How To Solve The Mystery of the Siren Song

Dear detectives,

We hope you’ve enjoyed solving our latest case, “The Mystery of the Siren Song”. We’re in the process of evaluation submissions to our Featured Detective Competition and look forward to announcing a winner soon. In the mean-time, Holmes would like to share with you how he solved the case, and what truly transpired.

Sincerely yours,

The Dear Holmes Team

——

Mr. Sherlock Holmes

221B Baker Street

London

Monday, 17th November 1884

Dear Mr. Pacé,

I trust that you have fully recovered from the exertions of the past few days and are now back in fine health. I freely admit I did not expect that events would have taken such a dramatic turn. That the scoundrel possessed a firearm, and was prepared to use it, was of great surprise to my companion and myself. We are all indebted to Doctor Watson’s fine marksmanship; his swiftness and skill in brandishing his Webley-Pryse enabled us to avoid injury and capture the miscreant with minimal injury to his person. That he will almost certainly be hanged for his crimes is of less importance, in this instance, than his survival which will allow him to face justice in a court of law.

It is only now, in the relative calm after such an extraordinary climax, that I am finally able to share with you the full details of the murder of your friend and client, Mr. Rufus Elphicke Jacox.

Firstly, I must offer you some congratulations for your persistence in pursuing this case. Despite your many errors and failures, you have proved to be an investigator at least as adequate as the official force. The greatest gift you possess is your willingness to learn from your mistakes, no matter how numerous or amateur they may have been. This eagerness to improve your abilities led you to discover several clues of vital importance.

Your initial letter gained my attention for two reasons. Your description of Mr. Jacox was of some interest; his habits and constitution did not speak of a man contemplating the taking of his own life. However, as you had met him but a handful number of times, and all of these in the same context, we can draw no definite conclusions to his state of mind at the time of his death.

Of far more importance was the letter that you received just two days before his death. Its rushed and urgent nature spoke of a man in a desperate quandary. I must stress here that you should feel no guilt over this terrible affair, for it is only with the benefit of hindsight that one could possibly infer from his letter that Mr. Jacox was in mortal danger. His offer to stage the meeting at your practice was certainly unusual, but he gave you no hint that he actually feared for his life.

It seemed clear to me that he had discovered something troubling of a legal nature; why else would he contact you? That he did choose you over the police speaks of a man who was either not entirely certain of his suspicions or one that, perhaps, preferred to confide in the only person that he could call a friend. Either way, he thought he could trust you to help him and I believe that, even after his passing, you have proved him to have been correct. 

Your initial interview of the valet, Beach, revealed little, except for the very pertinent fact that Mr. Jacox was a man of regular habits. Beach, himself, turned out to be a very interesting character, but more of him later.

Your secondary examination of the house proved far more fruitful. Your descriptions were adequate but incomplete; however, you did note the scratched tiles upon the floor of the balcony. These marks must have been both deep and recent for you to have noticed them. A small clue, perhaps, however, they discounted several theories that I had formulated and added support to others.

Now we must move on to the most outré part of this case, the mystery of the supernatural disembodied voice of the late Mrs. Elphicke Jacox. I have no reason to doubt the testimony of Stout, the gardener; just as I believe, completely, that of Adelia Casteel. It may well surprise you to hear me make definite statements regarding things of such a controversial nature, but you will soon understand that the seemingly impossible can become boringly mundane once explained, rationally. In fact, it was your own observation that convinced me that both witnesses had told the truth.

You suggested that it mattered not whether Mr. Jacox had actually heard his wife calling out to him, only that he believed that he had. This was the spark that lit up the case in my mind. However, the idea that he had rushed out to the balcony and, in full flight, misjudged the balcony and toppled over to his death, is ruled out by several clear factors. His bedroom was such a mess that a straight course to the balcony simply did not exist. Added to this is the fact that, on a cold November evening, the balcony doors would certainly have been firmly closed.

The next clue was one that was almost missed. I requested that you examine the unoccupied first floor, which you did to a very basic degree, your mind still occupied with thoughts of your client falling victim to ghostly siren calls. Despite your thoughts being elsewhere, you did accurately describe the rooms and, more importantly, the gaps between the artworks that were not present on the floors above and below. Your explanation for this was entirely reasonable, and would have passed by many a detective; however, in my mind, a different connection was made. Remember, what is absent can be as important as what is present.

Your report on Mr. Jacox’s will was useful inasmuch as it was enough to dismiss a number of lingering theories, albeit ones I had already mostly discredited. That you later discovered that both Beach and Smith were well-aware of the legacies which were to be left to them, and made no effort to hide this fact, was confirmation of what we now know for certain. The killer of Mr. Jacox did not act to gain premature access to his estate.

The next vital clue that you identified, correctly, was the presence of chalk marks on many of your friend’s artworks. There can be no doubt, Mr. Jacox was compiling an inventory of his collection. When we add this fact to my theory behind the gaps in the paintings on the first floor, we can come to but one conclusion. What would make Mr. Jacox suddenly want to catalogue his eclectic and chaotic collection of art, something he had not deemed necessary for decades? 

Mr. Jacox believed that pieces of his collection were going missing. Despite the huge number of works that he owned, he would have known them very well. He spent every day in those few rooms, year after year. If a painting had been taken from the ground floor, staircase, or the second floor, he would have noticed immediately. However, he rarely visited his first-floor rooms. Perhaps the thief took one too many objects and Mr. Jacox noticed its absence as he passed by on the stair. Whatever the exact reason, your client chose then to undertake a census of his collection to ascertain the truth: Was he being robbed under his own roof?

Despite your tendency to speculate wildly, which can be extremely distracting and unhelpful, you do seem to have a happy gift for stumbling upon the truth, even if it is only by means of expounding every possible theory in a random, chaotic fashion. Your examination of Mr. Jacox’s desk was rather cursory, but your speculation upon what might have been taken from the drawer turned out to be first-rate. The subsequent recovery of Mr. Jacox’s catalogue, along with its accompanying notes, proved that he had, indeed, become deeply suspicious that someone was stealing from his life’s work.

Once we were certain that a crime had indeed been committed – two crimes, in fact – we began to look towards possible suspects, of which there were surprisingly few. Mr. Jacox had few callers beyond his regular domestic deliveries. These would have seen nothing of the house beyond the kitchen; all tradesmen were sent directly to the rear entrance and had no access to the decorated living rooms. They would not have known of his art collection and, in any case, none visited with sufficient regularity to be considered realistic possibilities. This left but three candidates: the valet, Beach; the housekeeper, Mrs. Smith; and the sometime gardener, Stout.

I was certain that we could eliminate Stout for several reasons. He also had very limited access to the house, if any at all. Mr. Jacox was almost ever-present and would surely have mentioned any unexpected incursions into the house itself. If your client had not seen him sneaking around then, surely, he would have been spotted by Beach or Mrs. Smith.

This left the two full-time members of staff as the last remaining suspects. Both were long-serving and apparently loyal. I shall begin with Mrs. Smith and the spiritualist connection. It was at her suggestion that Mr. Jacox contacted a so-called expert in the subject. Her defence – that it was Mr. Jacox himself who had first expressed an interest in the subject – sounds reasonable enough; however, her ‘performance’ was, in your own words, far from convincing.

The valet, Beach, was, from receipt of your very first letter, my prime suspect. He had intimate knowledge of Mr. Jacox’s almost metronomic habits. He could predict, almost to the minute, where his master would be at any given time. Only Beach would have known that Mr. Jacox rarely visited the first floor of his house; from where the stolen artworks appear to have been taken. Only Beach could have known that his employer had begun to undertake an almost forensic catalogue of his collection, and what might have spurred him to take on this most uncharacteristic task. 

This would all have remained mere conjecture and speculation had you not then provided the first piece of real evidence that proved Beach was not to be trusted. You correctly observed that Mr. Jacox’s body could not have been observed from the kitchen, contrary to what Beach had claimed. This small fact was enough to convince me that it was now time to look seriously at Beach and learn what I could about his past.

While you were following Mrs. Smith and Beach to their apparently shared residence, I was making enquiries into Beach’s past positions. His previous employer was most helpful and provided me with several pieces of information that proved vital to the solution of this case. He confirmed that Beach was, indeed, married and also, at that time, resident at the same address he is now, St. Andrew’s Street, Bedford.

Armed with this information, I made enquiries at the office of land registry as to who owned the freehold of this property. The result was both a surprise and confirmation of what I suspected. The legal owner is a Mr. Hablot Knight de la Mare. Clearly, Beach had been living under an assumed name for at least fifteen years. This knowledge of his real identity allowed me to ascertain crucial factual information and also to speculate as to a motive for his crimes.

According to parish records, on the 6th of May 1860, Jocelyn Smith, a resident of Bedford, was married to Hablot Knight de la Mare, also of Bedford, formerly resident in London. 

I no longer had any doubt in my mind, I now knew exactly who had perpetrated this heinous crime. That the only people present in the house, other than Mr. Jacox, were a husband and wife, living under false identities, pointed the finger firmly in their direction.

We have to conclude that the motive for these terrible actions was simple greed, but not without a possible caveat. Beach’s true identity hints at a far more affluent past, however distant it may have been; his Huguenot roots certainly attest to such a possibility. Beach worked daily, surrounded by a collection of art, the value of which he must have been well aware. That its owner seemed to care so little for its monetary worth must have irked him even more, his family having lost so much.

However, the most perplexing part of this mystery remained the question of how Mr. Jacox was killed? We had already eliminated any likelihood of accidental, or self-inflicted death, so we were left with the only remaining possibility, a murder.

Unusually, for such a case, we already knew most of the mechanics of the death of Mr. Jacox. He fell from the balcony of his second-floor bedroom, his neck broken upon impact with the flag-stoned ground below. The sole remaining question is: How did his enemies orchestrate such a fall?

I approached the problem from a position of pure logic. How could Mr. Jacox have fallen? The simplest solution is that he fell because there was nothing to stop his forward momentum. This theory may well sound outlandish at first, but it has the two crucial features that are vital to all great ideas. Firstly, it is simple. Secondly, it is demonstratively true.

The combination of deep scratches in the tiles, the flakes of paint upon the balcony floor and, finally, the screw that you discovered on the ground below, led me toward an almost laughably obvious conclusion. Your description of the screws left in situ was almost enough to confirm my theory. It was now vital that I visit the scene of the crime, myself. 

Doctor Watson and I arrived, as you know, on the five o’clock train from St. Pancras, early on Friday morning. This meant we were able to be at Mr. Jacox’s house by six-thirty to enact a thorough examination of the scene, undisturbed. 

Even by artificial light, I could see exactly that which I had suspected. The balcony rail had been tampered with. The perpetrator had removed all the fittings from the top to the middle of the rail and left the entire barrier held only by two screws situated near the floor. These had been loosened, to create a point whereupon the entire rail would pivot forwards at the application of even the slightest force.

Poor Mr. Jacox. Roused by a song, which he believed was being sung by his wife, calling from beyond the veil, he rose from his bed, opened the balcony doors and rushed out. He raised a hand to halt his forward motion, but the railing fell away before him, his momentum sending him tumbling down to his doom.

Beach, who had been hiding nearby, probably on the seldom visited first floor, then simply pulled the railing back into place and re-attached the screws, believing that no one would notice the minuscule changes that he had made to the railing to carry out his egregious scheme. Remember the shiny heads on some of the screws? When Beach had first practised his plan, he discovered that the original screws, once removed for the first time in decades, took a substantial amount of rust and decay with them. The result of this was that the old screws no longer fitted, and had to be replaced with slightly thicker and, crucially, brand new fittings. I also believe that, in his rush to put things back to normal, he failed to notice that one of these replacement screws had slipped from his grasp and fallen onto the ground below.

Once he had decided to take this terrible course of action, Beach would have had both time and opportunity to plan and execute his scheme. Mr. Jacox’s predictable routine allowed Beach to know exactly where and when he could work on his demonic endeavour.

Nobody could have predicted Beach’s extreme reaction when he was finally confronted by the authorities, late on Friday afternoon. However, one might speculate that your dogged investigation had unsettled him enough to provoke such a desperate response.

I hope that this account answers any lingering questions that may be troubling you. I have found this affair to have been of some interest, intellectually; however, you must now put your own mind at ease. Beach and his wife who, incidentally, has since admitted to having been the voice calling from the woods beyond the walled garden, will both face justice. You have honoured the wishes of your friend and he can now rest in peace.

Yours faithfully,

Sherlock Holmes