The Sensible Necktie and Other Stories of Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

Holmes lit his pipe. “Yes, yes, that is all very good and, I have no doubt, interesting to the man who will eventually compile your father's biography. But surely your father was more than a politician, defining though his politician identity may have been?”

“Father went into politics at a very early age, and he showed an interest already at university, but he worked his way up. He comes from a not very wealthy family in Liverpool, and his father was a shipbuilder. He has told me very little about his early years, and I think his parents died when he was quite young.”

“How did he manage to get to university?” I asked.

“There was a schoolmaster at his school in Liverpool who noticed that he had a special talent, and put him up for a scholarship to Cambridge.”

I could not help but raise my eyebrows. “Cambridge, eh? Quite the rags to riches story.”

“Do you know what school he went to?” asked Holmes.

“I'm afraid not,” said Miss Crabb.

“The name of his supportive schoolmaster, perhaps?”

She shook her head. Holmes drew in the smoke from his pipe while eyeing our visitor for a few drawn-out seconds.

“Miss Crabb,” he then said. “How many times, exactly, have you actually seen your father since his madness first presented itself?”

The woman appeared to sense unpleasant suspicions behind Holmes' question and looked worried, but she answered in a calm voice.

“The last time I spoke to him was that time a week and two days ago when he was raving about pagan gods. Since then I have only seen him standing at his bedroom window while I was in the garden. Some of the servants have seen him, however. Mrs. Kilroy sometimes lurks by his door when she has brought his tray up to him to make sure he collects it, and she has seen his hands reach out for it on several occasions.”

Holmes put down his pipe on the mantelpiece.

“Thank you, Miss Crabb. Your narrative is most intriguing. I advise you to return to Sussex by the first train, and then Watson and I will follow on a train later this afternoon, if that is all right with you? I trust you have no objection to an outing, Watson? Excellent! I hope you will forgive my eagerness, Miss Crabb, but what you have told me contains many worrying details that I would like to give my undivided attention as soon as possible. I ask you not to fear, for all of this may just as well prove to be nothing, but the fact that your father's nocturnal wanderings have ceased to me indicates an ominous development in the course of events. I therefore beg you not to jump to any conclusions until we have all the facts before us.”

“I am grateful for your concern, Mr Holmes, and am happy to think that I will see you in Sussex later today.”

I admired the young woman's resources for composure, and was surprised to find a stronger woman behind that pale exterior than I had expected. Holmes took her hand graciously and we bid her
au revoir
. It had not been two days since our last excursion into the country, when we brought the affair of the Hargreaves heritage to a close, and I had not had time to unpack my overnight bag from that journey, so I quickly went up to my bedroom to fetch it. When I came back down to our sitting room, Holmes was busy going through his scrapbooks. His packed bag was already lying in the armchair beside him.

“I fear that our young visitor has lived rather a sheltered life. Her father seems not to have told her much about his work, other than that he was successful. We must go to other sources for a more rounded picture of our man! Now, let's see… Crabb, Crabb - ah! Here we are: The right honourable Wilfred Crabb, liberal. Yes, quite a distinguished career. Became an MP in '57, joined the Cabinet as Deputy Minister of Transport, then he appears to have had a series of more or less unofficial advisory positions within the core of the government. His trail grows more obscure the higher he rises in the ranks - a typical course of events in high politics. But my dear brother must know more about him than these meagre reports culled from the daily newspapers. I shall call on him at once! An unannounced visit is probably the thing he hates most in this world, but it does him good to have his all too steady foundations unsettled now and again. Watson! Meet me on the platform at London Bridge Station at two o'clock, and we will go together to see our retired politician.”

He had spoken without interruption, as was his habit when he did not want me to give my opinion and force him to alter his plans. As he spoke, he grabbed his hat and cane and was out of the door before I had been given an opportunity to confirm our meeting.

It was not until we were reunited in the railway compartment that afternoon that I was able to voice my reactions to Miss Crabb's story.

“I see very little reason,” I said as we were rattling out of the southern suburbs, “in connecting Mr Crabb's reclusive behaviour to the grotesque animal executions. That he has been going out in the night at the same time as animals have disappeared is no evidence for suspecting him.”

“That is true, Watson, but who else would it be?”

“I think it all points to the gardener. He is the one who claims to have seen Mr Crabb in the night.”

“Yes, but why would he go about killing animals?”

“Perhaps they have been intruding in the garden, eating his rosebushes or making trouble?”

“Cats don't eat roses, Watson. Pigs and hens may make a bit of a mess in a well-kept garden, I suppose, but we are not going all the way to Sussex to solve the murders of small animals.”

“Then why are we going? I must confess, I cannot quite see what the essence of this mystery is.”

Holmes crossed his arms and looked out of the window.

“The essence of the mystery is its disparate curiosities. A grown man with an eminent public record suddenly starts raving about pagan deities. He avoids his beloved daughter seemingly without reason. He makes nocturnal excursions into the nearby woods. The woods are littered with the corpses of animals. All very strange things that we must tie together.”

“I don't see how we can. There must be a missing link in this chain.”

“Precisely, Watson! We are missing vital parts of the drama. And my experience tells me that such parts are best searched for in the past.”

“But there is nothing untoward in the man's past.”

“Not that we know of, but his past has its blank spaces.”

“Ah! You have gathered information from your brother?”

“I have indeed.”

“Was he pleased to see you?”

“I had to ask the page boy at the Diogenes to go and ask him three times before he agreed to see me, and then he kept me waiting in the corridor outside his room for twenty minutes while he finished reading a chapter in his book.”

“The epitome of graciousness as always. Did he give you anything useful?”

“Mycroft was exceedingly informative, but his intelligence serves to focus the blank spaces rather than fill them in. Wilfred Crabb is an infamous man in government circles, and he appears to have been an ingenious political strategist working behind the scenes more than a charismatic public figure. His unofficial role in the Cabinet is the most interesting part of his career, and rumour has it he was at one time one of Gladstone's closest advisers, but this work does not seem to have brought Crabb into the fighting ground of politics, as it were. With men like this, however, who work in obscurity and gain a shadowy public image, there is a lot of talk, and Mycroft was at one point assigned to do some research into Crabb's background in order to make sure that there was nothing inappropriate in his past and to put a stop to some of the rumours. He found that what Miss Crabb told us is largely true. He came from a shipbuilding family in Liverpool and came to Cambridge on a scholarship, and there his promising political career began. Only one thing mystified Mycroft, and this was also the very subject of the malicious rumours, namely the scholarship that allowed him to go to Cambridge. The rumours claimed that it had not actually been a scholarship but that he had been sponsored by some or other illustrious person in exchange for certain indecent favours. Mycroft had never been able to ascertain whether this was true, but he found that all records on the scholarship and on how Crabb had funded his time in Cambridge had been lost or deliberately erased.”

Holmes paused and allowed the information to sink in.

“My word!” I exclaimed. “But do you think this has bearing on the recent events? I mean, maybe he fiddled his way into Cambridge, but that was half a century ago.”

“Yes, it does seem a bit farfetched, does it not? But then again, our past has a strange habit of haunting us just when we think we are far enough from it.”

Our speculations had not, as far as I could ascertain, brought us closer to any revelations when we arrived at Crowborough station, where we were met by Miss Crabb and a stable-lad with a pony and trap. We rode east, into an area of wooded hills where the villages were few and far between. After about fifteen minutes, we came down the slope of a pleasant shallow dale and Pettigrew Lodge soon appeared on our right side, a simple three-storey house of rough rubble walls and intricately arranged gables that looked like a well-restored Elizabethan manor house, but upon closer inspection proved to be a newly built Neo-Gothic villa.

“Well, Mr Holmes,” said our hostess as we descended from the trap, “I assume you want to try and talk to my father?”

“Certainly not,” replied Holmes. “Whatever for?”

Miss Crabb shot me a puzzled glance, and I responded with a shrug of the shoulders.

“But I…” she began.

“Why would he speak to me if he will not even speak to his own daughter? No, that would only be a waste of time. I suggest instead that we take a walk around the grounds of the house and acquaint ourselves with the premises. Perhaps you will be so good as to show us the place where you walked with your father on that fateful evening?”

“Of course, whatever you wish, Mr Holmes.”

She walked ahead of us and led us into the garden. Making our way along the flowerbeds, we saw a man of about sixty who was standing in one of them, enveloped by a thick bush, carefully pruning the branches with a short-bladed knife.

“Mr Brookshaw, I presume?” said Holmes, tipping his hat.

“Afternoon, gentlemen. Miss Crabb,” said the old man. “You the detective fellow?” he said to Holmes.

“I believe I am. It's quite a garden you have here, Mr Brookshaw. You must be proud of it.”

“There's hard work behind it. Every square-inch has been crafted to perfection.”

“Impressive, I must say. Are you the sole engineer of it?”

“I am. Well, Mr Crabb used to like to contribute with one or two ideas, but not now that he's gone funny.”

“I understand you have seen him going out at night?”

“I have. Several times. Went through the garden and into the woods over there.”

“And do you have a theory as to why he did this?”

Brookshaw looked at us with black eyes.

“Paganism,” he said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “Believe you me, it still has a hold in these parts of the world. The simple folk are still very superstitious. Once in a while it gets into the head of a gentleman who is bored with life and needs something exciting to hold onto. Mr Crabb was just such a man. Now that politics was no longer a part of his life, he needed something to replace it.”

“So he replaced politics with paganism?” I said.

“That's right.”

“Doesn't really sound like a natural transition.”

“You underestimate the power of paganism, sir.”

“Either that or he overestimates the power of politics,” said Holmes with a smile. “Would you object to our having a little look in your tool shed, where I understand you saw Mr Crabb one night?”

Brookshaw looked Holmes up and down. “I did not actually see him in the shed, only outside, but you are perfectly welcome to look at it. It is there, by the holly. The door's open.”

“Thank you very much for your help, Mr Brookshaw.” Holmes promenaded up to the little shed while I stayed with Miss Crabb, who started to talk to her gardener about their current trouble with moles. When Holmes returned he was smiling, but he said nothing and only led the way onwards. I was curious as to why he had conversed so briefly with the gardener. To me, he was a suspicious character whose involvement in this affair I presumed to be more insidious than it appeared, and so I queried him about it once we were out of earshot.

“My dear friend, we have no more reason to suspect Mr Brookshaw than we have to suspect any inhabitant of the area. Mr Crabb's strange behaviour began when he and Miss Crabb were far away from Brookshaw's domain. If in some way he played a part in that moment, stalking them on their way or some such thing, then what did he do, and why has he done nothing for several weeks? If he had sinister motives, his actions should have left some sort of traces.”

“I agree with you, Mr Holmes,” said Miss Crabb. “Brookshaw has been with us for a long time and he has always been most loyal, thinking very highly of my father.”

“But still,” I said, “a major part of this is based on Brookshaw's testimony. What if he is lying about seeing Mr Crabb at night? Then there is nothing to connect him with the dead animals.”

“Then who strung them up?” said Miss Crabb.

“Well, I don't know. I'm just saying that we cannot assume anything.”

Holmes made a sweeping gesture with his forefinger. “My dear Watson, I am assuming nothing at all. I am quite certain that if Brookshaw had done anything suspicious he would not wait around for us to arrive. Now, of course it is quite possible that Brookshaw strung up the animals, but we must acquire an overall picture before delving deeper. This is the way into the woods, I take it?”

“It is, Mr Holmes,” replied our host, “but is it really necessary to go in there? I would not like to see those animals again.”