The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures

enquiries to make.'

'Enquiries?' I pulled the sheet up over Crosby's face.

'We must speak with the relatives of the victims.' He walked from the room, pulling his Meerschaum from his pocket. 'The game is most definitely afoot. Though, if I am correct, then that in itself poses a further puzzle.'

I had grown used to if not tolerant of such enigmatic statements, though I had long since recognized the futility of pressing for more information. All would become clear in good time.

In the early evening we gathered once more at the police station, a full and somewhat depressing day behind us.

The November air in Harrogate was cold but 'bracing', to use the Inspector's vernacular. For Sherlock Holmes and myself, however, grown used to the relative mildness of southern climes, the coldness permeated our very bones. To such a degree was this invasion that, even standing before a roaring fire in the Inspector's office, it was all I could do to keep from shivering.

Holmes himself, however, seemed now impervious to the chill as he sat contemplating, staring into the dancing flames.

It had been a productive day.

Due to the fact that William Crosby had no relatives in the town, having moved to Yorkshire from Bristol some eight years earlier, we were forced to call in at the branch of Daleside Bank, on the Parliament Street hill leading to Ripon, there to interview staff as to the possibility of someone having some reason to murder their manager. A tight-faced man named Mr Cardew, enduring rather than enjoying his early middle age, maintained the stoic calm and almost clinical immobility that I have discovered to be the province of bankers and their ilk over the years. They seem a singularly cheerless breed.

When pressed, first by Holmes and subsequently by Inspector Makinson, Mr Cardew visited the large safe at the rear of the premises to see if the money deposited the previous evening was still in place and accounted for. Throughout the exercise, I watched Holmes who viewed the procedure with a thinly disguised disinterest. Rather he seemed to be anxious, as if needing to ask something of Cardew.

Whether my friend would have got around to phrasing his question to such a degree of correctness in his own mind that he would have committed it to speech I will never know for we chanced upon a portrait photograph of William Fitzhue Crosby hanging from the wall outside his office.

The photographer had gone to some considerable trouble to make the finished photograph as acceptable as possible presumably to Mr Crosby – using shadows and turning his subject into profile in order, clearly, to minimize the effect of the banker's disfigurement. But, alas, it had been to little avail.

In the photograph, Crosby's eyes spoke volumes about his attitude to the dark stain which, we subsequently discovered from Mr Cardew, ran from his left temple and down across his cheek to his chin. Those were eyes that barely hid a gross discomfort, hardened around the corners with something akin to outright hatred.

Cardew explained that, in the flesh, as it were, Crosby's stain was a deep magenta. The banker had grown his sideburns in an attempt to hide at least some of it but the effect had been that the sideburn on the left side had been wiry and white.

Believing that the answer to the puzzle involved a killer so mortally offended by such a mark that he would go to great lengths to remove it, we proceeded from the Daleside Bank to the school at which Gertrude Ridge had been, until recently, a teacher, having decided that it might not be necessary to trouble the young woman's grieving parents. On the way, Holmes seemed particularly thoughtful.

The story at the school was similar. Miss Ridge had had a large birthmark on the back of her right hand, stretching up over her wrist to an undetermined point above. Her colleagues at the school had been unable to comment as to how far that might be, Miss Ridge never deeming to appear at school in anything less than a long- sleeved blouse or dress, and even then one with the most ornate ruffled cuffs.

Diana Wetherall and Jean Woodward, widows of, respectively, the deceased landlord and the Hampsthwaite farmer, said that their husbands had suffered similar markings, Terence Wetherall's being a small circular stain about the size of a saucer, situated just to the left of centre of his chest, while Raymond Woodward's disfigurement had stretched across the back of his neck and down between his shoulder blades.

It was I who, eventually, back at the police station, voiced what had been Holmes's concern all along. 'We now most probably know the reason for the killings,' I said, 'but how on earth did the killer know of Wetherall's and Woodward's marks? They were covered at all times when they were not at home.'

Makinson frowned and considered this.

Holmes, meanwhile, said, 'You say we know why the killer committed the acts, Watson. But do we really know?'

'Why, of course we do,' I ventured. 'The chap is mortally offended by what are, in his eyes, such abominations and he feels it his rigorous duty to remove them from sight. He came up with the idea of removing hearts simply to mislead us hence, on one occasion, even forgetting to remove the young woman's.'

Holmes nodded. 'I think you are almost correct, old fellow,' he said, in a gentle tone that was anything but patronizing. 'However, you have neglected to take into account the fact that the killer first stuns his victims and only then obliterates nature's handiwork. My point is,' he continued, 'the killer needs to stun his victim without interference with the mark.'

'Whatever for, Mr Holmes?' enquired Makinson.

Holmes looked across at the Inspector and gave a thin smile that was devoid of any sense of pleasure. 'In order to remove them, Inspector.'

'Remove them?' I said. The suggestion seemed preposterous. 'Indeed, Watson. Let us adapt the facts as we know them to my proposition.

'Wetherall, the landlord, was stunned or killed by a blow to the head. The killer then stripped his victim to the waist and skilfully removed the birthmark from his chest. Then, in order to conceal his action, he proceeded to open up the chest in such a heavy-handed manner that the disappearance of the piece of skin which once bore the mark would not be so noticeable. He concealed the opening of the chest with the removal of the heart.

'The farmer was next. Again, the blow to the head was the all-important immobilizing factor. Once that had been effected, the killer could concentrate on removing the mark from the victim's neck and back before training a shotgun on the exposed area and destroying all signs. However, the blast failed to cover up all signs of his work, as you noticed, Watson. The removal of Woodward's heart tied his murder into the first death quite neatly.'

Holmes cleared his throat.

'Then came the teacher. With her it was more complicated. The position of Miss Ridge's mark – on her arm – was such that a blast to the affected area, once he had removed the skin bearing the mark, could not be the killing factor. Similarly, the removal of the heart would not conceal the removal of the mark. Thus he decided upon the method of removing her limbs, still tying the murder into the first two deaths by peripheral

association, only later to discard the three limbs for which he had no use. The final limb, the young woman's right arm, he discarded far from the scene of the crime and only then when he had removed the affected area.You mentioned earlier that he had forgotten to remove the heart: the fact was that he did not consider it necessary.

'With the banker he returns to the earlier method. A blow to the head, a common element throughout, then the careful removal of the facial skin bearing the mark, and then the shotgun blast to the face, destroying once again the evidence of his real reason for the murder. The removal of the heart ties the crime to the first two and, arguably, to the case of Miss Ridge.'

Holmes stretched towards the fire and warmed his hands. 'I read the reports from your forensics people, Inspector,' Holmes continued. 'I was interested to discover that, while there were traces of linen and wool fibre in the farmer's wound, there were no traces of skin except at the very extremities of the blasted area, confirming that, perhaps, a portion had been removed prior to the blast. And as for the banker, Mr Crosby, the gun shot damage to the wall bore no traces of skin or tissue. This indicates that the killing shot and the invasion which preceded it were done at some other location, with a second shot being fired directly at the wall.'

'But what other place might that be, Mr Holmes?' Makinson enquired.

'Wherever Mr Crosby went after leaving the bank might give us a clue,' Holmes retorted. 'I saw from your report, Inspector, that Crosby's apartment showed no signs of anyone being there since the morning: the fire was burnt down and breakfast things were in the sink. It is my opinion that wherever Mr Crosby went early that evening is where he encountered his killer.'