Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  “Thank you, Dr Watson,” she said. “What an awful punishment to receive for mere curiosity.”

  I met Holmes again in the study. He was sitting opposite the desk, looking at the closed safe.

  “The Hindus have very strong beliefs on crime and punishment, which has much to do with penance. Although I have no evidence to support this, this case reminds me of the Sanskrit Dharmaśāstras. In this document, Hindu law says that thieves should be maimed for their crimes, and sometimes even killed. Maiming is supposed to be self-inflicted too. But if the criminal refuses then the king must choose the punishment, and it often isn’t pretty.”

  “But these people aren’t thieves, Holmes. They inherited the jewel. How can they be held accountable for its original theft?” I said.

  “The Hindus believe you can also be punished for crimes you committed in a previous life,” Holmes continued. “We need to discover what killed Miss Ballentine’s parents. That way we may avoid the murder of Mr Richmond.”

  “An autopsy might help,” I said. “If we could gain permission from Miss Ballentine, of course.”

  “Since she brought us in to help, it would be odd if she refused,” Holmes observed.

  * * *

  “Absolutely not!” said Miss Ballentine. “I couldn’t possibly let you defile my parents’ graves!”

  “Even to save the life of your fiancé?” I asked.

  Hope Ballentine’s hands wrung in her lap. She was torn between her respect for her parents and love for Richmond.

  “But how can you help him?” she asked. “Surely in his condition he is better off…”

  “Dead?” Holmes finished.

  “No. Of course I don’t mean that. Oh no. This is just too awful!”

  Miss Ballentine’s tears fell and, once again, I found myself handing over my handkerchief.

  “You must do as you feel appropriate, naturally,” she said. “It’s just that it is so…”

  “My dear girl,” I said, “don’t take on so. Your parents won’t know. This is not a desecration, but a search for the culprit. A way for the guilty to be punished for their crimes.”

  “Yes. Yes… certainly.”

  With the aid of her driver and a footman, Holmes and I were soon at the Ballentine family graveyard towards the back of the extensive estate.

  * * *

  The body was decomposing but I immediately saw signs of emaciation: Mrs Ballentine’s sickness had given her a poor appetite towards the end. There was some pigmentation visible on her skin. Localised oedemas prominent on both calves. We took the body out of the casket, and lay it on a white cloth on the ground so that I could have better access. Then I examined her thoroughly.

  “I hoped this would confirm my suspicion,” Holmes said as I opened up Mrs Ballentine’s chest. We both looked inside and I saw the degeneration of her heart.

  The obvious state of the body confirmed my fears without the need to do further testing. It was surprising that these symptoms had gone unnoticed by the coroner assigned to Mrs Ballentine’s case. However, I was used to investigating the unusual and the symptoms I saw gave me good reason to believe that Mrs Ballentine had been the victim of arsenic poisoning.

  “A victim of arsenic poisoning rapidly loses their appetite, hence the overly slender frame. Oedemas and the brown pigmenting are other symptoms, but the condition of the heart was the final confirmation to me. If Mr Ballentine is in a similar state then I would be definite in my assessment that they were indeed both murdered,” I said.

  I closed up Mrs Ballentine’s chest and, with the help of the driver and footman, placed her body carefully back into her coffin.

  Sometime later Holmes and I left the driver and footman to re-bury the bodies of Mr and Mrs Ballentine and set off on foot back towards the house. It was then that Holmes saw a man lurking in the woodlands surrounding the house. He was wearing a thick overcoat, and a hat was pulled down over his eyes as though he did not wish to be recognised.

  “There’s our culprit!” I said, drawing my gun from the pocket of my overcoat.

  “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t,” said Holmes mysteriously. “Put that thing away for the time being. He doesn’t know he’s being observed, and so we will wait and see what happens.”

  Crouching down out of sight, we watched as the man approached the house at the rear. Then the back door opened to him as though he was expected, and the man entered the property.

  “The picture becomes clearer,” Holmes said.

  “Well I do wish you would enlighten me, old boy,” I said. “Only, the way I see it, there are several people who could have opened that door.”

  “Precisely,” said Holmes.

  * * *

  It was Mrs Anders who opened the door to us when we arrived at the front door after first heading back to the graveyard. From there, Holmes had taken the driver aside and directed him on an important errand. While he did so I helped the footman to lay the last of the earth back over the coffins of Mr and Mrs Ballentine.

  “Mrs Anders, can you please tell Miss Ballentine that we need to see her?” Holmes said.

  “Certainly, Mr Holmes,” she replied and turned to leave.

  “Oh, and, Mrs Anders… I would also like you and your husband to join us.”

  “Us, sir? But why, sir?”

  “It will all become clear. We will be upstairs checking on Mr Richmond,” I said.

  “Very good, Dr Watson,” said Mrs Anders, and then she hurried off in the direction of the kitchens.

  “Interesting,” said Holmes. “Miss Ballentine is usually in the drawing room, is she not?”

  We entered Richmond’s room to find him still sleeping off the laudanum that I had administered. Holmes went to the curtain and peeked out through the crack but did not make any attempt to bring light into the room. I lit the lamp, but kept the light down low as we waited for Miss Ballentine and the Anders to appear. It was quite some time before they presented themselves, but when they finally arrived, I made them all sit around the bed of Mr Richmond.

  “Did you learn something that can help Jeremy?” asked Miss Ballentine.

  “Certainly,” I said. “It seems that your parents did not die due to the lime sulphur exposure. They were helped along.”

  “Helped along?” said Mrs Anders.

  “Poisoned,” said Holmes. “A rather common poison at that too. Disappointing that it wasn’t more inventive actually. However, most poisoners are opportunists and these things are rarely thought through.”

  “Oh my God. My parents were murdered!” Miss Ballentine said. “But how? By whom?”

  “That is what we need to learn. And Jeremy, here, is the means by which we will have that truth…”

  Holmes whipped back the heavy curtain and the remaining light of the afternoon burst in and fell across the bed. Jeremy, however, was not in it. What lay in the bed was something that resembled a scarecrow, wearing a fine white mask that gave the aspect, in the gloom, of the wounded man.

  “This whole thing has been a charade!” Holmes said.

  “Where is Jeremy?” asked Miss Ballentine. “What have you done with him?”

  “My dear girl, he was never injured. It was all faked for your benefit. A simple chemistry trick that even a newly indoctrinated apothecary might know. You mix certain chemicals together to create a particular effect. That, coupled with a modicum of acting ability, is enough to fool anyone in dull enough light. Even my dear friend Watson.”

  “But where is he?” asked Miss Ballentine.

  “I don’t know. But I suspect he is hidden in the kitchen. Or cellar. Wherever his parents want him to be.”

  Holmes looked directly at Mr and Mrs Anders now and the two fidgeted in their seats.

  “Now, Mr Holmes. What are you implying?” asked Anders. “I’ll have you know…”

  “Please make it easy on yourself, Mr Anders. Richmond is your son… by adoption. But he is the proper son of Mrs Anders, isn’t he?”

  “Look her
e. I won’t stand around to be insulted…”

  “It’s no use,” Mrs Anders said. “I told you he’d know.”

  “His hands gave it away, Mrs Anders. Just as yours do. Sometimes the arsenic bleaching doesn’t always work in all of the grooves. You see, Miss Ballentine, you have been the victim of a hoax. I dare say that the Anders family hadn’t planned to take things so far. The plan was probably to get you to fall in love with their son, and when your parents died, he, as your new husband, would have access to the family fortune,” I explained. “I suspect when you invited Holmes here to investigate, they rather lost their nerve.”

  “Watson is quite right,” Holmes continued. “You see, Anders worked in India before he came here. I took the trouble to research you soon after I arrived. And after searching your room, I discovered a photograph of Mrs Anders in a sari, looking faintly darker in skin than she does now. Never truly Indian, but enough to have raised eyebrows had she not discovered how to lighten her skin with a common arsenic compound easily available from any local apothecary.”

  Holmes pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket and held it out to Miss Ballentine.

  “Here is a receipt for the compound. Found in Mrs Anders’ possessions this morning,” he continued.

  “We’ve done nothing wrong!” said Mrs Anders. “We’re hard-working. I wouldn’t have been employed if Mr Ballentine had realised I had Indian blood in me… More so that Joe had married me, even though he knew that.”

  “Good lord!” said Miss Ballentine. “You’ve lied to us. But, Mr Holmes, the other things you’ve said. About Jeremy. Surely that is a mistake.”

  Holmes had the evidence to hand and he held out a photograph for Miss Ballentine to see. I glanced at it also, but I already knew that it was a picture of Mrs Anders with her son, a young boy at the time, wearing the garb of an Indian. He was smiling in the photograph, and the face, even though I had only ever seen it supposedly damaged, was without doubt Jeremy Richmond.

  “This isn’t possible,” Miss Ballentine denied.

  “I’m afraid he’s telling the truth,” Richmond said. “And in a way, Mr Holmes, you have done my family a favour. I was wondering how I could easily disentangle myself from this situation.”

  Richmond was standing behind a Chinese screen at the other side of the room, and, I now noticed, it covered a door, probably leading to a dressing room, which in turn would lead onto the landing. He was wearing the overcoat and hat that we had observed him in as we had followed him through the woodland to the rear of the house, where, we now knew, Anders or Mrs Anders had let him back inside.

  “Jeremy!” Miss Ballentine gasped as he raised his arm to show that he was holding a pistol.

  “Mother, Father… get behind me. Don’t try to stop us leaving, Holmes. I have no inhibition towards shooting you or anyone else.”

  “I have no intention of stopping you,” Holmes said even while I slipped my hand into my overcoat pocket and found the butt of my own pistol. “But first, clear something up for us. You planned to marry Miss Ballentine and then your plan changed. Why? You could have easily disposed of her parents in a less brutal fashion once you were married. Or merely lived happily under their roof until they died of natural causes.”

  “No one wanted to kill anyone,” Anders said. “Then Rani turned up. He had worked for Mr Ballentine’s brother. And so had Mrs Anders once. She thought Rani recognised her.”

  “So you killed him as he left?” I asked.

  “No,” said Mrs Anders. “Jeremy followed him. Found out where he was staying… We wanted to know what he’d told the master.”

  “There was no plan to kill him,” Anders said. “It were an accident. And Jeremy weren’t to blame.”

  “Then Mr Ballentine got sick. He opened the casket and blinded himself,” said Mrs Anders.

  “You saw it happen?” Holmes said.

  “I was passing the study door. He always left it open. That stuff shot up into his eyes and I went in an’ tried to help him… I would never have hurt him. He were a kind man.”

  “That’s when you saw the diamond, though,” I said.

  “I didn’t steal it. I put it back. Closed the safe – just as Mr Ballentine told me to. He didn’t want anyone to see it, or that letter that Rani had given him… But I could read it and I knew what the diamond was.”

  “So you played on the curse?” Holmes said. “And the plan to kill Ballentine and his wife was formed.”

  “That’s enough talk,” Richmond said. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “You still haven’t explained why you didn’t carry on with the marriage, Richmond. Surely that would have given you access to everything. Including the diamond,” Holmes said.

  “Watson was right on that score. Your presence changed everything, Mr Holmes. I had to take any suspicion away from myself. I had lost interest in the charade anyway. Why bother going through all that when I can just take everything that’s hers anyway?”

  At that moment I raised the gun in my pocket and aimed it at Jeremy. Without hesitation I fired, intending to injure him and make him drop the gun. The pistol in his hand went off, and Mrs Anders fell as her son’s bullet pierced her in the back.

  “Mother!” Richmond yelled.

  Anders caught his wife as she fell, then Richmond’s handsome face turned to rage as he pointed the gun at me and prepared to fire again.

  “Don’t do it!” Miss Ballentine cried. “Jeremy, if you ever had any feelings for me at all…”

  Richmond’s face turned and glared hatred at Miss Ballentine, and she crumpled in tears when she finally realised that everything she had believed in was a lie. Jeremy Richmond was the brains behind this crime. I didn’t believe that Rani’s death was an accident. I was certain now that Richmond’s cold-blooded scheme had drawn in his parents as much as it had taken in Hope Ballentine.

  At that moment we heard the approach of pounding feet. Samuel, the coach driver, entered with a posse of policemen. They overwhelmed Richmond and surrounded Anders as he sat holding his wife. I bent to examine the woman as she breathed her last. Anders collapsed. He was a man ruined in every way.

  * * *

  “I cannot believe I fell for it all,” Miss Ballentine said.

  “Richmond was certainly plausible, and, who knows, perhaps you would have been happy if the diamond had not appeared and the family’s greed had not been so encouraged,” said Holmes.

  “What will you do with the diamond now, Miss Ballentine?” I asked. “It isn’t cursed and, now that it’s cleaned, no longer dangerous to hold.”

  “Even so,” Miss Ballentine said, “I feel like it brought us bad luck, and so I will pass it on.”

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “The museum. To be reunited with the original artefact,” Miss Ballentine said.

  “A good idea,” said Holmes.

  On the dresser, the blue diamond glittered in the sunlight. So beautiful, and yet so deadly.

  THE PILOT FISH

  Stuart Douglas

  It’s one of the great gifts given to Conan Doyle that he is capable of creating real characters with more economy of description than almost any other writer. Irene Adler appears in person just once, Sebastian Moran the same, and even Professor Moriarty only turns up in the flesh twice in the entire canon. And yet, these are amongst the most famous characters in detective literature.

  I obviously wouldn’t make quite the same claim about Fred Porlock, but there is something tantalising about the unseen spy. In a few brief paragraphs, Conan Doyle sketches a character neither good nor bad but somewhere fascinatingly in between – a man, in Holmes’s own words, “with some rudimentary aspirations towards right” though also one “encouraged by the judicious stimulation of an occasional ten-pound note”.

  That Porlock is no fool is plain; he has survived (figuratively) all but in the teeth of Moriarty, and can work a cipher as well as the next man. That he thinks well of himself is clear; few others would
dare challenge Holmes to identify them. And he is not lacking in bravery; even fearing Moriarty suspects him, he still gets word to Holmes. Combine that with a surname with a definite literary antecedent, and I never hesitated when asked to choose someone to use in my story. If there’s one person in the canon I’d like to know more about, it’s the pilot fish, Fred Porlock.

  —Stuart Douglas

  Readers of The Strand magazine will be aware that I had intended my last entry therein, in which I laid out the truth regarding the death of my friend Sherlock Holmes, to be my final word on the career of that exceptional man. That remains the case even now, more than a year later. I find that, in his absence, I have no appetite for writing of our time together, though I would do anything within my power to have him back by my side.

  Perhaps it was that which prompted me to pay a visit to Baker Street earlier this week. I had no particular reason for being there, but Mrs Hudson, I think, understood my motivations better than I. She left me alone in our former rooms, where I sat by the fire, smoking a pipe and flicking in a desultory manner through a collection of papers Holmes had piled by his chair in the days before he left for Switzerland. Each related to the late and unlamented Professor Moriarty, a man whose very name filled me with revulsion, and I was on the verge of consigning them all to the flames when I realised that the document I held in my hand was of a different type to the others.

  Where the others consisted of barely legible notes and pages clipped from newspapers, the package I found myself opening was evidently a diary, stamped as such on its cover and tied shut with a length of string. A date two years before our first meeting was stamped in the leather of the cover.

  I cut the string with my pocketknife, and carefully opened it, allowing several loose sheets of paper to fall from the back of the book into my lap. Laying them to one side, I turned eagerly to the first, undated page and began to read Holmes’s account of a time in his life before our paths crossed. The events I found recounted within I now present untouched, just as my dear friend wrote them, in the hope that readers will find the same solace as I in “hearing” his voice once again.