Back in our rooms, Holmes paced, and sat, and stood, and paced some more, and smoked his pipe, while I wrote a few letters and attempted to exert a calming influence by example. Occasionally he would mutter incomprehensibly to himself, jabbing the air with his pipe as he reached some particularly emphatic point in his internal soliloquy.
Finally he threw himself with great force into his favourite armchair, which made a loud creak of protest, and exclaimed, ‘I am baffled, Watson. I cannot express to you how frustrating the sensation is! And yet we can be sure that there is a real, definitive and absolute truth in this matter, if only we might capture it. It eludes us for the moment, and so we must persist.’
He stood once again, knocking a pile of magazines into the fireplace which he distractedly retrieved and placed, still smouldering, on Mrs Hudson’s carpet. I eyed them uneasily as he continued. ‘The only explanation – the one explanation that we could, under ordinary circumstances, possibly admit – is that Anderton obtained a key to the room, or copied it, and that he conspired with Garforth and Major Bradbury to release Kellway. That would be mundane and explicable: a trivial and sordid piece of fraud. And yet Sir Newnham is quite correct to ask how, in this case, his trusted butler, who could have turned to him in any difficulty, and who you and I, Watson, have judged to be a stolidly and unimaginatively loyal man, could have been suborned.’
I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that. The man has sisters, perhaps with families of their own – if someone threatened them, with dire consequences promised if he were to approach Sir Newnham about the matter, might he not be persuaded to go against his better nature for their sake?’
‘There are times when our thoughts are in perfect accord, Watson. While you were out at Mrs Rust’s I instructed some associates of mine to make discreet enquiries about Anderton’s sisters and their families.’ I knew that he was referring to his ‘Irregulars’, the street children who from time to time would help him in his investigations in return for small monetary considerations. ‘There are two sisters, three nephews, two nieces and a great-nephew. All but the great-nephew, who is but four years old, are in service in respectable households around London, and all appear to be going about their business as normal. Even if there were some threat looming over them that they were unaware of, that knowledge would surely have created some signs of unease on Anderton’s part, rather than the cheery optimism he showed this morning.’
‘He would have to be a very good actor for it not to, certainly.’
‘I do not consider that likely, and I am tolerably familiar with the acting profession. No – while such a threat might have the effect you describe on another man, I cannot believe that a man as guileless as Anderton would be capable of such deceit, of his employer or of us. He would break down in tears and confess, and throw himself on Sir Newnham’s mercy.’
‘But surely it is not impossible, Holmes. Your first thought was that Anderton, Bradbury and Garforth were in it together.’
‘If this were a purely intellectual exercise, you might be right. And yet I cannot believe it of Anderton. That may prove to be weakness on my part, but I will not recklessly implicate such a man. And there are attendant questions to consider, which may yet make a nonsense of the whole idea. Why have a third conspirator present when two would attract less attention? What was the true cause of Kellway’s baldness? Why did he carry a broken sword-stick when thousands of ordinary, serviceable and intact walking sticks are available throughout London?
‘Indeed, before we accuse Anderton of duplicity there is a more radical explanation we should consider. That is that the whole case, as presented to us, is a hoax on Sir Newnham’s part. Several of the witnesses would still need to be involved, but most could be faithfully reporting what they saw, and Sir Newnham would have the means to reward the others well for their pains. And Anderton would still be loyal, to his employer if not to the truth.’
‘That seems absurd, Holmes. Who on earth would benefit from such a deceit?’
‘I offer it merely to illustrate the uncertainties of the case. But indeed, the reward money is Sir Newnham’s own. If he wished to give Kellway ten thousand pounds, he need hardly justify it with such a charade.’
After a moment’s thought I suggested, ‘Unless perhaps Kellway was not part of the conspiracy. Perhaps Sir Newnham feared that his abilities were real, and connived with the others to do away with him.’
‘Really, Watson?’ Holmes said witheringly. ‘That hardly seems likely given that Sir Newnham has devoted himself to researching the existence of psychic phenomena. Any true proof of such a thing would be a glorious vindication of his stance, and with his fortune he could hardly miss the ten thousand pounds. Even if he had some personal animus against Kellway, he would hardly remove him in such a showy fashion and then go out of his way to draw my attention to the affair.
‘Indeed, the only motivation I can guess at for such a hoax would be to gull me, one of our era’s most notorious defenders of reason, into endorsing the existence of psychic phenomena. Others have made attempts, as you will recall – showmen and charlatans every one. But such a coup would hardly benefit a reputable scientist, as to stand up to scrutiny any such phenomenon would have to be indefinitely replicable, under ever more rigorous experimental conditions. No, to risk his reputation on such a ludicrous gamble Sir Newnham would be a fool, and the man we have spoken to is no fool. Again, we founder upon an impossibility, not of science, but of human nature.
‘Yet if we cannot accept one or other of these human impossibilities, the obvious solution – indeed, the only sensible and elegant solution – is that which scientifically speaking is quite impossible: that Thomas Kellway vanished from a locked room through some means presently unknown to science, and is now in some inaccessible place, Venusian or ethereal or otherwise, where the attractions of ten thousand pounds sterling hold no further appeal for him.
‘And that, my dear fellow, is so unconscionable that I can only conclude that something I have thus far dismissed as an impossibility in fact conceals a reality. That Kellway did somehow contrive to hide himself in a completely bare room, or that the room has a secret exit that eludes detection even by me, or that he was never in the room at all. Taken on its own terms, every theory that could possibly explain the facts we have been given is unacceptable.
‘Watson, my confidence that all things must have a rational explanation is unshakeable, but I am beginning to wonder whether my definition of the rational has not been too far limited hitherto.’
By now I had finished the last of my letters. I turned to smile at my oldest and dearest companion. ‘I, too, have confidence, Holmes – confidence in you. You know it’s not unusual for you to feel frustrated at this stage in a case. I have no doubt that with your own extraordinary powers you will find a way to shine a light into this murky space, and scramble out of this labyrinth of ifs and buts and maybes.’
He smiled thinly. ‘I thank you for your faith in me, old friend, but I fear I cannot share it.’ He lapsed into a melancholic silence which lasted for some time.
At last, struck by an inspiration, I said, ‘Perhaps what you need is more data. Perhaps your Index has something about the histories of the people involved that will prove relevant.’
‘Yes, that is possible.’ Holmes cocked his head, more animated for the moment. ‘Though I fear Sir Newnham’s biography at least is thoroughly documented. Still, I thought I had heard Garforth’s name before, for one. Bring me the relevant volumes, if you would be so kind, and we will look up the principals.’
It turned out that Holmes took a very broad view of who the ‘principals’ might be, and I had to fetch a number of files. They were heavy with paper, and I made several journeys between the shelves and the armchair where Holmes sat, distractedly filling his pipe. By the time I returned with R and S, he had it smoking, had already read the account of Anderton senior’s death – ‘A wholly inglorious suicide, Watson, notable only in that the father was of such a different character from his son’ – and was working through the entries on Gideon Beech, Major Bradbury and Countess Brusilova.
We learned that Beech had been involved peripherally in an incident of burglary in 1891, when he had taken it upon himself to clear the name of a servant accused of stealing his mistress’s ruby necklace. He had made a colossal nuisance of himself to the police in the process, and although in the end the footman was absolved of blame, his position in the household had become untenable, and the gems were never found. I had little doubt that Beech’s own account of the affair would make it seem altogether more glorious.
Major Bradbury’s sole entry in the files was a brief remark in a society column noting his return from India, kept by Holmes solely because the Major had served for some years under a person of far greater interest: Colonel Sebastian Moran. Bradbury had remained silent on this connection when introduced to Holmes, though as the latter’s attempted assassination by Moran was a matter of public record, it was possible that he was embarrassed by the association. Holmes’s information was normally drawn only from the British papers, however (primarily the London ones, in fact), and I had a growing suspicion that Bradbury’s name had been familiar to me by reputation during my own time out East. I had already resolved to follow this up when I had an opportunity, but for now it was important for Holmes to continue approaching the problem in his own way.
‘Countess Brusilova is undoubtedly a fraud,’ said Holmes, moving on through the alphabet. ‘Her imposture has been a successful one for many years, however, making her a tidy income. However, since her illness a few years ago it is Miss Casimir who has been at the helm of her endeavours, managing the Countess’s displays of mediumship while the old woman acts as a passive, and perhaps even an oblivious, passenger.’
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.’
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.’