“I see. And there was no formal inquiry conducted?”
“Oh no. I could not have faced it, and the hotel-owners indicated that they did not want rumours spread about their house.”
“That is understandable,” I remarked.
“Yes, but hardly helpful to us,” said Holmes. “What else can you tell us about Colonel Wilson?”
“Well, what do you have in mind?”
“His first name?”
“Desmond, I think. He told me he is club secretary at the Burlington Club and I believe he takes rooms in St James’s. I also seem to remember him telling me he is a widower, when he explained about his strong religious feelings.”
“How did he come across to you when you elaborated on your rationalist standpoint?”
“He was very controlled and took care not to make passionate statements, but it was clear to me he was uncomfortable. So was I. In the end, I think we came to a sort of silent truce which derived from our not approaching the subject again. And, of course, I was more compliant after my nocturnal experience.”
“Ah yes, that,” Holmes remarked, as if the incident was only a marginal aspect of the affair. “Did you ever have the opportunity of inspecting the other bed?”
“Not really. When the maid mentioned that both had been slept in, I was angry with her, and left my room without trying to make heads or tails of it.”
“Was it the same type of bed as the one you slept in?”
Parkins raised his hands. “Mr Holmes, I appreciate your interest, but I fear your attempts at comprehending the matter is in vain. I understand that your impulse is to solve the mystery, but I am starting to think it has no natural solution. I only came here to share my experience with you, to unload my burden, as it were, and now that I have done so, I already feel better.”
“So the experience has managed to convert you?” I said.
The professor looked my way, and seemed a bit surprised at hearing it so frankly put. “Yes. Maybe it has.” His gaze wandered, as if he only now realised the extent of this business.
We were interrupted by Holmes loudly clapping his hands together and bouncing out of his armchair.
“Well then, there is not much more we can do for you. I hope you don’t think your visit has been in vain, and I promise you we will get back to you if we should have any further thoughts on the matter.”
Parkins looked content and was also on his feet.
“I thank you for your time, gentlemen. You may reach me at this address.” He handed Holmes a card and walked towards the door. He stopped on the threshold, hesitated for a second, then turned back to us. “There is just one more thing.”
Holmes stepped up to him. “Yes?”
“It is nothing, but I mention it, simply because I cannot fit it into the rest of the story. When I woke up after having fainted, the room was exactly like it had been except for one thing. The curtains were back. Good day to you.”
And with these words he left the room. Holmes closed the door behind him and returned to his seat with a smile. After a while, he became aware of my startled look. “Is something the matter, Watson?”
“I just think you could have been a bit more stubborn.”
“We did what he asked us to do. We listened to his story.”
“But what a story! Don’t try to tell me you weren’t intrigued by it.”
“On the contrary, my dear Watson. I found it very interesting indeed. Not to mention fraught with unexplored aspects which might very well provide the investigator with a natural solution. But you heard the man! His mind was made up. Besides, there was not much more he could tell us.”
Holmes started filling his briar.
“But do you intend to investigate it?” I asked.
“Yes and no. On the one hand, there is not much to investigate. It happened several weeks ago, and whatever traces there might have been at the hotel must be obliterated by now. Not to mention deliberately burned. On the other hand, it is intriguing to the point of being quite irresistible. And there is one lead which we may very well follow up.”
“Which one?”
“Colonel Desmond Wilson of the Burlington Club.”
Holmes lit the pipe and stretched out his legs in front of him.
“Three-pipe?” I inquired.
“Just so. But unless you are otherwise engaged, you may return this evening to see the case through.”
I had a few appointments at my practice that afternoon, one of which took much longer than I had expected, and it was well past six o’clock by the time I returned to Baker Street. Stepping through the door of the sitting room, I found it empty, but then suddenly, a white sheet jumped out from behind a window curtain with a booming wail. It only took me a second to realise that it was Holmes playing me a prank, and though I smiled at him, his trick, or perhaps more so the fact that, for a fraction of a second, I had fallen for it, quite annoyed me.
“Holmes, you rascal,” I said, barely hiding my irritation.
He pulled back the sheet, revealing a laughing face. “Please forgive me, my friend, for playing you such a simple trick, but you have also helped me in my work.”
“Indeed? How so?”
Holmes carelessly folded up the sheet into a bundle and threw it over the sofa.
“I wanted to know how an average reasonable man, and preferably one of a scientific schooling, would react when faced with an evidently bogus ghost.”
“And what is the conclusion of your experiment?”
“A most interesting one. Have a seat and help yourself to the sherry, and I will tell you what progress I have made since this morning.”
I did as he advised, and had soon forgotten my recent humiliation.
“It is remarkable, is it not,” began Holmes, “how most of us, in spite of our living in a modern age of reason, instinctively react to sights we cannot instantly explain as if they were encounters with the supernatural. You tried very well to hide your unease when confronted with my ghost, but I must say that even through the little holes I had cut into the sheet with a pair of scissors your instant reaction was apparent in your face. You did believe, if only for a very brief moment, that I was a ghost.”
I shifted in my seat at the hearing of this, but saw no point in vainly contradicting him.
“You need not be ashamed of this, Watson. I think any man would react in the same way. The question is why. There we very nearly move into your territory, old man. I believe that, deeply embedded into our subconscious, are conceptions which we have inherited from our forefathers, conceptions which have been created over a very long time, and a time during which, until only a century ago, most people did believe in the supernatural. And I think these conceptions constitute our natural instincts, the wild men within us expecting to meet goblins and devils while walking in the dark forest.”
“It is an interesting theory, Holmes. But it rests on the assumption that everybody is at heart a believer rather than a sceptic.”
“Well, to put it another way: we are first and foremost animals with primitive beliefs, and secondly civilised human beings with sophisticated beliefs. The primitive animal is dying within us, because it only took half a second for you to look through my disguise. But the more believable the apparition which confronts us, the more room to thrive we give to the irrationalist within. Thus, when we encounter a thing like that witnessed by Professor Parkins in his hotel room, which resists the most fervent attempts at rationalisation, our power of reason is severely damaged. Even a devout rationalist such as he finds reason to adjust his worldview.”
“That sounds reasonable enough,” I said. “But it hardly explains what it was he saw.”
“On the contrary, Watson. It explains why he reacted as he did to what he saw, and his reaction is the most important aspect of this whol
e business. About a hundred years ago, an interesting case took place in Hammersmith. You may have heard stories of the Hammersmith Ghost?”
“Yes, I’m sure I have. Several witnesses in the area claiming to have seen a white-clad apparition wandering the streets at night.”
“Exactly. It even came to the point where a local armed patrol was formed, and the leader of it shot dead a poor innocent plasterer on his way home, simply because the man was wearing the customary white clothes of his trade. The murderer, though, was eventually acquitted, since the jury thought he had been acting under the influence of the current state of panic following the ghost sightings. Consequently, all of a sudden shooting a man in cold blood was no longer a hanging matter.”
“I see your point. The reactions to the sightings created the hysteria that resulted in both a murder and the acquittal of the murderer.”
“And what was the cause of it? Eventually a local shoemaker stepped forward, admitting he had been dressing up in a sheet to get even on his apprentice, who had been scaring the shoemaker’s children with ghost stories.”
“You should be thankful I did not draw a gun at you!”
“You see, Watson? This business was the consequence of a man dressing up in no better way than I just did. Can you imagine the result if someone tried a little harder to trick a man?”
“So you don’t think what Professor Parkins saw was a ghost?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Watson. Ghosts don’t haunt second-rate hotel rooms. I can think of a lot of better things I would do if I were dead.”
“Well, how do you explain it then?”
“I have been sitting here by myself all day. I am tired of my own thoughts. What are your reflections?”
I sipped my glass of sherry, trying to come up with some concrete hypotheses. “I cannot say I have been wracking my brains on this problem all day, like you. But it does seem to me that the most apparent theory would be to assume that there was another person in Parkins’ room.”
“I quite agree, Watson, but how do you account for this person’s sudden disappearance right in front of Parkins’ eyes?”
“It was the middle of the night and he had been sleeping. Perhaps he wasn’t quite awake yet? Or perhaps he was fast asleep still, all of it simply being a really violent nightmare?”
“Ah, you mean it was a nightmare as in the old definition of the word? The incubus riding its victim. Demons creeping out of their hiding places by the shelter of darkness.”
“Well, not exactly, old fellow, do try to take me a bit seriously. I am trying to give you as good natural explanations as I can come up with. For instance, I know some doctors who have ascribed nightmares and ghost sightings to indigestion.”
Holmes bobbed in his seat. “Was it not how Ebenezer Scrooge accounted for his experiences? ‘An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.’ Well, these are all perfectly decent explanations for strange phenomena, but they don’t quite fit this particular case, do they?”
“You could relieve me of my agony by just saying what conclusion you have reached yourself.”
“I have reached none as yet. But I have been staring myself blind at the strange details of the case, for I believe they hold the key to the solution.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the curious disappearance and reappearance of the curtains in Professor Parkins’ hotel room.”
“There is no mystery about that. The maid removed them to be cleaned and only replaced them in the morning.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“What else?”
“Well, that is really it, apart from the more apparent things, like the little boy and the figure he saw in the window, and the immediate destruction of the bed clothes, all of which point to the inference that Colonel Wilson is behind it all somehow.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“The tin whistle that Parkins found.”
“What about it?”
“It just seems that it plays some part in this. Professor Parkins implicitly connects it to the ghost, and his narrative was founded on the notion that his playing it summoned something from the other side.”
“The only thing it summoned, Watson, was a devilish plan of deception. I’m tired of sitting in this chair now, it is time to act. Get your hat and coat and we will be on our way.”
“Where to?”
“The Burlington Club!”
Holmes was visibly annoyed during our cab ride to St James’s, mumbling to himself and impatiently knocking on the windowsill with his knuckles. Holmes had insisted on a growler instead of a hansom, but the noise from the traffic outside was still too loud for me to be able to hear what he was whispering to himself, although at one point it seemed to me he was repeating one word over and over. “How? How? How?” I made some feeble attempts at reassuring him, quoting his own motto about eliminating the impossible until the only likely scenario remains.
“That is what you have done,” I said.
“Yes, but I still have no answer. I know what did not happen, but I do not know what did happen.”
“Then we shall ask him.”
“Ask him?”
“Exactly. We are quite certain he has something to do with it, are we not? Then we will ask him how it was done.”
“I don’t know, Watson.”
“Come, Holmes. This despondency is not like you.”
“It has been increasing of late. Oh Watson, it’s at times such as these I get images in my head of that farm in the Sussex Downs.”
“You have been talking about that farm for years, Holmes, but you never seem to be able to acquire one. You are a town rat, Holmes, you would not last a fortnight living in the countryside.”
But he wasn’t listening. The driver had stopped at an intersection, and Holmes was looking out the window at the commotion on the pavement. There was an unusually large crowd of people assembled there for some reason. When Holmes turned his head back to me, he was smiling broadly.
“I think we will be able to face our adversary with our heads held up high.”
As our cab started moving again, he chuckled and rubbed his hands together, every inch the cunning reasoner I was so familiar with. He had evidently made a mental leap that rekindled his confidence.
“I say, what happened, Holmes?”
“Only something that should have happened several hours ago. I hope I’m not losing my touch, Watson. But I can hardly be blamed, for it is a very clever and devious man we are dealing with. And oh, what a sinister thing it is he has done. What a pleasure it will be to reveal it.”
Holmes’ epiphany could hardly have come at a better time, for we were now turning into one of the back lanes adjoining Piccadilly, which was the location of the Burlington Club. This club had been completely unknown to me, and its address seemed to guarantee its place in the margins of club land respectability while at the same time safely ensconced in relative obscurity. Holmes had made some researches into it during the day, uncovering that its origins were of quite recent date, being a branch of a religious organisation which had established some mission chapels in the most spiritually deprived areas of the East End.
“As far as I can apprehend,” said Holmes, “it is a sleepy congregation of retired vicars and charitably minded elderly gentlemen of modest means who wish to signify connections with a club that lies in the neighbourhood of the more respectable London clubs. The image, then, is hardly one of a diabolical circle of criminals, which, of course, in itself is exceedingly suspicious.”
We came to a halt in front of an unassuming door without steps, wedged in between houses of a more grand appearance. Holmes paid the cab driver while I accosted it. A minuscule brass plaque next to it read “T
he Burlington. Gentlemen’s Social Club.” Below it was a bell, which Holmes’ gloved hand quickly reached out and pulled.
“What is the plan?” I asked him.
“If my estimation of this man is correct,” he replied, “it will be enough to let him know that we know. That, I think, will frighten him sufficiently.”
“What do we know?”
Holmes turned to me. “Just agree with everything I say, Watson.”
“Right you are, Holmes.”
The door was opened by a liveried servant, who let us into a very small front room with only a desk and a man in it. The man rose from his chair behind the desk, saying, quite simply:
“Yes?”
“We are looking for Colonel Desmond Wilson,” stated Holmes frankly.
The man asked us to wait, and disappeared through a door at the back. The servant stood to attention next to us, but the diminutive size of the room gave me the feeling he was peering over my shoulder, making it impossible for Holmes and me to talk privately. Thus there were a few moments of silence until the receptionist returned with a distinguished elderly gentleman in tow. His age and his bearing made for an unlikely villain in this drama, but while being scrutinised by his penetrating gaze as we introduced us, I felt that there was shrewdness and duplicity behind his façade.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he asked.
“We are operating on account of Professor Perivale Parkins, whom I believe you are acquainted with,” said Holmes.
The man searched his memory. “Parkins, Parkins, ah yes, Parkins. I met him at Burnstow a few weeks ago. Yes, a decent sort of man. Is there any trouble?”
“It concerns the strange event that occurred on his last night there.”
“I see.” The man looked at us each in turn. “Perhaps it is better that we speak in private. If you would come this way, please.”
We were shown into a small and comfortably furnished room, evidently kept for the benefit of non-members. Curiously, it was windowless, and its walls were covered in thick dark hangings, muffling every sound we made while entering.
The Sensible Necktie and Other Stories of Sherlock Holmes Page 14