“Was that the second of Sophia’s two misfortunes?” Hannah asked. “She provoked Fairbrother’s ire, and there were unforeseen and devastating consequences?”
“Not exactly. We have already established that I, not Fairbrother, am responsible for what happened to Sophia. You really must try to keep up, Miss Holbrook. What would your patron think of such a sloppy lack of attention? Were he here, Sherlock Holmes would surely have some harsh words for you.”
“Harsher words for you, I fancy. But yes, he is not here, and I am not he, more’s the pity. My assumption was that you and Fairbrother conspired together in some sort of plot against Sophia. In retrospect that does seem unlikely. I am confused, however, as to how her embarrassing him might lead to you perpetrating some foul misdeed upon her.”
“The two are connected,” said Dr Pentecost. “Sophia’s second misfortune, generally speaking, was getting close to me. Specifically, it was a visit she paid to my study two full moons ago, straight after she was selected for graduation at a Delphic Ceremony.”
“You told me you were not at Charfrome when Sophia graduated,” Hannah said. “You said you were holidaying in Turkey. Unless it was just another lie.”
“I am full of them, am I not? Again, I was deflecting suspicion from myself, distancing myself from direct association with Sophia. It worked, didn’t it? Sherlock Holmes might not have taken my statement at face value. He might have sought to substantiate it. Shirley Holbrook, however, was happy to accept it as gospel.”
“Shirley Holbrook is kicking herself about that,” Hannah said, with sincere feeling. “Hannah Woolfson the more so.”
“Of course, if you had made the appropriate enquiries and discovered that I was not telling the truth, I would simply have claimed I had erred. You would have fallen for it, I am certain. ‘Daft old Dr Pentecost,’ you would have said to yourself. ‘Cannot keep his dates straight. Head too stuffed with Classical allusions.’ But, in the event, it was not necessary. Mr Holmes’s agent at Charfrome proved less thorough than she ought to have been. I am inclined to wonder why he placed so much faith in you.”
Feeling an up-swelling of defiance, Hannah said, “Should I disappear as Sophia did, you can be certain Mr Holmes will get wind of it and will not rest until the mystery is resolved. He will sniff out the culprit, Dr Pentecost. You will pay the price.”
“I have made provision against that, my dear,” said the classicist, unruffled. He took out his fob watch. “Indeed, Mr Holmes may be here sooner than you think, with trusty Dr Watson in tow. So allow me to finish my tale, if I may, since time is short.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
SOPHIA’S SECOND MISFORTUNE
“Sophia’s selection for graduation came as a surprise to many,” said Dr Pentecost. “Certainly hers was not among the names offered at the staff meeting the day before. We put forward several viable candidates to Sir Philip. However, the gods spoke at the ceremony, and one of the two nominees was Sophia.”
“The gods, it would seem, are capricious,” said Hannah.
“Their human mouthpiece is, at least. I can only assume that another voice had whispered in Sir Philip’s ear beforehand, suggesting Sophia’s candidacy, and he chose to heed it in preference to any divine voice.”
“The other voice being Fairbrother’s. That is my thinking.”
“That is my thinking too.”
“Fairbrother twisted his arm somehow.”
“Sir Philip would never admit it in my presence, but it is the only explanation that fits.”
Hannah’s mind went back to the conversation she had eavesdropped on, out by the shrine to Daedalus. She recalled how Buchanan and Fairbrother had argued, each heaping blame onto the other for some calamity.
“Just the other day I overheard Sir Philip complain to Fairbrother that he had been cajoled into helping him, against his better judgement,” she said. “The two of them had schemed together and it had backfired in some way. Fairbrother had played upon their consanguinity, forcing Sir Philip into some moral compromise he now regretted. Fairbrother himself did not appear to be regretful, but then I do not think he has ever been too troubled by a conscience.”
“I do not think he possesses one at all,” said Dr Pentecost. “Your evidence does seem to support my theory. I take back what I said just now. You are not a wholly incompetent sleuth.”
“You are too kind, Doctor,” Hannah said with heavy drollery. “I suppose Fairbrother stood to gain from Sophia’s graduation. She would be expected to leave Charfrome, for one thing, in which case, he would be shot of her.”
“There is more to it, however. Graduation is not the pleasantest of experiences.”
“The goat sacrifice. Sir Philip’s speaking in tongues.”
“That is the Delphic Ceremony. I mean the actual graduation.”
“I do not understand. There is a further level of ritual?”
“A deeper one,” said Dr Pentecost. “A Mystery beyond the Mystery. Answer me this. What must all those who aspire to graduate from any course of learning face?”
“An examination.”
“Correct. A final test of knowledge and aptitude. Proof that they have absorbed everything they have been taught and that they are ready to move on to whatever awaits them next. Sir Philip has manufactured just such a test – an intricate, ingenious trial of wit and fortitude, one that Daedalus himself would have been proud to have devised. It is a baptism by fire from which the participating Elysian emerges toughened, exhilarated and suffused with self-confidence. It is, if you will, a hero’s journey of the kind I spoke about in Tartarus. Katabasis followed by anabasis, descending to arise.”
Although his tone was triumphal, Hannah felt a vague, inexplicable chill.
“I cannot help but think,” said Dr Pentecost, “that Fairbrother made Sir Philip choose Sophia for graduation specifically because he wanted her to undergo the difficulties and indignities it involves.”
“As a punishment.”
Dr Pentecost nodded. “Getting his own back on her for the Philomena Caversham incident. You do not make a laughing stock of Edwin Fairbrother and expect to avoid retaliation. Only, as it happened, the retaliation was severer than he bargained for.”
The classicist paused, collecting himself.
“Sophia called by at my study as soon as the ceremony concluded. She was in a rush, eager to share the glad tidings. As it happened, I was not there at the time. Nor had I attended the ceremony. I was suffering from a digestive complaint.”
“Perhaps a physical manifestation of guilt,” Hannah said drolly.
Dr Pentecost waved a dismissive hand. “Merely a case of mild dyspepsia, that is all, but I felt that seeing a goat slaughtered – not to mention smelling the spilled blood – would not be beneficial to me in any way, in that condition. I had gone downstairs to the kitchen to brew myself some chamomile tea, to settle my stomach. I lost track of time and did not realise that the ceremony had finished. When I returned to my study, there was Sophia. Streaks of drying goat blood caked her brow and cheeks. She had a book in her hands.”
“A book?”
“Mine. A notebook. I had left it out upon my desk. This is it.”
From his pocket Dr Pentecost drew a small clothbound notebook, which he showed to Hannah. Upon the cover were written the words Veritas Vitarum.
“The Truth of Lives,” Hannah said.
“It is where I keep a record of others’ indiscretions.”
She opened the notebook and glanced through. At the top of each page, in the same hand that had written the title upon the cover, was a name, with several lines of Latin below. Hannah knew the language well enough to get the gist of each entry. The word peccatum – “sin” or “crime” – recurred, as did adulterium, which was easily enough translated, and peculatus, which bore a close resemblance to a legal term her father would often use for embezzlement, peculation.
“This is your blackmail journal,” she said.
“At my age, when
the memory is not what it used to be, it is prudent to write things down,” said Dr Pentecost. “The Homeric texts I learned by heart in my youth remain indelibly with me, but more recently apprehended facts have a tendency to slip away unless somehow preserved for posterity. Who knows? One of my blackmailees might make a belated attempt to call my bluff, and where would I be if I could not recall what misdeed I was dangling, like the sword of Damocles, over that individual’s head?”
He took the notebook from Hannah and tucked it back into his pocket.
“I had been completing a new entry,” he said, “and neglected to put the book away in a drawer, out of sight, when I left my study. Upon such small lapses do great tragedies hinge. Sophia picked it up out of curiosity and started flicking through.”
“She realised what the notebook was.”
“It was writ large upon her face as I walked in. Beneath the goat’s blood, her expression was appalled. She threw all manner of swingeing rebuke at me. She was near hysterical.”
“How readily do men accuse women of hysteria,” said Hannah, “when it is simply righteous anger.”
Dr Pentecost disregarded the interjection. “I withstood her castigation for as long as I could bear, then when she paused for breath I asked her, as challengingly as I dared, what she proposed to do. Her answer was to go to Sir Philip and tell all. Her mind was quite made up.”
“Sir Philip, I imagine, would take a very dim view of your behaviour.”
“Sir Philip comes across as a moral, upstanding fellow, but he is not as saintly as you might think. I said as much to Sophia, telling her she would be lucky to find much satisfaction with him. To that, she retorted that if she had no joy there, she would go to the police instead. Scotland Yard, she said, would do what had to be done.”
“Good for her.”
“She seemed determined to make good on the threat, what’s more,” Dr Pentecost said. “I stood to lose everything. It would be the ruin of me. The notebook was sufficient evidence to send me to gaol for a long time.”
“Did you…” Hannah found the words hard to voice. “Did you kill her?”
“It would perhaps have been the simplest solution to my predicament. I keep a paper knife upon the desk, you may have seen. I could have snatched it up and used it. But, although the idea flitted through my mind, I rejected it. Stab the girl? I lacked the wherewithal. I am not that sort of man. Moreover, it would have created complications. How to dispose of the body? How to clean up the blood?”
“Yes, how inconvenient for you, such ‘complications’.”
“Sarcasm ill suits you, my girl.”
“Yet strangely, under the circumstances, I find it a comfortable fit.”
Dr Pentecost leaned closer to her. His genial façade remained in place, but his eyes were cold and hard, as was his voice. “I did not do lightly what I ended up doing. You should be under no illusion about that. It was an agonising choice. It haunts me to this day. I did it only because I had to, because there was no acceptable alternative.”
“Your future over Sophia’s.”
“Precisely. Precisely! I made that calculation. One flighty little girl with not much brain and nothing of great value to offer the world, versus me, a noted academic, a scholar, an educator…”
“A jumped-up schoolmaster.”
“You cannot provoke me, Miss Holbrook. I know the weight of my talents, and it exceeds Sophia’s by far.”
“So you ever so decently refrained from killing her straight away. What did you do?”
“First, I obtained an assurance from her that she would not do anything about the notebook until the following morning.”
“How did you manage that?”
“By pleading, mostly. I begged her to get a good night’s sleep first. I suggested that tomorrow, when we were calmer, we could perhaps discuss the matter again. In essence, I was throwing myself on her mercy, or seeming to. Sophia had power over me, and I was inviting her to wield it with the same cool restraint with which she had got her own back on Edwin Fairbrother. ‘Festina lente,’ I told her. ‘Hasten slowly.’ It was Octavian’s favourite adage, according to Suetonius. The emperor despised rashness in anyone but especially in a leader or a military commander.”
“I’m sure Sophia responded well to another contribution from your inexhaustible fund of Classical quotations,” Hannah said.
“Sophia responded well to my importuning as a whole. She agreed to postpone any action until the morrow. She left the room with a gracious, rather regal air, my notebook firmly in her possession. I retrieved it later, of course, after…”
“After you did whatever frightful thing you did to her.”
“I needed it back and, once Sophia was out of the picture, I had very little trouble stealing into her room and locating it. Her efforts at hiding the notebook were pathetic. She had stowed it under her pillow, like some schoolgirl with a keepsake of her lover, as if it were not the incendiary document it was. Under her pillow! Even though she must have realised that, while she had it, my fate was firmly in her hands.”
“Whereas in fact hers lay in yours.”
“And,” said Dr Pentecost, with sinister detachment, “there was not a smidgeon of doubt in my mind what that fate would be.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
EVIL, OR BLIND NECESSITY
As Hannah reached this point in her narrative, I felt moved to air an opinion of the man.
“I have known some blackguards in my time,” I declared. “Jonathan Small. Colonel Sebastian Moran. Dr Grimesby Roylott. Not forgetting Professor James Moriarty. Dr Archibald Pentecost unquestionably belongs in their ranks. Give me a common, knife-wielding street-ruffian any day. Somehow villainy is all the more reprehensible when it adopts a smiling countenance and a veneer of sophistication.”
Hannah concurred. “Somebody as intelligent as Dr Pentecost,” said she, “could surely have thought up a less drastic solution than he did. It is not as if he was in the grip of a raging homicidal passion. His actions were cerebral and premeditated.”
“How did he kill her?”
“That is the truly fiendish part. He did not. Not as such. As I understand it, he engineered things so that Sophia brought about her own demise.”
“He coaxed her into killing herself? She was suicidal once, when he found her in tears by the lake. Did he resurrect those turbulent emotions in her again? Prey upon them until they overwhelmed her?”
“I confess I do not know the full details,” Hannah said. “I know that he manipulated her in some way. ‘I did nothing to Sophia directly,’ he said to me. ‘Her blood is not on my hands.’ More than that, however, he did not divulge, for he had run out of time and our conversation was at an end. He had a rendezvous to keep, he said. That was over two hours ago. I did not see him again until he returned with Hart, and you in Hart’s arms, out cold.”
“I was the rendezvous.”
“One must presume so. He anticipated that you would be arriving – you and, he hoped, Mr Holmes – and went out to head you off.”
“What would he have done if it had been the two of us rather than just me?” I mused, touching my bruised skull. “He would never have been able to knock both out.”
“He had reinforcements. Hart must have been lurking nearby.”
“You think so?”
“It stands to reason. Hart was there to scoop you up and carry you to the house.”
“I am surprised Hart himself did not carry out the assault.”
“You would have been on your guard if Hart had met you at the gates. Dr Pentecost, on the other hand, was above suspicion as far as you were concerned. He lulled you into a false sense of security.”
“That is true. I never saw the attack coming. Hannah, if I have not made this plain already, I am an absolute halfwit. I raced here impetuously, with every intent of making things better, and have succeeded only in making things worse.”
“Worse?” said she. “For yourself, perhaps.”
&nb
sp; “And for you. I have added to your woes by engendering feelings of guilt in you.”
“What ought I to feel guilty about?”
“That my death is on your conscience, for I am quite certain Dr Pentecost means to despatch the two of us in some way or other. Please do not chide yourself for one moment, though. I came willingly, and I assure you I would do so again, a hundred times, without hesitation, even knowing what I do now.”
“Oh, Dr Watson,” Hannah said, mock-sternly. “How can I feel guilty when all I feel is grateful? If we are shortly to meet our maker, I cannot think of anyone in whose company I would rather be. Any woman, even one as generally unimpressed by the male species as I, could not fail to be affected by such a display of selfless bravery.”
These words were like a charge of electricity to my heart, filling me with tingling vigour.
“But,” she went on, “let us not be quite so ready to abandon all hope just yet. You seem more or less recovered now from your injury.”
“I am much improved, although I would not say at my peak.”
“Between us, nonetheless, we might launch a coup against our gaolers. You said you have bullets in your pocket.”
“A couple of dozen.”
“And up there hangs a Tilley lamp. I am no explosives expert, but if we were to introduce the gunpowder of the one to the flame of the other…”
“It would create a very loud bang, a bright flash, plenty of smoke, but not much else.”
“It would also create a momentary distraction, startling to someone entering. It would dazzle and disorientate him sufficiently that we could leap upon him and attempt to disable him. With the element of surprise, we might just succeed.”
“Good heavens!” I said. “Hannah Woolfson, what a capital idea.”
“One not without its pitfalls. The timing would be crucial. We would need to ignite the small heap of gunpowder at precisely the right moment, somewhere by the door. I am not sure how we would arrange that. Nor am I sure how easy it is to dismantle a bullet cartridge in order to extract the charge.”
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