Associates of Sherlock Holmes Page 25
Thus a whole three days of time were lost, clapping men upon the back and exclaiming about this or that sporting endeavour, until Sherlock – under the barbarous name of Philip Matherhyde – was quite as boon a companion to Mr Welby as any of that young man’s new friends. A telegram, meanwhile, had gone to Sergeant Rourke’s relatives to discover if the mysterious message that had cheered him had originated with them, or if they could raise a conjecture as to its sender. A reply reached Baker Street by the same means, while Holmes was among his cups. The letter had not directly concerned a legacy, but it had been a turn of fortune, which might suggest to the sergeant that the time had come to actively pursue the hand of Miss Athol. The message was nothing less than the news of the death of his estranged wife, an Indian woman – whom he had abandoned on his return to England. It is perhaps surprising that a man who would readily abandon one wife might feel a qualm in seeking to court another – but Rourke’s family were Irish Catholic stock, and, whereas the leaving of a native bride was accounted a venal sin, the bigamous or adulterous acquisition of another or the horror of divorce were both to him as much an evil as the bottled demons that he attempted to wrest from the hands of his soldiers. Considering himself free, however, he had undoubtedly gone to his death in the pleasant, if deluded, mental state of one contemplating the bliss of matrimony.
Watson hurried to inform Sherlock of this, and found him in a bout of fisticuffs among drunken men, as the erstwhile Matherhyde was forced to show his metal during a bout of ribaldry. Watson’s presence proved fatal to his disguise, for, as it transpired, Welby’s new friends were none other than members of Rourke’s own regiment, who had but a week before been questioned by Watson in connection with their sergeant’s death. The jig, as the cant has it, was up. If Matherhyde’s anxious friend was the well-known Dr Watson, whom could the bibulous Matherhyde be but the disguised Sherlock Holmes? The logic is not perhaps exact; Dr Watson might have many friends, but to drunken and violent men – prone to the quick reactions and suspicions of soldiers – it sufficed. My brother and his friend were bodily thrown out of the drinking den.
Only later when they compared their view of the case was Sherlock to declare that he had now, to his own satisfaction at least, determined the sequence of events, though he was doubtful of proving them in any court of England.
Firstly the presence of the soldiers around Welby was no coincidence: even before his intent encompassed marriage, Rourke desired to have no rival in respect of Miss Athol. Thus he set his men, who were keen to curry favour with him, to dog Welby’s footsteps and to drag him down. It was in their company that he gained the reputation that led to Margaret Athol refusing his offer of marriage, and it was no doubt through Rourke or a third party instructed by him that Miss Athol learned of her former beau’s misdeeds. Rourke then was not so innocent a victim as he might have appeared, nor were his misdeeds confined to this country, for he had left behind him in India at least one thread ending in death, which was to change his status here.
The family of his former wife was by no means rich, though, and to orchestrate vengeance across the bounds of the Empire, or over time, requires either considerable resources or passionate fanaticism, of which there was no evidence in the case.
Someone, however, had both the means (perhaps hemlock, perhaps another drug) to paralyse the sergeant, the capacity to persuade him to drink it, and – perhaps – knowledge of the shot tower. The latter requirement my brother concluded was a lesser one for he had conceived recently – a possible delusion which he has communicated to me, but which as yet I have been unable to either prove or disprove – the view that certain sorts of crime: robbery, vengeance, the more outré and unsolvable of murders, were being better planned, better executed, and rendered more baroque and elaborate in their elegance than the London criminal classes would ever manage on their own. The shot tower then might well be an elaboration of a scheme of revenge, suggested by a third party – this planner of crimes – rather than a natural thought of the murderer.
It is the shot tower that makes me call this an awful crime. To imagine Rourke, whatever his faults, lying conscious (for hemlock merely paralyses the body, it does not deaden the mind, nor, so far as I know, prevent the sensation of pain) while he was ‘shot’ again and again, is to imagine a mind cold and humorously evil in its planning.
You disagree? It’s true, you and I, as well as Sherlock, deduced the method once the nature of the wounds was made clear to us. But to work backwards from calamity to cause is not the same as to pull the mechanism of causation from the air with a view to the causing of a calamity. That must be the mark of a brain that has teetered upon its throne of reason and begun a fall into utter blackness. A brain not unlike that of your late brother. Oh, sit down man. What good does a protest do between us?
Well, no matter. The brain that suggested the tower may be a matter for another time, but the more proximate identity of the murderer was, I’m sure you will agree, clear. Who did Rourke know with whom he might be inclined to take tea? Who would be able to persuade him to drink a herbal tonic? Who but his intended bride Miss Margaret Athol? The cause of her conspiring in his murder was partially shadowed, it was true. His treatment of her former lover? A sufficiently fanatical teetotaller might see the enticing of a man into the grip of drink as an awful crime. His abandonment of his wife? There was no way of proving that she was aware of either action. My brother, however, and this was I confess a thought worthy of us, asked himself a single crucial question.
You can’t guess?
It was this: given that the method of murder – the repeated striking of shot into the body – had suggested itself to the hypothetical master planner of crime, what aspect of the request on the part of his client (whether it was Miss Athol, or not) for vengeance could have suggested to this hidden master – let us term him M – such an image? Surely the punishment must in some way have fitted the crime for which revenge was desired? An artist, a veritable Leonardo De Vinci of crime, would demand nothing less.
Once asked it is obvious, is it not? The repeated striking of shot into a victim. What was the shot tower replicating, but the action of a firing squad? A very satisfactory replication for a criminal vengeance, for it involved no living band of soldiers to shoot high from pity or to break down from guilt thereafter.
Coming to this conclusion, Sherlock sent for a copy of Rourke’s military record in India – a request that I was able to facilitate – and discovered, what Rourke himself must have forgotten, or failed to connect to the prim and pretty Miss Athol of the Lady’s League, his presiding presence at the court martial and execution of Private John Benjamin Athol at Benares in India in 1887. John Athol, Margaret’s older brother, had taken advantage of the awful famine of that year to sell grain at inflated prices to the starving from military stores, profiteering from goods that were not his to dispose of.
My brother confronted Miss Athol with these facts and, with Watson as a witness, was present as she broke down and confessed. She defended her brother to the last, claiming that he had not sought vast wealth in gold or gems, or favours, for the grain but only desired to alleviate the horrible lack among the native population when so much was stored for the feeding of the army. My brother pressed her as to how she had arranged the murder, and how the shot tower “firing squad” had been conceived, but she refused to acknowledge any other hand in the business – although it was certain that she must have had accomplices in the movement of the body, if not in the conception of the crime. As to the sideburns and the moustache – her explanation for their removal was simple, although it struck my brother as an account she had from another mouth rather than her recounting something she had done. The falling shot had cooled insufficiently in one case during the bombardment of the body – as sometimes occurs in the process, the irregular shot so formed being discarded after passing through a sizing sieve – and a splash of still-molten metal had rebounded, catching in and singeing part of Rourke’s moustache on t
he right side. The removal had been intended to prevent this being visible, and the removal of the rest of the moustache and the sideburns had been a matter of symmetry.
Oh, if we only knew the kind of mind that demanded such mathematical symmetry and brought such mechanical aptitude to the commission of crime, eh Colonel! A pity your late lamented brother is no longer with us; it has the feel of his work does it not, or a least a family resemblance to it.
Of course, there is no proof – but I have sometime wondered, what if a disinterested party could have spoken understandingly to your brother, before he was too far steeped in crime, could he have been persuaded to step back from the abyss? The civil service can always use a brilliant mind, and even a macabre streak need not be an absolute bar to gainful employment. Something to think about perhaps. Still, I’m rambling, and I fear I have your Queen.
A shame I never got to meet your brother, and it might be a bigger shame still if you were to have to meet mine.
1 This appears to refer to the three papers published in the first half of 1896 by Sigmund Freud.
2 The papers of the late Mycroft Holmes from which this account is derived do not date events. They were originally filed in an order that would have made their timing self evident to their maker. Sadly this arrangement was lost in the Blitz, when some of the papers were destroyed and all were scattered. Robert Louis Stevenson died on 3rd December 1894; this, and the earlier reference to Freud suggests that this account dates from 1897 at the earliest.
3 Mycroft is perhaps here referring to the definition of rational as opposed to superstitious in Hume’s Of Suicide unpublished in the philosopher’s lifetime except as an anonymous private pamphlet.
4 There is some possibility that this is not a compliment; Mycroft’s papers almost never use the term “ingenious” except in the sense it is used in Ambrose Bierce’s story “The Ingenious Patriot” (1899) where it signifies a technically adept individual with no grasp of the long-term consequences of his actions. This does not, however, in itself date the action to after 1899, as this usage of the word – which is essentially sarcastic – did not originate with Bierce.
5 Patrick Bowles-Lyon, thirteenth Earl of Strathmore and Kingshorne.
6 William Renshaw and Earnest Renshaw defeated the earl and his partner Sir Herbert Wilberforce: 2-6, 1-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-3.
7 While gun barrel rifling began in the sixteenth century in Germany, the end of smoothbore musket usage by the British Army was considerably delayed. The “Brown Bess” musket was in use until 1838, and the percussion-cap musket that replaced it also did not have a rifled barrel and remained in use until 1851.
8 Designed by David Riddal Roper for Thomas Malby & Co in 1826, the tower was still in use as late as 1949.
9 Colonel James Moriarty, though formerly in the Indian Army, was at this time employed as a railway station master. That his brother had the same name as him must have been confusing, but it is possible that they were referred to as James Senior and James Junior respectively, by a father more than usually obsessed with order and regimentation.
PAGE TURNERS
Kara Dennison
Billy the Page first appeared in The Valley of Fear, the last of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels. While he didn’t get much attention in the original canon, he was seen more in Doyle’s three plays, and has appeared in a few screen adaptations. Notably, Billy was also Charlie Chaplin’s first stage role, both in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: A Drama in Four Acts and William Gillette’s The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes.
—Kara Dennison
You want to talk about important, right? It’s all well and good to say Dr Watson’s important to Mr Holmes, but he writes the stories, don’t he? Of course he’s going to make himself big talk in his own stories. That Lestrade fella, he shows up a lot. Probably he really is a bit important because he’s a police sort and takes the criminals off to prison once Mr Holmes gets clever and finds ’em.
But none of them’s there every morning, crack of dawn ’til whatever sound dusk makes, making sure Mr Holmes sees the people he needs to see and gets the messages he needs to get. None of these people would even see him if it weren’t for me bringing ’em in, you know.
And eating; three times a day, like actual clockwork, I give a knock to let him know he needs to eat. His brain’s so full of clever things, you see, he’d forget otherwise. One time Mrs Hudson roasted an entire chicken, and you could smell it all the way up in his study, and he still didn’t know supper was on. She said: let him starve, the fool, but that’s not my job, is it?
That’s why he needs me. That’s why he needs Billy. Take away Billy, and what’ve you got? A really canny cove who starves himself and doesn’t know who’s at the door.
Suppose that goes for any Billy, really. Between us? My name’s Humphrey. The one before me? Alfie. But we’re both Billy. And whoever comes after us’ll probably be Billy, too. Easier than remembering new names every few years, I guess.
Wiggins’ll have a go at me whenever he sees me, though. Thinks being a page is too soft a job. Asks me how long it takes to shine all the buttons on my jacket every morning. Talks about what he’s bought with his latest guinea prize from Mr Holmes. Says he got in fistfights with big tough sorts – I don’t believe that or he’d have some proper bruises, right? He’s really awful jumped up, though, is Wiggins. Even more so since Dr Watson started mentioning him by name in his stories.
The other day he says – Wiggins says, I mean, not Dr Watson – the other day he says, “Maybe Holmes just don’t trust you with the important stuff. That’s why he keeps you at home instead of sending you off on actual important jobs.” Which is not the case, thank you – and people might know that if Dr Watson ever decides to write up certain other cases. That Valley of Fear business, maybe. (People’d love that one – just a suggestion.)
Besides, how’s he know? Maybe I am doing big, important jobs. Maybe, just maybe, Mr Holmes gives me the extra important work because he knows I won’t go bragging to every last person in Britain.
Right, so this is just between you and me. I wouldn’t go telling just anyone, because it ain’t proper, but I know you’re cast iron. You won’t go blabbing about this all over the place, will you? Course not. Like I said. Trustworthy. And it’s my job to know people, since I gotta let ’em in to see Mr Holmes every day.
Sometimes I get these letters to deliver that are so secret, so private, even I don’t know what’s in ’em. And I carry ’em! I never look, though. Never. Not even once. You ask Mr Holmes or Dr Watson. They’re sealed, and never have I ever delivered one with a broken seal. Not a one time. Not even when my life was on the line.
You take last Friday. Middle of the afternoon, Mr Holmes calls me in. He’s in the middle of opening the window for some fresh air, and he hands me a letter. “This message contains sensitive information of the utmost importance,” he says, all big and loud and important. “Take it to the usual recipient, and see that you’re not followed. Use whatever back alleyways and shortcuts you need to, but make sure you get it to him at his practice.”
“Back alleyways?” I say. “The usual recipient” is Dr Watson, see, and I’m thinking I could run down the main streets and get it to him twice as quick, maybe even take a cab if Mr Holmes’ll put the money forward.
But, Mr Holmes, he knows what he wants. “You must exercise all stealth,” he says. “I am unconcerned with alacrity. I can’t have you being seen dashing down the main roads, and I certainly cannot have you being followed. You can make your way back here any way you please, but lie low as you go. Make sure no one sees the letter, and definitely make sure no one knows to whom it is headed.”
Lie low as you go. “Yes, sir, Mr Holmes!” And I tuck the letter in my pocket and I’m on my way.
There’s a series of back alleys and a few cuts through back gardens I can take so you’ll never even see my face on the main street. That’s the way I go, just like Mr Holmes asks. Not a soul back there but myself, b
ut even so I’m sticking close to walls and shadows. Because you never know, and I follow my directions to the letter.
I’m coming ’round a corner, quiet as you please, and there’s a man standing in my way. He’s some toff’s servant for sure. Probably a butler from how he’s dressed. But he looks like he’s been stuffed into that suit. There’s no way he’s an actual butler.
“Young Billy, I presume,” he says, and he’s giving me this look like he’s deciding whether or not he’s gonna skin me. “On our way on a mission from Mr Sherlock Holmes?”
I ask how he knows it’s me, and he points at my jacket. “We’ve seen you coming and going from his rooms more than once.”
Drat. That’s stupid of me. I’m not lying low if I’m wearing my uniform, am I? But it’s too late now. I try to sidestep him, but he follows me.
“You seem nervous,” he says, but he’s saying it in this really superior voice like, you know, almost like he’s enjoying being a bother.
“Yeah,” I say, “I’ve got somewhere to be and I’ve got a big lunk standing in my way, course I’m tense.”
I figure he’ll get angry at me for that, and his face does go a little red, but all he does is stick his hand out. “You’re carrying a piece of correspondence. I request that you give it to me immediately.”
“Nah,” I say, “I don’t think I will.”
Now he’s going really red. “Young boy, I fear you do not understand the something-or-other of what you’re carrying.” He said an actual word, but I can’t remember what it was. It was one of those big expensive words like people say when they want you to think they’re more important than you.