Missing Squares
It was the early morning of a day in November, which found me comfortably seated in Holmes’ study, reading that morning’s paper. Holmes was sitting on the couch near me, looking pensively outside towards the bright morning. Suddenly, he rose from the chair, turning towards the dark oak door leading outside the study.
“Watson, I do believe we are about to have company.” I raised my eyebrows skeptically, but not a moment later we indeed heard a soft knock on the door. I placed the paper on the table beside me, and got up as well, ready to receive the visitor.
A young woman walked into the room, holding her hat nervously in her hands. She looked around the room; uncertainty seemed to plague her pallid features. Holmes smiled and offered her a place on the couch, which she hastily took and sat down. She identified herself as Amelia Mersend. There was a pause in which she seemed to want to run from Holmes’ study, but Sherlock reassured she was secure, and urged her to continue. Amelia smiled lightly and began her story.
“You see sirs, my mother passed away, just yesterday to be exact. The pathologist that examined her declared it was heart failure, but this seems strange for my mother, who has never had trouble with her heart at all, and was in general good health, for that matter. My father was very distraught by the news, as he was very attached to her. I’m not satisfied with the pathologist’s answer, and I want you to inquire on this death…I have enough money to pay you of course.” Holmes began to stride about the room, seemingly absorbed in thought.
“Do you remember anything peculiar about the day she died, what she did or otherwise?”
Amelia frowned slightly for a moment and then shook her head.
“No…I mean her routine was typical, and she ate nothing that I didn’t have as well. She took a shower in the morning and wrote a letter in the afternoon, nothing peculiar about her routine at all. She was found dead the following morning in her bed.” Amelia’s eyes shifted for a second, as if she was remembering a detail from the day.
“Well…I don’t know if it’s of any significance to you, but my mother couldn’t find some of her money early that day. She was looking through her purse and said some was missing, but she is quite paranoid on her savings, it may be she was overreacting.”
“Perhaps.” Holmes features did not let trespass what his brilliant mind was connecting, as very often it is with Holmes.
Later that morning, and escorted by Miss Amelia, we arrived at her home, a building located in a wealthy part of London. Inside the house a most sober silence reigned, not a whisper seemed to roam the empty halls. The furniture of dark wood, refined in a most beautiful fashion gave the house an aristocratic air. Miss Amelia took us directly to Mr. Mersend. He was sitting in the living room, contemplating the flickering fireplace. He seemed to be sitting completely still, his eyes staring straight ahead. His daughter had informed him of our coming, and as he heard us approach he motioned for us to sit in one of the numerous armchairs that filled the room.
The man’s signs of age had been more pronounced, the wrinkles, symbol of the passing of time, were deeper; the bags under his eyes were long and dark. It seemed the tragedy had defeated his body as well as his heart. He talked of his wife slowly, with a melancholic look in his dark blue eyes. I felt nothing but pity for that tired old face, deprived of a wife so on in his years, but Holmes just listened attentively, probably storing every detail in his mind. We left Mr. Mersend alone in the living room, and went to inspect the rest of the house. We decide to talk to Mrs. Mersend’s private maid, thinking she might have some information the neither daughter nor husband knew about. She was a young girl; I would have guessed her to be twenty or so. Holmes smiled politely at her, and took a puff from his pipe.
“What can you tell us about Mrs. Mersend’s private life? Something she might have kept from her husband?” The maid looked instinctively down at the carpet. There is much you can tell psychologically by signs from the body, Holmes has always told me.
“Well…maybe Mr. Mersend didn’t tell you, but Mrs. Mersend had a very close friend. You certainly know what I mean, sir. She writes many letters to him, and whenever he can, he comes to visit her. You must imagine Mr. Mersend! He was very angry towards his wife. I’ve seen him outburst more than once. They’ve had quite the row…” She shook her head, clasping her hands together.
After the maid left to tend to her chores, Holmes and I went up to Mrs. Mersend’s private study. It was a slightly messy but clean room, with a large desk to one side, a couch and some stray chairs. A window near the desk showed a view over the streets of London, on this bright day. We searched the drawers to the desk, anywhere around the room they could be, and in the end found a stack of letters neatly positioned under one of the chairs’ cushioned seat. Holmes took them out and inspected each one. They were all from the same address, and they were all quite thick, surely containing more than one paper. The envelopes were cracked and the paper was tearing, indicating they had been opened and closed many times. Holmes nodded to himself, and then looked my way.
“We are going to see this Mr. Cardel, whom it seems this lady was extremely fond of.”
As we were leaving Mr. Mersend’s home, one of the butlers approached us in a hurry. He was one of the eldest, his skin very pale, with a lean figure and a stern look in his hazel eyes. He took us to a side, and whispered he had just remembered something peculiar the day Mrs. Mersend died.
“I was in Mrs. Mersend’s study room, and I noticed that all the stamps were missing. Usually they are stacked in a pile on her desk. There were many the day before, and it struck me odd that they were gone, but I thought nothing of the detail at the time. Now, however, every detail may be the missing piece to the puzzle.” He walked off brusquely soon afterwards, and we made our way to Mr. Cardel’s home, which I hoped would bring some light into this mystery. I simply could not fit the disappearance of stamps in with a murder, and Mrs. Mersend’s money disappearing, but after all I was not a brilliant detective, and left this sort of business to Holmes.
Mr. Cardel is the sort of man who reminds you of person with many faces, but no real personality. He is that type of human being capable of adapting and mutating to please anyone, but there is no substance behind his wonderfully placed words. He opened the door with a charming smile, and as he learned our characters, he became a more sober, well mannered individual. I did not like him at all. He was a frivolous pretty boy in my opinion. He seemed very taken aback, however, when he learned of Mrs. Mersend’s death. Clearly no one had told him. His face went pale and his eyes seemed to expand slightly as Holmes calmly told him of the death. He then looked at the detective as if he were a madman, or as if he had not understood him properly. Silence reigned in the house.
“But…I just received a letter from her! Surely you must be joking…” his voice was slow, plagued with uncertainty and disbelief.
“No, I assure you she is dead. In fact, writing this letter was one of the last things she did. May I see the letter?” Mr. Cardel lingered a few moments to settle his person, and then walked quickly to a table in the far corner and came back with an opened envelope. He handed the package to Holmes silently. The latter examined the package, looking front to back repeatedly. He stopped abruptly and looked towards me, his eyes illuminated like they so often do when he has discovered something crucial.
“Watson! Of course…the stamps! Mr. Cardel, I must leave at once, and must take this envelope…you may have the letter however that is not important.” Mr. Cardel looked at Holmes inquisitively, but he had already walked out the door, and I followed behind him, walking as fast as I could.
“Come, Watson, we must go to Scotland Yard immediately, I must have something examined.” I did not have the faintest idea what he was mumbling about, but I followed faithfully, and before long we were in front of the Inspector, and Holmes, by now overpowered by an excited madness, told him the specific instructions as how to test it. I stood by, knowing that soon we would know if the death of Mrs. Mersend was indeed accidental.
“May I have everyone’s attention, please.” The Mersend household had been summoned to the living room, and everyone was sitting down, impatient to hear what the famous Sherlock Holmes had to say. Tension was high in the room, I could tell, and people looked about the place fervently, as if trying to spot out the culprit.
“It has come to my attention that this crime was a brilliant idea of the moment, a spur of imagination. But who did it? That is what we all wonder here, isn’t it? Because, yes, it was murder. I have seen my ideas confirmed by a test done, that told us of the presence of arsenic in an object that came in contact with Mrs. Mersend. A stamp. We all know that to place a stamp on a letter one must lick it, and then place it on the designated square on the letter. This is what killed Mrs. Mersend, this fatal movement of the tongue. This was the stamp on the letter sent off to Mr. Cardel the day of Mrs. Mersend’s death.” I looked over at Mr. Mersend, whose look had suddenly darkened. He had shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“I could not, however, see the motive anyone would have to commit this murder. The obvious choice would be Mr. Mersend, but I did not really suspect the poor man, though it seemed the true criminal wanted me to follow that lead. I perfectly saw the motive after reading all the letters that Mr. Cardel and Mrs. Mersend exchanged. I later asked for Mr. Cardel’s half, as I already had Mrs. Mersend’s. It seemed in their ‘relationship’, a third person kept constantly coming up.
It seemed this person was very jealous of the two, and I convinced Mr. Cardel to tell me the whole story in the end. This person had previously had a relationship with the same Mr. Cardel, but when Mrs. Mersend began showing sympathies for him, he quickly dropped his first ‘girlfriend’, because Mrs. Mersend was much wealthier and of a higher social class.
You cannot believe the overwhelming jealously this girl went through. The blinding rage of being inferior had always haunted her, ever since childhood. Enraged to the point of madness she poisoned Mrs. Mersend, in hope of regaining the favors of Mr. Cardel. This will not happen however, my dear Ms. Lowesky. Everyone turned their heads bewildered towards Mrs. Mersend’s personal maid. She didn’t move, but looked straight ahead at Holmes, tight lipped.
“There is no point hiding or running madam, police is surrounding the whole building.”
The woman didn’t move for a slight second, but then broke down crying, whimpering into her hands.
“He was…something special for me…that wretched woman was so ugly, but she had money! I may have all the feminine charm, but I will never be wealthy. That filthy woman…she could not bare to see me with a young man when all she had was poor old Mr. Mersend. I had to kill her you see! I knew she would write a letter to Mr. Cardel every day, so around noon I went into her study, picked up all the stamps and carefully put just enough arsenic on each of them, making sure to stack them back as I had, to make sure she would not notice. I couldn’t know which one she had used to so I had to poison all of them. When I did however know which she had taken, I had to burn the rest.
After sending the letter, she had dinner like usual and then went to bed, Arsenic takes a while to work. I had stolen money the previous afternoon…I knew a pathologist, by chance we had grown up together, and he fancied me himself, so it was for a relatively small sum of money he faked the cause of death…I thought no one would look into the matter!” She sobbed into her hands, hiding her face. Her small body was hunched up and trembling. Two officers entered the room form the main entrance, and forced her to her feet. She struggled to remain in the chair, wailing about how she was justified, tears and mascara running down her rosy cheeks. Finally the officers gruffly took her away from the room, as the frenzied crying had been replaced with the pale and quiet knowledge that she was walking towards the gallows. Her movements were stiff and forced, because she knew she had been the one to sign the sentence for her own passing away, and this time she would not die unexpectedly, in her sleep. No, fully conscious of her actions she would walk into Death’s outstretched arms, forced only by the feelings of hatred and jealousy she had herself harbored throughout her short life.