The Secret Notebooks of Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

During this mind-reading demonstration, I found my attention being drawn more and more to the Count rather than to his assistant, despite her more obvious charms, although Rakoczi, standing there centre stage in his black and white apparel, was himself a compelling figure. There was, however, something else about him which fascinated me. I felt I had met him somewhere before, quite where or when I could not remember. All the same, there was a disturbingly familiar quality about some of his movements rather than his features or his bearing.

I was still puzzling over this when the performance finished and the lady assistant returned to the stage, where Rakoczi, divested of his velvet mask, took her by the hand and, leading her towards the footlights, bowed with her to thunderous applause from the audience.

Hardly had the heavy curtains been drawn across the stage than Holmes got to his feet.

‘Come along, Watson,’ he whispered urgently. ‘It is time we left.’

Giving me no opportunity to protest that there
were two turns still to be performed before the end of the programme, a unicyclist and a famous soubrette well-known for her comic Cockney songs, who was top of the bill,
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he hurried towards the exit, leaving me with no other option but to stumble after him.

‘Where are we going now, Holmes?’ I asked as I caught up with him outside the theatre, for it was clear from the purposeful manner in which he strode up the street that he had a specific destination in mind.

‘To the stage-door,’ he replied briskly.

‘But why there?’ I asked, much mystified by his answer.

‘To interview Count Rakoczi, of course,’ he retorted, as if the explanation were obvious.

The stage-door, a dingy entrance poorly lit by a single gas flare, was situated in an alleyway which ran alongside the theatre. Once inside, we found ourselves facing a small, booth-like office with an open hatchway, behind which the doorkeeper, an elderly, bad-tempered looking man smelling strongly of ale, kept guard, who, from his glowering expression, seemed determined to refuse any request we might make. However, a florin soon weakened his resolve and he agreed to deliver one of Holmes’ cards, on which he had scribbled a short note, to Count Rakoczi’s dressing-room.

Shortly afterwards he returned to conduct us to this room, where we found Rakoczi standing facing the door as we entered, a look of acute anxiety on his face.

He had stripped off his stage persona, not just the evening clothes, which he had substituted for a shabby red dressing-gown, but also the appurtenances of his physical appearance, including the pallid complexion, the curly black mustachios and pointed beard together with the jet-black hair. He stood before us totally transformed from the dashing figure he had presented on the stage to a very ordinary man with reddish hair and a slightly undershot chin.

‘Mr Gaunt!’ I exclaimed out loud.

Those restless eyes which I had noticed at the Nonpareil Club darted from Holmes to me and then back again to Holmes, while one hand went up in a characteristic gesture to pull nervously at the lapel of his dressing-gown.

‘You received my card and read the note, I assume?’ Holmes remarked in a pleasant voice which nevertheless held a touch of menace. When Gaunt failed to reply, Holmes continued. ‘I have several courses of action open to me, Mr Gaunt. I could go straight to the police or alternatively I could inform Mr Sinclair or the manager of this theatre of your criminal activities. Any of these choices could lead to your arrest and imprisonment. Alternatively, I could leave you to remedy the situation yourself without my interference.’

Holmes paused and raised his eyebrows but Gaunt still failed to speak, although a slight inclination of
his head indicated agreement with my old friend’s last suggestion.

‘Very well,’ Holmes continued in a brisk, business-like manner, ‘then this is what you must do. You must go immediately to Colonel Upwood and explain the situation to him. The two of you will then arrange to send to Mr Sinclair at the Nonpareil Club your resignations together with a full list of all the club members whom you have cheated and a precise record of the amounts. With that letter, you will send the money owed, so that Mr Sinclair can return it to your victims.

‘Furthermore, you and Colonel Upwood will send me a written guarantee, making sure it is signed with your real name, that neither of you will ever play cards again for money. If either of you break that undertaking, I shall make sure that every gentlemen’s club is told of your past misdemeanours, as well as every music-hall manager and Colonel Upwood’s commanding officer. As a result, your reputations will be ruined. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, yes, indeed you do, Mr Holmes!’ cried Gaunt, beating his hands together in so frenzied a manner that I feared he might burst into tears. To my great relief, Holmes nodded in my direction and we left the room before the man succumbed to this final humiliation.

‘It was sheer good luck that I realised Gaunt was none other than Count Rakoczi, the self-styled telepathist,’ Holmes remarked as we left by the stage-door and stepped out into the narrow alley. ‘I saw a poster of him
several weeks ago outside the Cambridge Music-Hall and recognised Gaunt as the same man the moment we entered the gaming-room at the Nonpareil. Of course, you realise how he and Upwood arranged the fraud?’

‘I think so, Holmes. They used a form of code, did they not, to communicate secretly between themselves?’

‘Exactly so, Watson. In the case of the music-hall act, it was certain words or phrases used by Rakoczi’s assistant which told him what she was holding – a watch, say, or a purse. Other words indicated colour, number, initials and so on. No telepathy was involved; only a good memory and a convincing stage presence. Of course, the assistant also had to make sure that she chose only those items for which their system already supplied a code word.

‘I am convinced that Colonel Upwood saw their performance and realised it could be adapted for cheating at whist, using not just words and phrases but also certain gestures to indicate which cards each of them held in his hand, thereby controlling the play. Gaunt already had several nervous mannerisms which he made a point of using habitually so that no one would think it suspicious when he fingered his collar, for example, or stroked his chin at the card table.

‘It was a deception which they could not use too often, otherwise Sinclair and the club members would have suspected them of cheating. So they took pains to choose their victims with care, not experienced card-players but rash young men with plenty of money who might be expected to plunge in too deeply.’

‘And always on a Friday,’ I pointed out. ‘Why was that, Holmes?’

My old friend shrugged.

‘Possibly because it was the only evening in the week when Gaunt could persuade the manager of the Cambridge to change his placing on the bill, allowing him to leave a little earlier than usual so that he had time to remove his stage costume and make-up and take a cab to the Nonpareil.’

As he was speaking, he drew me quickly into a doorway, from the shelter of which we could watch unobserved the main entrance as well as the stage-door of the theatre. A few seconds later, we saw Eustace Gaunt, alias Rakoczi, emerge from this side entrance, dressed in street clothes, and walk hurriedly along to the main thoroughfare, where he hailed a hansom.

As it drew away, Holmes remarked with a chuckle, ‘I think we may guess Gaunt’s destination, my dear fellow. If I were, like you, a gambling man, I would wager half a sovereign that he is on his way to Colonel Upwood’s to lay my ultimatum before him.’

Holmes was, of course, correct, as usual.

The following day, he received two letters, one from Colonel Upwood, the other from Eustace Gaunt who signed himself as Alfred Tonks, presumably his real name. Both men unreservedly accepted the terms which Holmes had laid down.

That same morning, Godfrey Sinclair arrived to thank Holmes for his successful handling of the case and
for avoiding the scandal which would have ensued had the affair been made public.

The two men had resigned their membership of the Nonpareil, and Upwood, who presumably was in charge of their finances, had enclosed a list of names of all those they had cheated together with enough bank notes to repay the money their victims had lost.

‘A most satisfactory ending, my dear fellow,’ Holmes remarked, rubbing his hands together gleefully after Sinclair had left. ‘I suppose your faithful readers can expect a written account of the inquiry, suitably embellished in your own inimitable style. What will you call it? “The Adventure of the Colonel’s Cardsharping” or “Scandal at the Nonpareil Club”?’

In fact, I decided to call it neither, nor shall I publish an account of the case.

A few days after this exchange, I received an answer to a letter I had written to my old army friend, Colonel Hayter,
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asking if he knew anything about a Colonel Upwood, as he had maintained closer contact than I with our former regiments
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and was better acquainted with army gossip.

He wrote back to tell me that, although he had never met Upwood, he knew a little about his background and his service record, in particular one episode which my old friend thought would interest me, knowing of my own army experiences.

Colonel Upwood had taken part in the relief of Kandahar,
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the garrison town in Afghanistan to which the British forces, including myself, had retreated after our tragic defeat at the battle of Maiwand on 27th July 1880. The town was besieged by a vastly superior Afghan force led by Ayub Khan, and was relieved twenty-four days later by the heroic action of a British force of 10,000 men, led by Major General Frederick ‘Bobs’ Robert, which, after a forced march from Kabul to Kandahar of 320 miles across the mountains in the scorching summer heat, attacked Ayub Khan’s camp, killing thousands of his men and putting the rest to flight. Compared to these losses, our own, thank God, were mercifully light, amounting to only 58 men killed and 192 wounded.

Without the intervention of that gallant force, those of us at Kandahar might have been starved into surrender with consequences which do not bear contemplating.

Among that relieving force was Upwood, then a
Major, who was wounded in the left arm during the attack and was consequently, like myself, invalided out of the army with a pension.
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One might therefore claim that my life was saved as much by the action of Upwood and his brave comrades as by that of Murray, my orderly, who, after I myself was wounded, threw me across the back of a pack horse and joined the general retreat to Kandahar.

In view of this, I feel it would be disloyal of me to publish this account of Colonel Upwood’s subsequent fall from grace at the Nonpareil Club and therefore it will be consigned to my old army despatch box along with other unpublished papers, a fitting resting place, I feel, for this particular manuscript.
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