Sherlock Holmes--The Vanishing Man

by Philip Purser-Hallard

  ‘Hold your horses, Mr Holmes. By what right do you expect to interview me at all?’

  ‘Really, Beech, is this fuss necessary?’ Sir Newnham sighed. ‘As Chairman of the Society I have engaged Mr Holmes to look into the matter of Kellway’s disappearance. He is more than competent to do so, and I would ask you to please cooperate with him.’

  ‘Ah, so you’ve gone behind the Committee’s back,’ Beech observed. ‘Well, perhaps it’s for the best. It gives me the licence to bring in my own man – one whose competencies are rather better suited to the job in hand.’

  He gestured at the pallid youth behind him, who rolled his eyes nervously.

  Holmes said, ‘Is this gentleman known to you, Sir Newnham?’

  ‘We have had some dealings,’ Speight replied uneasily. ‘His name is Constantine Skinner. He calls himself…’

  ‘I’m an occult detective, Mr Holmes,’ said Skinner, proffering a limp hand. ‘I specialise in these kinds of cases. It’s why Mr Beech has called me in.’

  ‘I see,’ Holmes replied, with a wolfish smile. ‘I can only express my admiration at so brave a choice of career.’ Though he was rarely short of a jibe at the failings of Scotland Yard, my friend’s feelings towards the constabulary were positively comradely compared with his view of those investigators, so called, whose faddish and ineffective techniques he believed existed only to gull the public out of their money. ‘Tell me, Mr Skinner, how many banshees have you caught in the act of haunting? How many will-o’-the-wisps have you brought to trial? How many boggarts are now securely under lock and key because of your—’

  ‘You may entertain yourself at my expense,’ said Skinner defiantly, ‘but I’ve seen things you couldn’t dream of.’

  Holmes drawled, ‘I fear you underestimate the phantasmagorical effects of cocaine.’

  ‘I shall be fascinated to see you gentlemen match your wits in the face of our current little mystery,’ Beech told them both with a broad smile. ‘It will be quite the little experiment. But I’m afraid, Mr Holmes, that a career spent tracking down absconding aristocrats and restoring missing gemstones to wealthy owners will help you very little in this case.’

  Sir Newnham was beginning to look annoyed. ‘Beech, I must ask you to be more polite to my guests.’

  ‘Guests?’ Beech made a show of looking around, and then smiled maliciously at me. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Dr Watson. I didn’t see you there in Mr Holmes’s shadow.’

  I contained my temper, without very much difficulty. Beech was hardly the first person who had so misjudged my friendship with Holmes as to attempt to bait me with his deservedly greater fame.

  ‘So now you are here to solve the mystery, Mr Skinner, what shall be your first move?’ Holmes asked. ‘I am agog to learn from watching your techniques.’

  Skinner swallowed, and licked his lips. ‘First, I shall visit the site of the disappearance, and inspect the aura the Evolved Man has left behind.’

  ‘The aura?’ Holmes echoed. ‘This is a wholly new branch of criminology to me. Pray allow me to observe this fascinating new investigative technique.’

  My friend was notorious for never suffering fools gladly, but in this instance his mockery of the young man seemed to me excessive. The glint in Beech’s eye had made me wonder whether he had enlisted the unfortunate Skinner as a deliberate provocation to Holmes – either for mischief’s sake or to distract his attention from the proper conduct of the investigation.

  Rhyne led us down to the Annexe, and Anderton unlocked it once more. With Holmes and the others I watched from beside the doorway as Skinner moved the round table with some effort from the centre of the anteroom and stood there himself. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply and slowly raised his arms until his fingers were outstretched on either side of him. Then he began, very slowly, to revolve on the spot.

  ‘What is he doing?’ I whispered to Rhyne.

  ‘His technique is based on the idea that everyone carries an aura about with them,’ Rhyne said. ‘It’s field of psychical energy with a pattern unique to the person, whose qualities gifted individuals can sense. In extreme experiences such as injury or emotional trauma, it leaves traces behind. Skinner has learned to read such traces, as Mr Holmes might a set of physical clues.’

  ‘How fortunate that he is so dedicated to his noble calling,’ Holmes observed, altogether too loudly. ‘With such a readily demonstrated talent a lesser man would long ago have claimed Sir Newnham’s ten-thousand-pound reward and retired wealthy.’

  Skinner opened his eyes and glared at Holmes, before striding across the room and into Experiment Room A, and taking up his stance once more.

  I took my friend aside. ‘Really, Holmes,’ I whispered, ‘is it necessary to harry him so? He does not strike me as a man whose sanity is altogether secure. What he says is absurd, to be sure, but he seems to mean it all. If these “readings” of his represent a genuine delusion on his part, then I fear for his mental stability if you chip too persistently at its foundations.’

  Holmes looked very slightly abashed. ‘Then I bow to your medical judgement, my dear doctor. It simply galls me that such people—’

  He was interrupted by a bloodcurdling screech from the Experiment Room, and the crash of a body hitting the floor.

  Holmes and I were nearest, and he allowed me to reach Skinner first. I quickly confirmed that the young man was suffering a seizure, his limbs spasming as he writhed upon the tiled floor. I swiftly turned him on his side, removed his belt and placed it in his mouth.

  ‘My God, what can we do?’ Sir Newnham was asking.

  ‘If you have any potassium bromide in your laboratory,’ I said, ‘I suggest you fetch it at once, with a beaker of water and a pipette.’

  Speight hurried away.

  ‘The lad’ll be fine in a moment,’ Beech said easily, setting himself down in an armchair in the anteroom. ‘It’s all part of his modus operandi.’

  I am afraid I snapped at him: ‘Be quiet, you fool.’ His smile did not waver.

  Working as quickly and calmly as I could I made up a dose of the bromide, and had Rhyne hold Skinner tightly while I poured it between his lips. He began to quieten immediately, and within ten minutes, with the help of some smelling salts, he had recovered enough to be moved to a chair and speak to us, though weakly.

  ‘I saw… an echo,’ said Skinner, sipping a glass of brandy provided by the redoubtable Anderton. ‘A hollow, flapping shape, a pale imitation of what was once alive. The image of a person without the essence. I saw it folding, crumpling and collapsing in upon itself, and being drawn away through the void.’

  Beech said, ‘What are you saying, Skinner?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Skinner shook his head, so violently I feared another convulsion. ‘It’s as if Thomas Kellway became a ghost, a mere echo of himself, his substance leaching away from him where he sat. As if somebody drew the very life out of him.’

  Beech looked more intrigued than appalled, but he placed a hand on Skinner’s shoulder and told him, ‘You’ve done well, lad.’

  ‘So you contend that Kellway is dead?’ Holmes asked him. Skinner nodded an equally violent assent. ‘Well, it may be so. But I fear your insight is unlikely to stand up in a court of law.’

  Despite his words, Holmes’s voice was gentler now, no longer derisory. Nevertheless Skinner rounded on him, with all the anger and humiliation he must have felt at my friend’s earlier barbs, and at his own physical humiliation.

  ‘I will not have this, Mr Holmes! I cannot work – you see how difficult my work is for me – I cannot do it with your constant mockery! Sir Newnham, Mr Beech, I implore you – can you not keep this man’s superciliousness in check?’

  ‘My dear Skinner,’ began Holmes in a conciliatory tone, but Beech interrupted again.

  ‘You see the kinds of men we have each engaged, Speight. Skinner’s methods may not be those employed by Scotland Yard to keep the peasants in their place, but you see how deep is his commitment to his work, eve
n at the expense of his own health. Your man, meanwhile, has no regard for the feelings of an invalid, or for anything other than his own grossly inflated self-esteem. Why, even his best friend’s accounts of him show him to be arrogant and conceited, treating the lives of others as a game to be played, a problem to be solved. Is he really the one you would prefer to have investigating such a sensitive affair as this?’

  I was amazed at Beech’s gall in accusing somebody else of excessive self-regard, but Holmes responded haughtily. ‘Watson and I are here at your invitation, Sir Newnham, and if we are not welcome, we shall leave. You may rely on Mr Skinner to come up with some imaginative answers to your questions, I feel sure. Come, Watson.’

  We got nearly all the way along the corridor without anybody begging us to remain, and I feared that my friend’s acerbity had so soured the company’s view of him that they would indeed allow him to walk away.

  Then Sir Newnham was bustling after us, calling Holmes’s name. I saw a moment’s satisfaction on my friend’s face, soon obscured by stern impatience as he turned.

  ‘I confess I am disappointed by your conduct, Holmes,’ Speight said, ‘but my reasons for engaging you remain.’ More quietly he added, ‘I would never have employed Constantine Skinner myself, but we must allow Beech his legitimate interest as a member of the Committee. He is no less entitled than I to appoint an investigator in this matter.’ More loudly, for the benefit of those behind us in the Annexe, he declared, ‘I will not allow either you or Mr Skinner to interfere with the other’s work or to jeopardise its results. Is that understood?’

  ‘An admirable compromise,’ my friend said, ‘and one to which I am willing to accede.’ I wondered whether Speight, who seemed a generous and kind-hearted man, had seen as I had how disappointed Holmes would have been to give up this case.

  ‘Mr Skinner?’ Talbot Rhyne asked the younger investigator.

  ‘Oh, I suppose,’ Skinner muttered with ill grace. ‘I suppose it’s all right, as long as he keeps out of my way.’

  ‘Splendid.’ Holmes beamed, apparently putting the acrimony completely behind him. ‘In that case, Mr Beech, perhaps we might hold that interview now?’

  Beech conceded that we might. We placed Skinner in the care of the housekeeper, and made our way to Sir Newnham’s drawing room. Holmes asked Anderton to ensure that if any of the other observers of the experiment were to call on Sir Newnham in the meantime they should be asked to wait.

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Anderton replied. ‘What a pity you missed Mr Garforth this morning.’

  ‘Oh, so Garforth was here?’ Holmes asked. ‘Nobody has mentioned this to us.’

  ‘I was unaware, too.’ Sir Newnham frowned. ‘Who did he come to see, Anderton?’

  ‘He was seeing me, Sir Newnham,’ Rhyne interjected quickly. He flushed a little as he said it, and for the first time I wondered whether Sir Newnham might be a harder taskmaster than he appeared to be in public. ‘It was a flying visit, to find out whether there was any news of Kellway. When I told him there wasn’t, he left, being urgently required elsewhere. I’m afraid he didn’t tell me where.’

  ‘It is a pity you did not detain him nonetheless,’ Holmes observed. ‘I have a particular wish to talk to Mr Garforth. Tell me, is he a man of late middle age, with long grey hair, bushy eyebrows and muttonchop whiskers, sporting an ebony cane and a monocle, and wearing an Inverness cape?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Rhyne, surprised. ‘At least – I don’t know what coat he was wearing.’

  ‘It was an Inverness, sir,’ Anderton confirmed.

  Holmes said, ‘We saw him as he left, I fancy. He seemed in a great hurry to take our cab. What was his other pressing engagement, I wonder? Well, no matter, I’m sure we will have another opportunity to speak to him.’

  ‘I’ll send a message to his studio, if you like,’ Rhyne said, ‘and have him call back this afternoon.’

  Speight and his employees withdrew, leaving Holmes and myself to speak with Beech.

  ‘Now, sir,’ said Holmes in what for him was a conciliatory tone. ‘It is plain that you are as eager as I to understand the truth of what took place in Sir Newnham’s Experimental Annexe last night. In the interests of uncovering that truth, therefore, I beg your indulgence in answering a few simple questions. You stood the third watch with the Reverend Small, I believe?’

  ‘I did,’ said Beech, ‘and a very tedious time it was too. That parson strives to escape the limitations of his dogma, but the inside of his mind remains a very circumscribed place. Not for him the joys of unrestrained spiritual thought, I am afraid. I pointed out to him that he was privileged to share with me the chance to witness in Kellway the vindication of the supreme universal force that is the Will of Life, and of Her self-expression in mankind through the medium of evolution – meditated, it would now seem, through the benign guidance of Her earlier children, the enlightened beings from that celestial sphere which the ancients in their simple and perhaps unconscious wisdom named after the goddess of the erotic drive, which is to say after Life Herself. He replied in terms so redolent of guilty obeisance to a tyrannical tribal deity that I stopped listening after the first few words. To such people as the aptly named Mr Small, such contemplations of the absolute are, I fear—’

  ‘Mr Beech,’ interrupted Holmes drily, ‘I find your metaphysical speculations boundlessly fascinating, and shall be sure to buy Watson one of your books so that he can summarise them pithily for me. Meanwhile, if you would be so good as to confine yourself to the matter in hand…?’

  ‘But isn’t that what I’m telling you already? The session was a washout. Mr Vortigern Small took no interest whatsoever in discussing our sacred purpose there, blast his short-sighted eyes, and Kellway spent the whole time sitting alone in the dark doing nothing. The experimental materials didn’t move. Kellway didn’t move. Small would only make small talk. The whole experience was thoroughly vexing – especially in hindsight, given that a few hours later I might have been in a position to witness what ultimately happened to Kellway, as that ass Bradbury, that dauber Garforth and that sycophant Anderton so signally failed to do.’

  ‘And do you agree with Mr Skinner that Mr Kellway was somehow extinguished by supernatural means, or is your view still that he has ascended to a higher plane?’ Holmes smirked slightly.

  ‘For pity’s sake, man,’ Beech barked, ‘who mentioned a plane? Kellway was very precise about the source of his extraordinary development, and the science of celestial geometry is every bit as clear that Venus is a sphere. I realise that this information may be new to you, Mr Holmes, which is why I impart it so patiently. I understand from Dr Watson’s jottings that knowledge of astronomy is one of those areas in which your own so widely vaunted polymathy founders.’

  I rather regretted, now, committing that particular observation to paper early in our acquaintance, and still more allowing it to reach my publishers intact. Holmes was quite unperturbed, however.

  He said, ‘When specific knowledge is required of me, I am quite capable of acquiring it from the available sources. I would have been unable yesterday to tell you with any great certainty whether Venus was a planet, a comet or a star, but today I have at my fingertips such facts as are known about its magnitude, its periods of rotation and orbit, its atmosphere and its surface, in case these data should become relevant to the matter at hand. Among other things, I have learned that Venus is judged by astronomers to be a younger world than our own, on the basis of its greater proximity to the sun, just as Mars is supposed to be older. That being the case,’ he noted languidly, ‘the superior development that Kellway ascribes to its inhabitants appears to me rather anomalous.’

  Beech beamed. ‘I put just that point to him when we first met. He replied that a five-hundred-year-old tree is not so advanced an expression of the Will of Life as a five-day-old human child – a most profound observation, as I think you’ll agree.’

  I could see that Holmes did not, but he refrained from saying so, ins
tead returning to the events of the previous night. ‘I take it that there was nothing in Kellway’s manner, either when you saw him locked inside the Experiment Room or during the time when you were observing him, that suggested anything unusual to you?’

  Beech shook his head. ‘I saw nothing of the kind. He was both calm and cheerful as we locked him in, and I believe he was perfectly confident that he would leave that room having demonstrated the ability of telekinesis in the dreary manner the Society so inflexibly prescribes. Whenever I looked in on him during my watch he seemed quite serene, with that impassive stillness that comes from prolonged meditation. I freely admit that the curtailment of his night’s labours made for as great a shock to me as it did for everyone else. It’s my belief that Kellway, too, was taken completely by surprise.’

  ‘Curtailment?’ I said. ‘So you believe that Kellway was interrupted by some external force?’

  ‘The two of you heard what Skinner said as well as I did,’ said Beech tartly. ‘If you choose to reject his evidence then you are working with an incomplete model of events. That said, to my ears his description was likely that of a man being twisted through some fourth dimension of space before being translocated and rotated back into normality elsewhere – if existence on the second sphere of our Sun’s retinue can be considered normality, of course. Still, if Skinner believes there’s been murder done we shouldn’t rule it out altogether.’

  ‘That seems a somewhat extreme conclusion for him to have formed on the basis of such flimsy data,’ Holmes opined.

  ‘Aye, maybe.’ Beech looked uncharacteristically dubious for a moment. ‘I’ll be honest with you, though, and admit there’s something that’s been troubling to me. I said before that Mr Small had no wish to discuss any matters of true significance, and nor had I any desire whatsoever for a conversation on the prosaic and puerile topics in which he professed to be interested. Naturally, after a while, we ignored each other, except at the five-minute intervals when we were obliged to coordinate our observations.

  ‘Towards the middle of the second hour, however, I became aware of a low, dull moan emanating from my observation partner. I thought at first that he might be in pain, and thought to offer some of the information I’ve gleaned over the years regarding herbal remedies and the like, on the charitable assumption that his mind was not yet so firmly wedged shut as to reject such simple forms of wisdom. But then I realised that the noise was rhythmic in nature, the same outlandish syllables repeated over and over.