“No wonder he was so interested to see where your investigations would lead you!” I cried.
Holmes nodded. “And no wonder he left so abruptly when he did. He would know that if we examined the folly we were certain to find Hepplethwaite’s body. Quickly! We must get our hands on him before he can work any further villainy!”
We ran back along the path at the top of our speed. Two men were working in the kitchen gardens, and Holmes instructed them to bring the body of the unfortunate secretary from the folly to the house. In a garden by the side of the house, we encountered Miss Greville and her mother, sitting on a bench.
“Oh, Mr Holmes!” cried Miss Greville earnestly, rising to her feet. “Do you see any hope for Mr Whiting?”
“Indeed I do, Miss Greville,” returned Holmes briskly. “Have you seen anything of Sir George Kirkman recently?”
“Well, it really is most odd,” returned Miss Greville’s mother, “and I am not sure that I entirely believe it, but there is a wild rumour going round that he was seen driving himself off in a dogcart towards Winchester about fifteen minutes ago! They say he was lashing the horse as if his life depended on it! Absurd, isn’t it?”
“He must have gone to catch the London express,” said Lestrade, consulting his watch. “It leaves Winchester in about five minutes.”
“How long will it take him to get to the station there?” Holmes queried.
“About a quarter of an hour. He will have reached it in time, but we cannot. He has escaped us.”
“What of the halt where Watson and I alighted earlier? That is barely seven minutes’ distance from here in a trap, and the London train must come this way and pass through there.”
“That is true, Mr Holmes,” Lestrade replied. “Unfortunately, however, the London express does not stop there, but steams straight through.”
“It will stop if we tell it to!” cried Holmes. “There is, I observed, a signal-box at the halt. If we can get the signals set to danger, the train will have to stop!”
“By George! I think you have it!” cried Lestrade.
In a few moments the groom had put a horse in the shafts of a trap, and we were rattling at a furious rate down the winding country lanes. We clattered to a halt in a cloud of dust in the station yard, leapt down and ran onto the platform. In the distance, a plume of smoke indicated the rapid approach of the London express.
The signalman looked up in alarm as we sprang up the steps and burst into his little cabin. Quickly, Lestrade identified himself and instructed the man to alter the signals, but he hesitated.
“It is strictly against regulations,” said he.
“Regulations be blowed!” cried Lestrade angrily as there came a sharp whistle from down the track and the distant beat of the engine came to our ears.
“It is almost upon us,” said the signalman. “It is too late.”
“There is a murderer on that train,” said Holmes. “Let it pass and he will escape. Stop it and your name will be honoured for ever!”
“Here,” said Captain Blake abruptly, stepping to the row of heavy levers. “Never mind this man. I’ll do it myself! I learned about these things when I had a spell with the Royal Engineers.”
At this, the signalman sprang forward. “Very well,” said he. “Let me do it.” He pulled two of the heavy levers towards him, as the bright green locomotive, wreathed in smoke, burst into view round the distant curve and thundered towards the little station. There came an ear-splitting din, as the driver saw the signal ahead of him and applied the brake, and the wheels skidded with a shriek along the shining steel track. Through the platforms the train roared and screeched, and past the signal cabin, which shook like a leaf in a storm as the heavy engine passed it, until finally, in a cloud of steam and smoke, it came to a halt some thirty yards further on.
Sherlock Holmes sprang down the steps, and I followed him along the track to the back of the train, and round to the other side. We heard Lestrade call out, as he caught sight of his quarry in one of the carriages, and at that moment a door on our side was flung open, and the portly figure of Sir George Kirkman sprang down and landed heavily on the ballast. We rushed forward as he rose to his feet and withdrew something from within his coat.
“Look out, Watson! He’s got a gun!” cried Holmes, flinging himself upon the fugitive before he could raise his arm. The two of them struggled wildly for a moment, until Holmes managed at length to wrench the pistol from the other’s grasp and send it spinning through the air and into the bushes beside the track. Then, as Kirkman seemed about to break away, Holmes caught him with a right hook to the jaw, and he fell heavily to the ground. In a moment Lestrade and Blake had joined us.
“Thought you’d make a fool of the law, did you?” cried Lestrade, as he clapped a pair of handcuffs on his prisoner. “We’ll see about that!”
“Well, well,” said Holmes to me, as he stood up and brushed the dust off his clothes with his hands. “That appears to be that! I don’t know what your plans are, Watson, but I should very much prefer to be back in London this evening. So, what say you to taking this train which has so conveniently stopped for us?”
The Adventure of
KENDAL TERRACE
AMONG THE MANY strange and puzzling problems presented to Mr Sherlock Holmes during the time we shared chambers together, the story which was told to us by Mr Henry Claydon holds a special place in my memory. To an outside observer, there were certainly aspects of the affair that appeared absurd and almost farcical; but for those intimately involved in the matter it must have seemed anything but humorous. What is undeniable is that it was a very perplexing business, and one, moreover, which, but for the intervention of Sherlock Holmes, would very likely never have been solved at all.
It was a pleasant evening, just a few days before midsummer. Our meal concluded and cleared away, we had fallen into a discussion of the latest scientific opinion on the nature of sunspots, and of the possible effects of these phenomena upon terrestrial events. From these rarefied heights, our conversation had drifted on by way of other natural phenomena that were not yet fully understood to a consideration of the more mundane but equally intriguing mysteries with which the history of human society abounds. I had often observed that despite Holmes’s occasional pretence of ignorance of some field of human enquiry when he was not in the conversational vein, there was in reality scarcely any subject I could raise upon which he did not have an informed opinion. But upon the unsolved human mysteries of past centuries his knowledge was perfectly stupendous. Whether it was an inexplicable murder in the sixteenth century, a puzzling theft in the eighteenth, the baffling disappearance of some famous person or the mysterious publication of an anonymous manuscript, my friend appeared to have all the facts at his fingertips, and he held me enthralled as he ranged widely over these fascinating, unsolved problems. Some of his conclusions were at once so surprising and so interesting that I may one day make them the subject of one of these short sketches. Some of them, indeed, seemed on first hearing simply too startling to be true, but as he explained to me how he had arrived at his conclusions, I was in almost every case convinced that he had indeed hit upon the truth.
“You appear to have made a close study of these ancient problems,” I remarked.
“I have had little else to occupy my time recently,” said he.
“You have no case in hand?”
My friend shook his head. “I have had three prospective clients call upon me this week. Two of the cases were entirely devoid of interest. In both of them I was able to make a few suggestions, which I trust will be useful, as I sat here in this room, but I did not propose to enter into either matter to any greater extent than that. In the third case, that of Mr Tanner of Norwood, as you may recollect, I accompanied that gentleman back home to investigate the curious incidents he had described to me, only to find when we reached Norwood that someone had reported the matter to Scotland Yard, and that, despite taking almost four hours to respond to the report and travel the short distance to Norwood, they had already made an arrest. Furthermore, I could not doubt, from the facts available to me, that they had the right man, for it was the very person to whom my own suspicions had been drawn by my client’s account.”