by Barry Grant
‘You’ve gotten quirky with your metaphors in your old age.’
‘How very astute of you! I’ve noticed the same thing. Many of my ideas seem queer to me nowadays. I’m not sure all the chemicals of my brain remained precisely in their proper configuration.’
We rode in silence past Harrow-On-The-Hill, Pinner, Moor Park. All the stops blurred together in my mind like the posters that blurred as we sped away from each station. I looked at Holmes and could not tell whether he looked innocent, worldly or both. According to Watson’s account, in the old days he was rather a cold fish, though with a number of endearing quirks. And this was about right. He made such grand efforts to suppress all sides of his mind and personality except the logical side that at times I could not tell whether naïveté or perversity had the better claim. Could he really imagine there was any great advantage – presuming it could be done at all – in draining away all the warm impulses of the human heart and soul, leaving only the cold machinery of calculation to crank away unimpeded by distraction? He sat very straight in the bright modern seat. The huge glass window of the shining carriage held his half-reflection. He wore a brown coat and corduroy trousers and brown leather shoes, and he wore an expression that made him look somewhere between happy and amused. His sharp profile could make me imagine a hawk about to dive on its prey, or an old uncle with a quirky sense of humour and a bag of candy in his pocket for the kids. Also, he wasn’t completely on the side of logic. He did have this new theory about the necessity of illogical poetical leaps in the logical process. So it really wasn’t true, I thought, that he was one thing. Just mostly one thing. And this made it all the more surprising and rewarding when suddenly, amidst all his enumerating and filing and compiling of facts, he suddenly paused and just frankly admired (for a brief moment) the loveliness of the thing he was observing, irrespective of its relevance to ‘the case’: a footprint in dark soil. A face in a train car. A sudden baffle of wind that wakes the mind.
We stood in the blowing street outside the station at Croxley Green. The air was fresh, the leaves half-fallen from the trees, the sun lazy and hazy. We paused at a promising pub to eat a ploughman’s lunch. It was a warm place, old wood and mirrors and a ruddy-faced tapster.
‘The English Pub will last forever and never changes much,’ said Holmes.
At that moment his cell phone began playing Für Elise. He flicked it to his ear. ‘Holmes here. Yes, Lestrade . . . We are at this moment about to set out afoot from Croxley Green to have a look . . . yes . . . Well, I can’t say for sure just yet, but I expect to have enough facts within a few hours to be able to explain everything pretty convincingly . . . Watson and I will be staying the night at Tetchwick Manor, in all likelihood . . . yes . . . we have a key . . . No, no, by no means! The assistance of Scotland Yard would be fatal to my plan! . . . I realize, yes . . . I realize I’ve been saying that for a hundred years . . . I’m afraid it is true in this case. Must not scare away the lion, you know, before the trap is baited . . . of course, of course. Goodbye, Lestrade.’
We paid our bill and set off walking. In examining my Ordnance Survey map I discovered we could cut off half a mile by following the public footpath instead of the road, and this we did. We spotted the typical little Public Footpath signpost. It pointed us across fields towards Saratt. Soon we were walking between hedges, up a hill, along a stream. Holmes knelt and plucked a mollusc shell from the bank. As he did so his revolver pocket bulged.
‘Tell me, Holmes. How much danger is involved in this enterprise?’
‘Considerable. If the information we gather in the next hour or two is what I hope, we may soon encounter the man who created that blood bath at The Old Vicarage – and his intention will be to create another here.’
‘Always bright and cheerful, Holmes!’
Holmes looked at me grimly. ‘It may be more risk than you need to take, Watson. I’m used to this sort of thing, you’re not. When we’ve had our little walk through this lovely Hertfordshire countryside, you may like to go back to London and wait at the Savoy.’
‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ I said. ‘I risked bullets and bombs in Afghanistan. I can certainly risk an adventure with a friend.’
The path ran cheerily through meadows still misty green, past streams mottled with floating yellow and red leaves, through leaf-fallen woods where the path was bright and the trees were beginning to look cold and forlorn.
‘I shall be interested to hear your “take” on this little case, Watson.’
‘I am totally mystified, Holmes. All I can say is that Colonel Davis has more problems than he thinks. Sex is in the air, Holmes. His young wife is evidently having a bit on the side with Mr Simon Bart, the ever-helpful neighbour.’
‘Really?’ Holmes looked at me in surprise and raised an eyebrow. He swatted a mushroom with the walking stick he had grabbed in the woods.
‘She meets Simon Bart at a church affair, then at a spiritualist meeting. They spend time walking together. He brings gifts to the family – supposedly for the family, but they are candlesticks, more a gift for a woman than a man. And how do they arrange to get away together? She conveniently becomes so hysterical over a supposed ghost – a ghost that he told her of – that this provides her an excuse for her to go off for a ‘spiritual cure.’ My guess is that Simon Bart is with her. How does that sound?’
‘I think, Watson, you have got it . . .’
‘I am flattered, Holmes!’
‘I was about to say, I think you have got it about one-eighth right.’
‘Ah,’ I muttered, trying to recover as best I could. ‘I am flattered to hear you say even so much as that.’
‘She may well be infatuated with Bart,’ said Holmes. ‘And that is the one-eighth you have right.’
We noticed a pretty cottage peeking out of the trees off to our right. In the full foliage of summer we might not even have noticed it. Autumn smoke puffed gently out of the chimney, making little smudges on the blue sky. Holmes spotted a woman, and he waved.
She was walking with a rake in her hand. She waved her straw hat and came towards us smiling. Despite her grey hair and her obvious age she reminded me of a young girl – smile on her lips, dancing blue eyes. ‘Hel-lo!’ she said. ‘Wonderful day!’
Her name, she said, was Violet Anthem.
Holmes engaged her in conversation on trivial topics. I was surprised at how good he was on trivial topics, when the job required it. Then he modulated into a series of seemingly random questions about the sweetness of the neighbourhood. He asked directions to Tetchwick Manor, and he asked if she knew of a man named Simon Bart. Violet Anthem informed us quite happily that Tetchwick Manor was just a few hundred yards further on, and Mr Bart’s cottage, Swale Cottage, was only a quarter mile beyond that, just beyond a copse of mature trees and down in the swale. She said the Davises, an American couple, lived at Tetchwick now. She had met them and thought them charming – well, the wife was charming. The husband was a bit, you know, military. The husband didn’t look happy, said Violet Anthem – who looked very happy. She did not know much about Simon Bart, except that he often walked along this path quoting poetry.
‘Poetry?’ said Holmes.
‘Poetry, oh my, yes. He speaks it beautifully. English poetry. Keats, lots of Shakespeare. I weed in my garden, he walks, and I hear snatches of his recitation. Quite marvellous, really.’
‘Then he is an actor?’ asked Holmes.
‘I think that is so,’ she replied. ‘I believe I heard someone say that he was. Judging from his voice, he certainly could be.’
‘Have you known him long?’
‘Oh, no. Let me see, the Davises moved in about a year ago, a year last September, and then a month or two later Mr Bart bought Nancy Deveaux’s cottage – bought it or rented it, I don’t know.’
‘Then he is a new resident?’ asked Holmes.
‘Rather new. A great many new people are moving in everywhere, isn’t that so? The countryside is becoming
crowded, don’t you think?’
‘Then I wonder how Simon Bart knew Tetchwick Manor was haunted,’ said Holmes.
‘Haunted?’ She smiled up at him, and shielded her eyes from the sun with her small hand.
‘Somebody said it was haunted.’
She laughed. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve lived here forty years and I never heard that it was haunted. Of course, every place is haunted these days. I suppose it gives a house character, to call it haunted.’
We left Violet Anthem to her gardening and continued along the track until the ivy-covered walls and thatched roof of Tetchwick Manor appeared.
‘The insurance rates,’ I said, ‘must be astronomical for a large house like that with a thatched roof.’
Holmes strode along with an abstracted look on his face. His left leg seemed perfectly cured, as if the injection of a perplexing problem into his brain had somehow deadened the aches in his body. He gazed towards Tetchwick Manor with a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Everything is coming clear, Watson!’ he said. ‘Perfectly clear! Before long I think I may be able to put all the pieces together. Then we can stand back and admire the picture.’
‘I do hope the picture does not include a blood bath,’ I said.
‘Ah, Watson. We must bait the trap carefully, very carefully. For a start, if we should meet a man who might be Simon Bart on this path, we must merely say hello and pass on. Let us not call attention to ourselves.’
‘Right.’
We had now reached the garden gate of Tetchwick Manor and had stopped and were looking into the grounds. Leaves had blown over the driveway. The place looked tranquil and lovely. On the small pond a duck cruised.
‘When we enter the place, Watson, we must be certain that we do not speak, and we must walk very softly. No noise. But before we go in, let us first have a look at Mr Simon Bart’s cottage.’
We strolled along the path, up a little rise and into a copse of trees. On either side of the path we saw the high wire fences that Lestrade had mentioned. ‘So this is where the black-robed figure, supposedly seen by Mrs Davis, so utterly vanished,’ I said.
‘Not supposedly,’ said Holmes. ‘I am quite certain she actually saw a black-robed figure.’
‘Yet I get the impression the woman is a bit delusory,’ I said.
‘She is no doubt delusory in many circumstances,’ said Holmes. ‘But not in this one.’
We emerged from the leaf-fallen woods and descended into a little swale and soon we were passing a white cottage with red shutters and window boxes full of fading geraniums.
‘My heavens,’ said Holmes. ‘What sort of a vehicle is that? I have never seen such a thing.’
‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘An E-type Jaguar, vintage about 1965. I have always thought it the most beautiful car on the road. And that baby blue colour is absolutely striking.’
‘That is the missing piece,’ said Holmes.
‘What?’
‘We now have everything we need, Watson, to solve the Mystery of the Black Priest, and the blood bath at The Old Vicarage!’
‘All the facts!’ I said. ‘An E-type Jag tips the scales?’
‘Pretty much,’ he said. He could not conceal a note of pride in his voice. ‘Before the night is out we shall have laid hands on The Old Vicarage murderer, and I hope we will have prevented a similar murder at Tetchwick Manor. Let us continue on around that hill ahead, and then make our way back to Tetchwick Manor without passing Simon Bart’s residence again. I think I noticed a way, in looking at your map, that we can cut over to the side road. Let us pick up some food at that little shop we passed in the village, and then I must make a telephone call to Colonel Davis. And then, my dear Watson, we shall wait several hours in Tetchwick Manor and, with luck, bring this dangerous game to a close.’
TWELVE
The Torturer of Iraq
I knew, from reading the old Watson chronicles, that it was Holmes’s habit to keep his cards close to his chest. He would spread his astonishing revelations on the table only after he had safely in hand the whole sequence of startling events and deductions that would allow him to ‘go out’ and end the game. To shift metaphors a little, only when he had found the last little stone in the mosaic, and was ready to cement it into place, would he reveal the whole picture to his breathless companion – in this case, me. I resolved to be patient.
We walked down a blowing road carrying paper bags containing bread, cheese and wine for supper. As we turned on to the Public Footpath, Holmes put in a call to Colonel Davis. I only heard bits of the conversation for my feet were crunching in leaves and the breeze was blowing and high overhead a small airplane was moaning through the gauzy sky. I heard Holmes ask where the car key could be found, and I got the impression that the colonel was supposed to call him back at a certain time. Holmes then gave me some careful instructions.
We soon reached the rear of Tetchwick Manor. This time we opened the gate and hastened to the house. Holmes inserted the key in the front door and a moment later we were inside. Instantly Holmes put his finger to his lips, reminding me that we must walk softly and not talk at all. We crept through the house. Holmes found a car key hanging on a hook. He pushed the garage opener button. We went out through a side door. Holmes instructed me to back Colonel Davis’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle convertible out of the garage into the driveway, and to park it so it could be seen both from the public footpath behind the house and the road in front. This I did. The convertible top was down, which somehow made it appear as if someone had just jumped out of the car. We closed the garage door, entered the manor, and again stole through the house as silently as a couple of intruding field mice. Directly to the dining room we went. There Sherlock Holmes, with great care, silently lifted one of the silver candlesticks on the table and set it next to the matching candlestick. Very quietly we sat down to await the colonel’s call. Holmes had told me he was to call at precisely three o’clock.
The phone vibrated, Holmes pushed the button. Instead of putting the phone to his ear he held it next to the two candlesticks. Colonel Davis’s voice came loud and clear over the phone: ‘Hello, sir, thank you for calling. I just got home. Yes. Yes. I feel a bit tired . . . The chief inspector warned me to lock my windows, and the doctor warned me to eat sparingly and go to bed early. So I will follow doctor’s orders. I plan to be in bed by ten o’clock. So if you need me, call me before ten o’clock, right? After that I’ll be asleep. Right. Goodbye.’
Holmes closed the phone, looked at me, put his fingers to his lips. He motioned for me to open the door to the back of the house. I did so. He carefully lifted both candlesticks from the dining room table. He tiptoed past me and out into the garden, down the path, and to the pond. He submerged both candlesticks in the shallows at the edge of the duck pond. Then he returned to the house, seeming relieved. ‘So far so good,’ said he.
Holmes specified a few other household arrangements that he felt must be made. When we had finished these chores he said, ‘Now, Watson, let us see if we can find a potato or two in the pantry, and add baked potatoes to our evening repast. Baked potatoes, brie, bread and Bordeaux – what could be a healthier meal?’
We retired to the great room with a bottle of wine and two glasses. ‘What pleasant surroundings Colonel Davis has managed to acquire for himself,’ I said, waving my hand at the room in which we sat. It was a vast room with timbered ceiling, leaded windows, and a large fireplace that was, at the moment, dead. The setting sun threw red light through the windows and the light flowed grandly over the burgundy carpet like splashed wine. A few shelves of leather-bound books lined one wall. A large impressionist painting by Pissarro hung on another. These things gave the place a lived-in look, and warmed it considerably. The coffee table made of volcanic lava, the white Greek statue of a frenzied Maenad on the side table – these and many other objets d’art added interest to the room, lightened its Elizabethan darkness, and made it a most pleasant place in which to sit. A fire had been laid in
the massive fireplace. Holmes added a match and the room instantly bloomed with heat and became more pleasant still. With potatoes baking in the oven and each of us holding a glass of wine, Holmes concluded that the time for talk had come. He sat languorously in a wooden-armed chair, his left wrist dangling limply beyond the end of the one arm, his right hand holding the wine. He said, ‘You are remarkably patient, Watson. Your restraint does you credit.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I have been wondering why all these strange rituals have been necessary – tiptoeing like children through an empty house, listening to phone calls to no one, flinging perfectly good candlesticks into the duck pond, not to mention drawing most of the curtains on the lower floor, turning on lights of the upper floor, and backing a convertible out of the garage so it can sit in the weather and fill up with leaves.’
‘Simply put,’ said Holmes, ‘we are trying to make it look as if Colonel Davis has just arrived home and intends to go to bed at ten o’clock. We are, in short, inviting the intruder who intruded last week to intrude again.’
‘And who might that be?’
‘The same who committed the crime at The Old Vicarage.’
‘I do see that many elements are similar. The modus operandi is the same.’
‘Indeed,’ said Holmes. ‘It is true that the book about Abu Ghraib is newly published, and so might be expected to turn up anywhere. No great coincidence there. But when both crimes also feature men in black robes – Mrs Ogmore’s Father Pritchard, and Mrs Davis’s tortured monk – the odds of coincidence decline considerably. And when both victims are American servicemen who have recently served in the Iraq-Afghanistan theatre of operations, the chances of coincidence drop nearly to zero.’
‘Would you like my amateur opinion of this affair?’ I asked.
‘By all means,’ said Holmes, as he lifted his wine glass as if to toast me, and took a sip.
‘What happened here,’ I said, ‘was not a burglary attempt at all. Even as an amateur sleuth I can see that. My argument would run in this fashion: Davis came home from work and surprised an intruder who, when the doorbell rang, took advantage of the situation to knock Colonel Davis on the head, grab a few small items, and escape. But why grab so little? And why did he take only items so small that they could be put into a pocket or carried under a coat – the netsuke carvings, the Persian miniature paintings? If the colonel was out cold, and the visitors had left, why would he not take a few minutes more to fill the booty bag before decamping? We have seen, Holmes, that there are multitudes of objets d’art in the house to attract the interest of an art thief. So I will conclude that the intruder was here for some other purpose, that he was interrupted, that he grabbed a few easily hidden items to make the whole thing appear to be a bungled burglary.’