Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

by Donald Thomas

  “Mr Holmes, sir!” He shook my friend’s hand in a more cordial manner than Gregson or Lestrade would ever have done. As I was introduced I remembered Holmes’s description of him as the best fellow Scotland Yard ever had. A self-educated man, Swain had read Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Tait’s Recent Advances in Physical Science as easily as Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. By dint of early rising on the first day of sale, the young inspector had bought a first edition of Mr Robert Browning’s translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus.

  Such was our guide to murder! His mild eyes surveyed us.

  “A telegram for you, Mr Holmes, which you won’t much like. Neither Major Mordaunt nor anyone who could be him—in any disguise—was seen between Colchester and Harwich on the ferry train.”

  So much for a bolt to the Continent! Holmes gave Gregson a smile so sharp that it was hardly a smile at all. Then he turned back again.

  “You are mistaken in one thing, Mr Swain. I like it very much. And what of passengers leaving the train here?”

  Swain gave an awkward sideways nod of his tall head.

  “Major Mordaunt would find it hard to pass in disguise round here. He’s not been seen, not before the ferry train and certainly not since.”

  “Then that’s that!” said Gregson irritably. “By playing games, we’ve lost him!”

  In his indignation he spoke across Holmes directly to Swain.

  “I think not,” said Holmes quietly.

  “Then how—”

  “One moment.”

  Conversation was impossible as the engine of the mail train uttered its long shunting blasts of steam, pulling the jolting sorting-vans towards King’s Lynn.

  Instead of replying to Gregson, Holmes turned to Swain and took the inspector’s lamp.

  “If you please, Mr Swain.”

  Swain let it go. With his grey cloak wrapped round him, Holmes patrolled the edge of the platform, shining the lamp across the dark iron rails to the platform on the far side. He turned to the station-master.

  “When was the last train tonight from the far platform?”

  “Ten-fifteen, sir. Always the last. After that the gate is locked and the way over the footbridge is closed as well. You don’t want that side, sir!”

  “On the contrary,” said Holmes under his breath, “it is the very thing I do want and mean to have.”

  He drew his cloak tighter around him, still holding the police lamp. The station-master had just time to cry, “You can’t do that, sir!”

  But Holmes had done it. In a swirling leap he was down from the platform onto the iron rails where the mail train had stood. Three strides carried him across the double tracks. One hand at waist height on the opposite paving and a lithe upwards swing bought him, crouching, onto the far platform, breaking every railway by-law on his way. The station-master could only watch as Swain, Gregson and I followed more cautiously. Holmes was staring at a cream-painted wooden wicket-gate that led to the station yard and a darkened road. It would serve well enough to enforce ticket collection among law-abiding passengers. He unwrapped his cloak and handed it to me, took two long-legged strides, and cleared the top bar effortlessly. He landed heels-down on the soft earth beyond.

  Presently he called back to us.

  “In the dark, no one would see him drop down on this side while the train was stationary. From other sets of footprints—the depth of their impact—this has been a popular escape route from railway premises by those who feel disinclined to buy a ticket.”

  Swain was inspecting the wicket-gate.

  “You might have saved yourself the trouble, Mr Holmes. Someone kicked this fastening loose after it was locked tonight. Anyone could walk out of here.”

  “Very well, Mr Swain, then we will begin our advance upon Bly, if you please. Let us take a roundabout route. If Major Mordant is on foot, as he may be, or if he is lying low, we must not alert him. It is almost five miles. With the use of a vehicle, we may still count on getting there first.”

  So began our journey in the dark. A black van stood in the lamplight of the cobbled yard outside the country station. Its horses were restless in the chill. A sergeant and six uniformed men of the local division were waiting. A second sergeant and a constable had gone ahead to reconnoitre the gates and approaches of the house. With Holmes, Gregson, Swain and myself, there were twelve in the van. Gregson was of equal rank to Swain. Yet without speaking a word on the subject, Holmes had made the country policeman his second-incommand.

  Mordaunt, if it was he, would be an hour ahead of us but on foot. I calculated his route as a trek across rough ground in the dark. The summer night was damp and much cooler by the time we reached the deserted gate-house of Bly, its long driveway between lime trees leading to the main courtyard and house. Sergeant Acott saluted his inspector and spoke softly.

  “No sign yet, sir. He must either cross the road from Abbots Langley or take the lane from the village. He hasn’t done either yet—and both are being watched. What’s more, he could hardly penetrate these woods without a light—and we haven’t seen one.”

  “Major Mordaunt served with scouting parties of the Queen’s Rifles in the Second Afghan Campaign,” said Holmes quietly. “You will not see him. We shall not get a sight of him until he reaches us.”

  A few stars were out. The landscape was almost dark except where the tallest trees and the hedges caught what light there was in the sky. We passed on foot through a strange white-onblack world like a photographic negative. Acott with his constable remained at the gates as we approached the forecourt of the empty house.

  Holmes and I knew the lie of the land as well as any of the others. Acott posted another two men to keep surveillance on the house. Four more were to lie low at different points in sight of the lake. With one lantern between us, its shutter almost closed, Holmes and I with Swain and the sergeant followed the shadows of the rear lawns until we came to the locked stone structure of the boat shed in its walled rose garden. Among these smaller formal gardens, Holmes took a general survey without making a sound or casting a shadow. I followed him to the door of the stone shed, whose simple lock he had picked with his pocket-knife on our first visit. He tried the handle and found it still locked.

  “Excellent,” he said softly to one of our uniformed constables. “Stand out of sight by the corner of the wall. If anyone should approach, alert us. You will have time to get round the far side of the wall. I do not think he will come this way now, but we must know at once if he does.”

  Not five seconds later the lock clicked and the door eased open. Here was the same stone interior, facing the dark lake. The grimy window panes still danced with their mad race of little flies in a dimmed blade of lamplight. It was impossible to risk the reflection of a lantern on the white-washed stone interior.

  “He will not come here now,” Holmes repeated softly. “He has been. See for yourself, Watson. A man who would keep pace with the scouts of the Queen’s Rifles on campaign must cover forced marches over the worst terrain of barren hills. He would cross the fields from Abbots Langley to Bly at night as light-footedly as a huntsman with a pack of beagles. He has quite literally stolen a march upon us.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Look up there on the brackets. The oars have gone. The boat that looked as if no one used it can be used after all. But only by the man who can get at its oars. Only by the man who could open the lock on this shed. Therefore, only by Major Mordaunt. I daresay Miss Jessel might purloin the key, but she is otherwise engaged.”

  In the uncertain starlight we followed the path taken long ago by Victoria Temple, Mrs Grose and Flora on the afternoon of Miss Jessel’s apparition. It now occurred to me that Mordaunt was certainly armed. He had used a gun to put down his dog. No gun was found in his house, therefore he still had it with him. I had not packed my Army revolver because I had not supposed I should need it at a spiritualist séance! Gregson had not stopped to draw a handgun, knowing his plain-c
lothes men in Eaton Place would be carrying their police pistols. Holmes seldom bothered with firearms. As for “Mr Swain” with his poetry books and his geology! I doubted if he knew one end of a gun from the other. Our manhunt might yet turn into an awkward business with an armed and determined fugitive.

  We moved cautiously over dew-soaked turf towards the lake’s edge. The lily pads showed pale in the starlight. About five minutes later I saw the place on the bank where the shell of the white boat in its cradle would have been, if it had still been there. It was presumably concealed, for there was no sign of it on the water. Could Mordaunt have crossed to the island already, for that was presumably the “crossing” that Maria Jessel had meant? Holmes had been right about that.

  A rift in the night clouds struck a starlit gleam from the lake and lightened the background. The surface of the water was a flat calm. Ahead of us the shore was a sweep of lawn to the water, trees massed together further on. A plantation of beech and spruce rose behind the laurel and overhanging rhododendron. I made out the irregular silhouette of ash trees and sycamore standing high, sometimes reaching out low across the water for twenty feet or more. The shoreline would soon become inaccessible as the bank with its tree roots dropped steeply and unevenly to the lake. The path ahead of us now turned inland, skirting this wide shrubbery and coming back to the water’s edge well beyond it.

  “There is nothing for him here,” I muttered obstinately. “He should make for Holland or France.”

  “Let us not jump to conclusions.”

  “If he gets here, Gregson will have him. You may depend on that.”

  “I do not depend upon it. In any case, Gregson will do no such thing. I should intervene if he attempted it. Major Mordaunt must lead the dance a little longer.”

  A cloudbank rolled across the stars again. We neither saw nor heard an alert from the constables posted to keep watch. But if we could not see any sign of Mordaunt, there was as good a chance he could not see us.

  Several minutes later Inspector Swain caught us up again.

  “Messenger from Bly village, Mr Holmes. About an hour ago, a man crossed the little bridge where Quint’s body was found. No one’s come back that way and no one’s come up past the gate-house. I’d say he went through the trees, about twenty minutes before us. Being so far ahead, there’s a good chance he didn’t see anyone following. Our men have orders to close the shutters on their lanterns, lie low and watch. You and I can move ahead.”

  As a cloud covered the sky above us, we edged across the grass to the first lakeside trees. A half-moon had begun to rise beyond the firs, shedding a cool but fuller light on the water. This was where the path curved inland: rhododendrons and tree trunks made the water’s edge impassable. I must do my companions and their Essex policemen the justice of saying that neither movement nor glimmer betrayed their presence. Swain had trained them well.

  It was either Holmes or I who tipped a two- or three-pound stone with a foot and caused a splash below the bank. There was no response. As we stood quite still, however, a white shape like a large fish or a small whale slid out under the overhanging foliage. Mordaunt, for surely it was he, was just visible, stooping a little in the shadows and hauling at a length of cord. Reflected moonlight brightened and the cord became the painter of the boat which had once been lying in the wooden cradle.

  Mordaunt had launched this craft easily. I caught the slippery suction of his boots in soft mud as he pushed it out and boarded it over the stern. He took his seat in the bow, his silhouette clear against a moonlight glimmer on the water.

  Was this the fairy craft which had taken Miss Temple and the boy “spooning” on the lake? Moonlight made it seem daintier than the hull in the cradle, but I knew it was the same. There was room for an oarsman in the bow facing a pair of passengers in the stern with a picnic-hamper behind them.

  Such a scallop might be moved easily and lie concealed under the overgrowing shrubs and trees, as this had been. Neither the gardener nor the groom would use it or even see it. With its oars locked in the shed and the key to the shed in his pocket, it was in Mordaunt’s sole possession. Perhaps no one else had crossed to the island since the death of little Miles. Perhaps Mordaunt crossed every week without being seen, though there seemed little reason for that.

  This was our first sight of Major James Mordaunt. In silhouette at the oars he was burly, quite strong enough to push the craft out from under a muddy bank into the shallows and pull himself aboard. He paused suddenly in mid-stroke, as if he might have heard something. Not an owl hooted, not a badger stirred the undergrowth. Our presence had put such sensitive night-dwellers to flight. Mordaunt might yet pass among us without knowing it!

  How long would the silence last? There was a startled sound above me, the heavy wings of a restless wood pigeon displaced by our movements. That alone could betray our presence if the sound carried. Worse still, I caught the crackle of bracken in the uncleared copse, not trodden underfoot but pressed aside by one of Swain’s men. Surely Mordaunt would not miss it?

  But he was pulling out from the rhododendron bushes and tree trunks, forty feet at least beyond us. Hauling on the sculls with his back to us, he was turning out into the Middle Deep, heading for the island.

  I felt Holmes’s cold, hard grip upon my wrist.

  “The Temple of Proserpine! No one else has the means of getting there so long as the oars are under lock and key.”

  I said nothing. Instead I recalled Mrs Grose’s story of Harry the Poacher trying to swim the Middle Deep and dying in the treacherous embrace of the water weed. There was no danger of that. Without a boat we could do nothing. If Holmes was right—and if it took Swain an hour or even less to summon a boat on a cart from Abbots Langley—we had seen the last of such evidence as Mordaunt intended to destroy. What would be left—except Miss Jessel’s word against his?

  Tobias Gregson was, as they say, munching his teeth with frustration just behind us. I caught his muttered curse upon the wooden-tops, as Scotland Yard was apt to call its country cousins. Holmes ignored this. But Gregson was soon beside us. Indeed he was edging forward too far, where the tree trunks grew almost in the water and the mud of the bank ran into silt. It seemed as if he was trying to get level with Mordaunt and almost into the man’s view.

  If Mordaunt did not notice these movements, it was perhaps because something seemed amiss with him or his boat. The light of the short summer night was still poor, but the man’s outline remained clear enough to show that this figure at the sculls was making heavy weather of it. He was labouring as though his strength was failing him. Almost a hundred feet out among the lily pads, the boat was moving slowly and, worse, responding sluggishly. It was going nowhere. I could see no reason at first. Water weeds may drag down a human body but they would hardly snare a boat as tenaciously as this. Perhaps it had run into impenetrable pads of water lilies. Surely he would know his own waters well enough?

  To my astonishment, it seemed he was trying to stand up. The boat did not rock under his movements, as one might expect. Its bulk was lying too low in the water. He had an oar in one hand and was trying, vainly, to find the muddy bottom of the lake. Was his aim to move the little craft like a punt into the shallows? Perhaps it was by standing up that he caught a sound or glimpsed a movement on the bank. The mid-summer night had begun to lighten further towards dawn. I made out a plantation of horse chestnuts whose candles now stood white in the mist.

  Holmes was immobile as a graven image, his tall, spare figure with his back to the broad trunk of a beech, the edge of the lake at his toes. In the darkness, he would have been just out of line with our fugitive. But the distance between the two men was no longer quite dark. I could make out enough of Mordaunt’s wraith-like figure to see that he was gripping or waving something in his free hand, an object which he had taken from his pocket. His manner of holding it convinced me that it must be the gun with which he had shot his dog. We later learnt that it was a Webley Mark 4 service revolver.


  No one had been prepared for this. It would be an hour or more before we could have armed officers in place, let alone launch a boat on the lake. Mordaunt on his island with this revolver and a pocketful of .455 cartridges could keep us where we were for the next day and night.

  Then, in one startled moment, I understood the feeling of those who claim to have jumped out of their skin. From several feet behind me came the crack of a voice carrying the certainty of command.

  “Major Mordaunt, sir! Your attention if you please!”

  The authority of that voice was such that the outline of the man upright in the boat seemed to stiffen to attention as if obeying a command. But he was bringing his right hand up. A roar from the Webley echoed like a ricochet across the misty surface of the water. I heard its bullet chip the bark of the beech trunk about eight inches from my friend’s left shoulder. Mordaunt had heard Swain but seen Holmes, the grey cloak against the darker tree trunk. Holmes remained perfectly still, as if resigned to martyrdom. Every policeman near us was now lying flat with the exception of Inspector Alfred Swain, whom I had supposed to be more at home with the Agamemnon or the Idylls of the King than with armed conflict.

  “Put—your—gun—down, sir!”

  The same crack of authority rang out but Mordaunt’s arm was coming up again. Holmes did not move and there was not even time for me to jump forward and knock him flat. Yet Quint’s murderer was a marksman who would not miss him a second time. With a terrible sickness I heard a hoarse explosion and saw the human figure spin round and catapult into the water.

  Then the tall, quiet man whose face had suggested mild equine intelligence, whose private hours were spent among dead fossils and what his superiors derided as “School-Miss Poetry,” lowered his arm. He gently wrapped the grey barrel and the black stock of the Smith & Wesson .32 handgun, an ejector target revolver, in a piece of lint and handed it to Inspector Tobias Gregson.