they were.”
Sherlock Holmes had listened very quietly to all this.
“And Mr Winter?” he inquired, “What does he have to say?”
Patrick Riley looked up miserably and blew his nose.
“He won’t have sneaking or splitting. If a boy won’t stand up for himself but goes sneaking on the others, Mr Winter sends him away or beats him for it. That’s what I was warned.”
The eyes of Sherlock Holmes were dark, glittering ice. His fury, on the few occasions when it overtook him, was terrifyingly quiet and cold. I was more angry than I had been for a very long time. If half of this was true, then the sooner Sir John Fisher had all such places as this closed down the better. Patrick Riley ended his pause.
“John Porson is my friend, on the same side in the same class. We share the same desk. Still we daren’t fight Sovran-Phillips and his gang. But Porson is the last person I would steal from.”
Listening to him, I thought that was the most persuasive argument we had heard in our young client’s favour.
Holmes nodded and said, “You mention Sovran-Phillips. Tell me about him.”
“He’s Captain of Boats and prefect of the Deck Swells in the Upper Middle. The new boys act as servants to the captains and they get beaten if they don’t. He knows how to fight, that’s half the trouble. His step-brother’s a lot older, a cruiser captain. Phillips never lets us forget it. His real brother was here a few years ago and at Dartmouth now. He says his grandfather was an admiral, but I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t care now anyway. He says all the maids in the kitchen are spoony on him and he goes with them. Winter’s maid mostly. That’s a lie, I should say.”
Holmes let it rest there for a moment. I tried to imagine the shame and humiliation of Patrick Riley, defeated at every resistance to the smug and superior Phillips. I might have doubted the truth of it all but for the sincerity and grief in our young informant’s manner.
“Very well,” said Holmes at length. “If I have my way, you will find on your side an Admiral of the Fleet, who will outrank a cruiser captain two or three times over. In the next holidays, Dr Watson and I will find a room for you with Mrs Hudson. I am not inexpert in boxing and single-stick combat. After a fortnight’s instruction, I think I may promise that you shall return to St Vincent’s and give young Phillips the thrashing of his life. It is not a matter of size—for I suspect you are smaller than he is—but of skill.”
“I don’t care if I never go back, sir. I don’t mind not going back, but I won’t be called a thief. Could you teach me to fight, Mr Holmes?”
“I have complete confidence in my own abilities—and yours. Now, if you please, we will set aside the matter of the postal order, for I see the way we must go. Let us turn to your attempted suicide. Was it anything of the kind?”
The poor young fellow shook his head yet again.
“They say it proved I could not bear to face my mother, knowing I was a thief. But what I could not bear, Mr Holmes, would be to leave her for ever. She knows I am no thief.”
“Unfortunately what she knows you to be is not evidence, although to me it is proof. Why did you go to the field on Sunday afternoon?”
“I was in this sanatorium room for eight days. Alone, except for Sister Elliston and Mr Winter when he came to question me with two other masters. First of all I heard I was going to be expelled. Then they said there might be some sort of tribunal where I could appeal. There was even talk of a lawyer coming to see me, but I heard no more of that.”
“And your mother and your uncle?”
“I don’t know what they’ve been told or what they think. But last Sunday I had just had enough. No one would believe a word I spoke. There was no one here to stop me, and, surely, so long as I’m at St Vincent’s, I may walk over the field on Sunday afternoons as the others do. I have friends, sir. I’m forbidden to talk to them, but I thought if I could get to them, tell them the truth, they might be able to help me.”
“But you did not go out with the intention of killing yourself? That is what I need to know.”
He looked at us strangely, as I thought.
“I’d gone as far as I could go. I might have done anything. But murder, rather than suicide, if I could choose.”
I thought he was about to weep again. Instead he slumped dry-eyed in his chair and would say no more.
“You have done enough, Patrick Riley,” said Holmes after a pause, “and by this time tomorrow justice shall be done to you.”
“How can you say?” It was no more than a low murmur to himself.
“You must remember who I am,” said my friend quietly.
5
At quarter to seven it was Holmes, fully dressed.
“We must look lively, Watson. I reviewed the evidence before falling asleep last night and I fully intend to close our case today. Therefore, I am most anxious to be in good time for Morning Prayers at St Vincent’s. If the notice pinned on the headmaster’s board in his corridor is correct, early prep is at six forty-five. With their appetites sharpened by intensive study, the boys are then fed at seven-thirty. Morning Prayers follow at eight-thirty and the first period of instruction is at nine. We should arrive no earlier than eight-thirty and certainly no more than five minutes later.”
“Morning Prayers?”
As I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, I tried to imagine how Morning Prayers could have any bearing on our case.
“That is when Reginald Winter, in his scarlet M.A. hood and his Oxford gown, will be officiating in chapel. We shall have the main building to ourselves.”
“It may be,” I said, pulling myself upright, “but there is still a good deal to be resolved before we close this matter.”
“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “I shall tell them downstairs to have our breakfast ready in quarter of an hour.”
“Quarter of an hour? The place is only twenty minutes’ walk from here!”
“There is a call to make on the way.”
“Where?”
But he had closed the door and gone.
It was almost eight o’clock when we left the King Charles Hotel for St Vincent’s. We walked leisurely up the picturesque village street of Bradstone St Lawrence with its thatched and tiled dwellings. Ahead of us I noticed a bright scarlet post-box with Her Majesty’s insignia embossed upon it. The post office itself was a picture-book cottage which really did have a rambling rose round its door, as well as Sweet William and jessamine in a narrow border. A notice in the glass panel of the door informed us that the office was open from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. on every day from Monday to Saturday.
A bell jangled as Holmes pushed open the door, and we stepped into what might have been the large front room of a cottage or village house, with a smaller room behind it. The lath-and-plaster wall had been taken down, so that the near side of the wooden counter was open to the public and the far side reserved for official business. A middle-aged woman stood at the counter, sorting through pages of postage stamps. Her companion, to judge from her appearance, was surely a younger sister. She sat on a high stool in the back room, entering figures in a business ledger. To one side of her, a telegraph boy in a peaked cap and short jacket was perched on a bench with a copy of a penny-dreadful, “Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood,” open on his knee.
