Death on a Pale Horse by Donald Thomas

Author:Donald Thomas [Thomas, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9781605983943
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART III

Death on a Pale Horse

1

I pride myself that my medical education and military training have made me more observant than most men in the face of a threat. I had scanned Baker Street when “Samuel Dordona” from the Evangelical Overseas Medical Mission arrived. I had watched him as he left. So indeed did Sherlock Holmes. Of course Major Putney-Wilson was absurd in his amateur theatrical disguise. It made him conspicuous rather than unobtrusive. Yet I saw no one who might have been his shadow or who paid him the least attention.

At Carlyle Mansions, Holmes would have been the first man to notice if we had been followed. Of course, it now proved that we and the entire street were under observation by Albert Gibbons, but this in itself should have been a protection against spies. Civilian and military police have what are technically known as “private clothes” personnel who wear no regimental uniform. I needed no persuasion that Gibbons in his commissionaire’s livery was as much a sergeant of the Provost Marshal’s Corps as he had ever been.

Sherlock Holmes certainly behaved as if there was no present danger from Moran or his associates. My misfortune was to assume that danger is something which all men and women instinctively avoid. But there are also those to whom danger is the breath of life and who deliberately tempt their foe to combat. They will fight a duel when they might as easily avoid it. Holmes fell precisely into this category.

No doubt Colonel Rawdon Moran had become our enemy. Yet he could not have murdered Captain Sellon if he had been on the passenger list of a homeward-bound liner which had docked at Funchal in Madeira less than five days before the captain’s death. Holmes had easily confirmed from the shipping line clerk who knew the man: three days at sea and two more on the Transcontinental Express from Lisbon would still leave him on the wrong side of the English Channel at the time that Joshua Sellon died.

“Hence Ramon,” said Holmes sardonically.

“I beg your pardon?”

We were sitting over our glasses of whisky and warm water two evenings later as the sitting-room fire burnt down to a final glow.

“Hence Ramon. The foreign gentleman who booked the apartment opposite Carlyle Mansions, from which Lestrade insists the bullet was fired. The man who booked it but never arrived to occupy it. You noticed, of course, that the name Ramon is a childishly obvious anagram for Moran?”

It had not occurred to me until that moment because my mind had been occupied by other things, but I thought it best to say, “Of course.”

“It cannot have been Moran who murdered Joshua Sellon if he was not even in England. That is why he taunts us with his anagram. I doubt whether he any longer commits his own murders, except on special occasions. To use such a foolish pseudonym as Ramon is once again the old game of ‘Catch me if you can.’ We are not allowed to forget that he is the puppet-master of murder.

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