This breaks the case wide open for Holmes. She came back very angry, and made her friend swear not to say anything about the incident, claiming the man was a former acquaintance who had fallen on hard times. Nancy asked Miss Morrison to walk on ahead as there was apparently a private matter to discuss with this man. He looked up at Nancy and recognized her, and she him.
On their short outing, the two women met a bent, deformed old man carrying a wooden box.
She claims to know nothing of the reason for the argument between her neighbors, but when Holmes tells her that Nancy could easily face a murder charge, she feels that she can betray her promise to her and tells all. Holmes is sure that Miss Morrison holds the key to the mystery, and he is right. It left claw marks on the curtain, too, leading Holmes to deduce that it was a carnivore, for there was a bird cage near the curtain. Judging from the footmarks it made, it is long with short stumpy legs, like a weasel or a stoat, but bigger than either of those animals. Odder still, the mystery man seems to have brought an animal with him. This Holmes deduces from footmarks found in the road, on the lawn, and in the morning room. Although the staff are quite sure that they only heard the Colonel's and his wife's voices, Holmes is convinced that a third person came into the room at the time of the Colonel's death and, rather oddly, made off with the key. Holmes believes that the case is not what it initially appears to be. Although the staff has seen the Colonel's weapon collection, they do not recognize this weapon. A peculiar club-like weapon was also found in the morning room. Later, a thorough search failed to turn it up. The coachman summoned the police and medical help, and also found, to his surprise, that the key was not in the locked door on the inside. Upon entering, he found that Nancy had fainted, and the Colonel was lying dead in a pool of his own blood.
He remembered the outside glass door, and went outside to get into the room through that. Realizing that something awful had just happened, the coachman tried to force the locked door, but could not. Holmes, Watson and the "Crooked Man", illustration by Sidney Paget reprinted in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Suddenly, the Colonel cried out, there was a crash, and Nancy screamed. Nancy was very angry and shouting about what a coward her husband was his words were softer and less distinct. She fetched the other maid and the coachman, who came and listened. When the maid brought the tea, she heard an argument in progress between Nancy and her husband, and she heard Nancy say the name "David". The morning room's blinds were up, and the glass door leading out onto the lawn was open. The coachman saw him enter, and that was the last time that he was seen alive. Hearing that his wife had returned, the Colonel joined her in the morning room. She went into the seldom-used morning room and asked the maid to fetch her some tea, which was unusual for Nancy. Hyde in Harper's WeeklyĪs a married officer, the Colonel lived with his wife in a villa outside the camp at Aldershot, and one evening Nancy went out in the evening with her next-door neighbor, Miss Morrison, on an errand connected with her church, and came back not long afterwards. The Barclays are heard arguing, 1893 illustration by W.
0 kommentar(er)
