dead.
“I should have written the truth long ago,” I said. “Then he would never have had such a chance.”
Lestrade looked thoughtfully at an engraving on the wall. “I’ve had to write up a lot of reports over the years,” he remarked. “Not your kind of writing, of course - not the same thing at all,” he said hastily, as if I might have been offended by the comparison. “But I know how... when it’s something very bad, something you were close to ... I know it must have been very hard to do, is what I mean.”
“It’s out in the Strand tomorrow,” I said, rather than address how it had been. Then a thread of Mendelssohn drifted into the hall and I realised suddenly that I had left the door to the living room open and there was no polite way to keep Lestrade out of it. He has not been under my roof often, but he knows his way around and naturally he headed there, saying, “Oh, have you got one of those gramophones, then?”
I followed him, starting feebly, “Please excuse the . . .”
Lestrade took in the drawn curtains, the settee shoved close to the fire, the tumbled nest of blankets upon it in which I’d been lying a moment before, the rail of clothes standing at an untidy angle against the sideboard. “You’re sleeping down here?” he asked, and I heard him trying, halfway through the question, to iron the note of shocked incredulity out of it.
I looked away from him. “When my wife was ill, it often wasn’t practical for me to sleep in our bed, so I . . . and now . . . well.”
I stopped, realising how miserably transparent the rest of it was. Although it isn’t only what I saw in that room, in that bed, that keeps me out of it. It is the memory of lying there beside her when she was well, her lovely hair spread over my chest, one of her feet stroking idly up my calf or tucked warm underneath it. It may not have been quite so obvious to Lestrade that I also possess a perfectly adequate guest room - bachelor quarters for one - and I avoid that too. Not that there is anything left in there, one might look at that blankly comfortable space and never guess what it once contained, who lay in the crisp white bed, thinking ... no one will ever know what. And that is unbearable in its own way too. I know I must get things back into proper order; Mrs Glenny’s hints on the subject are growing ever more pained. I did make an attempt at it, a few weeks ago, but finding Mary’s letter rather stopped me in my tracks. I have not so much as opened the door to the bedroom again.
Besides, I generally return from my rounds so exhausted that I am simply grateful not to have to mount the stairs.
Lestrade became carefully expressionless, and steered me back into the hall and shut the door. “Well, I brought along a decent bottle of sherry,” he said briskly, “But that’ll keep until later. Come on, Dr Watson, ”
Mary had told me not to reject help. I am afraid I scarcely needed the advice; I could not have sent Lestrade away. And I did not like that; I wanted at least to be capable of refusing him. Thankful as I was for this Christmastide rescue, it was humiliating to need it so badly. My camp by the fireside had seemed a small, hidden enclave of warmth and quiet, and now through Lestrade’s eyes, I saw it as the wretched burrow of a wounded animal.
Lestrade hurried me down Airlie Gardens, away from it. “We’ll get a ’bus on the High Street,” he told me. “There are a couple of decent pubs round Piccadilly that stay open.”
“Lestrade - this is so kind of you, but someone else must have claims on you today,” I said. I felt rather abashed at not knowing the answer. I knew only that he was still a bachelor, but otherwise nothing of his home life. I did not want to think that all the time I’d known him, he might have been entirely alone in the world.
Lestrade pursed his lips. “I had a nice family Christmas last year,” he said broodingly, “and that’ll last me for a good while yet.”
I had to laugh a little at the grimness of his tone and he looked guilty. “My sister’s a good girl... in moderate doses. Her husband drives me round the bleeding bend, though.”
We fell silent as we crossed the park. It was a natural enough quiet at first but inevitably it changed -- I could feel Lestrade struggling for something to say to me, a stifled, restless silence I have experienced too many times already. And I had no words of my own with which to help him, not even to say I understood. It was the silence in the house, pursuing us even through the streets and out across the park’s icy grass.
Still, we weathered it through, and silence is better than some of the things that have had been said to me in the last few months. The new chaplain at St Mary Abbots told me after the service that I must not grieve. God took her for the best. I actually smiled and thanked him mechanically, and did not realise until hours later how angry I was. Mrs Graham on the other hand -- a trying patient at the best of times with her myriad imaginary ailments -- became the first woman I have ever been tempted to strike when she said to me that at least consumption is a gentle death, isn’t it, like a flower fading.
The ’bus driver and conductor were celebrating the season as best they could -a few sprigs of holly were tied to the guardrail; the conductor had to set down mug of beer to take our sixpences, while the driver had his little daughter sitting up beside him. They were sharing mince pies while the passengers filed aboard. The little girl had fine yellow hair, escaping from a wool cap. I could not look at them with wholly uncomplicated pleasure, but there was pleasure, nevertheless, in witnessing the tenderness between them, as the man handed his daughter the reins for a moment and so that he could tuck the blanket she was wrapped in more tightly around her and brushed some crumbs of pastry from her lap.
Lestrade, on the other hand, glanced up at the man’s face and was startled out of tongue-tied awkwardness. He hissed, “That’s Pete Barnsley - he used to be a regular of ours.”
I made a questioning noise, though more from automatic courtesy than genuine interest.
“In and out of the lock-up,” said Lestrade. “Last I heard he’d got two years for brawling. To be honest, when we never picked him up again after that I never took it for a good sign - I thought the drink’d finish him rather than the other way around, and probably before too long. Well, that’s a nice thing to see at Christmas - I’m glad to be wrong. ”
I looked again at the driver and the child beside him. The man’s straight back, his steady hands on the reins.
“Are you sure?”
“I couldn’t forget Barnsley,” said Lestrade, grinning at the memory. “He’d be smashing windows and throwing punches when we picked him up, but by time we’d got him into the van, he’d turn into the nicest, friendliest drunk you ever saw. He used to sing ‘Molly Malone’ in the cells. And he told Gregson he had a beautiful soul.”
The idea of anybody saying such a thing to poor Gregson startled the loudest laugh I’ve heard from my own lips in months. I asked, “How is Gregson?” , and Lestrade began to summarise almost three years’ worth of Yard gossip -- an anthology of marvellous, ridiculous stories, from Constable Murcher’s unfortunate run in with a vat of blue dye to the elderly shopkeeper who had beaten a would-be robber about the head with her own false leg. It lasted all the way to Piccadilly, where Lestrade startled the driver as we disembarked with a “Merry Christmas, Pete”.
The Blue Posts was rather desolate, despite the honest efforts of the staff-- only a few other lonely souls were dining there in solitary corners. Lestrade and I too were silent again over the food, but it was a far more solid, comfortable quiet. We had both decided against the cheerless-looking imitation of a Christmas dinner in favour of more work-a-day fare, and I watched my friend put away his Welsh rarebit in the rapid, businesslike, extremely thorough way he does everything else, and no longer felt only grateful and overwhelmed but intensely glad to see him.
Afterwards we wandered aimlessly south towards Westminster. The winter sky was no less dreary but the Houses of Parliament look grand in every season, and the river was at full tide, coursing dark and strong. Lestrade was telling me about a new young detective called Hopkins. “He’s green as a gooseberry but bright, yes; he’ll do well once we’ve worn a bit of the nonsense out of him. And I rather think you and Mr Holmes get the credit for him joining the force -- he’s read every story of yours, Doctor, he made sure everyone knew that about ten minutes into his first day.”
I didn’t answer at once. I thought of that unknown young man reading The Final Problem over breakfast the next day, along with thousands of others, and I wished, for a moment, that I could take all of it back, erase all those hundreds of pages, that I’d never written a word.
No, that is all wrong, I thought. Wishing to extinguish what is left of him - no, I should be proud: that in my words, as well as in all the lives he saved or changed, he still lives, at least a little.
But it has been such a mocking kind of shadow-company, that creature with nothing in its veins but memory and ink. And however lifelike it may perhaps remain to anyone else, to me that last story has left it forever embalmed in the act of falling.
“What are you working on, now, then?” I asked, realising I’d been silent too long.
Lestrade rubbed his hands together and acquired the sombre yet important look of the criminal investigator with an interestingly dreadful case. “Ah. You’ll’ve been following this Molesey Mystery, I expect?”
“No,” I replied, and Lestrade looked quite disproportionately aghast - almost as dismayed as he had when he’d seen my sitting room. I felt I had to reassure him, and besides I did feel vague stir of amused interest at the grandiose alliteration, so I amended: “Well - yes. Arsenic poisoning, I know that much. Tell me about it.”
So Lestrade began another story, and in the course of it, we strayed across to New Scotland Yard itself. I had never yet been inside it. I looked up at its smart exterior of banded red brick and white stone, with a certain nostalgia for all the comings and goings there once were beneath the soot-stained clock and weathervane of the old headquarters, but I was glad to see Lestrade had a larger and more comfortably appointed office than the dark little den in which we used to find him.
Lestrade coaxed a little fire to life, took out the bottle of sherry he’d been carrying in his pocket all this time, and continued to talk.
The case involved a large family spread over three households and as Lestrade talked I found myself reaching for pencil and paper to scribble down a list of names, a family tree, and finally a crude summary of events and details.
I shall reproduce some of my jottings here, in case I should happen to think of anything:
Adelaide Maitland m Albert Grenfell
_______________________________|__________________________
| | |
Isobel Grenfell Graham Grenfell Kitty Grenfell
m m
Alan Stentham Helen Meyers
Others:
Peter Waldrop M.D (doctor, family friend)
Anne Bicknell (housekeeper)
Adelaide Grenfell had been a formidable woman - not precisely wealthy, it seemed, but, despite being deserted by her husband for another woman in her youth, she had maintained a handsome house and a certain position in the town of Molesey in Surrey. Her younger daughter Kitty was a spinster, who remained beneath the maternal roof and under the maternal thumb. Her other two children lived in attractive properties on the same street. Mrs Grenfell had been disappointed in their marriages- her elder daughter, Isobel, had married Alan Stentham, a bluff, jovial former commissioner, already retired, whom she considered a boor. Her son Graham had scandalised her by abandoning the law to attempt a career on the stage. He had not become a new Barrymore, but he had had just enough success to win a discontented American bride, who had not settled well, having expected an exciting life in London rather than strained suburban gentility next door to a tyrannical mother-in-law. All three Grenfell children, though none was now below thirty-five, remained afraid of their mother - Kitty never daring to offend her, while Isobel and Graham were prone to fitful displays of rebellion then long relapses of cowed capitulation. They could not afford to antagonise their mother too far, being often in need of financial assistance. All three had been well provided-for on coming of age, but only Kitty retained any of her portion - Alan Stentham had run through all his wife’s money in reckless speculations, and Graham’s choice of career had always been a financially risky one.
Back in November of last year, her son-in-law Alan Stentham had died suddenly, after a few days of illness. Whatever his widow’s feelings had been, the rest of the family had quite openly considered the tragedy a blessing in disguise - there would be no more unexpected and his death left her free to marry the family’s preferred candidate, the local doctor, who was widely thought to be in love with her.
Months passed, and Kitty Grenfell, the youngest daughter, began to complain of feeling unwell. Then, after an impromptu lunch party, she fell seriously ill. She was not the only casualty-a family friend, the housekeeper and the cat all suffered vomiting and pain. Only Mrs Grenfell, who never touched Edwards’ Desiccated Soup which Kitty regularly favoured, was unscathed. The guest, the housekeeper and the cat all recovered. But Kitty Grenfell died.
A mere month after the funeral, Mrs Grenfell herself fell ill, after taking her daily tonic, and died, insisting she’d been poisoned. At last, as they should have been far earlier, the police were called, the bodies of Stentham and Kitty Grenfell exhumed, and found, like Mrs Grenfell’s, to be riddled with arsenic.
I snorted with amazement when I heard the conclusions of the original inquests, which had kept the police away for so long. Mr Alan Stentham was supposed to have died from heart failure brought on by hatlessness while fishing and poor Kitty Grenfell from influenza contracted by excessive bicycling.
“I know!” agreed Lestrade “Give me a hair to go on and I’d bang up the coroner.”
“The murderer must certainly have counted himself extremely lucky.”
“Or herself,” said Lestrade. “Poisoning’s mostly a pretty feminine way of killing, in my experience.”
“I don’t know about that, in general. But Mrs Stentham, then, you think? I suppose it does look like that.” Both Isobel Stentham and Graham Grenfell had received modest financial benefits from the loss of their sister and mother, but one could see no advantage in Mr Stentham’s death to any member of the family but Isobel.
“Nine times out of ten it looks like that because it is like that,” said Lestrade, a little sententiously. “Though Gregson’s half convinced himself it was the housekeeper.”
I looked at my scribblings. “Mrs Bicknell?” She had, it was true, served the soup and had had ready access to Mrs Grenfell’s tonic-bottle. “But she ate the soup as well.”
“Well,” Lestrade said, apparently in the spirit of justice to his colleague: “A clever killer might do that, mightn’t they - to divert suspicion? She had only a stomach upset. And the Stenthams were just over the road - she could have got at his beer.”
“But why should she do it? She hasn’t made her fortune out of this, has she?”
“No, indeed. It looks very black against, Isobel Stentham” agreed Lestrade, then sighed. “And yet not quite black enough. None of the evidence goes quite far enough to bring a charge. I can’t see how we’re going to prove it, unless something makes her confess -- and why should she? She clammed up for a good while, but she’s saying it must have been her brother, now. And the brother’s accusing everyone.”
We talked over -- and eventually dismissed - the possibility it might have been the unhappy American wife, or the amorous doctor. Statements and notes seemed to disgorged themselves from cabinets and dockets, until every spare surface around us had been colonised by papers. It had been dark for several hours when we realised at last how late it was getting. A little reluctantly, I stood up to go, and thanked him again. “Nothing to thank me for, Dr. Watson. I’ve had a fine Christmas day in your company,” said Lestrade warmly. “I hope you didn’t mind me bending your ear.”
“You know I didn’t,” I said.
“It was good to talk the whole thing through,” said Lestrade, sighing. “I feel I’ve got the whole thing that much more clear in my mind, now. Something’s got to turn up to pin it down... ”
I took a cab back to Kensington, thinking of nothing - almost nothing -- but Lestrade’s Molesey Mystery. I barely noticed the silence welling in the rooms of the house. Though climbing up to the cloistered bedrooms was still more than I could face, when I fell asleep on the sofa as usual, I was still puzzling over it.
Such a strange and terrible case. Whoever the murderer was, why kill Mrs Grenfell just a month after her daughter? She was an old, unwell woman, whose constitution must have been weakened by the shock of her daughter’s death - why not wait, at least a while? Isobel Stentham had received a modest legacy from both her mother and sister - but neither sum was sufficient to have greatly altered her way of living. From everything Lestrade had told me, there seemed no pressing reason why she should have needed a relatively small sum so desperately - especially when a third murder so soon after the second was almost certain to attract the attention of the police at last. As for Graham Grenfell, his financial problems appeared to have been somewhat more pressing than his sister’s -- but killing his brother-in-law would have done nothing at all to alleviate them. And he too, must have been mad to suppose a third poisoning would go unnoticed. And none of the possible candidates appeared to be mad.
If someone had simply wished to destroy the Grenfell family -- murder as many of them as possible and leave the survivors crushed beneath the weight of mutual suspicion -- they could not have done a better job of it.
I fear I am thinking like a writer, not a detective; it is one thing to invent a story that accounts for all events I know of, but quite another to find, in all that mass of data, the thread that once pulled will unravel the whole knot.
And yet is it not an assumption being imposed upon the data -- that the motive must have been financial?
Suppose it were not - or at least, not exactly?
I wonder if -
December 27th, 1893
TELEGRAM
ADELAIDE GRENFELL’S DESERTING HUSBAND STOP HIS SUBSEQUENT LIFE QUERY - JW
December 28th, 1893
TELEGRAMS
ALREADY INVESTIGATED STOP DEAD HEART ATTACK 1883 - GL
MISTRESS STILL LIVING QUERY OTHER CHILDREN QUERY APOLOGIES BOTHERING YOU WITH QUESTIONS - JW
December 30th, 1893
TELEGRAMS
MISTRESS louise simons ORIGINALLY GOVERNESS GRENFELL CHILDREN stop DEAD childbed 1870 stop THREE DAUGHTERS stop - GL
DAUGHTERS ALL ACCOUNTED FOR query - JW
January 1st, 1894
TELEGRAMS
Eldest daughter Jane Simons STOP Living Streatham STOP Youngest Susan Simons dead consumption 1884 STOP Second in service not yet traced - GL
Second daughter married QUERY Appearance QUERY How old QUERY Apologies --JW
January 2nd 1893
TELEGRAM
NO APOLOGIES STOP SECOND DAUGHTER FOUND STOP TOOK ELDER SISTER TO MOLESEY IDENTIFIED HOUSEKEEPER GRENFELL RESIDENCE STOP ANNE SIMONS MARRIED NAME ANNE BICKNELL CONFESSED MURDERS STOP YOU KNEW IT DIDN’T YOU -- GL
January 3rd, 1894
I met Lestrade at the Blue Posts again this evening - this time it was full and lively. Lestrade, looking at once pleased and rather put out, already had a drink waiting for me when I came in. “Well, that was a clever idea you had,” he said. “Lucky,” he added, almost involuntarily, “but still very clever.”
Besides whatever mixed feelings he may have had over my contribution, I think he was a little annoyed Gregson had turned out to be right about the housekeeper, even if he was a long way from finding the reason or the proof.
“I was only a fresh pair of eyes,” I said. “You would have found out who she was before long. I didn’t know it was Mrs Bicknell, though when you started telling me about the daughters I did wonder. But I was thinking about how the Grenfell family was nearly annihilated, and then I thought of the father and wondered if that was really so ... And I suppose I thought of that Baskerville case. I didn’t expect the outcome to be so dramatic.”
“It was that, all right,” agreed Lestrade. “It was hard on the other sister - Jane Simons. They hadn’t spoken since the youngest died, it seems - what a way to have a family reunion.”
The Grenfell patriarch had largely lost interest in his second, illegitimate family by his death in 1883. His mistress had died in childbed thirteen years before, and by then he had long since abandoned any pretence at supporting his children as gentlewomen. At his death, his money had been divided among his estranged wife and their children - this was the inheritance that Isobel Stentham and Graham Grenfell had so swiftly burned through. Grenfell’s daughters by Louise Simons had not received a penny. His youngest child died only a year after her father, at her sister’s dwelling, aged only fourteen years.
Lestrade showed me a copy of Anne Bicknell’s confession.
“...and I don’t care what you or Jane say, and I don’t care what happens to me now, why shouldn’t they have a taste of what we went through? That family ruined us. They had all that money from Father and they just trifled it away, and then they fancy themselves poor because they can’t live in Belgrave Square. Mrs Grenfell always knew who I was, though she wouldn’t have Miss Kitty know it- she thought she was being charitable having me scrub her stairs and clean her privy and paying me a pittance with my own Father’s money. If we’d had a penny of what they got from Father we could’ve looked after poor Susie proper. She could have had a decent doctor to see her and she’d be here today.”
They gave me the strangest feeling, those lines - an uneasy amalgamation of pity and guilt and anger, and there in amongst all of it was an absurd desire to tell this murderess that one cannot simply pay for consumption to go away. One may try and try and spend and spend and watch it all make no difference at all.
“A sad case,” I said, handing him back the paper.
“Aren’t they always, one way or the other?” said Lestrade. “But take heart, Doctor. There’s no knowing who else she might have harmed, and now she won’t have the chance. And Isobel Stentham spent hours comforting Jane Simons - at least they know they’re a family, now.”
I nodded. And Isobel Stentham and Graham Grenfell have their names clear, I reflected.
“Perhaps you’ll write it up for the papers?” suggested Lestrade. “It’d make quite a story.”
The small glow of pride went suddenly cold in my chest. I said, “No.”
[Pages torn out]
>>Part 4