entrance to Osborne or Dartmouth after that, let alone a Nomination. I’d better take my punishment and go home. If not, his brothers could see that I never got to midshipman. And if ever he saw an announcement of my sister marrying, he’d make sure the man would hear how her brother was the boy who stole the postal order at St Vincent’s.”
“Indeed?” said Holmes gently.
“There was no one else to hear him. He was careful about that. I’ve got no proof of anything he said. But I decided I’d fight him there and I’d fight my case in court. I’d repeat every word of what he said, whether they believed me or not. He said he’d break my head—”
“But he did not?”
“No, sir. Sovran-Phillips is stronger than I am, but I suppose I was angrier than him. We were on top of the bank, by the line, but he tried to pull away. I could see the train coming from the tunnel. He was hitting at me but I just wouldn’t let him go. I was on the track and he was trying to pull away. I said something like, ‘I’ll fight you here, in front of the train. If I’m killed, I’ll hold on tight enough to make sure you go down as well.’ I had him by his coat, trying to pull him on to the track. Then he broke clear. I don’t think I wanted to kill him exactly—and I didn’t want to die. But I was desperate, sir, and I was going to give him a fright he would never forget. I wanted him to know that if ever he hurt my family, I’d kill him by fair means or foul.”
It was something of a wild story, but to hear Patrick Riley was to know that he meant it. As he was describing the incident, I calculated that the stationary engine of the train would have hidden the two boys from Reginald Winter’s observation soon after it came out from the tunnel.
“And then?” Holmes prompted him.
“I shouted after him as he went down the bank on the other side. By then the train was slowing down and he was out of sight somewhere among the bushes on the other side. That’s all I saw, Mr Holmes. I was so mad with hate, I think I could have held him until the engine killed us both.”
With a chill down the spine at these last words, I thought of Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Such impulses of mutual destruction are no fantasy, even in children. Holmes, perhaps with the same image in mind, said nothing for a moment. The boy blinked a tear or two from his eyes. Then my friend steered us into calmer waters.
“So far we have talked very little about your work. Are you good at it?”
“I was first of my term for engineering and navigation, sir. Only second in mathematics but first in trigonometry again. I like history, but I can’t do languages well. If I could get to Dartmouth or Osborne, I should like most of all to be on a training cruiser. They teach torpedo and electrics, gunnery as well as engineering.”
“But getting there,” said Holmes quietly, “is not the same as staying there, is it? There is a cost.”
“Yes, sir,” said Patrick Riley quietly.
“Which there ought not to be,” said Holmes in the same quiet voice. “Our present system excludes all but a very small fraction of the population from serving the King as naval officers. It admits the duke’s son if he is fit but excludes the cook’s son if he is fit or not. Every fit boy should have his chance.”
Riley stared for a moment, then said, “Did you make that up, Mr Holmes?”
Sherlock Holmes shook his head.
“It was made up, as you put it, by Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher in a speech to the House of Lords almost ten years ago. Word for word. Now let us get back to business. It seems to me that Master Sovran-Phillips, step-brother of a cruiser captain and admiral’s grandson, feels under threat from a bank cashier’s son and his widowed mother. I find that most gratifying and I shall eat my hat if it is not at the root of all this. All your hopes rest, do they not, on an Admiral’s Nomination to Osborne or Dartmouth in the summer examinations?”
He shook his head.
“No, sir. I should never get one now, whatever happens”
“And why should you not get one?”
“Because exams aren’t all of it, Mr Holmes. Not as important as the headmaster’s recommendation. Not as important as being Captain of Boats like Sovran-Phillips, like his brother before him, or head of term. Not as important for Mr Winter as a boy having a cruiser captain and a head of term at Dartmouth.”
There was greater bitterness in this last remark than I had heard from most of our adult clients. We were later to learn that Reginald Winter had blocked many applicants of the “wrong sort” by simply writing such recommendations as, “I know nothing against this boy,” and not a word more.
“Very well,” said Holmes. “Be so good as to go downstairs and sit in the Parents’ Waiting Room. We shall not keep you long, but do not come back until I send for you.”
As soon as the boy had disappeared, Holmes turned to me.
“With the aid of Sister Elliston as messenger, we will now have Master R. J. Sovran-Phillips brought before our little tribunal. He has been kept waiting long enough.”
8
He did not sit down, nor did Holmes invite him to do so. Instead, Sovran-Phillips stood—and remained—at attention. Sherlock Holmes gazed past him at the sky through the latticed window of the sanatorium, and then back at the youth.
“You are R. J. Sovran-Phillips, are you not?”
“Sir!” He almost stamped his feet together as he said so.
“I shall not keep you long. I have only one or two questions. I take it that you know of the present predicament of your termmate Patrick Riley?”
“Yes, sir. And very sorry I am to hear that the poor fellow has got himself into such trouble!”
The tone was eerily similar to the sleek sympathy of Reginald Winter. There was abundant good nature in it. But unless Patrick Riley had lied most skilfully, Sovran-Phillips was about to step into an elephant pit of unimaginable depths.
“I am sure you are sorry,” said Holmes reassuringly. “And you know, of course, of the ten-shilling note and the sixpenny piece, missing since Porson’s postal order was cashed dishonestly?”
“Yes, sir. We all know that.”
“Do you indeed?” Holmes looked up, stared him directly in the eyes, and the destruction of Sovran-Phillips began. “Can you tell us how it might be that a ten-shilling note and a sixpenny piece should be found concealed in the linesman’s hut by the railway line?”
If Sovran-Phillips was out of his depth and drowning he was no more so than I. How could Holmes possibly know? Arthur the fireman had only thought the first boy might have been in there to begin with. But Sovran-Phillips went beetroot-red with panic.
“Perhaps …” he began.
“Yes?” Holmes said patiently.
“Perhaps it is not the same money.”
Holmes nodded encouragingly.
“You are quite right that it might be an entirely different sixpenny piece. Notes, however, are drawn new from the bank by certain post offices and their numbers are consecutive. We should be able to check that.”
If notes were drawn in this manner it would surely be by post offices in major cities, but Sovran-Phillips was in no position to know it. He stood before us like a lost soul. It was plain that Holmes had hit a target of some importance with his first shot. He let the silence extend, gazing at the youth until our subject could bear it no longer.
“When were they found?” Phillips asked. Had he stopped to think, he would have known this was a question most likely to be asked by the thief. What could it matter to anyone else?
