Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures

The woman appeared to have been in her middle twenties. I lifted the head carefully, some hidden and forgotten part of me half expecting the eyes to open and regard me with a cruel disdain, and turned it around. There was a similar depressed fracture to that suffered by the farmer and I was sure, simply by the pulpy feel of the bone around the occipital region, that death would have been instantaneous. I set the head down with the limbs and moved to the torso.

The limbs had clearly been removed by chopping as opposed to sawing and one of the shoulders showed signs of mis-hits, with some cosmetic damage to the edge of the right clavicle. One could only give thanks that the poor girl had been dead when the madman went about his business.

I turned to face Holmes and shook my head. "Nothing here," I said.

"Nothing save for the fact that the arm is missing," Holmes pointed out. "There is clearly some significance in that fact and the fact that the heart has not been removed."

"Why's that, then?" said the Inspector.

"Elementary, my dear Makinson," said Holmes, clearly pleased to be asked to explain his deduction. "I suspect that the killer simply forgot about the heart, being so concerned with his

plan to remove all the limbs and then discard those he did not need. If your men have been as thorough in their investigations around the scene of the slaying as you say – and I have no reason to doubt that such is the case – then the killer must surely have taken the arm with him."

"You mean that he was prepared to chop off everything just to get one of her arms?"

Holmes nodded. "Otherwise, why did he not leave all of the limbs together? For that matter, why remove them and then leave them?"

"Why indeed?" I agreed.

"Let us consider the final body," said Holmes.

The face of William Fitzhue Crosby no longer existed. Where once had been skin and, undoubtedly, normal characteristics

such as a nose, two eyes and two lips, now lay only devastation, a brown mass resembling a flattened mud pie into which a playful child had inserted a series of holes.

The sheer ruination of that face spoke of a hell on Earth, a creature conceived in the mind of Bosch – though whether such a description might not be more aptly levelled at the perpetrator of such carnage is debatable.

"Look at the rear of the head, Watson," said Holmes.

I turned the head to one side and felt the skull: the same fracture was there and I said as much.

"Inspector," said Holmes, "did you know Mr Crosby personally? By that I mean, were he still alive, would you recognize him on the street?"

"I'm not sure as I would, Mr Holmes," said Makinson, frowning. "I don't as doubt that him and me has passed each other by on occasion but -"

Holmes strode purposefully from the cot to the door. "We've finished here, I believe. Come Watson, we have enquiries to make."

"Enquiries?" I pulled the sheet up over Crosby's face.

"We must speak with the relatives of the victims." He walked from the room, pulling his Meerschaum from his pocket. "The game is most definitely afoot. Though, if I am correct, then that in itself poses a further puzzle."

I had grown used to if not tolerant of such enigmatic statements, though I had long since recognized the futility of pressing for more information. All would become clear in good time.

In the early evening we gathered once more at the police station, a full and somewhat depressing day behind us.

The November air in Harrogate was cold but "bracing", to use the Inspector's vernacular. For Sherlock Holmes and myself, however, grown used to the relative mildness of southern climes, the coldness permeated our very bones. To such a degree was this invasion that, even standing before a roaring fire in the Inspector's office, it was all I could do to keep from shivering.

Holmes himself, however, seemed now impervious to the chill as he sat contemplating, staring into the dancing flames.

It had been a productive day.

Due to the fact that William Crosby had no relatives in the town, having moved to Yorkshire from Bristol some eight years earlier, we were forced to call in at the branch of Daleside Bank, on the Parliament Street hill leading to Ripon, there to interview staff as to the possibility of someone having some reason to murder their manager. A tight-faced man named Mr Cardew, enduring rather than enjoying his early middle age, maintained the stoic calm and almost clinical immobility that I have discovered to be the province of bankers and their ilk over the years. They seem a singularly cheerless breed.

When pressed, first by Holmes and subsequently by Inspector Makinson, Mr Cardew visited the large safe at the rear of the premises to see if the money deposited the previous evening was still in place and accounted for. Throughout the exercise, I watched Holmes who viewed the procedure with a thinly disguised disinterest. Rather he seemed to be anxious, as if needing to ask something of Cardew.

Whether my friend would have got around to phrasing his question to such a degree of correctness in his own mind that he would have committed it to speech I will never know for we chanced upon a portrait photograph of William Fitzhue Crosby hanging from the wall outside his office.

The photographer had gone to some considerable trouble to make the finished photograph as acceptable as possible presumably to Mr Crosby – using shadows and turning his subject into profile in order, clearly, to minimize the effect of the banker's disfigurement. But, alas, it had been to little avail.

In the photograph, Crosby's eyes spoke volumes about his attitude to the dark stain which, we subsequently discovered from Mr Cardew, ran from his left temple and down across his cheek to his chin. Those were eyes that barely hid a gross discomfort, hardened around the corners with something akin to outright hatred.

Cardew explained that, in the flesh, as it were, Crosby's stain was a deep magenta. The banker had grown his sideburns in an attempt to hide at least some of it but the effect had been that the sideburn on the left side had been wiry and white.

Believing that the answer to the puzzle involved a killer so mortally offended by such a mark that he would go to great lengths to remove it, we proceeded from the Daleside Bank to the school at which Gertrude Ridge had been, until recently, a teacher, having decided that it might not be necessary to trouble the young woman's grieving parents. On the way, Holmes seemed particularly thoughtful.

The story at the school was similar. Miss Ridge had had a large birthmark on the back of her right hand, stretching up over her wrist to an undetermined point above. Her colleagues at the school had been unable to comment as to how far that might be, Miss Ridge never deeming to appear at school in anything less than a long-sleeved blouse or dress, and even then one with the most ornate ruffled cuffs.

Diana Wetherall and Jean Woodward, widows of, respectively, the deceased landlord and the Hampsthwaite farmer, said that their husbands had suffered similar markings, Terence Wetherall's being a small circular stain about the size of a saucer, situated just to the left of centre of his chest, while Raymond Woodward's disfigurement had stretched across the back of his neck and down between his shoulder blades.

It was I who, eventually, back at the police station, voiced what had been Holmes's concern all along. "We now most probably know the reason for the killings," I said, "but how on earth did the killer know of Wetherall's and Woodward's marks? They were covered at all times when they were not at home."

Makinson frowned and considered this.

Holmes, meanwhile, said, "You say we know why the killer committed the acts, Watson. But do we really know?"