Sherlock Holmes and the Abbey School Mystery

by John Hall

  ‘Ah. I fear I have no cards just at present,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘Just taken this post, you know, and had no time to get them printed.’ This was partly true; although part of the reason was that I hoped to conclude my investigations before I had many social engagements to perform. ‘Harris is the name, sir. Pleased to meet you.’

  He shook my hand in an absent-minded sort of way, and started back the way he had come. ‘You were going the other way, surely, sir?’ I told him. ‘I was going this way.’

  ‘Oh? Yes, to be sure. Of course, if the distance be not infinite, then logically one should come back to the same spot.’

  ‘But not in time for dinner.’

  He stared at me. ‘An interesting premise, sir. We shall meet again, I have no doubt.’ And off he went, in the right direction this time.

  I found my own rooms, and was pleased to see that one of the servants had lit a decent fire. I removed my coat, glanced at the card the old fellow had given me – ‘James I Tromarty,’ it read – and then got ready for dinner. This was held in a dining hall quite separate from the main hall, with masters and boys all dining together, and it was preceded by another roll call in the classroom. My thirty-one charges were all settled in, and somewhat inclined to be boisterous, a circumstance I attributed to the beginning of the new term, and the proximity to dinner.

  At dinner Graves was naturally seated next to Dr Longton, and the only other man I had met so far, the old chap I had bumped into in the quad, whose name I had forgotten, was down the other end of the table, so I found myself seated between two men I had not met hitherto. On my right was a short, round, balding, elderly man named Donaldson, who taught music, and on my left Herr Wieland, the German master, thirty-odd years old, with startlingly blue eyes, blond hair and the strapping physique of the mountaineer.

  Mr Donaldson proved to be a trifle deaf, and his conversation was largely centred upon his chosen subject. He told me at great length about the eighteenth-century organ, now in sad disrepair and pretty well walled up at one end of the assembly hall, and his unassuming ambition to restore it to its former glory that it might peal out of a morning to the glory of God and the greater honour of the school. Having spoken on this topic, as I say, for some time, he appeared to fall asleep, and I got into conversation with Herr Wieland. As I had suspected, he was a great one for climbing and walking in the hills, and something of a huntsman to boot, as are many of his compatriots. We thus had much in common, and I impressed him with some yarns about my time in India, being careful, however, not to give too much away which might hint at my true identity.

  We touched briefly on politics, though I could not tell you how we got on to that subject; perhaps it was the mention of India that did it. Herr Wieland was very hot on the subject of German expansion. ‘Britain has her empire, Russia hers, France her colonies. Germany, too, is a world-class power, and she will not be confined to her present boundaries for ever,’ he told me confidently.

  ‘You have your own colonies in Africa,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Pah!’ He dismissed this with a contemptuous gesture worthy of any Junker. ‘It is a start, I grant you, but it will not be enough in the future.’

  I had no great desire to get into an argument on my first day, so I changed the subject, and shortly after the meal came to a close. The boys filed off, and the masters followed Dr Longton to the Senior Common Room, for the promised glass of sherry, which was, I may say, by no means of the same quality as Graves’s had been, but was very drinkable none the less.

  I was now introduced to such of the masters as I had not yet met. I shall give you their names, though I do not for one moment expect you to remember them, any more than I did, at least at that time, for they seemed to me to march towards me in a continuous procession, and I barely had time to shake hands and murmur, ‘How d’you do?’ before the next one arrived. There was Monsieur Legrand, the French master; Mr Dennison, geography; Mr Reed, sciences; and Mr Huxtable, classics.

  This last name rang a bell with me. ‘Mr Huxtable?’ I asked him. ‘You are not by any chance related to Dr Huxtable of the Priory School, the author of Huxtable’s Sidelights on Horace, are you?’

  He glowered at me. ‘My brother, sir.’

  Oh, Lord, I thought, for I had met Dr Huxtable a year or so previous to this on a case I had investigated with Holmes, and I dreaded the thought that my identity might be revealed as a consequence. I became aware that Mr Huxtable was speaking to me.

  ‘Do you know my brother, sir?’

  ‘I can scarcely claim any acquaintance,’ I temporized, ‘but his fame is quite considerable.’

  ‘Indeed it is! Are you aware, sir, that I myself did a considerable amount of the research on the work you mentioned?’

  ‘Ah – no. Can’t say I am.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And not one word of credit was I given! Not one, sir. For which reason, and because there is some natural rivalry between the two establishments, I have not, unbrotherly though it may seem to you, I have not spoken to my brother this last ten years, sir, nor he to me.’

  Thank Heaven for that, I told myself with a sigh of relief. Considerably reassured, I gave Mr Huxtable a broad grin, and shook his hand heartily a second time, which seemed to surprise him slightly.

  I may add here that seven of the masters had charge of a form. Dr Longton, as head, did not, and nor did old Mr Donaldson, who looked too frail to keep order among a meadow full of butterflies, nor Mr Reed, the science master, who was only twenty-five or so, was recently married, and who lived in the village, about three-quarters of a mile away. Mr Reed left the gathering early, to go home.

  Carstairs, the school secretary, was present, and the matron, a Miss Windlass, looked in for five minutes at the end of our little gathering. Miss Windlass was a lady of around forty years of age, strikingly handsome, but with a no- nonsense air about her. I presume this was essential, as she was about the only woman, other than the cooks and maids, all elderly and respectable, with whom the boys and masters had any dealings.

  All in all, the gathering passed pleasantly enough, but I was not too sorry when it was over and we took our leave of Dr Longton. It had been one of the longest days of my life, and quite frankly I wondered if I should be able to stand the pace. And yet I had done nothing, or nothing that I could put a name to, apart from supervise a classroom full of young boys! Perhaps, I thought as I sought my bed, both Holmes and I had underestimated the difficulties of the teacher’s life?

  Four

  ‘Watson! Watson!’ It was Holmes’s voice, rousing me from my sleep. I tried to sit up, but had a considerable struggle with the bedclothes, which seemed to have taken on a life of their own.

  ‘Holmes, is that you? What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘You called me in, to help you out, do you not remember? But there is no time for explanations now. You must take command of your section and go to Maiwand, for there is trouble there.’

  ‘Trouble? At Maiwand?’ Try as I might, I could not understand him. ‘And what do you mean by my section?’

  ‘Why, the Conic section, of course. Quick, man, the Surds have rebelled, and only you can save the Empire!’

  I struggled for a suitable reply, but, ‘I’d have said you’re the Surd, Holmes, bursting into my dreams like this,’ was the best I could manage.

  ‘Come, Watson, the game is afoot! The Professor has calculated the dynamics of an asteroid to the nth degree, and he will send it spinning into the sun with disastrous consequences to the ecliptic if you do not prevent it!’

  ‘The Professor? Which professor do you mean, Holmes?’

  ‘Why, Moriarty, of course. Is there more than one professor, Watson? Only you know him better as Mr Tromarty, I fancy.’

  ‘Tromarty? Of course, Holmes! I knew that name rang a bell – rang a bell – a bell –’

  It was then that I woke. I was drenched with perspiration, despite its being the second week in January, and I had got the bedclothes wrapped round my ne
ck, so that I must have resembled a woodcut illustration of the Ancient Mariner with that damned albatross.

  I sat up in bed, aware that the bell that had somehow got into my dreams – though I could not recall the details just then – was the alarm clock on the bedside table. I reached out, for it was pitch black, found the clock and silenced it.

  Then I got the blankets into some sort of order, and sat there shivering. I fumbled around on the bedside table until I found a match. I lit it, found a candle and lit that. The light dispersed the last of my fears, and I laughed to myself. ‘A bad dream, that’s all. Can’t quite recollect what it was all about.’ Holmes, I remembered that, but something more, something Holmes had been trying to tell me. What the devil had it been?

  I looked at the clock. I am not one of nature’s early risers, nor a particularly consistent riser, as a rule, but I had not wanted to get a reputation as a sluggard during my time at the Abbey School, and so I had bought the loudest alarm clock they had in the shop. I had also taken the precaution of setting it twenty minutes ahead of the time I meant to rise on this first real day of duty, so that I might be able either to get up early, or – and this struck me as the more likely possibility – to turn over for another twenty minutes. I therefore had time to do a little hard thinking.

  Holmes, he was part of my dream, yes. And trying desperately to warn me about something. Or someone? I felt that I was getting closer, but I knew that if I tried to recapture my thoughts of the night I should merely succeed in driving them away altogether. I must approach the problem obliquely.

  Now, I am not a great believer in the supernatural, or thought transference, or anything of that kind, so I dismissed at once the notion that Holmes himself had, in some uncanny fashion, been trying to warn me of something. The message, whatever it may have been, had come from my own mind, that ‘unconscious’ or ‘subconscious’ mind that was currently provoking so much debate amongst certain of my medical colleagues. I recalled hearing a lecture a year or so back by one very eminent professor –

  Of course! That had broken my dream. Professor Moriarty, to be sure. And Mr Tromarty. That was it. Just a silly dream. But was there nothing more to it than just a silly dream? Could Tromarty possibly be Moriarty? I frowned. I got out of bed, and hurried to my little wardrobe. I found the visiting card which Mr Tromarty had given me the previous evening, a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil.

  Now for the acid test. ‘James I Tromarty.’ I wrote it out on my bit of paper, crossed out letters here and there, and stared in horror at the end result. It could not possibly be true! I checked again, and again, only the third time I worked backwards, so to speak. It rang true every time: ‘James I Tromarty’ was a perfect anagram of ‘James T Moriarty’!

  Wait, though, wait, wait, wait, I mumbled to myself. It was too perfect, too pat, too obvious. And by a very long chalk. The real Moriarty was nobody’s fool, he would never employ so crude a device. ‘Was’ nobody’s fool, and ‘would’ never employ it? I laughed. Moriarty was dead, had been these ten years and more!

  I glanced at the clock again. Ten minutes before the time I had appointed as my hour of rising. Well, I could turn over, for those ten minutes. Or a quarter of an hour, perhaps? That would mean I was only five minutes later getting up than I had intended, after all, and ever since my army days I have always been able to dress and shave quicker than most men.

  I blew out the candle, and snuggled into the bed. Funny the tricks the mind can play! One old mathematics teacher, a curious coincidence of names, together with the investigation I was engaged upon, these were the things which had kindled my imagination. Would that it could work so well, and with so little solid basis for inspiration, when I sat before those blank sheets of foolscap! No, it was nonsense, all nonsense. Moriarty was dead. Dead at Reichenbach. Dead these last ten years or more.

  But what about his brothers? I sat up in bed yet again. I knew that Professor James Moriarty, mathematics expert and criminal genius, had two brothers. One was, or had been, a colonel in the army, and the other was – what? I struggled to recall. A bus conductor, or train driver or something of that sort, was it? No, a station master. That was it, a station master. And I knew that the colonel, at any rate, had also had the name ‘James’, for I remember that it struck me as odd. A family name, possibly, I thought now, or the mother’s maiden name? Perhaps the ‘T’ of my anagram, which I had thought was the middle initial, was in fact the first name, ‘T James Moriarty’?

  This quibbling over nomenclature was not germane to my immediate purpose. Names or brothers be what they may, the same old objection applied. Too damned easy. Even if Moriarty’s brothers were both of the same evil persuasion, and it was by no means certain that they were, for there had never been any suggestion of that sort, but supposing for a moment that they were inclined to evil, and supposing that they had their brother’s flair for mathematics, and further supposing that Mr Tromarty was one of those brothers, then he would presumably have sufficient wit to hide his identity in a halfway decent fashion?

  On the other hand, would a complicated alias be necessary? Professor Moriarty had never come to trial, so his name had not been blazoned about the popular press in the same way as the name of, say, Colonel Moran, who was Moriarty’s trusted henchman. It is true that Professor Moriarty’s brother, Colonel James Moriarty, had attempted to blacken the name of my friend Sherlock Holmes a few years after the supposed death of Holmes and the actual death of the professor, by writing some absurd letters to the newspapers. And as a consequence I had been obliged to set out the true facts in the story which I called The Final Problem. But that was printed in, what, 1893? Ten years ago, or thereabouts, at any rate. Long enough for the average reader to have pretty well forgotten all about Professor Moriarty. Add to that the fact that the masters at an exclusive establishment like the Abbey School had probably never even seen a copy of anything so workaday as the Strand magazine; add the further fact that anyone who had read my account must know that Professor Moriarty was dead, and the need for elaborate disguise surely vanished?

  In any event, here was a second curious factor. The first was the old ruined abbey, out of bounds to all and sundry, and this Mr Tromarty was the second. It looked as if I had both my man and my site marked down, and I had not been at the school a full twenty-four hours! Holmes himself could scarcely have done better. Well, I now had two definite objects. The first was to become better acquainted with the mysterious Mr Tromarty, and the second was to explore those ruins.

  First, however, I had a day’s teaching to put in. I had been rather dreading it, but now it seemed to pale into insignificance beside my two major discoveries. After all, if I could solve the problem quickly, I should soon be waving a none-too-fond farewell to the Abbey School. Fired by this thought, I got up and was very soon washed and dressed.

  The preliminaries to the day’s work, roll call, breakfast, assembly, passed quickly and easily enough, and at nine o’clock I stood in front of my first class. As good luck would have it, this maiden effort was with ‘my own’ class, the Third, so at any rate I did not have to face a room full of curious strangers. I had been told that Dr Longton had taken charge of the Third on a temporary basis for the last couple of weeks of the old term, and his final instructions to the boys had been to write a lengthy composition during the Christmas break on the topic, ‘How I would spend the ideal holiday’. This, to be blunt, struck me as a pretty mean thing to saddle the poor boys with, but they had all obeyed the instructions, and now solemnly passed their sheets of foolscap along the rows and up to me, so that I soon had an impressive pile on the desk before me.

  I confess that my heart sank at the prospect of reading through these essays; from my earliest days as a writer I have been familiar with the phenomenon to which I append the long-winded but perfectly accurate label, ‘I have always thought that I could write, if only . . .’ with the sentence being variously ended, if only the speaker did not have to take the family on holiday to
Southsea, or oversee the killing of the Christmas goose, or dig the vegetable plot, or clean out his pipe, or engage in any of those other pleasant pursuits which those who do not write see as being equally important as, and considerably more difficult than, the production of readable writing. And when these cheery amateurs do put pen to paper, the result all too often reflects this happy-go-lucky approach. So the prospect of reading thirty-one juvenile attempts filled me with a nameless dread. I would leave them until later, I told myself, when I had leisure to do them justice, and perhaps when a glass of something both soothing and stimulating had done its work; a large measure of Teacher’s, perhaps, would not be entirely inappropriate. Good Lord! I told myself, only a day in the profession and I was making schoolmaster’s puns already. I must guard against that.

  All this ran through my head in much less time than it takes to write, or read, about it all. I fancy that I had smiled to myself at my thoughts, for I noticed the boys exchanging amused glances, and I realized that I was now centre stage, as it were, and that any little mannerisms would soon be picked up and caricatured.

  I squared my shoulders, metaphorically speaking, and assumed as stern an expression as I could manage. Dr Longton had given me a note of what the boys had studied, and what they were to study; and moreover I had consulted some of my friends and acquaintances who were, or had been, teachers, so that I had a memorandum of how I ought to proceed. Under cover of my desk, I now consulted this crib.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I told my class. ‘The study of English, as you know, may be arbitrarily divided into language and literature. I see that your set books for this year are –’ another glance at my notes here – ‘yes.’ The first on my list was Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and a copy of the work itself lay conveniently to hand; a slim volume, and a small one, so that should present no great difficulty. Apart from one. ‘I confess, boys,’ I told them, ‘that it is many years since I looked into this excellent work.’ This was not literally true. I had never read the damned thing, nor indeed felt the least inclination to do so. ‘If, therefore, you could read your grammar books for a moment or two, to permit me to refresh my memory?’