Trollheart

Chapter V: Being for the Benefit of Mr. Lestrade


Holmes presumably having already prepared the ground before we arrived, the maid bade us enter the Liebert home. In the fateful room in which the master of the house had met his end, Holmes took the key out of the lock and waved it in front of Lestrade.

“Never thought to check this, did you, my good Inspector?”

Lestrade looked puzzled.

“What is there to check about a key?” I confessed I, too, saw nothing which the key could have told us, but then, I was not Sherlock Holmes.

“When I entered,” he said, showing the key to us both, replacing it in the lock and returning to stand before the fire, which was now lit, the night drawing in, “I noticed dark marks on it here, here and here. You will see that they correspond with the points at which someone would have held, and turned, the key. I was not entirely certain, of course, but I made so by smelling the metal.”

“Smelling?” Lestrade darted me the kind of glance he always used when he believed that, brilliant and analytical a mind as Sherlock Holmes had, sometimes he considered my friend quite mad.

“Yes. I smelled what I suspected I would smell, which was tobacco. High Plains tobacco in fact, made, as I told the late M. Baudelaire, only in Canada – the Yukon Territory, to be precise - and only for purchase there. This told me that someone who had been smoking High Plains had handled, and turned the key. The marks of his fingers and the smell from them were on the key. Since the door was locked, it follows that this person was the one who locked it.”

Understanding began to dawn on the inspector's face.

“So you could tell that neither Mrs. Liebert nor her husband had locked the door?”

“Precisely. And so we have a scenario, whereby we assume one of the two is in the room with Baudelaire, when the other enters, either by accident or design. The Canadian crosses the room and locks the door. This may or may not have been with the permission or agreement of one or both, but considering that what was discussed in that room was of an intensely, ah, private nature, we can assume the former.”

It never failed to amaze me how Holmes took the smallest clues and built an entire world around them. The tiniest detail was often all he needed – or the first thing he needed, at any rate – to reconstruct a crime and solve the case.

“Now, we shall re-enact the crime, if you gentlemen will be so kind. Watson, you shall be Baudelaire, please stand there.” He indicated a point just beside the fire. “Inspector, I must ask you to play the role of the unfortunate Mr. Liebert. If you would just position yourself... so.” He had Lestrade face me, as if we were talking, about a yard or so apart. “And I,” he said, seating himself before the fire, “will be Mrs. Liebert, with the greatest of apologies to that eminent lady, whose beauty, grace and poise I could never hope to duplicate. But we shall work with what we have.”

And so saying, he steepled his fingers. He looked over at the fire, glanced at me, looked back.

“Watson, you are the killer, so if you would please advance to the door and lock it. Thank you. Now, you are facing the wrong way, my friend. Please turn so that you and Lestrade are facing one another. Excellent. Capital. Now, We need a weapon. So. This will do.” He indicated a candle which was on the mantelpiece, unlit. I picked it up.

“This is your knife, Watson,” he told me, rather unnecessarily, but I knew once Holmes got into his stride he would explain everything and leave nothing to chance. “You have been arguing with Mr. Liebert over, ah, well. Over Mrs. Liebert of course. Lestrade, you take exception to something Watson says. You lunge at him, he takes the knife – so! He plunges it into your heart. You fall.”

He waited.
He sighed.
“You fall, Lestrade, if you please!”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Lestrade fell to the ground.

“In the guise of Mrs. Liebert, I faint, so.”

Holmes made a rather convincing swoon.

“Watson, you approach and take the knife – the candle. You place it in my right hand, as did Baudelaire. However, Lestrade!” He tsked, shaking his head. “Had you only checked, you would have found out with minimal effort that she is left-handed. So the idea of her either striking with her right hand the blows that killed her husband, or of, even more fantastical a theory, somehow changing hands before fainting, are so ludicrous as to be not even worthy of contemplation.”

Somewhat stubbornly, Lestrade grumbled “We did think of that, Mr. Holmes. We considered Mrs. Liebert might be one of those people who can use either hand – what do you call them? Ambivalent?”

Holmes smiled thinly. “Ambidextrous. No, she is not. Again, a simple experiment proved this not to be the case when I visited her in Pentonville. You really must take your people more to task, Lestrade! You may get up now, Inspector.” He smiled sardonically as Lestrade scrambled to his feet, brushing dust off his coat. He tutted again, reached inside his jacket, extracted a slip of paper. It was the note – or part of it, at any rate, which he had shown me before. He handed it to Lestrade for his perusal.

“There!” The inspector pointed triumphantly, sure he was about to turn Holmes' clue against the great man. “It says it there, right at the bottom. Love, Frances. A love letter from Liebert's wife to...” He screwed up his brows. “Deschamps? Well, Baudelaire? They were carrying on? Ah yes, I see!” He nodded. “Mr. Liebert found out, challenged the Canadian, who killed him.”

Holmes smiled again.

“Not quite, Inspector. I fear there you do the lady an injustice. If you examine the note, you will notice that it bears no resemblance to Mrs. Liebert's handwriting. She is also unlikely to sign herself as Frances; she does not like the contraction and always uses Francesca, in her correspondence. Fran," he added, with an arch wink at me, "in more familiar terms. But never Frances." You will also note," he pointed at the name, "that our killer, being of - ah, not English extraction, was no doubt unsure as to the spelling of the lady's name. You see, here, he has used an "i" instead of an "e". Francis, not Frances. The male version, a common mistake." Again he arched his eyebrows. "A certain saint from Assisi would not be impressed."

Lestrade shrugged.

“What, then?”

“Well we shall never know for certain,” Holmes said carefully, “for we cannot intrude upon the private affairs of a lady who has now been found to be entirely blameless of any crime, and so her secrets are hers to keep. Were I to hazard a guess though, I would say that the letter was fabricated by Baudelaire, who had become infatuated with Mr. Liebert's wife, and had pressed his most unwelcome and unreciprocated advances upon her. Did you know that Liebert and Baudelaire had worked together in Canada?”

Lestrade shook his head.

“I did not.”

“This was, of course,” Holmes waved his hand airily, “before Baudelaire became the most feared killer in the territory. Oh yes. You knew Mr. Liebert had made his money in timber? Yes of course you did. But were you aware that he had started at the bottom, as a lowly lumberjack, a tree-feller in the wilds of Canada? No? A little research is a wonderful thing, Inspector. I discovered that twenty years ago, the two had been on the same crew, and had become somewhat friendly. He was using his own name then, Francis Deschamps. When the job they had been assigned to ended, each went his separate ways, but after going on a killing spree – the reason for which we will never know now; perhaps the isolation of the Yukon sent him mad – Baudelaire found the territory too hot for him, as Mr. Nilsson, the ringmaster of the circus, would no doubt say.

He managed to cross over the border into the United States, where as luck would have it – bad luck, I am afraid, for poor Mr. Liebert and his wife – he met Nilsson, who sympathised with his situation, though of course the Canadian refrained from clarifying why he was on the run from the law. Nilsson has his own reasons for hating the American legal system, and given the agility and dexterity of Baudelaire – who was of course now calling himself Deschamps – he offered him a position in his travelling circus, as an acrobat. When the circus came to England, he then either met Liebert by chance or engineered an encounter, fell in love with the man's wife (if such a man can be said to even understand the word) who rejected his advances, leading to her husband's murder and she being accused of being his killer, which occurred due to the real killer's quite clever attempt to throw off any suspicion which might somehow lead back to him, placing the knife in the hands of Mrs. Liebert, who had, not surprisingly, fainted at the sight of her husband having been struck down.”

Holmes smiled at Lestrade.

“We have come to the end of our little play, as far as the scene was when you, Lestrade, and your men entered.”

The inspector turned to him.

“Ah, but it is not, is it, Mr. Holmes?” he countered. “It is not as it was when I entered.”

Holmes nodded. “Of course you are right, Inspector. Our little party is one too many. Watson – that is, Baudelaire – was not present when you arrived.”

“So then, put us out of our misery, Mr. Holmes, for the love of all that is good! Where did he go? He can't have vanished into thin air, surely!”

Holmes grinned, turned his eyes towards the fire.

“He did not, of course.”

“The chimney?” We both chorused. Holmes nodded.

“The only other possible avenue of escape from this locked room. I admit, I had not quite worked it out immediately, as in the normal manner of things, and discounting for one moment a certain corpulent figure popular with children, a man could not climb up such a structure.” He paused for effect, grinned again. “But an acrobat? Gentlemen, an acrobat could perform such a feat with ease.”

A stunned silence descended over the room. Then Lestrade burst into a fit of impromptu applause. I joined him.

“Capital, Mr. Holmes! Capital! Though,” he looked a little dubious, “would not the heat...?”

Holmes waved his hand dismissively.

“The fire had not been lit since the previous day,” he pointed out. “The chimney would therefore be relatively cold, or at least not hot. And Baudelaire made his living originally as a lumberjack in Canada. He scaled trees with his bare hands and feet. His skin had toughened to the consistency of leather, as Miss Penny discovered first hand, as it were, when the brute struck her.” He murmured to himself “I really must see she is properly recompensed for the danger I unintentionally placed her in.”

Something had occurred to Lestrade.

“Back in the tent, before he bolted, you mentioned a jacket to Baudelaire.”

“What jacket?” I asked.

“Just what I want to know, Doctor,” agreed Lestrade.

Holmes sat back. I swear, there were times when he could be quite insufferable when he knew more than anyone else in the room.


“I sent Wiggins and his team on an expedition,” he told us. “They were to visit every washer woman in the vicinity and report back when they located the one who had washed a jacket dirty with soot.”

“Soot? But surely...?” Lestrade pointed at the chimney. Holmes grinned.

“Ordinarily, yes, Inspector, such a quest would be pointless, for every sweep in London would be sending his jacket in for cleaning. But you may remember, we are even now in the middle of the longest strike of chimney sweeps in the city's history. Not a chimney has been touched in two months and more. So the only person likely to have that much soot on his jacket would certainly be our killer.”

Holmes turned to me, shrugged.

“Granted, it was only one piece of evidence in a rather long chain I had already established, but our quarry was not to know that. Unaware of his blunder in putting the knife in the wrong hand, ignorant of my knowledge of tobacco, and indeed, completely unaware that his presence in this country had even been detected, he would have seen the sooty jacket as the only thing to tie him to the crime, even assuming someone” - he smiled, self-indulgently - “happened to be clever enough to put the pieces together.”

“Have I left anything out, Inspector? Anything you still do not understand?”

Lestrade shook his head, rising and putting on his hat as he tapped out his pipe.

“No, Mr. Holmes,” he said. “You've laid the case out nice and plain, once you understand the links. Well, I will bid you gentlemen good night. You've done a wonderful thing here, Mr. Holmes. You've solved, at a stroke, seventeen – no, eighteen, if we don't count the trapeze man, for we all saw Baudelaire push him to his death – eighteen murders, unmasked a killer we did not even know was in the country, helped our Canadian cousins and in the process saved an innocent woman from the gallows. I wish to the Lord I had a force of Sherlock Holmeses to assist me in these type of cases,” he grinned. “Or maybe not. Mayhap I would find myself surplus to requirements!”

Holmes offered him his hand.

“Never that, Lestrade!” he declared. “Scotland Yard will always need good, honest, forthright men like you, and I can only be in one place at any one time. You continue to do the good work, Inspector, but never hesitate to call on me should you need me. My door is always open.”

“Speaking of which,” I grumbled, “I should be quite glad to see that particular door. This has been a trying day, Holmes.”

He clapped me on the shoulder.

“But a profitable one, Watson! As Lestrade says, we have not only saved Mrs. Liebert from death, her son from scandal and her good name from being blackened, we have maintained the reputation of her late husband and have also found justice for those seventeen unfortunates killed in the frontier of Canada by that despicable murderer.”

I smiled in reply.

“All the same, I could do with my bed. It is almost ten o'clock.”

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018