Sherlock Holmes - Gods of War

by James Lovegrove

  “Holmes, you mustn’t berate yourself. You have been attempting to draw together a sequence of events that occurred months ago, in various far-flung parts of the country. Thus far, you have been doing commendably well. Even in your heyday you might still have wound up resorting to just the same measures. Pray continue.”

  “Thank you, old friend. Your confidence in me is heartening. Suffice to say, there was nothing inherently odd about Harold Anstruther’s death other than that it seemed a most uncharacteristic blunder. A fact that merited a mention in several of the articles about the incident, however, was that a small quantity of wine was discovered on the floor of the gunroom beside the body.”

  “Ah, he had been drinking. That might explain how he overlooked the presence of the fateful bullet.”

  “Yet nowhere did I find any reference to there being a bottle in the room, nor even a glass. It may be that nobody thought it needed saying, but I find it an intriguing lacuna, don’t you? Wine spilled but no wine container on the premises.”

  “Sloppy journalism, as you say.”

  “The final piece of the puzzle – indeed, the key to it all – was the death of Lady Partlin-Gray. Lady Inga was Norwegian by birth. She and Sir Josiah met at the turn of the century, when he was buying out a steel company based in Stavanger. She died in June, and her demise was by some margin the grisliest episode I am here relating. You may recall the headlines.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “You will when I describe the circumstances,” said Holmes. “It caused quite a sensation. The Partlin-Grays’ marriage was, shall we say, one where monogamy was not a prerequisite on either side. If the gossip columnists’ insinuations are to be believed, Lady Inga was the type to conduct affairs on a regular basis with anyone from high-born nobles to lowly stable boys. Sir Josiah, meanwhile, has gained notoriety for his liaisons with a string of music-hall actresses and opera sopranos. That said, the two of them were often to be seen out and about in one another’s company, he squiring her to charity balls and suchlike, and it was remarked that they always seemed close and affectionate in public.”

  “It can be that such an arrangement suits both parties,” I said. “Not that I would condone it, but serial infidelity is not an uncommon practice in the upper echelons of society. It keeps the relationship fresh, so they say.”

  “Lady Inga was found dead in a forest near the Partlin-Grays’ summer retreat, a log cabin overlooking a fjord outside Fredrikstad in her ladyship’s native land. She appeared to have tripped and fallen headlong into a ravine. It happened at night, and hence the assumption was that she had been on her way to or back from a tryst with a lover in a nearby village when she met her end. And it was a miserable end.”

  I now began to remember something about this incident. “Yes, when they discovered her body it had been torn apart by wild animals. Isn’t that the story? Wolves, I believe.”

  “Either she died instantly as a result of the fall or she was rendered insensible or otherwise unable to move, both scenarios leaving her vulnerable to predatory and scavenging beasts. Bite marks were clearly visible on her flesh. There is no question that the body was mauled, in all likelihood by wolves.”

  “I must say that, for her sake, I hope she broke her neck in the fall and knew nothing more. It would have been kinder that way. To lie there conscious, perhaps paralysed, as the wolves approached…” I shuddered.

  “One intriguing if gruesome detail was that Lady Inga’s lungs had been pulled out through the back of her ribcage. The assumption was that wolves were also responsible for this mutilation.”

  “You think they weren’t?”

  “I was, by this stage of my researches, beginning to perceive a pattern to these deaths.”

  “I’ll take your word for it that there is one, but at present I cannot see it.”

  “What do you see then, Watson?” Holmes asked.

  “I see a series of deaths which have befallen close relatives of three men who are friends with one another,” I said. “The deaths are grouped close together in time, but statistically that is not extraordinary, in my view. Harington’s elderly father dies of a senility-related illness. Anstruther’s brother suffers a tragic, careless accident. Partlin-Gray’s wife goes astray in a Norwegian forest, loses her way in the dark, falls into a ravine, and is partially eaten by wolves. All very unpleasant and unfortunate, but I daresay one could take any three men and find a similar distribution of tragedies in their lives.”

  “You’re forgetting Craig Mallinson and Patrick.”

  “So let’s add a fourth to the tally. It still doesn’t seem to be wildly beyond the bounds of probability.”

  “And that,” said Holmes, “could be exactly how it is meant to seem: a concatenation of deaths by natural causes or innocent mishap. To the casual observer, nothing is amiss. But you and I are not casual observers, Watson. We are alert to the existence of schemes and sequences. We pierce the surface of things. We cross-reference and double check, and that is how we solve murders.”

  “They were murders?” I said. “All four? You’re quite positive about that?”

  “Firmly so. Let me tell you why.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE PANOPTICON PERISCOPE

  “But first…” Holmes crossed over to the periscope which was attached to one wall of the safe room. “Our enemies have had ample time to regroup and prepare. We must keep a lookout for them.”

  He put his eye to the viewing slot and turned a handle mounted on the periscope shaft. I heard cogs mesh and chains clank.

  “I call this my ‘panopticon periscope’,” he said. “I have constructed it so that the reflecting mirror at the top can rotate through a full three hundred and sixty degrees. The shaft follows the chimney breast and its tip protrudes through the roof, camouflaged as a cowled chimneypot. I have a view round the entire perimeter of the cottage. Admittedly it is not a good one tonight, but I have left lights on in several rooms and the illumination cast from the windows is helping to penetrate the mist.”

  “An ingenious device,” I said.

  “When it comes to my own safety, I compromise on nothing, least of all inventiveness,” said Holmes. “Now, to continue…”

  While he kept watch on the outside world via the panopticon periscope, my friend outlined his reasons for thinking that the deaths he had been describing constituted a spate of connected murders.

  “It is the dates that are so striking,” he said. “Do you not detect a certain regularity in the frequency of the deaths?”

  “Let me think. December, March, June, September… Why, they occur at three-month intervals.”

  “And furthermore, the precise dates align with a set of major calendrical events. Eustace Harington’s father died on the twenty-second of December.”

  “That’s customarily the shortest day of the year.”

  “Known as the winter solstice. Harold Anstruther’s gun ‘accident’ took place on March the twentieth. The vernal equinox.”

  “Then Lady Inga Partlin-Gray presumably died on midsummer’s day.”

  “June the twenty-first, also known as the summer solstice. And what was last Friday?”

  “The autumnal equinox,” I said. “My goodness me, a clear, unambiguous pattern.”

  “Too clear and unambiguous to be purely random,” said Holmes. “The odds against it being happenstance are astronomical.”

  “Yet in another sense astronomical is precisely what it is.”

  “Well put. The deaths align, with terrible accuracy, to the celestial mechanics which govern the seasons and the earth’s orbital relation to the sun. The equinoxes are, of course, when the sun takes exactly half a day to travel from horizon to horizon and the plane of the earth’s equator tilts to the point where it passes the sun’s centre. The solstices are when the sun appears at its highest and lowest in the sky. In summer, the solstice marks the beginning of the sun’s declination – its gradual daily decrease in perceived altitude. In
winter, the opposite.”

  “So each of the four men committed the murder of a relative on one of those days. What for? To what purpose?”

  “That I do not know. One can only speculate that there is some profound significance in the dates, possibly of a mystical nature. But also, each of the four men cannot have committed the murders.”

  “How so?”

  “Here we come to the nub of the matter,” said Holmes, turning away from the periscope to give me a sardonic look. “On the face of it, each man has a reasonably solid motive for killing his respective victim. For Eustace Harington, there is the prospect of an inheritance.”

  “You told me there wasn’t much money left in the family coffers.”

  “There was still a house and land for the claiming, and more than that, a title. Harington has money of his own already, plenty of it. All he would need to make his life complete is a ‘lord’ to go in front of his name. Men have murdered for less.”

  “But… his own father?”

  “The fellow was old and ailing. Eustace could be said to have been merely hastening the inevitable. As for Anstruther, he and his brother were on the outs. Harold Anstruther was everything Victor is not: a wastrel, a sponger, a ne’er-do-well. He had never done a stroke of work in his life. Victor supported him financially and unstintingly, affording him a playboy lifestyle which he did nothing to deserve. There would have been a definite tension in their relationship.”

  “As there must have been between Sir Josiah and Lady Inga Partlin-Gray,” I said. “For all the apparent ‘freeness’ of their marriage, I can imagine the existence of a constant undertow of jealousy and resentment. Can a husband and wife truly be happy with each other if both are seeking affection elsewhere?”

  “As for Mallinson and Patrick, we know from Mallinson himself, and from Elizabeth Vandenbergh, that they had been at odds all summer.”

  “And yet Mallinson’s sorrow over the loss of his son seems entirely genuine. You cannot dissimulate that level of grief. If he is Patrick’s murderer, then he is either a sociopath or an incredibly gifted actor.”

  “He is neither,” said Holmes. “Nor is he Patrick’s murderer. This is what I am trying to convey to you. None of the four killed the person he is most likely to have killed. It is not possible. And it is not possible because all of them have cast-iron alibis. They were at the Colonial and Overseas at the time. Here, I have proof.”

  He fished out a scrap of paper from his pocket. It took me several moments to decipher the jottings on it, which were in Holmes’s own hand, somewhat crabbed at the best of times and made worse by the evident haste with which he had been writing. The text consisted of columns of letters and numbers, as though it were some abstruse code.

  In the event, it was simply a list of dates, beside each of which were sets of initials: CM for Mallinson, JPG for Sir Josiah Partlin-Gray, VA for Victor Anstruther, and EH for Lord Eustace Harington. These appeared in various permutations, sometimes all four, never fewer than three.

  I checked the four specific dates when the murders had occurred:

  22/12/12 VA EH CM

  20/03/13 JPG VA EH

  21/06/13 JPG CM EH

  22/09/13 CM JPG VA

  In each instance, the man whose relative had perished had been at the club, with two of the others also present.

  “By a process of elimination,” said Holmes, “you will be able to establish who was not there each time.”

  “Sir Josiah in December, Mallinson in March, Anstruther in June and Lord Harington in September.” I was agog. “So you’re saying that – that they colluded? They exchanged murders?”

  “Yes, in a kind of sinister round-robin, cunningly devised so as to allay any suggestion of guilt or impropriety and allow each man perfect deniability. Sir Josiah was the only one not at the club on the day the previous Lord Harington died – but could he have been in north Devon? Might he have been staying as a guest at the family seat, a good friend of the heir to the estate, there to offer company and consolation to the father in his son’s absence?”

  “During which time he could have administered an overdose of the Peruvian Gold.”

  “Indubitably. Either forced an excess of the stuff down the enfeebled old man’s throat in one go or somehow prevailed upon him to drink a series of dosages in quick succession, perhaps at hourly intervals, counting on Harington senior being too befuddled to realise he was receiving it at more than the prescribed frequency.”

  “Or else Eustace Harington could have provided a special mixture just for the occasion with extra-strength quantities of cocaine in it.”

  “Capital, Watson! I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, that could well be how it was done. A phial of liquid looking exactly like the normal medicine only many times more concentrated – lethally so.”

  “Then, by that token, it was Craig Mallinson who did for Harold Anstruther, arranging things so that it looked like a gunroom accident.”

  “Mallinson is a strapping fellow,” said Holmes. “I wouldn’t put it past him to be able to overpower the dissolute Harold, then place the barrel of a loaded rifle under his chin and pull the trigger.”

  “And also pour the wine on the floor, so that everyone would leap to the conclusion that Harold had been inebriated.”

  “Hardly a leap, given Harold’s habits.”

  “What about Lady Inga?”

  “Victor Anstruther might have waylaid her in the forest, struck her on the head with a tree branch or the like, and then thrown her into the ravine, knowing it was likely that wolves would come and ravage the body to such an extent as to erase all traces of foul play. The only point that needs making here is that she could not have ‘lost her way in the dark’, as you opined just now.”

  “Why not? Because she knew the countryside well, being a native? Oh, wait. I see. Midsummer in Norway.”

  Holmes nodded. “Land of the Midnight Sun. Night never truly falls in extreme northern latitudes in the summer. The sun barely dips below the horizon before rising again. At its darkest, the sky is still twilit.”

  “In the gloom, Anstruther would have been able to see well enough to sneak up on her.”

  “And still have long shadows to lurk in.”

  “And Patrick Mallinson? Eustace Harington is the only one of the four left who has not been assigned a murder.”

  “He is the logical culprit. How he did it, though, is most fascinating and diabolical. In order to ascertain that he used the method I believe he did, I left London yesterday at noon and took the train from Waterloo to Weybridge in Surrey. From there, it is less than a mile to Brooklands.”

  “The motor racing circuit,” I said.

  “Not quite,” said Holmes. “The aerodrome.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  FLYING LESSONS

  “The aerodrome, in case you don’t know, is situated within the ambit of the racing circuit,” said Holmes. “There is a clubhouse and, next to that, an encampment known as the Brooklands Flying Village. I encountered several louche young men there, heirs to wealth and privilege, loitering by their tents swigging champagne. They’re the worst kind of idle rich, braying and abrasive. Flying gives them a thrill otherwise missing from their sedate, featherbedded lives. Many of them race cars around the track as well, for much the same reason.

  “A number of aeroplane manufacturing companies have set up shop on the site – Vickers, Sopwith, Hewlett And Blondeau Limited – offering flying tuition. I made myself known to a fellow called Farnwell who works for Sopwith. He agreed to the hire of his services for an afternoon. I wanted him to show me just how quickly and easily one might acquire the basics of aviation. A crash course, you might say.”

  “With none of the crashing, one would hope,” I said.

  “Ha ha, Watson. Most droll. Farnwell led me out to a Sopwith Tabloid, a two-seater biplane which is unusual in having those seats positioned side by side instead of fore and aft. It’s a bit hugger-mugger in the cockpit, but the advantages
for a learner are obvious. The instructor can give a practical demonstration, in flight, of how the controls work, and the learner can then take over, if the mood comes upon him. As it did with me.”

  “You actually piloted the thing?”

  “Once we were airborne, I took the yoke for a while, yes,” said Holmes. “Very exhilarating it was, too. Mallinson is right: there is an extraordinary freedom to be found in the skies. When you’re up there, it is as if you are a breed apart, a strange hybrid of human and bird. Oh, it’s noisy all right – the roar of the propeller, the buffeting of the wind. Malodorous, too, with the engine exhaust. You come down with a sooty face, reeking of oil and petrol, and numb from the cold. But it’s worth it. The views I had over Surrey – they alone justified the entire enterprise. From Box Hill in the east to Hindhead in the west, I felt as though I could see the entire county. I thought this must be how God feels, surveying His creation, especially that most favoured part of it that we know as England.”

  “Steady there, Holmes. Hubris.”

  “Ah yes. What was it Mallinson said? ‘The dreams of Icarus’. One must not fly too high in the heavens, lest one provoke divine displeasure and suffer for it. At any rate, under Farnwell’s expert tutelage I established that a reasonably fit and intelligent individual could become an aviator with little difficulty. Back on the ground, he told me that at a rate of a lesson a day, I might be proficient enough within a fortnight to apply for my pilot’s licence from the Royal Aero Club. All one needs to be able to do is ascend in a machine and follow a figure-of-eight course at a prescribed height, whereupon the certificate is granted.

  “I asked him if he knew of Craig Mallinson, and he did. Mallinson had obtained his licence at Brooklands, he said. I had already inferred as much from the photo in The Illustrated London News, which had been taken at that aerodrome. Had Farnwell been the one who taught him? ‘No,’ he said. ‘That was Serge.’ By ‘Serge’ he meant Prince Serge Vincent de Bolotoff.”