Death on a Pale Horse

by Donald Thomas

  When Stamford introduced us that afternoon in the chemical laboratory, the great detective’s fingers were blotched with acid and stained a little by what looked like ink. Among broad low tables, shelves of bottles, retorts, test-tubes, and Bunsen burners with their blue flickering flames and odours of gas, he was in his element. After our brief introduction, he quite ignored me in his excitement at explaining to Stamford the success of some experiment on which he had been engaged. He confided to us that he had identified a reagent which was precipitated by haemoglobin and by nothing else. In plain terms, it would now be possible for the first time to identify blood stains long after the blood had dried.

  It is not my intention to say more of this first meeting, for I have done that elsewhere. Let me just add, for the benefit of those who have not met him before, that Sherlock Holmes dwelt in alternating spasms of fierce intellectual excitement and moods of brooding contemplation. The problem is that life cannot always be lived at a pitch of fierce excitement. In the most active career, there are days or weeks of tedium. Other men might have turned to drink or sexual vice in these doldrums. Sherlock Holmes preferred the less complicated palliatives of music or cocaine. I deplored his use of the narcotic, but I came to see that the drug was not his true addiction. It was merely his substitute for a more powerful cerebral stimulation when he was engaged upon a case. Then he needed nothing stronger than his faithful pipe.

  As to his mind, it was possessed of a profound knowledge of chemistry, an adequate acquaintance with anatomy, and a practical familiarity with the English criminal law. In morbid psychology or psychopathology, he had a firm grasp of mental alienation. He read Krafft-Ebing or Charcot in psychiatric medicine as other men read the morning newspaper. Nor did he ignore the analysis of human darkness in such literary imaginations as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, or Robert Browning.

  Perhaps his most formidable gift was an ability to master any form of knowledge in a matter of days or hours. He who had known nothing of astrology or joint stock companies or the effect of amberite cartridges on gunshot wounds would be a master of the subject within a week.

  Holmes exercised his brain as other men would have used a chest-expander or a set of dumb-bells. For example, he would set himself the great unsolved problems of mathematics. If he did not find solutions to age-old mathematical paradoxes like Fermat’s Last Theorem or the Goldbach Conjecture, I believe he understood the nature of those riddles better than any other man living.

  The most astonishing thing about him, from the moment of our first meeting, was his clarity of insight combined with a power of logical deduction. I remember the first illustration of this vividly. Almost the first thing he said to me, when Stamford introduced us and we shook hands in the laboratory, was “Dear me, sir! I see you have just been in Afghanistan. You were lucky to come back from Maiwand alive, despite your injury.”

  We were total strangers! Two minutes earlier, before Stamford and I walked into that laboratory, Holmes had not even known of my existence. How the devil could he tell me of Afghanistan, let alone that I had been at Maiwand? Even Stamford knew nothing of my part in that battle. I said as much to Holmes. He laughed but would not enlighten me just then. Stamford later remarked that Holmes was forever teasing his acquaintances with these curious displays of deductive power. It seemed he was seldom if ever wrong in his conclusions. I thought it was surely some trick that he had learnt. What else could it be? I was naturally determined to find out how that trick was done.

  To return to our adventure, however. Holmes had found vacant rooms at 221b Baker Street, handy for the streets of central London and the Metropolitan Railway, as well as agreeably close to the open spaces of the Regent’s Park. The arrangement of the rooms was convenient for two tenants but, as he had discovered, too expensive for one. We went together to Evans’s Supper Rooms that evening and over our meal agreed to inspect the new premises next day.

  He told me about himself as we ate. His first rooms—“consulting rooms,” as he grandly called them—had been in Lambeth Palace Road, just south of Westminster Bridge on the far side of the river. He had still been an apprentice then, but these lodgings were convenient for the chemical laboratory of St. Thomas’s Hospital. He was not a regular student but was allowed occasional access to this laboratory on the basis of grace-and-favour. This was by virtue of a legacy to the governors in a bequest made by one of his kinsmen. How or why he had transferred to Barts Hospital, he did not yet say.

  For a couple of years, this young researcher would return every evening from St. Thomas’s to the terraces and tree-lined vistas of Lambeth Palace Road, a favourite abode of our young physicians. It was here that he scored his first forensic triumph in the case of Dr. William Smethurst, an avaricious and philandering medical man. Dr. Smethurst’s wealthy bride had died in suspicious circumstances. The autopsy revealed large quantities of arsenic, and Smethurst had been the only person to have access to her in her final days. He was tried, convicted, sentenced and waiting to be hanged in a few days’ time. Sherlock Holmes, the young consulting detective, was employed as a last resort. In a sensational conclusion to this first case, he was able to prove that William Smethurst, though a thoroughly repellent individual, was as innocent of murder as the babe new-born. The arsenic had come not from the body but from items of the apparatus used to carry out the post-mortem tests.*

  From then on, he never looked back. Perhaps he lost his footing when St. Thomas’s Hospital grew anxious at the macabre nature of some of his experiments and drove him elsewhere. If so, this never impeded him. He confessed that shortly before our arrival at Barts on our first afternoon, he had been belabouring a cadaver with a truncheon to establish the extent to which bruising might be produced post-mortem!

  So much for his past. Next morning, the two of us travelled to 221b Baker Street and viewed the first-floor rooms on offer. There were two comfortable bedrooms plus a large and airy sitting-room with use of an attic storeroom. We should be provided for by a quietly spoken but agreeable housekeeper of Scottish extraction, Mrs. Hudson.

  Baker Street was less fashionable than the Strand, but I was pleased to find that I should be paying less than at my so-called “private hotel.” I was so taken with this new arrangement that I agreed to the terms at once and arranged for my things to be moved to these premises the same day. Sherlock Holmes followed on the next morning.

  I took an early opportunity of asking my new friend what made him think that I had lately been in Afghanistan and—indeed—at Maiwand. On one of our first mornings, I suggested at breakfast that someone must have told him. He shook his head: “No, my dear fellow. Why should anyone have told me? for they could not have known we were destined to meet. To begin with, I merely deduced that you came from Afghanistan. Why? My reasoning was very simple. Here was a gentleman of a medical type but perhaps in low water. His clothes are not new, even his waistcoat has seen a good deal of student wear. The nap is worn just where a stethoscope might hang. But there is also the air of a military man, one who holds himself upright as though having learnt to drill and march. Clearly, then, the probability is that we have an army doctor of some kind. Where has he been lately? He has probably just come from the topics, for his face is dark and that is not the natural colour of his skin, for his wrists are fair.”

  He made a vague gesture with his right hand as if the problem had been almost too easy for him. Then he resumed.

  “Our medical man has also undergone hardship and sickness. Pardon me, but the sunken eyes and his haggard face say that clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner, but he can hardly have set out with it in that condition! Where in the tropics, in the present state of affairs, could an English army doctor have got his arm wounded? Most probably in Afghanistan. What battle has been fought there recently ending in a rout of our troops and injuries to many of them? You see? It could only be at Maiwand. The process is really very simple.”

  “Very plausibl
e, at any rate,” I said ironically. He demurred at once.

  “Of course I could not be certain of all this, but where else would the path of reason lead me? If one follows it, one almost invariably reaches the correct conclusion. There is no trick to it, I assure you.”

  Soon afterwards, I was able to put this theory to the test. Until then, I still thought there was a certain boast and bluster in his claims. Little by little, Sherlock Holmes’s associations with Scotland Yard and the extraordinary abilities of which he repeatedly gave evidence made me think again. On this second occasion, however, we were looking down from the sitting-room window one morning. A man in plain clothes, carrying a blue envelope, was evidently looking for a number on one of the house doors.

  “I wonder who that fellow is after,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “You mean the retired sergeant of Marines?”

  How absurd! He could not possibly know that the Royal Marines had been the man’s career, unless he knew this visitor already. That seemed unlikely, for the man appeared to be having a little trouble in finding the right door. I saw my chance when this messenger crossed the road and there was a loud rap on our street door. Then came the sound of voices and footsteps on the stairs. A tap at our sitting-room door heralded the appearance of this wanderer. Determined not to be forestalled, I crossed the room and opened the door. There was our visitor with the blue envelope in one hand and his walking-cane in the other.

  “For Mr. Sherlock Holmes, sir,” he said, handing over the envelope.

  I had my chance now.

  “One moment, if you please! What is your trade?”

  “Commissionaire and messenger, sir. Uniform away for repairs just now.”

  Good! I thought.

  “Any previous occupation?” I inquired.

  “Yes, sir! Sergeant, sir! Royal Marine Light Infantry, sir! No answer to the message? Right, sir! Much obliged, sir.”

  He brought his heels together, raised his right hand in salute, and went back down the stairs.

  The face of Sherlock Holmes was all innocence.

  “Very clever,” I said. “But how could you know, unless you had met the fellow before?”

  We were standing at the window again, watching the man as he walked slowly down the busy street towards the Metropolitan station.

  “If you had observed more closely, Watson, you would have seen an anchor rather distinctly tattooed on the back of his left hand. Only a sailor, I think, would submit to wearing that. On the other hand he walks with a military step, does he not, rather than a seaman’s roll? He also sports army side-whiskers of regulation cut. Who would combine all these traits? Surely a Royal Marine. Clearly he is no longer in the service, therefore he has retired. Indeed, he is a commissionaire and messenger. Now watch him as he goes. That poise of his head and the swing of his cane give him a certain authority and command. Does not that suggest something more than a common ranker? Not an officer to be sure, therefore a sergeant. It is a matter of simple deduction. Nothing more.”

  “And I daresay a matter of luck.”

  He smiled gently.

  “My dear Watson! Lady Luck can play the deuce with us all!”

  He gave his attention to the blue envelope, slitting it with a paper-knife and drawing out a single sheet of foolscap. It was a letter from Inspector Tobias Gregson, “the smartest of the Scotland Yarders,” as Holmes described him. It solicited an opinion in the case of the Brixton Road murder. In the view of my new friend, Gregson and Lestrade were the pick of a bad lot at the Yard. Even so, he had been obliged to extricate Inspector Lestrade, when the inspector had got himself into a fog over the Bank of England forgery case some years before. After that, he was visited by this tenacious officer several times a week, bringing the latest news of London crime for his views upon it.

  If I had doubted the purpose of his “consulting rooms,” I did so no longer. They were the apartment of a private detective, who made himself available for hire as surely as a barrister or a hansom cab. Until a few days earlier, I would have told you that such people exist only in stories sold on station book-stalls. Now it seemed I breathed the excitement of crime and detection as surely as the air of Sherlock Holmes’s shag tobacco in our sitting-room.

  The new rooms in Baker Street received our first clients. My Army medical board discharged me with a pension which would not support me on its own. My only other qualification lay in medical practice. But a practice means a partnership, and such a partnership requires purchase money. I caught myself thinking that if I could somehow work with Holmes for the time being, a modest income from detection would combine with my little pension to keep me alive. After a while, I might save enough to establish myself as a physician again. Perhaps I could buy myself a place, if only as a junior in a country town. There were the cousins in Devonshire. I had not seen them in a good many years, but I daresay they might help me to establish myself as a small-town doctor.

  Alas, how greatly I underestimated the fascination of detection! Holmes and I were in partnership from the very first days of the Brixton Road murder mystery. There were certain understandings between us, of course. We almost always turned away marital disputes and divorce actions, which are the lot of so many “inquiry agents.” It also took me a considerable time to get used to Holmes’s insufferable air of superiority in the act of discovery. There was still a little too much “brag and bounce” in his demeanour, as it seemed to me. But the longer we knew one another, the better we got on.

  I resigned myself to his bohemian ways, his unexplained absences and his habits of working at all hours of the day and night. All day he gathered information, and much of the night he passed in restless calculation. How often did the night walker or the policeman on his beat in Baker Street glance up and see the familiar silhouette of Holmes in profile against the drawn blind of our first-floor room! It was the shadow of a man pacing rapidly to and fro, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed by a weight of thought.

  Those who caught sight of this familiar outline invariably imagined the subtle detective brain forming a pattern of clues to foil a new challenge by the underworld. Yet Holmes was human and, in his way, fallible. Like many successful men, from time to time he liked to sigh and confess that his true ambitions lay elsewhere. If he had his time over again, it would be a life of beekeeping in a fold of the quiet Sussex Downs. His cottage would be within sight of the glimmering sea and with the sound of its waves carried to him on a temperate breeze. For the time being, nothing pleased him more than to see his initials at the foot of a page in Notes and Queries or The Classical Quarterly, a few paragraphs on some obscure but learned topic, probably of interest to not more than fifty people in the entire world.

  Yet while we were putting our detective partnership on a secure footing, in such cases as the decipherment of the Musgrave Ritual or the retrieval of the Admiralty plans for the Bruce-Partington submarine, stolen from Woolwich Arsenal, the world outside our rooms was moving on. It was becoming a more dangerous place.

  In particular, to one who had seen something of imperial warfare, all was not well with Britain and her empire in South Africa. The shadow of defeat which had lain over Isandhlwana soon extended elsewhere. This was all the more important because it coincided with the discovery and development of the new diamond fields and gold mines by the Dutch Boers of the Transvaal. Their territory had been annexed by Britain, but I arrived home from India to hear of the uprising against British rule and an invasion of our own South African province of Natal by the Boers themselves.

  After a British column was ambushed and almost wiped out by Boer Commandos, a momentous battle followed at Laings Nek. British casualties were numbered in hundreds and those of the Boers scarcely in dozens. So complete was the rout that Her Majesty’s colours were never carried into battle again.

  As I read of this in The Times or the Morning Post, I truly wondered whether there was not some purpose or pattern of events behind it all. Isandhlwana now appeared lik
e a prelude to the loss of the whole of southern Africa. And what would follow in India and elsewhere? I said as much to Holmes several times, but he was not to be drawn into this discussion. He was less interested in British imperial policy than in the identification of bloodstains by haemoglobin.

  In any event, before my question could be answered, there was a decisive encounter at Majuba Hill. British losses included the death of their commander General Sir George Colley. These losses once again ran into hundreds. Those of the Boer Commandos amounted to only half a dozen.

  A returning medical colleague assured me that the enemy’s fire had been so accurate and lethal at Majuba that burial parties after the battle found five or six bullets in each skull of some fallen Highlanders. Red-coated infantry were no match for camouflaged guerillas. There could only be one outcome. Two months later, the vast territory was lost and the enemy was in Natal. Within three months, our surrender was signed. So much for the boast of General Sir Garnet Wolseley that “so long as the sun shines, the Transvaal will remain British territory.”

  Even then, being settled into Baker Street, I assumed that I had heard the last of my own military career and everything to do with it. I had little enough to do with the dreadful events in Zululand or the Transvaal. Our detective practice continued to prosper. The case of the Brixton Road murder came and went, followed by a succession of lesser mysteries which wait to be written up. Before I could set my pen working on these, I received a letter which assured me that certain horrors of the past were anything but forgotten.

  * “The Ghost in the Machine” in Donald Thomas, The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes.