‘By the living Jingo! The figure by the wagon pond,’ I exclaimed.
‘Watson,’ Holmes responded in high delight. ‘An Age of Miracles is upon us - well done!’
‘But Holmes,’ I returned, with sudden exhilaration, sensing a flaw, ‘Pevensey was painting at the wagon pond until just after three this afternoon - that I remember Siviter telling us. The inclusion of a figure with such a hat must prove...’
By now my companion was paying me no attention. Yet again his gaze (‘eyes sparkling like a Golconda diamond’) darted across the railway yard for a first sight of the sociable. Ignoring my words, he pulled out a black clay pipe, filled it from a pouch of seal-skin, and set about firing up the last gasp of Abdulla’s Egyptian tobacco provided on an occasional basis from Salmon & Gluckstein of Oxford Street - ‘Largest and Cheapest Tobacconists in the World’.
Despite my deepening anxiety, it intrigued me how Holmes could undergo the most extraordinary metamorphosis from torpor to energy, from the pallid and introspective dreamer so often displayed before me at Baker Street where he will lie for hours or days with a vacant look, hardly speaking, to the alert and hyper-active man on the station platform before me. What combination of chemicals, normally dormant but at a ready manufacture in brain or gland, produced this startling result?
With no sight of the sociable, Holmes turned back to me. ‘Watson, you are outraged this corpse was left unclothed, yet I say killing someone and leaving his body bereft of clothes in a public place was for a purpose.’
‘What would you deduce?’
‘It can only be to expose the patterning on the skin.’
I stared at Holmes in bewilderment. ‘Holmes, the report makes no mention...’ I paused and guffawed. ‘Ah, you mean, what of the fish tattooed on the corpse’s hand in a peculiar pink pigment which the constable failed so lamentably to spot, the sign of the Hung anti-Manchu secret society?’
‘Watson,’ came Holmes’ immediate response, ‘despite your quite admirable attempt at humour, think, I beg you. Among the many foolish customs of the white man in Africa is the way he exposes his body to a drubbing by the celestial orb. He takes scissors and chops the knees off breeches. He rolls up the sleeves of khaki shirts to the armpit. He folds the shirt front inward to expose as much of his chest as possible which, might I bring to your attention, clearly approximates a ‘V’. In short, this is the corpse of a migrant bird from Tropical climes.’
‘Holmes,’ I scorned. ‘This is absurd! On what pretext are we to return to Crick’s End with a charge of murder! With what evidence shall we confront Siviter and the Kipling League? Some dozen lines contrived by a sub-editor’s lurid mind for the Late Edition of the Evening London Standard? A naked corpse, quite probably the victim of drowning, lying in a wagon pond at Scotney Castle in Kent? Nearby, clothes neatly folded and topped by a crimson hat perhaps of Tropical origin. Shall I go on - the V-shaped markings on a corpse’s chest... the use of reds, oranges and yellow for the wagon pond. Oh, yes, not forgetting a majestic spiny ... cordylid.’
I stared boldly at my companion. ‘Can you not see? They will think, as I am myself inclined to, you are demented. At best they’ll greet us at the door and conclude you have a pawky sense of humour never before discovered, even by you, despite all your forensic skill, against which both they and I should guard ourselves. Certainly its employment in this enterprise and fashion is extremely untimely.’
Other rail passengers were growing ever more numerous around us. I went on in a lower tone, ‘My dear Holmes, by long experience I have learned the wisdom of obeying your injunctions to the letter. Yet I must now inform you I am seriously disinclined to believe your conclusions despite the edifice you erect. You must rally support for any facts you muster. So far, the facts themselves are far from dramatic or remarkable except through the lens of an overblown interpretation. On the contrary. They are so slight and commonplace that I would not feel justified in laying them before our loyal public regardless of the clamour for further chronicles from the Editor of The Strand. You may have - will have - ranged against you constable and coroner and Lord Fusey and his woodman too, and if you have your way several illustrious members of the Kipling League. And Pevensey. And further,’ I threw in desperately, ‘why return to Crick’s End? Why not to where the crime took place, at Scotney Castle, if crime it is, which is still so entirely debatable?’
To this last objection, Holmes responded with an impatient cry.
‘Watson, for heaven’s sake, apply your telescope to your eye not your ear! We do not need to look where the body lay but where its heart ceased beating. Have you not learned in our many years together, where the corpse lies may be the greatest lie of all? Have you not had your fill of sightless eyes? Besides, by now it rests under blocks of ice on some butcher’s slab in Lamberhurst or Tunbridge Wells. What do you hope to discover? A pair of ammunition boots? The body on a gun-carriage, his boots reversed in the stirrups of his favourite charger, led by his groom with his dog beside him? This is not an instance where I lie on my face with a pocket-lens to my eye. No, Watson, there is no crop for harvesting at Scotney Castle. Do you not recall the words of Brother Mycroft - ‘give me the details and I will give you an expert opinion’? And uttered where? Seated in his arm-chair among the periodicals at the Diogenes Club. This is a case where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than the acquiring of fresh evidence. We have enough from this newspaper account. Pevensey’s oils have told us Scotney Castle contains both wagon pond and moat. The evidence you use to refute my conclusions, namely that this person - shall we call him a passing stranger - was sighted at the wagon pond at three o’ clock, the presumption it was a self-inflicted or accidental drowning, the inference the clothes and dark glasses were stolen, all comes from one direction and one alone. As to further clues on offer at Scotney Castle, do you imagine the marks of an assassin’s heel would survive the excited tramplings of the local Peeler or the horses’ hoofs as they roll the wagon back and forth to soak the wheels?’
Holmes Insists A Murder Has Taken Place
The light carriage pulled by a fine pair of greys came clip-clopping around the bend from the village, the cabman high astride the raised seat at the rear. He was attired in a blue surtout rather the worse for wear, tipped at the collar with red, and leather breeches and brown top boots. The reins ran through the harness of the collar and up at a steep angle into his hands. At the rear, attached by a slight chain, trotted a carriage-dog, a brown-spotted Dalmatian. The young newspaper vendor clutched anxiously at the cabman’s side like a noviciate postilion. We watched the cab’s pair of handsome greys begin to turn in a slow circle, the young vendor beckoning us with excited gestures. At that same moment, to my despair, with a snort of its long black nostril, the train for London steamed alongside the platform.
‘Holmes,’ I cried, ‘I implore you. Let me pay the boy his ninepence and give the cabman a florin and send him home, and we shall be on our way to London.’
My companion paid no attention to my urgent appeal. Beckoning me to follow, he strode across to the carriage, looked up at the coachman and demanded, ‘Do you know Crick’s End?’
‘Everyone do, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,’ came the response.
‘So you know me, my good man?’
‘Everyone do, Sir,’ the coachman replied. ‘We heard you was at the manor.’
‘Then hasten there at your fastest pace,’ Holmes ordered. ‘How long do you estimate?’