“Yes, sir. We all know that.”
“Do you indeed?” Holmes looked up, stared him directly in the eyes, and the destruction of Sovran-Phillips began. “Can you tell us how it might be that a ten-shilling note and a sixpenny piece should be found concealed in the linesman’s hut by the railway line?”
If Sovran-Phillips was out of his depth and drowning he was no more so than I. How could Holmes possibly know? Arthur the fireman had only thought the first boy might have been in there to begin with. But Sovran-Phillips went beetroot-red with panic.
“Perhaps …” he began.
“Yes?” Holmes said patiently.
“Perhaps it is not the same money.”
Holmes nodded encouragingly.
“You are quite right that it might be an entirely different sixpenny piece. Notes, however, are drawn new from the bank by certain post offices and their numbers are consecutive. We should be able to check that.”
If notes were drawn in this manner it would surely be by post offices in major cities, but Sovran-Phillips was in no position to know it. He stood before us like a lost soul. It was plain that Holmes had hit a target of some importance with his first shot. He let the silence extend, gazing at the youth until our subject could bear it no longer.
“When were they found?” Phillips asked. Had he stopped to think, he would have known this was a question most likely to be asked by the thief. What could it matter to anyone else?
My friend looked surprised.
“I did not say that they had been found. I was very careful to ask you hypothetically how they might get there—not why they are there.”
“Then they were not there?”
Uncertainty was almost worse for him than defeat.
“I most assuredly did not say that either.” Holmes replied mildly.
“If they are there …” Sovran-Phillips was no longer at attention. “Riley must have taken them there, if they are there. Perhaps after he first got them. How else could they be there?”
“That is what we are here to discover. When do you suggest that Riley would have done that?”
“He was there last Sunday afternoon. We have all been told that.”
Holmes relaxed.
“You know he was there, do you not? So were you, some time before him, I understand. He would hardly try to hide them with someone else present. Did you see him do so? Be careful before you say you did. You do not yet know they were ever there at all. Perhaps someone else hid them before his arrival. Did you see anyone else going into the hut? No? Did you see other witnesses?
“Sir?”
“One other witness, I should say. Mr Reginald Winter.”
The mention of the headmaster as a witness knocked the wind from him.
“Mr Winter?”
“You did not know that he was there? To be sure you did. He really is most grateful for receiving Riley’s intercepted message chalked on the sanatorium tray. I daresay your friend Mitzi will enlighten us further when we question her.”
That last promise took the breath from him again. The next ten minutes were an object lesson in cross-examination, never hectoring, always courteous, and terrifying in its unpredictability. This youth had no idea how much Holmes already knew, let alone what the maidservant might say. His confidence was systematically shot through and through. Obnoxious though he might be, Sovran-Phillips made a pitiful figure by the time Holmes had finished, painstakingly stripped of every defence by the masterly bluff of his interrogator. At last his answers were little more than a mumble and a shake of the head. It was visible that he longed to be dismissed, no matter what the result. My friend brought the final silence to an end.
“Master Phillips, I can spare you a few minutes to make your choice. Please do not prevaricate. Did you entice Patrick Riley to the linesman’s hut on Sunday to settle scores with him man-to-man? Or did you propose to associate Riley with the discovery in the hut of a ten-shilling note and a sixpence, relying upon Mr Winter as a witness? It will be quite useless to pretend you were not there at the time or that you did not ensure the headmaster’s presence. When your plans were thrown into confusion by the approach of the Bradstone stopping train, did you not take the opportunity to start a rumour that Riley had tried to throw himself under the engine, thereby confirming the charge against him?”
There was a long pause, during which the youth’s facial muscles moved but he remained silent.
“Well?” said Holmes helpfully.
“I was never near the post office that afternoon, sir. I had no exeat permit. Riley must have chanced it without one, He was lucky not to be stopped and asked for it.”
“Perhaps not quite as lucky as a Captain of Boats and prefect of his year who was the last person likely to be stopped. Was he not?”
“I have nothing to say.”
“Do you not? I daresay that is very wise. We have almost done with you, Master Phillips. You will now accompany Dr Watson to your quarters. There you will produce to him the pad of permits issued to you at the start of every term. I believe each of them, when correctly completed and signed, entitles you to make a visit to the village. You did not go to the village on the Saturday in question, according to your own account. We can always ask the petty officer or master-on-duty for confirmation.”
As if he had lost the power of speech, the youth nodded.
“Good,” said Holmes encouragingly, “In that case, this term there have been two previous Saturdays and one since. Your pad of permits will be complete except for three torn off, will it not? Off you go, then. Dr Watson is waiting.”
A glance at Sovran-Phillips’s face told me that his mind was fully occupied with the absence of a fourth permit, no doubt faked for use in case of being stopped with the postal order in his pocket. Had he only had a few minutes warning of this interrogation, he might have destroyed or hidden his pad of permits or at least made up a story to explain the missing one before his mind was thrown into turmoil. But Sherlock Holmes had ambushed him pitilessly and repeatedly in every question.
There is only one description that I can give of the young Captain of Boats as we left the sanatorium. His self-confidence had been comprehensively wrecked after fifteen minutes in the presence of an accomplished cross-examiner. I caught him by the arm to steady him as he stumbled on the winding staircase that led down to the dormitories and reading rooms.
Without a word, he handed me the pad of yellow permits, from which a few had been torn off by this early stage in the summer term. We made our way back, and once again the unfortunate cadet stood before Holmes, who took the pad from me and fingered it.
“Excellent,” he said, glancing up at Sovran-Phillips. “These are your record of Saturday afternoon exeats, as I believe the word is. You have received three exeats so far, I understand, yet four permits have been used. How does that come about?”
Phillips had now recovered sufficiently to say, “A chap can easily get one wrong and have to write it again.”
At first it might have saved him, but now it was far too late for this sort of thing.
“I’m sure a chap can,” said Holmes patiently, “and you need have no fear. There will be fair play. Mr Thomas Gurrin, of the Home Office, is now retained in this case to make a full examination of all papers and documents. Even to the extent of seeing where a pencil may have pressed down to leave an indentation of its writing on the layer below—on a permit as well as a postal order. We all know, do we not, that a forgery may be traced rather than copied? So does Mr Gurrin. I feel quite sure that a chap may have every confidence in Mr Gurrin. His evidence, in one or two cases at least, has seen men hanged. A chap could not be in better hands. That will be all. Thank you.”
And so the witness, whom I can only keep describing as an unfortunate youth, was dismissed.
9
Spithead fell behind us as the paddles of the steamer Ryde cut the calm evening water with late sunlight on the grey battleship hulls and dock cranes of Portsmouth ahead. Holmes
drew the pipe from his pocket and began to fill it from his pouch. Faced by his deductive power, small wonder that the venomous Sovran-Phillips should have crumpled before our eyes that morning. By tea-time, Sherlock Holmes had been only too pleased to be quit of what he called the spite and snobbery of St Vincent’s.
“I would remind you of the first article of our creed,” he said casually. “What matters in this life is not what you can do but what you can make people think you can do. In the case of Sovran-Phillips that equation was not difficult. He was bowled middle stump, was he not?”
“The linesman’s hut was never searched?”
“Sovran-Phillips enticed Patrick Riley there in the knowledge that Winter would be watching. Phillips did not intend that he himself should be seen. But then he did not intend that a railway engine should be brought to a halt by Riley standing in front of it!”
The breath of a seagull’s wing, diving for a catch, caught both our faces.
“Phillips feared that Riley’s goose was not quite cooked by the theft alone,” Holmes said. “That is what this is all about. Suspicion was strong but not absolute. Suppose, however, that Riley should be seen by Winter on that Sunday afternoon near the hut or, better still, entering it. Suppose that the hut should then be inspected and the money—or an equivalent sum—found there.”
“Proceedings which were interrupted by the stopping train from Bradstone.”
“Indeed. And circumstances arose which enabled Phillips to embroider a story of Riley waiting to throw himself under the wheels of the engine. A situation which also gave welcome support to Winter’s judgement of the boy. It has been evident to me from an early point in our case, Watson, that this had little to do with a stolen postal order. That was the means to an end. Ten shillings and sixpence, though always welcome, is hardly worth risking the rest of one’s career for, unless one is a pathological thief and liar. Patrick Riley is no such thing. Sovran-Phillips is a repulsive piece of work but also an ambitious one.”
“The Admiral’s Nomination?”
“Precisely. Imagine this son of a prestigious naval family, with a cruiser captain for a step-brother, and an admiral lurking in the ancestral shadows. He regards a Nomination as his birthright. The money is nothing to him, it is the prestige. The racing start that it would give to a chap’s career. There is only one Nomination for each year at St Vincent’s.”
“And would he not get it?”
“I am sure Reginald Winter would dearly love him to. His report, as headmaster, would say so. Term prefect and Captain of Boats, like his brother before him. Cricket, boxing, football. The irony is that he might have got a Nomination in any case. But then there was Patrick Riley. No naval influence, father a bank clerk, a starveling, as they call it. Obliged to win his way by brains or talent. A rather lonely boy whose so-called friends easily turned against him. Organised bully-ragging might break him—and bully-ragging is not discouraged by the likes of Winter, who regards it as character-building. A plausible charge of theft, even if not fully proved, would put him out of the running. By taking his hope of preferment, that also might break him. Confidential dismissal.”
“After all,” I said, “he would not go to prison, merely to professional disgrace in the Royal Navy. There he would always be the boy accused of stealing the postal order.”
“Precisely. Sovran-Phillips and his kind have influence. But the likes of Jackie Fisher value brains and talent. Suppose influence should fail. Riley was the one boy whose mind and enthusiasms could beat Sovran-Phillips—or so Phillips thought. Even Reginald Winter might not be able to save his favourite Ocean Swell.”
The little pieces formed their pattern as we took dinner in the Pullman car of the express from Portsmouth to Waterloo.
How easily Phillips might purloin a braided jacket for half an hour and a pair of glasses from the locker of a boy who wore them. How easily he could provide himself with an exeat permit of his own devising. The impress of the last one issued would be on the thin paper of his pad. Only the master’s initials need be traced. But who would challenge the captain of his year or do more than glance at the exeat? Tracing over Porson’s permit and the boy’s signature, the indentation would be left upon the postal order. He had only to follow this impress at the post office counter. Riley’s game with Porson and the “exchange” of signatures had been nothing but a joke and no more than amateur copying. It was Sovran-Phillips who had proved to be the professional thief.
We were later informed that Sovran-Phillips had left St Vincent’s as soon as his bags could be packed. This did not surprise me. Even when I escorted him to get his pad of exeat permits, I thought he might bolt there and then, out of the nearest door. It was said that he left school on medical advice, consequent on contracting a nervous fever. No proceedings were taken against him. With his departure, it was possible for Reginald Winter to inform the governors that the case had been fully investigated and no boy at his school was involved in it. The money had been found abandoned near the school grounds and restored to its owner.
Their lordships of the Admiralty discontinued their licencing of St Vincent’s. Its numbers declined until it ceased to be a school of any kind. The final terms were transferred to Dartmouth or Osborne as age and examination performance permitted. The buildings were purchased by the government and converted into a naval hospital serving Gosport and Portsmouth. Sherlock Holmes received each successive announcement in the Morning Post with a shout of derisive laughter at the preposterous evasions by the authorities.
“My dear Watson! This whole affair will have saved more faces than the Day of Judgement!”
Patrick Riley remained at the school only long enough to take the July examinations, in which he distinguished himself. After a meeting between Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft, the boy transferred to Dartmouth for his remaining year as a junior and his entire senior cadetship. We were subsequently informed that he had passed out with distinction as a Royal Navy lieutenant at eighteen years old, in time to serve during the final year of the Great War.
Considerations of money had at first barred his way. His examinations at fourteen produced distinctions in mathematics and navigation, history and algebra. An essay on Athenian naval tactics at the battle of Salamis in 480 B.C. caused our friend Professor Strachan-Davidson to incline his head approvingly. Yet despite these distinctions, the boy had not been supported by Reginald Winter in his bid for an Admiral’s Nomination. Happily, he received this preferment directly from Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher without reference to the headmaster. Sherlock Holmes would take no other fee for his advice in the case.
2
The Case of the
Ghosts at Bly
1
“What would you do if you saw a ghost, Mr Holmes? Before I go further into a very sensitive matter, I should like to hear your opinion.”
Holmes raised one eyebrow a fraction higher than the other.
“On the existence of ghosts, Mr Douglas, I can only take refuge in the wisdom of Dr Samuel Johnson. All argument is against it, but all feeling is for it.”
We received our young visitor on a bright morning in the spring of 1898. A mild west wind ruffled the awnings of shops and cafes along Baker Street. Below us echoed a bustle of Saturday trade, a rattle of harness, a grinding of wheels against kerb stones, a brisk rhythm of hooves.
I had never heard my friend questioned about ghosts. We had never discussed the matter between ourselves. Our visitor sat back. He studied Holmes’s aquiline features and waited.
The Honourable Hereward Douglas had the air of a tailor-made English gentleman, freshly brushed and combed as if he had stepped from a band-box. Taller even than Holmes and quite as lean, he must have been about twenty-five. There was a striking contrast between his smooth black hair, the restless gleam of dark eyes, and a fairness of skin with a youthful blush. Eton College had formed his manners as a schoolboy. Trinity College, Cambridge, had done the rest.
This young parago
n won his open scholarship to Trinity in classics, cum laude. He then gained a “blue” at cricket, hitting eighty in an hour at Lords, where he led his team to victory in the annual Oxford and Cambridge match. A model of courtesy and elegance, he was any mother’s pride and every young girl’s ambition. If he outlived his siblings, he would inherit the Earldom of Crome. What had occurred in his privileged young life to bring him to Sherlock Holmes?
“Setting aside Dr Johnson, Mr Holmes, do you believe in ghosts?”
Holmes contracted his eyebrows.
“I shall not dodge your question, Mr Douglas. Bring me the evidence and I will sift it, as a rational inquirer. Probably I shall find a natural explanation. If not, and if all other possibilities are exhausted, I must consider whether these events may not be produced by causes beyond my power to detect. To conclude otherwise would make me a bigot. I may even have to accept, as the song has it, that King Henry VIII’s unhappy queen, Anne Boleyn, walks the Bloody Tower with her head tucked underneath her arm. Come to me without such evidence, however, and I must be a sceptic.”
“You make a joke of it, Mr Holmes,” said the young man reproachfully.
“On the contrary, Mr Douglas, I was never more serious. But now you have roused my curiosity, I beg you will satisfy it. I can act only upon evidence.”
Hereward Douglas inclined his head in acknowledgement.
“That is as I would wish it.”
“Admirable.” Holmes reclined against the back of his chair. I believe you are turning out to bat for Middlesex against Yorkshire this afternoon. It is now gone half-past ten. Therefore your time is rather more valuable than my own.”
Common sense told me that Holmes would never waste his talents on make-believe. Yet he seemed to look for a pretext to involve himself with ghosts and ghouls.
Mr Douglas ignored my friend’s cricketing pleasantry. He opened a briefcase and drew out a handsome quarto diary, bound in maroon leather.
Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly Page 8