Neither of them answered him. Sherlock Holmes sat back in his chair and continued without mercy.
‘If they had lamps, when did they light them?’
‘I don’t recall they did,’ said Skinner grimly.
‘That is something else you do not recall.’ He was the quiet assassin now. ‘But they would have lit them before they left the chapel, surely. Why else carry them?’
‘I suppose so.’ Skinner gave up the struggle.
‘If you have spoken a word of truth between you, those lamps must have been lit long before. If your story is to be believed, Rose Harsent said of some mishap that might have stained or disfigured a surface, ‘It won’t be noticed.’ How could she tell what would be noticed and what would not if she could not see it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If they lit lamps, you could have seen what was happening. You swear you could not. Therefore they did not have lamps and you could not have seen who it was that came out through the door.’
Wright had given up and was staring at his feet. Skinner struggled in the net. I do not think, in all my experience of Sherlock Holmes, I had ever seen such a mixture of fear and anger as in the eyes of this young rustic. He was not done for yet.
‘You do think yourself clever, Mr. Holmes, the Baker Street detective! Perhaps if you’d spent a little less time in London and a little more in the country, you might have learnt a good deal.’
‘I am always ready to learn,’ said Holmes humbly.
‘Well then, look at the sky at night! You talk about it being pitch dark. That sky ain’t pitch dark all the time. Moonlight and starlight show a good deal.’
‘I hardly think starlight would have illuminated the sunken path, hemmed in by shadow as it is.’
‘I daresay not, but moonlight would. With a clear sky and the moon almost at the full, as it was.’
‘You say the moon had risen?’
Skinner relaxed, as if he had sprung a trap on his victim.
‘Of course it had risen, or we wouldn’t have seen Rose and Mr. Gardiner, would we?’
‘Dear me,’ said Holmes, ‘a perfect example of
petitio principii
, better known as begging the question. Do go on.’
Skinner went on.
‘Three nights before, on the Saturday, a dozen of us went rabbit-catching. We do that when the moon is full sometimes. I can give you the names of witnesses enough. We went off early, about seven or eight, seeing that was when the moon come up and crossed the southern sky, as it generally does. That night, the moon would have shone almost directly onto that chapel door, the path, the gate, and the road beyond. It rises always a few minutes later ever y night, don’t it? We all know that. But not so much later as to make much odds only three nights after, when we saw what we saw at the chapel. Don’t tell me what we could and couldn’t have seen, Mr. Holmes. We were the ones that were there.’
‘Very well,’ said Holmes meekly, ‘then let me ask you one more thing and we shall have done.’
My heart sank. Was this all? It seemed as if these two wretches might be almost safe in their tale of ‘seeing’ Rose and her lover together at the chapel. Safe enough to hang William Gardiner. Skinner squared his shoulders confidently for the one more question. He truly seemed to think that he had beaten Sherlock Holmes at last.
‘All right,’ he said magnanimously, ‘what do you want to know?’
‘Who locked the chapel door?’ asked Holmes in the same meek voice. ‘Mrs. Crisp and her husband found it locked as usual when they went there at half past eight on the following morning. You have both sworn that a woman left first on the evening before, Rose Harsent, if it was she. You did not follow her but waited for the man, William Gardiner, if it was he. You understand?’
‘Well enough, I should say.’
‘Who locked the door that evening, for locked it was and locked it was found the next morning?’
Wright joined in.
‘Gardiner must have done that. He was the last to leave. It can’t have been anyone else, can it?’
‘It cannot,’ said Holmes in the same subdued voice. ‘And you followed Gardiner, did you not? According to your evidence, Skinner caught up with him almost at once. Let me see. Here we are: “I walked level with him for about twenty yards.” You then stood at the crossing and watched him continue home down the main street of Peasenhall, which is simply called the Street? Is that correct?’
‘Of course it is,’ said Skinner with a slight laugh at the absurdity of it all. Sherlock Holmes changed his manner in a split second. He came in, as they say, for the kill.
‘Kindly do not laugh, Skinner; a man’s life depends on our conversation this afternoon. So does your liberty for the next seven years and that of your foolish friend. All this was at nine twenty, you say?’
‘I have said so in court. It was nine twenty or perhaps by then nine thirty.’
‘Mrs. Crisp was able to tell us this afternoon that long before nine twenty, let alone nine thirty, the key to the chapel was safely locked in a drawer of her desk. Gardiner could not have used it to lock the chapel door.’
‘Then he did not lock it!’
‘Mr. and Mrs. Crisp found it securely locked the next morning. According to your sworn testimony, you watched Gardiner walk home from the Doctor’s Chapel. Rose Harsent was nowhere around. You did not follow her when she left and had gone on ahead. Gardiner, also according to your evidence, did not approach the door of Providence House. To use your own words in court, he walked straight past it.’
‘Then. …’
‘I am there before you, Skinner. Then, perhaps, Gardiner returned in the middle of the night, burgled Providence House, ransacked the desk, forced open the drawer, took the key to the chapel, and locked it? Or Rose Harsent got up in the middle of the night, broke open the desk, and took the key for the same purpose. By a fairy’s magic wand, all trace of breaking and entering vanished before Mrs. Crisp went to her desk the next morning. And all this happened at a time when neither the man nor the woman in your story had any idea that they had been watched—and therefore they had no reason for doing it. In any case, they would have thought that early next morning would do just as well for locking the chapel.’
‘It must have. …’
‘Do not tell me what must have happened, Skinner. Had you been a little more skilled in falsehood, you would have invented a story in which Gardiner caught up with Rose and handed her the key before he went home. If there were a word of truth in anything you have sworn to, Gardiner could not have given the unlocked chapel door a second thought and it would have been still unlocked next day—which it was not. Had he been uneasy, he would have hurried after Rose Harsent, got the key, and gone back to lock it then and there, which you swear he did not. My only regret in all this is that public flogging has been abolished for willful perjury.’
It was a masterly cross-examination. He had them by the throat as perhaps only Sir Edward Marshall Hall might have done in a court of law. Neither of these surly young fellows could muster an answer, for they had expected only a repetition of the more kindly questions asked at the assize court. But still he had not quite done with them.
‘Before we are rid of you this afternoon, I will add one brief lesson in astronomy. The moon’s orbit is somewhat more eccentric than that of the earth round the sun, where sunset and sunrise have a more regular principle. In the autumn, the time of the moon’s rising will scarcely vary from one night to the next. Therefore, when it rises just after dusk, it is good moonlight to make hay by, the so-called Harvest Moon. In October it is Hunter’s Moon. Unfortunately for you, the springtime month of which you speak is one when the differences in the moon’s rising are far greater from day to day, sometimes more than an hour and often fifty minutes between one night and the next. The fact that the moon rose conveniently for you at seven thirty
P
.
M
. on Saturday means that it would not rise three days later until after ten o’clock. At nine twenty, in the darkness of that alley below the hedge, you could not have seen a single thing by moonlight to which you have sworn in court, even had those things taken place.’
They hung their heads, but still he had not done with them.
‘Every item of your evidence taken together is now exposed for what it always was—a tissue of vindictive lies. At first you told these falsehoods for motives of malice, to ruin the lives of an innocent man and woman, a man whom you despised as “Holy Willie.” Then murder was done, and you dared not confess your slanders.’
In the matter of his reputation, William Gardiner was triumphant. Sherlock Holmes had fought the two bullies to a standstill, and they stood silent before him.
He spoke once more before Eli Nunn led them out.
‘Repeat your vicious allegations in court once more and you will find that you have gone to sea in a sieve. I will myself lay an information against you with Inspector Lestrade as my witness. I will seek a warrant for your indictment on charges of willful perjury, for which you may be sent to penal servitude upon conviction for a term of seven years. Think on that.’
There was a silence in the chapel as the door closed upon them. Even Lestrade and Ernest Wild sat in awe. Presently Wild turned to the Chief Inspector.
‘I cannot anticipate what you will say to the solicitor-general, Mr. Lestrade, but I must tell you this. If there is a third attempt to try William Gardiner for murder, after all that you have heard and he has suffered, I do not think the Crown will offer those two scoundrels as witnesses on its behalf. However, I promise you that I shall subpoena them for the defense, as hostile witnesses, and treat them as Mr. Holmes has treated them this afternoon.’
Lestrade got to his feet and shuffled his papers together. His bulldog gruffness had softened and he almost smiled.
‘It is not in my gift to decide such matters, Mr. Wild, only to make my recommendations. However, after what we have seen and heard this afternoon, I do not think you will be called upon to do anything of the kind.’
Whatever Lestrade’s failings as a detective, the inspector was a man of honour. He had given his word that his recommendation to the Metropolitan commissioner of police, and thence to the Director of Public Prosecutions, should be based upon the evidence. He was not to be influenced by the local prejudice that had brought William Gardiner so close to the gallows trap and the unmarked grave by the prison wall. My own part has been to reveal, for the first time, the role played in the famous Peasenhall case by Sherlock Holmes.
The world knew in a day or two that William Gardiner would not be called upon for a third time to stand trial for the murder of Rose Harsent. Yet innocent though he was, he and his family were punished by public opinion. He was forced to leave his home in Alma Cottage and take his wife and children to London, where their future lives were hidden in its twenty thousand streets.
At dusk on the day when the end of the prosecution was announced, as a soft January snowfall began to cover the stretches of Baker Street beyond the window, Holmes stood looking out at the smoky sky, from which the large flakes were falling slowly through the first yellow flush of lamplight.
‘
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum
,’ he said thoughtfully, drawing the velvet curtains and turning to the firelight. ‘“Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” The heavens are certainly falling at the moment, rather pleasantly, and justice has been done to William Gardiner in ample measure.’
He sat down and began to fill his pipe with the black shag tobacco that he habitually kept in a Persian slipper, a souvenir of some long-forgotten adventure.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘did you ever believe the man to be guilty? Was your promise to Lestrade of being willing to find him innocent or not anything but a blind, as they say?’
He looked into the crackling logs of the fire and sighed.
‘You see, Watson? You are too quick for me, as usual. I decided at the outset that I could not appear to be a counsel for the defence, for that would have turned Lestrade into the prosecutor as well as the judge. It was obvious from the start that the slanders that Wright and Skinner spread about the poor fellow were false. They were demonstrably false upon common sense and deduction. It really mattered nothing whether one believed Gardiner and his wife. The importance attached to her evidence and his was the red herring in the case. It was the one crucial error committed by Ernest Wild that he made so much seem to depend upon it.’
‘It was not thought beside the point in court.’
He waved this aside like the smoke of his pipe.
‘It was why the jury nearly convicted him, all but one man. The whole thing was settled in my mind by the impossibilities in the slanderers’ stories. Such people can rarely spread lies without giving themselves away. Mr. Wild did not quite appreciate the extent of this. He is good and we shall hear more of him, but after all he is not Sir Edward Marshall Hall and never will be. He never even suggested, I think, that Gardiner could not have left the chapel last and yet the door was found locked next morning. He did not point out that two hours after sunset it was pitch dark and yet Skinner claimed to identify two people, seen in total darkness through a hedge, on a path below him and a little distance away.’
‘It has been pointed out now,’ I said quietly.
‘When they were cornered, of course, they said there must have been a lantern and that was when I knew we had them! The whole story was an impossibility.’
‘And they were wrong about the moon.’
He paused a moment.
‘There, Watson, I must confess a small subterfuge. I do not know when the moon rose that night, though the nightly intervals of its rising are certainly far longer at that time of year, more than an hour sometimes between one night and the next. I did not know that it was pitch dark rather than moonlight at the time they claimed to have seen such goings-on. Yet, faced with the challenge, nor did they. For me, that was the final proof of their malice, dishonesty, and stupidity.’
‘You used a trick?’
‘A trick if you care to call it that. What is in a name? Our friend Professor Jowett used to say much the same of logic. Logic, he said, is neither an art nor a science. Logic is a dodge.’