Denis Smith - The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

‘Of course, I realised that this trivial matter might be of no relevance to the case, but it was at least possible that there was a relevance there, if I could see it. Why should anyone wish to remove the label? Presuming that the jacket belonged to Professor Arbuthnot, I could see no point to it. What would it matter to anyone where the professor had had his suit made? But, applying the law of contraries, it followed that if there were some significance to the act of removing the label, then the jacket did not belong to the professor at all. This made great sense; for the obvious hypothesis was that the label had been removed to prevent the discovery of this fact. The label might, for instance, be that of a tailor working far away from London, whom the professor could not have visited. But the dead man had certainly been wearing that tweed suit when stabbed, for the fatal blow of the knife had, as I mentioned, passed straight through the waistcoat, which was of the same material as the jacket, and therefore part of the suit. Why, then, should Professor Arbuthnot have been wearing someone else’s suit when he was murdered and why was someone else concerned to conceal this fact? Of course, this is an absurd question, and the absurdity of it at once suggested the correct solution: the murdered man was not in fact Professor Arbuthnot at all, but someone else.

‘I reconsidered then what you had told me of the case, Gregson. As far as I could recall from your account, after Mrs Arbuthnot had discovered the body and had sent the maid to find a policeman, no other family member had seen the body, nor any of the domestic staff. The identification of the body had therefore been made by Mrs Arbuthnot alone and it was possible that she had lied. The obvious explanation for this course of action was that it was Professor Arbuthnot himself who had committed the murder and his wife was seeking to protect him.

‘You see, then, that even before we reached the scene of the crime at Highgate, I had formed a preliminary hypothesis which explained the matter satisfactorily and was completely at variance with the officially accepted course of events.’

‘You say your hypothesis explained the matter,’ I interrupted, ‘but it left unanswered the identity of the victim.’

‘That is true, Watson, but there was of course one outstanding candidate for that unfortunate role, namely Professor Arbuthnot’s old colleague, Dr Zyss. Except for the spectacles he wore all the time, his description was not so different from that of Professor Arbuthnot himself – medium height, spare build, grey hair and beard. I could not really doubt, then, that the dead man was Dr Zyss. Of course, Mrs Arbuthnot stated that Dr Zyss had sent a note to say that he could not keep his appointment that evening; but if she had lied in her identification of the dead man, how much more easily might she have lied about the note.

‘I had taken the dead man’s shoes with me to Holly Grove and, with the aid of these, I examined the footprints in the garden. I very quickly found that there were just two significant sets of footprints upon the lawn. The first, which exactly matched the shoes I had brought with me, passed in a regular and even manner from the garden gate towards the corner of the house, and on towards the French windows. I examined the whole of the garden very closely, but could find no further traces of these prints. Had the shoes from the police station really been those of Professor Arbuthnot, as was supposed, this discovery would have been most mysterious. The only rational explanation would have been that the professor had left the house by the front door, walked down the path to the gate, and then returned to the house by way of the lawn and the French windows to the study. This would have been possible but unlikely, especially as the other evidence – the testimony of the servants and so on – was that he had not left the house all day. However, as I believed the shoes to be those of Dr Zyss, the track across the lawn made perfect sense. Clearly, when Dr Zyss had arrived – being no doubt familiar with his old colleague’s habits – he had decided not to bother ringing the front-door bell, but to walk round to the study window, where he would have been confident of finding the professor at work.

‘The second set of prints, made by shoes which were of a similar size to the first but of a slightly different shape, began just outside the study window. From there they followed the side of the house to the corner of the building, where their owner appeared to have remained standing for a moment – to judge from the large number of prints close together there – and then proceeded to the gate. Between the corner of the house and the gate, the impressions of this second pair of shoes were very much lighter, and hardly ever showed the heel distinctly, from which I inferred that the owner of these shoes had been moving with great haste. These footprints I could only regard as those of Professor Arbuthnot himself. Evidently, he had left the study – taking with him, incidentally, all the papers relating to his current work – just as his sister arrived and rang the bell at the front door. From the corner he must have signalled to her to return to her carriage, which was waiting in the street. No doubt puzzled by this strange behaviour, she nevertheless complied with his request and had almost reached the gate when the front door was opened by the parlour-maid, Ruby. Lady Boothby turned, but as she could see – which the maid could not – that her brother was urging her to leave at once, she did not respond when the girl spoke to her. When she raised her arm and pointed at the house, in the way that the maid found so menacing and frightening, she was no doubt simply trying to indicate to her brother that the front door had been opened and someone was standing there. Then she turned away and went out at the gate. Thereupon, the maid hurriedly shut the front door, Professor Arbuthnot no doubt left his hiding-place round the corner of the house, and ran across the lawn to join his sister in her carriage and furnish her with an explanation of this strange behaviour.

‘To sum up the matter, then,’ Holmes continued after a moment: ‘Dr Zyss probably arrived shortly before six, saw Arbuthnot in his study, had a quarrel with him and was stabbed. Although Mrs Arbuthnot stated that she had heard nothing of what had taken place in the study, that was an obvious lie. When I was in the study, I asked Dr Watson to put some questions to her in the drawing-room and I listened as he did so. Although I could make out few individual words, I could hear both their voices quite clearly, as Mrs Arbuthnot must have heard the voices of her husband and Dr Zyss. Knowing that Lady Boothby would probably be arriving shortly, the Arbuthnots made the plan to smuggle the professor away in his sister’s carriage, pretend that a note had been received from Dr Zyss to say that he could not come and make out that it was Arbuthnot himself that had been murdered. Of course, there was in reality no message from Zyss, no message from Mrs Arbuthnot to Lady Boothby and the messenger himself did not exist.’

Inspector Gregson nodded his head. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You must be right, Mr Holmes. That must be how it happened. But what made you so sure that Arbuthnot was at his sister’s house?’

‘That seemed to me practically certain,’ replied Holmes. ‘In the first place, according to my theory he had left Holly Grove in her carriage with her on Wednesday evening. In the second place, our information was that he had had little social contact with anyone else in the past ten years, so where else could he be? In the third place, when one of those elderly ladies thought she had seen Dr Zyss in Hampstead, I considered that it must in fact have been Arbuthnot she had seen and this indicated that he was in the vicinity of his sister’s house, for Hampstead High Street is, of course, only a short walk from Belsize Park. In the fourth place, Lady Boothby’s servants were, as you informed us, all elderly and long-serving, which made it less likely that they would question Arbuthnot’s presence there, or betray him to the authorities. In the fifth place, on our first visit, I heard someone pacing backwards and forwards on the floor immediately above the drawing-room. They were certainly not, I judged, the footsteps of a servant. I believe that Lady Boothby realised that we might hear her brother moving about in the room above the drawing-room and that was the true reason she elected to receive us in the dining-room; the fire had nothing to do with it. In the sixth place, when we first saw Lady Boothby, she did not ask you, Gregson, if you had any news, or if you had caught the murderer, which, it seems to me, would have been very natural questions, but instead presumed that you simply wished to interview her again. The reason, of course, that it did not occur to her to ask you if you had caught the murderer was because she already knew you had not, as the murderer was at that moment upstairs in her own house.’