Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons by James Lovegrove

Author:James Lovegrove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books

Chapter Twenty-One

THE DEVILRY OF IT ALL

The wagonette rumbled into Coombe Tracey with Holmes and the driver in the front seat and Grier and the boy sitting facing each other, knee to knee, in the back.

Holmes told me that he was feeling an odd sense of fatalism as the carriage pulled up outside the boarding house that Mrs Laura Lyons called home. This was a journey he had been expecting to make that day regardless. Dr Mortimer’s summons had merely hastened the inevitable. Holmes did not know why Mortimer had called him there and why the urgency, although he had a strong and troubling suspicion.

The landlady with the lazy eye was overwrought, near hysterical. “In my ’ouse!” she moaned as Holmes and Grier entered the main hallway. “A suicide! A suicide! What will people think? I shall never get over it.”

“A suicide?” Grier asked the woman. “Whose?”

Holmes answered for her. “Unless I am much mistaken,” he said with a grim shake of the head, “it is that of Sir Henry’s persecutor. This is something I did not anticipate, and yet, in hindsight, perhaps I should have foreseen it.”

“To be wise after the event is not to be wise at all,” Grier chided him amicably.

Upstairs, they came upon a horrific scene. Mrs Lyons was slumped in her armchair, in her nightgown, as pale and still as only the dead can be. Her eyes stared sightlessly, half-lidded, while her jaw hung slack. Her arm hung over the side of the chair, and from it protruded a short length of rubber pipe. One end of the terracotta-coloured pipe was capped with a needle which had been inserted into a vein in the underside of her bare forearm. The other rested in the spout of a one-gallon oil canister.

The canister was filled to the brim with blood, and a significant quantity of the blood had spilled over from the spout. Streaks of it encrusted the canister’s side, while the rest had soaked into the rug beneath, drying to form a huge brown bloom around its base. The coppery tang of it filled the air, mingling with the cloying aroma of Mrs Lyons’s chosen brand of perfume in a way that even Holmes, hard-headed as he was, found nauseating.

Dr Mortimer presided over the body. His face was ashen grey and fixed in a look of appalled compassion.

“Mr Holmes, Mr Grier,” said he. “I would say I was glad to see you both, but as you can tell, this is hardly a joyous occasion.”

“It is not,” Holmes agreed.

“Once I saw the body, I had you brought here because I knew Mrs Lyons was a suspect in the Baskerville case. I felt you should be informed of her death immediately.”

“You were sensible to do so.”

“She was unwell, of course. Not in her right mind. But to commit such an act of violence upon herself… I cannot imagine the inner torment that must have precipitated it.”

“Were you the one to discover her like this?”

“No,” said Mortimer, “that misfortune fell to the tenant in the room below.

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