Denis Smith - The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

‘This,’ said he, setting the little box upon the floor and unfastening the tape, ‘is all I have left to remind me of my stay at “The Highlands” in the Lincolnshire Wolds and of what became known as “The East Thrigby Mystery”.’

He lifted the lid and I saw that the box contained a small, wooden-framed mirror which exactly fitted the box. The frame was painted light blue, and stuck all over with sea-shells and little pebbles. Holmes lifted it carefully from the box, laid it upon his knee and gazed for several minutes at this pretty little object, gently running his fingers over the patterns on the shells, as if the past might be conjured up for him as much by touch as by sight.

‘It was a particularly fine, warm summer, in the mid-sixties,’ said he at length. ‘I was a mere lad, in my twelfth year. A distant relation of mine – I addressed him as “Uncle Moreton”, although the relationship between us was not in fact as close as that – had taken a house for the summer on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, not many miles distant from the sea. He and his wife, known to me as “Aunt Phyllis”, had a child of about my own age, a daughter by the name of Sylvia – although she was always known as “Sylvie” – and I was to spend the summer with them. The household was completed by Matthew Hemming, his wife, Ursula, and their son, Percival, who was a year or two younger than me. The Hemmings were distant relations of Aunt Phyllis’s, but not related to me.

‘It was interesting and varied country where we were staying, Watson. To the east, the land lies as flat as a sheet of paper all the way to the sea; to the west, towards the river Trent, it is much the same; but running up the middle of Lincolnshire, like a knobbly spine, are the rolling hills of the Wolds. If the lowlands have little but flatness to them, in the Wolds there is scarcely ever more than a hundred yards of level ground. This elevation leads to some varied and unpredictable weather. The heavy rain clouds that on occasion blow across England without shedding their load are forced upwards when they encounter the Wolds, and the result is very often a heavy downpour just a short time after the sky had appeared a clear and empty blue. The weather was generally fine throughout our stay there and such cloudbursts were not frequent, but there was a memorable one on the evening that Uncle Moreton and Mr Hemming decided to walk the few miles over to Tetford. Uncle Moreton was a great admirer of Dr Johnson, and had heard that that venerable sage had visited the White Hart at Tetford in the middle of the last century when speaking to the local literary society, which was one of the chief reasons Uncle Moreton had wished to spend a holiday in the Wolds. He and Mr Hemming received a thorough soaking for their enterprise, but their spirits remained undampened, and they regaled us at breakfast the following morning with an account of how they had enjoyed a glass of beer while sitting on the very settle from which Dr Johnson had held forth to the local worthies a hundred years before.

‘As for East Thrigby itself, it was one of those places that scarcely merit the title of “village” at all. It was a very broadly spread parish, but save for a row of cottages and an old decrepit-looking inn near the church, there was no natural centre to it, the other houses and cottages being scattered far and wide, often hidden away down the narrow lanes that criss-crossed the rolling countryside. Not a very likely spot for dramatic events and mystery, you might imagine. But those intent upon wrongdoing will generally find a way to achieve their ends wherever they are, and the scattered nature of rural homesteads can make the uncovering of their crimes all the more difficult.’

‘You sound somewhat cynical,’ I interrupted, laughing at the serious tones in which my companion spoke. ‘East Thrigby sounds a perfectly idyllic spot to me.’

‘Perhaps I am,’ my friend conceded. ‘But my professional experience has taught me that human nature is much the same everywhere. Besides, East Thrigby was not such an unblemished paradise as you perhaps suppose. There was a troublesome family in the village, by the name of Shaxby. It sometimes seems there is a mysterious law of nature that ordains that there is one such family in practically every parish in England, whose entire raison d’être seems to be simply to create nuisance and annoyance for their neighbours. To judge from what I heard subsequently, the Shaxbys were responsible for almost everything discordant and unpleasant that ever occurred in East Thrigby. Drunkenness, fighting, general disorder, wanton damage and petty pilfering: all these had been either proved or suspected against the Shaxbys. One of them in particular, Michael Shaxby, a rough, burly young man of nineteen or twenty, who was known to be the ringleader of all the most rowdy youths in the district, was regarded as a bad lot, and it was generally felt that he might well rise up by degrees in his criminality until he ended up on the scaffold. He was pointed out to us one day, I remember, as he walked past our house with a swagger, tapping a stout stick upon the ground as he went, for all the world as if he were strolling along one of the most fashionable streets in London. He struck me at the time, I admit, as a rather dashing figure, something like a brigand chief or pirate captain; but, of course, an eleven-year-old boy is not generally the best judge of someone’s true merits.

‘Now, to pass from the general to the particular: two nights before we arrived in East Thrigby there had been a break-in at the rectory and a valuable pair of silver candlesticks had been stolen. This was, in a sense, the start of the trouble that was to befall the village, although no one then could possibly have predicted what would later occur. It was widely believed that Michael Shaxby was responsible for the theft, but as his family were prepared to swear that he had never left their house on the night in question, there was not much that the local constable or anyone else could do about it, save for repeatedly questioning them all in a vaguely menacing manner which of course achieved nothing. Does the account in your book mention the Shaxbys at all, Watson?’

‘It certainly mentions a troublesome local family, but it gives them a different name. The author explains in a general preface to the book that he has been obliged to change many of the names of the people in his narratives to allow himself to speak freely and honestly about them without risking a legal suit for defamation.’

Holmes chuckled. ‘That is always a danger for such authors, unless their material is centuries old. Oddly enough, it is often the worst of people, those least deserving of respect, who are the quickest to resort to the law-courts in such circumstances. However, I am under no such restrictions, so you can be assured that the account you receive from me is the precise truth in every respect, names included. At first, of course, I was not aware of anything amiss in East Thrigby, but, like everyone else, saw only the attractive appearance of the fields and hedgerows, and the quaint and pretty cottages nestling among them.

‘The house that was to be our home that summer was a solid, handsome brick structure which had been built for a wealthy eccentric about fifty years previously and, as it occupied the highest point for some distance round, given the somewhat whimsical name of “The Highlands”. He had apparently wished to have fine views from his new residence and these there certainly were. From the sky-light of one of the attics, it was possible to see far across the flatlands to the east, towards where the German Ocean ceaselessly pounds the low sandy shore. Surrounding the house on all sides was a large garden. To the rear of the house much of this was taken up with a smooth and well-kept croquet lawn, where the adults often played. We children, too, were introduced to the game, but found it difficult. Once we had mastered the rudiments, therefore, we tended to wait until the adults had finished and then play a game of our own devising, with somewhat more relaxed rules. At the edges of the croquet lawn were two or three small flower-beds with rose-bushes in them, but most of the rest of the garden was given over to specimen trees and large, spreading shrubs.