Wisteria Lodge

1 The Singular Experience of Mr John Scott Eccles

I find it recorded in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1895. Holmes had received a telegram whilst we sat at our lunch, and he had scribbled a reply. He made no remark, but the matter remained in his thoughts, for he stood in front of the fire afterwards with a thoughtful face, smoking his pipe, and casting an occasional glance at the message. Suddenly he turned upon me with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

‘I suppose, Watson, we must look upon you as a man of letters,’ said he. ‘How do you define the word “grotesque”?’

‘Strange—remarkable,’ I suggested.

He shook his head at my definition.

‘There is surely something more than that,’ said he; ‘some underlying suggestion of the tragic and the terrible. If you cast your mind back to some of those narratives with which you have afflicted a long- suffering public, you will recognize how often the grotesque has deepened into the criminal. Think of that little affair of the red-headed men. That was grotesque enough in the outset, and yet it ended in a desperate attempt at robbery. Or, again, there was that most grotesque affair of the five orange pips, which led straight to a murderous conspiracy. The word puts me on the alert.’

‘Have you it there?’ I asked.

He read the telegram aloud.

‘ “Have just had most incredible and grotesque experience. May I consult you?—Scott Eccles, Post Office, Charing Cross.” ’

‘Man or woman?’ I asked.

‘Oh, man, of course. No woman would ever send a reply-paid telegram. She would have come.’

‘Will you see him?’

‘My dear Watson, you know how bored I have been since we locked up Colonel Carruthers. My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace, the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed for ever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove? But here, unless I am mistaken, is our client.’

A measured step was heard upon the stairs, and a moment later a stout, tall, grey-whiskered and solemnly respectable person was ushered into the room. His life history was written in his heavy features and pompous manner. From his spats to his gold-rimmed spectacles he was a Conservative, a Churchman, a good citizen, orthodox and conventional to the last degree. But some amazing experience had disturbed his native composure and left its traces in his bristling hair, his flushed, angry cheeks, and his flurried, excited manner. He plunged instantly into his business.

‘I have had a most singular and unpleasant experience, Mr Holmes,’ said he. ‘Never in my life have I been placed in such a situation. It is most improper—most outrageous. I must insist upon some explanation.’ He swelled and puffed in his anger.

‘Pray sit down, Mr Scott Eccles,’ said Holmes, in a soothing voice. ‘May I ask, in the first place, why you came to me at all?’