The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (139 page)

Armed with this, I advanced to the window, paused for a moment, heard the creaking continue and flung wide the casement. There was a swift movement among the branches of the tree just outside. I leapt forward, snatching with my free hand at a pale form I could vaguely discern. There came a loud yelp. The form wriggled, abominably in my grasp. I raised the poker to deliver a sound blow.

“Oh, come, Watson, spare the rod,” said the voice of Sherlock Holmes from behind me.

“Spare the rod?” I said refraining from bringing the poker down but keeping a firm grip on my opponent's clothing. “Holmes, we have a burglar here. Pray assist me.”

“A burglar, yes,” Holmes answered. “But only a small one, I venture to think.”

I heard the sound of him striking a match behind me. The rays from the candle he lit shone out into the night. By then I saw that I was detaining none other than the young red-haired Phillip Hughes.

I hauled him out of the tree and inside.

“Now, young sir,” I said, “what is the meaning of this new jape of yours?”

But Sherlock Holmes answered for him.

“No new jape, Watson, I think, since I believe I told you that in my opinion the lad committed no old jape.”

“But, Holmes, he has this instant proved himself a night prowler, and a determined one at that. There can no longer be any doubt about who blotted that book.”

“No, Watson, there never has been any doubt about that. But let us hear what brought our determined little ally prowling all the way over to us here.”

The boy looked up at Holmes, his eyes alight with admiration.

“You knew then that I had come to tell you, sir?” he asked.

Holmes's lips curved in a faint smile.

“I hardly think you would have risked so perilous a journey for any other purpose,” he said. “I take it that you found out from Mr. Arthur Smyllie where we lodged?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then tell us what you have to tell us.”

“Sir, I think I know how that book got to be covered in ink, sir.”

Holmes's eyes gleamed momentarily.

“I wonder if you do,” he said. “Let us hear.”

“Well, sir, it's not easy to believe.”

“The truth very often isn't. Your human being is a very tricky piece of machinery, my lad.”

“Yes, sir. Well, sir, I was lying awake tonight, thinking about you coming all the way down
from London and everything, and wondering whether you would solve the mystery, sir. Well, not really that. I knew you would solve it, sir, but I wondered what the answer could possibly be. And then, sir, I remembered Thompson Minor. He left last year, sir.”

“Thompson Minor,” I exclaimed. “Did a boy come back to the school and—”

“Watson, let young Hughes tell us in his own way.”

“Of course, of course. Speak up, young fellow me lad.”

“Yes, sir. Well, I thought about Thompson Minor and the way he used to get into great bates. And then, Mr. Holmes, well, he would do things that only hurt him himself. Once when he was in a specially bad temper he threw his champion pocket-knife into the fire, sir. He did really.”

Holmes's eyes were glowing sombrely now.

“So, young Hughes,” he said, “draw your conclusions. Bring your account to a proper end, and my friend Watson here shall record it for you.”

The boy looked back at him, white-faced and intent in the candlelight.

“Sir, Dr. Smyllie did it himself, didn't he, sir? It must have been him. Mr. Arthur's too decent ever to do a thing like that, and the only other key was Dr. Smyllie's. Sir, he did it to spite himself because Mr. Arthur won't be a poet but a scientist, sir. Isn't that it? Isn't it?”

“Yes,” said Sherlock Holmes. “That is it, my boy.”

He turned to me.

“And, as you suggested, Watson,” he said, “in the morning we shall have to go to Dr. Smyllie and tell him what his son guessed this evening, that no boy committed our crime. And it's ‘Hurrah for St. George' and a whole day of holiday.”

WITH THE POSSIBLE
exception of Professor Moriarty, who appears too seldom in the canon, the greatest criminal character in literature is, of course, A. J. Raffles, the gentleman jewel thief created by E. W. Hornung at the end of the Victorian era, his first book appearance being in
The Amateur Cracksman
(1899). A few years after the author's death in 1921, the popularity of the character remained at such a high level that the British magazine
The Thriller
asked Philip Atkey (1908–1985), already a regular contributor to its pages, to continue the rogue's adventures. After making arrangements with the estate of Hornung, Atkey, using the pseudonym Barry Perowne, produced many more stories and novels about Raffles than his creator had.

Atkey wrote hundreds of stories and more than twenty novels, many featuring the suave safecracker and his sidekick, Bunny Manders, including
Raffles After Dark
(1933; American title:
The Return of Raffles
)
, Raffles in Pursuit
(1934),
Raffles Under Sentence
(1936),
Raffles and the Key Man
(1940), and the short story collections
Raffles Revisited
(1974),
Raffles of the Albany
(1976), and
Raffles of the M. C. C
. (1979).

It was inevitable, of course, that the great criminal and the great detective would be matched against each other, and the finest examples of their confrontations are in Perowne's “Raffles: The Enigma of the Admiral's Hat,” first published in the March 1975 issue of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
, and its sequel, “Raffles on the Trail of the Hound,” first published in the July 1975 issue of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
. They were first collected in
Raffles of the Albany: Footprints of a Famous Gentleman Crook in the Times of a Great Detective
(London, Hamish Hamilton, 1976).

“
MORAL OR OTHERWISE
, Bunny,” said Raffles, “it's a fact of life that possession is nine points of the law.”

Immaculate in a grey suit, a pearl in his cravat, his dark hair crisp, his keen face tanned, he tossed aside the London
Times
, in which a correspondence had been going on for months about some ancient bas-reliefs, the Thracian Marbles, unearthed by an archaeologist on a field expedition and presented by him to the British Museum.

“This savant,” Raffles added, offering me a Sullivan from his cigarette-case, “probably hopes to be rewarded with a knighthood by the Queen—talking of whom, Bunny, this royal occasion we're on our way to should be a pretty good week, with luck.”

The train in which we were speeding through the sun-basking countryside was bound for the naval town of Portsmouth, which Her Majesty, making one of her now rare public appearances, was visiting for the purposes of declaring Navy Week open.

Among the official functions and sporting events arranged for the week was a three-day cricket match between the Royal Navy and a Gentlemen-of-England team captained by A. J. Raffles.

At Portsmouth Town station we found our host, the skipper of the Navy team, Lieutenant-Commander Braithwaite, in dazzling white naval uniform, waiting to greet us off the train.

“You're the first of the Gentlemen blokes to arrive, Raffles,” he said, as we followed a porter carrying our valises and Raffles's cricket-bag to the open four-wheeler Braithwaite had waiting. “The Navy Week opening ceremony went off very well this morning. I've just come from it. The Queen seemed quite her regal self, though still in widow's weeds. You'll get a chance to see her after lunch. She's due to board the royal yacht at two o'clock, at Portsmouth Hard, and proceed to her summer residence, Osborne House, in the Isle-of-Wight, just across the water. To see her pass by, I'd hoped to get you on board H.M.S.
Victory
—”

“Horatio Nelson's old flagship,” I said, “at the Battle of Trafalgar?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Braithwaite, as our cab jingled through streets ablaze with flags and pictures of the Queen. “
Victory
lies, perfectly preserved, at a permanent anchorage in our harbour here, but only invited bigwigs are allowed on board her to-day—including a bunch of millionaires.”

“Millionaires?” said Raffles.

“The international social crowd,” explained Braithwaite. “Commodore Vanderbilt, the Duke of Westminster, one of the Rothschilds, the Prince of Monaco, Mr. Leonard Jerome of New York with his beautiful daughter Jennie and her husband Lord Randolph Churchill. Real swells! They've come over in parties for the day from their glittering private steam-yachts gathered at Cowes, in the Isle-of-Wight, for the Regatta.”

I met Raffles's grey eyes. Cowes Regatta! He gave me a rueful look. We had clean forgotten the most brilliant event of the summer social season.
At Cowes we might have found some financial way to improve the shining hour. Instead, he had tied himself up in a three-day cricket match on just the wrong side of the water.

“So near, Bunny,” he murmured to me, “and yet so far!”

“By courtesy,” our host Braithwaite was saying, “of the Royal Navy Museum at Greenwich, Portsmouth's been loaned, in honour of the Queen's visit, a national treasure—the uniform, the hat and bloodstained knee-breeches, waistcoat, and swallowtail blue coat with epaulettes, which Nelson was wearing when he fell mortally wounded on
Victory
's quarter-deck in the very hour of his decisive triumph at Trafalgar. From to-morrow
Victory
will be open for the public to view Nelson's uniform, but only invited bigwigs are on board her to-day. Still, I can get you on board a Navy tug,
Gosport Jezebel
, to see the Queen pass by presently in the royal yacht.”

After lunch at the fine old waterfront inn, The Lord Nelson, where our Navy hosts had billeted the Gentlemen cricket team with myself as supernumerary, we boarded a tug flying the white ensign. As
Jezebel
steamed out from her berth, the great harbour, backed by the Portsdown Hill forts built to repel the Grand Army of Napoleon, was crowded with craft of every description, all laden with sightseers.

Besides Raffles and myself, there were a few other favoured civilians on board
Jezebel
and, as I leaned with Raffles and Braithwaite against the tug's throbbing rail, taking in the spectacular scene in the blazing sunshine, there drifted my way a cloud of strong shag-tobacco smoke from the pipe of some man who had come up behind us.

“There she is, Watson,” I heard a voice say, “the old
Victory
, as sound and trim as on the day Nelson sailed her, at the head of the fleet, into the blood and thunder of Trafalgar.”

“A study in scarlet, that day,” a second voice said. “Is Mr. Sherlock Holmes a patriotic man?”

“Unquestionably so. Look, Watson, there's a vacant space at the rail along there. Let's claim it.”

Braithwaite, seeing me glance round at the two frock-coated, silk-hatted men as they strolled away along the deck, the taller man tossing pipe-smoke over his shoulder, told me who they were.

“The shorter chap,” he said, “is a Mr. James Watson, Secretary of the Portsmouth and Southsea Literary and Scientific Society. The big, burly man is Dr. A. Conan Doyle, in medical practice in Southsea, the residential part of Portsmouth. As to Mr. Sherlock Holmes”—Braithwaite chuckled—“I'll lend you something to-night that'll introduce you to him, if you haven't yet met. I say, though! By Jove, look at those nobs on the old
Victory
!”

Our tug had hove-to as near as was permitted to Nelson's flagship, around which circling whaleboats manned by Navy oarsmen with capbands marked H.M.S.
Victory
preserved a space of water clear of the clustering sightseeing craft.

The bowsprit chains of the old seventy-four-gun ship-of-the-lines shone like silver. Her masts and yards towered above us to the blue sky. Her oaken hull was freshly tarred. Through her open gunports, framed in fresh white paint, the guns of her broadsides looked ready to rumble out with a lion's roar at the drop of a hat.

On her decks, her distinguished visitors stood about in groups, conversing. Others were gathered in the old ship's carven stern-gallery. Beautiful women twirled their parasols languidly. Jewels sparkled. Tophats and gold watch-chains glistened.

“Millionaires all,” Raffles murmured to me. “So near—and yet so far!”

Braithwaite explained to us that some of the unfamiliar naval uniforms visible on board
Victory
were those of Captains from American, Greek, German, Italian, and other foreign warships which, on courtesy visits for Navy Week at Portsmouth, were lying at anchor off the Isle-of-Wight.

The report of a cannon clapped across the harbour.

“First minute-gun of the royal salute,” said
Braithwaite. “The
Victoria-and-Albert
is putting out from Portsmouth Hard.”

The guns of the saluting battery at Haslar Point continued to fire at one-minute intervals through the storm of cheering as the Queen's yacht, flying the scarlet-and-gold of the Royal Standard, steamed through the multitude of small craft that made way for her stately progress.

Up the rigging of
Victory
, as the royal yacht approached, raced barefoot sailors in the uniforms of Nelson's time, the two topmost men running out to either tip of the mainmast-yard, to stand rigid, away up there, as the whole team formed a gigantic V—alike for
Victory
and for the royal widow whose tiny figure, in black shawl and jet-beaded bonnet, stood in regal solitude, well apart from her clustered attendants, on the deck of her yacht steaming slowly by.

As the Queen passed and, to the continued firing of the minute-guns, the royal yacht began to recede toward the harbour-mouth, I heard a wild cry, and I was just in time to see the sailor standing at the larboard tip of
Victory
's mainmast-yard sway on his dizzy perch—and fall, turning helplessly in the air, to strike the water with a glittering splash.

I hardly heard the continued cheering, further off, or the measured reports of the saluting battery's guns, as our
Jezebel
tug's bridge-telegraph bell clanged, the tug throbbed to life, and, with a dozen other assorted craft, sightseers, and Navy whaleboats, surged to the rescue.

One of the Navy whaleboats beat us to it. As our tug's screws reversed, slowing us alongside, I saw sailors in the whaleboat heaving in the drenched man, unconscious or dead, over their gunwale. They stretched him on the floorboards and, at a barked order from their midshipman coxswain, bent to their oars, pulled around under the chains of
Victory
's great bowsprit, and, leaving a dozen flung lifebelts and a confusion of would-be rescue craft bobbing on the water, passed from my view.

It was smartly done. Even before the last report of the saluting cannons marked the passing of the Queen's yacht out of the harbour-mouth, the incident was over.

Yet, if rumour was to be believed, something else had happened on board H.M.S.
Victory
. From what source the rumour emanated I had no idea, but by the time we disembarked from the tug
Jezebel
at Portsmouth Hard the excited crowd there was abuzz with a story that a Marine sentry on solitary duty in
Victory
's wardroom, where Nelson's uniform was displayed, had been found chloroformed shortly after the Queen had passed, and that, with the exception of the hat, Horatio Nelson's uniform, stained at Trafalgar with his lifeblood, had disappeared.

“Impossible!” said Braithwaite, as he, Raffles, and I jostled our way through the crowd besieging some waiting cabs. “Nelson's uniform stolen? It just
can't
be true!”

A whiff of shag-tobacco smoke from the pipe of Dr. Conan Doyle, who, with Mr. Watson, was just ahead of us, making for the cabs, floated back to me.

“
Can
it be true?” I heard Mr. Watson ask.

“The mention of the hat, Watson, has a circumstantial ring. Yes, I fear this rumour
could
have some factual basis.”

“In which case, Doctor, does any point occur to you to which our friend Holmes would be likely to devote particular attention?”

“The hat, Watson—the enigma of the Admiral's hat.”

“But people are saying the hat was
not
taken!”

“That is the enigma, Watson.”

People jostled between us at that moment, and I lost sight of the two men.

Raffles and I dined, that night, at the Royal Naval Barracks. The rest of the Gentlemen-of-England cricket team had arrived during the day and all of us were dinner guests of the Navy team in a vast room with walls from which gilt-framed portraits of bygone admirals, of Mr. Samuel Pepys, sometime Secretary of the Navy, and of Horatio Nelson himself, wearing what
was in all probability the very uniform which now had been stolen from his old flagship, gazed down on us.

At dinner, the talk was of nothing but the crime committed on the
Victory
, which was indeed a fact. The sailor who had fallen from the yardarm was a naval rating called John S. Hayter. His fall was said to have been due to sunstroke; he was now in Haslar Naval Hospital with a dislocated shoulder. The Marine sentry had, apparently, been chloroformed from behind and could say only that his assailant had been a man of great strength.

“What about the distinguished guests, Braithwaite?” Raffles asked.

“They had to be regarded, of course, as above suspicion. They've all dispersed now.”

“The millionaires gone back to their steam-yachts at Cowes, have they?” said Raffles “H'm! Has the Navy called in the County Constabulary?”

“Of course. Police reinforcements are pouring in from all over.”

“Including the Isle-of-Wight?”

“Naturally. Except for the Queen's bobbies, guarding her at Osborne House, there'll be damned few police left, over in the island.”

“Steward,” said Raffles, “I'll have a drop more of that wine.”

As we were leaving the Barracks, Braithwaite handed Raffles an obviously much read copy of
Beeton's Christmas Annual
.

“The thing I told you I'd lend you,” said Braithwaite. “It's a shilling shocker, published quite recently. Dr. Conan Doyle wrote the main story. It's called
A Study in Scarlet
. I don't think he gets many patients.”

“Or he wouldn't have time to write shockers,” said Raffles, putting the magazine under his red-lined evening cape. “I'll skim through this to-night, and see you in the morning, Braithwaite, ten-thirty on the cricket ground.”

Out of curiosity, I borrowed
A Study in Scarlet
from Raffles next morning. He told me he had skimmed through it in bed. At the cricket ground I found myself a chair on the pavilion terrace in the sunshine and sat reading the story while the cricket went on.

The Mr. Sherlock Holmes I had heard mentioned turned out to be the leading character in the book. A private investigator of crime, who claimed to have methods of his own, he held my interest. Even when Raffles went in to bat, I read on with increasing absorption, until a sudden collective groan from the spectators, mostly in Navy white, made me look up.

Out at the wicket, on the green expanse of flawless turf, Raffles had thrown down his bat and was pulling off his right-hand batting-glove. Blood dripped from his fingers.

“Bad luck, Raffles,” I heard Braithwaite call, as Raffles wrapped his handkerchief round his hand. “Will it put you out of the match?”

“I'm afraid so, Braithwaite,” Raffles said. He came to the pavilion. “Kicking ball, Bunny,” he told me. “Split my forefinger open. It'll need a stitch or two, by the look of it. I'll get changed and join you.”