Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,64
justice.
But this knight was being turned back from his crusade by Sherlock Holmes. Resolve was giving way to despair. There was no response, only a deepening silence such as one hears when the pulses of an explosion subside. There were tears of disappointed honour on the bowed face of the suspect. He would not look at us just then. Lestrade saw this too. In the quietest and kindest voice I had ever heard our Scotland Yard friend use, he spoke to the man who had so recently been the Reverend Samuel Dordona. The inspector stopped just short of putting an arm round the bowed shoulders.
“Here, what’s all this?” he said encouragingly as our prisoner wiped his eyes. “There’s no need for that. No one’s accused you of anything—yet.”
9
In deference to our client’s safety, Holmes referred in future to what he called the “nom de plume” of the Reverend Samuel Dordona, rather than to Major Henry Putney-Wilson. In my own narrative, I prefer the truth, now that the drama is over and the secret is out.
Henry Putney-Wilson, with his key to the door of the mansion apartment, was inevitably the first suspect in the murder of Captain Sellon. It was very soon clear, however, that there could be no charge against him. Joshua Sellon was seen alive by a milkman on his rounds and the porter at the desk on his arrival at Carlyle Mansions. It was no later than half-past six in the morning. Major Putney-Wilson meanwhile was at the Ravenswood Hotel in Southampton Row, where he had been a single resident for more than a month. It was at least half an hour’s cab-ride from Bloomsbury to Carlyle Mansions and back, plus whatever amount of time would have been needed for committing the murder. It would also require a cab to be waiting outside the mansions for his immediate return to Bloomsbury. No cab had been seen arriving, waiting, or departing.
At the Ravenswood Hotel, our client had still been in his nightshirt when the maid called him that morning just before seven. He had breakfasted in the public dining-room of the hotel from half past seven to almost half past eight. He then went out and scanned the day’s press at Drummond’s Reading Room in Russell Street between quarter to nine and quarter past.
Captain Sellon’s body had been found by the daily maidservant a little before nine o’clock. Scotland Yard being close at hand to Victoria, Lestrade and his officers were alerted at once and had been on the scene well before ten. The police surgeon had come and gone shortly before Holmes and I arrived, at eleven. Joshua Sellon had therefore died between half-past six and quarter to nine.
It was one thing to clear Henry Putney-Wilson of murder, but quite another to persuade him to talk about Carlyle Mansions. What was the strange “overseas medical mission?” How had it attracted this devout widower of a woman cruelly driven to take her own life by the conduct of Colonel Rawdon Moran? How had it involved a serving officer of the Provost Marshal Corps Special Investigation Branch?
In his impersonation of Samuel Dordona on the previous day, our retired major of the 109th Regiment of Foot had promised to provide us with evidence of the murder of the late Prince Imperial of France. So long as Lestrade was present, it was clear that Sherlock Holmes would not discuss the matter, let alone invite him to produce the evidence.
Putney-Wilson was obsessed by the evil of Moran. He had sent in his papers, resigned from the Army, and entrusted his two motherless children to the care of his brother, a wine-shipper in Portugal. The terrible crime against Emmeline Putney-Wilson remained on the record. The major sought justice for what my two subalterns had called moral homicide.
Before he left Hyderabad to bring his children to Europe, the major had also heard of the terrible accident to his friend Captain Brenton Carey. The two men had shared a belief and a cause. Our client had been present at the bedside of the dying man, not as Samuel Dordona but as Henry Putney-Wilson. Then he had gone to ground as Dordona, an absurd persona striving to shed the martial qualities of his creator. Perhaps it was not entirely absurd, if the evangelism of an overseas mission was close to Putney-Wilson’s heart as an “uprighter.” As for Joshua Sellon, was it old friendship? Had Putney-Wilson, on detachment to Army Headquarters in Delhi, been seconded to military intelligence?