The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

by Denis O. Smith

  ‘It was, I believe, during this period of just under ten minutes, when Zennor’s coat was the only one hanging in the corridor outside the cathedral office, after Bebington had brought it back, but before Nugent returned and took it, that Glimper put the envelope, cheque and note in the pocket. He would, under the circumstances, have been in a highly nervous and hurried state, for someone might have come by at any moment and seen what he was doing, so no doubt when he saw a single coat hanging there he assumed it was his own. This is the only explanation that covers all the facts. No doubt Glimper intended to travel up to London later in the day and cash the cheque there, but, shortly afterwards, Nugent came back and, exchanging Glimper’s coat for Zennor’s, therefore went off to London with the stolen cheque in his pocket.’

  ‘But if Nugent inadvertently brought the cheque up to London,’ I asked, ‘how was it that Zennor ended up with it?’

  ‘That occurred at Lambeth Palace,’ replied Holmes. ‘You will recall that when Zennor arrived there, he saw a hat on the hat-stand, but no coat on the coat-hooks. But it was a wet day, and anyone arriving there would surely have been wearing a raincoat and would have hung it up with his hat. What must have happened, then, is this: that the earlier visitor – which must have been Nugent – hung his coat up hurriedly and carelessly and as he proceeded into the building it slipped from its peg and fell in a heap on the floor behind the settle. When Zennor arrived, he saw no coat there, hung his own hat and coat up and went into Lambeth Palace to keep his appointment. Some time later, while he was still engaged in there, Nugent came out, took the only coat that was hanging there, which he assumed to be the one he had arrived in and left. When Zennor emerged, he at first saw no coat, then found the one behind the settle and he, likewise, assumed that it was the one he had arrived in. Oddly enough, it was actually his own coat, but that was the first time all day that he had worn it. The remainder of the events you know. Is that all clear, old man? Do you understand now the point of that diagram you are studying?’

  ‘I believe so,’ I said, with some hesitation. ‘I am sure your analysis is correct, Holmes and, in any case, the arrival of Dr Glimper at St Mark’s confirmed it beyond doubt.’

  Holmes nodded. ‘There was one other possibility I considered, which was that Stafford Nugent had stolen the cheque, when he returned to collect his library book. But if he had done so, I argued, he would surely have taken a little more care to ensure he took the correct coat when he left Lambeth Palace and that he still had the cheque with him.

  ‘Therefore, although it was always possible that no one would turn up today for the meeting at St Mark’s, especially as the stolen cheque had been recovered, it seemed to me that if anyone did so, it would undoubtedly be Dr Glimper.’

  ‘Amazing!’ I cried.

  ‘Elementary,’ said Sherlock Holmes.

  The East Thrigby Mystery

  It may be imagined that the long and intimate acquaintance I had with Mr Sherlock Holmes should have sharpened my interest in crimes and mysteries, and in those special methods which he used to solve them. I found myself sometimes, as a result, considering unsolved mysteries from earlier in the century and wondering whether, had my friend’s unique skills been at the disposal of those who had investigated them, they would have remained unsolved. Occasionally, I was able to persuade Holmes to discuss such matters and never failed to be impressed by his insights, but more often he would decline to enter into such speculations, remarking that the solution of any mystery, criminal or otherwise, invariably lay among the tiny details of the matter, and it was just those details that were most often lacking in the accounts of such cases as I read to him from time to time.

  On one notable occasion, however, I did succeed in drawing my friend into a more detailed discussion of an unsolved case, when he was able to shed light on the matter in a remarkable and surprising fashion.

  It was a dark winter’s evening and we had been reading in silence on either side of the fire for some time, I with a volume of unsolved mysteries, he with a recent treatise on the poisonous properties of vegetable alkaloids.

  ‘It is a singular thing to consider,’ said I, looking up from my book, ‘that of all the many millions of people in England, some of whom may be reading this book tonight as I am, there is not one who knows the solution to this mystery. One might have supposed that the application of so much collective brain-power to the problem would inevitably have produced a solution by now.’

  My companion put down his own book and took up his old brier pipe and a handful of tobacco from the Persian slipper which was hanging on a hook beside the fireplace.

  ‘But as I have remarked before,’ said he, ‘the authors of such works generally set out to entertain rather than enlighten, and to that end present the facts in a sensational rather than an analytical fashion, which tends to obfuscate and cloud the issues involved, rather than clarifying them.’

  ‘Sometimes, perhaps, that may be true,’ I returned, ‘but not, I think, in every instance. Take the case I have just been reading, for example. The author describes the events with great clarity, yet the matter remains utterly mystifying. The events take place in a quiet country district, in which nothing of sensation has occurred in a century, the local inhabitants going about their business in the most regular, peaceful way imaginable, until one summer, twenty years ago. Then, like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky, there are a series of mysterious burglaries, and a well-known local man is found murdered one morning in a country lane. No one can suggest why these things have happened, nor who might be responsible. No strangers have been seen in the area, except for a highly respectable family with children who have rented a house there for the summer. Immediately following this brief period of dramatic incident, the entire district settles back once more into its customary state of somnolence, from which it has never emerged since.’

  ‘Where did these incidents take place?’ queried Holmes, a note of interest in his voice.

  ‘Somewhere called East Thrigby. It is a village in the Lincolnshire Wolds, a few miles from the sea.’

  My friend nodded his head in a thoughtful fashion. ‘I thought your description of the case sounded familiar,’ said he. ‘As it happens, your example is an unfortunate one for your thesis: there is one person at least who knows the truth of what happened at East Thrigby.’

  ‘Of course, the criminal himself must know the truth.’

  ‘That was not my meaning.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘I was referring to myself, Watson.’

  ‘You?’ I cried in surprise.

  Again Holmes nodded. ‘I was present, a young lad, when the events you describe took place.’

  ‘And you believe you know the truth?’

  ‘I am certain of it.’

  This was a surprise indeed, for I had never heard Holmes refer to the matter before. I asked him why, if the truth were known, it had never been revealed. He did not reply directly, but sat in silent thought for several minutes.

  ‘The case supports my contention that it is in the details that the truth is to be found,’ said he at length, ‘for I can trace my own understanding of the matter to the moment I recalled how someone had polished his boots. I imagine you would be interested to hear an account of the case from my point of view.’

  ‘I should be fascinated,’ I returned; ‘for it interests me greatly.’

  Abruptly, he stood up from his chair and disappeared into his bedroom, returning a few minutes later with a flat wooden box, about eight inches square and two inches deep, tied up with red tape, such as might have contained a small painting or a precious china dish.

  ‘This,’ said he, setting the little box upon the floor and unfastening the tape, ‘is all I have left to remind me of my stay at “The Highlands” in the Lincolnshire Wolds and of what became known as “The East Thrigby Mystery”.’

  He lifted the lid and I saw that the box contained a small, wooden-framed mirror which exactly fitted the box. The
frame was painted light blue, and stuck all over with sea-shells and little pebbles. Holmes lifted it carefully from the box, laid it upon his knee and gazed for several minutes at this pretty little object, gently running his fingers over the patterns on the shells, as if the past might be conjured up for him as much by touch as by sight.

  ‘It was a particularly fine, warm summer, in the mid-sixties,’ said he at length. ‘I was a mere lad, in my twelfth year. A distant relation of mine – I addressed him as “Uncle Moreton”, although the relationship between us was not in fact as close as that – had taken a house for the summer on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, not many miles distant from the sea. He and his wife, known to me as “Aunt Phyllis”, had a child of about my own age, a daughter by the name of Sylvia – although she was always known as “Sylvie” – and I was to spend the summer with them. The household was completed by Matthew Hemming, his wife, Ursula, and their son, Percival, who was a year or two younger than me. The Hemmings were distant relations of Aunt Phyllis’s, but not related to me.

  ‘It was interesting and varied country where we were staying, Watson. To the east, the land lies as flat as a sheet of paper all the way to the sea; to the west, towards the river Trent, it is much the same; but running up the middle of Lincolnshire, like a knobbly spine, are the rolling hills of the Wolds. If the lowlands have little but flatness to them, in the Wolds there is scarcely ever more than a hundred yards of level ground. This elevation leads to some varied and unpredictable weather. The heavy rain clouds that on occasion blow across England without shedding their load are forced upwards when they encounter the Wolds, and the result is very often a heavy downpour just a short time after the sky had appeared a clear and empty blue. The weather was generally fine throughout our stay there and such cloudbursts were not frequent, but there was a memorable one on the evening that Uncle Moreton and Mr Hemming decided to walk the few miles over to Tetford. Uncle Moreton was a great admirer of Dr Johnson, and had heard that that venerable sage had visited the White Hart at Tetford in the middle of the last century when speaking to the local literary society, which was one of the chief reasons Uncle Moreton had wished to spend a holiday in the Wolds. He and Mr Hemming received a thorough soaking for their enterprise, but their spirits remained undampened, and they regaled us at breakfast the following morning with an account of how they had enjoyed a glass of beer while sitting on the very settle from which Dr Johnson had held forth to the local worthies a hundred years before.

  ‘As for East Thrigby itself, it was one of those places that scarcely merit the title of “village” at all. It was a very broadly spread parish, but save for a row of cottages and an old decrepit-looking inn near the church, there was no natural centre to it, the other houses and cottages being scattered far and wide, often hidden away down the narrow lanes that criss-crossed the rolling countryside. Not a very likely spot for dramatic events and mystery, you might imagine. But those intent upon wrongdoing will generally find a way to achieve their ends wherever they are, and the scattered nature of rural homesteads can make the uncovering of their crimes all the more difficult.’

  ‘You sound somewhat cynical,’ I interrupted, laughing at the serious tones in which my companion spoke. ‘East Thrigby sounds a perfectly idyllic spot to me.’

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ my friend conceded. ‘But my professional experience has taught me that human nature is much the same everywhere. Besides, East Thrigby was not such an unblemished paradise as you perhaps suppose. There was a troublesome family in the village, by the name of Shaxby. It sometimes seems there is a mysterious law of nature that ordains that there is one such family in practically every parish in England, whose entire raison d’être seems to be simply to create nuisance and annoyance for their neighbours. To judge from what I heard subsequently, the Shaxbys were responsible for almost everything discordant and unpleasant that ever occurred in East Thrigby. Drunkenness, fighting, general disorder, wanton damage and petty pilfering: all these had been either proved or suspected against the Shaxbys. One of them in particular, Michael Shaxby, a rough, burly young man of nineteen or twenty, who was known to be the ringleader of all the most rowdy youths in the district, was regarded as a bad lot, and it was generally felt that he might well rise up by degrees in his criminality until he ended up on the scaffold. He was pointed out to us one day, I remember, as he walked past our house with a swagger, tapping a stout stick upon the ground as he went, for all the world as if he were strolling along one of the most fashionable streets in London. He struck me at the time, I admit, as a rather dashing figure, something like a brigand chief or pirate captain; but, of course, an eleven-year-old boy is not generally the best judge of someone’s true merits.

  ‘Now, to pass from the general to the particular: two nights before we arrived in East Thrigby there had been a break-in at the rectory and a valuable pair of silver candlesticks had been stolen. This was, in a sense, the start of the trouble that was to befall the village, although no one then could possibly have predicted what would later occur. It was widely believed that Michael Shaxby was responsible for the theft, but as his family were prepared to swear that he had never left their house on the night in question, there was not much that the local constable or anyone else could do about it, save for repeatedly questioning them all in a vaguely menacing manner which of course achieved nothing. Does the account in your book mention the Shaxbys at all, Watson?’

  ‘It certainly mentions a troublesome local family, but it gives them a different name. The author explains in a general preface to the book that he has been obliged to change many of the names of the people in his narratives to allow himself to speak freely and honestly about them without risking a legal suit for defamation.’

  Holmes chuckled. ‘That is always a danger for such authors, unless their material is centuries old. Oddly enough, it is often the worst of people, those least deserving of respect, who are the quickest to resort to the law-courts in such circumstances. However, I am under no such restrictions, so you can be assured that the account you receive from me is the precise truth in every respect, names included. At first, of course, I was not aware of anything amiss in East Thrigby, but, like everyone else, saw only the attractive appearance of the fields and hedgerows, and the quaint and pretty cottages nestling among them.

  ‘The house that was to be our home that summer was a solid, handsome brick structure which had been built for a wealthy eccentric about fifty years previously and, as it occupied the highest point for some distance round, given the somewhat whimsical name of “The Highlands”. He had apparently wished to have fine views from his new residence and these there certainly were. From the sky-light of one of the attics, it was possible to see far across the flatlands to the east, towards where the German Ocean ceaselessly pounds the low sandy shore. Surrounding the house on all sides was a large garden. To the rear of the house much of this was taken up with a smooth and well-kept croquet lawn, where the adults often played. We children, too, were introduced to the game, but found it difficult. Once we had mastered the rudiments, therefore, we tended to wait until the adults had finished and then play a game of our own devising, with somewhat more relaxed rules. At the edges of the croquet lawn were two or three small flower-beds with rose-bushes in them, but most of the rest of the garden was given over to specimen trees and large, spreading shrubs.

  ‘Close by a side-gate in the garden wall was an enormous laurustinus bush which had spread so much, in an arching fashion, as to form a sort of hidden cavern beneath it, the floor of which was covered with a carpet of old leaves. We children quickly discovered this and at once established a camp in there which we termed our “den”. There we would meet in the morning, consume ginger beer and biscuits and plan our activities for the day. Sylvie was keeping a sort of holiday diary, in which she recorded all our plans and their outcomes. Her mother was of an artistic turn, and as well as making numerous sketches and watercolours of the countryside, showed us how to press leaves and flo
wers. This inspired us to attempt to make a complete record of every plant in the garden, from the largest tree to the humblest wild flower. This activity of course consumed a great deal of paper, paint and crayons, but Aunt Phyllis had come well furnished with these articles and encouraged us to use as much as we needed.

  ‘During the first few weeks we made brief acquaintance with many of the local folk, including Mr Giles Stainforth, a wealthy man and keen art-collector, whose house was about a quarter of a mile away and who was thus our nearest neighbour. He was hardly ever at home during the week, but spent much of his time in London, and although he kept a pony and trap, used it only to go to and from the railway station at Alford, the pony being fed and watered by one of the local youths who acted as his groom when required. Uncle Moreton made an arrangement with Stainforth that we might borrow the pony and trap whenever we wished, which was a great convenience. One particularly fine day, Uncle Moreton, Mr Hemming, Percival and I made the journey in the trap all the way to the sea near Mablethorpe. It is a wild and desolate coast there, Watson, with mile after mile of sand dunes and very little else, where the wind blows constantly, whipping the tough grass on the dunes this way and that with a relentless fury, and although the sun was shining, our bathe was a decidedly bracing one.

  ‘In those early days, we also met Mr Cecil Crompton, a very learned-looking man with a high domed forehead, who would often pause as he passed our gate and stand in amicable conversation for some time. He was, I gathered, some kind of historian, with an enormous fund of facts and figures relating to the history of the Wolds. On one occasion, when Crompton had gone on his way and tea was being served, one of the adults remarked that he appeared to have devoted an enormous amount of study to his subject and was evidently a man of independent means. Mrs Hemming agreed that he appeared to be fairly wealthy and, without thinking, I offered the opinion that he was not quite so wealthy as she supposed, at which all the adults turned to me in surprise. Although Sylvie and I were not actively discouraged from joining in the tea-table conversation, it was only rarely that either of us spoke and then generally only when directly addressed, so that my abrupt and uninvited intrusion into the adults’ conversation may have appeared a little ill-mannered to them, but in those days I had not learnt that it was sometimes better to keep my observations to myself. Now, as everyone looked at me, I felt distinctly uncomfortable to be the centre of attention.