Associates of Sherlock Holmes

A FAMILY RESEMBLANCE Simon Bucher-Jones

Being an account extracted from the Papers of Mycroft Holmes, released under the sixty-year rule and subject to such elisions as have been deemed necessary for National Security. Mycroft appears to have had a near-perfect memory, but he augmented – and perhaps to a degree even produced – this effect, in practice, by writing memoranda of his day’s activity each night including a verbatim account of his conversations.

There have been some interesting, though somewhat juvenile to my way of thinking, monographs out of Vienna in the last year[1] – which speak to the central problem of humanity – that is, why it is so difficult for a rational man to deal with those who merely regard themselves as rational.

Take my brother for example. There will be, I am sure, as our knowledge of the mind and body develop beyond that of Aristotle and the Edinburgh school of dissection-inclined materialists, a specific diagnosis that defines a man who oscillates between frantic activity and reptilian inaction. If the late Robert Louis Stevenson[2] had been more astute, he might have determined that the divide in man was not good and evil, but energy and lethargy, or extroversion and introspection. An introspective evil is more akin to an introspective good than it is unlike it, and an active force in the world, whether for good or evil, must move in similar ways albeit to different aims.

A rational being, as Hume might define one,[3] determines the modes in which his brain best functions and, having so determined, constructs a mechanism to permit the world to encroach upon that functioning as little as possible, as is commensurate with making a rational supportive contribution to the maintaining of that mechanism. We pay a debt to society, in so much and so far as society is necessary for us, either as a value in itself, or as a means to permit our protection from mere anarchy or worse. Where the mechanism forms a join with the irrational world it may become partly irrational, but that contact should be limited so as to prevent such contamination.

An irrational being, however effective it may be in one or more of its modes, risks everything in tearing itself apart when those modes do not suffice and, by working first in high gear and then in low, is always vulnerable to the specks of grit the world may throw into the delicate cogs of the vulnerable mind. Now I amend my path to minimise such dust, and by preserving the mechanism – under glass as it were – ensure its maximal utility. I wake, dress, attend my office, perform such tasks as are necessary, lunch at my club – whose silence suits the rumination over the morning’s data with a view to the creation of the afternoon’s synthesis. The daily task successfully dispatched I spend the evenings in equally splendid isolation. After a quiet sojourn once more at the Diogenes, I return to my lodgings – a grace and favour apartment in Admiralty Arch, courtesy of the Foreign Office – perfectly positioned to minimise unnecessary perambulations. I wash, I sleep – rarely dreaming (so far as I can determine) – and I repeat. All is as it should be. A working mind in a working body.

My brother, as you will perhaps have heard, gads about. He wastes time. He has created a useful tool in the Baker Street Irregulars, and yet he cannot bring himself to rely upon them consistently, but must always be running about in this disguise or that. Such tactics are effective no doubt among the unobserving criminal classes, or the Scotland Yarders, and no doubt there is a minor satisfaction in the perpetual surprise of his Boswell, but there came a time when he ran afoul of one of the bigger fish, who was less taken in by the ribbons of weed wrapped around the caddisfly larva and saw it for the plump dragonfly morsel it was in potential. That bigger fish was your brother – oh please don’t bother to deny it. I know you have protested the professor’s innocence in the newspapers, but between these four walls we both have good reason to look with some alarm at our families’ wilder members, have we not?

My brother too is also unafraid to break the law, for a supposedly good cause – a short-sighted moral position which has required me to intervene on his behalf with the authorities more often than I suppose he supposes. Yours did so for reasons of his own, about which I will not speculate.

That my brother does much that is good is undeniable. That he does the most good he could do is hardly likely. If he were to train his mind to wider questions – to address through support of social legislation by the government of the day towards the underlying causes of crime, to watch as I watch for the broader threat, and the less obvious larceny – he would be, in time perhaps, as indispensable as myself. Still, they tell me I shouldn’t expect old heads on young shoulders.

What has he been up to lately, you ask? Well, certainly – it is the hour when visitors are permitted to discourse here in the Stranger’s Room, and I can perceive you will need time to consider my last chess move. I have no objection to making my observations on my brother more specific.

If you were to believe that the accounts of the ingenious Watson[4] represent the norm or status quo of my brother’s activities, rather than a subset selected by their suitability for publication, you might conclude that the cases that come to my brother’s attention invariably begin with an impassioned plea from a caller at their Baker Street rooms. Perhaps a masked member of the nobility, or a governess singularly attractive for her class. However, Watson has not given publicity to the fact that Sherlock, like a little dog eager for scraps, has taken to calling monthly on the detectives of the Yard in a carefully timed “wander” through their offices that takes in each in turn without permitting the others to observe his interest. Thus he gains an early insight into cases yet to be from his minute observations of their environs and his picking up of casual gossip, to which the common constable is not immune. It is generally at around three-forty or so on the third Wednesday of the month that he calls upon Inspector Lestrade.

The Metropolitan Police detective force has suffered a certain amount of gentle lampooning at the pen of the Good Doctor and his literary agent, but there is no doubt in my mind that they are the best that can be obtained – for the money allocated by a niggardly Treasury. Their offices at New Scotland Yard administer a force that in total amounts now to over thirteen thousand, inclusive of their colleagues who perform the services behind the scenes, without which no substantial organisation can function, and they are no longer the well meaning but ill-organised handful of burly thief-catchers of Rowan and Bayne’s day.

What’s that? Yes, I agree that it is a slight embarrassment that New Scotland Yard was itself founded upon an unsolved mystery. The torso of the woman dug up in the preparation of the foundations in 1888 has, I must admit, never been identified to a degree that would permit a case to be made in law. However, strictly between ourselves: the disappearance, in July of that year, of the Countess of Strathmore’s lady’s maid Jane from the Royal Box at the Wimbledon Championship – together with the Strathmore tiara, valued I believe at over seven thousand pounds for the gems alone – did not, I fear, end well for the cat’s-paw who allowed herself to be persuaded by the honeyed words of her eventual killer. The theft was a well-planned one involving the distraction of the sporting event in which I believe, if I recall correctly, the thirteenth Earl[5] received a substantial defeat in the mixed doubles at the hands of the Renshaw brothers.[6] I wonder if it was the failure of him and his partner on the lawns or the theft that rankled most when the family sat down to dinner that night. One day the hand of retribution will fall upon the shoulder of the personable Colonel Moran – but forgive me it was not my intent to raise old spectres, and I fear I have allowed myself to be diverted by your remark from the narrative you originally requested. My apologies: I fear even Homer may nod.

On this particular Wednesday, Lestrade was going through reports of the beat officers from the Dulwich area looking for signs of crimes in the making. Indications that known criminals might be congregating, or for unusual spending which might tie any of the men known for such acts to the recent spate of robberies in that part of the city. You can well imagine the sort of thing that an intelligent man can glean from the chaff of the threshing, and Lestrade is by no means unintelligent. That he has not the flashy legerdemain of my brother, nor his accrued collection of bad habits, are both strengths in a man working with a regimented body: the crime solving engine that is the Metropolitan Police.

Knowing that a tool is best used for the types of fastenings with which it is by its forging designed to engage, Lestrade did not attempt to lay before Sherlock any of his diligent work, but immediately handed him the most outré and time-consuming task of the many demanding his attention. The Yard does this now at my suggestion, for a study which I am carrying out concerning the management of time has indicated that the solution of a single high profile case, though often of political importance, does not accomplish as much for the general repose and security of society as the countless smaller crimes which can be solved or even averted by the correct placement of resources. As a self-motivated agent, my brother can be deployed at no formal cost, boasting that he never varies his charges except where he defrays them altogether (a claim I do not expect always holds true, if only because he is inclined to discount the odd princely gift from a grateful nobleman or woman). He is – when bored – perfectly happy to be set upon a goal, and will – at his own expense – dig into anything if it be sufficiently interesting.

In this case it was the discovery of the body of Sergeant Major Lewis Rourke, absent without leave for five days from his Barracks – shot, it appeared, repeatedly in the chest, though not with any projectile from a normal rifle, and – this the matter that encouraged Lestrade to pass the case over to my brother – entirely clean shaven, despite his possession before his disappearance of both a large moustache, and formidable sideburns. No doubt this will eventually appear in print under such an attention-grabbing description as “The Adventure of the Shaved Sergeant” or perhaps “The Case of the Curiously Obsessive Murderer”, for, while to shoot a man more than once may be prudent, to shoot a single body twenty or thirty times suggests an unusual determination to ensure that the body breathes no more.

To give him his due, Sherlock began sensibly enough, delegating Watson – whose military background and medical acumen enabled him to undertake both tasks – to interview the enlisted men at his Barracks as to the character and history of the deceased, and to review the report of the doctor who had examined the body.

This produced the following information, which I can attest is completely true, so far as it goes: the sergeant major was – at forty-one years of age – an old campaigner and had served in India where his bald pate had been tanned by the Indian sun and his complexion had been given a florid hue that might otherwise have suggested drink. Thereafter he returned to serve as a drill sergeant and instructor of new recruits. He was regarded as being a fair man, not without a certain mawkish sense of humour, though still capable of enforcing discipline. Being himself a strict teetotaller, despite his appearance, he was but little inclined to overlook the minor japes and misdeeds committed by soldiers in their cups. Nevertheless he was well spoken of, and even those members of the regiment who had had occasion to be subject to military discipline under him appeared to have no onus for revenge, nor could a motive for his death easily be ascertained. He had been in fine fettle the day before his disappearance, and one of the gunners recalled that the sergeant had received a private letter, which had appeared, from the manner of its reception, to have conveyed good news.

As to the body itself, aside from the shaving of the moustache and sideburns, it showed no injuries other than the wounds to the chest. This was unusual, because of the many impacts and the exceptional accuracy of the marksmanship. The wounds were shallow indents from small-bore grapeshot of the kind used for the sport of hunting birds, one or even a dozen of which would not have necessarily been fatal to a man but which, impacting in great numbers upon a small part of the sergeant’s chest – which had been bared – had produced, cumulatively, a cratered wound from which he had evidently expired, the proximate cause of death being loss of blood.

At this point, if Watson were recounting the tale, there would no doubt be an erroneous theory of his coinage, there to be transcended by Sherlock’s own true account of the crime and the apprehending of the villain responsible. As I am standing in for Watson in recounting my brother’s exploit, perhaps you would care to supply your own surmise at this juncture?

Ha, you know, that’s very Watsonian. You have a surprising talent for mimicry. Your theory is not an impossible one. You suggest, on receiving good news, perhaps of a legacy long wished for but also long pushed to the back of the mind, the sergeant major slipped from his teetotal pedestal – a position occupied most forcefully always by the reformed bibber. Finding him drunk, his men – not wishing him ill, but possessed of that boisterous spirit that can make a man as intolerable in peacetime as he may be invaluable in war – proceeded to shave him, leaving him to wake to the shame of a barefaced hypocrite. So far so good. But how then in this condition would you venture the man came to die? Presumably, you frame it as an accidental demise?

You wonder if I have made any investigation into the forging of birdshot? Obviously it was the first thing to occur to me, as no doubt it was to Sherlock. The round shot is still used in fowling, although before the invention of the rifled barrel and the shell and cartridge it formed the ammunition of our armies as recently as forty years ago.[7] I am sure it will not surprise you that the first suggestions that soldiers might fire anything other than a ball from their firearms was rejected by the British Board of Ordinance in 1826 on the grounds that spherical shot had been good enough for the last three hundred years! Such shot is forged by dropping molten lead through a copper sieve, and, as it falls through the air, it solidifies into a perfect sphere. The fall needed is a considerable one, as the spherical shape is formed by the surface tension of the molten metal, and towers for the purpose of this forging exist at many metal works. As a point of interest there is such a tower,[8] which opened nigh on sixty years ago, at the Lambeth Lead Works between Waterloo and Hungerford Bridges. Well within the distance that a drugged man or a body could be conveyed by hansom cab. As to the method of the inflicting of the singularly uniform and regular injuries then, I fancy we are in agreement.

Your contention then is that his men, in ignorance of the tower’s function but aware of it as a landmark, conceived the idea of leaving the freshly shaved Rourke there, with a view to spying upon his awaking in such incongruous environs, bereft of his military moustache. Returning from a carouse to find him dead, as a result of some random accident sending a fusillade of shot down upon him where he lay, the men then panicked and, swearing their cabbie to secrecy, perhaps with bribes, carried the body to the wasteland where it was discovered and there left it – no doubt quaking in their boots at the thought that this crime might be brought home to them.

So, no doubt, a kind-hearted Watson, inclined always to see the best in mankind, was willing to construe as an accidental result of high-spiritedness what was in actuality one of the vilest and most inhuman crimes to come to my brother’s, and hence my, notice.

The fact of the body being exquisitely positioned to receive the fatal shot, with its breast bared, will not admit of accident.

There are many reasons why a man might shave his own face, from vanity to disguise. There are many reasons why a man might shave the face of another man who will go on living, from the obvious one of being employed as a barber, to the japery you wished to suggest to me. But to shave the face of a man only with the intent of killing him thereafter?

Only three theories occurred to my brother. The first, so as to facilitate the substitution of a bearded brother for a clean-shaven one, he quickly discounted. There was no such person in the case. Rourke was well known to many in the area, and both his superior officers and the men under him identified his body, despite the alterations. He had no dependants, was, so far as his men knew, unmarried, and in the event of his death, his goods were to be sold and the monies sent by a firm of lawyers to distant relatives in Ireland. Thus any question of substitution perhaps in pursuit of the suggestive legacy was ruled out.

The second theory I myself favoured for a little while. I do not know if you are aware, but the presence of certain poisons taken over time can be proven by the subjecting of samples of body hair to certain reagents. As the hair grows out from the follicle it forms a record of the chemical composition of its – ah – native soil. Perhaps because of relative rates of growth, while hair abounds on the human body, the analytical technique is most effective when carried out upon the hairs of the head. Rourke’s baldness has already been remarked; I confess to wondering then if his beard and sideburns might have been removed in order to render less discoverable a cause of death that owed nothing to the impact of the falling shot. Sherlock also went along this blind alley – though for longer than I, working from pure logic alone. He haunted public houses, and discovered that the teetotal Rourke had, with other members of the Temperance League, lectured and argued with the regular drinkers and the publicans alike. In the process – for Rourke, despite his age and his baldness was in other respects a virile and even an imposing figure – he had conceived a friendship with a member of the Ladies League Against Alcohol, one Margaret Athol, on one occasion violently defending her from the attack of several inebriated young men who had taken drunken offence at her characterisation of their behaviour and determined to live down to the description she gave of it. There was an understanding between them, and while not officially engaged, she had given him a lock of her hair to keep, and he – recently enough for it to be of interest to Sherlock – had provided her with, of all things, a scented pillow favour, stuffed with aromatic herbs and cuttings from his own hair.

Whereas you or I might perhaps have taken the lady into our confidence, given that this was a matter of murder, the vanity of my brother, which knows no bounds of good taste nor any check to his actions, led him to proceed to burglarise the lady’s boudoir in order to extract a lover’s keepsake which he then went on to render down to its constituent parts and subject to minute chemical analysis.

The spectacle of my brother, diligently teasing apart tufts of a man’s whiskers and boiling them in a variety of reagents is, I confess, an amusing one – and I must not let it deflect my mind from the fact that this was – and remains – a very brutal crime. Nevertheless, albeit grimly, I am inclined to smile at the mental image. Even Watson – I have little doubt – must have chided him for this graceless action, the more so because it availed nothing in terms of practical proof.

The theory was sound – something must have caused Rourke to lie unmoving while the hail of shot let out his life, and the absence of wounds at the wrists and ankles spoke against any physical restraint. Although the hair proved nothing either way as to poison, it might have been removed by an extremely careful assassin as a precaution. More likely though it spoke of a poison that required only a single dose, rather than a gradual building up of toxicity in the body. I do not share my brother’s interest in the minutia of murder, but any classicist must have been struck by the possibility of hemlock, and Sherlock considered the most likely poisonous agent to be conium maculatum – the poison which, in legend at least, was imbibed by Socrates. Hemlock tea can be given as a pleasantly tasting tisane – easily pressed upon a teetotaller. Its action is mild, and its predominant effect short of death is of a complete muscular paralysis. Under its influence, a victim – even if he had not in fact ingested a sufficiency to die – might well prove unable to stir a muscle to save himself from the slow drop, drop, drop of the fatal metal. Though unproven, my brother (and I) considered such a drug to be the likely means by which the victim was rendered helpless.

You’re right; I did mention a third theory, other than disguise, or the removal of evidence, which might account for the removal of the sideburns and moustache.

The third theory – though it had occurred to him – was not one that my brother felt able to pursue, involving as it did an emotional question of a certain delicacy. This task he forced upon Watson, despite the fact that Sherlock had rendered it almost impossible by his own felonious actions. The task was simply to interview Sergeant Rourke’s innamorata Miss Athol and ascertain whether or not his moustache and sideburns formed an impediment to their union, or were among his chief attractions. If the former, a simple chain of reasoning existed: learning of some improvement in his fortunes, the sergeant might well have been emboldened to propose – intending to do so he would have made the personal sacrifices necessary to present himself in the most aesthetically pleasing state. I am not myself much inclined to the pursuit of the fair sex – a man my size must be most enamoured of the pleasures of the table – but surely such an act as appearing clean shaven would charm an already interested party, who had professed a disquiet in connection with his appearance, almost as much as his increased financial prospects. The murder, and the mutilation of the moustache would then be either coincidences, or, if related, would be related by a causal chain in which both were set in motion by the letter, but without being themselves connected. Alternatively, if she especially favoured his appearance unaltered, then the change wrought upon it might represent a coup carried out by a rival, or unsuccessful suitor, with the murder in that model of events being again a parallel event, unless it – in itself – formed part of the spurned lover’s revenge.

Watson was – for he possesses an excellent bedside manner and all the graces of a confiding physician – able to gain the young woman’s confidences, as Sherlock would not have done. She did indeed have a previously favoured man, a George Welby, who had been pressing his suite upon her for some time, but whom she had rejected when he proved to be a habitual taker of spirituous liquors. He had attempted to conceal this from her, and indeed may have been inclined at one point to attempt to set drink aside and follow her example, but he had the misfortune (as it seemed) to be taken up by new friends and in their company so to wallow in the dens of the City, so that it could not but come to her attention. Her view of the sergeant’s moustache and sideburns was more than favourable, it seemed. It was one of a doting mother to a boy’s first facial hair. She approved of them heartily as a sign of a virile manliness which did not require gin to set it going, nor brandy to sustain it.

This I think Sherlock should have been able to deduce without Watson’s evidence – for no-one of professing an opposing view would have wished for or, having been given unwished, cherished the form of keepsake that he had earlier stolen. I confess I do not know how Holmes and Watson resolved the matter of this theft; I imagine the surreptitious re-stuffing of the bag by Holmes with some hair from a recently deceased scoundrel in police custody, and its replacement under her pillow with some embarrassment by the comfort-bearing Watson. But perhaps, after all, she did not miss it. I hesitate to conjecture about female sensibilities.

See how maddeningly my brother flounders between ideas, each one setting him on some active foray into events, when a cautious rational picture built up from item upon item of data would serve his turn so much more effectively. You can, I suppose, conclude his next step?

Quite so. Learning that the suitor Welby – now his main suspect – was prone to drink and consorted with bad companions, he began a wholesale haunting of public houses and traveller’s inns, his lean body bulked up with cloth to a drunkard’s dimensions and his nose reddened with rouge. Ah, what it is to be the brother of a thwarted thespian. I’d wager your own brother gave you no such trouble, personally, being a mathematician – the mildest and gentlest of professions, next to your own railway work.[9]

Thus a whole three days of time were lost, clapping men upon the back and exclaiming about this or that sporting endeavour, until Sherlock – under the barbarous name of Philip Matherhyde – was quite as boon a companion to Mr Welby as any of that young man’s new friends. A telegram, meanwhile, had gone to Sergeant Rourke’s relatives to discover if the mysterious message that had cheered him had originated with them, or if they could raise a conjecture as to its sender. A reply reached Baker Street by the same means, while Holmes was among his cups. The letter had not directly concerned a legacy, but it had been a turn of fortune, which might suggest to the sergeant that the time had come to actively pursue the hand of Miss Athol. The message was nothing less than the news of the death of his estranged wife, an Indian woman – whom he had abandoned on his return to England. It is perhaps surprising that a man who would readily abandon one wife might feel a qualm in seeking to court another – but Rourke’s family were Irish Catholic stock, and, whereas the leaving of a native bride was accounted a venal sin, the bigamous or adulterous acquisition of another or the horror of divorce were both to him as much an evil as the bottled demons that he attempted to wrest from the hands of his soldiers. Considering himself free, however, he had undoubtedly gone to his death in the pleasant, if deluded, mental state of one contemplating the bliss of matrimony.

Watson hurried to inform Sherlock of this, and found him in a bout of fisticuffs among drunken men, as the erstwhile Matherhyde was forced to show his metal during a bout of ribaldry. Watson’s presence proved fatal to his disguise, for, as it transpired, Welby’s new friends were none other than members of Rourke’s own regiment, who had but a week before been questioned by Watson in connection with their sergeant’s death. The jig, as the cant has it, was up. If Matherhyde’s anxious friend was the well-known Dr Watson, whom could the bibulous Matherhyde be but the disguised Sherlock Holmes? The logic is not perhaps exact; Dr Watson might have many friends, but to drunken and violent men – prone to the quick reactions and suspicions of soldiers – it sufficed. My brother and his friend were bodily thrown out of the drinking den.

Only later when they compared their view of the case was Sherlock to declare that he had now, to his own satisfaction at least, determined the sequence of events, though he was doubtful of proving them in any court of England.

Firstly the presence of the soldiers around Welby was no coincidence: even before his intent encompassed marriage, Rourke desired to have no rival in respect of Miss Athol. Thus he set his men, who were keen to curry favour with him, to dog Welby’s footsteps and to drag him down. It was in their company that he gained the reputation that led to Margaret Athol refusing his offer of marriage, and it was no doubt through Rourke or a third party instructed by him that Miss Athol learned of her former beau’s misdeeds. Rourke then was not so innocent a victim as he might have appeared, nor were his misdeeds confined to this country, for he had left behind him in India at least one thread ending in death, which was to change his status here.

The family of his former wife was by no means rich, though, and to orchestrate vengeance across the bounds of the Empire, or over time, requires either considerable resources or passionate fanaticism, of which there was no evidence in the case.

Someone, however, had both the means (perhaps hemlock, perhaps another drug) to paralyse the sergeant, the capacity to persuade him to drink it, and – perhaps – knowledge of the shot tower. The latter requirement my brother concluded was a lesser one for he had conceived recently – a possible delusion which he has communicated to me, but which as yet I have been unable to either prove or disprove – the view that certain sorts of crime: robbery, vengeance, the more outré and unsolvable of murders, were being better planned, better executed, and rendered more baroque and elaborate in their elegance than the London criminal classes would ever manage on their own. The shot tower then might well be an elaboration of a scheme of revenge, suggested by a third party – this planner of crimes – rather than a natural thought of the murderer.

It is the shot tower that makes me call this an awful crime. To imagine Rourke, whatever his faults, lying conscious (for hemlock merely paralyses the body, it does not deaden the mind, nor, so far as I know, prevent the sensation of pain) while he was ‘shot’ again and again, is to imagine a mind cold and humorously evil in its planning.

You disagree? It’s true, you and I, as well as Sherlock, deduced the method once the nature of the wounds was made clear to us. But to work backwards from calamity to cause is not the same as to pull the mechanism of causation from the air with a view to the causing of a calamity. That must be the mark of a brain that has teetered upon its throne of reason and begun a fall into utter blackness. A brain not unlike that of your late brother. Oh, sit down man. What good does a protest do between us?

Well, no matter. The brain that suggested the tower may be a matter for another time, but the more proximate identity of the murderer was, I’m sure you will agree, clear. Who did Rourke know with whom he might be inclined to take tea? Who would be able to persuade him to drink a herbal tonic? Who but his intended bride Miss Margaret Athol? The cause of her conspiring in his murder was partially shadowed, it was true. His treatment of her former lover? A sufficiently fanatical teetotaller might see the enticing of a man into the grip of drink as an awful crime. His abandonment of his wife? There was no way of proving that she was aware of either action. My brother, however, and this was I confess a thought worthy of us, asked himself a single crucial question.

You can’t guess?

It was this: given that the method of murder – the repeated striking of shot into the body – had suggested itself to the hypothetical master planner of crime, what aspect of the request on the part of his client (whether it was Miss Athol, or not) for vengeance could have suggested to this hidden master – let us term him M – such an image? Surely the punishment must in some way have fitted the crime for which revenge was desired? An artist, a veritable Leonardo De Vinci of crime, would demand nothing less.

Once asked it is obvious, is it not? The repeated striking of shot into a victim. What was the shot tower replicating, but the action of a firing squad? A very satisfactory replication for a criminal vengeance, for it involved no living band of soldiers to shoot high from pity or to break down from guilt thereafter.

Coming to this conclusion, Sherlock sent for a copy of Rourke’s military record in India – a request that I was able to facilitate – and discovered, what Rourke himself must have forgotten, or failed to connect to the prim and pretty Miss Athol of the Lady’s League, his presiding presence at the court martial and execution of Private John Benjamin Athol at Benares in India in 1887. John Athol, Margaret’s older brother, had taken advantage of the awful famine of that year to sell grain at inflated prices to the starving from military stores, profiteering from goods that were not his to dispose of.

My brother confronted Miss Athol with these facts and, with Watson as a witness, was present as she broke down and confessed. She defended her brother to the last, claiming that he had not sought vast wealth in gold or gems, or favours, for the grain but only desired to alleviate the horrible lack among the native population when so much was stored for the feeding of the army. My brother pressed her as to how she had arranged the murder, and how the shot tower “firing squad” had been conceived, but she refused to acknowledge any other hand in the business – although it was certain that she must have had accomplices in the movement of the body, if not in the conception of the crime. As to the sideburns and the moustache – her explanation for their removal was simple, although it struck my brother as an account she had from another mouth rather than her recounting something she had done. The falling shot had cooled insufficiently in one case during the bombardment of the body – as sometimes occurs in the process, the irregular shot so formed being discarded after passing through a sizing sieve – and a splash of still-molten metal had rebounded, catching in and singeing part of Rourke’s moustache on the right side. The removal had been intended to prevent this being visible, and the removal of the rest of the moustache and the sideburns had been a matter of symmetry.

Oh, if we only knew the kind of mind that demanded such mathematical symmetry and brought such mechanical aptitude to the commission of crime, eh Colonel! A pity your late lamented brother is no longer with us; it has the feel of his work does it not, or a least a family resemblance to it.

Of course, there is no proof – but I have sometime wondered, what if a disinterested party could have spoken understandingly to your brother, before he was too far steeped in crime, could he have been persuaded to step back from the abyss? The civil service can always use a brilliant mind, and even a macabre streak need not be an absolute bar to gainful employment. Something to think about perhaps. Still, I’m rambling, and I fear I have your Queen.

A shame I never got to meet your brother, and it might be a bigger shame still if you were to have to meet mine.