The Man From Hell

by Barrie Roberts

  ‘Maybe he threw us out because you played and sang to him,’ I joked.

  ‘So I did,’ he mused. ‘I played his strange instrument and I sang him – Watson, that’s it!’ he exclaimed.

  I stared at him dumbstruck. ‘Don’t you see?’ he demanded. ‘Williams knew that I was a musician. If he left a message accessible to the first comer it might have been destroyed, so he left a message that only a musician would see.’

  Before I could make any reply he snatched the photograph from the table and dashed out of the room. I followed him into the drawingroom, where Lord Backwater and Connors were conversing over a decanter. With no apology Holmes rushed to the piano and flung up the lid.

  ‘Listen!’ he commanded. ‘Does this remind any of you of anything?’ and he picked out a short phrase with one finger.

  He turned and we shook our heads. He repeated the phrase a number of times, each time changing the pitch. Still none of us saw any resemblance to anything we recalled.

  Holmes looked at our puzzled faces. ‘I have evidently not solved all the puzzle,’ he remarked, and left the room as swiftly as he had entered.

  ‘Does this have something to do with the case?’ asked Lord Patrick.

  ‘I am sure it does,’ I said, ‘though precisely what I do not know. I can only say that this mood usually presages some astounding insight into a problem.’

  I rejoined Holmes in the library. He had fallen back into his previous position, scanning the photograph.

  ‘I must be right,’ he said. ‘It must be music.’

  ‘I do not follow you,’ I admitted.

  ‘You yourself asked, Watson, why the initial “J” followed by mere spots. That is because it is not a “J”. It is the treble clef, hence the spots that follow it are notes.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, ‘but they do not seem to make any recognisable tune. Surely he would have used something obvious?’

  ‘Indeed he would,’ said Holmes. ‘So I have still missed something here.’

  ‘Maybe they are letters,’ I hazarded. ‘You have shown me that some codes consist of symbols replacing letters. Musical notes are named by letters.’

  He stared at me. ‘Watson!’ he exclaimed. ‘I never understand you. Sometimes you do not grasp the obvious but occasionally you produce sparks of sheer brilliance.’

  He snatched a sheet of paper and scribbled. ‘It cannot be FDGGD,’ he muttered. ‘Oh, Watson, Watson... what might you have become if only you had systematised your thought processes?’

  I did not know whether to be pleased by his praise or offended by his last comment, but suddenly he straightened up.

  His eyes gleamed as he looked at his note. ‘Yes, Watson, brilliant,’ he repeated. ‘Now, I think I have all that I need to complete my enquiries. Please ask Lord Backwater to send a message to the Superintendent to meet me here at ten tomorrow morning,’ and with a curt ‘good night’ he dismissed me.

  Twenty-Three

  A FINAL REPORT

  Holmes was early at breakfast and with a keen appetite. He deflected all questions about the case, remarking only that he fully expected to have concluded the entire affair by noon.

  When Superintendent Thorpe arrived, accompanied by the young constable, Holmes would only tell him that he was now in possession of all the facts, that he proposed to present a final report to the Chief Constable and that, in view of the Colonel’s hostility to him, he wished the Superintendent to be present.

  At the Chief Constable’s door we were met by his manservant in shirt-sleeves. He apologised, explaining that the Colonel was enjoying his daily sword and pistol exercises and for that reason we would not be able to see him.

  ‘I feel sure he would wish to see me,’ said Holmes, and strode past the protesting servant into the hall. We followed and the Colonel’s man could do nothing except dart nervously ahead of us, repeating his objections.

  We followed him to a large room at the rear of the house. It was evidently once the ballroom but had been converted into an exercise area. The walls were racked with firearms and swords. Near us was a table on which lay pistols and ammunition and beyond it stood a mechanical exercise horse. At the far end of the room stairs led up to a gallery, once intended for musicians. The area beneath the gallery had targets displayed on the walls, which showed more bullet-pocks than our sitting-room wall in Baker Street.

  Colonel Caddage stood by the mechanical horse, in a loose, old-fashioned shirt, trousers and top-boots. A sabre dangled from his right hand. It struck me that, despite his years, he looked like some blood of the Regency era.

  ‘What the devil?’ he snarled as we entered. ‘Oh, it’s you, Holmes. I should have expected even you to have the manners to go away when you’re not welcome. As for you, Thorpe, it’ll cost you your place if there’s no good reason for this intrusion.’

  ‘I have come,’ said Holmes, ‘to present my final conclusions in the case of Lord Backwater.’

  ‘And what are they?’ sneered the Chief Constable. ‘Now that Williams and the other two are dead, have you come to tell me that it was poachers all along?’

  ‘It was not,’ said Holmes evenly, ‘poachers who killed Inspector Scott.’

  ‘Then tell us your conclusions, by all means,’ said the Colonel.

  ‘Firstly,’ began Holmes, ‘I have been examining your own career.’

  The Colonel’s eyes flickered. ‘You impertinent scoundrel!’ he grated. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Only this,’ said my friend, ‘that you come of an undistinguished country family so that, when you chose the Army as a career, you were commissioned in a less fashionable regiment, having to accept postings that lacked fashionable interest.’

  ‘I shall not,’ warned the Colonel, ‘stand to be insulted in my own home for very long.’

  ‘I shall not be very long,’ said Holmes. ‘The facts are simple. As a young officer you were posted to Norfolk Island and there you murdered a brother officer, one Lieutenant Dawson.’

  ‘Damn you!’ roared the Colonel. ‘You muck-raking jackanapes! Dawson took his own life. If you do not withdraw that lie, I–’

  Holmes ignored the outburst and pressed on, ‘Dawson died by your hand, Colonel. There were no powder burns on his waistcoat and, before you replaced it, the pistol was across the table.’

  Caddage’s eyes stood out like organ stops. ‘You have questioned...’ he began, then stopped.

  ‘You were,’ said Holmes, ‘about to say that I have been questioning the former convict Connors, with whose help you succeeded in making Dawson’s death look like suicide. In return, and so that Connors could not blackmail you, you connived at – nay – arranged his escape from Norfolk Island.’

  A storm of emotions was raging across the Colonel’s face. Holmes continued. ‘In the wake of the Chinese War you were sent to Hong Kong and there, by a fluke of chance, you saw Connors again, though that was not the name he used. You have always been a greedy man, Colonel. Even at Norfolk Island you found ways to accumulate wealth. Connors had a valuable pearl to sell and, when you found that out, you tried to blackmail him for a portion of the proceeds. When he fled, you had him hounded.

  ‘The whole of the British possessions in the East and around the Pacific were full of two kinds of Britons, soldiers and ex-convicts. It was easy for you to use the Ring to keep track of him and to threaten him.’

  ‘The Ring!’ snorted Colonel Caddage. ‘An invention of cheap novelists and do-gooders!’

  ‘Was it, indeed?’ said Holmes. ‘Perhaps you will be so kind as to turn back your sleeves and prove to us that you were not a Brother of the Ring. No? I thought that you would not. No matter. There came a day when you were posted back to England and lost track of Connors, but you had sufficient wealth from one source and another to purchase this splendid estate in your native county. Here, in retirement, you achieved apparent honour and respect.

  ‘There the story would have ended, but for the unlucky fact that this county
is also Connors’ home and, when you had ceased to hunt him, he began to visit Backwater. Your faithful henchman and Brother of the Ring, Williams, will have reported the comings and goings from the Backwater Arms of an outspoken radical from London, and your investigations revealed your old quarry. You could not believe your good fortune. His movements were watched and, a few days ago, Williams led two more Brothers to the ambush in the beech glade that resulted in Lord Backwater’s death.’

  The Colonel’s face had settled to a mask of white, out of which his eyes burned black. ‘You have no proof,’ he said.

  ‘It might be found,’ said Holmes airily. ‘It had already dawned on you that Connors, being illegally returned to England and living under a false name, had left his money in the care of Lord Backwater. When Connors escaped your net you had Lady Patricia Backwater abducted and sought to extract money from her brother.

  ‘There are some things, it seems, at which even the villainous Williams rebelled,’ he went on. ‘He sought to speak to me and Inspector Scott heard the message given to Dr Watson. The Inspector reported that to you in his nightly report and by the time he and Watson called on Williams the next day he was dead at the hands of your minions.’

  ‘By God, Holmes,’ growled the Colonel, ‘your lying effrontery has no limits. You shall pay for this!’

  Holmes ignored the threat. ‘As Inspector Scott left here on the eve of his death he spoke to Superintendent Thorpe. He said that he must ask Dr Watson something that would confirm his suspicions of someone. Mr Thorpe innocently repeated that remark to you and you knew that Scott must be stopped before he exposed you.’

  ‘Why do you say so, Mr Holmes?’ said Thorpe, who had stood like a statue throughout Holmes’ revelations.

  ‘Scott intended to ask Watson if anyone else had heard of Williams’ message. If Watson had told no one, then the only other person who had known was Colonel Caddage and it must have been the Colonel who had Williams killed. So, his henchmen dead, the Colonel must shift to ambush Scott himself and shoot him down.’

  ‘This is all very interesting,’ broke in the Colonel, ‘but so far you have advanced only theories, presumably because you have no single item of proof.’

  ‘I do beg your pardon, Colonel,’ said Holmes. ‘Have I forgotten to tell you that I have absolute proof of what Williams wished to tell me?’ and he reached in his coat pocket, withdrawing one of the photographs.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘is a photograph of the very clear message that Williams left me, in which he identifies you as the progenitor of the crimes in which he was involved,’ and he held it out to Colonel Caddage.

  Caddage snatched it with his left hand and stared at it. ‘This is that stupid tin violin of Williams!’ he snorted. ‘And someone has scribbled on it. Since, Holmes, you have evidently been prying into the Army List to learn my history, you might have taken the trouble to observe that my forenames are Gerald Oliver. What is written here is plainly a “J” and has no relation to me.’

  He thrust the card back at Holmes who ignored it. He was smiling thinly, for he enjoyed nothing so much as the successful denouement of his theories. I, however, was watching the Colonel’s white, hard face, and remembering that he still held a sabre in his right hand.

  ‘It is not,’ said my friend, ‘a “J”. It is the treble clef. Are you musical, Colonel? I think not as your ballroom serves as a firing range and gymnasium. Nevertheless, you may take my word for it that what follows that symbol is a row of notes and that those notes spell out–’

  ‘More of your incompetent nonsense,’ sneered Caddage. ‘There are no stave lines. Even if these are intended for notes you cannot determine which notes are intended.’

  ‘So you are musical, after all,’ said Holmes pleasantly. ‘Then you will agree with me that we ordinarily use only seven notes, each identified by a letter. Thus there are only seven possibilities in that line of dots. They might, I grant you, be DBEEB, but that would be meaningless. As would ECFFC, or FDGGD, or GEAAE, AFBBF or BGCCG. In fact, only one sequence makes any kind of sense – CADDA – which, apart from forming the first five letters of your name, is, so far as I know, the beginning of no other word or name in the English language. There is no doubt, Colonel, that Williams named you.’

  The sword swung in the air and Caddage slashed at Holmes, screaming, ‘Damn you! Damn you! Damn you! I’ll not hang for a crawling convict and a prying Cockney muck-raker!’

  Holmes slipped under the sabre’s arc with a fluidity surprising in so tall a man. In a moment he had possessed himself of a weapon from the wall-racks.

  ‘If we are to try conclusions in this fashion,’ he began, ‘I should warn you–’ but Caddage cut him short.

  ‘Do tell me,’ he sneered, and a mad light of battle was in his eyes, ‘that you did a little fencing at college and you fancy yourself my match!’

  ‘I was about to remark,’ said Holmes, ‘that at the age of fourteen years I enrolled with Maître Alphonse Bencin, considered to be the finest swordsman in Europe. After four years of his tuition he thought well of my abilities.’

  He lunged suddenly at the Colonel, and with a flurry of well-directed blows drove him back to the foot of the stairs leading to the gallery. There Caddage was able to hold him at bay for a while, but the relentless strength of Holmes’ strokes drove the Colonel, step by step, up the stairway.

  At the head of the stairs, and before Holmes had reached the gallery, Caddage swung suddenly as though to run down the landing, then turned instantly back and drove a murderous blow at my friend’s midriff. Holmes’ sabre smashed the Colonel’s blade upwards, so that the hilts of their weapons locked above their heads and they reeled and twisted along the gallery in a grotesque waltz.

  They had reached the far end of the little gallery when their twisting flung them against the balustrade. With a snap like a pistol-shot the old woodwork gave way under their combined weight and in a whirl of arms and legs they fell to the floor of the exercise room.

  Both were on their feet in a flash, but Holmes had lost his weapon in the fall. As he stooped to grasp it the Colonel was on him, driving his sabre point at my friend’s unprotected chest.

  I groped in my pocket for my pistol but I knew there was no time to aim and fire. My hand had just closed around the butt when a shot rang from behind me and Caddage stopped dead. The sabre point dropped and he staggered back, a look of astonishment crossing his face. Then the sword clattered to the floor and he fell backwards beside it.

  ___

  Author's notes on this chapter

  Twenty-Four

  SUPERINTENDENT THORPE’S CONCLUSIONS

  I turned to see Patrick Connors standing by the table, a smoking pistol in his hand. As I watched he handed it to Superintendent Thorpe.

  I looked to see if Holmes required assistance, but he was brushing his coat and referred me to the Colonel.

  Caddage lay on his back, his right hand clutching his shirt where an extremely accurate shot had taken him in the heart. He still breathed and waved me away, not wishing, I imagine, to be saved for the noose, but it was evident to me that he would not survive long. Nor did he; in minutes he was gone.

  Patrick Connors sat at the gun table, coolly smoking a cheroot, and Superintendent Thorpe sat opposite, making a note in his pocket-book. It occurred to me that Connors, by saving Holmes, had placed himself in grave danger.

  As Holmes and I walked over the Superintendent looked up from his pocket-book.

  ‘I have,’ he said, ‘been jotting down the particulars of this event while they are still fresh in my memory. If you will be so good, gentlemen, I should like to read what I have written and, if you agree with my account of events, I shall ask each of you to sign it, making it the official contemporary record of what has passed here this morning.’

  We nodded and he cleared his throat and read us what he had written:

  ‘“At ten o’clock in the forenoon, together with PC 112 Wetherby, I attended Mr Sherlock Holmes, consulting
detective of 221B Baker Street, London and his associate, Dr Watson. Mr Holmes had sent a message that he wished me to meet him at Backwater Hall. On my arrival he informed me that he wished me to accompany him to the home of Colonel Caddage, Chief Constable of the county. I knew that Mr Holmes had been retained by Lord Backwater to investigate the former Lord Backwater’s death and events which appeared to arise therefrom. I understood that he wished me to be present when he put certain facts and conclusions to Colonel Caddage, perhaps so that I could make an arrest.

  ‘“We proceeded to Colonel Caddage’s home where we were taken to the Colonel’s exercise room by his manservant. The Colonel had been exercising himself with pistols and at sword-play. Mr Holmes then put to the Colonel the following propositions:

  ‘“One, that while a serving officer of the garrison at Norfolk Island the Colonel had murdered a brother officer, one Lieutenant Dawson, and arranged and connived at the escape of a convict youth called Connors.

  ‘“Two, that, coming to learn of Connors’ return to England and that he had visited the Backwater vicinity, Colonel Caddage, being fearful of exposure, conspired with Elihu Williams and two others (all now deceased) to lie in wait for Connors and injure or kill him.

  ‘“Three, that the late Lord Backwater fell by accident into the ambush set for Connors and was killed.

  ‘“Four, that the Colonel then conspired with the same associates who had murdered Lord Backwater to abduct and unlawfully imprison Lady Patricia Backwater and two of her servants, by which means he extorted the sum of fifty thousand pounds sterling from Lord Backwater.

  ‘“Five, that, learning of an intention of Elihu Williams to inform on his plots, the Colonel conspired with the same two confederates to compass the death of Williams.