Death on a Pale Horse: Sherlock Holmes on Her Majesty's Secret Service

by Donald Thomas

  Captain Sellon’s body had been found by the daily maidservant a little before nine o’clock. Scotland Yard being close at hand to Victoria, Lestrade and his officers were alerted at once and had been on the scene well before ten. The police surgeon had come and gone shortly before Holmes and I arrived, at eleven. Joshua Sellon had therefore died between half-past six and quarter to nine.

  It was one thing to clear Henry Putney-Wilson of murder, but quite another to persuade him to talk about Carlyle Mansions. What was the strange “overseas medical mission?” How had it attracted this devout widower of a woman cruelly driven to take her own life by the conduct of Colonel Rawdon Moran? How had it involved a serving officer of the Provost Marshal Corps Special Investigation Branch?

  In his impersonation of Samuel Dordona on the previous day, our retired major of the 109th Regiment of Foot had promised to provide us with evidence of the murder of the late Prince Imperial of France. So long as Lestrade was present, it was clear that Sherlock Holmes would not discuss the matter, let alone invite him to produce the evidence.

  Putney-Wilson was obsessed by the evil of Moran. He had sent in his papers, resigned from the Army, and entrusted his two motherless children to the care of his brother, a wine-shipper in Portugal. The terrible crime against Emmeline Putney-Wilson remained on the record. The major sought justice for what my two subalterns had called moral homicide.

  Before he left Hyderabad to bring his children to Europe, the major had also heard of the terrible accident to his friend Captain Brenton Carey. The two men had shared a belief and a cause. Our client had been present at the bedside of the dying man, not as Samuel Dordona but as Henry Putney-Wilson. Then he had gone to ground as Dordona, an absurd persona striving to shed the martial qualities of his creator. Perhaps it was not entirely absurd, if the evangelism of an overseas mission was close to Putney-Wilson’s heart as an “uprighter.” As for Joshua Sellon, was it old friendship? Had Putney-Wilson, on detachment to Army Headquarters in Delhi, been seconded to military intelligence?

  He had tracked Moran from India to Africa during the Zulu War, then to the gold and diamonds of the Transvaal after the expulsion of the British. Some of his revelations I would rather not have heard. Moran was by then a professional criminal among canteen-keepers and wooden hotels that offered billiards and brandy to the rogues and the roués of the camps. He was well-matched by the “fathers” of crime, former convicts or the pickings of street corners all over Europe. They gambled on everything from animal fights and bare-knuckle boxing to cards, roulette, and coin-tossing. At intervals, the primitive and lawless townships were devastated by dysentry, typhus, and malaria, as surely as by devouring infections from houses of pleasure like The Scarlet Bar and The London Hotel.

  Among other criminals, Moran and a younger business partner, Andreis Reuter, had little to fear. Law in the settlements was the justice of a lynch-mob, bought and paid for. The Volksraad or the Supreme Court of the new South African Republic might as well have been on the moon. The punishments of hanging and flogging became entertainments, performed for audiences of the brutal and the bestial. The weak and unknown lay at the mercy of the rich and influential. The hangman’s profession was not restrained by rules of evidence or right of appeal.

  Reuter had been a youthful speculator, known as a “walloper.” He bought cheap from the diggers and sold at top prices to the jewellers of Cape Town, Amsterdam, or London. He became a prospector when there was hardly a law in the settlements, let alone a mercantile code. In swindler’s argot, “watered stock” was one of his frauds. He advertised shares in the London press, took the investors’ money, paid a promising dividend for the first year, and pocketed the rest as directors’ remuneration. No gold ore extraction had taken place. No plant or machinery had been installed—and none ever would be. But not one in ten thousand of the investors could travel to Southern Africa to see for themselves.

  With Moran’s assistance, Reuter now “salted” a so-called gold mine. The cracks and crevices of two worthless diggings were plugged with gold and silver ore to make the “discovery” of deposits possible. Moran was the man for that. His work would have taken an exceptional metallurgist to detect. At first, the two partners could not risk selling the mine. Instead, they sold shares in an exploration company and options on land adjoining the digging. Andreis Reuter soon believed that with “Colonel” Moran as his partner, he had secured a prize among men.

  Major Putney-Wilson saw his prey once and got no nearer Moran in the Transvaal. The colonel struck before suspicion touched him. He planned to rob his younger partner most efficiently. To do that, he must kill him. With Reuter dead, he might drain the funds and seize the shared assets.

  The murder had an ironic resemblance to the fate of Emmeline Putney-Wilson. Young Reuter was as hard-faced as the older Moran; but he had a weakness, though not much affection, for certain women. Most envied among these was a maidservant, Seraphina. Her beauty as a favourite might be her downfall, but her moment of hope had not yet passed.

  To Rawdon Moran, the trick was as easy as persuading a child to eat a poisoned apple. Age marked him almost as a father to the girl, and he played up to this. Through his dealings with Reuter, he became her confidant. Seraphina shared her secret ambition which was, in truth, no secret at all. She trusted him more readily when she discovered that she was pregnant by Reuter. She had no power over the man. Soon she might be lucky to have even a roof over her head. She could hope for no rescue but marriage.

  Moran was wiser in the ways of the world than any man she had known. He promised to bring Reuter to the right state of mind. The younger man was susceptible, but there was no time to lose. He must be worked upon before she confided her secret pregnancy to him.

  This simple and superstitious girl believed every word from one as confident in predicting as Moran. He understood the way these things are managed. He told her stories of “love-philtres” and their effects on the object of desire. A child in her ways, she would have believed him as readily if he had talked of wizards and dragons and magic spells.

  He had such a philtre. It was a powder from the root of the African dandelion, Flower of the Forest, tasteless and harmless. He showed or read to the girl a passage in a pharmacopoeia. It confirmed all this. Hidden in Reuter’s food or drink, it would begin to work at once. If it produced no effects after two or three days, she need only abandon it and her friend would think of something else. Even if this philtre failed, which it never did, she would be no worse off.

  Seraphina must keep this to herself until she was sure the powder had worked. If her lover were to hear of it, he might be angry. All her hopes would end completely and for ever. Once she had succeeded, he would never be angry again. Even if he were to learn the truth then, he would be grateful to her for their happiness. They would laugh together over it.

  In the face of advice from her kindly and persuasive mentor, Seraphina followed his instructions. Within a week, Andreis Reuter was dead. Under a brief and brutal interrogation by the township police, she was ready to tell the story of the philtre her friend had given her and which she administered to her lover. She could have done him no harm.

  There was no pathologist in the township. Two doctors examined the white powder. It was derived from an ordinary weedkiller, in which four grains of sodium arsenite produced two and a half grains of arsenic. As for the appearance of the corpse, the dead man was shrunken, eyeballs sunk. He had swallowed three grains of arsenic on a single occasion.

  Seraphina appealed to her friend. Rawdon Moran was nowhere to be found. Two days earlier, he had taken with him from their joint enterprise whatever of Andreis Reuter’s mineral and financial wealth he could lay hands on. It was less than he had hoped, but he was beyond the jurisdiction of the Transvaal. He very simply denied knowledge of the so-called lovers’ tragedy, except that he had long suspected Seraphina of robbing her master secretly. He had even warned Reuter, but the poor fool had been so besotted with his scullery prin
cess that he had taken no action. A cursory examination by the constables showed that Andreis Reuter had certainly been robbed by someone of great things and small.

  Had Colonel Rawdon Moran remained at the diggings, matters might not have gone well with him. But it appeared that he had left for British territory, less than a hundred miles away, with no intention of returning and in the knowledge that no British court could make him return. Then it was believed that he had reached Cape Town and boarded a Union Castle liner for England.

  At this point, Major Putney-Wilson paused and looked round at us.

  “You are mistaken, gentlemen, if you believe that my intention was to hunt the wretch and shoot him out of hand. I would far rather see him endure death by process of law. Joshua Sellon was my friend in Hyderabad and London. I was never far from him in the pursuit of justice. We worked separately but between us we traced Moran. He was never near British territory. He had headed north into Belgian jurisdiction. He reached the Congo, with such gold and cash as he had been able to loot from his partner. He did not sail to England but from Leopoldville to Antwerp. The Kingdom of Belgium sheltered him.”

  “And still does?” I asked.

  Putney-Wilson shook his head. “He may be anywhere between Belgium and the Congo Free State—or the Transvaal—as his criminal business takes him. I may say, gentlemen, that I have not been idle. I can tell you that according to the shipping-lists, he was a passenger on the Reine Hortense bound from Leopoldville to Madeira.”

  That was the end of our inquiry. Whatever his speed, even with the aid of the Trans-European express from Lisbon to outdistance a steamship, four days would still leave Moran on the wrong side of the English Channel when Joshua Sellon died.

  What of the murder of Andreis Reuter? Putney-Wilson assured us that in the Suid Afrikaansche Republick, as the independent Transvaal was now known, Moran had retained well-placed friends and influence enough to laugh out of court the only story that Seraphina, as she became known in the law reports, could tell in her defence. Justice in the local “high court” was speedy and rough. Seraphina had never denied giving her lover the philtre. Indeed, she had admitted it at the first opportunity, sure that it could not be the cause of Andreis Reuter’s death. On the evidence available, the tribunal was persuaded otherwise. Worse still, she had made a foolish attempt to incriminate a British officer of honourable rank and name who was not present to defend himself. As it happened, Moran was less concerned with honour and rank than with the discovery that Andreis Reuter was smarter than he had supposed: the account which held their working capital had been largely drawn upon by the young man who had felt the first doubts about his elder partner as a prize among men.

  For Seraphina there could be no hope. Her local judges presumed that she had acted in revenge against a man who had seduced her. An example must be made of such domestic “petit treason,” as the law called it. Crimes and executions were sufficiently commonplace in these primitive settlements not to cause much comment. Seraphina was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. Being pregnant, however, she was respited until the child should be born, so that she need not be hanged until after its birth.

  Major Putney-Wilson told his tale and looked at the horror on all our faces. It was not the facts which convinced us, so much as the manner in which he gave his account.

  “Be assured, gentlemen, Colonel Moran does not hate the young woman. He might not even desire her death in other circumstances. However, it became necessary to his scheme that she should die—that scheme could not work otherwise. Therefore it must be so. There is no anger in him on this occasion—just a cold and bitter self-interest.”

  For the only time in my acquaintanceship with him, I saw Holmes pause in asking a question because he feared the answer.

  “And has she died at their hands?”

  “No, sir. Not yet.”

  “Then she must not and shall not! Brother Mycroft shall answer for that.”

  10

  All that remained was to elicit from Major Putney-Wilson the evidence of the Prince Imperial’s murder. But Holmes looked at me with a hard and direct stare. In other words, as I had decided for myself, in the presence of Lestrade any such explanation must be postponed, nor did the major offer it. Better still, in the case of Joshua Sellon, the inspector seemed easily convinced of Putney-Wilson’s innocence. It would require only proof of the witness’s address and personal details before dismissing him from the case. All the same, Lestrade could not resist a brief reprimand.

  “Let this be a lesson to you, sir, how you go about to deceive. Good-hearted and brave you may be. All the same, certain things are best left to those of us whose business is to deal with the world’s wickedness.”

  Before Lestrade could develop this homily any further, Sir Melville Macnaghten, Commissioner of the Detective Division at Scotland Yard, arrived at Carlyle Mansions in a plain black carriage, a rolled umbrella in his hand. He entered the room upright as a guardsman. Indeed, he had far more the air of a brigadier than of a police commissioner. Neither Holmes nor I had ever met him before and, in any case, he was the last person to confide in a pair of private detectives.

  Two uniformed constables and a sergeant had accompanied Sir Melville to attend to the evidence. First the body must be moved. In a moment more, Captain Joshua Sellon lay on his back, staring up open-eyed from the black leather day-bed with a stretcher underneath him. Having read the police surgeon’s report, the Westminster coroner had now released the body to the nearby pathology department of St. Thomas’s Hospital. Sir Melville’s carriage had been accompanied by a hearse from the public mortuary.

  While the commissioner and his officers made a survey of the rooms, Holmes addressed our Scotland Yard friend for Sir Melville’s benefit.

  “We are grateful to you, Mr. Lestrade, for your hospitality, but I doubt that anything further will be found here. We must look elsewhere.”

  As he addressed Lestrade, he still looked purposefully at Major Putney-Wilson. Direct conversation with our client was impossible just then, and that evening he was to be dismissed from the case. Before he left, in the company of Sergeant Haskins, he drew from his pocket a visiting card. It bore upon it the legend of the Ravenswood Hotel in Southampton Row.

  “Should you wish to speak to me again, Mr. Holmes, you will find me here. I will give you the number of my room as well.”

  He drew a gold pencil from his pocket and scribbled on the back of the card. Holmes took it from him, glanced at the scribble, slipped it into his pocket and shook the major’s hand. It was clear that Sir Melville wanted the premises to himself and his uniformed constables. He was in no mood to listen to the “theories” of Sherlock Holmes.

  Even Lestrade was now instructed to make himself useful elsewhere by questioning the commissionaire of Landor Mansions across the street. Sir Melville had been quite taken with the notion of a sniper firing from the opposite window. Whatever the guardian of that mansion block had seen or heard was therefore of immediate importance to this theory, and he must be closely examined.

  As we came out by the main door, Putney-Wilson was sitting in a cab with Sergeant Haskins, about to start for Scotland Yard. Holmes tapped the pocket into which our client had seen him slip the hotel card. Then he touched the brim of his hat in acknowledgement and the major, as it seemed, passed out of our lives. Holmes later boasted of extracting a promise from him of an early return to the safety of India.

  Where Lestrade went, it was easy for Holmes and myself to follow. Presently we were sitting with the inspector in a cramped cubby-hole office behind the commissionaire’s desk on the opposite side of Carlyle Street.

  Holmes might be sceptical of chance encounters in criminal investigation, but the discovery of Joshua Sellon’s body was not the only coincidence that day. I need not describe the commissionaire at Landor Mansions, for I have already done so. Albert Gibbons was none other than that retired sergeant of the Royal Marines whom Holmes had identified when the man brought u
s Tobias Gregson’s message about the Brixton Road murder case, some months earlier. His commissionaire’s uniform, which was being cleaned and repaired at that time, was now back in place, but there was no doubt of his identity.

  Sergeant Gibbons had been pensioned by the Royal Navy, just as Holmes had guessed. He now supplemented this by such work as a dependable and honest man can come by. He was even privately employed on occasion by a Scotland Yard plain-clothes officer to carry routine messages. One of the kind had come to Holmes from Inspector Gregson. Yet it seemed that the sergeant was a stranger to Lestrade.

  As for the anchor tattooed on the back of this messenger’s right hand—there it was on Albert Gibbons. The splendid regulation side-whiskers of the non-commissioned officer were not easily forgotten. Like any master of the parade-ground, he stood back on his heels, not forward on his toes, and he walked like Major Putney-Wilson, as though to the beat of a drum-major’s stick. This upright stature and air of self-possession portrayed a man willing to serve but never to be subservient. The security of his modest pension no doubt contributed to this air of stoical independence.

  A man like our Royal Marine sergeant was unlikely to turn to crime—either from nature or necessity. With a sinking heart, I listened to Lestrade’s hectoring interrogation for the next twenty minutes. It was increasingly evident that he had no idea of Gibbons as anything but the porter of a mansion block. Sherlock Holmes checked a yawn with the back of his hand and sighed. If Albert Gibbons could “give the devil himself the slip,” as the inspector later complained, it was because he was plainly innocent.

  “No, gentlemen,” he said quietly, his sad eyes looking at us each in turn, “I heard no gunfire this morning. Nothing from here and nothing from across the road. And I’ve heard enough guns fired off in my time to know if one was discharged in this neighbourhood. It wasn’t. Even with all the other street noises, there’s something about a rifle or even a revolver shot that you can’t mistake for a Christmas cracker nor a firework. Not if you’ve heard it coming at you from the Rhoosian infantry at the Alma or at Inkerman. Nor if you’ve had a taste of being in the Naval Brigade under the guns of the Redan.”