Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of The Cold-Served Revenge

XII: The Adventure Continues

My friend’s true resurrection occurred when he finally discarded the beard, the pomade in his hair, the glasses and the Cedric-style clothes. For the first time since his coronary several weeks ago, he stood before me as I and his admirers knew him. With his lightly shaved pointy beard he was now ready to confront any enemy and to pursue the Darringfords as himself. The newspapers printed an official denial of his death in bold letters, and we immediately afterwards received letters, telegrams and cards from well-wishers as well as people with various requests.

Journalists bombarded him with requests for interviews. But the detective had never granted any before and stayed true to his convictions. His time was too precious to devote to prattle and to the disingenuous questions of these riffraff.

Our work again moved from the field to the dusty archives of register offices. The day after Alice magically vanished from her house and Holmes appropriated the photograph of her and her brother standing in front of the stone castle, we launched an investigation in search of this mysterious fortress.

It was painstaking work. It took us two days just to find all the available photographs of Scottish castles and strongholds in the historical institute and royal library, and we spent the next day endlessly comparing them with the castle in the Darringford photograph. I never knew how many castles there were in Scotland! Our work was frustrated by the fact that our photograph of the castle was only from one angle, so we sometimes had no recourse but to refer to our spatial imagination.

“The circle has narrowed to twelve possible locations,” said Holmes late in the afternoon of the third day, when we had examined the last of the archival photographs.

“That’s quite a lot.”

“It is not much when you consider how many we started with,” said the detective reading his notes and drumming his fingernails on the desk.

No doubt he wanted to smoke. He was watching me from the corner of his eye to see if I would let him have tobacco, but I did not relent.

I did not hold out much hope that he would listen to my advice for long. But for now the memory of his coronary was fresh in his mind, so he tried to listen to me.

I examined the list.

“Are we going to Scotland then?” I asked. “Shall we go from castle to castle and knock on the door until the lady herself opens? It seems very time consuming.”

“That’s how the police would go about it,” said Holmes. “We will use our brains.”

He unfolded a map of Scotland and marked the positions of the castles that corresponded to the photographs. They were separated by hundreds of miles, from Aberdeenshire to Inverclyde, Orkney to West Lothian.

Visiting all of them would require many cold and damp days.

“Is the castle that we are looking for inhabited or abandoned? They are no doubt hatching their plans in secret.”

The detective nodded thoughtfully.

“A keen observation, my friend, but unfortunately not to the point,” he said. “It could be the headquarters of one of their sympathisers.”

“No matter how I look at it, I can’t find the key to figuring out which castle is the right one,” I admitted. “They are spread out across the entire country and the photograph contains no other point of orientation that would give us a clue.”

“Correct,” said Holmes. “But let us look at it from the other side. Indeed, the absence of orientation points on the photograph can be just as important.”

He again studied the map alongside the photographs of the castles, taking into account the features of the landscape in the background. He measured contours, calculated sizes and distances, factoring in each bit of information to reveal something about the environment.

“We can eliminate two more castles,” Holmes said happily, crossing off two points from the map, one on the north coast and the other near Glasgow.

“On what basis?”

“Dunvegan is near Caisteal Maol on the Isle of Sky, it is surrounded by water. The angle from which Darringford’s castle is photographed must show the water, but around it there are just plains, so we can exclude Dunvegan.”

“And the other?”

“Cathcart Castle. I eliminated it due to its position. It stands on a rocky coastline and in the centre of a rather populous locality, where secrecy would be difficult.”

“In that case we ought to focus our efforts on the Scottish highlands.”

Of the remaining sites there were five that appeared as though they could be located in these endlessly rolling plains. Nevertheless it was progress. Holmes found a map of the Scottish highlands and spread it on top of the other map.

“Ackergill Tower, Leod, Freswick, Glinney and Dalcross Castle,” he said, counting off the remaining castles.

All seemed in play.

“Could the lady have said anything that was a clue?”

His face registered a flash of surprise and his eyebrows rose in astonishment.

“Of course, Watson! I had almost forgotten!”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember what Alice said when she parted company with us?”

“Only a tirade of insults.”

“And?”

“She expressed regret that the reports of your death were premature.”

“The information is staring you in the face, yet you do not see it!” Holmes’s mood had clearly improved. He again saw a trail of clues where I saw nothing. This always made him feel mischievous and cheerful. I was glad to be a source of amusement.

“She said that we do not even know who she is and what she plans to do,” he said.

“Does it mean anything?”

“It might, but we will not find out here,” he said, hitting the desk with his palm and giving the order to leave.

I blindly followed him outside into the street. But when I realised that his brisk steps were taking us straight to the London registry office my heart sank with the thought of rummaging through more musty archives.

“Don’t worry, we know exactly what we are looking for this time!” he said.

He asked the archivist for a file about the Darringfords.

“When I was investigating Lady Darringford’s past, for some reason I only found information about Bloody Sunday,” he explained. “When you reminded me of her comment it occurred to me why I did not get deeper.”

The archivist sat us at a desk with a lamp and left us alone with a thick dossier. It contained a genealogical tree of the noble family all the way to its roots. The information that we found in it surprised us!

“It says here that Lord Percy Stanley Hubert Darringford and his wife Margaret had only one son, Rupert!” said the detective with astonishment, searching in vain for a mention of Alice Darringford.

“But that’s not possible!”

“But it is, look,” he said, handing me the document.

Indeed, Lady Alice did not appear in the official genealogical tree of the family whose name she so proudly bore.

“Where did she come from? Did she deceive everyone?”

“She has been living as Sir Rupert’s sister in London for at least two decades,” the detective said thoughtfully. “Mycroft confirmed her identity, and we even have a photograph of her with her so-called brother. It is unlikely that she would be just passing herself off as a noblewoman. She needs a solid foundation for her criminal agenda. Certainly she would not risk premature disclosure of her false identity. Lady Darringford she truly is, but how did she become part of the family?”

Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his chair and rested his chin on his fingers.

“She might be the old man’s illegitimate offspring?” I said. “A stepdaughter?”

“Doubtful. He would still have to publicly acknowledge her and that would appear here.”

“Could she be pretending to be Rupert’s sister while in fact being his wife or mistress?”

“Impossible. There would be records of a wedding and my brother would surely know about that. Do not forget that Alice was already Lady Darringford on Bloody Sunday when the police arrested her. The family posted bail for her. She was still too young. No, there must be another explanation.”

He again plunged into the papers, determined to discover where and when our femme fatale had emerged. That she had come from the very depths of hell we already had no doubt. But what was the mystery of her origin?

“Here it is!” the detective whooped. “Though she is not bound to Rupert by kinship or blood, in a sense she truly is his sister!”

“Please, Holmes, no more riddles!”

Holmes finished reading the page and shook his head in disbelief.

“Imagine that Alice became part of the family in 1885 at the age of fifteen. The Darringfords took her in as a foster child from the convent in Anges.”

“From a convent? She is an orphan?”

“There is nothing here about her real parents,” he said, leafing through the pages. “Just that the Darringfords quickly adopted Alice and that she took the family name. In all probability they did not want to risk another pregnancy due to their son’s illness. Still, they longed for another child. Alice’s real name does not appear in the records; perhaps it was not even kept. And as the old lord and lady died in 1891, there is no one who recalls the events who can help us.”

“The death of the foster parents who saved her from the convent must have been a great blow,” I said. “Maybe that’s what made Alice seek revenge on the world.”

“You see good even in the devil,” said Holmes, patting me on the shoulder. “But I must disappoint you. The Darringfords died in a barn fire on their estate.”

Another fire. I understood what Holmes was trying to tell me. The death of her foster parents was no accident, just like all of those fires in the munitions factories.

“She needed to bury the secret of her origins,” said the detective. “Her Machiavellian scheming dates to 1891. She took advantage of her brother’s mental illness and over time she poisoned his mind even more!”

“Disgusting,” I shuddered. “But how shall we discover her hiding place when she thwarts any attempt to uncover her past?”

“We must once again travel,” he declared. “To the convent in Anges!”

Scotland, the homeland of my mother. A deep green valley, wedged into the majestic mountains reflected in peat-coloured lakes and wetlands covered with heather. A land of purple-tinted moors and pastures, lush grass and yellow-green cushions of moss, swamps, lilies and blooming flowers. To the east there are beaches and to the west and centre lies a region of uncultivated grassland with a sprinkling of oat fields.

I was glad that we had to go on this journey. Here peace and quiet reigned. We could wander through the countryside the entire day without encountering a soul.

In London one does not have the chance to enjoy nature. In our investigations Holmes and I rarely had the opportunity to venture into the very heart of the wilderness that our country hid. In Scotland one could see deer as big as in a fairytale, eagles soaring high overhead, and fresh wild streams full of salmon and trout. And of course the ubiquitous sheep.

We took the overnight train and the next morning found ourselves in the small town of Anges. Except for the barest necessities we had very little with us in the way of luggage. From the poor, simple train station we headed straight to the inn. It was a typical stone building with a dark thatched roof and an even more typical owner, preserved alive in a brine of thick rye whiskey.

To our query regarding vacancies he replied gruffly that today he had only one room and began rambling about the shabbiness and poverty of the local people. We did not want to become entangled in a long conversation with this bored Scotsman, whose thick Gaelic accent we could barely understand, and so went to our cosy attic room, ate some strong chicken broth, and immediately headed out.

“No matter what they tell us in the convent I can feel in my bones that we are on the right trail,” said Holmes, peering at the map.

“How do you know?”

“Anges is directly on the way to Glinney, which is one of our other possible castles.”

“Do you think that the lady returned to the place of her youth?”

“Criminals do have a tendency to return to the scene of the crime,” he said.

He pointed the way and we embarked on the long walk to the convent.

It was a beautiful day. The sun was pleasantly warm and the blooming meadows gave the normally rough-looking plains a softer aspect. We followed the map up a dirt trail over a hill and up through a pine forest, behind which lay the mysterious place of Alice’s origin.

Except instead of the convent we found a ruin.