Sherlock Holmes (15 page)

“What was stolen?”

“Please understand that I have obtained special dispensation to share this information with you, Watson. I managed to coax my fellow bathers into accepting you into our ‘bare brotherhood of the water’, even though you did not commit yourself as wholeheartedly as I did.”

“What you call commitment I call the act of a man who should be committed,” I said, and receiving nothing in response from Holmes but stony-faced silence, added, “To a lunatic asylum, that is.”

“Yes, I got the joke. You didn’t need to spell it out. My lack of evident mirth should have clued you in to the fact that I did not find it amusing. To answer your question, what was stolen was an academic gown, a convocation robe belonging to a certain doctor of Divinity. The act of taking it would have been child’s play. The walls of the changing cubicles do not extend all the way to the ground. There is an aperture of some six inches at the bottom, intended so that the water from the bathers’ bodies may flow out rather than accumulate in the corners and rot the planking. The cubicles do not have hooks from which to hang clothes. Everything must be folded and placed on a low shelf. It would be the easiest thing on earth to reach in from underneath, through the aperture, and pluck whatever garment one wished.”

“That was all that went missing, a gown?”

Holmes nodded. “The fact that the culprit was not spotted suggests one of two things. Either he is a don himself and was able to mingle freely amongst his colleagues at Parson’s Pleasure, or he crept up to the changing cubicles from the rear and performed his act of larceny clandestinely, unnoticed. I err towards the latter explanation, simply because I cannot fathom why one don would purloin another’s gown.”

“It might just have been a prank carried out by students, as was suggested.”

“Naturally. But consider this. The Bulldog, Stanway, stated that the moustachioed don who identified me as an intruder had a gown with a red hood. The gown of a doctor of Divinity has a long hood of scarlet silk which hangs down the back.”

“Good grief!” I said. “You’re suggesting the thief and the don at Magdalen are one and the same?”

“More than that. The don at Magdalen is the man who poisoned Aubrey Bancroft.”

“Holmes, that is a leap of logic too far, surely.”

“And,” Holmes continued, undaunted by my objection, “he is not a don at all but an impostor. Think about it, Watson. If you wished to go anywhere in Oxford, enter any college, pass unobtrusively amongst its quads and cloisters, what better disguise could you wear than that of an academic? No porter would think to challenge you, nor any Bulldog. You could come and go as you pleased. People would barely notice your face; all they would see was the gown. It would not even matter if you looked uncertain rather than purposeful or if you had to stop a passer-by to beg directions. Academics are such unworldly creatures; no one expects them to behave in a conventional manner. No great thespian talent would be required, just the confidence that your garb will shield you like some cloak of inconspicuousness, the perfect camouflage.”

“Still, it would take some audacity to pull off the pretence.”

“I believe we are dealing with an individual who is not deficient in boldness, or in ruthlessness.”

“Why not simply buy a gown?” I said. “I’ve seen a shop selling them on the High Street. Why go to the effort of stealing one?”

“Because a shopkeeper might remember your face and be able to provide a description, and because the theft of an item of clothing from Parson’s Pleasure is not only easy to execute but will not be reported to the authorities. Our malefactor knew that. He is, it seems, a wily one. Even his choice of disguise – a doctor of Divinity – was calculated to deflect suspicion. A theologian. One step short of the priesthood. The last person you would think capable of wrongdoing.”

“So this man, the bogus academic, was Bancroft’s co-conspirator?”

“The gown was stolen just over three weeks ago,” said Holmes. “It wasn’t long after that that Merriweather received the first poison pen letter. The dates line up. My theory is, our phoney theologian presented himself to Bancroft, befriended him, gained his confidence, then worked his wiles on the youngster, making him his cat’s paw. Perhaps he claimed to share Bancroft’s dislike of Merriweather, citing some long-running scholastic feud, a common-room rivalry. It wouldn’t have taken much to spur Bancroft into action, with the added incentive of offering to help by drafting the letters for him to write out. Such larks, the gullible aristocrat must have thought, little realising that the instigator of the deed had a hidden agenda: the letters were not as anonymous as they appeared.”

“But then to attempt to kill him…”

“As I said – ruthless. Aware of Bancroft’s taste for champagne, the felon knew he would have no difficulty coaxing him into drinking a bottle of the stuff which he surreptitiously laced with strychnine while uncorking it. He himself refrained from taking even a sip, professing to be an abstainer.”

“To think, we might have run into him, had we visited Bancroft just a few minutes earlier.”

“My view is that we came nearer to encountering him than we realised. He must have spied us as we were entering Bancroft’s staircase, put two and two together, and fled the scene, but not before taking the precaution of warning the Bulldogs about us so that we would be waylaid and unable to give chase. I would go further than that and say he had been monitoring the whole situation at Magdalen and was not ignorant of the fact that Merriweather had contacted me. This informed his decision to kill Bancroft.”

“Holmes,” I said after a pause for thought, “do you discern any connection between the Merriweather letters and the Jericho murders? It strikes me that there are correspondences there. In both cases a third party provided the impetus and the structure for an offence which someone else then committed.”

“Watson, that is by far the most intelligent thing you have said all day. All year, even.”

The warmth with which my friend uttered the remark did little to mitigate its condescending nature. As was often the way with Holmes’s compliments, it carried more than a hint of disparagement.

“I have been coming to that conclusion myself,” he went on. “What if the same individual who cajoled Bancroft into writing the letters also gave Grainger the idea for murdering his family and then building himself – almost literally – an unassailable alibi? It is fantastic, yet it is also only too possible. We are looking at a kind of agent provocateur, someone who derives an obscene satisfaction from driving others to acts of wickedness and then disposes of them afterwards at his convenience. He is at large in Oxford, a serpent in human form, a tempter and enabler, and we must find him and stop him before he strikes again, as he doubtless will.”

We had by this time put the rolling landscaped greenswards of the Parks behind us and were wending west along streets lined with towering hornbeams that were just coming into leaf. I assumed we were returning to the Randolph, but Holmes, as was his wont, had other plans, and presently we were approaching the Radcliffe Infirmary, an imposing late-eighteenth-century edifice built in the style of a grand country house, with double gates, ivy-wreathed wings and a fountain in front featuring a statue of a muscular Triton.

“We need to talk to Aubrey Bancroft,” Holmes said. “The more we learn about the doctor of not-such-great-Divinity, the better.”

“What
you
need,” I said, “is to change into dry clothing, or risk becoming an inmate of this hospital too. But it would be wasting my breath to tell you that.”

The last comment fell on deaf ears, thus proving its acuity. Holmes entered the building, I trailing in his wake.

Soon locating a physician with responsibility for Bancroft’s care, we learned that an interview with the young noble would not be possible.

“Are you friends of his?”

“Acquaintances,” said Holmes. “Is he unavailable? Asleep, perchance?”

The look that came over the doctor’s face was one I have had to adopt many times myself over the years. It was blandly neutral, with a tinge of compassion. It is the look we in our profession use when we are called upon to deliver the worst kind of news.

Holmes was sanguine as we exited the Radcliffe; I was angry.

“Dash it all, it’s not fair!” I seethed. “What Bancroft did was mischievous, unpleasant, malicious even – but he did not deserve to die for it. That is far too severe a punishment. And him barely in his twenties…”

“Watson, you did all you could for him. He had ingested too much of the poison already. It was coursing through his bloodstream. His lungs had been affected irreparably and in the end gave out. You pursued extreme measures to revive him, you went above and beyond, and it is not your fault that it was insufficient. You must not berate yourself.”

“I am not berating myself,” I said, although I was, just a bit. “At the very least, Holmes, promise me we will find his murderer. Promise me we will catch the wretch and build an ironclad case against him so that a judge will have no choice but to reward him as he has rewarded his victims.”

“Further evidence from Bancroft would have helped in that respect,” Holmes said. “Without it, we do not have much to go on. Even so, I vow that the villain will not escape. If I have to remain in Oxford ’til kingdom come, no matter. So be it. He will not get away with this.”

It was not long after these events that Holmes was engaged to solve the diverting case which I wrote up and published nine years later as “The Adventure of the Three Students”. Readers of that tale will recall that it centred on the displacement of galley proofs of an examination paper in the rooms of a lecturer named Hilton Soames, the implication being that someone had moved the sheets in order to copy down their contents for the purpose of cheating.

In that narrative I went to some pains to disguise the name of the college where the incident took place, dubbing it St Luke’s. Anyone reading
this
narrative may be able to intuit that the actual college was one that was named after another of the Four Evangelists, to wit St John’s, which is amongst Oxford University’s older and more prestigious constituents.

“Hilton Soames” was also a pseudonym, and I likewise rechristened each of the three undergraduates on whom suspicion for the misdeed fell, my principal aim being to spare the blushes of the one – “Giles Gilchrist” – whom Holmes was able to single out as the perpetrator. I am glad that I did so, for I have it on good authority that the young man, after a self-imposed exile in southern Africa and a stint in the Rhodesian Police, settled in the Transvaal, married a Boer woman, forged a career for himself in the diamond mining industry, and has gone on to lead a blameless and profitable life. His minor infraction was, in the long run, the making of him.

For Holmes, the affair was something of a palate cleanser, a break between courses of a meal. It bore no attachment to the larger mystery at hand; nor did it come to the attention of Professor Quantock and hence was not subjected to the ministrations of the Thinking Engine. An isolated occurrence, incidental,
co
incidental one might say, it offered respite from the somewhat oppressive chain of circumstances in whose toils we had become enmeshed.

I have a pair of letters which Holmes sent to me during this period, both of them on the Randolph’s handsomely embossed notepaper and adorned with my friend’s usual spidery penmanship. In the first, he described his efforts to track down the deadly agent provocateur, who was proving an elusive quarry. “Various avenues of investigation, which look promising, turn out to be cul-de-sacs,” he wrote. “I seem to make inroads, only to find myself up a blind alley.” His tone was sprightly, but reading between the lines one can sense a frustration. Holmes was not enjoying being repeatedly stymied.

In the second of the letters he related, in a most ironical fashion, how the Thinking Engine had begun to make headway even as he was wallowing in the doldrums.

I have heard tell, mainly through the auspices of Inspector Tomlinson, that people have been travelling to the University Galleries to consult the Engine on personal matters – the loss of some valuable item, the whereabouts of an errant spouse on certain evenings, the mislaying of a wallet or purse, even a pet cat gone astray. They are like pilgrims visiting a shrine, hoping to have their prayers answered. And, Watson, the machine obliges. Each time, it spits out a tickertape response, and damn me if it isn’t invariably right! Not least about the cat (which had got itself locked in a neighbour’s tool shed by accident, in case you’re wondering). I am astonished at the Engine’s perspicacity, and beginning to ask myself if this isn’t truly the miracle of science that Quantock and Knaresfield have been saying all along. It directed us to Parson’s Pleasure, did it not? How did its mechanical brain know that there had been a theft there? How on earth did it winnow down all of the available probabilities to arrive at the conclusion that a man in a stolen academic gown was the é
minence grise
behind the letters to Dr Merriweather?

These rhetorical questions went unanswered, in that letter at least, and I descried in them a crumbling confidence, a deepening bewilderment. My friend was not one to give in to despair, not easily, but here he was, expressing an inability to decipher an enigma. That was anathema to a man in his line of work, with his track record and his keen skills of ratiocination.

For further evidence of the Thinking Engine’s mounting public prestige, a sampling of Knaresfield-owned newspapers from that time is instructive. Holmes would not have been ignorant of their coverage of its doings, and this could not have alleviated the pressure that he was under.

A copy of the
Midlands Gazette
dated Monday 11th March 1895 devotes space to an article about the Duke of Marlborough, whose financial straits at the time were common knowledge and who was keen to find some way to repair both his failing family fortunes and his decaying ancestral home, Blenheim Palace, situated some ten miles north of Oxford.