The Sensible Necktie and Other Stories of Sherlock Holmes (17 page)

“Excellent, Mr Broker, that should do.”

“Any more questions?”

“What about the old aunt?” I said.

“She has passed ninety and lives in a room on the top floor from which she rarely ventures. She is hard of hearing and exceedingly forgetful. I cannot possibly think that she has anything to do with this.”

“We can be sure of nothing at this point, Mr Broker,” said Holmes in my defence. “My experience tells me that a thief can be in another room than where the theft takes place and still be guilty.”

“That sounds incredible,” said Broker.

“Ha! Do you not recall, Watson, the curious case of the Smithers jewels?”

I could not keep from slapping my knee. “By Jove, Holmes, you're right!”

“And how was it perpetrated?” asked Broker.

“By an intricate system of strings connected via the bell-ropes,” replied Holmes. “The diligence and patience of thieves are not to be underestimated, Mr Broker!”

“Good. Now then, Mr Holmes, I was hoping that you and Dr Watson might want to accompany me back to Ealing to examine the box and my study. I was uncertain about whether I should bring the box here, but from what I have read about your exploits, I gathered that you might want to look at it in situ, as it were. Since the letter is evidently not in the box, the obvious object of your examinations I suppose should be the room instead.”

“That is wise of you, but it is also unfortunate that you have left the box and the room unguarded.”

“My wife is there.”

“Yes, of course. And your brother-in-law?”

“We went into town together. He continued to his office.”

“I see. And when will he be back?”

“Late this afternoon.”

“Good. We will come to Ealing, Mr Broker, but I would implore you to go back on your own and stay at your house keeping the box under constant supervision until we get there.”

“Why will you not come with me now?”

“Because there are certain points in this case that I would like to satisfy myself on first. Make sure that your wife is in the house, and stay with your wife in your study. Watson and I will be there no later than three o'clock this afternoon, and then I hope to be able to present a solution.”

“I have little faith of recovering my letter, but I appreciate your help and am thankful for it.”

“Rest assured, Mr Broker, that all is not lost.”

Holmes saw our visitor, who looked slightly relieved but also puzzled, to the door. When he was just about to leave, Holmes stopped him.

“By the way, Mr Broker. What was the name of your wife's father?”

Broker looked back at Holmes with a blank gaze. “Frederick Falmer,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Holmes and shut the door in his face.

I looked at my friend with a mixture of amusement and indignation as he walked up to the fireplace and lit a cigarette. He leaned towards the mantelpiece and shot me a glance. “Fascinating, wouldn't you say?”

“Fascinating, yes, in its impossibility.”

Holmes chuckled. “Yes, it's strange, is it not, how little everyday objects can baffle us so? Nevertheless, I will wager that the key to it all rests in one of the little details that Mr Broker has provided us with.”

“But why were you so keen to know what his brother-in-law looks like?”

“That, my dear friend, is precisely the information I needed for the little excursion I am about to do now!”

“Oh I see. Hush hush, eh? And I assume you do not want me to accompany you?”

Holmes smiled and I understood at once that, as usual, he felt the need to be secretive until he could be positive that his conjectures were correct.

“But I hope,” he said, “that you will accompany me to Ealing this afternoon?”

I tried to look as secretive as him, and failed.

“Of course!” I said.

Holmes was gone no more than an hour, after which he returned to Baker Street invigorated and in good spirits. I had passed the time in solitude by trying to contemplate the problem that had been laid before us that morning, but was dissatisfied with my conclusions. The best possibility I could think of was that the letter had somehow slipped between a crack in the bottom of the box that had been invisible in the murkiness of Broker's study, and I presented this hypothesis to Holmes when he returned.

“I think,” he replied, “that you are staring yourself blind on the events of that isolated study. When you have a case like this, all trapped within the minutiae of a small incident in a closed space, you must not forget the context. Context is everything, my dear Watson! Would Louis XVI have been beheaded if it had not been for the revolutionary atmosphere of eighteenth-century Paris?”

“I suppose not.”

“Of course not, my boy! To conceive of the execution of a king as a murder perpetrated by a man who happens to work as an executioner would be to foolishly ignore obvious instrumental circumstances.”

“And what have you been doing then?” I asked.

“I have been looking into the affairs of two men - Frederick and George Falmer.”

“And what have you discovered?”

“Vital things. The main point of which I suppose is that Frederick Falmer is the same person as Fiddly Freddy.”

“Fiddly Freddy?”

“You do not recall him?”

“I cannot say that I do.”

“Well, perhaps you were not such an avid music-hall visitor in your youth. Fiddly Freddy was one of the most successful performers of the London music halls a few decades ago.”

“I thought Mrs. Broker's father was in shipping?”

“It sounds more respectable, does it not? Especially if you want to set up house in a fashionable middle-class suburb. But I tell you, Watson, that Fiddly Freddy is the key to the whole thing! But we have no time to lose. We must get to Ealing before any danger befalls our client.”

What type of danger was in store, or why Holmes had taken a sudden interest in old music-hall performers, I had no idea, but I took my hat and coat and followed him without hesitation, and within half an hour we were walking through the pleasant autumn landscape of the western London suburb.

Peregrine House was a forbidding red-brick building located at the end of one of the common suburban streets, but set apart from the rest of the homely-looking villas by its worn and archaic appearance, and by the surrounding wilderness of a garden, which only allowed the passer-by to see the very top of the building from the street. We were welcomed into the house by a dirty-aproned chambermaid who quickly scurried off to fetch her master. The entrance hall showed signs of a vulgar taste - the traces of upstart characteristics in the man who once built the edifice, I thought to myself. Masterman Broker soon descended the grand staircase to greet us, arm-in-arm with his wife, a pleasant young lady with kind eyes and dimpled cheeks.

“I am so glad to see you again,” he said. “There has been no change in the matter since we last spoke.”

“Well, let's see if we cannot put a right to that,” said Holmes.

And with a brisk step, he started to go up the stairs ahead of us all. The Brokers hurried after, and Mr Broker managed to catch up with him in order to direct him to the study. We were shown to a closed door down the corridor on the first floor, and Holmes took hold of the handle.

“When are you expecting Mr Falmer back?” he asked.

“In about half an hour, perhaps,” said Mrs. Broker.

Holmes nodded and opened the door. The room was dark and slightly over furnished, with bookcases lining the walls and a vast rug spreading from the threshold to the large desk at the far end. The curtains were drawn, and a small table lamp on the desk provided the only illumination. In front of the desk were two visitor's chairs, and along the book lined walls were placed a few sideboards upon which a selection of exotic or decorative trinkets had been arranged. One of these tables had on it only one object, a medium-sized old wooden box.

“Ah! I assume this is what has been giving you trouble?” said Holmes, approaching it.

Broker sighed and nodded.

“Well, well, well.” Holmes picked it up and looked at it closely. Then he put it down again and lifted the lid. He peered down for a long time, slowly leaning down lower and lower, until his face was almost inside the box. Then with a sudden movement he looked up at us again. He smiled and motioned at us to come closer. We all assembled around the box. Holmes looked at us, barely able to contain his giddiness, and then he put his hand in the box. He fumbled around at the bottom for a while, and then all of a sudden there was a change in his face as if he had found something.

“Now,” he said, “if you will please look closely at the bottom of the box.”

His fingers were placed along the edge of the bottom and with a delicate motion, they slowly lifted the bottom as if it was itself a lid. Lifting it higher, he managed to hold it more firmly, and when it was fully opened, this false bottom became one wall of the box, thin enough not to make the wall that was already there noticeably thicker. But what was even more extraordinary, was that the lifting of the bottom had revealed a piece of folded-up paper that had been lying underneath it.

Holmes picked it up. “Is this your letter, Mr Broker?”

Broker stared at the letter, his eyes wide open, and his only response was a faint nod. Mrs. Broker smiled and put her hand on her husband's shoulder. He took the letter and examined it.

“Yes,” he said. “This is certainly it! Do you mean to tell me it was there all the time? But how… and how did you know where to look?”

Holmes picked up the box once more.

“Have a look at this. See the ornaments and the carvings? Yes, the style is decidedly oriental, but this was not made in the orient. It was made by someone who have seen some pictures of oriental decoration, at best, but who is, on the whole, quite a mediocre artisan. I should say this was made in Croydon.”

“Croydon?” I exclaimed incredulously.

“There is a workshop out in Croydon that specialises in the construction of devices for magicians.”

“Magicians?” said Broker.

“Of course!” I said. “Fiddly Freddy.”

“Dear God,” said Mrs. Broker.

We all turned towards her.

“Yes,” she said. “I should have realised. This ‘magic' box was one of my father's contraptions that he used for one of his routines. He was a music-hall conjurer.”

“He was?” cried Broker. “But I thought…”

“Father was always ashamed of the way he made his fortune. Coming from such a simple background as he did, he was always anxious to escape his humble beginnings, not to mention hide them from his family. Both George and I were raised in this house after he had settled down and left the stage for good. I was unaware that he had kept any of the props he used as a performer, seeing as he wanted to leave it all behind him, but maybe he was more nostalgic than I thought.”

“I conducted some research this morning,” declared Holmes, “going through back editions of
The Era
. You see, when Mr Broker mentioned his father-in-law's name to me, I recognised it instantly as the real name of ‘Fiddly Freddy', the music-hall conjurer. And this to me seemed a vital point. I managed to find several reviews of his appearances, some of which mentioned his use of the ‘The Vortex of Arabia', an oriental box in which any item that was placed there disappeared without a trace. One of the reviewers looked through the trick, however, and noticed how Freddy, when the person he had called up from the audience had put something in the box, carried it across the stage before opening it, and when doing so, pretended to stumble on a floor board. Making some witty remark about this apparently indeliberate faux-pas, he continued by opening the box, revealing it to be inexplicably empty. It was while reading this account that I remembered one detail from your story, Mr Broker.”

“That George stumbled on the edge of the carpet!” said Broker.

“Precisely. Mrs. Broker, just how well acquainted was your brother with your father's past?”

The woman shook her head anxiously.

“George did spend a lot of time with father in this room when he was young. But why would he…?”

Just then a man appeared in the doorframe. He was tall and elegant, and he smiled a world-weary smile at us. “Hello, what's going on here?”

Mrs. Broker stepped up to him. “George, can you explain this? Masterman's letter was in the box the whole time!”

Mr Falmer looked at his sister, then at us and then at the box. “Well, I never. What an extraordinary thing!”

“Come, come, Mr Falmer,” said Holmes. “Such charades are only a waste of time.”

“Charades? I'm sure I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Did you know this box was one of father's old magic boxes?” enquired Mrs. Broker.

Falmer walked up to it and examined it. “How curious.”

His sister turned impatiently to Holmes. “Oh, I cannot stand this, Mr Holmes. Do you really mean to imply that George hid the letter on purpose?”

“On purpose?” said Falmer. “Balderdash!”

Holmes raised his hands in a gesture of appeasement.

“Please, Mr Falmer, it is no good. I know that you took advantage of the box and its hidden mechanism in order to hide the letter.”

“That is a gross accusation, sir! You have no proof.”

“I do. Earlier today I visited the offices of the firm where you work, Sanderson & Cox.”

“Did you?”

“I did. Or at least I tried to, seeing as how the firm was dissolved two months ago.”

“What?” exclaimed Mrs. Broker.

“The man I spoke to in the neighbouring office,” Holmes continued, “had some interesting things to say about you, Mr Falmer, and the gambling debts that you would have such difficulty paying back without an employment.”

“This is utter nonsense!” said the accused man, and sat himself down in one of the chairs.