Death on a Pale Horse

by Donald Thomas

  Carlyle Mansions, the office of the Evangelical Overseas Medical Mission, was just as I would imagine anonymous chambers hired by the day for the Provost Marshal’s Special Investigation Branch. Nothing was left there, nothing was trusted. If they were Provost quarters, that was of course why Sir Melville himself insisted upon attending the anonymous corpse. There was nothing more personal here than the pots and pans, beds and chairs that go with such temporary accommodation.

  “Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?” Holmes muttered, as I gave my quiet opinion. “A Shoreditch burglar could search rooms like these and be on his way in five minutes. No one entrusts anything of use or value to such a place.”

  I nodded, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I recalled Lieutenant Jock’s comment on Sellon during that railway journey to Lahore. I do not believe I had thought of it since. Immediately Sellon left our saloon coach, the young scamp whispered, as if I should have known already, “He’s only Provost Marshal’s Corps! That’s all! Snooping into black-guards!” That phrase—“Snooping into black-guards.” It was an odd one. It struck me at the time that Jock spoke as if it was well-known Army slang and we all secretly knew what it meant. As a novice, it had meant nothing to me. Nor did I hear it again in my short and invalid military career. Was it coincidence that the initial letters of the phrase were SIB? I guessed “The SIB” must be a common abbreviation of the Provost Marshal’s Special Investigation Branch. Was that what Jock meant about Captain Sellon? Was that what had brought us all here? And finally, was that the profession for whose honour Joshua Sellon had chosen to die?

  8

  I stood between Holmes and Lestrade in the main room of the mansion apartment. The body of Joshua Sellon still lay like a Chamber of Horrors waxwork across the desk. Glancing at Lestrade, I wondered whether he believed a word I had said. Should I say more?

  But before I could explain myself further, there was a patient beat of hooves from the street, growing slower and halting below the room in which we listened. The inspector drew out his watch, looked at it, and seemed to pull himself together.

  “Twelve o’clock, gentlemen,” he said solemnly. “It sounds as if Sir Melville Mac may have got back early from his explosives conference.”

  Until that moment, I had not consciously noticed a white hospital screen folded and propped against the wall by the door. Lestrade now took hold of it, like a man who has been neglecting his duty. He unfolded its panels to hide the desk and the corpse, as if for decency’s sake. Satisfied that all was in place, he swung round and opened the door to the stairway.

  “Sergeant Haskins!”

  “Sir? Yes, sir. Hansom cab pulled up outside, sir. Gentleman at the desk. Not Sir Melville. Some other gentleman asking for number 49.”

  “Then make yourselves scarce. Up to the next floor landing. All of you. Eyes skinned and ears open. Let him alone unless he tries to leave the building again!”

  He drew back, shutting the door quietly, drew a pass-key from his pocket, and locked it. Turning round to us, he put his finger to his lips and stood back against the wall level with the white screen. The inward opening of the door would hide him from the visitor’s immediate field of view. For a moment he waited, pressed against the wall, and listened. I doubted that Lestrade would have asked permission to draw a firearm. Did he even know how to use one? He had had no reason at all to think he would need its protection this morning. But if this was the return of Joshua Sellon’s killer, what a fool I had been to leave my Army issue “Webley Mark 1” revolver in a drawer of my Baker Street bedroom. A loaded six-shot with a hinged frame might prove extremely useful in a moment more.

  It was a tense and distinctly unpleasant half-minute as a key rattled, the lock turned on the outside, the latch clicked back, and the hinges of the brown door creaked as it was pushed open. Then I exhaled and relaxed, for I had been holding my breath without intending to.

  “Good morning,” said Sherlock Holmes in his most courteous tone. “Good morning, Mr. Dordona. We are a little early for our rendezvous, I fear.”

  Samuel Dordona looked at the white screen round the desk and then his eyes jumped back to us. So far, he had not seen Lestrade, who was now concealed by the open door. The inspector was at the edge of the screen itself and had only to take a step behind it.

  “Who let you in?” Mr. Dordona asked quietly.

  Before Holmes could reply, I intervened. By drawing his gaze towards me, I hoped that he would not yet turn and see Lestrade.

  “Mr. Dordona, there has been an accident. I fear that a man is dead. I have examined him. I believe his name and rank to be Captain Joshua Sellon and that he is a serving officer of the Provost Marshal’s Special Investigation Branch.”

  All this hit him at once. As he stared at us, there came upon Samuel Dordona’s face a look of stark fright. How can one describe such a spasm adequately? The apprehension in those tense and narrow features, the look in those dark volatile eyes, transformed him from a man who had seemed merely odd to one who now appeared grotesque. I shall never forget his quick neurotic speech and movements. The sallow tan of his skin grew paler, the double peaks of his dark pomaded hair seemed to stand on end, almost like an illustration of terror from Varney the Vampire or any other “Penny Dreadful” comic. There was even the suggestion of a winged predator in the abrupt hunch of his shoulders.

  During our exchanges, Lestrade had moved silently out of view beyond the screen.

  “And you, Mr. Dordona,” Sherlock Holmes was inquiring courteously, “who let you in? Or should I say, who gave you the key to unlock this door?”

  But Samuel Dordona glanced uneasily at the hospital screen and what must lie behind it. He ignored my friend as he muttered his own erratic questions.

  “Is he still here? Is the body still here? How do you know it is he?”

  “For the moment,” Holmes said courteously, “I should like my own inquiry answered, if you would be so good. Who gave you the key?”

  “The key!” I thought Samuel Dordona’s voice might rise in a cry of anger, but it dropped away again. “Of course I have a key! These rooms are Overseas Mission premises! You know that already. What are you doing here?”

  Holmes looked at him dispassionately.

  “I know only, Mr. Dordona, that a man has been shot dead in these rooms this morning before our arrival. You or anyone else with a key to the apartment would have been able to come and go as you pleased. Does it not strike you that you will certainly be one of the first people to be suspected of the crime? It may even seem to the police that you have returned now to remove or to re-arrange some of the evidence of your guilt.”

  Now, of course, Samuel Dordona could not take his eyes off the white screen that concealed the desk and the image in his mind of what lay behind it.

  “Is he still here?”

  “Joshua Sellon? Indeed he is, and in a moment we must trouble you to look very carefully at him.”

  This promise turned his face a little paler still.

  “What was he to you?” Holmes resumed. “Was he a colleague of yours? Another missioner of some kind as well as a military policeman?”

  Mr. Dordona tried to speak. He began and halted. Then he said, with a perceptible tremor in his voice, “He was a good man, Mr. Holmes. A brave and trustworthy man. He was more than a colleague or a missioner. He was my friend.”

  Holmes spoke reassuringly. “I am sure he was, sir, but that is not quite the question that I asked.”

  “What would you have me say?”

  “The truth, Mr. Dordona, if you would be so kind. I understand that you came to me yesterday with a view to becoming my client. Very well. My first advice to you was then, and must be now, to tell me the truth. Do you know the truth?”

  “What truth?”

  “In the first place, did you know that Joshua Sellon was a captain in the Special Investigation Branch of the Provost Marshal’s Corps? Whether he supported your evangelical medical mission, I have no idea. Perhaps we
never will know.”

  Samuel Dordona paused and then spoke slowly, as though renouncing everything he had said so far and starting again. I thought to myself that this was going to end badly for someone, perhaps for everyone concerned.

  “Mr. Holmes, I am in England on my furlough. As you are already aware, I am using that time to qualify myself as a medical assistant. I do so in order that I may be of practical use in addition to my work as an evangelist.”

  But time was shorter than Samuel Dordona would ever know. Holmes had become impatient enough to break him.

  “And how long, sir, have you been engaged in ‘qualifying,’ as you call it?”

  “A month or so.”

  There was an intolerable weariness in my friend’s voice.

  “Very well, Mr. Dordona. I have played the game fairly with you so far. But if you will have it otherwise, it must be so. Answer me, if you please, at once! How many bones are there in the human body? The precise number, if you would be so good! Now!”

  Something resembling a foolish half-smile appeared on the poor evangelist’s face.

  “How many bones? A great many, to be sure! It is not the sort of total one carries around in one’s head!”

  “Does one not? There are two hundred and six,” Holmes snapped back at him, “as any bona fide student would tell you. Would you care to name twenty of them? That will do just as well. Before you make excuses, I may tell you that I visited the London Mission School in Holborn yesterday evening. You would have learnt the answer to my question in the very first week of the instruction in First Aid. More than that, you would have sat in class with the other beginners and chanted the entire list alphabetically until you knew it by heart, like your schoolboy twice-times table in arithmetic or your Greek verbs.”

  He was about to continue, but at that moment Samuel Dordona’s nerve broke. The poor fellow turned and snatched the door open by its handle. He almost threw himself out of the room, closing and locking the door behind him in a single movement. Holmes made no attempt to prevent his escape. There were raised voices and hurried steps on the landing. Someone called out, “Stop that man!” There was the sound of a scuffle. The high cry that followed was not pain but Mr. Dordona’s despair.

  A key opened the lock of the door again. The fugitive reappeared, walking slowly with head bowed before the uniformed police sergeant. He was now crestfallen and apathetic, for all the world as though he might be on his way to the gallows. What a tableau the four of us made, the sergeant, the suspect, my friend, and I! Inspector Lestrade stepped out from behind the screen to join us.

  “Very clever, Mr. Holmes,” he said sardonically.

  Sherlock Holmes waved Sergeant Haskins away. The door closed, and he addressed Mr. Dordona as if their previous conversation had never been interrupted.

  “I made inquiries after you, sir, from the mission school authorities. They had no knowledge of any First Aid student by the name of Samuel Dordona. Only of one with that name who had attended Bible studies at the Mission School a dozen years ago. Where he may be now, no one knows. Did you take a dead man’s name, perhaps, for your little charade?”

  But Samuel Dordona, if it was he, had been well and truly frightened into silence. My colleague ended the pause.

  “Very well. The school authorities had kept all their earlier records. These included an entry in that same year for the training of a nursing sister who went out to India. They knew her then as Emmeline Bancroft. You and I, and anyone else who cared to check the records of marriages at Somerset House, would perhaps know her better by her married name. She was the late Emmeline Putney-Wilson.”

  The stricken figure gave a gasp of shock, as if simply to empty his lungs and fill them with new breath. I could see that Holmes longed to be sympathetic but dared not.

  “It grieves me, sir, that we should have to come to the truth by means that must be so painful to you. I still believe you to be an honourable man and a just man. Deceit does not become you, however necessary it may seem to you.”

  He paused and then addressed the frightened figure before him.

  “For whatever distress I have caused you, Major Henry Putney-Wilson, I owe you an apology. You are in danger and you hoped a dead friend’s identity might protect you. I think it will not. I beg you to leave this place and leave this city. Return to India or anywhere else away from England. You need not fear me, although you hoped to make use of me in destroying the man who killed your wife by the cruellest means. Leave that to the law, sir. It will come, I assure you. As for the secret of your identity, I need hardly say that it is safe with me. Until all danger to you is past, Henry Putney-Wilson does not exist for me. Except in the presence of my associate, Dr. Watson, and of Inspector Lestrade, I shall speak of you and think of you as the Reverend Samuel Dordona of Lahore. But I beg you will listen earnestly to what I have said. If I could trace the truth about you so easily, what might your enemies do?”

  The poor man still stared at us. “You could not have known!”

  Holmes shook his head sympathetically.

  “I could not have helped knowing, sir! From the moment I met you—indeed from the moment I saw you walking down Baker Street—I did not believe that you were the man who had written that letter to Dr. Watson making your appointment. You do not have sufficient power to deceive, if I may say so. The letter is deferential, even obsequious. You are upright, forthright, firm, an air like Mars to summon and command. It is as much in your military stride as in your character. Did Captain Sellon write that letter for you? or, as I think more probable, did he compose it and did you persuade some other person to act as your scribe? I deduce that Joshua Sellon may have warned you not to let your own handwriting be publicly examined.”

  “But you could not know that!”

  “I could and do, Mr. Dordona. Once again, if I do, how many others might do so?”

  Our client’s reply was little more than a mumble. “There are places in the commercial district of the city of London where men of means without the art of writing may pay to have letters written for them by clerks or scriveners. It is common enough. I made use of that to avoid discovery. Now, Mr. Holmes, I believe you know everything that I can tell you.”

  “I know something, Major Putney-Wilson. Not everything. I shall continue to wonder, as I did yesterday, whether you have left India to follow and kill a man. I was not joking when I asked you that. I am not joking now. Indeed, I might honour you for your intention. But there is a price attached, is there not?, and you may not be the one who pays it. So I must also wonder whether your crusade has already caused a brave man to give up his life in this room in order to save yours. Only you can tell me whether I am right.”

  While Holmes was speaking, I watched our client. Indeed he was our client. But yesterday he had been the absurdly disguised Samuel Dordona. Today he was the crusader who had employed two guards and a farrier to mark obscenely with a hot iron the man who seduced his wife and then drove her to hang herself. I was convinced he now sought that man’s life. He had been terribly wronged, but we should not make the mistake of believing in him as a victim without the resolve to inflict justice.

  But this knight was being turned back from his crusade by Sherlock Holmes. Resolve was giving way to despair. There was no response, only a deepening silence such as one hears when the pulses of an explosion subside. There were tears of disappointed honour on the bowed face of the suspect. He would not look at us just then. Lestrade saw this too. In the quietest and kindest voice I had ever heard our Scotland Yard friend use, he spoke to the man who had so recently been the Reverend Samuel Dordona. The inspector stopped just short of putting an arm round the bowed shoulders.

  “Here, what’s all this?” he said encouragingly as our prisoner wiped his eyes. “There’s no need for that. No one’s accused you of anything—yet.”

  9

  In deference to our client’s safety, Holmes referred in future to what he called the “nom de plume” of the Reverend S
amuel Dordona, rather than to Major Henry Putney-Wilson. In my own narrative, I prefer the truth, now that the drama is over and the secret is out.

  Henry Putney-Wilson, with his key to the door of the mansion apartment, was inevitably the first suspect in the murder of Captain Sellon. It was very soon clear, however, that there could be no charge against him. Joshua Sellon was seen alive by a milkman on his rounds and the porter at the desk on his arrival at Carlyle Mansions. It was no later than half-past six in the morning. Major Putney-Wilson meanwhile was at the Ravenswood Hotel in Southampton Row, where he had been a single resident for more than a month. It was at least half an hour’s cab-ride from Bloomsbury to Carlyle Mansions and back, plus whatever amount of time would have been needed for committing the murder. It would also require a cab to be waiting outside the mansions for his immediate return to Bloomsbury. No cab had been seen arriving, waiting, or departing.

  At the Ravenswood Hotel, our client had still been in his nightshirt when the maid called him that morning just before seven. He had breakfasted in the public dining-room of the hotel from half past seven to almost half past eight. He then went out and scanned the day’s press at Drummond’s Reading Room in Russell Street between quarter to nine and quarter past.

  Captain Sellon’s body had been found by the daily maidservant a little before nine o’clock. Scotland Yard being close at hand to Victoria, Lestrade and his officers were alerted at once and had been on the scene well before ten. The police surgeon had come and gone shortly before Holmes and I arrived, at eleven. Joshua Sellon had therefore died between half-past six and quarter to nine.

  It was one thing to clear Henry Putney-Wilson of murder, but quite another to persuade him to talk about Carlyle Mansions. What was the strange “overseas medical mission?” How had it attracted this devout widower of a woman cruelly driven to take her own life by the conduct of Colonel Rawdon Moran? How had it involved a serving officer of the Provost Marshal Corps Special Investigation Branch?