"Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thomas Donald)

7

Lord Arthur had returned to his seat on the government benches for the very good reason that he was to act as teller for the Ayes at the end of the stockbreeders debate which now began. We knew where he would be until that debate ended or was adjourned. Lord Blagdon led us to his room beyond the House of Lords with its fine view of the Houses of Parliament terrace running above the Thames. He stood at his desk, pouring whisky from a decanter into three glasses. Then he straightened up and handed us each a glass.

“Why did he ask his foolish question? Why did he vote in support of the very law which he had condemned in my hearing as an abuse of freedom and a mere expression of prejudice against the enlightened?”

“Blackmail,” said Holmes simply.

“Blackmail! How could he be blackmailed?”

“With great respect, my lord, has it not occurred to you that the so-called cheiromancer or palmist foretold something which, if true, would have made Lord Arthur liable to the criminal law or exposed him to public disgrace?”

“But what?”

“Nothing less than murder, I think.”

“But my cousin has murdered no one!”

“Possibly not. Not yet.”

Lord Blagdon had left instructions that the door-keeper should warn him as soon as a vote was called in the present House of Commons debate. Lord Arthur, as teller, could not leave until the result was announced. We should be alerted in good time to pick up his trail as he left the Houses of Parliament. Or so we thought.

I realised too late that something had gone wrong with Lord Blagdon’s arrangement. We had received no message of Lord Arthur preparing to leave the building when I heard a familiar call echoing through the corridors outside. It is the cry that ends every day’s business in the Palace of Westminster, calling like a watchman through the streets of a city.

“Who goes home? Who goes home?”

We looked at one another. Where was he? Holmes and I could scarcely go and search for him. Much of the building was forbidden territory to us and we should hardly know where to begin.

“Wait here, if you please,” said Lord Blagdon peremptorily, “I will go and find him. If the door-keeper sees him preparing to leave, he will get word to you. Lord Arthur must still be somewhere in the building.”

As it proved, Lord Arthur Savile was in the precincts of Parliament but he was no longer in the building. Left to ourselves, Holmes and I stood at the latticed window. It looked down across the terrace and the river which ran at the base of its wall. By the lights of the far bank we could see cabs moving along the Albert Embankment. A tugboat pulling a string of three lighters was proceeding down the river towards the wharves of Battersea or Lambeth.

“I do not understand it,” I said, not for the first time.

“Possibly not,” said Holmes patiently, “Have the goodness, however, to keep quite still and watch the river. I would rather not be noticed.”

I was surveying the river terrace which extends from New Palace Yard almost the entire length of parliament. There was a man walking by the wall, his back to the river. He was pacing up and down as if in expectation, wearing a black silk hat and smoking a cigar.

“That is the fellow who was sitting in the Strangers Gallery,” I said at once, for there was no mistaking his bulk and the material of his bag-like summer suit, “The man who turned round and smiled at us, after Lord Arthur had made his faux pas by interrupting the Junior Minister.”

“Just so,” said Holmes quietly, “If it will help your understanding a little further, I was able to read the card which he was holding and which admitted him. He is the correspondent of the Psychical Research Quarterly. Had it been a more exalted publication he might no doubt have claimed a seat in the Press Gallery.”

“What is he doing out there?”

“Wait! Give your attention to the facts and the events. Nothing else. From his presence in the gallery and the title of the publication, we may deduce that this is Mr Septimus Podgers and that his reading of palms at the Lancaster House spring party is probably responsible for Lord Arthur Savile’s curious change of mind this evening. His sudden antipathy to fortune-telling.”

“And the wearing of gloves to conceal his hands?”

“To conceal his palms, Watson. He cared nothing about the backs of his hands when he played the piano. I think you will find that it was the Line of Life on his left palm which promised murder, according to Mr Podgers.”

“You cannot believe that, Holmes!”

“It is enough that simple-minded Lord Arthur believed it. You follow his reasoning? If he was doomed to murder, as his belief persuaded him, let it be someone whose life was of little account and with whom he would not be connected. Imagine Lady Clementina Beauchamp-despatched by aconite in a chocolate taken from the bonbon box and eaten with her coffee after dinner. Who would look for a sinister event in the death of one so frail? Who would suspect Lord Arthur, a thousand miles away in Venice and with no motive for murder? Only when he heard of her death by natural causes did he take fright. He must, at all costs, inspect the interior of the bonbonnière and remove whatever chocolates chanced still to be there. But there were none. With luck, he must have thought, the smear of chocolate on the porcelain base was no more than a smear of chocolate.”

“And Archdeacon Percy?”

“I confess that gave me a little more trouble. The reason that there is no clock-maker at 199 Greek Street is that there is no such address at all. The numbers stop before 199. The clock’s explosive mechanism was put together most inefficiently by an amateur elsewhere in London. The first percussion cap evidently detonated only a small part of the gunpowder at noon. I suspect that it merely ignited a brief trail of it, which had leaked in the post and now burnt without any significant explosive force. It was only when the hands met again at twelve midnight that the remaining percussion caps were struck and the main detonation took place.”

“Lord Arthur was the bomb-maker?”

Holmes shook his head.

“I think not. It was a botched job but even that would have been beyond him. Let us say he commissioned it. As for the timepiece, clocks of this model were made after 1871 in France to celebrate the advent of the Third Republic. They are a rarity in England, merely a curiosity. We have no taste for these revolutions. Through the agency of Inspector Lestrade and the records of Customs and Excise, I have established that no more than half a dozen have been imported into England in the past twelve months. One of these was addressed to Mr Elivas Ruhtra in the care of the Serbian News Agency in Lisle Street.”

“Who on earth is Elivas Ruhtra? What possible interest could a Serbian anarchist have in Archdeacon Percy?”

“It is a fact, Watson, that one who adopts an alias or memo-rises a combination of numbers for a lock is almost always more fearful of forgetting or muddling the pseudonym or the numbers than of a thief discovering them. For this reason, the most common combination of numbers chosen is 1,2,3,4 or the numerical date of a birthday. Lord Arthur Savile is only an amateur assassin, scatterbrained enough to muddle a pseudonym, devoid of much rationality. If he were not the grandson of an earl, he would probably be in the workhouse or selling matches on the street. Yet even he would hardly forget his own name.”

“He is Elivas Ruhtra?”

“Arthur Savile is Elivas Ruhtra spelt backwards. Even his uncertain mental grasp could hardly let that slip from his memory. The Archdeacon, with whom he had no connection, beyond choosing him from the octogenarians in Crockford’s Clerical Directory, gave him a second opportunity of homicide without motive or association. The evidence of the clock, such as it was, would be destroyed in the explosion, along with the Archdeacon. His predicted murder would be committed, the dreadful prophecy would be realised. Lord Arthur would be a free man.”

I pointed at the window.

“And Septimus Podgers? What part had he in all this?”

“Blackmail. Podgers had kept him in view. He had only to tell the world, perhaps in the shape of Scotland Yard, that Lord Arthur believed himself doomed to murder. His acquisition of aconite or gunpowder would be easily traced. The deaths of Lady Clementine or the Archdeacon would take on a very different appearance. The cheque for a hundred guineas, whose impress Lord Blagdon read on his lordship’s blotter, was the final piece of evidence which convinced me. It is absurdly high for a palmist’s consultation but scarcely excessive when the object is to conceal murder.”

“That is your proof?”

“Not quite. I believe the rest will follow very shortly.”

As he spoke I saw another figure, moving towards Podgers through the doorway which opened from the library staircase to the terrace. There was lamplight enough to make out the youthful aristocratic stoop of Lord Arthur Savile. If Holmes was right, this was a private rendezvous between a blackmailer and his victim. It was a place where no one else was likely to be found at this time of night, as members hurried homewards.

I prepared myself for a confrontation between the two, a loud argument perhaps, ending in the submission of Lord Arthur, the exchange of a further cheque or bank notes. However slippery and odious, Podgers had the whip-hand over the young man. Lord Arthur came on, stooping, his hands clasped under the tails of his evening coat.

He came closer and for some reason Podgers uttered a cry that was no louder than a distant bird-call by the time that it reached the height of our window. The cheiromantist was making sudden motions with his hands, as if he were trying to push his adversary away. But he was trapped in a corner of the stone wall which rose to the height of his waist. Lord Arthur moved his hand quickly and I swore that the lamplight caught the blade of a knife. I looked at Holmes but he made no movement.

Septimus Podgers did what any man might have done in the circumstances. He put his hands on the wall, jumped up backwards and was soon sitting on it, his feet flailing at the man who stood before him, as if to ward him off. I cannot say whether Lord Arthur welcomed this or, indeed, whether he had engineered it. In another second he had dropped the knife, if that was what it was. He snatched Septimus Podgers by the ankles, tipped him back and let him go. There was a second cry, softer than the first and, I could swear, the bump of a body against stone, followed by a splash.

Lord Arthur stood at the wall, watching the river tide. There was little that he could have done, even had he wished to. The terrace of Parliament drops sheer and implacable to the Thames, the ebb running fast downstream. The tugboat and its barges were in midstream, the currents flowing powerfully toward them from both the Westminster and Lambeth banks of the great waterway. I could not see whether Podgers was alive or dead, nor even where he was. He had disappeared from the eyes of mortals. I thought I could make out a black silk hat floating directly in front of the powerful tugboat as it threshed downstream.

Holmes made no movement and said only, “Even if Lord Arthur were to raise the alarm, the miscreant is beyond all hope. It is far too dark and the tide is running far too fast for any help that might be offered. It is better so. Justice moves in mysterious ways. I cannot deny that it has dealt with Septimus Podgers as he deserved. The man was the architect of his own murder. He planned it to the last detail.”

“Planned his own murder?”

Holmes began to button his coat and draw on his gloves.

“To be sure.”

“How?”

He looked at me, his head on one side in a gesture of despair.

“My dear Watson, if a palmist were to tell me that I was preordained to commit murder-and if I believed him-I should rid myself of the burden at once by murdering him. What else? It is only because Lord Arthur is so soft-headed or soft-hearted that he chose victims who were likely to die before long in any case.”

“Then we are to do nothing?”

“There is nothing that requires doing, my old friend.”

“Ought we not at least to search the lodgings of this man Podgers in West Moon Street and remove any compromising documents or evidence relating to the case?”

He chuckled.

“It is only to their victims that blackmailers pretend to have an archive of incriminating evidence. They know too well that such documents are like a knife which is more likely to injure its owner than his victims. It is the invariable practice of these scoundrels to carry the important or crucial items in their heads-or in the case of Mr Septimus Podgers what remains of his head now that the tugboat and its barges have passed. We will, if you please, take our leave of Lord Blagdon and return to Baker Street. I daresay it will be as well to keep an eye upon the columns of the press for a week or two.”

With a sense of foreboding I followed his advice. The next week brought a letter from Lord Blagdon informing us that Lord Arthur Savile had suffered a nervous collapse and was now in the care of a keeper at a clinic for such disorders in Bexhill-on-Sea. He was well cared for in every way and, so far as he could ever be, he was happy. It was not thought that he would be released at an early date, therefore the services of Holmes and myself would no longer be required for his protection. Lord Blagdon added his thanks and enclosed fifty guineas in settlement of his account.

There the matter stood for a further week. Then, as the breakfast-table was cleared on a fine September morning with a hint of autumn in the air, I opened the pages of the Morning Post and knew that our anxieties for Lord Arthur Savile were at an end.

On Sunday morning at seven o’clock, the body of Mr Septimus R. Podgers, the eminent cheiromantist, was washed on shore in Greenwich, just in front of the Ship Hotel. The unfortunate gentleman, whose mortal remains appear to have been in collision with a steamer of the river traffic, was identified by the contents of his pockets and the prints of his fingers. He had been missing for almost a fortnight, and considerable anxiety for his safety had been felt in London ’s cheiromantic circles. It is supposed that Mr Podgers committed suicide under the influence of a temporary mental derangement, caused by overwork. A verdict to that effect was returned this afternoon by a coroner’s jury. Mr Podgers had just completed an elaborate treatise on the subject of the Human Hand, that will shortly be published, when it will no doubt attract much attention. The deceased was sixty-five years of age and does not seem to have left any relations.

Holmes read this. Ile put the paper down and gazed at the mellow sunlight beyond the window.

“I was a little short with you, old fellow, in the matter of a week or two at Ilfracombe or Tenby. September is not too far advanced and the sunny days are not yet too misty. I have for some time been meditating a monograph on criminal aberrations of the benevolent impulse, what the poet Browning calls ‘the honest thief and ‘the tender murderer.’ Warm autumn days on an Atlantic coast would do as well as anywhere for the composition I have in mind.”

Before he had a chance to change his mind, I had consulted Bradshaw’s railway guide, wired to a comfortable hotel reserving our rooms and also to the Great Western Railway, securing a first-class carriage from Paddington to Barnstaple, via Exeter.