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I hardly needed to answer him. There had been a locked room in that business, true enough, but there had also been a ventilator, a poisonous snake, and a killer fiendish enough to introduce the latter into the former. It had been the work of a cruelly brilliant mind, but Holmes had seen to the bottom of the matter in almost no time at all.
"What are the facts, Inspector?" Holmes asked.
Lestrade began to lay them before us in the clipped tones of a trained policeman. Lord Albert Hull had been a tyrant in business and a despot at home. His wife had gone in fear of him, and had apparently been justified in doing so. The fact that she had borne him three sons seemed in no way to have moderated his savage approach toward their domestic affairs in general and toward her in particular. Lady Hull had been reluctant to speak of these matters, but her sons had no such reservations; their papa, they said, had missed no opportunity to dig at her, to criticize her, or to jest at her expense… all of this when they were in company. When they were alone, he virtually ignored her. Except, Lestrade added, when he felt moved to beat her, which was by no means an uncommon occurrence.
"William, the eldest, told me she always gave out the same story when she came to the breakfast table with a swollen eye or a mark on her cheek: that she had forgotten to put on her spectacles and had run into a door. 'She ran into doors once or twice a week,' William said. 'I didn't know we had that many doors in the house.'"
"Hmmm," Holmes said. "A cheery fellow! The sons never put a stop to it?"
"She wouldn't allow it," Lestrade said.
"Insanity," I returned. A man who would beat his wife is an abomination; a woman who would allow it an abomination and a perplexity.
"There was a method in her madness, though," Lestrade said. "Method and what you might call 'an informed patience.' She was, after all, twenty years younger than her lord and master. Also, Hull was a heavy drinker and a champion diner. At age seventy, five years ago, he developed gout and angina."
"Wait for the storm to end and then enjoy the sunshine," Holmes remarked.
"Yes," Lestrade said, "but it's an idea which has led many a man and woman through the devil's door, I'll be bound. Hull made sure his family knew both his worth and the provisions of his will. They were little better than slaves."
"With the will as their document of indenture," Holmes murmured.
"Exactly so, old boy. At the time of his death, Hull 's worth was three hundred thousand pounds. He never asked them to take his word for this; he had his chief accountant to the house quarterly to detail the balance sheets of Hull Shipping, although he kept the purse-strings firmly in his own hands and tightly closed."
"Devilish!" I exclaimed, thinking of the cruel boys one sometimes sees in Eastcheap or Piccadilly, boys who will hold out a sweet to a starving dog to see it dance… and then gobble it themselves while the hungry animal watches. I was shortly to find this comparison even more apt than I would have thought possible.
"On his death, Lady Rebecca was to receive one hundred and fifty thousand pund'. William, the eldest, was to receive fifty thousand; Jory, the middler, forty; and Stephen, the youngest, thirty."
"And the other thirty thousand?" I asked.
"Small bequests, Watson: to a cousin in Wales, an aunt in Brittany (not a cent for Lady Hull's relatives, though), five thousand in assorted bequests to the servants. Oh, and-you'll like this, Holmes-ten thousand pounds to Mrs. Hemphill's Home for Abandoned Pussies."
"You're joking!" I cried, although if Lestrade expected a similar reaction from Holmes, he was disappointed. Holmes merely re-lighted his pipe and nodded as if he had expected this… this or something like it. "With babies dying of starvation in the East End and twelve-year-old children working fifty hours a week in the mills, this fellow left ten thousand pounds to a… a boarding-hotel for cats?"
"Exactly so," Lestrade said pleasantly. "Furthermore, he should have left twenty-seven times that amount to Mrs. Hemphill's Abandoned Pussies if not for whatever happened this morning-and whoever did the business."
I could only gape at this, and try to multiply in my head. While I was coming to the conclusion that Lord Hull had intended to disinherit both wife and children in favour of a resthome for felines, Holmes was looking sourly at Lestrade and saying something which sounded to me like a total non sequitur. "I am going to sneeze, am I not?"
Lestrade smiled. It was a smile of transcendent sweetness. "Yes, my dear Holmes! Often and profoundly, I fear."
Holmes removed his pipe, which he had just gotten drawing to his satisfaction (I could tell by the way he settled back slightly in his seat), looked at it for a moment, and then held it out into the rain. More dumbfounded than ever, I watched him knock out the damp and smouldering tobacco.
"How many?" Holmes asked.
"Ten," Lestrade said with a fiendish grin.
"I suspected it was more than this famous locked room of yours that brought you out in the back of an open wagon on such a wet day," Holmes said sourly.
"Suspect as you like," Lestrade said gaily. "I'm afraid I must go on to the scene of the crime-duty calls, you know-but if you'd like, I could let you and the good doctor out here."
"You are the only man I ever met," Holmes said, "whose wit seems to be sharpened by foul weather. Does that perhaps say something about your character, I wonder? But never mind-that is, perhaps, a subject for another day. Tell me this, Lestrade: when did Lord Hull become sure that he was going to die?"
"Die?" I said. "My dear Holmes, whatever gives you the idea that the man believed-"
"It's obvious, Watson," Holmes said. "C.I.B., as I have told you at least a thousand times-character indexes behaviour. It amused him to keep them in bondage by means of his will… " He looked an aside at Lestrade. "No trust arrangements, I take it? No entailments of any sort?"
Lestrade shook his head. "None whatever."
"Extraordinary!" I said.
"Not at all, Watson; character indexes behaviour, remember. He wanted them to soldier along in the belief that all would be theirs when he did them the courtesy of dying, but he never actually intended any such thing. Such behaviour would, in fact, have run completely across the grain of his character. D'you agree, Lestrade?"
"As a matter of fact, I do," Lestrade replied.
"Then we are very well to this point, Watson, are we not? All is clear? Lord Hull realizes he is dying. He waits… makes absolutely sure that this time it's no mistake, no false alarm… and then he calls his beloved family together. When? This morning, Lestrade?"
Lestrade grunted an affirmative.
Holmes steepled his fingers beneath his chin. "He calls them together and tells them he's made a new will, one which disinherits all of them… all, that is, save for the servants, his few distant relatives, and, of course, the pussies."
I opened my mouth to speak, only to discover I was too outraged to say anything. The image which kept returning to my mind was that of those cruel boys, making the starving East End curs jump with a bit of pork or a crumb of crust from a meat pie. I must add it never occurred to me to ask whether such a will could be disputed before the bar. Today a man would have a deuce of a time slighting his closest relatives in favour of a cat-hotel, but in 1899, a man's will was a man's will, and unless many examples of insanity-not eccentricity but outright insanity-could be proved, a man's will, like God's, was done.
"This new will was properly witnessed?" Holmes asked.
"Indeed it was," Lestrade replied. "Yesterday Lord Hull's solicitor and one of his assistants appeared at the house and were shown into Hull 's study. There they remained for about fifteen minutes. Stephen Hull says the solicitor once raised his voice in protest about something-he could not tell what-and was silenced by Hull. Jory, the middle son, was upstairs, painting, and Lady Hull was calling on a friend. But both Stephen and William Hull saw these legal fellows enter, and leave a short time later. William said that they left with their heads down, and although William spoke, asking Mr. Barnes-the solicitor-if he was well, and making some social remark about the persistence of the rain, Barnes did not reply and the assistant seemed actually to cringe. It was as if they were ashamed, William said."