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Traill said to me: “I should, perhaps, address you in private.”

“My colleague is privy to all my affairs,” I assured him, suppressing a smile of my own.

“Very well. I dared to approach you, Dr Watson, since certain accounts which you have published show that you are not unacquainted with outré matters.”

“Meretricious and over-sensationalized accounts,” murmured Holmes under his breath.

I professed my readiness to listen to any tale, be it never so bizarre, and – not without what I fancied to be a flicker of evasiveness in his eyes – Martin Traill began.

“If I were a storyteller I would call myself hag-ridden … harried by spirits. The facts are less dramatic, but, to me, perhaps more disturbing. I should explain that I am the heir to the very substantial estate of my late father, Sir Maximilian Traill, whose will makes me master of the entire fortune upon attaining the age of twenty-five. That birthday is months past: yet here I am, still living like a remittance-man on a monthly allowance, because I cannot sign a simple piece of paper.”

“A legal document that confirms you in your inheritance?” I hazarded.

“Exactly so.”

“Come, come,” said Holmes, reaching for a quire of foolscap and a pencil, “we must see this phenomenon. Pray write your name here, and Watson and I will stand guard against ghosts.”

Traill smiled a little sadly. “You scoff. I wish to God that I could scoff too. This is not a document that my hand refuses to touch: see!” And, though the fingers trembled a little, he signed his name bold and clear: Martin Maximilian Traill.

“I perceive,” said Holmes, “that you have no banking account.”

“No indeed; our man of business pays over my allowance in gold. But – good heavens – how can you know this?”

“Yours is a strong schoolboy signature, not yet worn down by repeated use in the world, such as the signing of many cheques. After ten thousand prescriptions, Watson’s scrawl is quite indecipherable in all that follows the W. But we digress.”

Traill nervously rubbed the back of his right hand as he went on. “The devil of it is that Selina … that my elder sister talks to spirits.”

I fancied that I took his point a trifle more quickly than the severely rational Holmes. “Séances?” I said. “Mischief in dark rooms with floating tambourines, and the dead supposedly called back to this sphere to talk twaddle? It is a folly which several of my older female patients share.”

“Then I need not weary you with details. Suffice it to say that Selina suffers from a mild monomania about the ingratitude of her young brother – that is, myself. Unfortunately she has never married. When I assume formal control of our father’s fortune, her stipulated income from the estate will cease. Naturally I shall reinstate and even increase the allowance … but she is distrustful. And the spirits encourage her distrust.”

“Spirits!” snapped Holmes. “Professor Challenger’s recent monograph has quite exploded the claims of spirit mediums. You mean to say that some astral voice has whispered to this foolish woman that her brother plans to leave her destitute?”

“Not precisely, sir. On the occasion when I was present – for sisters must be humoured – the device employed was a ouija board. You may know the procedure. All those present place a finger on the planchette, and its movements spell out messages. Nonsense as a rule, but I remember Selina’s air of grim satisfaction as that sentence slowly emerged: beware an ungenerous brother. And then, the words that came horribly back to mind on my twenty-fifth birthday: fear not the hand that moves against its own kin shall suffer fire from heaven.

“And my hand did suffer, Dr Watson. When I took up the pen to sign that paper in the solicitor’s office, it burnt like fire as though in my very bones!”

I found myself at a loss. “The pen was hot?”

“No, no: it was a quill pen, a mere goose feather. Our family lawyer Mr Jarman is a trifle old-fashioned in such matters. I do not know what to think. I have made the attempt three times since, and my hand will not sign the document. Jarman is so infernally