How Holmes Closed in on a Crooked Con
Dear Detectives,
Your careful work has helped put a stop to The Cox & Co Caper. Although the bank, and Watson’s despatch box, may have been breached, the case came to a close with relatively few casualties — and for that we can be thankful.
As per usual, Holmes has also provided his own analysis of this case (now that he’s got the time). If you think you may have missed something, or just want to see how you stack up against Holmes himself, don’t hesitate to take a look!
The Dear Holmes Team
——
18 June, 1890
My dear Watson,
Your customary modesty will attribute the happy outcome of this despatch-box affair to my intervention, yet I assure you the credit lies chiefly with your own power of observation. The little ragged pages that were so curiously left behind in the vault were almost enough to illuminate the whole conspiracy. What follows is therefore not a paean to my cleverness but the plain recital of how each of the clues you (and, grudgingly, Mr. Glunn) supplied, led us step by unerring step to our culprit, and the rescue of several terrified innocents.
I have set my deductions in the sequence they must have occurred to any reader who would have received the three previous packets on the days you despatched them; so that you and anybody else might see the case was winnable by reasoning alone.
I. The first packet: Mr. Glunn’s anxious memorandum of 1 June
Glunn’s narrative offered three facts which, set side by side, yielded the essential skeleton of the crime.
Only your tin despatch-box was removed, though gold, scrip, and jewellery were trampled underfoot. From the first sentence I therefore dismissed motives of greed and looked instead for a brain that feared, coveted, or despised information.
The locks bore no violence. The thief possessed a key—or borrowed one under duress. Immediately the spotlight shrank to the four key-holders.
Among the litter lay:
a) A fragment of Lorimer-&-Pike tracing-paper, the favourite stock of draughtsmen and mezzotint engravers;
b) A single band of Flor de Ébano Gran Corona, the rare Havana associated in Police Gazette circulars with the mezzotint rogue Henri Vautrelle;
c) Two freshly torn notebook-leaves, one a rough ground-plan of three weather-board sheds beside the Thames, the other a tide-table of barge movements.
Those three items, lying cheek by jowl, proclaimed a mezzotint forger’s workshop upon the river, a workshop so precisely located on your sketch that it imperilled the whole criminal enterprise.
At that early stage one could not yet know whose hand tore the pages, nor whether they came from your own notebook, but it was already certain that the burglar sought them. Why then scatter them? Only a frightened accomplice—someone compelled to steal—would dare leave so blatant a signal for honest eyes.
Thus, before the end of Glunn’s first paragraph I possessed both motive (silencing a compromising sketch) and method (forced use of a vault-key).
II. The second packet: your quarantine narrative of 8 and 9 June
While the public might chuckle at your mis-diagnosis of those “tropical fevers,” your letter furnished decisive particularities.
Mrs. Perrin’s testimony of river silt and chloroform on Whittle’s boots and jacket, preceding the burglary by twenty-four hours, fixed him as the key-holder who had already visited the riverside shed. The presence of a baby’s pacifier bulging in his pocket made the grim inference unavoidable: wife and children were hostages, and the pacifier a token that he dared not lose.
Your own inspection of the scullery bin in the Belvedere Road lodging-house disclosed a teething ring, chloroform bottle, and six more Ébano bands. Nothing so powerfully corroborates a theory as the discovery of all three earlier “vault clues” in the very lodging where the box was prised open.
The chemist’s chloroform receipt dated 2 June, signed “C. Vale,” at last coupled Vautrelle’s cigar with the less-proclaimed but equally dangerous Vale, whose expertise in drugging watchmen had driven the Spindle Forest mezzotint fraud a year earlier.
From these points, one might already sketch the whole plot: Vale abducts the Whittles, forces Hugh to steal the box, ferries it to the Belvedere shed, then prepares to burn the shed once the next forgery is ready for market.
Two gaps remained. First, could any of the three other clerks be Vale’s willing agent, rather than a red herring? Second, what of the mud-smeared pages found in the vault?
III. The third packet: Campbell’s memorandum & attachments (14–15 June)
Inspector Campbell, though terminally prosaic, supplied the final nails for every coffin save the forger’s own.
Fire Brigade call-sheet—Shed No. 2 burned at one o’clock the morning of 12 June; therefore the gang remained on the premises for eleven days after the burglary, using the sketch as working reference until the hour came to flee.
Half-burnt tracing-paper overlay—found in the ashes, it duplicated your ground-plan, proving Vale had indeed copied the map and tried belatedly to destroy his stencil. The attempt failed: Campbell’s constable preserved a corner sufficient to match Lorimer & Pike’s fleur-de-lis watermark.
Alfred Peck, lighterman, deposition—two foreigners, veiled woman, three sleeping children, scorched trunk, all embarked upon a barge bound eastward. Peck was told to “forget the night.” The cargo manifest fits Vale, Vautrelle, Mrs. Whittle, and her brood.
Whittle’s pantechnicon—at his Brixton house the furniture had been removed on 13 June. Only a man expecting to bolt—or expecting his family’s safe return—hides such a vacancy.
Abdon Hillier’s Sandown observations—Ackerley’s only contact with the cigar-smoking “M. Vaulx” was a careless word at the rail; no money or paper passed. With that we may strike Ackerley from the indictment.
Sutton’s left-hand smear, tide-tables, and tracing-paper—harmless scholarship; the man is guilty of nothing save bibliophily.
Glunn’s over-zealous watch and cheque-book—the cashier’s new coat is vanity, not villainy; his offer of a guinea merely tone-deaf thrift.
At this juncture, we own every tile of the mosaic—every clue necessary to expose the criminals, absolve Ackerly and Sutton, and redeem poor Whittle, lay in plain sight with yours and Glunn’s epistles in hand. The first letters I received furnished motive, whilst the second set supplied the identity of the compelled key-holder; the third gave the temporal sequence of events alongside the names and habits of the mezzotint forgers, Vale and Vautrelle. Indeed, a patient reader, collating those fragments, could have guided the Yard as surely as I.
From the moment Vale learned that your notebook lay locked in Cox & Co., the plan unfolded with ruthless clarity. He and Vautrelle were already using the three weather-board sheds under Hungerford Bridge as a clandestine mezzotint studio, timed to the half-hour rhythms of passing barges and watch-lamps. Fearing your sketch might direct the police straight to their door, Vale first bought chloroform and seized Mrs. Whittle and the children, then forced Hugh Whittle—key in hand—to steal the despatch-box. Inside the shed they copied the rest of your notebook for their own reference, torched the building to erase every trace, and fled downstream with hostages and negatives in a single night of smoke and tide. Whittle, desperate for rescue, left the mud-stained leaves scattered in the vault and prayed that his silent cry for help would shine a light on our villains’ whereabouts.
Having reached this conclusion on the evening of the 15th, all that remained to me was to anticipate Vale’s next berth east of Tower Bridge, telegraph the River Police to surveil the Bermondsey wharves, and accompany Campbell to the warehouse of “Vaulx & Company” in Blue Anchor Lane, which he referenced in his most recent letter. We arrived an hour before dawn this morning, surprised the scoundrels packing their glass-plate negatives, and liberated Mrs. Whittle and the children—chloroformed but uninjured—within a locked lumber-loft. Ackerley’s “French fellow” sulked in the corner, cigar still clamped between his teeth; Vale attempted a dash for the cat-walk and fractured his ankle for his pains.
IV. Odds and ends resolved
The benzoin & xylene fumes you detected in the despatch-box were confirmed by a Yard analyst: the pair constitute the quick-dry varnish favoured by itinerant photographers. Vale had taken copy-negatives of your Spindle Forest memorandum as insurance against future black-mail. The plates are now in police hands.
Mrs. Whittle’s ring indeed served as proof of her survival. Vale taunted his victim by sending the ring in a letter demanding compliance; Whittle hid it on his person lest his captors search him.
The “foreign addition” in your box—the chloroform receipt—must have slipped from Vale’s breast-pocket while he wrestled the lid; it will assist the prosecution greatly, as it was no doubt used to aid in the kidnapping of the Whittle family.
Mr. Stuart Glunn has, I believe, ordered a yet grander watch-chain in anticipation of the Board’s gratitude. I have suggested he inscribe the back with the words “memento diligentiae”—lest a second burglary teach him humility.
Mr. Hugh Whittle signed his deposition at noon, his children clinging to his knees. No charge will be laid; the Home Secretary himself has telephoned Cox & Co. urging they promote the man. I venture to predict the Bank will oblige; public sympathy is a powerful solvent of bureaucracy.
I have also instructed Inspector Campbell to retain, for your medical curiosity, a phial of Vale’s improvised sedative—no harm in adding it to the museum of rascal chemistry that grows behind your surgery books.
Now, Watson, should you ever again consign your writings to tin and iron, pray employ a padlock of less obliging temperament. Forgers may smash cedar and steel; they rarely shift Mrs. Hudson’s broom.
Until duty summons us anew, I remain, as always,
Your friend,
