Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

He brooded on this for a moment, his lean profile reflected in the darkened window of the carriage. Then he brightened up.

“As always, we must bow to the evidence. I shall attend Somerset House tomorrow morning, to view the death certificate of Miles Mordaunt. I believe we must test your presumption that diphtheria could not have gone far enough to kill him on its own.”

It was dark across the marshes. The bright, square illumination of the carriage windows flashed on hedgerows and embankments as we thundered into the night.

6

The powers of memory exhibited by Sherlock Holmes would have been worth a whimsical monograph of the kind that only he could write. How any human being could have so encyclopaedic a recollection of so many divers facts was beyond me, and I no longer sought the answer. Once he had tried to explain it by saying that the only thing necessary was a passion for knowledge which made it impossible to forget. Then he tried to define it as a system, in which knowledge of one thing led by association to two more—and so on by geometrical progression. It seemed far simpler to accept that once his indomitable memory learnt a fact, he never forgot it.

None of this prepared me for the next day’s bombshell.

On the morning after our return from Bly, I was later than usual coming down to breakfast. Holmes was seldom an early riser and I was not surprised to see the Morning Post unopened. But his knife, fork and plate had been cleared away. Therefore he had gone out even before the paper was delivered. Once the game was afoot, as he called it, there were nights when his head hardly touched the pillow before he was up and about again.

I finished breakfast and was reading the county cricket scores in The Times. The rasp of a wheel rim against the kerb indicated that a cab had pulled up. Slow and hollow hoofbeats signalled the driver’s return to the Regent’s Park rank. I waited to hear Holmes’s key in the lock and his footsteps on the stairs, while I followed the report of yesterday’s match at Bath between Middlesex and Somerset. As time ran out—ten to make and the match to win!—Hereward Douglas had hit a stylish half century for the visiting team.

Why was there still no sound on the stairs? I got up and drew back the curtain a little, looking up and down the street for any sign of Holmes. He was a hundred yards away, towards the park, in conversation with half a dozen of the ugliest little ragamuffins I ever saw. Four boys and two of their sisters, no doubt. This unsightly group was a detachment of his “Baker Street Irregulars,” as he called them. They were his spies in enemy territory. While they watched and listened, gathering intelligence or shadowing a quarry on our behalf, our opponents never gave them a second glance. He was either describing the details of their next assignment or arguing over their extortionate demands for payment.

The prestige of working for Mr Holmes, the Baker Street Detective, always carried the day with these little bandits. Several coins now passed from his purse to the tallest boy of the group. The balance would follow upon completion of their task. He turned back and strode towards the freshly polished brass of Mrs Hudson’s doorstep.

Vigorously, as if he had just woken from a good night’s sleep, he came up the stairs two at a-time and into our sitting-room. Action and activity were his great restoratives. His cap went skimming onto the hat-stand. He threw himself down in his fireside chair and greeted me with a broad smile. Then he drew a sheet of paper from his breast pocket.

“We have it, Watson! I shall be surprised if a competent Queen’s Counsel cannot argue Miss Victoria Temple out of Broadmoor by next week.”

He produced a sheet of paper.

“What is that?”

“A transcript from Somerset House. Their doors were open at eight-thirty and I was the first applicant across the step. This is a transcript of the death certificate of poor young Miles Mordaunt—or rather the details which I have copied from it. Still appended to it was a post-mortem report.”

“How does it help Miss Temple? She has already admitted killing him. If she was so deranged that she did not know what she was doing or did not know it to be wrong, she will remain insane but guilty under English criminal law.”

“I shall take the liberty of calling that into question.”

“How?”

He sighed.

“Because she never killed anyone. The great pity, Watson, is that I was not invited to attend Miss Temple’s trial. I could have saved the lawyers on both sides so much trouble.”

On these occasions, he was quite insufferable.

“What trouble, for God’s sake?”

“She was found guilty of suffocating the child. But the postmortem evidence here shows that the primary cause of death was cardiac arrest. Not suffocation.”

“Cardiac arrest at the hands of Miss Temple? What of it? All deaths—including all those occasioned by murder—end in cardiac arrest. The question is how they are brought about!”

He beamed at me and clasped his hands.

“Like everyone else, I had first believed Miss Temple’s confession in her journal. She hugged a delicate boy tightly enough and long enough to suffocate him. Without her intervention, any slight initial diphtheritic infection would not have killed him at that point and might well have yielded to treatment. Her conduct was what the law calls the novus actus interveniens, the new act which changes the course of events.”

This legal subtlety was merely an irritation and I told him so. His smile grew a little warmer as he continued.

“Our simple rustic coroner never went further than the story in her journal. Miss Temple had confessed to murder, therefore it must be so. My dear Watson, I have also been through the post-mortem report of the fever hospital, separately and minutely. As a result, I am quite convinced that Miss Temple could not have murdered Miles Mordaunt because the child she hugged to herself was already dead. There were too many mind-doctors at her trial and too few specialists in contagious diseases.”

He had a trick up his sleeve, but for the life of me I could not see what.

“It will not help her, Holmes! Let us suppose she frightened a delicate child violently enough to cause heart failure. By legal precedent, it is unlawful killing to frighten a victim to death, even by impersonating a ghost. What else is her nonsense of an evil spirit at the dining-room window but such an act?”

He relaxed his smile.

“The boy was in the very early stages of diphtheria.”

“We already know that. The very early stages would not kill him. They will certainly not exonerate Miss Temple.”

He shook his head indulgently.

“I believe, my dear friend, that an item of your medical training has escaped your memory for a moment. It certainly eluded the simple country physician at Bly. The equally simple coroner’s jurors were content to believe Miss Temple’s confession in her journal. Accordingly, they returned a verdict of homicide against her.”

“What is your alternative?”

“Curiously, while diphtheria may take its course over several days or a week, it can also kill at once and without warning. It can even kill without any previous symptoms.”

This was too much.

“I have treated diphtheria for twenty years and I have never met with such a case!”

He stood up without replying and walked across to the long bookcase, extending from floor to ceiling. Its rows of scrapbooks and volumes of reference made up his library.

“Nor, perhaps, have you ever heard of Professor Stresemann. If you are not too weary after yesterday’s