At my words he looked away. His expression changed from one of humouring a child-like companion to stern and pensive. He stared at the river flowing dark-grey below us. White of face he exclaimed harshly, ‘Damnation! Perhaps through your superb normality you have come up with a valid point. Do I drown in an excess of ingenuity?’
He paused so long that had he been seated I would, under other circumstances, assumed his narcolepsy had struck him into a momentary asleep. With a sudden determined shake of his head, like a bull staggering under the blood-letting of a picador’s darts, he turned back to view me.
‘Watson, these many years in my profession have given me a nose for a crime as keen as a vintner’s for a fine claret. Were Moriarty not definitively dead, I would say he is alive and well among these Sussex hills. Certainly he must be mocking our disunity from his watery grave in Hell.’
He continued in a low, disturbed voice, ‘I assure you, Watson, something vast and evil is taking place around us, though right now it lies a yard or more beyond my outstretched hand.’
He stared once more along the long straight stretch of the River Dudwell to the distant outline of Crick’s End. In the crepuscular light, it appeared a sombre edifice, saved only by the jaunty set of the Tudor chimneys etched against the still-lit westerly horizon. To my troubled eye, though at first picturesque in the happier time of our arrival earlier in the day, Holmes’ accusations now caused it to take on the grim and menacing visage of the sinister Crooksbury Hall, we encountered in The Adventure Of The Solitary Cyclist.
My companion resumed. ‘I can see you are not yet at my shoulder. We shall discuss the matter further before we resume our journey to their lair.’
Although impressed and disconcerted by his serious tone, his words calmed me. I was relieved at the prospect of a hiatus before we clamoured at their door.
‘Where do we start?’ I asked.
Holmes leaned on the bridge rail, looking down at the river.
‘As you point out, the evidence I have offered you is slight - not one witness for the prosecution or a scribbled note - yet we know from our other cases small pickings are to deduction as wick to candle.’
He threw me a swift glance.
‘Think on these things once more, try to view them as from afar. The watchman keeping an eye on our Baker Street door. The urgent nature of the invitation. The arrival of Weit and Sir Julius to hear my talk at three o’ clock precisely - delayed by what? The indent of a hat too small on Sir Julius’ brow. A disrobed body in a shallow wagon pond exposing the effects of a burning sun. A Tropical hat with a band sourced in the Transvaal lying a-top the victim’s clothes. The dark glasses clutched between finger and thumb on a jutting arm. Why hold up dark glasses as you sink beneath the surface of a wagon pond - to save them from drowning? The empty pockets. Not far away a moat eight feet deep or more. Pevensey at work on two canvases on the same Estate, the second painting commissioned only two or three days ago. The use of boiled linseed oil for the figure of the stranger replacing Constable’s dog.... do you say there is no fusion in all this?’
‘Holmes...’ I started, trying to break in.
He stilled me with the wave of an imperious hand. ‘Let me continue, Watson. I believe you have given me the gist of your argument. I need your ear more than your tongue. Let us cast the net wider to see if further clues cry out for our attention. Siviter’s study would be the poison gland of the nettle, the engine through which this plot was hatched. Does an important clue lie there? I recall only an old photograph of his mother wearing black patches on her face to enhance the delicacy of her complexion.’
My recollection of the study was of a well-lit room, an outsize desk sparsely adorned with the silver-framed photograph of Siviter’s mother, two fine inkwells, a little silver comfit box, a delicate Ming dynasty saucer of the most beautiful deep-blue colour, an unusual emerald snake ring presented to Siviter by the Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, a dish of oranges beside a carafe of water, and a Berliner Gram-o-phone. To each side was a papier mâché mother-of-pearl chair surrounded by a litter of dog-baskets filled with the eager attractive faces of the Aberdeen terriers. One basket was formerly a nursery-bath, with the lid still on it.
‘And some 2000 books around the walls,’ I ventured.
‘Among which ..?’
‘Many for the eyes of sailors: Superstitions of the Sea, Knots and Splices, Typee, Know Your Own Ship, South Pacific Directory, Castaway on the Auckland Islands, Stevens’ Stowage. Oh, yes, and Nimrod’s Conditioning Of Hunters. And books on bees.’
‘I too observed his fine collection on bee-farming, twenty-one in all. He has some good in him. But was there anything ... absent?’
Among all Siviter’s literary treasures on the layers of shelves in his study, there was not so much as a copy of The Strand to catch my attention, not even the best-known of our cases - The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Speckled Band, A Study In Scarlet, or The Empty House. Instead, on a shelf set aside for three-decker novels and other light reading sat works by J. M. Barrie, Conrad, Olive Schreiner, James Fenimore Cooper, Galsworthy, an Emily and a Charlotte Brontë and a half dozen works of Rudyard Kipling.
‘Not one of your chronicles, Watson? Surely not... Not one, you say?’
‘Not one.’
Holmes’ amour de soi had been stung.
‘Aquila non captat muscas,’ he said dryly. ‘The Eagle does not catch flies.’
We fell silent. Although the sun had yet to set behind the wooded hills, the air above the stream was beginning to dampen and cool.
Still staring along the Dudwell towards Crick’s End, brow furrowed, Holmes resumed. ‘Something I cannot identify disturbs me, something in the paintings, a clue as important to the prosecution of this case as the tip-toe marks at the Baskerville Estate. We must pass through these oils by Pevensey and step out the other side, or like a palimpsest rub hard at them with oat bran and milk. I say the reason he used boiled linseed oil was to cover up their tracks. Up to then, neither canvas showed any signs of hurry. Its use serves Pevensey well. It speaks loud in his defence. It proves to me he knew nothing of the murder until after lunch today. A President of the Royal Academy does not live in a Daguerreotype world, summoned hither-and-thither to paint an oil in fifty seconds. Yet today, haste there was. It turned the Constable from a work of promise into mere quantities of pigment awaiting a frame. It is that which first drew my attention.’
‘Enlighten me, Holmes, if you will. Why precisely did he need that figure to dry at such a pace? A few hours more or less...’
‘... could turn their alibis against them. They had to calculate the possibility something about the death would raise the Peeler’s suspicion. This where the figure in the Constable is central. If the figure stayed wet until tomorrow it could throw into doubt the claim a passing stranger - the so-called tramp - was painted in this afternoon and not some hours later. By drying at an exceptional rate, the figure would provide convincing evidence the stranger was alive at three o’ clock.’