It is the shot tower that makes me call this an awful crime. To imagine Rourke, whatever his faults, lying conscious (for hemlock merely paralyses the body, it does not deaden the mind, nor, so far as I know, prevent the sensation of pain) while he was ‘shot’ again and again, is to imagine a mind cold and humorously evil in its planning.
You disagree? It’s true, you and I, as well as Sherlock, deduced the method once the nature of the wounds was made clear to us. But to work backwards from calamity to cause is not the same as to pull the mechanism of causation from the air with a view to the causing of a calamity. That must be the mark of a brain that has teetered upon its throne of reason and begun a fall into utter blackness. A brain not unlike that of your late brother. Oh, sit down man. What good does a protest do between us?
Well, no matter. The brain that suggested the tower may be a matter for another time, but the more proximate identity of the murderer was, I’m sure you will agree, clear. Who did Rourke know with whom he might be inclined to take tea? Who would be able to persuade him to drink a herbal tonic? Who but his intended bride Miss Margaret Athol? The cause of her conspiring in his murder was partially shadowed, it was true. His treatment of her former lover? A sufficiently fanatical teetotaller might see the enticing of a man into the grip of drink as an awful crime. His abandonment of his wife? There was no way of proving that she was aware of either action. My brother, however, and this was I confess a thought worthy of us, asked himself a single crucial question.
You can’t guess?
It was this: given that the method of murder – the repeated striking of shot into the body – had suggested itself to the hypothetical master planner of crime, what aspect of the request on the part of his client (whether it was Miss Athol, or not) for vengeance could have suggested to this hidden master – let us term him M – such an image? Surely the punishment must in some way have fitted the crime for which revenge was desired? An artist, a veritable Leonardo De Vinci of crime, would demand nothing less.
Once asked it is obvious, is it not? The repeated striking of shot into a victim. What was the shot tower replicating, but the action of a firing squad? A very satisfactory replication for a criminal vengeance, for it involved no living band of soldiers to shoot high from pity or to break down from guilt thereafter.
Coming to this conclusion, Sherlock sent for a copy of Rourke’s military record in India – a request that I was able to facilitate – and discovered, what Rourke himself must have forgotten, or failed to connect to the prim and pretty Miss Athol of the Lady’s League, his presiding presence at the court martial and execution of Private John Benjamin Athol at Benares in India in 1887. John Athol, Margaret’s older brother, had taken advantage of the awful famine of that year to sell grain at inflated prices to the starving from military stores, profiteering from goods that were not his to dispose of.
My brother confronted Miss Athol with these facts and, with Watson as a witness, was present as she broke down and confessed. She defended her brother to the last, claiming that he had not sought vast wealth in gold or gems, or favours, for the grain but only desired to alleviate the horrible lack among the native population when so much was stored for the feeding of the army. My brother pressed her as to how she had arranged the murder, and how the shot tower “firing squad” had been conceived, but she refused to acknowledge any other hand in the business – although it was certain that she must have had accomplices in the movement of the body, if not in the conception of the crime. As to the sideburns and the moustache – her explanation for their removal was simple, although it struck my brother as an account she had from another mouth rather than her recounting something she had done. The falling shot had cooled insufficiently in one case during the bombardment of the body – as sometimes occurs in the process, the irregular shot so formed being discarded after passing through a sizing sieve – and a splash of still-molten metal had rebounded, catching in and singeing part of Rourke’s moustache on the right side. The removal had been intended to prevent this being visible, and the removal of the rest of the moustache and the sideburns had been a matter of symmetry.
Oh, if we only knew the kind of mind that demanded such mathematical symmetry and brought such mechanical aptitude to the commission of crime, eh Colonel! A pity your late lamented brother is no longer with us; it has the feel of his work does it not, or a least a family resemblance to it.
Of course, there is no proof – but I have sometime wondered, what if a disinterested party could have spoken understandingly to your brother, before he was too far steeped in crime, could he have been persuaded to step back from the abyss? The civil service can always use a brilliant mind, and even a macabre streak need not be an absolute bar to gainful employment. Something to think about perhaps. Still, I’m rambling, and I fear I have your Queen.
A shame I never got to meet your brother, and it might be a bigger shame still if you were to have to meet mine.
PAGE TURNERS
Kara Dennison
Billy the Page first appeared in The Valley of Fear, the last of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels. While he didn’t get much attention in the original canon, he was seen more in Doyle’s three plays, and has appeared in a few screen adaptations. Notably, Billy was also Charlie Chaplin’s first stage role, both in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: A Drama in Four Acts and William Gillette’s The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes.
You want to talk about important, right? It’s all well and good to say Dr Watson’s important to Mr Holmes, but he writes the stories, don’t he? Of course he’s going to make himself big talk in his own stories. That Lestrade fella, he shows up a lot. Probably he really is a bit important because he’s a police sort and takes the criminals off to prison once Mr Holmes gets clever and finds ’em.
But none of them’s there every morning, crack of dawn ’til whatever sound dusk makes, making sure Mr Holmes sees the people he needs to see and gets the messages he needs to get. None of these people would even see him if it weren’t for me bringing ’em in, you know.
And eating; three times a day, like actual clockwork, I give a knock to let him know he needs to eat. His brain’s so full of clever things, you see, he’d forget otherwise. One time Mrs Hudson roasted an entire chicken, and you could smell it all the way up in his study, and he still didn’t know supper was on. She said: let him starve, the fool, but that’s not my job, is it?
That’s why he needs me. That’s why he needs Billy. Take away Billy, and what’ve you got? A really canny cove who starves himself and doesn’t know who’s at the door.
Suppose that goes for any Billy, really. Between us? My name’s Humphrey. The one before me? Alfie. But we’re both Billy. And whoever comes after us’ll probably be Billy, too. Easier than remembering new names every few years, I guess.
Wiggins’ll have a go at me whenever he sees me, though. Thinks being a page is too soft a job. Asks me how long it takes to shine all the buttons on my jacket every morning. Talks about what he’s bought with his latest guinea prize from Mr Holmes. Says he got in fistfights with big tough sorts – I don’t believe that or he’d have some proper bruises, right? He’s really awful jumped up, though, is Wiggins. Even more so since Dr Watson started mentioning him by name in his stories.