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

‘It is not so amazing,’ said Holmes. ‘The only railway station from which you could reach here in less than ten minutes, however wind-like your progress, is the Great Western terminus at Paddington. All the trains arriving at Paddington have come down the Thames valley, but those from Oxford are run to a fairly regular timetable and do not reach London at the time your train must have arrived, hence you have come from elsewhere. Your blazer and muffler give you the cut of an undergraduate and that you spend some time on the river is suggested by the little enamel badge on your lapel, which displays the crossed oars of a college rowing club.’

‘Oh, I see!’ said Ashby. ‘How very observant of you! Although I suppose it is all fairly obvious!’

‘Everything is obvious when someone has explained it to you,’ returned Holmes with some asperity. ‘But, come! What has brought you to consult us on this bright Saturday morning?’

‘I am, as you say, a member of the rowing club at my college,’ replied Ashby after a moment. ‘The college is All Saints and the rowing club is Pegasus. I am also a member of several other clubs and societies. There are, of course, innumerable societies at Oxford, catering for every possible interest. One of these at All Saints is a rather stuffy organisation, the Independent Language Society, the members of which seem to place an inordinate amount of emphasis on punctuation and the minutiae of grammar, and which has thus come to be known to outsiders, somewhat disparagingly, as “The ABC Club”. Inspired by that, some of my fellow undergraduates at All Saints proposed setting up a new society, devoid of all pretensions to learning and scholarship, and devoted only to trivial enjoyment, to be known as “The XYZ Club”. I joined last autumn, largely because the other fellows on my stair did. Altogether there were about a dozen of us, and at first it was very democratic, but it has since come to be dominated by one particular member.’

‘Who is that?’

‘Charles Churchfield. His family are very wealthy, I understand.’

‘The bankers?’

‘Yes, that is it. As far as I can make out, his whole life has been one of hedonistic pleasure, so why he should wish to institutionalise it by creating the XYZ Club, I’m sure I don’t know. It was because of his domination of the group, I think, that several members left. There are now just five of us: Churchfield, myself, Stavros Xantopoulos, Archibald Loxton and Philip Warnock. I, too, had had enough of it and intended to resign some time ago, but was dissuaded from doing so by some of the others. The trouble is that although I certainly have no objections to enjoying myself, Churchfield’s idea of pleasure strikes me as fairly unpleasant at the best of times and downright malicious at others. Sometimes it just seems like old-fashioned debauchery, and at other times he seems to derive his greatest pleasure from being offensive to perfectly ordinary and unexceptionable people, and going out of his way to humiliate those less wealthy or less well-connected than himself. Just recently we had an elaborate supper at a restaurant. By the end of the evening, Churchfield had managed to insult all the waiters, break several dishes, two wine bottles and a chair, and then complained to the manager about the service we had received. The others were drunk and did not care, but I felt so ashamed I did not know where to look.’

‘I think we understand the situation,’ said Holmes. ‘But what has brought you to consult us on this matter? My only advice would be for you to relinquish all connection with this unsavoury group of people and their immature and unpleasant activities.’

‘I quite agree,’ I said. ‘Do not let them persuade you to do anything you do not wish to do. People of that sort always need weak cronies about them, without whom they are nothing. Plough your own furrow, not someone else’s, and you will gain the respect of all decent-minded people, and, more importantly, you will retain your own self-respect.’

‘Yes, of course, you are right,’ said our visitor. ‘I had already practically decided to do as you suggest. But the difficulty is that I am rather stuck with them for the next day or two and I fear there is something odd afoot, something that I don’t understand.’

‘Pray, let us have the details,’ said Holmes.

‘It was decided that we would spend the end of this week at Churchfield’s family home, Challington House, which we have visited once before and which lies beside the Thames, not far from Bourne End. Don’t ask me how this was decided, or by whom, as I wasn’t present when the others were discussing it. The house is apparently closed up at the moment, as Churchfield’s family are travelling on the Continent, and Churchfield said we could have an entertaining time there, ‘‘untrammelled by social conventions and artificial restrictions’’ as he put it. The others all travelled down there yesterday afternoon, but I pleaded a prior engagement of having to visit a cousin of mine at Maidenhead and said I would join them later. In fact, this ‘‘engagement’’ was not such a definite one as I pretended. It was true enough that I had been meaning to visit my cousin for some time, but my main reason for absenting myself from Churchfield’s house for a few hours was to avoid the excessive drinking and gambling that I knew would be a prominent feature of Friday afternoon.

‘I paid a pleasant visit to my cousin and then, the day being a breezy one, had an idea. He is a keen rower and sailor, as I am, and has a small sailing dinghy in which we have passed many a pleasant hour on the river. I asked if I might borrow the dinghy, my idea being that I would sail it upriver and arrive at Churchfield’s house by water. Just before I was about to set off, however, there was a heavy and prolonged shower of rain which set me back about an hour, and by the time I left the day had become grey and overcast.

‘I had been making reasonable progress for some time when there came another heavy rain shower and I was drenched. I didn’t mind that too much, but as the rain cleared, the wind dropped and I found myself becalmed in the middle of the river. I unshipped the oars and rowed for a while, but the current was running strongly against me and my progress was very slow. Presently the wind got up again, but it was very uneven and gusting from almost every quarter but the south, which, of course, is where I would have liked it to be. I was thus obliged to tack back and forth across the stream, and progress was again very slow. All this time, the light was fading. However bright the day may be at this time of the year, it never lasts very long. Soon the light had gone altogether, when I was still some distance from Churchfield’s boathouse.

‘The moon was up, which was a help, but whenever it went behind a cloud, I couldn’t see a thing. Eventually, one brief burst of moonlight revealed that I was at last approaching the boathouse. It was fortunate that I knew where to find it, as it appeared now as little more than a vague, grey shape. I dropped the sail and took up the oars again. Next moment I ran slap-bang into a very large houseboat which was riding at anchor in midstream with no lights displayed. The collision almost threw me into the water and I very nearly lost my oars in the darkness. At least I was only rowing; had I been sailing I think the dinghy would probably have capsized. I was a bit shaken up by this, but recovered and rowed my way into the boathouse without further mishap. Of course, it was pitch black in there, and I couldn’t see a thing, but I knew there was a wooden walkway by the side wall and I felt my way along this with my hands, until, with a jolt, the dinghy hit something. I leaned over the prow and my hands touched what was clearly another small skiff. Returning my hands to the footway at the side, I located a mooring-ring, tied the boat up, picked up my bag and stepped out.