The home of Chief Constable Alistair Grimshaw stood on the northern slope of the hill that overlooked Arnsford, a substantial villa of red brick and Portland stone, set well back from the road and screened by a grove of ancient elms. It was a house that spoke of comfortable authority, of a man who had risen to a position of prominence and intended to enjoy its fruits. The gravel drive was freshly raked, the brass door knocker gleamed with the attention of a diligent maid, and the windows that faced the road were hung with heavy curtains of burgundy velvet that admitted no glimpse of the interior.
It was mid-morning when Holmes and I presented ourselves at the door, having sent no advance notice of our visit. The maid who answered our knock was young and flustered, and she regarded my companion's card with an expression of blank uncertainty.
"Mr. Sherlock Holmes," she repeated, as though the name were a foreign coin whose value she could not quite determine. "I shall see if the Chief Constable is at home."
She left us standing in the hall, which was panelled in dark oak and decorated with a series of sporting prints that depicted the pursuit and dismemberment of foxes. The air smelled of beeswax and cigar smoke, and from somewhere deeper in the house came the murmur of a man's voice, speaking in the measured cadences of one accustomed to giving orders.
The maid returned and conducted us to a study at the rear of the house, a room that was at once luxurious and oppressive. The walls were lined with leather-bound volumes that had the appearance of never having been opened, and the windows gave onto a garden that was immaculately tended but seemed curiously lifeless, as though the plants had been instructed to grow in a certain fashion and dared not disobey.
Alistair Grimshaw rose from behind a desk of monumental proportions to greet us. He was a man of perhaps fifty years, broad-shouldered and powerfully built, with a face that was handsome in a heavy, florid fashion. His handshake was firm to the point of aggression, and his smile did not reach his eyes.
"Mr. Holmes," he said, gesturing us to chairs. "Your reputation precedes you. I confess I was rather expecting your visit, though I had hoped you might have the courtesy to announce yourself in advance."
"I have found," said Holmes, settling himself into a leather armchair with every appearance of ease, "that unannounced visits are more productive. They catch people in the act, as it were, of being themselves."
Grimshaw's smile tightened. "I have nothing to conceal. The Arnsford constabulary is an open book."
"An open book whose pages have been recently rewritten. I refer, of course, to the duty roster for the night of the fourteenth of June."
The Chief Constable's expression did not alter, but I saw his hand, which had been resting on the desk, contract slightly. "The roster was amended for operational reasons. The original officers assigned to the demonstration were inexperienced in crowd control. Bridges, Hobbs, and Clegg were veterans."
"Veterans with records of disciplinary infractions. Bridges was cited for excessive force. Hobbs has been reprimanded for conduct unbecoming. Clegg was dismissed from a previous post for striking a worker. These are the men you chose to police a peaceful demonstration?"
Grimshaw leaned back in his chair and regarded Holmes with an expression that was outwardly calm but which I sensed concealed a considerable tension. "The demonstration was not expected to be peaceful. Intelligence had reached us that agitators from Manchester were planning to infiltrate the crowd. Strong measures were required."
"Intelligence from whom?"
"That is a confidential matter."
Holmes allowed a small silence to gather before he spoke again. "Let us speak frankly, Chief Constable. You were at Arkwright College with Horace Pemberton. You were two years his junior, but you were in the same house. You knew him. You knew his character. And you knew, as everyone in this town seems to know, that something happened at that school thirty years ago—something that involved Pemberton and a charity boy named Isaac Greaves."
The name hung in the air like a struck bell. Grimshaw's face, which had been carefully composed, underwent a subtle convulsion. For a moment I thought he would order us from the house. Then, with a visible effort, he mastered himself.
"I was a boy of fourteen when Greaves was expelled," he said, his voice low and strained. "I was not a participant in the affair. I knew only what the whole school knew: that a theft had been committed, that Greaves had confessed, and that he had been sent away."
"And did you believe the confession?"
Grimshaw rose and walked to the window, turning his back to us. "I was fourteen years old, Mr. Holmes. I believed what I was told to believe. It is only in recent years that I have begun to question it."
"Recent years? Since when, precisely?"
The Chief Constable turned back to face us, and I saw that his mask of authority had slipped. Beneath it was a man who was haunted by something he could not name. "Since a man came to Arnsford two years ago and began asking questions. A man who knew things—things that only someone who had been at the school in those years could have known. He came to my office and introduced himself as Mr. James Carrington, a solicitor from London, acting on behalf of a client who wished to remain anonymous. But I knew, even as he spoke, that he was no solicitor."
"What was he?"
Grimshaw drew a long breath. "He was the past made flesh. He asked me about the chalice, about the confession, about the role that Pemberton had played in the whole affair. He knew details that I had thought were buried forever. And when I asked him how he had come by this knowledge, he smiled and said that the truth has a way of surfacing, like a body that will not stay drowned."
Holmes leaned forward. "What did he want from you?"
"At first, nothing. He simply asked questions and listened to my answers. But then, some months later, he returned. This time he wanted information about the constabulary—the duty rosters, the disciplinary records, the men who could be relied upon to follow orders without asking too many questions. I told him I could not provide such information. He told me that if I did not, he would make public certain matters that I would prefer to remain private."
"Matters connected with the Greaves affair?"
"Not directly. But he knew things about my family, about my business dealings, about certain indiscretions of my youth. He had compiled a dossier, Mr. Holmes, that would have destroyed me utterly. And so I complied. I reassigned the duty roster on the night of the demonstration. I told Bridges, Hobbs, and Clegg that there was a man who needed to be taught a lesson, and that they were to ensure the lesson was a memorable one. I did not know, until afterward, that the man was Pemberton."
Holmes was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was cold and measured. "You have confessed to a conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, Chief Constable. You have confessed to corruption of office. And you have confessed to being the instrument of a man whose identity you claim not to know, but whom I suspect you know very well indeed."
Grimshaw sank back into his chair and covered his face with his hands. "I do not know his true name," he said, his voice muffled. "He called himself Carrington, but I knew it was a falsehood. I thought, at first, that he might be Greaves himself, returned from the dead to claim his revenge. But the man I met was not a charity boy from the workhouse. He was cultured, polished, a man of means and education. He spoke like a gentleman."
"Which is precisely what a charity boy who had spent thirty years remaking himself might sound like," said Holmes. "But let us return to the present. The man who called himself Carrington—where can he be found?"
"He gave me an address in Manchester, but I have since learned that it is a vacant building. He contacts me; I do not contact him. The last I heard from him was a note, delivered on the morning after the beating. It said only, 'The first instalment has been paid.'"
The phrase echoed in my memory. The debt of thirty years is not yet paid in full. The first instalment has been paid. The language of a man who saw his vengeance as a series of transactions, each one calculated and precise.
Holmes rose. "You have been most informative, Chief Constable, though I cannot say that your conduct has been admirable. You will, I trust, make yourself available for further questioning. In the meantime, I suggest you reflect upon the fact that the man who has been manipulating you is almost certainly the boy whom your schoolfellows destroyed thirty years ago, and that the net he has woven around Pemberton may yet tighten around your own throat."
We left the villa in silence and walked back down the hill toward the town. The fog had lifted, but the sky remained overcast, and a thin, persistent drizzle had begun to fall.
"Grimshaw is a coward and a scoundrel," I said, with some heat. "But he is also a victim, in his way."
"Every man in this affair is both victim and perpetrator, Watson. That is the nature of the disease we are examining. The school, the town, the system that produced them—all of it is complicit. Grimshaw is merely one link in a chain of corruption that stretches back three decades." Holmes drew his coat more tightly about him. "But we are now in possession of a crucial fact. The man who orchestrated the beating is the same man who has been systematically destroying Pemberton's life. He calls himself Carrington, but he is almost certainly either Isaac Greaves or someone acting on Greaves's behalf. And if he is not Greaves, then the most likely candidate is Simon Thornfield, the one boy who befriended Greaves at Arkwright and who subsequently made a fortune in the Cape Colony."
"The Cape Colonial Trading Company," I said. "The creditor that forced the bankruptcy."
"Precisely. Thornfield's company holds Pemberton's debts. Thornfield's company has been the instrument of his financial ruin. And if my deductions are correct, Thornfield—or perhaps Greaves operating through Thornfield—has been the invisible hand behind every misfortune that has befallen the Pemberton family for the past two years."
We had reached the market square, and Holmes paused before the entrance to the Arnsford Arms. "I have sent a further telegram to London, requesting information on the Cape Colonial Trading Company and its directors. We should receive a reply by this evening. In the meantime, I think the hour has come for us to make the acquaintance of the man whose name appears at the head of the complaint: Horace Pemberton himself."
The lodging-house where Pemberton resided was situated on the canal basin, a dreary district of warehouses and dilapidated tenements that seemed to crouch beneath the shadow of the shuttered mill. The building itself was a narrow, soot-stained structure that listed slightly to one side, as though it had grown weary of standing upright. A woman of indeterminate age, her face lined with the particular hardness of those who have seen too much and felt too little, directed us to a room on the third floor.
The door was opened by the man whose photograph had appeared in the Arnsford Gazette of some years earlier, when he had been a magistrate and a captain of industry. The figure who stood before us now bore only a spectral resemblance to that portrait. Horace Pemberton was tall and gaunt, his clothes hanging loosely on a frame that had once been robust. His face was pale and unshaven, and his eyes, which had once been described as piercing, were now dull and bloodshot. The room behind him was bare but for a narrow bed, a deal table, and a single chair. A bottle of cheap gin stood on the table, half empty.
"Mr. Holmes," he said, his voice hoarse. "I was told you might call. Come in, if you can bear the squalor. I am beyond shame now."
We entered, and Pemberton gestured toward the bed, the only surface that might accommodate us. Holmes remained standing, his eyes moving over the room with the rapid, cataloguing glance that I knew so well.
"You have brought a lawsuit against the Borough Council," Holmes began, without preamble. "A lawsuit that, if successful, will win you five thousand pounds. And yet you live in a room that cannot cost more than five shillings a week, and you are drinking gin of the cheapest sort. Why?"
Pemberton gave a laugh that was entirely devoid of mirth. "Why? Because the money is not the object, Mr. Holmes. Surely a man of your perspicacity has deduced that by now."
"The object is exposure. You wish to bring the truth to light. But what truth, exactly? The truth of your own torment at the hands of constables? Or a truth that is older and darker?"
Pemberton sank onto the bed and buried his face in his hands. For a long moment he said nothing, and I heard only the lapping of the canal water against the stone embankment outside the window.
"I was a cruel boy," he said at last, his voice barely audible. "I do not offer that as an excuse. I offer it as a fact. At Arkwright, I had power—the power of a prefect, the power of a boy from a wealthy family, the power of a young man who had never been taught that cruelty has consequences. And I used that power against a boy who had no defence."
"Isaac Greaves," said Holmes.
"Isaac Greaves." The name seemed to cause Pemberton physical pain. "He was a charity boy, a scholarship pupil from the workhouse. He was clever, far cleverer than I, and that galled me. He was quiet, and that infuriated me. He was everything I was not, and so I set out to destroy him. The theft of the chalice was my doing. I hid it in his trunk and then accused him. I wrote the confession that he was forced to recite. I stood and watched while he was stripped of his scholarship and sent back to the workhouse, and I felt nothing but satisfaction."
"And now, thirty years later, you wish to atone."
Pemberton looked up, and his eyes were wet. "I do not know if atonement is possible. But the man I wronged—or his ghost—has returned to claim his due. Every disaster that has befallen me has been his doing. The fires in the mill, the collapse of my investments, the loss of my house, the departure of my wife—all of it has been orchestrated. And the beating in the alley, the beating that has brought me here to this room, was the final stroke."
"You speak as though you know your tormentor's identity."
"I know it because he told me. On the night of the beating, as I lay in the alley with my ribs cracked and my mouth full of blood, a man leaned over me. He was not one of the constables. He was dressed like a gentleman, and his face was calm and still. He said, 'Do you remember a boy named Isaac Greaves, Pemberton? This is his gift to you.' And then he was gone."
Holmes stood very still. "Did you recognise the man?"
"No. I had never seen him before. But his voice—there was something in his voice that I had heard before, long ago. A cadence, a turn of phrase. I cannot place it, but it haunts me."
"Did you tell anyone of this encounter?"
"I told no one. Who would believe me? A ruined man, a drunkard, claiming that a phantom from his past had orchestrated his destruction? They would have called me mad. But when I returned to this room that night, I found a document on my table. A draft of the complaint that I have since filed with the court. Every page was written out in a clear, precise hand, with the arguments fully formed and the citations exact. Attached to it was a note that said only, 'This is your part to play. Do it, and the truth will be known.'"
Holmes exchanged a glance with me that I could not read. "And so you have played your part. You have brought the lawsuit, knowing that it may destroy you as thoroughly as it destroys those you accuse."
Pemberton nodded slowly. "I have nothing left to lose, Mr. Holmes. The man I wronged has taken everything from me—except this one thing: the power to force the truth into the open. I do not know if that will be enough to atone for what I did. But it is all I have."
We left the lodging-house as the light was failing, and walked along the canal towpath in the gathering dusk. The water was black and still, and the reflections of the gas lamps wavered on its surface like the ghosts of drowned men.
"Consider the symmetry, Watson," said Holmes, his voice low and thoughtful. "Pemberton tormented Greaves at school, stripping him of his scholarship and casting him into the workhouse. Thirty years later, Greaves—or Thornfield, or some combination of the two—has stripped Pemberton of his wealth, his position, his family, and his dignity, and has cast him into a lodging-house by the canal. The victim has become the oppressor, and the oppressor has become the victim. It is a revenge of almost mathematical precision."
"But who is the true author of the complaint? Pemberton says it was left for him, already drafted."
"And I believe him. The legal sophistication of the document, the philosophical language, the careful construction of the arguments—none of it is consistent with a broken drunkard. The complaint was written by a man of intelligence and education, a man who has spent years mastering the law. It was written by the same man who engineered the beating, the same man who ruined the mill, the same man who called himself Carrington and manipulated the Chief Constable. And that man, Watson, is either Isaac Greaves returned from the dead, or Simon Thornfield acting as his instrument."
We had reached the end of the towpath, where a bridge arched over the canal and led back into the town. Holmes paused and looked back at the dark water.
"There is one possibility that I have not yet voiced," he said, almost to himself. "What if Greaves and Thornfield are one and the same? What if Simon Thornfield never existed as a separate person, but was merely a name adopted by Greaves when he arrived in the Cape? A quiet boy, a year younger than Greaves, who befriended him at school—is it not possible that this boy was Greaves himself, that he invented a friend to console himself in his misery, and that he later took that friend's name as his own?"
The thought was staggering. "But the old porter, Toombs, remembered Thornfield as a separate boy."
"Toombs is an old man, and his memory may have been shaped by the story he has told himself over the years. Or perhaps Thornfield was real, and Greaves adopted his identity after Thornfield's death. The colonial records would not have been precise enough to prevent such a substitution."
We returned to the Arnsford Arms to find a telegram waiting at the desk. Holmes tore it open and read it by the light of the gas lamp in the foyer. His expression, as he absorbed its contents, was one of grim satisfaction.
"It is from my brother Mycroft," he said. "The records of the Cape Colonial Trading Company reveal that the company was founded not by three directors, but by one. Henry Marston and Frederick Baines were fronts. The sole proprietor, operating under the name Simon Thornfield, has been drawing a steady income from the company's operations for the past five years. But the most significant detail is this: the company's funds were initially deposited by a man named Isaac Greaves, who opened an account with the Bank of Cape Town in 1875, using a draft drawn on a bank in the Transvaal. The draft was for a sum of fifty thousand pounds."
"Fifty thousand pounds! But how could a former workhouse boy have come by such a fortune?"
"Diamonds, Watson. The Transvaal is diamond country. If Greaves made his way to the diamond fields after his indenture, he could have amassed a fortune in a few years. And then, having secured his wealth, he could have returned to England under a new name to orchestrate the destruction of the man who had wronged him."
He folded the telegram and placed it in his pocket. "We now know the identity of our adversary, or very nearly. He is Isaac Greaves, operating under the name Simon Thornfield. He is the architect of this elaborate vengeance. And he is still at large, still watching, still waiting for the final act of his drama to play out."
"But where is he now? If he is not the man who called himself Carrington, then Carrington must be an agent, a hired hand."
"Or Carrington is Greaves himself, and the name is simply another mask. The man is a master of disguise, Watson—not in the theatrical sense, but in the deeper sense of a man who has remade his entire identity. He was a charity boy from the workhouse. He became a diamond magnate. He poses as a solicitor from London. He is whatever he needs to be to achieve his purpose."
He turned toward the stair that led to our sitting-room, and his face, in the flickering gaslight, was set with a determination that I had seen before, on the eve of some great resolution.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we shall lay a trap. We shall announce that we have discovered the truth about the Cape Colonial Trading Company, and we shall see who comes to silence us. And when he comes, Watson, we shall be waiting."
The fog had returned, thicker than ever, and as I followed Holmes up the stair I could not shake the sensation that somewhere in that grey shroud, a pair of eyes was fixed upon our window, watching and waiting, patient as the grave.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!