Death on a Pale Horse

by Donald Thomas

  “We did. Almost as far as Lahore.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you recall that the train was delayed at a small junction, some distance short of Lahore?”

  “It was. To this day I do not know why. Probably because a shorter train overtook us as we waited there, going in the direction of Bombay.”

  “Do you also recall that a staff officer, probably Brigade Major Anstruther, came to your coach? Captain Sellon was summoned to an immediate conference with his superiors.”

  “Correct.”

  “You do not know why Sellon was taken away?”

  “I do not. When I next saw him—or even heard of him—he was lying dead in Carlyle Mansions with a bullet in his skull.”

  “Then it may interest you to know, doctor, that Joshua Sellon was not just a Provost Marshal’s man: he was one of the best officers that the Special Investigation Branch had ever possessed. He was removed from your train because a wire from Calcutta—from the Viceroy’s secretary—ordered his return to Bombay. The first suspicions about Isandhlwana had been raised in Cape Town. The few survivors had begun to talk. Captain Sellon was to be despatched from India to South-East Africa in charge of a Provost detail. He was to accompany the first patrol to the battlefield. A special train was despatched to your little junction from Lahore. A light cruiser lay at anchor in the harbour of Bombay. It waited for those whose skills were needed at the scene of the massacre. England was too far to send, but Josh Sellon could reach Durban, the nearest port in South-East Africa to Isandhlwana, long before you were with your regiment in Kandahar.”

  “I had no idea about him, at the time,” I said slowly. “The young officers in my coach treated him as being rather a joke. A dull old fellow, was how they spoke of him.”

  Mycroft chuckled at my stupidity.

  “A dull old fellow, eh? And what better disguise could such a man have? How fortunate for your two young buccaneers that they never came under his scrutiny. Joshua Sellon was asked for in South Africa by Sir Henry Bartle Frere, Her Majesty’s Governor at the Cape. Sir Bartle had once had Sellon under him when he was Governor of Bombay. He knew his quality. When the rumours began after Isandhlwana, he cabled direct to the Viceroy in Calcutta and made his request. So Josh Sellon, Lieutenant Halliwell, and two of the Provost Quartermasters joined the first burial party that was sent into Zululand. They arrived there a few months after the disaster, the first troops to reach that remote scene. That was how it came about.”

  Mycroft Holmes laid the rifle on its shelf in the cupboard and turned round.

  “Their investigation soon located several bogus turn-screws lying in the grass of the wagon-park. The difference in calibre between these and the .450 Martini-Henry ammunition might not be noticed at a glance. But these were put to the test as a matter of course.”

  This would not do, I thought. “But why had no one examined them or tested them in all the time that Lord Chelmsford’s column was marching from the Cape to Zululand? Had they no occasion to fire their rifles in all that time, even in practice?”

  He looked at me with a sad suggestion of pity for my obtuseness. It reminded me of Sergeant Gibbons.

  “I think you do not quite understand, doctor. The fatal substitution of the mis-matched turn-screws was not made until after the final camp inspection had been carried out on the evening before the battle. That was the whole point. It must be done on the right day. The so-called hunter who performed it had first to assure himself that the Zulu impi was already in a position to advance on the following morning. He knew enough about the tribes and their tactics for that. It was what Moran waited for, night after night.”

  “For how long?”

  Mycroft shrugged. “Who knows? He is a hunter, a tracker. No one sees him come or go. I know something of the fellow. That is my job. Randy Moran could cross a forest floor in pitch darkness without a single twig ever cracking under his foot. That same night, knowing that the attack was prepared for next day, he also entered the mess tent of the 24th Foot and removed the head in its specimen jar. He had no need to do it. It was the obsession of putting a signature to his work. We know him well enough to understand his ways. You had far better leave him to us.”

  Sherlock Holmes had been silent for an uncharacteristically long time. Now he shifted in his chair.

  “Leave him to you? You seem remarkably sure of yourself, dear Brother, for one who has not yet proved a word of this story against Colonel Moran.”

  This time, Mycroft’s chuckle had no humour in it.

  “We know the scoundrel as well as we know poor Owain Glyndwr. True, his head is not yet pickled in a jar. That will be possible, I suppose, when the hangman has finished with him.”

  But his brother continued to scowl. “Then you have not found him?”

  Mycroft bowed his head and pulled open a drawer of his desk. He took out a small pile of slim leather folders, chose one, and opened it. A large quarto-sized photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man in his middle forties. Even stilled by the camera’s lens, a mesmeric coldness lay in those narrowed eyes. There was ferocity in the lines of the brow and nose, which seemed all the more powerful for the large size of the print. We confronted an image so lifelike that it seemed as if it might answer back at us, a virile yet sinister face. The model of a hunter and a killer. The height of his brow was evidence of an intelligence to rival Mycroft Holmes. Yet the determined set of the mouth and jaw also bespoke a sensual leer that would corrupt intelligence or natural virtue. The shoulders conveyed the strength of a body which the portrait did not include.

  “Colonel Rawdon Moran,” said Mycroft quietly, “a bad enemy and a treacherous friend. A man of immense strength, his anger often masked but never appeased. Cunning beyond everything. A man who conquered the God-fearing Emmeline Putney-Wilson. The face that laughed into hers when she begged him not to desert her, not to betray her to the mercy of the world. These, gentlemen, are the eyes that taunted her into becoming her own executioner and almost the murderer of her own children. You see?”

  Sherlock Holmes handed the portrait back. But Mycroft had not yet done. He pulled open another drawer and drew out a second folder. It contained bills of lading for consignments of goods to be shipped from Belgium, the port of Antwerp, to the capital of the Congo Free State at Leopoldville. As he turned the pages, I saw enough to understand that this was indeed the merchandise of death. Krupp 7.5-centimetre guns. Creuzot’s 7.5-centimetre. A consignment of 3.7-centimetre automatic Maxims. Eight four-inch Howitzers. Add to that Maxim-Nordenfelt field guns and Krupp 3.7-centimetre mountain guns.

  Sherlock Holmes looked hard at his brother. “And where did these papers come from? A reliable source?”

  Mycroft sighed.

  “A good man risked his life for them—and lost it in the end.”

  “Joshua Sellon?”

  “Joshua Sellon. Since his return from the Transvaal, guns have been the trade of Rawdon Moran with that territory and with the moral leprosy of the Congo State. His old masters in Praetoria see themselves as the new Prussians of Southern Africa. The most brutal traders of Central Africa know that they are safe with Leopold of Belgium. He may be the most depraved monarch in Europe, but that did not prevent the others from giving him the state of the Congo and its people as his personal plaything.”

  From one of the folders he drew out a page of a newspaper. I recognised the Berlin National Zeitung. He looked not at me but at my friend.

  “The criminal confederation that you imagine, dear Brother, now proposes to extend itself into the dark continent, and Rawdon Moran is its agent. He prospered less than he hoped from all that was corrupt and tyrannical in the Transvaal. Yet the income of that republic from gold and diamond fields has increased a thousandfold in the last decade, from ten thousand pounds sterling to more than eleven million. Its power to make war upon the remaining British territories, or to blackmail them by threat of war, grows faster still. At first he directed armaments under the guise of im
porting agricultural machinery through the harbours of Portuguese East Africa. Now he prefers Belgium and her Congo Free State. The artillery has been armed; now it is the turn of the infantry. A shipment is pending via Antwerp of forty thousand Mauser rifles and twenty-five million rounds of ammunition.”

  Sherlock Holmes relaxed his scowl, though I could not believe that this tale of blood-money was new to him. “And where is Colonel Moran now, if I may repeat my request?”

  Mycroft paused and then shrugged.

  “Keep on going as you are going, dear Brother, and you may find the answer to that question sooner than you suppose and perhaps to your very great regret. I beg of you—leave him to us.”

  5

  In dealing with my patients, I find that there is sometimes an interval during which a man or woman can worry no more about a particular threat to life or even the well-being of a loved one. I suppose it is nature’s temporary protection during a long period of strain. I felt something of the sort after our encounter with Mycroft Holmes. There were no further alarms, and the drama seemed to blow away like a bad dream. I felt like a hard-pressed rifleman in a long campaign—willing to continue the fight, but longing to be taken out of the front line for a few days’ respite.

  A little while later, Sherlock Holmes and I found ourselves enjoying the pale sunshine of the pre-season race meeting on Epsom Downs. Holmes had come by long-standing arrangement; I was there to keep him company. I do not call myself a racing man, nor indeed was my friend, but this was something of a special occasion for him. A year or so previously, as my readers may recall, Holmes had been of service to Colonel Sheffield Ross. That gentleman’s racing stables were on a barren stretch of Dartmoor at King’s Pyland, two miles west of the market town of Tavistock.

  Colonel Ross was still the owner of a four-year-old, Silver Blaze, so-called from the white “blaze” on his forehead. The previous spring, this horse had been tipped as favourite to win the Wessex Cup at the Winchester meeting. Indeed, the odds had shortened to 4–5 on. Just before the event, the animal was missed from its stable and the body of John Straker, a local man who lived close by, was found there. The blow that the man had suffered gave every reason for suspecting foul play. But thanks to the skills of Sherlock Holmes, this strangest of all murders was explained, almost innocently, as being no murder at all. The colonel’s horse went on to win the Wessex Cup in the most unusual circumstances. Not since the impostor Judas Maccabeus triumphed in the Derby of 1843, disguised as Running Rein, had there been anything like this result in the racing calendar.*

  The same Silver Blaze, fully recovered, had now been entered for the Surrey and Suburban stakes at the Epsom meeting. After his earlier success, the “ring” (as professional backers on the course are described) made him favourite to win at odds of 4–6 on. Nothing would do but that Sherlock Holmes must be there to see him run and to meet again his grateful client, Colonel Sheffield Ross.

  If anyone had told me that this event could be connected with the murder of Captain Joshua Sellon, I should have laughed in his face.

  On that Wednesday morning, we took the railway from Waterloo down through suburban Surrey to the Epsom course. We had also hired a drag, as they call them, to drive us from the railway station to the Downs. These antiquated conveyances are a rarity now. They resemble old-fashioned stage-coaches, and are little used except for show on such special occasions. As Holmes pointed out, one can park a drag by the side of the course and see the whole thing from the spacious comfort of its well-upholstered buttoned-leather interior. We had been provided by Fortnum’s with a picnic hamper of game-bird, fruit, and Champagne.

  The annual Surrey and Suburban meeting brings together a whole encampment of the disreputable class of the nation as well as the more raffish element of high society. Ascot is for royalty. Epsom is for the people. The Pearly King and Queen from the streets of London’s East End appeared, selling whelks and jellied eels. Beside the roadway from the town, poles were still being driven into the ground and the last showmen’s tents were going up. There were brightly painted gypsy caravans with flower-pots in their windows, and a litter of jars and copper pans on their steps. Thin horses and donkeys, turned loose or tethered, grazed on the ragged turf. Where the refreshment stalls ended and the entertainments began, the squalling sounds of the Punch and Judy show promised all the fun of the fair. The remainder of the booths stretched far across the sunlit downland that lay beyond the course.

  We passed the flags that streamed out above the grandstand. Banners proclaimed the weighing-in enclosure, Tattersalls, and the bookmakers’ booths. From the little canvas stalls, you could take your pick of Neapolitan ice, sold for a penny in silver paper, lemonade, or sherbet. A man in a chef’s tall hat with a basket of lobsters was crying out “Champions a bob!” up and down the fairground. A whole town of canvas marquees advertised “New-some’s Equestrian Novelties” and side-shows from “The Hall of Mirrors” to “Beauties of the Harem” and the Fortune-Teller’s booth. Puppet theatres performed such successes of the London stage as The Corsican Brothers and The Daughter of the Regiment.

  There was enough to occupy us here even without the racing! However, the Surrey and Suburban was to be run at two o’clock, and we finished our bottle of Veuve Cliquot in good time. After so much of “Samuel Dordona” and “Randy” Moran, I felt new life had been breathed into me. A bell rang to clear the course and six runners trooped out from their enclosure. I glanced at the card and saw the entrants listed for the one mile and six furlongs of the race. There was Prince Napoleon-Jerome’s Centurion, Mr. Augustus Newton’s Rascal Jack, Colonel Armitage’s Underand-Over, the Earl of Craigavon’s Dandy Dick, Mr. Seth Boyd’s Shinscraper, and, to be sure, Colonel Ross’s Silver Blaze, carrying his owner’s familiar colours of black cap and wine-red jacket.

  A thousand guineas was riding on the outcome. Small wonder that a roar of excitement went up from the stand as the starter’s flag came down. Then the onlookers grew silent and I could feel the tension in the sparkling air. At the first bend, the rivals were bunched so tight that it seemed a wonder that they did not collide. The hooves pummelled the turf like padded thunder. Then, at the first straight, the line was strung out a little more. Gussie Newton’s powerful bay, Rascal Jack, had taken the lead. But true to his title, he gave his backers the slip on the second bend and fell back gradually to last place.

  Down past the grandstand, again it was Shinscraper who held the crowd’s attention. All eyes followed him as the handsome grey led by a nose from Under-and-Over. Away they went, round the curve with the spaces between them lengthening now, inch by inch. We lost sight of them then until they came up over the brow and into the final straight that would take them past the famous old grandstand for the last time. The order of running had scarcely changed. Then, almost at the stand itself, Silver Blaze came on, as fresh as though he had only just left the starting gate. His jockey’s knees were tight to the saddle, as he loped past Dandy Dick and then past Shinscraper. He came home by a length and a half, with Bobby Armitage’s Under-and-Over just beating the French horse, Prince Napoleon-Jerome’s Centurion, for second place.

  The aftermath of such a close-fought contest is an anti-climax, but this had been a fine performance. For myself, I had been so absorbed in it that I realised afterwards, with something of a shock, how easily any of our adversaries could have put a bullet into me before I sensed the least danger. Sherlock Holmes must now leave me for an hour or two and seek out Colonel Sheffield Ross to congratulate our client on his splendid win. We should meet back at the hired drag.

  “I have not the least doubt, Watson, that after such a run as that, we shall see Ross and his protégé back at Epsom for the June meeting. Next time, I promise you, it will be the Derby itself. A Derby winner in his stable will be the crown of his career!”

  I had thought it best to leave my friend to the colonel, for my active part in the case of the missing favourite had been rather small. We arranged to meet at five o�
�clock, and I turned away to view the boisterous entertainments of the fair. A number of other silk-hatted swells were “slumming it” among the merrymakers. Every sportsman in this lower order of society seemed to have got out his fawn waistcoat and silver watch-chain for the occasion.

  I had not walked two hundred yards when I came to the canvas walls of the “Royal Britannia Rifle Range.” As a military man, marksmanship is a natural interest of mine, and this particular range was quite a grand affair. It stood high among the medieval jousts and gaming tents. The bull’s-eye was quite fifty feet from the counter where the hopeful sportsmen queued up to take their turn. The wall at the far end was a proper “bullet-stopper” of packed earth, at least two feet thick. Upon this was the target scene, painted as a castle wall. There was a make-believe gateway at the bottom with a small red, white, and blue target roundel above it. A rack of prizes, from cheap dolls to china souvenir dishes, stood to one side of the aiming point. A barker in his moleskin jacket and cockney cap was the proprietor.

  “The siege of Se-bast-op-ol, ladies and gentlemen! The famous Redan fortress correct in every detail. Who’ll put a bullet through a bold bad Rhoosian? Who’ll take a pot at the Tsar? Who’ll shoulder a musket for Old England and the Queen? Every hit a winner!”

  Curiosity got the better of me. I watched half-a-dozen working men detach their wives or women from their arms and pay their sixpence for a rifle with three shots. Five of them wasted their ammunition on various bricks of the castle wall. Each time this happened, the little entrance gate below the target opened and the face of a Beelzebub with his tongue sticking out appeared, followed by the derisive cuckoo! call of a novelty clock. The next man missed the bull’s-eye with his first go—but hit it with his second. The little castle-door then opened and a Venus statue with a smile, holding a bouquet of flowers to cover the greater part of her nudity, appeared and bowed to him. There was a murmur of laughter as the man turned aside to claim his prize from a pale girl who no doubt kept company with the barker.