In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," the principal crime occurred two years ago when Helen Stoner's sister Julia was murdered by their stepfather Dr. Grimesby Roylott. He was also guilty of the attempted murder of Helen on the night before she comes to see Sherlock Holmes—but that would have been impossible to prove, since Helen never even saw the "speckled band," a poisonous snake Roylott had sent through the ventilator in the expectation that it would bite and kill her, exactly as it had killed Julia in the same room and in the same bed two years before. Holmes comes down to Stoke Moran because he has agreed to help the frightened young woman who has told him that she heard the same low whistle described to her by Julia shortly before she died an agonizing death.
‘Tell me, Helen,’ said she, ‘have you ever heard anyone whistle in the dead of the night?’
‘Never,’ said I.
‘I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in your sleep?’
‘Certainly not. But why?’
‘Because during the last few nights I have always, about three in the morning, heard a low, clear whistle. I am a light sleeper, and it has awakened me. I cannot tell where it came from—perhaps from the next room, perhaps from the lawn. I thought that I would just ask you whether you had heard it.’
Helen tells Holmes that her stepfather has found a pretext for moving her into her dead sister's room and that she has just heard the same low, clear whistle at around three o'clock that very morning. She waited until daylight and then took a dog cart to the nearby train station and has just arrived in London to consult the great detective.
There is good reason to suspect that Dr. Roylott murdered Julia and is now trying to murder Helen. Money is the motive. Under the terms of his deceased wife's will, Roylott would have been legally obligated to pay Julia one-third of the income from her mother's estate if she married. Julia had become engaged just before she died. Now Helen has become engaged, and Roylott has the same motive for dispatching her.
"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is in the subgenre of a "locked room murder mystery." There is no apparent way of entering the room once the door is locked and the window-shutters bolted. The big question is not "whodunit" but how it was done. Holmes deduces that Roylott sent a poisonous Indian snake through the ventilator, where it slid down a dummy bell-rope and onto the sleeping Julia's bed, which is bolted to the floor for no apparent reason. It took several nights before the snake bit Julia, and it was there on the bed with Helen only one night without biting her. But Roylott was under time pressure and was forced to send the snake back into the room adjoining his on the next night. Holmes and Watson were waiting there in the dark, and when he heard the low whistle Holmes struck a match and began whipping the slithering "speckled band" with his cane, driving it back up the bell-rope and through the ventilator, where the angered snake bit the unprepared and unexpecting Dr. Roylott and caused his instant death.
The author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, concludes his story with a bit of poetic justice. Killing Roylott with his own snake was the only way to punish the mad doctor for his real crime as well as for his intended crime, because there was no way of proving that he had murdered Julia two years ago and no way of proving that he intended to murder Helen. Doyle coined the term "speckled band" and used it in his title because he did not want to mention the word "snake," which would immediately make the reader suspect that the solution involved sending a snake into a room that was otherwise impervious.
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