Peter Tremayne - An Ensuing Evil and Others

“Having served his purpose, Moriarty, knowing well the properties of the waxy substance with which he had coated the child’s body, left the child to suffocate and dumped the body in the mountains.”

I waited for some time after Holmes had finished the story, and then I ventured to ask the question to which he had, so far, provided no answer. As I did so, I made the following preamble.

“Accepting that Moriarty had accomplished a fiendish scheme to enrich himself and that it was only in retrospect you realized how he managed to use the child to impersonate a specter-”

Holmes breathed out sharply as he interrupted. “It is a failure of my deductive capabilities that I have no wish to advertise, Watson.”

“Yet there is one thing-just how did Moriarty manage to spirit away the body of James Phillimore after he stepped back inside the door of the house to retrieve his umbrella? By your own statement, Moriarty, Jack Phillimore, and yourself were all together, waiting for the colonel, outside his house. The family retainer, old Malone, swore the colonel did not reenter the house. How was it done? Was Malone in the pay of Moriarty?”

“It was a thought that crossed my mind. The RIC likewise questioned old Malone very closely and came to the conclusion that he was part of no plot. In fact, Malone could not say one way or another if the colonel had returned, as he was in the kitchen with two housemaids as witnesses at the time.”

“And Agnes?…”

“Agnes was in the cellar. She saw nothing. When all is said and done, there is no logical answer. James Phillimore vanished the moment he stepped back over the threshold. I have thought about every conceivable explanation for the last twenty years and have come to no suitable explanation except one….”

“Which is?”

“The powers of darkness were exalted that day, and Moriarty had made a pact with the devil, selling his soul for his ambition.”

I stared at Holmes for a moment. I had never seen him admit to any explanation of events that was not in keeping with scientific logic. Was he correct that the answer lay with the supernatural, or was he merely covering up for the fact of his own lack of knowledge or, even more horrific to my susceptibilities, did the truth lie in some part of my old friend’s mind which he refused to admit even to himself?

Pinned to John H. Watsons manuscript was a small yellowing cutting from the Kerry Evening News; alas the date had not been noted.

“During the recent building of an RIC Barracks on the ruins of Tullyfane Abbey, a wellpreserved male skeleton was discovered. SubInspector Dalton told our reporter that it could not be estimated how long the skeleton had lain there. The precise location was in a brickedup area of the former cellars of the abbey.

“Doctor SimmsTaafe said that he adduced, from the condition of the skeleton, that it had belonged to a man in midlife who had met his demise within the last twenty Or thirty years. The back of the skull had been smashed in due to a severe blow, which might account for the death.

“SubInspector Dalton opined that the death might well be linked with the disappearance of Colonel Phillimore, then the owner of Tullyfane Abbey, some thirty years ago. As the next owner, Professor James Moriarty was reported to have met his death in Switzerland, the last owner having been an American who returned to his homeland, and the Phillimores being no longer domiciled in the country, the RIC are placing the matter in their file of unsolved suspicious deaths.”

A few lines were scrawled on the cutting in Dr. Watson’s hand, which ran, “I think it was obvious that Colonel Phillimore was murdered as soon as he reentered the house. I have come to believe that the truth did lie in a dark recess of my old friend’s mind which he refused to admit was the grotesque and terrible truth of the affair. Patricide, even at the instigation of a lover with whom one is besotted, is the most hideous crime of all. Could it be that Holmes had come to regard the young woman herself as representing the powers of darkness?” The last sentence was heavily underscored.

Of the many adventures and curious hazards that I have shared with my good friend Sherlock Holmes, the wellknown consulting detective, there is one that still brings an icy chill to my bones and a tingle to the hairs on the nape of my neck. I can still recall the apprehension-nay, the unutterable fear-that gripped me when I saw the pale specter of that naked, dancing woman who had lured so many seamen to their watery deaths-and she no more than ten yards away from where Holmes and I huddled in an open dinghy on the tempestuous seas off the rocky granite coast of Cornwall.

Lest Holmes rebuke me for starting my account at the end rather than at the beginning, let me remind those of my readers who have followed my record of his adventures that, in the spring of 1897, Dr. Moore Agar of Harley Street had prescribed to my friend a complete rest, should he wish to avoid a breakdown in his health. We had taken a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, near Mullion, on the Lizard Peninsula almost, but not quite, on the farthest extremity of Cornwall.

It was here that the ancient Cornish language had arrested Holmes’s attention and he received a consignment of books on philology and set himself to writing a monograph on what he perceived as Chaldean roots in that branch of the Celtic languages.

Our idyll was rudely interrupted when, taking tea at the local vicarage with its incumbent, Mr. Roundhay, we became involved with the strange case of Mortimer Tregennis, which I have recounted as “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.” It was a stimulating exercise in deduction but, as Holmes remarked at the end of it, he was pleased to get back to the study of the Cornish language.

Only three days elapsed before we had a visitor who would send us helterskelter into a case that made the investigation of the death of Mortimer Tregennis seem a mere diversion in mental entertainment by comparison with the terrifying peril it presented.

It was just before noon. I was taking the sun in a garden chair outside our cottage, sipping a preprandial sherry. Although it was April, it was a warm day and not at all breezy. Holmes was enclosed in the room we had set aside as his study, poring over a newly acquired volume that had arrived by that morning’s mail. It was Some Observations on the Rev. R. Williams’ Preface to his Lexicon CornuBritannicum , written by no less a luminary than Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte. That is why I recall it so well; the idea of one of the Bonaparte family becoming a philologist and an authority on the Cornish language was a matter which intrigued me.

Holmes had scooped up the book and disappeared into his study after breakfast, promising faithfully to appear for luncheon because our daily help, Mrs. Chirgwin, was preparing it, and she did not take kindly to her meals being missed.

I was, therefore, sitting, reading the Falmouth Packet when I heard the sound of a carriage rattling along the track that led to our cottage. I reluctantly placed my sherry and newspaper aside and stood up, waiting to receive the unexpected visitor with some curiosity. We were so isolated that visitors were an unusual phenomenon.

It took a moment for the carriage to appear from behind a clump of trees and come to a halt before the garden gate. It was a sturdily built carriage, one more often seen in the country than in town. But it was clearly the vehicle of some welltodo personage.

A tall, darkfaced coachman leaped down and opened the door. From the interior, a short, wellbuilt man alighted and glanced about him. He had a shock of white hair, a red face and was well dressed, bearing the hallmarks of a country squire. In fact, he seemed almost a caricature of one.