The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (12 page)

He smiled at this and continued.

‘On top of the search in Clonsilla graveyard and the visit to Hadley Street, all in a few hours, it was too much for Shackleton to bear. He left Park Lane and walked quickly to the post office in Grosvenor Street. I watched him write his message on the pad of telegraph forms, tear off the page and go to the counter. I pretended to write on the next leaf, tore it off and followed him. He was agitated in the extreme and had therefore pressed hard with the pencil, as I expected he would. Even without dusting over the imprint, his indentation was easy enough to read. It was addressed to Captain Richard Gorges of the Royal Irish Fusiliers at Dublin Castle. It asked him to communicate at once with the sender.'

‘Who the devil is Captain Gorges?'

‘A greater scoundrel still, Watson, and the thief who worked to Shackleton's orders. My researches tell me that they served in the South African War together in a unit of irregulars. Gorges was a drinker, womaniser, and petty thief. Before the war was over, they drummed him out of the regiment. They did it in the proper style. Every man had a kick at him as he passed.'

‘Then how comes he to be in the Royal Irish Fusiliers?'

‘By the influence of Frank Shackleton, Dublin Herald. To speak the truth, he is not established in the regiment but serves it as a small-arms instructor. For all his faults, Gorges is a marksman. Who less likely to be stopped by the guard on the gate of Dublin Castle than an officer who passed that way regularly in the course of his duty?'

‘Where is he now?'

‘Gone, my dear Watson, no doubt with the jewels. Gone before he could receive Shackleton's telegram. Who knows where?'

‘And Molly Malony?'

‘Our friends in the Sûreté have traced her in Paris. She registered alone at the Hôtel Raspail in the Boulevard Montparnasse, forty-eight hours after the robbery, as Molly Robinson. I imagine she had been paid off.'

‘And how is Captain Gorges to be found?'

‘By Frank Shackleton,' Holmes said softly. ‘Shackleton is in desperate straits. He must soon be revealed as a bankrupt and a man utterly disgraced. I am told that his debt to Cox's Bank in London alone exceeds forty thousand pounds. His business affairs have been gangrened by fraud. Prison is all that awaits him unless he has redeemed his position by robbery. The motive for the theft was as simple as that. Now we must wait. But he will answer, Watson, never fear.'

The fact that Gorges had escaped abroad with the jewels before he could be prevented might have soured Holmes's triumph. He had discovered to the last detail how the jewels were stolen and who had done it. But the evidence was not such as would secure a conviction in a court and the treasure seemed lost for ever. He remained philosophical.

‘The jewels were stolen in the first place, Watson, by the British invaders from the tombs of their colonial subjects. At least they have very likely returned to those parts of the world whence they came.'

XI

In order that the story may be concluded, I must look forward a few years after the robbery. In Holmes's scrapbook is a cutting from the
London Mail
for 11 November 1912. It quotes a witness who saw Molly Malony leaving Dublin Castle at the time of the robbery and alleges that Sir Arthur Vicars himself provided the money to put her out of the way in Paris, as the scandal broke. For this last allegation, Sir Arthur recovered libel damages.

What of Frank Shackleton? For a year or two his fortunes improved surprisingly. He maintained a lavish
ménage
in Park Lane between the mansions of the Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, and Lady Grosvenor. A few months after the robbery, he acquired a most expensive limousine for the sum of £850. Though he was the embarrassment of his brother, Sir Ernest, and the despair of his father, old Dr Shackleton, the law could not touch him. I did not doubt for one moment that he lived upon money remitted to him by the mysterious Captain Gorges, who was then disposing of the stolen gems in the secret markets of Africa or Asia.

But then the remittance of funds ceased. Shackleton returned to his old ways as a swindler. In desperation, he launched a succession of bogus companies, intending to fleece dupes, who were in many cases his wealthy friends. One after another, enterprises that existed on paper alone came to market. They gathered in the investors' funds, and failed. The Montevideo Public Works Corporation was followed by the North Mexican Land and Timber Company. This undertaking, upon its inevitable bankruptcy, was quickly succeeded by a series of Shackleton's commercial fictions.

As the storm broke about him, Frank Shackleton fled to Portuguese West Africa, beyond the reach of English law. From time to time, Holmes heard reports and complaints of Shackleton's conduct in Africa and Asia, usually in the safety of Portuguese colonies and enclaves. For all their chicanery, neither he nor Captain Gorges had the least aptitude for business or for dealing in gems. They themselves were robbed by more accomplished cheats among local traders and they had no grounds on which they dared to complain.

At length, Frank Shackleton fell foul of the laws of the Portuguese colonies and was held without trial in a festering gaol in Benguela. The conditions of this squalid and disease-ridden African prison were so atrocious that he volunteered to surrender himself to officers from Scotland Yard, if they would only take him back to England. To Inspector Cooper, who was sent to arrest him for fraud, he said, ‘I will do anything to get out of this place. If I have to remain here much longer, I am sure I shall be dead.'

By the time that he stood his trial at the Central Criminal Court, Shackleton had no money and no jewels. He went to a long term in prison for fraud, having cheated his dupes of £84,000. Though there was still too little evidence to charge him with complicity in the jewel robbery, justice had him in her clutches. Though it is a platitude, he left prison many years later, a broken and dying man.

Captain Gorges, however, was to have a brief notoriety. As war threatened Europe, he slipped unnoticed into Ireland and then to England. Holmes had not the least doubt that, somewhere, Captain Gorges came face to face with Sir Arthur's nephew, young Peirce Mahony. I daresay by now Mahony had guessed the truth and threatened to unmask the scoundrel. Before he could do so, Mahony was found floating in the lake at Grange Con, his chest blasted open by the barrels of his own gun. That it was murder, rather than accident, was not proved.

Unknown to any of us and under an assumed name, Captain Gorges came to London, where he lodged with a professional boxer, Charles Thoroughgood, at Mount Vernon, Hampstead. Information had reached Special Branch independently that the house was an arsenal for the gunmen of Sinn Fein, for whom Gorges now acted as quartermaster. Two officers entered the house and searched it while it was unoccupied. They found only a revolver and two hundred rounds of ammunition.

That evening, after Gorges had returned to his basement room, the house was surrounded. The wanted man appeared on the area steps with his hands behind him. As the officers closed in and one of them seized him, it was evident that he was holding a gun behind his back. The first man, Sergeant Askew, struggled with him. During the scuffle, the gun went off and by an unhappy fluke shot dead Detective Constable Alfred Young, who was coming down the steps to assist his colleague.

Richard Gorges was taken to Cannon Row police station and charged with manslaughter, for which he later served twelve years' penal servitude. As the charge sheet was filled in, he said pathetically, ‘Don't call me “Captain”, for the honour of the regiment.'

No more than Shackleton would Gorges say what had become in the end of the Irish Crown Jewels. Those who knew no better assumed that Sir Arthur Vicars, the only man to possess the keys to the safe and the strong-room, had been the thief. He was dismissed from his post, though not for the theft. Later he paid with his life because a party of looters believed, as did others, that he had been the thief and that the treasure must still be in his strong-room at Kilmorna.

What of the stolen jewels? Their story was the strangest of all. There was no doubt that the thieves had sold them on the underworld market as best they could, though being cheated themselves in the process. Then, when the old King died in 1910 and preparations were made for the coronation of the present sovereign George V, a strange report began to circulate among those who would be first to hear such things. The jewels, or as many of them as could be found, had been ‘ransomed'. The money had been paid by Baron William James Pirrie, Chairman of Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast. The story appeared only once in the press and was instantly denied on all sides. Great persuasion was used upon other editors to prevent its republication.

It was Sherlock Holmes, after all, who solved the mystery. I returned to his rooms in Baker Street one afternoon, not long after the coronation of George V and Queen Mary. Holmes had a picture paper spread on the table with several photographs beside it. It was not usual for him to take much notice of picture papers and more unusual for him to read Mr Bottomley's effusions in
John Bull
.

He had a magnifying-glass in his hand and was studying minutely the photographs of the royal couple and the princes and princesses. The article asserted that the Dublin jewels were once again in the possession of the royal family, having been sought and purchased from those who had them after Shackleton and Gorges lost them. Few men in England could rival Holmes in the particular knowledge of mineralogy required to identify precious stones.

‘Even when they are recut, Watson, their shape cannot be entirely altered. A stone may only be cut along certain lines, as a triangle must always have three sides.'

He gazed again through the glass at the photograph of Queen Mary in the magazine and then at the photographic print on the table beside him.

‘See here, Watson. If you will look at the stones in the Star of St Patrick, as I have marked them there, and the tiara of our gracious Queen there, I see no room for doubt. The jewellers have worked with the utmost discretion. The stones have been reset in new stars and badges for the new reign. After all, in the present political situation, it is hardly likely that His Majesty will require a set of Crown Jewels in Ireland much longer.'

Though I yield to no one in my estimation of Sherlock Holmes's forensic skills, I could not quite bring myself to believe him. Surely, the recovery of the Irish jewels would have been accompanied by some triumphal announcement. Surely he was mistaken. Surely sovereigns and governments do not deal in the dark like this. How wrong I was!

As I now look at his papers, I see a copy of a Home Office file, with the number 156, 610/16. By the time this account is published, the curious will be able to consult the document for themselves in the record office. It confirms that the Badge of the Order of St Patrick had survived intact, come into the hands of Sir Arthur Vicars, and had been returned to the King. The document was stamped, ‘Most Secret'. Whether Lord Pirrie had paid a ransom and returned the jewels through the good offices of Sir Arthur, I cannot say. That some benefactor had done so, albeit anonymously, I could not doubt.

When I first read this secret file, not long after the death of Sherlock Holmes, I wondered why it should have been passed to him by the Home Office. After all, his name appeared nowhere in it. Why should it concern him? But, as I thought the matter over, I knew I had done my friend an injustice.

That afternoon many years before, he stood over the picture papers magnifying-glass in hand. He was so sure that Queen Mary's tiara, made for the coronation celebrations of 1911, contained lost gems of the Order of St Patrick. Could any man, however expert, be so certain of that when he had seen only a newspaper photograph? Perhaps, after all, even skill in mineralogy was not enough. Lord Pirrie may or may not have provided the ransom, that I cannot tell. But who more likely to have been the government's intermediary in those shadowy negotiations for the recovery of the precious stones than Sherlock Holmes himself? Who but government or monarchy would have the wealth to buy such a collection?

Of course Holmes had said nothing of all this. It was his usual habit, when the monarch was concerned in one of the investigations, to maintain a complete silence, even to me. But I swear that Holmes knew that King George and Queen Mary were in possession of the gems again long before he saw Mr Bottomley's picture paper! Alas, by the time I read the Home Office file on the subject, my friend was dead and I could not ask him.

As we sat in the firelight, on that evening long ago, I recall saying, ‘So Shackleton and Gorges have escaped justice?'

He flung himself down in his chair and filled his pipe.

‘I do not think they would agree with you upon that, Watson. A man who is in prison suffers. What more is there? He may commit two crimes but he cannot suffer twice at the same time. Those men are ruined beyond redemption and that is enough.'

He stared at the fire for a moment.

‘All the same,' I protested, ‘you seem to take the robbery rather lightly, for such a crime. Indeed, I find that you have never suggested that the theft itself was of great moral consequence.'

Holmes stared at the dancing flames.

‘Perhaps I remember that there was another robbery, long before.'

‘A theft of the jewels?'

He looked up at me. ‘Of course, Watson. These were the holy treasures of the royal tombs at Golconda and elsewhere. Our imperial commanders ransacked those shrines to provide gew-gaws for the Kings and Queens of England. Theft compounded by sacrilege. A far worse crime, my dear fellow, than anything that Shackleton or Gorges could devise. If our sovereign or his subjects choose to buy back these stones from the very countries to whom they first belonged, so be it. I daresay the treasure could not safely go back to Golconda now. But if England took them without giving a single penny on the first occasion, I see no objection to her paying a fair price on the second. I call that true justice, my dear fellow. Don't you?'