Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle

by Tim Symonds

  Addendum

  So great was Holmes’ humiliation he abandoned his plan to compile a text-book on crime detection for fear it would invite mockery from reviewers. The years passed. I caught sight of my former comrade only once in all that time. I was taking an evening walk in St James’s Gardens. He was entering Buckingham Palace perched in a shabby one-horse shay. I was with him on a previous visit to the Palace when Queen Victoria conferred an emerald tie-pin on him for services above and beyond the call. I discovered later that despite our estrangement this second visit was to ask King Edward if the knighthood His Majesty had offered to confer on him for services to Justice (an honour Holmes refused) could be transferred to me, a request the King rejected out of hand. Was that passing glimpse at the gates of the Palace to be the last time I was destined to see my dear friend, I wondered. I pined for our long lost days as comrades-in-arms.

  More years passed. The King died. George V was crowned. Holmes and I may never again have been shoulder to shoulder until death (I had long since gained his word of honour for a grave next to his among the Italian bees) except for a most remarkable and unexpected event seven long, lonely years later.

  It was 1912. I stood in the early-morning sunshine outside the front-door of my medical practice. The badge of my profession, the stethoscope, hung from my neck. It was my custom to observe patients before they came limping through my door. Many are the times I have made my diagnosis before they enter my premises or utter a word.

  My thoughts turned to my dear dead wife, a striking-looking woman with a beautiful olive complexion, large, dark, Italian eyes, and a wealth of richly-tinted deep black hair. Holmes once opined she was a little short and thick for symmetry, to my mind a quite impertinent remark. With her passing I felt doubly lonely. Of all ghosts, those of our loves are the ones we most want to wend their way back and wave to us.

  It was while deep in such thoughts that I had an unexpected interruption. One of the cheaper horse-drawn cabs pulled up in front of me from which our former landlady alighted, the good Mrs. Hudson, clutching her favourite lace-edged parasol. These days I saw her only on an annual basis when I went round to pay for the storage of my tin trunks in her attic and indulge in a few moments of nostalgia over a first infusion of her best tea. She brought with her a most curious and unexpected summons.

  ‘Dr. Watson,’ she cried in great agitation, waving the parasol, ‘a telegram from Lewes. I must assume it’s from Mr. Holmes. I know he never remembers your address. I hope he’s all right. Why would he send a telegram when the letter post is so much cheaper!’

  Holding out my hand to her with a reassurance I did not feel, I cried, ‘Why, my dear Mrs. Hudson, I am sure there is nothing amiss. Holmes never writes when he can telegraph!’

  She received my hand in hers, looking up at me with moist eyes. ‘I know you’ve had your differences of late but I wouldn’t waste an hour in going to see him, sir, or you may not see him alive.’

  To judge by her words and her precipitate arrival, Mrs. Hudson feared (and at the thought my heart beat even harder) his tempestuous life might be coming to its end. A world without Holmes, even a disaffected Holmes? And two years my junior? No. Unthinkable.

  For the past few years my former friend had spent much time at his isolated farm-house on the Sussex Downs, occupied with his hives and building a library. A mutual acquaintance came to tell me Holmes prowled about the purlieus of his farm like the Bengal tiger ‘Bert’ at the Regent’s Park Zoo, as restless, brilliant and dissatisfied as ever. This acquaintance took the chance to tell me that my name never came up.

  I slit open the envelope. The message read, ‘Early today a cutting from the Rheinische Merkur was pushed under my door. Grave events afoot. Come, if convenient - if inconvenient come all the same. S.H.’

  I read out the words to Mrs. Hudson. Without waiting for her encouragement (which was soon forthcoming), I resolved to obey my old comrade’s ringing command, though the request made it unlikely he was, as I had immediately feared, lying on his bed near death. Nor was there in this summons any hint of malice or retribution.

  There was a post-script to the telegram. I should arrive by a circuitous route. This, I was instructed, would be by fast train to Hindhead, in Surrey, where he had arranged for the Station Master to put me on a char-à-banc or electric brougham to Lewes. At Lewes, given the state of the ground after a period of heavy rain, I would find a horse-drawn four-wheeler to take me on the final stage of my journey to the farm near King’s Standing. I was without fail to bring the latest Continental Gazetteer. The telegram ended, ‘The tsunami has struck,’ followed by a mysterious command, ‘Spend an hour in intensive study of the Kiel Canal.’

  My heart sang at his customary presumption though I was alarmed by the phrase ‘The tsunami has struck’ and by the order to take a circuitous route. ‘What on Earth does all this mean?’ I said aloud, after I had twice read over the summons. Should I purchase a carpet-bag and fill it with a jemmy, a dark lantern and my best field-glasses? Or at the very least load two chambers of my Eley’s No. 2 with soft-nosed bullets and slip it in a hip-pocket? As to the Kiel Canal, I revolved in my head how to carry out so strange an order in such a short time and decided it was not possible.

  I threw myself briskly into country-wear wondering why I should ‘without fail’ bring the Continental gazetteer. My practice could get along very well for a day or two without me since it was the slackest time in the year. I pinned a note to the patients’ entrance asking them to make do with the locum summoned from the St. Pancras Hospital. I promised Mrs. Hudson a supply of black hothouse grapes from Solomon’s in Piccadilly on my return and left helter-skelter for the railway station. Soon I was taking lunch on the train to Hindhead.

  Shortly after five o’ clock that day, with a medical bag and the small portmanteau containing the Continental gazetteer, I was aboard the four-wheeler travelling through the mud and quiet of the Ashdown Forest. Just past Chelwood Vachery I glimpsed Holmes’ lonely, low-lying black-and-white building with its stone courtyard and crimson ramblers. From a nearby height Holmes could command a view of the English Channel, close enough as the seagull flies to blast his farm with winter gales. It was clear his respect for Nature had grown with age and familiarity. For many a year it took a little diplomacy to wrest him from London. On several occasions during our days at Baker Street I urged him to go to the countryside for a rest, not least because he could obtain a wondrous view of the heavens. He replied with some asperity, ‘Watson, the proper study for my species is my species, not blades of grass or insects and the stars! I shall sooth myself with Nature in my later days. For the moment, it is to the Quadrant of Regent Street and Charing Cross I turn to for recreation and inspiration, amid the sounds and sights of hansom-cabs, omnibuses and dog-carts, wing collars, and the flickering of gas-light, watching the ever-changing kaleidoscope of life as it ebbs and flows through Fleet Street and the Strand.’

  As I journeyed closer to Holmes’ country retreat, my hearing grew attuned to the clip of the horses’ hoofs striking the road’s metalled surface. This switched to the crunching sound of the carriage-wheels turning from the highroad into the gravelled drive. The air wafting through the carriage window was suffused with the scent of dried grass. Heralding my arrival at this once-familiar place, we passed the small stand of Holm oaks and a fine 100-foot Lebanon cedar with a small engraved plate pinned to the bark stating ‘From a seed sourced in the Forest of the Cedars of God, planted to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon 1815’.

  To my relief (given my still-bubbling worry for his health), as the horses pulled the carriage along the final stretch, I saw Holmes pacing up and down. He looked well enough for a man now into his sixties. I observed nothing formidable in his symptoms, except for an increase in lumbago in the lower spine, no doubt worsened by damp air seeping from the nearby woods. His demeanour reflected the tenor of the telegram. While I fumbled
for money to pay the cabman, Holmes drummed his fingers on the carriage side. The payment made, with a touch of the driver’s whip the horses wheeled and turned away. I could give Holmes my fullest attention.

  My host reached a hand across to my shoulder and in the tone of old said approvingly, ‘Well done, Watson, prompt as ever in answering a telegraphic summons. I see you have brought the Continental gazetteer.’

  ‘I have, yes,’ I responded, suffused with warmth, ‘but are you well?’

  ‘My ever-faithful friend, I am. You shall meet Mrs. Keppell once more, she is still with me. Her billeting and victualing are still carried out like army manoeuvres.’

  Mrs. Keppell had remarried. Her new husband was the village wheel-wright and coffin-maker, though she kept to her former name when at Holmes’ farm. With her came Tallulah, a lively Norwich terrier. Refused entry in-doors by the master of the house, Tallulah spent the two hours as on daily duty, patrolling the courtyard, yapping with unabated excitement whenever Mrs. Keppell waved from an open window.

  Now summer was almost upon us, petunias and snap-dragons set the farm ablaze with colour. Wall-flowers protruded from crevices, a favourite flower of mine from a nostalgic childhood holiday spent in Dorset with my mother, taking long walks around Thomas Hardy’s birthplace at Higher Bockhampton.

  With the carriage gone and my introduction to Tallulah complete, Holmes raised a hand dramatically. Grasped between finger and thumb fluttered a piece of newsprint perhaps five inches square, displaying angular heavy characters. I heard his dry, crisp, emphatic utterance as, with a grim expression, he plunged into the matter without further preamble. ‘The tsunami, Watson, the proof of crime - and worse it is than we could ever have imagined.’

  ‘What crime?’ I demanded.

  ‘What crime?’ Holmes expostulated, striding towards the house. ‘The greatest crime of our life together!’

  At the veranda, he stopped to allow me to catch up. ‘Those Sungazer devils, Watson. I should have realised it would not end at the slam of a Lanchester’s door. I fear they mock us yet. In the night this piece of newsprint was pushed beneath this very door by person or persons unknown, though I can guess from where the commission came.’

  ‘Were there no clues as to the sender?’

  ‘None, Watson. Would you expect a seal of red wax stamped with a crouching lion? No. You will observe the cutting is pasted to ordinary cream-laid paper without watermark.’

  I followed him into the house, Holmes continuing to hold the cutting high, like a tour guide waving a coloured umbrella at the British Museum. Despite the warmth of the air outside, the fire was already burning up, crackling merrily, and sending spurts of blue, pungent smoke into the room, overcoming the perfume from the vases of sweet peas and roses Mrs. Keppell had placed everywhere. Within two hours of leaving London it was as though we were once more back in our old rooms in Baker Street.

  ‘Watson, this clipping torn from the Rheinische Merkur contains the answer to the riddle at Scotney Castle. It is turning out to be a greater riddle than either you or I thought. You will shortly agree nothing in our long career as allies in the fight against crime has had such implications.’

  Holmes could on occasion resort to exaggeration though never with me, or at least not in private, even in the terrifying case of the Parsee Solicitor. Once inside the low-beamed room, I placed my coat upon a peg. As of old, while I waited for Holmes to settle, I shuffled through the pile of correspondence threatening to tumble from the overmantle. One piece, several months old, began ‘Rumour abounds in Titel that Albert Einstein ordered the mercy-killing of his daughter Lieserl...’

  I put aside a handsome mahogany Seneca view camera and took its place on a rickety chair. Over the years of regular occupation, white-painted shelves of deal had sprung up on every wall, purchased from a late fellow at Oriel College. One shelf was loaded with modern text-books, another with works of reference, including the much-thumbed Dictionary of London by Charles Dickens’ eponymous son, with its guide to Ah Sing’s opium den and much other information required of a Consulting Detective. Old friends lined the upper shelves, transported from our rooms in Baker Street. In addition to a two-year-old Baedeker, I spied British Birds, the Dictionary of National Biography, the Origin Of Tree Worship, Poe’s The Mystery of Marie Roget, Catullus, Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, several of my favourite sea stories by Clark Russell, The Holy War and, less to the fore, The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall & Spurzheim with its instruction on reading the faces of Chinamen. A few of the works had accompanied him from far-away University days - Hafiz and Horace, Flaubert and Goethe, Twelfth Night, a copy of E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, and the pocket Petrarch.

  More volumes lay open on the bear-skin hearthrug, signs of wide contacts among authors, printers and publishers. A French admirer had presented him with a stuffed icterine warbler in a small glass cage. In another glass cage was a human skull the size of a coconut, with an iron-stained mandible. An inscription stated, ‘To My Partner In Crime, Sherlock Holmes, the culmination of my work. Chas. Dawson F.S.A’.

  One wall was bullet-pocked with the patriotic monogram V.R., the old Queen’s initials. My former companion had continued his habit of pistol-practice in the sitting-room, his formidable marksmanship learned from many visits early in life to a range on the sand-dunes in the neighbourhood of Calais, a whole day’s shooting for one pièce de cent sous. Though he had undergone no military training as far as I ever ascertained, he was at least my equal with a pistol though less so with something heavier.

  ‘Watson, my dear friend,’ came Holmes’ voice, interrupting my inspection. ‘For just a moment I shall keep you in suspense over this newspaper clipping. Please, first take up the Continental gazetteer and read me the entry for Carl von Hofmeyer. Then we shall indulge ourselves in a cup of Mrs. Keppell’s tea.’

  He threw himself into his old arm-chair, drawing up his knees until his fingers clasped round his long, thin shins. With a gesture at a box on a low table, he said, ‘Try one of Lord Cantlemere’s cigars. He dropped them off on his way to the Continent the other day. They are less poisonous than one would expect.’

  ‘Ulrich von Hofmeyer,’ I repeated to be certain I had caught the name. ‘Who might that be?’

  ‘We shall discover that together if you do as I ask, Watson,’ Holmes responded, the old sarcasm evident in the words softened by a slight smile.

  I turned the pages to ‘H’ and came to von Hofmeyer.

  ‘Count Ulrich von Hofmeyer (1856- )

  Ranked among Germany’s most prominent imperialists.

  1881 1st Life Guard Hussar Regiment

  1888, Founder of Deutsch-Ostafrika, considered the pearl of Germany’s overseas possessions.

  1891 appointed Imperial Commissioner in German East Africa.

  Such is his enterprise and energy, by 1889 he was seen as rival to Henry Stanley.’

  Holmes broke in, impatiently, ‘The Informal, Watson, the informal!’

  He was puffing on a familiar old pipe, the smoke curling up more thickly to emphasise each curious element in the Gazetteer’s tale

  I moved my finger down the page.

  ‘Apostle of ruthless imperialism. Devoted agent of the Kaiser. Of all the conquistadores in the Scramble for Africa, von Hofmeyer is considered the most pugnacious, his line of march through Africa marked by blackened villages and dead warriors.

  Uncomplimentary reports on his activities in Africa have appeared in the British Press (especially the Manchester Guardian).

  Said to model himself on Nietzsche’s Superman.’

  I stopped reading to comment, ‘Nasty piece of work, Holmes!’

  ‘Who became a rising statesman at the Kaiser’s Court. Read on, Watson, then we’ll talk.’

  I continued:

  ‘Regarded by Bismarck as a
‘flag-waving, buccaneering freebooter’.

  Describing Africans he is said to have expressed the view ‘the only thing that would make an impression on these wild sons of the steppe was a bullet from a repeater’.

  Among those he is accused of murdering is Swahili sugar-plantation owner Abushiri ibn Salim al-Harthi, chief supporter of the Sultan of Zanzibar.

  In 1889 he engaged in a mêlée with Galla tribesmen, killing a sultan and six of his leading men, then pushed on into the Wadsagga country.’

  I looked up. ‘That’s all,’ I said. ‘But tell me, Holmes, why the interest in this unpleasant fellow?’

  ‘’Of all the conquistadores in the Scramble for Africa’...’ He turned to me and repeated, ‘‘Of all the conquistadores in the Scramble for Africa.’ Watson, what do you make of that?’

  ‘I make nothing of it, Holmes. What should I be making of this murdering ... this...’ I looked back at the page. ‘...flag-waving buccaneering freebooter’?’

  Holmes put away the pipe. He pulled a silver cigarette-case from a pocket and pointed with it to the pile of books scattered across the floor.

  ‘As you can see, I am expanding my knowledge as you so often urged. It now strikes me had I not been a consulting detective - or a Naturalist ...’ his eyes gave a momentary twinkle, ‘I might have become an historian. There are many similarities in our quest for answers.’

  He extracted an Alexandrian cigarette and after lighting it resumed. ‘I doubt if your gazetteer yet contains the name of another Prussian, Bernhard Dernburg?’

  ‘It does not,’ I affirmed after a search.

  ‘No matter.’

  Holmes reached for a strip of paper at his side and threw it across to me.

  I read. ‘Confidential. From Mark Sykes, British Embassy Berlin, 31/V/1912. For the attention of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Near Lewes, Sussex, England.