The Man From Hell

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘“Lieutenant Dawson–” I began, but he hissed at me, “Dawson won’t bother us,” and, taking a key from his pocket, he unlocked the door. As I followed him in I saw that Dawson sat sprawled back in a wooden armchair with his back to the door. In front of him a low lamp burned on a table littered with cards, bottles and two glasses. I thought him senselessly drunk until I walked around the table.

  ‘“He’s dead, sir!” I cried, for now I could see that Dawson wore a look of surprise on his face and his left hand clutched the breast of his waistcoat where blood had spilled and darkened.

  ‘“Dead enough,” said the Lieutenant. “My brother officer and I were playing cards when we had a falling out. The fool drew his little pistol on me and when I tried to take it from him it went off.”

  ‘Frightened as I now was, I could tell that was a lie, for there was no powder burn on Dawson’s waistcoat and the pistol lay on the far side of the table, but I kept my opinions to myself.

  ‘“Now, this is all a damnable embarrassment to me,” said the Lieutenant, “so we’re going to act like Brothers of the Ring. First you shall help me, then I shall help you.”

  ‘“How can I help you, sir?” I asked.

  ‘“First we shall arrange things so that it seems that Dawson sat on alone after our game, when I had gone. Then we shall make it seem that he took his own life with the pistol. Come, put the shutters up and bar them!”

  ‘I closed the shutters while he rearranged the scene at the table, stowing the cards in a drawer and removing one glass. Next he placed the little pistol on the floor below Dawson’s right hand.

  ‘I watched in puzzlement, not seeing the part I was to play. “Now,” he said, “I shall leave. You must take this key and lock the door from the inside. Leave the key in the lock and climb out by the chimney. When Dawson’s servant arrives from the barracks in the morning he will see that his master shot himself while locked in and alone.’

  ‘It was a cunning plan but I saw a drawback. “When I go up the chimney I shall knock down soot. They will know in the morning that someone went out the chimney.”

  ‘“So they will,” he agreed, ‘though they will know ‘twas not me. Still, you are right.”

  ‘He started to take papers and letters from Dawson’s drawers, crumpling them and piling them in the fireplace. When there was a little mound of them he handed me a piece of paper and a tinderbox. “Take these up with you,” he said, “and at the top set alight to the paper and drop it into the hearth. The fire will cover any soot that falls. They will merely believe that Dawson was destroying papers before he killed himself.”

  ‘We proceeded according to his plan and, in a very few minutes, I was at the chimney top. My burning paper soon fired those below and I clambered down the rough-laid exterior of the chimney to where the Lieutenant waited for me.

  ‘“Well done, boy,” he said. “Now, so we have no misunderstanding, repeat to me the Oath of the Ring.”

  ‘I did so and he looked me long in the face. Then he said, “And do you wholly acknowledge the Ring’s law – that any favour shown you will repay?”

  ‘“Of course,” I said.

  ‘“Then come with me,” he commanded and I followed him away from the cottages and down to the beach, where he jumped into a boat.

  ‘“Row,” he commanded me, “as though your life depended on it, for I assure you that it does,” and with my heart pounding with hope and excitement I took up the oars.

  ‘There were no jetties or wharves at Kingston. As I have already mentioned, ships stood out and were unloaded by boat. As we pulled further out I could see three vessels lying at anchor, but two of them I knew to be British.

  ‘At the Lieutenant’s instruction I pulled alongside the third ship and we clambered aboard, where a word from the Lieutenant sent a seaman for his skipper. What passed between them I do not know, for it was done in the captain’s cabin. When the Lieutenant returned to the deck he looked me over again.

  ‘“I have done my best for you, Connors,” he said, “and it has cost a pretty penny to persuade the good captain to sail early. As of this moment you are the ship’s boy of the Juliet Jones, and a citizen of the United States. Whatever you become you will always be a Brother of the Ring and you owe the Ring one hundred pounds. Never forget that you also owe the Brotherhood for your freedom, and never forget that if you are found on British soil, on a British vessel or in British waters and identified you will hang, American or not. I wish you good luck, boy!”

  ‘With that he was over the side and gone and I stood alone on the deck, hardly able to believe my change in fortune. It was growing light as the Juliet Jones weighed anchor. Once away from the land the morning breeze filled her sails and blew on the face of her new ship’s boy, Peter Collins, like the very breath of freedom as he stood on her deck and watched the hills of Norfolk Island sink into the ocean.’

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  Author's notes on this chapter

  Twenty-Two

  THE BLACK QUEEN OF TUMUROA

  Lord Backwater’s guest paused again and gazed out of the window. I was struck by that even, expressionless look on his face that I have seen before on those who have been long in prison. It comes from using the face as a mask so that no warder or official may read a man’s intentions or feelings in his expression.

  ‘I was not yet sixteen years of age,’ he said, almost as though talking to himself. ‘I had been taken from home and flung down all those steps to the blackest pit of the System and by the most unimaginable chance I had survived and was free.

  ‘Can you imagine, gentlemen,’ he said, turning to us, ‘what that felt like?’ and we shook our heads for truly we could not.

  ‘The skipper of the Juliet Jones found me a willing worker and kept me aboard as he cruised among the islands of the Pacific and for two years I lived the carefree life of a young sailor among the sweetest places and the most gentle people on earth.

  ‘At last the skipper grew homesick for America but I was besotted by the islands and wished to stay, so he paid me off and left me on Tumuroa.

  ‘There were more white men in the islands in those days than you might think. Some were bolters like me, out of the penal colonies on foreign ships. Some were seamen, again like me, who could not bear to leave what seemed like paradise on earth. Food was all around us, drink was there when we wanted it and the lovely girls of the islands thought it an honour to be partner to a white man. So I passed more than a year in idle contentment until I almost believed that the iron of Point Puer and Norfolk Island had washed out of my blood.

  ‘But it was not, in the end, the life for me. I began to see what happened to those who stayed too long. They became weathered old wrecks of men, given over completely to drink and rambling endlessly about the homes that they had left so many years and so many miles away. So it came to me that I must be doing something that had some purpose.

  ‘On Tumuroa the natives fished for pearls. They would go out in their little craft and send divers down, but not in fancy dress with air pumped to them. They would fill their lungs and take a great rock and leap over the side, letting the weight of the rock carry them to the seabed as quickly as possible. There, while their breath held, they would scrabble to fill a bag with shells and bring it back up with them.

  ‘I have always enjoyed athletic activity and, at first, I went out in their boats and matched my ability against theirs purely as a sport, but very soon I realised the considerable strength and skill they employed and the deadly danger of their task. As I became more proficient, I realised as well that here was a source of income.

  ‘I became, in a while, a moderately effective diver, and began to accumulate funds from my operations. As soon as I was able I sent a draft to the Lieutenant, paying off my debt to the Ring and, I thought, freeing me from its Brotherhood. I knew not whether he was still at Norfolk Island, but I knew that my unsigned letter would follow him to whatever posting he had taken. On the day I committed that draft to the post I
poured acid over my own arms to remove for ever the Ring’s signs.’

  He paused, and drew a deep breath, as though the action still gave him satisfaction.

  ‘Freed of any obligations, save to myself, I worked at pearling until, by careful dealing, I had accumulated a decent sum. Now I became anxious to be on my way. The attractions of the islands remained, but there was nothing there for me to do and I had grown up in my time there; grown up to realise that I could not let my time pass meaninglessly.

  ‘Fate turned to me again, for out of one of the last harvests of shell I brought ashore came one, large, flawless black pearl.’

  ‘The Black Queen of Tumuroa,’ said Holmes.

  ‘You have heard of it?’ asked Connors.

  ‘I should have remembered it before,’ said my friend. ‘Precious jewels are the focus, if not the cause, of so much crime, that it behoves a detective to know all that he can of them. Is it not now in the collection of one of the Czar’s family?’

  ‘It is, I believe,’ said Connors, ‘and how right you are. When I first saw the Black Queen I knew at once that I held a fortune in my hand. I should, perhaps, have realised that I also held in my hand a magnet that would draw death around me.

  ‘I left the islands and took my accumulation, topped now by that magnificent black pearl, to Hong Kong. There I had no trouble in disposing of my collection at a sensible price. At last I believed that the convict boy from Norfolk Island could be forgotten. I had sufficient funds to make me more than wealthy anywhere in the world.

  ‘That delusion lasted me only hours. During the night after I had sold the Black Queen a message was slipped under the door of my hotel room. I can recall it word for word. It said, “Connors, you are free because the Ring made you so. If you would stay free the Ring must have a half-share in your good fortune,” and it bore the Ring’s emblems.

  ‘When I first held the Black Queen I believed that it had closed the past behind me for ever, but now that note had opened it all again. I felt the tattooed hands of the Ring reaching out to drag me back to Hell. I fled from Hong Kong the next day, for I dared not stay a moment longer on British soil, and made my way to California.

  ‘For a short while I felt safe there. I was not on English soil. But there are many Australians in California and I had not been there long before I received another message from the Ring.

  ‘I might, I suppose, have paid them, but I felt that to do so would only guarantee that they would bleed me dry. So I ran again. And kept running.’

  For once the passive face twisted in bitter reflection. ‘Oh how I ran,’ he said. ‘For more years than I can recall I went wherever the next boat or train would take me – India, Ceylon, Egypt, who knows where – and each time they found me, till at last I fetched up in South America. From there I went north into Mexico and I seemed to have left them behind. I crossed into Texas and there I stayed. Slowly the years mounted with no sign of the Ring. I began to breathe freely again. At last I could enjoy the profits of the Black Queen. I bought myself what they call a “spread” and there I raised horses.

  ‘All the time I watched and listened for any sign of the Ring, but none came. I heard how New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were no longer convict colonies, then Western Australia and Norfolk Island had closed. When I knew that Norfolk Island was gone I surmised that the Ring must have died. I waited a few years more and then I slipped back to England.

  ‘Nothing could have kept me from Backwater. I had been a hunted exile so long that there was a deep longing in me to see my childhood home. I had no fear of being recognised, for I had been gone for forty years.

  ‘So I came home. I do not know what might have been the conclusion if Rupert Varley had been alive, but they told me that he had met a better end than he deserved. I went to the churchyard and there I found that someone had raised a handsome stone over my good old Uncle Joe and Aunt Lisa. When they told me at the inn that it was a whim of the new Lord Backwater a strange idea came to me. If someone had done to our foster-parents’ grave what I would have done, and done it in secret, I wondered if that could possibly be Jim.

  ‘I sent a note to the Hall, a note signed only “The Man from Hell”, to meet me at the old place. Can you imagine how we greeted each other by that old tree? We were two of the richest men in England and we stood beneath the old beech and wept like the children we had been when last we stood there.

  ‘Together we made our plans, that I should make doubly sure that the Ring had given up its claim on me, and then I should settle here in Backwater. In the meantime I transferred most of my funds to Jim, to do with as his own and to help those that he helped.

  ‘I came again and each time I was careful. I would stay a day or two at the Backwater Arms, being just a holiday-maker in the country. On the last day I would send a note to Jim, take my bags to the station and then slip back through the woods to the beech glade and meet him. The last time we met was, indeed, to have been the last. I was satisfied that the Ring had forgotten me and I was going to move to Backwater.

  ‘When we were attacked I recognised the ruffians who did it. There was the mad old fiddler from the Backwater Arms and two more I had seen with him at the pub. Jim fought like a lion and kept telling me to run, but I could not. Then, when he was struck down and I could see he was killed, there was nothing more to do except run.’

  He paused again, far longer this time. ‘We had survived it all, Van Diemen’s Land, Norfolk Island, all our wanderings, and we had come back home to be two old men with enough money to help those who might have followed our path, but I brought murder with me. I saved Jim at Eaglehawk Neck only to kill him in Backwater Woods under the tree where we played.’

  Now, at last, he brushed away a tear. ‘There’s my story, gentlemen. I hope it assists you.’

  We also were quiet for a long while. Once again the panelled walls of Lord Backwater’s library had heard a tale fully as strange as anything on their shelves.

  Sherlock Holmes broke the silence. ‘You should not reproach yourself, Mr Connors.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Lord Patrick. ‘For forty years my father grieved in secret that his beloved foster-brother had gone to his death to protect him. If he was to die he would not have wanted better than to do so while protecting you.’

  ‘You were right in one matter,’ said Holmes, ‘and wrong in another.’

  ‘What were they?’ asked Connors.

  ‘You were right to believe that the Ring died when Norfolk Island closed,’ he said.

  ‘But surely, Holmes,’ I protested, ‘you identified the Ring’s tattoos on Lord Backwater’s arms, you heard his narrative, you’ve seen the letters. This must be the work of the Ring!’

  ‘I do not say,’ he said imperturbably, ‘that this affair does not have its roots in the Ring, but I do say that the Ring is dead. It was an organisation that could only thrive on Norfolk Island, a thousand miles from anywhere, where both convicts and guards could be bent or threatened to its will. Its convict members are dead, sent to the Australian mainland or, in a very few cases, returned to England. Its soldier members too are either dead or scattered wherever the Army has sent them. In England the Ring has no closed and fearful community in which it can operate and only small numbers to do its bidding. The Ring has died.’

  ‘Then, in what way was I wrong?’ asked Connors.

  ‘You were wrong,’ replied Holmes, ‘to believe that it is still the Ring that is hunting you.’

  ‘Then who is it?’ demanded Lord Backwater.

  ‘There,’ said my friend, uncoiling from his chair, ‘lies the crux of the problem, to the solution of which I propose to devote some time. Perhaps, Lord Backwater, you will excuse me if I miss dinner. If you can have some coffee sent in to me here I shall consider what we now know in greater detail.’

  At dinner we racked our brains to see what Holmes had meant, but with no success. After the meal Arnold was about to take more coffee to Holmes but I relieved him of the duty.
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  The library was thick with tobacco smoke and Holmes sat, leaning back from the table, gazing through narrowed eyes at a row of items laid out in front of him. I saw that they were Inspector Scott’s photographs and my own sketch of the marks on Williams’ violin.

  ‘You have not made sense of the marks, then?’ I enquired as I poured his coffee.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why, Watson, why would he begin with a letter and then make only spots?’

  ‘I cannot imagine,’ I said, ‘but are you sure the four spots are meaningful?’

  ‘There are, in fact, five spots,’ he said.

  ‘But I drew only four,’ I said.

  ‘So you did. But if you look at the photograph you will see a fifth mark, to the right and on a level with the second one.’

  I picked up the picture. ‘There is a mark there,’ I conceded, ‘but I took it for a mere smear.’

  ‘I grant you that it is less pronounced,’ said Holmes, ‘but I believe it is intentional.’

  ‘But if he wrote the “J”, surely these marks are only where his fingers fell as his strength gave out?’

  ‘They cannot be,’ said Holmes and passed me his lens ‘Take a look through that.’

  I examined each spot carefully but failed to see any difference. ‘They all look alike to me,’ I confessed.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Holmes, ‘so they cannot be the marks of different fingers. The lens reveals that each spot includes an impression of the same scar, even the fifth. They are the deliberate marks of one finger applied five times.’

  ‘Perhaps it is not a “J”,’ I suggested. ‘Might it not be a “G” or an “I”?’

  ‘It is not, I think, a “G”,’ said Holmes. ‘The loop is all wrong. I suppose that it might be interpreted as an “I”, but either would leave the same fundamental problem. What is the significance of a single letter followed by a row of blobs?’

  He looked at the photograph again as I gave it back. ‘Curse the man!’ he said. ‘I offered him safety from the rope if he would tell us what he knew and he showed us the door with a torrent of abuse. Then he leaves this singularly obscure message.’