Death on a Pale Horse

PART III



Death on a Pale Horse





1





I pride myself that my medical education and military training have made me more observant than most men in the face of a threat. I had scanned Baker Street when “Samuel Dordona” from the Evangelical Overseas Medical Mission arrived. I had watched him as he left. So indeed did Sherlock Holmes. Of course Major Putney-Wilson was absurd in his amateur theatrical disguise. It made him conspicuous rather than unobtrusive. Yet I saw no one who might have been his shadow or who paid him the least attention.

At Carlyle Mansions, Holmes would have been the first man to notice if we had been followed. Of course, it now proved that we and the entire street were under observation by Albert Gibbons, but this in itself should have been a protection against spies. Civilian and military police have what are technically known as “private clothes” personnel who wear no regimental uniform. I needed no persuasion that Gibbons in his commissionaire’s livery was as much a sergeant of the Provost Marshal’s Corps as he had ever been.

Sherlock Holmes certainly behaved as if there was no present danger from Moran or his associates. My misfortune was to assume that danger is something which all men and women instinctively avoid. But there are also those to whom danger is the breath of life and who deliberately tempt their foe to combat. They will fight a duel when they might as easily avoid it. Holmes fell precisely into this category.

No doubt Colonel Rawdon Moran had become our enemy. Yet he could not have murdered Captain Sellon if he had been on the passenger list of a homeward-bound liner which had docked at Funchal in Madeira less than five days before the captain’s death. Holmes had easily confirmed from the shipping line clerk who knew the man: three days at sea and two more on the Transcontinental Express from Lisbon would still leave him on the wrong side of the English Channel at the time that Joshua Sellon died.

“Hence Ramon,” said Holmes sardonically.

“I beg your pardon?”

We were sitting over our glasses of whisky and warm water two evenings later as the sitting-room fire burnt down to a final glow.

“Hence Ramon. The foreign gentleman who booked the apartment opposite Carlyle Mansions, from which Lestrade insists the bullet was fired. The man who booked it but never arrived to occupy it. You noticed, of course, that the name Ramon is a childishly obvious anagram for Moran?”

It had not occurred to me until that moment because my mind had been occupied by other things, but I thought it best to say, “Of course.”

“It cannot have been Moran who murdered Joshua Sellon if he was not even in England. That is why he taunts us with his anagram. I doubt whether he any longer commits his own murders, except on special occasions. To use such a foolish pseudonym as Ramon is once again the old game of ‘Catch me if you can.’ We are not allowed to forget that he is the puppet-master of murder. He pulls the strings, and we are his marionettes who dance to his commands.”

“What practical use is that to him?”

“The greatest use, old fellow. It is intended to rattle our nerves, to unbalance our judgment, and to tip us headlong into doing something foolish. Now, if you do not mind, I think I shall retire for the night with a volume of Mr. George Meredith. He is the only master of fiction who I can tolerate for very long. I have intended for some time to re-read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first endeavour and in many respects still his best.”

And so a remarkable few days in our lives came to an end, bringing in its wake what I think of as the night in question. A night of terror.





2





I had known fear on the battlefield, where I expected to find it. But then I had been in company with my comrades. Terror, I was to learn, is faced alone. There is no comrade to turn to, no rhyme nor reason to what is happening. The image of Captain Joshua Sellon’s body lingered ghostlike in my mind, but that was far from the irrationality of terror.

I learned that terror is not the ghost before the eyes, like some student prank played with an owl’s hoot and a white sheet. It is a heart-jump of fright at what has become inexplicable, as if one were waking in the silence and stillness of one’s very own coffin. It is a brief irrational movement, alone in a familiar room, caught in the corner of the eye. The flicker is quick as a darting mouse, where there can be no mouse. Or a sudden shriek that teases the very edge of hearing, where no one else can hear it. Terror at its worst comes in solitude and silence. In terror, as in pain, each must feel his own.

Perhaps worst of all, terror is malignant because it pounces in familiar surroundings, like a loyal guardian turned traitor. It immobilises the brain and annihilates reason. On that night, in my own Baker Street room, I knew that what could not be happening to me was none the less happening. And yet I was a man who would laugh outright at a ghost beyond the window-glass or a spirit knocking on the wall.

It began when I woke drowsily and without apparent reason from an uninterrupted sleep. I felt as though I had risen suddenly and rapidly from a far greater depth of unconsciousness than usual. The speed of it had almost left me dizzy. I could not at first tell where I was or guess what the time might be, except that it was deep night. My surroundings were out of kilter. I could not recognise the dim landmarks of my familiar surroundings. Had the room changed its shape, or had I been taken somewhere else? Reason told me that I must be in the bed where I had fallen asleep.

I was aware at first only of light filtering into a dark room. If it was my own room, the bed and the light were in the wrong place and at the wrong angle. Nor was this the familiar reflection of yellow street lamps at my curtains’ edge. The light was thick and tawny, as if I lay under foul water or something opaque had blemished my vision. Suddenly I could feel a cold draught where the curtains of the window above me might be. They were wide open, not pulled together as I had always left them when I went to bed.

My first thought was that there must surely have been an intruder. Where was he? I had the sense to lie quite still and give no indication of having stirred. I went back quietly in my thoughts through the first seconds of consciousness. I believed that perhaps I had heard a whispering at my ear and even a laugh. Yet now I heard nothing, nor could I see anyone. So after all I must be alone in my room, if it was my room. What of the objects around me?

As I looked cautiously, it seemed that someone or something had also changed the angle of a chest of drawers, if it was a chest of drawers. Perhaps that was what had made me think the bed had been moved. Though it was dark, I began to get my bearings again. Waking at night, I have always had some innate sense of time. I now felt that it must be three or four o’clock in the morning. But I could see no clock face and could hear no bell.

Someone, somehow, must be watching me. There was no sense to it otherwise. But why? I still made no movement to betray my consciousness. I listened meticulously. At this hour, no sound came from the street at the front of the house. A very faint mouselike scratching was audible from the slates or brickwork outside the back wall. I could tell there was no moon but only starlight at the rear. It was framed by an open window with the curtain drawn aside, rising above me where there should be no window. I moved my eyes as far as I could. Had there been a burglar? I would surely not have slept through the coming and going of a housebreaker.

As my sight adjusted to the faint light of the stars, I made out something luminous. Or, rather, it was something seen in a faint and tawny glow. I saw now that the chest of drawers had indeed been moved to provide a flat surface. A murky half-light fell upon an object that seemed to be standing upon it. Yet the object had no explicable outline. I twisted my head a little. The thing was just above me, blocking my vision at this angle. The light was not falling upon it but coming through it. I saw that it was not even on the chest of drawers itself, but in the window embrasure.

Something had been left there or strung up there. Someone had come and gone. Now I was alone in the room. I pulled myself up and sat looking at the thing. It was not stationary, but moving or twisting at a slant as it came slowly into my view. What the devil was it? There was such an unclean light within it. I felt a shock of repugnance that it had been so very close all the time and I had not known it. It was like waking to find a snail moving on one’s cheek or a rat licking one’s neck.

The object was not even standing on the window-sill, within the casement or embrasure. When it moved as it did, I knew it must be suspended in the opening, not quite touching the surface. It was, after all, bottled in a jar of some sort, a curious amorphous shape, almost translucent, as if it had been fished from the depths of the sea.

I looked more closely at the only feature I could begin to distinguish from the rest. I doubted for no more than a second or two. It was surely a human ear that appeared to float before me in a tawny liquid. As I looked, it turned very slowly away. Wet hair, dark in colour, drifted about it, for all the world like weed in tidal shallows. Thick though the light might be, I knew my eyes were not playing tricks upon me. As it twisted away, I was looking at the upper section of a bare brown neck, severed from its shoulders. I had seen a score of cadavers in the course of my training, but never before one in which the entire head had been cut off so cleanly from the body to which it belonged.

I am not squeamish by nature. The thing had given me a fright only because it caught me with my guard down as I came to the surface of sleep. For a split second, I had thought I might be still asleep, in a mortuary nightmare of some kind. I had struggled to pull out of it. But what the devil was this object, suspended in the dim space of my own bedroom? A severed head? It turned a little more. I glimpsed in profile the curve of a dark-skinned cheekbone. The tip of a nose came next as the invisible cords that must be supporting its bulk unwound themselves a little more.

In reaction to this trick, as I thought of it, I now felt a growing anger with the object and the perpetrator. The grotesque image revealed itself a little further—or, rather, it was grotesque by what it did not reveal. It was not a head after all but, much worse, half a head severed vertically. The nose I was now looking at had only one nostril. The profile had only one cheek. The face had only one eye, which was open and blank as it stared at me with the pupil rolled upwards. The mouth had only half a cherry-bud lip at top and bottom. However horrible it might be, my defiance now drew me upright until I sat on the edge of the bed.

I was on my own ground now. This gargoyle of flesh and blood had got the better of me before I could rally my senses. My momentary instinct had been to call out for someone to come and wake me from a grotesque dumb-show. What a fool I should have looked, lying there petrified by some commonplace relic of the anatomy theatre—a joke at my own expense. The object continued to turn a little more, as if to give its expressionless eye a better view of me. The hair still drifted aimlessly as if in a yellow tide.

At last this “terror” was nothing but an anatomical specimen such as one passes in a bell-jar along a row of students in a lecture room. Still unwinding at the end of whatever cord suspended it, the jar gradually displayed the human brain that had been laid open for examination, a cerebrum the colour and texture of greyish-brown meat that has been first cooked and then served cold.

The tightness in my throat had passed as mundanely as a fit of indigestion. Now that I understood what was happening, it was nothing. As a medical student, I had a dozen times examined a brain laid open in just such a manner as this, preserved in a bell-jar of spirit. What floated before me was not borne aloft from the underworld of nightmares, but pickled in formaldehyde. The “thing,” for I still caught myself thinking of the word, had no more power to harm me. The erratic beat of the heart that had woken me with a jolt was steady again. Reason no longer ran squealing into its corner, like the wainscot mouse on the far rim of human vision.

I put a lighted match to the gas-mantle. A pale glow strengthened. It fell across the window where the rear wall dropped to a little yard at the back of the house and the roof of a shed for coal and tools, a dozen feet below me. I neither heard nor saw a movement.

The severed head, or rather the wizened skin of its face, had a colour and texture which suggested that this had been an elder of some Indian tribe. I proved to be a little wrong in that diagnosis, but I was not to know it at the time. Now that I could see the bell jar more plainly, it sat in a shallow dish. The dish itself had been suspended by three chains from the lintel of the window, rather like a hanging lamp in the chancel of a church. That was how it had been kept aloft, apparently floating in the air.

Only a professional roof-top thief could have put this object and its container in place without rousing me from sleep. By now I knew a good deal from Holmes about the skills of London’s so-called cat-burglars, quite enough to conclude that none could have climbed the outside wall without alerting either of us. Once again I confronted the sightless eye and its floating hair. How had this head been put there—and why—and by whom? No doubt the sole aim was to scare me out of my wits; but for what reason?

It was not a practical joke. For a second only, I imagined some ingenious pleasantry on the part of Sherlock Holmes. But his whimsies always had a purpose to them, and I was damned if I could see any purpose in this pathological monstrosity. Instead, if it had a dark humour it also had a whiff of mania about it. However eccentric his impulses might be, my friend and housemate was no maniac.

I must wake him, of course, if only because the perpetrator might still be close at hand. I went to the open window and glanced out. There was no one in sight. I was about to draw away from my survey of the back yard when I saw by the faint reflection of gaslight and stars that there was a message of some kind written on the slates of the outhouse roof a dozen feet below. The night was cold and the roof slates had been humid enough to cause a chilly condensation. It was presumably a finger that had traced darker lines on the lighter moisture of the slates in large uneven capitals.

I COME IN SILENCE AND I KILL WITHOUT A SOUND

I VANISH LIKE THE SMOKE UPON THE WIND.

READ THIS, WHOEVER YOU MAY BE,

AND TAKE GOOD CARE YOU DO NOT CHALLENGE ME.

It seemed that the writer feared that he had still not made his purpose sufficiently plain. There was a further line, detached from the quatrain and drawn lower down across the roof. It appeared to have been done as an after-thought, just before he dropped softly from the outhouse guttering to the ground.

BEWARE ALL—I WARN BUT ONCE.

If I was to beware of anything, it was that the wretch might still be down there waiting for me to appear at the window. I found my key and unlocked the bureau bookcase, inherited from my father. This piece of furniture had for years been my companion as I slept.

My Army service revolver, a reliable and efficient Webley Mark 1, lay in the top drawer, carefully wrapped in lint, cleaned and oiled only the week before. With this faithful friend loaded in my hand, I felt more than equal to confronting any roof-top burglar or any spectre of the dead alike. At such a range, I was confident that my first bullet would settle all accounts between us.

I had no idea how Holmes would take to being roused from sleep at this unsocial hour by such a wild story as mine. I had still not consulted my watch; but as I crossed the landing, I heard the distant winter chimes of St. Marylebone Church striking four in the morning. I paused, then tapped gently at the door of his room. I pushed it open without waiting for an invitation. I kept my revolver drawn. For all I knew, he might be in mortal danger from an intruder standing over him.

I realised, as he looked up at me expressionlessly from the pillow, that he had been lying there wide awake during my silent ordeal.

“Holmes!” I said quietly. “We have had an intruder in the house!”

“Indeed?” he said equably. “And has anything been taken? Have Mrs. Hudson, Billy, and the maid been roused?”

“It is not what has been taken, but what has been brought!” As I went on, my story sounded more and more fatuous. Holmes listened without expression or reply, patiently pulling his dressing-gown about his shoulders.

“A bell-jar with half a human head, preserved in formaldehyde by the look of it, is hanging in my window. It was put there while I was fast asleep. I have heard nothing since I woke just now, and I have seen no one.”

How ridiculous it sounded! What if the thing was no longer there when we went to investigate? He looked up sharply.

“Is that all?”

“All? Is it not enough? But no—it is by no means all. Someone has left a message written in the dew on the slate roof of the shed. Someone who claims to move and kill without a sound. He warns only once and this is our warning. It is mad; the whole business is insane.”

He got to his feet and nodded.

“Good,” he said thoughtfully as he shuffled into his carpet slippers. “Capital. I had been expecting something of the kind, Watson, visitors or messages. I prefer that they should not have kept us waiting.”

“Expecting it? Preposterous! And who are ‘They,’ I should like to know!”

He was already leading the way across the landing.

“Not preposterous, Watson. I should call it inevitable in the circumstances.”

“Why, in heaven’s name? What circumstances?”

Before replying, he paused on the threshold of my room, looking across at the macabre souvenir in the window. He turned away and said, “I forsook George Meredith. I have lain awake until now, thinking. Night is the best time for it. Consider this. We may conclude that Captain Joshua Sellon of the Provost Marshal’s Corps is dead because he believed, on the evidence of Major Putney-Wilson, that Jahleel Brenton Carey was killed in India in order to silence him. Captain Carey and perhaps his wife had come to believe that the killing of the Prince Imperial was not a chance encounter with Zulu tribesmen, but rather a carefully planned assassination. Major Putney-Wilson was the Careys’ natural ally, having suffered at much the same hands. Both men were stationed close to Hyderabad, and both shared a similar evangelical faith. I will bet a pound to a penny that they shared the same garrison chapel and, not surprisingly, a determination to rid the world of Colonel Rawdon Moran.”

He stopped for a moment, as if to check that the room was truly empty, and then looked round at me.

“After Carey’s death, Putney-Wilson adopted his absurd role of Samuel Dordona in order to hunt down the murderer of his wife. So far, he has done his best to get himself killed and accomplished nothing. No doubt he has resigned his commission, but the best place for him is safely back in India.”

“And our nocturnal visitors?”

He shrugged and stared at the shrivelled head in its jar of formalin.

“Simple observation would have drawn them here. We entered Carlyle Mansions, the apartment of the murder, in public view. Who more likely to keep secret watch than the murderers? We have publicly associated ourselves with Sergeant Albert Gibbons, late of the Royal Marines, confidential courier—as and when required—to the Provost Marshal General. Who more likely to keep watch on us than those who knew his history? Did you really think we should not be noticed? For my own part I have counted upon it and should be disappointed if it were not so!”

“Even though the opposite apartment in Landor Mansions was not occupied?”

“Precisely because it was not. It had been taken by a certain ‘Mr. Ramon,’ that foolish anagram of ‘Moran.’ It seems he is not yet in the country, but how dearly he wants us to know the game has begun. This pickled head is his doing. Learn to know his mind. Moran is master of the revels, and mankind are his puppets. He reminds us tonight that we are his creatures, our very lives are at his beck and call. After Carlyle Mansions, did you truly believe we should hear no more of the matter?”

“I had hoped so. I did not quite see it as you do.”

“Did you not? For myself, I was so sure of it that I have slept tonight—or rather I have not slept—with an efficient little Laroux pistolet under my pillow. It is a firearm better suited to a lady’s corsage but handy enough in the circumstances. One cannot be too careful. Now let us see what we have.”

He stood back a little from the window, regarding the severed and cloven head in its jar as though it might have been a work of art. After a moment or two, he passed judgment.

“Phrenologically, I feel quite sure that this fellow’s origin is East African, though not, I believe, the Somali coast. That aquiline nose and the proud angle of the jaw would tempt me to suggest Ethiopia or even perhaps one of the many itinerant tribes of the southern Sudan. I would hazard that as a guess.”

“Holmes! Who cares where the damned thing came from? What matters is that it is here!”

“I care greatly,” he said in a murmur. Then he leant forward a little for a view of the yard with its outhouse. “And you say that you saw the message on the slates below us?”

“It is on the roof, just down there.”

He shook his head.

“I only ask because I fear it is there no longer. It is a foolish but effective trick of writing on ice or dew or anything which will vanish in the warmer air. It makes the inscription useless as evidence and usually casts doubt on the credibility of the witness. As it will do upon you, if you repeat the story outside these walls.”

“Fortunately, I can remember what was written, word for word!”

“Of course you can!” he cried soothingly, “and I should believe you without hesitation, in any case. But do you not see? It was essential to their purpose that you should read it while it was still there. I am quite sure that they watched you as you did so. They may be watching still, for all we know. That message—that challenge indeed—was the whole purpose behind tonight’s charade. As for the rest.…”

“I come in silence and I kill without a sound,” I repeated; “I vanish like smoke upon the wind.…”

“Just so. Certainly neither of us heard them come or go.”

“Beware all, I warn but once!”

“Of course, they could not leave without a threat of that kind. These are men of some quality, Watson, however criminally deranged. We should do well to remember that.”

“And we still have no evidence of the message they left!”

He looked a little put out by this. “I would not quite say that, my dear fellow. You have read the message and that is all. If proof of its existence became absolutely necessary, I do not think it would be beyond my powers of detection to provide it. I should be surprised if the finger which traced those wet words had not also disturbed the patterns of minute debris collected on the surface of the slates. A microscopic examination would, I think, reveal paths of lettering left in this process. For the moment, however, we have more immediate evidence to consider.”

“The severed head?”

“The severed head indeed. Our visitor—or visitors—have departed, and I believe we shall hear from them again. But I do not think it will be tonight. They would prefer to see us tremble a little, first of all. Where is the fun otherwise? Therefore I propose to recoup a little of the sleep I have lost. Following that, I have no doubt what our next step must be.”

I nodded towards the window. “That thing?”

“Indeed,” he said. “Let that be our task.”

“To do what?”

He looked at me with surprise.

“What else, Watson? To discover its origins. Why have we been favoured with that particular gift? If we can establish the reason, it may take us a good long way.”

Breakfast on the following morning was a little later than usual. The exhibit in its bell-jar had been covered with a cloth and placed out of sight in an old leather hatbox in the lumber-room above our sleeping-quarters. On Sherlock Holmes’s instructions, nothing was to be said to Mrs. Hudson or the rest of the household about the events of the preceding night.

“You believe that we shall experience some further intrusion of this kind?”

He shook his head. “Not of this kind. I think that most unlikely, Watson. Surprise is their weapon, and so these people seldom repeat themselves. We are merely forewarned and therefore forearmed.”

I laid my knife and fork on the empty plate. “He came unseen and in silence,” I said thoughtfully; “he vanished like smoke in the wind. How did he come?”

Holmes rattled the pages of his Morning Post a little impatiently and spoke from behind them.

“He was here already, I imagine.”

“But how?”

He looked at me round the corner of the paper.

“Watson, you have already assured me that the ascent in silence to your window from the yard—or the descent from the roof-top—would be almost impossible while carrying a head in a bell-jar. Heads are heavier than people imagine. How then was it delivered?”

“How?”

“My dear fellow, were I to perform such a task, the modus operandi would be simple. I should enter when the house is open at various points, take cover, and then remain concealed. That is how I should go about it. I might choose the roof-space for my concealment. Until this morning, when did we last have occasion to open up the lumber-room? Even without that, how easy the access would be to those other dark corners under the tiles which Mrs. Hudson abandons to nature. Once in the house and their purpose accomplished, the departure requires only a doubled length of rope which may be used for the descent. This can then be cut through as one stands on the ground and the entire length drawn clear.”

“These people have been in the house with us for all those hours, and we have not known it?”

“Quite certainly. Were we to search those abandoned spaces, we should no doubt find the evidence of it. Our time is too valuable at present to waste it upon foregone conclusions.”

“How did they get in?”

“I was in conversation with Mrs. Hudson this morning. It seems the gas company sent two workmen yesterday afternoon to make a routine inspection of safety joints on the pipes. It is now an annual precaution, to ensure that we shall not all be asphyxiated in our beds. An hour later, these fellows took their departure. That is to say, they shouted a cheery farewell down the basement staircase and the outer door was heard to slam behind them as they—or one of them—left. No one recalls their appearances. They were just gasmen in gasmen’s caps, like all other gasmen. How simple.”

“And if they should return?”

“I do not believe they will take the trouble to disturb us again today,” he said, sighing behind his newspaper. “You recall the message? Beware all, I warn but once. In that, if in nothing else, I believe them to be sincere. We have had our warning. Next time, I imagine it will be a question of whose throat is slit first.”

“And what is to be done?”

He lowered the paper again and spoke thoughtfully,

“It is possible that Brother Mycroft may know more than I do about these matters. It is sometimes the case. We shall endeavour to find out presently. Today is the first Thursday of the month, when the committee of the Diogenes Club meets at 11 A.M. That is where Mycroft will be this morning. Let us therefore put Mrs. Hudson’s Billy to the trouble of fetching the leather hatbox down from the attic—before he puts his best foot forward for the telegraph office.”