Death on a Pale Horse (32 page)

From time to time, when I am out and about in London, I take lunch with a friend at the Army and Navy by appointment. On other days I go alone and chance “pot luck” at a large round communal table at the centre of the dining-room. Those who are unaccompanied may dine together there for the sake of gossip.

Preoccupied by our present investigation, I had not been near the club for two or three weeks. It was time to show my face again. Even so, it was perhaps best not to travel alone in a cab. There is safety in numbers, and it is really just as convenient to take a first-class ticket on the underground railway, which people had begun to refer to as the “tube.” To travel to St. James's Park from the Metropolitan station at the junction of Baker Street and the Euston Road was direct enough.

I walked along the busy pavement at my leisure and down the steps to the platform from the station booking-hall. I had only to wait for the next oncoming train to rumble out of the sooty brick arch of the tunnel into the brown glazed vaulting of the station. When one is travelling underground, Baker Street appears to be the centre of the civilised world. There is a line running east and a line running west, both of which end here. The stationary trains then stand side by side until the moment of their departure in reverse directions. This system is said to be the best for preventing collisions—and so it seems to be. Trains waiting at preceding stations do not leave their platforms until the electric telegraph signals that the space at Baker Street is “vacant.”

There were trains waiting at either platform as I came down the steps and took my seat in a carriage of the westbound departure, which would be the second to leave. After a moment or two, I glanced up at the window of the adjacent eastbound train a few feet away from me. A blast on the guard's whistle would signal its departure in due course. My thoughts were far away from that adjacent carriage window, two or three feet distant. I was roused unaccountably by an open newspaper which a passenger sitting on that other train was reading. I could not see the face of the reader, or anything other than a man's hands holding the pages open as he read. The black headline was plain in its large bold type: VICTORIA MANSIONS MURDER.

What did it mean? It was a bizarre situation. I could see the headline well enough but I could not communicate with that other reader nor attract his attention. He and I were as isolated in adjacent trains as goldfish in two separate bowls. Had there been a second murder in the mansion blocks? Or was it merely a statement by Scotland Yard of some new development in the mysterious case of Joshua Sellon? It was neither. Though the columns of newsprint were too small to read at this distance, I saw that this could not be today's paper. At the top of that front page it was stamped in red “AFTERNOON EDITION.” It was still only half-past ten in the morning. Afternoon editions do not come on the news-stands until after midday.

I managed at length to make out some of the smaller numerals and to see that the edition bore a date well past. It was the original report of Captain Sellon's murder. Why was someone now holding it open, as if for me to read? A sharp whistle-blast announced the departure of that other train, towards King's Cross and the banking districts. With a quickening of the heart, I convinced myself that should the newspaper be lowered, I would be staring into the malevolent features of Colonel Rawdon Moran. Those same eyes must surely have followed me from our rooms—perhaps in a slowly moving cab—with the quiet expressionless stare of the patient trapper.

That was absurd, of course. It was vastly more probable that someone else from London's millions had somewhere picked up a discarded out-of-date paper and was reading it. Yet I had begun to know the man since Epsom. I felt sure it must be he. He was not here by chance. I had ten—perhaps twenty—seconds before his carriage window glided out of view. But if I could see nothing else, I had a view of the back of his right hand as it held open that front page of the paper. In my mind, I tried to picture the hand that had held a gun at the Royal Britannia Rifle Range. I had kept in my memory the strong roughened fingers with a sprouting of red hairs on their backs.

There was time to focus on them. These were the same fingers, I could swear it. But they gripped the edge of the paper at just such a level that the upper corner of its page fell back upon them a little. Not enough to conceal them but, in this light and at a rapidly increasing distance, to suggest a reddish colour to those little tufts of hair that perhaps I was only imagining.

There was nothing more I could do—and he would have known it. That was what made me all the more certain. I could not see him but I would have bet my life that somehow, perhaps through a pinhole poked in the paper, he could see me register my astonishment before his train pulled into the darkness of the tunnel. Then I could only watch as that carriage slid completely out of sight.

Moran had surely kept me in his view, but any story I might tell to others would sound like the babbling of a delusional neurotic. He had contrived it all, if indeed it was he, so that I could not communicate with him or hold him to account. It was not twenty-four hours since I had heard that voice directed to me in the so-called Hall of Mirrors. Now I was being taught to understand that I should remain under scrutiny by his people in the London crowds, always at his beck and call. He had killed before—who knows how many times?—but always in such a way that he could not be touched by the law. From now on he would be constantly on the offensive, always driving me back. When my summons to execution came, I should be as powerless to evade him as I had been to confront him just now in our two “goldfish-bowls.”

If I stop and read again the last paragraph that I have written, its words seem to me like the protests of an hysteric. Short of a growing obsession with our adversary, there was nothing to prove that it had been Moran. Had I imagined or misread the headline? No. I knew instinctively that this had been our second encounter and presumably my third warning. I was being informed that my time was up. Holmes was under sentence in any case.

As the half-lit stations slipped by, I tried to think as Holmes would think. In London, it is far easier than in any jungle for a determined man to stalk his prey. My friend had recently begun to make use of those juvenile ragamuffins and mudlarks whom he called his “Baker Street Irregulars.” They could gather gossip, eavesdrop on conversations, and track a man who would never suspect a child among so many of them in the city streets. But then what Holmes could do, Moran could do. Which man, woman, or child in my vicinity might not be in the colonel's pay?

Someone in the busy crowd at Baker Street station might still have been watching me as the train pulled out—or might even be on the train. There was no question of what I must do—or rather what I must not do. They would expect me to scramble out of the carriage, run back up the street to our rooms and report everything to Holmes. I confess I was angered at the thought that they regarded me as the weakling of the two. Anger sharpened my wits. Holmes had deductive and forensic gifts far beyond mine. But a man who has been through the slaughter of Maiwand and the siege of Kandahar does not take to his heels in the face of common criminals. It did me good to think of these masters of conspiracy as nothing but common felons.

I stepped down from the carriage only when I reached my destination at St. James's Park. I emerged from the steps into the sunlight with the park before me, Buckingham Palace to one side and Whitehall on the other. I did not think anyone had followed me up to the surface. Of course, there were dozens of people crossing the lawns, past the flower-beds, over the bridge and the lake to the Mall. A few were nursemaids with prams. Most were men whose suits and hats proclaimed them as going about the business of government. Almost anyone in that moving crowd might have been detailed to report on my movements, but I no longer cared. Past Marlborough House and the cabs of Pall Mall, I came to the club.

The rooms are quiet in late morning. Roebuck, the porter at the desk, took my hat, coat, and gloves. From force of habit, I glanced at the baize notice-board, where letters to members await collection, held in place by a wire mesh. There were seldom any for me. I did not correspond much within the club, and I give my Baker Street address to friends and acquaintances as a rule. I scanned the board and saw one envelope with my name on it. It would be the steward's bill for monthly expenses.

Then I noticed a postage stamp on the envelope and knew that this had nothing to do with club business. It also came as an unwelcome surprise to see that the address of the club had been written in the same copperplate hand as on the first letter which “Samuel Dordona” had persuaded someone to write on his behalf. It even had the same punctilious style. “John H. Watson Esq., M.B., B.Ch.” The postmark confirmed that the envelope had been posted only two days earlier.

I did not think anyone could be watching me here. A stranger would be challenged if he tried to follow me into the club lobby. Moran himself would never have been so foolish as to put up for election to membership. His right to the title of “colonel” must have been questioned at once, even if his conduct had not been known. I slid the envelope from behind the wire and walked slowly up the wide carpeted marble stairs to the library on the first floor. I chose an armchair in a corner with a window view of lawn and trees at the centre of the square. That was where a spy might linger, but I saw no one. I slit open the envelope.

There was no letter—just a card of the kind used by doctors or dentists as a memorandum for appointments. Only the name and the date had been filled in, but I did not recognize the writing. Of course I had been prepared for threats or “warnings”; yet the five words on the card meant absolutely nothing. Had the envelope not been so precisely addressed, I should have thought that the message was intended for someone else.

In the space left for a name, someone had entered
Comtesse de Flandre
. Where there was a space for the date, there were instead just two words:
New Moon
. And that was that. I stared at the words, but I faced a stone wall at the end of a blind alley. What the devil was this? I could find no meaning to the name or date, and yet the circumstances of their delivery suggested they must be of importance. Whoever sent the card knew that I belonged to the club. Had it been sent by someone who also knew that an envelope delivered among all the others coming to the club would slip through without notice more easily than one addressed to 221b Baker Street? That suggested a friend. But was it from friend or foe? Was it simply a reminder that I was safe nowhere, not even in my own club?

I was determined that before I left the shelter of the Army and Navy I would know what this was all about. At least I could then write a message “to whom it might concern” and leave it in the trustworthy care of Roebuck at his desk, to be held in case I should suffer some unaccountable “accident.”

I looked at those five words again. Why were they not explained? With sudden unease, I wondered whether they had been written in desperate haste by someone like Colonel Pulleine or Joshua Sellon, someone who had no time to explain them. Someone who knew that he—or she—would be dead in a minute more. A killer might search the place of his murder but would hardly bother with an appointment card on a mantelpiece.

I felt cold in that comfortable sunlit room with its leather arm-chairs and mahogany shelves of books. I thought of Moran again. Perhaps the card was from a killer rather than a corpse. A taunt or an invitation.

I was determined to have the truth of this. To begin with, I tried to remember who the Comtesse de Flandre might be. I had certainly heard—or read—that name. An old-fashioned club library was one of the best places to identify her. A few minutes with European aristocracy in the current volume of the
Almanach de Gotha
informed me that Marie Luise, Comtesse de Flandre, was a Prussian princess, forty-four years old. She was married to Prince Philippe, Comte de Flandre. He in turn was brother of the childless and dissolute King Leopold II of Belgium. The Comte and Comtesse de Flandre had five children, of whom the young Prince Baudouin was now heir to the Belgian throne.

But what could there be in all this? Anyone who read such sensational London newspapers as the
Pall Mall Gazette
knew of King Leopold II as a man of unsavoury reputation. His correspondence with Mrs. Mary Jefferies, the so-called White Slave Widow of recent infamy, had lately been read out at the Middlesex Sessions during her trial for keeping a house of ill repute. His character was even more widely known for the brutal treatment meted out to the tribes of his vast and newly acquired Congo Free State. It was the blameless Comtesse de Flandre herself who famously described this royal brother-in-law as the only man who could survive without such an organ as a heart in his body.

What on earth had she to do with our case? From what I could now make out, thanks to the
Almanach
and the bound volumes of
The Times
, the Comtesse de Flandre was a figure of domestic virtue and public philanthropy. King Leopold's sister-in-law would be as revolted as anyone by the stories of his Congolese tribesmen suffering amputation of a hand for returning without a full quota of harvested rubber. This unhappy land, dubbed “The Heart of Darkness,” was also the centre of an arms trade to the Transvaal and elsewhere, the destination of Colonel Moran's Krupp field-guns and the heavy howitzers.

By now I was scanning the newspaper columns for any clue that might connect such a worthy lady with the hateful underworld of Rawdon Moran and his cronies. She was born a princess of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, sister of the present King of Rumania and of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Her father had been Prime Minister of Prussia.

The Comtesse's visits to England were reserved for such anniversaries as our own Queen's birthday or the military ceremonial of the Trooping of the Colour in St. James's Park. On their arrival at Victoria Station from the channel ferry and during their residence at Claridge's hotel, she and her husband were visited by foreign ambassadors and British statesmen from Benjamin Disraeli to Lord Salisbury, as well as by the most enlightened of our aristocracy. In her own country, she had been in the Royal Opera Box for the visit of the Shah of Persia and had been radiant at the opening of the Brussels Exhibition.