Holmes’s eyebrows were raised in surprise. “That is not what she said, Inspector.”
“As good as, I’d say. The sense of the statement if you’d rather, then; that it could well have been in reference to the recent fight he’d had with Captain Hopkirk?”
“It might refer to any number of things, Inspector,” Holmes insisted. “I could not say what exactly.”
Fisher frowned in annoyance. It was plain that he was unimpressed with Holmes’s refusal to accommodate his suggestions. “So, Salah could have sought Hopkirk for a reckoning and then come out the worse in the fight which followed? Or Hopkirk could have decided to finish the job you interrupted?”
Holmes, too, was showing increasing signs of irritation. “I really could not say, Inspector,” he snapped. “I try not to engage in idle speculation.”
The change in Inspector Fisher was immediate. “In the police force, we call such speculation ‘theorising’ and do not consider it idle in the least. In fact, I have found it very handy in my police career.” As he spoke, his voice became cold and unfriendly. He carefully closed his notebook and laid it on the table at his side. “Another thing I’ve found, Mr. Holmes, is that the guilty party in any crime is most commonly – indeed, almost exclusively – uncovered due to routine police work. Speaking to the parties involved, checking that their stories agree, digging about in the weeds and the shadows. Dogged and unglamorous, to be sure, but almost always the best path to a swift and successful conclusion.” He smiled, but his eyes remained cold and sharp. “The sort of handy deductions with which you solve your cases in The Strand are rare in the real world, Mr Holmes. Cleverness is all very well, but without the embellishment of Dr Watson’s pen, I’d bet it’s all but useless when faced with actual crime.” He retrieved his notebook and tucked it inside his jacket, leaning forward in his chair. “I should tell you now that I decided to speak to you prior to introducing myself formally to the other guests in order that I might judge the type of person you are. I am used to deciding the path my cases will take, and do not appreciate interference from outsiders. Bearing that in mind, you will realise that I did not, therefore, appreciate receiving a telegram from my chief constable this morning, instructing me to make use of your particular talents while investigating this murder. I was rendered even less appreciative on discovering that the reason for this instruction was an earlier telegram from an Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, who somehow knew you were here and took it upon himself to appraise the chief constable of that fact.” As he spoke, he rose to his feet, so that he was looking down upon us. “So far as I’m concerned, the fact that you are Sherlock Holmes and John Watson does not make you any the less suspects in the murder of Alim Salah. I have been ordered to make use of you. Very well, you may observe when I deem it appropriate, but nothing more. I am now officially cautioning you that you have no other role to play in this investigation. Furthermore, you may not involve yourselves in questioning the other guests. I would be obliged if you would stay within the house and its grounds, unless you have been given permission from me to leave. That,” he concluded grimly, “includes any trip to the village, which is from this moment out of bounds to anyone present in the house at the time of Mr Salah’s death. Is that understood?”
A mere half hour had passed since we had met Inspector Fisher, but even on so brief an acquaintance, it was clear that he was a man both quick to take offence and very aware of his own status. I could scarcely help but think that he and Sherlock Holmes were not well suited to working together.
Holmes’s reply simply confirmed my theory. “Of course, Inspector,” he said coldly. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have some reading to do.”
He too rose to his feet and, without another word, stalked from the room. Left alone with Inspector Fisher, I reached for the teapot and poured myself a fresh cup. He looked down at me for a moment then muttered, “Dr Watson,” and followed Holmes into the hall. I lit a cigarette and expressed a silent hope that the case would be solved quickly and the two men would in the meantime have no cause to clash. Even then, it seemed a wish that was unlikely to be granted.
Chapter Twelve
Reilly is Suspected
For all my misgivings, the remainder of the morning passed without incident. Fisher spoke to everyone in the house individually, while his two assistants disappeared into the cellar and the grounds, digging about in the weeds and the shadows, as he had put it. Now and again, as I sat in the library, I saw one or other of them scurry past, the bearer, presumably, of new evidence.
Holmes kept himself to his room, emerging only briefly at midday to request a pot of tea and a sandwich from Alice. I was still in the library, discussing some of the more eccentric of the Thorpe ancestors with Buxton over a light lunch, and I only caught a glimpse of my friend as he hurried past the door and again as he hurried back.
I was considering a post-luncheon nap, in fact, when the shorter of Fisher’s constables appeared at the library door and asked me to accompany him to the room upstairs, formerly Holmes’s interview room, which Fisher had commandeered as his base of operations. It seemed Inspector Fisher had proven as good as his word. He had promised swift action, and within a few hours, he had fixed upon a suspect and had summoned him for questioning.
We were to collect Holmes on our way, the little policeman explained, but he was already standing outside his room, waiting for us, when we reached him. Even though there was a door, a short flight of stairs and a corridor between us and the interview room, we could clearly hear the sound of raised voices emanating from that direction. One of them was unmistakably the inspector’s, but it took me a second to recognise the owner of the other as Stephen Reilly.
“I have never in my life been spoken to in such a manner,” he was declaring loudly as we preceded the constable into the room. “Back home, the police force remember that they are employees and act accordingly. They do not harass gentlemen of substance on the say-so of witless subordinates, nor do they make accusations based on nothing more than a… a ragged smudge in the earth!”
I had remarked before on Reilly’s bronzed appearance, but even through his tanned skin it was clear that he was furiously angry. He banged a fist hard on the table in front of Inspector Fisher – who sat, his face expressionless, in his chair, a scattering of pages torn from his notebook in front of him – and drew in a huge breath, the better to renew his verbal attack.
“I have not accused you of anything, Mr Reilly,” the inspector said quietly, before he could do so. “I merely ask the question. Where were you between half past ten and one a.m. on Sunday night?”
“And I have answered that I was in my room, asleep!”
“Indeed you have, sir, indeed you have. And yet how is it that my constable has just discovered a set of footprints which exactly match those made by your fur boots in the snow outside the rear entrance to the house, and also down the sloping pathway which leads to the door into the cellar? Prints,” he went on quickly, observing Reilly about to explode once more, “which could only have been made that night, given that the snow stopped falling at half past twelve on Sunday evening and you spent last night in a room with Mr Buxton?” He looked up at Reilly and waited for a reply.
The elderly planter said nothing. He glared down at Fisher, who returned the stare unblinkingly. Eventually, Reilly looked away, and said, “Perhaps someone else was wearing my boots? They are the best to be had in this house, after all.”
“And then replaced them in your room afterwards? The boots supplied by Mr Buxton are still outside your room, but your fur boots were retrieved from the side of your bed by Constable Halliday not ten minutes ago.”
“How dare you enter my room!” Reilly’s voice rose to a pitch of fury once more, but I had the distinct impression that his outrage was, if not exactly feigned, then prompted more by fear than anger. When the inspector again said nothing, he allowed his expostulation to tail off; in recognition, I suspected, that the manner in which Fisher
had obtained the boots was hardly germane at this point. He turned and looked imploringly at Holmes, as though beseeching him to intervene, but my friend remained silent.
“I was in the rear garden late on Sunday night,” he said finally. “But I give you my word that I had nothing to do with the death of Mr Salah. And if a gentleman’s word is not good enough for you, Inspector, then I shall keep my own counsel until my lawyer is present.”
Fisher was no fool. He knew that Reilly was a rich man, and that once his lawyer became involved there was little chance of him saying anything useful. But what could he do? If Reilly was determined not to speak, then he could not force him. He made one final effort, however. “That’s as may be,” he said. “But perhaps you would care to comment on a separate, but related, matter? I am informed that Salah accompanied you down to the village after his fight with Captain Hopkirk, and that when you returned there was obvious ill feeling between you?”
If Fisher had hoped to disconcert Reilly by this new line of questioning, he was to be disappointed. Where he had undoubtedly been flustered by the need to explain his presence in the garden, now he was completely sanguine.
“I did not speak to Salah either on the way to the village or on the way back, Inspector,” he declared confidently. “In fact, I have no idea why he chose to accompany me at all. I went straight to the post office and left him in the street outside. When I emerged, he was standing in the doorway to the public house, sheltering from the wind. He followed me back up the road, but as I say, we exchanged not a word. And that is all I have to say to you until my lawyer is present!”
Fisher closed his notebook. “Very well,” he sighed. “But be aware that juries in this country take a dim view of defendants who will not explain themselves. Halliday, take Mr Reilly to any empty bedroom you can find and lock him in. He is not under arrest at present, but I would like to know where he is. Stand guard outside until I decide what to do with him.”
Constable Halliday nodded and politely indicated that Reilly should accompany him from the room. Before he did so, however, the accused man stopped in front of Holmes and me. “It is nobody’s business but my own if I was outside or why. I will explain my behaviour once we are in London and my lawyer is present, but I beg of you in the meantime, do not be like this fool of an inspector. Continue your investigations, Mr Holmes. Discover who murdered Mr Salah – for I promise you that I had no hand in it!”
With that, he left the room, with Halliday in close attendance. Holmes and I found ourselves alone with Inspector Fisher.
“You will have gathered that the police investigation has already borne fruit,” he announced. “By means of the sort of assiduous but unglamorous police work I mentioned to you earlier, my men discovered several very distinct footprints in the snow to the rear of the house. Each of these prints was made by an item of footwear the size of a gentleman’s boot, but extensively fringed all around.” He pushed a piece of paper towards us, on which was drawn the rough shape of a man’s shoe, with an array of irregular spikes projecting from it. “As you can see,” he went on, “the hairs of the fringe have clumped together in the snow, but tests I made earlier have ascertained that this is exactly the sort of print which would be made by a set of fur-covered boots, such as those worn by Mr Reilly. And as you just heard, he was unwilling – or unable – to explain what he was doing in the freezing cold and pitch dark at the back of the house in the middle of the night.”
He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his seat. “We also have the evidence of… well, everyone actually… that Reilly and Salah fought at their first meeting.”
“Hardly fought, Inspector,” Holmes protested. “A few harsh words were exchanged, no more than that.”
“Did you exchange any harsh words with the dead man, Mr Holmes? You, Dr Watson? No, you did not. I’m sure that you take my point.”
“I am not sure that I do, Inspector,” Holmes replied. “Mr Reilly’s falling out with Salah was by no means the most severe among the guests, and hardly seems likely to provide motive for a murderous attack.”
“Even so, he was in the vicinity, for reasons which he will not explain, at the exact time the dead man was murdered. That is an incontrovertible fact.”
“Even if that were proof of anything other than the fact that he was standing in the snow in the dark – which it is not – your incontrovertible fact is not one which you will be able readily to demonstrate in court, Inspector.”
“Really?” Fisher sneered. “I don’t see why not.”
“As we speak, your evidence is melting. These clumps of hair are, I presume, reasonably clear at the moment, but they will either melt away if the temperature rises even a tiny amount, or be covered, should it snow again. Either way, you cannot preserve them and will not be able to show any jury the footprints themselves.”
The expression on Fisher’s face would have been comical had the matter not been so serious. Where he had been triumphant, now he was downcast, as the realisation sank in that his physical evidence had very likely already disappeared.
“A jury will accept the word of a policeman!” he protested after a second’s reflection.
“Very probably,” said Holmes. “But a good lawyer will have no difficulty in suggesting that the poor overworked policeman, tired after a day’s hard work, is not fully to be trusted when it comes to identifying specific items of footwear by the tread they leave in snow. And Mr Reilly will have a very good lawyer, of that I am certain.
“Besides, you have no reason to suspect Reilly, other than the fact he was outside, near the place where the body was secreted. It is not nearly enough evidence to hold him in a bedroom, far less a prison cell.”
Fisher glared at Holmes, but remained silent. Holmes stared steadily back, and it was the inspector who dropped his eyes first. He stalked to the door and threw it open.
“Halliday!” he shouted down the corridor. “Let Mr Reilly go. For now, he’s a free man.”
He walked back to his desk and sat down, pulling his notebook towards him and picking up his pencil. He began to take notes on a blank page then, without looking up, muttered in our direction, “If you will excuse me, gentlemen.”
The almost imperceptible smile that played about the corners of Holmes’s mouth was the only thing that betrayed his pleasure at the inspector’s discomfiture. As we walked out of the room, I hoped that my own feelings were as well disguised.
* * *
With no official role in the investigation, and the inspector’s admonition not to leave the grounds still fresh in our ears, we decided to walk down to a structure that Buxton had described as “the finest shell grotto north of Margate”.
It was only a five-minute walk from the house, across an area so completely flat that I assumed a lawn must lie underneath the thick blanket of snow. As we walked, we smoked in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. My own, I must admit, were largely taken up with the realisation that the appearance of a corpse had, in a way I did not care to interrogate too closely, actually improved the tenor of our trip. Holmes had demonstrated an absolute lack of interest in the question of the Thorpe Ruby and not much more in the missing art collection, but the possibility of a murder had certainly invigorated him. Even walking across the snowy lawn, his stride was brisk and his face flushed with what I was certain was exercise of both a physical and a mental nature.
As if to prove my supposition, he suddenly stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “Now that we are clear of the house and the inspector’s prying assistants, I have a confession to make, Watson,” he said. “I have not been completely truthful about Mr Reilly.”
He reached into his coat pocket, then apparently thought better of it. He pointed to the grotto, a few hundred yards distant. “I think we had better speak inside,” he said, and trotted towards it, kicking up sprays of snow behind him as he did so. I manoeuvred to one side of him to avoid being soaked and jogged alongside him through the “cave”, which comprised the entrance t
o the grotto, eager to hear what he had to say.
Once inside, however, I was momentarily distracted from Holmes’s secret by the opulent spectacle that confronted me. To call the elaborately decorated interior a cave seemed absurd, for one thing. Directly in front of us was a curving golden wall, illuminated by natural light streaming through vents in the ceiling, on which were picked out a series of stars and planets, each shining whitely, as if made of the finest china. On closer inspection, the stars and planets, indeed the whole surface of the wall, was made up of tens of thousands of shells of varying sizes and colours, carefully affixed to give the impression of the glittering night sky. The wall curved away from us and vanished into the darkness but where we stood, only a few feet inside, the area was as brightly lit as any room in the house and far more beautiful.
Holmes appeared unmoved by the spectacle, however. He moved inside just far enough to place himself directly beneath one of the shafts of light and impatiently beckoned me to join him.
“We do not have a great deal of time, Watson. I would not put it past Inspector Fisher to have us followed, and there is something I must show you.”
He opened his jacket and pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Here are the contents of the telegram that Reilly sent to London when he visited the village in company with Alim Salah on the evening of his murder.”
I took it from him, and unfolded the thin paper. It was printed in block capitals, obviously written down by whoever worked in the village post office, and was short and to the point.
SHERLOCK HOLMES IS HERE STOP WILL DO WHAT I CAME TO DO THEN DEPART BEFORE IDENTIFIED STOP MAKE ARRANGEMENTS TO LEAVE TUESDAY PM STOP
The meaning was clear enough, but I was confused by one thing.
“Where on earth did you get this, Holmes?” I asked.
“From the post office in the village, of course.”
“Let me rephrase my question. How did you get this?”
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--Sherlock Holmes and the Crusader's Curse Page 12