Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon

by James Lovegrove

  “Paperknife?” said Holmes with quiet gratification. “I did not mention a paperknife.”

  “You did. I’m sure you did.”

  “He did not,” said Thaddeus. “Tell us straight, Raz. Have you been thieving from the castle?”

  Erasmus understood then that his little slip of the tongue had destroyed whatever last shred of credibility he thought he had. His defensiveness curdled into spite. “Very well. So what if I did pinch a few gewgaws here and there, and make some cash out of them? They were just lying around the place, doing no one any good. I needed money. That pittance you would have me live on, Papa, is a joke.”

  “Your allowance is more than enough for someone of your age and standing.”

  “Hah! You think so? My friends down in London laugh when I tell them how much it is. A paltry sum by their standards. Their parents are far more unstinting. I have asked you time and again to give me more, but you always say no.”

  “Your allowance might have sufficed,” said Holmes to Erasmus, “were it not for the fact that you have been gambling at the Dawsons’ makeshift card club upstairs at the Sheep and Shearer.”

  “Gambling as well?” said Thaddeus. “Oh, Raz. You young fool.”

  “The Dawson brothers are not above using physical coercion to get their way. It was courtesy of one Neville Dawson that Erasmus came by that black eye of his.”

  “You did not get it from a fall?” said Eve to her brother. “You were struck?”

  Erasmus gave her a hangdog look. “There was a scuffle. I came off worse. That is all.”

  “You should know, Erasmus, that the Dawsons have been cheating,” said Holmes. “The card games are rigged, and you have been their mark.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. That unscrupulous pair have been taking you for every penny they can. It has left you in a financial hole which even pawning valuables has not been able to get you out of all the way. That is why you hit upon the idea of masquerading as the Black Thurrick and trying to scare your sister out of her wits. That four thousand pounds would have come in very handy, would it not?”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Eve. “Was it really you, Raz?”

  “How could it have been me, sis?” he replied. “The second set of birch twigs appeared outside my own window.”

  “Misdirection, plain and simple,” said Holmes. “A good means of throwing off suspicion from oneself is to make oneself appear to be a victim. The same goes for the twigs you deposited outside Watson’s window during the night. Eve was your principal target all along, but spreading your aim would make it appear as though she was not.”

  “You,” said Eve. Her gaze was pinned upon her brother. Her voice was rising, more in dismay than anger. “You wanted me insane?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But do you deny you were responsible for the twigs? Look me in the eye and tell me you were not.”

  Erasmus Allerthorpe drew a deep breath and exhaled. All at once, what little fight remained in him was gone. He looked deflated, drained, bereft of spark. “There seems no point in pretending any more. All right, yes, it was me.”

  “My God.” Eve snatched her hand out of his. “The person I trusted most in this world…”

  “Hear me out, Eve. Please. I have been a frightful ass, I realise. I shouldn’t have done what I did. I was desperate but I never meant to harm you. It seemed like my only chance, that’s all. I could not go to Papa and ask him to bail me out. It would have meant explaining everything. You can imagine how well he would have taken it.”

  “Not well in the least,” Thaddeus growled.

  “I thought to myself, if I can get my hands on my portion of Aunt Jocasta’s will, all my problems are solved. I can pay off the Dawsons and have plenty left over so that I can keep up with my London friends.”

  “At my expense?” said Eve. “If Dr Greaves had pronounced me mad, I might have been consigned to an institution.”

  “I thought that even if you did get locked up, it would only be temporary. You would soon recover and the doctors would judge you cured and you would come back home and all would be well. I… I didn’t really think it through. I see that now. I was dazzled by the idea of easy money, and I turned a blind eye to your suffering. Until the day before yesterday, at least.”

  “What changed, the day before yesterday?”

  “It was when I came back from Yardley to be told that somebody had just died at the castle. My immediate thought was that it was you. In that moment, it all hit home. I had pushed you too far. I had previously considered the business with the twigs to be… well, little more than a practical joke.”

  “A practical joke,” Eve echoed hollowly.

  “I saw how it was distressing you. It was meant to. I knew how the Black Thurrick had frightened you as a child, and I was playing upon that. But all at once the game seemed to have turned deadly serious. You cannot imagine my relief at being told that it was Goforth who was dead, not my beloved sister. I resolved there and then to abandon the whole scheme. I would devote myself instead to your welfare. Hence I have been bringing you broth in your room and reading to you and…”

  Tears brimmed in Erasmus’s eyes. He slid off the sofa and prostrated himself before Eve.

  “Sis, please forgive me,” he implored. “I cannot apologise enough. I will spend the rest of my life making amends, if that is what it takes. Just say I am pardoned and all between us will be as it was before.”

  Eve gazed down at her brother. Tears were rolling down her cheeks too, yet she held herself with an imperious grace.

  “Raz, you are an absolute blithering idiot.”

  “I am. I am.”

  “You have behaved atrociously.”

  “I have.”

  Her lofty demeanour softened just a fraction. “But you are my brother still, and I love you.” She laid a gentle hand upon his. “Now, how much exactly do you owe these Dawson people?”

  Erasmus raised his head. “In the region of a hundred pounds.”

  “As soon as Jocasta’s will has gone through probate and the money is disbursed, I will pay them off.”

  He blinked at her in delighted disbelief. “You would do that for me?”

  “What is the point in having wealth if I cannot use it to help those in need?”

  “Great heavens. You are an angel, Eve. An angel!”

  “There is one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “You do not gamble any more, with these Dawson people or with anyone. Swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “And you start taking instruction from Papa on how to run the estate and the family finances.”

  “I swear that, too.”

  “And drink less. Much less.”

  “Those are three conditions, not one.”

  “It is a single condition in three parts. Would you argue with me? Or will you accept my terms?”

  “I accept.”

  “Then we have a deal,” Eve said. “Up you get. Off your knees.”

  Erasmus leapt to his feet and showered his sister with kisses. It was a touching sight, and while a sceptical part of me wondered whether Erasmus would keep his side of the bargain, a less sceptical part very much hoped he would.

  “Daughter, I am proud of you,” said Thaddeus gruffly. “Your mother would have been too. With you, on the other hand, my son, I shall reserve judgement. If you hold to your promise and truly do turn over a new leaf, then I am prepared to put your history of misdemeanours behind us.”

  Sherlock Holmes likewise seemed content with the outcome. “So we have unpicked one of the two interwoven strands of the investigation. I would call the Black Thurrick the lesser of the two evils at work in Fellscar. For it was not Erasmus whom Eve saw crossing the lake that night some two weeks ago. Erasmus confined himself to the twigs. He did not carry his imposture any further than that.”

  “But I did see someone?” Eve said. “I did not dream the whole thing?”

  “
You did not. Here is where the one mystery impinges upon the other. You might call it the point at which the lesser evil and the greater overlap.”

  “If not Raz, then who was it?”

  “A pretender. But not in the sense of one who impersonates. More in the sense of one who aspires to usurp.”

  “Whatever is that supposed to mean?” said Thaddeus.

  “This,” said Holmes. “Within your household, Mr Allerthorpe, you unwittingly harboured a man who desired to claim the Allerthorpe lands for himself, and his name was Robert Trebend.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  THE GREATER OF TWO EVILS

  “Trebend?” said Thaddeus. “What on earth are you talking about? Trebend is a capital fellow. A man couldn’t ask for a better, more attentive butler. Where is he, by the by? You had Mrs Trebend join us here but not Trebend himself. What has become of him?”

  “I regret to inform you that Trebend cannot be with us,” said Holmes. He turned to Mrs Trebend. “It falls to me to be the bearer of bad tidings, madam. Your husband—”

  “He is dead, isn’t he?” said she. Her features contorted in sorrow and vindictiveness. “I knew it. I knew it the moment I saw you and Dr Watson here. I could read it in your faces. Did you kill him, you devil?”

  “It was pure mishap. He fell through the ice on the lake.”

  “And you did nothing to save him, no doubt.”

  “I would have if I had been there to witness the event. As it was, I arrived too late at the scene to be of any use.”

  At this, Mrs Trebend let loose a torrent of most unladylike oaths, after which, her spleen vented, she collapsed in a swoon.

  “Watson? Can you be of assistance?”

  I administered smelling salts and slowly she came round. “Perhaps, madam,” Holmes said, “you would like to repair to your room. We can continue this in the morning, when you have recovered.”

  “No,” said she with bitter resignation. “May as well get it over with.”

  “Very good. Your resilience does you credit. I had my first intimation that there might be more to Trebend than met the eye when I observed the shield above the mantel in the central hallway. The Allerthorpe family coat of arms consists of three golden bars angled downward to the right on a red background, with a lion above. In heraldry, a bar is known as a bend, while the heraldic term for ‘three’ tends to occur as the prefix ‘tre-’, as in the three-leafed trefoil; the tressel, a three-legged frame supporting a table; and the tremoile, which comprises a trio of hearts. By putting ‘tre-’ and ‘bend’ together… Well, I hardly need to spell it out for you.”

  “Good grief!” Thaddeus declared. “You mean to say Trebend was one of us by birth? Some distant, unacknowledged relative?”

  “I feel, as an historian, that I ought to have known the names of the symbols on the crest,” said Shadrach, “and ought to have made the connection with Trebend.”

  “There is no need for self-recrimination, sir,” said Holmes. “Unless one has a keen interest in heraldry, one tends to take a coat of arms, even that of one’s own family, at face value. It is just a set of patterns and images. In Trebend’s case, there is grimly pleasing applicability in the fact that when a bar goes from the top left corner of the shield to the bottom right, it is known as a bend sinister. And Trebend was, without doubt, a sinister character.”

  “My Robert was a good man,” Mrs Trebend piped up. “A wronged man but a good one.”

  “We shall see about that,” said Holmes. “It is clear to me that Trebend already knew, when he entered your employ, Mr Allerthorpe, that he was in some way related to your family. His humble origins notwithstanding, there was Allerthorpe blood running in his veins. I suspect his widow can enlighten us as to how he arrived at that knowledge, but we shall come to that in a moment. First, I must explain how Trebend was mistaken by Eve for the Black Thurrick.

  “Put simply, Trebend was carrying out excavations beneath the east wing. He had been doing it for some while. There is a door at the far end of the ground-floor corridor that opens onto a cellar which was once a cold store or a root cellar but which has since fallen into disuse. During the small hours of yesterday morning, I conducted a thorough survey of it. This was after Mrs Trebend’s unfortunate, rather noisy episode in the servants’ quarters which had the effect of bringing us all running.

  “Once everyone had returned to bed, I took myself back to the east wing, where Watson and I had earlier been keeping lookout. Watson himself is unaware I did this. He, too, went to bed, but I decided that the night should not be a complete loss, and so I gained access to the cellar by lowering myself into it. The stairs leading down have partly collapsed, but by dint of hanging by my hands from the remainder, I was able to drop to the floor below safely. Similarly, I was able to jump up and catch hold of the bottom riser and haul myself back out. Neither feat of athleticism was too taxing.

  “I had taken the precaution of lowering a dark-lantern down into the cellar beforehand on the end of a length of string. And what did I discover down there by its light? Only that the heap of planks that had been the broken staircase were being used to conceal the entrance to an adit – a horizontal tunnel, dug out by hand and propped up at intervals by timbers. Along this adit, its dimensions just large enough to accommodate a man on his hands and knees, I crawled a short distance. At the end I emerged into a broad chamber – again, hand-dug – which was dotted about with the remnants of old masonry.

  “With Shadrach Allerthorpe’s assistance earlier in the day, I had learned that the ruins of an older castle lay beneath the foundations of Fellscar Keep. The sorry saga of Sir Mansfield Allerthorpe is perhaps familiar to you. It is a dark chapter in your family history, all the way to its fiery, fateful conclusion. That chamber demonstrated that someone had been busy uncovering the long-buried rubble, in secret, and not for reasons of archaeological enquiry, either.”

  “Trebend,” said Thaddeus.

  “Trebend,” said Holmes. “I was looking at many months’ worth of diligent nightly labour, conducted by your butler after he had discharged his normal household obligations for the day. This was the source of the various indistinct thuds, scrapes and bangs noted by other servants; the groans, too, which may be attributable to the grunting of someone exerting himself. The work would have necessitated the removal of significant quantities of earth, of course. And where, I asked myself, could all that earth have gone?

  “The answer must be: into the lake. Trebend would fill a sack with the excavated earth – the spoil or overburden, as it is known in mining parlance – which he would hoist back up to the corridor and thence dispose of its contents into the water. Rather than tip the spoil out of a window, however, which might leave telltale traces of soil on the rocks below, he was obliged to do something a little more involved. The only safe way down to the lake’s edge would be by fastening a rope around a window mullion. I said as much to you, Watson, when we were discussing how to reach Goforth’s body. Trebend could lower the sack down onto the rocks and lower himself after it. Then he could simply dump the spoil straight into the water.

  “Repeated use of the rope, with the weight of a man hanging from it, had progressively caused the base of the iron window frame to warp outwards. That was one of the clues that led me to deduce the nature of Trebend’s activity. Another was the fact that the hinges and latch of the cellar door, a door which supposedly had not been used in a long time, had been oiled so that they did not squeak.”

  I recalled Holmes opening and closing the door and now realised that he had been testing the smoothness and noiselessness of its operation.

  “But what can the fellow have been looking for down there?” Olivia Allerthorpe asked.

  “All in good time, Mrs Allerthorpe. Until the end of autumn, Trebend’s system of spoil disposal would have presented no problem. With the onset of winter, however, the lake froze over and so he could not continue to get rid of the earth as before. Now, perforce, he had to resort to the more
arduous measure of walking across the ice and emptying his sack in the copse that lies just beyond the far bank, the nearest place where the ground is free of snow. It was while he was conducting this task that Eve, looking out from her window late one night, spotted him and took him for the Black Thurrick.”

  Eve’s hand flew to her mouth. Comprehension dawned in her eyes.

  “Picture it,” Holmes said. “A man dressed in dark clothing. A man who has been digging underground so that his face and hands are dirtied, blackened like a coalminer’s. He has a sack slung over his shoulder. As he picks his way across the ice, he turns to look back at the castle. Perhaps he is merely checking that he is unobserved, or perhaps, in that uncanny way that a person knows instinctively when he is being watched, he senses another’s gaze upon him.”

  “His eyes,” Eve said. “I told you they seemed to glow. I remember that distinctly.”

  “The moon was up and full. You were looking northward, so that it was at your back. I am of the view that Trebend’s eyes caught and reflected the moonlight. This, and the contrast between their brightness and the darkness of the rest of his face, is what made them appear to shine in such an eerie fashion. Your mind, Eve, did the rest. It synthesised the various factors into a whole, assembling them in the image of a folkloric Christmas monster that had had such a profound influence on your imagination in childhood. Where someone else might have seen only what was there, you saw the dreaded Black Thurrick.”

  Eve was on the point of crying again, but this time the tears, when they came, were tears of relief. Erasmus stroked her arm comfortingly.

  “You were already primed to see the Thurrick,” Holmes continued, “thanks to your brother’s endeavours with the birch twigs. Alas, together the twigs and your sighting of Trebend served only to exacerbate your anxieties and take you to the brink of madness.”

  “Did Trebend have something to do with Goforth’s death?” Thaddeus asked.

  “Not something,” replied Holmes. “Everything. Becky Goforth was conducting an illicit affair with Fitzhugh Danningbury Boyd. I trust Mrs Danningbury Boyd will not mind me stating it so boldly.”