Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The (21 page)

  'I was informed that if I got hold of the clue of the silver spoons I should be in a fair way of settling our case.'

  'Who told you that?'

  'Mr Lionel Dacre.'

  'Oh, does Dacre refer to his own conjuring?'

  'I don't know, I'm sure. What was his conjuring?'

  'A very clever trick he did one night at dinner here about two months ago.'

  'Had it anything to do with silver spoons?'

  'Well, it was silver spoons or silver forks, or something of that kind. I had entirely forgotten the incident. So far as I recollect at the moment there was a sleight-of-hand man of great expertness in one of the music halls, and the talk turned upon him. Then Dacre said the tricks he did were easy, and holding up a spoon or a fork, I don't remember which, he professed his ability to make it disappear before our eyes, to be found afterwards in the clothing of some one there present. Several offered to bet that he could do nothing of the kind, but he said he would bet with no one but Innis, who sat opposite him. Innis, with some reluctance, accepted the bet, and then Dacre, with a great show of the usual conjurer's gesticulations, spread forth his empty hands, and said we should find the spoon in Innis's pocket, and there, sure enough, it was. It seemed a proper sleight-of-hand trick, but we were never able to get him to repeat it.'

  'Thank you very much, Mr Gibbes; I think I see daylight now.'

  'If you do you are cleverer than I by a long chalk,' cried Bentham Gibbes as I took my departure.

  I went directly downstairs, and knocked at Mr Dacre's door once more. He opened the door himself, his man not yet having returned.

  'Ah, monsieur,' he cried, 'back already? You don't mean to tell me you have so soon got to the bottom of the silver spoon entanglement?'

  'I think I have, Mr Dacre. You were sitting at dinner opposite Mr Vincent Innis. You saw him conceal a silver spoon in his pocket. You probably waited for some time to understand what he meant by this, and as he did not return the spoon to its place, you proposed a conjuring trick, made the bet with him, and thus the spoon was returned to the table.'

  'Excellent! excellent, monsieur! That is very nearly what occurred, except that I acted at once. I had had experiences with Mr Vincent Innis before. Never did he enter these rooms of mine without my missing some little trinket after he was gone. Although Mr Innis is a very rich person, I am not a man of many possessions, so if anything is taken, I meet little difficulty in coming to a knowledge of my loss. Of course, I never mentioned these abstractions to him. They were all trivial, as I have said, and so far as the silver spoon was concerned, it was of no great value either. But I thought the bet and the recovery of the spoon would teach him a lesson; it apparently has not done so. On the night of the twenty-third he sat at my right hand, as you will see by consulting your diagram of the table and the guests. I asked him a question twice, to which he did not reply, and looking at him I was startled by the expression in his eyes. They were fixed on a distant corner of the room, and following his gaze I saw what he was staring at with such hypnotising concentration. So absorbed was he in contemplation of the packet there so plainly exposed, now my attention was turned to it, that he seemed to be entirely oblivious of what was going on around him. I roused him from his trance by jocularly calling Gibbes's attention to the display of money. I expected in this way to save Innis from committing the act which he seemingly did commit. Imagine then the dilemma in which I was placed when Gibbes confided to me the morning after what had occurred the night before. I was positive Innis had taken the money, yet I possessed no proof of it. I could not tell Gibbes, and I dare not speak to Innis. Of course, monsieur, you do not need to be told that Innis is not a thief in the ordinary sense of the word. He has no need to steal, and yet apparently cannot help doing so. I am sure that no attempt has been made to pass those notes. They are doubtless resting securely in his house at Kensington. He is, in fact, a kleptomaniac, or a maniac of some sort. And now, monsieur, was my hint regarding the silver spoons of any value to you?'

  'Of the most infinite value, Mr Dacre.'

  'Then let me make another suggestion. I leave it entirely to your bravery; a bravery which, I confess, I do not myself possess. Will you take a hansom, drive to Mr Innis's house on the Cromwell Road, confront him quietly, and ask for the return of the packet? I am anxious to know what will happen. If he hands it to you, as I expect he will, then you must tell Mr Gibbes the whole story.'

  'Mr Dacre, your suggestion shall be immediately acted upon, and I thank you for your compliment to my courage.'

  I found that Mr Innis inhabited a very grand house. After a time he entered the study on the ground floor, to which I had been conducted. He held my card in his hand, and was looking at it with some surprise.

  'I think I have not the pleasure of knowing you, Monsieur Valmont,' he said, courteously enough.

  'No. I ventured to call on a matter of business. I was once investigator for the French Government, and now am doing private detective work here in London.'

  'Ah! And how is that supposed to interest me? There is nothing that I wish investigated. I did not send for you, did I?'

  'No, Mr Innis, I merely took the liberty of calling to ask you to let me have the package you took from Mr Bentham Gibbes's frock-coat pocket on the night of the twenty-third.'

  'He wishes it returned, does he?'

  'Yes.'

  Mr Innis calmly walked to a desk, which he unlocked and opened, displaying a veritable museum of trinkets of one sort and another. Pulling out a small drawer he took from it the packet containing the five twenty-pound notes. Apparently it had never been opened. With a smile he handed it to me.

  'You will make my apologies to Mr Gibbes for not returning it before. Tell him I have been unusually busy of late.'

  'I shall not fail to do so,' said I, with a bow.

  'Thanks so much. Good-morning, Monsieur Valmont.'

  'Good-morning, Mr Innis.'

  And so I returned the packet to Mr Bentham Gibbes, who pulled the notes from between their pasteboard protection, and begged me to accept them.

I
N THE 1890s and early 1900s, Francis Edward Grainger wrote a large number of crime stories under the pseudonym of 'Headon Hill' which were published in the monthly magazines of the period and later collected in book form. In many ways his most original creation was Kala Persad, an elderly Hindu sage who is brought to London by a young man named Mark Poignand. This odd couple join forces to solve crimes in the capital. However, Headon Hill's most Sherlockian character is the private detective Sebastian Zambra. Indeed, some of the Zambra stories quite blatantly 'borrow' their plots from Conan Doyle stories. None of Headon Hill's narratives is particularly original and the crimes they describe rarely need a mastermind to solve them. In many ways, however, they are typical of their period and of the crime fiction which filled so many pages of the magazines of the late Victorian and Edwardian era. And who could resist a story which, whatever its other merits, has such a memorably eye-catching title as 'The Sapient Monkey'?

I
WOULD ADVISE every person whose duties take him into the field of 'private enquiry' to go steadily through the daily papers the first thing every morning. Personally I have found the practice most useful, for there are not many
causes célèbres in which my service
s are not enlisted on one side or the other, and by this method I am always up in my main facts before I am summoned to assist. When I read the account of the proceedings at Bow Street against Franklin Gale in connection with the Tudways' bank robbery, I remember thinking that on the face of it there never was a clearer case against a misguided young man.

  Condensed for the sake of brevity, the police-court report disclosed the following state of things. Franklin Gale, clerk, aged twenty-three, in the employment of Messrs. Tudways, the well-known private bankers of the Strand, was brought up on a warrant charged with stealing the sum of £500 – being the moneys of his employers. Mr James Spruce, assistant cashier at the bank, gave evidence to the effect that he missed the money from his till on the afternoon of July 22nd. On making up his cash for the day he discovered that he was short of £300 worth of notes and £200 in gold. He had no idea how the amount had been abstracted. The prisoner was an assistant bookkeeper at the bank, and had access behind the counter. Detective Sergeant Simmons said that the case had been placed in his hands for the purpose of tracing the stolen notes. He had ascertained that one of them – of the value of £5 – had been paid to Messrs. Crosthwaite & Co., tailors, of New Bond Street, on July 27th, by Franklin Gale. As a result, he had applied for a warrant, and had arrested the prisoner. The latter was remanded for a week, at the end of which period it was expected that further evidence would be forthcoming. I had hardly finished reading the report when a telegram was put into my hands demanding my immediate presence at 'Rosemount', Twickenham. From the address given, and from the name of 'Gale' appended to the despatch, I concluded that the affair at Tudways' Bank was the cause of the summons. I had little doubt that I was to be retained in the interests of the prisoner, and my surmise proved correct.

  'Rosemount' was by no means the usual kind of abode from which the ordinary run of bank clerks come gaily trooping into the great City in shoals by the early trains. There was nothing of cheap gentility about the 'pleasant suburban residence standing in its own grounds of an acre', as the house-agent would say – with its lawns sloping down to the river, shaded by mulberry and chestnut trees, and plentifully garnished with the noble flower which gave it half its name. 'Rosemount' was assuredly the home either of some prosperous merchant or of a private gentleman, and when I crossed its threshold I did so quite prepared for the fuller enlightenment which was to follow. Mr Franklin Gale was evidently not one of the struggling genus bank clerk, but must be the son of well-to-do people, and not yet flown from the parent nest. When I left my office I had thought that I was bound on a forlorn hope, but at the sight of 'Rosemount' – my first real 'touch' of the case – my spirits revived. Why should a young man living amid such signs of wealth want to rob his employers? Of course I recognised that the youth of the prisoner precluded the probability of the place being his own. Had he been older, I should have reversed the argument. 'Rosemount' in the actual occupation of a middle-aged bank clerk would have been
prima-facie
evidence of a tendency to outrun the constable. I was shown into a well-appointed library, where I was received by a tall, silver-haired old gentleman of ruddy complexion, who had apparently been pacing the floor in a state of agitation. His warm greeting towards me – a perfect stranger – had the air of one who clutches at a straw.

  'I have sent for you to prove my son's innocence, Mr Zambra,' he said. 'Franklin no more stole that money than I did. In the first place, he didn't want it; and, secondly, if he had been ever so pushed for cash, he would rather have cut off his right hand than put it into his employer's till. Besides, if these thick-headed policemen were bound to lock one of us up, it ought to have been me. The five-pound note with which Franklin paid his tailor was one – so he assures me, and I believe him – which I gave him myself.'

  'Perhaps you would give me the facts in detail?' I replied.

  'As to the robbery, both my son and I are as much in the dark as old Tudway himself,' Mr Gale proceeded. 'Franklin tells me that Spruce, the cashier, is accredited to be a most careful man, and the very last to leave his till to take care of itself. The facts that came out in evidence are perfectly true. Franklin's desk is close to the counter, and the note identified as one of the missing ones was certainly paid by him to Crosthwaite & Co., of New Bond Street, a few days after the robbery. It bears his endorsement, so there can be no doubt about that.

  'So much for their side of the case. Ours is, I must confess, from a legal point of view, much weaker, and lies in my son's assertion of innocence, coupled with the knowledge of myself and his mother and his sisters that he is incapable of such a crime. Franklin insists that the note he paid to Crosthwaite & Co., the tailors, was one that I gave him on the morning of the 22nd. I remember perfectly well giving him a five-pound note at breakfast on that day, just before he left for town, so that he must have had it several hours before the robbery was committed. Franklin says that he had no other banknotes between the 22nd and the 27th, and that he cannot, therefore, be mistaken. The note which I gave him I got fresh from my own bankers a day or two before, together with some others; and here is the most unfortunate point in the case. The solicitor whom I have engaged to defend Franklin has made the necessary enquiries at my bankers, and finds that the note paid to the tailors is not one of those which I drew from the bank.'