“Cannot because you refuse to, or cannot because you do not know?”
“The latter,” said Holmes. “Can you think of anyone, Mr Mallinson, who disliked Patrick enough to kill him?”
“In the manner you’re suggesting? No.”
“You are certain?”
“Utterly.”
“But you yourself, you have enemies.”
“Business rivals. One doesn’t get to the position that I’m in without treading on a few toes along the way. Nobody, though, hates me that much, I am quite convinced of it. More to the point, I have no enemy that I know of who could have pulled off the elaborate feat you’re outlining. Availing himself of my Type Seven, taking Patrick up in it… A simple knife in the dark would have done the trick. A bullet in the back. Mowing him down with a car. There are any number of ways my boy could have been assassinated, none involving night flying and my very own plane. So why go to such lengths?”
“Yes,” Holmes admitted, “put like that my case rather falls apart.”
“Falls apart? I would say I had demolished it.”
“Unless the aim was to make Patrick’s death look like suicide.”
“But why bother?”
“To throw off suspicion, obviously.”
“Surely blatant murder would have sent a blunter message.”
“The result, either way, would be the same: a devastated father. The purpose need not be a message, merely the destabilisation of yourself and your company.”
“Mr Holmes…” Mallinson appeared at a loss for words. “I am made of tough stuff. I will survive this. Mallinson Mining Limited will survive this. Anyone who knows me at all would know that. It is my opinion, and I am quite firm in it, that you are looking in the wrong direction. Have you considered the possibility that a certain Miss Elizabeth Vandenbergh might be the guilty party? Have you even spoken to the woman?”
“I have.”
“And? Did she not strike you as the forceful, vengeful type? Could she not have lured Patrick up to the cliffs, perhaps on the pretext of begging for reconciliation after she thought better of spurning him? The woman is crafty, if you ask me. Rapacious, too. The gold-digging sort. No money of her own to speak of, just a failing costumier business that’s leaking funds like a sieve. Perhaps she saw Patrick as her ticket to prosperity. I could have – should have – warned him about girls like her. They would have been a particular hazard for him at Cambridge, frequenting the undergraduates’ favourite watering holes and attending college functions and balls in the hope of snaring a well-to-do husband with prospects. Patrick, naive and rich – he would have been catnip to the more scheming kind of female up there. Clive spent all of three years of his degree course sidestepping unwelcome advances from just such women. He viewed them not least as a distraction from his academic and sporting endeavours. And yet, with tragic irony, Patrick managed to fall into the clutches of one right here on his doorstep.”
“Miss Vandenbergh pushed Patrick off Beachy Head?” I said.
“It would have been easily done, while Patrick’s guard was down.”
“To what end?” said Holmes. “Was Miss Vandenbergh not the one who rejected him? She was hardly, in that sense, ‘a woman scorned’.”
“Patrick’s sudden cooling towards her,” I said. “Remember she mentioned that? How he became evasive and secretive?”
“Exactly,” said Mallinson, seizing upon my words. “That could be construed as being scorned. A woman is a subtle, complex creature, her motives often inscrutable. Perhaps she expected Patrick to fight to regain her affections and was bitterly disappointed when he did not. Cherchez la femme, Mr Holmes. Our French cousins know a thing or two about the duplicity and dangerousness of the opposite sex. Seek the lady.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS
Before we left Settleholm Manor it was agreed that the matter of our break-in at the barn would remain solely between ourselves – that is to say, between Holmes, Mallinson, Reptilio, Jenks and me. Mallinson had behaved with remarkable reasonableness throughout the episode, not once succumbing to the temptation to be outraged, although he had every right to be and had veered close. He agreed to write off our expedition onto his estate as an aberration and a wild goose chase. No blame would attach to us for it. This came as a special relief to Reptilio, who had the most to lose by being involved in a further felony.
“Inspector Tasker shall be none the wiser as to what transpired here tonight,” Mallinson promised.
“I couldn’t ask for more than that,” was Holmes’s reply, and we all parted on fairly good terms, Jenks the only truly disgruntled one among us. I imagined he felt that we three trespassers had got away with more than we deserved. His eyes said he would not have been quite so magnanimous as his employer.
Holmes was sunk deep in thought as we trudged back through the dark to East Dean.
When I enquired what was preoccupying him, his somewhat unexpected reply was, “Scuff marks.”
“What?”
“Perhaps you noticed. No, what am I saying? Of course you didn’t. When Sir Josiah crossed the hallway to stand by the sideboard, I observed scuff marks on the floor tiles by his feet. They formed a curve from the legs of the sideboard, suggesting the thing has been moved lately.”
“Moved? Whatever for?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know.”
“Perhaps an object fell behind and the sideboard was pulled out from the wall in order to facilitate its retrieval.”
“Perhaps,” said Holmes. “Perhaps it was just that. It may mean nothing at all.”
“It would have been small but valuable, the thing that fell behind,” I said. “That sideboard must weigh several hundred pounds. I would not want to shunt it aside without good reason.”
“Watson, as ever you speak sense. I should probably not waste any more time thinking about the matter.”
At the cottage, I retired upstairs to bed while Holmes remained down in the sitting room, keeping watch over Reptilio in case he attempted to sneak away.
Early the next morning, two police constables came to collect the contortionist and return him to his cell.
With Reptilio gone, Holmes lapsed back into his funk. I couldn’t tell if he was angry, stymied, or just thinking hard. It was difficult to know with Holmes. When his shutters came down, they came down firmly, and there was no penetrating them. He sat in his armchair stuffing black shag into his pipe and puffing away with a brooding determination that bordered on mania. I couldn’t elicit a single word from him, and soon gave up trying.
“I’m off for a stroll,” I said, fastening the buttons of my overcoat and fetching my walking-stick. “I may be a while. Goodbye.”
Holmes’s only response was an airy flap of the hand that was not so much a farewell as a dismissal. I was, at that moment, nothing other than an irritant, a buzzing gnat.
Leaving him lost in smoke and contemplation, I bought that day’s Times from the village shop, then set off cross-country with the newspaper tucked in my pocket. Soon I was descending the slope into Eastbourne over sheep-grazed downland that was smooth and uninterrupted save for the occasional thicket of hazel or wind-warped briar.
A cool, pale sun was emerging through the morning’s hazy overcast as I circumvented a chalk pit and joined the seafront promenade at its western end, not far from the natural spring called Holywell that leapt from a cleft in the cliffside. A low onshore breeze blew steadily and strongly, stirring the waves to a chop. The Channel was the white-streaked grey of a much used blackboard.
I passed the stately Grand Hotel and continued on along the lower parade, tipping my hat to my fellow promenaders. The weather might not have been of the warmest but Eastbourne’s seafront afforded such a pleasing aspect that it drew people to it in all conditions short of a full-blown storm. The buildings ranged from Italianate stucco terraces to individual houses and hotels in the Flemish Renaissance and Regency styles, a delightful variety. Well-kept
municipal lawns and flowerbeds added a dash of colour. Then there were features such as the bandstand, which projected out over the beach on stilts like some great glass birdcage, and of course the ornate pier, my intended destination. Not for nothing was this town nicknamed “the Empress of Watering Places”.
The beach’s bathing machines were all drawn up above the tideline, for this was not a day for casual swimming. However, a handful of young men were preparing themselves for immersion, and I stopped to watch, marvelling at their fortitude and foolhardiness. Some of them performed jumping jacks and similar warm-up exercises to get the blood pumping while others smeared grease on their bare limbs to insulate against the cold. I overheard a passer-by say that these were members of an endurance swimming club and their goal was to cross all the way to Pevensey Bay – some two miles as the crow flies – and back in under an hour. The young men, in their woollen bathing costumes, proceeded to tiptoe down the shingles and enter the water, whereupon with yelps and exhortations they launched themselves into the surf like seals and struck out from land. Soon they had taken a left turn and were forging eastward, parallel with the shore.
Rather them than me, I thought.
I stopped at a shop to buy a postcard and a stick of rock. I planned to send the former to Mrs Watson and, when I returned home, present her with the latter as a gift. Thus she would know that she was never far from my thoughts.
I continued on towards the pier.
I was, and remain, terribly fond of Eastbourne Pier. Any pleasure pier is a splendid folly, in my opinion – a structure jutting boldly out over the sea with no purpose other than to look jaunty and gay and be a venue for recreation and entertainment. There is something peculiarly affecting, not to say peculiarly British, about their elaborateness and sheer frivolity. Eastbourne’s is no exception, and as I paid my fee at the entrance kiosk and strode through the turnstile I felt a smile forming on my face. Last night’s shenanigans, Holmes’s brown study, my own tiredness due to lack of sleep – all seemed to melt away with every resonant thud of my feet on the boardwalk.
With the windbreak screens shielding me from the worst of the buffeting breeze, I headed towards the structure that dominated the pier’s seaward end, the Kursaal. Named after the “cure halls” found in fashionable German spa towns, the Kursaal was a two-storey fantasy of cast-iron pillars, balconies, balustrades, domes, cupolas and finials. Inside, it contained a theatre, bars, offices, and last but not least a rather good tearoom, where I claimed a table beside the window and shortly was tucking into a late breakfast of eggs, bacon, fried bread, sautéed mushrooms and black pudding, washed down with strong coffee.
Stomach replete, I wrote the postcard to my wife, confining myself to a few innocuous comments about the weather and expressions of affection, and making no mention at all that Holmes and I seemed to be involved in a case, of sorts. The second Mrs Watson did not wholeheartedly approve of my crime-solving activities with Holmes and had often expressed how glad she was that he, and therefore by extension I, had abandoned the habit. She preferred a husband who kept regular hours performing a regular job and didn’t go, in her words, “gallivanting around, risking his neck chasing after villains”.
I then spent the next half an hour perusing The Times. Usually this was an agreeable occupation, but on that particular day the news was unduly dispiriting. There were massacres and disasters far afield, such as an attack by Libyan tribesmen on a garrison of occupying Italian soldiers which resulted in over thirty deaths and the bombing of a train in Mexico by terrorists which resulted in over fifty. Closer to home, though, there were the continued ominous rumblings of something much worse, a catastrophe in the making which nobody, it seemed, either was willing or knew how to avoid.
A second war in the Balkans was under way, hot on the heels of the last one. Bulgaria had provoked Greece and Serbia, and was reaping the consequences. Meanwhile tensions in the rest of Europe, already simmering, were rising to the boil. The continent’s great powers – the Triple Entente of Britain, Russia and France on one side, the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary on the other – were at loggerheads, their imperial fiefdoms in a state of continuous competition and flux, each seeking advantage over their rivals, keen to expand their spheres of influence. Russia was ramping up her military might, mobilising troops and amassing matériel like never before. Germany was doing likewise in alarmed response, and also increasing the size of her navy, vying with Britain on that front as she had been since the invasion of the Transvaal in 1896. France, for its part, was behaving in a provocatively cocksure manner, in the grip of a nationalistic fervour which had been stoked by recent setbacks resulting from its colonial crises in Morocco.
It was clear to an old soldier like me, and to anyone with even the loosest grasp of international politics, that Europe was on a knife edge. It was the proverbial powder keg awaiting a spark. All this diplomatic growling, this aggressive jockeying for position, could not carry on indefinitely. Matters would come to a head sooner or later, and one could not help but think that the resolution would be a far from peaceful one. Many commentators foresaw a spasm of violence unlike any the world had hitherto witnessed, an entire continent at war, tearing itself apart. How many millions of deaths might that mean? The level of destruction and devastation would surely be unprecedented.
These thoughts cast a pall of gloom over me. I left the tearoom and walked to the very end of the pier hoping to find consolation in the view out to sea. The sun had by now fully shaken off its veil of cloud, and the water had gone from grey to pearly green, like nephrite marble. Seagulls haunted the air, pinned on the wind with their wings spread, yet they were outnumbered by starlings, of which there were many hundreds, congregated in the sky in that ever-shifting mass known as a murmuration.
It swooped and twisted, this bird cluster, directly above the pier. It flexed and folded in on itself as though it were a single sentient entity, a vast amoeba gifted with secret intelligence.
The starlings were flocking in readiness to migrate south to Africa. The pier was a landmark, a rallying point which they returned to by instinct year after year. I knew these facts, yet that did not vitiate the wonder of the phenomenon. Countless individual creatures acting as one, moving in concert as though choreographed – it offered at once a mesmerising display and a salutary reminder that Nature was above the affairs of men, indifferent to our scrambles for territory and our propensity for conflict. We and our squabbles were transitory. Nature had its rhythms and its rituals, eternally recurring. Nature abided.
Leaning on the pier railing, with the waves crashing against the support pylons some thirty feet below me, I observed the starlings and felt my dread begin to ebb away. I did not believe for a moment that all would be well. I was too old and jaded to harbour that hope. However, I did at least feel that there was some stability in the world, that some things were constant and immutable. The ever-changing murmuration was, paradoxically, a symbol of permanence.
I had thought I was alone at the end of the pier, but then all at once hands seized me roughly from behind. A brutal, powerful grip took hold of my left arm, another of my right thigh. I felt myself being upended, pivoted over the railing.
I struck backwards with my walking-stick, a clumsy flailing blow, but the handle of the stick must have connected with some part of my unseen attacker, for I felt a sharp impact and heard a furious grunt.
It did not deter him, however. With a terrible, remorseless strength he continued to tip me over.
I was upside down. The sea seethed below. The waves seemed terribly far away and at the same time terrifyingly close. I tried to utter a cry for help but somehow my throat was stopped, my tongue blocking my larynx.
The only thing preventing me from falling was my assailant’s grip on me.
This he relinquished, and down I went, head-first.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ONE BRUSH WITH DEATH AFTER ANOTHER
Helplessly I fell, and o
n the way down my shoulder collided with one of the pier’s pylons, which not only sent a savage jolt of pain through me but set me spinning. I crashed into the water at an angle, mostly on my back, with enough force to drive the air from my lungs and render me halfway insensible.
All that I recall of the next few desperate moments was the roar of bubbles in my ears and the horrendous, sickening sensation of being unable to tell up from down. Underwater, I thrashed toward what I hoped was the surface, but I seemed to be getting no closer to it and feared that, in my efforts to save myself, I might instead be going in the opposite direction, sinking deeper. Panic overcame me; I heard myself howling in the back of my throat, and my exertions grew more frenzied but also less focused. The harder I fought to keep from drowning, the more remote my chances of success seemed.
My chest ached. My lungs burned. My shoulder felt jagged like broken glass. I began to think I would never be able to extricate myself from the sea’s clutches. My clothes had become sodden and heavy, their weight bearing me down. I resigned myself to the inevitable. In a moment of weird stillness and clarity I thought of Sherlock Holmes, and of the current Mrs Watson, and of my darling lost Mary, the three people who were nearest and dearest to me, the pillars of my life. I realised how much I had relied on them and leaned on them over the course of my life, and I prayed that I had been as good to them as it was in my power to be.
Then a pair of hands fastened on to me, and in my stunned, hypoxic daze I imagined they must be the same hands responsible for hurling me off the pier, so I writhed against them, trying to shake off their inimical grasp.
But they insisted on maintaining their hold, and there came more of them, at least three pairs now, and they were hauling me, cradling me, and I remember wondering, dimly, if they belonged to angels and I was being carried to my final reward.
Then my face broke the surface, and through reflex I opened my mouth and sucked in air.
A wave crashed over me mid-inhalation, and I spluttered and gagged, and someone nearby shouted, “Keep his head up!” and another replied, “What do you blooming well think I’m trying to do?”
Sherlock Holmes - Gods of War Page 13