A Study in Sherlock

“Now then,” he went on, pointing with his chin towards the woman sitting alone on the park bench closest to the water. “Over there is a person who seems quite ordinary—quite plain. No superabundance of clues to be had. I’ll bet you a shilling you can’t supply me with three solid facts about her.”

As he spoke, the woman leaped to her feet and called out to a child who was knee-deep in the water.

“Heinrich! Come here, my sweet little toad!”

“She is German,” I said.

“Quite so,” said Montague. “And can you venture more? Pray, do go on.”

“She’s German,” I said with finality, hoping to bring to an end this unwanted exercise. “And that’s an end of it.”

“Is it?” he asked, looking at me closely.

I did not condescend to reply.

“Let me see, then, if I may succeed in taking up where you have left off. As you have observed, she is German. We shall begin with that. Next, we shall note that she is married: the rings on the usual finger of the left hand make that quite clear, an opinion which is bolstered by the fact that young Heinrich, who has lost his stick in the water, is the very image of his pretty little mother.

“She is widowed—and very recently, if I am any judge. Her black dress is fresh from Peter Robinson’s Mourning Warehouse. Indeed, the tag is still affixed at the nape of her neck, which tells us, among many other things, that regardless of her apparent poise, she is greatly distracted and no longer has a maid.

“In spite of having overlooked the tag, she possesses excellent eyesight, evinced by the fact that she is able to read the excruciatingly small type of the book which is resting in her lap, and without more than an upward glance, keep an eye upon her child who is now nearly halfway across the basin. What do you suppose would bring such a woman to a public park?”

“Really, Montague,” I said. “You have no right—”

“Tut, my dear fellow. I am merely exercising the possibilities. In truth, I have barely scratched the surface. Where were we? Oh, yes. German. Indubitably German. But from which region in particular?

“Let us begin with young master Heinrich. What was it she called him? ‘My sweet toad,’ wasn’t it? An expression which, although not restricted to Baden, is nevertheless much more commonly to be heard there than in other parts of the country.

“Very well, then let us for the moment hypothesize that the young widow is from Baden. How may we test that rather broad assumption?

“Let us dwell for a moment upon her teeth. Surely you noticed, as I did when she called out to her child, that she showed a very fine, strong set of teeth, remarkable however, not for their completeness or their pleasing alignment, but rather for the fact that they are pinkish: a rare, but nonetheless documented phenomenon which arises only in those who have been accustomed to drink, from birth, the iron-rich waters of certain spas.

“As I know from my own remarkable cure in those waters, one of those with the highest content of ferric matter is at Mergentheim. Yes, I should say we could not go far astray if we pegged the lady as a Swabian from Baden. That and her accent, of course.”

I couldn’t restrain a laugh.

“Altogether far-fetched,” I told him. “Your hypotheses, as you call them, leave no elbow room for reality. What if, for instance, she is mourning her father? Or her mother? Or her great-grandmother, for that matter?”

“Then her name would not have been splashed all over the front pages of this morning’s newspapers as the wife of a murder victim.”

“What?”

“Tragic, but nevertheless quite true, I assure you.”

He reached with two fingers into his vest pocket and extracted a double-columned clipping which he proceeded to unfold and flatten on his knee.

“Shocking death in Buncombe Place,” he read aloud. “Police were called at an early hour this morning to Number Six, Buncombe Place by Mrs. Frieda Barnett, who had, moments before, found her husband, Welland Barnett, aged fifty, of the same address, dead in the drawing room in a pool of his own blood. The victim had received a number of stab wounds to the back of his neck, any one of which might have proved fatal, according to the police surgeon at the scene …

“They oughtn’t really to put that in,” he interrupted himself. “Not until autopsy and inquest are complete. I’m quite sure that heads will roll—if it is not indelicate to express such an opinion.”

I couldn’t find words to respond, and Montague went on with his reading.