Notes From the Dispatch Box of John H Watson, MD

by Ashton, Hugh

  We went back to London with our bags full of real cash, and, as I had predicted to Archie, Moran was absent from the city, which made it more pleasant in my opinion. When the cash was being transferred, I asked the messenger to take a message to Moriarty, asking for an interview.

  The request was granted, and the same method of transporting me to his house as previously was employed. A carriage drew up, and it took me, with the blinds drawn as before, across the river to an unknown destination.

  Moriarty lounged in the chair where I had seen him on the previous occasion. He seemed not to have moved in the months since we last spoke, and he regarded me with a quizzical air.

  “ What is it this time, Clay ? You wish to found a monastery, or perhaps this time it is a mission to save the souls of fallen women ? ” He smiled, to indicate that he was joking. “ To return to seriousness, have you had word how your little enterprise in the West Country is coming along ? ”

  As it happened, I had received a report the previous morning, delivered to my post office box, in which the orphanage was described as flourishing, with some twenty infants being provided for. The statement accompanying the report showed that the financial health of the institution rivalled that of the infants for which it was caring. I explained this to Moriarty, who appeared to be listening with great interest.

  “ Well done,” he said at last. “ You seem to show an impressive talent for organisation and attention to detail. I have a good mind to promote you to take the place of Colonel Moran as my chief of operations.”

  I protested against this. Such a move would almost certainly set the Colonel against me still further and result in a rivalry in which I was almost sure I would end up as the loser. “ Before I could consider taking such a position—and believe me, I am sensible of the honour here—I have an opportunity which I think may be of interest.” I told Moriarty about the City and Suburban Bank’s loan of the gold, and that I believed Archie Stamford and I could take it.

  “ I had heard of this, too, but had no idea how to obtain the gold. What is your plan, Clay ? ”

  “ I have no plan as yet, sir,” I told him. “ Give me three days, and I will have a plan, though. I am confident that Stamford and I can take this alone, without violence and without bloodshed. Since only two of us will be involved, I will ensure that the expenses are kept to a minimum. It may take some three or four months, but I promise you we can do it.”

  “ From any man other than you, I would regard this as an outrageous boast,” he said. “ You have three months, no more, to carry out your plan. And two days, not three, to inform me of it. At the end of that time, send me your proposal in writing. The usual cypher.” He turned away, and I knew I was dismissed.

  The next two days saw me engaged in walking up and down Aldersgate-street, examining the bank, as well as those streets and thoroughfares surrounding it. I even entered the bank, posing as a potential customer, and was shown into the manager’s office. On my way there, I noted a set of stairs leading down to a cellar, which I could guess was used as a vault. The doors and other barriers within the bank appeared to be of a strength and thickness that would prevent Archie and me from breaking through. But the cellar could prove to be an Achilles’ heel, I guessed.

  If, I reasoned, the buildings behind the bank or next to it were also provided with a cellar, and if it were possible to gain access to that cellar on a regular basis, I guessed that Archie and I could dig our way to the gold. On one side of the bank was a restaurant of some kind. I could guess that the basement of that would be used as a kitchen, and this was confirmed by the odours arising from the grating at my feet. The other side was a small newspaper shop, owned by a squint-eyed man seemingly of uncertain sobriety, which did not appear to be in the least promising.

  I left the main thoroughfare and entered a small mean-looking square, Saxe-Coburg-square, containing a number of shops, one of which, a pawnbroker’s on the corner, appeared to be directly behind the bank. I went up to the shop and read the notice in the window.

  “ Assistant required. Apply within.” I rang the bell, as the shop door appeared to be locked, and a young servant-girl answered.

  “ I’ve come about the job,” I told her. “ Is Mr. Wilson in ? ” The owner’s name, Jabez Wilson, was prominently displayed beside the three balls above the door.

  “ He’s out. Have you come about the advertisement ? ” she asked me.

  “ No, I just saw the card on the door.”

  “ Himself won’t see you if you haven’t replied to the advertisement in the newspaper. In writing,” she told me.

  “ Which newspaper ? ”

  “ I don’t know. The usual ones, I suppose. Whatever they are. You think I’ve got time to sit around reading them ? ”

  “ Very good,” I said, and took myself back to the drunken newsagent’s, where in consideration of a small sum, I was permitted to buy all the papers for the last week that might conceivably carry the advertisement.

  I took them back to my home, and soon found what I was looking for.

  Giving my name as “ Vincent Spaulding”, the name of a loathed and feared House Captain from my days at Eton, I wrote a letter in a none-too-literate hand to Jabez Wilson, offering to work for low wages, as I wished to learn the pawnbroking trade.

  He answered my missive by return of post, inviting me to Saxe-Coburg-square, and the first thing that I noticed about him was his hair, which was as fiery red as that of my colleague Archie. Surely, I thought to myself, as I say through his endless prattle as to how I was to conduct myself in my time with him, there was a way to make use of this coincidence. In a flash it came to me, and as soon I could make my escape, I made my way back home, refining the details of my plan as I did so. By the time I reached my abode, I had it all worked out in every detail, and I set down my thoughts, and sent them to Moriarty.

  z

  John Clay speaks 7:

  The Red-Headed League

  O

  n receiving permission from Moriarty to carry out my scheme, I told Archie that we were ready to start work.

  “ What’s your plan, then ? ” he asked me.

  “ I’ve got a new crib,” I told him. “ It’s a pawnbroker’s just behind the bank, and they have a cellar there. We can get into the bank vaults from there, I am sure. We can dig our way in.”

  “ But if you’re meant to be working there ? ”

  “ I’m taking up photography,” I told him. Archie looked puzzled.

  “ What for ? ” he asked in bewilderment.

  “ Because,” I explained to him, “ it needs a dark place to develop the pictures. And can you think of a darker place than a cellar ? ”

  For the first week, I submitted to Wilson’s tuition on the duties of a pawnbroker’s assistant. As you might imagine, these are not exactly onerous, but the old fool kept on giving me the same instructions several times. Despite my newly acquired hobby of photography, I saw that there was no possibility of my ever breaking through to the bank in the time that Moriarty had allowed me. It was obvious that both Archie and I would have to work on the project together, and work hard—harder than was possible with Wilson always calling me from upstairs. It was clear that we would have to keep him away for at least a part of the day to allow us time for our excavations. The girl who did the cooking and some housework could be discounted—she seemed to be possessed of little curiosity in the affairs of others. Indeed, I sometimes suspected her of being more than a little simple.

  The mornings and early afternoons seemed to me to be the most suitable times that Mr. Jabez Wilson should be elsewhere. For some reason, a pawnbroker’s customers seem to prefer the evenings, especially towards the end of a week, to do their business. Perhaps they feel that they won’t be seen by their neighbours ? In any event, Wilson liked to mind the business himself at those times, reserving Tuesday night alone for the meetings of the Freemasons’ Lodge that he attended on those nights of the week.

  I pondered hard on
what stratagem would be most effective in removing him from the shop at other times, and was ruminating on the strange coincidence of he and Archie both possessing singularly striking and distinctive heads of red hair, when my stroke of genius (and I do not believe that I am being unduly modest when I describe it in those terms) came to me.

  The next day, I showed Archie an advertisement in the newspaper.

  “ TO THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE.—On account of the bequest of the late Ezikiah Hopkins, of Lebanon, Penn., U.S.A., there is now another vacancy open which entitles a member of the League to a salary of four pounds a week for purely nominal services. All red-headed men who are sound in body and mind, and above the ages of twenty-one years, are eligible. Apply in person on Monday, at eleven o’clock, to Duncan Ross, at the offices of the League, 7 Pope’s Court, Fleet-street.”

  “ That sounds like a berth worth shipping for,” said Archie. “ Think I’d stand a chance ? ”

  “ No, you juggins,” I told him. “ You are Duncan Ross.”

  He scratched his head. “ Why ? ”

  I was about to curse him as a thick-headed fool, when I remembered that he had never clapped eyes on Wilson. “ Because, my dear Archie,” I told him, “ both you and Mr. Jabez Wilson, my employer of the moment, have this wonderful thing in common about you. You both have red hair.”

  I must give Archie some credit. It took him a very short space of time to work out what I had in mind. “ That’s capital ! ” he cried. “ How will we make him fill his time all day ? ”

  “ We’ll just keep him at it for four hours a day. I don’t want him to chuck it halfway through because he gets bored. I know,” I said. “ We’ll get him to copy out the Encyclopedia Britannica—see how far he gets with the letter ‘ A’ in the next few months. I’ll make sure that he sees the advertisement, and I’ll bring him to you in Pope’s Court, where I have arranged for the office, and you take him on at four pounds a week.”

  “ Oh, you’re a joker, you are, John ! But you must coach me in my part. Tell me what I have to say and do when you bring him to me.”

  “ Indeed so. We must also trick you out for the occasion. We wish Mr. Jabez Wilson to meet a worthy representative of the late Ezikiah Hopkins, do we not ? ”

  I have to confess that Archie made a convincing representative of the Red-Headed League, and when he met Wilson at the room I had rented, he played his part to perfection, even seizing the pawnbroker’s hair and pulling it hard—an action which I felt fully repaid the nagging I had experienced at his hands. I have read Dr. Watson’s account of Wilson’s relation of the events at Pope’s Court, and I do not think I could better it. There is one small point which might be of interest. I thought it would be amusing if Wilson had to expend some of his own money to gain the sovereigns I was to pay him each week, and we therefore made it a condition that he should provide his own pen and paper.

  So, with the bumbling old fool tucked safely away and working his way through the alphabet, as Dr. Watson has him describing, Archie and I went to work. We were in luck, as the cellar floor was loose and allowed us to start our excavations with some ease. The tunnelling was not in the least easy, though, and we were at a loss as to where to store the earth that we removed, until we stumbled into a mysterious disused underground chamber with a single door that seemed to lead to a dead end blocked by soil, presumably once the cellar of a previous structure that had stood on the site. We used this chamber as a repository for the debris from our tunnel.

  We had setbacks. At one point the tunnel collapsed, and I was forced to dig Archie out from a pile of loose earth and rubble, which would have stifled him had he remained buried in it. It was nearly eight weeks before the tunnel was completed to our satisfaction, and it was a red-letter day when I poked my shovel upwards to discover the flagstones that made up the floor of the bank’s vault.

  I should mention that almost at the end of the course of our excavations, indeed, just after we had reached the bank vault, I was visited by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Although I had seen Dr. Watson previously, as I mentioned earlier in my account of the Darlington substitution, I failed to recognise him on this occasion. Indeed, I paid little attention to these visitors, who merely wished to know the way to the Strand, and I gave them the first answer that came into my head. As I closed the door on the visitors, though, I remembered that the one who had asked the question of me had failed to meet my eye, but had instead kept his gaze directed downward. I looked at myself, and noted that the knees of my trousers were in a noticeably less than pristine condition, but failed to attach much importance to this.

  Anyway, as I mentioned, we had arrived at what I took to be the bank vault, and I carefully lifted one stone and shone a lantern around the room thus revealed. It was certainly a vault, and the crates that I beheld, clearly marked with the stamp of the Banque de France, almost certainly contained the gold of which I had heard.

  “ We’re there, Archie ! ” I told him. “ We’ll do the job at the weekend, and they won’t notice a thing until the Monday, by which time Vincent Spaulding will have ceased to be.”

  “ And the Red-Headed League ? ”

  “ I suppose we’d better close it down. You can do that, Archie. Just post a notice on the door saying that the League has closed down or something along those lines.”

  What I did not know was that Archie was fool enough to go away and do what I had suggested almost as soon as I had told him to do it. This sudden loss of the weekly four sovereigns had obviously annoyed Wilson, who had gone off in a huff to see Sherlock Holmes, and it was that which had prompted the visit by him to my door. If he’d only waited another day or so...

  Still, there’s no point in crying over the milk that was spilled. Archie was one of the best, but it was my fault to trust him with a piece of business like that. I will say, though, that he was smart enough to leave a false trail for Wilson to follow when he closed the lease on the office we had rented. He picked an address at random, and I was amused to read later in Watson’s account that Wilson had actually gone there and discovered it to be a manufactory of artificial knee-caps.

  We prepared ourselves for the removal of the gold, which was planned for a Saturday night. Dark lanterns we had already, of course. We prepared slings and ropes for the removal of the crates from the vault into the tunnel, and a small wheeled trolley to move them back into the empty cellar where we had deposited the earth. From there, we would move them out to a waiting wagon on the Sunday night.

  I am afraid that Archie and I were guilty of the sin of counting our chickens before they were hatched. We were already determining at which restaurant we would celebrate, and anticipating the fall from grace of Colonel Moran as we crept along the tunnel to the vault.

  I will say this much for Sherlock Holmes; that he had everything well organised. It was the work of a minute for both Archie and me to be nabbed. You can probably imagine the shock I felt when I lifted the slab in the cellar and raised my lantern to behold four pairs of boots standing around, one pair of which I recognised as being of standard police pattern.

  In his account of our arrest, Dr. Watson writes of the revolver that was struck from my hand by Sherlock Holmes’ hunting-crop. It is true that I was carrying a revolver, but what Watson fails to mention is that it was unloaded. Archie was also carrying an unloaded pistol. The idea was to frighten any possible opposition, not to harm. I have to laugh at the idea that Sherlock Holmes’ action here was heroic, as Dr. Watson makes it out to be.[15] As it was, I was chagrined that we had been snared so easily. I urged Archie to fly, but of course the place was surrounded.

  As to the words that Dr. Watson records me as uttering (“ I’ll swing for it ! ”), it was ridiculous for me to ever dream that I should be hanged for an offence such as this. What I actually said was, “ I’ll sing for you,” meaning that I would confess and take all the blame on myself, in the hope that a clean and full confession would mitigate his sentence—as indeed it did.[16]

  I
nspector Jones proved himself to be something of a sport. I humorously complained of his treatment of me, asserting my blue blood, and he responded in kind. As we rode together in the police hansom to the station, he engaged me in conversation, and given the circumstances, I could hardly have wished for a more amiable companion. Of course, I could have wished for more friendly and favourable conditions, but I pride myself that one of my strengths is knowing when to stop. There was little advantage to be gained in struggling, or even protesting, and so I made an effort to be as pleasant as was possible, and I am glad that he responded in kind.

  As I had promised Archie, I took as much of the blame as was possible when I made my confession to the police. I also mentioned my founding of the orphanage, which caused some hilarity at the time among the police to whom I related the story, but I later discovered that they had taken the trouble to verify my tale, and had even spoken with the Reverend Roundhay, who had confirmed my words. Inspector Jones, who told me of this, gave a most comical imitation of that worthy’s apparent consternation at being told of my arrest. Also, to his credit, I believe that Inspector Jones took it upon himself to brief my defence counsel—retained by Moriarty, naturally—on the facts of the orphanage. Certainly, I never spoke about it to him, and I am sure neither Moran nor Moriarty would have done so, but it was mentioned as part of my defence plea. I bear neither Inspector Jones nor the police any ill-will in this affair. He was only doing his job, as I was doing mine.

  At the time of my arrest and during the confinement leading up to my trial, I wished I could have met and spoken with Sherlock Holmes regarding the processes that led to my arrest, but after reading Dr. Watson’s excellent account in the Strand Magazine, I feel that I am now sufficiently enlightened on that score. However, Sherlock Holmes and I did see each other again, though I confess my view from the dock of him in the witness-box was a little limited.