Stewart Sinclair, Private Eye: Part Ii

© 2012 by Elizabeth Greenwood. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 06/08/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-7822-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-7823-2 (e)

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Contents

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF STEWART SINCLAIR

THE HOUSE AT NUMBER TEN

VENGEANCE IS MINE

CIRCUS ACT

A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY

REBECCA X

SMALL TALK

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF

STEWART SINCLAIR

If Sinclair’s parting shot to the accused who was acquitted of murder and arson in the Blacker case had brought about a feeling of triumph, it was short lived. And it was not long before Sinclair felt compelled to confide in Sebastian about the growing sense of disconcert which afflicted him with regard to the affair, as time went by.

‘You can’t blame yourself for the way the trial went’, Sebastian would remark to try and put balm over his heart, which would invariably achieve the opposite effect of reviving the sore. ‘You did provide the only piece of physical evidence in support of the circumstantial evidence.’

‘No, that’s true; it was a bad business from the start, and Judge Ruddersford having the covert prejudice that he has against the jury system didn’t exactly encourage the two counsels to put before the jurors sufficient scientific evidence about the Mendelian laws of physical inheritance for them to secure a ‘guilty’ verdict with any confidence.’

‘You mean without the shadow of a doubt?’

‘Yes, not to mention the lack of credibility in both your and Arthur Blacker’s testimonies regarding the identification of Jacob Blacker as the bald-headed twin… In a way, I feel responsible. You know what they say about the way to hell being paved with good intentions? Well, I feel I have created a hell for both Eleanor Blacker and her father-in-law in that they are mewed up with a potential criminal, a relative about whose identity they are not sure about, somebody who needs tender loving care while his hair requires strict management, lest it should grow again with dire consequences to themselves, if the story of Sansom is anything to go by. If that isn’t a living hell, I don’t know what is, and I am responsible for creating it in the first place by going after Daniel Blacker on a hunch.’

‘Why don’t you go away for a while? Travelling might take your mind off things. Go up to Scotland for a wee bit of fishing and hill walking. You haven’t been home for a long time.’

‘Yes, I think I might do just that,’ replied Sinclair with a lack of enthusiasm that was inspired by the word ‘travelling’ used by Sebastian, a word which brought back the memory of a text by Seneca entitled ‘Travelling does not cure the soul’, which had caused him a great deal of perplexity as a schoolboy when he was given it to translate into English. At the time, he had heard of material bodies being afflicted by sickness (he himself had caught mumps during an epidemic), but never of souls, which were immaterial and therefore immune to bodily disorders… Not until now had he become accessible to the idea of a ‘soul’ being liable to sickness because he had acquired experience of the condition at first hand, feeling sick at heart every time his thoughts reverted to the situation in which Arthur and Eleanor Blacker were cooped up together probably for the rest of their lives,—a situation he had been instrumental in bringing about—the name of the incurable illness of the soul which was undermining him being called guilt. The plight of Eleanor Blacker in particular made him remorseful. She needed to dedicate herself to someone she loved, but she could never be sure whether the man she was nursing back to health out of love was a worthy recipient,—the victim of a tragic accident at sea—or a hardened criminal who might suddenly go berserk. Yet, in his pursuit of Daniel Blacker he had, he thought, been guided by the highest moral principles in the profession. Was there any point, any point at all, in going all he way to Scotland to find oneself face to face with an incurable sickness of the soul every time one looked down at a picturesque mountain valley with a stream running through it? The answer was no. Another job might prove more beneficial? He was about to go and enlist Sebastian’s help provisionally when the latter appeared out of breath:

‘Have you heard the news?’

‘What news?’

‘After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Arthur Blacker shot his son and then turned the gun on himself. I suppose he could not bear the thought of leaving Eleanor behind to cope with Daniel by herself. He felt responsible.’

‘I often wondered how between the two of them they managed to stop his hair from growing again in case his strength returned and he turned on his wife for cheating on him with Jacob, his alter ego. It doesn’t bear thinking of, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t. Do you think there was a kind of tacit understanding between the two of them about not allowing his hair to grow again beyond a certain length in case there was a genetic link between hairiness and virile strength as in Samson’s case?’

‘It’s possible. In any case Arthur Blacker must have known she could never have coped by herself with the practical side of that particularly vital hair management.’

‘You mean, he liberated her by killing Daniel before shooting himself?’

‘Yes, he set her free.’

‘What if she doesn’t feel liberated, I mean, if she loved him, no matter what?’

‘I don’t know… Perhaps, here, a quotation from Sherlock Holmes would not be out of place :-

There are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves. He said that in The Beryl Coronet.’

They walked in silence for a while, awed by the tenor of what had just passed between them, and then Sebastian said :

‘Of course, by doing what he did Arthur Blacker set you free too?’

‘Yes, he did, though, of course, he could not have known about the burden of guilt I carried around for having placed them both in such a terrible situation.’

‘You could find out, if you wanted to… ?

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s to stop you now from contacting Eleanor Blacker?’

‘It seems such a trivial thing in retrospect compared with what she went through. Actually, that’s not the real reason; I fear her reproach. I took from her the only thing she had. Although it was an illusion, and a lethal one at that, she had someone to love.’

‘So, what now?’

‘Well, in the circumstances, now I feel liberated, I think I’ll take a trip to New York rather than go to Scotland and fall into a melancholy mood over the scenery which would not do me any good. New York is such a vibrant city, and they love stories about Sherlock Holmes. After all, that is where he first became famous, on Broadway of all places, in a play by Conan Doyle with the uncannily Holmes-like actor William Gillette in the title role, a dramatic triumph in the U.S.A. for the author who at the time was volunteering for service as a front-line surgeon in the Boer war,—admirable man. Did you know that at one time there were forty Sherlock Holmes societies in the States? I get really angry about Doyle’s home in Hindhead not having been preserved by English Heritage, or The National Trust. After all, it was not like 221 Baker Street a fictitious address. I’m sure American tourists would have flocked to its gates. After all, Doyle was the father of modern forensic science. That’s man’s gratitude for you.’

Like his great mentor, Sinclair found popular acclaim abhorrent and when he espied reporters waiting for him at La Gardia Airport, he realized he would have to devise ways and means of protecting his anonymity if he wanted to stroll down Broadway at leisure. The level of interest in the Blacker case surprised him. And he did little to encourage those interviewers who, despite his protestations, kept insinuating that perhaps he knew more about the case than he was prepared to disclose, in case the FBI got wind of it and showed an interest in him too, ruining his holiday.

The thought of disguise, which Sherlock Holmes was not above resorting to in desperate situations, did occur to him when having sneaked out of the hotel late one morning a man stopped him, and claiming to recognize him offered to take him to a smart cocktail bar where the barman served the best Margaritas in New York. Sinclair claimed he had been toasted to excess by a group of hotel residents the night before, and he never touched a drop anyway to keep ahead of the fitness game; but the man was so genuinely disappointed, and thinking that perhaps New Yorkers would read his refusal as an insult to their warm-hearted welcome, Sinclair relented ‘exceptionally’, but warned his host that he knew absolutely nothing about Margaritas and would not be in a position to savour the cocktail as perhaps educated people would expect him to. That was not a problem, the man retorted; he himself was very partial to those cocktails like the Margarita which were served in ‘coupettes’ rather than other types of glasses, and the barman was a friend of his, a happy-go-lucky type of guy, who would not take offence at his guest’s lack of appreciation,—to each his own. It all sounded bland and informal, and Sinclair almost against his will began to warm up to the very spontaneous way in which New Yorkers took him into their fold for the role he had played in the Blacker case, acting with purpose and determination right through to the end in order to bring a psychopath to justice. As those friendly encounters repeated themselves more and more frequently, and he downed Margarita after Margarita, not wanting to hurt any of those lovely people’s feelings, Sinclair began to think that a retreat somewhere quiet, where austerity was managed on a financial basis, would be beneficial if only for a short spell of time, and pretending to suffer from over-indulgence, he checked for a detox into a clinic on Long Island after leaving the address on his father’s answering machine.

Of the journey, he remembered very little, except it seemed surprisingly lengthy, but then he had been toasted rather a lot at the hotel the night before. On arrival, he was given a potion to drink which would flush his system right out, so the nurse said. She was very pretty but after a few times she was replaced by a male attendant whose visits he did not look forward to as the man seemed to go through the motions, whatever they were, in a thoroughly disenchanted manner, making it fairly obvious that he did not belong to a sect of dedicated therapeutics whose vocation was to heal people; and Sinclair, who felt jaundiced, could not muster the energy to try and humour up the man as he went about the business of shutting down all systems so Sinclair’s liver could regenerate itself. It all made perfect sense, down to the layers of eyeshades that were superimposed upon his brows so light could not filter through to interfere with the general process of relaxation. Strangely, he did not react. Though he was not a religious man and seldom turned to holy texts for solace, somehow he kept thinking of Jesus’ hedonistic philosophy ‘Take no thought of your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink… Behold the fowls of the air; for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.’ The morrow would take care of itself.

How long he remained in that state of blissful suspension, he was unable to gauge not having any means of establishing a system of correlation with the outside world because there was something odd about the form of enforced captivity that he endured,—it was quiet, dead quiet. At times, he thought he could hear the sound of waves far, far away, but it was so distant that he wondered whether it was not a figment of his imagination evoking isolated places of confinement like Alcatraz or the Chateau d’If, made famous in the film ‘The French Connection’, to provide him with a parallel. One thing he was sure of, he was not held in a conventional jail; no gate ever clanked here, no footsteps ever echoed down passage ways; the feeling was one of utter remoteness. The attendants were few, very few and easily recognizable by the utilitarian sounds they made in relation to their menial tasks, emptying slop basins or scrubbing floors. Then, one day, after those people had done their jobs, someone whose footsteps he had not heard before came in, walked round his couch and set a glass down on his bedside table, then went out again. The person, whoever it was, wore casual shoes; that was the only particular he did manage to note from the sound of their footfalls. The glass, when he did manage to put it to his lips, contained a Margarita; and when the same thing occurred the next day, and the next, in exactly the same way, the penny dropped; whoever held him in their thrall had carried out a systematic cleansing of his system in order to initiate a terminal phase of cirrhosis.

That detectives made enemies was inevitable; one took it in one’s stride as an occupational hazard; but enemies in America where he had met with so much friendliness, that was puzzling, and as time went by he realized not only did he have enemies in the States but they were cunning ones too. Every day the Margarita tasted sweeter and sweeter, and remembering a conversation he had with the owner of a cocktail bar in Manhattan, where an admirer had brought him, he realized it did so because the Triple Sec in it was being replaced systematically by Grand Marnier in order to conceal the bitter taste of whatever harmful substance was put in it to induce necrosis.

Every day, due to the increasing torpor of the Portal vein, he would lapse into a state of semi-consciousness and dream he was Prometheus, deriving comfort from the fact that according to the Greek myth the god’s liver grew again despite the eagle feeding on it every day. Although there was very little hope of a supernatural power like Zeus appearing to kill the vulture, it was nice to know that already in their times the ancient Greeks knew about the liver being capable of regenerating itself… Unbeknown to him, his mind must have been preoccupied with Greek mythology to a deeper level than he could imagine in his comatose waking life. This was brought home to him by a dream he had which was very poignant and vivid. He saw himself as Perseus flying through the air, carrying off Andromeda in his arms after rescuing her from the rock where she had been tied up naked except for her jewels, but the strange thing was that in his dream, Andromeda wore a long white gown and she had no jewellery… Then one day, when he was trying to figure out the meaning of that strange dream about Perseus’ rescue of Andromeda, pandemonium broke out. A group of men burst into his room without any warning, smashed the glass of Margarita which had been dispensed to him in the usual way, removed the eye shades from his brows and doused his face with buckets of cold water before standing him on his feet. In a mist, through the open door, he saw two men in wide-brimmed hats who looked familiar.

‘I know you’, he said, ‘you’re from the Miami Vice squad! Aren’t you out of your league here on Long Island?’

They looked at him and shook their heads.

‘This is Miami. You were on Long Island, but when your trail disappeared the Feds took over.’

‘Are there many of us here?’, he asked bewildered.

They helped him walk to the door and urged him to take a closer look. Up there, on the threshold, there was a tall, slim, effeminate-looking young man in a smart grey suit being held by two agents from the FBI.

‘Sebastian!’, he cried, ‘I can’t believe it!’

‘Up the wrong pole’, said one of the Miami men, ‘he’s at the Precinct with your father waiting to take you home.’

‘My father’s come all the way to America to take me home? Then I must have bungled in a very big way!’

Just then one of the Feds accidentally knocked over the young man’s hat as he handcuffed him, and a cascade of long blond hair tumbled down his back.

‘Mrs. Blacker!’, exclaimed Sinclair, ‘Mrs. Daniel Blacker! Are those men bullying you?’

She turned round and gave him an angelic smile of the kind that would open the gates of Paradise to any would-be lover worth his salt. And then, as they led her away, the scales fell from his eyes; he saw it all in one backward glance from end to end, and by the same token one of Sherlock Holmes’s sayings in ‘A Study in Scarlet’ presented itself to his mind, putting balm over his heart : ‘In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards… In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other (accomplishment) comes to be neglected’, which went to show what a great modern philosopher Holmes was.

The first time he and Sebastian spotted the men from the Miami Vice squad was in the Laboule garden district in Haiti and they assumed that they were up there to keep an eye on Daniel and the Margarita, not on Eleanor, Daniel’s beautiful, refined wife. The tone of voice used by Daniel when referring to his new bride, which so shocked Sebastian when he overheard Daniel shouting orders to the deckhand prior to putting her ashore after their honeymoon, was in actual fact in keeping with their personal relationship; she too dealt in drug trafficking; that made them equal as partners in crime.

Like a black widow, Eleanor Blacker had spread her web far and wide. All those enthusiastic admirers who had accosted him with such spontaneous friendliness in New York were probably members of a gang she had planted here and there in order to initiate her plan for a personal vendetta against the detective whom she held responsible for her deprivation. While he laboured under a soul-destroying sense of guilt for having turned her life and that of her father-in-law into a living hell following Daniel’s acquittal, she was enjoying being reunited with her husband (though the latter was probably impaired by his ordeal at sea) and looking forward to the day when his hair grew again and he recovered his full sexual potential. When, by an unexpected twist of fate, Daniel was taken from her, and her dream could not be fulfilled, she concentrated all her energies on wreaking revenge on the man whom she held responsible for depriving her of marital bliss, while carrying on their illegal trade single-handed… Sebastian had come very close to the truth when he had suggested a woman had been the sender of the photographs of the Margarita taken by Daniel on his mobile phone as the yacht sank.

What saddened him most was the way he had misinterpreted the meaning of the dream with himself in the role of Perseus and Eleanor Blacker as Andromeda. She did not need rescuing; she was perfectly happy where she was,—tied to the rock’, ‘wearing all her jewels’; and that is why in the dream she was wearing a white gown and no jewelry. The symbolism could not have been clearer, but he had failed to see it and gone on suffering from remorse…

At the precinct, Sinclair’s father handed him a letter.

‘I thought this would cheer you up; it is just what the doctor ordered’, he said smiling, ‘it’s from Messrs Baxter and Oldfield. They were very glad to hear you had not disappeared for three years like Sherlock Holmes after his horrendous accident at the Reichenbach falls because, as I understand it, the business of the Peacocks of Tarshish may have cropped up again.’

F I N I S

THE HOUSE AT NUMBER TEN

Sinclair who like Sherlock Holmes had escaped from the brink of death, but, unlike the great man had not spent three years ‘wandering through foreign lands’—whatever that meant—before getting back home, was relieved to hear another case was in the offing, especially one like The Peacocks of Tarshish, which had been frustrating as a first enquiry because he had been unable to convert the abstract substratum of the case into a concrete one, as his intuition required, and this was another chance for him to do so. An additional reason for looking forward to it was that it would give him another opportunity to practise the ability to ‘reason backwards’, so highly valued by Sherlock Holmes, of which he had sadly evinced a lack in the Blacker case. Inevitably, as he picked up the threads, he would have to look back on past events and reinterpret them in the light cast by new ones, while avoiding self-deceit.

The senior partner of Oldfield and Baxter’s looked a lot older than Sinclair remembered from their first meeting, and he did not seem as enthusiastic about the case as on the previous occasion, hinting that his client, though still in possession of all her wits and remarkably hale and hearty for her age, had acquired some rather irritating habits. For one, she had become garrulous, ignoring the fact that people had other clients to consider, and Sinclair might find that a disadvantage, if he took on the job again. Admittedly, the new developments in the case, if they were real and not a figment of the old lady’s imagination were enough to stir anybody’s imagination…

Sinclair thought he would make his position clear.

‘I will be dealing with your client myself, Mr. Oldfield; my assistant wouldn’t have the patience, but I insist that you tell me her name and something about her, because the last time I was left in the dark about a lot of things concerning both your client and her niece. I have a reputation now, you know, and I cannot afford to make a fool of myself. And another thing; the piper calls the tune throughout; there will be no break in the enquiry until the judicial process has been concluded. I hope I make myself clear.’

To signify his assent, Mr. Oldfield waved a languid hand; he really was not keen to continue acting on his client’s behalf; he was not sure that she wasn’t phantasizing to attract attention to herself; she was still good-looking for her age; and he spent a lot of time away from the office pleading in court. But he would guarantee a cash flow, Mrs. Emerson-Orton having recently inherited a lot of money from her sister.

That was music to Sinclair’s ears. He would have a free hand in the affair, unlike last time when on Mr. Oldfield’s advice, the client had stopped the money, blighting the affair.

To Sebastian waiting outside Mr. Oldfield’s office, the prospect of being involved again in the case of the peacocks of Tarshish was not at all appealing. He had been prompted to accompany Sinclair to the solicitors’ out of a sense