23
She had not been long asleep when she was awakened
by such a clatter at the door as if it was being broken
down, and it was thundering and lightning frightful. Nurse
was greatly frightened, but lay still, hoping the knocking
would cease, but it only got worse and worse. At last she
rose and opened the window, when she saw by the
lightning flashing, which almost blinded her, a little
man sitting on a big horse, hammering at the door.
—“A PIXY BIRTH” IN A BOOK OF THE WEST: DEVON
A
S THE LONG morning drew on I became increasingly distracted, anxious to lay eyes on Holmes, unable to sit still any longer. I finally took my coat and told Mrs Elliott I would be back in time for dinner, and left Lew House.
I ended up not far up the high road to Okehampton, sitting in the window of an inn, drinking coffee and pushing a pastry around on the plate in front of me, staring blankly down the road, when I saw Holmes heave into view on a distant rise in the road. I quickly gathered up my things, left coins enough to cover the bill, and went out to meet him.
He came towards me, striding with brisk concentration and an enormous rucksack complete with tin cup swinging wildly from a tie on the side: A less likely member of the rambling brotherhood it would have been difficult to imagine.
We approached each other rapidly, halted on the macadam facing each other, opened our mouths, and spoke simultaneously.
“He’s salting the streambed,” said Holmes.
“He’s planting gold to run a fraud,” I said, adding for good measure, “with dynamite.”
“Black powder,” he corrected me, and added, “using thunderstorms to conceal the sounds of the explosions.” He took my elbow to turn me back in the direction of Lew House. “Excellent, Russell. How did you work it out?”
“It’s all in Baring-Gould’s books.”
“What?” He paused to look at me in astonishment.
“In pieces, but it’s there, for eyes that are looking for it.”
“Scheiman’s eyes.” He started forward again.
“He is the bookish one of the pair, to be sure. He is also engaged to be married to Violet Baskerville.”
This time Holmes came to a complete stop. He worked his shoulders to let the rucksack thud to the ground, then sat on it, taking out his pipe and eyeing me expectantly. I perched on a nearby stone.
“Miss Baskerville confirmed that Ketteridge was here in March of 1921, and purchased the Hall no later than June. And as soon as he had taken possession, he and Scheiman brought her the portrait of Sir Hugo, which now sits in her flowery drawing room looking truculent and very out of place.”
“So I should imagine,” he murmured around his pipe.
“How did you discover it?” I asked him.
“Shelling in the bed of the Okemont,” he said briefly, and having got his pipe going, he stood up again. I was about to protest, but decided that unless we were to risk patches of frostbite about our persons to match those of the gold baron, the story would best be told in the warmth of Lew House. I hopped down from my rock and reached for the rucksack, and in the process of heaving it onto my back, I was nearly sent staggering off the road into the ditch.
“What on earth is in this?” I exclaimed. “Rocks?”
“A few rocks, yes. Also three books, a cookstove, and a very wet oneman canvas tent.”
“Pethering was camped out in the open during Tuesday’s storm,” I deduced. I turned to face the right direction and leant forward to let the dead weight drive me along. “He must have heard or seen them laying the charges that would drive the grains of gold into the gravel bed, and been foolish enough to allow himself to be seen.”
“It went beyond that. He had camped up in a protected area on the edge of Sourton Common, half a mile away, but I found signs of a struggle and blood that had seeped down between some stones, right near the river.”
“You think he was insane enough actually to go down and accost them, face to face?”
“Did he not seem the type?”
“I’m afraid you’re right. God protect us from fanatics.”
Holmes dismissed Pethering. “Were there any answers to my telegrams ?”
“Just from the laboratory in London.” I told him what the report had said, adding, “I’d have expected traces of the explosive.”
“Perhaps it was too small a sample,” he said. “The lack of response to my other enquiries is irritating. I had hoped to find a warrant outstanding for Scheiman, at any rate. What can they be doing?”
His irritation faded briefly when we entered Lew House and found a telegraph envelope on the table just inside the door. He ripped it open and read it while I was struggling to ease the load from my shoulders without allowing it to crash violently onto the floorboards. I straightened slowly and circled my shoulders experimentally to see if the ache was going to get any worse.
“Is your shoulder bothering you, Russell?” Holmes asked, his back to me. The irritation was back in his voice; whatever the news, it was not what he had wanted.
“It’s fine. What does the telegram say?”
He thrust it at me and went off in the direction of the kitchen,
where I heard him talking with Mrs Elliott for a moment before he returned to take up his place before the fire.
“You must have warned them not to use names,” I noted curiously, reading the flimsy a second time.
“I mentioned it was a rural area and circumspection was wise.”
Circumspection in this case may have been unnecessary, for the telegram from New York merely stated:
FIRST PARTY UNKNOWN SECOND PARTY HEADMASTER RETIRED DUE TO ILL HEALTH. SCHOOL SOLD 1921 NOW FAILING. M BRIDGES
The necessarily terse style engendered by telegraphic communication, even compounded by Holmes’ caution, could not explain the dearth of information provided by this little missive. “I’d say this raises rather more questions than it answers, wouldn’t you agree?”
My partner’s face twisted briefly in a moue of annoyance. “My usual informant in the police department must be away. Bridges is his inferior officer, in the fullest sense of the word. Still, it would indicate that Scheiman left New York voluntarily, rather than with the hounds of the department on his heels. Interesting that he should have chosen to run a school, as his father did. In this case, the school’s failure to survive his departure could be an indication of his having pillaged the coffers a bit too effectively, or merely a sign of the man’s immense charisma on which the entire enterprise rode.”
I did not think it necessary even to respond to this last scenario. Instead, I said, “Tell me about Pethering.”
Mrs Elliott came in then with tea and a plate of toasted muffins, and when she had returned to her kitchen, Holmes told me how he had spent the last three days.
“In the end I did not leave here until nearly midday on Sunday,” he began, although I knew that, from Mrs Elliott. Well after midday in fact; Holmes had stayed with Baring-Gould all morning, had waited while the
old man recited the morning services, and had in fact not left until after the noon meal. I did not tell him I knew this, and he did not explain.
“I took a room at the inn in Sourton that night. I did succeed in prising a cup of tea from them before I left in the morning, but I could not wait until the kitchen was awake. I haven’t had a proper meal, now that I think of it, until noon today.” He paused to reach for a buttered muffin.
“As you will have seen from the map, it is a stiff climb up onto the moor, closer akin to rock climbing than walking. However, it was the way Pethering took, so I had no choice.
“I came out on Sourton Common just after dawn on Monday, a short distance above the old tramway to the peat works at the head of Rattle Brook. It did not take long to find the place where Pethering had made his first camp, almost as soon as he gained the moor—he didn’t even bother to look for a sheltered place, no doubt because darkness overtook him. I set off from there in the direction of Watern Tor, almost due east and four miles by the map, but nearly twice that on foot, what with the hills and the streams and the congregation of marshes that intrude in that place.
“There was no knowing for certain Pethering’s exact route, but I came across signs of his passing. For a man who reveres antiquities he was very casual about what rubbish he strewed across the countryside.
“His second night he camped near Watern Tor, and judging by the number of tins I found at his campsite, he remained in that vicinity from teatime Monday until midday Tuesday, no doubt searching for giant canine footprints in the boggy areas, where I found a number of his own boot marks. He might have remained longer but for the storm, which began to blow in at about two o’clock in the afternoon.
“He may have thought he could get off the moor before it hit; certainly he would not have wished to remain where he had settled down, which was a very exposed and uncomfortable place. He packed up his rucksack in some haste, leaving behind one tent peg and a couple of unopened tins of food, and launched due west, aiming, I believe, for the
ravine of the West Okemont, which his map would have told him would be windy, but less vulnerable than where he was.
“The storm caught him just after he’d crossed the river, three hard miles short of Sourton. He found a low place in the hill leading down to the river, got his tent more or less up, and crawled inside.
“It must have been a wild night for him, with nothing to eat but cold beans spooned from the tin, the roof of his tent blowing about and leaking in a number of places—his sleeping roll, which I abandoned, weighed as much as all the other things combined.
“And then, at some time during the evening, just after the height of the storm when the soil was at its most sodden, something made him leave the tent and venture down to the river, slopping through the wet ground more than half a mile to a place where the river is bordered by a narrow strip of primeval oak forest similar to Wistman’s Wood.”
“Black Tor Copse,” I said, having read my guidebook and my map. He nodded. “There it was he met his death, in a stretch of rough but open terrain. Pieces of his broken hand torch lay between the rocks, and the blood that seeped down had been only lightly diluted by rain.”
“The storm blew through by midnight in Postbridge.”
“And slightly earlier to the north. He lay there for an hour or more, and after the rain had ended and begun to seep off the surface of the peat, his body was carried a mile or so down the river and hidden in an abandoned mine. His assailants then went back for the tent and his possessions, dragging and carrying them a lesser distance to the adit that I came across on my last tour of the area.”
“Ah. Too fastidious to share the watching place with a corpse,” I suggested.
“It would also indicate that they are not finished with the adit, whether they are proposing to use it for storing things or for watching from, or simply as a shelter out of the rain.”
“And yet you removed the rucksack.”
“It had been thrown far to the back in the collapsing portion of the shaft used for their rubbish tip, with the sleeping roll thrown on top. I
thought it unlikely they would brave the unsavoury elements to retrieve it, so I simply rearranged the sleeping roll to look as it had before, and took the other possessions out from under it.”
I decided against closer enquiry concerning the type of rubbish in the tip; I also vowed to have my overcoat cleaned at the earliest opportunity.
“I found the adit first, and after I left there I continued downriver, where I found the signs of what I first took to be shelling from the range just north of there, as if the guns had overshot their mark. It had been roughly concealed, by spade work and a redistribution of leaves, and I imagine that in another month, with the last leaf-fall, it will be invisible.
“A short distance farther on, however, in a piece of broken ground that was once a tin works, I was interested to find the ground more freshly disturbed, with signs of digging still clear to be seen. On closer examination, I found pipes.”
“Pipes?” I said, as there flashed before me the bizarre image of a collection of meerschaums and briars planted stem-first into a hill.
“Empty steel piping, two inches in diameter and approximately two feet long. There were twenty of them altogether, arranged about four feet apart from one another, sunk into the ground and covered carefully with a cap to keep the inside clear of debris.”
“Not filled with pieces of gold and a charge of black powder?”
“Not yet.” His eyes gleamed briefly. “I believe that the technique is to prepare the hole by drilling or shoveling down into soft ground and inserting a length of hollow pipe. One then takes a similar length of a smaller diameter of thin-walled, soft pipe which has had a good number of holes drilled or punched into it and then been loosely packed with the charge and the gold, probably an ounce or so mixed into a spadeful of river sand. The smaller of the pipes is then dropped—gently—into the larger, after which the outer pipe is withdrawn, and the wires on the detonators fastened onto a master wire running to the detonator plunger.”