More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

by Nick Rennison

  Here were the pale new sods; they could just be seen, though his feet first felt their inequalities. His cigarette was the one pin-prick of light in all the garden, though each draw brought the buff brim of Jim Paley’s Panama within an inch of his eyes, its fine texture like coarse matting at the range. And the chair in which Jim Paley had sat smoking this time last night, and dozing the night before when the shot disturbed him, was just where he expected his shins to find it; the wickers squeaked as John Dollar took his place.

  Less need now not to make a sound; but he made no more than he could help, for the night was still and sultry, without any of the garden noises of a night ago. It was as though nature had stopped her orchestra in disgust at the plot and counterplot brewing on her darkened stage. The cigarette-end was thrown away; it might have been a stone that fell upon the grass, and Dollar could almost hear it sizzling in the dew. His aural nerves were tuned to the last pitch of sensitive acknowledgment; a fly on the drooping Panama-brim would not have failed to ‘scratch the brain’s coat of curd’. … How much less the swift and furtive footfall that came kissing the wet lawn at last!

  It was more than a footfall; there was a following swish of some long garment trailing through the wet. It all came near; it all stopped dead. Dollar had nodded heavily as if in sleep; had jerked his head up higher; seemed to be dropping off again in greater comfort.

  The footfalls and the swish came on like thunder now. But now his eyelids were only drooping like the brim above them; in the broad light of their abnormal perceptivity, it was as if his own eyes threw a dreadful halo round the figure they beheld. It was a swaddled figure, creeping into monstrosity, crouching early for its spring. It had draped arms extended, with some cloth or band that looped and tightened at each stride: on the rounded shoulders bobbed the craning head and darkened face of General Dysone.

  In his last stride he swerved, as if to get as much behind the chair as its position under the tree permitted. The cloth clapped as it came taut over Dollar’s head, but was not actually round his neck when he ducked and turned, and hit out and up with all his might. He felt the rasp of a fifteen-hours’ beard, heard the click of teeth; the lawn quaked, and white robes settled upon a senseless heap, as the plumage on a murdered pigeon.

  Dollar knelt over him and felt his pulse, held an electric lamp to eyes that opened, and quickly something else to the dilated nostrils.

  ‘O Jim!’ shuddered a voice close at hand. It was shrill yet broken, a cry of horror, but like no voice he knew.

  He jumped up to face the General’s wife.

  ‘It’s not Jim, Mrs Dysone. It’s I – Dollar. He’ll soon be all right!’

  ‘Captain – Dollar?’

  ‘No – doctor, nowadays – he called me down as one himself. And now I’ve come back on my own responsibility, and – put him under chloroform; but I haven’t given him much; for God’s sake let us speak plainly while we can!’

  She was on her knees, proving his words without uttering one. Still kneeling speechless, she leaned back while he continued: ‘You know what he is as well as I do, Mrs Dysone; you may thank God a doctor has found him out before the police! Monomania is not their business – but neither are you the one to cope with it. You have shielded your husband as only a woman will shield a man; now you must let him come to me.’

  His confidence was taking some effect; but she ignored the hands that would have helped her to her feet; and her own were locked in front of her, but not in supplication.

  ‘And what can any of you do for him,’ she cried fiercely – ‘except take him away from me?’

  ‘I will only answer for myself. I would control him as you can not, and I would teach him to control himself if man under God can do it. I am a criminal alienist, Mrs Dysone, as your husband knew before he came to consult me on elaborate pretences into which we needn’t go. He trusted me enough to ask me down here; in my opinion, he was feeling his way to greater trust, in the teeth of his terrible obsession, but last night he said more than he meant to say, so today he wouldn’t say a word. I only guessed his secret this morning – when you guessed I had! It would be safe with me against the world. But how can I take the responsibility of keeping it if he remains at large as he is now?’

  ‘You can not,’ said Mrs Dysone. ‘I am the only one.’

  Her tone was dreamy and yet hard and fatalistic; the arms in the wide dressing-gown sleeves were still tightly locked. Something brought Dollar down again beside the senseless man, bending over him in keen alarm.

  ‘He’ll be himself again directly – quite himself, I shouldn’t wonder! He may have forgot what has happened; he mustn’t find me here to remind him. Something he will have to know, and you are the one to break it to him, and then to persuade him to come to me. But you won’t find that so easy, Mrs Dysone, if he sees how I tricked him. He had much better think it was your nephew. My motor’s in the lane behind these trees; let him think I never went away at all, that we connived and I am holding myself there at your disposal. It would be true – wouldn’t it – after this? I’ll wait night and day until I know!’

  ‘Doctor Dollar,’ said Mrs Dysone, when she had risen without aid and set him to the trees, ‘you may or may not know the worst about my poor husband, but you shall know it now about me. I wish you to take this – and keep it! You have had two escapes tonight.’

  She bared the wrist from which the smallest of revolvers dangled; he felt it in the darkness – and left it dangling.

  ‘I heard you had one. He told me. And I thought you carried it for your own protection!’ cried Dollar, seeing into the woman at last.

  ‘No. It was not for that’– and he knew that she was smiling through her tears. ‘I did save his life – when my poor dog saved Jim’s – but I carried this to save the secret I am going to trust to you!’

  Dollar would only take her hand. ‘You wouldn’t have shot me, or any man,’ he assured her.

  ‘But,’ he added to himself among the trees, ‘what a fool I was to forget that they never killed women!’

  It turned almost cold beside the motor in the lane; the doctor gave his boy a little brandy, and together they tramped up and down, talking sport and fiction by the small hour together. The stars slipped out of the sky, the birds began, and the same cynic shouted ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty!’ at the top of its strong contralto. At long last there came that other sound for which Dollar had never ceased listening. And he turned back into the haunted wood with Jim Paley.

  The poor nephew – still stunned calm – was as painfully articulate as a young bereaved husband. He spoke of General Dysone as of a man already dead, in the gentlest of past tenses. He was dead enough to the boy. There had been an appalling confession – made as coolly, it appeared, as Paley repeated it.

  ‘He thought I knocked him down, and I had to let him think so! Aunt Essie insisted; she is a wonder, after all! It made him tell me things I simply can’t believe… Yet he showed me a rope just like it – meant for me!’

  ‘Do you mean just like the one that – hanged the gardener?’

  ‘Yes. He did it, so he swears… afterward. He’ll tell you himself – he wants to tell you. He says he first… I can’t put my tongue to it!’ The lapse into the present tense had made him human.

  ‘Like the Thugs?’

  ‘Yes – like that sect of fiendish fanatics who went about strangling everybody they met! They were what his book was about. How did you know?’

  ‘That’s Bhowanee, their goddess, on top of his bureau, and he has Sleeman and all the other awful literature locked up underneath. As a study for a life of sudden idleness, in the depths of the country, it was enough to bring on temporary insanity. And the strong man gone wrong goes and does what the rest of us only get on our nerves!’

  Dollar felt his biceps clutched and clawed, and the two stood still under more irony in a gay contralto.

  ‘Te
mporary, did you say? Only temporary?’ the boy was faltering.

  ‘I hope so, honestly. You see, it was just on that one point… and even there… I believe he did want his wife out of the way, and for her own sake, too!’ said Dollar, with a sympathetic tremor of his own.

  ‘But do you know what he’s saying? He means to tell the whole world now, and let them hang him, and serve him right – he says! And he’s as sane as we are now – only he might have been through a Turkish bath!’

  ‘More signs!’ cried Dollar, looking up at the brightening sky. ‘But we won’t allow that. It would undo nothing and he has made all the reparation… Come, Paley! I want to take him back with me in the car. It’s broad daylight.’

  DICK DONOVAN

  Created by JE Preston Muddock (1843-1934)

  The impressively named James Edward Preston Muddock was born in Southampton, the son of a sea captain. After an adventurous early life, which involved travel in India and the South Seas, gold mining in Australia, and a lengthy sojourn in America, he took up writing in his late twenties. During a career that lasted more than sixty years, he published dozens and dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories. Muddock has the unusual distinction of having had a town named after one of his characters. His 1905 fantasy novel The Sunless City follows the adventures of a prospector named Josiah Flintabbaty Flonatin who discovers a lost world at the bottom of a lake in the Rocky Mountains. The book became a favourite of Thomas Creighton, a real-life prospector who founded a township in Manitoba and called it Flin Flon after Muddock’s creation. The town still exists under that name. However, Muddock’s most famous character – so famous that the writer eventually used his name as a pseudonym under which to publish other books – was the detective Dick Donovan. Donovan first appeared in print at much the same time as Sherlock Holmes and initially the careers of the two detectives unfolded in parallel. Under the collective title of ‘Romances from a Detective’s Case-book’ several stories featuring Donovan appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1892, the same year that many of the early Sherlock Holmes stories were first published there. In 1900, Muddock’s daughter Dorothy married, as his second wife, Herbert Greenhough Smith, The Strand Magazine’s long-serving editor. All told, Muddock wrote more than 180 Donovan stories which were collected in a dozen or so different volumes in the late 1880s and 1890s.

  THE JEWELLED SKULL

  Busily engaged one morning in my office in trying to solve some knotty problems that called for my earnest attention, I was suddenly disturbed by a knock at the door, and, in answer to my ‘Come in!’ one of my assistants entered, although I had given strict orders that I was not to be disturbed for two hours.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ said my man, ‘but a gentleman wishes to see you, and will take no denial.’

  ‘I thought I told you not to disturb me under any circumstances,’ I replied, somewhat tartly.

  ‘Yes, so you did. But the gentleman insists upon seeing you. He says his business is most urgent.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Here is his card, sir.’

  I glanced at the card the assistant handed to me. It bore the name – Colonel Maurice Odell, The Star and Garter Club

  Colonel Maurice Odell was an utter stranger to me. I had never heard his name before; but I knew that the Star and Garter Club was a club of the highest rank, and that its members were men of position and eminence. I therefore considered it probable that the Colonel’s business was likely, as he said, to be urgent, and I told my assistant to show him in.

  A few minutes later the door opened, and there entered a tall, thin, wiry-looking man, with an unmistakable military bearing. His face, clean-shaved save for a heavy grey moustache, was tanned with exposure to sun and rain. His hair, which was cropped close, was iron grey, as were his eyebrows, and as they were very bushy, and there were two deep vertical furrows between the eyes, he had the appearance of being a stern, determined, unyielding man. And as I glanced at his well-marked face, with its powerful jaw, I came to the conclusion that he was a martinet of the old-fashioned type, who, in the name of discipline, could perpetrate almost any cruelty; and yet, on the other hand, when not under military influence, was capable of the most generous acts and deeds. He was faultlessly dressed, from his patent leather boots to his canary-coloured kid gloves. But though, judging from his dress, he was somewhat of a coxcomb, a glance at the hard, stern features and the keen, deep-set grey eyes was sufficient to dispel any idea that he was a mere carpet soldier.

  ‘Pardon me for intruding upon you, Mr Donovan,’ he said, bowing stiffly and formally, ‘but I wish to consult you about a very important matter, and, as I leave for Egypt tomorrow, I have very little time at my disposal.’

  ‘I am at your service, Colonel,’ I replied, as I pointed to a seat, and began to feel a deep interest in the man, for there was an individuality about him that stamped him at once as a somewhat remarkable person. His voice was in keeping with his looks. It was firm, decisive, and full of volume, and attracted one by its resonance. I felt at once that such a man was not likely to give himself much concern about trifles, and, therefore, the business he had come about must be of considerable importance. So, pushing the papers I had been engaged upon on one side, I turned my revolving chair so that I might face him and have my back to the light, and telling him that I was prepared to listen to anything he had to say, I half closed my eyes, and began to make a study of him.

  ‘I will be as brief as possible,’ he began, as he placed his highly polished hat and his umbrella on the table. ‘I am a military man, and have spent much of my time in India, but two years ago I returned home, and took up my residence at the Manor, Esher. Twice since I went to live there the place has been robbed in a somewhat mysterious manner. The first occasion was a little over a year ago, when a number of antique silver cups were stolen. The Scotland Yard authorities endeavoured to trace the thieves, but failed.’

  ‘I think I remember hearing something about that robbery,’ I remarked, as I tried to recall the details. ‘But in what way was it a mysterious one?’

  ‘Because it was impossible to determine how the thieves gained access to the house. The place had not been broken into.’

  ‘How about your servants?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t a servant who isn’t honesty itself.’

  ‘Pray proceed. What about the second robbery?’

  ‘That is what I have come to you about. It is a very serious business indeed, and has been carried out in the mysterious way that characterised the first one.’

  ‘You mean it is serious as regards the value of the property stolen?’

  ‘In one sense, yes; but it is something more than that. During my stay in India I rendered very considerable service indeed to the Rajah of Mooltan, a man of great wealth. Before I left India, he presented me with a souvenir of a very extraordinary character. It was nothing more nor less than the skull of one of his ancestors.’

  As it seemed to me a somewhat frivolous matter for the Colonel to take up my time because he had lost the mouldy old skull of a dead and gone Rajah, I said, ‘Excuse me, Colonel, but you can hardly expect me to devote my energies to tracing this somewhat gruesome souvenir of yours, which probably the thief will hasten to bury as speedily as possible, unless he happens to be of a very morbid turn of mind.’

  ‘You are a little premature,’ said the Colonel, with a suspicion of sternness. ‘That skull has been valued at upwards of twelve thousand pounds.’

  ‘Twelve thousand pounds!’ I echoed, as my interest in my visitor deepened.

  ‘Yes, sir; twelve thousand pounds. It is fashioned into a drinking goblet, bound with solid gold bands, and encrusted with precious stones. In the bottom of the goblet, inside, is a diamond of the purest water, and which alone is said to be worth two thousand pounds. Now, quite apart from the intrinsic value of this relic, it has associations for me which are beyond pr
ice, and further than that, my friend the Rajah told me that if ever I parted with it, or it was stolen, ill fortune would ever afterwards pursue me. Now, Mr Donovan, I am not a superstitious man, but I confess that in this instance I am weak enough to believe that the Rajah’s words will come true, and that some strange calamity will befall either me or mine.’

  ‘Without attaching any importance to that,’ I answered, ‘I confess that it is a serious business, and I will do what I can to recover this extraordinary goblet. But you say you leave for Egypt tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes. I am going out on a government commission, and shall probably be absent six months.’

  ‘Then I had better travel down to Esher with you at once, as I like to start at the fountain head in such matters.’

  The Colonel was most anxious that I should do this, and, requesting him to wait for a few minutes, I retired to my inner sanctum, and when I reappeared it was in the character of a venerable parson, with flowing grey hair, spectacles, and the orthodox white choker. My visitor did not recognise me until I spoke, and then he requested to know why I had transformed myself in such a manner.

  I told him I had a particular reason for it, but felt it was advisable not to reveal the reason then, and I enjoined on him the necessity of supporting me in the character I had assumed, for I considered it important that none of his household should know that I was a detective. I begged that he would introduce me as the Rev John Marshall, from the Midland Counties. He promised to do this, and we took the next train down to Esher.

  The Manor was a quaint old mansion, and dated back to the commencement of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The Colonel had bought the property, and being somewhat of an antiquarian, he had allowed it to remain in its original state, so far as the actual building was concerned. But he had had it done up inside a little, and furnished in great taste in the Elizabethan style, and instead of the walls being papered they were hung with tapestry.