Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

6

Our last inquiry in the village was at mid-morning. Its venue was the old “Rest and Be Thankful” inn, dating from an age when most travellers went on foot—“Shanks Pony” as the term was in my childhood. They toiled up from the foreshore to the height of Boniface Down, where this homely signboard announced a respite.

As we ducked our heads under the low lintel of the bar parlour and stepped down on to its floor of waxed red tiles, our visitor was waiting, in conversation with the landlady. Samuel Wesley, a grey-haired veteran of the South Coast Railway engine drivers, was not a drinking man. His neat, plain Sunday suit, worn out of courtesy to us, had the discreet badge of a Missionary Fellowship in its buttonhole.

We shook hands and sat down with nothing stronger than small beer between us. Introductions were brief. Samuel Wesley was, as he said, a lover of truth and straight talk. Attempted suicide was “a terrible thing to say about a young man.” Unlike Reginald Winter, he was reluctant to say it.

“I suppose you might call it that, Mr Holmes, according to what you saw and how your mind works.”

“Quite true, Mr Wesley. And what did you see?”

“Nothing at first, sir, for there is a curve in that tunnel and you don’t see the line ahead until you’re almost out of it. It was young Arthur, my fireman. He noticed one of the schoolboys running across close to the embankment, as he might run in a game. Then he was lost sight of as he went under the lee of the bank. I was watching the pressure gauges, which can’t be read very easily in the tunnel for want of light.”

“What would your speed be?”

“Oh, thirty miles an hour at the most, and I daresay more like twenty-five just there. It isn’t a place for anyone to do away with themselves.”

“But it is accessible to those with suicide in mind.”

Mr Wesley took a modest pull at his small beer and shrugged.

“That’s true, sir. But Arthur suddenly shouted to me, ‘Stop! Brake!’ I had my hand on the lever, and even before I’d seen the boy, I’d given it a darn good pull. It didn’t take half as long to do it as to tell it!”

“And the train stopped?”

“Not at once. They don’t stop at once. What you get first, Mr Holmes, is a bit of a jerk. Then she do slide on the rails. And then she do stop with a big jerk and all the passengers is thrown about.”

“And when did you first see the boy?”

Mr Wesley exhaled thoughtfully.

“With the weight of a train behind you it can take the best part of a hundred yards to come to rest. While she was sliding I saw him standing there on the track, looking straight at us.”

“Very disagreeable for you,” I said sympathetically.

He looked surprised.

“Oh, I never thought we’d hit him, doctor. Not where he was. He’d only to step aside. A hundred yards nearer would have been a different matter, but he could never have got that close. We came right up to him before she was at rest, but he couldn’t have done himself any harm.”

“And then?”

“He got off the line, sir. I think he went after another boy I didn’t see. Down behind the bank, most like. He shouted at someone. I never saw the other. Arthur thought there was one in the linesman’s hut at first.”

“Did you think that the boy who had been on the railway line was afraid of the other boy you never saw?”

Samuel Wesley thought this amusing and shook his head.

“I did not, Mr Holmes! Your young chap was smallish but in a mood to knock seven bells out of someone. A terrier! Don’t ask me what it was about, though. I got down from the footplate to give ’im a piece of my mind but he ran off. I shouted after ’im and asked what the damnation he thought he was doing. I couldn’t go and leave the engine standing there, but the whole thing was reported as soon as we got to Ryde. Now I’m told they’re going to do what they should have done long ago. Put a proper barbed-wire fence from the linesman’s hut to the tunnel mouth. They’ll care too much about their skins to try getting over that.”

“Whoever they were,” said Holmes thoughtfully, “one might have expected them to run down the bank towards the school. But they did not, did they? The first one ran down the bank away from the school, did he not? And your terrier followed him.”

“How could you tell which way they ran?” Mr Wesley asked with a laugh. “You was never there, sir.”

“No,” said Holmes in the same thoughtful tone, “but someone else was.”

Samuel Wesley’s evidence, which seemed to have been sought by no one but Holmes and me, altered the story of the drama.

To a more distant observer on higher ground, the sight of Patrick Riley running out on to the track in front of an oncoming train might look like an attempt at suicide. At least, it might be conveniently described as that. This more distant observer, perhaps smoking his pipe among the elders and ash saplings by the pond, might not see the second boy with the train blocking his view. After hearing Mr Wesley, however, I could not help feeling that our young client had indeed gone out with a rage to murder rather than an impulse to destroy himself.

As we walked back to St Vincent’s, I said, “Tell me, Holmes, how could you know which way they ran? I should have thought it most likely that they would have gone down the near side of the embankment and back to the school.”

“Across Reginald Winter’s field of vision,” he said sceptically. “Unless my brains have turned to sawdust, the unknown boy was one who had determined that he would not be seen during this little drama, while making certain that Patrick Riley should. I can prove that in the next half-hour. If not, on our return to town I shall stand you the most expensive dinner on the menu of the Langham Hotel.”