The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (36 page)

I was annoyed at Holmes’s cavalier dismissal of writers whom I judged to have a high place in the forensic world, but I knew that mine was no match for his intimate knowledge of the criminological literature. Still, I decided to continue the debate and perhaps to provoke him into another tale.

“But surely the jails in our Empire are not filled with the innocent. My own experience in Afghanistan led me to the conclusion that were we to win control of those areas we would be faced with an enormous civilising mission, considering the moral turpitude of most of the local population. Even educated Hindoos have remarked on the enormous number of social pests found among the lower castes who, in a variety of disguises, commit the overwhelming majority of crimes.”

Holmes laughed warmly. “Brilliant, Watson,” he exclaimed, “not even Gunthorpe himself could have put it any better. But I know you well enough to know that you do not believe such twaddle. If you want me to relate another tale, you should say so straightforwardly.”

I smiled broadly at his remark. “I should have known better than to try to provoke you. But perhaps you could give me a longer example of the universality of your science and the nature of the special circumstances to which you have just alluded.”

“If you mean by circumstances what is usually referred to as circumstantial evidence, Watson, then we have much to talk about. A crime in England, one in Italy, one in Turkey, one in Japan, will all differ in local circumstances and the way they happen. What makes them similar is the view that the detective takes of the circumstances. Universality lies in the eye of the observer. You no doubt remember the case to which you gave the name of the Boscombe Valley mystery.”

“I remember, indeed. Surely no one ever appeared to be as guilty of murder as young McCarthy. Were it not for your intervention, Lestrade would have had him led to the gallows without the slightest qualm.”

“Precisely. In many serious crimes—murder, in particular,—there are often no witnesses, nor other direct evidence of any kind. Hence it is the reading of the indirect evidence that leads to a conclusion. Shift one’s viewpoint just ever so much and starkly differing conclusions may be reached. The guilty become innocent and the innocent guilty.”

Holmes stopped for a moment. “There is, Watson,” he said with a sudden look of recall on his face, “a case that speaks to our discussion, one with which you are not familiar since it is occurred during my time in the Orient. Perhaps you would like to hear it?”

We moved from the table to our favourite chairs, and he related the following tale of murder in the thieves’ bazaar of Bombay.

“You will remember, Watson, that in one of my recent relations to you I described the awful events of Trincomalee.”

“Yes, indeed, I do.”

“It was shortly thereafter that I left Ceylon and began the long trip to Bombay, where I fully intended to begin my journey back to England. I decided to travel up the west coast of India this time, and so my first stop was the pleasant Indian city of Trivandrum. Here I met a most interesting individual, an Italian nobleman by the name of Lorenzo Spinelli. We found each other compatible, and Spinelli suggested that we travel together since we had similar destinations. Spinelli, I learned quickly, had a profound knowledge of Indian philosophy and, even though I did not share his passion, I found our conversation to be a most welcome distraction, particularly on the rather desolate portions of our trip that often held nothing of interest. He had no travelling companions except for three servants: Lachman, a young man who served as cook and chief guide, and two porters, who were obliged to carry Spinelli’s large collection of books and papers.

“The tale that follows, Watson, concerns Lachman, who was, I could see from the first, devoted to the Italian. When Spinelli finally left, he was quite distraught. In age only about twenty, he had become totally dependent on his master. The boy was of a very low caste, Jogee by name, and had born in a small village in the poorest part of central India, in the area known as Bustar, a place considered by some to be among the most backward of the Subcontinent. The boy had run from the village and made his way to Nagpur. Spinelli found him wandering the streets, starving, and took him on as his personal servant. To Spinelli’s great fortune, the boy turned out to be honest, intelligent, and diligent in his duties. I found him of great help in our travels myself.”

Holmes continued by telling me that Spinelli tried to find his servant Lachman further employment with the Italian legation in Bombay, but to no avail. He therefore gave him a sum of cash that he estimated would last until the boy found further work. Lachman used the money to send for his wife and to construct a small house on the edge of what is called the Chor Bazaar, the great flea market of Bombay. He had no other income and Spinelli, still concerned about his survival, left more money—this time the princely sum of about five hundred Indian rupees—with Holmes, who promised Spinelli that before his final departure from Bombay he would visit Lachman and deliver the gift.

It was more than three weeks after Spinelli’s departure, however, before Holmes found a moment to begin the search for Lachman. He had been called in to a minor affair that had baffled the Bombay police, and it was only after it had been resolved that he began to look for the boy. Spinelli had drawn him a small map and with it Holmes found his way to the Chor Bazaar, or Thieves’ Bazaar, and therein Lachman’s modest abode.

When he arrived, he found only Lachman’s wife, whom he had met only once previously. As soon as she saw him, however, she burst into tears and began to tell in her broken Hindustanee what had happened to poor Lachman.

On the previous evening, she said, she and Lachman had gone to visit some close friends. Their friends had entertained them well, so that when they returned they sat in their small garden, passing the time until bedtime. Lachman had been out of sorts because of a quarrel that afternoon, and she tried to change his mood by idle chatter, but without success. She pointed to a spider climbing up the leg of a nearby chair.

“What do you call these little beasties in your village?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. Angrily picking up a nearby shoe, he aimed it at the insect.

“Don’t kill him, don’t!” she shouted. But Lachman did not hear her entreaty and despatched the helpless spider.

“May he rest in peace,” he said mockingly.

Furious with her husband, she was about to go inside when they thought they heard a noise.

“Shhh, listen,” said Lachman. “There is someone in there with him.” Lachman became even angrier, but she calmed him and they retired for the night.

Because they were again short of money, the couple had rented out one of their rooms to a guest, a retired soldier returning from abroad, and it was he that they had just heard talking in a low voice to someone unknown. And it was with this soldier that Lachman had had a near violent altercation on the street, for the soldier had made unwanted advances towards his wife. There had been many witnesses to the argument. So heated had their quarrel become that Lachman had threatened to kill the soldier and had to be restrained by his neighbours.

It was later during the night, after they had retired, that they were awakened by a loud thud coming from the soldier’s room. Lachman put on his shirt and, lighting a candle, he and his wife went into the corridor. They heard strange gasping from the soldier’s room. Frightened, they opened the door to find the soldier lying in a pool of blood, his neck badly cut by a sharp knife. A cash box, filled with rupees, lay open on the floor. It was the box hitting the floor that had awakened them. Interrupted by the noise, the murderer had fled quickly. The open window attested to his escape. Lachman tried to help the dying man by holding his head up and offering him water, but to no avail. He expired almost immediately.

Lachman told his wife to inform the police, and that he would notify the head man of their block. His wife did as he requested, and Lachman, now bloodstained, stared at his dead enemy for a moment and then began walking towards the head man’s house.

It was a dark night, and he walked slowly at first, thinking over the events of the day. This scoundrel, who had tried to touch his wife, was now dead, and Lachman could not help but feel a certain satisfaction. But the sight of the dying man had changed much of his anger to pity, and, as he walked in the night, he lost all bitterness towards him. Suddenly, Lachman’s mind seized on a thought, and he was thrown into a panic: what if he were to be accused of the murder? Had he not threatened to kill the man in front of a large crowd of witnesses? He began to run towards the head man’s house, but when he reached there, instead of entering, he kept on going. In a fit of fear, he ran into the night, forgetting everything, his wife, his very life.

Lachman’s wife said that the police found him not far away, cowering and shivering at the home of a friend who had convinced him to give himself up. His attempt to escape had convinced the police that he had indeed committed the murder. His wife’s words were discounted, for it was believed that she would do anything to protect him. And so he was arrested, charged with the crime of murder. He now sat somewhere in a Bombay cell, awaiting the next step of Indian criminal justice.

Lachman’s wife was sobbing by the end of her story, and Holmes could get nothing more from her. He went at once to the local police station to find Lachman. There the chief inspector, a most intelligent man by the name of Pushkar Shamsher, made it clear that he regarded the whole affair as unfortunate but as an open-and-shut case. The circumstantial evidence was conclusive. There was, he said, an unimpeachable witness who, as he passed their house that night, heard Lachman’s wife cry “Don’t kill him!” and an angry “May he rest in peace” from Lachman’s mouth. He had bloodstains on his shirt, his knife was not in its case, and, above all, he had a motive: Lachman had publicly threatened to kill his boarder that very day. The soldier’s cash box had not been taken. Robbery was therefore not the motive. No, said the inspector, let us not waste our time. Lachman is guilty.

“There is nothing to be done, my friend,” said Inspector Shamsher. “A most tragic case of anger leading to murder.”

“Perhaps,” said Holmes, “But I know the boy well, having travelled with him from Trivandrum. I am not convinced.”

Holmes asked that he be allowed to visit Lachman, and his request was immediately granted. Because of the grim nature of his crime, Lachman was alone in a small, vile cell deep inside Bombay’s main prison. The poor boy was overjoyed when he saw Holmes, for his first thought was that he had obtained his release. Holmes had to tell him at once that he would try to help in his case, but that he did not know if he would be successful.

“How is my case, Sahib? I did not kill that man. Believe me. And believe my wife. Someone else came into the house. Through the window.”

“Then why did you run?” asked Holmes

“‘I suddenly became frightened, Sahib. I could not think. I ran and ran. Then I realised I had no where to go. So I went to my friend’s house and he called the police. That is all.’”

Holmes then asked Lachman to recount everything he remembered, from the time he met the soldier until he ran from the scene of his murder. Detailed as it was, he was unable to add anything to the story that his wife had not already related. Holmes asked him to try and remember the voice that he thought he heard coming from the soldier’s room, but he could not. And the soldier died before he could say anything.

Holmes had seen enough of Lachman on his journey to believe in his innocence. He now had to find a way of proving that he had not committed the murder. This would not be easy. The circumstantial evidence was very strong. How to tear this web of circumstance and arrive at the truth?

He comforted Lachman, telling him that he would do his best to clear his name. He returned directly to Lachman’s house to examine the scene of the crime. He had of course by this time no chance of examining the murdered man where he had been killed, and the room had been ransacked by the police. Still, he went about his business, carefully looking through the dust, examining the meagre furniture, the string bed, and the various other articles in the room. The window was still open and someone could have left by it in a hurry. The murderer, hearing the approaching Lachman and his wife, could have rushed through it into the night. What looked like smudged hand and foot prints were visible on the frame and the sill. But how again to prove that they were those of someone other than Lachman?

It soon became apparent to Holmes that his methods of observation and deduction depended very heavily on another set of assumptions, assumptions that involved not only criminals and the police, but the society at large.

“What one observes and deduces in London,” he said, “is based on what Londoners ordinarily do and think. And my experience in the Orient had been so far almost exclusively with the crime of Europeans, among whom the same set of assumptions held. Here in Bombay, particularly among the lower classes, I had suddenly to think in different ways. My questions were of the same kind. Who was this soldier who was killed? From where had he come? Who killed him and for what motive? But I must say that as I gazed around the dusty room, I was totally without answers. If the questions I asked were the same as those that I might ask at home, could the answers be so different?”

Holmes rose and began to pace about the room. “I realised at once that this was a case in which the most minute examination of detail, the sifting of every word of Lachman’s and his wife’s testimonies, the scrutiny of every piece of evidence, would eventually produce another hypothesis, an explanation of the evidence that told another story. I renewed my efforts at the scene of the crime. If I looked carefully enough and went over the room skillfully enough, something would be found of value. Again I scoured the room. Finally, under the bed, I saw two small pieces of reddish clay, fairly fresh. My hopes were increased when I noticed that the same clay was stuck to the end of the bed, where someone’s feet may have deposited them, either those of the murdered man or the person who had killed him. I re-examined the window sill and noticed to my great elation small traces of the same clay. Hoping that they did not come from this part of the city, I placed them carefully in a small envelope. I examined the rest of the house and all the shoes that were there. There was no red clay anywhere, none on any of the shoes. I also found one other clue, significant for Lachman’s wife’s version of the story, but in itself not enough to change anything: in one corner of the room was a single
chupple
on the sole of which the body of a dead spider lay crushed.”