The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

by Denis O. Smith

  When Holmes eventually re-emerged from his bedroom, he appeared refreshed and was clearly in good spirits. He ordered a four-wheeler for three o’clock, remarking that although it would mean a long wait for us at St Mark’s, he wanted to make sure that we arrived there well before anyone else did.

  Zennor arrived promptly at lunchtime, and shared our simple meal of cold meats, bread and cheese. He appeared very pale and nervous in his manner, although he cheered up a little as Holmes plied him with questions, about his various duties at the cathedral, about his family and about the families of his colleagues. Whether any of the information Holmes elicited by these questions was of any relevance to his view of the case, or whether he was simply trying to distract, and thus cheer, his client, I could not say, but so lively and enthusiastic was his conversation that the time flew by, until, at five to three, a ring at the front-door bell announced the arrival of our cab.

  ‘Your hats and coats, gentlemen!’ cried Holmes, springing to his feet. ‘Courage, my dear sir!’ he said to Zennor, clapping him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Your ordeal is almost at an end!’

  ‘I wish I knew what was going to happen,’ returned his client, as he took his hat and coat from the peg.

  ‘We none of us know precisely what is going to happen, even two minutes in the future,’ said Holmes; ‘but I think I can promise you this, at least, Mr Zennor, that by the end of this week you will have returned to your duties at the cathedral without the slightest stain on your character!’

  It took us less than ten minutes to reach our destination. As we approached the cross-roads, Holmes instructed the cabbie to drive slowly past the front of St Mark’s and continue on towards the north end of the road, where it meets Carlton Hill.

  ‘No sign of anyone at present,’ said Holmes, as we passed the churchyard, ‘but let me know at once if you see anyone loitering about.’

  Zennor looked out of one side and I looked out of the other, but there seemed to be no one at all about in the whole of that broad, quiet thoroughfare. When we reached the end of the road, Holmes told the cabbie to turn his cab round, take us halfway back to the church and let us down there. ‘We’ll walk the rest of the way,’ said he, as we alighted and he paid off the cab. ‘It seems to me that the north corner of the building, where there is some projecting masonry and a large laurel bush, will be the best place for us to wait. It is impossible to say from which direction anyone will come, but whichever it is, we should be well-enough hidden there.’

  We did as Holmes suggested, positioning ourselves behind a large buttress and, as we did so, a fine drizzle began to fall. This was not very pleasant, but it did not appear to trouble my friend, who kept his eyes fixed on the churchyard before us and the road beyond. In truth, there was little enough to be seen there, for very few people passed by, and I rapidly formed the conclusion that Hamilton Terrace must be one of the quietest large roads in the whole of London. Because of this, our vigil seemed an inordinately long one, although, in reality, it was little more than forty minutes.

  All at once, when my thoughts had drifted far away, a man – a dirty, rough-looking individual – appeared from the right, from the north end of the road. I felt Holmes’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me in a little more behind the laurel bush. We watched as this man glanced furtively this way and that, as he approached the gateway into the churchyard. Then, in one swift movement, he had opened the gate and slipped in; but instead of walking up the short path to the church door, he quickly crouched down behind the low wall, just to the side of the gateway, so that he could not be seen from the road. Moments later, a large delivery van clattered by, and as it did so he raised his head slightly, to see over the wall and watch its progress. Again he looked furtively to left and right, and then bobbed his head down again to hide. Whether this man had anything to do with our reason for being there, I had no idea, but it seemed clear that he was fearful of being discovered by someone. Holmes touched Zennor on the arm and, with a raise of his eyebrow and a nod in the direction of the newcomer, made a silent enquiry; but Zennor shook his head, his features expressing complete ignorance as to who the man might be. Holmes frowned and a variety of emotions passed quickly across his face; but before I had time to consider the matter further, we heard the rapid approach of a cab from along Abercorn Place. It slowed down at the cross-roads, then swung round sharply into Hamilton Terrace and pulled up at the gate of the churchyard.

  A moment later, a man stepped down from the cab who was instantly recognisable as Dr Glimper, the supervisor of the minor canons at Canterbury Cathedral. What he might be doing here, I could not imagine, and I wondered if he had followed someone – possibly Holmes’s client – to London. Whatever his purpose in being at St Mark’s, it looked as if he was about to receive an unpleasant surprise, for as soon as he opened the gate, he would see the man hiding behind the wall. He put his hand on the gate and pushed it open, and at that moment the man behind the wall sprang up. Dr Glimper took a step backwards in alarm and I thought for a moment that the other man was about to attack him, but then the two of them began to talk animatedly, walking slowly up the short path towards the church door.

  Abruptly, they stopped, evidently as a result of something that Dr Glimper had said, for the other man began to remonstrate with him violently, waving his arms wildly in the air. For several moments they stood there, speaking in raised voices, although I could not catch what they were saying. Then, abruptly, they stopped again, and looked hurriedly this way and that, as if they had heard something.

  ‘Come on!’ said Holmes. ‘This has gone on long enough!’ He stepped briskly forward, into the open, at which the two men looked round in alarm.

  ‘You traitor!’ cried the rough-looking man to Glimper. ‘You have betrayed me!’

  ‘No, no!’ returned Dr Glimper. ‘I assure you, I have no idea who these men are!’ But even as he spoke, he evidently caught sight of Zennor, behind us. ‘Zennor!’ he cried. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘So,’ said the other man, raising his arm aggressively, ‘you do know these people! So you’re a liar as well as a traitor! You stinking, slimy scug!’ He then concluded his remarks with a string of foul oaths.

  ‘We have come,’ said Holmes, addressing Dr Glimper, and ignoring the other man’s outburst, ‘to learn why you attempted to steal the cathedral’s cheque.’

  Dr Glimper’s mouth fell open, his eyes were wide and wild, and his whole expression was one of the utmost terror. Before he could respond, however, there came the most surprising interruption. The rapid clatter of hooves and the jingle of harness came from somewhere to our right, from the north end of Hamilton Terrace, and an instant later, a large police van came into view travelling at tremendous speed. It drew to an abrupt halt at the church gate and three policemen sprang down.

  ‘You swine!’ cried Dr Glimper’s companion, and, launching himself forward, struck the clergyman full in the face with his fist. Then, as Glimper fell to the ground with a pitiful cry, the other man bolted and sprang over the side-wall of the churchyard into Abercorn Place. Two of the policemen at once gave chase, while the third, in the braided uniform of an inspector, approached us and introduced himself as Inspector Jackett.

  ‘Are you the vicar of this church, reverend?’ he asked Glimper, as he helped him to his feet.

  ‘No,’ replied Glimper, touching his cut and bruised face gingerly with his hand. ‘I am the brother of that poor wretch you are chasing.’

  ‘What!’ cried the policeman in astonishment: ‘the brother of Jake Sligo, the most notorious burglar in north London!’

  ‘I didn’t know he was using that name. His real name is Jacob Glimper.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Inspector Jackett. ‘I know he’s used several aliases, but I’ve never heard that one before! You do know,’ he continued, ‘that we have been on his trail for weeks? No? Well, I can tell you he is wanted for questioning for at least eight burglaries, five violent assaults and two counts of attempt
ed murder. We finally tracked him down to an address in Kilburn, but when we went there this morning, he’d already left. We’ve been hunting for him all day and finally got a tip from a carter that he had seen a suspicious-looking individual hiding in this churchyard.’

  ‘I swear I knew none of this,’ said Dr Glimper in a tone of utter dejection. ‘I do not live in London, but in Canterbury, where I am connected with the cathedral. I have neither seen nor heard from my brother in many years. But I recently got a letter from him, from an address in Kilburn, telling me that he was in serious trouble and begging me to bring some money to him here today, so that he could get away and start a new life elsewhere. I assumed that he owed money to someone, that is all.’

  ‘And did you bring him any money?’ asked Inspector Jackett.

  ‘No,’ said Glimper. ‘I was just telling him that I had been unable to get any, when you arrived.’

  ‘Who are these gentlemen?’ the inspector asked, turning to us.

  ‘They have nothing to do with the matter,’ replied Glimper; ‘at least, not directly. I suppose it must all come out,’ he continued after a moment, in a tone of resignation. ‘I attempted – unsuccessfully – to take some money from the cathedral office to give to my brother. He sounded so desperate, and I thought if I didn’t give him something he might come down to Canterbury and ruin my life as he has ruined his own. These men must have been following me, and witnessed what happened here.’

  ‘Are they inquiry agents?’

  ‘One is, I believe.’

  ‘Do you agree with what he says?’ the policeman asked, turning to us.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Holmes. ‘This young man here,’ he continued, indicating Zennor, ‘has been falsely accused of trying to steal the money that Dr Glimper mentioned. He asked me to look into the matter, and when I did so, my enquiries led me to suspect that the true culprit was Dr Glimper himself. We also found a note, naming this place and time for a meeting of some kind, so we made sure we arrived here first, so we could see for ourselves what the meeting was about.

  ‘As for you, sir,’ Holmes continued, turning to Dr Glimper, ‘your behaviour has been disgraceful. Your loyalty to your brother is understandable, even if your chief motive seems to have been to preserve your own position at the cathedral; your succumbing to the temptation to steal the cheque is also understandable, if highly reprehensible in a man of your position and learning; but your treatment of Mr Zennor: that, sir, is unforgivable. To allow a young man you knew to be perfectly innocent to suffer the shame of baseless suspicion, and the scorn and distrust of his companions and superiors, when all the time you had it within your power to free him in an instant from these chains of disgrace: that, sir, is despicable!’

  At that moment the two policemen reappeared from the direction of Abercorn Place and between them they held Dr Glimper’s brother. As they approached us, he let out a stream of foul abuse, directed particularly at his brother, who hung his head in shame.

  ‘Put him in the van,’ said Inspector Jackett.

  ‘You see a gulf between us,’ said Dr Glimper, looking up abruptly, ‘but it was not always so. It is not I who have risen, but he who has fallen. We are from a good family and I am sure the Glimpers of Newbury are still well spoken of. My brother was educated at one of the finest schools in England, and had all that a good education and a loving family could provide. But his course was set on dishonesty, deceit, debauchery and depravity, and this is where that course has led him. You are right, sir,’ he continued, addressing Holmes, ‘to call me despicable in my treatment of Zennor. It is the lowest, meanest act of my life and I despise myself for it. But I shall make amends at once and tender my resignation this very day. I shall make a full statement of the facts to the Dean this evening, totally exonerating Zennor and confessing my own guilt.’

  ‘Before you do any of that,’ said Inspector Jackett in a dry tone, ‘I shall need your full name and address, and those of these other gentlemen, too. You may be called as a witness in the criminal proceedings against your brother.’

  _______

  I asked Holmes that evening, as we discussed the case over supper, whether he had already suspected the truth before Dr Glimper had arrived at St Mark’s.

  ‘I was tolerably certain of it,’ said he, nodding his head.

  ‘I don’t see how you could be,’ I responded. ‘When I saw the notes you had made, they appeared to consist chiefly of a series of zigzag lines, interspersed with hieroglyphics! How that could possibly indicate Dr Glimper’s guilt, I cannot imagine!’

  Holmes chuckled. He reached for his note-book and opened it at the relevant page. For a moment, he studied it in silence, then he passed it to me. ‘I suppose it does look a confused muddle if you don’t understand what it represents,’ he conceded; ‘but it’s not really quite so complex as you suppose, Watson.

  ‘To begin with, we were presented with the problem of how the envelope containing the cheque had found its way into Zennor’s coat pocket. He had not placed it there himself and therefore someone else had done so. He also said that it was practically inconceivable that anyone should dislike him so much as to place it there deliberately in order to incriminate him. This I accepted, not simply because it was Zennor’s opinion, but also because such an underhand scheme was very unlikely to be successful. If, for instance, he had noticed the envelope when he first put on his coat at the cathedral, possibly in the company of others, he would never have been suspected of trying to steal it. Suspicions were only aroused because of the somewhat odd circumstances in which the envelope came to light: the hue and cry had already gone up over the theft in Zennor’s absence, and he was then seen, when alone in the garden of Lambeth Palace, to be doing something with an envelope he had just taken from his pocket. This is what roused suspicions against him.

  ‘So, if the envelope had not been placed in Zennor’s pocket deliberately, either by himself or by someone else, then it had been placed there in error. But what could that mean? Zennor told us that there was no legitimate reason for the envelope to be in anyone’s pocket – the Dean’s secretary was to deal with the cheque later – so the reason was clearly an illegitimate one. In other words, it must be that someone had intended to steal the cheque and had meant to place it in his own pocket, but had made a mistake and put it into Zennor’s pocket instead. How could such a mistake have occurred? Only, surely, if the raincoats had got muddled up. Thus you see, Watson, that even on the most preliminary analysis of the matter, I was drawn to the conclusion that the whereabouts of each of the coats on the day in question was likely to be crucial to the solution of the case.

  ‘This is where we come to that diagram you see before you. Now, altogether, there are seven overcoats to consider, the six belonging to the minor canons and that of Dr Glimper, which are all customarily hung in the corridor outside the cathedral office. But we can immediately eliminate several of them from our inquiry, which helps us enormously. That is the significance of those little stick figures you see at the top of the page, which have a line through them. Henry Jeavons had left about seven o’clock in the morning, wearing Michael Earley’s coat, so that coat can be removed from the equation. But Jeavons’s own coat was left, not in the corridor, where anyone might use it, but in his bedroom. So that coat, too, can be eliminated. Then there is the coat belonging to Wallace Wakefield: he is a somewhat larger size than anyone else and would very quickly have realised his mistake had he put anyone else’s coat on, so he was undoubtedly wearing his own, which can, therefore, also be eliminated. This leaves us with the coats belonging to Martin Zennor, Stafford Nugent and Hubert Bebington, which are all the same, and that of Dr Glimper, which is slightly larger.

  ‘Now we know, from the testimony we heard, that Zennor arrived back at Canterbury wearing his own coat, a fact he verified by examining the initials in the pocket, and that Nugent, who had also been up to London, was wearing a coat that fitted him, but which was not his own as it did not have the loose button w
hich he mentioned to us. This coat could only therefore have been Bebington’s. Hence, the coat that Earley was wearing, when he left to go to Ramsgate, which he admitted was not his own, but which he said fitted him perfectly well, must have been that of Nugent. As Earley was away in Ramsgate all day, only arriving back in the late afternoon, Nugent’s coat can therefore also be eliminated from the equation. The only coats which are relevant to our little problem, then, are those of Zennor, Bebington and Glimper.

  ‘When Nugent was first leaving the cathedral precincts, there was only one coat remaining in the corridor, so he took it and hurried off to catch Zennor up. He had got only halfway to the railway station, however, when he remembered the book he had intended to take back to Lambeth Palace. He therefore returned to the cathedral to get the book, but saw when he did so that there was now another coat hanging in the corridor which looked more like his own, so he took off the one he was wearing and put on the other. It seems certain, then, that the first coat he took was that of Dr Glimper, which is why it didn’t fit him so well, and the second coat either Bebington’s or Zennor’s. Where had this second coat come from? Clearly it had been used by Bebington when he went to the stationer’s. He had gone out five or ten minutes before Zennor and Nugent left, and had returned a few minutes after they had gone, and perhaps seven or eight minutes before Nugent came back to get his book. You will see I have marked all the timings down the edge of the page. But Bebington told us that the coat he was wearing during his brief visit to the stationer’s was not his own. It was, therefore, Zennor’s, and Zennor himself must have gone off to London wearing Bebington’s coat.