SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE RETURN OF THE SPECKLED BAND

"The Return of the Speckled Band" by Edward D. Hoch  (from the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, edited  by Martin H. Greenberg & Carol-Lynn Rossel Waugh, 1987 [the expanded edition of 1999 adds Jon L. Lellenberg as an editor]; reprinted in The Sherlock Holmes Stories of Edward D. Hoch, 2008)

Five months after the strange events involving "the speckled band", Holmes and Watson ae once again called to Stoke Morton in Surrey.  Henry Dade 'recently gave up the wandering life of a gypsy to become a blacksmith" in Stoke Morton and to marry Sarah Tinsley, a young village girl.  This did not sit well with his younger brother Ramon, who has been urging Henry to leave the village and his wife and go back to the gypsy tribe.  (The fact that Henry, the elder son, spent his inheritance to buy the smithery and marry Sarah might have something to with it.)  The gypsy are encamped on the property of the late Grimsby Roylett, now owned   by his niece, Helen Stoner.  The property holds bad memories for Helen who has placed the estate up for sale and is now traveling Europe; once the property is sold, the gypsy tribe will be force to move out of the county and Ramon wants his brother to join them; Ramon feels the tribe -- the family -- is more important than Henry's marriage to an outsider.  Besides having kept the deadly swamp adder that was the speckled band of the previous story, he also kept several wild animals, including a baboon and a cheetah, which Helen sold to Ramon, telling him he could also have any other animals he found on the estate.  What Ramon did find, in an old shed and in a wire cage, was another swamp adder, identical to the first.  Ramon took the snake and, for unknown reasons, regularly milked the snake's venom, because (I guess) that's what gypsies did back in 1883.   Now Ramon has been taking the caged snake and using it to threaten Sarah and Henry wants Ramon stopped.  Sherlock takes the case because he wants to protect Helen Stoner and because he realizes that, if there actually were another serpent, it would be the even more deadly than its close cousin the krait.

Ramon declares that he has used the snake to threaten Sarah, only to scare her.  He feels that she only married his brother because of his inheritance.  Sherlock tries to convince Ramon to leave Henry and Sarah alone, but is not sure if his words have any effect.  He has a private word with Sarah later that evening, while Henry is resting upstairs after a hard day at the forge.  Before he leaves, Henry is found dead with a snake bite on his neck.  The room is locked and the windows are shut and there is no way the snake could have escaped the room.  A through search shows no sign of the snake.  There is some talk about Aaron's Rod, a biblical tale about a staff that became a serpent; there was an umbrella stand in the room containing a number of walking sticks about the same length as the missing snake.  And there is a mentally deficient gypsy who keeps popping up.

Holmes has to solve the who and how and why of the murder in order for Watson and him to leave Stoke Morton, hopefully never to return to that accursed village.

Not the greatest locked room murder Hoch has ever given us  but it is always interesting to read one of Hoch's stories about the world's first consulting detective.

Read it if you ever have the chance.