by Otto Penzler
“Quite simple, really,” said Dr. Doyle’s companion.
“When analysed, Watson, and explained.”
“I trust I did not, by my inadvertent remark—”
“By no means, Watson.” But the Elm Grove doctor’s keen eyes remained fixed on Raffles. “Inquiry at the Navy Records Office provided me with the home address of Seaman Hayter, who proved to be a Portsmouth-born man, like many sailors. Mr. Watson and I visited that address, a small restaurant owned by his mother—a woman from the Greek island of Corfu. From 1815 until 1863 in this century, Corfu was under British jurisdiction, and Hayter’s mother, a Corfu girl, married a British sailor, Hayter’s late father. Their Portsmouth-born son, Able-Seaman Hayter, was brought up—due to the mother—with loyalties divided between Britain, land of his father, and Greece, the land of his mother. But these are simple people.”
The doctor puffed thoughtfully at his pipe.
“Seaman Hayter is still in Haslar Naval Hospital with a dislocated shoulder. Could a foretopman, certainly a physical type, have conceived and co-ordinated the Victory crime? Improbable. Could his crewmate confederate—no doubt a man of the same type and, on the evidence of the chloroformed Marine, remarkably strong—have conceived the crime? Improbable. No, Mr. Raffles, those men were paid by somebody. Whose was the mind behind the Victory crime?”
Raffles and I both knew. But we neither moved nor spoke.
“Our local newspaper, the Portsmouth and Southsea Chronicle,” said Dr. Doyle, “published a list of the distinguished persons invited to be present on board Victory on Navy Day. The newspaper published a second list—those invited guests who actually were on board Victory on that day. On comparing the lists, I noted that, of the yacht-owning visitors at Cowes, who had all received invitations to Victory, only one had not availed himself of the invitation.”
“Mr. Aristotle Andiakis,” said Mr. Watson, “of the S/Y Achilleion.”
“Precisely, Watson. Mr. Andiakis. A powerful mind—a Greek mind. A man, moreover, with seamen at his disposal—the crew of the Achilleion—to pose as sightseers and, in some hired boat, manoeuvre into a convenient position to pick up the lifebelt flung for them from Victory.”
Dr. Doyle tamped down the tobacco in his pipe.
“Why was Mr. Andiakis not on board Victory? Was it from fear of personal involvement in the crime he possibly had planned? I wondered. I noted an absence of violence in the crime. Seaman Hayter’s dislocated shoulder was unforeseeable. The Marine sentry was not brutally blackjacked, as would have been quicker and easier. He was harmlessly chloroformed. Was Mr. Andiakis, then, if his was in fact the mind behind the crime, a man of some nicety of scruple—sufficient nicety, perhaps, to decline to be a guest on board a ship he planned to rob? To you personally, Mr. Raffles, would such a scruple be comprehensible?”
I did not like the question. I could sense trouble coming. But Raffles said quietly, “Yes, Dr. Doyle, it would.”
“But if Mr. Aristotle Andiakis,” said the Elm Grove doctor, “were a man of scruple, what possible motive could he have for so drastic a deed as the illicit acquisition of a national treasure of the British nation?”
“I cannot imagine,” said Raffles. “Unless—” He stopped.
“Something has occurred to you?” said Dr. Doyle.
“The Thracian Marbles,” said Raffles.
“Ah!” said Dr. Doyle. “You read the London Times. So do I. And when I recalled a long-standing wrangle in its correspondence columns about the moral right of the British Museum to possess those ancient bas-reliefs commemorating a battle as important in Greek history as is the battle of Traflagar in British history, I felt sure of my ground.”
“Dr. Doyle,” said Mr. Watson, “immediately invited me to accompany him to the Isle-of-Wight.”
“To Cowes, Watson, to be precise. Millionaires! Millionaires were all around us there. But some things,” said Dr. Conan Doyle, “cannot be bought with minted money. We found Mr. Andiakis absent from his yacht. He was being granted the extremely unusual privilege of being received in audience by our Queen at her summer residence, Osborne House. Mr. Watson and I were invited on board the yacht to await his return. On his arrival, I immediately accused him of being in possession of the uniform in which Horatio Nelson died at Trafalgar.”
In this room, in this ancient waterfront inn, there was for a moment no sound.
“Realising,” Dr. Conan Doyle said, then, “that I had found him out, Mr. Andiakis immediately—under seal of secrecy—confided to me the outcome of his audience with Her Majesty. Mr. Raffles, the Nelson uniform is in due course to be returned to the Royal Navy Museum at Greenwich. In due course, in return, the Thracian Marbles will be restored to Greece, the ancient land of their origin. By command of Her Majesty, no explanation will ever be given. But, as to this—well, a danger exists.”
My heart thumped slow, stifling. I could not breathe.
“Mr. Raffles,” said the Southsea doctor, “Mr. Andiakis’s possession of the Nelson uniform became known—last night—to an intruder. The safe on the S/Y Achilleion was opened.”
I stared at the floor. Raffles was as still as a statue.
“I asked Mr. Andiakis,” Dr. Doyle said, “if Mr. Watson and I might see the uniform. You’ve read, you told me, my story, A Study in Scarlet. Nelson’s blood is not scarlet. Time has blackened those honoured stains. But I noticed a faint red blemish on Nelson’s swallowtail blue epauletted coat. Blood, Mr. Raffles. Mr. Andiakis assured me that, when he set the combination of the safe just before leaving for his audience with the Queen, that blemish of fresh red blood was not on the coat.”
“Dr. Doyle,” said the big doctor’s companion, “thereupon made a close examination of the safe’s exterior—”
“And found on the carpet before it something that led me to the conclusion that the intruder had been wearing a fingerstall.” Coldly blue as an arctic iceberg, Dr. Doyle’s eyes were fixed on Raffles. “For greater tactile sensitivity in the manipulation of that relatively simple combination-lock, the intruder took off his fingerstall. For greater sensitivity still, he removed from the finger, probably with his teeth, two surgical stitches and, with his tongue, flicked them from his mouth. I have them—together with my bill, Mr. Raffles—in this envelope.”
So it had come. Raffles was exposed. We were finished. I could not swallow the great lump in my throat.
“Seaman Hayter,” Dr. Doyle said, “and his bosun confederate in Victory’s crew will not be charged before a Court of Admiralty. They are no longer in the Royal Navy. They have been bought out by Mr. Andiakis and will be employed in his merchant-shipping fleet. Further, because a ban of silence has been imposed on every facet of the Victory crime, the intruder last night on S/Y Achilleion cannot be charged at Winchester Assizes. I don’t know why you left the Nelson uniform where you found it, Mr. Raffles. Perhaps the devil looks after his own. You remain free to catch your train. But I, personally, have a bill to present. I shall hold it pending. If ever, traceable to you or your friend Manders, there comes to my ears any mention of what you know about Mr. Andiakis, I shall seek you out, Mr. A. J. Raffles, and infallibly present my bill—at a price a great deal higher than you will care to pay.”
The doctor of Bush Villas, Elm Grove, knocked out his pipe-bowl into an ashtray on the dressing-table.
“To each,” his strong voice said, “his own. To every nation, the mystery of its own soul, which is born of its past. Our Queen grows old. Her heart has known sorrow, but in that heart is the pride of kings. And the man who stood before her in Osborne House last night is a king among men—a self-made aristocrat, an Odysseus of our own century. He was confident of the lady to whom he spoke, and he knew how to present his case to her. He quoted to her four lines from one of her favourite poets, Lord Macaulay:
For how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods?
And t
hat great Greek gentleman, Mr. Aristotle Andiakis, told me that the little, aging, indomitable Widow looked long at him. Then she turned to her Private Secretary and said, ‘In this matter of the Thracian Marbles, convey to Ten Downing Street this, Our Royal Command: Let right be done.’ ”
Staring blindly at the floor, I heard the door open.
“Come, Watson.”
The door-latch clicked shut.
Neither Raffles nor I moved.
Through the open window-casements, the breeze from the sea blew cool and salty upon us. Thinly over Portsmouth Harbour floated the bugle notes of the day’s end call, “Retreat.” The report of the sunset gun clapped across the water. From the masthead of H.M.S. Victory, as on all the Queen’s ships at their anchors, the flag of her Realm fluttered down.
I heard Raffles draw in his breath, deeply.
“From now on, Bunny,” he said, “an unsettled bill hangs over us.”
“In account,” I muttered, “with Dr. A. Conan Doyle.”
“Or in account,” Raffles said, in a strange tone, “with the other name he uses for himself—in the pages of that story.”
On the fourposter bed, with our valises and Raffles’s cricket-bag, lay the copy of A Study in Scarlet.
Historical Note
Not only does Mr. Manders’s foregoing narrative, now at last become available, seem to explain the official silence which for so long has enshrouded the circumstances of the Victory crime, but it appears also to corroborate a perceptive remark made by Mr. John Dickson Carr on page 194 of his Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Harper & Row, 1949).
“When we consider,” remarks Mr. Carr, “Conan Doyle’s detective work in the case of George Edalji, we may ask ourselves a question to which the answer will be self-evident: Who was Sherlock Holmes?”
In Mr. Carr’s book appears a photograph of Dr. Conan Doyle taken at approximately the period of the Victory crime, together with a photograph of the handwriting and signature of Mr. James Watson, Secretary of the Portsmouth & Southsea Literary & Scientific Society.
H.M.S. Victory, now preserved in drydock, may still be visited in Portsmouth Harbor, and the uniform stained with the lifeblood of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson may be viewed today in the Royal Navy Museum at Greenwich.
Due, presumably, to the official sequestration of documents touching upon the Victory crime, no mention of it appears in Mr. Carr’s book, but it may be of interest to note that the Thracian Marbles were quietly returned to Greece not long after the events described by Mr. Manders in his private writings about the career of his friend, A. J. Raffles.
RAFFLES ON THE TRAIL OF THE HOUND
Barry Perowne
“I WONDER IF by any chance, Mr. Raffles, you’re one of those discriminating people who may be described, perhaps, as Sherlockians?”
The question was tossed suddenly at A. J. Raffles by Mr. Greenhough Smith, distinguished editor of England’s leading monthly periodical, The Strand Magazine.
It was a morning in dubious springtime, and a fitful sun shone in through the windows of Mr. Smith’s editorial sanctum in Southampton Street, just off London’s busy Strand.
Mr. Smith had invited Raffles, England’s best-known cricketer, to contribute an article on the game, and dropping in on Mr. Smith to discuss the matter, Raffles had brought me along with him.
Knowing what I knew about the least suspected side of Raffles’s life, the criminal side, I felt uncomfortable when Mr. Smith, agreement having been reached with Raffles for the cricket article, asked his unexpected question.
“Why, yes, Mr. Smith,” Raffles replied, at ease in a saddlebag chair, his suit immaculate, a pearl in his cravat, his dark hair crisp, his keen face tanned. “I think Bunny Manders and I can claim to be—shall we say—amateur Sherlockians. Eh, Bunny?”
“Certainly, Raffles,” I murmured uneasily, taking my cue from him and accepting a Sullivan from his proffered cigarette-case.
“You may be interested, then,” said Mr. Greenhough Smith, “to note this big basketful of letters on my desk. They’re just a small part of the mail that’s been flooding in from readers of Dr. Conan Doyle’s latest tale, The Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s the twenty-sixth published adventure of Sherlock Holmes. Its first instalment appeared last year, in The Strand Magazine for August 1901. Its eighth and final instalment is in the current issue—practically vanished already from the bookstalls. You may have been reading the tale?”
“Bunny Manders and I consider it,” said Raffles, “the most enthralling Holmes adventure that’s so far appeared.”
“An opinion, to judge from these letters,” said Mr. Smith, “concurred in by most readers—with one curious exception.”
The jingle of passing hansoms was faintly audible from Southampton Street as Mr. Smith, polishing his scholarly glasses, frowned at a letter that lay open before him on his blotting-pad.
“You know, Mr. Raffles,” he went on, “Dr. Doyle was asked recently if he’d based the character of Sherlock Holmes on any real-life original. He replied that he had had in mind a preceptor of his undergraduate days at Edinburgh University, a certain Dr. Joseph Bell. On being told of this, Dr. Bell smiled. He said that Dr. Doyle’s kind remembrance of his old teacher had made much of very little and that the real-life Sherlock Holmes is, in fact, Dr. Conan Doyle himself.”
My palms moistened with embarrassment, for Raffles and I knew from personal experience that Dr. Joseph Bell’s remark was only too true. Back at a time when Dr. Conan Doyle had been an obscure medical practitioner in the naval town of Portsmouth and had published, to no great acclaim, only the first of his Sherlock Holmes tales, A Study in Scarlet, Raffles and I had had an encounter with Dr. Doyle and had nearly gone to prison as a result.
Now here in Mr. Greenhough Smith’s editorial sanctum twenty-five Sherlock Holmes tales later, with the great detective and his creator known the world over, the conversation had taken a turn I found distinctly disquieting.
But Raffles merely tapped ash casually from his cigarette and said, “To amateur Sherlockians, Dr. Joseph Bell’s remark provides food for thought, Mr. Smith.”
“Of late,” Mr. Smith said, “Dr. Doyle’s own great investigative ability has been concentrated on a challenge of the times we live in. As you may know, on the success of the Holmes tales, he abandoned medicine for literature. However, when the recent regrettable war with the Boers broke out, he abandoned literature for medicine—in order to serve in South Africa with the Langman Field Hospital. That photograph of him was taken at the time.”
Among the framed drawings and signed photographs on the walls of Mr. Smith’s Sanctum was the original, I saw now, of an illustration for The Hound of the Baskervilles, depicting Sherlock Holmes, in deerstalker cap and Inverness cape, firing his revolver at the apparition of a gigantic hound charging with lambent eyes and slavering jaws out of the fog of a Dartmoor night.
Beside this illustration of the fictional Holmes hung a photograph of his creator, the real-life Sherlock Holmes. Big, burly, bushy-moustached, wearing khaki fatigues and a sun-helmet and smoking a Boer curved pipe, he was shown standing, a stalwart, uncompromising figure, against a background of Red Cross bell-tents on the parched South African veld.
“You may have met Dr. Doyle out there?” Mr. Smith asked.
“As Yeomanry subalterns for the duration, Bunny Manders and I served in a different sector,” said Raffles, naturally making no mention of our Portsmouth encounter with Dr. Doyle, which had occurred years before the Boer War.
“Now that peace has been restored,” said Mr. Smith, “Dr. Doyle has felt it his duty to investigate foreign allegations, not made by the Boers themselves, that the British used dum-dum bullets and committed other transgressions. As a doctor who had a good many Boer prisoners, wounded and sick, pass through his hands, he saw no evidence to support the allegations. He considers them to emanate from tainted sources with a vested interest in maintaining discord among nations.”
“The traffickers
in armaments,” said Raffles.
“Exactly! And our government,” said Mr. Smith, “apparently considering it beneath its dignity to heed such allegations, Dr. Doyle has undertaken the task of investigation himself, at great personal expense of time and money. He has, nowadays, a world-wide audience. He feels a duty to it and to the cause of Peace, for he knows that when he speaks it’s with a voice known to the world—the voice of Sherlock Holmes.”
“Quite so,” said Raffles.
“Dr. Doyle has gathered his documented evidence in rebuttal,” said Mr. Smith, “in a book he calls The South African War: Its Cause and Conduct, written without fee and printed far below cost by a sympathetic publisher. With the object of financing the translation of the book into many languages and its printing and world-wide distribution, gratis, a Fund has been opened for the receipt of contributions—”
“A Fund?” said Raffles, his grey eyes alert.
“A ‘War Book Fund,’ ” said Mr. Smith, “administered by Dr. Doyle’s own bank—and also, you may recall, as Sherlockians, Holmes’s bank—the Capital and Counties, Oxford Street branch. Of course, this great task which Dr. Doyle has taken upon his broad shoulders leaves him no time for fiction. In fact, he tells me he intends The Hound of the Baskervilles to be his last Holmes tale—which is bad news, of course, for the writers of all these letters. Strange as it may seem, I dare not bother him with them in his present mood—which is a pity, because there’s one here in particular that—”
He broke off and called, “Come in!”
The door opened to admit a tall young man, meticulously frock-coated, with a high collar and clean-cut, intellectual features.
“My Assistant Editor,” said Mr. Smith, introducing us and handing the newcomer a sheaf of page proofs. “You want these for Mr. W. W. Jacobs? Very well, they can go off to him now. We mustn’t keep humorists waiting. By the way, I was thinking of getting Mr. Raffles’s impression of that letter from Dartmoor.”
