The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (153 page)

“He could have had someone…” Elspeth Belknapp said, and then stopped, realizing that she was now actively trying to protect the man who had shot her husband.

“No,” said Holmes. “Mr. Donaberry made an appointment with your deceased husband, probably not giving his real name. John Belknapp went on the assumption that he was going to see a potential client. When he entered this room, he was murdered. We have only Mrs. Belknapp's word that her husband had many weapons and even if he did, we have no evidence that he brought a weapon with him. And then there is the note.”

Holmes held up the note.

“I had a moment or two to glance at Belknapp's papers on his desk. There is definitely a similarity. However, I think careful scrutiny will show that it is at best a decent forgery. I suspect that Mrs. Belknapp wrote the note herself. Is that sufficient, Inspector?”

“I think so, Mr. Holmes. Easy enough to check it all through.”

“But, Holmes,” I interjected, looking at the mismatched accused, “are you telling us that Donaberry and Mrs. Belknapp are lovers still, that he allowed his wife to not only marry but to enter into marital relations with another man?”

“I would suggest, Watson, that the white band on Mr. Donaberry's ring finger resulted from removing the wedding band from his marriage to Elspeth Belknapp's mother. I would suggest that she was not his wife but was and continues to be his daughter.”

With that the woman ran into the arms of her father who took her in clear admission of their defeat.

“They made too many mistakes,” Lestrade said, motioning for the constable to take the pair into custody.

“Yes,” said Holmes. “But the biggest of them was thinking they could make a dupe of Sherlock Holmes. I can sometimes forgive murder. It is their hubris which I find intolerable.”

BORN IN KAMUNDONGO
, Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), Manly Wade Wellman (1903–1986) and his family moved to Washington, DC, when he was still a child. Wellman worked as a reporter for two Wichita newspapers, the
Beacon
and the
Eagle
, then moved east in 1934 to become the Assistant Director of the WPA's Folklore Project. He moved to North Carolina in 1955 and remained there for the rest of his life, becoming an expert in mountain music, the Civil War, and the historic regions and peoples of the Old South.

Writing mainly in the horror field in the 1920s, by the 1930s Wellman was selling stories to the leading pulps in the genre:
Weird Tales, Wonder Stories
, and
Astounding Stories
. He had three series running simultaneously in
Weird Tales
: Silver John, also known as John the Balladeer, the backwoods minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar; John Thunstone, the New York playboy and adventurer who was also a psychic detective; and Judge Keith Hilary Persuivant, an elderly occult detective, whose stories were written under the pseudonym Gans T. Fields.

Wellman also wrote numerous nonfiction books, including
Dead and Gone: Classic Crimes of North Carolina
(1954), which won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book. He also wrote fourteen children's books and wrote for the comic books, producing the first Captain Marvel issue for Fawcett Publishers.

Wellman's short story “A Star for a Warrior” won the Best Story of the Year award from
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
in 1946, beating out William Faulkner, who wrote an angry letter of protest. Other major honors include Lifetime Achievement Awards from the World Fantasy Writers (1980) and the British Fantasy Writers (1985), and the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection for
Worse Things Waiting
(1975).

“But Our Hero Was Not Dead” was first published in the August 9, 1941, issue of
Argosy
. It was first published in book form in
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes
, edited by Ellery Queen (Boston, Little, Brown, 1944) under the title “The Man Who Was Not Dead.”

OUT OF THE
black sky plummeted Boling, toward the black earth. He knew nothing of the ground toward which he fell, save that it was five miles inland from the Sussex coast and, according to Dr. Goebbels's best information, sparsely settled.

The night air hummed in his parachute rigging, and he seemed to drop faster than ten feet a second, but to think of that was unworthy of a trusted agent of the German Intelligence. Though the pilot above had not dared drop him a light, Boling could land without much mishap…Even as he told himself that, land he did. He struck heavily on hands and knees, and around him settled the limp folds of the parachute.

At once he threw off the harness, wadded the fabric and thrust it out of sight between a boulder and a bush. Standing up, he took stock of himself. The left leg of his trousers was torn, and the knee skinned—that was all. He remembered that William the Conquerer had also gone sprawling when he landed at Hastings, not so far from here. The omen was good. Boling stooped, like Duke William, and clutched a handful of pebbles.

“Thus do I seize the land!” he quoted aloud, for he was at heart theatrical.

His name was not really Boling, though he had prospered under that and other aliases. Nor, though he wore the uniform of a British private, was he British. Born in Chicago late in 1917, of unsavory parents, he had matured to a notable career of imposture and theft. He had entered the employment of the Third Reich, not for love of its cause or thirst for adventure, but for the very high rate of pay. Boling was practical as well as gifted. He had gladly accepted the present difficult and dangerous mission, which might well be the making of his fortune.

Now the early gray dawn came and peered over his shoulder. Boling saw that he was on a grassy slope, with an ill-used gravel road below it. Just across that road showed lighted windows—a house with early risers. He walked toward those lights.

Which way was Eastbourne, was his first problem. He had never seen the town; he had only the name and telephone number there of one Philip Davis who, if addressed by him as “Uncle,” would know that the time had arrived to muster fifteen others.

They, in turn, would gather waiting comrades from the surrounding community, picked, hard men who whole years ago had taken lodging and stored arms thereabouts. These would organize and operate as a crack infantry battalion. After that, the well-tested routine that had helped to conquer Norway, Holland, Belgium, France—seizure of communications, blowing up of rails and roads, capture of airdromes.

Reinforcements would drop in parachutes from overhead, as he, Boling, had done. At dusk this would be done. In the night, Eastbourne would be firmly held, with a picked invasion corps landing from barges.

Crossing the road toward the house, Boling considered the matter as good as accomplished.
He needed only a word from the house-dwellers to set him on his way.

He found the opening in the chin-high hedge of brambles and flowering bushes, and in the strengthening light he trod warily up the flagged path. The house, now visible, was only a one-story cottage of white plaster, with a roof of dark tiling. Gaining the doorstep, Boling swung the tarnished knocker against the stout oak panel.

Silence. Then heavy steps and a mumbling voice. The door creaked open. A woman in shawl and cap, plump and very old—past ninety, it seemed to Boling—put out a face like a cheerful walnut.

“Good morning,” she said. “Yes, who is that?” Her ancient eyes blinked behind small, thick lenses like bottle bottoms. “Soldier, ain't you?”

“Right you are,” he responded in his most English manner, smiling to charm her. This crone had a London accent, and looked simple and good-humored. “I'm tramping down to Eastbourne to visit my uncle,” he went on plausibly, “and lost my way on the downs in the dark. Can you direct me on?”

Before the old woman could reply, a dry voice had spoken from behind her: “Ask the young man to step inside, Mrs. Hudson.”

The old woman drew the door more widely open. Boling entered one of those living rooms that have survived their era. In the light of a hanging oil lamp he could see walls papered in blue with yellow flowers, above gray-painted wainscoting. On a center table lay some old books, guarded by a pudgy china dog. At the rear, next a dark inner doorway, blazed a small but cheerful fire, and from a chair beside it rose the man who had spoken.

“If you have walked all night, you will be tired,” he said to Boling. “Stop and rest. We're about to have some tea. Won't you join us?”

“Thank you, sir,” accepted Boling heartily. This was another Londoner, very tall and as gaunt as a musket. He could not be many years younger than the woman called Mrs. Hudson, but he still had vigor and presence.

He stood quite straight in his shabbiest of blue dressing gowns. The lamplight revealed a long hooked nose and a long lean chin, with bright eyes of blue under a thatch of thistledown hair. Boling thought of Dr. Punch grown old, dignified and courteous. The right hand seemed loosely clenched inside a pocket of the dressing gown. The left, lean and fine, held a blackened old briar with a curved stem.

“I see,” said this old gentleman, his eyes studying Boling's insignia, “that you're a Fusilier—Northumberland.”

“Yes, sir, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers,” rejoined Boling, who had naturally chosen for his disguise the badges of a regiment lying far from Sussex. “As I told your good housekeeper, I'm going to Eastbourne. If you can direct me, or let me use your telephone—”

“I am sorry, we have no telephone,” the other informed him.

Mrs. Hudson gulped and goggled at that, but the old blue eyes barely flickered a message at her. Again the gaunt old man spoke: “There is a telephone, however, in the house just behind us—the house of Constable Timmons.”

Boling had no taste for visiting a policeman, especially an officious country one, and so he avoided comment on the last suggestion. Instead he thanked his host for the invitation to refreshment. The old woman brought in a tray with dishes and a steaming kettle, and a moment later they were joined by another ancient man.

This one was plump and tweedy, with a drooping gray mustache and wide eyes full of childish innocence. Boling set him down as a doctor, and felt a glow of pride in his own acumen when the newcomer was so introduced. So pleased was Boling with himself, indeed, that he did not bother to catch the doctor's surname.

“This young man is of your old regiment, I think,” the lean man informed the fat one. “Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers.”

“Oh, really? Quite so, quite so,” chirruped
the doctor, in a katydid fashion that impelled Boling to classify him as a simpleton. “Quite. I was with the old Fifth—but that would be well before your time, young man. I served in the Afghan War.” This last with a proud protruding of the big eyes. For a moment Boling dreaded a torrent of reminiscence; but the Punch-faced man had just finished relighting his curved briar, and now called attention to the tea which Mrs. Hudson was pouring.

The three men sipped gratefully. Boling permitted himself a moment of ironic meditation on how snug it was, so shortly before bombs and bayonets would engulf this and all other houses in the neighborhood of Eastbourne.

Mrs. Hudson waddled to his elbow with toasted muffins. “Poor lad,” she said maternally, “you've torn them lovely trousers.”

From the other side of the fire bright blue eyes gazed through the smoke of strong shag. “Oh, yes,” said the dry voice, “you walked over the downs at night, I think I heard you say when you came. And you fell?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Boling, and thrust his skinned knee into view through the rip. “No great injury, however, except to my uniform. The King will give me a new one, what?”

“I daresay,” agreed the doctor, lifting his mustache from his teacup. “Nothing too good for the old regiment.”

That led to discussion of the glorious past of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, and the probable triumphant future. Boling made the most guarded of statements, lest the pudgy old veteran find something of which to be suspicious; but, to bolster his pose, he fished forth a wad of painstakingly forged papers—pay-book, billet assignment, pass through lines, and so on. The gaunt man in blue studied them with polite interest.

“And now,” said the doctor, “how is my old friend Major Amidon?”

“Major Amidon?” repeated Boling to gain time, and glanced as sharply as he dared at his interrogator. Such a question might well be a trap, simple and dangerous, the more so because his research concerning the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers had not supplied him with any such name among the officers.

But then he took stock once more of the plump, mild, guileless face. Boling, cunning and criminal, knew a man incapable of lying or deception when he saw one. The doctor was setting no trap whatever; in fact, his next words provided a valuable cue to take up.

“Yes, of course—he must be acting chief of brigade by now. Tall, red-faced, monocle—”

“Oh, Major Amidon!” cried Boling, as if remembering. “I know him only by sight, naturally. As you say, he's acting chief of battalion; probably he'll get a promotion soon. He's quite well, and very much liked by the men.”

The thin old man passed back Boling's papers and inquired courteously after the uncle in Eastbourne. Boling readily named Philip Davis, who would have been at pains to make for himself a good reputation. It developed that both of Boling's entertainers knew Mr. Davis slightly—proprietor of the Royal Oak, a fine old public house. Public houses, amplified the doctor, weren't what they had been in the eighties, but the Royal Oak was a happy survival from that golden age. And so on.

With relish Boling drained his last drop of tea, ate his last crumb of muffin. His eyes roamed about the room, which he already regarded as an ideal headquarters. Even his momentary nervousness about the constable in the house behind had left him. He reflected that the very closeness of an official would eliminate any prying or searching by the enemy. He'd get on to Eastbourne, have Davis set the machinery going, and then pop back here to wait in comfort for the ripe moment when, the chief dangers of conquest gone by, he could step forth…

He rose with actual regret that he must get about his business. “I thank you all so much,” he said. “And now it's quite light—I really must be on my way.”

“Private Boling,” said the old man with the blue gown, “before you go, I have a confession to make.”

“Confession?” spluttered the doctor, and Mrs. Hudson stared in amazement.

“Exactly.” Two fine, gaunt old hands rose and placed their finger tips together. “When you came here I couldn't be sure about you, things being as they are these days.”

“Quite so, quite so,” interjected the doctor. “Alien enemies and all that. You understand, young man.”

“Of course,” Boling smiled winningly.

“And so,” continued his host, “I was guilty of a lie. But now that I've had a look at you, I am sure of what you are. And let me say that I do have a telephone, after all. You are quite free to use it. Through the door there.”

Boling felt his heart warm with self-satisfaction. He had always considered himself a prince of deceivers; this admission on the part of the scrawny dotard was altogether pleasant. Thankfully he entered a dark little hallway from the wall of which sprouted the telephone. He lifted the receiver and called the number he had memorized.

“Hello,” he greeted the man who made guarded answer. “Is that Mr. Philip Davis?…Your nephew, Amos Boling, here. I'm coming to town at once. I'll meet you and the others wherever you say…What's the name of your pub again?…The Royal Oak? Very good, we'll meet there at nine o'clock.”

“That will do,” said the dry voice of his host behind his very shoulder. “Hang up, Mr. Boling. At once.”

Boling spun around, his heart somersaulting with sudden terror. The gaunt figure stepped back very smoothly and rapidly for so aged a man. The right hand dropped again into the pocket of the old blue dressing gown. It brought out a small, broad-muzzled pistol, which the man held leveled at Boling's belly.

“I asked you to telephone, Mr. Boling, in hopes that you would somehow reveal your fellow agents. We know that they'll be at the Royal Oak at nine. A party of police will appear to take them in charge. As for you—Mrs. Hudson, please step across the back yard and ask Constable Timmons to come at once.”

Boling glared. His right hand moved, as stealthily as a snake, toward his hip.

“None of that,” barked the doctor from the other side of the sitting room. He, too, was on his feet, jerking open a drawer in the center table. From it he took a big service revolver, of antiquated make but uncommonly well kept. The plump old hand hefted the weapon knowingly. “Lift your arms, sir, and at once.”

Fuming, Boling obeyed. The blue dressing gown glided toward him, the left hand snatched away the flat automatic in his hip pocket.

“I observed that bulge in your otherwise neat uniform,” commented the lean old man, “and pondered that pocket pistols are not regulation for infantry privates. It was one of several inconsistencies that branded you as an enemy agent. Will you take the armchair, Mr. Boling? I will explain.”

There was nothing to do, under the muzzles of those guns, but to sit and listen.

“The apparition of a British soldier trying hard to disguise an American accent intrigued me, but did not condemn you at first. However, the knee of your trousers—I always look first at the trouser knee of a stranger—was so violently torn as to suggest a heavy fall somewhere. The rest of your kit was disarranged as well. But your boots—I always look at boots second—were innocent of scuff or even much wear. I knew at once that your story of a long night's tramp, with trippings and tumblings, was a lie.”