A Study in Sherlock

“The deceased was described as a man of regular habits, and had no known enemies, according to Mrs. Barnett, who is left to mourn with her only child, Heinrich, aged four years …

“They always go for the heart, don’t they, these scandal sheets—like the bullets at a military execution. Where were we—oh, yes, her child …”

Montague paused to look out at the little boy who had now fished his stick from the water and was giving the surface a good wet thrashing by way of repayment.

“ … her only child, Heinrich, aged four years,” he went on. “Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard has given it as his opinion that robbery may have been a motive, inasmuch as a small silver key of peculiar design was missing from its customary place upon the victim’s waistcoat chain, according to Ellen Dimity, the Barnetts’ cook. Inspector Gregson declined to give further information until investigations are complete, although he has requested that any person or persons who might have further information bearing upon this crime, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Would you like to read it?”

He offered the paper, but I shook my head.

“No thank you. I find such things upsetting.”

“Indeed,” he said, “as do I. Which is precisely why I made my way to Number Six, Buncombe Place, and begged my old friend Gregson to let me have a look round.”

“Inspector Gregson? You know him?”

Montague chuckled, a surprisingly shrill cackle that ended in a suppressed cough.

“Old lags have friends, too,” he said. “Surprising, isn’t it, the people you meet in a park?”

I said nothing because there was nothing to say.

“The thing of it was,” he went on, as if I had asked him to, “the position of the wounds, which were high on the back of the neck. Welland Barnett was an exceedingly tall individual, over six feet in height—as much as six foot three or four, by my own measurement of his prostrate body. Am I upsetting you?”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve not yet eaten today, and I’m afraid it’s telling.”

“Ah, then. Presently we shall step round to the Hart and Hurdy-Gurdy for a pig’s knuckle and a pint of Burton. Then we shall be fit for whatever lies ahead.”

I gave him a weak smile.

“And then there was the widow,” he said, glancing at the woman in black who sat, again motionless, upon the bench, her gaze fixed firmly upon the ground.

“How peculiar, don’t you think, that she should leave the house under circumstances in which drawn drapes and smelling salts are most often the order of the day?

“But perhaps it was the child—perhaps she wanted to get young Heinrich as quickly as possible away from that house of death. But no, the good Gregson assured me that the child had put up quite a fuss—what you might call a scene, in fact—over being dragged into the street and involving, in the end, more of the neighbors than it ought.

“Gregson could not detain her, of course. She had given her account of finding her husband’s body; her words had been taken down in the prescribed form; the house had been searched; the body was in the process of being removed.

“Why, then, would she leave?”

I shrugged.

“Who could know?” I said. “There are as many reasons as stars in the heavens. It is pointless to guess.”

“Guess?” Montague’s voice and his eyebrows shot up. “Where murder’s afoot the guess is disallowed. The facts must be driven home one by one like nails into the shoe of a horse. Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Tap! Do you hear them, Mr. De Voors?”

“No,” I replied, “but then I’ve never been given over greatly to imagination.”

“Then I shall help you,” he said. “Imagine this: imagine that on a fine day in autumn a woman leaves the house in which her husband has just been brutally murdered, and sets out with her only child, for a park that is somewhat more than a mile away.

“Why not the park that is directly across the street from where she lives? Why not the one in the next block—or the next?

“The child has no sailboat, but only a stick which he picked up near the gate. I saw it with my own eyes. So it is not the water which is the attraction. It is, in the second place, distance. She did not wish to be observed. She came here, as I knew she must have done. Where else may one with a child become invisible but in the city’s largest park?”

“The second place, you say? Then what is the first?”