Mycroft Holmes 03 - The Notched Hairpin by H. F. Heard

Author:H. F. Heard [Heard, H. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Detective and Mystery
ISBN: 9781504037754
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2016-07-04T23:00:00+00:00

THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

The Enchanted Garden

by H. F. HEARD

“‘Nature’s a queer one,’ said Mr. Squeers,” I remarked.

“I know what moves you to misquote Dickens,” was Mr. Mycroft’s reply.

Here was a double provocation: first, there was the injury of being told that the subject on which one was going to inform someone was already known to him, and secondly, there was the insult that the happy literary quotation with which the information was to be introduced was dismissed as inaccurate. Still it’s no use getting irritated with Mr. Mycroft. The only hope was to lure his pride onto the brink of ignorance.

“Then tell me,” I remarked demurely, “what I have just been reading?”

“The sad, and it is to be feared, fatal accident that befell Miss Hetty Hess who is said to be extremely rich, and a colorful personality’ and ‘young for her years’—the evidence for these last two statements being a color photograph in the photogravure section of the paper which establishes that her frock made up for its brevity only by the intense virility of its green color.”

I am seldom untruthful deliberately, even when considerably nonplussed; besides it was no use: Mr. Mycroft was as usual one move ahead. He filled in the silence with: “I should have countered that naturalists are the queer ones.”

I had had a moment to recover, and felt that I could retrieve at least a portion of my lost initiative. “But there’s no reason to link the accident with the death. The notice only mentions that she had had a fall a few weeks previously. The cause of death was ‘intestinal stasis’.”

“Cause!” said Mr. Mycroft. He looked and sounded so like an old raven as he put his head on one side and uttered “caws,” that I couldn’t help laughing.

“Murder’s no laughing matter!” he remonstrated.

“But surely, cher maître, you sometimes are unwilling to allow that death can ever be through natural causes!”

“Cause? There’s sufficient cause here.”

“Post hoc, propter hoc,” I was glad to get off one of my few classic tags. “Because a lady of uncertain years dies considerably after a fall from which her doctor vouched there were no immediate ill effects, you would surely not maintain that it was on account of the fall that the rhythm of her secondary nervous system struck and stopped for good? And even if it was, who’s to blame?”

“Cause.” At this third quothing of the Raven I let my only comment be a rather longer laugh—and waited for my lecture. Mr. Mycroft did not fail me. He went on: “I’ll own I know nothing about causality in the outer world, for I believe no one does really. But I have spent my life, not unprofitably, in tracing human causality. As you’re fond of Dickens, I’ll illustrate from Copperfield’s Mr. Dick. The causes of King Charles’s head coming off may have been due to four inches of iron going through his neck. I feel on safer ground when I say it was due to his failing to get on with his parliament.

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