How Holmes Halted the "High Society Swindle"
Honourable Detectives,
A sincere “Thank you” to all who assisted Lord Reginald Crumblin and the rest of his Committee. Without your decisive intuition, Lords Crumblin and West might have succumbed to their supposed colleague’s nefarious plan. We are still evaluating our Featured Detective entries for this case, but in case you’d like to jog your memory, feel free to peruse Holmes’ thoughts on the High Society Swindle below! Did you see Fernsby’s betrayal from the start, or were you one of those scrutinizing Lord West himself?
As always, we’ll be in touch soon,
The Dear Holmes Team
——
16 June 1898
Dear Lord Crumblin,
I realise that Inspector Lestrade might have already contacted you with the news, but I felt compelled to write you a thorough explanation, for without your help this corruption would have continued freely. In the case that you have not yet heard from Scotland Yard, please allow me to assure you: You are not in danger, and your committee should no longer be under threat. Your committee’s latest endeavours, however, may need to be reassessed.
To begin, your first letter to me on the 10th of June provided few viable routes of inquiry and an abundance of possibilities. There was little doubt that you had suffered from two rather odd assaults, but as you yourself mentioned, the nature of these attacks and the reasons for them were obscure. It was possible that these two occurrences– as your colleagues later suggested– were wholly unrelated, but nonetheless, the fact that your pursuer had left your briefcase near Church House indicated something beyond a typical attempted theft. Furthermore, your status as Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Clerk of Her Majesty’s Privy Council was cause enough for concern; there could have been countless reasons to explain why someone might be targeting you, I thought.
Your second missive suggested to me that your initial inclinations were well-founded. Although I have many a time come across beggars conducting well-practiced schemes, it would have been foolish to ignore the fact that two separate members of your unique committee had suffered from the same sort of attack at the same location. From your descriptions, it seemed that both yours and Lord Fernsby’s briefcase might have held something valuable enough to merit attention on either occasion. But when considered together, there did not seem to be a particular pattern of documents or contents linking your cases together, other than the fact that you both possessed various committee-related records.
With your first two letters in hand, I still considered the possibility that the fellow who lunged after you outside of the Church House was not one and the same as the blond man near Admiralty Arch, however, your third letter– that is, your account of the incident at Lord West’s residence– made this notion seem invariably unlikely. This burglary marked the third occasion after which a light-haired tattooed scoundrel was reported to be involved; coincidence or not, this sort of curiosity warrants scrupulous evaluation. The information you relayed in your third letter facilitated this evaluation by allowing me to narrow the scope of my search for a suspect. The tattooed man had successfully located you twice– both times in the hours following a committee meeting– while also managing to not only encounter Lord Fernsby at one of those same locations, but also ascertain the address of Lord West’s residence. Therefore, one could conjecture that the swindler must have possessed knowledge of your committee and/or its particular constituents, if not at least their respective schedules. As such, I had two prevailing theories at this point in time.
The first was that the blond fellow could be connected to a committee-member’s house staff. Considering the fact that your colleagues’ staff were generally acquainted with each other, it would not have been unreasonable to believe this. Likewise, it could have been somebody with ties to a shared purveyor, such as Wilton’s or Briarcliff. The second and admittedly simpler theory was that this tattooed man was personally or otherwise directly linked to somebody appointed to your committee. If this were the case, we would then be faced with another question. Was somebody on your committee perhaps being exploited or blackmailed, or was this person on your committee voluntarily exposing your inner workings and inviting the assaults on your colleagues? An angry governess, or a desperate relative, or a company facing scrutiny; many possibilities crossed my mind, however, the tattooed man’s actions made little sense unless his goal was but that of sheer intimidation.
Finally, Mrs West’s discovery of the note in her front hall’s display case, which you detailed in your fourth letter, gave us insight into the villain’s objective. If this note had indeed been left behind by the burglar, and if that burglar was in fact the same tattooed blond man, then it would stand to reason that the blond man was acting on behalf of somebody to whom Lord West was supposedly indebted. The question of ’Who?’ was at least partially answered shortly thereafter, when you met and spoke with Mr Edward Miller of Russel & Bromley. I was reluctant to believe in the theory that you, Lord Crumblin, were secretly orchestrating these events, for I could hardly imagine you would have written to me so brazenly upon having your ’secret cheques’ discovered. Similarly, Lord West would have been unlikely to charge into your conference, with the threatening note in hand, were he actually guilty of corruption. Rather, it seemed all too likely that somebody was attempting to make it seem as if you– and your colleague Lord West– were at the head of a crime you knew nothing about.
At that stage of my investigation, I contemplated your unexpected sighting of Lord Sheridan and considered him a person of interest, but my theory truly began to take shape once I read your account of the meeting at Lord Fernsby’s home. As soon as I learned of the slit in your briefcase’s lining, I recalled a detail I had not appraised since receiving your first letter– the knife you witnessed the blond man wielding outside of the Church House– and from that moment, the path to our culprit quickly illuminated itself before me.
I posit that your briefcase had been left behind by the thief on that evening because his objective was not to take something from it, but rather to hide something within it. After startling you with the knife in hand, I suspect the blond man dashed back to your briefcase and swiftly made an incision in its inner lining. He then slipped in the false cheques and fled the scene, leaving your briefcase nearly the same as it was before. The note found at Lord West’s residence was planted in a similar fashion– behind the veil of a threat solely meant to induce panic. As for the notorious tattooed man in question, Stephen ’Thomas’ Grogan, the information provided by Miss Devlin indicates that he believed he had been acting at the behest of the Crown. Considering the impressive wages he was seemingly offered in exchange for his services, I believe this claim to be true. Fortunately, the identity of his generous new employer became evident through your subsequent visit to Russel & Bromley and the additional information your fourth letter provided. Your discovery of the fact that Russel & Bromley had been offered a sort of illicit ’contract’ made it resoundingly clear that a member of the Privy Council, most likely one within your special committee, had been conspiring against you and your colleagues.
Lord Crumblin, as I have told Inspector Lestrade, all of the evidence with which you have thus far provided me indicates that this member, and the man coordinating the recent assaults involving Mr Grogan, is indeed Lord August Fernsby. Between Fernsby’s position on the committee and Grogan’s proximity to Miss Devlin and therefore the Wests’ residence, it would have been easy to gather information regarding both you and Lord West’s schedules. Using that information, Grogan first attempted to steal your briefcase near Admiralty Arch, but failed. Had he succeeded, I imagine he would have ran to the safety of some alley before inserting the false cheques and ultimately leaving the briefcase to be conveniently discovered by you. Instead, he was forced to carry out a second attempt, this time, later at night when you were alone. After planting the cheques in your briefcase, Grogan moved onto Fernsby’s final task: ransacking the West residence, leaving behind the supposed ’threat’, and disappearing without a trace. Fernsby would then be able to direct accusations toward yourself and Lord West, while allowing the authorities to pursue some ’tattooed blond fellow’ who was no longer in London. I arrived at these conclusions after analysing your letters again with close attention to his actions.
As you had noted in your second letter, Lord Fernsby was an extravagant man, opulent enough to sport bejeweled golden cufflinks– perhaps his wealth stems from more than just his work for the Crown, I began to suspect. Then there was the issue of his precious briefcase. In that same letter, you had recounted Lord Fernsby’s insistence that his briefcase was irreplaceable. Yet by the time you wrote to me yesterday, he seemed to have obtained a nearly identical replacement. I theorise that in reality his briefcase was never stolen, rather, Lord Fernsby played the role of victim to cast a light of innocence over himself.
Revisiting your third letter, it was Lord Fernsby who was most troubled by your decision to request my assistance. In addition to this, you claimed that he had entered your meeting that day, announcing that the ’fearsome blond man’ had struck again. While he may have somehow inferred this fact, you had noted that your messages to Lords Berkeley and Fernsby merely summoned them to confer at 11 o’ clock, with no mention of the blond man. Arriving again at your fourth letter, Fernsby’s displays of guilt become increasingly apparent. It was Lord Fernsby who motioned for your latest meeting to take place at his residence. It was also Lord Fernsby who suggested that the conference begin without Lord West. When the meeting was sidetracked, despite your best intentions, it was Fernsby again who interrupted– not to mention, he was delaying discussions regarding your findings at Russel & Bromley. After escalating the situation, Lord Fernsby suggested that you and your colleagues allow their attachés to be searched, whereafter he himself singularly discovered the supposed evidence in your briefcase. The man even demanded that you and Lord West cease investigating your charges– likely a means of impeding any additional unwanted discoveries, but also an action that suggests the possibility of other organisations having been deceived with the same ’contract’. In short, I hypothesise that Lord Fernsby simply sold his three ’suggestions’ off to the highest bidders he could find and deceive, with little regard for the ultimate results. However, when you began to investigate Russel & Bromley yourself, he succumbed to his anxieties and took bold action to defend himself.
Had Lord Fernsby been more cautious, perhaps his scheme would not have crumbled before him. But alas, the men from Scotland Yard will likely have apprehended him before you have had the opportunity to read these words. Regarding Grogan, with the aid of Miss Devlin and his former employer at Briarcliff Dairy, Lestrade hopes to locate the young fellow without delay. If he is fortunate, they may allow him a reduced sentence in exchange for cooperation and any details that may help elucidate the depths of Fernsby’s corruption. For now, it is imperative that you ascertain that no other companies currently under review have been compromised in a similar manner. Once that is done, I encourage you to move forth with your committee’s order to the Crown.
Besides that, Lord Crumblin, if Lestrade is able to confirm any additional information pertaining to Fernsby’s malpractice, he will contact you personally, as my work on this case must now come to a close. I commend you for your commitment to the Crown, and for acting decisively in the face of uncertainty– had you not done so, your innocence in all of this madness might have become much more troublesome to determine.
God save the Queen,
