Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of The Pigtail Twist

by M J H Simmonds

  Holmes’ introduction was blunt and direct.

  “Mr Shiner. Do you not think it is time to end this? Make your confession, tell your tale and maybe the courts will be lenient. If you are truthful with us right now, I will do all that is in my power to ensure that you receive a fair sentence. If you share everything with us right now, I believe that you may be spared the rope. If you persist in denying what we know for certain to be true, then I will not be able to help you.”

  “Mr Holmes,” began Shiner, slowly. “I am an old man now. Whether it is prison or the rope, it makes no difference to me. But then again, I have no fear of you, Mr Holmes, as you have nothing on me. I am an honest man and you have no case against me,” he snarled.

  “We know all about your relationship with Harrison. Your voyage to Africa to seek your fortunes, your travails and misadventures. We know that you failed to match his success and returned to England with little to your name, whilst he lived a life of luxury in a country mansion. Surely, you were jealous and wanted to punish him?” Holmes accused.

  “Oh no, Mr Holmes, not at all. For, as you know, Harrison had long ago left Africa before he made his fortune. Why would I be jealous? I have heard he made his money honestly, through his own hard work, and good for him.” Shiner smiled through gritted teeth.

  “So, what made you return to England, if not jealousy or revenge?” asked Holmes.

  “Like I have always said, I missed the old country, I wanted to see home one last time. However, I soon realised that this country was no longer my home. It had changed, or I had had changed, does not really matter which. So I left.”

  “And where were you planning to go? Back to Borundia? Strange, as I have received information that you sold your business and property out there before you left,” countered Holmes.

  “Ah, your information is not entirely correct there, Mr Holmes. I did indeed sell the old fishing business and I also sold some land, but I did not sell my farm. What I sold was a piece of land on the coast overlooking the mouth of L’Argenté River. I had spent every penny I had in acquiring it, knowing that one day this piece of strategically important land would be worth a great deal. It took nearly twenty years to be proved right, but I finally sold it and for a very good price. This enabled me to return to England and rent a house for the summer. But I am far from penniless, Mr Holmes, for I still own the balance of what I was paid for the land along with my homestead back in Borundia. I will certainly enjoy using the former to employ a lawyer to sue you all for assault, false imprisonment and more.”

  The air was charged with tension. I had not expected Shiner to be such an intelligent and eloquent opponent. I had forgotten that he had acquired the beginnings of a good education before fate stole away his parents. This was no ordinary seaman adventurer made good we were facing, but a cunning and dangerous snake of a man.

  “You are right, of course, Mr Shiner,” Holmes continued. “We know that you have money. We know that Harrison had money. But we also know that this whole affair was never about money.”

  “Very well then,” Holmes continued after receiving no response from Shiner. “I shall give as fair and accurate an account of the background to this case that I can, from what we have ascertained. Please correct any inaccuracies, if you will, and afterwards, I will ask you to fill in such parts of the tale that remain unknown to us.”

  Holmes proceeded to recount the tale that Sir Christopher Janus-Bennedict had shared with me in his eccentric house nearly two weeks ago. He put significant stress on Shiner’s short and tragic marriage and Harrison’s subsequent return to England. Shiner sat unmoving, his eyes fixed upon Holmes throughout the course of his account.

  “Once you were back in England, you headed straight to Bedden. You knew that the best place to mingle with the villagers, whilst avoiding direct contact with Harrison, was at the church. You could be confident that, as an avowed atheist, Harrison would never attend, leaving you free to inveigle your way into village society and convince the Widow Fairchance, firstly, to rent you her summer house and then to finally accept her long-standing invitation to visit the Hall. That is where you confronted Harrison and that is where you killed him.”

  “Revenge was the motive. Revenge against Harrison for the death of your wife.” Holmes sat back in expectation, but Shiner’s expression had changed not one iota.

  “Tell me,” said Holmes, after a short pause. “Do you think Harrison was aware of your presence in the village? Did he suspect something was amiss? You couldn’t risk a confrontation in public in front of witnesses, so you conceived your fiendish plan.”

  “And what a plan it was. You knew that Harrison would be shocked, confused and suspicious if you arrived at the Hall as yourself, unannounced and out of the blue. But I am not sure that he recognised you at all, a harmless old sea-dog accompanied by a local widow. Thirty years, and the addition of a thick beard, meant that Harrison had no clue as to who was his latest dinner guest. After all, he had entertained many and varied personalities over the years. You were not even the only newcomer at the table, Professor Seaworthy was also there for very first time.”

  “You spent the evening trying to fit in as best you could, until the gentlemen retreated to the conservatory to smoke. This was a tradition that was well known to the people of the village and thus was something that you had become well aware of, long before your visit. You had also learned that this arboretum was lush and maze-like, so you simply followed Harrison, watched him sit down at the bench and waited for the right moment to strike. From what we have heard from the witnesses, I do not believe you allowed him to plead his case or even speak a single word to defend himself. You killed him right there, instantly, in cold blood.”

  Shiner remained still for a minute and then slowly a smirk began to cross his grizzled face.

  “You have been busy, Mr Holmes, Inspector.” He nodded towards Lestrade. “I again state that I am guilty of no murder. However, as you have worked so hard and been oh so very clever, I shall answer some of your questions,” smiled Shiner, sarcastically.

  “I did pass Harrison deliberately in the village on several occasions to see if he would recognise me. The first time, I looked away as we got close, but the next time I looked him straight in the face. He did appear to react slightly, at first, but he said nothing. I tried for a final time the following day and this time he paid me no heed at all, I expect he thought me just another labourer passing through the village. I had to trim the beard a bit before persuading the widow to take me up to the Hall, but I was now confident that Harrison would not recognise me.”

  Shiner all but spat out the name of his former friend. His sardonic smile remained, while his ice-cold eyes stared unblinking at Holmes.

  “But that is all you will get out of me regarding that evening. I was simply a guest at a dinner in a house where a man died.” Shiner sat back, seemingly content with his unassailable position.

  “I have no wish to go over events that occurred after you murdered Harrison,” Holmes quickly responded. “I am only interested in what happened beforehand, many years beforehand.”

  “What happened to your wife, Mr Shiner?” Holmes demanded, leaning forwards, his hard grey eyes boring into Shiner. “What makes you think that Harrison was responsible for her death?”

  Shiner’s rictus grin vanished, instantly, leaving only a face so barren and devoid of feeling that I felt physically cold in its presence.

  “Very well. I will tell you my story. Then, perhaps, you will see that justice has been served in this matter and let me leave this place, to live what remains of my life in peace,” declared Shiner, his vacant mask slipping just an inch to reveal a speck of pain in those colourless eyes.

  “We were as close as any two friends could be. From the moment we met on board the ‘Africa Gem’ we were inseparable. He was a shy and sensitive man, I am more open and gregarious
, but somehow we seemed to find a common middle ground. We lived, laughed, drank and sinned together. We were both chock full of dreams and ambition, but we also knew how to work hard. Borundia was not quite the land of plenty we had imagined it to be. It was soon apparent that there were no fortunes to be made there. I was all but ready to leave after only a few months, but Harrison persuaded me to stay. We had found a small deposit of semi-precious stones, enough to make us comfortable, if we invested well, but to nowhere near the levels of which I had dreamed.”

  Shiner’s reminiscences seemed to soften him and he was now visibly more relaxed.

  “As you know, we bought a boat and became fisherman, at least for long enough until we could afford to employ a crew to do the work for us properly. We returned to our mining and within a year had made enough from both concerns to buy ourselves plots of land in Argentville. There we each built a house, alternating between working on our plots and the mine in the hills.”

  “Things changed in 1851, when I met Sarah Hardcastle. It was love at first sight, I can tell you gentlemen. I took one look at her beautiful face and knew that she had to be mine. I spent the next six months in pursuit of her and she finally agreed to be my wife, we wed the following year.”

  “Was the marriage a happy one?” asked Holmes. I could tell that he was keenly absorbing every word and subtle inflexion.

  “As happy as is any, Mr Holmes,” snorted Shiner, in reply. “She was a great beauty, but also an independent, almost wild, soul who needed taming occasionally. But I provided well for her, she could have no complaints.”

  I tried hard to stop the anger rising inside me. The man was clearly a brute and a bully. I was beginning to wonder whether his whole friendship with Harrison might have been rather more one-sided than he had described it.

  “How did she die, Mr Shiner?” Holmes asked, gently and sensitively. Even a monster such as this must have been terribly injured by such a huge loss.

  Shiner hesitated for a moment before shaking his head, presumably to clear it, and replying.

  “It was December of ‘53. She was walking by the coast. She liked to walk along the cliffs in the evening. They say she lost her footing and fell. Those cliffs are sixty feet high and the sea below is the Atlantic. Even that far south, the seas in December can be treacherous, and the rocks below...” Shiner’s voice faded to a whisper. “They only found a few scraps of her clothing, covered in blood. The sea took her, what was left of her, after the breakers and the boulders had finished their foul work.”

  If it had been any other man, I would have been aching with sorrow and sympathy at hearing such a tale, but knowing Shiner, as I had come to, I reserved my pity for that poor woman alone.

  My next thought was much darker. Had she not fallen but jumped, to escape her beast of a husband? I could hardly bear to imagine the abuses and deprivations he may have inflicted upon her to make her take such a course. I pledged there and then, that if this proved to be the case then I would finish the job myself if Shiner avoided justice in the courts. I was, by now, biting my lip to stay calm.

  “I am sorry for your loss,” said Holmes, with much more sympathy than I could have mustered. “Then what happened? What led to Harrison leaving?”

  “Well, as you can imagine, I was hit hard by the loss of my Sarah. I took heavily to drink. To be honest with you, I had always enjoyed a drink, but for the next few years, I drank to such excess that I could do nothing else. I hardly even noticed that Harrison had left to return to England. I just picked up the earnings from the fishing boat once a week and spent the next seven days drinking the profits away.”

  “The next thing I knew, ten years had passed. Gone in a flash. I was so shocked that I decided then and there to give up the drink for good. I realised that I was no longer a young man and, in any case, the profits from the fishing boat were no longer enough to both carry out badly needed repairs and also keep me in drink. So I killed two birds with one stone, so to speak. I hiked back up into the hills and re-opened our little mine. It was deathly hard work for a while. I was awful sick as the alcohol left me but up there I had nothing to turn to, so I slowly recovered my health along with my wits. After six months, I returned to Argentville, sober and carrying a sack of gemstones. I fixed up the boat and had enough left over to buy a second.”

  “Over the next ten years, I bought eight more boats, until I controlled most of the local fishing fleet. I was fair to my men, mind, I always paid them, even in the lean times. They reciprocated by working hard and soon I had spare money to invest. I began buying up plots of land overlooking the mouth of the river. Harrison had often recounted stories of great wars and naval battles, and he had always stressed the importance of high ground overlooking strategically important sites. What could be more important than the mouth of a country’s major river?”

  “By 1875, I owned the entire coastline, three miles either side of the mouth of L’Argenté. I was aware that many in the town thought me quite mad but I was prepared to wait for my investment to bear fruit. In the summer of 1880, I received a letter from Paris, inquiring as to the availability of my land. Six months later a similar one arrived from Vienna. By the end of the following year, I had received offers from seven different nations, but being a patriotic man, I was still holding out for the one offer that I valued above all others. One from Her Majesty’s government.”

  “I had heard nothing by the middle of ‘83, so I decided to act. I grabbed several of the more incendiary offers and posted these to London. This finally spurred them into action and I duly received an offer that was acceptable to me. Although it was far from being the highest bid, I was happy that Britain would now become a major influence in the country.”

  “I will never know whether it was coincidence or divine providence, but if I had not been taking such an interest in world affairs at that time, then I would never have seen the newspaper that changed everything.”

  “Please continue, Mr Shiner, your account is vital to this whole affair,” Holmes said quietly.

  “Some months previously, I had begun to have papers delivered from London to aid me with the sale of my land. I posited that if I had more knowledge of world politics and events then I could gain a higher price for my land. As I have just explained, this certainly worked out in my favour. However, it was while idling through one of these that I saw something that chilled me to the bone.”

  “It was a photograph, one of those new halftones. They had only started appearing a few years earlier, before that, we had to put up with sketches or vague, blurry images. But this picture was clear. It showed a successful businessman celebrating the opening of a railway line back home. I very nearly turned the page over, but something about him made me stop. It may simply have been the novelty of the photographic image, but I slowly began to realise that I actually recognised the face. It was James Harrison. I quickly read the article, which confirmed Harrison’s identity and went on to describe, in some detail, his great success and wealth. I will admit that, at first, I felt a certain sense of pride that my old friend had been so successful, but then I noticed something in the picture.”

  “Pinned upon his jacket’s right breast pocket was a brooch. It was made from gold and inlaid with diamonds. It was a fine piece, indeed. It was also the most valuable and treasured possession of my late wife, Sarah. It had belonged to her mother and her grandmother before that. She had always worn it with pride.”

  Shiner paused.

  “She was wearing it when she left to take her walk, on the night she fell to her death,” he growled.

  His words seemed to echo like thunder around the small white room.

  Chapter Nineteen - Witness

  This revelation left me reeling, but Holmes rather seemed to take it all in his stride. I looked to Shiner and back to Holmes, wondering who would speak next.

  It was Holmes who, finally, broke the s
ilence. “So, you took this to be proof that Harrison had, in fact, murdered your wife and stolen her most precious possession. He then made off with the proceeds of his crime while you were too intoxicated to notice, let alone, even care.”

  “Once you saw this picture, you swore revenge and, using the proceeds of the recent sale of your land, tracked him down to Bedhurst Hall. The rest we already know.”

  Holmes paused and then I heard the sound of a commotion outside the holding cell. The voices were rather indistinct but I could just about make out the words ‘drank’ shortly followed by ‘communion’. Gregson had returned, and he had been successful.

  Holmes resettled himself in his chair before leaning forwards.

  “Mr Shiner, I give you one final opportunity to confess. Tell the truth, admit that you killed Harrison. Otherwise, what is to follow may cause you far more harm than any custodial sentence,” he implored.

  “There is nothing more that can now be done to me, Mr Holmes,” replied Shiner. He then leaned forward, as close to Holmes as the desk between the two men would allow.

  “You have lost, Mr Holmes. Let it go and, for God’s sake, it is now time to let me go!” he growled.

  “Very well,” replied Holmes, in a low, resigned whisper, which was quickly followed by a loud bark. “Gregson, bring in the witness.”

  Shiner’s face appeared momentarily puzzled and he muttered, “What witness?” as the door opened and two figures entered the room. One was the tall light-haired Inspector. The other was completely unfamiliar to me.

  She was a lady of late middle age, perhaps even approaching sixty. It was difficult to put an exact age to her, as she held an ageless grace and skin which hardly carried a line, even after so many years. Her long hair was mostly white, but still retained a slight hint of the original blonde. She wore it tied back and swung down low, behind her, in the fashion of a much younger woman. She wore a black skirt and smart jacket over a plain white blouse.