Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly

4

Something of a change had come over Reginald Winter in the past half-hour. It was so abrupt that I wonder to this day whether he had not received a peremptory telegram or even a telephone call from Sir John Fisher. No more obstacles were put in our path. He went so far as to hint that if an interview with Cadet Porson should be necessary, he would bend the rules to allow it. Far more important, for the time being, was our first meeting with young Patrick Riley.

The sanatorium lay at the top of a winding stone staircase just above the study. It was little more than a well-lit, high-ceilinged room with a wash-room to one side. There were four beds, three of them unoccupied, and a central table with upright chairs. It appeared to be the domain of a grey-haired nurse, Sister Elliston. She seemed admirably untroubled by having as her patient one who was a condemned thief and an attempted suicide.

As we entered, Patrick Riley was sitting on his bed turning the pages of a picture magazine. His situation was not to be envied. For ten days he had been almost entirely isolated and with no idea of what was going on or what might happen to him. He was forbidden to speak to or associate with any other boy. Frankly, if he were not an attempted suicide an environment like this might go far to make him one. He got to his feet and stood at attention in his blue uniform with its tell-tale grey braiding of the Engineer Cadets.

He was indeed the lightly-built but nimble fourteen-year-old of Holmes’s description. His appearance was hardly memorable, the soft features yet to be defined by manhood. An unruly flop of fair hair was perhaps the most prominent characteristic, through not while wearing his cap. His expression was downcast, as it well might be, but he appeared and sounded apathetic rather than distressed. No doubt he believed that the worst had happened and that no one would trust his explanations. He had little emotional energy left for histrionics.

“Patrick Riley?” Holmes spoke quietly as he stepped forward and held out his hand, “I am Sherlock Holmes. It is possible you may have heard of me.”

Riley nodded and said, “Yes, sir,” only because he felt he must say something rather than nothing.

“May we sit round the table and talk?” Holmes continued courteously. “I am here at Admiral Fisher’s request to ensure that justice is done, and I fear it may not have been so far. That is all. You have nothing to fear so long as you speak the truth.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy repeated, still as if he did not care much either way. “They said you were coming.”

“I propose to see if truth is not on your side,” Holmes said more firmly, obliging Patrick Riley to recognise his presence.

“I don’t see how you can ensure anything, when all their minds are made up. How can you?”

“Because, my boy, I am Sherlock Holmes and there is very little I cannot do once I put my mind to it—and once those for whom I fight supply me with a little ammunition.”

He smiled, lifted his arm and laid it on the boy’s shoulder, shepherding him towards the table. He was not at his best with the very young, but so far he had not made an irretrievable mistake with Patrick Riley. The miniature cadet stared at him and then, to my very great relief, returned the smile, albeit half-heartedly.

So the ice was broken. I guessed there had been few smiles in the boy’s life recently. But Riley was now encouraged to see himself as the hero of his own adventure story with Sherlock Holmes at his side.

“Sit here,” said Holmes politely, drawing out a chair.

So the interview began. Riley now looked up at us with a helpless appeal.

“It was just a joke, Mr Holmes! A bit of fun!”

To my dismay, I thought Riley was about to blurt out a confession to the theft and plead that it had been a prank. So—I am sure—did my friend, from the expression on his face. “A joke” must be one of the oldest and certainly least successful defences to a charge of fraud.

“What was a joke, Patrick?” Holmes asked quietly, and I held my breath. The use of the boy’s Christian name made the question somewhat more sinister because it closed his retreat into a shell of apathy.

“Writing names was a joke, Mr Holmes. I don’t remember when we first did it. I sat next to Porson in class. We sat together in the evening too, when we did whatever prep the masters set. If we finished our prep before the bell went we used to mess around, writing, playing battleships on paper, all sorts of things. Porson sometimes wrote my name in my writing and I wrote his. Lots of fellows did things like that. It was a game. It wasn’t forgery or theft any more than it’s murder when you point your finger and say ‘Bang, you’re dead.’ It was just fooling about.”

“Very good,” said Holmes approvingly. “And how successful were these imitation signatures?”

“I don’t know, sir. How can you tell? They looked a bit the same.”

“Believe me, I can tell. How many other people knew that you were doing this?”

“Anyone could watch us, if they wanted to. They must have seen but they wouldn’t think anything. Lots of fellows played games like that.”

“Did they? And how many other fellows’ signatures did you copy?”

The young face clouded with uncertainty.

“I don’t remember that I did. Perhaps I did. But no one else that I can remember. I played this game with Porson because we sat next to one another. I could see his name written on his prep book and he could see mine.”

“And Porson has always been in the same class with you? He is an Engineer Cadet like you?”

“We’re all engineers in our class. That’s why we sit together in school prep. Lower Middle Engineers. We’re above the junior engineers but below the Upper Middle and the seniors.”

“Have you got a copy of your imitation of Porson’s signature that you can show me?”

He shook his head.

“We never kept them, sir. They were thrown away. It was just a game.”

“Could you do one now?”

“Not without one to copy from. Nobody could.”

“It is said that you wrote a signature at the post office as you had copied Porson’s for a game. Did you?”

“No! I couldn’t do it! I was never at the post office on that afternoon!”

It was a wail of protest and despair, uttered so often in the past ten days. No hawk-nosed cross-examiner in wig and gown could resemble a bird of prey more suggestively than Holmes just then. But Riley had returned the answer of an innocent defendant.

“Very well. Now then, you must help me. Could you, for example, copy your own signature?”

The boy sat back and shook his head slowly, not in refusal but exasperation.

“Any fellow could copy his own!”

“I think you misunderstand me. I do not want you to repeat your signature but to copy it exactly. As a criminal expert it is my business to know about such things. I may tell you that even in the most innocent way, no signature is precisely the same on two successive occasions. And besides, you will please write the first one with your eyes closed. I am offering you a chance to prove your innocence, but you must do this much for me. Write it as you would normally write your signature and do not worry what it will look like.”

The boy nodded. Holmes produced a fountain-pen and a sheet of paper from his pocket, handing them to him.

“You had better put your glasses on,” he said casually. “You will certainly need them for the copying.”

The boy looked as if he was about to ask Holmes how he knew about the glasses, but my friend anticipated him.

“There is a slight mark either side of your nose, evident to a student of physiognomy. That is unusual in one of your age. It is plain that you spend a commendable amount of time in reading and study. You do not wear glasses otherwise, but I believe you should. There is a sluggishness of movement on one side which suggests that you suffer from what is called a lazy eye.”

Riley was visibly disconcerted by this impromptu oculist’s diagnosis.

“Have no fear,” said Holmes cheerily. “It is my business to notice such things. I believe, however, it may be of importance in your case.”

The lad’s inability to copy a signature without his glasses might be of importance to our inquiry, but for the life of me I could not see how.

Riley laid the paper on the table and closed his eyes. He took the pen and wrote a little uncertainly but quite fluently. It was not a bad effort, though the inconsistencies were clear. Let me just say that his name written with his eyes closed looked to me something like “Put riccc Rileg.”

“Excellent,” said Holmes encouragingly. “Now, imitate that, if you please, as closely as you can. Do not correct it to your normal signature. Imitate it as if it was another person’s signature on a postal order.”

The boy began. He drew quite accurately the down stroke of the “P” and the loop. Lifting the pen he then began the “u.” He paused and lifted it again where it dropped down to join the “t.” At the end of his first name, he paused to check his progress, though without lifting the pen. The copy of his surname appeared in a more rounded script than the original and only the last three letters were joined.

Holmes unfolded his magnifying glass and there was silence for a long two minutes, an eternity as it must have seemed to the poor boy, before my friend looked up.

“Capital!” he said enthusiastically, “If it will bring you any consolation, Patrick Riley, you would make a very poor forger.”

The relief on the poor young fellow’s face was almost inexpressible.

“Unfortunately,” Holmes added, “whoever signed the postal order—which I have seen, of course—was probably also a poor copyist. But we have made a good beginning. Very well. Whoever endorsed that order produced a so-called feathering effect of the pen, as most of us do when we write something familiar like our names. That is to say, the pen is moving almost before it touches the paper. I observe that you started with the nib already on the paper, as a copyist might.”

He held up the page at a slant to the light from the window.

“Twice at least in the copy you have lifted the nib clear of the paper, though you did not do so in the original. Through my glass, though not with the naked eye, it is also possible to see three places at which you have rested the nib on your work while checking your progress. This lack of flow appears only in the crudest freehand forgeries. The signature on the counterfoil of the postal order was skilled enough to avoid anything of that kind. It was not crude copying. This is copied. That was traced—or possibly written on an indentation.”

“But can you prove it, Mr Holmes?” The earnestness in the young face was painful to behold. “Can you show them I never did it?”

“My dear young fellow, a negative is hard to prove. I cannot demonstrate to the world that you never traced it. But I do say that on the basis of this experiment there is no evidence that you could have produced the forgery on that postal order—which is a good long way towards the same thing.”

During this exchange, I had got up and walked slowly across to the window. It looked out over the downland towards the channel. A late afternoon sun cast a burnish upon the lavender blue of the Western Approaches.

“Now,” said Holmes, “please tell me exactly how you first heard about the theft.”

Riley’s answer was commendably simple.

“Porson came up to me about half-past five on that Saturday afternoon. He said, ‘I say, isn’t it rotten? Someone’s stolen my money from my locker.’ It wasn’t real money, of course, just the order. They don’t let us keep money in our lockers.”

“And you replied to John Porson?”

“I said he should have another look to make sure it had gone. If it had, he should tell the housemaster or one of the two petty officers on duty. Petty Officer Carter was on that day. I said not to waste time, the sooner he reported it, the better his chances of getting it back.”

“Admirable,” said Holmes, “Then you spoke as a good sensible friend, not as a frightened thief.”

“I hope I did, sir. I knew nothing about it until Porson told me then, in the locker room.”

As I listened, I was standing by a table on which his toiletries and other articles were set out in regulation order. Among them was a rather expensive clothes-brush, with black bristles and a polished walnut back, evidently brought from home. On this varnished back someone at home had very precisely cut the name “Riley” and his school number, “178.” Next to this there were several words lightly scratched, as if to deface the varnish. They in turn had been scraped over, as neatly as possible, to obliterate them. Even under these neater scratches it was just possible to see that an unknown hand had cut four words next to Riley’s name. The effect was to make the whole lettering read “Riley Is an Oily Hog.”

There was also a cheap hair-brush which had been similarly treated. Once again, whatever had defaced it was scratched over in its turn but I could still make out an ominous jingle.

Tell-tale tit.

Your tongue shall be split,

And all the little dicky-birds

Shall have a little bit.

The old-fashioned clothes-brush might have been an heirloom of some kind. The hair-brush seemed a cheap replacement, perhaps for one that had already been defaced in this way.

Several more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. I picked up the clothes-brush and turned round.

“Who carved your name and number so neatly on the back of this?”

Riley glanced up.

“It was my uncle, sir, before I came for my first term. I was in Collingwood Term.”

“And who scratched these other words?”

He bit his lip and shook his head.

“Don’t know, sir.”

I would have bet a hundred pounds that he did.

“Very well, then tell me at least who scratched them out—did you do it?”

He shook his head again. “My mother did it, when I went home for the first holidays. There were so many things to be bought for school that we couldn’t throw away the brush. And it belonged to my father.”

Holmes gave a murmur of approval.

“And what are Oily Hogs? I regret having to ask that. Please tell me.”

The boy stared at the table-top and hesitated. To my astonishment, with his deliverance now a possibility, he was close to tears. Then he pulled himself together and said, “We are. The Engineers. The Executive Cadets—the Deck Officers—are the Ocean Swells. There are far more of them. One or two of us at a time have to go to be bully-ragged. The rest of us keep quiet because we’re glad it’s someone else. They gang round and rag us for half an hour or so, thirty or forty of them sometimes. There’s no reason—they get excited and it just happens. Everything is quiet one minute and then they’re singing “Oily Hogs, Oily Togs, Dirty Dogs and Frenchie Frogs,” throwing things, punching, spitting. Once or twice they pushed the same chap’s head into the wash-room latrine and flushed it. He ran away from school in the end. He got home on the railway somehow and never came back. Most get caught before they get very far. Then they cop it from old Winter for being out of bounds.”

“Do they never complain?”

“We’re not allowed to sneak or split. That only makes it worse.”

“And what of the Ocean Swells?” Holmes inquired.

“They say they’ll own the decks one day and we’ll be the hogs down in the grease pit.”

Again I thought he might weep, but I underestimated him.

“Deck officers—children of twelve or fourteen!” I said angrily, “Look, my boy, remember this. So far as names go, sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.”

“It was my mother’s name,” he said sadly, and then indeed, he began to weep. “Sovran-Phillips is one of the Ocean Swells. He found out that her name was Clemency. They thought it was a funny name. Phillips and the others went ganging round the school after me, shouting it, shouting that my father never died because I never had a father. My mother never had a husband. They ganged round me shouting lies about her. The more I begged them to stop, the more they did it. Now it doesn’t matter, because I shan’t ever go back or see them again.”

I stood there. For the first time in my life the word “dumbfounded” meant something to me. When our case began I had never imagined such juvenile evil would be unearthed. Forging a postal order was nothing compared with this! But now that Patrick Riley had begun it was hard to stop him going on. What had he to lose? His eyes were dry again, reddened but angry.

“The worst of it is that I thought some of them were my friends. When it happened, even the ones I thought were friends … I could see them standing on the edge of the gang smiling and laughing at me. I’ll never forget who they were.”

Sherlock Holmes had listened very quietly to all this.

“And Mr Winter?” he inquired, “What does he have to say?”

Patrick Riley looked up miserably and blew his nose.

“He won’t have sneaking or splitting. If a boy won’t stand up for himself but goes sneaking on the others, Mr Winter sends him away or beats him for it. That’s what I was warned.”

The eyes of Sherlock Holmes were dark, glittering ice. His fury, on the few occasions when it overtook him, was terrifyingly quiet and cold. I was more angry than I had been for a very long time. If half of this was true, then the sooner Sir John Fisher had all such places as this closed down the better. Patrick Riley ended his pause.

“John Porson is my friend, on the same side in the same class. We share the same desk. Still we daren’t fight Sovran-Phillips and his gang. But Porson is the last person I would steal from.”

Listening to him, I thought that was the most persuasive argument we had heard in our young client’s favour.

Holmes nodded and said, “You mention Sovran-Phillips. Tell me about him.”

“He’s Captain of Boats and prefect of the Deck Swells in the Upper Middle. The new boys act as servants to the captains and they get beaten if they don’t. He knows how to fight, that’s half the trouble. His step-brother’s a lot older, a cruiser captain. Phillips never lets us forget it. His real brother was here a few years ago and at Dartmouth now. He says his grandfather was an admiral, but I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t care now anyway. He says all the maids in the kitchen are spoony on him and he goes with them. Winter’s maid mostly. That’s a lie, I should say.”

Holmes let it rest there for a moment. I tried to imagine the shame and humiliation of Patrick Riley, defeated at every resistance to the smug and superior Phillips. I might have doubted the truth of it all but for the sincerity and grief in our young informant’s manner.

“Very well,” said Holmes at length. “If I have my way, you will find on your side an Admiral of the Fleet, who will outrank a cruiser captain two or three times over. In the next holidays, Dr Watson and I will find a room for you with Mrs Hudson. I am not inexpert in boxing and single-stick combat. After a fortnight’s instruction, I think I may promise that you shall return to St Vincent’s and give young Phillips the thrashing of his life. It is not a matter of size—for I suspect you are smaller than he is—but of skill.”

“I don’t care if I never go back, sir. I don’t mind not going back, but I won’t be called a thief. Could you teach me to fight, Mr Holmes?”

“I have complete confidence in my own abilities—and yours. Now, if you please, we will set aside the matter of the postal order, for I see the way we must go. Let us turn to your attempted suicide. Was it anything of the kind?”

The poor young fellow shook his head yet again.

“They say it proved I could not bear to face my mother, knowing I was a thief. But what I could not bear, Mr Holmes, would be to leave her for ever. She knows I am no thief.”

“Unfortunately what she knows you to be is not evidence, although to me it is proof. Why did you go to the field on Sunday afternoon?”

“I was in this sanatorium room for eight days. Alone, except for Sister Elliston and Mr Winter when he came to question me with two other masters. First of all I heard I was going to be expelled. Then they said there might be some sort of tribunal where I could appeal. There was even talk of a lawyer coming to see me, but I heard no more of that.”

“And your mother and your uncle?”

“I don’t know what they’ve been told or what they think. But last Sunday I had just had enough. No one would believe a word I spoke. There was no one here to stop me, and, surely, so long as I’m at St Vincent’s, I may walk over the field on Sunday afternoons as the others do. I have friends, sir. I’m forbidden to talk to them, but I thought if I could get to them, tell them the truth, they might be able to help me.”

“But you did not go out with the intention of killing yourself? That is what I need to know.”

He looked at us strangely, as I thought.

“I’d gone as far as I could go. I might have done anything. But murder, rather than suicide, if I could choose.”

I thought he was about to weep again. Instead he slumped dry-eyed in his chair and would say no more.

“You have done enough, Patrick Riley,” said Holmes after a pause, “and by this time tomorrow justice shall be done to you.”

“How can you say?” It was no more than a low murmur to himself.

“You must remember who I am,” said my friend quietly.