Peter Tremayne - An Ensuing Evil and Others

The attendant nodded confirmation.

“What made you think there would be hairs on the brush and that they would be his?” queried His Grace, staring dubiously at the black dyed hairs that were entangled on his silverbacked brush.

“Because Moran is a vain man and could not resist cocking a snoot at you, Your Grace, by brushing his own hair while you were within feet of him. It fits in with Moran’s character, a demonstration of his nerve, for any moment you might have opened the door and discovered him. Chance is his adrenaline.”

“Holmes, this is amazing!” gasped Cloncury.

“It was another Trinity man who alerted me to the importance of careful observation,” I informed him. “Jonathan Swift. He wrote that a standerby may sometimes see more of the game than he who plays it.” I could not resist turning to Mycroft and adding, sotto voce, “And Trinity almost refused to give Swift a degree because they thought he was too lazy and undisciplined!”

The chairman of the club signaled the uniformed club doorman and his assistant. They looked exmilitary men.

“You will find Colonel Moran in the dining room,” he instructed. “Ask him to join us immediately. If he will not comply, you have my permission to escort him here with as much force as you have cause to use.”

The two men went off briskly about their task.

A moment later, the colonel, whose appearance suggested that he had polished off the rest of the wine, was firmly propelled into our presence.

His redrimmed eyes fell on his Ulster and on Cloncury holding his precious leather case. The mans face went white in spite of the alcoholic infused cheeks.

“By Gad, sir, you should be horsewhipped!” growled the Duke of Cloncury and Straffan menacingly.

“This is a fabrication!” bluffed Moran feebly. “Someone put the box in my inside coat pocket.”

I could not forbear a grin of triumph. “How did you know that it was the box which had been stolen? And how did you know it was found in your inside coat pocket, Colonel?”

Moran knew the game was up.

“Moran,” the chairman said heavily, “I shall try to persuade His Grace not to bring charges against you for the sake of the reputation of this club. If he agrees, it will be on the condition that you leave Ireland within the next twelve hours and never return. I will circulate your name in society so that no house will open its doors to you again. I will have you blackballed in every club in the land.”

The Duke of Cloncury and Straffan gave the matter a moments thought and then agreed to the conditions. “I’d horsewhip the beggar, if it were me. Anyway. I think we all owe young Mr. Sherlock Holmes our thanks in resolving this matter.”

Moran glowered at me. “So you tipped them off, you young interfering-” He made a sudden aggressive lunge at me.

Mycroft inserted his large frame between me and Moran. His fist impacted on the colonels nose, and Moran went sprawling back, only to be neatly caught by the doorman and his assistant.

“Kindly escort Colonel Moran off the premises, gentlemen,” ordered the chairman, “and you do not have to be gentle.”

Moran twisted in their grasp to look back at me with little option but to control his foul temper.

“I have your measure, Sherlock Holmes,” he glowered, seething with an inner rage as they began to propel him toward the door. “You have not heard the last of me.”

It was as Mycroft was sharing a cab in the direction of my rooms in Lower Baggott Street that he frowned and posed the question: “But I cannot see how you could have identified Moran as the culprit in the first place.”

“It was elementary, Mycroft.” I smiled. “When we left the luncheon room and passed behind Moran’s chair, I saw that the colonel had dandruff on his shoulders. Now he had jetblack hair. But with the dandruff lay a number of silver strands. It meant nothing to me at the time, for I was not aware of the facts. When I discovered that the missing case contained a hairbrush and comb, everything fell into place. The duke not only had silver hair, but, I noticed, he also had dandruff to boot. By brushing his hair in such a foolhardy gesture, Moran had transferred the dandruff and silver hair to his own shoulders. It was easy to witness that Moran was a vain man. He would not have allowed dandruff and hair, if it had been his, to lie on his shoulders when he entered a public dining room. Indeed, I saw him rise from his table and go out, brushing himself as he did so. The sign of a fastidious man. He had, therefore, unknowingly picked it up during his short absence. Everything else was a matter of simple deduction.”

As Moran had been thrown out of the Kildare Street Club, he had called out to me that I had not heard the last of him. Indeed, I had not. But I could not have conceived of how our paths would meet at that time, nor of the sinister role Moran’s friend, Professor Moriarty, would play in my life. While Moriarty became my most implacable foe, Colonel Sebastian Moran was certainly the second most dangerous man that I ever had to deal with.

This is one of those papers.

I must confess that there are few occasions on which I have seen my estimable friend, Sherlock Holmes, the famous consulting detective, in a state of some agitation. He is usually so detached that the word calm seems unfit to describe his general demeanor. Yet I had called upon him one evening to learn his opinion of a manuscript draft account I had made of one of his cases which I had titled “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”

To my surprise, I found him seated in an attitude of tension in his armchair, his pipe unlit, his long pale fingers clutching my handwritten pages, and his brows drawn together in disapproval. “Confound it, Watson,” he greeted me sharply as I came through the door. “Must you show me up to public ridicule in this fashion?”

I was, admittedly, somewhat taken aback at his uncharacteristic greeting. “I rather thought you came well out of the story,” I replied defensively. “After all, you helped a remarkable woman, as you yourself observed, while, as for Mr. Gibson, I believe that he did learn an object lesson-”

He cut me short. “Tush! I do not mean the case of Grace Dunbar, which, since you refer to it, was not as glamorous as your imaginative pen elaborates on. No, Watson, no! It is here”-he waved the papers at me-”here in your cumbersome preamble. You speak of some of my unsolved cases as if they were failures. I only mentioned them to you in passing, and now you tell me, and the readers of the Strand Magazine , that you have noted them down and deposited the record in that odious little tin dispatch box placed in Cox’s Bank.”

“I did not think that you would have reason to object, Holmes,” I replied with some vexation.

He waved a hand as if dismissing my feelings. “I object to the manner in which you reveal these cases! I read here, and I quote…” He peered shortsightedly at my manuscript. “ ‘Some, and not the least interesting, were complete failures, and as such will hardly bear narrating, since no final explanation is forthcoming. A problem without a solution may interest the student, but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader. Among these unfinished tales is that of Mr. James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.’ There!” He glanced up angrily.