It was Lestrade. The inspector had arrived in company with two of the other detectives who’d worked on the Jobson case, but it was still a surprise to see him. The Scotland Yard man was currently, and rather notoriously, involved in the hunt for a large male crocodile that had gone missing from the zoological garden at Regent’s Park . . . an investigation which had already been the object of several humorous cartoons in Punch. It represented a considerable change of pace from his previous and more earnest hunt for Harold Jobson, the vicious murderer of five people.
Holmes shook his head. “For once, Lestrade, both you and I are at an equal loss.”
“Some vague ramblings,” Watson added. “Didn’t make a lot of sense.”
The policeman harumphed, then adjusted his collar. In honor of the day, he was wearing one of his higher, stiffer ones. “I daresay the fellow is insane . . . but it was a despicable crime. He’s going to the only fate he deserves.”
“No doubt,” Holmes said, turning on his heel and striding away. “No doubt at all.”
And that was true. Harold Jobson’s crime had been quite despicable.
In the dead of night, in an apparent drugged stupor—nobody could conceive that he’d gone about his heinous act while of sound mind—he’d broken into the Russell Square home of the wealthy chemist and professor Archibald Langley, intending to burglarize the property. At some point during the course of the crime, he came across two of the maids while they slept in their ground-floor room, and brutally bludgeoned them to death with his crowbar. He then went upstairs, where he attacked Professor Langley’s butler, Henry, who had risen from his bed, thinking he’d heard a noise. The loyal Henry was also slain, his skull battered to a pulp. Still not sated, Jobson made his way into the bedroom of the chemist’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Laura, hauled her from under her blankets, and bound her to a chair with a bellpull cord. He then went next door into Professor Langley’s bedchamber and did the same to him. What happened after this was uncertain. Very possibly, Jobson tortured the poor souls, seeking to learn the whereabouts of valuables in the house. Whether or not he did this, he left an hour later empty-handed . . . but only after he’d deliberately started a fire in the sitting room, which very quickly swept through the rest of the building, entirely gutting it, and burning the still-bound captives beyond recognition as human beings. It was to be hoped that Professor Langley and his daughter had been killed first; the evidence, however, suggested otherwise.
As they rode back to Baker Street, Holmes mulled over the dark details of the crime. Even now, with the knowledge of the full confession obtained by the police, it made little sense.
“Why should a fellow,” he said, “in the process of committing a crime for which he can expect at most several years’ penal servitude, for no obvious reason then go on and make it far, far worse . . . both for his victims and himself?”
Watson shrugged. “Why try to understand the irrational? It can’t be done.”
“I’m afraid I disagree.” For a moment, Holmes was lost in thought. “Often the most irrational acts seem rational to the perpetrator. Yet in this case, though we know a little about Jobson’s background—he came from a good family, for example, but regarded himself as a failure, and in later life took to drugs and drink—we’ve learned remarkably little about his true motives.”
“Well, it’s typical of Lestrade not to have done a more thorough job, I suppose.”
Again, Holmes shook his head. “On the contrary. On this occasion, I think the inspector performed his office excellently. The felon was arrested within a day of committing his atrocity, and a watertight prosecution case was presented.”
“Yes, but as you said . . .”
“Ah!” Holmes half smiled. “I don’t think Freudian psychoanalysis is really Scotland Yard’s field just at the moment, Watson . . . though maybe we should make it ours. What do you make of the rumors that Jobson belonged to some kind of cult or sect?”
“I honestly wouldn’t know.”
Holmes pondered. “The mentality of the cultist is often the hardest to understand. Still”—and he took out his watch and saw that it read two minutes past nine—“that’s one cultist we needn’t worry about any longer.”
Holmes spent much of the rest of that day engrossed in the puzzle. When he wasn’t taking measurements of its lines and making odd calculations, he was at the lab table setting up chemical tests on the paper and the ink. No conclusion of value was drawn.
“Isn’t it possible that Jobson was simply trying to inconvenience you?” Watson wondered. “Setting you a meaningless and insoluble problem in order to frustrate you?”
Holmes considered as he gazed down on Baker Street and puffed on his pipe. “But why should he? I never had any contact with the man.”
“This forthcoming calamity he spoke about. Perhaps he was just trying to cause a panic . . . his last revenge against society, so to speak?”
Again Holmes thought about this, but shook his head. “In which case he should have gone to the newspapers. Of all people, he must have known that I was the least likely to spread it around.”
“Well, it confounds me,” Watson admitted, getting back to the Times.
“And me.” Holmes lifted the slip of paper from his desk, looked it over one last time, then folded it and slid it into his jacket pocket. “Perhaps we should approach this from a different angle. Come, we’re off to Southwark.”
“Southwark?”
“Jobson lived on Pickle Herring Street. I saw it in the trial transcripts. It wasn’t an address I was likely to forget.”
Pickle Herring Street ran alongside that bustling reach of the Thames known as the Pool of London. It was hemmed in on its north side by a dense forest of sails, masts, and rigging, which extended all the way from Cotton’s Wharf to the immense new construction that was Tower Bridge. Little of the grandeur of that marvel of engineering filtered down into the shadowy recesses below it, however. At this point, Pickle Herring Street, which stank somewhat appropriately of whelks, shrimps, and strongly salted fish, gave out to a series of narrow, straw-matted passages, winding off into a gloomy warren of ale shops and dingy lodging houses.
In one of these alleyways, a squalid, rat-infested place, Holmes and Watson found the former habitation of Harold Jobson. It was little more than a lean-to shelter, its broken windows patched up with rags, its single inner room now open to the elements, the door having been torn from its hinges, and anything of value within long ago pillaged.
“I don’t understand,” said Watson as they stared into the dank interior. “Jobson was educated. He boasted of his comfortable family background. How did he descend to this?”
Holmes pursed his lips. “Who can say? The pressure of living sometimes becomes too much for a man . . . he simply drops out of society. Then there is the cult factor. I’ve heard of such things before. Acolytes are so mesmerized by their new calling that they surrender everything they have. Either way, Watson, I doubt there’s anything of use to us here.”
They made their way back by what seemed to Watson a circuitous route, Holmes taking each left-hand turn as they came to it. A few moments later, perhaps inevitably, they were covering ground they’d already covered before.
“You realize we’ve just come ’round in a wide circle?” Watson ventured.
“I do,” Holmes replied quietly. “Do you think the fellow behind us does?”
“Behind us . . .”
“I’d rather you didn’t look ’round.”
They continued to stroll, but Watson was puzzled. These riverside cut-throughs were thronging with laborers of every sort; riggers, ballast heavers, coal whippers, lightermen, all hurrying back and forth. How his friend had managed to pick one out as a potential foe was beyond him.