Page 14 of A Study in Scarlet Women
Inspector Treadles had first heard of the name Sherlock Holmes two years earlier.
The Treadleses had joined Lord Ingram for a dig on the Isles of Scilly—it never failed to surprise Treadles that he was affiliated with a man of such elevated circumstances, but their friendship was as warm as it was unlikely.
The excursion had been an especially good one, the days balmy and clear, the landscape a heart-stopping green against a shallow sea that was almost turquoise at times. At each meal, the companions luxuriated in conversation and camaraderie. And late at night, conversation and camaraderie continued in private between the inspector and his wife in their tent, augmented by tender lovemaking.
The pearls came up one evening.
Not long before, at Easter dinner with his wife’s family, Mr. Barnaby Cousins, Treadles’s brother-in-law, had complained bitterly about a pair of expensive earrings he had bought for his wife and which had disappeared ten days prior, shortly before Mrs. Cousins dismissed her maid. Mr. Cousins simply could not understand why the matter hadn’t been handed to the police.
“If a servant steals a spoon,” he had thundered, “you dismiss herwithout a letter of character. Those pearls cost a fortune! Of course one never wants one’s door darkened by a constable, but this one could have used the service entrance and the housekeeper could have taken care of the matter.”
Remembering himself, Mr. Cousins had nodded stiffly at Treadles, then still only a sergeant. “Present company excepted, of course.”
“Of course,” Treadles had replied.
Mr. Cousins berated his wife for another five minutes. Treadles would have had more sympathy for Mrs. Cousins if she weren’t as disagreeable as her husband—and he’d have forgotten the matter if Alice, his wife, hadn’t commented later how odd it was that Mrs. Cousins hadn’t turned to the law.
“She abhors any hint of criminality on the part of staff. I would have expected her to at least have said something to me, in order that word would reach your ear. And I did visit at the time—remember? She was so upset Barnaby demanded that I call on her.”
Lord Ingram, as was his wont, listened carefully to their account. Two nights later, he asked Alice whether Mrs. Cousins frequently suspected wrongdoing on the part of her staff.
“And how,” answered Alice. “I should hate to be in service in her house.”
“You wouldn’t by any chance have noticed any strong odors when you visited her, shortly after the disappearance of the earrings?”
Alice leaned back in surprise. “Now that you mention it, I do remember thinking that my sister-in-law’s rooms smelled pungently sour. But how did you know that, my lord?”
“Ihadn’t the least inkling, Mrs. Treadles,” replied Lord Ingram, a rather mysterious expression on his face. “But I know someone named Holmes, who enjoys such little puzzles. I sent a note—with all references to names and locales redacted of course—and a reply came today with these questions to ask.”
“How interesting. Will you now write back to Mr. Holmes with the answers to his questions?”
Lord Ingram’s eyes gleamed. “That will not be necessary. Holmes had instructed that should the answers to both questions be yes, I may go ahead and tell you that it is Holmes’s theory that Mrs. Cousins’s suspicions got the better of her sense. More specifically, she became convinced that her maid had stolen her precious pearls and replaced them with a pair of replicas, French imitations which are said to be able to fool the eyes of an expert. To prove that it was indeed the case, she dropped the earrings into a container filled with hot vinegar—ergo the odor in her rooms—because paste pearls would not dissolve in vinegar.”
Alice gasped. “And the pearls must have dissolved, fully or partially, which proved her maid’s innocence but destroyed the expensive earrings!”
“No wonder she needed to take to her bed!” exclaimed Treadles. “And no wonder she couldn’t have her maid charged with any crime when her own stupidity was her undoing.”
“Oh but she did dismiss the poor woman without a letter of character. After seven years of service!” Alice set her hand on her husband’s sleeve. “We must find her so that I may provide a letter of character for her—and to amend for my sister-in-law’s unkindness.”
“Consider it done, my dear.” Treadles turned back to Lord Ingram. “But this Holmes fellow is marvelous.”
“Holmes’s mind has always been a thing of beauty,” said Lord Ingram with a slight smile.
Two months later, while dining out with Lord Ingram in town, Alice related a tragic but curious case that came to her via her physician, Dr. Motley, who had learned of it many years ago from a colleague. The colleague had attended a prominent family. The daughter of the house, who was about fourteen at the time, hadsuffered for a while from a deep melancholia. One morning, by all appearances, she passed away peacefully in her sleep. The parents, though devastated, believed it to have been an act of God, that their child was now in a much better place. The family physician, however, could not bring himself to put faith in such a fairytale.
He dared not voice his thoughts aloud to the parents, but did confide in Motley his suspicion that the girl had committed suicide, even though he couldn’t find any evidence to that effect. She had on occasion taken a sip of her mother’s laudanum to help her sleep, but the draught was always measured out carefully by the mother, drop by drop. No empty bottles of morphine or chloral lay by the girl’s bedside. No signs of suffering or struggle that would have betrayed the involvement of arsenic or cyanide. She had said good night to her parents a perfectly healthy young woman and in the morning they had found themselves sobbing over her inert body.
“Perhaps your friend Holmes can solve this terrible riddle, my lord,” Alice had said to Lord Ingram.
The next evening Inspector Treadles received a note from Lord Ingram. He had a question from Holmes. Was soda water made on the premises for the consumption of the household?
As it so happened, Alice, calling on her father, whose health was deteriorating, had run into Motley the following day. She took the opportunity to pose the question. A surprised Motley had answered in the affirmative: Yes, he believed that the staff at the house did procure canisters of liquid carbon dioxide to make soda water.
Treadles passed on the intelligence to Lord Ingram. An answer came in due time. According to Holmes, as relayed by Lord Ingram, the girl had died of self-inflicted hypercapnia. When liquid carbon dioxide evaporated, the process dramatically lowered the surrounding temperature, so that some of the liquid carbon dioxide froze into a solid—a phenomenon someone in the house might have shown her.
On the night of her death she could have replicated that process, smuggled the resulting solid pieces to her room, and then, when she was drowsy from the laudanum, set the frozen carbon dioxide on her bed and drawn the bed curtains. In the morning there would have been no trace of the frozen gas, which would have sublimated completely in the intervening hours, suffocating her in the process. And if any excess carbon dioxide had been in the air, it would have dissipated by the maid opening the door, the windows, and the bed curtains.
“But why?” Treadles exclaimed after he’d read the note. “Why go to such extraordinary lengths?”
