Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black Read online

  She nodded towards the candlesticks arranged on the dressing table and beside the bed.

  ‘They were hers, Mr Holmes. Her grandmother, Mrs Trevalyan, left her all the family silver. There were other things as well: pictures, pieces of jewellery, things Miss Eleanor knew from her childhood. Then he started taking them and selling them off.’

  ‘Roger Sinclair, you mean?’ Holmes asked.

  ‘Oh, so you’ve heard of him, have you?’ she asked, bright-eyed. ‘You know what Bill and me used to call him? The scavenger. He’d snap up anything valuable you left lying about and sell it; even the house Mr Sutton had built for her. We were living then in a little old cottage in the rough part of town. But he’d still turn up even there. He knew she still had some money and investments Mrs Trevalyan had left her in trust. And then I caught him one day trying to force himself on her. Don’t tell Bill that. It’ll only upset him even more. That’s when I made up my mind.’

  ‘To do what?’ Holmes asked.

  ‘To clear out, of course,’ Mary Neave said, as if any fool should have known the answer. ‘I said to Bill, “I’m not putting up with it any longer. We’ll go and take Miss Eleanor with us.” I’d gone through the papers Mrs Sutton’s solicitor had drawn up – Miss Eleanor was in no state to deal with anything like that – and found out she had £100 in cash as well as stocks and shares so I got Miss Eleanor to sign up for the lot to be withdrawn before he got his hands on it. “Right! Start packing!” I said to Bill when the bank statement came through. “We’re leaving!” “Where to?” he asked. “Fulworth”, I said. “We’re taking her home.” It was what she wanted. She kept crying all the time, “I want to go home! I want to go home!” Like a little child who’s lost.’

  ‘And then?’ Holmes asked obviously fascinated by her story.

  ‘Once the money was safe in her account, we bought a van, packed everything in it and drove off to Sussex.’

  ‘Did you know that Fulworth Hall was empty and up for renting?’ I asked, like Holmes bemused by Mary Neave’s narration.

  Mary Neave gave me a smile.

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ she replied. ‘We hoped there’d be somewhere cheap in the village that we could buy or lease for the three of us.’

  She broke off here to put an unexpected question to Holmes and myself.

  ‘Do you believe in fate?’ she asked.

  Holmes and I looked at each other, not sure how to respond. There was no need to anyway for she answered it for herself.

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I never had before but I did then. We were driving down the hill towards the village when we saw the ‘To Let’ sign by the gate of Fulworth Hall. It was a godsend; sent by God; and it was meant to happen. I’m sure of that. So we went straight back to Lewes to the estate agent and arranged to pay the rent for it there and then.

  ‘The man warned us it was in a poor state. It had been empty for several years. But we didn’t care. Me and Bill cleaned it up as best as we could and we bought one or two bits of furniture to go in it from a second-hand shop, such as the bed,’ nodding at it, before breaking off to address Holmes.

  ‘Is that all, sir?’

  He responded immediately.

  ‘No, Mrs Neave. It’s far from all. There’s a lot left that still hasn’t been explained.’

  She accepted the rebuke without protest. Straightening herself up, she looked him directly in the face.

  ‘You mean us breaking into Melchett Manor and stealing some of the silver?’

  ‘I do indeed. Tell me what happened.’

  She was not easily cowed.

  ‘There’s not a lot to say, sir,’ she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘We knew what Roger Sinclair had stolen from her. I’d kept a list of everything he’d taken down to the last teaspoon. It was not long after we’d moved to Fulworth when Bill had gone into Lewes to do some shopping – we steered clear of Fulworth village in case there was any gossip about us. Anyway, he bought a copy of the local newspaper, the Lewes Gazette, and there was an item in it about the owners of Melchett Manor buying a new selection of silverware at an auction to add to their collection and they’d decided to put it all on display. Several pieces were described. One of them was a little casket with silver roses on the lid. It was one of Miss Eleanor’s best-loved pieces her grandmother had left her. She kept asking where some of the things had gone, “Where’s my christening cup?” She’d say. Or “Have you seen the silver bowl we used to put flowers in?” It distressed her. I hated to see her cry.’

  ‘So you decided to take them back?’ Holmes asked.

  ‘I’m afraid we did, sir. Bill went to look around the place on one of the open days and thought we could get in without too much trouble.’

  ‘Through the pantry window?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I did that. I was the smallest. Bill was too big and we couldn’t expect Miss Eleanor to do it.’

  It was said in the same calm almost dismissive manner.

  ‘You took her with you?’ I asked, taken aback.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘She couldn’t be left alone. She was too ill by then.’

  ‘Ill?’ I repeated.

  ‘In the head, sir. She’d lost her mind. There was no knowing what she might do.’

  ‘Like going down to the beach in the middle of the night and sitting on one of the rocks?’ Holmes put in.

  She gave him a quick glance.

  ‘You saw her, sir?’

  ‘A couple of times. I noticed your husband on the last occasion leading her back to the house.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ was the only reply she granted him before adding, ‘is that everything?’

  ‘Almost,’ he replied. ‘There’s still the matter of the crypt to be dealt with. You kept some of the silver down there. Why?’

  ‘Because Bill thought he’d seen Roger Sinclair one day in Lewes so we decided to lock all the silver up somewhere safe. But I think Bill was mistaken. It wasn’t Sinclair he’d seen.’

  ‘How did you get into the crypt?’ Holmes continued.

  ‘With a key,’ she replied with a small wry smile as much as to say ‘Isn’t that obvious?’ But as Holmes made no response, she added, ‘The old grandfather, Henry Trevalyan, left one for everybody in the family so that they could be buried with him, I suppose, and he’d still be Lord of the Manor even after he died. The solicitor gave it to us when he sorted out Miss Eleanor’s papers.’ After a little pause in which she regarded us both with that same amused expression, she went on, ‘And if you’ve ever wondered why she always wore black it was because of the death of her mother and grandmother in the same year. It was then that her mind began to go wrong. There was too much grief for her to bear any longer.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ Holmes said while I simply bent my head in agreement.

  But Mrs Neave had not quite finished with us.

  ‘Now let me ask both of you something. What’s going to happen to Bill and me? I suppose the police will have to be told about us stealing the silver from Melchett Manor and we’ll have to go to prison? I’m right, aren’t I?’

  Holmes and I exchanged glances and it was he who answered.

  ‘Leave it with me, Mrs Neave. We’ll discuss this after the funeral.’

  And with that, he rose from his chair and walked towards the door, leaving me with no option but to follow him.

  ‘Discuss?’ I demanded when we set off in the car to return to Holmes’ cottage. ‘What good can we do in discussing it? They’ll be charged with theft and go to prison. There’s the end of it.’

  ‘Oh, Watson, my dear fellow, you must learn to be a little less pessimistic. There are ways and means. Trust me.’

  I do not know what ‘ways and means’ Holmes used. I only know that he spent a long time on the telephone speaking to Inspector Bardle the following day and that by the time the funeral was arranged something, somehow had been agreed and all was well. He had also, I found out later, arranged with the solicitor for the Neaves to inherit Eleanor Sutton’s s
ettlement of the stocks and shares.

  ‘You see,’ Holmes remarked, ‘fate does sometimes turn up trumps, like Mrs Neave’s godsend. But don’t ask how it happened, Watson.’

  I stayed on for a few more days to attend Eleanor Sutton’s funeral. I felt I had to be there and my wife agreed.

  It was a moving ceremony. St Botolph’s was packed with people from the village who had known and remembered her mother and grandmother, and Eleanor herself as a child. Mrs B, who was among the congregation, said there was more there than had been for Henry Trevalyan’s funeral. And rightly too.

  After the service, the coffin was driven away to Barton for a private internment with just the family attending and she was buried with her mother, as I’m sure she herself would have wanted, under the white cross, her name and dates added to the marble book that lay open on the grave.

  Fate also intervened, I felt sure, a littler later when Langdale Pike telephoned Holmes to inform him of Roger Sinclair’s own fate. He had died, Pike said, of cirrhosis of the liver, alone in some shabby little hotel room in London, and had been buried in a pauper’s grave.

  ‘And, as Mrs B might have said,’ Holmes continued, ‘serves him right!’

  I must confess that I agreed with him completely.

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  About the Author

  JUNE THOMSON, a former teacher, has published over thirty novels, twenty of which feature her series detective Inspector Jack Finch and his sergeant, Tom Boyce. She has also written seven pastiche collections of Sherlock Holmes short stories. Her books have been translated into many languages. June Thomson lives in Rugby, Warwickshire.

  By the Same Author

  THE SHERLOCK HOLMES COLLECTION

  The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes

  The Secret Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

  The Secret Journals of Sherlock Holmes

  Holmes and Watson

  The Secret Documents of Sherlock Holmes

  The Secret Notebooks of Sherlock Holmes

  The Secret Archives of Sherlock Holmes

  Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black

  THE JACK FINCH MYSTERIES

  Going Home

  Copyright

  Allison & Busby Limited

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  First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2015.

  This ebook edition published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2015.

  Copyright © 2015 by JUNE THOMSON

  The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978–0–7490–1843–6