Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  It did not.

  Then it did.

  Oh, it did!

  The scent was already in the house. I had smelled it, amongst a myriad of others, as we crossed the threshold.

  Whoever’s blood this was, was in the building with us.

  * * *

  Ninth Instalment: Southern End of Southwark Bridge

  Nearly there. If you’ve followed this tale so far, trickle by trickle, congratulations – especially if you’ve managed to visit all the instalments in the correct order, treading in my pawprints. Hope it’s been worth your while.

  As soon as I realised what Mr Holmes was driving at, I leapt up at him, barking frantically.

  He immediately detached the leash, and off I raced. I heard Farnaby-Coutt behind me yelling in protest. “What is this? Where is that beast going? I demand that he be stopped. This is outrageous. He is running amok!”

  I charged upstairs, Mr Holmes and Dr Watson following as fast as they were able. Within seconds I was outside a bedroom on the second floor, turning circles and letting out a volley of loud, urgent woofs.

  Mr Holmes barged through the door to the bedroom, Farnaby-Coutt still remonstrating volubly as he joined us on the landing.

  On the bed lay a man with a heavily bandaged leg.

  He was the absolute spitting image of the Honourable Jeremy Farnaby-Coutt.

  * * *

  Tenth Instalment: Doorstep of 3 Pinchin Lane, again.

  Full circle. We end where we began.

  Suffice to say that the jig was up as far as Farnaby-Coutt was concerned. Inspector Lestrade and his constables were summoned from without, and the noble burglar was swiftly clapped in handcuffs, as was his accomplice.

  The latter was only too ready to make a confession, once it was explained to him that the courts would look leniently on him if he incriminated Farnaby-Coutt.

  His name was Bill Jervis, and he was a petty larcenist of no great breeding and no great account. What had elevated this fellow to Farnaby-Coutt’s company was the fact that the two of them looked to all intents and purposes the same. Farnaby-Coutt had encountered Jervis one evening while trawling the stews of the East End in search of paid female companionship. Jervis had attempted to pick Farnaby-Coutt’s pocket, but Farnaby-Coutt, sensitive to the illicit activities of others, had seized hold of his hand as it dipped inside his jacket. He had taken one look at Jervis’s face and immediately spied an opportunity. Jervis was his perfect double. The two were alike as pups in a litter. Other than a certain roughness of speech, the Cockney commoner could have passed for the aristocrat in any light. Even their own mothers might not have been able to tell them apart.

  Farnaby-Coutt hatched a plan. He had begun to feel that his sins were catching up with him. He was pushing his luck further than was wise. He was not going to be able to get away with his burglaries much longer. Sooner or later his winning streak was going to come to an end.

  He could not, however, bear to abandon the habit. But this other man, this twin from another set of parents, provided the solution. Farnaby-Coutt would carry on selecting the targets for thievery, but Jervis would commit the actual felonies while Farnaby-Coutt paraded about town garnering unimpeachable alibis everywhere he went. In return, Jervis was rewarded with a sizeable wage from the nobleman’s own pocket, worth around half of the proceeds, along with the assurance that if Jervis were ever caught, Farnaby-Coutt would use his influence as an aristocrat to get him off the hook. I’m not sure that promise would have been worth anything if put to the test, but it had seemed acceptable to Jervis, who, one can assume, was not the freshest dog biscuit in the tin.

  Theirs was a cosy little alliance, and would have continued despite the bullet wound. The plan had been that Jervis would lie low until he recuperated, whereupon the stealing would resume as before. At the same time, Farnaby-Coutt’s bona fides would be maintained and even strengthened, for how could he be the burglar Sir Reginald had winged if he was demonstrably, palpably unhurt?

  As for the loot, there I played a vital role again. Mr Holmes invited me to seek more of Jervis’s scent around the house, and my nose led us to several rooms before finally we ended up in the wine cellar, where the smell was at its strongest. I found a wall, which appeared to be solid but which I knew was made of plasterboard not brick. I whined and scratched at it, and sure enough Mr Holmes discerned that it was a false partition, and behind it lay Farnaby-Coutt’s ill-gotten gains, a treasure trove of stolen property, all neatly arranged upon shelves like trophies.

  That clinched it, and currently the Honourable Jeremy Farnaby-Coutt is languishing in a police cell at Scotland Yard, facing trial and possible transportation.

  “A lengthy stretch in gaol awaits him,” said Mr Holmes as he, Dr Watson and I wended our way back to Lambeth. “Perhaps his father might intervene, pull some strings, have the sentence reduced or even quashed – but equally Viscount Harrington may wish to disavow his wayward offspring and wash his hands of him. I know, were Farnaby-Coutt my son, which of the two options I would choose. At any rate, thanks to Toby here, justice is going to be served and all the items that Farnaby-Coutt purloined are going to be restored to their rightful owners. Which reminds me… Would you do me the favour of holding Toby for a moment?”

  He passed my leash to his companion and ducked into a nearby butcher’s shop. Dr Watson stood gingerly by me, every so often offering me a timorous “Good boy. Good dog.” Shortly Mr Holmes emerged from the shop with a big, juicy hambone wrapped in waxed paper. I started salivating, and didn’t stop until I was back home and sinking my fangs into that crunchy, marrowy treat.

  Thus concludes my tale.

  Do you know, it never ceases to amaze me what a dull instrument the human nose is. Mr Holmes’s seems keener than most – I suspect all his senses are keener than most – but even so, by comparison with me he might as well not have the use of that organ at all. He cannot smell a hundredth of what we dogs can. Something that to him and all humans seems an incredible feat is, to us, mere pup’s play.

  Never mind. As long as he has need of my nose, reliable old Toby will be here, ready and willing to lend a paw.

  THE SECOND MASK

  Philip Purser-Hallard

  I’m fascinated by the scope of change the human lifespan can encompass – that someone born, say, when Wagner was writing operas in the 1870s, might live long enough to hear The Beatles. For my story I wanted to write about a child known to Holmes, so I could follow him or her into old age. I settled on Lucy Hebron, the little girl in “The Adventure of the Yellow Face”.

  Lucy is perhaps five years old sometime in the 1880s, so would be in her seventies during the 1950s, when “The Second Mask” is set. She’s the daughter of an African-American lawyer, and the mystery in “The Yellow Face” arises from her English mother’s attempts to conceal her dark-skinned child from her new husband, fearing his potential prejudice. Though Effie Munro brings her daughter to live in a nearby cottage, she insists Lucy always wears the mask that gives the story its title.

  It’s an unusual case because Holmes’s theory – that the mask at the cottage window conceals Effie’s first husband, not dead but blackmailing her – is completely wrong. In the event, though, Holmes is the one who unmasks Lucy, and he’s as surprised as anyone else by what he finds.

  —Philip Purser-Hallard

  I remember you; of course I do, though it was a lifetime ago. Your quiet laugh of realisation when you saw me; your slim fingers reaching for my face; your kind eyes glinting with amusement as you removed my mask. I thought the whole thing was an enormous joke, and you were there to share it with me.

  It was the day I met my stepfather, the man who would adopt me as his own, and claim me with fierce pride whenever some client or visitor asked what this strange foreign creature – this capering savage – was doing in his house. I loved him, of course. I was too young to remember my real father, Mr John Hebron of Atlanta. And from the moment of my unmasking, when he made his decis
ion about me, Mr Grant Munro of Norbury adored me with all the devotion he had already given to my mother.

  But it was you who showed him my true face, and for that I loved you, too.

  * * *

  “Of course it was very charitable of you, my dear,” Elizabeth Goodge tells me shrilly, not because she has strong feelings on the matter – although she evidently does – but because everything she says is shrill. “You have such a charming garden, it would be a waste not to use it more, and they were all so conscientious about tidying up after themselves. It’s only that it was a little noisy, and so very conspicuous. We’re just a little concerned about the tone of the neighbourhood, if you understand my meaning.”

  “I believe I understand you very well,” I say quietly, as I pour another cup of tea for her stern friend Maud Stokes.

  It seems to me that, if anyone should worry about the tone of the neighbourhood, it should be me. I lived here comfortably for some sixty years before Elizabeth and her husband arrived, but it hardly seems gracious to point that out. Charles Goodge is something in the city (though surely not anything wildly successful, or they would have moved somewhere more impregnably affluent), Elizabeth the doyen of the neighbourhood book groups, flower-arranging rotas and sewing circles.

  “Please don’t misunderstand me, dear,” Elizabeth goes on. “We couldn’t be happier to have you as our neighbour. But we all have to consider the area’s reputation.”

  “For pity’s sake, Lizzie, it was a church picnic.” My other next-door neighbour, Annabel Finch, is far more forthright than I am, which is why I asked her here. “You can’t get much more respectable than that.”

  “You’re not a member of the church in question though, Miss Hebron,” Miss Stokes declares. “It is a nonconformist denomination.” Her voice is deep and flat, a contrast to her friend’s agitated trilling. Another neighbour, though not so near, she teaches at a nearby girls’ grammar school and sits on the parish council.

  So many neighbours, now. I can still remember a time, before the end of the last century, when my family’s house stood almost alone among fields. Over the decades the houses that once clustered by the railway station have spread along the road, crowding us in, bulldozing the cottages and felling the fir trees, turning the pastoral playground I grew up in into this smoky, traffic-clogged outcrop of London.

  Well, times change. These days few of us are left who see past the houses to the landscape beneath. For the likes of the Goodges – who arrived, half my age then, soon after the end of the last war – this area might as well have always been its grubby yet genteel suburban self.

  Sometimes, I am ashamed to admit, I wish they’d all go back where they came from.

  “It’s a Pentecostal church,” I admit now, “and no, the worship isn’t to my taste. But the minister asked me, and I was glad to do them a kindness. As Elizabeth says, I have a large garden. Their congregation meets in an old air-raid shelter down by the railway line.”

  “Rather there than here,” Miss Stokes deems.

  “That is unworthy of you, Maud Stokes,” says Annabel stoutly.

  “I would have thought you of all people would have some concern about the character of the neighbourhood,” Miss Stokes suggests coolly.

  But Elizabeth Goodge is still giving us the benefit of her wisdom. “It was just such a worry having so many strangers on the street, my dear. They could see right into our back upstairs windows – yours too, Annabel. And of course they saw far more of your house, Miss Hebron. We’re rather vulnerable here, I’m afraid. It’s well known that ours are the houses in Norbury worth burgling.”

  I know the reason they are making a fuss, of course, and I detest it. I do not feel myself under any obligation to make it easy for them.

  “It was a church outing,” I say. “Surely you can’t suppose that anyone was taking the opportunity to case the joint?”

  * * *

  I was a savage, certainly, when I first came to live here: unruly, wayward, inquisitive, volatile… little different, in fact, from any other child of that age, although perhaps it is true that my upbringing had done less than usual to tame me.

  Yet people – our few neighbours, my stepfather’s business contacts, friends of my mother’s family – responded to me as something quite out of the ordinary, just as you and Dr Watson did, that day we met. After my mother’s early lessons in human nature, it was easy for me to understand why.

  In his reminiscences of your cases together, Dr Watson – seeking, no doubt, to make the most of his moment of revelation – described me as “a little coal-black negress”. In that, he exaggerated. My mother was white, as you know, nor was my real father’s blood unmixed (I was never able to establish the precise details of his ancestry, and it is possible that he never knew either). Had he been consistent in his language, Dr Watson might have called me a “mulatto”, like the voodoo-worshipping cook in the affair at Wisteria Lodge, but that would have rather undercut the tender emotion of his dénouement.

  I am certainly dark of complexion, though – darker than my father, based on my mother’s memories and the single photograph that survived him – and there was never any likelihood that I would be mistaken for the child of Grant and Effie Munro.

  Still, my adoptive father was wealthy and respectable, and that makes up for a great deal. As I grew older I found that, given certain cues, adults (a handful of boors and imbeciles aside) would treat me like any other young Englishwoman, though many did so rather self-consciously. Provided I comported myself in a manner consistent with my upbringing, I found that those I met, from my stepfather’s wealthy partners and their debutante daughters to servants and tradesmen, generally fell into line and treated me with the deference appropriate to our respective stations. I might enter a haberdasher’s to be faced with scowls and intakes of breath, but as soon as shopkeeper and customers saw the cut of my clothing, heard my speech and observed my manners, they were able to fit this exotic object into a familiar slot, and act accordingly. Despite my mother’s fears, it seems that here in Britain, class takes precedence over race.

  I was excessively fortunate in the class that claimed me, of course; I have no illusions on that score. Had I been a cook like that nameless man at Wisteria Lodge, or a street-thug like Steve Dixie, who threatened you when you investigated the burglary at Three Gables, society’s reaction would have been very different.

  Even you were not so kind to Mr Dixie as to me, not by a long chalk. I do not think you would have been so rude to a woman, or Dr Watson in describing one, but when I read that case study it made me wonder how real your pleasure had been in the resolution of my own story. Though you both acknowledged me a child, and to be loved as one, you allowed those men to be as defined by their blackness as poor leprous Godfrey Emsworth, your “blanched soldier”, was by his excessive whiteness.

  But those black men, like the Indians, lascars and Chinese who so colourfully occupy the margins of your cases, lacked the advantages I derived from my mother’s family and marriage. In the hierarchy of British society, still barely changed since those days, they had not even reached the lowest rung: they were, at best, holding the ladder in place, and at worst, trying to kick it over. Convention told you what to think of them and of me, and, like everyone else, you treated us accordingly.

  I might have hoped for better from you, but for all your percipience you were never infallible. That, after all, was Dr Watson’s point in publishing my story.

  * * *

  “It’s not that I’ve anything against their colour,” Elizabeth Goodge explains, very earnestly. She is speaking still of the congregation I hosted here the previous Sunday, and has finally reached the crux of her objection.

  “I was not expecting you to tell me you had,” I say, perhaps too pointedly.

  “Oh, not in the least,” Elizabeth agrees, oblivious. “After having you as my neighbour for so many years, I don’t think there’s a racialist bone left in my body.” She helps herself to a custa
rd cream, although there are plenty of bourbon biscuits available. “But there are just so many West Indians these days, don’t you feel? They seem to be everywhere. And they keep coming, ship after ship of them, expecting to find work here. There won’t be any jobs for British workers soon.”

  “The West Indians are British subjects too,” says Annabel Finch. “And they mostly do the jobs our own people don’t want to.”

  “That tells you all you need to know about the attitude of the British labourer,” Maud Stokes states flatly.

  “You can hardly blame men returning from a war if they don’t want to go back to working in a factory or on the buses,” Annabel objects. “Those who came back at all, that is.” Her own husband Peter, a dear man whom I liked a great deal, was one of those who did not, although the job his death left vacant was in the civil service.

  But Elizabeth is not to be deflected from her track. “It’s just that they haven’t had the advantages you have, Miss Hebron,” she says, as if this should come as news to me. “They come from a very backward part of the world. If it was just the one occasion I’m sure we wouldn’t mind, but there’s the girl as well.”

  “I’m entitled to invite who I please to my own house,” I tell them sharply. I want to remind them that it has been standing here far longer than any of theirs, but that would seem petty. “I’m interested in Miss Youngblood. I’ve been helping her learn French and Latin during the school holidays.” It has been many years since I last tutored, and I have greatly enjoyed revisiting the experience; the effort of grappling with the O-level syllabus, less so.

  “Taking on a poorer pupil gratis speaks volumes for your generosity, Miss Hebron,” Miss Stokes judges, “but not your good sense. Having such a person regularly visiting so prominent a house cannot be good for the reputation of the neighbourhood. You should consider yourself lucky your sons no longer live at home, Annabel. I cannot imagine that this young person’s influence on them would be beneficial.”