Sherlock Holmes (17 page)

“You are not fond of Trenchard,” Holmes said.

“If I’m honest, no,” said Preston. “It’s fair to say that no one in the boat is. We acknowledge that he is a fine oarsman, and as a stroke he keeps the rating like a metronome. As a human being, though…”

“Arrogant,” said one of the crew.

“Overbearing,” said another.

“A harsh taskmaster,” said a third.

“He demands as much from himself as he does from any of you,” Gill pointed out, but this argument carried little weight with Trenchard’s crewmates, judging by the frosty glares it elicited.

“So his absence is a blow to your hopes of sporting glory,” said Holmes, “but not to any of you personally.”

“He can be replaced,” said Stevens. “The stroke of the 2nd VIII, Hargreaves, is highly talented. He would be only too happy to be promoted, and we would be only too glad to have him.”

“Why don’t you tell Watson and myself exactly what happened this morning? I have had one version of events from Mr Gill, but he – no disrespect meant, sir – did not see everything. It would be useful to hear about it from the perspective of those who were actually in the boat.”

“Why don’t we tell the Thinking Engine instead?” said a brawny, swarthy lad who was only an inch or so taller than Preston the cox and whose face seemed to bear a permanent mischievous smirk. “That thing has all the answers.”

A few of the oarsmen sniggered. Beside me Holmes bristled. I could see him doing his utmost to maintain his composure.

“I posed that very question myself to Mr Gill when he came to me at the Randolph,” my friend replied. “Do you know what he said? ‘I don’t trust machines, Mr Holmes.’”

“Especially ones that purport to think like men,” said Gill. “It isn’t natural.”

“There you have it,” said Holmes to the swarthy lad. “It’s Llewellyn, yes? The bow man?”

“What gave me away? My Welsh accent?”

“Mr Gill told me there was a joker in the pack, one who hailed from the Valleys. The deduction was beyond elementary.”

“El-em-ent-ar-ee,” said Llewellyn in his orotund tones, with a triumphant gloat. “Hear that, boyos? Mr Holmes used his magic word, his abracadabra. That’s a shilling each you owe me.”

There were more sniggers.

“You were right, Taff,” said one of the rowers. “You said he would say it.”

“I’ve read the stories. He always does.”

“I do not,” Holmes countered. “Watson may have me use the expression in several of his narratives, but I assure you, in life it seldom passes my lips.”

I refrained from pointing out that he had last uttered the word only a fortnight ago, shortly after our visit to the Graingers’ house in Jericho.

“Well then, this was a rare instance of life imitating art,” said Llewellyn, “and that’s me better off to the tune of more than one crown. Much obliged, sir.
Diolch yn fawr
.”

Holmes drew himself up to deliver an even sharper rebuke to Llewellyn. I was afraid that the young Welshman might be scorched to a cinder by the full force of my companion’s scorn, so I placed a hand on Holmes’s arm, a gesture of restraint.

“Come, come,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Perhaps I do attribute ‘elementary’ to you more often than you actually say it. Put it down to creative licence. Now, are we here to locate the missing Trenchard, or what?”

My words had the desired salutary effect. Holmes calmed and said, “Very well. It was a dawn training outing, was it not? As the sun rose, the ten of you gathered at this very spot – eight oarsmen, one cox, one coach. The mist was as thick as it is now, if not thicker. You carried your boat out from the boathouse and deposited it in the water. And then…?”

The story came out in dribs and drabs, the crewmen taking it in turns to be narrator, sometimes interrupting one another to chip in with some extra detail or expand on a point the previous speaker had made.

The thread of it, when assembled, was as follows.

Once the boat was afloat in the water, Gill set off on his bicycle along the east bank towpath to the road bridge called Folly Bridge. Crossing this, he came back down the river along the west bank. The towpath on that side is unbroken all the way south to the Iffley Lock, beyond which Oxford crews do not row, whereas the towpath on the other side terminates at the university boathouses.

By the time Gill drew level with the Oriel boathouse, the crew had pulled out from the landing pontoon and were already some way downriver, going at a fair lick. He pedalled hard to catch up but lost sight of them at the first bend. He called out to them through his megaphone, telling them to slow down and wait for him, but the cox, Preston, stated that he did not hear the instruction. Neither did any of his crewmates. The mist was too dense.

Eventually coach and boat were reunited just past the bend, a zigzag turn known picturesquely as the Gut. The boat had come to a halt, oars at rest, and was drifting gently with the current. It was then that Gill observed that one of his oarsmen was gone. The stroke’s seat was empty. Trenchard was nowhere to be seen.

Gill asked, with some astonishment, what had become of Trenchard. An answer was not immediately forthcoming. The remaining crewmen were in consternation, flummoxed by the unexpected turn of events.

Trenchard, it transpired, had leapt from his seat and dived into the water. He had swum the few yards to the bank, crawled out and begun running. Not a word of warning had he tendered, nor of explanation. He had waited until the cox had given the order to stop – “Easy all! Hold her hard!” – and the boat had been braked by the insertion of the oar blades perpendicular in the water. Next moment he had, in a manner of speaking, abandoned ship.

Gill raced off after him along the towpath, cycling as fast as he dared given the limited visibility. He failed to find him. Trenchard might well have cut to the right and headed across the fields between the river and the Abingdon Road. Equally, he might have continued southward to Donnington Bridge and joined the main road there. He was a fit athlete, a strong runner. Staying ahead of a much older man on a bicycle, especially after a decent head start, would not have been difficult for him.

Gill returned to the Gut, out of breath, unsuccessful, despondent. The crew then had no choice but to limp home minus its stroke, with Trenchard’s oar shipped and Jenkins at seven filling in for him as pace-setter. Gill meanwhile went to Trenchard’s rooms at college, hoping he was there, but no luck. He tried the common rooms, the dining hall, the library, stopping anyone he passed to enquire if they had seen him; no one had.

When asked if anything had occurred prior to the outing which might have precipitated Trenchard’s impromptu self-jettisoning, the remaining crew members confessed there had been a slight contretemps. Trenchard liked to give pre-training “pep talks”, which consisted of him cataloguing his crewmates’ flaws as rowers and inviting them to concentrate on improving their skills. Llewellyn had, on that morning, found this habit particularly irksome and had called Trenchard various choice names. Bad blood had been festering between bow man and stroke as the boat set forth. The rest of the crew had not been happy either. Perhaps Trenchard had been able to sense the discontent in the boat, the waves of resentment emanating towards him from behind, the stares piercing his back like daggers. That might account for his actions. Suddenly it all became too much for him and he snapped.

The crew were, by their own admission, labouring under a heavy burden of expectation. Hopes were riding on them. Oriel had never stood a better chance of dislodging Brasenose from the top spot and becoming Head of the River than it did this year. It was a college where sporting prowess was valued almost as highly as academic achievement. Winning the event and hoisting high the Torpids Challenge Cup would mean a lot.

“If you ask me, Trenchard couldn’t take it any more,” said the number four man, Allardyce. “The strain, I mean. He just cracked.”

“As captain of boats as well as stroke, he would have been feeling it more than any of us,” said Stevens. “He isn’t what you’d call sensitive, but still waters run deep. He may just have had enough and wanted to be shot of the whole thing.”

“Surprising of him to quit in so rash and dramatic a fashion,” said Knight, who rowed at number two. “But then, prone as he is to fits of uncontrolled temper, perhaps not that surprising.”

“Anyway,” said Llewellyn, “now we can recruit Hargreaves. It shouldn’t take long to integrate him into the boat. He stroked for us a couple of times earlier in the term, when Trenchard got injured. He’ll slot right in, no trouble.”

“Trenchard injured?” said Holmes. “How?”

“He ‘caught a crab’, Mr Holmes. Nasty it was, too. Oar handle flew up and whacked him in the mouth. Broke a tooth. He had to visit the dentist and have it seen to.”

“How unfortunate for him.”

“Very. And him such an expert rower. Mind you, it wasn’t his fault. Turns out there was a problem with his rigger. Couple of the bolts had worked themselves loose. The whole thing nearly fell off mid-stroke.”

Llewellyn looked spectacularly sly as he said this, and there was little doubt in my mind that the bolts had not just “worked themselves loose” of their own accord. Someone, most likely Llewellyn himself, had tampered with them with the aim of triggering some sort of mishap. The stunt had succeeded better than hoped, causing Trenchard not simply embarrassment but actual bodily harm.

“In sum, then,” said Holmes, “you are a man short but you are none of you too bothered by the fact.”

“
I
am,” said Gill. “Hargreaves is good but he’s no Trenchard. I want the best in my boat and only the best.”

“So you would still like me to locate him for you?”

“If you would be so kind.”

“Yet your crew wouldn’t care if he remained lost.”

The seven oarsmen and one cox shuffled their feet.

“They may think they can manage without him,” said Gill, “but I am their coach and I’m saying they cannot. If they want to win their blades this year and give Brasenose a bloody nose, it will be with Trenchard stroking or not at all. I know he is a disagreeable so-and-so. I know he puts people’s backs up. I’m not blind. But I know, too, that he is passionate about this sport. Lives for it. It’s that passion that drives him to excel and makes him impatient with those who don’t meet his high standards. And it’s that passion that will lead us to victory this coming week.”

It was a rousing speech, both a rallying cry and a plea for peace and unity. The Oriel 1st VIII were affected by it, I could tell, but not swayed. Their faces remained set in defiance. They didn’t want Trenchard back. They had no wish for Holmes to find him.

“It seems to me,” Holmes said, “that I would be none too popular were I to retrieve Mr Trenchard from whatever hiding place he has holed up in.”

“You can say that again,” Llewellyn muttered.

“How about if we were to come to some sort of compromise, then? I shall limit my investigation to an examination of the boat. If I cannot deduce the fellow’s whereabouts from that, I shall refrain from any further efforts.”

There were puzzled frowns all round, the deepest belonging to Gill.

“How would that help?” he said. “At best you’d be doing half the job. The boat itself can’t reveal anything. It’s just a boat.”

“If that is all Mr Holmes wants,” said Preston, “why not let him?”

The crew murmured assent.

“But Trenchard could be miles away by now,” said Gill. “He could be in London, Manchester, anywhere. I’ve sent a wire to his parents in Lowestoft. If he returns home, they are to let me know as soon as possible.”

“How far do you think he will have got in sodden rowing clothes?” said Holmes. “With no money in his pockets? No, if he is anywhere, it is somewhere nearby, and the boat may well reveal where.”

The boat was duly lugged out of the boathouse and laid onto a pair of trestles fitted with canvas straps which cradled the hull in the manner of a sling. Holmes then set to inspecting it from end to end, giving it his customary microscopic attention. Not a plank, not a bolt, not a screw went unstudied. He checked the gates on the riggers, the leather bindings which fastened the oarsmen’s feet to the footrests, and the runners on which the seats slid. In particular he scrutinised the narrow niche at the stern where the cox sat. He tugged the cords which controlled the rudder and ran a finger along the inside of the saxboards, the top edges of the gunwales.

The crew were bemused by the amount of time he spent looking over the boat. To anyone unaccustomed to Holmes’s methods it might have appeared that he was in the grip of an obsession, a mania even. No detail, no minutia of the vessel’s construction seemed too small to be of notice.

Finally he pronounced himself done. “I am satisfied,” said he, “that there is nothing further to be gleaned here. You may return the boat to its rack, gentlemen. Before you do, however…”

The crew, who had assembled on either side of the boat to pick it up, halted.

“Yes?” said Stevens.

“Perhaps you might explain why you have lied to me.”

“I?”

“Not just you. All eight of you.”

“That’s preposterous. I’ve told you only the truth. We all have.”

“No, you have not. You have lied consistently all day, first to Mr Gill, now to me. Trenchard did not jump out of the boat.”

“He did,” said Stevens, “and I defy you, sir, to prove otherwise.”

“Oh, that will not be a problem,” said Holmes. “The evidence is right in front of us. You, Stevens, and your cohorts have colluded in a rather cunning ruse, all to cover up the fact that Trenchard did not abscond in the colourful fashion you have collectively described. On the contrary, he is sequestered in a place of your choosing – trussed up and gagged, I’ll wager.”

“That’s a blatant—”

“Were I to enter the boathouse,” Holmes said, gesturing towards the entrance, “and look around, might I not find a storeroom of some sort?”