Sherlock Holmes--The Vanishing Man

by Philip Purser-Hallard

  I wish the police could take credit for the discovery that the jewels were all forgeries, but this was established by the investigator for the insurers, a very smart lad, who had had the idea of talking to all makers of costume jewellery in the area. He found out that a set exactly matching the description of those which Elmet deposited had recently been made to commission, as cheap as dirt relatively speaking, by a theatrical costumier in York.

  This meant that the case was not one of robbery but of fraud, and that our supposed ‘Mr Elmet’ was now not the victim but the perpetrator, with an accomplice who resembled him closely enough that the two of them could be twins. Between them they had got a long way towards extorting a princely sum of money from the hotel and its insurers. In fact the first, very substantial, instalment had already been paid, though there was a lot more waiting for the outcome of the insurers’ investigation.

  Fortunately the costumier’s clerk could describe the young man who had placed the order for the counterfeit stones, and from that description and our knowledge of the local criminal element we were able to identify the perpetrators of the fraud. One of them, Simon Greendale, was a lad from a small village nearby who had only been involved with the police on occasions of petty affray, but his uncle, Theodore Greendale, was a seasoned confidence trickster who had evidently started training him up in the family business. A few of my colleagues had had serious dealings with Theodore in the past, though never over a crime this ambitious.

  I had never met Theodore myself, but allowing for some alterations to his hairstyle and other easily achieved cosmetic changes, I could see he was a good match for the description of ‘Mr Elmet’. More significantly, Simon, although he was so much younger, bore such a close resemblance to his uncle at the same age that we were told it had been much remarked upon in their home village of Garforth.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘Greendale?’ I repeated, recalling the name at last. ‘Isn’t that the family who were involved in that fraud case in Leeds?’

  ‘Indeed, Watson,’ said my friend. ‘They hailed from the village of Garforth in Yorkshire, hence Theodore Greendale’s choice of pseudonym here in London.’

  ‘So Frederick Garforth was Theodore Greendale?’

  ‘Quite so. And our friend here is his nephew, Simon. They have traded on their close family resemblance before.’

  For the benefit of Sir Newnham and the others who had joined us by now, Holmes explained the nature of the Greendales’ fraud. ‘I have been in correspondence about the case with Inspector Utterthwaite of Yorkshire’s West Riding Constabulary,’ Holmes revealed. ‘It seems that when he realised they were discovered, Theodore Greendale absconded with the first payment of insurance money, leaving Simon with nothing to show for his pains but the paste jewellery. Once the Leeds police knew who they were looking for he, being so much less experienced than his uncle, was more easily found. He was arrested and convicted, and only recently completed his prison sentence.’

  Sir Newnham looked little the wiser. ‘But how came they to be here, Holmes? And why was Theodore Greendale impersonating Frederick Garforth? Was there ever a Frederick Garforth, or was he only an alias?’

  ‘I shall explain all, Sir Newnham,’ Holmes replied. ‘According to Utterthwaite, though Simon Greendale has been understandably aggrieved against his uncle, he has rebuffed several overtures from the police soliciting his help in entrapping him. It would seem he had plans of his own for revenge.

  ‘From what we have learned, it now seems certain that following his release he followed his uncle’s trail to London, with the express intention of recovering what was owed to him. He located Theodore and observed his activities, which included impersonating Frederick Garforth and attending the meetings of your Society. I cannot confirm this for certain, but I believe that the journalist who visited Mr Beech seeking more details of the Society’s activities was Simon himself.’

  ‘Drivel, Holmes,’ Beech asserted hastily, ‘quite quintessential drivel. The young man who visited me looked nothing like that thug. He was from one of the quality papers. Indeed, he is probably at my house for our interview now.’

  ‘Yet Inspector Lestrade has spoken to the editors of all the major newspapers by telephone, and each disavows any knowledge of such an interview. I would surmise that young Greendale has learned a number of useful skills from his uncle, including some aptitude at disguise.’

  Before the gaping Beech could reassert his own infallibility, Holmes pressed on. ‘With his hair and whiskers grown far beyond his usual custom, and affecting a monocle, Theodore Greendale would have provided his new artist character, Frederick Garforth, with a most distinctive countenance. I found evidence at his studio that he also adopted certain theatrical techniques, involving flesh-coloured clay and cotton wool, to change the shape of his nose, ears and cheeks.

  ‘To be precise, though, whilst I believe that Theodore did originally sport his own hair and whiskers as Garforth for long enough to avoid any suspicion that they might be false, by the time Simon caught up with him he would have shaved them off. Indeed, he must have removed all his hair, with the exception of his eyelashes. For with this new and distinctive appearance, and lacking the amendments to his facial appearance he had adopted as Garforth, he reintroduced himself to the Society in the new person of Thomas Kellway.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed the Reverend Small, with no little relish. ‘So when you told us that Greendale was the killer of both Garforth and Kellway…’

  ‘I was alluding to but one murder, though that is distasteful enough. For a year or so, Garforth established himself fully as a member of the Society in good standing, and if his status as an artist was nonexistent, that impinged little on the interests of those here. I would imagine Greendale chose Garforth’s profession to precisely that end. His selling on to Sir Newnham of a second-hand canvas acquired elsewhere – a very inferior one, I am afraid, Sir Newnham, of lesser value even as a curiosity than if it had been truly painted by a murder victim – sufficed to establish his credentials in your respective eyes.

  ‘For the past month, Greendale has been using a wig and false eyebrows and whiskers when appearing as Garforth, but as you were all so used to his striking appearance they have escaped the suspicious scrutiny they might have inspired earlier on. Greendale has shaved regularly – at Garforth’s studio, not at Kellway’s rooms – to maintain Kellway’s baldness. He has smoked only with a cigarette holder to avoid staining his fingers, and has freshened his breath with lozenges so that Kellway might pass as a non-smoker, despite Garforth’s excessive smoking. Thus he has appeared to the Society in both personas at different times. Anderton told us that the two of them met once, in the street outside this house, but his only witness to that meeting was Garforth himself.

  ‘In this way, Greendale maintained a dual identity for the weeks required to establish the deception. Indeed, he may have had further identities during this time. Given the poverty of both Frederick Garforth’s and Thomas Kellway’s accommodations, and the substantial value of the payment from the hotel fraud, it is possible that Greendale maintained yet another establishment at which he resided between times. Although the payment for the hotel fraud was partial, the full sum claimed was large, and he would have been able to bear such an expense for the necessary time.

  ‘Such, in any case, was Theodore Greendale’s routine when his nephew Simon caught up with him. From observing his uncle’s movements, and with the information you gave him, Mr Beech, Simon was able to deduce what Theodore’s current money-making scheme must be – as I am sure you must all have done by now. He intended, of course, to stage Kellway’s disappearance with the help of the Garforth disguise, and to reappear in person as Kellway to claim the ten thousand pounds before disappearing more permanently. Whether he intended to carry on living as Garforth and develop further schemes in that person, or simply to abscond and allow both identities to lapse, I cannot tell. I doubt he intended to continue attending Society meeting
s, though – the risk of recognition would have been considerable.’

  Several of the Society had clearly been straining to interrupt during this speech, and as Holmes paused for breath their voices sounded forth.

  ‘But how did he disappear, Holmes? You haven’t covered that!’ Sir Newnham expostulated, and the others made similar protests with differing degrees of rudeness.

  ‘All in good time – gentlemen, Miss Casimir,’ Sherlock Holmes replied with insufferable calm. The Countess Brusilova had been put to bed and was being attended and chaperoned by one of the older maids, freeing her companion to listen with the rest of us to Holmes’s account. ‘I have a little demonstration planned which will, I hope, set all your minds wholly at rest on that score. If I may continue in the meantime, however:

  ‘I imagine that Greendale’s plan for his reappearance involved arriving at Parapluvium House as Garforth on Wednesday morning and changing in situ into his Kellway guise, before emerging unannounced from the Experimental Annexe, to the awe and admiration of Sir Newnham and any others who chanced to be present. In the commotion Garforth would not have been missed, at least not at first. Greendale would then return to Kellway’s rooms and create some less spectacular evidence to suggest that Kellway had once again been taken up into interplanetary space, more permanently this time.

  ‘Instead of which, he had a nasty shock. On arrival he learned not only that Sir Newnham had engaged my services to investigate Kellway’s disappearance, but that I was expected at the house at any moment.

  ‘I flatter myself that the reputation I have earned during my modest career –’ I distinctly heard Gideon Beech snort, but Holmes continued implacably ‘– would cause all but the most confident criminal mind to experience some trepidation at such news. In any case, Greendale panicked. He left at once, taking the cab in which Watson and I arrived, and fled back to his studio to destroy the evidence he had been keeping there. He had nearly completed this process when, to what I would imagine was his extreme surprise and dismay, his nephew arrived at the studio.

  ‘Simon was unaware that matters had reached such a head. He knew from speaking to Kellway’s landlady that the experiment had taken place on Monday night. He knew that the first half of the deception, Kellway’s disappearance, had come off without a hitch, and that Theodore needed only to reappear to claim the reward, which Simon had every intention of taking for his own. He had, in fact, arrived in a cab that he had commandeered for the purpose of abducting Theodore, taking him to a vacant warehouse of whose existence he had learned, and there insisting with menaces that Theodore complete the job and hand over all the proceeds to Simon, cutting out his accomplice.’

  ‘Accomplice?’ Miss Casimir frowned.

  ‘With Simon harbouring such an intention, and with Theodore already in an agitated state of mind, we can well imagine the conflict that might have developed between the two men. How Simon ended up killing Theodore with a blow of the latter’s walking stick is less clear. Possibly Theodore, who though older was no feeble specimen, offered such a fight that Simon was forced to defend himself by any means that came to hand, or possibly the news that Theodore was abandoning his carefully laid scheme to defraud the Society enraged Simon beyond reason. Whatever the reason, he gained nothing by killing a goose which might yet have been persuaded to lay him a golden egg.

  ‘Whether in anger or by accident, however, he did so, and thus was he faced with a problem. He still intended, as we have seen today, to claim the money Theodore had earned through his meticulous planning. To do so, however, he would have had to disguise himself as Theodore – and not in his Garforth appearance, which would have been relatively easy to mimic, but in the person of Thomas Kellway.

  ‘The family resemblance between the two men is quite remarkable, but it is not perfect – the most striking difference, of course, being in their ages. When disguising himself as Theodore during their Yorkshire escapade, Simon had needed to pass muster only for a few minutes. Methods such as growing his hair and whiskers to resemble his uncle’s, whitening them with talcum powder or some similar agent, and creating wrinkles on the visible parts of his face with spirit gum, would have sufficed. But “Kellway”’s lack of facial hair, or even hair on his scalp, to draw attention away from his unadorned skin made such a deception all but impossible.

  ‘Nevertheless, Simon had a notion of how he might, given this Society’s unusual openness to unconventional ideas, pass himself off for long enough to claim the reward and make his getaway. First, however, Garforth’s absence needed to be accounted for. If the artist had merely disappeared – if, say, Simon had filled his uncle’s pockets with bricks and dumped him in the Thames – the coincidental timing would have raised associations that would have been all too pertinent. The police and others would have been looking out especially for Frederick Garforth, and would have been more likely to recognise the echo of his features in Simon’s.

  ‘However, were Theodore to be found in his state at the time of death – his wig and whiskers held on with spirit gum, clay clinging to his nose and ears and cotton wool stuffed into his cheeks – the imposture would have been discovered, and all would have been lost. Dead hoaxers claim no rewards. Theodore’s body must be lacking all evidence of disguise, which of course meant it must be hairless. For a man to be shaven after death is grotesque, but for him to sport a day’s stubble when he was seen earlier that day with a full head of hair is unnatural. As for the facial discrepancies caused by the removal of the disguise, Simon was fortunate indeed that I had caught only the most fleeting glimpse of Garforth, or I would certainly have detected them when Watson and I viewed the body.’

  I could see several of the Society itching to interject once again; Sir Newnham, in particular, looked thunderstruck and furious, and I was beginning to understand why. Once again, however, Holmes pressed on.

  ‘Simon Greendale was faced with the grisly business of ferrying his uncle’s corpse to the warehouse where it was found, and shaving it so that it appeared Garforth’s hair and whiskers had been removed post mortem. He also required the services of someone who could identify the body definitively as Garforth, with no ambiguity suggesting that it might belong to Thomas Kellway.

  ‘This forced Simon to enlist Theodore’s accomplice, the same person he had hoped to induce Theodore to cut out of the deal. With the knowledge he had gained from observing meetings between the two, however, he was able to blackmail this person into assisting him, by threatening to reveal their complicity in the attempted fraud. They seem to have dug their heels in rather, creating a delay to finding the body which was to nobody’s advantage, but evidently they capitulated in the end.’

  At this point Major Bradbury, a little slower on the uptake than his fellows, succeeded in interjecting, ‘But who—?’

  ‘This was the man who introduced Garforth as a member of the Society,’ Holmes announced, ‘and one of very few who had the opportunity to duplicate Sir Newnham’s key to Experiment Room A. He planned the observation rotas which were crucial to the deception, and warned Theodore of my imminent arrival on the Wednesday morning. You do not need me to tell you who this person was. It was the man who ultimately identified Frederick Garforth’s body – the body, he claimed, of a dear family friend – without noticing that its appearance had changed, giving it a marked resemblance to that of Thomas Kellway.’

  From the ensuing animated discussion, it emerged that nobody had seen Talbot Rhyne since he had excused himself following my conversation with him and Sir Newnham at Harrington’s.

  A search of his bedroom revealed that a number of his personal effects were missing, and the luckless Gregory revealed that he had, at Mr Rhyne’s request, sent a valise by cab that morning to be held for collection at Victoria Station. By now Inspector Lestrade had arrived to take Greendale into custody, and he at once dispatched two men to Victoria, but Holmes agreed with him that they would almost certainly be too late.

  ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that Talbot Rhyne
has joined the legions of the capital’s vanished men.’

  Simon Greendale was hauled away, still swearing blood-curdling oaths against us all, by four strong policemen, and bundled into a wagon bound for the Yard. We all relocated to the drawing room, and the men lit their pipes and cigarettes. Lestrade remained, out of curiosity to hear the rest of Holmes’s explanation.

  ‘It was Rhyne who betrayed me, then?’ Sir Newnham asked bitterly. ‘I would have trusted that man with my life. If you had asked me, I would have said that he was no less loyal than Anderton, though I admit that having known him but a few years I would have had less firm grounds for saying so. Was he treacherous from the start?’

  ‘I do not know for sure,’ said Holmes. ‘It seems just as likely, however, that he had no such intention before he was suborned by Greendale. He may have been as unwilling an accomplice of Theodore’s as he later was of Simon’s.

  ‘What I am sure of is that Rhyne borrowed the keys you keep in your office safe for long enough to copy those that open Experiment Room A and the exterior door of the Experimental Annexe, and that he arranged the watch rotas to allow for the cunning scheme that Theodore had planned.’

  ‘But this is nonsense, Holmes,’ the Major insisted. ‘You must see that it is. Why, I stood outside that room with Garforth and looked in at Kellway. If what you say is true, the man must have had perfectly genuine miraculous powers. I saw a dervish bilocate once in Sind, mind you, but that man could only keep it up for minutes at a time. He was a remarkable fellow, actually—’