Sherlock Holmes Stories of Edward D. Hoch (3 page)

“He has threatened you?”

“On more than one occasion. He showed me that damned creature…yes, damned by God since the beginning of time…and told me the speckled band could come for us anywhere. He reminded me of Aaron’s staff in the Bible, the one that turned into a serpent.”

“Holmes!” I said, pointing out in the street, where a figure scurried along on the opposite side.

“What is it, Watson?”

“That gypsy we saw at the camp! I think he followed us here.”

“It is Manuel,” Sarah Dade said. “He is feeble-minded, but harmless. He runs errands for us. You see, all of the gypsies are not our enemies. Only Ramon would cause us trouble.”

“Let us hope our visit today has deterred him,” Holmes said. “We will remain overnight at the Crown Inn before returning to London by the morning train. If anything unusual transpires, we are close at hand.”

“Come up to see Henry before you leave.”

“Very well.”

We followed her up the narrow staircase to the second floor living quarters. She opened the door to a comfortable parlor and I could see her husband seated in a large armchair, his head down, apparently dozing. She walked over to him, clutching the shawl about her shoulders as if to ward off a sudden chill. She bent, shook him and uttered his name.

“Henry! Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson are leaving now.”

“Is he all right?” Holmes asked, sudden alarm in his voice.

“Oh my God!” Sarah backed away, one hand to her mouth. “He’s…”

She collapsed in a faint before I could reach her. Holmes hurried to the man in the chair.

“Careful, Watson!” he warned. “We are not alone in this room!”

My revolver was in my hand as I searched the corners with my eyes.

“Holmes, do you mean…”

“Henry Dade is dead. There are the twin punctures of a serpent’s fangs on his neck. It is the speckled band again.”

I helped Sarah recover with the aid of some smelling salts, and she insisted on going for the constable, while Holmes and I searched the room for the deadly swamp adder.

“Its fangs may be empty, but it is still dangerous,” Holmes warned. “Keep your weapon in hand.”

“The window is closed, Holmes. How did that terrible creature gain access to the room?”

“When we find him, we may know the answer to that.”

But we did not find the swamp adder or any other snake in the room with Henry Dade’s body. Every inch of the room was searched without result. I was especially careful of the umbrella stand, expecting one of the canes to come alive in my hand, as it had for Aaron, but they remained merely wood.

“It is not here,” I said at last, after a half-hour’s search.

“I quite agree, Watson.”

Sarah had returned with a Constable Richards, a stout young man who had little experience with violent death.

“I will have to summon Scotland Yard,” he told us. “We have no facilities here for investigating a murder by snakebite.”

“Dr. Roylott…” I began.

“The official inquiry concluded that Dr. Roylott died accidentally while playing with a dangerous pet. But you say this is murder.”

“The victim’s wife says it is,” Holmes corrected. “I have not completed my investigation of the facts.”

“His brother killed him,” Sarah Dade insisted. “There is no other explanation.”

“There seems none,” Holmes agreed, “but, pray tell me how the deadly serpent was introduced into the room.”

“I left that window slightly ajar when I came downstairs. Henry must have closed it when he came up here to nap. The serpent had entered through the window and hidden itself somewhere.”

“But there is no snake here now,” my friend pointed out. “Your husband was hardly in a position to open the door or window for the serpent after he’d been bitten. Dr. Roylott lived only ten seconds, you remember.”

“That is true,” she agreed. “My god, is it possible Ramon has the power to change staffs into serpents?”

“Whatever his power, we need to speak with him,” Holmes decided. “And with that other gypsy, Manuel, too. He was across the street at about the time the deed was done.”

There was no doctor in the village itself, so I pronounced Henry Dade officially dead. Though I’d had little experience with death from snakebite, the symptoms seemed to bear it out. While snakebite death was rarely instantaneous, we knew from the case of Dr. Roylott that it was certainly possible.

When Ramon Dade arrived in the company of Constable Richards, he went at once to the body of his brother.

There were tears in his eyes as he turned and told us, “I did not do this thing. The snake has been in its cage in the potting shed this whole day.”

Sherlock Holmes stepped forward. “Do you deny threatening your brother’s wife with the snake?”

“I threatened her, yes,” he admitted. “She lured Henry away from the family for the gold he had. He belonged to us, not to her.”

Holmes turned to the constable. “What of the snake?”

“I have it in its cage, in my trap.”

“And the other gypsy, Manuel?”

“He is downstairs, but you will not get any information out of him.”

“We’ll see,” Holmes said.

I followed him down to speak with the gypsy named Manuel. Seeing him up close, I was struck by the ugly deformity of the man. The poor devil had suffered some childhood injury which had left the working of his brain impaired. His few words of speech were mere noise, hardly recognizable to my ears.

“Manuel,” Holmes said, “you came here earlier this afternoon.”

“Yes…”

“Did you like Henry and Sarah?”

“Yes, like.”

“Did you do errands for them?”

He nodded his head, smiling with comprehension.

“And did you bring them a snake today? The gypsy snake?”

This required a little more thought, but finally he shook his head.

“No. No snake.”

“Did you ever touch the snake in its cage?”

“No! No! Snake bad!”

Holmes sighed in exasperation and tried a different approach. “Did Ramon take the snake today? Did you see him with the snake?”

He shook his head, looking frightened.

“All right,” Holmes decided. “There is nothing more to be learned here. Let us go look at the villain in its cage. Perhaps it will tell us how the crime was committed.”

To me, the swamp adder looked much as it had a few hours earlier. Its brownish speckles seemed almost pretty at times, and I had to remind myself that it was a deadly killer.

“It’s close to three feet long, Holmes,” I observed.

“About the length of a walking stick.”

“Are you back to that again? We examined the ones in the umbrella stand.”

“So we did. And did it not strike you as odd that a gypsy turned blacksmith, a reasonably vigorous man in his forties, would possess those walking sticks? Certainly he did not need them for support, and he had no walking stick with him yesterday in London. What were they doing in his parlor? What purpose did they serve?”

“Holmes, you can’t believe the snake was hidden in one of those canes! Even if it had been, how did Ramon manage to retrieve it?”

“Let us speak to Sarah Dade about this most interesting question of the superfluous walking sticks.”

Sarah seemed surprised at Holmes’ question, but answered it immediately.

“They belonged to the previous blacksmith’s father, who died last year. When he moved out, he said he had no use for the canes, and left them for us. I decided they looked nice in the umbrella stand.”

“As simple as that,” Holmes said with a laugh. “Watson, you must remind of this the next time I seem too pompous and self-assured with my deductions.”

It was decided that Sarah Dade should spend the night at the Crown Inn, too, on the slim chance there might be two snakes, with one of them still loose and undiscovered in her flat above the blacksmith shop. The constable promised a more thorough search of the furniture and closets in the morning, when the Scotland Yard people would arrive to join the investigation.

We dined with Sarah on the main floor of the inn, but she was still understandably distraught at her husband’s death.

“I was the one who insisted he come to you,” she told Holmes. “I was so fearful something like this might happen. Now he is gone and I have nothing but the memory of our brief time together.”

“His killer will be brought to justice,” Holmes promised her.

I had assumed we would retire early and spend a peaceful night but, once we were alone in our room, my friend paced the floor like a caged animal, deep in thought. Finally he seemed to reach a decision.

“There are things to be done tonight, Watson. Come along now, and bring your revolver.”

“Holmes…”

But he would say no more and, before I knew it, we had left the inn under cover of darkness, carefully slipping out the back door. We headed through the alleys, approaching the blacksmith shop from the rear, and quietly Holmes opened the back door.

“I took the liberty of unbolting this earlier,” he explained in whispered tones. “Move very softly now. We’re going upstairs to the living quarters.”

“You think the serpent is still there?”

“We shall see.”

I followed him through the darkness, barely able to make out his form as he moved up the steps, testing each one first for possible squeaks.

“Step over this one, Watson,” he whispered, halfway up. “Not a sound now!”

We entered the living room where Henry Dade had been killed, and he motioned me to take up a position behind the sofa.

“My revolver, Holmes,” I said, offering it to him.

He waved it away.

“Keep it ready, Watson, but don’t use it unless I tell you to.”

It was like the night we spent in Miss Stoner’s bedroom, a dreadful vigil in the dark, and I half-expected to hear again the low, clear whistle with which Roylott had summoned the speckled band. The ticking of the mantle clock was the only sound for a long time. My leg was cramped beneath me and, at last, I tried shifting to a more comfortable position.

At that instant, we heard a squeak on the stairs. Someone, something, was approaching. I gripped the revolver more tightly as the door to the room opened slowly inward. The figure that entered could barely be discerned in the darkness. It crossed the room quickly and seemed to kneel by one of the chairs.

That was when Holmes moved.

He struck a match and yelled, “Don’t move! There are two of us!”

The figure gasped and Holmes sprang forward, his right arm raised as if to ward off a blow. The burning match fell to the floor and went out, plunging us into darkness again. I heard the struggle, the panting breath, and hurried forward with my weapon.

“Holmes! Are you all right?”

“I think so, Watson, though it was a close call. Strike another match, will you?”

I did so and, by its glow, I saw now that he had pinned Sarah Dade to the floor. In her right hand, carefully held in Holmes’ powerful grip, were a pair of hypodermic needles tied together with string, side by side.

“Here, Watson,” Holmes gasped as she struggled to free herself. “Here are the fangs of the speckled band, and no less deadly than the real thing!”

After Constable Richards had been summoned and Sarah Dade was placed in custody, Sherlock Holmes explained.

“I felt certain she’d come tonight to retrieve those needles. The Scotland Yard people would be searching the place in the morning and she couldn’t risk their being found.”

“I still don’t understand, Holmes,” I admitted. “Henry Dade showed every symptom of having been killed by snakebite.”

“It was a clever plan to dispose of a husband she’d married only for his gold. Dr. Roylott’s crime was well-known in the village, of course, despite the verdict of accidental death, and my part in the investigation was known, too. When Henry’s brother Ramon showed Sarah the snake and made some ambiguous comments, she chose to interpret them as threats. She even went further, persuading her husband to summon me here to protect them. With us on the scene when Henry Dade was killed, it was sure to been seen as another crime like the earlier ones involving the deadly snake. She arranged the crime in such a way that it seemed impossible for her to have committed it.

“It was impossible, Holmes!” I insisted. “Sarah Dade was with us in the blacksmith shop when her husband was killed.”

“So it seemed at the time, Watson. Remember, though, that Henry went upstairs to rest a bit, and he even seemed to be dozing when we entered the room. That is exactly what he was doing…sleeping in his chair, until Sarah ended his life by injecting the poison into his neck in our presence.”

“You mean we saw the murder committed?”

“I fear so, Watson. Remember how she clutched the shawl around her, hiding the twin needles she’d prepared earlier. She even shook him to cover his involuntary jerk as she injected the poison. He was dead almost instantly, and she shielded his face from us in those crucial seconds. Then she had only to dispose of the needles. She pretended to faint and, while on the floor, pushed them into the bottom of the chair. She was attempting to retrieve them tonight when we surprised her.”

“What was in those needles, Holmes?”

“The poison Ramon Dade had milked from the fangs of the swamp adder. Remember he told us he did that for safety’s sake and, no doubt, he told Sarah as well when he showed her the snake. I feel certain she paid the dim-witted Manuel to steal the venom and bring it to her. He often did errands for them, and he would not have realized the full import of his task.”

“How did you know she was guilty, Holmes?”

“It was more a matter of knowing the snake must be innocent. She relied on the window being left open a bit, but Henry must have closed it when he came up for his nap. There was no way the snake could have escaped, and it was not in the room when we searched it. The twin punctures in his neck were also suggestive to me. They were right where Sarah would have stood, bending over the sleeping man. But, to be certain, I still needed to catch her in the act of retrieving those hypodermic needles.”

“She might have killed you, Holmes!”

“So might the speckled band on our last visit.”

“The next time we come to Stoke Moran…”