The Disappearance of Mr James Phillimore

by Dan Andriacco

  “You could answer a question: Why the umbrella?”

  She smiled. “That was part of the magic trick - the misdirection. Mr. Phillimore’s large purple umbrella was so outlandish that it is what everyone remembered about him, not his delicate features or his perhaps rather raspy voice.”

  It was days before I could get Holmes to discuss the adventure further one evening at Baker Street.

  “There was a similar case in Manchester in ’57 and another in Paris just last year,” he said. “And yet I made a mistake at first by assuming that there was a real James Phillimore. When I realized that the most likely impersonator, Masterson the Magnificent, could not have undertaken the disguise, and that the putative Mrs. Phillimore was herself a child of the music hall, I began to look at things differently. The Phillimores were not in a photograph together because they were the same person, not because of some estrangement. Annie was not just her mistress’s loyal servant but her accomplice. I must admit that she told the exact literal truth - a most deceptive truth - when she said that Mr. and Mrs. Phillimore couldn’t have been closer!”

  “But for a woman to present herself as a man for such an extended period hardly seems credible!” I protested.

  “On the contrary, Watson. There have been a number of women in British history who have successfully carried out just such a masquerade for a life-time. James Barry, surgeon, and James Gray, soldier, were both women. And both named James, mark you, just like our Phillimore! Still, I take nothing away from Miss Kenworthy merely because she was far from the first. She is a remarkable woman indeed.”

  As Sherlock Holmes spoke, his eyes stole toward a cabinet photo on our mantelpiece and I knew that his thoughts had wandered back to another remarkable woman who had also once dressed as a man.

  Chapter Eight

  The Fact of Fiction

  I finished reading the pastiche that afternoon sitting on the couch in Mac’s suite before we went out to dinner.

  “No way,” I exclaimed as I put it down. “This can’t be the solution to the Phillimore disappearance. I don’t care how good an actress Heather O’Toole is, that wasn’t her disguised as Phillimore. They don’t call her HO’T for nothing!”

  Before Mac could respond, our wives came into the room. They were weighed down with shopping bags, I noted gloomily. Being a good uncle, I asked Kate if she’d heard from the kids today.

  “Brian is complaining that his siblings are inhibiting his self-actualization.” Well, that’s what big sisters do. “I told him I will inhibit his access to all electronic devices until he goes to college if he texts me again in the middle of the London night.”

  “Did you finish reading the story?” Lynda asked. “I thought it was pretty authentic, even though it was a bit shorter than the originals.”

  “I agree,” Mac said. “It is certainly the best presented for my consideration in the contest, and quite worthy of winning. That presents something of a problem, however, with the author unavailable to claim the honor. The style of the writing is passably Watsonian, and there were quite a few touches in the storyline that ring true. For example, Holmes’s first theory is wrong. That also happens in a number of canonical cases, such as ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band,’ ‘The Yellow Face,’ ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ and even The Hound of the Baskervilles. One might say the plot is rather derivative, with its echoes of ‘A Case of Identity’ and ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip,’ but that, too, is canonical. Several of the later Holmes stories have plot lines similar to the earlier ones.

  “The reference to other cases is classic Watson. I blush to note that the allusion to ‘the singular suicide’ at the Cavendish Club is clearly a nod to my own mystery novel, Nothing Up My Sleeve, in which ‘The Singular Suicide’ is a chapter title. You will recall that in that book Damon Devlin solves a murder made to look like a suicide made to look like a murder.”

  No wonder I don’t read your books more than once, and that just for friendship.

  “If the author was trying to curry favor with one of the judges, it worked,” Mac droned on. “I also found the references to misdirection - ”

  “This is a fascinating exercise in literary criticism,” I lied. “But I repeat: You can’t expect me to believe that Phillimore was really his wife in disguise.”

  “Indeed I do not!” Mac said, as if the mere idea was the most ridiculous notion in the world - which, of course, it was.

  “But you said the solution was in the story!” I sputtered.

  “And so it is - not in the solution of the story, but in a possibility that Holmes investigated and rejected.”

  “A hidden room!” Lynda said.

  “You mean like in Scooby-Doo?” I said acidly. “Oh, come on. That house has been standing like that for hundreds of years.”

  Mac nodded. “Just so - it has been standing like that with a hidden room. Or, to be more precise, it has a priest hole. I am a dolt for not exploring that possibility last night.”

  I was tired of staring blankly at Mac, so I turned to Lynda... and stared blankly at her.

  “Weren’t priest holes where Catholic priests hid during the time of the persecutions?” she asked my brother-in-law.

  “Precisely,” Mac confirmed. “Altar vessels were concealed there as well. Priests in those days, the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, were forbidden by English law from celebrating the Mass. The penalties escalated up to life in prison for a third offence. In practice, some priests were tortured - usually drawn and quartered - and then executed. Nevertheless, many wealthy Catholics had priest holes concealed in their homes. St. Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit lay brother, was quite skilled at building and concealing them. He was caught and tortured to death on the rack.

  “In a sense, priest holes were not all that different from the secret room in my home and others on the Underground Railroad used to hide runaway slaves on their way north to Canada and freedom. Berkshire, where Headley Hall is located, was particularly known for having numerous priest holes in the homes of the local gentry.”

  “And you know this how?” Kate demanded before I could.

  Mac shrugged his massive shoulders. “I must have read it somewhere, possibly while researching something else. You know how the McCabe mind works, my dear: What I read, I seldom forget. Where I read it, I seldom remember. I must shamefacedly admit that the notion of a priest hole as a hiding place for Phillimore did not occur to me until I read the pastiche with Holmes looking for a secret room. Then it struck me like a body blow. I was able to confirm at the British Library not only that the Headley family was Catholic, but that there were rumors of a priest hole on the premises.”

  Being a neophyte Catholic, this idea of throwing Jesuits on the rack was all new to me, but I didn’t interrupt with questions. Mac assured me later that English Catholics started getting legal rights at the end of the eighteenth century. Flash forward to 1994 and a member of the royal family, the Duchess of Kent, became Catholic with scarcely an eyebrow raised. Today, the monarch can even marry a Catholic. Sometimes change is a good thing, although you should never bet on it.

  “When Holmes looks for a hidden room in ‘The Adventure of the Magic Umbrella’ and says ‘it’s been done before,’ that is a clear reference to two Holmes stories with a hidden room - ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Builder’ and The Valley of Fear,” Mac said. “Both of those cases took place before the 1895 setting of this story. To me, however, it seemed like a neon sign pointing to the present whereabouts of Mr. James Phillimore.”

  This didn’t track for me. “Are you saying that Phillimore wrote into this story a clue to how he disappeared? But why do that if his goal was to slip out of Dodge before he could get arrested? In fact, why stage such an elaborate, attention-getting disappearance to begin with?”

  “What!” Lynda said. “Arrested? I think I must have missed a cha
pter.” She looked from me to Mac to me again. “Would you boys care to fill me in?”

  Oops. With all the chatter about the pastiche, we hadn’t gotten around to debriefing our wives about our discussion with Faro. Mac brought them current with the news that Phillimore apparently had been running a giant Ponzi scheme.

  “Hot damn!” Lynda responded. “The story gets even bigger. And I got a text from Megan while we were at Covent Garden - she wants me to pursue it, all right.” She chewed a nail. “But I’ll never catch up to Faro and all his sources. I have to find a unique angle.”

  “You can go with us on our return trip to Headley Hall,” I said.

  “So can Faro!”

  “But you have special access to the genius who figured it out.” I turned to Mac. “Presuming you did figure it out. You’d better be right. And you still didn’t answer my questions about why he’d disappear in such a pulp novel way and why he’d leave a clue, if he really did and it’s not just your imagination.”

  Mac put on that Mona Lisa smile that drives me nuts. “I am not certain that the clue was deliberate. Perhaps it was subconscious. Perhaps the fact that the notion of a hidden room proved to be a dead end in the story was intended to throw us off the trail. That remains to be seen. I have not solved all of the mysteries yet, old boy. Give me time.”

  Excerpt from the Professor’s Journal

  June 8, 2012

  Phillimore suspects something. “I read suspicion in his eyes,” as Porlock wrote to Sherlock Holmes. He has proved more astute than I expected. But it’s too late for him now. He’s cowering away in his luxurious hideout, totally dependent on me. Unfortunately, as he is beginning to fear, he made the mistake of putting himself into the wrong hands. He probably worries that I am going to turn him in to Scotland Yard. He should be so lucky.

  Chapter Nine

  The Ponzi Principle

  “What are you doing?” I asked Lynda.

  “Writing on my iPad.”

  Patience, Jeff. “I can see that, my lovely wench. What are you writing on your iPad?”

  “Call me that again and I’ll give you a free taekwondo demonstration. You won’t like it.” What, you don’t like being called lovely? “I’m brainstorming ways to get into the story with a different angle.”

  Welles Faro, as expected, had broken the story of Scotland Yard’s investigation of Arthur James Phillimore with another huge top-of-page-one column in The Daily Eye. The other London papers, meanwhile, were absorbed with comparatively trivial matters like the torrential rains battering the British Isles, Prince Philip’s continuing hospitalization, and the Euro 2012 football (a.k.a. soccer) tournament which had opened the day before in Warsaw with a 1-1 tie between Greece and Poland.

  “But we’re on our honeymoon!” I protested.

  “Honeymoon, yes. Vacation no. And aren’t you supposed to be working, too?”

  Oh, that. It was Saturday morning, before breakfast. We’d been in London since Wednesday. Although Mac had already done some of his business at King’s College before we arrived, and was going to go back, I hadn’t yet made that trek. We’d been busy with other things. Eventually we would have to justify the deal I had struck whereby I was considered to be on the clock for St. Benignus part of the time in London because I would be working up publicity on the exchange program.

  “I’ll get around to it,” I promised.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking of the college. In fact, I missed the campus, as well as Erin, my nieces and nephews, Popcorn, and even Oscar. I liked to travel, but it seemed that we’d been away so long. Well, it didn’t help any to dwell on that. I tried to scrunch up my homesickness into a little ball and shove it to the back of my mind. At least the love of my life was with me.

  “So what’s on your to-do list today?” I asked.

  “First,” Lynda said, “I need to get an interview with that Assistant Commissioner, Andrew Madigan. He’s the wheel behind the investigation.”

  “That sounds like a conflict of interests, or at least an oddity. Madigan and Phillimore, if not friends, are at least more than nodding acquaintances. They’re both members of the Binomial Theorists.”

  “Good point.” She typed. “I’ll ask him about that. I also have to find out more about how this fraud worked. Faro’s breathless column this morning was heavy on shock and pretty skimpy on facts.”

  “Faro said it was a Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi principle is simple enough.” Knowing that I pay attention to this stuff, Lynda was all ears. Wait, scratch that. Sitting on our bed in her yellow satin pajamas, bent forward to type on the iPad on her lap, it was obvious that she was not all ears. But she was paying attention to what I was saying. I diverted my eyes from her shapely body so that I could pay attention to what I was saying, too.

  “A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment scam in which existing investors are paid out of money coming in from new fish entering the pipeline. Even though the investors are getting a huge return on their money, the scammer is getting even more. And eventually it all collapses because there aren’t enough new investors to keep it going forever. I think most of the time the legal authorities step in before it gets to that point. If it gets big enough that hundreds of investors are involved, eventually somebody smells a rat.”

  “And why is it called a Ponzi scheme?”

  “It was named after one of your countrymen, an Italian immigrant named Carlo or Charles Ponzi. He worked a scheme like this in the early 1920s in Boston. But the idea was around long before him, and keeps getting resurrected for new generations of suckers.”

  “Wasn’t that Madoff business a Ponzi scheme?”

  I nodded. “The biggest of them all, so far. It all came unraveled at the end of 2008, during the Great Recession, when a lot of his clients panicked and wanted to cash out. That’s when they found out there wasn’t any cash and their investments were essentially worthless. I don’t know how many thousands of investors Bernie Madoff bilked, but I know they ranged from well-heeled individuals to big-name charities.”

  “I followed it at the time, but I’m sure not as closely as you. How much money was involved?”

  Numbers are not her strong suit. “That’s hard to say. Some of the early estimates were as high as $65 billion missing from client accounts, but - ”

  “Billion?” Lynda’s eyes widened.

  “With a ‘b.’ But that figure was probably too high because it included a lot of investment gains that never really existed and therefore wasn’t actually money lost. I think the bean counters figured out that Bernie Madoff and his associates actually stole somewhere between ten and eighteen billion. Whatever the real number was, it got Bernie a hundred and fifty years in federal prison.

  “Next up among the big Ponzi schemers was a guy named R. Allen Stanford. He was convicted a few months ago in Texas of bilking investors out of more than $7 billion. I think he’s going to be sentenced later this month.”

  “How do you remember all that stuff, Jeff?”

  “I’m very good with numbers” - yours are 38-28-38! -“and I’ve always been interested in investments.”

  “So when’s my birthday?”

  “December first.” Good thing I remembered that number! “You’ll be thirty-one.”

  She didn’t linger on that topic. “Why do people fall for these scams and schemes?”

  I smiled ruefully. “The idea of wealth without work or risk never seems to lose its appeal. When the stock market is down, as it was at the end of the last decade, and interest rates on CDs are in the low single digits, I guess it’s hard to remember the old rule that if it seems too good to be true it probably is.”

  She regarded me shrewdly. “I’ve been following your advice on my 401(k) for years, Jeff. I hope you haven’t - ”

  I protested with my hands. “Not to worry! Don’t you r
emember? You were going to put it all into Grier Media Corp. stock, but I talked you into a prudently diversified portfolio of stock and bond mutual funds which I rebalance periodically in light of your projected retirement date.”

  “Whatever that means,” she muttered, going back to her typing.

  Financial planning and saving are not Lynda’s strong suits. She does fairly well at spending, though.

  I was about to explain to her that, thanks to my wise advice, her retirement portfolio was growing nicely when I heard a rap at the door. I looked through the eye-hole. My brother-in-law was standing in the hallway, filling up the view available through the wide-angle lens.

  “It’s Mac,” I reported to Lynda. “You’d better get decent.”

  “I’m always decent, darling. I’ll put on a robe.” Marry a wordsmith and that’s what your conversations are apt to be like.

  When I let Mac in, he gave evidence of being under the influence - of caffeine.

  “Good news, Jefferson!” he boomed. “Ms. O’Toole has granted us an audience at Deadly Hall.”

  “Don’t call it that,” I said. “That name gives me the creeps.”

  “Besides,” Lynda added, tying the belt around her robe, “it’s a Faro-ism.” Are you saying he’s not your favorite Anglo-American journalist covering this story?

  Mac bowed graciously. “As you wish.”

  He thought we could get a start on planning the day while Kate was finishing her shower. Heather O’Toole was expecting us around noon.

  “When are we going to King’s College?” I asked. “We’re actually supposed to be working on this trip, remember?”

  Mac waxed indignant. “I assure you that thoughts of my beloved popular culture program have never been far from my mind. Tomorrow night, before the debate on the King’s College London campus, we are dining at Simpson’s in the Strand with Professor Ralston as well as Sir Stephen Fresch.” Althea Ralston, no doubt some dry-as-dust academic, was the moderator of the debate as well as Mac’s principal connection on the KC campus. “I also have an appointment with her on Monday, at which time you will accompany me and photograph the campus, interview her, etc. -whatever it is you do.”