‘Yes?’
‘On no account venture into the garden after dark. I cannot pretend to have fathomed yet the mystery which surrounds you, but that you walk amidst great danger I am convinced.’
‘Well, Watson,’ said my friend when our visitor had left us. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘Nothing whatever,’ I replied with perfect honesty.
‘You are a singular fellow, indeed!’ cried Holmes with a chuckle. ‘I sometimes think that you are quite the most remarkable man in London, Watson; for I have certainly never known another so honest! There are few, I should imagine, who would care to announce their ignorance so candidly; yet, in this case, I should not believe anyone who did not confess himself baffled, for Mr Mark Pringle has brought us quite the most outré little problem I have encountered these past twelve months. As he himself remarked, the incidents taken separately could almost all bear an innocent, trivial, even prosaic explanation; but place them together and something more sinister begins to be discernible. The individual incidents are like the flourishes of the piccolo, the flute, the horn; but underlying all of these, barely perceptible save when the piece is regarded in its entirety, is a deep and continuous theme upon the ’cello and the double bass.’
‘And yet,’ I remarked, ‘perhaps these things are just coincidences. Perhaps there is not, after all, any connection between them.’
‘No, it cannot be,’ replied Holmes, his brow furrowed with thought. ‘Every nerve of intuition I possess tells me that the events are in some way connected – must be connected; and it is for us to find the connection. The difficulty lies in the fact that the incidents, as reported to us, are not only quite distinct, but, in some cases at least, mutually contradictory. One might, for instance, suspect a mere vulgar affair of some kind between Mrs Pringle and this man, Dobson, were it not for the extremely friendly relations which seem quite genuinely to subsist between Mrs Pringle and Dobson’s wife, Helen.’
‘There is certainly something suspicious about the Dobsons,’ I remarked. ‘They have some secret aim in view, of that I am convinced; although what it might be I cannot imagine.’
‘And yet,’ Holmes replied, shaking his head slowly, ‘it does not quite make sense. Consider the matter, Watson: imagine for a moment that you were the one with the secret aim in view. You are not a man remarked for duplicity, nor to any degree a natural schemer, yet surely even you would take great care to conduct yourself with modesty, self-effacement and propriety, and to do all that was required of you, in order to disarm any suspicions that might arise. But the Dobsons, so far from being discreet, seem to have gone out of their way to be conspicuous and irritating to their employer. There seems a want of cunning there!’
‘Considered in that light, their behaviour is certainly odd,’ I concurred.
‘These are deep waters, Watson,’ continued my friend after a moment, ‘and may yet prove far deeper than we can at present imagine. I cannot help feeling that there is some factor in the case of which we are as yet unaware; some hidden strand, which, if we could but grasp it, might at once pull together all the other strands, unconnected though they now seem.’
‘It is certainly a tangled skein at present,’ I remarked, ‘and I confess that the more I reflect upon it, the more baffling it seems to become. Whatever can be the significance, for instance, of the violet liquid in the pail that Pringle found one morning by the cottage?’
‘Ah, there, my dear Watson, you put your finger on what is perhaps the one point in the whole of his narrative to which no mystery attaches,’ responded Holmes, breaking into a smile. ‘For whoever had printed his hand upon the wall that morning – using perfectly ordinary ink, to judge from this sheet which we have examined – would, in the process, have marked his hand quite as conspicuously as he had marked the wall, as I am sure you would agree. He could of course cover his hand with a glove, but at this time of the year that would excite almost as much comment as an ink-stained hand and, in any case, there may be other circumstances which would render such a device impossible. What does he do, then, to remove the stain and thus preserve his secret, but plunge his hand into the water and rinse off the incriminating ink? It is certainly what I should do in his position. But, come, we are beginning to circle around the problem without ever approaching any closer to it, after the style of our good friend, Inspector Athelney Jones!’
‘Very well,’ said I, laughing. ‘I shall leave you to your solitary meditations.’
‘Drop by tomorrow afternoon,’ said Holmes, as I took my hat and stick, ‘and we can review any progress in the case.’
_______
At three o’clock the following afternoon I was seated by the window in my friend’s rooms, reading the evening paper, when he returned. His face was drawn and tired, but the slight smile which played about his lips told me that his day had not been a fruitless one.
‘Tiring weather!’ said he by way of greeting, tossing his hat on to the table.
‘You have made some progress with the Pringle case?’ I ventured.
‘More than that,’ he replied. ‘I have quite cleared up Mr Pringle’s little mystery and am now in a position to lay the whole of the facts before him. It was a simple affair after all. You will come with me? If we leave within the half-hour we should be in time to catch him at his office in the Crutched Friars. As to the advice I should give him, however—’
His voice tailed off and an introspective look came into his eyes. It was clear that despite the solution of the mystery, there was something about the case which vexed him still. Without a word he threw off his coat and began slowly to fill his old black pipe with tobacco from the pewter caddy upon the mantelpiece, his eyes all the while far away. A score of questions welled up in my mind at once, but I forbore to voice them, for I knew well enough, from ten years’ experience, that he would enlighten me of his own volition when he himself chose to do so and that to question him at any other time was a profitless exercise.
I also knew that he rarely jested when his profession was the subject and I had never once known him exaggerate his achievements, so that if he said he had solved the case, then I knew it must he so, incredible though such a claim seemed. How on earth, I wondered, had he, in less than twenty-four hours, discovered the key that would unlock the mystery which surrounded his unfortunate client? Again my mind turned over the remarkable series of events which Mark Pringle had narrated to us the previous evening, again I pondered the significance of all that he had told us – the disturbing conversation he had overheard upon his sick-bed, the mysterious and grotesque hand-prints, his wife’s unfathomable behaviour towards both the Dobsons and her own husband, and the dark, sinister figures that came in the night – but again I was obliged to admit utter and total defeat.
‘Your client’s part of the country seems to be having more than its share of mysteries at the moment,’ I remarked at length.
‘What is that?’ said Holmes in a vague, abstracted tone, as if so far away in his thoughts that he found it difficult to refocus his mind upon the present time and place. ‘What did you say?’
‘There is a report in the early editions that the body of a man was found in the river early this morning, just by Chertsey Bridge. There was a knife stuck in his side.’
‘What!’
‘The police believe that the body had been washed down the river from the Staines area.’
He took the paper from me and ran his eye rapidly down the column, a look of alarm upon his face. ‘“A short, squat man!”’ he cried after a moment, a note almost of relief in his voice; ‘“with a swarthy complexion and curly black hair, and with a single gold ear-ring.” Well, it is no one we know, anyhow.’
‘So I judged.’
‘Nevertheless, Watson, it bears upon the case.’
‘You think so?’
‘I know so. You remarked the contents of his pockets? “Very little was found in the dead man’s pockets by which his identity might be established, although he doe
s not appear to have been robbed: three bank notes in a clip and a small amount of loose change, six whiffs in a pigskin case, a box of wax vestas and a bottle of ink being the sum total; in addition, the cork from a wine-bottle was discovered in the lining of his jacket.” Now, why should a man carry a bottle of ink, who does not also carry a pen of any sort?’
‘The purple hand!’
‘Precisely! Listen: “All labels and marks appear to have been removed from his clothing, as if to prevent any discovery of his antecedents, but inside one pocket of his waistcoat was found a small tag bearing a single word – believed to be the maker’s name – in the Cyrillic script in use in parts of Eastern Europe. The possibility that the murdered man was from those parts is given some support by the evidence of the knife that killed him. This is a narrow fixed-blade type, with an elaborately carved bone handle, which is stamped on the blade with the word ‘Belgrade’.”’
‘What does it mean, Holmes?’
‘It means that events have moved faster than I expected. If we are to prevent another death we must act at once. Will you come with me?’
‘Most certainly. We are going to Crutched Friars?’
‘No; to Low Meadow.’
He donned his outer clothes as quickly as he had thrown them off, and in a minute we were in a hansom and driving furiously through the traffic to Waterloo station.
‘No doubt you have by now formed an opinion upon the matter,’ said Holmes as our railway carriage rattled along the viaduct and through Vauxhall station.
I shook my head. ‘I should be very much interested to hear your own conclusions,’ I replied.
‘You will recall,’ said he, after a moment, ‘that my client felt confident of only two facts about his nocturnal visitor: that he had a deformed hand and that he was unusually small in his overall figure. But in both these opinions he was mistaken. The hand, as we saw, is in reality quite unexceptional; and it seemed likely, once we had heard that the hand-print was made approximately five feet from the ground, that his figure was unexceptional, too.’
‘Why so?’
‘Because it would be the natural tendency of anyone making such a print to do it at shoulder height – try it for yourself some time and you will see – and anyone who is five feet to the shoulders is obviously of a fairly normal build. So the intruder ceases to be inhuman and freakish, and becomes instead a perfectly ordinary specimen of humanity.’
‘I can see that that would make the matter yet more baffling and difficult of discovery,’ I remarked.
‘On the contrary, it admits a tiny ray of light into the mystery for the first time.’
‘I do not follow you.’
‘Consider: if the intruder is not equipped by nature with six digits upon his right hand, then the fact that he prints it in that bizarre fashion is evidently a matter of deliberate choice upon his part. Clearly the print has some very definite significance for him and he must expect that it will have the same significance for others, otherwise there would be little point to the exercise. Thus the print as an unfathomable, purely personal thing quite disappears and in its place we see an item of public communication, which is far more amenable to investigation.’
‘And yet I am not convinced,’ said I. ‘For what possible significance could be possessed by such a grotesque daub?’
‘You have not heard anyone speak of the Seven-Fingered Hand?’ said Holmes in a quiet voice.
‘Never!’
‘I must admit that that does not surprise me; there is really no reason why you should; for its activities receive little enough publicity in this country. Indeed, until today my own knowledge of it was exceedingly sketchy and yet it almost comes within my field of speciality. It is a secret society, Watson – that most vile excrescence of civilisation. It sits like a vile beast upon the Balkans, its evil tentacles stretched out to every remote corner, so that there is scarcely a town or village there where it cannot command the allegiance of at least one person; and that allegiance is rarely commanded but for terrorism and murder.’
‘It sounds monstrous, Holmes! Whatever is the purpose of such an organisation?’
‘Ah! The answer to that question illustrates rather nicely the divergence between theory and practice in human endeavours; for the surprising thing is that the society of which I speak was originally formed of principled, high-minded men, who would never have chosen to meet in secret conclave had they not felt driven to it. Their purposes originally were quite altruistic, their only aim being to petition the authorities on behalf of those of their fellow countrymen whose lot they considered a woeful one. But the society was soon taken over – some would say inevitably so – by those whose very delight it is to be secret, to pass unseen in the night-time with the knife beneath the cloak, to feel a sense of power in the anonymous assassination of the innocent. Soon all pretence of altruism was as good as abandoned and the sole raison d’être of the society became its own continued existence, an existence which is sustained and nourished on the terror of the very people in whose name it was originally founded.
‘The society’s somewhat fanciful name derives partly from the fact that it was constituted originally of groups from seven different provinces, and also from an initiation ceremony in which the new recruit is obliged to make a hand-print upon a document of allegiance to the society. This hand-print, embellished with the addition of two extra fingers, eventually became the symbol of the society. It is used to strike terror into the hearts of its enemies – and this it will surely do, for the society has the deserved reputation of being both implacable and ruthless. I tell you, Watson, a man had rather be in a cage of ravenous tigers than have these gentlemen upon his trail.
‘So much I managed to glean this morning, from long hours among the files of old newspapers – steep, steep work, Watson! I also learnt a further fact there, which brings the history of this unholy gang up to date: the Eastern Roumelian section, having evidently transgressed some rule or other, was last year expelled from the society, amid considerable blood-letting. One finger was accordingly removed from the society’s symbol, leaving just six – as in the letter my unfortunate client received yesterday morning at his breakfast table.’
‘But why?’ I cried. ‘What possible business can this abominable society have in England? And why do they seek to terrorise Mark Pringle?’
Holmes did not reply at once, but leaned back in his seat and surveyed the tranquil countryside through which our train was now speeding. On either side of the track, a broad expanse of heath-land stretched far away, all dotted over with bright patches of poppies and buttercups. It seemed to me incredible that upon such a day, and in such a spot, these desperate men from across the seas could be pursuing their evil ends.
‘Mark Pringle is not their primary quarry,’ said my companion at length. ‘You will recall that our first surmise upon seeing the envelope with the misspelt name was that Pringle was not personally known to the sender. This suggests as a possibility that it was only because he had been seen in the garden on Sunday night that they had gone to the trouble of learning his name – no doubt from a neighbour – in order to send him a specific warning that he should not interfere in their business. The fact that they were evidently not previously aware of his identity further suggests, of course, that the first two hand-prints were not in fact made for his benefit at all.’
‘I do not understand,’ I interrupted. ‘Does this mean that he is not, then, in danger?’
‘I should not go so far as to say that,’ replied my friend. ‘Indeed, I believe that he is exceedingly fortunate still to be alive. But to answer your questions more fully, it is necessary to go back a dozen years, to when a gentleman by the name of James Green deposited a large sum of money in the vaults of the Anglo-Hellenic Bank in King William Street, in the City. He was, according to his own testimony, the principal in a firm of wine-shippers, who specialised in wines from Greece and the Aegean Islands. At regular intervals after that, further sums were deposit
ed and, from time to time, withdrawals made, either in London or at the branch office in Athens.
‘It was only when the bank collapsed, amid a terrific scandal, early in ’82, that in the course of attempts to locate all the creditors and settle with them as best they could – which was hardly at all – the authorities discovered that no such person as James Green existed and no more did his supposed firm of wine-importers. The whole elaborate charade had been devised to conceal the fact that the funds were those of the Seven-Fingered Hand – money which had been extorted from the peasants of Eastern Europe, and which was employed in the furtherance of the society’s own evil ends and to keep its leaders snug. This emerged at the bankruptcy hearing and the subsequent fraud trial, which created quite a sensation at the time.’
‘I believe I recall it,’ said I. ‘The chief clerk had used his clients’ money in a series of wild speculations, each of which had in turn failed. He had thus been driven further and further into desperate measures, and yet wilder schemes, in his attempt to recoup the losses, until in the end the bank had scarcely a penny to its name.’
‘You recall it precisely. The chief clerk’s name was Arthur Pendleton, who distinguished himself at his trial by showing not the slightest shred of remorse and who was, as I learnt from the court records this morning, sentenced to fifteen years for his troubles. A junior clerk whom he had somehow managed to embroil in his criminal schemes received a shorter sentence, of ten years, in recognition of his lesser culpability and in the certain knowledge that had it not been for the strong and evil influence which the older man had had over him, he would never have become involved at all. The bank was sold off, lock, stock and barrel, but the creditors received scarcely one part in a hundred of what they were owed.’
‘You have evidently had a busy day,’ said I, impressed by the speed at which my remarkable friend had been able to gather information on such remote matters; ‘but I still cannot grasp the pertinence of these matters to the case in hand. Are you convinced that there is a connection?’
The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes Page 31