by Otto Penzler
Holmes was on better terms with Gustave Hamard, whose authority allowed my friend to tread where the great Bertillon had gone before, to examine the interior of the house in the Impasse Ronsin on behalf of his client. He had no wish to consult Madame Steinheil in prison. If ever there was a case to be decided on cold and precise points of evidence—away from the hysteria of the mob and the suspect—it was this. Hamard had shrugged his broad shoulders at the futility of further examination but granted the request.
By the time that Holmes finished his examination, the trial of Marguerite Steinheil on charges of murder had begun at the Palais de Justice. The final leaves of autumn fell from the birch trees of the Ile de la Cité, which we had last seen breaking into a green haze of spring across the Boulevard du Palais.
A few days later, Sherlock Holmes and Alphonse Bertillon faced each other across the desk of Gustave Hamard. The duel that Holmes had promised was about to begin, with Hamard and I as seconds. My companion took from his pocket a photographic card upon which the ridges and whorls of an index finger were plainly seen. He handed it to Bertillon, who shrugged and pulled a face.
“There were hundreds, Mr. Holmes,” said the great anthropologist, taking off his glasses, brushing his eyes with the back of his hand, and replacing the spectacles. He took a page of fingerprints which was lying on the desk and ran his eye down it, looking aside from time to time at the image Holmes had given him.
“Try number eighty-four,” Holmes suggested whimsically.
Bertillon picked up another card and glanced down it.
“Indeed, monsieur,” he said affably, “you are quite correct. The print of this finger was found a number of times, among many many others, in the studio of Adolphe Steinheil. It was not found, I see, in the rooms of the upper floor where the crimes were committed. The studio was entered by so many visitors that it can count for little, I fear.”
“Forgive me, monsieur,” said Holmes quietly, “but the fingerprint upon the card I have handed you did not come from the studio of Adolphe Steinheil, nor from anywhere else in the Impasse Ronsin.”
“Then where?” asked Bertillon sharply.
The voice of Sherlock Holmes was almost a purr of satisfaction.
“From the presidential apartments of the Élysée Palace on the sixteenth of February 1899, at a time when the late Félix Faure had just received the last rites. You will recall that you and I were at that time exchanging views on the use, or otherwise, of such prints. Having received as a present from Monsieur Faure’s family a small pill-box of Sèvres ware—a charming thing—I was boorish enough to subject it to dusting with silver nitrate and exposure to a fixed-range Kodak, a contraption of my own.”
Bertillon went pale. Hamard spoke first. “Who do you say this print comes from?”
“The Comte de Balincourt,” said Holmes smoothly, “alias Viscount Montmorency, alias the Margrave of Hesse, sometime assistant chamberlain at the Élysée Palace—under what name I know not, as yet. Dismissed after the passing of President Faure for some trivial dishonesty. A dozen witnesses will tell you that, not a few weeks before his murder, Adolphe Steinheil began a commission to paint in his studio a portrait of the Comte de Balincourt in hunting costume.”
Hamard’s eyes narrowed. “Do you say, Mr. Holmes, that Steinheil knew such a man as Balincourt?”
“Not only knew him, Monsieur, but was heard in the studio discussing with him Félix Faure and the secret history of the Third Republic. There is a fingerprint, matching exactly the one I have shown you, on the door of a casually concealed wall-cupboard in the studio, where Balincourt was told that the papers of that secret history were kept. A package of papers remained there until the night of the two murders, inscribed with the name ‘Marguerite Steinheil’ and with instructions that it was to be burned unopened upon her death. On the morning following the crimes, that cupboard was empty. The scratches on the mirror of its lock indicate that it was opened by a little force and a good deal of fraud.”
“Then the trial must be adjourned!” Hamard said. “My God! What if all this were to come to light and she had already been condemned?”
“And where,” interrupted Bertillon, “is the Comte de Balincourt?”
Holmes shrugged. “At the bottom of the Seine, I imagine, or the bed of the River Spree, depending on whether his political masters are in Paris or Berlin. I do not think he will bother us again.”
“The papers!” Hamard said furiously. “The manuscript! Where is that? Think of what it might do to the politics of France—to the peace of Europe!”
“The history of the Third Republic is quite safe,” Holmes said coolly.
Hamard looked at him with narrowed eyes. “The cupboard was opened and the manuscript stolen, was it not?”
Holmes shook his head. “Madame Steinheil trusted no one, least of all the discretion of her weak-willed and garrulous husband. She let it be known in the household that the wall-cupboard contained the manuscript and the secret drawer of her writing-desk held a dummy package. Adolphe Steinheil did not know this when he boasted to the President’s former chamberlain. In truth, it was the dummy package to which he unwittingly directed the man. After the blackest of crimes, the Comte de Balincourt handed his masters a bundle of old newspapers and blank pages. You may imagine how they will have rewarded him.”
If an Anarchist bomb had gone off in the tree-lined Boulevard du Palais and blown the windows out, Hamard and Bertillon could scarcely have looked more aghast.
“You say Balincourt is a murderer?” Bertillon demanded. “Yet the same fingerprint was found nowhere upstairs.”
“Not for one moment did I suppose he had committed murder. I think it likely that he entered the upper rooms and that he was accidentally seen by Madame Japy. The poor old woman would have recognised him from his portrait sittings, for which reason she was put to death. Balincourt or his masters had hired men who would not scruple to take that precaution for their own safety as well as his.”
“A little convenient is it not?” said Hamard sceptically.
Holmes took from his pocket three more photographic prints.
“You will not know these fingerprints, for I believe they are unique to my own little collection. However, I shall be surprised if you do not find photographs of the three men in your Office of Judicial Identification. Baptistin is a young and violent criminal. Marius Longon, ‘The Gypsy,’ is a skilled and ruthless thief. Monstet de Fontpeyrine is a Cuban, a stage magician and a specialist in hotel robberies. He was seen last autumn, loitering in the Rue de Vaugirard, near the Impasse Ronsin. From there he was followed to the Métro station of Les Couronnes, where he met the other two men, a young woman with red hair, and a third man who is now identified as the Comte de Balincourt.”
“You know where these other men are?”
“In the same deep water as Balincourt, I should imagine,” said Holmes dismissively. “I scarcely think you will hear from them either.”
“And the papers of the Third Republic?” Hamard persisted.
“Ah,” said Holmes with an air of false regret. “They are where they will do no harm. I regret, however, that it is not in my power to produce them.”
“You will be ordered to produce them!” Hamard shouted.
Holmes was moved invariably by poverty, misfortune, desperation in others, never by browbeating.
“Those papers, monsieur, are essential to my client’s defence. You have my word that, as yet, they have been seen by no other eyes than my own. After she is acquitted, which on the evidence I have produced to you is what justice must demand, I can promise you that these documents will trouble the world no more. If, after all that has been said in this room, she is condemned to execution—worse, if she goes to the guillotine—I will stop at nothing to see every word of them published in the leading newspapers of every capital.”
Gustave Hamard strode from the room and we heard his voice raised as he gave instructions to his subordinates. The trial of Madame Ste
inheil was adjourned early that day on the far side of the Boulevard du Palais. Two days later, its result was to be published across the world. After midnight, in the small hours of 14 November 1909, the jury that had retired to condemn Marguerite Steinheil was summoned into court again. De Valles, the president of the tribunal, imparted certain instructions to the jurors in the lamplit courtroom, his voice fraught with an anxiety that he had failed to show in the earlier stages of the proceedings. They retired and returned again to acquit Madame Steinheil of all the charges against her.
So much is history, as is the change in Professor Alphonse Bertillon’s view on the usefulness of fingerprints. During the day or two left to us in Paris, he became almost a friend to Sherlock Holmes. The two men were now disposed to regard their past differences as something of a joke, each assuring the other that he had never really said the things that were reported—or that, if he had said them, he had never really meant them.
We came back to Baker Street by the night ferry to Charing Cross and arrived home in good time for lunch. That evening, as I watched Holmes arranging some experiment or other upon the familiar stained table, I brought up the subject that had lain between us for the last few days.
“If you are right about Balincourt, Holmes…”
“I am seldom wrong in such matters, Watson,” he said gently, without looking up.
“If that man tampered with the box of capsules in the Élysée Palace…”
“Quite.” He frowned and took a little brush to dust a surface with white powder.
“Then it was not an old man’s lust that destroyed him, though it gave the opportunity.”
“Quite possibly.”
“Balincourt or one of their spies knew that Faure was about to change his policy—that he would turn to the Dreyfusards! That he would order a retrial! She had persuaded him.”
“I daresay,” he murmured, as if scarcely hearing me.”
“It was not a love philtre but an instant poison, after all, disguised among the other capsules!”
He looked up, the aquiline features contracting in a frown of irritation.
“You will give me credit for something, I hope! My first analysis in Paris was confirmed by a more searching examination here. What was in the remaining capsules was a homeopathic quantity of canthar. They call such pills ‘Diavolini.’ The truth is that their contents would not even stimulate passion in a man, let alone kill him. Their effect, if any, is entirely upon the mind.”
He returned to his studies.
“Then we witnessed it, after all!” I exclaimed.
“Witnessed what, my dear fellow?”
“The assassination of the President of France by those who had most to fear if Dreyfus were found innocent!”
“Oh, yes,” said Holmes, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. “I had never supposed otherwise. However, it would not do for you to give that to the world as yet, Watson, in one of your little romances. Sleep on it a little, my old friend. Speaking of romances, there is one that requires our attention without delay.”
He took a bundle of papers from a Gladstone bag and broke it open. A pile of well-filled foolscap envelopes slithered out randomly across the table.
“I have made my promise to Gustave Hamard,” he said. “Madame Steinheil has paid me in kind. All debts are now discharged.”
He took the first sheaf of papers, on which I just had time to catch sight of a few names and phrases in a neat plain hand. “General Georges Boulanger…Colonel Max von Schwartzkoppen, Königgrätzstrasse, Berlin…Pensées sur le suicide du Colonel Hubert Henry…Les crimes financières de Panama…L’affaire de Fashoda…Colonel Picquart et le tribunal…” An envelope lay addressed in black ink to Major Count Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, Rue de la Bienfaisance, 27, Paris 8e.
The fire in the grate blazed whiter as the first pages burned. Holmes turned to take another envelope and emptied it. There fluttered down to the floor a note on the stationery of the Italian Embassy in the Rue de Varenne, inviting Colonel Schwartzkoppen to dine with Colonel Panizzardi. He scooped it up and dropped it into the flames. The fire blazed again and a shoal of sparks swept up the chimney. For half an hour, the secret ashes of the Third Republic dissolved in smoke against the frosty starlight above the chimney-pots of Baker Street.
The Abandoned Brigantine
SAM BENADY
ONE OF GIBRALTAR’S most distinguished citizens for many years, Dr. Samuel G. Benady (1937– ) was born on the island into a family who has lived there since 1735 (an ancestor was kidnapped by pirates and had to be ransomed). After receiving his medical degree in London, he practiced pediatrics in Bristol and Jerusalem before returning to Gibraltar, where he has lived ever since.
Benady ran the Gibraltar Child Health service and single-handedly ran the Gibraltar Health Authority from 1980 until his retirement in 2002. He is a frequent lecturer at the Gibraltar Museum and regularly contributes articles to the newsletter of the Gibraltar Heritage Trust.
His lone book devoted to Sherlock Holmes was Sherlock Holmes in Gibraltar (1990), which featured two long short stories: the present one, in which Holmes solves one of the greatest mysteries of the sea, the abandonment of the Mary Celeste, and “The Gibraltar Letter,” which narrates Holmes’s involvement in the abduction of the Duke of Connaught while he was stationed in Gibraltar.
More recently, he has been cowriting (with Mary Chiappe) a series of mystery novels featuring Giovanni Bresciano, an amateur detective working in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gibraltar. The titles are The Murder in Whirligig Lane (2010), Fall of a Sparrow (2010), The Pearls of Tangier (2011), The Prince’s Lady (2012), The Devil’s Tongue (2013), and Death in Paradise Ramp (2014).
“The Abandoned Brigantine” was first published in Sherlock Holmes in Gibraltar (Gibraltar, Gibraltar Books, 1990).
THE ABANDONED BRIGANTINE
Sam Benady
I
“YES, WATSON,” SAID Mr. Sherlock Holmes, raising his head briefly from his huge book of references, which he had been engaged in cross-indexing. “The sea is indeed mysterious and terrible.”
“Most mysterious!” I replied absently, and then started with astonishment as I realised that, yet again, Holmes had penetrated my inmost thoughts.
“Holmes,” I expostulated, “how could you possibly have known what was going through my mind? I have said not a word to you for over thirty minutes.”
He looked up again with a chuckle. “True, you did not speak,” he remarked. “But nevertheless you told me your thoughts as clearly as if you had shouted them from the roof-tops.”
“This is too much, Holmes,” I exclaimed. “Explain yourself!”
“Only if you promise not to say ‘How absurdly simple’ when you have heard my explanation.”
“Done!”
“When you came into the room,” said he, “you were carrying a copy of The Strand Magazine, which carries on its cover an illustration of a sailing ship in distress—a brigantine, if I am any judge. You then settled into the armchair and commenced to read. Within minutes, looks of perplexity and then of sadness appeared on your face. You put down the magazine and stared fixedly for a full minute at that picture of a tea clipper which hangs on our wall. You then rose, went to the bookshelf and withdrew one of the volumes which contain the somewhat sensational accounts which you have written of my cases, in particular, the one which includes the cases of the barque Gloria Scott and the one which you have chosen to entitle Black Peter. Having opened and perused this volume for a while, you returned to your chair, where you sat with an expression of gloom until I ventured to break into your thoughts with my not very profound observation, which merely followed the thoughts which were implicit in your face and actions.”
“How absurdly simple—” I began, and then instantly joined him as he laughed heartily.
“Holmes,” I said, passing him the magazine, “have you ever heard of a more mysterious and impenetrable problem than that detaile
d in these pages?”
He opened the magazine and glanced at the article in question.
“An Unsolved Mystery. I see that they have misspelled the name of the ship as usual and no doubt have repeated all the other errors and absurdities which were perpetrated some years ago by some scribbler named Boyle, or Doyle.”
“You are acquainted with the case, then?”
“I have some slight recollection of it. Let us look it up in my book of references.”
He opened the index volume and scanned it intently.
“Musgrave Ritual,” he read. “That was a mysterious and tragic case. Moriarty; plenty of references to him, of course. Mazarin stone, Merton the pugilist—same case, those two. Matilda Briggs—another sea story there, Watson. Margolis the strangler. Ah, here it is, Mary Celeste.” He selected the appropriate volume, turned over the pages, and handed the heavy volume to me.
I settled down to read the pages which he indicated. They were mainly abstracts of court proceedings and official reports, interspersed with cuttings from newspapers, mainly English and American, but including the Gibraltar Chronicle and a few which were presumably from Spanish and Portuguese papers.
“The real facts are certainly more prosaic,” I remarked. “But the problem seems no easier to solve.
“Holmes,” I continued, as a thought struck me, “surely you would find it easy to solve the case, which has baffled the whole world for years, by the application of those deductive methods of reasoning which you have so often employed in the past.”
“You overestimate my powers, Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes, with some amusement, although I could see that he was pleased by the compliment to his abilities. “I do not think that even I could reach the correct solution by pure reasoning from the facts available in these files.”