3: I Visit Brevet Colonel Fenlon in Gaol

A cab took me to Waterloo Station to catch the London and South Western Railway express to the Dorset seaside town of Weymouth. I reached the coast in good time to board the midnight ferry to the Guernsey capital, St. Peter Port. Bleary from a sleepless overnight voyage lurching through the choppy seas and perilous races off the Channel Islands, I arrived at the gaol and was led to a cell underneath the Magistrates’ Court. It was some 8 feet long by 6 feet wide, equipped with a solid bench around the edge on which the prisoner sat or slept. A weary Fenlon looked up. The man before me was not the cheery soul I had lunched with at Boodle’s only a week earlier.

He noted my expression.

“I agree,” he said drily. “On the whole I prefer the battery mess.”

“Even with the Erbswurst pea sausage and tins of Effner’s condensed eggs?” I asked.

He attempted a smile.

“Even,” came the answer.

“What’s this about a serious charge?” I asked.

“Delves is dead. I’m accused of his murder.”

“Delves dead!” I parroted. “You’re accused of his murder? How was he killed?”

“By a combination of alcohol and Chlorodyne.”

“And your part in the matter?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry, Watson, I’m not answering that question. I need you to relay my plight to Mr. Holmes and convince him to come to court on my behalf. It’s my only hope.”

“Is the evidence that strong against you?” I asked, alarmed.

Again he tried to smile.

“I already feel the noose dropping over my head. I’m told it’s 44 years since the last execution on the island, a Charles Tapner convicted of stealing an elderly woman’s belongings and setting fire to her. The trap door fell open but the rope was too short. He didn’t fall fast enough, his neck didn’t snap. The executioner got down through the opening and hung on to the man’s legs until he died. Took twelve minutes.”

“The evidence against you?” I repeated.

“A thumb and a forefinger mark on a glass phial which had contained the same mix of chloroform and morphia found in Delves’s stomach at the autopsy. The morphia was enough to kill him when combined with the amount of alcohol he drank during our visit to three pubs that night.”

“Where did they find the phial – not in your rooms at the hotel, I hope?” I asked.

“No, not in my rooms. Under the chair I’d been sitting on at the last pub, the New Moon Inn. The landlord’s wife discovered it the next morning.”

“The prints, are they definitely yours?”

“It seems so,” came the reply, “yet I’m equally certain I’d never seen the phial before they showed it to me, let alone pinched it between finger and thumb.”

“Is there any other evidence against you?” I asked.

“For example?”

“Anything to show you might have had it in for Delves after Maiwand?”

“Not that I know of,” came the reply. “Delves certainly gave nobody the impression I was a threat to his life. All three pub landlords agree they saw him engaging me in talk over old times in a most hearty manner. So everything hangs on that phial.”

“Have they discerned a motive of any sort?” I asked.

“I can’t see how.”

“After Maiwand did you testify at the court martial of Delves’s senior officers, by inference implicating him for our wretched defeat?”

“I wasn’t summoned to any courts martial. By early 1881 I was otherwise occupied against the Boer in South Africa.”

“No letters to The Times, criticising his command at Maiwand?”

“Not one,” Fenlon replied, “or he’d hardly have invited me to go over his memoirs with him.”

“When will the trial take place?” I asked.

“Several weeks down the line, I believe,” Fenlon replied.

“You’ll plead not guilty, of course?”

“I shall refuse to enter a plea, either guilty or innocent,” came the bewildering response.

I frowned. If this had been a hundred or so years earlier, refusing to plead in such a high profile case would mean being treated to peine forte et dure – increasingly heavy weights loaded on your chest until a plea was entered or you died.

I asked, “Are you protecting someone?”

He shook his head.

“No,” he replied. “Delves and I were alone together all evening.”

“Look here, Fenlon,” I said sternly, “I’m sure you’re innocent, but refusing to enter a plea doesn’t go down well with juries. They’re the more likely to conclude you’re guilty as charged.”

“Nevertheless, that’s my intention,” came the reply.

He looked up at me in an agony of reflection.

“To think, Watson, in ’68 I took part in the punitive expedition to Abyssinia, and another to Ashanti in ’74. I took part in the Bazaar Valley Expedition in ’78. In 1880 alongside you I survived the carnage at Maiwand, then the repeated deadly uprisings on the North-West Frontier as we extended our authority into Gilgit and Chitral. In ’81 I fought against the Boers at Majuba Hill. I was with Wolseley at the Battle of Tel el-Kebir on a night approach and bayonet assault at dawn. I survived the Third Anglo-Burmese War. Look at me now! In a prison cell on a tiny island off the coast of Normandy, awaiting the hangman’s noose, brought low by a pair of prints on a glass phial.”

I picked up my coat and said, “I’ll send a telegram to Holmes right away. You’ll have to give us a detailed description of the events, of course.”

Fenlon shook his head.

“I’m afraid that’s another track I am not willing to go down, Watson,” Fenlon replied. “You can tell Mr. Holmes about the phial. Otherwise I ask him simply to hear what the Prosecution has to say and try to save my neck after that.”

Dismayed and bemused by his obduracy, I was about to start for the door when Fenlon called for me to “Hold on”.

He proposed a bargain so bizarre I wondered if the strain had been too much for his senses: “If Mr. Holmes agrees to come to court without first asking for an account from me,” he said, “I’m prepared to offer a quid pro quo.” “That being?” I asked.

He stood up and with a sharp tug, pulled out a large envelope from under the seat-covering.

“The moment they incarcerated me I asked for a supply of writing paper. I’ve composed an exact account of what took place. I describe the moment I arrived in St. Peter Port to the moment the medics declared Delves dead. It all rests in this envelope.”

I said, “But you’ve just told me you do not want to tell

Holmes…”

“That’s right. There’s a non-negotiable proviso to which you must agree on his behalf...”

“Which is?” I asked, wondering how Holmes would greet any such conditionality.

“...that you’ll smuggle this envelope out from here and place it in a bank vault sealed and unread. I want your word of honour you’ll never break the seal until you receive news of my death, even if Mr. Holmes works some miracle and the jurymen – known as Jurats here – find me innocent.”

“Fenlon, my dear chap,” I said, exasperated beyond compare, “your life’s at stake yet you’re asking Holmes to go into the witness box blindfold, confronted with two prints – apparently yours – on an empty bottle of Chlorodyne found under your chair at that pub, the concoction which added to the alcohol may have bumped Delves off! On that evidence I would myself find you guilty.”

“It’s a risk I shall take,” came the reply.

“Your wife and daughter,” I asked, “shall I get word to them?”

Fenlon replied, “No! If possible I want my plight kept from them till the trial’s over.”

His eyes grew moist.

“What if the Jurats rule against me? What of the loss of more fulfilling years in the regiment? What of the life I planned in the Kenya Highlands with my Molo sheep? I might break down blubbing for all the plans I shan’t live to carry out. I don’t want that to be the last sight my dearest wife and daughter have of me.”

I took the envelope from him and placed it inside my coat.

“I give you my word reluctantly, old friend,” I said. “I shall seal it and place it in a tin box at Cox & Co, my bank at Charing Cross.”

At the door I turned and waved at him exactly as he had waved at me on his exit from Boodle’s dining-room a week earlier. This time the smiles were absent.

I cabled Holmes, ‘RETURNING TOMORROW

NIGHT (STOP) FENLON IN EXTREMIS (STOP) YOUR HELP GREATLY NEEDED (STOP) WATSON.’

I spent the evening in my rooms at the hotel re-reading ‘A Marriage At Sea’, a fine story by W. Clark Russell. I was hoping Fenlon would summon me once more and change the terms of our agreement, but he did not.

At Baker Street the following evening I recounted Fenlon’s plight and informed Holmes of Fenlon’s mystifying terms. He listened carefully, without comment. The next morning I sent Fenlon a reassuring telegram: ‘SPOKEN TO HOLMES (STOP) HE WILL APPEAR AS WITNESS IN THE TRIAL (STOP) BEST WISHES (STOP) WATSON’