The Disappearance of Mr James Phillimore

by Dan Andriacco

  Then Sir Stephen went on to draw what he thought were parallels between the three Dupin stories and Sherlock Holmes stories fifty years later, which I thought was stretching it a bit.

  “There’s no denying that Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective in the world,” he said as he reached his conclusion. “His deerstalker hat and magnifying glass mean detective all over the globe. Everybody has heard of Sherlock Holmes and almost nobody has heard of C. Auguste Dupin. But the question was not which character is best known, but which was more influential and therefore most important. And the answer to that question, ladies and gentlemen, can only be Chevalier Dupin!”

  Sir Stephen sat down to a smattering of polite applause, this being a Holmes-friendly crowd. But I gave him full marks for cleverness in the way he framed the debate at the end so that popularity was taken off the table as part of the argument. U.S. presidential candidates could learn from that. I’m almost certain that Mac was forced to cut from his opening statement a boatload of statistics on books sold, movies made, sets tuned to the BBC’s Sherlock, and groups like the Baker Street Irregulars and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. Instead, he began with:

  “Without Dupin, there never would have been a Sherlock Holmes. But without Sherlock Holmes, the detective story might never have become the almost universally appreciated genre that it is today. Conan Doyle took Poe’s formula, improved upon it by almost always playing fair with the reader, and popularized it to a degree that Poe could scarcely have imagined. He achieved an enviable commercial and critical success, which inevitably inspired imitators and successors in the field.

  “And how did he do that?”

  Mac proceeded to answer his own question, but I missed it. I heard a little “ping” noise and Faro, sitting next to me on the left, pulled out his phone and looked at the screen. After a minute he started typing furiously with both thumbs like a digital native.

  “Hot news,” I whispered to Lynda on my right.

  “The latest on the Miley Cyrus nuptials, no doubt,” she responded archly.

  But I wasn’t so sure. I tore my attention back to the debate, but I still thought something big might be happening.

  There were more comments and rebuttals until each debater had the opportunity to make a final statement. Sir Stephen rose to the occasion. After a summary of his previous arguments, he concluded by saying:

  “If all that means nothing to you, then consider this, ladies and gentlemen: Sherlock Holmes cannot be the most important fictional character because, according to his most ardent fans, he is not fictional!”

  With that, he abruptly sat down as the audience exploded in applause, the loudest coming from the Sherlockians.

  If Mac had had a cigar in his mouth at that moment, he would have swallowed it. He stared at Sir Stephen, then at the audience, and then at Althea Ralston.

  “Madame Moderator,” he intoned solemnly, “in the face of truth I have no rebuttal. I concede the debate.”

  The response from the crowd was about half and half between laughter and applause. I was one of the clappers, glad that it was over.

  As soon as the commotion died down a bit, I turned to Faro. “Something’s up. What is it?”

  He didn’t bother to deny it or stall. “It’s Phillimore. Scotland Yard found him at the Langham Hotel. He apparently shot himself to death.”

  Excerpt from the Professor’s Journal

  June 10, 2012

  Phillimore was a greater fool than I imagined. His suspicion of me was even more obvious at the end. He was a bundle of nerves when I came to his room at the Langham. And yet he did nothing to protect himself from me. Killing him was just no challenge at all. Now it’s up to McCabe to make this interesting. I still have hopes.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “It Simply Does Not Make Sense”

  We didn’t get much sleep that night. After the auditorium cleared out, Lynda interviewed Sir Stephen and then wrote a story for the Grier wire. She got him to hold forth not only on his feelings about being out millions of pounds in a Ponzi scheme, but his reaction to the news that Phillimore had killed himself (“I’m speechless,” followed by a paragraph full of such phrases as “feel so betrayed,” “coward’s way out,” and “complicates the situation”).

  Then I had to endure Mac’s lecture on the important history of the Langham Hotel. Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde had dined with an American magazine publisher there in 1889. The result had been Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Several characters from the Canon had stayed there, most notably the King of Bohemia, but apparently they had all had better experiences than Phillimore.

  Faro’s column was once again occupying page one of The Daily Eye the next morning with a piece comparing Phillimore’s exit to that of Robert Maxwell, a British publishing baron who apparently fell off his yacht in the Canary Islands and drowned in 1991. After he died it turned out that he’d stolen money from his companies’ pension funds to keep the empire afloat. His sons had to declare bankruptcy.

  “That’s a pretty flimsy analogy,” Lynda complained. “I hate it when reporters do that.”

  Mac, sitting at breakfast with us in our hotel restaurant, had a different concern. “Why the devil would Phillimore go to all that trouble to disappear in such a dramatic fashion and then kill himself? It simply does not make sense.”

  “Don’t suicides often do things that don’t make sense?” Kate said. “Hedda Bortz back in Erin set out her cereal bowl at the breakfast table right before she took an overdose of sleeping pills on the day that guy she dated for seventeen years married her sister Minnie.”

  “Hedda Bortz was non compos mentis to begin with,” Mac grumbled, “as proven by the fact that she dated Ralph Hollis for seventeen years. Minnie divorced him after six months.”

  Fascinating as this discussion might have been (to somebody), I was listening with only half an ear as I read through the sidebar on Faro’s column. The piece was obviously written earlier and originally intended to be Faro’s daily contribution to world knowledge before it was upstaged by Phillimore’s death. It listed the movie actors, reality-TV stars, athletes, politicians, wealthy entrepreneurs and executives, and even charitable institutions who had been Phillimore clients. It was like Bernie Madoff with a British accent, although there were plenty of fish from the American side of the ocean caught in the net as well.

  When I had a chance to get a word in edgewise, I called my tablemates’ attention to the sidebar. “It’s a who’s who of big money people,” I said. “At least, they used to have big money.”

  “I wonder where Faro got all those names,” Lynda said.

  “Most likely from his sources at Scotland Yard, one of whom almost certainly is a fellow Binomial Theorist,” Mac said, clearly referring to Assistant Commissioner Madigan, Faro’s pal at the Brigadiers Club. He paused as if struck by a thought. “Now that is curious.”

  I’ll bite. “What?”

  “I am not privy to the entire membership list of that exclusive group, but so far as I know not one member of the Binomial Theorists appears on that list of Phillimore victims.”

  Lynda shrugged, expressing my sentiments exactly. “So he didn’t cheat his friends,” she said. “What’s strange about that?”

  “Everything! It is almost a cliché that when a con man is exposed many of the victims will say in interviews that they had been friends for years. I believe you would find that was true in the Madoff case. Of course, I could be wrong.” You don’t really believe that. “Perhaps some of the victims are members of the Binomial Theorists whose names have never come to my attention. It is a rather quiet group, as well as an elite one. Its members do not publish books and papers or - ”

  “Or engage in some of the public frivolities that consume the more extroverted Holmes groups.” The portly fi
gure of Welles Faro had appeared in our midst, standing over Mac’s shoulder. Lynda squeezed my hand. His voice must have reached her ears with all the charm of a fingernail scratched on a chalk board. He was not her favorite fellow.

  “We aren’t quite like Mycroft Holmes’s Diogenes Club, whose members were absolutely forbidden to speak to each other on pain of expulsion,” Faro continued, “but we have kept a rather low profile. Even sponsoring the pastiche contest was a bit of a step out for us.”

  “I was just observing that your members seemed to have been surprisingly fortunate at avoiding Phillimore Investments,” Mac said.

  Faro shrugged. “None of our names is on the list, that’s true enough. Our purpose as a club is social, not business.”

  “How did you get that list?” Lynda asked. Maybe she hoped to surprise the answer out of Faro by the bluntness of her question.

  “Ah, that would be telling, and I never reveal my sources.” I’m sure Faro considered his tone humorous. I’m equally sure that Lynda, in the tradition of a former British monarch, Was Not Amused. “In fact, I’m just on my way to catch up on a few sources now. Thought I’d drop around first and see how you survived the night.”

  Just great. Who needs sleep?

  “So what’s today’s scoop for the all-seeing Daily Eye?” Lynda asked, apparently trying to sound downright perky. The three cups of caffeine-laced coffee that she’d consumed before and during breakfast probably helped.

  Faro chuckled. “I get paid very well to save that kind of information for my readers. But I can tell you - ”

  He didn’t, though, because just then Lynda’s cell phone rang. It’s a very boring ringtone that came with the phone. She pulled the phone out of her purse, looked at the number calling, and stood up. “Excuse me,” she said on her way out of the room.

  “Yes, Welles,” Mac prompted.

  Faro had been watching Lynda, a little closely for my comfort, but he turned back to Mac. “I’m sure all the media will have this, but Scotland Yard has assigned Inspector Neville Heath to look into Phillimore’s death, reporting to Andy Madigan.”

  Mac raised an eyebrow. Kate said, “You mean they suspect it was something other than a suicide?”

  “Of course not, my dear! It’s just that when a swindler on a massive scale disappears and then turns up dead, one has to be sure. Heath’s a good man, but he has one weakness: I happen to know that he harbors a secret ambition to be a mystery writer. And one of his favorite sleuths is your Damon Devlin, Professor McCabe.”

  “I shall endeavor not to hold that against him,” Mac said with a painful attempt to not seem pleased by that last bit of intel.

  “Well, the day is getting on,” Faro said. Wow, yeah, it’ll be noon in just four hours! “I’d best be going.”

  Nobody tried to stop him.

  He’d barely left when Lynda returned with an excited expression on her face. “That was Assistant Commissioner Madigan. He agreed to my request for an interview. And here’s the super-weird part: He asked me to bring along my husband and my brother-in-law.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Scotland Yard

  Max Cutter, the hard-boiled Philadelphia private eye who is the hero of all seven of my unpublished mystery novels, would probably never be allowed inside New Scotland Yard. That’s just one of the differences between us.

  “You ought to go with us,” I told Kate. “They don’t do tours of the Yard. It would be something different.”

  “Not different enough for me,” Kate said. “I live with a mystery writer. I get enough of Scotland Yard from him. Besides, I want to visit the National Portrait Gallery and there’s no sense in dragging the rest of you along.”

  You don’t have to be a tea-swilling fan of Inspector Whosis on PBS to feel at least a little thrill at hearing the two words “Scotland Yard.” The name carries a romantic resonance that the initials FBI lack. The concrete barriers around the building and the armed guards patrolling it did nothing to disabuse me of the notion that this was a no-nonsense outfit. So, of course, inside we had to show our IDs, sign our names, march through a metal detector, and so forth. After about fifteen minutes of that rigmarole, we finally got hustled into the Assistant Commissioner’s office.

  When I say the Assistant Commissioner, I don’t mean the Assistant Commissioner. There are four of them. I don’t know how their responsibilities are divided, but apparently AC Andrew Madigan was in charge of mopping up swindles against rich and important people. This merited an office four times the size of mine, though probably not humongous by corporate standards.

  I’d seen Madigan from a distance at the Brigadiers Club when he’d been leaving Faro. Closer up, I still thought his high forehead and prominent, patrician nose were worth a “Sir” in front of his name, and I figured he’d get one eventually.

  “Welcome to New Scotland Yard,” he said, extending his hand to each of us in turn. “Thanks for coming in. You men may wonder why I asked for you to join Ms. Teal. I’ll get to that presently. But first, I believe Ms. Teal has some questions for me.”

  “That I do. Thanks for taking the time to see me, Assistant Commissioner.” Lynda flipped out her notebook and a small recording device. “Do you mind if I record this? Good. I want to be accurate. Let’s start with Phillimore. He fooled a lot of people. The list of his victims reads like a Who’s Who of entertainment, the arts, business, and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. I even noticed the name of Moon Kelso, lead drummer for Orange Zebra.” That’s one of Lynda’s favorite groups. “Phillimore must have been special. What can you tell me about him that I don’t know from the other media?”

  It was an excellent question. Madigan smiled at the way she phrased it.

  “I suppose he was a bit of a con man from the get-go. He liked to give the impression that he was the son of some minor royal, born on the wrong side of the blanket. In point of fact, his father drove a lorry.” That’s “truck” in American. “He was a bright lad, good enough to get a scholarship to Winchester College, one of our most prestigious public schools - what you would call a private school in America.” Of course, private is public in England.

  “He took a first in finance at Oxford and landed a job at Lloyd’s Bank. He built a reputation for being good at investments, which he parlayed into starting his own firm. At this stage of the investigation, we believe that Phillimore Investments was legitimate in the beginning. It appears that during the last recession he didn’t want his clients to know that the value of their holdings had diminished greatly. In order to maintain his reputation as an investment sage, he falsified their returns. When any of them cashed out, he took the money from new clients.”

  “A classic Ponzi scheme,” Lynda noted, thanks to my tutorial on Saturday. “I understand that you were a friend of Phillimore.”

  Madigan nodded. “You could say that, applying the term rather loosely. We didn’t dine at each others’ houses, but we saw each other with some frequency because we shared a certain interest. When I got wind of the investigation, I immediately alerted the Commissioner of my potential conflict of interests. He decided that, having disclosed the relationship, there was no reason that I should remove myself from supervision of the case.”

  “How did the investigation begin?” Lynda asked. “Who blew the whistle?”

  “That I am not at liberty to say.”

  “Was it a client or an employee?” my favorite journalist pressed.

  “Again, that is something I’m afraid I can’t discuss while the investigation is ongoing.”

  “So Phillimore’s death changes nothing?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. It may make our task more difficult in some ways as we try to untangle all of this.”

  “How close were you to an arrest?”

  “I wouldn’t want to speculate on that, but I’ve already indicat
ed that we have not completed the investigation.”

  The interview went on for another fifteen minutes or so. Mac and I kept our peace while Lynda asked questions about how long the investigation might take (probably weeks rather than months), the size of the fraud (certainly billions, but not even estimated yet), the possibility that others in Phillimore’s company were involved (“almost certainly”), etc.

  “Is there any question I haven’t asked yet that I should have?” Lynda said at the end.

  “I can’t think of any,” Madigan said. “But I would like to make this statement. If anyone has information that would be helpful in our inquiries, we would be most eager to have your cooperation even if you were a party to this crime.” Translation: Let’s make a deal.

  Madigan stood up. “Now I would like you to meet the investigating officer in Phillimore’s death. He is eager to talk to you gentlemen because you were on the scene when Phillimore disappeared. He’s already talked to Mr. Faro.”

  “Will this conversation be on the record for me?” Lynda asked.

  “That’s up to Inspector Heath, Ms. Teal.”

  Inspector Neville Heath had a smaller office than Madigan and a heartier manner. He was taller than me, with big ears and black hair combed back, wearing a double-breasted gray pinstriped suit like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. I figured he was in his late forties. He reminded me of somebody, but I couldn’t figure out whom.

  Heath approached Mac with an outstretched hand. “Sebastian McCabe.” He said it the way Lynda once pronounced the name of a legendary master distiller she met during a bourbon-tasting that she coerced me into. “I have all of your books.” They make good doorstops, don’t they?