How Holmes Beat Grosvenor at His Own “Game of Chance”
Esteemed Detectives,
We would like to thank you all for aiding us in solving our first case of the summer. As we continue to review our latest Featured Detective submissions, we encourage you to take a look at how Holmes helped the audacious Verity Wright foil her employer’s fraud. In this case, there appears to have been a rather familiar Game of Chance involved...
Until next time,
The Dear Holmes Team
——
13 May, 1888
I take pleasure in informing you that I have been able to confirm your suspicions and expound upon Felix Grosvenor’s erratic behaviour. Upon receipt of your first letter, I was not fully convinced that Mr. Grosvenor’s actions warranted investigation. His ramblings about counsel, his abrupt departures, and his disregard for scheduling pointed toward incompetence perhaps, but not toward malice. However, after learning of his meeting with the dark-suited man, and his subsequently frantic meetings with not only ABC Limited’s executives, but also those of its competitors, it became apparent that Mr. Grosvenor’s secrecy was worthy of examination.
At first, the most puzzling aspect of Mr. Grosvenor’s conduct was his brooding over those enigmatic pieces of paper. The first one you discovered, upon which he had written ’PIERRE’, suggested that the word might refer to a person. Although you were correct to consider ’Pierre’ to be a French translation, it was not ’Peter’, but another cognate that caught my attention. ’Pierre’ is both a name and a word that signifies ’stone’ in French.
Why he would write such a message was still unclear, but your second letter placed these details under an entirely new light. In it, you mentioned seeing Mr. Grosvenor with a page that bore an outline resembling a large cross, and then what seemed to be a blank sheet of company paper. The sheet bearing the cross could point to his religious fervour, but that was merely a blind. When one considers the shears, held at right angles, which you observed him holding as you entered his office, it becomes evident that the outline of the ’cross’ was likely formed using the instruments. Yet, your later findings indicate that Mr. Grosvenor was not attempting to depict a cross at all; rather, his goal was the more obvious one of depicting shears themselves.(More on this to follow.)
As for the ’blank’ letter that Mr. Grosvenor sent with you to the mail-room, perhaps most interesting of all was its addressee: the Périodique d’Assurance Européenne. Why would your superior be corresponding with the Périodique’s offices, and with whom precisely? Your notion of a clandestine message in ABC Limited’s letterhead was clever, but unfortunately, I distinguished nothing of the sort upon inspection. So I then began to ruminate upon your account of Mr. Grosvenor’s latest meetings. His previous visitor had returned with two associates, at least one of whom was carrying a briefcase marked with a portcullis. That symbol indicated that they were likely tending to business for the Crown, but even more telling was Mr. Grosvenor’s response to the assembly. His pale-faced reaction to their arrival, his explosion at their departure, and the fact that he had discreetly left you in possession of his letter to the Périodique, made it clear that Mr. Grosvenor was concealing something from these men. Bearing in mind his wordless note and the torn magazine page that he asked you to dispose of, I began to theorise that this hidden ’something’ involved some degree of connection to the Périodique.
The excerpts of the Périodique’s market research you provided supported this hypothesis. These lists, which Mr. Grosvenor had slammed onto your desk upon exiting his ’animated’ meeting, suggested an uncanny level of balance in the European home insurance market. Despite ABC, DEF, and GHI seemingly functioning as competitors, the Périodique’s ’research’ indicated that no one company resolutely triumphed over the others. Instead it exhibited a clear and consistent pattern, wherein each firm enjoyed a discrete period of offering leading prices, before inevitably falling behind another firm, whose new and better price would introduce another short-lived, but definitive, bout of triumph. Such a pattern might have seemed unremarkable in passing, if not for your account of Mr. Grosvenor’s aforementioned ’animated’ meeting, which featured the word ’trust’ repeatedly. This detail solidified my theory that your superior was facing accusations of anti-trust price manipulation.
Home insurance lends itself remarkably well to such manipulation, which effectively undermines the possibility of competition in a certain market. While businesses may partake in these illicit activities independently, the speed with which Mr. Grosvenor fled to his competitors’ offices after his unexpected interviews suggested a greater conspiracy. Those unscheduled meetings suggest that the government must have already drawn the same conclusions as I did and started their official investigations. Following his second meeting with the men, you overheard him speaking to Mr. Hunter and Mr. Gripper about the ’enlightened attitude’ of the Swiss, presumably towards financial manipulations. Considering that the penalties for engineering a monopoly include imprisonment, I posit that Mr. Grosvenor planned to destroy ABC Limited's company records and quietly flee the country to avoid prosecution in Switzerland.
Once I received your third letter, the reasons for Mr. Grosvenor’s dismissal of your husband and co-workers became clear, and his conspiracy began to unravel. Mr. Grosvenor’s decision to hire external security was not simply meant to ensure the confidentiality of ABC Limited’s documents. In truth, these new security guards were meant to supervise the premises while Mr. Grosvenor and his associates vacated their offices after business hours. This feat was made all the more easy by terminating watchful eyes, like those of your husband and the other document retention officers.
By your fourth letter, you had unwittingly noted several other indicators of Mr. Grosvenor’s forthcoming scheme. Your office’s supply room had been unusually neglected, and Mr. Grosvenor was suddenly growing concerned with minutiae, like the personal effects on your desk. Clearly, his demands for tidiness were masking a desire to not only accelerate his evacuation, but also ensure that his staff had minimal reason to return. I could tell that Mr. Grosvenor’s move was to happen soon, but I could not determine exactly when or how, until he provided you with the details of ABC Limited’s upcoming ’25th Anniversary’ celebration.
As you noted, Mr. Grosvenor aims to invite all of ABC Limited’s staff (with the exception of the newly-hired security guards) to the Savoy Hotel, for a celebration marking ’roughly’ twenty-five years since the company’s foundation. Knowing that ABC Limited was actually established in 1868, I conjecture that Mr. Grosvenor’s effort to honour the company is yet another blind. With all of the staff distracted through the night, Mr. Grosvenor, Mr. Gripper, and Mr. Hunter would be able to fully purge the premises of any remaining records. The details of this plan continued to unfurl before me as I read of your investigation of Mr. Grosvenor’s office, and your later visit to Cavendish Square.
The dates that you were able to transcribe from the Bible in Mr. Grosvenor’s office encompassed the periods from 18 February to 25 February, 18 March to 15 April, and 17 June to 22 July. During that last period, the Périodique lists ABC Limited as offering the best insurance rate for a two bedroom flat compared to its competitors. In other words, ABC Limited appeared to triumph during that time period. Recalling a detail in your third letter– Mr. Grosvenor’s remark that ’It’s better we lost this week anyways’– I suspected that there was a game at play. If Mr. Grosvenor and company had in fact ’lost’ that week, which began on Monday, 22 July, that would help explain the sets of dates you found in his Bible. Your superior was tracking dates through which ABC Limited was offering ’winning’ prices. Of course, their ’game’ remained largely ambiguous, until I recalled the three types of documents that you had found in Mr. Grosvenor’s possession. The sheets of company paper adorned with either ’PIERRE’, outlined shears, or nothing at all, were not secret messages, but rather maneuvers pertaining to a curious gamble of Chinese origin.
Watson and I became acquainted with the unique diversion during a spell in Japan, where the game is broadly referred to as a ’sansukumi-ken’. Mr. Grosvenor and his fellow associates were likely introduced to the gamble on one of their frequent travels. Many variations of the game exist, each with its own moniker, but it is normally played using three distinct hand gestures. Those playing will all form a gesture at once, and a simple hierarchy declares the winner. In the case of your superior and his associates: a stone, or ’pierre’, would triumph over shears, shears over paper, and paper over stone. Watson and I are more amenable to a version involving a centipede, frog, and snake, but the rules are applied identically. In simple terms, the sansukumi-ken gamble allowed the companies to determine who would offer a ’winning’ price each week without exhibiting a detectable pattern. However, since there were more than two players, they would have likely had to adjust the rules to account for possible ties. Therein lies Mr. Grosvenor’s connection to the Périodique, which I theorise has been receiving payments from GHI and DEF as well, in exchange for its arrangement of these ’games’.
The cheque that you discovered in Mr. Grosvenor’s Bible was addressed to the Périodique and inscribed with an ’F’. The ’F’, in turn, was followed by numbers the man had written himself. This foreign cheque obviously indicates some sort of payment to the publication, but more importantly, it suggests that Mr. Grosvenor is utilising a new, or otherwise secret, bank account. Based on the printed ’F’, one with a bank that deals in francs rather than the British sterling. However, in spite of these affirmations, my hypothesis conflicted with the question of Mr. Grosvenor’s residence, which he had claimed was under repairs. Why would a fleeing man remodel his property?
Fortunately, your trip to Mr. Grosvenor’s now-former estate confirmed that his home renovations were nothing more than a lie. The fellow sold his old family house in anticipation of an escape, which in all likelihood, is set for 18 August, the date on which he hoped to depart from Victoria Station. Based upon your discovery that DEF and GHI’s offices had been vacated, I would also argue that they are among the ’friends’ who Mr. Grosvenor remarked were relocating to Switzerland. There, they could all resume operations in a country where anti-trust offenses are permitted in the name of financial freedom.
Little did these gentleman know that their game of chance would ultimately attract the attention of our government. My brother, Mycroft, who works for the Crown, has been warned of Mr. Grosvenor’s plans for the weekend of 16 August. He assures me that the proper officials have been informed and are readying a plan for apprehension. Further, he shares that GHI has claimed ignorance to the fact that their British representatives were engaged in this ’game’. The company’s President, Hermann Jaeger, has agreed to pay multiple fines– amounting to roughly 40,000 marks– and swiftly terminate its London branch, in exchange for the opportunity to continue operations without pause. DEF remains under scrutiny, and ABC Limited will likely suffer from extensive reorganisation as ordained by the British government, leaving much of its staff indefinitely unemployed.
With regard to your personal circumstances, Mrs. Wright: I am fortunate to have many generous friends in the vicinity of London, one of whom presides over an advertising agency and constantly bemoans his need for ’competent helping hands’ in the office. I have testified to your dedication and wit, and he has agreed to extend you an offer of employment. While the position might require you to learn the workings of a rather different industry, I am confident that your compensation would be more than enough to restore you to your previous conditions. Should you be interested, I am confident your new employers will be graced with the service of a most remarkable secretary.
Yours sincerely,
