Читать книгу The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters - Michael Kurland - Страница 7

THE CASE OF THE TARLETON MURDERS, by Jack Grochot

Now living back at Baker Street with my fellow lodger Sherlock Holmes, I awoke early on this particular morning in 1895 with an ache in my left shoulder, where the Jezail bullet struck and shattered the bone during my service in the Afghanistan campaign.

Holmes already had finished breakfast, evidenced by the crumbs scattered on his plate, and had gone off to the hospital chemistry laboratory to achieve a breakthrough in his latest scientific experiment—or so said the note protruding from under the lid of the half-empty coffee pot.

Still lingering, the dull pain in my shoulder brought me thoughts of Murray, my brave orderly in the war, who saved me from falling into the hands of the treacherous Ghazis. Where was Murray today, I wondered, as I flipped Holmes’s note onto the tabletop and saw, on the reverse side, an invitation to join him to witness his discovery.

Mrs Hudson, our landlady, must have heard me stirring, because she soon appeared with two soft-boiled eggs, bacon, and toast, which I ate with haste so I would not miss out on Holmes’s moment of truth.

I walked briskly part of the way to the lab, which seemed to ease my suffering. I glimpsed an empty hansom on Great Orme Street near the British Museum, so I flagged down the driver and comfortably rode for the remainder of my journey. I made my way down the labyrinth of freshly white-washed hallways of the great hospital, familiar with each intersection, until I reached the dissecting room. This I entered and cut through, because the rear exit opened into the chemistry section, where I had first met Sherlock Holmes several years earlier.

Presently, on this glorious summer day, I found Holmes hovering over a large glass globe, under which was a Bunsen lamp, a sheet of foolscap, and a vial with red liquid suspended over the flame.

“Now, Watson,” said he, as if I had been there the whole time with him, “we shall see if my theory proves correct. The iodine solution will produce a gas that should form the effect I am anticipating.”

In a matter of a few moments, the paper began to change colour to a pinkish purple. Then, coming into view, as if by magic, was a latent palm print, with the ridges and furrows, loops and whorls distinctly detectable now.

“Voila tout!” Holmes exclaimed as he wrung his bony, acid-stained hands. “This surely will inspire the tongues to wag at the nascent fingerprint bureau of Scotland Yard! Imagine what this development could have accomplished in the Yard’s failed prosecutions of the scoundrel Jeremy Conway or the international swindler Benito Zito. I should think my finding will receive prominent mention in your chronicles, Watson.”

Holmes could hardly contain his excitement, so he persuaded me to help carry the glass globe, the burner, and the vial of iodine solution to Scotland Yard, where, with his flare for the dramatic, he recreated the scene in the hospital laboratory and demonstrated the technique for the incredulous fingerprint bureau personnel and a handful of sceptical inspectors. They were astonished, to say the least, at the result.

“I shall hazard a guess that one or two of you might find this somewhat useful in the future,” Holmes predicted, an understatement he intended for emphasis.

* * * *

Little did we know then that Holmes’s new method would play a key role in the adventure that awaited us upon our return to the flat at Baker Street, a ghastly case that took us to the sleepy farming village of Tarleton in the marshy Lancashire District, three hundred kilometers to the northwest of London.

When we arrived home, Mrs Hudson greeted us at the door to inform Holmes that a young special constable from the distant country town was in our sitting-room with a problem he chose not to discuss with her.

“I can’t tell you what it’s about because he wouldn’t confide in me,” she sniffed. “His name is Hubert Roddy.”

We went up the stairs and into our apartment, Holmes extending his hand and introducing himself. He told Roddy who I was and said I was helpful in many of the investigations Holmes had undertaken. Roddy, standing erect and alert, told Holmes no introduction was necessary because he had read my accounts of the exploits and admired how Holmes had solved the crimes.

“I hope my visit here will cause the same successful consequences in Tarleton,” he began. “I implore you, Mr Holmes, to lend your assistance in an urgent matter.” Roddy explained that what appeared to be a routine missing person enquiry had evolved into a grisly murder mystery over the last several weeks.

“Tell me more, Constable Roddy, I am all ears,” Holmes commented. “I am unoccupied for the time being and a trip to the hinterlands could be invigorating as well as challenging.”

Roddy continued: “This is my first exposure to a killing, Mr Holmes, and I am afraid that I must admit I am at a total loss as to how to proceed. If only the victim, James Harley Carroll, could talk, I wouldn’t be here to trouble you. But he can’t talk for two reasons, the first being that he is dead, of course, and the second because he has lost his head. Mr Carroll, one of our most prosperous grain farmers, was decapitated when his body washed up on the shore of the River Douglas to the east of the village.”

“Without a face to recognise,” Holmes interrupted, “how did you come to learn the identity of the remains?”

“As I said, Mr Carroll had been reported missing two weeks prior to the torso washing ashore,” Roddy answered, “and our town doctor who examined it noticed a fresh surgical scar on the abdomen. He reported that the incision had been made by him when he operated on Mr Carroll to repair a hernia just two months before. In addition, the clothing on the body was identified as what Mr Carroll was wearing when he was last seen.”

“Last seen by whom?” Holmes wanted to know.

“By the stable boy at Mr Carroll’s farm, a lad eighteen years of age—the person who filed the missing person information.”

“Pray tell,” Holmes went on, “what have you learned of Mr Carroll’s history?”

“He had led an interesting life, Mr Holmes,” said Roddy, “and only a fraction of it in Tarleton. Mr Carroll was raised there as an only child. His parents died of the plague when he was in his early twenties, and they bequeathed to him the expansive farm of nearly five hundred hectares. He left it in the care of a neighbour, who treated it as his own, while Mr Carroll went off to America to seek his fortune. He prospected in the western state of Utah and located a rich silver deposit, becoming the owner of a mine and a man of wealth.

“Mr Carroll bought cattle ranches in the Wyoming territory and eventually retired a millionaire, returning to his estate in Tarleton to spend the last of his years as a country gentleman.

“When Dr Brem performed the autopsy, Mr Carroll’s signature leather wallet, made from the hide of one of his steers and engraved with his initials, was not in his pocket, nor was there on his hand a gaudy silver ring with the letter C on the top. I have been working on the theory that the motive for this homicide was robbery, but I have no suspects. In a nutshell, that is where the case stands. Needless to say, I am experiencing severe pressure from community leaders and my superiors in the county police force to make an arrest, which is why I am turning to you, Mr Holmes.”

“Your dilemma,” Holmes informed the special constable, “arouses considerable curiosity in me. But before I agree to assist you in your probe, please answer some basic questions. One, did Mr Carroll have any enemies or feuds with anyone in the village?”

Roddy paused to think, then: “No enemies, for certain, Mr Holmes, but he was on the outs with Mr McNaughton, the local grain merchant, over the amount Mr McNaughton paid Mr Carroll for ten wagon-loads of oats.”

Holmes asked if Mr Carroll had associated with others in the village.

“He was friendly with everyone, but he was particularly close to his neighbour, Sir Ethan Tarleton, a boyhood friend whose ancestors founded the village. Mr Tarleton is in extremely poor health and Mr Carroll would visit with him frequently to cheer him up. It was Mr Tarleton who acted as caretaker of Mr Carroll’s farm while he was in the United States. Mr Tarleton has a son who lives with him and cares for his needs, along with a sister who lives in the village. The son, Zachary, is very protective of the family heritage and has held the family farm together ever since Sir Ethan’s health failed.”

“Did Dr Brem establish the cause of death to be anything prior to the beheading?” Holmes asked.

“There were no other fatal wounds or marks on the torso,” Roddy responded, “but without the head the autopsy was rendered incomplete.”

Holmes enquired if Mr Carroll left any heirs or a last will and testament.

“He was a man alone in this world, Mr Holmes, with no descendants or kin. I personally searched thoroughly his home and effects, but found nothing to indicate who would inherit Mr Carroll’s farm and his money. I suppose it’s a matter for the lawyers to haggle over as to who will benefit from Mr Carroll’s demise.”

Holmes concluded the interrogation with this question: “Was the neck wound jagged, as if the head had been hacked off with an axe, or was it a single, clean cut, such as what might be dealt by a sharp instrument, a knife or a wire perhaps?”

“Mr Holmes, it was as if he had been executed with a guillotine,” Roddy revealed.

“This puzzle beckons me to find the missing pieces,” Holmes said. “You are welcome to have dinner with Dr Watson and me, rest here tonight, and accompany us on the train tomorrow.”

Roddy politely declined the invitation, saying he had been away long enough and that he would board a train leaving Clapham Junction that evening.

“I had best be on my way if I am to be on time—and thank you both for your attention to my problem,” he said, adding as he departed: “You won’t find a hotel in Tarleton, but you may take up lodging in Mr Carroll’s empty house, because it is still in my custody. I shall leave the key in the postman’s box.”

Afterwards, Holmes said little. He was deep in thought. Once, he blurted: “As I have said before, Watson, there is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.”

And later, during supper at Simpson’s: “As in the case of the killer Jefferson Hope, what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance. In solving a difficulty like Constable Roddy’s, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward.”

That night we packed our luggage while Holmes studied the train schedule aloud. “The train for Birmingham leaves at ten o’clock in the morning, and if it is not late arriving there, we can make a connection to Stoke-on-Trent, then Manchester, and finally to Southport, near Tarleton, a trip of five hours total duration. We shall likely find it necessary to hire a drag to take us from Southport to Mr Carroll’s former home.”

* * * *

It was late afternoon the following day when the horse-drawn cart turned onto the long, winding drive to the low Tudor-style house that had belonged to Mr Carroll. Our route had taken us through the centre of the village, with its two-story brick dwellings and shops, a pub, a post office, and grain storage facilities all built close together, as if in a city. Outside the town limits, the countryside exploded into vast crops of wheat, oats, corn, green vegetables, and a variety of flowers growing in black soil rich with peat. We could glimpse only the peaked rooftops of farmhouses scattered among the fields.

Holmes unlocked the door, which opened into a foyer with a slate floor and walls decorated with landscape paintings depicting scenes from the American West. Beyond the foyer was a large sitting-room with an immense fireplace, above which hung the antlers of an elk, plus the horns of a steer and a mountain goat. Bookshelves lined one side of the room, each packed with volumes on American law, the classics, history, as well as fiction and nonfiction that told stories of Western heroes and outlaws. The opposite end of the room was a veritable museum of Western artefacts, with a well-worn, silver-studded riding saddle on a wooden rack, a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots beside it, and a small table holding a bulky chunk of silver. Horse tack, a lasso, and fancy spurs covered the wall.

“I daresay the man was obsessed with his life abroad,” I remarked to Holmes, who was seated at a desk, rummaging through the documents on the top. He found more papers in the drawers and was examining them when there came a knock from the clapper on the carved oak door.

I answered the call, and standing on the stoop was a young, dark-skinned fellow dressed in Western attire, complete with fringed chaps and a wide-brimmed hat, and strands of hay clinging to his sleeves.

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” he said humbly, “but I’m the late Mr Carroll’s barn hand, Alexander McRae. You can call me Tex. Mr Carroll always did, ever since he hired me on in Wyomin’ when I was just nine years old and runnin’ away from the orphanage.”

I escorted him inside to meet Sherlock Holmes, and Tex continued in his quiet manner: “Constable Roddy said you’d be arrivin’ today, and I wanted to offer you any he’p you might need to git familiar with the surroundin’s. He told me you’d be solvin’ the murder of Mr Carroll, who was like the father I never had. I hope whoever did it gits his neck stretched by a rope on a tall tree branch.”

Holmes and I were charmed by Tex’s unassuming, blunt way. He replied to Holmes’s questions frankly and without hesitation. We learned that Mr Carroll had risen at sunrise daily to assist Tex with the feeding of the livestock, then he would return to the barn in the evening to do the same. He usually cooked breakfast, prepared lunch, and cooked supper for the two of them. In between those times, Mr Carroll would supervise the labourers in the fields, walk the trails between them to visit with Sir Ethan Tarleton, ride to town on his favourite gelding, Bullseye, and at four o’clock sharp stop at the tavern for a mug of beer.

“I can’t disappoint the barkeep—he expects me there at the same time every day,” Mr Carroll would jest.

One day about a month ago, Tex recalled, Mr Carroll was nowhere to be seen around the farmhouse at the noon hour and failed to make an appearance at dinnertime. Worried, Tex tried to pinpoint Mr Carroll’s whereabouts by tracing his known footsteps, discovering that Mr Carroll hadn’t kept his four o’clock appointment at the pub. Tex checked inside the barn and found Bullseye in his stall, with no indication that he had been ridden. When the farmhouse remained empty that night, Tex was certain something dreadful had happened to Mr Carroll, so in the morning Tex fed the horses alone, went to his quarters above the stable to don a clean shirt, and sought out the police to report Mr Carroll as missing.

“What Tex had to tell us disclosed a great deal,” Holmes muttered after the youngster had gone off to his chores. “I believe I shall call upon Sir Ethan Tarleton first thing tomorrow. For now, I shall resume my inspection of Mr Carroll’s effects.”

That evening, after Holmes had finished his research, we were readying for bed when Constable Roddy came with news that would keep us awake half the night.

“Sorry to trouble you gentlemen so late, but I thought you would want to know as soon as possible, Mr Holmes, that another headless body has surfaced,” he announced. “This one was found along a seldom-travelled path that leads from the outskirts of town past a shack inhabited by the village drunkard, George Beidler. It appears he is the victim, although we have no one to make a positive identification. Poor old George—he was harmless. Who would want to kill him? He could have been lying there a number of days, and if it were not for one of our residents taking a short-cut home tonight, the discovery could have been delayed even longer.”

“Take me to the scene of the crime immediately,” commanded Holmes, “because there may be clues that will vanish by morning.”

We rode in Roddy’s surrey about two kilometers on narrow roads and through a small forest, at the end of which was a cart path. When we were near the scene of the crime, Holmes ordered Roddy to stop so as not to disturb any evidence.

“As I have observed to Dr Watson on more than one occasion,” Holmes explained, “there is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.”

“If you walk up the path about a hundred paces, you will find the torso all in a heap in a dried pool of blood,” Roddy advised.

Holmes instructed both of us to remain in the surrey while he took a lantern from the side of the vehicle and proceeded up the path in the moonlight. We could see the glow of the lantern when he reached the site. The lantern remained stationary a few moments, then circled to the left and to the right, then back to the left, pausing for a length of time. Then the lantern travelled farther up the path about twenty paces and into the forest, where it disappeared from view for a short time.

When he returned, Holmes asked Roddy if the person who notified him of the crime had been on horseback, and Roddy answered in the affirmative.

“That accounts for the hoof prints, then,” Holmes said, adding: “There are three distinct sets of footprints. One set led away from the village, the footprints left by the victim. The second set belonged to you, Constable Roddy. And the last belonged to the killer. He is six feet tall and weighs approximately two hundred pounds. I determined this from the length of his stride and the depth of the track in the soft soil. He wears a new square-toed boot, size eleven, with cleats on the heels. He made his escape in a wagon under the cover of the forest. I lost the tracks of the wagon there.”

“But what of the motive, Mr Holmes?” Roddy wanted to know. “No one would steal from a drunkard—George had no valuables. He played cards at the pub for money to buy whisky. Could the culprit be a maniac who strikes at random for the thrill of it?”

“The motive is not clear to me yet, but I have a suspicion. However, it is too premature to discuss,” Holmes answered as we drove away. “You can arrange to have the torso removed to the doctor’s office. I have seen all there is to see here.”

After we arrived back at the farmhouse, Roddy excused himself to take care of matters at the scene of the crime, so Holmes and I went inside to change into our bed clothes. I retired for the night, but Holmes climbed into his purple dressing-gown, lapsed into a chair with his elbows on the arms, his fingertips together, and his eyes to the ceiling.

* * * *

I awoke in the morning to the sound of Holmes talking to Tex in the kitchen. They were preparing breakfast with a half-dozen fresh eggs Tex had gathered from the hen house and sausages they had retrieved from the ice chest.

Holmes informed Tex of the horrible finding on the cart path the night before, and Tex reacted with a wide-eyed expression.

“The monster just left him there for the buzzards, eh?” Tex said. “Constable Roddy said Mr Carroll was dumped in the river from the bridge for the fish to eat. There was a blood stain on the railin’.”

I also learned from their conversation that Tex would take Holmes on a buckboard into the village so Holmes could speak with the blacksmith, then over to the shack of the drunkard George, and on to the home of Sir Ethan Tarleton.

I volunteered to clean up after them so they would not be delayed. I planned to walk the grounds afterwards to take in the warm sunshine and inspect the lay of the land.

“This is stimulatin’—bein’ with you while you solve the murders,” Tex said to Holmes as they seated themselves on the wagon. “Do you suppose ole George and Mr Carroll are lookin’ down with pride from heaven? That’s where they must be. Neither of ’em ever hurt a soul while they was on this earth.”

Holmes assured Tex that George and Mr Carroll had gone to their rewards, and the two consulting detectives went off, smiling broadly.

I soon finished work in the kitchen, took up my walking stick, and began to stroll through the property. The horses cropping grass in the lush pasture picked up their heads and followed me for some distance along the barbed-wire fence line. They were magnificent, muscled creatures that Mr Carroll had brought with him from the Wyoming territory, which had attained statehood in 1890, the year he left for Europe with Tex.

One red roan mustang, when I reached the place where the fence turned at a right angle, snorted and stomped the ground just beyond the corner. Something there had disturbed the animal, and I went over to investigate. To my amazement, there was a patch of sod discoloured with what appeared to be dried blood near the base of a fence post.

Could this be the spot where Mr Carroll lost his life? I wondered. Holmes, I was certain, would be intrigued by what I had found and would want to see it for himself, so I marked the location with my bowler by placing it atop the post.

I continued walking until I reached a neighbouring barnyard, then reversed my direction when a tall, sturdy man about the age of thirty emerged from the grey, frame farmhouse to warn me in an unfriendly voice that I was trespassing on his land. I apologized and quickly made my way back onto the property of Mr Carroll. I attributed his demeanour to the fear the residents must have shared because a killer was prowling among them.

I took a different route back to our quarters, and when I entered, the Carroll home was unoccupied. Since Holmes and Tex had not yet returned, I decided to busy myself with some reading from the bookshelves in the sitting-room. I studied the titles in the classics section, and one volume in particular caught my eye, Shakespeare Analysed, by the British playwright Sidney Humphries. I took it down from the shelf, and to my surprise, the gap it left revealed the dial to a safe in the wall. How fascinating, I thought. “Holmes will be enthralled with yet this second discovery of mine,” I said aloud to myself. My inquisitiveness was heightened further when I learned that a button on the shelf, when depressed, caused the entire bookcase to swing away from the wall to allow access to the small hide-away safe. I returned the bookcase to its normal position.

I tried to concentrate on the book I had selected, but my anticipation of telling Holmes about my detective work prevented me from absorbing the words. So, I put Shakespeare Analysed back on the shelf. I began to pace back and forth across the room, much like Holmes’s habit when lost in thought.

Finally, at about two o’clock, I heard the horses and buckboard arrive at the front gate. Holmes came into the farmhouse alone, while Tex went on toward the barn to unhitch the wagon and cool down the team.

“Tex is a talker, to be sure,” Holmes started to say, but I interrupted him to tell him my news about the discoloured patch on the trail.

“Excellent, Watson!” he exclaimed. “It fits perfectly into my theory of this case! Now to the bookcase. Tex advised me that Mr Carroll kept important documents and Yankee dollars in a safe hidden behind the shelves.”

I was crestfallen, and my disappointment was obvious. “I discovered the safe while you were gone, and I wanted to shock you with it,” I informed Holmes when he asked me if he had said something to offend me. I showed Holmes the button and he pressed it.

The safe now exposed, Holmes placed his ear tightly against the door and began to turn the dial to the right and to the left. I knew he was proficient in the skills of a burglar, but I had been unaware that safe-cracking was a part of his repertoire.

“I heard the tumblers click,” he whispered after a few moments. He turned the handle and the safe opened. “Halloa!” he blurted.

Holmes marvelled at the contents. There was fifty thousand dollars in cash, deeds to all of Mr Carroll’s properties, a document from an orphanage in Wyoming, a carbonated copy of a forty-year-old agreement between Mr Carroll and Sir Ethan Tarleton, bank deposit slips, plus a will enscrolled with a date after Mr Carroll had relocated to the farmhouse outside the village.

“I was convinced a man of his stature would be careful to maintain such records,” Holmes stated. “The only question was where.” Holmes carried the documents to the desk, organised the papers that were already on it, and sat to examine the new ones, I looking over his shoulder. He fished inside his jacket pocket, withdrew his clay pipe and a pouch of shag tobacco, filled the pipe half way, lit it, and settled against the back of the chair. The smoke curled to the ceiling as Holmes read voraciously.

“This means Mr Carroll adopted Tex when he was thirteen years old, just before they sailed for England,” Holmes summarised. “And he has bequeathed to Tex all worldly possessions. We must inform Tex promptly.”

We went to the barn as Tex was feeding the horses their evening meal. He was startled and befuddled by the information.

“Golleee,” he intoned. “Now I know why he treated me like a son. But why do you suppose Mr Carroll kept it such a secret?”

“I don’t know for certain, Tex,” Holmes replied, “but perhaps he wanted to avoid you becoming haughty and arrogant, like the disposition we found in the son of Sir Ethan Tarleton. Whatever the answer, your adoptive father took the secret to his grave.”

“This changes everythin’,” Tex went on. “I have greater responsibilities now. I’m not sure I can handle them.”

“You have a few years to prepare,” Holmes added. “The will stipulates you inherit Mr Carroll’s wealth and properties when you reach the age of twenty-one. For the time being, it is all in the hands of a trustee in America.”

We all returned to the farmhouse for supper, and Tex peppered Holmes with questions about the future.

“Right now,” he said, “there’s the matter of payin’ the field hands. And to be honest, I’m a little short of money myself.”

Holmes told him there was enough in the safe to care for those needs. “With guidance from the trustee, you will have no worries,” Holmes said.

After we ate and were refreshed, Holmes asked me to lead him to the patch of sod with the suspected blood stain. “There is ample sunlight left to go there, perform a test, and be back here before dark,” he surmised.

Although I was tired, I agreed, and we set off on foot toward the post where I hung the derby. Under the evening sun, the spot was less pronounced than in the morning. Holmes produced a leather case from his jacket pocket, and inside were several small vials containing various liquids. He removed one from the case, plucked a few blades of grass from the stained patch, and immersed them into the clear solution in the vial. “If the liquid turns yellow, then it is blood on the grass,” he informed me. It did. “Mr Carroll met his end here, then,” Holmes conjectured, “before he reached the home of Sir Ethan Tarleton.” Holmes pointed over the rise ahead and said the Tarleton farm laid just beyond it.

“Then it was someone from the Tarleton homestead who shooed me away today,” I mentioned to him, and I told him of my encounter with the tall, sturdy fellow.

“More than likely that was Sir Ethan’s son, Zachary,” Holmes guessed. “I, too, found him unfriendly. He erroneously advised me that by living in the Carroll farmhouse I was trespassing on land that rightfully belonged to his father now. He contended the written agreement between his father and Mr Carroll spelled out the ownership in no uncertain terms.” Holmes said Sir Ethan Tarleton was of little help in the investigation because he suffered from dementia and had a weak heart that kept him bedfast most of the time. “His memory is dysfunctional,” Holmes revealed during our walk back to Mr Carroll’s farmhouse.

* * * *

At mid-morning the next day, Holmes and Tex took the buckboard to the office of the magistrate, the keeper of records for the county. On the way, they were to pick up Constable Roddy, who would obtain a writ to gain possession of the original of the old agreement between Mr Carroll and Sir Ethan Tarleton. Holmes suspected the agreement on file with the magistrate might have been altered recently.

“I shall explain when I return with the document,” Holmes said when I went to the front gate to see them off.

To pass the time while they were gone, I opened the volume entitled Shakespeare Analysed and was soon mesmerised, acquiring the knowledge for the first time that there existed a hypothesis that The Bard was not a single person but actually a collection of playwrights using the pseudonym William Shakespeare. I thought it preposterous, recounting in my head many of the quotations from the dramas and trying to imagine that they were the handiwork of more than one genius.

Time passed quickly, for I was still absorbed in the author’s analysis when Holmes, Roddy, and Tex walked through the door in the middle of the afternoon.

“It is as I suspected, Watson,” Holmes announced. “Take the carbonated copy of the agreement from the desk and compare it to the original. A page has been substituted which contradicts what is in the copy. Notice the watermark—the depiction of the fool in the floppy cock’s comb cap and the collar with five peaks, each bearing a jingle bell. He is in a different position on the bogus page of the original. The fool is at the centre right on the other three genuine pages, and at the bottom left on the substituted page.

“I refer you to my monograph on the subject of dating documents. The McKean Paper Mill moved the location of the watermark to the bottom left just two years ago, meaning the forged page was inserted recently.”

What Holmes alleged was correct when I compared the two documents. The bogus page specified that Mr Carroll’s five hundred hectares would revert to the ownership of Sir Ethan Tarleton and his heirs if Mr Carroll preceded him in death, whereas the copy made no mention of such a succession.

“Now to prove the identity of the counterfeiter,” Holmes declared. “I borrowed from the village doctor a Bunsen burner and gas canister on our way back here, Watson. And that glass globe covering the clock on the mantle should do the trick, if you wouldn’t mind fetching it down.” Holmes then took a vial with his iodine solution from the leather case in his jacket pocket, set up his laboratory on the kitchen table, and placed the questioned page under the glass after igniting the burner and adjusting the vial on the little stand he also brought with him.

“You will soon see the latent fingerprints and hand print of the wrongdoer,” Holmes advised Roddy as the forged page began to change colour. Roddy watched in awe as the heel print of a right hand appeared on the margin, along with three fingerprints at the top left corner.

Said Holmes: “All that is left to do is contrast these with the prints of young Zachary Tarleton, which we can do with a writ and some printer’s ink we can acquire from the village weekly newspaper.”

Tex, who was equally astounded by the development, drove Roddy to the village to do his part. Meanwhile, Holmes and I discussed the implications of the findings over a bottle of port wine we took from Mr Carroll’s rack in the dining room.

It was drawing toward evening when Roddy returned in his surrey. Tex had already arrived in the otherwise empty buckboard and was putting up the team. Holmes and I climbed onto the surrey behind Roddy, who drove toward the Tarletons’ home.

Zachary Tarleton was obstinate, but he reluctantly allowed Holmes to smear the ink on his hands and make an impression of them on a sheet of foolscap—after Roddy served young Tarleton with the writ.

“What are you trying to prove with this?” he demanded.

“We shall let you know in the morning after we compare your prints to those we recovered from the agreement between your father and Mr Carroll,” Holmes answered.

“How can you recover my prints from an old document that was signed before I was born?” Tarleton wanted to know.

“I employ a foolproof method,” Holmes informed him.

“Your method is pure madness,” he retorted, and strode off to the kitchen to wash away the ink, his robust arms outstretched.

After we arrived back at Mr Carroll’s home, we ate a plate of beef stew that Tex had prepared in our absence, left over from the pot roast dinner we had the night before.

“Mr Carroll, er, my father, taught me to cook,” Tex said, “but I don’t do as well with the stove as him. My stew will go down easy, though, especially when you’re as hungry as we all are.”

Holmes was in no rush to make the comparisons, convinced that the two sets of prints would match. So confident was he that he relinquished the honour to Roddy, handing him a magnifying glass and seating him at the desk in the sitting-room. Roddy studied the prints thoroughly and eventually disclosed his conclusion: “They are a perfect layover, Mr Holmes. Where do we go from here?”

Holmes said he would confront young Tarleton in the morning but wanted to do it alone. “He might say some things to me that he would not in your presence, Constable Roddy.”

“Well, if you say so,” Roddy said in reaction, “but I insist on going along and waiting in the surrey outside the house in the event he decides to fight.”

“I should like to be there as well,” I chimed in.

Holmes agreed, and the next day we set out together for the Tarleton homestead. Roddy stopped the surrey out of view of the front door, and Holmes approached it on foot from about two hundred paces away. Once we were certain he was safely inside, Roddy drew the surrey closer to the house.

Holmes had disappeared for nearly an hour. When he came out, he was escorting Zachary Tarleton to the surrey. Young Tarleton looked dishevelled and was bleeding from a gash on his cheek.

“Standing before you,” Holmes said matter-of-factly, “is the forger who murdered the respected James Harley Carroll as well as the drunkard George Beidler in cold blood. Young Mr Tarleton here has admitted to it.”

Roddy was flabbergasted. I, on the contrary, had come to expect such pronouncements. Roddy clasped irons on the reprobate and seated him in the back of the surrey between myself and Holmes, then we headed in the direction of the village.

Later, after the prisoner had been secured in the tiny gaol, Roddy drove us to the Carroll home, where Tex greeted the news with a whoop.

“Do you suppose they’ll string him up before long?” he asked Holmes and Roddy.

“First there is the matter of a fair trial,” Roddy cautioned.

“Right after that, then?” Tex pleaded.

“Perhaps then,” Holmes responded.

“How did you catch him, Mr Holmes?” Tex continued.

Holmes explained to all of us then the phases of his investigation. First, there were the killer’s boot prints near the body of Beidler. “Young Tarleton wears a pair exactly as I described,” Holmes told us.

Second, when Holmes examined the crime scene, he found in the woods the iron rim from a wagon wheel. “The village blacksmith informed me that he had repaired a wagon wheel with a missing rim for young Tarleton that very morning, after the discovery of Beidler’s torso,” Holmes went on.

Additionally, Holmes said, he learned in the village that the muscular Mr Tarleton was an expert with a sabre, having been taught by his grandfather, the son of Sir Banastre Tarleton, nicknamed The Butcher. Sir Banastre cut off the heads of his enemies with one swipe of a sabre in the American War of Independence.

“When I confronted Tarleton with this information, and the fact that we had proof he had forged the agreement,” Holmes said, “Tarleton became enraged and lunged for one of the crossed sabres above the fireplace. ‘You know too much, Holmes, so it’s off with your head also,’ he sputtered. I dodged his advance and took down the other broadsword. He attacked, and I parried. We were engaged in this combat for only a minute when I intercepted a thrust and disarmed him, placing the tip of my blade against his chest. I asked him then what he had done with the heads of Mr Carroll and George Beidler, and he confessed that he had buried them in the family cemetery behind his home. He also acknowledged that he had taken Beidler’s life merely as a diversion to throw off suspicions in the death of Mr Carroll, as was my belief from the start.”

“That means he killed ole George for nothin’ and he killed Mr Carroll to inherit this farm,” Tex added. “Hangin’ ain’t good enough for him.”