Sherlock Holmes - Found Dead by Lyn McConchie

Author:Lyn McConchie [McConchie, Lyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2018-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

1

The start of this case was a good fifteen years before my friend and I ever met those involved. Even after the case began, it was nine days before Holmes was called in. However, the woman who brought the case to us told us everything, and I begin the story at her arrival.

The Isle of Sheppey, in the estuary of the Thames River, has a small population of mostly working-class folk, many of whom make their living from the sea or from the flocks of sheep that graze on the island. Amongst the inhabitants was a man named Alistair Johnson, richer than his fellows. While originally of fisherman stock on his mother’s side, he had attained a decent education, and made money in London thereby. Now in his sixties and beginning to fail in his full health and strength, he returned to his childhood home and settled there, hiring a local woman, a widow, to live in and care for him.

Lily Klimpton, née Habbert, had a daughter, Florence by name, who married a carpenter and boat-builder, Robin Simes, who was in a fair way of business. And there the matter stayed for almost fifteen years. The problem was, that while on the surface things may jog along, often there are deep currents that boil unnoticed, and so it was in this case. Alistair and Lily, having no one to please but themselves, became lovers. He promised she would inherit his house and savings, swearing that once he was dead she would never have to work again. Moreover, she would have that advantage desired by anyone who has risen from being poor, that she would have a property to pass on to her daughter in turn.

Alistair demanded Lily say nothing of that to anyone, including her own family, but after a dozen years she broke that vow, and Florence and Robin knew that in time the Johnson house would pass to them. They continued to work hard since, as Florence told her husband, “there’s many a slip t’wixt cup and lip, and we’ve twins. If we inherit ma’s house, better we have one of our own to leave to the other child.”

Alistair was eighty-one when he died, and Lily, now sixty-seven, walked behind his coffin, weeping. She had been fond of her lover and would miss him. Her grief, however, was tempered by the knowledge that she would inherit. The will was read, and the next day the lawyer called on her. To his horror, he found her dead, lying upon her bed. A letter in a sealed envelope, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” lay beside her upon the bedside table.

A coroner’s verdict was brought in as “suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed,” and there it would have rested, but for her daughter Florence Simes, and her son-in-law, Robin. Neither believed the verdict nor the act—which was where Holmes entered the story.

Florence and her husband called upon him nine days after Johnson’s death,

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