Sherlock Holmes--The Vanishing Man

by Philip Purser-Hallard

  Miss Casimir had no entry of her own. Holmes guessed that there might be some record of her under some other name, but without some clue as to what that alias might be the Index was so sizeable as to make any search pointless.

  ‘However,’ Holmes went on, ‘neither woman has attempted a deception of this kind before – their mediumistic tricks are all along the familiar lines of mysterious knockings and ectoplasmic apparitions, rather than anything more physical. And it seems that both were away from Parapluvium House at the time of Kellway’s disappearance, though we might profitably confirm that point with the Star and Garter. Let us note that they are of suspicious character, and move on.’

  It seemed that Gerald Floke’s family was a venerable, dull and undistinguished one, of which nothing scandalous had been known since a non-fatal duel involving his great-great-grandfather’s younger brother and the husband of one of the Prince Regent’s mistresses. I imagined that young Gerald’s fervour for the esoteric must be rather a worry to his elders, but beyond that, volume F of the Index was unilluminating.

  Under G, it turned out that the Garforth whose name Holmes had remembered was not the artist nor even a person, but a village near Leeds: it had been the birthplace of two confidence tricksters who had been caught in a daring insurance fraud a few years previously. Holmes was amused by the audacity of the crime, which had traded on the strong family resemblance between one Simon Greendale and his uncle Theodore. Though Simon was eventually imprisoned, Theodore Greendale had escaped arrest.

  Of Frederick Garforth there was no trace in the records; nor was there any entry for Thomas Kellway. As with Miss Casimir, this proved nothing in itself except that neither name had come to the attention of the criminal press.

  For form’s sake, we checked the record of the Hon. Percival Heybourne’s murder of Ralph Cordwainer MP at what had been Keelefort House, but found nothing supporting his unusual defence. Indeed, Heybourne had a motive for killing Cordwainer that had nothing to do with seventeenth-century loyalties expressed via the spirit realm; he had been driven near to bankruptcy by a recent speculation, and Cordwainer had been refusing to sell a property in Staffordshire that they had jointly inherited. As it was, Keelefort House, which would otherwise have gone to a more distant cousin on the Heybourne side, had been sold to Sir Newnham to pay off the murderer’s debts.

  Dr Peter Kingsley had been an expert witness at a number of inquests and one or two criminal trials. I knew from our conversation at dinner that his medical specialism was pharmacology, but it appeared he was also a keen amateur practitioner of mesmerism. Like Sir Newnham, he was often called upon as an expert witness, and on one occasion he had apparently hypnotised a woman in the witness box, allowing her to recall without hysteria the details of her husband’s ghastly murder, but the evidence had been ruled inadmissible. Again, Holmes noted all of this while also observing that the Doctor, having taken first watch in the experiment, had been away from the house during its later stages.

  Talbot Rhyne was another participant who, it seemed from the Index, had thus far made no impact on Holmes’s area of interest. Though not very much older, Constantine Skinner had appeared in the occasional news report, and had been instrumental in apprehending suspects in certain crimes judged by him to have had an occult dimension. Reassuringly from the point of view of public justice, these men had generally been convicted only when substantial non-supernatural evidence against them was also available.

  Vortigern Small also lacked an entry, though establishing this enabled Holmes to spend a short while reminiscing about his namesake Jonathan Small, the one-legged ex-convict whom we had hunted up the Thames with his accomplice, the Andaman tribesman Tonga, in the case which first introduced me to my late wife Mary. At the time of Jonathan’s crimes our Mr Small had, as I discovered from his entry in Crockford’s, been publishing works with such innocuous titles as On the Eschatology of the Gospels and A New Hermeneutics of the Revelation to St John the Divine. His benefice was in Chiswick, a stone’s throw from Mrs Rust’s house, and I wondered whether it was the one her devout boarder Mr Brightlea attended, before remembering that she had said the man was a non-conformist.

  Sir Newnham Speight’s career was, as Holmes had said, a storied one, and there was no shortage of material even given my friend’s idiosyncratic criteria for inclusion. In 1869, as a much younger man, Speight had been instrumental in foiling a robbery; in 1882 he had been a witness in the prosecution of one Ezekiel Whart, an accountant who had embezzled several thousand pounds from the Speight Company’s head office; and in 1887, at the height of his fame and shortly before the awarding of his knighthood, he had been involved in an embarrassing street fracas with a madman who had levelled preposterous accusations against him. In 1890 it had been more credibly argued at an inquest that the deaths of two workers at his plant in Guildford were a result of negligence, but the coroner had fully vindicated the Speight Company.

  Only one elderly clipping in the file gave us serious pause: an accusation that Speight, as an impoverished young man, had gained financial backing through a fraudulent demonstration of one of his earliest prototypes. A judge had dismissed the case in 1863, ruling it baseless – a decision that had relied strongly on the testimony of William Anderton.

  ‘This proves no wrongdoing, Holmes,’ I pointed out. ‘Quite the reverse. The facts of the case were very likely as the court decided. The idea that there was somebody inside the machine’s casing doing the work is rather far-fetched, don’t you think?’

  ‘Far-fetched but not impossible, Watson. You must remember the case of the Mechanical Turk, the famous chess-playing automaton which proved to be a hoax. In that case the cabinet on which the mechanism was mounted concealed a skilled chess-player who operated the figure’s arms. The folding of bed-linen is assuredly a less demanding task than the playing of chess.’

  ‘Perhaps we should ask Mrs Hudson whether she would concur,’ I suggested jocularly. ‘But we have agreed that Sir Newnham is not the sort of man to perpetrate such a deception, nor Anderton to support it.’

  ‘And so the judge ruled. But what if he was wrong, Watson, what then? Both men could be far better dissemblers than we have given them credit for.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I scoffed. ‘You’ll be saying next that he killed those men at the factory.’

  ‘I say nothing of the sort, Watson. I merely outline the possibilities as I see them. Well, I think I am done for the night. After all, we must be fresh for the morning, and our meeting with the evasive Mr Frederick Garforth.’

  The Morning Chronicle

  8th August 1863

  A diverting Case was heard this week at the Magistrates’ Court at Bow, as one Jeremiah Halborn, financier, contended that he had been the subject of a fraud perpetrated two years ago by a novice entrepreneur of business and his manservant.

  Both Parties agreed that in January of 1861 the Defendant, a young man named Newham Spate, was seeking fiscal support for a remarkable new contrivance, a domestic linen-folding apparatus that would ease the work of maids, laundry-workers and humble housewives. He had arranged, for those whose interest he had succeeded in attracting, a series of private demonstrations of his prototype device.

  The Plaintiff told how when the machine was shown at his house, he marvelled at the speed and dextrousness with which it had worked: unfolded linen was bundled into an opening on the top of the apparatus, to emerge minutes later, neatly laid out, from a slot in the side. On this basis he had agreed to finance the completion and manufacture of the machine, which the Defendant insists has since been much in hand.

  The Plaintiff has, however, become impatient with the absence of pecuniary return on his investment. He is now convinced that the presentation he witnessed was fraudulent, and demands the return of his money in full.

  The Defendant was able to produce in Court the latest model of the linen-folding contraption, which he demonstrated to operate exactly as the Plaintiff had described. He then dismantled it,
to the amazement of those assembled, and showed how its components worked together to achieve the desired end of folded sheets.

  The Plaintiff returned argument that, if it should indeed prove that the funds have in the meanwhile enabled the defendant to create a machine that functions and may profitably be sold, he should be entitled to a full half-share in the patent and the profits therefrom.

  Asked if he knew how a demonstration such as he described might have been counterfeited, the Plaintiff replied that, for all he knew, there had been a midget in the casing of the machine, folding the bed-clothes; and thus provoked much merriment in the Court-room.

  The common sentiment of the attendant crowd was that, although Mr Halborn had made himself risible with this comment, nonetheless Mr Spate was ‘too clever by half’, and both Plaintiff and Defendant had factions of support among those present.

  This opinion was amended when the defendant’s man Wm. Anderson was called as a witness. This Anderson had already assisted with the demonstration of the device in Court, and it was he who had assembled the prototype machine in situ in the Plaintiff’s house two years previously. He was therefore in a position to know with certainty of any such deception as the Plaintiff indicated.

  Anderson attested that the earlier machine had functioned much as the one now in evidence, though less perfected and refined; that its parts had been exclusively mechanical and automatic, requiring no intervention by human hands; and, to further and greater hilarity in the Court-room, that he and his master were not acquainted with any midgets.

  Such was the frankness with which the stout fellow presented his testimony that the crowd was soon in agreement that his was the truth of the matter, and sure enough the Magistrate judged in the Defendant’s favour, considering the manservant’s testimony to be ‘unimpeachably honest, and such as to which I cannot take exception.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  I had drunk rather more port than is generally good for me, and so I spent a troubled night beset by dreams of shaven fakirs and of five-legged, five-eyed Venusians, who explained to me that the perfectly evolved state involved having one’s organs quintupled, like the human fingers. At one point I beheld Vortigern Small, dressed in a loincloth and turban, giggling as he showed me how Sir Newnham had built the Experimental Annexe above an entrance to a network of subterranean tunnels, where Kellway had joined the other victims of his fiendish torture-machines.

  All in all I felt little rested when Holmes shook me awake shortly after six-thirty the next morning, bringing with him a pot of coffee and an air of offensively vigorous enthusiasm.

  ‘Rise and shine, Watson!’ he insisted breezily. Needless to say he was already fully dressed. ‘The sky is lightening, the sun strives to breast the horizon, and the cockerels are doubtless crowing somewhere, albeit not on Baker Street. We must be about our business. I have decided, given his reluctance so far, that we should no longer wait for the elusive Mr Garforth to attend our pleasure and will instead, like Mohammed, make our own pilgrimage to see the mountain.’

  I struggled upright, and seized the coffee gratefully. ‘Have we the mountain’s address?’

  ‘I heard what he said to the cabman,’ Holmes reminded me, ‘and it matches the address of the card in Kellway’s pocket book. A brisk walk through the park to Camden should put us in an excellent state of mind for questioning him. If Anderton is right to say he is none too alert in the mornings, we may as well seize our advantage.’

  Though I felt my own mental advantage over Garforth might be small, I could not fault my friend’s logic, and a short while later I found myself enjoying the early-morning birdsong and fresh air in an almost deserted Regent’s Park, while the sun climbed slowly above the stands of ash and elm, painting their autumnal shades with its own rosy hue. It was a fresh, bright morning, and by the time we left the park and turned onto Camden Road my lungs and my head were perfectly clear, and I was blessing once again the good fortune that had seen me settled in this leafy city, the metropolis of empire, at the side of the man who did so much to protect it from enemies within and without.

  By a quarter past seven we were approaching Garforth’s studio. It occupied the entire attic of a boarding house, but had its own entrance at the side of the building, reached by an iron staircase like the one we had used to ascend to the roof of Parapluvium House. At its foot FRED. GARFORTH, PAINTER was written on a wooden sign. Further evidence of Garforth’s profession became obvious as we mounted the steep flight, in streaks of paint that stained the steps – boot-prints in paint, the left one blue, the right one green, becoming clearer as they approached the top. Alongside them, and overlaying them in places, was a pair of parallel streaks on each flat surface, one of white and a fainter one of green, that similarly became more pronounced as we climbed. Holmes touched the paint a few steps ahead of him, and clicked his tongue. I saw that his finger had left a slight imprint in the white streak.

  He said, ‘It is about time for some fresh development in this case, Watson, but this is not the form I would have wished it to take. Come quickly now, but try not to step on the paint.’ He began to climb two steps at a time, treading only at the very edges, and I followed his lead.

  At the top was a wooden door, its own paint faded and flaking. It hung not quite shut on its hinges. Holmes pulled it open and stepped gingerly into the studio.

  The attic was large, light and airy, with two big east-facing windows letting in a generous amount of the early-morning sun, and their west-facing counterparts presumably offering a similar service in the evenings. It seemed to be a living-space as well as a workshop, with a cramped area under the sloping eaves holding a bed, a chest of drawers, a small gas-stove and a crudely plumbed washbasin. Whether Garforth lived here at all times, or whether he had another address he went to when he was not painting, I could not guess.

  The rest of the room had apparently been given over to Garforth’s work, with canvases, paint and what I assumed must be other artistic paraphernalia strewn everywhere.

  I say ‘strewn’, because the room had been ransacked. The canvases, whether fresh or in use, had been slashed to ribbons, and everywhere tubes of paint lay trampled and burst. Wooden palettes were splintered in halves, two easels had been smashed to pieces, and so had some larger wooden structure whose planks – some splintered and broken, some still nailed together – lay in jagged heaps. There was much smashed glass, some of it crushed to powder underfoot, and a few intact bottles.

  Huge strips of torn linen, looking like shredded bedsheets, festooned the scene of destruction. Among them were darker rags, and I peered at the nearest of these, which hung from the back of a flimsy wooden chair. It was a remnant of a jacket – not the Inverness cape which we had seen Garforth wearing the previous day, but something of a black material and a lighter weight.

  A tin bath had been dragged from the living area under the eaves and apparently used to contain a fire. Its sides were blackened, as were the roof-beams above it, and the bottom was heaped with ash. Looped among the greyish powder, still intact, were several yards of wire to which a few black remnants clung, apparently also shreds of cloth. An oily film of soot clung to the nearest surfaces, and the stink of smoke suffused the room.

  Holmes had gravitated towards a part of the floor where the glass shards and paint were particularly thickly smeared. Leaning forward, he grasped a roof-beam and used it to swing himself down without stepping nearer, the better to examine the traces without disturbing them.

  He tutted. ‘This is a bad business.’ Hanging from one hand, he reached for his magnifying glass with the other. In the centre of the spillage, between distinct patches of green, white and blue, there was an area scabbed with blackish-red, which I knew from my medical experience had not come from any colourman – or not, at least, from his paintworks. Next to it lay an ebony walking stick, to which scraps of some residue – I did not need to look closely to imagine of what kind – still clung. Boot-prints of green and blue paint, together with twi
n trails of white and green, led from this area to the door.

  Holmes said, ‘Watson, pray speak to the occupants of the premises below us and find out whether there is a telephone to be found. We must send word to Scotland Yard at once.’

  I found nobody at home downstairs, and the nearest neighbours stared at me in bafflement when I asked if anybody in the street owned a telephone. I returned ten minutes later, having dispatched a cabman with a message for Inspector Lestrade, and also bringing a constable whom I had happened to run into during the excursion.

  We found Holmes at the bottom of the stairs, examining the stones of the pavement. I now saw that these, too, bore the faint traces of the variously coloured paints.

  Without preamble, or greeting for the constable, he said, ‘The body was dragged as far as the kerbside, then the same man loaded it aboard a vehicle. Whether it was unconscious or dead at the time I cannot presently tell, but the signs are ominous. We are dealing with assault and kidnapping at least, and most probably with murder. Whatever conveyance was used will be heavily stained inside with paint and blood, as will the criminal’s clothes.’

  ‘Crikey,’ the constable declared, a little awed by Holmes’s presence.

  ‘There are some details I would show you, Watson, before Lestrade arrives,’ Holmes said.

  We ascended the stairs again, all three of us treading carefully. ‘From the state of the paint,’ Holmes told us, pointing, ‘which is very nearly but not altogether dry, the violence took place rather less than a day ago.’

  I said, ‘We saw Garforth at Parapluvium House, Holmes, remember? It was about ten o’clock yesterday morning. He wasn’t dead or kidnapped then. Although I suppose if he himself had just murdered or kidnapped someone, it would be understandable that he wouldn’t want to run into us.’

  ‘Yet he came to this address after leaving Richmond,’ said Holmes. ‘That is what he told the cabby, at least, and the cape we saw him wearing is here. Even if he had had the time to move the body and find clean clothing before visiting Rhyne, it hardly seems likely that he would have returned here after a crime yet still left it in its current state.’