The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(6)
The inside of the house was in even worse repair than the outside garden. There was some torn and decrepit furniture, but mostly the place lay empty, as if much of what might once have been there had been carried off a long time ago. Old paint of a universally drab grey colour flaked off the walls and a smell of dust, mould and decay permeated every corner. Not a noise came to our ears except the whispering of the wind outside, and our every footsteps, which sent echoes through the apparently empty and abandoned structure.
We made our way through part of the house and found only more empty rooms until Holmes stopped me as we came upon the entrance to an old-fashioned courtyard. The doors were flung open and broken, one hanging only on a single hinge and swaying in the slight breeze. He pointed down at several sets of fresh tracks etched into the dust on the floorboards in front of us.
“Careful where you step, Watson,” he said as he crouched to a nearly prostrate position to examine them. “Two different sets of workman’s boots, one large, one even more so, both hobnailed. And an entirely different set of well-to-do gentleman’s boots. Curious…”
“Holmes, look here,” I said. From my removed position, close to the end of the hallway, I had nearly placed my hand on a crack in the wall without noticing the bullet lodged there.
“Excellent, Watson!” Holmes cried as he came back to look at my find. “Score one for you!” He pulled a penknife out and carefully pried the bullet free. “There is blood here.” He wrapped the evidence in his handkerchief and placed it in his pocket as he went back to his work on the floor. “And more blood by your foot, here.” The spot he indicated was just a few drops, but he used his knife to scrape up a sample of this, too.
“Give me a moment while I examine these markings.” His path carried him closer to the entrance of the courtyard as he examined the area in minute detail. When he looked up from the doorway itself, a shadow passed over his face, followed by a look of grim determination.
“Whatever has gone on here,” he said, “it seems that we are too late to prevent it. But perhaps not too late to deal with the villains responsible.”
Seeing that Holmes’s inspection of this portion of the floor was done, I entered the courtyard.
By the doorway lay the bodies of two men, so horribly battered and bent into unnatural angles that there could be no doubt about the nature of their death or the futility of my medical services. Their faces were twisted into a shocked rictus of horror. These were men who had seen their violent deaths coming. A six-shot revolver lay just inside the doorway. Holmes picked it up, sniffed at it, then opened the cylinder. All the bullets were still in place. He tucked it into his jacket pocket.
Then, in the centre of the courtyard, I caught sight of the third body, though it was nearly unrecognizable as such, being so badly charred. In an act of further barbarism, a stake had been driven completely through the unfortunate victim’s torso, pinning it to a long plank that lay on the ground. Though I have seen many horrors in my career between Afghanistan and the innumerable cases in which I’ve assisted Sherlock Holmes, none of them chilled my soul in the same way that this scorched cadaver did.
“Holmes!” I said in a choked voice as I noticed something that increased my horror of the charred cadaver tenfold. “Look at this woman’s hands!”
“Yes, Watson,” he said. “I was wondering if you would pick out that detail.”
“The left hand is missing the very same ring finger!” My stomach and mind churned with the fearsome image of any woman being burned to death in this manner.
“Indeed it is, Watson,” Holmes said. He picked a cigarette butt off one of the flagstones, sniffed at it, and gave a small cry of satisfaction. From there, he went through a search of the victims’ pockets, finding, in very short order, several of the distinctive cigarettes loose in one of the men’s pockets. “These are loose, but have at one time been in a cigarette case. You can see impressions from the clip used to keep the cigarettes in place. It seems very likely that this man provided that case for transport of the finger to Stross, who would then deliver it. But deliver it to whom?”
I had seen Holmes perform some thorough inspections before, but this one was exceedingly so. He took several more blood samples with his penknife, placing the contents in small tubes apparently brought for the purpose and labelling them as he went. His investigation included every flagstone and overgrown flower bed in the courtyard and even the bricks of the courtyard wall as high as he could reach. He poked, peered, and pored over every detail, even sniffing at the burnt corpse. He took longer going over this ghastly scene than I ever remembered him taking over similar scenes, muttering to himself as he went, though I could catch nothing of what he said and so was quite in the dark as to what he might have found out. It was several hours and well into the latter half of the afternoon before he completed his task.
“Well,” he said, finally, “I believe that we can do no further good here, Watson, and it is well past time that we should be on our way. I wish to get back to Baker Street as quickly as possible.”
“Have we learned nothing?” I asked. “Is there no clue to lead us to the villains that have done this monstrous thing?”
“Oh, I should say we’ve learned a great deal,” he said, “but the conclusions are so fantastic that I do not dare entertain them until I have eliminated all other possibilities.”