The Five Orange Pips ♦ By sir Arthur Conan Doyle ♦ Mystery Short ♦ Full ...

The Five Orange Pips ♦ By sir Arthur Conan Doyle ♦ Mystery Short ♦ Full Audiobook



Title: The Five Orange Pips



Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle



Genre(s): Crime & Mystery Fiction, Anthologies



Language: English



Read By:  Simon Evers



Librivox Recording



A young gentleman named John Openshaw has a strange story: in 1869 his uncle Elias Openshaw had suddenly come back to England to settle on an estate in Horsham, West Sussex after living for years in the United States as a planter in Florida and serving as a colonel in the Confederate Army.



Not being married, Elias had allowed his nephew to stay at his estate. Strange incidents have occurred; one is that although John could go anywhere in the house, he could never enter a locked room containing his uncle's trunks. Another peculiarity was that in March 1883 a letter postmarked Pondicherry, in India, arrived for the Colonel inscribed only "K. K. K." with five orange pips (seeds) enclosed.



More strange things happened: Papers from the locked room were burnt and a will was drawn up leaving the estate to John Openshaw. The Colonel's behaviour became bizarre. He would either lock himself in his room and drink or he would go shouting forth in a drunken sally with a pistol in his hand. On 2 May 1883 he was found dead in a garden pool.



On 4 January 1885 Elias's brother Joseph – John's father – received a letter postmarked Dundee with the initials "K. K. K." and instructions to leave "the papers" on the sundial. Despite his son's urging, Joseph Openshaw refused to call the police. Three days later, Joseph Openshaw was found dead in a chalk-pit. The only clue with which John Openshaw can furnish Holmes is a page from his uncle's diary marked March 1869 describing orange pips having been sent to three men, of whom two fled and the third has been "visited."



Holmes advises Openshaw to leave the diary page with a note on the garden sundial, telling of the burning of the Colonel's papers. After Openshaw leaves, Holmes deduces from the time that has passed between the letter mailings and the deaths of Elias and his brother that the writer is on a sailing ship. Holmes also recognises the "K. K. K." as the Ku Klux Klan, an anti-Reconstruction group in the South, until its sudden collapse in March 1869 – and theorises that this collapse was the result of the Colonel's maliciously taking their papers away to England.



The next day there is a newspaper account that the body of John Openshaw has been found in the River Thames and the death is believed to be an accident. Holmes checks sailing records of ships who were at both Pondicherry in January/February 1883 and at Dundee in January 1885 and recognises a Georgia-registered barque named the Lone Star, that he infers as a reference to Texas. Furthermore, Holmes confirms that the Lone Star had docked in London a week before.



Holmes sends five orange pips to the captain of the Lone Star, and then sends a telegram to the Savannah police claiming that the captain and two mates are wanted for murder. The Lone Star never arrives in Savannah, due to a severe gale. The only trace of the boat is a ship's sternpost marked "LS" sighted in the North Atlantic. Summary by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Orange_Pips



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