Esteemed Detectives,
Your diligence has paid off and The Mystery of the Pernicious Pubs has been laid to rest for good. Patrons can now enjoy their drinks without worry of sudden illness, or worse... Thank you, yet again, for you swift work and keen intellect.
As always, Holmes has also laid out his analysis of the case. Should you have any lingering questions, he will surely have the answer. Read on below!
The Dear Holmes Team
——
16 March, 1902
My dear Inspector Walker,
I have spread your four letters on the study table in the order they reached me — 4 March, 5 March, 10 March, 13 March — and, by reading them as they came, have retraced step-for-step the same crooked path you may have already walked. That is, if you have already solved this case.
Allow me now to conduct you along that route at a gentler pace, lingering over false scents, and eventually arriving at one unmistakable door.
Your opening report presented two lonely shopkeepers who died after convivial evenings: Paul Meyer, fishmonger of Billingsgate, April 1899, and Bartholomew Weeks, Bermondsey chandler, September 1900. Their only common attribute, as Watson observed, “a fondness for liquor.”
Even so, three of your notes pricked my attention:
- Meyer had no signs of injury yet collapsed a short distance from the Horse & Carriage door.
- Weeks likewise fell within a hundred feet of the Four Bells.
- In neither case did the coroner conduct a post-mortem.
Two drownings in the same pond might be an accident; two men toppling outside their respective taverns invited scrutiny. But with only these sparse coincidences, the file remained an unsolved puzzle-piece: suggestive, not probative.
The second letter, despatched after your Bermondsey rounds, supplied the first real key. Miss Olive Cashin recounted how Edward Scott, barman of the Four Bells, would overturn a small hour-glass and challenge patrons to “give me your name in numbers.” One minute only, A equalling 1, B 2, and so on. The game seemed childish, however its existence meant that someone in the public-house thought constantly in that substitution. I underlined the anecdote twice. Why should a tavern-man amuse himself with cryptograms? Because, Inspector, he wished to exercise the very cipher he used elsewhere. You will see in a moment how right Miss Cashin was to remember it.
The same dispatch produced Mrs. Eliza Venn’s sighting of a blue-cream envelope (“Compass and Crown Life” or perhaps “Crown and Compass”) delivered to Meyer a fortnight before his fatal stroll. Insurance, no doubt! The idea now took visible shape: a bachelor tradesman is an excellent risk for a swindler. He signs a small proposal “for burial expenses,” pays a weekly premium, drinks perhaps a final complimentary bumper, dies intestate, and the policy ripens into a tidy cheque for whatever “cousin” appears to claim it.
But two deaths do not prove conspiracy. You and I both resisted the temptation to gallop, and wisely waited for another letter.
Then came what I have dubbed your Clerkenwell and Limehouse replies.Your circular to the metropolitan stations returned a harvest. Your third letter set before me Robert Lyons, tailor of Amwell Street, dead 22 August 1896, and Matthew Swofford, Limehouse store-keeper, dead 18 February 1901, giving us four solitary proprietors, spread over five years and four boroughs, each carried lifeless from within a cricket-ball’s throw of his evening house.
Lyons’ docket enclosed another blue-cream envelope, this time incontrovertibly from Albion Fidelity & Life, with the pencilled note “Agent R.C.” All the while, Swofford’s case yielded the vivid description of Edgar Southey — tall, limping, red-bearded, Shakespeare on his tongue — and the puzzle quickened into life.
For look: Edward Scott, Ward Sidney, and Edgar Southey are not three men, but one masquerader cycling through initials E-S / W-S / E-S, always the same height but a new facade, and always vanishing after his chosen client expires. An actor who cannot resist the stage, reciting Polonius while he polishes glasses, and quoting Falstaff while he poisons tankards.
Your fourth letter, dated 13 March, scattered the last chaff. A strawberry-bearded “pedlar” pressing Margery Hill to accept “burial benefits. Sixpence the week!” An invoice, with an odd grid of numbers, and above all, a neighbour recalling a “Ryan” at what should have been Edward Scott’s former residence....
First, let us tackle the numbers, which came alongside a taunt: “Solve me and know my name.” Looking at this square, I was reminded of an old sort of puzzle, often referred to as a “magic square”. These puzzles tend to rely on rows and columns of unique numbers, all of which combine to form the same total. Within minutes of scrutinising our numbers, I realised that the sum of each completed column, row, and diagonal, came to sixty-five. Thus, only 3 and 18 would satisfy the vacant parts of the grid, and allow for a total of 65 in their respective columns. Then, like a flash of lightning, the hour-glass game Miss Cashin had detailed crashed into my thoughts.
If one applies the rules of Mr. Scott’s number game to 3 and 18, they become C and R, which aligns rather curiously with a name that has continued to exist in our periphery: Cornelius, Ryan.
The name is no vague rumour. Albion Fidelity’s agents’ list for March 1901 gives Ryan Cornelius at just that Milford-Lane address, “territory: City & Riverside Public-Houses.” His receipts are signed there, his policies filed, and his commission paid in sovereigns easily laundered through Sunray Licorne & Co., a Strand “importer” whose signboard is, as you guessed, a perfect anagram of the same two words.
One still might wonder, if poison, then what sort? I posit that his weapon was strychnine. Your earlier notes provided the answer almost without realising it. Josiah Brown, landlord of the Horse & Carriage, mentions “Ward Sidney’s gentian tonic” for stiff wrists; Harold Landau saw Southey dose the same cordial when his leg ached. Gentian is bitter, transparent, and pungent enough to cover the minuscule taste of strychnia nitrate. Mixed into a night-cap of neat whisky it stops a heart before any man can fetch a surgeon; mixed into a steaming rum it sends a fishmonger sprawling in a nipping April breeze.
But we must be just— not every irregularity was murder. You suspected for a moment that Angus McFey, Weeks’s quarrelsome friend, might have struck the blow over unpaid debt. Yet the debt itself came to no more than a sovereign; besides, McFey’s sudden flight only highlighted an absence of evidence, if anything.
We have already examined the possibility that this was but a case of tainted ale? Anchor Brewery supplied Horse & Carriage and Four Bells; Swofford died 70 yards from the Old Schooner, an Anchor house too. So bad casks, perhaps? But the brewer’s cooperage is inspected weekly, and a single poisonous butt would never linger five years undetected. Moreover, Weeks drank little ale that night; his final toast was whisky. No: the weapon sat behind the bar, not in the cellar.
Thus the red herrings, flung boldly across your path, swim harmless back into the stream.
Returning to our “magic square”, by the time I had translated the missing puzzle digits into possible initials, I needed only a physical tether. You obligingly supplied it in the neighbour’s remark: “Ryan’s been out for months, but he didn’t sell the place.” A murderer may change wigs and whiskers daily, but he cannot so easily abandon a free lodging within ten minutes’ walk of the Strand post-office.
I can confirm for you, that this very evening, Ryan Cornelius, wearing the modest brown beard of Ned Spenser, will pour stout in the back bar of the Parrot’s Mirror, while Mrs. Conley fries beefsteak for the late crowd. Under the counter stands you will likely find a brown gentian bottle, and in his pocket, I warrant, is a fresh Albion proposal awaiting the signature of some friendless tradesman from Leonard Street.
Go, then, with two plain-clothes men. Arrest him the moment the clock strikes ten, seize the cordial, cuff the wrists (they will be trembling— the actor always fears the gallery’s verdict), and carry him to Bow Street. At the same instant, I have been assured that Sergeant Grey will take possession of the Milford-Lane residence, and Dr. Watson, who has already made up his reagents, will attend to demonstrate strychnia in the locks of hair extracted from Weeks’s coffin.
I have written at inordinate length because your own patience deserved the courtesy of a full explanation, and because our unseen readers— those shrewd amateurs to whom you entrusted facsimiles of every letter— may like to trace the argument for themselves, and see exactly where each breadcrumb lay upon the road.
Send me a wire the instant you have your man; I shall join you at the cells and perform the final unmasking. Until that pleasant moment I remain, with the highest respect and warmest congratulations.
With great respect,