life of me I could not see how.
Riley laid the paper on the table and closed his eyes. He took the pen and wrote a little uncertainly but quite fluently. It was not a bad effort, though the inconsistencies were clear. Let me just say that his name written with his eyes closed looked to me something like “Put riccc Rileg.”
“Excellent,” said Holmes encouragingly. “Now, imitate that, if you please, as closely as you can. Do not correct it to your normal signature. Imitate it as if it was another person’s signature on a postal order.”
The boy began. He drew quite accurately the down stroke of the “P” and the loop. Lifting the pen he then began the “u.” He paused and lifted it again where it dropped down to join the “t.” At the end of his first name, he paused to check his progress, though without lifting the pen. The copy of his surname appeared in a more rounded script than the original and only the last three letters were joined.
Holmes unfolded his magnifying glass and there was silence for a long two minutes, an eternity as it must have seemed to the poor boy, before my friend looked up.
“Capital!” he said enthusiastically, “If it will bring you any consolation, Patrick Riley, you would make a very poor forger.”
The relief on the poor young fellow’s face was almost inexpressible.
“Unfortunately,” Holmes added, “whoever signed the postal order—which I have seen, of course—was probably also a poor copyist. But we have made a good beginning. Very well. Whoever endorsed that order produced a so-called feathering effect of the pen, as most of us do when we write something familiar like our names. That is to say, the pen is moving almost before it touches the paper. I observe that you started with the nib already on the paper, as a copyist might.”
He held up the page at a slant to the light from the window.
“Twice at least in the copy you have lifted the nib clear of the paper, though you did not do so in the original. Through my glass, though not with the naked eye, it is also possible to see three places at which you have rested the nib on your work while checking your progress. This lack of flow appears only in the crudest freehand forgeries. The signature on the counterfoil of the postal order was skilled enough to avoid anything of that kind. It was not crude copying. This is copied. That was traced—or possibly written on an indentation.”
“But can you prove it, Mr Holmes?” The earnestness in the young face was painful to behold. “Can you show them I never did it?”
“My dear young fellow, a negative is hard to prove. I cannot demonstrate to the world that you never traced it. But I do say that on the basis of this experiment there is no evidence that you could have produced the forgery on that postal order—which is a good long way towards the same thing.”
During this exchange, I had got up and walked slowly across to the window. It looked out over the downland towards the channel. A late afternoon sun cast a burnish upon the lavender blue of the Western Approaches.
“Now,” said Holmes, “please tell me exactly how you first heard about the theft.”
Riley’s answer was commendably simple.
“Porson came up to me about half-past five on that Saturday afternoon. He said, ‘I say, isn’t it rotten? Someone’s stolen my money from my locker.’ It wasn’t real money, of course, just the order. They don’t let us keep money in our lockers.”
“And you replied to John Porson?”
“I said he should have another look to make sure it had gone. If it had, he should tell the housemaster or one of the two petty officers on duty. Petty Officer Carter was on that day. I said not to waste time, the sooner he reported it, the better his chances of getting it back.”
“Admirable,” said Holmes, “Then you spoke as a good sensible friend, not as a frightened thief.”
“I hope I did, sir. I knew nothing about it until Porson told me then, in the locker room.”
As I listened, I was standing by a table on which his toiletries and other articles were set out in regulation order. Among them was a rather expensive clothes-brush, with black bristles and a polished walnut back, evidently brought from home. On this varnished back someone at home had very precisely cut the name “Riley” and his school number, “178.” Next to this there were several words lightly scratched, as if to deface the varnish. They in turn had been scraped over, as neatly as possible, to obliterate them. Even under these neater scratches it was just possible to see that an unknown hand had cut four words next to Riley’s name. The effect was to make the whole lettering read “Riley Is an Oily Hog.”
There was also a cheap hair-brush which had been similarly treated. Once again, whatever had defaced it was scratched over in its turn but I could still make out an ominous jingle.
The old-fashioned clothes-brush might have been an heirloom of some kind. The hair-brush seemed a cheap replacement, perhaps for one that had already been defaced in this way.
Several more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. I picked up the clothes-brush and turned round.
“Who carved your name and number so neatly on the back of this?”
Riley glanced up.
“It was my uncle, sir, before I came for my first term. I was in Collingwood Term.”
“And who scratched these other words?”
He bit his lip and shook his head.
“Don’t know, sir.”
I would have bet a hundred pounds that he did.
“Very well, then tell me at least who scratched them out—did you do it?”
He shook his head again. “My mother did it, when I went home for the first holidays. There were so many things to be bought for school that we couldn’t throw away the brush. And it belonged to my father.”
Holmes gave a murmur of approval.
“And what are Oily Hogs? I regret having to ask that. Please tell me.”
The boy stared at the table-top and hesitated. To my astonishment, with his deliverance now a possibility, he was close to tears. Then he pulled himself together and said, “We are. The Engineers. The Executive Cadets—the Deck Officers—are the Ocean Swells. There are far more of them. One or two of us at a time have to go to be bully-ragged. The rest of us keep quiet because we’re glad it’s someone else. They gang round and rag us for half an hour or so, thirty or forty of them sometimes. There’s no reason—they get excited and it just happens. Everything is quiet one minute and then they’re singing “Oily Hogs, Oily Togs, Dirty Dogs and Frenchie Frogs,” throwing things, punching, spitting. Once or twice they pushed the same chap’s head into the wash-room latrine and flushed it. He ran away from school in the end. He got home on the railway somehow and never came back. Most get caught before they get very far. Then they cop it from old Winter for being out of bounds.”
“Do they never complain?”
“We’re not allowed to sneak or split. That only makes it worse.”
“And what of the Ocean Swells?” Holmes inquired.
“They say they’ll own the decks one day and we’ll be the hogs down in the grease pit.”
Again I thought he might weep, but I underestimated him.
“Deck officers—children of twelve or fourteen!” I said angrily, “Look, my boy, remember this. So far as names go, sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.”
“It was my mother’s name,” he said sadly, and then indeed, he began to weep. “Sovran-Phillips is one of the Ocean Swells. He found out that her name was Clemency. They thought it was a funny name. Phillips and the others went ganging round the school after me, shouting it, shouting that my father never died because I never had a father. My mother never had a husband. They ganged round me shouting lies about her. The more I begged them to stop, the more they did it. Now it doesn’t matter, because I shan’t ever go back or see them again.”
I stood there. For the first time in my life the word “dumbfounded” meant something to me. When our case began I had never imagined such juvenile evil would be unearthed. Forging a postal order was nothing compared with this! But now that Patrick Riley had begun it was hard to stop him going on. What had he to lose? His eyes were dry again, reddened but angry.
“The worst of it is that I thought some of them were my friends. When it happened, even the ones I thought were friends … I could see them standing on the edge of the gang smiling and laughing at me. I’ll never forget who
