The Adventure of the Jade Hansom (Conclusion)
An original Sherlock Holmes short story
Folks, after five installments of Mafia madness, I thought to lighten the mood this week. so I’m sharing an original short story I wrote in 1982. Its not in my normal true crime style, but it is also not in my crime fiction style either. This was intentionally written in tribute, remembering the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I thought in these times of artificial intelligence and too-perfect editing, you might appreciate a blast from our crime fiction past.
Note: The British English spellings (italicized) are intentional.
The following is the conclusion of a Sherlock Holmes pastiche written in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
From the memoirs of Dr. John Watson of London…
I struck out and felt my fist meet a jaw like the corner of a packing-case. He grunted — a deep, foreign sound — and his hands found my throat. I have been in tight places before, in Afghanistan and since; but for one long, ugly moment I believed my account was closing there in the fog.
Then there were quick feet upon the step, and Holmes’s voice, very hard. “Let him go, or I fire.”
The man froze, and I realized for the first time, the man quite literally had a monkey on his back.
For an instant his face hung close to mine — heavy, weathered, fair-bearded, the pale eyes wild with what I took then for murder and understand now to have been grief. Then he flung me from him with contemptuous ease, struck aside Holmes’s arm before the pistol could speak, and was gone, swallowed whole by the fog. We heard his boots upon the kerb a moment, and then nothing at all.
Holmes raised me by the arm. “You are not hurt?”
“Only my dignity,” said I, feeling at my collar. “Holmes, who in the name of —”
“A question I am not yet in a position to answer.” He was already stooping, and his fingers closed upon some small thing that had fallen to the wet stones in the struggle.
He held it to the light of the doorway: a cheap locket of foreign make, sprung open by the fall. Within was the likeness of a young woman, very fair, looking gravely out with her hands clasped before her. I had never seen her in life. But I had stood within a yard of her not eight hours since, where she lay upon the floor of a jade-green cab.
“You know her,” I said.
“I begin to.” He snapped the locket shut and dropped it into his waistcoat pocket. The grey eyes, when they met mine, held no fear — only that bright, far-off attention I had learned to read as the first loosening of a knot.
“Go home, Watson. Lock your door, and oblige me by carrying your revolver to-morrow. Say nothing of this to a living soul before noon.” He turned back toward the lighted stair. “We are not, it seems, the only persons in London who wish to know who killed that young woman.”
I left him there, and went home through the fog more thoughtful, and a good deal more watchful, than I had come.
My morning did not improve my understanding of the matter. Holmes had, while I slept, despatched a note requesting that I call upon Fenton’s establishment in the Kingsland Road and make what enquiries I could regarding the woman who had boarded Williams’s cab.
It was a delicate enough business for a man presenting himself as a private enquirer rather than a police officer, but the proprietor, a round, obliging fellow named Greaves, confirmed without much prompting that a young woman had left his premises at shortly after eight that morning. She had arrived late the previous evening, he said, taken a room for the night, and departed early carrying a single bag.
She had seemed anxious. She had asked him, before leaving, whether he knew of a reliable cab company. He had not remarked upon her name at the time, and the register showed only the signature J. Krüger in a neat, Continental hand.
I wired the name to Holmes from the post office in the Kingsland Road, received no reply, and made my way to Baker Street by noon.
I had not expected the audience that awaited me. Upon the four chairs before the fire sat Inspectors Gregson and Lestrade, the cabman John Williams — pale but composed — and a spare, plain-clothed man who proved to be Detective-Sergeant Collins of the Finger-Print Branch at New Scotland Yard, sent by the Commissioner to speak to the evidence.
Holmes stood at the mantelpiece with his back to the fire, and in the doorway, just entering as I arrived, was a fifth figure: a broad-shouldered man of fifty with a Norfolk accent and the measured deliberateness of someone who does not hurry and is not hurried.
“Ah, Watson. Pray be seated.” Holmes reached to the mantle and produced the photograph — the work, I now understood, of the newspaper photographer he had summoned the previous day. He passed it to the sergeant. “Gentlemen, I shall ask you to direct your attention to the mark I have made upon the floor of the cab.”
A small X, in pencil, indicated a point upon the near footboard. Beside it, in the original position recorded by the camera, was the crumpled shape of a bloodied lace scarf of fine quality.
“Inspector Gregson,” said Holmes, “that pink-coloured scarf was taken from the floor of the cab in that position. It has not been moved?”
“It has not.”
“Sergeant Collins. You have had the opportunity to examine it.”
The sergeant straightened slightly. “I have. The divisional surgeon recovered metal filings from the fabric — consistent with a blade recently cleaned or sharpened. And the fingermarks upon the scarf are the woman’s own, and no other’s.”
“Precisely.” Holmes set down the photograph and began to pace, slowly, before the fire. “Mr. Williams. You stated that you heard a single cry from within the cab as you slowed for the corner at Dorset Street. You did not hear the sound of a struggle — no impact, no second voice?”
“Only the one cry, sir.”
“Quite so.” Holmes stopped. “Then I put it to you, gentlemen, that there was no murder.”
The silence lasted perhaps four seconds.
“I submit that the sequence of events was as follows. The woman entered the cab carrying, concealed within that scarf, an English dagger. She had brought it deliberately and with purpose. As the cab slowed for the corner, she rose from her seat — a hansom, as you are aware, is a two-wheeled vehicle, and it pitches forward sharply upon braking. She rose with the knife in hand at precisely the wrong moment.
“The forward pitch drove her against the front-board. The handle of the dagger struck the wooden facing — you will observe the fresh scar in the photograph at the point I have also marked — and the blade was driven inward. The cab then rocked backward, as hansoms do upon completing a stop, and returned her to the seat. The scarf, already loosened, fell to the floor as her hand opened.”
“Holmes,” said Lestrade slowly, “you are saying she stabbed herself.”
“I am saying the cab stabbed her, which is a somewhat different statement. She did not intend it. She intended, I believe, something rather different.” Holmes looked at the fifth man in the room. “Inspector Martin. I think this is your moment.”
The Norfolk man settled his large hands upon his knees. He had, about him, the patience of the countryside and the precision of someone who had thought a great deal about what he was going to say.
“I am Martin of the Norfolk Constabulary,” said he. “I came as Mr. Holmes requested, and I’ll tell you plainly what I know, and let the facts speak for themselves as best they can.
“In the last week of June, in the summer of 1902, a German couple named Otto and Charlotte Krüger were found dead at their farmhouse outside Cawston, in Norfolk. They had come to England some twelve years before and were well regarded thereabouts — quiet people, churchgoing, no enemies that any of their neighbours could name. They were killed indoors, in the night, by a man who broke in through the kitchen window. It was a violent business and I will spare this company the particulars.
“We arrested a man within the week. He had been seen upon the Cawston road the evening before the murders, and a farmer’s boy identified him at the subsequent hearing. He was a Frenchman who had been working seasonal labour in the county. The evidence against him was considerable, and the jury had no difficulty. He was sentenced to death.
“He escaped from Norwich Gaol eleven days before the date set for his execution. He got out through the laundry, I am sorry to say, with the assistance of a fellow prisoner who has since himself been tried. He has not been found from that day to this.” Martin paused. “The Krügers had one child. A daughter, Johanna, who was at the time of the murders employed as a governess in Hannover. She was brought back for the trial. She gave evidence. She saw the man convicted.”
The room was very still. The fire shifted.
“She saw him convicted,” said Holmes quietly, “and she saw him escape. And then she came to London. With a knife in a pink lace scarf.”
“She came to find him,” said Martin. “I have no doubt of it.”
“Nor have I.” Holmes turned to the cabman.
John Williams had not moved. He was staring into the fire with an expression that had changed, by some imperceptible degree, from the blank composure of the frightened innocent into something harder and more careful.
“Mr. Williams,” said Holmes, with a particular deliberateness, “when first we spoke, I asked whether you might have a French or German connexion. You shook your head.”
Williams said nothing.
“The name ‘Williams’ is English enough. But you will recall that I despatched a telegram last night to Inspector Martin. I asked him, among other things, for the convicted man’s name.”
Holmes reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a folded paper. “His name was John Guillaume — pronounced, in the French manner, Gee-om.“ He looked at Williams. “You will perhaps not require me to supply the English translation.”
There was a moment — very brief — in which John Williams appeared to calculate. Then he turned to Holmes and said, in a voice entirely without expression, “I wonder if I might trouble you for a glass of water. The fire is very warm.”
Holmes walked to the basin. I observed, through the corner of my eye, that as he filled the glass he also turned the key in the lock of the door and placed it quietly in his watch pocket. He returned, passed the water to Williams, and resumed his place at the mantelpiece.
“I believe, Sergeant,” said Holmes pleasantly, “that the Commissioner wished to know why the woman had drawn the dagger. I think Inspector Martin has answered that. The remaining question — the one Scotland Yard has been asking for sixteen months — is considerably simpler.”
Williams tossed the water into the flames. The fire erupted in a cloud of hissing white smoke that billowed into the room with the sudden ferocity of a breaking wave.
In the chaos that followed I was aware of crashing, of coughing, of someone’s elbow finding my ribs — and then, as the smoke thinned and the figures about me resolved themselves, I saw John Williams standing at the door, his hand upon the latch, and Sherlock Holmes standing two paces behind him with my own service revolver levelled at the man’s back.
“The door is locked,” said Holmes. “Inspectors, I believe your prisoner is ready to be collected.”
Gregson said nothing as he led the man away. Lestrade said very little. Detective-Sergeant Collins pressed Holmes’s hand at the door and undertook to tell Sir Edward that the reputation was not misplaced — which Holmes received with a small, gracious inclination of the head that managed to suggest both thanks and the opinion that the reputation had, if anything, understated the case.
When they had all gone, and Baker Street had returned to its usual November quiet, Holmes retrieved the brandy from my old desk and poured two glasses without being asked.
“It was Johanna Krüger’s own dagger,” he said, handing me mine. “She had read of his escape in the English press — that was the cutting she carried in her muff, you will recall — and had tracked Guillaume to London, where he had been foolish enough to return to the cab trade he knew.
“She had obtained the knife with the intention of settling the matter herself, outside the reach of a court from which he had once already escaped. She was, by all appearances, a composed and purposeful young woman.” He settled into his armchair. “The cab was a more exact instrument of justice than she was, as it turned out.”
“She died for nothing, then.”
“On the contrary. Guillaume is taken. The law will hang him for two murders; it cannot touch him for the manner of his taking. But I confess I find something not entirely unsatisfying in the arithmetic.”
“And the big man in the fog with a beast on his shoulder?” I asked. “The one who very nearly throttled me in your own doorway. He troubles my sleep, I own, more than all the rest of it.”
Holmes drew the little locket from his pocket and turned it in the firelight.
“He troubled mine, until I understood him — and a sadder explanation I have not met in some while.”
He passed it across, open, and again the fair grave face looked up at me.
“Her name is engraved within; and beneath it, in the same hand, a man’s. Friedrich, the organ grinder. They were betrothed in Hannover. When she left her post upon her errand he followed — to aid her, or to turn her from it, we shall never now know — and lost her in the city. Then he came upon the end of it: a whistle, a crowd, a green cab of a livery he would not forget, driven off at the gallop. He could not follow on foot; but a man may trace a numbered cab, and by nightfall it had brought him to this door.”
“Ourselves,” I said.
“Ourselves. And there he kept his watch, until you came down. In his mind, Watson, you and I were the men who had killed her.” Holmes closed the locket gently. “There was no murderer to find — there never had been; but you cannot tell a man so with his hands at your throat. I had a quiet word put about where such a man would hear it — the German mission, the shipping offices — and this morning he came in of his own accord, before the others, and I told him the whole of it. He did not weep, which was somehow worse. He thanked me very correctly, and asked only that the locket be returned to him when the law had done with it.”
Holmes laid it upon the table between us. “A man may hunt a phantom across half of Europe, and be undone in the end by a single fact kindly delivered.”
He regarded his glass for a moment. “Hafiz, I think, puts it better than I can: ‘Even the wisest plan is carried out, in the end, by the hand of God.’ The Sufi poets were often more sensible than the courts.”
He stretched his long legs toward the fire.
The fog had thickened outside; the lamps in the street were nothing but orange smears against the glass. It was, I thought, exactly the atmosphere in which the whole adventure had begun.
“Now, Watson,” said Holmes, without looking up. “About Mrs. Watson.”
My heart performed a brief but determined interruption of its regular duties. I waited.
“I must apologise,” he continued, “for causing you to miss your luncheon yesterday. It was inconsiderate of me. Please assure her it was entirely my fault.”
“Holmes,” I said, after a moment, “you know perfectly well she and I are — “
“I know that you hired a woman to press your cuffs, that you have walked rather than taken any cab for the past several weeks, and that you are thinner than you were at the wedding.”
He glanced across at me then, and the grey eyes held, for once, no trace of the analytical engine — only the expression of a man who has known his friend a very long time.
“I know that you came here yesterday afternoon because you needed to. And I know that whatever is between you and Mrs. Watson is not my business unless you choose to make it so.”
He turned back to the fire. “I merely wished to say that Baker Street has not changed.”
I looked at the familiar walls, the disordered bookshelves, the spider’s web still under construction in the cold grate, the two lamps burning steadily upon the mantle.
“No,” I said. “It has not.”
We sat for a while in silence, the fire doing its slow work between us, and it seemed to me, in that comfortable and companionable quiet, that there were a great many varieties of fidelity in the world, and that not the least of them was this.
THE END
The preceding account was written up from notes made by Dr. John Watson in the week following the events described. Certain details have been altered to avoid embarrassment to living persons. The reader who wishes to verify the subsequent legal proceedings in the matter of John Guillaume, alias Williams, is referred to the Norfolk County Court records of the winter assizes, 1903–04.
I love Conan Doyle. This was delicious.