The Labyrinth of Death Read online

  “I do not guess,” Holmes said sharply. “The evidence is plain. You have a gold wedding band on the ring finger of your right hand, and a mark on the ring finger of the left that indicates the selfsame band resided thereon until recently. You have switched the band from one to the other, showing that you have accustomed yourself to the loss of your wife but that she will never fade from your memory or your heart.”

  Our visitor bent his head and thumbed the corner of one eye.

  “In addition,” Holmes went on, “a strip of the upper left sleeve of your jacket is marginally cleaner than the rest. It accords with wearing the black armband of mourning, a habit you have only newly abandoned. I would hazard that it is but six months since your wife passed away.”

  The man was now tangibly upset, his shoulders heaving, and I motioned to Holmes, indicating that he should, for the time being at least, refrain from further comment on the subject. I laid a hand on the judge’s arm and offered a comforting word or two. I myself had suffered a similar bereavement in the not-too-distant past. My own wife had left this world some three years earlier, during that period when I was under the impression that Holmes likewise was dead after his fateful clash in Switzerland with Professor Moriarty. The blow of Mary’s demise, coming on the heels of the apparent demise of my closest friend, had sent me reeling, and I still had yet to recover fully from it. A part of me continued to nurture the hope that my late wife would, as Holmes had, make a miraculous return from the grave, for all that I knew this was impossible. In Holmes’s case there had been no body, and therefore always a lingering element of doubt, whereas with Mary I had been there, holding her hand, as she slipped slowly away from me.

  Eventually our visitor mastered his feelings and, drawing a sharp breath, said, “You are correct, Mr Holmes. My beloved Margaret is no longer with us. But I have worse to contend with, for now my daughter, my only child, has gone missing!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE DISAPPEARED DAUGHTER

  “My name, Mr Holmes, is Sir Osbert Woolfson,” the judge said. “I have served the Law loyally all my adult life, from studying jurisprudence at Cambridge to becoming a pupil, an advocate, a QC, then eleven years ago being appointed a Justice of the High Court by Her Majesty. You would be hard pressed to find someone who has faith in the British legal system to the extent that I do. You will appreciate, therefore, that it goes hard for me to throw myself on the mercies of one such as yourself, who operates outside that system.”

  “I am no less ardent an upholder of the law than you, Sir Osbert,” Holmes replied. “My methods may be my own, but my goal is never anything other than the apprehension of criminals and the application of due justice.”

  “Given that so many in the constabulary approve of you, I cannot believe it to be otherwise. Nor would I have come here if I had not been failed by the same processes to which I have dedicated myself for so long. Put simply: Hannah, my daughter, vanished a week ago. She went out for a stroll in the morning and did not return home. I have not seen hide or hair of her since, and the police have shown themselves signally incapable of finding her.”

  Holmes rolled his eyes. “That is, alas, all too typical. Scotland Yard has plenty of triers in its ranks but precious few achievers. Even the best of policemen, however well-intentioned, are apt to make a situation worse rather than better through their involvement.”

  “You take a dimmer view of their capabilities than I, yet on present showing I cannot entirely gainsay your assertion. As soon as I became aware of Hannah’s absence I alerted the appropriate authorities. I cannot fault the alacrity and diligence with which they responded. There were officials thronging my house within the hour, and I received all manner of assurances that no stone would go unturned, no avenue unexplored, no lead unpursued, and so forth.”

  “For a man of your rank and standing, that is hardly surprising.”

  “Indeed,” Sir Osbert Woolfson allowed, “but the promises have come to naught. The Yard has dedicated a great deal of manpower to the search for Hannah, but so far not the slightest trace of my girl has been discovered. There have been no reported sightings of her. No witnesses have been unearthed who may attest to her movements or whereabouts. She has, it would seem, been whisked off the face of the Earth.”

  “I am sure that is not the case,” I said. “She is somewhere, safe and sound. She must be.” The words sounded banal even to my ears, but I felt that some consolation must be tendered to the judge and it undoubtedly was not going to come from Holmes.

  “When I went to the Yard today to vent my frustration at the lack of progress,” Sir Osbert said, “one inspector drew me aside and confided that Sherlock Holmes might be the answer to my prayers. Lester, I think his name was. Pale, rodent-like chap.”

  “Lestrade,” said Holmes.

  “That is he. He told me that he could personally vouch for you. You had, he said, been useful to him on a few occasions.”

  “‘Useful’. How generous of friend Lestrade. Perhaps, Sir Osbert, you would be so good as to give me some information about your daughter and the circumstances of her unexplained disappearance.”

  “I shall endeavour to do so. What do you need to know?”

  “First of all, how old is your daughter?”

  “Twenty-nine, nearly thirty.”

  “A spinster?”

  “She is, yes. That is not for a lack of suitors, nor a lack of accomplishment and physical attractiveness. Far from it. Though I say so myself, Hannah is a charming, lively, beautiful creature – the very spit of her mother in those respects. She plays the piano with expertise and finesse. She has a gracious air. She is well-educated, highly articulate, not to mention well-read. She is, in short, a catch for any man, a pearl of great prize. There have been numerous offers for her hand, the majority from candidates I would have no hesitation in welcoming as a son-in-law. And yet…”

  “She turns them down.”

  “Hannah is deucedly headstrong.” Woolfson gave a heartfelt sigh. “I would not go so far as to say she is the sort who would join the campaign for women’s suffrage, but she has definite leanings in that direction. She reckons herself the equal of any male and goes out of her way to prove it. Those who would have her as a wife are not deterred by this. I suspect they believe that marriage would reform her, making her more compliant and biddable. All the same, no man cares to be made to feel that he is a woman’s inferior. For instance, when one of these aspirants plays Hannah at tennis, invariably she wins, and by some margin. She does not, as a wiser woman might, feign incompetence and allow her opponent to be the victor. Far from it. She trounces him with merciless aplomb.”

  “That is something masculine pride will not easily support.”

  “And she insists on indulging in high-flown conversation, relishing the cut-and-thrust of a good intellectual argument. Petty small-talk and a pretence of dull-wittedness – not for my Hannah. Often, at a dinner party, she will refuse to withdraw with the rest of the women and will insist on remaining at the table with the men, to join in their discourse. My friends tolerate the habit but privately one or two of them have had words with me to complain. It is exasperating. She is a tremendous girl and I am inordinately fond of her, but I do wish she had more in the way of feminine wiles, as her mother did.”

  “All the same, it is not beyond the bounds of reason that she may have eloped. Can it be that some beau has come her way and swept her off her feet?”

  “Inconceivable. She would not do that to me. During these past months, and before, when my wife Margaret was gravely ill, Hannah has been my rock. She has coped with the tragedy far better than I have.”

  “Perhaps this eligible bachelor I am hypothesising about is an unsuitable match. Knowing he would not gain your approval, your daughter has absconded with him, and the two of them will traipse home in the near future as husband and wife, presenting you with a fait accompli.”

  “Again, inconceivable. She would never betray me like that. Each of us is
all the other has. Hannah would never do anything that she knows might cause me pain, especially not at present.”

  “Is she employed?”

  “She lives with me but works part-time as a private tutor for various respectable families in the locality, helping those of their children who have fallen behind in their studies. By all accounts she excels at it. She also performs the duties of personal secretary to me, managing my correspondence and my diary and suchlike.”

  “You have checked, I presume, with these families? They have been unable to supply you with any clues regarding her disappearance?”

  “They are all as baffled as I.”

  “And her behaviour immediately prior to this event – there was nothing untoward about it?”

  “I must confess,” said Woolfson, “I have not been the most attentive of parents in recent weeks. I have been distracted, you understand. Not in my right mind. My work has not suffered. Indeed, I have thrown myself into it wholeheartedly, finding a refuge there from grief. But domestically, I regret to say, I have rather let things go. The solace of alcohol has beckoned to me and I have regularly answered its call. Many an evening I have lapsed into an inebriated stupor, necessitating that Hannah conduct me up to my bedroom. It shames me to tell you this, but I must, for it means that if she has been acting in any way unusually, out of character, I will not have been in the best position to notice.”

  “So any secretiveness on her part, any divergence from her normal pattern of life, will have escaped you?”

  “Most likely. Oh, Mr Holmes, Dr Watson, I cannot help but feel that I am responsible for all this. I have driven Hannah away by being an intolerable burden on her at an already difficult time.”

  “Come, come, let us have none of that,” I said. “Self-recrimination will get you nowhere.”

  “There is another explanation, of course,” said Holmes. “I am loath to raise the idea, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that your daughter’s disappearance was not of her own volition.”

  “She was kidnapped, you mean? Abducted?” said Woolfson. “That did occur to me too, though I have tried my damnedest to discount it.”

  “A man like you must have enemies: a wrongdoer whom you consigned to jail and who has since been paroled might well nurse a grudge. Likewise a relative of someone whom you ordered to be transported or even sentenced to death. How better to strike back at you than through your closest kin?”

  I shuddered. “The very notion chills me to the bone.”

  “Militating against the probability,” Holmes said, “is the fact that you have received no notification from any abductor. You would have mentioned it if you had.”

  The judge nodded. “There has been no ransom demand, nor any crowing message from a captor.”

  “There would surely have been by now. A week is a long time for someone bent on revenge to stay silent. If the aim of taking your daughter were to hurt you, the miscreant would want you to know that she is in his power. It would feed his sense of superiority over you and satisfy his feelings of grievance. No, we may regard the dearth of activity on that front as a positive sign.”

  “Is Hannah even alive, though?” said Woolfson. “That is the thought which torments me the most. Has she met with some accident? Or has she, God forbid, fallen foul of some savage lunatic like that Ripper fellow of recent memory? Is her body even now lying… lying somewhere—”

  He broke off. One could only imagine the nights he had spent wide-awake wondering, the unspoken terrors that assailed him every hour of the day. It was chastening to see so illustrious and upright a man humbled and broken.

  “Sir Osbert,” I said, “listen to me. I feel I can speak for Holmes as well as myself when I say that we will do everything in our power to locate your daughter and reunite you with her. Is that not so, Holmes?”

  My friend waved a hand abstractedly, which I could only take to signify assent.

  “In the meantime,” I went on, “I advise that you go home and try to get some rest. I have a soporific draught in my medical bag that I will give to you and insist you must administer to yourself. A good night’s sleep will have a remarkable restorative effect.”

  “You are too kind, Dr Watson. I – I suppose it can do no harm. As a matter of fact I feel a little less frantic already, knowing that Sherlock Holmes has agreed to take the case.”

  “We shall pay a call on you first thing tomorrow. Your address?”

  Woolfson fumbled out a card. He lived, it transpired, on one of the smartest streets in Mayfair.

  “I thank you both, gentlemen,” said he. “I shall see myself out. Good evening.”

  No sooner had he left the premises than Holmes said, “Watson, you should not have been so quick to give Sir Osbert false hope.”

  “False hope? You saw the man, Holmes. I had to do something to alleviate his distress.”

  “Still, it was far from prudent to make him a pledge we may not be able to keep. What if we fail to find this Hannah?”

  “Then he will know that we have tried our best and will surely find it in his heart to forgive our lack of success.”

  “You vaunt my abilities higher than perhaps they warrant. There seems precious little to go on here.”

  “So far, yes, but doubtless an inspection of his home tomorrow will scour up clues.”

  “That is as maybe,” said Holmes. “Nonetheless I fear the worst. For a daughter so loyal and devoted to go missing without warning or explanation is a matter of the utmost gravity. I pray I am up to the task for which I have been volunteered.”

  I let out a huff of exasperation. “As if you would not have volunteered yourself!” I ejaculated. “I was merely confirming the inevitable.”

  Holmes reached for his clay pipe and the Persian slipper where he kept his tobacco. “Well, what’s done is done. We shall learn tomorrow, shan’t we, whether or not I can shed some light on this very dark prospect.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A PRACTITIONER OF THE EPISTOLARY ART

  Accordingly, we turned up the next morning at the door of a large Regency townhouse on one corner of a garden square in Mayfair. A butler ushered us within, and we presented ourselves in Sir Osbert Woolfson’s study, where the man himself greeted us warmly. He looked markedly improved from the previous day. His face had a more even colour and was less haggard. Yet his eyes remained haunted and there was something desperate in the profuse gratitude he expressed to us, in particular to my companion.

  “Anything you need to ask, Mr Holmes,” he said, “any question at all, do not hesitate. I am at your beck and call, as are my household staff. If you wish to interrogate them, go ahead. I have instructed them to cooperate fully.”

  “Before anything else, I should like to see Hannah’s quarters.”

  “Naturally. Right this way.”

  Woolfson led us upstairs to the second floor, where Hannah had a suite of rooms to herself, consisting of a bedroom, a bathroom and a modest drawing room. The last of these was so bedecked with books that one might legitimately have dubbed it a library. Upon the shelves I spied titles by Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand, which added weight to her father’s depiction of her as an independent-minded and free-thinking woman. Yet I was also pleased to note that her tastes in contemporary fiction reflected mine, with the works of Dickens, Scott and Mrs Gaskell prominent in her collection. Moreover, my own writings were well represented, and I would not be human if I were not flattered to see this. An author, above all else, craves confirmation that he is read.

  Holmes, for his part, embarked on a lengthy perusal of all three rooms in the suite. He subjected the furnishings to close analysis and, with Woolfson’s permission, went through the contents of Hannah’s wardrobe and chest of drawers. These, judging by his shrugs of dissatisfaction, yielded nothing of significant value to him.

  More fruitful, however, was her writing desk. It was a bowlegged escritoire fashioned from walnut and fitted with a plethora of drawers and cubbyholes. Ink stains
on the veneer suggested that it had received plenty of use over the course of its lifetime. Holmes studied it for several minutes, running a hand over its contours and now and then rapping on its surfaces with a knuckle.

  “May I?” he said, gesturing at packets of letters tied up with string and lodged neatly in the cubbyholes.

  “By all means,” said Woolfson. “Hannah is a prodigious letter writer. She produces three or four at a sitting, sometimes more, and receives at least one a day.”

  “I am reluctant to intrude on personal correspondence, but I believe it could prove worthwhile.”

  “Anything that will help.”

  The letters were from friends, relatives and acquaintances, and Holmes scanned them one by one with an appraising eye, lingering longer over some than others.

  “Amongst the contents of the more recent specimens there is a lot about your wife, Sir Osbert, and her illness and eventual passing. Expressions of sympathy, regret and condolence. Going further back we find copious amounts of gossip. An aunt who did this, a neighbour who did that. All very trivial and unrevealing. Of course I am getting only one side of the story. Hannah’s own letters would, I am sure, have more meat to them. Indeed, to illustrate, here is one correspondent – a Winifred Forshaw – who upbraids your daughter for being so intense and serious.”

  “Winifred is a cousin of Hannah’s on my wife’s side of the family.”

  “‘There are times, dearest Hannah, when your earnestness ill becomes you,’” Holmes read aloud. “‘I say this lovingly and with respect. I realise you are infinitely cleverer than I shall ever be, but you perhaps do not always have an appreciation of the lighter side of things. Nor do you hold in high enough esteem the role that I and many other women have chosen for ourselves – that of dutiful wife and caring mother – when it is, I would submit, the highest calling any of our sex can answer.’”

  He flicked through several further letters, muttering to himself as he assessed the intrinsic merit of each. “Irrelevant. Uninteresting. Boring. Less boring. Noteworthy.”