Associates of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  “An honour, Dr Watson, an absolute honour.”

  “Likewise,” he affirmed warmly.

  “I’ve followed your biographies very closely indeed. You might even say I’ve made a study of them. And the internationally celebrated Mr Sherlock Holmes – I hardly know what to say. What does a chap say when Orpheus is standing in his office? I, that is – hang it – the world is thankful for your return. Welcome back to London, sir.”

  Lestrade half-turned to cover a sneeze I suspected was not a sneeze at all. Dr Watson merely smiled and rocked onto his heels and back again, tilting his head to see what reply his friend would make. Mr Holmes examined my hand for an instant too long before gripping it.

  “France is hardly Hades,” he demurred – but I know the look of a man who has seen prolonged hardship and danger, and it was the look he wore. Come to that, the doctor likewise appeared a touch left of centre, eyes continually darting at his friend as if to ensure he was really there. “Inspector Hopkins, I believe you’ve something unpleasant to show me.”

  “Growing more unpleasant every hour. But Lestrade, I thought –”

  “If we wait any longer, there will be nothing to find,” he interjected tersely. “Mr Holmes did more than his part during the dark times, and agreed to come down. Follow me, gentlemen.”

  I knew this already, knew everything about his involvement with Saucy Jack that could be gleaned from the gutter press, though I also knew better than to trust so much as a word written by a yellow journalist. But the H Division lads had confirmed Mr Holmes was in the thick of it when I joined their ranks, would mutter ’twas its own special hell and not another word I’ll speak on the subject. Snatching up my paperwork, I hurried after the trio.

  Mr Holmes visited the arm, which had been preserved as best we could in glycerin, but pronounced there was little to see, glancing at Dr Watson to determine whether his medical companion agreed. Then we strode in his long-legged wake towards the evidence lockers and I located the box, watching as the great detective circled the table like a panther. Suddenly he froze. Somehow his stillness appeared more electric than his motion.

  “I’d hardly any hope of being able to assist when you wired me so unforgivably late, Inspector,” he admitted, glancing up at Lestrade. “Happily, I was guilty of rash pessimism. Your box, Hopkins, will be of immense help to us.”

  This surprised Lestrade, and Dr Watson likewise blinked. Staggered as I was, my pleasure took precedence. “I’m glad you think so, sir. Here is my initial report.”

  Mr Holmes took the paper with a bored air, but his eyes flicked back to the page almost instantly. A faint dusting of colour had appeared on his wan face. When through, he passed the page to Dr Watson and quirked a brow at Lestrade.

  “Hopkins here reads The Strand,” Lestrade pronounced with an air of martyrdom.

  “Good heavens! He certainly does,” Dr Watson exclaimed.

  “And provided me with three clues I should have lost otherwise due to the arm’s inevitable decay.” Mr Holmes’s tenor remained clipped, but an icicle twinkle appeared in his eyes.

  “Did I really?” I cried, overjoyed.

  “It’s going to be utterly intolerable around here from now on,” Lestrade sighed. “I’m requesting a transfer to Wales.”

  “Best pack a muffler,” Dr Watson suggested, biting his lower lip valiantly.

  This elicited a soundless laugh from Sherlock Holmes. “Come, Lestrade, you needn’t despair. He’s missed absolutely everything to do with the box. So have you, but we can hardly be shocked over that occurrence.”

  Lestrade ignored this jab. “By Jove, splendid! You’ve really found something?”

  “What have I missed?” I protested. “The teak wood and lotus flowers strongly suggest foreign origin, likely Chinese. Lestrade informed me that the lock was not used, the hinges are quite normal, and… and I don’t see anything else.”

  “Wrong again, I’m afraid. You do not observe anything else.” Mr Holmes flipped the box onto its side with long fingers. “What is this?” he asked, pointing.

  “A chip in a lotus petal.” Mentally cuffing myself, I moved to examine it.

  “Why should that have happened, I wonder?”

  “The box must have been subjected to violence in the Thames. A boat or a piece of driftwood struck it.”

  “That may well be true, but it is not remotely what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?” I questioned, mesmerised.

  “What do you conjecture?”

  “I can think of no other answer.”

  “If you give up so quickly on your first case, I shudder to think what will daunt you six months from now. Astrological impediments? The state of Parliament, perhaps?” When I flinched, he continued in the same ironical tone, “What do you know about teak wood?”

  “Very little,” I admitted, my face heating.

  “Teak has an average weight of forty-one pounds per square foot, rendering it extremely hard, and thus resistant to stress and age. It also contains a high level of silica, which often causes instruments used on it to lose their sharpness. A direct blow to this box while in the river could cause this chip, but not without cracking considerably more of the body. Thankfully, this is not tectona grandis, however. This is alnus glutinosa, which is remarkably helpful and ought to narrow our search considerably.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Dear me, I’ve considered writing a monograph regarding the fifty or so commonest woods in daily use hereabouts, and I see I’ve been sorely remiss in delaying the project. It is European alder, indigenous to our fair isle and, might I add, a fairly soft wood. Observe the scratches covering the surface – this vessel was knocked about by flotsam, but as you noted, Hopkins, the limb was not waterlogged enough to have been very long in the Thames, and teak could never have suffered such myriad injuries in so short a period. It is stained in the expected dark reddish manner, and there its resemblance to the Chinese product ends. This is a sham,” he concluded, pressing a small pocketknife into the wood. A faint but clear mark immediately resulted.

  “Thank God. You think it a hoax made by some perverse anatomist?” Dr Watson ventured.

  “You misunderstand me, my dear fellow. Deteriorated as the limb we just viewed was, the cut severing the arm was never made with any medical precision – you must have determined as much yourself.”

  “Certainly. I would hazard our subject used either a small axe or a large hatchet.”

  “I concur.” Mr Holmes had produced a notebook and pencil and made short work of recording something. “No, the arm is quite real. The conveyance is the sham, and we must be grateful for its abnormality.”

  “Severed limbs are abnormal enough,” Lestrade muttered.

  “Would that were true, but this serves our purposes better.” Sherlock Holmes’s eyes glinted with enthusiasm despite our sobering mission. “What sort of person would create a false Chinese box?”

  I couldn’t answer. None of us could. But when Mr Holmes spun on his heel and glided through the door, we understood that we were about to find out.

  As it happened, the sort of man who would create a false Chinese box was a skilled woodcarver who lacked access to the high-quality lumber of his homeland and yet wished to ply his trade, or so Mr Holmes deduced most convincingly as we four hastened from the slate monochrome of Scotland Yard into the colour and chaos of London’s busiest thoroughfares. I’d been sniffing about the wrong neighbourhood, though I was as close to the mark as was possible without having the faintest notion of what I sought, the sleuth claimed (this seemed to be meant as neither censure nor condolence). Apparently, I didn’t want the gritty straw-strewn byways of Stepney, with its deafening markets and echoing warehouses and mountains of imports.

  “You wanted Limehouse, my good inspector,” Mr Holmes finished, clapping me on the shoulder as he stepped down last from the four-wheeler. “The single neighbourhood hereabouts where Chinese culture thrives in corporeal rather than merely importe
d form.”

  Air thick as soup filled our nostrils, the tarry odour of the docks combined with roasting meats, simmering vegetables, and unfathomable spices. Beneath all skulked the reek of strangely foreign refuse – for whatever they were discarding, it wasn’t potato peelings and apple cores. Chinese with glossy queues teemed along the pavements, and intermingling with them loitered grizzled career seamen and leather-skinned stevedores making deliveries. Lestrade flipped up his coat collar against the chill breeze.

  “Are we to communicate what we’re looking for through pantomime, or learn Mandarin?” he asked dourly.

  Mr Holmes smirked, flipping open his notebook to reveal three Chinese characters. “I rather think the signature of the maker might be of greater immediate use.”

  “Capital, my dear fellow!” Dr Watson approved, grinning.

  “How the devil did you find that out?” I cried.

  “It was a positive tour-de-force of inferential reasoning,” Mr Holmes drawled. “When I flipped the box on its side, I discovered the mark had been scratched very subtly into the base.”

  Dr Watson had the decency to study a stray cur worrying at an oxtail as my face flamed, but Lestrade gave a low whistle.

  “Oh, come, none of that.” Mortified as I felt, I was grateful that Sherlock Holmes sounded impatient rather than pitying. “Ut desint vires, tamen est laudana voluntas. You mistook the characters for more ill-use visited by the Thames – resolve to do better during your second case. Now. I’m acquainted with one or two nearby apothecaries in this warren, and I’d wager a fiver my friend Wi Cheun will do right by us. Do wait here, for the poor fellow suffers from a tremendous sensitivity to strange Englishmen.”

  We watched his gleaming black hat bob away in the throng of men fully a foot shorter than he. Or I did, while Lestrade and Dr Watson complacently lit cigarettes under a mud-spattered gaslight, as if they had waited for Sherlock Holmes to consult Chinese apothecaries some dozens of times. Decades seemed to pass. I’ll be dashed if glaciers didn’t melt.

  “I feel such a fool,” I confessed.

  “That was nothing,” Lestrade scoffed.

  “It wasn’t nothing. My father was a clergyman – I do have some Latin, enough for Ovid anyhow. I suppose it’s too much to hope he’ll forget about it?”

  The men continued smoking. I forced my jaw not to clench in dismay.

  “Never mind, Inspector,” Dr Watson offered along with a genuine smile. “If everyone were Sherlock Holmes –”

  Lestrade mock-shuddered, and the doctor chuckled gamely.

  “I say, if everyone were Sherlock Holmes –”

  “Then my career would be ruined,” the man himself finished, fairly vibrating with energy as he materialised in our midst. “I’ve traced the box, and we’ve a brief trudge. I’ll tell you on the way that I dislike Wi Cheun’s account extremely for the hypothesis it suggests to my mind, and yet – well, we refuse to draw conclusions before the evidence is scrutinised. Quick march!”

  We set off briskly towards the Limehouse basin and soon were crossing its dingy footbridge under the octagonal hydraulic tower, surrounded by the clatter, shouts, and bangs of the lifeboat manufactory. As we walked, Mr Holmes shared what he had learned.

  Five years previous (according to Mr Holmes’s druggist acquaintance) the mark, which read “Wu Jinhai,” would have designated Wu Jinhai himself, an immigrant from the outskirts of Shanghai who had once made his living carving teak. Upon arriving in London, he discovered that he could procure a few shillings by foraging driftwood along the riverbank, creating landscapes and animal menageries and the like on the flotsam’s surface, and afterward staining the piece to a high sheen. In time, he earned enough not merely to buy wood and commence crafting boxes, for which there was a perennial demand, but to marry a beautiful young Chinese woman and set up both shop and household in Gold Street near to Shadwell Market.

  “A single domestic canker blighted this idyllic scene,” Mr Holmes explained. “Wu Jinhai and his wife were childless, and no amount of visits to the local physicians could banish their infertility.”

  So distraught were they over their lack of progeny that one day, when Mrs Wu was scattering wood chips and sawdust over the ice in the back alley and spied a pair of white children on the brink of starvation, she did not chase them away as most would have done with street arabs, especially those of another race – she invited them in for soup. The Wus did not lack for money, and she saw no harm in gaining a reputation for both status and generosity amongst all manner of neighbours.

  “In Chinese society, benevolence is often a way to reach across social boundaries and forge acquaintances that would otherwise be impossible,” Mr Holmes continued. “In this case, however, there was a catch which manifested almost immediately.”

  Mrs Wu by this time spoke good English and discovered over empty bowls of dumpling soup that the children were mudlarks – the most wretched of the destitute, scouring the riverbanks for scraps of rag or coin or metal, as her own husband had once been forced to scrounge for wood. Far worse, the girl suffered from a spinal deformity – possibly brought on by polio, Wi Cheun had theorised to Mr Holmes – and the boy, though a few years older, was simple, only speaking in monosyllables. The girl revealed that they were siblings escaped from the cruelties of a nearby orphanage, and neither knew who their parents had been nor where they had lived before the bleak institution.

  “The Wus took them in,” reported the detective. The intersections we now crossed, though no less cramped nor refuse-strewn, were populated with as many Italians and Jews as Chinese, though queerly picturesque Oriental writing remained slashed across many ashen shop placards. “As employees at first – or so Mrs Wu presented them – but later, apparently they were indistinguishable from her children save for their skin. The sister, Liza, worked on accounts and answered supply orders after learning her sums and letters from a paid neighbour. Arlie, the brother, never learned eloquence, but showed an immense aptitude for carving once Wu Jinhai taught him technique.”

  “What happened five years ago?” I inquired breathlessly, for our pace had been set by the man with the longest stride.

  “Five years ago,” he reflected. “Yes, five years ago Mr and Mrs Wu passed away from an influenza outbreak, leaving Arlie and Liza alone to run the family business as best they were able. And that, gentlemen, is the part I do not like, though I decline to make inferences in advance of tangible data.”

  A chill stroked my spine, and my companions’ faces froze, for we had all seen Mr Holmes’s mind. A doltish brother, a defenceless sister who might have been thought a burden, a frail white arm hacked away and consigned to the Thames. None of us wanted to contemplate such a thing, and I’ll be dashed if the world-famous problem-solver did either.

  “You’re right, Mr Holmes. We know too little as yet to condemn anyone,” I declared.

  The sleuth’s steely jaw twitched. “Are you being fawning or optimistic?”

  “Neither. I’m being magnanimous, or attempting it. I was meant to become a clergyman like my father,” I said wryly.

  “Disinclined to resemble the patriarch?”

  “On the contrary, I admired him more than anyone I’ve ever known. Didn’t share any of his talents, more’s the pity. Always stammering my way through catechisms. Dreadful. He passed some eight years ago and Mum thought I’d finally see the light, but all I saw was the noose in the prison yard. When my cousin took the cloth, I gave him Dad’s Bible with heartiest blessings and a helping of good riddance.”

  Dr Watson nodded sympathetically as Lestrade sniffed in mild amusement. A flicker of a smile ghosted across Mr Holmes’s lips and vanished.

  Then we had arrived, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live: the crooked house in the middle of the row, runoff trickling down Gold Street, rivulets sparkling despite their leaden colour. The Wu residence’s steps had not been cleaned since the last snowfall melted, streaks of soot painting black waterfalls down them, and one of the w
indows was patched with four or five layers of rotting newsprint.

  Mr Holmes and Dr Watson approached with the bearing of men who’ve looked into the abyss and lived to tell about it, Lestrade close at their heels. Trailing only slightly, though my nerves hummed and sparked, I watched as the independent detective whipped out his pocketknife again and bent to one knee at the top of the steps.

  “We haven’t any warrant, Mr Holmes!” Lestrade hissed.

  “You directed my notice to a trail old enough to be considered positively historical, and now you’re quibbling about warrants?” the detective snapped in return, fiddling with the lock and producing a sharp snick. “Supposing we find anything, claim you investigated because the door had been forced. It would even be true.”

  Lestrade struck his palm against the rusted iron rail, but made no further protest. Indeed, we were all about to burst into the house when Mr Holmes flung his arms out, causing Lestrade to stumble and Dr Watson to catch his friend’s shoulder.

  “Enter, and then don’t move a muscle,” Sherlock Holmes ordered. “I must read the floor.”

  We crowded inside and my senior edged the front door closed. We were in a murky room, lit only by the undamaged windows, with a thin haze of wood particles tickling our throats. Stack after stack of carved boxes filled the chamber, only interrupted by a deal table with an unlit lamp resting upon it, and next to it a bowl of soup with dried broth staining its lip. Mr Holmes tiptoed along the walls, hands hovering in midair, reading the sawdust as we watched in silence.

  “All right, come in.” Mr Holmes’s brows had swept towards his hawklike nose. “There’s been traffic within the past day or two, but –”

  He cut himself off and stalked across the room, staring down at a row of boxes piled six and eight high. When we followed him, it was plain to see that a single column had recently vanished, for its rectangular outline was printed clearly in the dust on the floor.

  “Dear God,” Dr Watson breathed.