More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

by Nick Rennison

  ‘I wish it was well over,’ admitted Hollyer. ‘I’m not particularly jumpy, but this gives me a touch of the creeps.’

  ‘Three more hours at the worst, Lieutenant,’ said Carrados cheerfully. ‘Ah-ha, something is coming through now.’

  He went to the telephone and received a message from one quarter; then made another connection and talked for a few minutes with someone else. ‘Everything working smoothly,’ he remarked between times over his shoulder. ‘Your sister has gone to bed, Mr Hollyer.’

  Then he turned to the house telephone and distributed his orders.

  ‘So we,’ he concluded, ‘must get up.’

  By the time they were ready a large closed motor car was waiting. The lieutenant thought he recognised Parkinson in the well-swathed form beside the driver, but there was no temptation to linger for a second on the steps. Already the stinging rain had lashed the drive into the semblance of a frothy estuary; all round the lightning jagged its course through the incessant tremulous glow of more distant lightning, while the thunder only ceased its muttering to turn at close quarters and crackle viciously.

  ‘One of the few things I regret missing,’ remarked Carrados tranquilly; ‘but I hear a good deal of colour in it.’

  The car slushed its way down to the gate, lurched a little heavily across the dip into the road, and, steadying as it came upon the straight, began to hum contentedly along the deserted highway.

  ‘We are not going direct?’ suddenly inquired Hollyer, after they had travelled perhaps half-a-dozen miles. The night was bewildering enough but he had the sailor’s gift for location.

  ‘No; through Hunscott Green and then by a field-path to the orchard at the back,’ replied Carrados. ‘Keep a sharp look out for the man with the lantern about here, Harris,’ he called through the tube.

  ‘Something flashing just ahead, sir,’ came the reply, and the car slowed down and stopped.

  Carrados dropped the near window as a man in glistening waterproof stepped from the shelter of a lich-gate and approached.

  ‘Inspector Beedel, sir,’ said the stranger, looking into the car.

  ‘Quite right, Inspector,’ said Carrados. ‘Get in.’

  ‘I have a man with me, sir.’

  ‘We can find room for him as well.’

  ‘We are very wet.’

  ‘So shall we all be soon.’

  The lieutenant changed his seat and the two burly forms took places side by side. In less than five minutes the car stopped again, this time in a grassy country lane.

  ‘Now we have to face it,’ announced Carrados. ‘The inspector will show us the way.’

  The car slid round and disappeared into the night, while Beedel led the party to a stile in the hedge. A couple of fields brought them to the Brookbend boundary. There a figure stood out of the black foliage, exchanged a few words with their guide and piloted them along the shadows of the orchard to the back door of the house.

  ‘You will find a broken pane near the catch of the scullery window,’ said the blind man.

  ‘Right, sir,’ replied the inspector. ‘I have it. Now who goes through?’

  ‘Mr Hollyer will open the door for us. I’m afraid you must take off your boots and all wet things, Lieutenant. We cannot risk a single spot inside.’

  They waited until the back door opened, then each one divested himself in a similar manner and passed into the kitchen, where the remains of a fire still burned. The man from the orchard gathered together the discarded garments and disappeared again.

  Carrados turned to the lieutenant.

  ‘A rather delicate job for you now, Mr Hollyer. I want you to go up to your sister, wake her, and get her into another room with as little fuss as possible. Tell her as much as you think fit and let her understand that her very life depends on absolute stillness when she is alone. Don’t be unduly hurried, but not a glimmer of a light, please.’

  Ten minutes passed by the measure of the battered old alarum on the dresser shelf before the young man returned.

  ‘I’ve had rather a time of it,’ he reported, with a nervous laugh, ‘but I think it will be all right now. She is in the spare room.’

  ‘Then we will take our places. You and Parkinson come with me to the bedroom. Inspector, you have your own arrangements. Mr Carlyle will be with you.’

  They dispersed silently about the house. Hollyer glanced apprehensively at the door of the spare room as they passed it but within was as quiet as the grave. Their room lay at the other end of the passage.

  ‘You may as well take your place in the bed now, Hollyer,’ directed Carrados when they were inside and the door closed. ‘Keep well down among the clothes. Creake has to get up on the balcony, you know, and he will probably peep through the window, but he dare come no farther. Then when he begins to throw up stones slip on this dressing-gown of your sister’s. I’ll tell you what to do after.’

  The next sixty minutes drew out into the longest hour that the lieutenant had ever known. Occasionally he heard a whisper pass between the two men who stood behind the window curtains, but he could see nothing. Then Carrados threw a guarded remark in his direction.

  ‘He is in the garden now.’

  Something scraped slightly against the outer wall. But the night was full of wilder sounds, and in the house the furniture and the boards creaked and sprung between the yawling of the wind among the chimneys, the rattle of the thunder and the pelting of the rain. It was a time to quicken the steadiest pulse, and when the crucial moment came, when a pebble suddenly rang against the pane with a sound that the tense waiting magnified into a shivering crash, Hollyer leapt from the bed on the instant.

  ‘Easy, easy,’ warned Carrados feelingly. ‘We will wait for another knock.’ He passed something across. ‘Here is a rubber glove. I have cut the wire but you had better put it on. Stand just for a moment at the window, move the catch so that it can blow open a little, and drop immediately. Now.’

  Another stone had rattled against the glass. For Hollyer to go through his part was the work merely of seconds and with a few touches Carrados spread the dressing-gown to more effective disguise about the extended form. But an unforeseen and in the circumstances rather horrible interval followed, for Creake, in accordance with some detail of his never-revealed plan, continued to shower missile after missile against the panes until even the unimpressionable Parkinson shivered.

  ‘The last act,’ whispered Carrados, a moment after the throwing had ceased. ‘He has gone round to the back. Keep as you are. We take cover now.’ He pressed behind the arras of an extemporised wardrobe, and the spirit of emptiness and desolation seemed once more to reign over the lonely house.

  From half-a-dozen places of concealment ears were straining to catch the first guiding sound. He moved very stealthily, burdened, perhaps, by some strange scruple in the presence of the tragedy that he had not feared to contrive, paused for a moment at the bedroom door, then opened it very quietly, and in the fickle light read the consummation of his hopes.

  ‘At last!’ they heard the sharp whisper drawn from his relief. ‘At last!’

  He took another step and two shadows seemed to fall upon him from behind, one on either side. With primitive instinct a cry of terror and surprise escaped him as he made a desperate movement to wrench himself free, and for a short second he almost succeeded in dragging one hand into a pocket. Then his wrists slowly came together and the handcuffs closed.

  ‘I am Inspector Beedel,’ said the man on his right side. ‘You are charged with the attempted murder of your wife, Millicent Creake.’

  ‘You are mad,’ retorted the miserable creature, falling into a desperate calmness. ‘She has been struck by lightning.’

  ‘No, you blackguard, she hasn’t,’ wrathfully exclaimed his brother-in-law, jumping up. ‘Would you like to see her?’

  ‘I also have to warn y
ou,’ continued the inspector impassively, ‘that anything you say may be used as evidence against you.’

  A startled cry from the farther end of the passage arrested their attention.

  ‘Mr Carrados,’ called Hollyer, ‘oh, come at once.’ At the open door of the other bedroom stood the lieutenant, his eyes still turned towards something in the room beyond, a little empty bottle in his hand.

  ‘Dead!’ he exclaimed tragically, with a sob, ‘with this beside her. Dead just when she would have been free of the brute.’

  The blind man passed into the room, sniffed the air, and laid a gentle hand on the pulseless heart.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That, Hollyer, does not always appeal to the woman, strange to say.’

  MISS FLORENCE CUSACK

  Created by LT Meade (1854-1914) & Robert Eustace (1854-1943)

  LT Meade was the pseudonym of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith, an almost impossibly productive writer of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras who made her first appearance in print in the 1870s and went on to publish close to 300 books. At one stage in her career she was writing ten novels a year. In her lifetime she was best-known as the author of stories for girls, often with a school setting, but she also wrote many crime stories, sometimes in collaboration with other writers. One of her most regular collaborators was Robert Eustace (real name Eustace Robert Barton), a doctor and part-time writer. With Eustace she created a number of series characters including a remarkable femme fatale and supervillain called Madame Sara, John Bell, a professional ghost-hunter, and Diana Marburg, a palmist and occasional solver of crimes. Eustace outlived Meade by several decades and continued to write fiction in the crime and mystery genre. He also continued to collaborate with other writers, including Dorothy L Sayers with whom he wrote The Documents in the Case, first published in 1930. Meade and Eustace’s female detective Florence Cusack appeared in a series of short stories first published in Harmsworth Magazine between 1899 and 1901. The stories are narrated by one Dr Lonsdale. Indeed, he also does much of the legwork in them but it is the glamorous Miss Cusack – ‘this handsome girl with her slender figure, her eyes of the darkest blue, her raven black hair and clear complexion’ – who provides the final insights and solves the crimes.

  THE ARREST OF CAPTAIN VANDALEUR

  One soft spring day in April I received a hurried message from Miss Cusack asking me to see her immediately.

  It was a Sunday, I remember, and the trees were just putting on their first green. I arrived at the house in Kensington Park Gardens between four and five o’clock, and was admitted at once into the presence of my hostess. I found her in her library, a large room on the ground floor fitted with books from wainscot to ceiling, and quite unlike the ordinary boudoir of a fashionable lady.

  ‘It is very good of you to come, Dr Lonsdale, and if it were not that my necessities are pressing, you may be sure I would not ask you to visit me on Sunday.’

  ‘I am delighted to render you any assistance in my power,’ I answered; ‘and Sunday is not quite such a busy day with me as others.’

  ‘I want you to see a patient for me.’

  ‘A patient?’ I cried.

  ‘Yes; his name is Walter Farrell, and he and his young wife are my special friends; his wife has been my friend since her schooldays. I want you to see him and also Mrs Farrell. Mrs Farrell is very ill – another doctor might do for her what you can do, but my real reason for asking you to visit her is in the hope that you may save the husband. When you see him you may think it strange of me to call him a patient, for his disease is more moral than mental, and is certainly not physical. His wife is very ill, and he still loves her. Low as he has sunk, I believe that he would make an effort, a gigantic effort, for her sake.’

  ‘But in what does the moral insanity consist?’ I asked.

  ‘Gambling,’ she replied, leaning forward and speaking eagerly. ‘It is fast ruining him body and soul. The case puzzles me,’ she continued. ‘Mr Farrell is a rich man, but if he goes on as he is now doing he will soon be bankrupt. The largest fortune could not stand the drain he puts upon it. He is deliberately ruining both himself and his wife.’

  ‘What form does his gambling take?’ I asked.

  ‘Horse-racing.’

  ‘And is he losing money?’

  ‘He is now, but last year he unfortunately won large sums. This fact seems to have confirmed the habit, and now nothing, as far as we can tell, will check his downward career. He has become the partner of a bookmaker, Mr Rashleigh – they call themselves “Turf Commission Agents”. They have taken a suite of rooms in Pall Mall, and do a large business. Disaster is, of course, inevitable, and for the sake of his wife I want to save him, and I want you to help me.’

  ‘I will do what I can, of course, but I am puzzled to know in what way I can be of service. Men affected with moral diseases are quite out of an ordinary doctor’s sphere.’

  ‘All the same it is in your power to do something. But listen, I have not yet come to the end of my story. I have other reasons, and oddly enough they coincide. I know the history of the man whom Walter Farrell is in partnership with. I know it, although at present I am powerless to expose him. Mr Rashleigh is a notorious swindler. He has been in some mysterious way making enormous sums of money by means of horse-racing, and I have been asked to help the Criminal Investigation Department in the matter. The fact of poor Walter Farrell being in his power has given me an additional incentive to effect his exposure. Had it not been for this I should have refused to have anything to do with the matter.’

  ‘What are Rashleigh’s methods of working?’ I asked.

  ‘I will tell you. I presume you understand the principles of horse-racing?’

  ‘A few of them,’ I answered.

  ‘Mr Rashleigh’s method is this: He poses as a bookmaker in want of capital. He has had several victims, and Mr Farrell is his last. In past cases, when he secured his victim, he entered into partnership with him, took a place in the West End, and furnished it luxuriously. One of the Exchange Telegraph Company’s tape machines which record the runners, winners, and the starting prices of the horses was introduced. As a matter of course betting men arrived, and for a time everything went well, and the firm made a good business. By degrees, however, they began to lose – time after time the clients backed winners for large sums, and Rashleigh and his partner finally failed. They were both apparently ruined, but after a time Rashleigh reappeared again, got a fresh victim, and the whole thing went on as before. His present victim is Walter Farrell, and the end is inevitable.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’ I said. ‘Are the clients who back the horses really conspirators in league with Rashleigh? Do you mean to imply that they make large sums and then share the profits with Rashleigh afterwards?’

  ‘I think it highly probable, although I know nothing. But here comes the gist of the problem. In all the cases against this man it has been clearly proved that one client in particular wins to an extraordinary extent. Now, how in the name of all that is marvellous does this client manage to get information as to what horse will win for certain? And if this were possible in one case, why should he not go and break the ring at once?’

  ‘You are evidently well up in turf affairs,’ I replied, laughing, ‘but frauds on the turf are so abundant that there is probably some simple explanation to the mystery.’

  ‘But there is not,’ she replied, somewhat sharply. ‘Let me explain more fully, and then you will see that the chances of fraud are well-nigh at the vanishing point. I was at the office myself one afternoon. Walter Farrell took me in, and I closely watched the whole thing.

  ‘It was the day of the Grand National, and about a dozen men were present. The runners and jockeys were sent through, and were called out by Mr Farrell, who stood by the tape machine; then he drew the curtain across. I made some small bets to excuse my presence there. The others all handed i
n their slips to him with the names of the horses they wished to back. The machine began clicking again, the curtain was drawn round it, and I will swear no one could possibly have seen the name of the winner as it was being printed on the tape. Just at the last moment, one of the men, a Captain Vandaleur – I know of him well in connection with more than one shady affair – went to the table with a slip, and handed it in. His was the last bet.

  ‘The curtain was drawn back, and on Captain Vandaleur’s slip was the name of the winning horse backed for five hundred pounds. The price was six to one, which meant a clear loss to Walter Farrell and Mr Rashleigh of three thousand pounds. The whole transaction was apparently as fair and square as could be, but there is the fact; and as the flat-racing season is just beginning, if this goes on Walter Farrell will be ruined before Derby Day.’

  ‘You say, Miss Cusack, that no communication from outside was possible?’

  ‘Certainly; no one entered or left the room. Communication from without is absolutely out of the question.’

  ‘Could the sound of the clicking convey any meaning?’

  She laughed.

  ‘Absolutely none. I had at first an idea that an old trick was being worked – that is, by collusion with the operator at the telegraph office, who waited for the winner before sending through the runners and then sent the winning horse and jockey last on the list. But it is not so – we have made inquiries and had the clerks watched. It is quite incomprehensible. I am, I confess, at my wits’ end. Will you help me to save Walter Farrell?’