Sherlock Holmes, Sign of the Four: The Mystery

So, back to Sign of the Four.  We are moving somewhat in the direction of a modern mystery here.  Holmes is able to determine whodunnit based solely on the clues offered in the novel. It still relies on the villain to give a great many details that are not implied in the story.  And the villain has two accomplices, one of whom is killed on sight and the other is never really identified.  Doyle does not appear to be much interested in either of them; his real focus is on Jonathan Small.

Much harder to forgive -- Holmes solve the mystery in chapter six (of twelve).  Most of the remainder of the novel is taken with the attempt to hunt him down, including the 19th Century's equivalent of a high speed pursuit, and Small's account if events.

The story begins with a lovely young governess, Miss Mary Morstan, daughter of an army captain who served in Indiaa.  Her father sent her to a boarding school in Scotland after her mother died.  When she turned 17, he telegraphed her from London that he was home from the Andaman Islands, where he was in charge of a military prison, and summoning her, with great hope and excitement.  When she arrived, her father had vanished, leaving his luggage behind, and was never seen again.  His only friend in England was Major Sholto, retired from his regiment, who said he knew nothing of Captain Morstan's visit to England.  Four years later, she received a mysterious pearl of great value by mail, and continued to receive such a pearl each year. This went on for six years, and that morning she received  a letter in the same handwriting saying that she had been wrong and would receive justice, and setting a time and place to meet.  She was invited to bring friends if she was (understandably) distrustful.  Watson is most enchanted with her, and Holmes praises her judgment in bringing the letter and the envelopes that contained the pearls. 

 

Andaman Islands

While Holmes and Watson await the meeting, Holmes does some research into Major Sholto and finds that he died in 1882 and that Miss Morstan began receiving the pearls within a week of his death.  He deduces that his heir is behind the pearls and is making some sort of compensation to Mary Morstan for the loss of her father.  When Miss Morstan joins them, she brings a mysterious paper from her father's effects -- a mysterious diagram of halls, corridors, and passages, signed by "The sign of the four,—Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, Dost Akbar."*

They go to the designated meeting place and are greeted by an Indian coachman, who escorts them to the house of Thaddeus Sholto, the Major's son, heavily decorated with Indian ornaments.  He explains that his father returned from India with significant money, but was fearful of some unknown danger, had his house guarded by professional boxers, and particularly feared wooden-legged men.  He once shot at a wooden-legged man who proved to be completely harmless.  In 1882 the Major received a letter that so frightened him that his health failed and his illness was proclaimed mortal.  In his final illness, the Major told his sons that he and Captain Morstan had come into a significant treasure in India.  Captain Morstan had a weak heart and got into a quarrel over division of the treasure so heated that he had a fatal heart attack.  The Major's own servant assumed that it was murder, so the Major hid the body, not seeing how he could convince anyone of is innocence.  On his deathbed, the Major wants to make it right with Captain Morstan's daughter.  He is about to reveal the location of the treasure when a mysterious fact looks through the window.  "It was a bearded, hairy face, with wild cruel eyes and an expression of concentrated malevolence."  Thaddeus and his brother, Bartholomew chase after the mysterious man, but he escapes, and by the time they return their father is dead.  Their father's room was ransacked and piece of paper left behind saying, "The sign of the four."  (Dum da dah!)  Bartholomew has now found the treasure, hidden in that attic at their father's old house, but shares his father's greed and does not want to part with it.  Thaddeus proposes that the go over to confront him.

They travel to the house and find Bartholomew locked inside the study and unresponsive.  They break down the door and find him dead, his features grossly contorted, and beside him a piece of paper with the words "The sign of the four."  (Dum da dah!).   Holmes examines the body and determines that the cause of death is a prick with a poisoned thorn. The two brother made a hole in the ceiling to bring down the treasure, but now it is missing.  Thaddeus is the obvious suspect.  

Holmes sends him off to fetch the police and starts some detective work.  The window is locked from the inside, but there are prints on the ledge -- a boot and a peg leg -- the wooden-legged man (dum da dah!).  A wooden-legged man could hardly have climbed the wall, but Holmes spots a rope lowered to help him up.  Clearly, then, he had an accomplice.  Inspecting the rope, Holmes sees blood.  The killer is a good climber, but not a sailor or his hands would be more hardened.  It is then that Holmes introduces his precept -- "[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."  If the door and window are locked from the inside and the chimney grate is too small, they must have entered through the hole in the roof.  Which points to an inside contact who told them about the hole.  Looking in the attic, Holmes sees the prints of the accomplice -- a bare foot too small to be a man or even most women, toes splayed out in the manner of one whose feet have not been encased in shoes.  There is a trap door in the roof to the attic -- again pointing to an inside source or how could they have known.  

About this point, Detective Athelney Jones shows up and immediately concludes that Thaddeus Sholto is the killer.  The motive is a dispute over the treasure, the thorn could easily have come from the collection of Indian materials.  He dismisses the "sign of the four" note as a red herring to throw the police off track.**  Jones first postulates a quarrel between the men and Thaddeus makes off with the treasure.  Holmes points out that this would require the corpse to lock the door!  Jones recognizes the hole in the ceiling and concludes he must have used that.  Holmes gives his own description of the killer:

His name, I have every reason to believe, is Jonathan Small. He is a poorly-educated man, small, active, with his right leg off, and wearing a wooden stump which is worn away upon the inner side. His left boot has a coarse, square-toed sole, with an iron band round the heel. He is a middle-aged man, much sunburned, and has been a convict. These few indications may be of some assistance to you, coupled with the fact that there is a good deal of skin missing from the palm of his hand.

After Detective Jones has arrested Thaddeus Sholto, and after Miss Morstan has been taken home, Holmes explains his reasoning to Watson.  Small's size, shoe size, and the details of his peg leg, naturally come from Holmes' examination of his footprints, as with the previous novel.  Major Sholto so feared wooden-legged men that he shot at a white wooden-legged tradesman.  Jonathan Small was the only white name of the four.  He further reasons that Sholto and Morstan got the map from Small while they were operating a military prison.  It seemed likely that he was an inmate, and that his incarceration was the reason he had not retrieved the treasure himself.  His age is deduced from the time elapsed since that even, his sunburn from convicts being outdoors, and his general appearance from Thaddeus' description.  Holmes does not (yet) say much about the associate, except that he is small, habitually goes barefoot (toes splayed out instead of bunched together), and that he committed the murder and that Small was displeased.  Spoiler alert: Holmes will later reveal that the accomplice was a native of the Andaman Islands where Small was a convict and the two officers guards.  Aboriginal inhabitants of the islands were small, primitive (hence the bare feed), and used poison darts.

So, now Holmes has determined whodunnit, how, and why.  What does that leave?  Catching the offender.  Holmes is an expert tracker, but within human limitations, i.e., he looks at footprints and makes deductions from them.  He cannot track by smell like a dog.  Tracking by sight is not much use on the busy streets of London.  Even a dog might find the streets challenging.  However, the islander stepped in some creosote and left a trail that even a human can smell.  Holmes borrows a dog to track the smell.  This is somewhat complicated by the frequent transportation of creosote throughout London to preserve wood.  However, after some false starts, they are able to trace the offenders until they catch a boat.  He approaches the owner's wife on the pretext of wanting to hire the boat and is able to determine that the owner was, indeed, hired by the wooden-legged man and has been missing since yesterday.  He also gets a description of the boat.  The boat goes missing for a time, until Holmes deduces that Small must be concealing it by sending it in for repairs.  They trace the boat and Doyle entertains us with a high speed chase on the water, both sides frantically shoveling coal into their engines.  The primitive islander aims his blow gun at his pursuers and they shoot him in self-defense.  That is the end of him. They capture Jonathan Small and, as before, the killer gives a long back story that we could not have known from the clues.

He joined the army after a scrape with the law, made the mistake of swimming in the Nile, and had his leg bit off by a crocodile.  That would appear to be the end of his military career, so he took a job as a plantation manager in India, but was interrupted by the Sepoy Mutiny (1857, or about 30 years before the date of the novel).  He took refuge in a fortress with many halls, corridors and passages.  The emergency was so dire that despite his wooden leg, Small was given command over two Sikhs -- Mahomet Singh and Abdullah Khan.*  The two of them forced him at gunpoint to take an oath to join their conspiracy, saying that they trusted a Christian, but not a Hindu, to be bound by his oath.  A messenger was coming from a local Raj to hide his jewels in the fort.  Dost Akbar would lead him to the others and they would kill him and seize the treasure.  This was done, but they were found out and sentenced to penal servitude for life.  He ended up on the Andaman Islands, under the guard of Sholto and Morstan, both experiencing serious financial pressure.  Small offered them a one-fifth share of the treasure if they would help the four escape.  He was quite firm on this point.  His accomplices must also be freed and must have their share of the loot.  Well, as we know, the two officers double crossed him.  Small had learned some medicine from the prison doctor and used his skills to nurse a mortally sick island native back to health and escape with his help.  And, he finally says, he threw all the jewels into the river, rather than let them fall the heirs of Sholto and Morstan.

With the jewels no longer an issue, Watson can now ask Mary Morstan to marry him without looking like a gold digger.  Holmes, burned out after the exhilaration of the case, returns to his cocaine.

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*Mohammed Singh?  Without claiming any special expertise, this seems like a most unlikely combination, since Mohammed is a Muslim name and Singh is a Sikh name.  It is later revealed that the team are Sikhs, which I would think would make Abdullah also an unlikely name.  But I am ready to be proven wrong.   

**An interesting inversion from the previous novel, in which the killer wrote the word "rache" (German for revenge) on the wall, to make the police falsely suspect a secret society.