Death on a Pale Horse

11





In the fleeting phosphorescence from the light-ship, I made out a small boat that had come alongside our stern. The line of the Comtesse de Flandre dropped down at the after end to a small well-deck that accommodated the winch and its platform. The lower stern rail could also be opened at this point to give access for engineering maintenance. In the present state of the wreck, as the lower decks flooded, this had become the easiest point at which to disembark survivors into a small boat. Or, indeed, to embark from one.

We stood and listened behind the yellow funnels. The black “admiralty caps” round their tops were lost in the mist overhead. The scene around us was illuminated by the last glimmering oil-lights, two of them fitted just above the windows of the after-saloon. Their pale glow extended little more than a yard or two around us. Even here, the devastation was considerable. Not only was the navigation-bridge wrecked, but the wide ventilation skylight of the engine-room had been blown off by an explosion of steam from the boilers. Looking down at the flooded engine-room, I could just see that the rising water was now level with the blocks of the pistons that had driven the ship.

At that moment, my heart seemed to jump to my throat as the casing of an oil-light mounted above a square window of the saloon shattered without warning. There was no sound of a detonation as the frosted glass enclosing the wick burst apart, only the rattle of fragments scattering across the deck. A small pool of fire from the little oil reservoir of the lamp rippled, guttered, and expired on the planking no more than a foot or two away from us.

Then someone laughed in the darkness of the fog bank that lay on all sides.

Before I could ask Holmes what the devil was happening, another glass lamp-bowl disintegrated, high on a standard above the companionway opening. Specks of burning wick flew about like sparks from a forge. Then there was darkness except for a remaining glimmer above the starboard window of the saloon. But I knew who had laughed even before I heard the voice calling me.

“It won’t do, doctor! It won’t do at all! I have warned you more than once, have I not, that you had far better give it up?”

The launch alongside our stern had not come to rescue us. Without another sound, the square glass window of the saloon, by my right shoulder, cracked into three pieces and slithered inwards. Joshua Sellon had died without a sound, for I had examined the wound that killed him. I was now undergoing my first practical experience of Von Herder’s carbon dioxide cylinder-pistol. No percussion wave. No powder flash. No acrid drift of cordite. And in the darkness of the fog, the marksman remained an invisible assailant, his soft-nosed lead bullets travelling almost at the speed of sound. Powerful enough to smash a window with a shot whose discharge was silent and invisible. Powerful enough, as I had seen for myself, to drill through a man’s skull and blow the segments of his brain apart as though they had been no more than a cauliflower.

The voice came again, abruptly and from a different direction. I had not a hope of seeing him in such conditions. Stillness everywhere made it all the more difficult to guess the range.

“Doctor! I warned you that you would only hurt yourself! But you would have it so. You would not listen! And since you would have it so, it shall be so.”

After the first smooth irony, the last four words were spoken with a snarl. Then there was complete silence again. Where the devil could he be? The voice certainly came from astern of us, but that told me very little. There was nothing of the ship’s bows left. Forward of the funnels and the wrecked navigating bridge, the deck dropped to a vast and empty sea. In the dripping fog, a gunman could take fresh aim with every bullet and we should never see him. He had a store of cartridges and all the time in the world. Sooner or later, if only by luck, he would bring down one or other of us. Then we should be finished. Small wonder that the skill of Von Herder, the blind mechanic, was a legend in the European underworld.

I could make out Sherlock Holmes, motionless as a statue. His unmistakable gaunt silhouette was just visible in the veil of mist beside me. He had not bothered to draw my revolver from his pocket. A single shot, a flash from its muzzle, the crack of the explosion, would pinpoint our position for a man who was probably not more than twenty feet away. A man who could put five shots in succession through the heart of the ace of spades at thirty-seven paces. The fog remained our friend. As long as it persisted, Rawdon Moran must fire blind.

In a voice no louder than a breath, Holmes whispered.

“He will hit us sooner or later. We must lead him on constantly, bring him forward from the shadows. He will not resist the temptation to follow. The man is a hunter, and it is his instinct to stalk the prey. But we must move. Now.”

As if to confirm this necessity, the glass pane in the other window of the saloon shattered. I had heard nothing of the bullet passing. But I remembered Holmes telling me that there would be no atmospheric crack until the velocity of the shot exceeded the speed of sound. All three targets had been within ten or twelve feet of where we stood. One question was uppermost in my mind. Why the devil had Holmes not got his useful little Laroux pistolet, as I had brought my Webley? Was it still in his table-drawer at Baker Street? Surely not. But if not, where was it?

He was moving away slowly ahead of me without a sound, gliding round the port side of the after-saloon, beckoning me on.

Then came that damned voice again! Was he such a fool as to believe he could torment our nerves until one of us shouted out or fired blind?

“Why could you not do as you were advised, doctor? Why could you not go back and heal the sick, as you were trained to do? Why could you not be content to marry your little sweetheart, Mary Morstan, or invest your little nest-egg in old Mr. Farquhar’s Paddington practice? Even now it is not too late. I could wish you well and dance at your wedding, but you have given me no chance.… Oh, doctor, doctor!”

In those few seconds, I became badly frightened by this buffoonery. How it was, I knew not—but he had watched every moment and knew every secret. Miss Morstan and I were dear friends. Who knows what the future might hold? How did Moran know of her—and what could he know? Her name was now on the lips of a man who would send her to her death without scruple. Had he not sent Emmeline Putney-Wilson and almost the maid Seraphina—and others, perhaps, by his own hands? The brute need only watch patiently until that one minute in a thousand days when a woman was not under the immediate protection of a lover or her family. However constant the guard, such a moment always comes to one who watches patiently enough. Holmes was right. There was no safety except in the destruction of Rawdon Moran.

“Oh, doctor, doctor!”

Now there was laughter in that voice again, laughing at itself, laughter that was unhinged. Of course he judged me to be weaker than Holmes, and so aimed at me. He would break my nerve, frighten me to answer back, pleading for a chance to bargain, giving away our position. Then he would have us both. But I felt a sudden anger and determination. I accepted his challenge. Where was he? A brief luminance from Ruytingen across the waves lay upon the fog without piercing it. The wide surface of that cold sea was still and calm, except for the occasional wash of a wave against the listing wreck of the Comtesse de Flandre.

I heard him again as I followed Holmes round the side of the after-saloon. Now it was my friend’s turn to be taunted.

“Have no fear, Mr. Holmes. As a man of honour, I do not take my opponent’s life by an act of murder. I would not treat a beast of the jungle so. Stand your ground, both of you, and you shall both have your chance. Run like cowards and you must accept the consequences. Even you, my dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes! Would you prefer the readers of the obituaries and the penny papers to learn that, at the last, you had been a ninny, shot in the back running away?”

Despite the worst I had heard of him, I never expected this gibbering of the madhouse cell, for that was what it had become. The voice now seemed to echo from the starboard side and we were moving like ghosts towards the stern, under the port shelter of the after-saloon, keeping our backs to its wall. Then a fragment of deck planking snapped and splintered just beside my right foot. It was the impact of a shot at random from his silent pistol. He had moved round and was behind us suddenly. We continued to edge sideways towards the stern, presenting the smallest possible target. But in a moment we must leave the shelter of the saloon and come into the view of Moran’s seamen by the winch. Holmes had instinctively drawn the Webley revolver, but it was useless to us now.

I had a mad idea that we could save ourselves by swimming for our lives. Without shoes and heavier outer clothing, we might dive from the rail and support ourselves if necessary on one of the floating planks. After a few strokes from the ship’s side, the fog would close round us again. It could not be more than two hundred yards to the ropes that hung down the sides of the Princesse Henriette for survivors to clutch at. Could we do it? I could swim further than that as a schoolboy or at Battersea baths as a medical student. But this dark sea held a bitter chill, and its unknown currents might carry us away from safety.

Holmes seemed intent upon his own plan. With long supple fingers that Paganini or Joachim might have envied, he was silently easing back the sliding door at this side of the saloon. There was no sound of our adversary, no derisive voice. Moran might be six feet away—or sixty. Had he come and gone? No. I felt sure he was still behind us. Keeping our heads down, we crossed the curtained saloon in darkness, its curtains still closed, and came out on the starboard side. Holmes was evidently making a circuit in order to follow our route again and then take him in the rear.

Coming out through that opposite door into the enveloping mist once more, we felt our way forward, our backs to the wall of the saloon again. We were coming to the point at which he had seemed to be standing when we first heard his voice. With luck, he was still following us towards the stern and we might track him unseen. Once in view, a single bullet would do the job. That, of course, was the moment when we might dive from the rails and save ourselves from the rest of his crew. But as I calculated our chances, my foot caught some object in the darkness and I almost overbalanced. It felt like a fallen log. I put my hand down and felt a human leg, then a jacket, and then the features of a face. The Ruytingen light touched the surface of the sea for an instant. In its brief reflection I saw the dead man’s face. It was Lieutenant Cabell.

If I felt fear of any kind, it was not for a dead body. I had seen far too many for that. Rather, it came from the knowledge that something had gone wrong with all our plans. We were in the trap. Holmes had counted on our adversaries watching us every minute, reading our messages, decoding our cipher. He had counted on them believing that he would be on board the ship, no matter what he said. Had his judgment failed him now in the matter of the young lieutenant?

A whisper came at my ear, so quiet that it might have been Holmes. It was amiable, intimate, and soothing, coming from behind me:

“You would have it so, doctor, would you not? And, you see, it has come to this. You stand between Mr. Holmes and myself. He cannot shoot me unless he shoots you first, which I think he will not do. And he knows that if he does not lay his weapon down upon the deck this minute, then I—with more regret than I can ever describe—must shoot you here and now. And then, with more reluctance than I have felt in killing the noblest beast, I must shoot him.”

I cried out at once, “Do as you must, Holmes!”

The moment the words were out of my mouth, I knew what a fool I had been. I meant him to understand that he must ignore me and take Moran to the land of shadows at all costs. Had I said, “Shoot him!” that would have done it. But it seemed as if “Do as you must” meant “Do as he tells you.” To my dismay, Holmes laid my revolver on the deck and addressed our adversary.

“My congratulations, colonel. Your reputation as a hunter goes before you. It was remiss of me not to foresee that you might use Lieutenant Cabell’s body as a bait to catch your prey. Sooner or later, even in this fog, we should stumble upon the poor fellow quite literally. The snare at which you waited would spring and you would have us.”

Moran ignored the compliment. He came into view now, almost bear-like in his heavy military coat. He motioned us on with the pistol in his hand.

“A little further forward, if you please, gentlemen. Under the light.”

In a situation so desperate and with the mind racing, there was nothing for it but to obey, moving an inch at a time and keeping one’s nerve. With the heavy-looking weapon of Von Herder in his hand, Moran followed us, scooping up my revolver from the deck before I could prevent him.

Someone had now drawn back the curtains of the after-saloon, where the broken windows faced the ship’s funnels, and a lamp had been lit. The space where we had first stood was hazily lit by the light from the interior. Holmes turned to face our enemy so that we stood with our backs to this illumination. Moran laughed, as if to assure us that such a position would not inconvenience him in the least.

Without looking down, he broke open the Webley and shook the six cartridges out. He dropped them into his pockets. Then, as if thinking better of this, he drew one back out and inserted it in the gun, spun the chambers, and closed the gun. It was as if he was performing some trick for our benefit.

With the revolver in his right hand, he raised his left and pulled the trigger of Von Herder’s pistol. With less sound than a cork popping, the weapon discharged and I ducked my head as the remaining window behind us shattered. What was his game? For it was a game, a sport for an asylum of the criminally insane. Why not kill us then and there?

“You do not think well of me, Mr. Holmes?”

As coolly as if he was declining a second slice of cake at a tea party, Holmes replied. “I cannot say that I often think of you at all, Colonel Moran.”

Moran chuckled. “You know that is not true, sir! I should be offended if it were. But however badly you may view me, I am a sportsman. I do not kill in cold blood—not even you. I might shoot you both now. But that is not my way with a man of your calibre, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, even though you have caused me some considerable difficulties. You deserve a better end.”

Mad as a hatter!

“Indeed?” Again, Holmes made the word sound like an expression of polite boredom.

“We must have this thing over between us, Mr. Holmes. The world cannot any longer contain us both. That is all. But you shall have a sporting chance.”

This time there was no reply, and Moran was left to continue his own demented monologue.

“There are two guns, you see? Mine and the doctor’s. We shall duel at this distance. At so short a range, we may expect that the contest will soon be decisive. They tell me you are an opponent worth challenging to a match at firearms, Mr. Holmes. Very well. You are unfamiliar with the Von Herder pistol, I daresay, but no matter. You are very familiar with your friend’s Webley revolver. Excellent. You shall have his revolver and this one bullet. And you shall fire first. You may check that the chamber brings the cartridge to the top in readiness. I have a certain knack of dodging bullets, but you will agree that if you miss me at this distance, you deserve neither your reputation nor your life. In that case, I shall have my turn after yours. Is that not fair?”

There must be a trick in this, though I could not yet see what it was. I knew that he intended to kill us both, but this game would also serve some peculiar vanity of his own.

“And in either event,” Holmes inquired politely, “what is to become of my colleague?”

Moran gave another of his light-hearted chuckles.

“If you succeed, his difficulties are resolved. If not, then I fear we shall have to see what we shall see.”

“And if I should refuse.…”

“You would be a far more stupid man than the world takes you for, Mr. Holmes! Now, do not disappoint me! You may miss me, of course. But even then, I may forego my right of reply. I am a hunter, sir, and more than half my pleasure is the thrill of the risk. I propose to be your executioner. But, as they used to say in the days of steel, the delight of an execution is not in the slovenly butchering of a man but in cutting the head from the shoulders with a single sword-stroke and leaving it standing in its place. Is that not so? Come, now.”

Holding the Webley by its muzzle, he laid it on the deck and then with his foot sent it scudding across to the toecaps of Sherlock Holmes.

I measured the distance between us. I could never reach him before he fired at me. But the moment Moran raised his gun to take aim at Holmes, I would try to charge him down as I had charged many an opposing forward on the rugby ground at Blackheath in my student days. He might still shoot us both. But he must first turn and shoot at me before I could reach him. That would give Holmes just a moment’s chance to spring and finish what I had started. It was a slim chance, but it was the only one.

The colonel’s laughter seemed higher-pitched now, as he said “Come!”

Holmes was holding the Webley down, at arm’s length, the safety catch released, the chamber carefully positioned. He began to raise it, his arm coming higher like a clock hand until it was horizontal. I watched for the forefinger to tighten on the trigger. But to my surprise, his arm kept rising. He would never hit Moran now! Higher and higher went the arm, until the gun was pointing at the sky. Then I could see that Moran was prepared to shoot first until Holmes called out, “Major Putney-Wilson, if you please!”

Moran would not have been human had he not paused to see what this meant. In a moment of surprise, he looked like a man who feels he has been harpooned. A second later there was a roar from the muzzle of the skyward-pointing Webley and a flash of fire. Holmes was not looking at Moran, but somewhere just beyond him. The colonel’s eyes, which had been flicking here and there, now went still and round as marbles. With his pistol covering Holmes, Colonel Moran half-turned and saw a figure like a ghost in the vapour. The man took shape, tall and dishevelled, a cotton cap on his head, his body cased in a grimy boiler-suit, his face immaculately blackened by soot, the eyes and lips alone visible. In his hand was the silver Laroux pistolet of Sherlock Holmes.

In that same second, Holmes leapt at his enemy. The length of his reach was always extraordinary, but never more so than in this flying leap. His feet never touched the ground until the moment of impact. He was on Moran before the colonel could raise his gun. Moran was a ferocious hunter, but his skill was with his gun rather than with his fists—and with his fists rather than in his arms. Their collision enabled Holmes to knock aside the Von Herder pistol.

Each recoiled from the impact. Moran at once tried to snatch Holmes round the neck and double him over, imprisoning him in the traditional English wrestling grip of “chancery.” But when he closed his arm round his opponent’s neck, it had apparently dissolved into air. Holmes had dived and caught Moran round the waist, tossing him over his shoulder like a sack of coals. The colonel’s teeth were brought together by the shock with a force that might have broken his jaw.

In a second more, Holmes threw him down on his back, knocking out his breath and catching him by the feet. What followed was more like a ballet than a prize-fight. The strength in Holmes’s hands was daunting, as anyone would know who had watched him casually bend straight Dr. Roylott’s distorted iron poker. From a spell of education in Germany, he was schooled in boxing and fencing as well as in the less common art of singlestick. In some forms of combat, Moran might have been his superior. But Holmes had waited for his chosen time and his chosen place. Despite his bulk, Moran seemed helpless as Holmes, with footwork quicker and more intricate than a dancer’s, swung him by the feet in circle after circle at increasing speed. The art of it was to make the helpless victim gain velocity until he appeared to contribute to his own destruction.

At a precise moment, Sherlock Holmes released him and sent him hurtling into what I believe is called a “Tipperary swing.” The colonel went head-first into the steel plating of the saloon. What damage was done to him I do not care to speculate, but it was surely the end of Rawdon Moran. So neatly had Holmes despatched him that the senseless body slid down and through the opening in the deck where the engine-room skylight had once been. The colonel fell like Satan into the darkness below, between the motionless pistons of the ship’s engines. Knocked side to side, he crashed on to the barrel-shape of the steel condenser below them. I cannot tell at what point he was dead, but the white paintwork of the condenser showed him face down, head and hair washing to and fro in the rising flood. He was then as dead as any man had ever been.

The conclusion of that night’s drama may be briefly described. As any reader of the press will know, the wreck of the Comtesse de Flandre was very nearly saved, perhaps in the belief that Plon Plon’s baubles were on board. The breaking away of the bows, let alone the sound of gunshots from amidships, had been enough to frighten off Moran’s two or three underlings who had brought the little boat alongside the stern. The captain of the Princesse Henriette, seeing that the remains of the other ship continued to float and hearing what sounded like a distress maroon, ordered two of his boats to carry across a pair of ropes so that he might take the wreck in tow. Holmes and I, with Major Putney-Wilson, took passage back to the anchored steamer in the first of these lifeboats.

It was still dark when the Princess Henriette’s paddles began to churn. With her salvage prize in tow, she resumed her crossing to Ostend at half speed. The refugees from the Comtesse de Flandre were accommodated and fed, Napoleon-Jerome and his companions being consoled in the captain’s quarters. Holmes and I were waited upon by the chief steward in a cabin of our own.

As for the strange adventure of Major Putney-Wilson, he had at first kept his promise to board the RMS Himalaya for Bombay. He then broke that promise at Lisbon and travelled to Oporto, where his children were cared for by his brother, the wine-shipper. Yet to see his children was surely forgivable. Someone, whom he would never name, then sent him two clues in a note such as I had received at my club. That benefactor also placed information for him relating to Colonel Rawdon Moran’s activities in the Belgian arms trade. I looked hard at Sherlock Holmes and, I believe, detected a certain sheepishness in him as Putney-Wilson revealed all this.

My friend would only say that in the course of his own Belgian preparations, he had tried to account for every member of the Comtesse de Flandre’s crew at new moon. In taking on casual labour a week or two earlier, the Compagnie Belgique had engaged a hand for the stoke-hold. This humblest of the humble in the ship’s company went by the name of Samuel Dordona.

Why had Holmes said nothing to me of Putney-Wilson, even as we studied the mysterious stoker who was not a stoker? Holmes looked at me as though I should have known better than to ask.

“My dear Watson! You had met Samuel Dordona, on two occasions. I confess I was a little concerned that Putney-Wilson might not pass muster last night. Therefore I said nothing to you but encouraged him to act his little part for your benefit. If he could deceive you, he could deceive all those who mattered. You never doubted him, not even when I pointed out that he was not the stoker he pretended to be. That was excellent! His part was all important, for he was to shadow those who shadowed us. I naturally entrusted him with the Laroux. If we could not account for Moran with your Webley, it was better that the pistolet should come upon him unawares rather than be taken from us in defeat. With such a man as Putney-Wilson behind us, I imagine we were never truly in danger.”

“It felt very much like danger to me, Holmes! The only shot in our locker was the cartridge Moran returned to you in my Webley.”

“A scoundrel like Moran gives his victims no chance. Logic therefore dictated that this must be a harmless Boxer blank, carefully separated in his pocket from the others. I still have the cartridge case. You may inspect it if you choose.”

“You knew it was a blank?”

“What else? It came too easily from his pocket. Such a man would never allow me a chance to kill him! Far better to use that cartridge to summon our friends.”

“But why play such a trick? He might have shot us out of hand and had done with it!”

“If you ever try, Watson, you will find that one man with a pistol cannot easily shoot two men at close range before one of them gets hold of him. On this occasion, in the fog, he might not hit his target at a longer range. Moran hoped that I would fire the blank at him, believing the round was live. While we waited for him to fall, he would shoot me and turn the gun on you, as you still waited to see him collapse.”

“That was all?”

“By no means. Far more important was the act of firing into the air and calling out to Major Putney-Wilson—whom Moran had occasion to remember. You saw how the act and the name threw him off his balance for that vital second or two. Because I did not fire at him when I had the chance, he knew that whoever I called out to behind him must have a gun. He could not ignore the risk. He was, I like to think, a little bewildered. By instinct he half-turned, and by instinct he hesitated when he saw a figure coming through the mist behind him while two more remained in front of him. That gave me my chance. Not for nothing was Putney-Wilson a comrade of the Special Investigation Branch. He has lain very low in all this, but I am proud to have served—albeit irregularly—with such a man.”

It was an extraordinary story, but I knew Holmes was right in one thing, for I had seen it myself. Whatever advantage Moran thought he might have over us was swept away by that inexplicable shot fired overhead. It was beyond his comprehension. In other circumstances he might perhaps have out-fought Sherlock Holmes. His downfall was that in no circumstances could he out-think him.

With that, my friend stretched himself out on the cabin settee, which his legs overlapped a little. He folded his hands and fell sound asleep. I sat and thought of all that had happened. A drama that extended to the scorching plains of Zululand and the banks of the Blood River, to Hyderabad and the Transvaal, to the dangerous underworlds of espionage, the murder of Captain Joshua Sellon, the dogged loyalty of Sergeant Albert Gibbons of the Royal Marines, and the devious policies of the Great Powers of Europe, was coming to its conclusion. As for that international criminal brotherhood which Holmes had identified—or imagined—its members had certainly lost a battle, if not a war.

Two miles off the harbour pier of Ostend, a tug came out to take the tow from us. Again I heard the rattle of a heavy chain and the splash of the Princesse Henriette’s anchor. It took an interminable time to complete the transfer of the wreck as a dim morning broke—if morning ever breaks in such weather and in such a place. We were still in our cabin, sitting over breakfast as though this might have been Baker Street, when there was a commotion on the upper deck. I went up and saw the rails of the ship lined with spectators.

Across the dull surface of the water, still a mile or two off-shore, the remainder of the Comtesse de Flandre was subsiding gradually into the depths. It did not capsize or turn turtle or any such exciting thing as we had been promised the night before. It sank slowly and evenly into deep water, taking with it, among other things, the mortal remains and secrets of Colonel Rawdon Moran. His grave was never to be disturbed, for the depth was too great and no one ever thought the contents of the wreck worth raising. Of Plon Plon’s baubles, no more was said. A plain crate marked as containing surplus stock of the Army Temperance Society Tracts came safely to the Senior Chaplain at Aldershot Garrison.