The third theory – though it had occurred to him – was not one that my brother felt able to pursue, involving as it did an emotional question of a certain delicacy. This task he forced upon Watson, despite the fact that Sherlock had rendered it almost impossible by his own felonious actions. The task was simply to interview Sergeant Rourke’s innamorata Miss Athol and ascertain whether or not his moustache and sideburns formed an impediment to their union, or were among his chief attractions. If the former, a simple chain of reasoning existed: learning of some improvement in his fortunes, the sergeant might well have been emboldened to propose – intending to do so he would have made the personal sacrifices necessary to present himself in the most aesthetically pleasing state. I am not myself much inclined to the pursuit of the fair sex – a man my size must be most enamoured of the pleasures of the table – but surely such an act as appearing clean shaven would charm an already interested party, who had professed a disquiet in connection with his appearance, almost as much as his increased financial prospects. The murder, and the mutilation of the moustache would then be either coincidences, or, if related, would be related by a causal chain in which both were set in motion by the letter, but without being themselves connected. Alternatively, if she especially favoured his appearance unaltered, then the change wrought upon it might represent a coup carried out by a rival, or unsuccessful suitor, with the murder in that model of events being again a parallel event, unless it – in itself – formed part of the spurned lover’s revenge.
Watson was – for he possesses an excellent bedside manner and all the graces of a confiding physician – able to gain the young woman’s confidences, as Sherlock would not have done. She did indeed have a previously favoured man, a George Welby, who had been pressing his suite upon her for some time, but whom she had rejected when he proved to be a habitual taker of spirituous liquors. He had attempted to conceal this from her, and indeed may have been inclined at one point to attempt to set drink aside and follow her example, but he had the misfortune (as it seemed) to be taken up by new friends and in their company so to wallow in the dens of the City, so that it could not but come to her attention. Her view of the sergeant’s moustache and sideburns was more than favourable, it seemed. It was one of a doting mother to a boy’s first facial hair. She approved of them heartily as a sign of a virile manliness which did not require gin to set it going, nor brandy to sustain it.
This I think Sherlock should have been able to deduce without Watson’s evidence – for no-one of professing an opposing view would have wished for or, having been given unwished, cherished the form of keepsake that he had earlier stolen. I confess I do not know how Holmes and Watson resolved the matter of this theft; I imagine the surreptitious re-stuffing of the bag by Holmes with some hair from a recently deceased scoundrel in police custody, and its replacement under her pillow with some embarrassment by the comfort-bearing Watson. But perhaps, after all, she did not miss it. I hesitate to conjecture about female sensibilities.
See how maddeningly my brother flounders between ideas, each one setting him on some active foray into events, when a cautious rational picture built up from item upon item of data would serve his turn so much more effectively. You can, I suppose, conclude his next step?
Quite so. Learning that the suitor Welby – now his main suspect – was prone to drink and consorted with bad companions, he began a wholesale haunting of public houses and traveller’s inns, his lean body bulked up with cloth to a drunkard’s dimensions and his nose reddened with rouge. Ah, what it is to be the brother of a thwarted thespian. I’d wager your own brother gave you no such trouble, personally, being a mathematician – the mildest and gentlest of professions, next to your own railway work.[9]
Thus a whole three days of time were lost, clapping men upon the back and exclaiming about this or that sporting endeavour, until Sherlock – under the barbarous name of Philip Matherhyde – was quite as boon a companion to Mr Welby as any of that young man’s new friends. A telegram, meanwhile, had gone to Sergeant Rourke’s relatives to discover if the mysterious message that had cheered him had originated with them, or if they could raise a conjecture as to its sender. A reply reached Baker Street by the same means, while Holmes was among his cups. The letter had not directly concerned a legacy, but it had been a turn of fortune, which might suggest to the sergeant that the time had come to actively pursue the hand of Miss Athol. The message was nothing less than the news of the death of his estranged wife, an Indian woman – whom he had abandoned on his return to England. It is perhaps surprising that a man who would readily abandon one wife might feel a qualm in seeking to court another – but Rourke’s family were Irish Catholic stock, and, whereas the leaving of a native bride was accounted a venal sin, the bigamous or adulterous acquisition of another or the horror of divorce were both to him as much an evil as the bottled demons that he attempted to wrest from the hands of his soldiers. Considering himself free, however, he had undoubtedly gone to his death in the pleasant, if deluded, mental state of one contemplating the bliss of matrimony.
Watson hurried to inform Sherlock of this, and found him in a bout of fisticuffs among drunken men, as the erstwhile Matherhyde was forced to show his metal during a bout of ribaldry. Watson’s presence proved fatal to his disguise, for, as it transpired, Welby’s new friends were none other than members of Rourke’s own regiment, who had but a week before been questioned by Watson in connection with their sergeant’s death. The jig, as the cant has it, was up. If Matherhyde’s anxious friend was the well-known Dr Watson, whom could the bibulous Matherhyde be but the disguised Sherlock Holmes? The logic is not perhaps exact; Dr Watson might have many friends, but to drunken and violent men – prone to the quick reactions and suspicions of soldiers – it sufficed. My brother and his friend were bodily thrown out of the drinking den.
Only later when they compared their view of the case was Sherlock to declare that he had now, to his own satisfaction at least, determined the sequence of events, though he was doubtful of proving them in any court of England.
Firstly the presence of the soldiers around Welby was no coincidence: even before his intent encompassed marriage, Rourke desired to have no rival in respect of Miss Athol. Thus he set his men, who were keen to curry favour with him, to dog Welby’s footsteps and to drag him down. It was in their company that he gained the reputation that led to Margaret Athol refusing his offer of marriage, and it was no doubt through Rourke or a third party instructed by him that Miss Athol learned of her former beau’s misdeeds. Rourke then was not so innocent a victim as he might have appeared, nor were his misdeeds confined to this country, for he had left behind him in India at least one thread ending in death, which was to change his status here.
The family of his former wife was by no means rich, though, and to orchestrate vengeance across the bounds of the Empire, or over time, requires either considerable resources or passionate fanaticism, of which there was no evidence in the case.
Someone, however, had both the means (perhaps hemlock, perhaps another drug) to paralyse the sergeant, the capacity to persuade him to drink it, and – perhaps – knowledge of the shot tower. The latter requirement my brother concluded was a lesser one for he had conceived recently – a possible delusion which he has communicated to me, but which as yet I have been unable to either prove or disprove – the view that certain sorts of crime: robbery, vengeance, the more outré and unsolvable of murders, were being better planned, better executed, and rendered more baroque and elaborate in their elegance than the London criminal classes would ever manage on their own. The shot tower then might well be an elaboration of a scheme of revenge, suggested by a third party – this planner of crimes – rather than a natural thought of the murderer.
9
Colonel James Moriarty, though formerly in the Indian Army, was at this time employed as a railway station master. That his brother had the same name as him must have been confusing, but it is possible that they were referred to as James Senior and James Junior respectively, by a father more than usually obsessed with order and regimentation.