Sherlock Holmes--The Vanishing Man

by Philip Purser-Hallard

  ‘Two gents was here,’ Daphne revealed as I arrived. ‘Sir Newting Something and Mr Turbot Something Else. They wanted to talk to Mr Holmes. When I said as he wasn’t to be disturbed on no account – what he still isn’t, in case you was wondering – they wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Sir Newnham Speight and Mr Talbot Rhyne?’ I asked in alarm. I could only imagine the impression Holmes’s unconventional new pageboy must have given those two worthy gentlemen. ‘Did they tell you where they were going?’

  ‘I said they couldn’t wait in the sitting room ’cause that was where Mr Holmes was, and he wasn’t to be disturbed on no account, and besides it was full of his old tat. And Mrs Hudson’s rooms are just a little bit sooty just now, ’cause of how Pete reckoned as he could remember how to sweep a chimbley. So I said as they could wait in that tea-shop what’s just round the corner.’

  ‘Thank you, Daphne,’ I said, passing her a penny. I should have realised that Holmes would have left a relatively sensible child in charge, though I shuddered at her description of Mrs Hudson’s sitting room. ‘I’ll go and see them now. Did they say what it was they wanted?’

  ‘They said,’ Daphne informed me importantly, ‘as how Mr Kettley’s turned up, and he’s round Mr Bleach’s house right now.’

  Excerpt from Discoverer of the Esoteric Wisdoms: A Life of Her Illustrious Highness the Countess Irina Grigoriyevna Brusilova (1920) by Callum Carpenter

  Irina’s acceptance into London society had not been free from obstacles. Her manner, though not as tantalisingly enigmatic as it would become in later years, was found by her contemporaries to be oblique, a quality that in conjunction with her faltering English was sometimes uncharitably taken for rudeness. Though assured by her nobility of entry into the highest levels of society, she was also at the mercy of the English prejudice that saw Russians as uncivilised, a view that would mellow only somewhat with the Tsar’s visit to England in 1874. Her wholly innovative explorations of the arcane were thus often mistaken by the ignorant for the backward superstitions of her mother country.

  Of greater personal import, however, were the malicious rumours begun in early 1873 by one Captain Ivan Viktorovich Kotovsky, newly arrived in London. After being introduced to Irina at one of Arkady Garbuzov’s receptions, Kotovsky impudently announced to all who would listen that Irina was, if not a fraud as a medium, then certainly no true Countess. He impertinently insisted that he had known her and her family in Smolensk in the Sixties, that they were mere servants working in his uncle’s household, and that her account of her noble descent, her education in Moscow and St Petersburg and her tragic widowhood were pernicious fabrications.

  A gallant protector but always a cautious one, Garbuzov tried gently and discreetly to discover whether there might be any truth underlying these rumours, but his contacts in Smolensk failed to make contact with the family Kotovsky had described. They reported that the family had moved away some time before, leaving only a senile uncle behind, and they could never be traced.

  Captain Kotovsky’s perfidy sowed grave distrust of Irina among the city’s expatriate Russian community, which had always been excessively conscious of class politics. At the same time, though, thanks to a succession of revelations in her private séances, which would culminate in her defining vision of Hy-Brasil in March 1874, Irina’s reputation among the metropolis’s home-grown occultists and esotericists had grown sufficiently that she no longer needed to call so often upon the dubious support of her unreliable countrymen.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  At Harrington’s I found Sir Newnham and Rhyne waiting for me in a booth, with a nearly empty pot of tea and a plate mostly denuded of scones. I saw that the younger man’s face was still drawn, exhibiting traces of the shock and dismay it had displayed in Lestrade’s office in the early hours. I remembered that Holmes and I had a number of questions to ask Mr Rhyne, not least about his acquaintance with Frederick Garforth, but for the moment it seemed there were more pressing matters.

  Sir Newnham’s visage mostly betrayed his irritation. ‘Thank you for coming, Dr Watson,’ he told me, politely enough. ‘I admit, though, that it was Mr Holmes who I was most hoping to see. Indeed I must confess that I’ve been increasingly disappointed in his conduct of this case. As a reader of your reminiscences I understand that he has certain eccentricities, and that is perfectly understandable – the same is true of other associates of mine, as you have had ample opportunity to observe – but when I engage a person’s services I do expect them to be available for consultation during reasonable business hours. I do not expect to be fobbed off by a small girl with an instruction to await his associate’s pleasure at my own expense.’

  ‘I can only apologise, Sir Newnham,’ I told him.

  ‘I do not blame you for his peccadilloes, of course – Mr Holmes is his own man if he is anything. Nevertheless, I trust you understand the reasons for my displeasure. The matter at hand has become most urgent, and I have at present no indication of when Mr Holmes is liable to spare it his attention.’

  ‘When Holmes is preoccupied by an idea he becomes quite single-minded, and he can occasionally forget social niceties.’ I was aware that this was the second time today I had been called upon to justify my friend’s absence, and I wished I knew enough to be more reassuring. ‘I can promise you, however, that whatever has his attention at the moment will be germane to the case, and may even prove decisive in solving it,’ I concluded, fervently hoping that this would prove true. ‘I gather there have been developments since we last spoke.’

  ‘There certainly have been; grave developments. It seems highly likely that I will be forced to give ten thousand pounds of the Society’s money to an obvious fraud, and become the laughing stock of the scientific world. That the whole affair is a fabrication is more transparent than ever, yet the majority of the Society Committee appear to support it. Beech, Floke and the Countess present a united front, and just as I feared they have induced Mr Small to go along with them.’

  ‘Small? But he believes Kellway is a fraud, and he and Beech loathe each other. Oh… now I see. Beech told me he would ask Skinner to leave Small alone, but he must have placed a condition on the favour. That odious man!’ I exclaimed. ‘I should have realised he capitulated too easily.’ I supposed this had been Beech’s intent all along in suggesting Small’s guilt to Skinner, and for that matter to Holmes.

  ‘The Society’s promise must be honoured, of course,’ Speight lamented. ‘After that I shall have no choice but to resign my Chairmanship and my entire interest, in protest. To distance myself from the entire debacle will be the only way to salvage my reputation. I fear this is a play for power on Beech’s part; he covets the Society for himself, it seems, and if he must embarrass me to achieve it, then so be it.’

  I said, ‘Perhaps you should tell me from the beginning what has happened, Sir Newnham. I was only told that Mr Kellway has returned.’

  Speight and Rhyne exchanged a dubious look. ‘That’s the contention, Dr Watson,’ Rhyne said. ‘As Sir Newnham says, it appears on the face of it ridiculous. And yet…’

  Sir Newnham gave a cry of despair, to the consternation of the other customers. ‘If that man is Thomas Kellway, then I am the late Prince Albert, returned from the grave.’

  I was shocked at this disrespect for royal persons from a man who had been appointed a knight of the realm by the Queen herself. ‘Nevertheless,’ I said, ‘it would be helpful to have an account of the events in order…’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Sir Newnham groaned. ‘We received a message from Gideon Beech, early this morning. He said nothing about Kellway’s return, but intimated that he had solved the mystery of his disappearance, and would reveal the truth to the Society Committee at ten o’clock.

  ‘We hurried over there, naturally, and found Gerald Floke, the Countess Brusilova and Miss Casimir already in attendance along with Beech. Professor Scaverson has gone up to Camford to deliver a lecture, but Mr Small and Dr Kingsley joined
us very shortly afterwards.’

  ‘Can the Professor vote in absentia?’ I asked.

  ‘Alas, no, the rules preclude it. Though I fear his vote would avail little in any case.’

  ‘This wasn’t a formal committee meeting, you understand,’ Rhyne explained. ‘Only the Chairman can call those. Instead Beech said that he’d assembled us to tell us his solution to the mystery. Constantine Skinner was there, too, but from the way he was sulking I don’t think he had much to do with it. Beech claimed all the glory, of course.’

  ‘He assembled us in the drawing room, with all his usual pomposity,’ Speight went on. ‘Then he delivered a lengthy monologue to us, like those interminable prefaces he appends to his published plays. After a long preamble about the Will of Life and how it pertained to Evolved Men, he rehearsed what we all already knew of the events occurring on the night of the experiment, and then got to the meat of his pronouncement.

  ‘He explained that Kellway had recently been in touch with him, and had requested his assistance in collecting the reward money for the very clear demonstration of phenomena beyond the ordinary, namely his disappearance. “At first,” Beech told us, “and for reasons which I feel sure will not elude you over the coming hour, I betrayed my good judgement by entertaining certain intellectual doubts that my correspondent was indeed Thomas Kellway, but he has answered all my questions very satisfactorily and you may all take it as a settled fact that he is indeed the same man.”’ Sir Newnham’s impression of Beech’s voice was rather good, and I smiled a little.

  ‘By now, I’m sure you can imagine, we were getting rather impatient for him to come to the point,’ Rhyne put in. ‘At least, Sir Newnham and I were. I had the impression that Floke and Miss Casimir, at least, knew what was coming.’

  ‘I have reason to believe that they did,’ I said. ‘Please continue, though.’

  ‘Well, I asked him to come to the point. I said something like, “Whatever do you mean? Surely this person’s either Kellway or he isn’t?” And Beech gave that infuriating grin of his, and one of his servants ushered in the fellow he was talking about.

  ‘He looks a lot like Thomas Kellway, I’ll give him that – the resemblance is quite uncanny, in fact. I’ve no idea how or where Beech found him. He was quite bald, and just as big and muscular as the real Kellway. But – well, as I’ve told you, Kellway looks to be in his early fifties. This fellow isn’t even half that age.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ I exclaimed. ‘But however did Beech think that he could pass a young man off as Kellway?’

  ‘When Sir Newnham says the resemblance is uncanny, Dr Watson,’ said Rhyne, ‘if anything he understates the case. Set the difference in age aside, and the pair could be twins.’

  ‘But why on earth would you set it aside?’ I expostulated. ‘That alone makes the contention insupportable.’

  ‘You say “on earth”, Doctor, but…’ began Talbot Rhyne, but such was Sir Newnham’s agitation that he spoke quite rudely over his subordinate.

  ‘This was perfectly obvious to me as well, Dr Watson, but it seems that Gideon Beech would indict us both for having insufficiently open minds. To his credit, the young fellow puts on quite the performance – he has Kellway’s voice, accent and mannerisms down just as well as his appearance. He greeted us by name as he arrived, as perfectly naturally as if he had seen us but a few days previously. He spoke knowledgeably about the Society, and the details of the experiment. I could see that young Floke was entranced, and I might even have said that Beech was taken in as well, were his interests in the matter not so evident.’

  ‘Beech must have coached him to say the right things.’ I nodded. ‘When did Beech say he had arrived?’

  ‘Yesterday, at around lunchtime,’ Rhyne said. ‘Beech told us he wanted to be sure of his identity before showing him to the rest of the Society.’

  ‘Well, he was showing him to some of them yesterday, I’m sure of it.’ And I told them what I had seen and heard at Beech’s townhouse. ‘You must be right that this is a plot to take control of the Society from you, Sir Newnham. Without your level-headed presence at the wheel, Beech could allow the wilder excesses of the members’ beliefs their full rein. It would become a vehicle for his bizarre personal religion, and all your scientific work could be wasted.’ Sir Newnham groaned, and I carried on more tactfully. ‘It’s plain that the man is both ambitious and amoral. What isn’t clear is whether he planned it all along, perhaps with Kellway’s connivance, or whether he’s merely taking advantage of an unexpected circumstance.’

  ‘With Beech it could be either,’ Speight admitted ruefully. ‘The way his conceit exaggerates his genius works leads many to underestimate him, but he is a genuinely clever man. Indeed, I wonder whether he contrives his public personality to provoke just that response.’

  ‘I still can’t see why he thought you would accept a different man as Kellway,’ I said. ‘Did the fellow have any explanation for such a remarkable rejuvenation?’

  ‘Indeed, though it was a lengthy one. Rhyne, may I have my notes?’

  Rhyne fished out some hastily scrawled papers from his briefcase and handed them to Speight. (I was able later to take possession of these, and I have since supplemented them with notes found in the Yorkshireman’s own hand, detailing his story. I can thus be fairly sure that what follows reproduces with a reasonable degree of accuracy what he told the assembled group at Beech’s house.)

  ‘“My friends,” he began,’ said Sir Newnham, doing a creditable imitation of a Yorkshire accent, ‘“since last you saw me I have made an astonishing journey, to the place that is the source of all my enlightenment, past and future. You shake your heads at the change you perceive in me, and believe me I understand your bewilderment, for it is a transformation I myself can scarce credit. And yet it is the truth.

  ‘“For as you have suspected I have been on Venus, the sphere that first created me, an Evolved Man, whose intelligences have cultivated me from afar in the service of evolution and of the Will of Life. The meditations which I carried out towards the culmination of your little experiment brought me, instead, to the very culmination of my time on earth. There was no more that I could achieve here, without first having unmediated communion with my Venusian principals, and so they removed me to their own sphere.

  ‘“There I have embarked upon the second phase of my enlightenment: one which has entailed intense physical and mental training, and which has lasted for many years.”’

  ‘Years?’ I said, interrupting Sir Newnham’s flow. ‘But this story becomes ever more absurd. If this man were indeed Kellway, then he would have only been away for a few days.’

  Talbot Rhyne grinned rather mischievously. ‘Sir Newnham interrupted him to make that very point, quite forcefully. You waxed quite lyrical about it, Sir Newnham.’

  Speight looked a little embarrassed. ‘Well, I was furious at how gullible he must believe us to be – though of course the confounded fellow hasn’t been proven wrong on that score. And of course he had an answer ready to my question. I suppose it was so obvious that I should hardly have expected otherwise.

  ‘He said, “One of the things I learned on Venus was that time moves differently on different worlds. Like Life, of which it is merely an aspect, Time pours in a torrent from the great sun of our local universe, and trickles out across the worlds, from fleeting Mercury to slow old Neptune. Because Venus is closer to the sun than our Earth, time flows more quickly there. Had I instead visited Mars, I might have returned here believing that it was just a day or so later, to find instead that years had passed. As I have been on Venus, while from your point of view I may have been absent for a mere three days, I have experienced a span closer to the measure of three decades.

  ‘“However,” he said, ‘“thanks to my Venusian principals and the exceptional spiritual techniques they have cultivated – techniques which affect the body also, because spirit and body are one – for every day I spent there by my own reckoning, instead of ageing I gr
ew a day younger. By the count of the days I have lived, I am now eighty years old, my friends, and yet I have the youth and vigour of a stripling in his twenties. That is the reason you find me so changed, but I know that from my manner and my voice – why, from my very face, free of its wrinkles and the work of earthly time and care upon my features – you will know me nonetheless as your friend – by your reckoning, your very recently vanished friend – Thomas Kellway.”

  ‘Then, if you’ll believe the gall of the man, he explained that the return journey had so exhausted his reserves of psychical energy that he had none left to demonstrate the many thoroughly miraculous new abilities he had acquired while among the Venusians, though he could describe them at length. When we left, the others were all clamouring to ask him further questions about his experiences. A more unconscionable and blatant fabrication I have never heard, and yet Beech has them all believing it.

  ‘Floke is delighted to have his idol back – and so much closer to his own age, making the imitation of him all the easier. The Countess is pleased – or at least, Miss Casimir assured us she was – because the impostor confirmed the name of Palú-Odranel, her mediumistic contact on the planet, as one of his Venusian tutors… thanks, no doubt, to Beech’s coaching. Now that this has been corroborated, Miss Casimir has high hopes of the Countess channelling further Venusian wisdom in future séances, with hefty attendance fees of course. Mr Small gave his support rather wanly, but spoke of biblical sanction for the idea of life on other worlds and speculated that Venus might be an unfallen world, untainted by the sin of Adam.

  ‘And Beech, of course, takes the whole business as the most magnificent vindication of his evolutionary philosophies – though I am quite convinced that he, at least, is acting in the worst possible faith.’

  I said, ‘Will not your further investigations, with the repeated experiments and the testing of hypotheses, prove that this false Kellway has none of the psychical capacities he claims? That he is in fact a baseless fraud?’