Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle

by Tim Symonds

  With no sight of the sociable, Holmes turned back to me. ‘Watson, you are outraged this corpse was left unclothed, yet I say killing someone and leaving his body bereft of clothes in a public place was for a purpose.’

  ‘What would you deduce?’

  ‘It can only be to expose the patterning on the skin.’

  I stared at Holmes in bewilderment. ‘Holmes, the report makes no mention...’ I paused and guffawed. ‘Ah, you mean, what of the fish tattooed on the corpse’s hand in a peculiar pink pigment which the constable failed so lamentably to spot, the sign of the Hung anti-Manchu secret society?’

  ‘Watson,’ came Holmes’ immediate response, ‘despite your quite admirable attempt at humour, think, I beg you. Among the many foolish customs of the white man in Africa is the way he exposes his body to a drubbing by the celestial orb. He takes scissors and chops the knees off breeches. He rolls up the sleeves of khaki shirts to the armpit. He folds the shirt front inward to expose as much of his chest as possible which, might I bring to your attention, clearly approximates a ‘V’. In short, this is the corpse of a migrant bird from Tropical climes.’

  ‘Holmes,’ I scorned. ‘This is absurd! On what pretext are we to return to Crick’s End with a charge of murder! With what evidence shall we confront Siviter and the Kipling League? Some dozen lines contrived by a sub-editor’s lurid mind for the Late Edition of the Evening London Standard? A naked corpse, quite probably the victim of drowning, lying in a wagon pond at Scotney Castle in Kent? Nearby, clothes neatly folded and topped by a crimson hat perhaps of Tropical origin. Shall I go on - the V-shaped markings on a corpse’s chest... the use of reds, oranges and yellow for the wagon pond. Oh, yes, not forgetting a majestic spiny ... cordylid.’

  I stared boldly at my companion. ‘Can you not see? They will think, as I am myself inclined to, you are demented. At best they’ll greet us at the door and conclude you have a pawky sense of humour never before discovered, even by you, despite all your forensic skill, against which both they and I should guard ourselves. Certainly its employment in this enterprise and fashion is extremely untimely.’

  Other rail passengers were growing ever more numerous around us. I went on in a lower tone, ‘My dear Holmes, by long experience I have learned the wisdom of obeying your injunctions to the letter. Yet I must now inform you I am seriously disinclined to believe your conclusions despite the edifice you erect. You must rally support for any facts you muster. So far, the facts themselves are far from dramatic or remarkable except through the lens of an overblown interpretation. On the contrary. They are so slight and commonplace that I would not feel justified in laying them before our loyal public regardless of the clamour for further chronicles from the Editor of The Strand. You may have - will have - ranged against you constable and coroner and Lord Fusey and his woodman too, and if you have your way several illustrious members of the Kipling League. And Pevensey. And further,’ I threw in desperately, ‘why return to Crick’s End? Why not to where the crime took place, at Scotney Castle, if crime it is, which is still so entirely debatable?’

  To this last objection, Holmes responded with an impatient cry.

  ‘Watson, for heaven’s sake, apply your telescope to your eye not your ear! We do not need to look where the body lay but where its heart ceased beating. Have you not learned in our many years together, where the corpse lies may be the greatest lie of all? Have you not had your fill of sightless eyes? Besides, by now it rests under blocks of ice on some butcher’s slab in Lamberhurst or Tunbridge Wells. What do you hope to discover? A pair of ammunition boots? The body on a gun-carriage, his boots reversed in the stirrups of his favourite charger, led by his groom with his dog beside him? This is not an instance where I lie on my face with a pocket-lens to my eye. No, Watson, there is no crop for harvesting at Scotney Castle. Do you not recall the words of Brother Mycroft - ‘give me the details and I will give you an expert opinion’? And uttered where? Seated in his arm-chair among the periodicals at the Diogenes Club. This is a case where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than the acquiring of fresh evidence. We have enough from this newspaper account. Pevensey’s oils have told us Scotney Castle contains both wagon pond and moat. The evidence you use to refute my conclusions, namely that this person - shall we call him a passing stranger - was sighted at the wagon pond at three o’ clock, the presumption it was a self-inflicted or accidental drowning, the inference the clothes and dark glasses were stolen, all comes from one direction and one alone. As to further clues on offer at Scotney Castle, do you imagine the marks of an assassin’s heel would survive the excited tramplings of the local Peeler or the horses’ hoofs as they roll the wagon back and forth to soak the wheels?’

  Holmes Insists A Murder Has Taken Place

  The light carriage pulled by a fine pair of greys came clip-clopping around the bend from the village, the cabman high astride the raised seat at the rear. He was attired in a blue surtout rather the worse for wear, tipped at the collar with red, and leather breeches and brown top boots. The reins ran through the harness of the collar and up at a steep angle into his hands. At the rear, attached by a slight chain, trotted a carriage-dog, a brown-spotted Dalmatian. The young newspaper vendor clutched anxiously at the cabman’s side like a noviciate postilion. We watched the cab’s pair of handsome greys begin to turn in a slow circle, the young vendor beckoning us with excited gestures. At that same moment, to my despair, with a snort of its long black nostril, the train for London steamed alongside the platform.

  ‘Holmes,’ I cried, ‘I implore you. Let me pay the boy his ninepence and give the cabman a florin and send him home, and we shall be on our way to London.’

  My companion paid no attention to my urgent appeal. Beckoning me to follow, he strode across to the carriage, looked up at the coachman and demanded, ‘Do you know Crick’s End?’

  ‘Everyone do, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,’ came the response.

  ‘So you know me, my good man?’

  ‘Everyone do, Sir,’ the coachman replied. ‘We heard you was at the manor.’

  ‘Then hasten there at your fastest pace,’ Holmes ordered. ‘How long do you estimate?’

  ‘Half an hour should do it.’

  ‘Half a sovereign if you do it in twenty minutes.’

  Holmes clambered in the cab before me and looked back through the open door with a quelling expression. ‘Come in and seat yourself comfortably, Watson, we still have some time before we confront them at their door. Now,’ he added, once I had joined him with a hang-dog look, ‘bring out the gazetteer. Let us have the facts. Take up where you ended on our downward journey. Please select the most important elements concerning the Transvaal from events preceding the South African War.’

  Not since The Five Orange Pips had I seen Holmes riven by such barely-contained excitement. Soon we should be grotesquely insulting four of the first brains of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen. My spirits drifted ever-downward. I retrieved the gazetteer, and began, ‘The Transvaal is central to the strategic map of Africa.’

  ‘Yes!’ Holmes breathed. ‘Go on! Do go on!’

  Main towns: Potchefstroom and Pretoria.

  Republic founded in 1840 by dissident descendants of the Dutch settlers in Cape Colony and Natal.

  Annexed in 1877 by Cape government on spurious grounds of ‘disorder’.’

  ‘Once Bismarck made his unexpected lunge at Angra Pequena, the Cape had a new German colony on its north-western border. If the Transvaal, at a second attempt, could take Bechuanaland, it would join hands with Germany and snap its fingers at British paramountcy.’

  I looked up. ‘Holmes here is a mention of Viscount Van Beers.’

  ‘Good! Excellent, in fact!’ Holmes cried. ‘Read on.’

  ‘1897 Van Beers sent to Cape Town to pick up the pieces after the Jam
eson Raid. He returned to London in 1897 ‘to stamp on Chamberlain’s ‘rose-coloured illusions’ about South Africa. Kruger re-elected for a fourth term as President of the Transvaal. Kruger believed Van Beers’ aim was to humiliate the Volk, divide them from their fellow Boers of the Orange Free State and the Afrikaners of Cape Colony. Kruger purchasing large quantities of guns from Germany. The gold-rush to the Transvaal turned South Africa on its head: the new political centre was Johannesburg, not Cape Town. The Transvaal Boers could unite the whole of South Africa in a republic and Britain would lose both Natal and the Cape.’

  On I read. ‘’If war was to ensue, it needed a crisis. It is now known Van Beers forged a secret alliance with the two richest ‘gold bugs’ of the Rand, Alfred Weit and Sir Julius Wernher. In 1899 they and Van Beers paid for an anti-Kruger press campaign in Johannesburg, a significant destabilising factor in the path to the outbreak of war. Weit and Wernher among other of the Randlords believed to have joined with Van Beers in a secret plan to settle the newly-annexed Transvaal and Orange River Colony with Anglo-Saxon emigrants.’

  Holmes muttered, ‘Secret alliances... the Jameson Raid... why, the unscrupulous, unprincipled adventurers!’

  My heart was turning leaden. ‘Holmes,’ I protested, putting the gazetteer to one side, my eyes on the paved road unravelling beneath us, ‘these leaps of yours are most entertaining but they remain mere will-o’-the wisps of your imagination. I can hardly bear the thought of standing at your side as you confront the members of the Kipling League. I do not judge Van Beers to be of a particularly forgiving disposition. We are recklessly to accuse four - throw in Lord Fusey, five - of the richest, most masterful men in England - six if we add the President of the Royal Academy - with the murder of a stranger, perhaps a Boer, more likely a tramp in stolen attire, with not a jot or tittle of proof! One does not need to be a toady or a sycophant to recognise the power and eminence of the Kipling League. They are men of the utmost wealth and consideration. Why, Holmes, the four in the parlour were in King Edward’s grouse-shooting parties when he was heir to the throne!’

  Despite my heated protestations, Holmes’ demeanour remained as resolute and collected as ever I had seen.

  ‘For fear of being overheard, Watson,’ he replied, pointing upwards to the cabman’s perch, ‘let us henceforth refer to these members of the Kipling League as the Sungazer Gang. I tell you, notwithstanding you deem them the greatest subjects of the Crown, they have the edge over all the crooks and loafers we have ever encountered in all the underworlds of Liverpool or London.’

  ‘By the by,’ I returned, ‘though I do not suppose it to be of the slightest importance - certainly you appear to consider it entirely inconsequential to your case - you have not yet answered how you intend to attribute opportunity to the Kipling League when, as you admit, all four were in our presence in the parlour at three this afternoon, the very hour this crime, if crime it is, is purported to have happened quite some miles away.’

  Mistaking my companion’s failure to retort at once as discomfit at my reminder, I took a risky step and added a provocation. ‘Surely that is fatal to your theory?’

  Rather than answering with the angry words I anticipated, Holmes responded with a heightened amiability which served only to increase my agitation. ‘Watson, of course that is fatal to my theory - of course we were with them at that time.’

  ‘But Holmes,’ I floundered, ‘if we were with them ... how can they be...?’

  ‘Perhaps I should put it another way,’ Holmes went on. ‘Of course we were with them at three o’ clock, the very time the coroner will rule the time of death. That was their intention. Watson, don’t you see, that’s the infernal genius of this ... this Sungazer Gang. They will call us - you and me - as principal witnesses before a jury of honest foremen and clerks from the stores. I contend you and I are the planet-wheel in a most cunning scheme. Do you not see,’ he repeated, voice dropping low, ‘that is why we received their urgent summons. We are to be their alibi if needed.’

  ‘Alibi!’ I exclaimed. I gave an incredulous laugh. ‘My dear fellow, surely...’

  ‘Surely you say! I say surely you see the similarity to the Foxy Ferdinand matter?’ Holmes retorted.

  This was a reference to the case of the Prince Regnant of Bulgaria four years earlier, a matter of the most profound international importance. My account in manuscript form lies in the tin box under our landlady’s supervision, never to see the light of day until the Prince’s death or exile.

  Holmes shook his head.

  ‘Vanity, Watson! Vanity as vast as their power and wealth. I say they retained this Boer as their guest behind those high Yew hedges until this morning, kept alive like a chicken for a voodoo ceremony in Port-au-Prince - until they were assured I was back at Baker Street fresh from my peregrinations around the docks. Hence the watchman with the amber eyes who never sold a hare. Once they were assured their telegram had found its mark, they killed the Boer and cast him in the moat.’

  ‘Moat, Holmes?’ I exclaimed in great surprise. ‘You are mistaken. The body was discovered in the wagon pond.’

  ‘Indeed - an inexplicable fact for which I do not as yet have an answer.’

  My heart leapt with disloyal hope as he went on.

  ‘Watson, I agree I must do some pondering on that inconvenient matter. We are lost if an answer to the conundrum is not soon forthcoming. As to motive... it is surely connected to the recent South African War. There remain many unresolved hatreds. Boers’ wives and children by the thousand died from enteric fever in our concentration camps. Or a more venal reason. You yourself have recounted tales of the maelstroms that lay around the reefs of gold in Australia - why not around South Africa’s Rand?’

  ‘Holmes,’ I argued, ‘Weit and Van Beers and Sir Julius comprise Randlord and Gold Bugs, but what about our host? Siviter’s life is the sub-Continent, not South Africa. I estimate he possesses more than five hundred volumes on India.’

  ‘What drives Siviter is more than India. He is a true adherent of his literary Master. Recall, Watson, Kipling’s poem The Mary Gloster - hard work, duty, self-sacrifice and resilience. These Sungazers are hardly red republicans. They are men of Empire and the White Man’s burden.’

  He was silent for a moment, followed by, ‘But what of India?’

  ‘Populous?’ I ventured, edging towards firmer ground.

  ‘Very populous.’

  ‘Colourful?’

  ‘Yes, colourful.’

  ’Large?’

  Holmes frowned impatiently.

  ‘Yes, Watson, yes, it is a sub-continent, very large, very populous, but politically?’

  ‘Why, in ferment,’ I replied.

  ‘Indeed, Watson, there you have it. To a medical man like you, India is the geographic expression of mosquitoes and fevers. India and Afghanistan left you with a shattered leg and shoulder, a half-pay surgeon on a pension of eleven shillings and sixpence a day. But what of salted Anglo-Indians like Siviter? For him it is the great pilgrimage to Hurdwar on the holy Ganges. The ‘wind of March against the lattice blowing’.’

  Stirred at this unexpected poetry coming from my friend. I joined in, a chorus to his verse. ‘‘Tamarisk-trees white with the dust of rainless days’.’

  ‘The road from Jugdullack to Butkhak! What of the festival of lights at Chiragan? The Levées at Government House. The Carabiniers... the drink called peg. The Squadrons - think, old warrior that you are, of the Punjab Cavalry!’

  Tears sprang to my eyes for the second time that day. ‘The day-long rolling thunder among the Khyber hills. The 14th Bengal Lancers,’ I added.

  Holmes leaned forward. He continued in a low and serious voice, ‘To them it is love and longing of a mystical kind. Yes, Watson, you are right. Rail as he might against the tide of unclean humanity amid the seething, stinking bustees of the preside
ncy cities, when Siviter dies we will not discover ‘Crick’s End’ lying on his heart but Lahore or Simla, the Abode of the Little Tin Gods. In short, he adores being Heaven-born, white stranger within the gates of Hindoos, Mohammedans and the Sikh, set apart in a vast, anonymous multitude, scion of an empire which contains only Milords Anglais, soldiers, shipowners, magnates, famous barristers and explorers.’

  He paused dramatically. ‘Now, however, England’s rule is being ripped asunder by agitating natives. You heard his references to lascars - ‘caste-ridden, venal and incompetent’, and ‘hybrid, University-trained mules’. Even if Siviter has not yet cast his topee into the waters of Port Said en route to Blighty, India is saying good-bye and he must turn with urgency elsewhere.’

  As he spoke, the coachman called out ‘whoa!’. The horses halted. The tinkle of a thin chain from the rear told us the brown-spotted carriage-dog was being released and led away.

  Holmes continued insistently. ‘As India loosens from Siviter’s grasp, what then? You read his words in the gazetteer. England is ‘slipping down the broad, easy decline to our extinction as a Great Power with an influence to exert on the side of the angels, with a civilising tradition to plant all the world over’. Where better to cast the fly of the White Man’s burden next than on the sweated backs of Zulus and poor devils in Matabeleland?’

  With a jerk our journey recommenced. The promise of a half-sovereign in mind, our driver whipped up the greys. We sped at a flat run, the vehicle whirling along the ridge. Holmes resumed his discourse. ‘I have enough to beard them in their lair, though mark my words, before we pass this to Scotland Yard it might take seclusion and a seven-percent solution, or an ounce of shag from Bradley’s before we meet them in a Court of Law.’

  He wiped the condensation from the cab window and continued, ‘Take the corpse. It is clear the local constabulary has no thought of suspicious death, itself no small achievement by the Kipling League.’