The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free

an important mission—to give you an opportunity to prove the truth of your outlandish claim. Will you answer one question for us?”
    â€œNo!” she cried. “I’ve had enough questions! None of you care about my answers! Get out, out!”
    â€œThis might be the most important question you have ever heard. Your life, your future, your freedom may depend upon your reply. Will you listen?”
    The rigidity of Holmes’s posture, his emotionless tone, the absence of neither indulgence nor pity seemed to startle the woman. She nodded, her unkempt black hair falling in a dirty tangle over her bandaged face.
    â€œVery well,” she said, “What is it?”
    â€œI would like to know,” Holmes said, “if this phrase holds any significance for you:
the Ace of Spades.”
    She stared at him vacantly, and I’m sure her surprised expression was a mirror of my own.
    â€œThe Ace of Spades?” she said scornfully. “I thought I was the one supposed to be mad!”
    â€œThink carefully, madam,” Holmes said.
    She rose from the rocking chair and turned her face to the window, so thick with grime that the only view it afforded was pale winter sunlight. Then her narrow shoulders lifted slightly, and she turned.
    â€œThe Ace of Spades,” she repeated slowly. “The birthmark. On his upper right thigh.”
    If there was even a flicker of acknowledgment on the face of Sherlock Holmes, I missed it by staring open-mouthed at the woman by the viewless window. By the time I turned my attention back to him, that face was wholly transformed. Instead of the carved, stony countenance he could adopt so easily, his features had melted into a look of mingled triumph and—what would be the right word? Compassion.
    A smile flickered across his lips, and Holmes said, “I will promise you this, Lady Darlington. I will obtain your release within the next few days. But I cannot predict how long it will take to bring your monstrous husband to justice.”
    I now understood why Holmes had insisted upon my bringing my black bag. No sooner did he speak these last two sentences than the woman’s legs gave out and she crumpled to the floor in a dead faint. It was almost an hour before she was fully recovered, and during that waiting period, I learned the rest of the story as deduced by that astonishing convoluted organ that was the brain of Sherlock Holmes.
    I t wasn’t one fact alone that Inspector Lestrade offered which made me suspicious,” Holmes said. “It was the odd combination of events. The fact that Rufus Darlington, for all his aristocratic pretensions, married the daughter of a tea merchant. The fact that he learned ‘somehow’—to use Inspector Lestrade’s word—about Mrs. Paige’sodd delusion, and allowed his wife to convince him to make a mercy mission to a madhouse. The fact that Mrs. Paige insisted on being alone with the couple. The fire that succeeded in maiming her. And then, the quick departure of Darlington and his bride on a long cruise and a distant address . . . Do you see the pattern, Watson?”
    â€œNo,” I had to admit. “I do not!”
    â€œRufus Darlington was a murderer,” Holmes said. “A murderer who escaped the law, behind the skirts of a woman.”
    â€œGood heavens, Holmes! Do you mean Darlington shot Carlton Paige?”
    â€œMr. Paige discovered the
affaire
between Darlington and his wife. And being a brutal husband, he punished her with a beating that enraged His Lordship enough to make him take a gun to the Paige household. He may have meant only to threaten Paige, but as often happens in such cases, the gun was fired.”
    â€œBut—Mrs. Paige took the blame!”
    â€œA very noble woman, in her own way,” Holmes said drily. “But I suspect that Darlington himself suggested it, promising her that a beaten wife would receive sympathetic treatment in the