Sherlock Holmes--The Vanishing Man

by Philip Purser-Hallard

  Holmes left the constable on guard at the top of the stairs, then took me back inside the attic studio. He drew my attention to the sole surviving canvas, an unrecognisable daub of greys, blues and ochres. ‘Does anything occur to you, Watson?’ he asked.

  ‘It seems to be just random brushstrokes in different colours,’ I said. ‘But I’m no art expert. Is it perhaps an early stage in a seascape, with more detail to be added later?’

  ‘An inspired guess, Watson.’ He smiled. ‘But no, I think not. If it is an artistic composition, it is of a style more daring than the world is yet prepared for. And no care has been taken over the technique at all. It is not difficult to see why Garforth has made no name for himself in the art world. I think that this is not a real painting. It is not even a forgery. Its purpose is simply to mimic a half-finished canvas for the benefit of the uninterested observer. Presumably our friend has visitors – his landlord or landlady, if no-one else.’

  ‘How peculiar,’ I said.

  ‘It is true of all of them, as far as I can tell,’ Holmes reported. ‘Some are too torn to be certain.’

  ‘You think Garforth is a fraud? But he paints. We saw that example of his work at Sir Newnham’s house.’

  ‘If he does, then this room holds no evidence of it. But all we know for sure of his artistic career is that he sold Speight a canvas he claimed to have produced.’

  ‘Then how does he make his living? Does he steal the paintings?’

  ‘He may have an independent income. A studio such as this, with such large windows, would be the envy of many a true artistic practitioner. It would be a wild extravagance to indulge in if merely to keep up appearances.’

  I looked around, trying to imagine the studio without its current devastation. The conditions were sparse, especially for a man who moved in society as a gentleman, but Holmes was surely right that such a room would not have come cheaply, and I knew many artists kept ordinary homes in addition to their studios.

  He went on, ‘No, plainly there is a deception of some kind going on here, but it could be as mundane as that of a wealthy man trying to prove himself as an artist and finding himself forced to cover up the fact that he has no talent at all.’

  ‘Rhyne said Garforth knew his family,’ I remembered.

  ‘True,’ said Holmes. ‘We must ask Mr Rhyne what he knows of his family friend’s affairs.’

  He showed me the surviving bottles, which looked as if they had been used to store chemicals rather than paint; in any case, Garforth apparently favoured oils, which came in tubes. He said, ‘As there are no pools of liquid other than paint, nor traces of corrosion or desiccation in the wooden floor which might suggest a chemical spillage, I suggest that the bottles were emptied down the sink and then smashed, to what end I cannot guess. Some residue may remain in the pipes. I shall ask Lestrade to have them swabbed so that I may analyse it.’

  ‘One might expect a painter to own turpentine,’ I ventured.

  ‘True,’ said he, ‘but there are far more bottles here than that could account for. And turpentine has a distinctive smell, which would be noticeable even among those of paint and smoke, and which I do not detect here.’

  We looked over the remainder of the room as we waited for Lestrade’s arrival. The bed was unmade since it was last slept in. From the eaves hung two suits and half a dozen shirts, as well as some empty clothes hangers, while the chest of drawers held socks, underwear and shirt-collars. Though most of the clothing would pass muster at a society gathering, all was of the cheapest quality, and none would have had the durability of Kellway’s ostensibly more modest belongings. It had not been interfered with during the altercation, beyond some spattering of paint and glass. Garforth’s hat and, I now saw, the Inverness cape hung on a hook by the door.

  The washstand held ordinary carbolic soap, a toothbrush, a shaving-brush, a packet containing a single remaining cigarette, and a tin of French throat lozenges. A mirror, mounted above it, had also escaped the devastation. A great many balls of cotton wool lay at its base, some of them still contained in a fragment of a jar. This piece had survived partly because it had had a lump of clay, about the size and colour of my fist, stuck to it, and this had evidently kept its shards together after it fell.

  Beneath the bed were several empty cigarette packets and one full one, two more tins of the lozenges, a number of old newspapers, a discarded sock and a cardboard box containing a pair of shoes, which Holmes seized on with a cry of pleasure and compared at once with the coloured boot-prints.

  ‘The size is a match,’ he declared. ‘Regrettably this is a new pair, so there is no pattern of wear for comparison. The boots that made the prints are older, but show no especial peculiarities. The wearer’s stride is long and even, and he is a little heavy but not excessively so. It might be Garforth, but it might equally be five thousand men in London of a similar build and shoe size.’

  In a chest by the window there were art supplies: tubes of paint, rolls of canvas, unused palettes, brushes and a palette-knife, a book-sized packet of clay identical to the lump we had already seen, wrapped carefully in wax paper, a drill-bit with its handle, and a writing-case, in which the only written material proved to be a few bills, mostly for art supplies and timber, and some papers pertaining to Speight’s Society. ‘Nothing from galleries or dealers,’ Holmes noted. ‘Nor any personal correspondence.’

  ‘Perhaps he burns it all,’ I suggested. Looking at the ashes in the bath, I added, ‘Or perhaps someone else did.’ We checked the room’s fireplace, and found the chimney blocked with soot: no fire could have been kindled there for years. With its large windows, the room must get terribly cold during the winter.

  Next to the chest was a stack of virgin timber, on which stood a hammer, well worn with use, a tin of nails and a pot of pitch with a stained brush stuck to its lid. ‘What are all the other planks?’ I wondered, looking back at the debris scattered around the room. I saw now that many of them had been daubed at the edges with pitch. ‘Was he building something?’

  ‘A crucial question, Watson, to which I have no immediate answer,’ my friend replied. He added dubiously, ‘Although I suppose an unsuccessful artist might resort to carpentry to make ends meet.’

  Inspector Lestrade arrived shortly afterwards – a self-important, ferrety-looking man whose mind, I had found during our long association, was significantly sharper than his appearance and habitual conversation might have suggested. He was no match for Sherlock Holmes, but he was hardly alone in that.

  ‘Well, this is a right to-do, gents,’ he informed us sagely as he entered, accompanied by two Scotland Yard men. ‘It certainly looks as if mischief was done here, doesn’t it? What was your business here, Mr Holmes, if I may ask?’

  Holmes said, ‘The tenant goes by the name of Frederick Garforth. He is a witness in a matter I have been investigating for a private client – one which until today has presented no criminal ramifications.’

  ‘Well, I’d say this was a ramification all right, wouldn’t you?’ said Lestrade. ‘This Garforth’s either dead or a murderer, I’d bet my best suit on it.’

  ‘It looks highly likely,’ Holmes agreed.

  ‘And you just happened to be here to find the evidence,’ Lestrade added, with a smirk.

  ‘It was a great shock,’ I objected. ‘We had no reason to expect anything of the kind before we arrived.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the inspector. ‘You may not have, Doctor, but in my experience few things come as a surprise to the great Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘In this instance I admit I was as surprised as Watson,’ Holmes replied, with no trace of annoyance, ‘though I perhaps should not have been. Mr Garforth has recently been most elusive.’

  ‘Well, Mr Holmes, private client or no, you will have to let me in on the secret now. This has become a police matter, and anything you know that might be relevant, I need to be told.’

  Holmes agreed readily enough, and between us we summarised for him the story Sp
eight had told us, and what we had learned since.

  When we finished, Lestrade whistled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I stand by my first opinion. A right to-do is what this is, and no mistake. You don’t believe all this nonsense, do you, about this Kellway fellow vanishing into thin air like that?’

  ‘At present I believe very little,’ Holmes replied. ‘I am still gathering data, which was the purpose of our visit here this morning.’

  ‘Well, it sounds like a clever confidence trick to me. And of course it gives someone an obvious motive to have done away with Garforth. If he was part of some scheme to defraud this Society and he threatened to expose it, then one of his fellow conspirators might just have decided to silence him, mightn’t they?’

  ‘It is, as you say, an obvious motive,’ Holmes agreed.

  ‘But you’re not convinced,’ Lestrade observed drily.

  ‘Thus far there has been little about this case that conforms to the obvious. There may, indeed, be no connection between the disagreement here and whatever happened at Parapluvium House on Tuesday morning. We have some reason to suspect that Garforth was in the habit of passing others’ work off as his own. That might have made him enemies.’

  Lestrade sucked his teeth. ‘In my experience – and we do deal with art theft at the Yard, Mr Holmes, and sometimes forgery as well – while artists may be disreputable, unreliable sorts, they’re rarely the kind to do each other violence. A nasty review in the papers is more their line when revenge is on the cards.’

  ‘You may be right,’ admitted Holmes. ‘But not everyone connected with the art world is an artist.’

  ‘That I’ll grant you. But why don’t you show me what you’ve found here while you’ve been waiting? I’m sure you must have some theories by now.’

  Holmes showed the inspector the patterns in the glass and paint, showing where the struggle had taken place, and the signs that a large body had fallen partly into the mess of green, yellow and white, and partly into a separate patch of cerulean blue.

  ‘The man’s clothes must have been smothered in paint,’ said Holmes. ‘After moving him, so will the attacker’s have been, not to mention the upholstery of whatever carriage he was taken away in.’

  ‘Couldn’t he have undressed him first?’ asked Lestrade. ‘If he was dead, I mean.’

  ‘And left on the shoes which made those trails down the stairs? Besides, there is no trace of the clothes here. The ash in the bath is not enough for them.’

  ‘He might have come well-prepared and taken them away in a sack,’ Lestrade suggested doubtfully. ‘What are these bits of cloth and stuff?’

  ‘A jacket, I believe,’ said Holmes. ‘I see no trace of blood on the remnants, nor of paint either, beyond the occasional light smear. I do not believe either party can have been wearing it during the struggle or afterwards.’

  ‘We should ask Garforth’s friends whether it was his,’ I suggested.

  ‘If so, he must have been cold afterwards,’ said Holmes. ‘His cape is still here.’

  Lestrade smiled grimly. ‘The cold won’t have troubled him much if he was the corpse. But I’m sure you saw straight away what’s troubling me now, about the scene of this crime, Mr Holmes.’

  ‘I have observed several things that are perplexing,’ said Holmes. ‘The shaving-brush, for example. It is well worn and free of dust, suggesting Garforth uses it often, presumably when trimming the edges of his whiskers, but we have found no razor. Then there is the clay.’

  Lestrade looked exasperated as I said, ‘Surely that’s an ordinary enough thing to find in an artist’s studio?’

  ‘You think so? Perhaps. But there is no other evidence that Garforth works in clay – no sculpting tools, for instance, and no completed work. There is the loop of wire in the bathtub – that might be used to cut clay, or perhaps as an armature, to give a model some internal structure. I am perplexed, though, as to why it was put in the fire at all. Wire does not burn at ordinary temperatures.

  ‘However,’ Holmes continued, ‘I imagine that what has exercised you more, Inspector, is the clear evidence that this is not a case of an artist being attacked and his studio deliberately wrecked – at least, not in that order. For the signs of the struggle to overlay the spillage of paint and glass as they do, the destruction must have been carried out before the quarrel between our principals. The only footprints made afterwards appear to be those left while dragging the body.’ By this time the inspector was nodding in agreement.

  ‘Good Lord,’ I said. ‘You mean Garforth came back to his studio to find someone else already here, and smashing the place up? And then confronted him?’

  ‘That seems the most likely story,’ said Holmes. ‘And yet it would have been surprising if he were to hang up his coat and hat first. For all we can tell, someone else might have arrived here to find Garforth smashing the place up. We should remain alive to all the possibilities.’

  ‘Well, however the fight started,’ said Lestrade, ‘it ended in murderous violence.’ We all looked at the walking stick, still lying on the floor next to the discoloured patch, and I was sure he was correct. The size of the bloodstain, and the fragments of blood, skin and hair adhering to the stick itself, did not look like evidence of the sort of attack someone would survive. ‘And then the winner fled with the loser’s body.’

  ‘When we saw Garforth in Richmond,’ I said, ‘he was taking a cab – our cab, in fact. But no cabman would have accepted an unconscious passenger covered in paint. And it seems unlikely that Garforth owns a carriage. So the vehicle must have belonged to the other man, meaning that it was Garforth who was killed.’

  I was rather pleased with this inference, so it irked me when Lestrade shook his head at once. ‘No – if it was a private vehicle without a driver, either of them could have taken it.’

  ‘Besides,’ Holmes pointed out, ‘we cannot know the exact time of the quarrel. Garforth might have had time to procure a second vehicle between Parapluvium House and here.’

  We contemplated this for a moment. ‘So,’ Lestrade said, ‘We don’t know whether Garforth or this other person brought the carriage, or which of them went on the rampage smashing and burning things, or which one killed the other. Any of those could have been either of them, independent of the others. Is that right?’

  ‘It seems an admirable summation. We might consider the further possibility that there were two vandals, one of whom turned on the other, and that Garforth was not directly involved at all, but given the presence of his coat and hat I think we can dismiss it as unlikely.’

  I said, ‘Surely we can rule it out entirely. There’s only one set of boot-prints, after all. If Garforth wasn’t involved, why has he not been back here since?’

  Holmes said, ‘Perhaps he became aware that violent men had been visiting his studio, and has hidden himself away somewhere. That would explain why he has not been seen anywhere else since. I admit, though, that this seems an unlikely contingency.

  ‘In any case, one thing is clear. Whether Garforth is dead or merely keeping his distance, we should not expect him to return to the scene of this crime in the near future. Indeed, we may have seen the last of him in this case. In a city the size of London, it is very easy for a man – living or dead – to disappear and never be seen again.’

  Letter from Mr Mark Admiral of the Admiral’s Gallery, Camden, to Mr Robert Travis, 4th November 1896

  Dear Travis

  We have taken delivery of your latest canvas. I am afraid I can, in all conscience, only ask whether the degenerative illness from whose late stages you are evidently suffering has already affected your brain, or merely your eyes and fingers?

  You spoke of a ‘new direction’ for your painting, and we all imagined some bold and imaginative use of colour, light and shadow, akin to the experiments we have seen from Mr Sickert or Mr Whistler. Instead you deliver us a pallid orange nude executed to look so sickly and emaciated that I can only suppose the reason for her unusual colouration is that s
he has been dead for some weeks. I can hardly bear to look at it, and I think you know that I do not object lightly to nudes.

  Since I cannot exhibit this, and since nobody short of a magician could sell it, I return it to you with this letter. I can only suggest that you pass it off for a pittance to some neighbour wholly ignorant of art as the work of a genius too precocious for the hidebound prejudices of the galleries; that, or toss it on some nearby rubbish-heap and let it be scavenged for fire-lighters.

  I beg to remain, your obedient servant,

  Mark Admiral

  P.S. Hettie is looking forward to seeing you and Roger for Thursday dinner. Don’t forget to bring that bottle of whisky you owe me, you skinflint! Rgds, M.

  I cannot of course be certain, but based on works from Mr Travis’s hand that I have seen in less discriminating galleries, I believe this to be the one. – S. H.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  One of the letters I had sent the previous night was to an old army colleague, asking if I might visit him during the day on a matter of some import.

  Holmes had decided, doubtless for the best of reasons, that it was imperative that Garforth’s monocle be found. As I could see that he and the Yard men would be engaged at the studio for some time, I excused myself as the morning drew on, and walked to the Anglo-Indian Club in St James’s for luncheon with this friend, Captain Arnold Mayhew.

  I came upon him in the club’s lobby. ‘How excellent to see you, Watson!’ he cried. Some ten years my senior, Mayhew was a handsome grizzled fellow with a splendid handlebar moustache. Though these days he walked with a stick, I always found him as vivacious as he had ever been. ‘Come and have a drink before lunch, old chap. Our chef here does an excellent curry, for these climes at least – though I miss my Madrassi cook, Naveen, I can tell you. Don’t you remember his exquisite mulligatawny?’