He left me, and I rose to look at the chit.
I expected to see a headed document like that which Miss Leckie had found left behind by Mr Foley but instead I found just a slip of blank paper with a single tick on it. Having got myself into the Bar of Gold, I now wondered through the cloying haze of burning pipes how I might prosecute my investigation.
And then I had a stroke of good fortune. There was an altercation at the entrance, and on striding to the front of the establishment to see what was afoot, I found myself face to face with my former patient, Mr Isa Whitney, in a furious argument with the Lascar manager of the Bar of Gold.
“Watson, how good to see a friend,” wheezed Whitney through the haze. “I fear there has been a complete misunderstanding with the good proprietor of this establishment. I think it would be as well if I departed.”
“Whitney!” I exclaimed, “How long have you been here for?”
“We don’t use names in here,” interjected the Lascar. “Ever.”
“A couple of hours, maybe three,” mumbled Mr Whitney.
“Then why do you have the Evening Standard from three days ago in your pocket?”
“What day is it?”
“It is Thursday afternoon.”
“Surely it is only Monday. I have had perhaps three pipes, maybe four. Not more.”
“It is Thursday,” I replied firmly. “I will take you home. Your wife will be out of her mind with worry. How much does Mr Whitney owe you?” I asked the Lascar.
“Fourteen shillings and fourpence halfpenny—and I said we don’t use names in here,” snapped the Lascar. “But it won’t be the first time this man has made difficulties.” I was about to ask whether I might have a receipt when the proprietor roared, “Now get ye both gone before it be the worse for ye.”
I settled the amount outstanding, went out onto the street, and was able to summon a cab when an idea dawned on me. I may not be able to make an extended observation of the interior of the Bar of Gold but, if Mr Whitney was still a habitué of the establishment, I could ask him whether he recognised the photograph of Mr Foley.
On the way back to Mr Whitney’s house near Paddington my former patient’s mood swung violently between clarity and hysteria but in one of his lucid moments I showed him the photograph of Foley.
He stared at it for some time. “Well, we get all sorts in there—tars and tarts, quacks and queers, pawnbrokers and pornographers, politicians, lawyers, and journalists—but I don’t remember him.” That was as much as I could get out of him and I had soon left him back at his home and returned to Baker Street.
“The lady is back for you again,” said the buttons, when I arrived. “I didn’t want her to go up, but she insisted on waiting for you in the upstairs flat.”
“I am so sorry to have come back for a third time today,” said my petitioner, when I entered the sitting room, “but I have made a further discovery that I would share with you.”
“I have got nowhere in establishing whether your betrothed was in the Bar of Gold,” I countered gloomily.
“Nor have I—or to be more precise—I have found evidence that he was not, but that only makes the matter more mysterious.”
“Please explain.”
“I keep a careful record both of my movements of those of my betrothed as we need to ensure that we can see each other as often as possible while allowing him to attend to his constituency duties and to his wife’s needs. I checked my diary for last year and found that on the evening of the 24th of January 1906, my brother and I accompanied Ignatius to Euston Station whence he boarded the night train to Perth.”
“Could he not have alighted at an intermediate stop and returned to London.”
“My local library gets copies of both national and local newspapers and I was able to find the Perth Weekly Informer of the 26th of January of last year. It states: ‘Mr Foley gave a brief speech as he opened the new orphanage at Fraser Terrace at eleven o’clock in the morning of the 25th of January,’ and in a separate article it says, ‘The Perth Society of Whisky Producers held its annual Burns Night supper yesterday evening. After the piping in of the haggis, the members were addressed by Perth’s member of parliament, Mr Ignatius Foley’. My betrothed was thus indubitably four hundred or more miles from the Bar of Gold on the 25th of January of last year.”
“I must commend you on both the thoroughness of your investigation and on its speed but, I concur with you, that this only makes matters only more mysterious. You have excluded the possibility of your fiancé from having been in the Bar of Gold on the date for which you have the bill, but can think of no reason, disreputable or otherwise, why he should be carrying this receipt on his person when he was not actually there.”
“Dr Watson, my discussions with you have hardened my resolve. I cannot live with the uncertainty the discovery of these documents is causing me. Mr Foley is back in London next Tuesday and I will confront him with my findings. My brother is away at present, and I would like you to act as my chaperone.”
Miss Leckie looked me directly in the eye and I confess it was hard to deny her this request.
“Very well,” I said, “I think you are well advised to clarify the matter with him. Who will you say that I am?”
“I have an uncle Horace of whom Ignatius has heard tell but has ever met. I will introduce you as him.”
So it was that a few days later I found myself at the Leckie house in Kensington when the maid brought in Mr Ignatius Foley. He was a tall man with a bluff manner. He expressed no surprise at my presence, and he and Miss Leckie sat down before the fire while the maid brought them tea.
After initial pleasantries, in which Miss Leckie displayed a degree of froideur towards her beau which seemed to pass him by, Mr Foley made the first conversational gambit.
“And Miss Jean, how would you like at, some point in the future, to be Lady Foley. For I am to be made attorney general quite soon. The post carries with it not only a princely salary but a knighthood.”
“Why this sudden political advancement?” asked Miss Leckie, I think somewhat repelled by the politician’s self-congratulatory air. “A man with a constituency in a distant part of the country, a sick wife, and a pining fiancée, is not likely to be in a position to take on the additional responsibilities of high office. And I am not aware of anything you have done to catch the eye of the prime minister and so persuade him to promote you to this lofty position.”
“Events, dear Jean, events,” Foley breezed. “Some are beyond our control. Some we can influence. They have unexpected consequences for us all—some for good, some for ill. Life’s winners turn events into opportunities. The prime minister was most insistent I should take the post, and I would be most reluctant to disoblige him.”
“What events?” pressed Miss Leckie, but he would not be drawn further.
There was a pause and then Miss Leckie countered.
“Ignatius, I have a matter of great concern which I would like to raise with you. When you were here last week you dropped some papers from your pocket. You displayed great agitation about these papers and insisted vehemently that you and you alone should pick them up.”
“I recall an incident when I dropped some documents of a purely administrative nature but not any untoward agitation to retrieve them.”
He paused, but I thought he would continue. Several seconds elapsed before I realized he was waiting for Miss Leckie to speak.
“You were, if I may say so, dear Ignatius,” she eventually ventured, “abrupt in the extreme when my brother and I sought to help you to pick up the papers.”
“Well, what of it?”
“In spite of your agitation to pick up the papers, I subsequently found two that you had failed to observe. One was for an opium den called the Bar of Gold, and the other was a rental bill for a fellow member of parliam
ent. I can think of no reason that is not discreditable for the first item to be in your pocket. I have no explanation at all for the second.”
Foley went white as the spirited Miss Leckie spoke although he soon recovered his composure.
“I can give you my word that I have never been to any opium den,” he replied at last.
“I can, you may be surprised to know,” countered she, “regard that as possible since I was able to establish that you were not in London on the day the bill was raised. But that does not of course explain its presence in your pocket.”
He was silent.
“And why did you have the rental bill of another member of parliament in your pocket? Under the chaise longue you left a bill for a month’s rent for a member from another party?”
“Really? Which one?”
“It is of no moment which member or which party. I can think of no satisfactory explanation for either document being on your person.”
“You may,” he responded, cautiously and not entirely convincingly, “have misunderstood the nature of politics. In politics, one’s enemies are in one’s own party as members of parliament from one’s own party are the people with whom I am in competition for ministerial preference. Members of other parties, by contrast, do not constitute a barrier in the way of one’s political advancement, and are opponents with whom one occasionally works to get things done. I am accordingly in regular though not frequent discussion with members of other parties.”
“That hardly explains why you would have a document personal to another member of parliament. Does this flirtation with a member of another political party have anything to do with your political advancement?”
“How could dealings with a member of another party enable me to win the favour of the prime minister?”
“It is I who must ask the questions. I am the person who is sacrificing her youth in the hope that we can get married when you are free. You have a wife and children. You have already had a life with another. I am hoping to have one with you and have foresworn all others to do so. It is I who is risking her future happiness for, while I can be confident that I could find a suitable match if our betrothal should come to an end now, my confidence of this diminishes with every day that passes.”
Foley was silent and eventually it was Miss Leckie who spoke again.
“I repeat, have these documents to do with your sudden political advancement?”
“Dear Jean, there are matters of state the workings of which you cannot possibly understand and which I cannot divulge to you. As politicians we have a duty to our individual constituents, to the population at large, and to the state. These duties will sometimes conflict so one will undertake actions on behalf of an individual to protect him from the state, or on behalf of the state to preserve its reputation. I fear I cannot give you a more detailed answer than that although I would assure you that I have done nothing that is dishonourable towards you, towards my party, or towards my country—indeed, if my actions are to be judged at all, they may be said to have served to protect the reputation of this country and all that it stands for.”
“But that is no answer to my concerns. Is there no further information you can give me?”
“I would refer you to my previous responses to your questions.”
“Mr Foley, I had hoped you would have an answer that would put my concerns to rest but you have not. I will need to consider whether you are worthy of my affections. Our relations are of far more moment to me than a mere flirtation between a man who is old enough to know better and a young girl who is not. I will write to you if decide I wish to see you again. Uncle Horace, would you escort Mr Foley to the door.”
After Mr Foley left, I felt that I had little to say to Miss Leckie. I would not wish her to see my admiration for her stand against her fiancé in case she felt that I had a motive behind it. I left her, and, feeling the need for a change of scene, spent the evening at my club.
I rose late the following day, and on descending to the sitting room, found breakfast already laid out on the table. I lifted the cloche on one dish and was about to start to eat when Holmes entered.
“I normally,” he started as he sat down, “feel uncomfortable without my biographer at my side but you missed nothing in not joining me. The case I was asked to investigate had nothing of complexity—indeed, contrary to what Mycroft had told me—the local police were already well on the way to clearing up the conspiracy against the Bulgarian leader. I telegraphed Mycroft from the telegraph office at Victoria on my arrival and he will be here shortly for a full debrief. And, how have you filled the last few days?”
I gave my friend an account of the developments in the case that had first been brought to our attention by Miss Leckie. As I expatiated on them, Holmes sat upright in his chair. Eventually he said, “Well, this matter strikes me as being of considerably greater moment than what Mycroft asked me to investigate.”
“Really?” I countered. “I appreciate Miss Leckie has a personal dilemma, but I hardly think that what appears to me to be a personal matter compares to a matter of state like the one to which you have referred.”
“Good Watson, while I must commend you on your courage in venturing into the Bar of Gold, and congratulate Miss Leckie on the speed and thoroughness of her investigative techniques, I fear that both of you have missed the solution to a case that is at the same time trivial in its substance, grave in the way it would be perceived by the public, and of great consequence to her personally. I fear that clarifying the case for Miss Leckie without placing both her and the stability of the state in peril is something that is beyond even my powers.”
“Perhaps you could explain.”
“I will start with the resolution of the case which is facile in the extreme although I will have to conduct one brief interview to confirm my opinion.”
“So, what were these documents?”
“It is clear that neither of the documents Miss Leckie retrieved were personal to Mr Foley. It is also clear—and here is a point both you and Miss Leckie have missed in your investigation—that he had no idea of precisely what documents he was carrying as he attached great importance to their recovery when he dropped them but failed to realise subsequently that he had been unsuccessful in retrieving them all.”
“But you still have not explained what these documents were,” I insisted.
“Mr Foley was under interrogation by his betrothed when he said that the documents were of a purely administrative nature and that they had not been addressed to him. These two facts make it likely that he was telling the truth on both points, and this theory is borne out by the two documents that Miss Leckie found.”
“So why was he carrying a sheaf of administrative documents that belonged to other people?”
“An intellectual scintillation is required by you here, good Watson. Where might you find administrative documents in large numbers belonging to several or many different people?”
“I would say at the post office, but I hardly think that Mr Foley would be abstracting documents from a post office.”
“Not in a post office, dear Watson, but in an accounts office. Mr Foley has broken into an accounts office and scooped up as many accounting documents as he could lay his hands upon.”
“Can you prove which accounts office?”
“Mr Mycroft Holmes to see you, Mr Holmes,” the voice of our buttons interrupted before Holmes could answer my question.
“It is good to see you return from your eastern Europe sojourn, dear brother,” said Mycroft as he entered. “I have another commission for you which will also require your absence from London.”
“Good day to you, brother Mycroft,” said Sherlock Holmes. “I have remarked to my friend Watson here, that you often are the British government—the great clearing house of all its thinking on diverse matters such as the bime
tallic question and India. I suspect you are about to demonstrate this for us now on an entirely separate matter.”
“Pray be brief then, good brother, in the exposition of your problem,” replied Mycroft. “It is most crucial that you undertake this second overseas mission and most undesirable that I be away from Westminster for any length of time. It gives the prime minister and his acolytes the wholly erroneous impression that they can run the country on their own.”
“Very well,” replied my friend. “Why then, may I ask, as a good citizen of this country, have you not called the police in to investigate the recent burglary of the accounts office of the Houses of Parliament or the Serjeant-at-Arms’ Office, as it is normally called?”
Mycroft started violently. “How do you know about that? I have taken the most extreme measures to make sure that that does not get into the press just yet. I would even go so far as to say that your fruitless mission to Bulgaria was not unconnected with the break in.”
“Perhaps you would like to expand on your remark.”
“Parliament has been rocked with rumours that members have been submitting inappropriate expense claims. If proof of this was brought to the attention of the public, there would be general outrage and the role of our parliamentary representatives, aye even of parliament itself, would be called into question.”
“Pray continue.”
“Just over two weeks ago, an intruder was apprehended by one of our night security staff. The trespasser was just leaving the office of the Serjeant-at-Arms where the expense records of members of parliament are kept. After a struggle, the intruder was apprehended, and a capacious briefcase prised from his grasp. When the matter was reported to me, I had the intruder brought before me and made sure I was the only person present when I forced the case open.”
There was a pause and Mycroft took a large pinch of snuff.
The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6 Page 2