The Sensible Necktie and Other Stories of Sherlock Holmes (2 page)

Holmes smiled, then smacked his lips as if he was tasting an expensive wine. “Mr Thicknesse, your case is most intriguing, but my instincts tell me that immediate measures are of necessity. I believe we should go to Chilton Gifford before the trail grows cold.”

The village of Chilton Gifford lay in the centre of a shallow dale, surrounded by an area of thick woodlands unusual for that part of Oxfordshire. As we stepped from the train onto the platform, I was struck by how provincial and small the place seemed. No other people stepped on or off the train, and the stationmaster stood idly by as we paced the length of the platform. Ellis Thicknesse showed us the place where he had seen his brother standing before walking away. Holmes undertook a lengthy examination of the ground before looking up and turning to us.

Mr Thicknesse could not contain his giddiness. “I have been going over it in my mind, time and time again,” he said. “Why would he be standing here in the first place. Was he waiting for someone? Did he intend to board the train, then changed his mind? Or was his business here something else, unrelated to the railway?”

“Yes, all very pertinent questions,” said Holmes, “although it is pointless to be asking them at the moment because we have nothing to help us answer them. They are all secondary to the only question we should be trying to find an answer to at the moment: Why did he wear such a brightly-coloured tie?”

“But that is an even more impossible question, Holmes!” I protested.

“Is it? Perhaps. But it arouses thought-provoking speculations, does it not?”

“Yes, I suppose so. You mean that he became bored with his own drab existence and longed for an escape, so he put on a tie that was as far from his usual self as he could imagine and took the first train out of London?”

“Precisely.”

“Do you believe that is what happened?”

“Preposterous!” Mr Thicknesse exclaimed. “My brother was not the main character in a novel of romance. Not all sensible and restrained gentlemen are suppressed dreamers, you know!”

“I have no doubt in my mind,” said Holmes, “that the explanation that Watson has just provided us with is as far from the truth as one can get. But sometimes the opposite of the truth may point us in the direction of the truth itself. If Cyrus Thicknesse was so far from the dreamer that you say, then he would not take a train out of London, breaking his meticulous routine, without a very good reason, and most likely against his own will.”

“I could have told you that,” said Mr Thicknesse.

“Indeed,” said Holmes, “but what it points to is two things. Firstly, that the green necktie you saw your brother wearing was not his own, and secondly, that what we are looking for is, most likely, a letter.”

“You mean a letter that summoned him to Chilton Gifford?”

“If that was his destination.”

“But should we not search for that letter in his home?” I asked.

“A letter of such importance that a pedant breaks his routine because of it, he would probably take with him on his journey. I believe this is a part of it.”

Holmes held up a very small piece of paper, firmly clasped between his thumb and forefinger.

“Good God!” said Mr Thicknesse. “But how do you know that is my brother's letter?”

“That, my dear Mr Thicknesse, is still a matter of some debate, but the writing on it does tie together some loose ends.”

Holmes gave it to our client, who held it up so that he and I could read it. The remains of two lines could be read:

e at the plat

ll be expla

“How strange,” said Mr Thicknesse. “What do you think it could mean?”

“A not very wild guess,” replied Holmes, “is that the full sentence reads ‘Be' or ‘Meet me at the platform and all will be explained', or something similar.”

“You mean to say my brother had an appointment with someone here?”

“I mean just that. But the state of the letter suggests that he will not be coming back.”

“Then we have come no further, have we?”

“I would not say that. Ask yourself this: if your brother was standing on the platform waiting for his appointment two days ago, why did he take a train here three weeks earlier?”

“Has he been waiting for three weeks?” I said.

“Or he has only recently been able to wait. Do you recall that when the stationmaster walked through the train here just after your brother's disappearance, he came across a jammed curtain? It was a detail for which there was no explanation, and despite its trivial nature, I have suspected it to pertain to something important. You know how there are doors in every compartment of these trains that open directly onto the platform? If a passenger tried to pull down a curtain in one of these compartments, and the curtain was stuck but the door handle was loose, then the struggle to unjam the curtain might receive an unexpectedly dramatic conclusion.”

“You mean he fell out trying to pull down the drape in his compartment?” I said.

“The sun was shining that morning, and the compartments on this part of the line face east.”

“I cannot stand this!” cried Mr Thicknesse. “Will you tell us your suspicions, man? What happened to my brother?”

“I will explain on the way,” said Holmes.

“What way?” said Mr Thicknesse.

Holmes asked us to wait, and then he walked up to the station house and knocked on the door of the station-master's office. A thin moustachioed man stepped out, and Holmes started speaking to him, remaining out of earshot. Mr Thicknesse and I waited patiently while they spoke, and after a few minutes, the station-master nodded and closed the door to his office. Holmes gestured at us to follow, and then the station-master led us along the platform. When he came to the end, however, we were surprised to find that he did not stop, but jumped down onto the ground and kept walking along the railway tracks. In this way we went along, our guide repeatedly instructing us to walk in a straight line and not go to near the tracks. A ten-minute walk took us to a small clearing in the woods that lined the tracks, and as we halted by the shelter of a few thick tree trunks, we saw a number of carriages parked in the centre of it. A thin string of smoke rose from a nearly extinguished fire in the middle, and we could hear the sound of rumbling and chatting from within some of the vehicles. Holmes patted the station-master on the shoulder, thanking him for his help, and then he stepped out into the clearing without hesitation. The rest of us followed him warily. We were not three paces from the edge of the trees when a man and a woman emerged from behind one of the carriages and looked at us with suspicious glances. Holmes spoke a few words in a foreign tongue I had no idea he was acquainted with. The woman replied curtly before vanishing once more behind the carriage. Not ten seconds later, she reappeared in the company of a man. Our client's reaction informed us promptly of his identity.

“Cyrus!”

The man squinted for a while, his face betraying no emotions.

“Ellis,” he replied.

Mr Thicknesse stepped up to his brother, paused for a moment, then embraced him. It was a most moving scene, and Holmes and I stood by, allowing the revelation to sink in.

“How could you possibly know, Mr Holmes?” Ellis Thicknesse said in a broken voice while still clinging to his brother.

“I inferred that the only likely solution was that Mr Cyrus Thicknesse had somehow lost his memory. When I coupled the mystery of the jammed curtain with the lack of a sensible necktie, the conclusion that he had fallen off the train while trying to pull down the curtain, then hitting his head causing temporary memory loss was close at hand.”

We all looked down at Cyrus Thicknesse's shirtfront. Hanging down it was the bright green spotted tie that his brother had described.

“Where on earth did you get this tie, Cyrus?”

“Ghastly, isn't it? But my own was torn when I fell from the train, and one cannot go without a tie, can one? These people, who took care of me when they found me senseless by the railway track, kindly lent me this one.”

“Your description of the tie,” said Holmes to our client, “indicated to me that gypsies fitted into this affair at some end. Watson and I were once involved in a case concerning just such a ‘speckled band',” he added, and winked at me.

“Yes,” said the station-master, “they have been camped here a few months now. I suppose it is a bit irregular, but they do no 'arm, do they, so who am I to tell 'em off?”

“They have been very kind,” Cyrus Thicknesse agreed. “My memory started to come back gradually about a week ago. I remembered the train, trying to pull down that damned curtain and losing my footing, falling on the door. But why had I been on the train in the first place? The gypsies had taken care of my suit, and I had the idea to search its pockets. I found a letter. It was from a woman named Ursula Prentiss. The name meant nothing to me at first, but slowly my memories of long ago were awakened. She was betrothed to me when I was a young man, but we were ill-matched, the result of an agreement by our parents. Eventually, we managed to break off the engagement and parted as friends. Her parting gift - a lace handkerchief - I have worn in my breast pocket to this day as a memento of her decent and sensible nature. Now, suddenly, she wrote to me saying that she needed my help. Her parents were once more trying to force her into marriage, not being able to accept that she wishes to live as a free woman. She wanted me to come to Chilton Gifford, where her parents live, and try to persuade them to desist. We were supposed to meet at the station and go to their house together. When I realised that I had missed the appointment, I was distraught and went there to see if she had left a message for me. She had not, and I could do nothing but keep waiting, as my memory was still patchy. I could not remember where I lived or where I worked, and so I could not return. All I could do was go to the station every day and wait for Ursula. Of course, it was futile. Finally, I realised that all was lost and tore up her message. It was not until now, when I saw you, Ellis, that the last pieces of my memory came back to me. Good God. I must return to London. What an uproar there must be at the office! I am only too glad my colleagues are not here to see me like this. We must get back to London, so that I can contact Ursula. Maybe it is not too late yet!”

And thus was the tale of one of the most chivalrous and dutiful men of my acquaintance. I was almost ashamed at how easily I had assumed that this pedantic man had succumbed to feelings of romance. The reality of it was that he had remained himself, more staunchly than any man I had encountered, and that he had endeavoured to save a woman who wished only the freedom to live like he did. How curious that two so similar people had been matched, only to see that they were so similar they could not possibly marry.

We took Cyrus Thicknesse with us after he had profoundly thanked his gypsy benefactors, and took the first train back to London. He was safely brought to his Belsize Park flat, where the first order was to put on a decent necktie. Holmes and I went back to Baker Street, but learned already the next day that he had been able to contact his former fiancée, whose engagement had not yet been initiated. We were ensured that both Cyrus and Ellis Thicknesse would work to prevent it from being so.

“A most admirable gentleman, Mr Cyrus Thicknesse,” said Holmes as he reclined into his armchair. “His consistency should be a model for us all.”

“It is like you to sing the praises of a man who puts reason before emotions,” I commented.

“Call me predictable, my dear friend, but I sometimes think that it is the rational and unromantic people who bequeath to this world the real romance, when the starry-eyed only produce clouds that dissolve at the slightest puff.”

A Patch of Mist

In the final weeks of November of the year 1901, the amount of work at my practice had piled up following a lengthy visit to Scotland attending a medical conference, and when the level of engagement started to dwindle, I suddenly found myself with some free time on my hands. It was in periods such as this that I was reminded of my old friend Sherlock Holmes, whom I had seen very little of for some months, and so, one morning in early December, I decided to pay him a long-postponed visit. The weather was unusually mild for the season, and I walked to our old lodgings in Baker Street with my overcoat unbuttoned and my wool scarf sticking out of my coat pocket. It was a bustling, busy day and I was pleased to be able to enjoy the street life of the metropolis without the sensation of duty or hurry pervading my mind. Mrs Hudson appeared delighted to see me, and her questions about my current life were so numerous that it was a full twenty minutes before I got round to climbing the stairs to the old sitting room.

The state of the room, which always transformed into a welcoming and cosy place in my memory when I had been away from it for some time, was enough to give me a start as I opened the door. All over the floor were scattered the pages of torn and trampled old newspapers; the breakfast table, beside which I had spent so many soothing hours, had been overtaken by an intricate chemical experiment involving a complex series of test tubes and Bunsen burners, and on Holmes' old desk by the bay windows lay half a dozen large folios opened on top of each other. In the midst of all this, in front of the roaring fire, stood Holmes, his pipe clenched between his teeth and his hands holding up a newspaper so close to his face that the glow from the pipe was in serious danger of setting fire to it. “Is that you, Watson?” he said from behind the periodical. “Help yourself to a cigar. I will be with you shortly.”

I took a cigar from the usual place, and seated myself in the sofa before the fire. I could hear Holmes make a dismissive sound and then he closed the newspaper and threw it over his shoulder, the same way as he must have with all the others.

“Watson, my dear chap,” he said, extending his arms in a hospitable gesture. “So nice to see you after so long. Have a cigar, oh did I already - ? So sorry, well things have been in a bit of a disarray here for the past few days.”

He sat down in the armchair opposite me. He looked tired and overworked, but his face glowed with the lustre and energy that a constant supply of rewarding mental stimulation generally infused in him.

“You seem to be busy?” I said.

“I have been tremendously busy recently. As I have no doubt you have too. As a matter of fact, I read all about your success in Edinburgh. Well deserved, Watson, well deserved.”

I confess I blushed.

“It is nothing, really. I suppose I have not the stamina of refusing to accept accolades that you have?”

“Tut, Watson. Some accolades are mere knick-knacks, but others are the fruits of hard labour.”

“And what of your hard labour? Any fruits?”

“I cannot say I need to go hungry. But illustrious clients, such as those you may have read of in the papers, serve better as advertisements for my agency than as benefactors of its finances. They seem curiously aware of this themselves. My only compensation for my recent services to the Grand Duchess Constantia, for instance, was a silver candlestick that I immediately pawned. In fact, my recent work has to a large degree been about trading in various useless valuables for hard currency that will put food on my plate.”

“From what I understand, these cases are seldom rich in challenging puzzles. I seem to recall an extremely trifling matter involving the Crown Princess of Hungary and a missing lapdog.”

“I try not to be prejudiced at the outset, and treat every case with an equal degree of seriousness, but it is trying sometimes.”

He relit his extinguished pipe and leaned his head back. Just then, the chemical experiment on the table behind me started to emit strange and ominous hissing sounds, and Holmes bolted from his seat to attend to it. He turned off the gas flames, and picked up one of the test tubes, into which a yellowish liquid had been dripping from a spout.

“Disaster,” he stated placidly, before putting the tube down again and returning to his seat.

“You appear to be in the throes of a more demanding commission at the moment,” I said.

“Hum! Yes, it is a case of some difficulty. One of my problems is that I lack a sparring partner to test my theories on, and not least someone to throw foolish theories at me from which I may be guided towards the truly inspired ones.”

“I recognise that description.”

“Oh, Watson! You are sorely missed in these quarters. My conductor of light. But now that you are here, perhaps you would be interested in hearing the details of the case upon which I have been consulted?”

“Naturally.”

“You gladden me, dear friend. It is a problem of some complexity containing various possible loose ends to tug at. For the time being, I have become obsessed with matters of weather in connection with it, and by consulting the morning papers of the past few weeks, I have been trying to piece together the recent movements of high and low pressures across the English Channel. But I am getting ahead of myself, and seem to have picked up your old habit of telling a story the wrong way around. You must think that I have finally lost my sanity, blabbering on about weather conditions before I have explained the true nature of the case.”

“It sounds most intriguing.”

“To a meteorologist, perhaps. But to the commonplace observer, this is a case of a mysterious disappearance. It is no use, Watson. In order to give you a picture of it I must lower myself to the level of the tabloid journalist and tell the story as if it were a sensational affair. It seems you have at long last won our old argument on how best to narrate the reports of my cases. Anyway, I trust you are familiar with the phenomenon of pilot cutters that are used in harbours to take maritime pilots out to incoming larger vessels.”

“Indeed. I have a cousin who is a maritime pilot in Cardiff.”

“Splendid. Then you know that the cutters that take the pilots out to the large vessels are rather small affairs, driven by sails or oars.”

“I have been taken out on one myself.”

“Not a week ago, I was visited by a man who appeared most agitated and flustered. As he entered, he complained of headaches, and it was only after some minutes of relaxing in that sofa, that he introduced himself as a Mr Jack Frome, harbour master of Lydmouth harbour on the south coast west of Brighton. He began by painting a picture of the locality. It is quite a small harbour, but recently they have seen an upsurge in commercial activity trading on the vicinity to the larger harbours of Brighton and Portsmouth. They receive shipments of tomatoes from Spain and sugar from the West Indies. One of the larger West Indian trading vessels, the
Lizzie May
, has stopped at Lydmouth for minor maintenance work on a number of occasions, and it did so once more on the afternoon of November the 28
th
. The main pilot cutter of Lydmouth is called
Alicia
, and it went out with pilot Richard Wexton at exactly fifteen minutes past three. It was a clear day, and although the sky was already darkening, the harbour master had full sight of the
Lizzie May
from the windows of his office at the quayside.
Alicia
went out with Wexton and three ship's mates on board, but just as it approached the mouth of the harbour, Frome noticed that a thin mist was forming out at sea between the harbour and the trading vessel. In the following minutes, this mist started to grow thicker and thicker, until there was a small but concentrated patch of mist about two miles across separating the harbour from the vessel. Frome swears that in all his life as a seaman he has never seen mist gather so swiftly. The
Alicia
continued out of the harbour and sailed straight into the mist. It never emerged on the other side.

“When the mist cleared away only minutes after the cutter had gone out of sight, Frome could not see any sign of the
Alicia
between the harbour and the trade ship. He waited for nearly two hours, and then he arranged for the spare cutter to be prepared for the journey out to the
Lizzie May
. When it came out of the harbour, with Frome himself on-board, they saw that the
Alicia
was nowhere to be seen in the surroundings of the
Lizzie May
. Reaching the large ship, Frome and his associates started to question the crew, who swore they had not seen any sign of the cutter, despite keeping acute lookout for it, and keeping full watch over the mist since it formed. Frome knows the men in the crew well, and swears there is not a dishonest soul among them. Consequently, there is no accounting for what befell the cutter
Alicia
after it entered the cloud of mist outside Lydmouth harbour.”

“Astonishing!” I exclaimed. “I have never heard anything quite like it. Even in the case of the
Marie Celeste,
the disappearance of the crew took place without witnesses, and the ship was only found after the event. But here we have a disappearance right in front of several observers!”

“Exactly, Watson! That was just the aspect that attracted me to the case. I immediately accompanied Frome back to Lydmouth to examine the scene of the mystery for myself.”

“I would have expected nothing less from you. What did you find?”

“Precious little. Two days had gone by since the event, and still nothing had been seen or heard either of the boat or its crew. A meticulous search had been conducted along the coast to the east and west of Lydmouth to try and find any remains of the wreck, and three ships had gone out from Lydmouth harbour to scan the area where the cutter had been lost in search of any traces. But not so much as an oar had been found. Upon my arrival, I was taken out with the spare cutter, a boat of similar manufacture to the
Alicia
, and we circled once more the area of the disappearance. I asked Frome and his men about the men who had been on board it. Richard Wexton, he claimed, was an experienced pilot who had been based at Lydmouth for twenty years. He has a wife and three children, two of which are of mature age and have families of their own. He is described as a pillar of the community, much liked by locals and seafaring visitors alike. The three crew members included Thomas Fulford, a local fisherman and old sailor, just as established in Lydmouth as Wexton, and two men who were brothers by the name of Taylor. These two brothers are apparently newcomers to the area, claiming to be shipbuilders from Southampton. You know how suspicious people in small towns can be of strangers, Watson, and the Taylor brothers were no exception. Frome spoke of them with caution, making sure not to put any unfair blame on them, but conspicuously sparing in his praise of them. They are both quite young men, one of them not yet twenty, and they lodge together at one of the harbour taverns. But before I could consider the role these men could have played in the disappearance, I had to try and explain the disappearance itself.

“I continued by examining the
Lizzie May
, which was now anchored in the harbour. I found nothing out of the ordinary, neither by inspecting the hull nor by going through the interiors. The crew is made up to a large extent of indigenous West Indians who speak little English, and the rest of the crew are strangers to Lydmouth, which makes it unlikely that they would have any interest in making away with a small cutter and its crew. It was easy to dismiss a number of possible scenarios by asking what the motive would have been. The problem was that nobody seemed to have stood to gain from the disappearance of the
Alicia
and its crew. In consequence, I saw myself compelled to turn to forces outside of human agency. The explanation had to be connected to the powers of nature or human error. I considered the conditions of the disappearance, and compiled a list of five possible causes: a fire, a large sea wave, a shoal causing the boat to sink rapidly, an encounter with a whale or some other large creature, or an explosion. The problem was that the course of events had to have taken place within a very limited timeframe of no more than four minutes, from the moment when the patch of mist formed to when it cleared away. In this time, the boat could not possibly have been consumed by a fire - unless the mist was no mist but smoke from a fire on a different boat - but it could have sunk as a result of running aground, being attacked by a large animal, consumed by a wave or exploding. All of these eventualities, however, would have left behind a wreck that would have surfaced at least partly, not to mention dead bodies that would eventually have been swept ashore. None of this has happened. I returned to Baker Street from Lydmouth vexed by the lack of clues in this case, and have spent several days testing a number of hypotheses from the comfort of this sitting room. Today, I thought that I had hit upon something promising. I conjectured that the patch of mist in which the cutter was lost was created by artificial means, and have attempted to find the method used by recreating the process in my laboratory.”

“That accounts for the mess on the table. And have you found the method?”

“That is not the problem, Watson. A cloud of smoke or vapour could easily be created by human hands, but the question is how could it be done several yards out into the open sea? In conjunction with my experiments, I have tried, as I mentioned, to acquire a complete picture of the weather conditions at Lydmouth that day using as many newspaper reports as I could find. You see the remains of them scattered around you.”

“It is a veritable newspaper graveyard. And what does your complete picture indicate?”

“Nothing conclusive. There were no reports of fog anywhere in the vicinity on that day, but the weather was not clear, and the creation of small areas of mist cannot be excluded.”