I looked out the window and sighed. Sherlock cared little for trivia, but if it helped him prove a point, he would always manage to find a way to sneak in some minutia from his brain attic to do so.
We found our way to an inn and then set out for a meal, though Sherlock did not wish to eat. He wanted to find Elizabeth Jane Hopgood, the murderer’s sister. But I coaxed him into finding a place to eat by telling him he might be able to get information from the locals. We ended up at the Fox, an ancient stone-built pub near the marketplace. We ordered chipped beef and some ale, but Sherlock immediately began asking people about the Hopgoods. I had barely eaten a mouthful when he yanked at my arm as he downed his ale, saying, “The sister lives on a hilltop in Stow-on-the-Wold, not far from here. We can rent a carriage just down the road from here. Let’s go.”
It was pitch dark and oppressive as we approached the house to which Sherlock had been directed. It was bramble-covered and ominous, but caught up in the adrenalin of the adventure, London seemed dull and distant.
Sherlock knocked on the door and almost immediately a tall, heavily built woman opened it. Her black mane was sprinkled with grey and she wore thick glasses.
When Sherlock introduced himself and said he was looking for Danford Hopgood, she tried to slam the door in our faces, but Sherlock elbowed his way in. “Where is your brother?” he demanded.
“Why do you ask about him?”
“Because he is suspected of murder.”
“He is no murderer. I’ll be damned if I tell you anything!” she screamed.
Sherlock stepped toward her. “Your brother is a mad man.”
“My brother is a brilliant scientist. He will determine how a murderer’s brain works! Just like Lombroso! You don’t know anything. None of you do.”
Unaccustomed to being spoken to by a woman in such a fashion - with the possible exception of myself - Sherlock whirled around, placed his hands on her neck, choking her and pushing her up against a wall. Very deliberately he said, “Where is he?”
For a moment, she stared at him in complete silence. He shoved her away. Then he glanced around the entry and pulled her toward the kitchen. He yanked a lacy curtain from the window, tore off a slim fragment, and tossed it to me. “Bind her feet,” he said as he took another remnant and bound her hands behind her back.
“Sherlock, are you sure we should - ?”
He gave me a stern look, so I protested no further. I followed his instructions and then we began searching through the house. Soon he made his way to the door at the top of the stairs that led to the summer kitchen in the cellar.
He opened it, peered into the darkness and glanced at me. I nodded and followed him down the steps.
Chapter 24
I touched Sherlock’s shoulder. “She mentioned Lombroso, Sherlock, as you did before.” I whispered. “Is it his work that Hopgood is following then?”
“Lombroso is an Italian surgeon. A few years ago, he conducted a postmortem on a serial murderer and rapist. He discovered a hollow part of the killer’s brain, and he proposed that violent criminals were throwbacks to less evolved human types, identifiable by ape-like physical characteristics.”
Sherlock fumbled in the darkness and finally found lanterns and lit several. What we saw when the cellar was illuminated was the most grotesque and frightening display I’d ever witnessed.
On table after table were severed heads. Torsos were tossed in baskets in a corner. Some heads were shaved with markings on them indicating different sections of the brain and the so-called correlating behaviors.
This caught me off-guard in a way that even emergency medical situations had not and I felt myself wobble. Sherlock seized my arm and steered me back toward the stairs. I sat down on the bottom step. As he walked from table to table, he said, “It really began in Italy in 1871 when Lombroso met with a criminal, a man named Giuseppe Villella, a notorious thief and arsonist. Cesare Lombroso is an army doctor, who worked in lunatic asylums and become interested in crime and criminals while studying Italian soldiers. He wanted to pinpoint the differences between lunatics, criminals and normal individuals by examining inmates in Italian prisons.
“Lombroso found Villella interesting,” Sherlock continued, seemingly unaffected by the hideous and gruesome evidence before him. “So, when Villella died, Lombroso conducted a post-mortem and discovered that his subject had an indentation at the back of his skull, which resembled that found in apes. Lombroso concluded that some people are born with a propensity toward crime and were also savage throwbacks to early man.”
Sherlock wandered over to a bookcase along the stone wall. He took a book from the shelf, tapped it and walked over to hand it to me. “Lombroso wrote this,” he said. “The Criminal Man, published just a few years ago. His interest in forensics and crime is interesting but a bit warped. He seems to think that by looking at a skull, by considering palm lines and the size of orbits and cheek bones and so on, one can determine if the person is like an ape, if he’s insensitive to pain, if he craves evil for evil’s sake. Essentially, Lombroso believes that criminality is inherited and that criminals can be identified by physical defects that show them to be savage-like.”
Staring down at the skull of what appeared to be a youth, Sherlock said, “According to Lombroso,” he said, “a thief can be identified by his expressive face and small, wandering eyes. Murderers have cold, glassy stares, bloodshot eyes and big hawk-like noses.” He touched his nose and said, “I shudder to think how he would think of me.
“And rapists have what Lombroso calls ‘jug ears’. He also
