Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

My friend looked surprised.

“I did not say that they had been found. I was very careful to ask you hypothetically how they might get there—not why they are there.”

“Then they were not there?”

Uncertainty was almost worse for him than defeat.

“I most assuredly did not say that either.” Holmes replied mildly.

“If they are there …” Sovran-Phillips was no longer at attention. “Riley must have taken them there, if they are there. Perhaps after he first got them. How else could they be there?”

“That is what we are here to discover. When do you suggest that Riley would have done that?”

“He was there last Sunday afternoon. We have all been told that.”

Holmes relaxed.

“You know he was there, do you not? So were you, some time before him, I understand. He would hardly try to hide them with someone else present. Did you see him do so? Be careful before you say you did. You do not yet know they were ever there at all. Perhaps someone else hid them before his arrival. Did you see anyone else going into the hut? No? Did you see other witnesses?

“Sir?”

“One other witness, I should say. Mr Reginald Winter.”

The mention of the headmaster as a witness knocked the wind from him.

“Mr Winter?”

“You did not know that he was there? To be sure you did. He really is most grateful for receiving Riley’s intercepted message chalked on the sanatorium tray. I daresay your friend Mitzi will enlighten us further when we question her.”

That last promise took the breath from him again. The next ten minutes were an object lesson in cross- examination, never hectoring, always courteous, and terrifying in its unpredictability. This youth had no idea how much Holmes already knew, let alone what the maidservant might say. His confidence was systematically shot through and through. Obnoxious though he might be, Sovran-Phillips made a pitiful figure by the time Holmes had finished, painstakingly stripped of every defence by the masterly bluff of his interrogator. At last his answers were little more than a mumble and a shake of the head. It was visible that he longed to be dismissed, no matter what the result. My friend brought the final silence to an end.

“Master Phillips, I can spare you a few minutes to make your choice. Please do not prevaricate. Did you entice Patrick Riley to the linesman’s hut on Sunday to settle scores with him man-to-man? Or did you propose to associate Riley with the discovery in the hut of a ten-shilling note and a sixpence, relying upon Mr Winter as a witness? It will be quite useless to pretend you were not there at the time or that you did not ensure the headmaster’s presence. When your plans were thrown into confusion by the approach of the Bradstone stopping train, did you not take the opportunity to start a rumour that Riley had tried to throw himself under the engine, thereby confirming the charge against him?”

There was a long pause, during which the youth’s facial muscles moved but he remained silent.

“Well?” said Holmes helpfully.

“I was never near the post office that afternoon, sir. I had no exeat permit. Riley must have chanced it without one, He was lucky not to be stopped and asked for it.”

“Perhaps not quite as lucky as a Captain of Boats and prefect of his year who was the last person likely to be stopped. Was he not?”

“I have nothing to say.”

“Do you not? I daresay that is very wise. We have almost done with you, Master Phillips. You will now accompany Dr Watson to your quarters. There you will produce to him the pad of permits issued to you at the start of every term. I believe each of them, when correctly completed and signed, entitles you to make a visit to the village. You did not go to the village on the Saturday in question, according to your own account. We can always ask the petty officer or master-on-duty for confirmation.”

As if he had lost the power of speech, the youth nodded.

“Good,” said Holmes encouragingly, “In that case, this term there have been two previous Saturdays and one since. Your pad of permits will be complete except for three torn off, will it not? Off you go, then. Dr Watson is waiting.”

A glance at Sovran-Phillips’s face told me that his mind was fully occupied with the absence of a fourth permit, no doubt faked for use in case of being stopped with the postal order in his pocket. Had he only had a few minutes warning of this interrogation, he might have destroyed or hidden his pad of permits or at least made up a story to explain the missing one before his mind was thrown into turmoil. But Sherlock Holmes had ambushed him pitilessly and repeatedly in every question.

There is only one description that I can give of the young Captain of Boats as we left the sanatorium. His self-confidence had been comprehensively wrecked after fifteen minutes in the presence of an accomplished cross- examiner. I caught him by the arm to steady him as he stumbled on the winding staircase that led down to the dormitories and reading rooms.

Without a word, he handed me the pad of yellow permits, from which a few had been torn off by this early stage in the summer term. We made our way back, and once again the unfortunate cadet stood before Holmes, who took the pad from me and fingered it.

“Excellent,” he said, glancing up at Sovran-Phillips. “These are your record of Saturday afternoon exeats, as I believe the word is. You have received three exeats so far, I understand, yet four permits have been used. How does that come about?”

Phillips had now recovered sufficiently to say, “A chap can easily get one wrong and have to write it again.”

At first it might have saved him, but now it was far too late for this sort of thing.

“I’m sure a chap can,” said Holmes patiently, “and you need have no fear. There will be fair play. Mr Thomas Gurrin, of the Home Office, is now retained in this case to make a full examination of all papers and documents. Even to the extent of seeing where a pencil may have pressed down to leave an indentation of its writing on the layer below—on a permit as well as a postal order. We all know, do we not, that a forgery may be traced rather than copied? So does Mr Gurrin. I feel quite sure that a chap may have every confidence in Mr Gurrin. His evidence, in one or two cases at least, has seen men hanged. A chap could not be in better hands. That will be all. Thank you.”

And so the witness, whom I can only keep describing as an unfortunate youth, was dismissed.

9

Spithead fell behind us as the paddles of the steamer Ryde cut the calm evening water with late sunlight on the grey battleship hulls and dock cranes of Portsmouth ahead. Holmes drew the pipe from his pocket and began to fill it from his pouch. Faced by his deductive power, small wonder that the venomous Sovran-Phillips should have crumpled before our eyes that morning. By tea-time, Sherlock Holmes had been only too pleased to be quit of what he called the spite and snobbery of St Vincent’s.

“I would remind you of the first article of our creed,” he said casually. “What matters in this life is not what you can do but what you can make people think you can do. In the case of Sovran-Phillips that equation was not difficult. He was bowled middle stump, was he not?”

“The linesman’s hut was never searched?”

“Sovran-Phillips enticed Patrick Riley there in the knowledge that Winter would be watching. Phillips did not intend that he himself should be seen. But then he did not intend that a railway engine should be brought to a halt by Riley standing in front of it!”

The breath of a seagull’s wing, diving for a catch, caught both our faces.

“Phillips feared that Riley’s goose was not quite cooked by the theft alone,” Holmes said. “That is what this is