Sherlock Holmes--The Vanishing Man

by Philip Purser-Hallard

  ‘Neither of them stayed for long?’

  ‘Only a couple of minutes.’

  ‘And you and Rhyne remained in the room the whole time?’

  ‘Damn it, Holmes, I used to be a soldier,’ the Major insisted angrily. ‘I’m perfectly capable of standing two hours’ watch without wandering off and getting lost.’

  ‘I apologise, Major, no slight was intended,’ Holmes said soothingly. ‘During those two hours, did you notice anything unusual in the behaviours of Mr Kellway or Mr Rhyne, or any of your visitors?’

  ‘Certainly not. Speight went over to look through at Kellway and the experimental materials, but Kellway didn’t pay any more attention to him than he did to us. Anderton didn’t go anywhere near the rooms. Rhyne and I alternated our observations, each of us looking in on one room every five minutes as per instructions. In between we played cards, but he got tired of whist and I ended up playing patience on my own.’

  Remembering the supposed purposes of the experiment, I said, ‘Did you see any sign of any effect on the experimental materials, Major?’

  Bradbury grunted. ‘No, not a hint of movement there. Still, that isn’t unusual, you know. Some of these fellows need a runup, but when they get there the results can be quite spectacular. I was in Simla once and I saw this sadhu who—’

  ‘Let us move on, then,’ said Holmes hastily, ‘to the later shift, Garforth and Anderton’s, where you made an unscheduled appearance.’

  Grudgingly, the Major gave his account of his early awakening on the Tuesday and his eagerness to find out what had been happening with the experiment. It conformed in all important particulars to what we had already been told by Anderton, and to the second-hand account originally given to us by Speight.

  ‘I was going to sit with them a while,’ Bradbury said, ‘play a round or two of cards, but Garforth wanted to play chess. Then he looked into Room A and found Kellway gone, and the whole fuss and bother blew up. Anderton ran off to fetch Speight and Rhyne and I sat down and wished someone would offer me a drink, frankly. It was a tremendous shock.’

  ‘You looked through the window to confirm what Garforth said, is that correct?’

  ‘Absolutely. Fellow was gone. Five minutes earlier he was there, perfectly clear, then he’d vanished.’

  ‘When he was there,’ asked Holmes, ‘which of his legs was uppermost?’

  Bradbury looked irritated. ‘Right over left still. Why on earth does that matter?’

  ‘It may not in the least.’

  ‘And did you notice any other change in Kellway?’ I asked, remembering what Skinner had reported of Jermaine and McInnery’s opinion.

  Bradbury huffed. ‘None at all, till he disappeared.’

  ‘While Anderton was out of the room,’ Holmes stated, ‘did you move from one chair to another?’

  ‘Did he say I did? Damn it all, I’m hardly likely to remember a thing like that, after the shock I’d had. Yes, now you mention it I think I did get up, to check the evidence of my eyes again. I probably sat down again in a different chair. Does that matter?’

  ‘Do you remember where Mr Garforth had left his jacket?’

  Bradbury shifted uncomfortably. ‘No, I don’t remember that either. For God’s sake, Holmes, you may be able to spot a fleck of dust on somebody’s cuff and guess that they’ve just been to Brighton to buy a new hat, but most of us don’t notice the first thing about what another fellow’s wearing or where he’s put it down, unless there’s something funny about it.’

  ‘So I understand,’ said Holmes. ‘However, I am interested because you were present during both Rhyne and Anderton’s shifts, and those two men, if any, are the ones most likely to have been in a position to copy a key to Room A.’

  ‘A key? Is that what this is about? I tell you, sir, the man just disappeared from the room. Nobody opened the door and there was no key. If a man’s going to transport himself ethereally to Venus, it hardly makes a difference whether the door’s locked, does it?’

  ‘In that case, very likely not. I feel there are other possibilities that we might explore.’

  ‘I tell you nobody unlocked that room,’ said Bradbury. ‘I would have seen.’ I noticed that his leg was twitching rapidly. ‘When Garforth saw Kellway was missing, he tried to go inside at once, to find out what had happened. The door didn’t budge. I tried it myself and it was definitely locked.’

  ‘I see,’ said Holmes. He asked the Major a few further questions, about the search of the rooms after Sir Newnham arrived, but again Bradbury merely confirmed what we had already been told.

  As our cab left Notting Hill and began to trot along the north edge of Hyde Park, Holmes put a final question to the Major. ‘There is one more thing I have been wondering, Major Bradbury. You were on watch till midnight, and you must have gone to bed some time later. You had no commitments prior to breakfast with the Society at eight. Why were you awake and seeking company at five o’clock?’

  During this Bradbury had been looking more and more uncomfortable, and at this he exploded in anger. ‘See here, Holmes, I will not be questioned like this! I am not accused of any crime – indeed, there has been no crime committed! You have no right to poke and pry into my personal affairs in this way, sir, and I will not stand for it!’

  He rapped on the roof of the cab, and the driver opened the hatch to allow him to speak. ‘Stop, please,’ he said. ‘I’ll walk from here. These gentlemen are going the rest of the way alone.’

  The driver called the horse to a halt. The Major fairly burst out of the cab, and walked at great speed into Hyde Park, where we lost sight of him among the trees and bushes. The cabby moved on, and so did we.

  ‘I thought he was heading back to his club?’ I pointed out. After a moment’s thought, I added, ‘He said he didn’t notice where Garforth left his jacket or which chair he sat in. But he was pretty clear on which way round Kellway had arranged his legs.’

  ‘I had made the same observation,’ Holmes agreed calmly. ‘Also, he has left us to pay the cab fare.’

  The Daily Gazette

  17th April 1885

  The heavy hearts of the parliamentary constituents of Birlstone will be lightened somewhat today by the knowledge that the murderer of their popular Member of Parliament, Ralph Cordwainer, has been found guilty of his crimes.

  The court heard how the Hon. Percival Heybourne, a cousin of the MP on his mother’s side, invited him in November last year for supper at Keelefort House, his property in Richmond, and how once there, he so plied the other with drink that the normally sober Mr Cordwainer became incapacitated and had to be removed to the guest bedroom, and his manservant sent for from his home. In the morning the man went to awaken his master, only to find him dead, bludgeoned to death in his sleep. The unhappy servant broke down in tears in the witness box as he testified to his discovery of his master’s grisly remains.

  The police had never entertained any suspects in the investigation beyond those resident in the house, and the owner confessed after bloodstained clothing of his was found in the furnace, which the boy had that morning forgotten to stoke as usual in the unaccustomed excitement of the household.

  Though Mr Cordwainer’s solicitor gave evidence that Heybourne might have gained pecuniary advantage from the cold-blooded killing of his cousin, Heybourne’s own account of his motives was a singular one. He maintained under oath that he had been tormented beyond endurance, and goaded into violence, by a ghost said to have haunted the house since the seventeenth century.

  This spirit was named as that of Anne, the unfortunate daughter of the Royalist Heybourne family, said to have been murdered by Parliamentarian thugs in 1644; who, it was averred, retains such a grudge against all representatives of Parliament that she made her descendant the instrument of her vengeance upon the unfortunate Mr Cordwainer.

  The judge, the Hon. Mr Justice Perchester, was unmoved by the defence counsel’s plea for a verdict of insanity. Instead he was pleased to remind the jury that sp
irits of the dead cannot be found guilty in English law, and joked that the jury would have to make do with convicting Anne’s accomplice, which they duly did.

  Percival Heybourne is sentenced to hang at a future date.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Back in our rooms, Holmes paced, and sat, and stood, and paced some more, and smoked his pipe, while I wrote a few letters and attempted to exert a calming influence by example. Occasionally he would mutter incomprehensibly to himself, jabbing the air with his pipe as he reached some particularly emphatic point in his internal soliloquy.

  Finally he threw himself with great force into his favourite armchair, which made a loud creak of protest, and exclaimed, ‘I am baffled, Watson. I cannot express to you how frustrating the sensation is! And yet we can be sure that there is a real, definitive and absolute truth in this matter, if only we might capture it. It eludes us for the moment, and so we must persist.’

  He stood once again, knocking a pile of magazines into the fireplace which he distractedly retrieved and placed, still smouldering, on Mrs Hudson’s carpet. I eyed them uneasily as he continued. ‘The only explanation – the one explanation that we could, under ordinary circumstances, possibly admit – is that Anderton obtained a key to the room, or copied it, and that he conspired with Garforth and Major Bradbury to release Kellway. That would be mundane and explicable: a trivial and sordid piece of fraud. And yet Sir Newnham is quite correct to ask how, in this case, his trusted butler, who could have turned to him in any difficulty, and who you and I, Watson, have judged to be a stolidly and unimaginatively loyal man, could have been suborned.’

  I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that. The man has sisters, perhaps with families of their own – if someone threatened them, with dire consequences promised if he were to approach Sir Newnham about the matter, might he not be persuaded to go against his better nature for their sake?’

  ‘There are times when our thoughts are in perfect accord, Watson. While you were out at Mrs Rust’s I instructed some associates of mine to make discreet enquiries about Anderton’s sisters and their families.’ I knew that he was referring to his ‘Irregulars’, the street children who from time to time would help him in his investigations in return for small monetary considerations. ‘There are two sisters, three nephews, two nieces and a great-nephew. All but the great-nephew, who is but four years old, are in service in respectable households around London, and all appear to be going about their business as normal. Even if there were some threat looming over them that they were unaware of, that knowledge would surely have created some signs of unease on Anderton’s part, rather than the cheery optimism he showed this morning.’

  ‘He would have to be a very good actor for it not to, certainly.’

  ‘I do not consider that likely, and I am tolerably familiar with the acting profession. No – while such a threat might have the effect you describe on another man, I cannot believe that a man as guileless as Anderton would be capable of such deceit, of his employer or of us. He would break down in tears and confess, and throw himself on Sir Newnham’s mercy.’

  ‘But surely it is not impossible, Holmes. Your first thought was that Anderton, Bradbury and Garforth were in it together.’

  ‘If this were a purely intellectual exercise, you might be right. And yet I cannot believe it of Anderton. That may prove to be weakness on my part, but I will not recklessly implicate such a man. And there are attendant questions to consider, which may yet make a nonsense of the whole idea. Why have a third conspirator present when two would attract less attention? What was the true cause of Kellway’s baldness? Why did he carry a broken sword-stick when thousands of ordinary, serviceable and intact walking sticks are available throughout London?

  ‘Indeed, before we accuse Anderton of duplicity there is a more radical explanation we should consider. That is that the whole case, as presented to us, is a hoax on Sir Newnham’s part. Several of the witnesses would still need to be involved, but most could be faithfully reporting what they saw, and Sir Newnham would have the means to reward the others well for their pains. And Anderton would still be loyal, to his employer if not to the truth.’

  ‘That seems absurd, Holmes. Who on earth would benefit from such a deceit?’

  ‘I offer it merely to illustrate the uncertainties of the case. But indeed, the reward money is Sir Newnham’s own. If he wished to give Kellway ten thousand pounds, he need hardly justify it with such a charade.’

  After a moment’s thought I suggested, ‘Unless perhaps Kellway was not part of the conspiracy. Perhaps Sir Newnham feared that his abilities were real, and connived with the others to do away with him.’

  ‘Really, Watson?’ Holmes said witheringly. ‘That hardly seems likely given that Sir Newnham has devoted himself to researching the existence of psychic phenomena. Any true proof of such a thing would be a glorious vindication of his stance, and with his fortune he could hardly miss the ten thousand pounds. Even if he had some personal animus against Kellway, he would hardly remove him in such a showy fashion and then go out of his way to draw my attention to the affair.

  ‘Indeed, the only motivation I can guess at for such a hoax would be to gull me, one of our era’s most notorious defenders of reason, into endorsing the existence of psychic phenomena. Others have made attempts, as you will recall – showmen and charlatans every one. But such a coup would hardly benefit a reputable scientist, as to stand up to scrutiny any such phenomenon would have to be indefinitely replicable, under ever more rigorous experimental conditions. No, to risk his reputation on such a ludicrous gamble Sir Newnham would be a fool, and the man we have spoken to is no fool. Again, we founder upon an impossibility, not of science, but of human nature.

  ‘Yet if we cannot accept one or other of these human impossibilities, the obvious solution – indeed, the only sensible and elegant solution – is that which scientifically speaking is quite impossible: that Thomas Kellway vanished from a locked room through some means presently unknown to science, and is now in some inaccessible place, Venusian or ethereal or otherwise, where the attractions of ten thousand pounds sterling hold no further appeal for him.

  ‘And that, my dear fellow, is so unconscionable that I can only conclude that something I have thus far dismissed as an impossibility in fact conceals a reality. That Kellway did somehow contrive to hide himself in a completely bare room, or that the room has a secret exit that eludes detection even by me, or that he was never in the room at all. Taken on its own terms, every theory that could possibly explain the facts we have been given is unacceptable.

  ‘Watson, my confidence that all things must have a rational explanation is unshakeable, but I am beginning to wonder whether my definition of the rational has not been too far limited hitherto.’

  By now I had finished the last of my letters. I turned to smile at my oldest and dearest companion. ‘I, too, have confidence, Holmes – confidence in you. You know it’s not unusual for you to feel frustrated at this stage in a case. I have no doubt that with your own extraordinary powers you will find a way to shine a light into this murky space, and scramble out of this labyrinth of ifs and buts and maybes.’

  He smiled thinly. ‘I thank you for your faith in me, old friend, but I fear I cannot share it.’ He lapsed into a melancholic silence which lasted for some time.

  At last, struck by an inspiration, I said, ‘Perhaps what you need is more data. Perhaps your Index has something about the histories of the people involved that will prove relevant.’

  ‘Yes, that is possible.’ Holmes cocked his head, more animated for the moment. ‘Though I fear Sir Newnham’s biography at least is thoroughly documented. Still, I thought I had heard Garforth’s name before, for one. Bring me the relevant volumes, if you would be so kind, and we will look up the principals.’

  It turned out that Holmes took a very broad view of who the ‘principals’ might be, and I had to fetch a number of files. They were heavy with paper, and I made several journeys between the shelve
s and the armchair where Holmes sat, distractedly filling his pipe. By the time I returned with R and S, he had it smoking, had already read the account of Anderton senior’s death – ‘A wholly inglorious suicide, Watson, notable only in that the father was of such a different character from his son’ – and was working through the entries on Gideon Beech, Major Bradbury and Countess Brusilova.

  We learned that Beech had been involved peripherally in an incident of burglary in 1891, when he had taken it upon himself to clear the name of a servant accused of stealing his mistress’s ruby necklace. He had made a colossal nuisance of himself to the police in the process, and although in the end the footman was absolved of blame, his position in the household had become untenable, and the gems were never found. I had little doubt that Beech’s own account of the affair would make it seem altogether more glorious.

  Major Bradbury’s sole entry in the files was a brief remark in a society column noting his return from India, kept by Holmes solely because the Major had served for some years under a person of far greater interest: Colonel Sebastian Moran. Bradbury had remained silent on this connection when introduced to Holmes, though as the latter’s attempted assassination by Moran was a matter of public record, it was possible that he was embarrassed by the association. Holmes’s information was normally drawn only from the British papers, however (primarily the London ones, in fact), and I had a growing suspicion that Bradbury’s name had been familiar to me by reputation during my own time out East. I had already resolved to follow this up when I had an opportunity, but for now it was important for Holmes to continue approaching the problem in his own way.

  ‘Countess Brusilova is undoubtedly a fraud,’ said Holmes, moving on through the alphabet. ‘Her imposture has been a successful one for many years, however, making her a tidy income. However, since her illness a few years ago it is Miss Casimir who has been at the helm of her endeavours, managing the Countess’s displays of mediumship while the old woman acts as a passive, and perhaps even an oblivious, passenger.’