Encounters of Sherlock Holmes Page 25

  Eric Brown has lived in Australia, India, and Greece. He began writing when he was fifteen and sold his first short story to Interzone in 1986. He has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories and has published almost fifty books. His latest include the novel Helix Wars and the collection The Angels of Life and Death. He writes a monthly science fiction review column for the Guardian and lives near Dunbar in Scotland. His website can be found at www.ericbrown.co.uk.

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE SWADDLED RAILWAYMAN

  BY RICHARD DINNICK

  As I have said before, from the years 1894 to 1901 inclusive, Mr Sherlock Holmes was a very busy man. It is safe to say that there was no public case of any difficulty in which he was not consulted during those eight years, some of them of the most intricate and extraordinary character, in which he played a prominent part.

  Just such a case came to light in the autumn of 1898. Holmes had taken to rising late and breakfasting at a time more appropriate to luncheon. It was therefore at least mid-morning before he began his perusal of The Times that day. He had taken a seat at the breakfast table laid by Mrs Hudson and had yet to even speak a word to me in greeting or acknowledgement.

  He was in the final throes of filing his pipe after dissecting a pair of smoked kippers when he turned to me.

  “What do you think of London’s underground railways?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said. “It is progress. To traverse the capital underground is a marvel. The working classes can travel in relative comfort and speed, can they not?”

  Holmes sucked on his pipe and produced a cloud of blue-brown smoke that wafted up to the ceiling, causing a cloud level to form, caught in the sunlight coming in through the windows from Baker Street.

  “No, Watson,” Holmes replied at length. “They cannot. The carriages and system are hot and crowded. The companies behind these ‘marvels’ continue to disembowel London, while at the same time congesting both parliament and the Queen’s Highway. It has sometimes proved near impossible to take a hansom cab across some districts of the metropolis due to the earthworks along the thoroughfare. And now this!”

  Holmes had become animated in a manner I knew meant that not only his interest but also his pique had been aroused.

  “Now what?” I asked, rising from my chair.

  “See for yourself!” He folded The Times neatly and handed it to me, tapping the relevant piece with two elegant fingers.

  Between an item on Jewish anarchists and the new progressives of the Liberal Party I read:

  RAILWAY WORK SUSPENDED BY FEAR OF GHOST

  Work on the new Central London Railway has been suspended at Bloomsbury because workers say the tunnels are haunted. Construction of the deep-bore tunnel and its stations began last year but now workers have downed tools and some have simply not returned to work. A figure was seen in the tunnel where none could possibly have been and disappeared when the foreman went to clarify what the person was doing.

  I looked at Holmes.

  “A ghost!” exclaimed he. “Fascinating, is it not, how the mind of the common man turns to myth and superstition to explain something that appears inexplicable.”

  “And you are sure it is not a ghost...”

  Holmes laughed humourlessly. “I realise that to your eyes I am a slugabed, Watson, but do not presume that my ability to spot mockery has been dulled by the lateness of my rising.”

  “No,” I said in an appropriately contrite fashion. “I am sorry, Holmes.”

  “You know my methods and you know even better my distaste for the fantastical. Rational explanations are often improbable or even implausible and yet the supernatural is repeatedly called upon to make up any shortfall in data.”

  “Yes, Holmes. You have often said as much to me,” I said and then did my best to affect an exact recitation of what might have passed for his motto or mantra. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

  “Very good, Watson!”

  “So you know what this ghost is?”

  “I do not. But of one thing I am perfectly certain.”

  “And that is?”

  “That the figure is most emphatically not a ghost.”

  * * *

  Soon after, we were seated in a hansom cab, clattering our way across the capital from Baker Street and along Gower Street and thence to the site of the dig at Bloomsbury. Holmes sat in silence with his fingers in a steeple beneath his chin. I knew this to mean he was deep in thought and left him to his labyrinthine processes.

  When we arrived, the excavation was dominated by a huge crane that had been erected for the removal of the detritus from the tunnelling far below. The site was encased by a wooden fence and the London traffic had to make do with the side streets around it. Several young men were collected under a nearby tree. By their dress and reading matter I assumed them to be students from the nearby University College London.

  A wide, gated entrance allowed for the removal of earth from the digging and through it I could see two gentlemen holding a discussion. One was older and considerably taller than the other, with great whiskers that were greying at the edges. His younger counterpart wore a brown suit and a bowler hat of the same hue.

  Holmes spoke briefly to the men, who smiled and nodded as I joined the group.

  “We are indeed fortunate, Watson!” He turned to the first man. “These gentlemen are engineers engaged in the construction of the new railway — Mr Joseph Porter and his assistant, Mr John Earl.”

  “Excellent,” I said, although I had not the faintest notion why Holmes was so excited.

  “It is a most rum affair,” commented Porter. His voice was deep and had me in mind of a music hall master of ceremonies. “As you may know, Mr Holmes, the Tube has not been without its share of strange occurrences.”

  “Oh?” I asked. Even if Holmes was apprised of these matters, I was not.

  “When one is tunnelling or even using the cut-and-cover method of Tube construction, one may come across all manner of things in the ground,” explained Earl with a nervous, staccato delivery. “Not least of which are plague pits and former graveyards unmarked on any map.”

  “This often spooks the men,” confided Porter in a conspiratorial whisper, narrowing his eyes. “They are a superstitious breed. Hard working but willing to believe in any mumbo-jumbo that might cause them ill fortune or otherwise mean they might have a cursed life! Hardly rational.”

  “Indeed,” Holmes commented.

  “Did you see the ghost that the newspapers are reporting?” I asked.

  They both shook their heads.

  “Old Tom said it was like a mummy!” Earl announced. “He told all the labourers about it and said it was a bad omen.”

  Porter frowned at him. “Poppycock!” he exclaimed. “Mummies, indeed.”

  “Well,” said Holmes, gazing about. “We are very close to the British Museum. Perhaps we should enquire there if they have misplaced a pharaoh from the Egyptian Room.”

  Porter stared at him with an open mouth before realising Holmes was attempting humour. “Aha!” he boomed. “Very good, Mr Holmes. Yes. The Egyptian Room.”

  Holmes smiled beatifically, then leant in and spoke in a hushed tone. “Nonetheless, a trespasser in the tunnel cannot be a good thing,” he said. “With your leave, Mr Porter, I should like to speak with the navvies and the foreman. They are the only true witnesses to this ‘subterranean spectre’ and I should like to establish what they saw for myself.”

  It transpired that the men in question worked on the tunnel at night and a different team of workers was employed during the day. So far, because of the refusal to work on the site, no one had seen anything untoward for over a day now. Holmes asked for addresses for the men of the night shift and Mr Earl obliged by vanishing for a short period and returning with a handwritten list.

  “We do not have all our workers’ addresses,” he confessed. “But I trust these should prove su
fficient to your purposes, Mr Holmes.”

  * * *

  The first stop we made was at a large and ungainly lodging house in Westminster, it being the nearest address to our point of origin. Two urchins were perched on the doorstep and, due to the manner in which their hair had been trimmed with what must have been blunt scissors, it was impossible to assign either child a gender. Holmes stepped between then and disappeared inside.

  Upstairs we encountered several women and an old man who were clearly grieving. When we enquired as to the nature of their woe the old man informed us that his son had passed on that very morning. I gave him my sincere condolences, but Holmes cared not for such niceties and was already inside the lodging rooms, speaking with a young woman, asking how this tragedy had occurred.

  Her name was Rusheen and in a light Irish lilt she explained that Sean was her cousin and had appeared “right as rain” two mornings ago. But after developing a nasty cough he had taken himself to bed — apparently very uncharacteristic behaviour for the young man. His “ma” had found him dead that very morning.

  “And did he mention anything unusual he had seen at work?” Holmes asked.

  “You mean the ‘ghost’?” Rusheen asked in a hushed tone. “He saw it. Said it chilled him to his very core, it did. We even heard him screaming the previous night. We thought it was a nightmare.”

  “Brought on by the sighting?” I asked. “How did he describe it?” I was keen to erase the ethereal spectre I had in my mind’s eye.

  “He said it were a mummy, not a ghost,” she said. “He saw it down the tunnel about a hundred yards or so. Said the figure was covered in bandages.”

  I looked at my friend, but he ignored my raised eyebrows.

  “And did he say at what time this man appeared?” Holmes demanded.

  “I think it was towards the beginning of the shift,” Rusheen replied. Then she stared from me to Holmes and back again. “You’re not police, are you?”

  “No, madam, we are not,” said Holmes, as if affronted by the very suggestion. “We are merely interested parties.”

  “We are sorry for your loss,” I added. “We have come to pay our respects.”

  “He’d have been tickled to think a pair of gents such as you was paying their respects to the likes of him,” Rusheen said, and managed a brave smile. Then she pointed through an open door to a room where furniture had been pushed back against the wall, allowing her cousin’s body to be laid out.

  “Come, Watson!” Holmes left the woman without a second thought and allowed me to move ahead of him into the small bedroom. “As thorough an examination of the cadaver as you can manage without defiling the poor unfortunate.”

  I nodded and approached the bed. Sean Finlay was approximately twenty-five years old and five foot eight inches tall with a comma of sandy hair. He had been readied for the afterlife and dressed in a black suit with pennies on his eyes. As I looked more closely, though, I could see that the eyelids were inflamed as if he had suffered from conjunctivitis. I also noted that his hands, which had soil or dirt beneath the fingernails, were covered in bandages.

  We discussed these findings as we left the lodging house and walked down to Westminster to hail another cab.

  “He could not have worked in tunnelling if his hands had been thus affected before he came off the shift,” Holmes told me. “For how could he have performed his duties? No, the wounds were given to him or were self-inflicted between the early morning of Tuesday and last night.”

  “Yet, according to his family he remained in bed all that time,” I added. “Do you think the cough pertinent?”

  “All data must be assumed to be pertinent until it proves otherwise,” Holmes replied inscrutably.

  We took our third hansom cab of the day from Westminster to Bermondsey. Tom Stevens’ address was far less salubrious than Sean Finlay’s had been. This was a London slum of the worst kind and Holmes mused as to why a relatively well-paid navvy would still live in such a place.

  We found the address easily but after Holmes had rapped on the front door with his cane several times, it became clear that no one was home. Holmes quickly ingratiated himself with an old washerwoman who was sitting on a nearby doorstep with a mangle and some linen. He returned several minutes later with a slight smile upon his lips.

  “Mary over there informs me that she witnessed Tom come home two mornings ago. As far as she knows he has not left since, neither has he received any visitors in that time.”

  “Mary is remarkably well informed,” I snorted.

  “Never underestimate the powers of retention belonging to someone who is employed in repetitive work. Apparently she watches the entire world pass by her front door,” said Holmes. “And thus she also knows that Mr Stevens returns home in the early morning, when it is his habit to leave his door unlocked until he goes to bed sometime around ten o’clock, for this is when he draws his curtains.”

  He tried the handle and the door opened a couple of inches. The smell assaulted us first, followed by a small cloud of disturbed flies. Lying on the floor of the narrow hall was the body of a man, possibly fifty years old.

  “Tom Stevens, I presume,” I said. Holmes nodded and immediately bent and pushed the deceased man’s shirtsleeve up the arm that lay closest to us. I knelt and, taking a handkerchief from my pocket, held the man’s hand in mine. It was covered in blisters of a sort I had never encountered.

  “I hope this isn’t plague,” I said.

  “Unlikely, Watson.”

  Then it struck me. “You said the door would be locked.”

  “A simple application of logic and a little conjecture,” he replied. “When we arrived I wondered why a man who was remunerated sufficiently to leave the area and set up a new home in a better neighbourhood had not done so. The reason is sentimentality, Watson. The man probably grew up here, or close by, and the engineers had called him “Old Tom”. Therefore, he was bound to be older than Sean Finlay. As I suspect that our railway workers have been poisoned and that the toxin is a slow-acting one, it would affect an older man more quickly than a younger one due to the fortitude of the latter’s constitution. I surmised that Mr Stevens would not have survived long enough to lock his front door.”

  I shook my head in admiration.

  “Now, we must bring the police into play,” said Holmes, standing up. “I would like a thorough post-mortem performed on Mr Stevens and I suspect they would prefer us to do it at the mortuary.”

  * * *

  The arrangements to have the body taken to Scotland Yard and my involvement in the examination took some time, but if there is one thing the inspectors of the Metropolitan Police know, it is to heed the requests of Mr Sherlock Holmes.

  For his part, Holmes said he would return to Baker Street, and when I returned there at almost midnight, I went straight to bed.

  The next morning I rose late and went in search of breakfast. Instead, I found our consulting room covered in scientific journals and copies of the Hansard from Parliament. I thought these two were interesting compatriots in Holmes’ research. Of the great man, however, there was not a sign. I called out to him, but of course he made no reply. I suspected his mind to be totally focused on whatever task he had appointed himself.

  A rapid search of the apartments unearthed Holmes at a table lined with bottles and test tubes. He was wearing goggles and gauntlets of some kind. He looked as if he were about to take to the skies and I said as much.

  “You may be closer to the truth than you believe,” he said absently “Tell me about the post-mortem.”

  Holmes listened intently as I imparted my report. Robert Stevens had been killed by water on the lungs. He had second-degree burns on his hands, and his eyes—like those of Sean Finlay—showed signs of conjunctivitis. No poison as such was detected, although there were chemical elements that should not have been present.

  “Just as I thought,” he said, and stood up. “I think we should attend to our hunger.”

  A
s we breakfasted on sausages Holmes pored over The Times and, shortly after opening it, gave a triumphant “Ha!” He spun the paper round and slid it across the table.

  The story of the haunted tunnel had graduated dramatically in the number of column inches, and now recounted the untimely deaths of ten more labourers the previous day, three days after they had stopped work. This was seen as further evidence of a mummy’s curse and, just as Holmes had joked, the paper now married the bandaged figure with the proximity of the British Museum.

  “I had expected more of The Times,” Holmes said. “But this will force our unknown poisoner’s hand.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “We must visit Bloomsbury once more,” he replied.

  * * *

  As well as broadening his mind on the subject of chemistry and parliamentary procedure, Holmes had also managed to obtain a letter from Joseph Porter that gave him practically carte blanche at the Bloomsbury tunnel. He gave me the letter and asked me to meet him that evening at the site.

  On the strike of six, I arrived at the double gates and presented my credentials to the night-watchman, who ushered me through to a rather ramshackle elevator. I asked if Mr Sherlock Holmes was awaiting me and was told that Mr Holmes had requested I descend to the tunnel to meet him there.

  In the lift was a bent old man with a moustache sporting a thick and grubby coat, a similar scarf and a hat of charcoal grey. He touched his cap as I stepped in and then stretched past me to draw a safety lattice across the opening.

  I rode the lift into the depths of London. It became increasingly warmer the deeper we descended, as if Hell really were an underground realm and we were dropping into its fiery furnace.

  “Hot, ain’t it?” asked the old man and gave a nasty, hacking cough. I wondered if he was in the early stages of pneumonia.

  “Yes,” I said, smiling.

  “Why don’ you loosen that tight collar o’ yours?”

  I bridled at the fellow’s impudence, but then realised who it was that had addressed me. For the old man had straightened up, gaining a good few inches in height. His shoulders also rose, losing their slouch, and he removed the cap to reveal elegantly slick, black hair. “Holmes!”