“So that’s what we did,” said Johnny. “We pretended there was nothing the matter, but of course the one set of people we couldn’t pretend to was the examiners. Heather was all right—besides, it wasn’t really anything very much to do with her—but the rest of us just about scraped through, no more. We’ve done all right since then—family, you know—but I for one have been haunted ever since by not knowing what the hell happened to Midgeby. You see,” he said, now addressing himself to Greta, “Bill was wrong. Midgeby didn’t turn up that night to rub it in our faces that he’d outwitted us. He didn’t turn up at all. He’d vanished from St. Loys. A few days later the porters cleared out his belongings from his room—there wasn’t very much to clear out, poor devil—and since then, so far as any of us know, no one in the world has seen hide or hair of Alexander Midgeby, Esquire.”
Greta was staring at her husband as if he were an especially unpleasant lizard, as if she didn’t want to know him any longer and was disgusted they’d ever met.
“Did the cops not investigate the disappearance?” I said.
“Not much,” said Johnny. “They tended to dismiss it as just another case of an undergraduate folding under the pressure of the big week. They probably kept an eye on the river, in case he turned up there, but that was about it. He was an adult, after all, and adults are allowed to disappear if they choose to.”
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And ever since then, you see, it’s been hanging over us. How the hell did Sandy Midgeby get out of that goddamned dungeon, and where did he go to? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think I see him sitting on the end of my bed, playing with a sharp knife or a piece of rope and with this horrible vengeful leer on his face…”
“We could ask Sherlock Holmes where he is,” I said, nodding at the ouija board. The others seemed to have forgotten about it.
Bill snorted. “How old do you think we are? There aren’t any spirits and there’s never been a Sherlock Holmes. Johnny should have kept his mouth shut, though after all these years I don’t suppose it makes any difference what we did to Midgeby.”
“That’s what you think, buster,” I heard Greta mutter.
“Still, there’s no harm in asking,” I pressed. “Humour me. At the very least, it’ll take our minds off Johnny’s spooky story.”
“One spooky thing in place of another,” David said, clearly trying to lighten the atmosphere.
I smiled. “You could put it like that.”
Greta didn’t want to have any part of it any more, but the rest of us gathered round the board and dutifully put our fingers on the planchette.
“Are you still there, Sherlock?” I asked the empty air.
The planchette moved promptly and easily, as if the spirits had been waiting for the question.
“N-O S-H-I-T,” it spelled out.
“Our friend has a sense of humour,” observed Heather drily.
“I’m not sure I want to know the answer,” said Johnny, looking as if he were about to pull his hand away.
“Don’t break the circle!” Heather hissed. “It’s better to find out the truth, even if it’s a truth you don’t like. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life the way you’ve been up to now, constantly looking back over your shoulder in case the spectre of Sandy Midgeby comes leaping out of the woodwork?”
Johnny grumbled under his breath, but didn’t remove his finger from the planchette.
“This is ridiculous,” said Greta from the far side of the room. “Just take a look at yourselves. Grown men and women—well, grown men and a woman—asking the nonexistent ghost of a nonexistent private detective if it can help you.”
“Hush,” said Johnny, with surprising vehemence.
“All right,” I said. “Here goes. Mr. Holmes, could you tell us what happened to Sandy Midgeby?”
There was a long silence, and Heather shivered as if the room had suddenly grown a little colder. Then the planchette began to move again, speeding between the mother-of-pearl letters on the board.
“ ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,’ ” said David, when the planchette had stopped. He began to laugh—a nervous, high-pitched, self-conscious sound.
“Oh, for God’s sake shut it, David,” growled Bill. “What the devil can Sherlock mean by that?”
“He means that, in any investigation, you—” Johnny began doggedly.
“I know what the sentence means, you oaf. I’m not a complete illiterate. But what does the remark mean in the context of Sandy Midgeby’s disappearance?”
“Maybe,” I said, “Sherlock’s trying to tell us that all these years you’ve been looking for a complicated explanation for the man’s disappearance—an impossible explanation, really, because you’d have known if somehow he’d been able to break down the dungeon door, and he could hardly scrabble his way out through thick stone walls, could he?—when really the answer was staring you in the face the whole time. That’s the problem with locked-room mysteries, as they’re called. Everyone looks for an elaborate mechanism when really the easiest way in and out of a locked room is to unlock it.”
“But Midgeby didn’t have a key,” Bill protested. “There was only one key to that padlock and it was in my trouser pocket all night long.”
The planchette moved again, making a noise like paper being cut as it moved from one letter to the next.
“Holmes wants to know,” I said once it had paused, “how you can be so very sure of that.”
“Because I—”
A light dawned in Bill’s eyes, and he turned to look at Heather.
“I never stirred from my bed that night, not even to go for a pee,” he said. “But you…”
She smiled in an embarrassed way and dropped her gaze to the tabletop. “I couldn’t bear the thought of that poor boy stuck miles underground in a dungeon with no way of escape, knowing the exams on which his future depended started the next day. Johnny had the right word—it was a truly shitty thing you lot did to Sandy Midgeby. You boasted to me about it and thought it was a great joke but, though I laughed about it with you, like your loyal little woman, I didn’t think it was so hilarious. So as soon as you were asleep, Bill, I crept out of our bed, grabbed a flashlight, and retrieved the key. Luckily no one saw me as I went down the stairs to the cellar. From there, it was easy enough to follow where the dust had been disturbed until I found the room where you’d imprisoned him.”
“And you let him out?” said Bill.
“Yes.”
“And you never told the rest of us?”
“No. I thought it was your turn to suffer. You’d been happy enough to ruin poor Midgeby’s chances in the exams, so my conscience suffered not at all at the thought of you three being in a cold sweat all finals week. I let him out, and I apologised for my pig of a boyfriend and my pig of a boyfriend’s piggish friends, and then the two of us went back up to the corridor together. He vanished into his room while I crawled back into bed beside you, Bill. In the morning, you were none the wiser. It was the last time we ever slept together, Bill. Did you ever wonder why?”
“The fact that you dumped me during finals week didn’t help my results. Though, with everything else that was on my mind…”
“You shit,” David snarled at Heather. “All the time we were suffering the torments of the damned, you were laughing up your sleeve at us.”
“It’s all right, Jim,” said Heather, putting a hand on my arm. “I don’t mind what he calls me. The feeling’s entirely mutual. There’s hope yet for Johnny, who’s always had pangs of guilt about what happened that night, but as for the other two—pfft. They’re pathetic.
“Mind you,” she added, “I was as puzzled as anyone else when Sandy failed to appear the next day. I’d expected to see him at breakfast, or at the latest in hall for dinner.
But then I thought maybe he was just so revolted by the people he’d found himself among that he wanted to put as much distance between them and him as he could. Who could blame him? Wherever he went, wherever he is in the world now, I hope he’s doing well for himself. My guess would be that he is. He was so much brighter than the three upper-crust stooges who looked down their noses at him.”
Understandably, my little soirée didn’t last too much longer after that. The guests all left together in something of a rush, the men braying at each other in loud voices as if to let the world know they hadn’t been humiliated this evening.
From the way Greta was acting, my guess was that Bill would be looking for a hotel room by this time tomorrow. I felt sorry for her and wished she hadn’t been among those hurt. It wasn’t her fault the man she’d married had poison at his heart. I wondered idly what all those other shitty things were that Bill might have done.
Heather didn’t leave with the rest but hung back on the pretext of helping me tidy up.
“I’ve guessed, you know,” she said as I stooped to pick up the overturned plate of cheese and crackers David had left on the carpet in his haste to leave.
“Guessed what?”
“Don’t play games with me, Sandy.”
“Jim,” I said. “I’ve been Jim for a long time now.”
“It was the way you pursed your lips as you leaned over the ouija board. That was the final straw. Often enough over the past few years you’ve done something that’s rung a bell, but I’ve discounted it because, after all, there’s only a limited range of mannerisms that human beings can display. But tonight, when the subject shifted around to Sandy Midgeby, I put everything together. I recognised you.”
I spread my hands and looked at her in my best aw-shucks fashion. “Guilty as charged, ma’am. At least the accent’s genuine. Since I got back to this country and managed to insinuate myself into your circle, Heather, I’ve been expecting at every moment that you’d spot me for who I am—or was.” I paused, then said, “Are you going to tell the others?”
“Why should I? I enjoyed playing along with your game tonight. And I don’t care if I never see them again. I wouldn’t like to lose sight of you, though, Sandy. Jim.”
“The feeling’s mutual. Back at St. Loys, you were just about the only reason I stuck it out. After that dreadful night, when I got back to my room, I looked around, decided I could never attain you and there was nothing else to keep me there, and so I lit out for good. Worked my passage across the Atlantic on a liner and set out to make my fortune in California. By the time their immigration people caught up with me I’d gotten myself a green card. I’m a citizen now.”
“So it was you pushing the planchette?” she said.
“None other. It’s easy enough to do—surely you learned that when you were a kid. Everyone else is trying so hard not to influence the pointer that the slightest little shove you give it will be amplified by the others and, presto change-o, the spirits are spelling out a message.”
“And you convinced those poor goofs they were in touch with the afterlife shade of Sherlock Holmes?” She began to giggle. “No wonder they were lucky to scrape through with Thirds.” She patted the couch beside her. “Come here.”
I obeyed. “There’s only one thing,” I said as I settled myself. “You’re wrong to think of Sherlock Holmes as a fictional character.”
“Oh, pull the other one, Jim.” She gave my knee a playfully cross little slap.
“I’m not trying to kid you, Heather. People say Conan Doyle based Holmes on a surgeon he’d known at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary called Joseph Bell, but that’s not strictly true. Well, maybe it’s true in part. You see, my grandma’s maiden name was Holmes. She married a Midgeby.”
“I know the other three are stupid,” said Heather, “but please don’t put me in the same bracket. I’ve had enough of tall tales for one night, Jim. It was fun watching you pull the wool over the eyes of those dimwits, but I don’t relish the notion of your thinking you can do the same to me.”
“I’m not. I’m telling you the truth. My mum’s grandpa was a Welshman named Sefton Holmes. He didn’t wear a deerstalker or play the violin, and so far as I know he didn’t have a cocaine habit, but he genuinely was a private detective. He lived in Edinburgh for a while and that was where Doyle met him. Later in life, when Doyle was trying to establish himself as a writer, he got in touch with my great-granddad and suggested they could write a book together—really, that Doyle would ghostwrite my great-granddad’s autobiography. The adventures of a private detective, Doyle said: what could be more guaranteed to grab the attention of the reading public?
“Holmes disagreed, and besides there was the matter of his clients’ confidentiality to think about. But he allowed Doyle to follow him around for a few weeks to garner some ideas, telling people Doyle was his hired assistant—his dogsbody.”
“His Watson,” said Heather.
“You got it in one. They even shared a profession, Doyle and Watson. Doyle wanted to give his fictional detective the same name as my great-granddad, but Holmes—the real Holmes—refused to let him do that. So Doyle changed the forename to the obviously bogus ‘Sherlock.’ And there you have it.”
“I’m not sure I entirely believe you,” said Heather thoughtfully.
“I’m not sure I entirely believe me either,” I said. “But that’s the story as it was handed down to me by the family.”
“And you think maybe we got in touch tonight with the spirit of your great-grandfather?”
“I very much doubt it. Like I said, it was my finger that was pushing the planchette, not some ectoplasmic extrusion from the great beyond.”
We sat in silence together for a while, side by side. Her hand was still on my knee.
“We’ve wasted a lot of time, you and I, haven’t we, Sandy?” she said at last.
“Years and years and years,” I said. “Far too long.”
The Booby’s Bay Adventure
By O’Neil De Noux
Our latest visitor stepped in, paused, and looked at me for a moment before turning her gaze to my friend leaning against his oversized chair.
“Mister Sherlock Holmes, I presume?”
Holmes stood straight and said, “Miss Emily Topping.” He opened a hand to me and added, “This is my friend, Dr. John Watson.”
The young woman nodded at me and looked back at Holmes, and I made mental notes so I could describe her in what I expected to be another of my friend’s adventures.
Emily Topping, five foot six inches, blue eyes, yellow blond hair worn in a bouffant.
Miss Topping wore a slim blue dress which showed her willowy figure, but it was her face which kept my eyes on her. There stood a beautiful young woman with an almost angelic face, wide eyes, full mouth, high cheekbones, and a small chin.
“I received your note, Miss Topping.” Holmes pointed to the chair across from his as he sat and crossed his leg.
She sat.
“Your note stated that I was the only one who could help with a matter most urgent.”
Mrs. Hudson brought in a tray of tea, fixed a cup for me and Holmes each as we liked it, and turned to our guest.
“Milk? Sugar?”
“Both.”
Mrs. Hudson left and we sipped our tea.
“Back to the note,” said Holmes.
Emily put her cup down. “I need your expertise, Mr. Holmes. Your expertise in the paintings of Gowan Gindick. I believe I have located the lost View of Bay near Trevose Head.”
My aloof friend tried not to show his excitement at hearing this, and I sat back, astonished that Holmes was expert in the paintings of…what was the name? I took the notebook and a pencil from my jacket pocket and wrote notes.
“Continue,” Holmes told the young lady.
“I have traced it to Halmouth Abbey, on
Booby’s Bay just outside the village of Bushly, Cornwall. Within view of Trevose Head.”
My olfactory sense picked up a hint of the lady’s light perfume, a welcome scent in a room smelling of burned tobacco.
To me now, Emily said, “Gowan Gindick died in 1622. There are only ten known paintings by this Scottish painter, a contemporary of the great Johannes Vermeer. There are only thirty-four confirmed works from Vermeer’s brush. Gindick’s final work, finished shortly before he took his life, has been lost for over two and a half centuries.”
“A suicide?” I asked.
Emily raised her cup and said, “Gindick’s torrid infatuation with young Alice, Lady Febland, was unrequited, and he wrote her a final letter and leapt from a high cliff at the Mull of Kintyre. Alice was a cousin of the future King Charles I, the beheaded one. She would marry Lord Smyth-Grader, who was killed at the Battle of Saint Fagans.”
A torrid infatuation?
Back to Holmes—“Money is no object, Mr. Holmes.”
“What do you propose we do?”
“If you can authenticate the painting, I shall make such a generous offer, the owner would be unable to refuse.”
Holmes raised his chin, looked down his nose at the pretty woman.
“Why? Gindick was a good painter, but hardly Vermeer.”
“Gowan Gindick was my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great uncle.”
I lost count of the greats.
“I am the last of the Gindick line.”
Holmes finished his tea, sat back.
“Cornwall? Will you accompany me, Watson?”
“Of course.”
“There is a complication,” said Emily as she took another sip of tea.
“Complication?”
“Halmouth Abbey is a nudist resort. The Booby’s Bay Nudist Resort. Once we arrive, we must disrobe and wear no clothing during our stay.”
Holmes blinked twice, sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes, his face as stern as I’ve ever seen it. The lady turned to me.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes Page 11