More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes

by Nick Rennison

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Ah, he was a smart man, no doubt. Well, he went to work, taking out a panel, substituting a new one, painting it over, and chopping up the old one on the quiet, getting rid of the splinters out of doors when the booty had been extracted. The decoration progressed and the little heap of diamonds grew. Finally, he came to the last panel, but found that he had used all his new panels and hadn’t one left for a substitute. It must have been at some time when it was difficult to get hold of the joiner – Bank Holiday, perhaps, or Sunday, and he was impatient. So he scraped the paint off, and went carefully over every part of the surface – experience had taught him by this time that all the holes were of the same sort – and found one diamond. He took it out, refilled the hole with putty, painted the old panel and put it back. These are pieces of that old panel – the only old one of the lot.

  ‘Nine men out of ten would have got out of the house as soon as possible after the thing was done, but he was a cool hand and stayed. That made the whole thing look a deal more genuine than if he had unaccountably cleared out as soon as he had got his room nicely decorated. I expect the original capital for those Stock Exchange operations we heard of came out of those diamonds. He stayed as long as suited him, and left when he set up housekeeping with a view to his wedding. The rest of the story is pretty plain. You guess it, of course?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I can guess the rest, in a general sort of way – except as to one or two points.’

  ‘It’s all plain – perfectly. See here! Challitt, in gaol, determines to get those diamonds when he comes out. To do that without being suspected it will be necessary to hire the room. But he knows that he won’t be able to do that himself, because the landlady, of course, knows him, and won’t have an ex-convict in the house. There is no help for it; he must have a confederate, and share the spoil. So he makes the acquaintance of another convict, who seems a likely man for the job, and whose sentence expires about the same time as his own. When they come out, he arranges the matter with this confederate, who is a well-mannered (and pretty well-known) housebreaker, and the latter calls at Mrs Lamb’s house to look for rooms. The very room itself happens to be to let, and of course it is taken, and Challitt (who is the invalid cousin) comes in at night muffled and unrecognisable.

  ‘The decoration on the panel does not alarm them, because, of course, they suppose it to have been done on the old panels and over the old paint. Challitt tries the spots where diamonds were left – there are none – there is no putty even. Perhaps, think they, the panels have been shifted and interchanged in the painting, so they set to work and split them all up as we have seen, getting more desperate as they go on. Finally they realise that they are done, and clear out, leaving Mrs Lamb to mourn over their mischief.

  ‘They know that Kingscote is the man who has forestalled them, because Gillard (or Jones), in his chat with the landlady, has heard all about him and his painting of the panels. So the next night they set off for Finchley. They get into Kingscote’s garden and watch him let Campbell out. While he is gone, Challitt quietly steps through the French window into the smoking-room, and waits for him, Gillard remaining outside.

  ‘Kingscote returns, and Challitt accuses him of taking the stones. Kingscote is contemptuous – doesn’t care for Challitt, because he knows he is powerless, being the original thief himself; besides, knows there is no evidence, since the diamonds are sold and dispersed long ago. Challitt offers to divide the plunder with him – Kingscote laughs and tells him to go; probably threatens to throw him out, Challitt being the smaller man. Gillard, at the open window, hears this, steps in behind, and quietly knocks him on the head. The rest follows as a matter of course. They fasten the window and shutters, to exclude observation; turn over all the drawers, etc, in case the jewels are there; go to the best bedroom and try there, and so on. Failing (and possibly being disturbed after a few hours’ search by the noise of the acquisitive gardener), Gillard, with the instinct of an old thief, determines they shan’t go away with nothing, so empties Kingscote’s pockets and takes his watch and chain and so on. They go out by the front door and shut it after them. Voilà tout.’

  I was filled with wonder at the prompt ingenuity of the man who in these few hours of hurried inquiry could piece together so accurately all the materials of an intricate and mysterious affair such as this; but more, I wondered where and how he had collected those materials.

  ‘There is no doubt, Hewitt,’ I said, ‘that the accurate and minute application of what you are pleased to call your common sense has become something very like an instinct with you. What did you deduce from? You told me your conclusions from the examination of Ivy Cottage, but not how you arrived at them.’

  ‘They didn’t leave me much material downstairs, did they? But in the bedroom, the two drawers which the thieves found locked were ransacked – opened probably with keys taken from the dead man. On the floor I saw a bent French nail; here it is. You see, it is twice bent at right angles, near the head and near the point, and there is the faint mark of the pliers that were used to bend it. It is a very usual burglars’ tool, and handy in experienced hands to open ordinary drawer locks. Therefore, I knew that a professional burglar had been at work. He had probably fiddled at the drawers with the nail first, and then had thrown it down to try the dead man’s keys.

  ‘But I knew this professional burglar didn’t come for a burglary, from several indications. There was no attempt to take plate, the first thing a burglar looks for. Valuable clocks were left on mantelpieces, and other things that usually go in an ordinary burglary were not disturbed. Notably, it was to be observed that no doors or windows were broken, or had been forcibly opened; therefore, it was plain that the thieves had come in by the French window of the smoking-room, the only entrance left open at the last thing. Therefore, they came in, or one did, knowing that Mr Kingscote was up, and being quite willing – presumably anxious – to see him. Ordinary burglars would have waited till he had retired, and then could have got through the closed French window as easily almost as if it were open, notwithstanding the thin wooden shutters, which would never stop a burglar for more than five minutes. Being anxious to see him, they – or again, one of them – presumably knew him. That they had come to get something was plain, from the ransacking. As, in the end, they did steal his money, and watch, but did not take larger valuables, it was plain that they had no bag with them – which proves not only that they had not come to burgle, for every burglar takes his bag, but that the thing they came to get was not bulky. Still, they could easily have removed plate or clocks by rolling them up in a table-cover or other wrapper, but such a bundle, carried by well-dressed men, would attract attention – therefore it was probable that they were well-dressed. Do I make it clear?’

  ‘Quite – nothing seems simpler now it is explained – that’s the way with difficult puzzles.’

  ‘There was nothing more to be got at the house. I had already in my mind the curious coincidence that the panels at Chelsea had been broken the very night before that of the murder, and determined to look at them in any case. I got from you the name of the man who had lived in the panelled room before Kingscote, and at once remembered it (although I said nothing about it) as that of the young man who had been chloroformed for his employer’s diamonds. I keep things of that sort in my mind, you see – and, indeed, in my scrapbook. You told me yourself about his imprisonment, and there I was with what seemed now a hopeful case getting into a promising shape.

  ‘You went on to prevent any setting to rights at Chelsea, and I made enquiries as to Challitt. I found he had been released only a few days before all this trouble arose, and I also found the name of another man who was released from the same establishment only a few days earlier. I knew this man (Gillard) well, and knew that nobody was a more likely rascal for such a crime as that at Finchley. On my way to Chelsea I called at my office, gave my clerk certain instructions, and look
ed up my scrapbook. I found the newspaper account of the chloroform business, and also a photograph of Gillard – I keep as many of these things as I can collect. What I did at Chelsea you know. I saw that one panel was of old wood and the rest new. I saw the hole in the old panel, and I asked one or two questions. The case was complete.’

  We proceeded with our dinner. Presently I said: ‘It all rests with the police now, of course?’

  ‘Of course. I should think it very probable that Challitt and Gillard will be caught. Gillard, at any rate, is pretty well known. It will be rather hard on the surviving Kingscote, after engaging me, to have his dead brother’s diamond transactions publicly exposed as a result, won’t it? But it can’t be helped. Fiat justitia, of course.’

  ‘How will the police feel over this?’ I asked. ‘You’ve rather cut them out, eh?’

  ‘Oh, the police are all right. They had not the information I had, you see; they knew nothing of the panel business. If Mrs Lamb had gone to Scotland Yard instead of to the policeman on the beat, perhaps I should never have been sent for.’

  The same quality that caused Martin Hewitt to rank as mere ‘common sense’ his extraordinary power of almost instinctive deduction kept his respect for the abilities of the police at perhaps a higher level than some might have considered justified.

  We sat some little while over our dessert, talking as we sat, when there occurred one of those curious conjunctions of circumstances that we notice again and again in ordinary life, and forget as often, unless the importance of the occasion fixes the matter in the memory. A young man had entered the dining-room, and had taken his seat at a corner table near the back window. He had been sitting there for some little time before I particularly observed him. At last he happened to turn his thin, pale face in my direction, and our eyes met. It was Challitt – the man we had been talking of!

  I sprang to my feet in some excitement.

  ‘That’s the man!’ I cried. ‘Challitt!’

  Hewitt rose at my words, and at first attempted to pull me back. Challitt, in guilty terror, saw that we were between him and the door, and turning, leaped upon the sill of the open window, and dropped out. There was a fearful crash of broken glass below, and everybody rushed to the window.

  Hewitt drew me through the door, and we ran downstairs. ‘Pity you let out like that,’ he said, as he went. ‘If you’d kept quiet we could have sent out for the police with no trouble. Never mind – can’t help it.’

  Below, Challitt was lying in a broken heap in the midst of a crowd of waiters. He had crashed through a thick glass skylight and fallen, back downward, across the back of a lounge. He was taken away on a stretcher unconscious, and, in fact, died in a week in hospital from injuries to the spine.

  During his periods of consciousness he made a detailed statement, bearing out the conclusions of Martin Hewitt with the most surprising exactness, down to the smallest particulars. He and Gillard had parted immediately after the crime, judging it safer not to be seen together. He had, he affirmed, endured agonies of fear and remorse in the few days since the fatal night at Finchley, and had even once or twice thought of giving himself up. When I so excitedly pointed him out, he knew at once that the game was up, and took the one desperate chance of escape that offered. But to the end he persistently denied that he had himself committed the murder, or had even thought of it till he saw it accomplished. That had been wholly the work of Gillard, who, listening at the window and perceiving the drift of the conversation, suddenly beat down Kingscote from behind with a life-preserver. And so Harvey Challitt ended his life at the age of twenty-six.

  Gillard was never taken. He doubtless left the country, and has probably since that time become ‘known to the police’ under another name abroad. Perhaps he has even been hanged, and if he has been, there was no miscarriage of justice, no matter what the charge against him may have been.

  JUDITH LEE

  Created by Richard Marsh (1857-1915)

  After a false start as a writer of stories for boys’ magazines, Richard Heldmann reinvented himself, took the pseudonym of Richard Marsh and began to pump out reams of fiction in the crime and supernatural genres. His novel, The Beetle, published in 1897, the same year as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is the tale of a shape-shifting devotee of ancient Egyptian gods stalking the fog-shrouded streets of late Victorian London. It was a great commercial success, outselling Stoker’s work, and was made into a silent film in 1919, two years before Count Dracula made his debut on a cinema screen. Other horror novels followed, as well as crime fiction (Philip Bennion’s Death, The Datchet Diamonds) and collections of short stories with titles like The Seen and the Unseen and Both Sides of the Veil. His work appeared in most of the periodicals of the day from The Strand Magazine to Belgravia: A London Magazine. When the Judith Lee stories first appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1911, the editor hailed the character as ‘fortunate possessor of a gift which gives her a place apart in detective fiction’. Judith Lee is a young woman drawn into detective work of a kind because of this gift – her ability to read lips. She is forever seeing people discuss wicked plots and outrageous crimes, unaware that their words have been understood by the young woman across the room. The stories about her, including ‘Conscience’, are dependent on wild and improbable coincidences (Miss Lee always seems to be in the right spot at the right time) but they are still fun to read.

  CONSCIENCE

  I had been spending a few days at Brighton, and was sitting one morning on the balcony of the West Pier pavilion, listening to the fine band of the Gordon Highlanders. The weather was beautiful – the kind one sometimes does get at Brighton – blue skies, a warm sun, and just that touch in the soft breeze which serves as a pick-me-up. There were crowds of people. I sat on one end of a bench. In a corner, within a few feet of me, a man was standing, leaning with his back against the railing – an odd-looking man, tall, slender, with something almost Mongolian in his clean-shaven, round face. I had noticed him on that particular spot each time I had been on the pier. He was well tailored, and that morning, for the first time, he wore a flower in his button-hole. As one sometimes does when one sees an unusual-looking stranger, I wondered hazily what kind of person he might be. I did not like the look of him.

  Presently another man came along the balcony and paused close to him. They took no notice of each other; the newcomer looked attentively at the crowd promenading on the deck below, almost ostentatiously disregarding the other’s neighbourhood. All the same, the man in the corner whispered something which probably reached his ears alone – and my perception – something which seemed to be a few disconnected words:

  ‘Mauve dress, big black velvet hat, ostrich plume; four-thirty train.’

  That was all he said. I do not suppose that anyone there, except the man who had paused and the lazy-looking girl whose eyes had chanced for a moment to wander towards his lips, had any notion that he had spoken at all. The newcomer remained for a few moments idly watching the promenaders; then, turning, without vouchsafing the other the slightest sign of recognition, strolled carelessly on.

  It struck me as rather an odd little scene. I was constantly being made an unintentional confidante of what were meant to be secrets; but about that brief sentence which the one had whispered to the other there was a piquant something which struck me as amusing – the more especially as I believed I had seen the lady to whom the words referred. As I came on the pier I had been struck by her gorgeous appearance, as being a person who probably had more money than taste.

  Some minutes passed. The Mongolian-looking man remained perfectly quiescent in his corner. Then another man came strolling along – big and burly, in a reddish-brown suit, a green felt hat worn slightly on one side of his head. He paused on the same spot on which the first man had brought his stroll to a close, and he paid no attention to the gentleman in the corner, who looked right away from him, even while I could see his lips framing pr
ecisely the same sentence:

  ‘Mauve dress, big black velvet hat, ostrich plume; four-thirty train.’

  The big man showed by no sign that he had heard a sound. He continued to do as his predecessor had done – stared at the promenaders, then strolled carelessly on.

  This second episode struck me as being rather odder than the first. Why were such commonplace words uttered in so mysterious a manner? Would a third man come along? I waited to see – and waited in vain. The band played ‘God Save the King’, the people rose, but no third man had appeared. I left the Mongolian-looking gentleman still in his corner and went to the other side of the balcony to watch the people going down the pier. I saw the gorgeous lady in the mauve dress and big black picture hat with a fine ostrich plume, and I wondered what interest she might have for the round-faced man in the corner, and what she had to do with the four-thirty train. She was with two or three equally gorgeous ladies and one or two wonderfully attired men; they seemed to be quite a party.

  The next day I left Brighton by an early train. In the compartment I was reading the Sussex Daily News, when a paragraph caught my eye. ‘Tragic Occurrence on the Brighton Line’. Late the night before the body of a woman had been found lying on the ballast, as if she might have fallen out of a passing train. It described her costume – she was attired in a pale mauve dress and a big black picture hat in which was an ostrich-feather plume. There were other details – plenty of them – but that was enough for me.