Death on a Pale Horse

9





For the rest of the week, I found it difficult to share Holmes’s enthusiasm for a fight to the finish. We might simply be victims of our antagonists’ sense of fun. We should board the Comtesse de Flandre at Ostend and disembark at Dover eight hours later, just as though no villainy had been intended. We should watch in the darkness and fog without ever setting eyes upon Plon Plon and his little court in their “royal saloon.” Perhaps whatever meaning we had read into the cryptic words “Comtesse de Flandre” and “New Moon” was entirely of our own invention. Only time would tell. Worst than that, we might land in England to hear that some monstrous robbery or homicide had taken place elsewhere; all our careful planning would have merely ensured that we were not there to prevent it.

I lay awake and tried to imagine why even the most inventive gang of criminals would announce to the world that it was about to board such a ship, hold a prince to ransom, overcome armed guards and a steel grille, and then escape in the middle of the sea. They would be fools to try it. Moran, whatever else he might be, had shown he was no fool. They certainly dared not remain on board when the steamer docked in England, for the harbour police would be waiting at Dover, supplemented by waterguard officers and reinforced if necessary by a party of riflemen from the duty regiment at Dover Castle.

It made very little difference to me when Holmes announced that he was going ahead of me as far as Brussels, a seventy-mile journey by rail. He would travel back by train to Ostend and we should meet at the pier an hour before the Comtesse de Flandre sailed. My friend’s appointment, arranged by courtesy of Brother Mycroft, was with the British military attaché at our Brussels embassy. Though our mission involved a ship belonging to the Belgian government, it had been decided not to involve the authorities in Brussels or Ostend. Mycroft, always a prudent man, therefore insisted on having some diplomatic authority on our side in the event of what he vaguely called “complications.”

On the day of our crossing to Ostend, I woke with an unexpected lightness of heart. All this would prove to be a fuss about nothing. If the final accounting came with Colonel Rawdon Moran, as it might well do, it would take some other form. At any rate, it seemed most unlikely to come yet.

As usual, I had packed my belongings and was ready while Holmes was still getting his things together. Despite my scepticism, I did not neglect to include my Webley revolver with its six chambers loaded.

“I suppose Belgian law is the same as ours,” I said cheerfully: “one is permitted to carry a firearm for reasonable self-defence.”

He shrugged this off: “I hardly think it will come to matters of Belgian law.”

He then closed the drawer of his “chemical table,” where he usually kept his Laroux pistolet. I had not seen it lying in its usual place and assumed he must already have it with him.

“It does no harm to be prepared,” I said gently.

If we were credulous enough to believe what we had been told, we had a good chance in the next few days of encountering one of the most ruthless men we were ever to meet. He appeared to be as intent upon assassinating the pair of us as anyone I had ever heard of. Yet I sensed that Holmes was going into combat unarmed.

The next twelve hours were as uneventful as I hoped the rest of our escort duty would prove to be. The sea journey to Ostend takes the form of a direct fifty-mile crossing from Dover to the Ruytingen lightship, a point roughly parallel with the French coast at Dunkirk. There follows a stretch of some twenty miles eastwards, passing the frontier of France and Belgium. The tidal harbour of Ostend, between two steamer piers, lies just beyond it.

I cannot recommend a voyage to Ostend out of season. The air was bitter with an east wind blowing, for there is no high ground to speak of between here and Siberia. The sky had the colour of lead, and we were surrounded by a constant rising mist from a chilly sea. This vapour blotted out even coastal views of the flat land extending through Belgium and Holland.

It was the middle of the week and there were relatively few other passengers. However, this cross-channel service is maintained every day and night of the year, for these are the mail services of the Belgian and British governments. Our companions included a monsignore, in his uniform dress of cassock and biretta. He might be an assassin in disguise but I thought it more likely that he was a future cardinal. A party of schoolgirls travelled with two stout middle-aged chaperones. Hardly the stuff of which murderers are made.

The time during which I was on my own in Ostend, while Holmes went to make diplomatic arrangements in Brussels, did not show the resort at its most appealing. To be sure, it has become fashionable enough in the summer season with its raised promenade along the Digue, its Assembly Rooms, grand hotels, even a villa for the visits of King Leopold and the royal family. Out of season, the bathing machines stood abandoned on the sands where a forlorn seashore is divided by wooden groins into separate beaches for men and women.

The docks consist of a tidal harbour with a steamer pier running out into deeper water at either side. A railway line extends along the eastern jetty and the Brussels train pulls in not more than twenty yards from the gangways of the channel steamers. Two ancient ironclad warships stood guard offshore, square gun-ports along their sides, a pair of squat funnels between their tall masts. A large-rigged sloop and an old bomb-ketch lay rotting on the mud of the shallows. Two other ferries had tied up already and were taking on stores.

I had nothing to do but await the return of Sherlock Holmes. I did this in my own room or else in the dining-room and lounge of the Hotel de la Plage. The service had been recommended to me as preferable to the Hotel de l’Océan, the only other first-class establishment on the shore.

Any reader of The Times will have noticed the number of letters complaining about the dismal unpunctuality of the ferry service between Ostend and Dover. To be fair, it is not the fault of the steamers but of the Belgian railway system. Frustrated correspondents complain of the consequences. Business mail is delayed, post is not delivered. Brokers in the City of London deal one or even two days late with transactions which in Paris or Frankfurt would have been punctually completed. Money is lost, and that is always a great thing.

It was something of a relief on the following day to see, through the mist, the shape of the Comtesse de Flandre moored at the eastern harbour pier, where the trains come in. She had probably sailed light from Antwerp, after coaling, and would remain alongside empty until sailing-time. Mycroft Holmes assured us that she would have been searched and inspected from stem to stern before even a single member of the crew was allowed back on board. To make assurance doubly sure, a pair of uniformed Belgian policemen kept their watch by the ship’s gangways, which was a customary precaution for international sailings.

As it happened, the two gangways were not yet in place, having been hoisted side by side on to the paddle-box amidships to prevent strangers coming and going while the ship was docked. Some of her crew had taken advantage of their afternoon shore leave, sauntering down the pier for the seaman’s privilege of a few hours in the bars and cafés of the old town. No doubt the captain and the first mate would be the first allowed aboard to supervise the stokers, who must lay the fires and raise steam before she sailed.

As I surveyed her from the window of the hotel dining room, through the vaporous light, the steamer was smaller and lower in the water than the vessel which had brought us over the day before. She was, as I later had reason to know, about five hundred tons, a little over two hundred feet long, and at least thirty feet broad amidships. With the deck extending over the paddle-boxes on either side, the “waist” amidships on these ships is wider than those more recent ferries driven by propellers. There were two funnels, yellow with black “admiralty” tops to trap cinders. The first-class deck saloon stood aft of these and the captain’s navigating-bridge forward. I thought that in the present calm sea, she would do well enough for the sixty or seventy miles of this channel crossing.

I still could not believe that this was the ship or the place for some great adventure. If I had any concern at all, it was for the state of some of the crew after their visit to the old streets of Ostend. No one had so far returned to the ship and, though I had seen my portmanteau with other cases being wheeled from the hotel to the jetty by a porter, the gangways remained drawn up. The brown-and-cream vans of the Messageries Impériales had already arrived, and the chests for the mail-ship’s strong-room had been unloaded under the eyes of the three guards with guns in their belts who would accompany them.

Plon Plon’s war-chest must be weighed before being loaded, and again at Dover Harbour, to ensure that the weights were identical. In this way, the ferry company was absolved from blame if things went wrong at some other point of the journey. Now was the time I would have chosen to stage a robbery. The baggage was in the open air, not locked behind a steel grille. The robbers had the whole of Belgium to escape into, rather than being trapped on a ship in the middle of the English Channel. But nothing happened. There were, after all, six or eight guardians of the law with pistols or revolvers to hand. Surely we had hoaxed ourselves into believing that some master-stroke of villainy was in prospect?

I was thinking I might as well sit it out until tea-time, when a liveried post-boy appeared at my table and saluted me.

“Doctor Vastson?”

I looked up and he handed me an envelope. Though it was of a different colour to the English kind, I had no doubt that this contained a telegram. Who but Holmes knew that I was here? I slit it open and drew out a flimsy paper with a longer message than I had expected.

JNQFSBUJWFUIBUJSFNBJOJOCSVTTFMTTUPQQSFTFOU

TDFOFPGFWFOUTJTIFSFTUPQPVSDMJFOUTJOGPSNFE

ZPVXJMMCFUIFJSFTDPSUTUPQZPVSEVUJFTOPNJOB

MTUPQMFTUSBEFPSHSFHTPOBUEPWFSTUPQ

BDLOPXMFEHFNFNTOPUSFRVJSDFTUPQIPMNFT

What on earth was this? A cipher from Holmes, of course, though nothing in it identified him. And where from? Brussels, presumably. But what about? Any telegram was obviously urgent. I stared at the jumble of letters in growing panic. There was not a single name hidden here, not a single word that meant anything. I had no idea where to begin!

Worse still, the use of a cipher presumably meant that our enemies were on to us after all. They had penetrated our defences so expertly that we could no longer communicate in plain English nor trust the officials of the Belgian telegraph service. This revelation brought me up short. Had Holmes sent me these few lines of mere gibberish as a warning of all this? But I must assume that the nonsense before me could be decoded. I glared at it, wondering what the cipher might be and where I should begin.

At the end of twenty minutes, I was shaking with mental exhaustion and apprehension. Despite the raw cold of the day outside, I was also perspiring a little from the concentrated anxiety. To start with, I had guessed that the last six letters would be his name, as they would be on any telegram. So IPMNFT probably equalled HOLMES. But these letters made no sense anywhere else in the message.

Very well. The sequence TUPQ appeared six times in five lines, at more or less regular intervals. I felt a flood of relief in the knowledge that a letter of the code would always have the same equivalent in the alphabet. Thank God! From now on it might be straightforward. If the encoding of every single letter had varied, I might try from now till Christmas without deciphering a word of this. The sequence TUPQ also appeared immediately before what I took to be the sender’s name. In a telegram, this was invariably the punctuation STOP. At last I was getting somewhere and, surely, Holmes would not use a cipher that I had not a hope of breaking. Very well. I caught my breath and worked with a pencil on the back of a menu card until I began to get the better of this rampart of a hundred and ninety-two coded letters.

The letter F appeared twenty-five times. Other things being equal, that must be E, the most commonly used letter in English prose. Then J appeared twelve times, ahead of B at seven. I guessed that J was most likely to stand for I, made more frequent by its use as the personal pronoun. B was very probably A. With that last conclusion the system fell into place. I had soon divided the lines into words.

JNQFSBUJWF UIBU J SFNBJO JO CSVTTFMT TUPQ QSFTFOU

TDFOF PG FWFOUT JT IFSF TUPQ PVS DMJFOUT JOGPSNFE

ZPV XJMM CF UIFJS FTDPSU TUPQ ZPVS EVUJFT OPNJOBM

TUPQ MFTUSBEF PS HSFHTPO BU EPWFS TUPQ

BDLOPXMFEHFNFOU OPU SFRVJSDF TUPQ IPMNFT

He had simply replaced each letter with the one following it in the alphabet. It was childishly simple now but not in a moment of dismay when faced by an alphabetic rampart, infinite possibilities, and very little time to spare! Of course I had supposed from the start that he was not likely to send me a message I could not unravel—but that start had been a moment of panic. And if I could decode it, why was it that our enemies could not?

I completed the transposition of the letters.

IMPERATIVE THAT I REMAIN IN BRUSSELS STOP PRESENT SCENE

OF EVENTS IS HERE STOP OUR CLIENTS INFORMED YOU WILL BE

THEIR ESCORT STOP YOUR DUTIES NOMINAL STOP LESTRADE OR

GREGSON AT DOVER STOP ACKNOWLEDGEMENT NOT REQUIRED

STOP HOLMES

And that was all. I had been right. Whatever might be going on in Brussels, this was to be a channel crossing as uneventful as any other in the ship’s itinerary. All the same, I swore that I was going to be the first passenger aboard the Comtesse de Flandre and not a face that followed me should escape my scrutiny. Not even if it were Holmes in disguise!

As a rule, passengers were permitted to board an hour before sailing time. I reached the gangways as they were being lowered into place, side by side, and made fast. I was dressed in my warm Harris tweed coat and my hat and carrying my black malacca cane, ready for the worst that the voyage could bring. My revolver was in the pocket of the coat, but much use did it seem to be now. Before I and a few others could get closer, the purser was at the gangway and his message was clear.

“Stokers’ party and crew only just now. Thank you.”

We waited until they were aboard—and still we waited. Then the reason for this became apparent. It was the arrival of a four-wheeler drawn by a pair of white horses. Several men got down, one of them a stout figure in a frock coat with a glimpse of astrakhan collar and silk cravat. He was holding a top hat as if to save the trouble of taking it off to acknowledge the crowd. This was my first sight of Prince Napoleon-Jerome, Plon Plon. The lamp-light caught a heavy face with mouth turned down and eyes mournful. His head was bald at the top and the dark hair grizzled. Yet the profile was strong and impressive. Here and there people clapped, but for the most part the onlookers were quiet. Most of them probably did not recognise the claimant to the French throne. Waiting passengers stood back for him to pass with three soberly dressed civilians and two officers in dark blue uniforms and gold insignia.

After an interval to allow the royal party to settle itself in the first-class deck saloon, the purser stood back and I was, indeed, the first of the other passengers aboard. I had decided that the best vantage point would be at the steamer’s rail just forward of the paddle-box. From there I could see every face that came up the gangways, until each arrival stepped on to the deck a few feet away from me. I could even watch them as they waited on the harbour pier for their turn to come aboard. Perhaps because this was a Friday sailing, there were far more than had come across from Dover, but the second-class travellers would be confined to the forward part of the ship.

I truly had expected that Holmes might slip aboard in disguise; but none of these, whom I saw at very close range, resembled him in the least. I do not underrate my friend’s capacity for concealing his identity. Yet there is one thing that cannot be disguised, short of bandages or dark glasses, and that is the eyes. Not for nothing had I been a physician searching the gaze of my patients for hope, fear, or resignation. I looked at close range into the faces of those hundred or so who came aboard. I would swear on my life that none of them was Holmes nor, indeed, Colonel Rawdon Moran. His telegram seemed to have told the truth. The scene of events would be in Brussels.

As the light dwindled, the rising mist became a fog that closed upon us with the chill of a hoar frost. The ritual of departure began and with it came a fond memory of my childhood. It was low tide and the steamer had come in bows-first. To go astern in shallow water, against low tide and poor visibility, is unwise. Yet there was often no room for a ship to turn herself round in a small harbour where other vessels were moored. The answer is simple. A man in a rowing boat comes out, carries the loop of a heavy mooring rope from the winch in the stern of the ship to a bollard on the far quay. The winch is then used to wind the rope in and pull the stern round until the bows of the steamer face the tide. The loop from the bollard splashes into the sea, and the length of the mooring rope is wound in at the stern. How often had I seen the ferries perform this manoeuvre in the west coast harbours of my Scottish boyhood!

The oarsman in his little shell rowed out from the mole, collected the rope, rowed back, and looped it over the bollard. There was a clanking and a gust of steam from our stern as the heavy rope rose taut and dripping from the water. Our stern swung slowly round until the bows faced the sea. The loop was cast off by the oarsman standing at the end of the harbour jetty. The bridge telegraph above me rang “Half Ahead.”

We faced the dark with several hours and sixty or seventy miles of fog-bound sea in a flat calm ahead of us. We should round the Ruytingen lightship off Dunkirk, then turn north for Dover. British travellers “going foreign,” as the saying is, would have taken the shorter crossing to Dover from Calais. Unfortunately, our royal protégé, like all other claimants to the throne of France, had been permanently exiled by the laws of the Third Republic and was not to set foot on French soil.

The weather promised to be thick, but not so dense that the sailing had to be cancelled. As we eased past the end of Ostend’s western pier, the bridge telegraph rang “Full Ahead” to the engine room and the two paddles picked up speed. Their wake frothed down either side of the ship as we slid into the seaway, past a tier of colliers and coasters. Presently we were steaming at about twelve knots, parallel with the flat winter sands. Behind a line of muddy surf, only a chain of lights from houses on the esplanade marked the shoreline that was fast receding into the gloom.

While I was leaning on the rail, watching our departure, the first mate had come to the foremast and hoisted a white oil-light almost twenty feet above the deck. He then turned, gave an order, and a second man standing behind him handed a box of lucifers to the ship’s boy. The lad struck one of these and lit the green navigation light whose lantern was fixed to the forward edge of the starboard paddle-box. The seaman took the box back and went to attend to the red light on the port side.

On such Channel crossings in poor weather, I much prefer to “stick it out on deck,” smoking a pipe, rather than go down to the miasma of the refreshment saloon. The vibration of the ship’s reciprocating engines under my feet and the beat of the paddles on either side of the hull was comforting, even on such a journey as this. We passed very little shipping. From time to time I could just make out the drifting ghost of a fishing smack or a lugger, its ochre-coloured sails catching the faint breeze as it made its way out from Ostend or Dunkirk to the fishing grounds of the North Sea.

After twenty minutes of standing amidships, I had lost the lights of the shoreline. The sea-mist closed in until it condensed into a silent fog whose droplets hung on my hat-brim and lapels. They call it mist, rather than fog, but it was so thick that from the bows of the Comtesse de Flandre I could no longer see the red, yellow, and black of the Belgian flag at the stern. Indeed, I could hardly make out the two life-boats on board, hanging aft in their hoists, conveniently close for first-class passengers. The first-class saloon, at present the “royal saloon,” was enclosed by a little metal gate across either side of the deck indicating to second-class passengers that they had reached the limit of their permitted territory.

I heard a voice behind me.

“Doctor Vastson, is it not?”

For a moment I expected to turn and see the liveried waiter from the Hotel de la Plage, but this was the younger of the two French military figures in their dark blue uniforms who had accompanied the Prince Napoleon-Jerome aboard.

“Lieutenant Theodore Cabell,” he said reassuringly with a slight click of the heels and a respectful inclination of his head towards me.

It was an unexpected time and place for such formalities, but we shook hands. Lieutenant Cabell was a slightly built and flaxen-haired young man, more German than French in appearance. I thought he was the last person to be taken for an intelligence agent—or, indeed, a royal valet. He indicated the little gate to the first-class promenade, which now stood open.

“Come, please, sir. His Highness wishes it.”

I should have been happier keeping watch according to my own rules, but I could hardly ignore a claimant to the throne of France.

Theodore Cabell repeated his invitation.

“You come this way, please. It is all right. His Highness merely wishes to receive you.”

The very thing I had been hoping to avoid was to be held answerable for the measures we had taken to protect Plon Plon and his possessions. I hardly knew what the measures were, in the absence of Holmes himself.

Lieutenant Cabell slid back the outer door at one side of the first-class saloon and stood aside for me to enter. He followed and pronounced my name in his own way. At the far end of the casually furnished saloon, a bowed figure in formal frock coat and silk cravat looked up from his easy chair. I might easily have mistaken him for the manager of an important branch of one of our London banks. To one side stood a man in the uniform of the French general staff. Next to him was a middle-aged and formally dressed civilian, who I assumed to be General Georges Boulanger. These made up the “royal” party, so far as I could see.

“Doctor Vastson,” the prince spoke as if in imitation of Cabell, holding out his hand but remaining seated, as befitted his rank.

I took the hand and inclined my head over it. It was a suitable compromise in acknowledging a man who did not yet wear the crown of France but might very well do so before the summer was out.

“Tell me,” he went on in his casual and slightly accented English: “I am a small bit puzzled. There was to be Mr. Sharelock Holmes. He was recommended to me by his brother, Sir Mycroft. Now there is you but, I think, no Mr. Holmes?”

“My colleague has run to earth those who were suspected of trying to board this steamer. They are safely detained in Brussels and no danger to us. I have myself examined every passenger who embarked at Ostend. Now there is no port of call until Dover. Inspector Lestrade or Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard will be waiting for us there with an escort. Mr. Holmes has arranged all that.”

I hoped I was right.

“Run to earth?” Napoleon-Jerome, whom I continued to think of as Plon Plon, balanced the phrase delicately upon his tongue. “I much like that. Run to earth. I am pleased to hear it.”

Theodore Cabell looked at me with a deferential smile.

“Very pleased,” he said warmly.

Plon Plon looked up at him.

“Oh? Oh, quite so. Very pleased. I am very pleased. Since there is no Mr. Holmes, perhaps you would do a small thing for me, sir. I should like you to go downstairs for a bit. See that no one has opened the gate to the mailroom where my box is deposited.”

I wondered why Lieutenant Cabell could not go down and take a look. Presumably his instructions were never to leave the prince unprotected.

“Of course, sir.”

“You were brave in Afghanistan, monsieur. Sir Mycroft says so to me. A good deal brave.”

“I hardly think that, sir. I was present when the battle took place at Maiwand. Not as a fighting man.”

“But as a soldier!” He smiled as if at the comicality of my reply. “You must tell me everything about it soon. I should like that a great deal. I shall look forward to it.”

He shifted himself in his chair, looking aside slightly at the man I took to be General Boulanger. Lieutenant Cabell touched my arm and bowed before his prince, rather as if at the altar of a church. Plon Plon did not look at me again as I lowered my head briefly and respectfully. Then I withdrew in company with my escort. I knew, of course, that the prince and I would never discuss Afghanistan nor anything else.

I went down the steps of the companionway to the lower deck. It seemed most unlikely that any of the guards would open the mailroom door to me in the middle of the voyage, let alone would they permit me to inspect the so-called war-chest. In that case, I should allow myself a glass of Highland malt in the ship’s bar.

Below-decks, a ship of this kind, with its engine-room on view from the passageways down either side, is a wonderland of mechanical devices. Amid the smell of warm oil and the glow of copper piping, two massive steel pistons drove the heavy shaft that connects the weighty paddle-wheels at port and starboard. Rising and falling, the two so-called diagonal cylinders with three hundred horsepower of steam behind them surged and retreated, rose and fell alternately, like captive beasts. No mere propeller could rival this display of mechanical might which had long ago conquered the ocean steamer routes to New York and Bombay.

Further aft, the port and starboard passageways came together at the glass doors of the dining-saloon. To one side was a steel grille or gate. Behind it were the “high-value” parcels and boxes, as well as the wicker baskets of registered post, bound for England from the Continent. The vertical steel bars of the gate were about six inches apart but connected by a redoubtable cross-piece and lock half-way down. This mailroom was a self-contained steel compartment in the stern of the ship. The three armed guardians of the Messageries Impériales were somewhere out of sight behind their partition.

Whether the prince’s strong-box was secure, I could not yet see. A long curtain hung immediately inside the grille, cutting off most of the view. There was a small hatchway to one side, the barred guichet of the bureau de change. It seemed that its clerk had access only through the mailroom. But even that cubby hole was closed on this occasion and hung with a brusque notice—Pas de service jusqu’au Douvres.—closure until Dover.

There was no one in sight to answer inquiries. At one side, however, the curtain left a narrow gap. By taking a slant view, I could see most of the interior. Canvas bags of mail were ranged down one side. I made out a number of trunks, almost cabin-size, and a dozen or so wicker baskets which no doubt carried insured letters and small registered packets. Among the commercial consignments, there were a dozen or so wooden courier-boxes, reinforced by steel corner-pieces and lock-plates.

That was all, except for what at first I thought must be a coffin or casket carrying home the body of an unlucky Englishman abroad. The quality of the polished wood was infinitely superior to anything else in the room, probably made of oak. The other boxes had merely the agent’s or banker’s name painted in black on the lid. From this one, I swear I caught a glint of gold leaf. If that was not Plon Plon’s “war-chest,” I was mightily mistaken.

There was no means of calling attention. This was as far as I should get—or wished to get. I would go back, explain the situation, and suggest that Lieutenant Cabell should come down with me. He, at least, could try to make a formal request. I had nothing but my steamer ticket, no credentials whatever. No one would unlock that steel grille just to please me.

As I passed the dials of the engine-room again, the pistons had settled to a crossing speed of thirty-three revolutions per minute, still driving us “Full Ahead.” The gleaming brass of the overhead telegraph dial, connecting the engine-room with the navigating-bridge, confirmed this. The engineers saw nothing of the outside world while on duty. A link that appeared like a bicycle chain connected the handle of the telegraph on the bridge with the hand on the repeater dial of the engine-room as the captain’s orders jangled down here. The engineers themselves had now found their perches, one with a pipe, another with a newspaper, glancing up at the dials from time to time as if the ship would drive herself.

I put my hand on the steel wall to one side of this open view and snatched it off again. The heat would almost raise a blister. This was the partition of the passageway from the stokehold and the boilers. The crack of a metal door between the stokers and the engineers reflected an intermittent yellow flame-light.

Just then, the donkey-man was attending to the machinery with his oil-can and wad of cotton waste. The second engineer was reading his paper by the reversing gear, as they call it. The door of the stokehold opened. A man like a tall hobgoblin was standing in the alleyway that leads to the furnace. The engineer turned and shouted at him. I knew enough French to understand “Allez-vous en!” as the soot-faced scallywag was ordered back to his work. He was a tall rather bent fellow in vest and overalls, with a cap worn back to front. Truly he looked like something from the underworld. Soot covered his face until nothing was visible but the pink of his lips and the whites of his eyes. Very likely he had come aboard more than a little drunk. The engineer swore at him again and scouted him back to his duties, just at the moment all the stokers were needed to shovel up coal from the bunkers and toss it into the furnaces. I guessed that this malingering lout might be dismissed next day.

For a moment the man continued to defy the engineer, as if for the pure fun of the thing. It seemed he was demanding a “proper” drink, not the enamel jugs of water provided in the stokehold. He had presumably shovelled several hundredweights of coal into the furnaces since Ostend. But he was wasting his words. At length, having made his point, he shambled back down the narrow passage to the boilers, where reflected flames flickered on the white-painted iron. I thought after all that if I was condemned to work in such conditions—and for such wages—I might well take to the bottle.

I was so far away in my thoughts that I almost jumped like a cat at a sudden voice behind me.

“Dr.Vastson?”

I turned and found myself staring into the spectacled face of the man who had rowed his boat from Ostend harbour pier to collect our heavy mooring rope. He had carried it back to the jetty, looped it over a bollard, and waved us farewell as the winch in the stern of the steamer turned our bows seawards and the rope was cast off again. He still wore his greasy cap, bulky donkey jacket, and moleskin trousers with worn-out knees. But I had watched him wave us off from the harbour pier, across a hundred yards of open sea, as we steamed away. He could never row after us at the speed of the ship’s engines! How was he here? The face with its eyes vastly magnified by his lenses was one I did not know—or so it seemed, until a slight change in his glance and the removal of the spectacles betrayed him by his smile as Sherlock Holmes!

He turned his head away.

“Listen carefully, Watson, and do not appear to notice me.”

Fortunately, we were leaning on the safety rail where the vibration of the engines made our words inaudible more than a few inches distant. I turned aside to survey the pistons.

“I watched every passenger up the gangway, Holmes. I swear you were not among them. The man who carried that rope back is still in Ostend.”

“Indeed he is,” Holmes said impatiently: “Sergeant Albert Gibbons of the Royal Marines is still in Ostend. It was I who rowed that cockleshell out to the ship to fetch the rope. I took it. While all eyes were on preparations for the ship’s departure, I let my shell drift from the stern well-deck back to the platform of the paddle sponson at this level. A crewman climbed out to coil a sponson rope. A crewman climbed back. Not a glance came our way. It was Gibbons who rowed back with the mooring rope. Who notices the face of a dockyard scully? It was the easiest thing in the world, while the men at the winch gave that machine their full attention.”

“And then what?”

He shrugged and smiled again.

“In weather as thick as this, a man could become invisible in a dozen places on deck.”

“And the telegram? The code? What went wrong in Brussels?”

“I am happy to say, my dear fellow, that nothing went wrong. My coded message to you was betrayed in Brussels by a post office clerk for £100, just as we have been betrayed in London. That was essential. I would gladly have paid him myself to cheat us, though I fear the poor wretch may soon be lying somewhere with his throat cut after he has served his purpose. I have counted upon Moran or his underlings reading that telegram and deciphering it.”

Then he sighed.

“I trusted your powers of perception, Watson. Why was my cipher made so simple? A schoolboy game! A babe in arms could transpose each letter with the next one in the alphabet and decode the meaning. Did you believe I could do no better than that, if I had wanted it to remain secret? You cannot have believed that what it said was true? Oh, Watson, Watson! I tell you again, you see but you do not perceive. Please listen to me.”

I listened.

Holmes said, “I cannot find that Moran or anyone connected with him is on this ship. But there is an impostor.”

“Who?”

“Why do you think I am standing here? You have just seen him!”

“The insubordinate stoker?”

“That man is no stoker!”

“He came from the stoke-hold.”

“How long have we been at sea?”

“Almost an hour.”

“Correct. That man’s face was so covered in coal dust that only the eyes and the mouth were visible. After an hour of shovelling coal in intense heat, did you see a single trace of perspiration running down his cheeks? for I did not! A ship of this capacity requires two furnaces to raise sufficient steam for its two boilers—fore and aft. Each furnace requires at least quarter of a ton to travel the distance from here to Ostend. Does he look like a man who has worked in that heat, at that pace, for an hour?”

“No,” I said reluctantly.

“Nor does he to me. He looks to me like a man who has applied soot to his face as an actor applies make-up, in this case to disguise himself beyond possible recognition. For the moment, however, his attempt to escape the stokehold has been frustrated. I shall watch him.”

“But there are stokers already. He cannot stand idle in front of the furnaces.”

“Of course not. Stoking is an art which he does not possess. I believe he is posing in front of them as what they call a trimmer, a menial who merely shifts coal from the store to the bunker and whose face does not get covered in coal dust like that. He has used it as stage make-up.”

“Then who is he?”

“Let us be content that he is probably an impostor with the speech and manner of a dockland drunkard. Now if you will forgive me, I must leave you and attend to the safe-keeping of Plon Plon and his baubles.”

“I should have thought he and they are safe enough from here to Dover.”

“Would you? Then you have clearly overlooked the promises of ‘Hunter’ Moran. I assure you he has never yet failed to keep them. To lose that reputation might quite literally be the death of him.”