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

‘Indeed he is!’ cried Herbert. ‘He was in the year below mine. But I believe he was only at Whalley Abbey for two or three terms. Though I occasionally saw him about the place, I scarcely knew him at all, which is why I did not remember him before.’

‘And now?’

‘Now that you have recalled him to my mind,’ said Herbert slowly, his eyes closed in concentration, ‘I remember that he was one of those boys who seemed always to be loitering round corners – a dark, sly-looking youth, as I remember, with calculating eyes. Wait a moment! I remember now that there had been a spate of petty pilfering one autumn term, and the next term, when nothing of the sort occurred, someone – Greig, I think – remarked in jest that Rowsley must have been responsible, as he had left at the end of the previous term. I remember laughing, without really thinking it to be true; but now that I consider it afresh, from twenty-odd years’ distance, I wonder if it wasn’t in fact the very truth of the matter! But how on earth have you managed to discover Rowsley’s name, Mr Holmes?’

‘We shall have to postpone the explanations for a little while,’ returned Holmes in a brisk tone. He glanced at his watch. ‘We must be off now. It is ten-forty, and there is no time to lose.’

‘To where?’ I enquired in surprise.

‘The Albert Dock.’

‘Am I to accompany you?’ asked Herbert.

‘Most certainly, Mr Herbert. You are one of the very few men in London who can identify this scoundrel. We should, I think, be able to catch the eleven twenty-five from Fenchurch Street.’

‘We can do better than that, Mr Holmes,’ said Lanner, who had re-emerged as Holmes had been speaking, followed closely by two uniformed officers, hastily fastening up their tunics. ‘I have made inquiries. There is a launch available at Hungerford Pier. I’ve sent a message to tell them to get steam up for an immediate departure.’

‘Capital!’ cried Holmes, clapping the policeman on the shoulder. ‘Nothing could be better! And these men will accompany us?’ he queried, indicating the uniformed officers.

Lanner nodded. ‘Constables Jefferson and Cook. I think between us we should be able to manage the matter.’

In a minute we were in the street and hurrying to the pier, in five we were in the police-launch, Ariel , and on our way down the great heaving river.

It was a perfect night, a night to delight astronomers, cloudless and crystal clear. Above us the great arc of the Heavens was bright with stars, among which the moon floated in milky white splendour, casting its silvery light across the sleeping city.

Our vessel was a swift one, and soon we were flashing past lines of moored boats and lighters, setting them bobbing in our wake. Beneath the bridges we flew, past lines of dark warehouses on our right hand and the spires of the City on our left, above all of which rose the great dome of St Paul’s, eerily magnificent in the moonlight.

‘This is the adventure of my life,’ whispered Herbert to me as we sat side by side in the stern of the boat. For myself, I could not but recall the previous occasion I had made such an expedition in a police-launch, when we had pursued the Aurora down the Thames, at the conclusion of the case I have chronicled elsewhere as ‘The Sign of Four’.

‘The last time you were here, Watson,’ remarked Holmes with a smile, sitting himself down beside us and apparently reading my thoughts as he did so, ‘we were after the great Agra Treasure. Mr Herbert’s fifty pounds may not appear to have quite the same recherché quality, but it is a good cause nonetheless, and there is an added piquancy to the enterprise in that we cannot be certain until we arrive at our destination whether the scoundrel who took it is there or not.’

We had passed the Tower as he had been speaking, gaunt and forbidding in the moonlight, and had come to the vast region of the docks. The cranes and hoists and pulleys, so busy and noisy in the day-time, now stood still and silent, as our little vessel shot swiftly past, the smooth, rhythmic beat of its engine almost the only sound to be heard on the river.

At Wapping, we slowed and drew up alongside the jetty. Lanner sprang ashore and raced up the stairs to the police station which overhung the bank above us, but was back again in a matter of minutes.

‘It is all arranged,’ he called out as we cast off, and, with a roar from the engine and a plume of smoke from the funnel, we resumed our surge down the river once more.

‘You are probably wondering what is afoot,’ said Holmes, as we flew along, ‘and why Inspector Lanner has taken up the matter with such commendable dispatch. The fact is, that, important though Mr Herbert’s fifty pounds is, there are yet bigger stakes upon the table tonight.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘The enterprise is finely balanced,’ he continued with a shake of the head, ‘and it will be a close-run race. However, to explain to you how matters stand: you may have read in your newspaper of the recent burglaries which have occurred, at some of the finest houses in town. In each case the value of the goods stolen ran into many thousands of pounds. Geographically speaking, the burglaries were fairly widely separated – the first was in Mayfair, the second in Belgravia, the third in Chelsea, and so on – but in other respects they were remarkably similar, so that it is almost a certainty that they are the work of the same gang. In every case, access to the house was gained by what proved on subsequent examination to be the weakest point in the house’s defences, but which would not normally have been known to an outsider: in one instance, for example, a landing window which was warped and would not fasten properly, in another, a loose-fitting French window which a child of six could have opened from the outside. In each case, too, the items stolen were very coolly selected from what was available: only the very best things were taken, the less valuable remaining almost completely untouched.

‘Inspector Lanner had charge of the first case – in Charles Street, in the West End – and soon formed the hypothesis that the burglars had had assistance from within the household, at least to the extent of helpful information. His suspicions naturally fell upon the domestic staff, and in particular on the butler and the lady’s maid, for it was clear that whoever had supplied the information had had more knowledge of the worth of the household contents than is customary among domestic staff. He therefore arranged for these two to be watched closely and followed by disguised police agents whenever they went out. A setback for his theory arrived fairly quickly, however. For as his suspects were being followed about the place, a second, very similar burglary occurred in Cadogan Place, Belgravia, and shortly afterwards there was a third. Clearly the butler and lady’s maid from Charles Street could not have had anything to do with these, and Lanner was therefore obliged to modify his theory somewhat. He wondered then if there were a gang undertaking wholesale corruption of trusted domestic staff, although such a proposition seemed distinctly unlikely. Many of the senior domestic staff at the houses in question had been in their employment for upwards of twenty years and had unimpeachable records. It was almost unthinkable that such loyal and valued servants could have been persuaded by a cash bribe, however large, to have betrayed their trust.

‘But what, then, was the alternative? Lanner remained convinced that in each case the thieves had acted upon information received from within the household; but if the information had not come from the servants, then it must have come from guests who had visited the houses, of whom there had been a great number in the course of the London season. This suggestion seemed, on the face of it, even more fantastic, but it did have the merit of perhaps explaining more convincingly how the stolen goods had been disposed of. For many of the items stolen were of very great value, and their disposal would have required a greater knowledge and better connections than are possessed by the average London burglar. With considerable difficulty, Lanner eventually managed to compile a list of all those who had recently visited the burgled houses and found that it included two bishops, several of the most senior judges in the country, including the Lord Chief Justice himself, together with half the membership of the House of Lords, and a fair sprinkling of scions of some of the oldest and most distinguished families in the kingdom. Somewhere in the list, there might have been a villain, the criminal brain responsible for the planning of these robberies, but, if so, it was not apparent. The matter was thus a complete enigma. Unable to see how he might make progress, Lanner decided to place his researches in abeyance for the moment and hope that any further activity by the same gang might yield a fresh clue.