Death on a Pale Horse (28 page)

I had not been expecting the question but the answer seemed plain.

“He may have been struck down by a blow he could not see coming. He may have been unconscious before the final damage was done. In any case, the shock of injuries severe enough to leave him unconscious might also wipe recollection of the incident from the brain when consciousness was regained.”

“A horse's hoof or a blunt instrument would be all the same in its effect?”

“If the implement was chosen for that purpose, it probably would be.”

Mycroft Holmes nodded and counted again on his forefinger.

“Number three. The trail then leads back to Carey's troubled murmurings on the last night of his life, his story of royal assassination at the Blood River in Zululand.”

“The Prince Imperial,” said Sherlock Holmes languidly. “We have read the newspapers, dear Brother. We know that Captain Carey himself was at first held responsible for allowing the tragedy to occur. We also know that while he was dying, he revealed to Mr. Dordona those secrets that might otherwise die with him.”

Mycroft paused and managed a rare smile. He was pleased with himself and did not care who knew it. He shook his head. “I am aware that you have entertained to tea the Reverend Samuel Dordona.”

“Are you indeed?”

“Come, Brother Sherlock! We may not be as clever as you, but we are not complete simpletons! Samuel Dordona, indeed! In other words, a well-meaning over-acting impersonator, Major Henry Putney-Wilson. Until the tragic death of his wife, Emmeline, the major was not too pious to take part in respectable theatricals at Lahore. It seems to have stood him in good stead. He once played the ruined hero, in Bulwer-Lytton's moral drama
Money.
It was performed at Simla as a compliment to the author's son, Lord Lytton, who had just come out from England as Viceroy. You did not know all this, dear Brother, did you?”

This was intended to irk his sibling, as they say. I glanced quickly at Sherlock Holmes. But not a nerve nor a muscle in his profile moved. Mycroft resumed.

“Of course, Brenton Carey can never have intended Putney-Wilson to keep the story of the Prince Imperial to himself. On the contrary, the major surely swore an oath to his dying friend that he would pass the story on to their mutual comrade in arms, Joshua Sellon of the Special Investigation Branch. That is perhaps the only item of the story which Putney-Wilson withheld when he told it to you in his absurd charade.”

Mycroft sighed and pushed his tea cup away.

“I do not know how Rawdon Moran heard of any this. Yet I fear Brenton Carey unwittingly signed Joshua Sellon's death warrant by implicating him. We must now assume that Moran knows everything.”

“Who else might know?” I asked.

Mycroft Holmes shook his head. “Perhaps Annie Brenton Carey. After the prince's death, Captain Carey retained his commission. As a servant of the Queen, he was forbidden from telling story-book tales of a man on a white horse. That was left to other ranks. There may or may not have been a figure on a pale horse above Isandhlwana, but it was a flesh-and-blood murderer who directed the tribesmen in their attack on Louis Napoleon.”

He took a small key from his waistcoat pocket and stepped across to a cupboard set in the wall by his desk.

“What of the sabotaged holster-leather?” Sherlock Holmes asked coldly.

“You know of that, do you? I deduce it was substituted for the original while the horses were grazing and their riders were lunching. Substituted by someone who can handle a horse without disturbing it. It was certainly not the strap that had been tightened in place and inspected that morning.”

The cupboard door was now wide open and Mycroft was struggling a little with what looked like an elongated cricket bat, wrapped in oilskin and tied with a cord. He continued his account.

“Even if the prince had escaped being thrown to the ground and speared, a marksman with a Martini-Henry on that ridge above the kraal could have brought him down from the saddle easily with a single bullet. The tribesmen with their captured rifles would most certainly have got the credit of killing him with a lucky shot from one of their guns.”

A little breathlessly, he deposited his wrapped treasure on the desk-top.

“How many men thought they saw a figure on the ridge as they rode away?” I asked.

“One. Trooper Le Brun.”

Sherlock Holmes intervened. “Le Brun was the last man to come alive out of the kraal. Therefore he was able to see the top of the ridge which those ahead of him were hidden from as they went under the hill. How unfortunate that, once again, there was no corroboration of his story.”

Mycroft was picking at the cord that bound the oil-cloth. “Le Brun, if that was ever his name, was last heard of among ruffians and scallywags in the Transvaal gold fields. He is probably as dead now as Arnold Levens—and I daresay by the same hands.”

He had loosened the knot and drawn the wrapping free. On his desk lay a rifle, its brown wooden stock polished as if it had been new. Its barrel was a breech-loader, shorter than the infantry weapons of ten years ago but common enough now. A neat steel plate on one side of the breech bore the imprint of the British crown and the letters “V. R.” for Victoria Regina. Beneath that was the manufacturer's trade-mark, “Enfield 1870.”

Mycroft patted the stock. “After the prince fell dead, Carey's party rode for their lives and never stopped until they reached the Blood River camp. A search party was not sent out until next day to look for the bodies of the prince and the two troopers. This weapon was also recovered on the ridge above the deserted kraal. Martini-Henry, .450 bore, British Army issue. According to Woolwich Arsenal, it had never been fired. It was no doubt loaded, but the round was ejected when the marksman saw that a bullet was not needed. The spears had done their work. A most efficient weapon, in its action. See here. The firing pin is cocked automatically as a round goes in over the breech. In the hands of a game-shot, the time between loading and detonation is very short. The gun is also extremely accurate. A short lock means that the marksman will almost invariably hit whatever he sees between the sights.”

“Yet it was abandoned?”

“Abandoned, doctor? Yes. By someone who disappeared even more quickly than Captain Carey's patrol! Someone who was well aware that there might be other British Army riders in the area, who could be drawn to the scene by the sound of the tribesmen's gunfire. Our mysterious horseman would hardly care to explain to them how he, as a civilian, had come into possession of an Army rifle in pristine condition. Far better drop it on the ground and let the tribesmen take the credit for throwing it away as they ran.”

Mycroft paused and then counted on his fingers for the fourth time.

“Last of all, Isandhlwana, the beginning of the tale. A similar figure to that reported on the ridge above the scene of the assassination had perhaps been seen or imagined above the battle. Mounted on a grey, he watched from the col. But the case is different. It needs no phantom on a hillside, gentlemen, to explain how Isandhlwana was lost. The mis-matched turn-screws and the sabotaged cartridges will do that.”

He wrapped the rifle in its oilcloth again and tied the knots in the cord.

“Henry Pulleine acted with great gallantry. He knew he was condemned to die, but first he would write one brief note and conceal it where it might not be discovered by his killers before his body was found. He wrote of betrayal. And that was not all. A blade of metal no thicker than your middle finger was found on the ground by his body. There was no purpose for it in that tent except as a message. His fingers seem to have lost their grip of it in the moment of his death. Useless turn-screws of the same calibre lay among the grass of the wagon-park. Turn-screws that would never open those crates of cartridge packets to replenish the pouches of the infantry lines. Never in a month of Sundays.”

There was silence in the sunlit room. The image of that last dreadful scene, men fighting the enemy back-to-back with their bayonets until the end, played like a lantern-slide in our imaginations.

“And Joshua Sellon?” I asked: “How did he come to Isandhlwana?”

Mycroft tested a last knot in the cord round the oilskin. He looked up and raised his eyebrows, as though surprised I had not guessed.

“Do you not recall, doctor, that you first met him in a saloon carriage of the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway?”

“Indeed I do.”

“Captain Sellon was in the habit of noting the names of those he met and what they talked about. It was his profession as an intelligence officer—his second nature. Your name and conversation were entered in the notebook. You were proceeding from Bombay to Peshawar and the North-West Frontier, were you not? You talked of court-martials, he says, subalterns' court-martials.”

“We did. Almost as far as Lahore.”

He nodded.

“Do you recall that the train was delayed at a small junction, some distance short of Lahore?”

“It was. To this day I do not know why. Probably because a shorter train overtook us as we waited there, going in the direction of Bombay.”

“Do you also recall that a staff officer, probably Brigade Major Anstruther, came to your coach? Captain Sellon was summoned to an immediate conference with his superiors.”

“Correct.”

“You do not know why Sellon was taken away?”

“I do not. When I next saw him—or even heard of him—he was lying dead in Carlyle Mansions with a bullet in his skull.”

“Then it may interest you to know, doctor, that Joshua Sellon was not just a Provost Marshal's man: he was one of the best officers that the Special Investigation Branch had ever possessed. He was removed from your train because a wire from Calcutta—from the Viceroy's secretary—ordered his return to Bombay. The first suspicions about Isandhlwana had been raised in Cape Town. The few survivors had begun to talk. Captain Sellon was to be despatched from India to South-East Africa in charge of a Provost detail. He was to accompany the first patrol to the battlefield. A special train was despatched to your little junction from Lahore. A light cruiser lay at anchor in the harbour of Bombay. It waited for those whose skills were needed at the scene of the massacre. England was too far to send, but Josh Sellon could reach Durban, the nearest port in South-East Africa to Isandhlwana, long before you were with your regiment in Kandahar.”

“I had no idea about him, at the time,” I said slowly. “The young officers in my coach treated him as being rather a joke. A dull old fellow, was how they spoke of him.”

Mycroft chuckled at my stupidity.

“A dull old fellow, eh? And what better disguise could such a man have? How fortunate for your two young buccaneers that they never came under his scrutiny. Joshua Sellon was asked for in South Africa by Sir Henry Bartle Frere, Her Majesty's Governor at the Cape. Sir Bartle had once had Sellon under him when he was Governor of Bombay. He knew his quality. When the rumours began after Isandhlwana, he cabled direct to the Viceroy in Calcutta and made his request. So Josh Sellon, Lieutenant Halliwell, and two of the Provost Quartermasters joined the first burial party that was sent into Zululand. They arrived there a few months after the disaster, the first troops to reach that remote scene. That was how it came about.”

Mycroft Holmes laid the rifle on its shelf in the cupboard and turned round.

“Their investigation soon located several bogus turn-screws lying in the grass of the wagon-park. The difference in calibre between these and the .450 Martini-Henry ammunition might not be noticed at a glance. But these were put to the test as a matter of course.”

This would not do, I thought. “But why had no one examined them or tested them in all the time that Lord Chelmsford's column was marching from the Cape to Zululand? Had they no occasion to fire their rifles in all that time, even in practice?”

He looked at me with a sad suggestion of pity for my obtuseness. It reminded me of Sergeant Gibbons.

“I think you do not quite understand, doctor. The fatal substitution of the mis-matched turn-screws was not made until after the final camp inspection had been carried out on the evening before the battle. That was the whole point. It must be done on the right day. The so-called hunter who performed it had first to assure himself that the Zulu impi was already in a position to advance on the following morning. He knew enough about the tribes and their tactics for that. It was what Moran waited for, night after night.”

“For how long?”

Mycroft shrugged. “Who knows? He is a hunter, a tracker. No one sees him come or go. I know something of the fellow. That is my job. Randy Moran could cross a forest floor in pitch darkness without a single twig ever cracking under his foot. That same night, knowing that the attack was prepared for next day, he also entered the mess tent of the 24th Foot and removed the head in its specimen jar. He had no need to do it. It was the obsession of putting a signature to his work. We know him well enough to understand his ways. You had far better leave him to us.”

Sherlock Holmes had been silent for an uncharacteristically long time. Now he shifted in his chair.

“Leave him to you? You seem remarkably sure of yourself, dear Brother, for one who has not yet proved a word of this story against Colonel Moran.”

This time, Mycroft's chuckle had no humour in it.

“We know the scoundrel as well as we know poor Owain Glyndwr. True, his head is not yet pickled in a jar. That will be possible, I suppose, when the hangman has finished with him.”

But his brother continued to scowl. “Then you have not found him?”

Mycroft bowed his head and pulled open a drawer of his desk. He took out a small pile of slim leather folders, chose one, and opened it. A large quarto-sized photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man in his middle forties. Even stilled by the camera's lens, a mesmeric coldness lay in those narrowed eyes. There was ferocity in the lines of the brow and nose, which seemed all the more powerful for the large size of the print. We confronted an image so lifelike that it seemed as if it might answer back at us, a virile yet sinister face. The model of a hunter and a killer. The height of his brow was evidence of an intelligence to rival Mycroft Holmes. Yet the determined set of the mouth and jaw also bespoke a sensual leer that would corrupt intelligence or natural virtue. The shoulders conveyed the strength of a body which the portrait did not include.