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

‘Nothing whatever,’ I replied with perfect honesty.

‘You are a singular fellow, indeed!’ cried Holmes with a chuckle. ‘I sometimes think that you are quite the most remarkable man in London, Watson; for I have certainly never known another so honest! There are few, I should imagine, who would care to announce their ignorance so candidly; yet, in this case, I should not believe anyone who did not confess himself baffled, for Mr Mark Pringle has brought us quite the most outré little problem I have encountered these past twelve months. As he himself remarked, the incidents taken separately could almost all bear an innocent, trivial, even prosaic explanation; but place them together and something more sinister begins to be discernible. The individual incidents are like the flourishes of the piccolo, the flute, the horn; but underlying all of these, barely perceptible save when the piece is regarded in its entirety, is a deep and continuous theme upon the ’cello and the double bass.’

‘And yet,’ I remarked, ‘perhaps these things are just coincidences. Perhaps there is not, after all, any connection between them.’

‘No, it cannot be,’ replied Holmes, his brow furrowed with thought. ‘Every nerve of intuition I possess tells me that the events are in some way connected – must be connected; and it is for us to find the connection. The difficulty lies in the fact that the incidents, as reported to us, are not only quite distinct, but, in some cases at least, mutually contradictory. One might, for instance, suspect a mere vulgar affair of some kind between Mrs Pringle and this man, Dobson, were it not for the extremely friendly relations which seem quite genuinely to subsist between Mrs Pringle and Dobson’s wife, Helen.’

‘There is certainly something suspicious about the Dobsons,’ I remarked. ‘They have some secret aim in view, of that I am convinced; although what it might be I cannot imagine.’

‘And yet,’ Holmes replied, shaking his head slowly, ‘it does not quite make sense. Consider the matter, Watson: imagine for a moment that you were the one with the secret aim in view. You are not a man remarked for duplicity, nor to any degree a natural schemer, yet surely even you would take great care to conduct yourself with modesty, self-effacement and propriety, and to do all that was required of you, in order to disarm any suspicions that might arise. But the Dobsons, so far from being discreet, seem to have gone out of their way to be conspicuous and irritating to their employer. There seems a want of cunning there!’

‘Considered in that light, their behaviour is certainly odd,’ I concurred.

‘These are deep waters, Watson,’ continued my friend after a moment, ‘and may yet prove far deeper than we can at present imagine. I cannot help feeling that there is some factor in the case of which we are as yet unaware; some hidden strand, which, if we could but grasp it, might at once pull together all the other strands, unconnected though they now seem.’

‘It is certainly a tangled skein at present,’ I remarked, ‘and I confess that the more I reflect upon it, the more baffling it seems to become. Whatever can be the significance, for instance, of the violet liquid in the pail that Pringle found one morning by the cottage?’

‘Ah, there, my dear Watson, you put your finger on what is perhaps the one point in the whole of his narrative to which no mystery attaches,’ responded Holmes, breaking into a smile. ‘For whoever had printed his hand upon the wall that morning – using perfectly ordinary ink, to judge from this sheet which we have examined – would, in the process, have marked his hand quite as conspicuously as he had marked the wall, as I am sure you would agree. He could of course cover his hand with a glove, but at this time of the year that would excite almost as much comment as an ink-stained hand and, in any case, there may be other circumstances which would render such a device impossible. What does he do, then, to remove the stain and thus preserve his secret, but plunge his hand into the water and rinse off the incriminating ink? It is certainly what I should do in his position. But, come, we are beginning to circle around the problem without ever approaching any closer to it, after the style of our good friend, Inspector Athelney Jones!’

‘Very well,’ said I, laughing. ‘I shall leave you to your solitary meditations.’

‘Drop by tomorrow afternoon,’ said Holmes, as I took my hat and stick, ‘and we can review any progress in the case.’

At three o’clock the following afternoon I was seated by the window in my friend’s rooms, reading the evening paper, when he returned. His face was drawn and tired, but the slight smile which played about his lips told me that his day had not been a fruitless one.

‘Tiring weather!’ said he by way of greeting, tossing his hat on to the table.

‘You have made some progress with the Pringle case?’ I ventured.

‘More than that,’ he replied. ‘I have quite cleared up Mr Pringle’s little mystery and am now in a position to lay the whole of the facts before him. It was a simple affair after all. You will come with me? If we leave within the half-hour we should be in time to catch him at his office in the Crutched Friars. As to the advice I should give him, however—’

His voice tailed off and an introspective look came into his eyes. It was clear that despite the solution of the mystery, there was something about the case which vexed him still. Without a word he threw off his coat and began slowly to fill his old black pipe with tobacco from the pewter caddy upon the mantelpiece, his eyes all the while far away. A score of questions welled up in my mind at once, but I forbore to voice them, for I knew well enough, from ten years’ experience, that he would enlighten me of his own volition when he himself chose to do so and that to question him at any other time was a profitless exercise.

I also knew that he rarely jested when his profession was the subject and I had never once known him exaggerate his achievements, so that if he said he had solved the case, then I knew it must he so, incredible though such a claim seemed. How on earth, I wondered, had he, in less than twenty-four hours, discovered the key that would unlock the mystery which surrounded his unfortunate client? Again my mind turned over the remarkable series of events which Mark Pringle had narrated to us the previous evening, again I pondered the significance of all that he had told us – the disturbing conversation he had overheard upon his sick-bed, the mysterious and grotesque hand-prints, his wife’s unfathomable behaviour towards both the Dobsons and her own husband, and the dark, sinister figures that came in the night – but again I was obliged to admit utter and total defeat.

‘Your client’s part of the country seems to be having more than its share of mysteries at the moment,’ I remarked at length.

‘What is that?’ said Holmes in a vague, abstracted tone, as if so far away in his thoughts that he found it difficult to refocus his mind upon the present time and place. ‘What did you say?’

‘There is a report in the early editions that the body of a man was found in the river early this morning, just by Chertsey Bridge. There was a knife stuck in his side.’

‘What!’

‘The police believe that the body had been washed down the river from the Staines area.’

He took the paper from me and ran his eye rapidly down the column, a look of alarm upon his face. ‘“A short, squat man!”’ he cried after a moment, a note almost of relief in his voice; ‘“with a swarthy complexion and curly black hair, and with a single gold ear-ring.” Well, it is no one we know, anyhow.’