At that moment, there came the sound of a key being inserted in the lock, and a moment later we were joined by Mrs Prentice and Maria. There was a moment of dreadful silence, as they saw the shrouded figure on the floor, and the blood seemed to drain from their faces.
Holmes took a step forward and addressed Mrs Prentice. “I am afraid you must prepare yourself for bad news,” said he, at which Mrs Prentice put down her shopping basket and began sobbing, leaning for support on the younger woman, who put her arm round her. Then, after a moment, she gathered herself together and stepped forward to identify the dead man. Inspector Jones lifted the shroud, at which she nodded her head and began to weep copiously. I brought forward a chair and sat her down on it, then went behind the bar to find some brandy.
“Who could have done such a thing?” the poor woman wailed, “and why?”
“Have no fear, madam,” said Jones in a reassuring tone. “We shall catch whoever committed this terrible crime. He shall not escape us!”
“The ‘why’,” said Holmes in a grim voice, “is because of this list that Jack was writing the last time you saw him alive.” He took the sheet of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “He was certainly trying to work something out, but it was not the value of the ring that you saw. He was using Roman numerals so that you would not guess what he was writing, for it was something he was ashamed of, and he did not want to lose your trust, which I believe he valued above all else.”
“But what was it he was working out?” asked Mrs Prentice in a puzzled tone as I handed her a tot of brandy.
“I believe he was calculating dates,” said Holmes. “When I got home last night and examined this sheet anew, it seemed to me then that there was perhaps a slightly wider space after the third numeral on each line, and I conjectured that what he was writing in this deliberately cryptic fashion was perhaps a seven, followed by different numbers of single strokes, indicating ‘seventy-four’, ‘seventy-three’, ‘seventy-two’ and so on. This in turn suggests the years known by those abbreviations. If this is so, then the other letters must surely be the initials of the European ports that he remembered visiting in those years – Amsterdam, Hamburg, Oporto, Lisbon and so on. That is the only explanation that makes sense.”
“But why should he be trying to remember what he was doing all that time ago?” asked Mrs Prentice. “Those days were before he served his time in Pentonville; and after he came out, he gave up the sea completely. That’s all just ancient history now.”
“It might not be simply ancient history to everyone,” returned Holmes.
“What do you mean?”
“To someone who was born then, for instance, one of those years would undeniably be a significant date. Someone such as Maria, perhaps.” He turned to the Spanish girl as he spoke, and she took a step backwards, a look of alarm on her face.
“I do not understand!” she cried.
“I think you do,” returned Holmes. “I think you showed Jack Prentice that amethyst ring – a ring he had perhaps given to some woman he met in Corunna at a time when he was feeling fairly well-off from his ill-gotten gains – and you accused him of being your father. That is why I believe he was so concerned to recall everywhere he had been in those years of the early ’70s.”
“You lie!” cried Maria.
“I think not,” said Holmes. “You are the one that lied. There is no ‘C’ on Jack Prentice’s list – ‘C’ for Corunna – until ’74, which is much too late for him to have been your father. I believe you were down here in hiding, late on Monday evening, when Mrs Prentice came downstairs to see what was happening. After she had gone back upstairs, Prentice, who had satisfied himself that he could not possibly be your father, confronted you and demanded to know, I imagine, what sort of a trick you were trying to play on him. In the ensuing quarrel, you seized the candlestick from the mantelpiece and struck him with it. You may not have intended to kill him, but that was the result. You then dragged his body down the cellar steps, and across the cellar floor. Your footsteps were quite clear in the dust down there.”
“Lies! All lies!” cried the girl.
“If I am right,” continued Holmes, turning to Inspector Jones, “she’s probably got the ring on her. It’s certainly not in any of Prentice’s pockets. I suggest she be searched.”
“I have no ring!” the girl protested. “I never have ring!”
“That’s not true, Maria,” said Mrs Prentice in a quiet tone. “I saw you fiddling with a ring one day last week, but I never saw what it was.”
“All right,” said Maria. “I have ring. I find it on floor.”
“Let us see it, then,” said Jones.
She stepped forward in a reluctant fashion and put her hand in her coat pocket. The next moment a dreadful thing happened. She took her hand from her pocket, but in it was not the ring we were all expecting to see, but a wicked-looking little dagger with a narrow, pointed blade. In that same instant, with a loud howl of rage, she flung herself forward at Sherlock Holmes, the dagger aimed for his breast. But quick though she was, Holmes was quicker. His hand shot out like lightning, seized her wrist and held it tightly, then he pressed her arm down and forced her to drop the knife. At that point she let out an ear-piercing scream and began to kick him violently on the shins, at the same time lunging forward to try to bite him. Jones and I sprang forward and pulled her away, and in a moment the policeman had clapped a pair of handcuffs on her. At that moment the door opened and Constable Griffin put his head in to enquire if everything was all right.
“There’s a young woman outside, sir,” he added, “who wants to come in – name of Lily Bates.”
“That’s my daughter,” cried Mrs Prentice, rising to her feet. A moment later, a sandy-haired young woman pushed her way past the police constable and into the room. “Lily!” cried Mrs Prentice in a voice full of emotion. “Your father is dead!” The two women embraced, and in a few words Mrs Prentice gave her daughter a brief account of what had happened.
The younger woman’s eyes flashed fire. “I knew it!” she cried, looking with anger at the Spanish girl. “I always thought she was a scheming little minx! You do know, Ma, that she’s the reason William stopped coming round here. He didn’t trust her. He always said she was no good and was up to something!”
“Here’s a ring!” said Jones, who had been feeling in the Spanish girl’s coat pockets. “Would you say that that is an amethyst, Mr Holmes?” he asked, holding up the ring, which contained a single large purplish stone. Holmes nodded his head, and Mrs Prentice confirmed that it was the ring she had seen her husband slip into his waistcoat pocket on Monday evening.
“That rather settles the matter,” said Holmes. “I don’t know what this girl was doing before she came here, Jones, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she was put up to this scheme by ‘One-eye’ Vokes or Elias Dack.”
“Elias Dack?” cried Maria abruptly in a voice suffused with contempt. “I spit on Elias Dack!”
“Well, at least that shows you know who he is,” remarked Holmes in a dry tone. “As I was saying, Jones, I can’t believe that having made her way all the way from Corunna to England, whether alone, or in the company of an English sailor, as she claimed, she just happened by sheer chance to land up in the household of the man she was later to accuse of being her father. What is more likely, I think, is that she had already fallen in with Elias Dack, or some member of his gang, and he saw the possibilities in the situation: that he could use this girl to blackmail Prentice into throwing in his lot with them in their dishonest activities, as he used to do in the days before his prison sentence. It is likely, I think, that Prentice himself had mentioned to Dack, many years ago, that he had given this ring to a young woman he had met in Corunna. Dack would know that the very last thing that Prentice would want would be a serious falling-out with his wife, and he could use this fact as a sort of evil leverage against him.”
“It may well be so,” agreed Jones. “And we may learn more about it late
r. Between you and me, gentlemen,” he continued, taking us to one side and lowering his voice, “the important business that Inspector Quirke and his men are undertaking today is a raid on The Cocked Hat. We have had reliable information that the loot from most of those West End robberies is being stored there at the moment. A search warrant has been issued, and the raid should be starting any time now. With a little luck we should get our hands on both the stolen goods and Dack and his gang!”
As Holmes and I walked along to the railway station, I reflected on the whole sorry business.
“I was thinking,” I remarked, “that Elias Dack, despite supposedly being an old friend of Prentice’s – in days gone by, at least – was perfectly prepared to destroy Prentice’s marriage just to get him to help them.”
“That should not surprise you, Watson,” returned Holmes with a harsh laugh. “Despite the efforts of some writers to romanticize criminals, in tales of highwaymen and other such villains, there is, in truth, as the old saying has it, no honour among thieves. These sort of people would sell their own sisters into slavery if it happened to suit their immediate purposes. People like Dack have no real friends.”
I was to remember my friend’s cynical words later, when I read a report in the newspaper of the police raid on The Cocked Hat. For during the chaos and violence that followed the arrival of the police, Dack evidently scented treachery, and formed the opinion – rightly or wrongly – that the information the police had received had been given to them by his lieutenant, “One-eye” Vokes. Seizing a moment when no one was looking, therefore, he attacked Vokes with a knife he had concealed in his sock, and, before anyone could stop him, had plunged it into the other man’s breast, killing him on the spot. That raid, and the trials that followed, marked the eradication of what Holmes had described as a “plague-spot” in south-east London, leaving the honest inhabitants of that district to thenceforth go about their business in peace. The part I had played in the matter was, of course, a very slight and peripheral one, and yet I do not mind admitting that it gives me a feeling of both pride and satisfaction to know that I played any part in it at all.
The Adventure of
THE WILLOW POOL
I: CAPTAIN JOHN REID
MR SHERLOCK HOLMES was always of the opinion that no record of his varied professional career would be complete without an account of the singular case of Captain John Reid of Topley Cross, late of the West Sussex Infantry. It was without question an unusual case, and I should certainly have placed the facts on record long ago, were it not that those intimately concerned in the matter had expressed a specific wish that I not do so. That prohibition having recently been withdrawn, I lay the following narrative before my readers, to remedy the omission. The events I describe occurred in the autumn of the very first year in which I shared chambers with Sherlock Holmes following my return to England from Afghanistan, and just a few weeks after an Army Medical Board had finally determined that I was unlikely ever again to be fit enough to serve my country, and had therefore discharged me from further duty.
The Second Afghan War has already taken its place in the pages of modern history. Drawn unwillingly into a violent fraternal quarrel, in which a simple overture from one side justified one’s slaughter in the eyes of the other, the British Army endured great suffering and reversals of fortune before its final triumph settled the matter and restored peace. I have little doubt that many years hence, when the history of the time is written from a longer perspective, the whole campaign will command but a paragraph or two in an account of the period. A vicious conflict, which no one had desired, marked by treachery and double-dealing, in a barren and inhospitable land in which no one had ever wished to set foot, it can scarcely be expected to excite that interest in future generations which other, more glorious, episodes in our military history might command. Yet the very misfortune and hardship that bedevilled the campaign brought forth courage and endurance in our forces such as has never been surpassed, and those who were in Afghanistan during this fateful period are unlikely ever to forget it.
Having been severely wounded at the Battle of Maiwand, where our forces had been outnumbered by ten to one, I was among the first to be sent home to England; but it was not very long before most of my compatriots had followed me, and by the end of April 1881, Afghanistan had been effectively evacuated. It may be imagined with what relief the returning troops set foot once more upon their native turf, with what hopes for rest and the sight of a friendly face they turned their steps towards the towns and villages of their youth. But for one man, at least, that relief proved short-lived and those hopes remained unfulfilled, for when Captain John Reid returned home to the scenes of his childhood, he encountered a hostility there which was, in its way, as implacable and incomprehensible as any he had endured with his companions abroad.
It was a dull, foggy day in October, and I had not ventured out of doors all day. Now, as the afternoon drew on, I stood for a minute at the window and surveyed the dismal scene outside. Like a dull brown sea, the fog swirled slowly about the street and lapped silently at our windowpanes, where it condensed in filthy, oily drops.
With a sigh I returned to the bright fireside and picked up the tedious yellow-backed novel I had been attempting to read before the ache from my old wound had driven me from my chair. Sherlock Holmes was engaged at his chemical bench, in some malodorous experiment that involved the rapid boiling of benzine in a flask, and neither looked up nor spoke as I passed. He had his watch on the table before him, and was clearly timing the process precisely. I watched as he took a pipette and extracted a little of the bubbling liquid. Evidently satisfied, he added a small amount of chemicals to the flask and watched as the liquid became suffused with a vivid violet tint. Smiling to himself, he came to the fireside and took his old brier pipe from the mantelshelf.
“Is your experiment of importance?” I asked. “Professionally speaking, not at all,” returned my companion
with a shake of the head. “But it is not one I have performed before, and it is always worthwhile, I find, to verify for oneself the bland pronouncements of textbooks.” He took a handful of tobacco from the pewter jar on the shelf, and regarded me for a moment over his pipe. “It is a great pity, Watson,” said he at length, “that you and I cannot somehow combine our energies and our work. Between us we might just make one moderately useful citizen.”
“Whatever do you mean?” I asked in surprise.
“You are not yourself,” said he, “that is plain to see.”
“I sometimes fear I never shall be again,” I returned with feeling.
“Tut! Tut!” cried Holmes in a tone of admonishment. “You must not speak so! Time and rest will heal, Watson; I am sure of it! But it is clear that at present you are not in the best of health. You lack energy. On the desk I see a pile of foolscap, an atlas and your other books of reference. You desire, as I know, to pen a personal memoir of your time in India, and of the Afghan campaign especially; your work lies waiting for you to begin it, but at the present you simply do not have the energy to make a start. I, on the other hand, am blessed with excellent health and with energy sufficient for two men. But where is my work? Where is that for which I have trained myself for so long?”
“You have had no case lately?” I queried.
“Not a thing,” he returned in an emphatic tone. “No case, no clients, no crimes, no puzzles to unravel. As you see, I am reduced to working out a few elementary experiments in chemistry, simply to occupy my mind. When I have finished one, I move on to another.”
“In that case, I shall leave you to it,” I remarked with a chuckle, rising to my feet. “Your experiments may serve to occupy your mind, Holmes, but they do tend also to occupy one’s nose somewhat.”
“My dear fellow!” cried he in an apologetic voice, his features expressing dismay. “Do not say I am driving you from the room!”
“Not at all,” I returned, smiling at his expression. “You are not to blame for my feeling l
ike a limp rag! I shall put my feet up for half an hour and then I shall be fine.” I left him busying himself once more with his test tubes and retorts, and ascended wearily to my bedroom.
The next thing I recall is being shaken by the shoulder. I opened my eyes to find Holmes standing by my bedside, a look of concern upon his face. The room was warm and stuffy, for the window was closed, and a fire was burning in the grate. I had fallen asleep fully clothed, and now, as I awoke, my brow was wet with perspiration.
“I am sorry to disturb you, Watson,” said he as I sat up, “but there is a brother officer of yours downstairs.”
“What! A friend of mine?”
Holmes shook his head. “He has come to consult me professionally, but he, like you, has lately returned from Afghanistan, and your presence at the interview might prove of assistance.”
“Is he ill?” I enquired.
“He is not, perhaps, in the pink of health, but his troubles, I fancy, are more spiritual than physical. He is finding it difficult to describe his circumstances to me. The presence of a brother officer, someone whose experiences are similar to his own, might set him at his ease. But do not feel obliged to come if you do not feel up to it.”
“I shall be all right when I have splashed my face with water,” I returned, setting my feet upon the floor. “Give me a minute and I shall be with you.”
I was intrigued by this invitation. During the year we had shared lodgings together, I had taken a great interest in my companion’s work. Indeed, without this interest, my life would have been a solitary and empty one, for I knew very few people in London, and my poor state of health frequently prevented my leaving the house for days on end. But, save in one or two exceptional cases, I had followed Holmes’s work only at second hand, and generally knew nothing of a case until it was completed, when he would entertain me by giving me a lively account of it, and of how he had worked his way to its solution. Whenever one of his clients called, my habit, generally speaking, was to absent myself from our shared sitting room. That he should have specifically requested my presence in this instance therefore greatly aroused my curiosity. In a few moments, I had neatened myself up and joined them in the sitting room.
The Mammoth Book of the Lost Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes Page 32