IV. The Case of Peter the Painter
1
On a morning in early December, three years before the Great War, Mrs Hedges brought us the unusual story of a yellow canary. By this time of the year, the branches of the great elms and beeches were bare. Beyond Clarence Gate, on my morning walk, the avenues of the Regent’s Park echoed to the scuffling of pedestrians striding through drifts of dried leaves, as if they were wading through the shallows of a holiday beach.
When the rain began that morning, at ten minutes before ten o’clock, I had just returned to our rooms, stopping only at my tobacconist for two ounces of Navy Cut. Sherlock Holmes had still been at the breakfast table in his dressing gown when I set off. Now he was rigged out in a tweed suit with a belted Norfolk jacket. As I entered the sitting-room, he drew aside a corner of the Paddington Gazette and looked at me from his arm-chair.
“You had not forgotten, Watson, that the mysterious Mrs Hedges is to call upon us at ten-thirty precisely?”
“No,” I said, a little irritably, “I had not forgotten.”
I sat down at the table in the window and began to rub the moist tobacco leaves, crumbling them into my leather pouch.
Holmes and I had reached that stage of our history when the clatter of omnibus engines in the street below had begun to eclipse the more homely beat of hooves and the grinding wheels of the hansom cabs.
“Good,” said Holmes in a tone that irritated me somewhat more, “I am glad you had not forgotten. The romance of crime has grown stale of late, Watson. Villainy is at a discount. Let us hope that Mrs Hedges can bring a challenge into our too-sedentary existence.”
I thought that was most unlikely. Mrs Hedges had been recommended casually by John Jervis, the new young curate of St Alban’s Church, Marylebone, a stone’s throw from Baker Street. Mr Jervis with his scrubbed nails and shining face had presumed, on a very slight acquaintance, to send a note recommending the lady to our attention and suggesting that an appointment at ten-thirty on the morning in question might be convenient. He described her as a worthy woman who was in some difficulty over a matter concerning a yellow canary. And that was all. It scarcely sounded likely to restore to our lives the drama of major crime. In that, not for the first time, I was to be mistaken.
It was a measure of our present idleness that Holmes had welcomed the young curate’s suggestion.
“Depend upon it, Watson, there is nothing so indicative of true villainy as the commonplace. The song of a yellow canary is quite capable of heralding the arrival of gangsters of the most atrocious kind.”
He spoke more truly than even he could possibly have known. For the moment, I sat and rubbed tobacco while the sky darkened. Then the rain swept along Baker Street in a winter storm for half an hour. As suddenly as they had darkened, the heavens cleared again. A little before ten-thirty, Holmes got up and stood at the window, his tall spare figure veiled from the outside world by net curtains. He was gazing at a wooden bench outside the florist’s shop.
“It appears to be a characteristic of our working classes, Watson, that their greatest fear is not of murder or highway robbery but that they may be late for an appointment at which such things are to be discussed. Hence, they are always early. Unless I am mistaken, our visitor is already in attendance. See there.” He reached for his ivory-rimmed opera-glasses, which were kept on a bookshelf conveniently close to the window, and unbuttoned their case. “A worthy woman of the less fortunate class, as Mr Jervis promised. Do you not observe?”
I studied the figure sitting on that public bench. If this were she, Mrs Hedges was the type who is about forty-five years old but has been made by toil and deprivation to look more like fifty-five. Her dress of polka-dot cotton, her white blouse, boots and dark-blue straw hat secured by a pin of artificial pearl, spoke of thrift, hard-work and economy. She also wore a dark outdoor coat which had seen better, not to say more fashionable, days.
“Mr Jervis told us little enough,” said Holmes quietly, “but by the aid of strong glasses and at comparatively short range one may deduce a little more. Mr Jervis may hail from Marylebone but I fancy that the slums of Whitechapel or Stepney are this lady’s parish.”
I laughed at him.
“How can you tell?”
“Observe the sky. A glance at its movements suggests that the clouds and rain are moving eastwards at about five miles an hour. Our visitor has escaped the rain. Her coat you will see is quite dry. The umbrella she carries is not even unrolled. The welt of her boots is a little damp from walking in Baker Street where rain has already fallen. Yet there is no drop of water on the uppers nor even a mark where a drop has dried. Therefore she did not arrive in Baker Street until after the rain stopped ten minutes ago. She evidently came by omnibus as a matter of economy, since we have heard no sound of a cab drawing up. Moreover, it cannot have been raining at the point where she boarded the bus for her journey, shall we say forty minutes ago? That would put her just clear of the oncoming rain from the west. Let us say she was some three and a half miles to the east or south-east of us. I believe that would place her at Whitechapel or possibly Stepney. Had she come from the west she would have been rained upon, probably twice.”
“And what if she came by the underground railway?”
“I think not. That journey would have been quicker, which means she would have caught the rain at one end of it or the other.”
We drew back from the window. At half-past ten to the minute, there was a knock at the sitting-room door. Our landlady Mrs Hudson announced Mrs Hedges. Sherlock Holmes was on his feet at once. In a couple of strides he was shaking our visitor’s hand and simultaneously gesturing her to a buttoned lady-chair which was now at one side of the fireplace.
“Mrs Hedges! How good of you to come all the way from Stepney to see us. My name is Sherlock Holmes and this is my friend and colleague, Dr John Watson, before whom you may speak as freely as to myself.”
For all his bonhomie, she was a nervous type.
“I hope, sir,” she said quietly, “it’s no inconvenience. It was Whitechapel, rather than Stepney, to tell the truth.”
Holmes glanced at me with a look of reproach, which said on behalf of Whitechapel, “Oh ye of little faith.” Then he spread out his hands, gallantly dismissing any suggestion that her arrival might be an imposition.
“Pray be assured, Mrs Hedges, that no service we can do you will be an inconvenience.”
“Not Whitechapel, precisely,” she continued awkwardly, “Houndsditch, more like. Perhaps I should tell you a little…”
Holmes gave her a nod of reassurance and another deprecating gesture. My heart sank, for I felt he might be in the mood for sport.
“Let me see if I can deduce a little, Mrs Hedges. That is, after all, the profession of a criminal investigator. You have come from Houndsditch and that is all we know, beyond the fact that you were evidently a seamstress until you retired from that occupation because, as is sadly so often the case with sewing, you suffered a loss in your near-sight. You are plainly left-handed and you have a little girl who has lately suffered an infectious disease. She is not at present attending school. The poor little mite is a nervous child and apt to be lonely.”
“You could not know so much, Mr Holmes, sir! Not even Mr Jervis knows about my little girl. Though, to tell the truth, it’s the canary that began it.”
Holmes paused, then laughed gently at the unease in her face.
“There is no black magic here, my dear Mrs Hedges. A certain quickness in the movements of your fingers, a fine mark imprinted on the left forefinger and thumb, a fuller development of the left-hand musculature would suggest something more than fireside stitching. You do not wear spectacles just now, so it seems evident that you do not require them all the time. Yet there are the marks at the bridge of your nose to indicate that you require glasses for close work. Were you still systematically engaged in it, the marks would be more definitive. Therefore you have retired from an occupation which, in anything but the best light, damages the near sight.”