The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters. Michael Kurland
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me that by living in the Carroll farmhouse I was trespassing on land that rightfully belonged to his father now. He contended the written agreement between his father and Mr Carroll spelled out the ownership in no uncertain terms.” Holmes said Sir Ethan Tarleton was of little help in the investigation because he suffered from dementia and had a weak heart that kept him bedfast most of the time. “His memory is dysfunctional,” Holmes revealed during our walk back to Mr Carroll’s farmhouse.
* * * *
At mid-morning the next day, Holmes and Tex took the buckboard to the office of the magistrate, the keeper of records for the county. On the way, they were to pick up Constable Roddy, who would obtain a writ to gain possession of the original of the old agreement between Mr Carroll and Sir Ethan Tarleton. Holmes suspected the agreement on file with the magistrate might have been altered recently.
“I shall explain when I return with the document,” Holmes said when I went to the front gate to see them off.
To pass the time while they were gone, I opened the volume entitled Shakespeare Analysed and was soon mesmerised, acquiring the knowledge for the first time that there existed a hypothesis that The Bard was not a single person but actually a collection of playwrights using the pseudonym William Shakespeare. I thought it preposterous, recounting in my head many of the quotations from the dramas and trying to imagine that they were the handiwork of more than one genius.
Time passed quickly, for I was still absorbed in the author’s analysis when Holmes, Roddy, and Tex walked through the door in the middle of the afternoon.
“It is as I suspected, Watson,” Holmes announced. “Take the carbonated copy of the agreement from the desk and compare it to the original. A page has been substituted which contradicts what is in the copy. Notice the watermark—the depiction of the fool in the floppy cock’s comb cap and the collar with five peaks, each bearing a jingle bell. He is in a different position on the bogus page of the original. The fool is at the centre right on the other three genuine pages, and at the bottom left on the substituted page.
“I refer you to my monograph on the subject of dating documents. The McKean Paper Mill moved the location of the watermark to the bottom left just two years ago, meaning the forged page was inserted recently.”
What Holmes alleged was correct when I compared the two documents. The bogus page specified that Mr Carroll’s five hundred hectares would revert to the ownership of Sir Ethan Tarleton and his heirs if Mr Carroll preceded him in death, whereas the copy made no mention of such a succession.
“Now to prove the identity of the counterfeiter,” Holmes declared. “I borrowed from the village doctor a Bunsen burner and gas canister on our way back here, Watson. And that glass globe covering the clock on the mantle should do the trick, if you wouldn’t mind fetching it down.” Holmes then took a vial with his iodine solution from the leather case in his jacket pocket, set up his laboratory on the kitchen table, and placed the questioned page under the glass after igniting the burner and adjusting the vial on the little stand he also brought with him.
“You will soon see the latent fingerprints and hand print of the wrongdoer,” Holmes advised Roddy as the forged page began to change colour. Roddy watched in awe as the heel print of a right hand appeared on the margin, along with three fingerprints at the top left corner.
Said Holmes: “All that is left to do is contrast these with the prints of young Zachary Tarleton, which we can do with a writ and some printer’s ink we can acquire from the village weekly newspaper.”
Tex, who was equally astounded by the development, drove Roddy to the village to do his part. Meanwhile, Holmes and I discussed the implications of the findings over a bottle of port wine we took from Mr Carroll’s rack in the dining room.
It was drawing toward evening when Roddy returned in his surrey. Tex had already arrived in the otherwise empty buckboard and was putting up the team. Holmes and I climbed onto the surrey behind Roddy, who drove toward the Tarletons’ home.
Zachary Tarleton was obstinate, but he reluctantly allowed Holmes to smear the ink on his hands and make an impression of them on a sheet of foolscap—after Roddy served young Tarleton with the writ.
“What are you trying to prove with this?” he demanded.
“We shall let you know in the morning after we compare your prints to those we recovered from the agreement between your father and Mr Carroll,” Holmes answered.
“How can you recover my prints from an old document that was signed before I was born?” Tarleton wanted to know.
“I employ a foolproof method,” Holmes informed him.
“Your method is pure madness,” he retorted, and strode off to the kitchen to wash away the ink, his robust arms outstretched.
After we arrived back at Mr Carroll’s home, we ate a plate of beef stew that Tex had prepared in our absence, left over from the pot roast dinner we had the night before.
“Mr Carroll, er, my father, taught me to cook,” Tex said, “but I don’t do as well with the stove as him. My stew will go down easy, though, especially when you’re as hungry as we all are.”
Holmes was in no rush to make the comparisons, convinced that the two sets of prints would match. So confident was he that he relinquished the honour to Roddy, handing him a magnifying glass and seating him at the desk in the sitting-room. Roddy studied the prints thoroughly and eventually disclosed his conclusion: “They are a perfect layover, Mr Holmes. Where do we go from here?”
Holmes said he would confront young Tarleton in the morning but wanted to do it alone. “He might say some things to me that he would not in your presence, Constable Roddy.”
“Well, if you say so,” Roddy said in reaction, “but I insist on going along and waiting in the surrey outside the house in the event he decides to fight.”
“I should like to be there as well,” I chimed in.
Holmes agreed, and the next day we set out together for the Tarleton homestead. Roddy stopped the surrey out of view of the front door, and Holmes approached it on foot from about two hundred paces away. Once we were certain he was safely inside, Roddy drew the surrey closer to the house.
Holmes had disappeared for nearly an hour. When he came out, he was escorting Zachary Tarleton to the surrey. Young Tarleton looked dishevelled and was bleeding from a gash on his cheek.
“Standing before you,” Holmes said matter-of-factly, “is the forger who murdered the respected James Harley Carroll as well as the drunkard George Beidler in cold blood. Young Mr Tarleton here has admitted to it.”
Roddy was flabbergasted. I, on the contrary, had come to expect such pronouncements. Roddy clasped irons on the reprobate and seated him in the back of the surrey between myself and Holmes, then we headed in the direction of the village.
Later, after the prisoner had been secured in the tiny gaol, Roddy drove us to the Carroll home, where Tex greeted the news with a whoop.
“Do you suppose they’ll string him up before long?” he asked Holmes and Roddy.
“First there is the matter of a fair trial,” Roddy cautioned.
“Right after that, then?” Tex pleaded.
“Perhaps then,” Holmes responded.
“How did you catch him, Mr Holmes?” Tex continued.
Holmes explained to all of us then the phases of his investigation. First, there were the killer’s boot prints near the body of Beidler. “Young Tarleton wears a pair exactly as I described,” Holmes told us.
Second, when Holmes examined the crime scene, he found in the woods the iron rim from a wagon wheel. “The village blacksmith informed me that he had repaired a wagon wheel with a missing rim for young Tarleton that very morning, after the discovery of Beidler’s torso,” Holmes went on.
Additionally, Holmes said, he learned in the village that the muscular