Notes from the Dispatch-Box of John H. Watson M.D. by Hugh Ashton

Author:Hugh Ashton [Ashton, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-912605-26-2
Publisher: j-views Publishing

Holmes’ deductions were soon proven to be correct when he and I made our way back to London and called in at the police station where Colethorpe, or Richards, to give him his proper name, was being interviewed by Lestrade.

“What a pitiful shrimp of a man he is, to be sure,” remarked Holmes as an aside to me when we first saw him, and indeed, it was hard to determine how the small pink-faced man with his thin sandy hair had managed to engage the affections and trust of Mme. Montpensier. He spoke in a pitiful whine as he answered the questions that Lestrade and Holmes put to him, confirming the evidence that I had recorded during Holmes’ interrogation of Sarah, showing little remorse at the relation of his deeds with which he was confronted.

As had been foretold, Richards was married to another, and had lived at Holborn with his family for the past ten years. A firm of lawyers with which he had been employed in the past had had dealings with the late Mr. Stevens, and it was from this source that he had learned of the latter’s wealth, and his demise.

He had therefore determined to take on a new identity and woo the widow, for whom, it appeared, he had or no feeling whatsoever, his affections being chiefly tied to the lawful Mrs. Richards and her children.

He had, however, found some place in the heart of the kitchen-maid Sarah, whom he had persuaded to leave her post with the family for who she was working, a neighbour of the Richards family, and take up a position in the new household into which he had married. Once she was in place, he proceeded to lure her with promises of leaving both his existing wives, and setting up a new existence with her in Canada, using the money that he was sure would come to him, following the decease of Miss Annabel Stevens, and the arrest and conviction of her step-mother.

He had somehow managed to discover the story that Annabel Stevens had been secretly writing in her memorandum book, and had noted a passage there where the heroine was describing her fear of her impending death. Whether he had his diabolical scheme already in his head, or whether he was inspired by this, he refused to say, but he had instructed Sarah to purloin the book at a suitable opportunity. The cunning of his whole plan, as Sherlock Holmes pointed out to me later, was that at all critical junctures, he was away from the house with an unshakeable alibi, while his unsuspected cat’s-paw set the snare.

The rat poison was found in the household, as Lestrade had foretold, having been purchased for its proper purpose. The only missing part of his plan was a duplicate sugar container, which he purchased and gave secretly to the kitchen-maid, instructing her to place only a thin layer of the poison over the top of the sugar after exchanging the jars, in order to make the introduction of poison into the food or drink by Mme.

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