The Empty Birdcage Read online

  20

  AT LONG LAST, SHERLOCK AND HUAN ARRIVED AT THE Thame railway station, which served the towns of Thame in Oxfordshire and Bledlow, in Buckinghamshire, a mere five miles on foot from the Wickham residence where Elise was murdered. Trains made frequent stops, enough so that strangers would not be especially noteworthy. Nearby woods provided several well-trodden and less trodden paths. The killer could have easily disembarked, hidden himself for as long as necessary and then, when no witnesses were about, arrived at the Wickham residence after little more than an hour on foot.

  “So? Where to begin?” Huan wondered. “Perhaps ask people if they have seen anyone strange?”

  “The Queen’s desires notwithstanding,” Sherlock replied, “by now every resident has heard the news and spread it abroad that the Fire Four Eleven killer struck near Bledlow, and that the murdered party had a link, however tenuous, to Victoria. Had anyone seen anything of note, they would have already hastened to the constable to report it, if for no other reason than to possibly ingratiate themselves to Her Majesty.”

  “Perhaps you can ask in any case,” Huan said.

  “Yes, perhaps I could, Huan. But I am guessing that few of the locals would be amenable to my peppering them with queries about suspicious characters, considering that I am likely far and away the most suspicious character they have ever laid eyes on.”

  Huan’s white teeth gleamed in his burnished copper face.

  “You have not many illusions of yourself, Master Sherlock,” he said.

  “Mark me, Huan, I can well utilize my unusual looks to my advantage. But I am also aware when they are of disadvantage. To say nothing of the fact that the Queen has forbidden us from questioning the only person who might be helpful: Elise’s mother, for she was the one who found her, and she is the one who might be persuaded to reveal whether the girl had any enemies.”

  Sherlock took one last look at the station. “No need to linger here,” he added. “Let us hasten on.”

  * * *

  Half an hour later, they reached Holy Trinity, Bledlow’s parish church. It was a flint and limestone affair, lichen-tinted, and overlooking the gently rolling green hills of Aylesbury Vale. Sherlock and Huan had barely joined the knot of mourners, several dozen all in black, when the church bells began to toll, for the funerary carriage was arriving.

  The white hearse bearing Elise Wickham’s mortal remains was pulled by two high-stepping white horses. Through its window, Sherlock could see the flowers surrounding her coffin.

  Standing next to Sherlock was an elderly lady of modest means but of upright demeanor. She had one purple-veined hand clutching her umbrella, the other at her throat, a ready clue that something was displeasing her.

  “White?” she clucked. “Unfathomable in my day!”

  Sherlock looked about but did not see anyone whom he would mark as the mother of the deceased. He wondered if perhaps she was already inside the church: close family members sometimes chose to eschew the arrival of the casket in favor of welcoming guests to the service itself—or so his brother had reminded him.

  “Her family may’ve preferred white, Mrs.…?” Sherlock replied evenly, engaging only in the event that the old biddy knew something of note.

  “Partridge,” she declared, “and it’s Miss,” before adding: “Makes no difference what one prefers, Mr.…?”

  “Holmes,” he said.

  “Ah. Scottish,” she frowned, her tone dripping with condescension. “Now. Miss Wickham was eighteen her birthday last, about your age, I surmise. Young ladies and gentlemen have no need to go about in a child’s carriage!”

  She is the former governess, Sherlock thought.

  “And let us not even speak of the fact that the girl is to lie in state until after dark, at which time she shall be buried. After dark! When no one shall be left to witness it! And where are the mutes?” she exclaimed. “Why, the last funeral I attended had four mutes trailing behind the coffin, two on either side! But not to be interred until evening!” she repeated. “Shocking, would you not say, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Quite,” Sherlock replied, though his inattentive demeanor made clear that he thought it nothing of the sort, for he was wearying of Miss Partridge. “Might her mother be inside, do you know?” he asked.

  “From what I understand,” the old woman sniffed, “Lady Anne has not bothered to come. And she sets the tone, for you see what a poor assembly has gathered here. Mind you, it is none of my affair, as I have not been a member of the household for nearly two years. But the countess has no living relatives. And though her second husband, the count, is of royal pedigree, there is no one here to represent his side of the family. A ghastly breach of protocol, for I was hoping to see one royal at least,” she muttered, her lips pursed. “Unless you…”

  “I?” Sherlock said. “No, madam, far from it!”

  “Ah. And who are you?” she asked, appraising him with small, suspicious eyes.

  “Assistant to the undertaker at your service, ma’am,” Sherlock said with a slight bow. “I helped to prepare the body for burial. Perhaps at some future date when you might have need of our services…”

  When she went pale and turned away, Sherlock whispered to Huan: “Right after the final hymn, when the rector accompanies the mourners out, you must cover for me.”

  “For how long?” Huan asked.

  “For long enough that I might examine her.”

  Huan, who had been following the hearse’s sad approach, was looking suddenly as mournful as if he’d been Elise’s nearest relative.

  “You take whatever time you need,” he whispered back. “Someone must do right by that girl!”

  * * *

  Once sat in a pew, Sherlock looked about in case Lady Anne Hohenlohe-Langenburg had changed her mind and decided to make an appearance, but he saw no one who resembled Elise and so could have been her mother. In fact, the first row reserved for family was strangely empty, containing only two ladies of late middle years who were sniffling intermittently, though they were wholly dry-eyed. Relatives, he guessed. Aunts, most likely.

  As the service droned on, Sherlock was conscious of hymnal books opening and closing, the occasional cough or sigh or rustle of petticoats, but all his attention was on that little white coffin surrounded by flowers.

  The rector’s final words on behalf of the deceased were the usual kind-but-bland statements that one voices when someone dies too soon to have made any particular mark. As the small congregation rose to its feet and made its quiet way outdoors again, Sherlock approached the two women who had been seated in the family pews.

  “Terribly sorry for your loss,” he said to the one in the lead: a short, rotund blonde.

  Though they looked very much alike, with features that seemed made out of putty, the one he addressed was slightly older, her face more pleasant and her manner more open than her sister, who was nervous and pinched.

  “I take it you are members of the family?” he asked her gently.

  “Yes,” she said. “We are, or were, her aunts. Our dear departed brother was her father. Death is a tragedy, no doubt, but especially so when one dies so young.”

  She made it sound not so much murder as a twist of fate.

  “Elise was a remarkable young woman,” she added, while the other managed to nod her agreement.

  But when Sherlock asked in what ways she had been ‘remarkable,’ the aunt equivocated and in the end could not say. And when he asked how long it had been since they had seen their niece, the more nervous of the two looked away, seemingly embarrassed; while the mouthpiece declared that the family home was nearby Leeds, and therefore quite far for casual visits, and that neither she nor her sister had laid eyes on the girl since she was five.

  About the time that Count Wolfgang and her mother Anne separated, Sherlock thought. When the royal association ceased, mother and daughter were abandoned.

  Sherlock walked them to the door of the church and then waited a moment. Finally, ascertaining
that no one else was about, he hurried to the casket and pried open the lid, which lifted with a groan. A second later, he found himself staring down at the remains of Miss Elise Wickham.

  The small likeness of the girl that Mycroft had given him had been exceptionally well executed. He could note little difference between the girl in her coffin and the one in the portrait. Her cheeks were rosy, her forehead unmarked with care, her overall mien calm and void.

  Upon closer inspection, he could see an ugly stain at her neck. Blood had coagulated under the skin of her scalp where the swing had struck her. A lace foulard, in the same shade of black as her frilly taffeta dress, had been placed over the high collar in an effort to mask the nasty bruise. Had the impact shattered bone? When the killer had hit her with the swing, what had he been attempting to hide?

  And why had he not done this to everyone whom he’d killed? Why her?

  Sherlock heard a sound, heard Huan’s voice at the open side door, speaking to the rector. He could spy the rector’s profile, framed by the door and looking uncomfortable, while Huan was loudly declaring that, “In my country, we have an open coffin! One more look for a proper goodbye, that would be good, no? Ah, and it is our custom to say of the body, ‘Does he not look well!’ Sometimes, over the dead we pass a young child three times to keep the spirit from causing harm…”

  Sherlock slipped a hand under the girl’s head.

  The skin was rough to the touch, most likely the work of tweezers pulling out splinters from the swing. But then higher up, at the nape of her neck, he felt something else, a spiny protrusion that had sunk deep; for when he tugged at it, it was much longer than it had felt at first.

  The only other victim with an injury to her neck, and splinters, had been little Abigail Sykes. But surely the killer had not arranged for Abigail to spin and fall and break the table!

  Huan’s voice, was growing in volume and beginning to sound slightly hysterical. His Trinidad patois was thickening; he was losing his audience.

  “It is not a rare t’ing that we mourn forty days?”

  Sherlock pinched the splinter between his fingers, pulled it out, and shut the lid only a moment before the rector excused himself and walked back in.

  21

  SHERLOCK’S BORROWED CARRIAGE PROCEEDED DOWN the long drive lined with ploughman’s-spikenard, and dotted here and there with St. John’s wort and gooseberry bushes, towards the house where Elise Wickham had grown up and died. The entire property was well tended and well maintained, with chalk grasses and field pansies seeming to grow wild but in truth situated for best effect. The residence itself was surrounded by a low stone enclosure, which separated the green without from the green within, and was set off by a large, ornate wrought-iron gate with acorn-shaped finials atop the posts on either side.

  If any other houses were within eyesight, Sherlock could not make them out.

  Huan parked beside the stables just outside the walled garden. There was no groom to greet them, or to water and feed the poor Irish Cob that had brought them such a long way without a whinny of complaint. There seemed, in fact, no one in the grounds at all.

  Inside the stables were two well-brushed Hackneys of middle years and a Chapman mare, who blinked at them without interest.

  Nicely kept but undistinguished, Sherlock thought, eyeing the horses.

  “Quiet. Not just the stables,” Huan commented. “No sound anywhere.”

  “Indeed,” Sherlock replied, glancing about.

  “The servants, they were not at the funeral,” Huan continued. “That seems quite unusual.”

  “Yes. Nor does Lady Anne appear to be receiving guests after the service, for there are no servants bustling about. I am guessing that they—six, I’d say, judging from the size of the house—all left together, along with Lady Anne.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “For one thing, they took the cart.”

  “What cart?”

  “It was parked nearby that barouche to your left, you see the empty space? The wheel marks on the ground? And secondly, I would say, given the copious bales of hay stacked up and the grooming implements on the wood block, that four horses are being used.”

  “Four horses? Impossible. There are but two empty stalls!”

  “Huan, you surprise me,” Sherlock remonstrated. “Look at those brushes. Are not two of them meant for double coats? Do you spy any horse in the vicinity that is double-coated?”

  “Perhaps the horses they took, they are double-coated!” Huan countered.

  “They are. Those two brushes have seen a lot of wear; the handles are shiny with use. But it is because they are used not on two horses, but on four. Note the placement of the feeding troughs. What does that tell you?”

  “Closer to the ground. Ponies?” Huan guessed.

  “Four Shetland ponies,” Sherlock affirmed with a nod, “which fit two per stall. Most likely, they were a wedding present from the Queen, since the entire country knows that Victoria favors them. A good Shetland can pull twice its own weight, and a cart could easily accommodate Lady Anne and her small household.”

  “But why would a countess use a cart?”

  “Normally, she would not. But a girl Elise’s age would have no such qualms. She would see it as an adventure, and she probably utilized it—and the ponies—with some frequency, perhaps with friends. Lady Anne and the servants must have gone to mourn Elise’s death together, and in private—people who sincerely loved the girl, rather than busybody former governesses or long-lost aunts who grow scarce right around the time that the royal link is severed.

  “And, like every other young girl since time immemorial, Elise no doubt had a favorite spot,” he continued, “some place where she liked to walk and to reflect. And that is where they went,” Sherlock concluded.

  Huan shook his head, baffled. “These behaviors, they are… not so British, yes?” he mused.

  “It is flouting the rules a bit. But the moment that the old biddy at the church objected to the color of the hearse, or huffed that the burial would not take place until evening, it was clear that Lady Anne is thumbing her nose at convention. Perhaps out of grief or spite, she is sending a message that she will do things her way. In either case, she and her household will visit the chapel long after the others have departed, where they will see their precious girl interred properly.”

  “I like this Lady Anne,” Huan said.

  “As do I,” Sherlock agreed.

  While Huan filled a water trough and purloined some hay for the Irish Cob, Sherlock made his way through the gate, walked up the little footpath, knocked upon the front door for courtesy’s sake, and was not at all surprised when no one answered his call.

  With no living soul to disturb him, he slipped around to the garden at the back of the house, where the swing was, and where Elise had been murdered. Here, the low walls were lined with bushes, a perfect place to hide, albeit at a fair distance from where the victim had been seated. A rose garden, closer in, grew fulsome and well tended but provided inadequate covering. A small arbor awash in trumpet vines was closer by, but it too could not compete with the bushes.

  He glanced back at the house, to the windows that overlooked the garden. What were the servants doing in the late afternoon, that not a one of them had chanced to look out? Or perhaps they had, but had been unable to see the killer.

  The garden was alive with the singing of jays and yellowhammers. Butterflies flitted about, unmindful of the dank, unseasonal weather, or of a stranger in their midst. It was in every way bucolic, except for one thing: the swing, split in two, and dangling by a length of chain from an ancient alder. The breeze pushed it so that it twisted and swayed, and the chain, where it linked together over the branch, rubbed and whined.

  Sherlock approached cautiously. Something about it gave him pause. Dropping to his knees, he closely examined the splintered wood. Then he took the little sliver he had found embedded in Elise’s neck, which he had kept pressed between thumb and for
efinger of his left hand, and matched it to what he saw before him.

  Though it confirmed a hunch, nevertheless it startled him so that he heard his breath catch… and then a twig break behind him.

  “Wherever this is from, it is not from the swing,” he said without turning around.

  Huan knelt by his side, eyeing the inch-long splinter pressed against Sherlock’s thumb, which Sherlock carefully passed his way.

  “What do you see?” he asked Huan.

  Huan held it before his eyes. “Different color,” he noted, frowning.

  “Yes,” Sherlock replied. “It is lighter, very nearly blond, with smooth borders. And although I could break off a splinter of this length and width, it would be altogether more brittle, whereas this has flexibility.”

  Huan looked around with a haunted expression. “It seems impossible…” he began.

  “It does,” Sherlock confirmed. “I have seen drawings in nature books, though I have never seen one up close. Huan, I am loath to ask, for I fear the reply, but however outlandish, tell me what you think it might be.”

  “Cactus spine,” Huan said at once.

  Sherlock nodded solemnly. He took it back and, piercing the cotton of his shirt just above the pocket, threaded the splinter through.

  “Maybe we check for cactus?” Huan suggested dubiously.

  “Merely to be thorough, for we shall not find one. Look about you: have you ever seen a more quintessential English garden than this? Not a whiff of anything remotely exotic.”

  “But this is a very big clue!” Huan declared. “A joyful moment, no? Why are you not happy?”

  Sherlock sighed. “It is a very big clue indeed, monstrously so. But, much as I attempt to be up to any task required of me, I find that with this, I am also monstrously unprepared. I could tell you of tobaccos, and prints, or tracks, or dirt! But cactus? I am not acquainted. I have done no research! Though I recall reading that there are nearly two thousand types, I could not enumerate more than a dozen, I can barely surmise where it grows. I never assumed there would be the need; how could I?” he added in his own defense. “Once again I see that assumptions based on nothing shall always be the enemy of the sleuthhound—”