Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes Page 7

  Loveday said nothing.

  “No matter. That is not important now. Having done away with Stapleton, Baghinder must have realised that it would be easy to trace the tiger’s tracks back to the hall, and so he moved the body from the hollow, while the hunting party was out on the moor fruitlessly searching for the Beast of Bodmin, hoping that no one would discover the connection or see him in the process.”

  “But I heard Stapleton scream,” I piped up then. “I came upon the body within minutes.”

  “You heard someone scream,” Holmes said, with a wry smile. “Logic would suggest that it was actually Baghinder. While you were running towards Stapleton’s corpse, he could return to the house and cover his tracks. It’s only a shame he didn’t think to cover the tiger’s tracks as well. And once they knew that Sherlock Holmes was on the case, Miss Trelawny and Baghinder must have realised that the game was up, and so planned to eliminate both of us. And what then, Miss Trelawny? Make good your escape back to India?”

  “We realised that the money didn’t really matter after all,” she replied distantly, the conflagration reflected in her moisture-filled eyes. “It didn’t matter where we were just as long as we were together. And it still doesn’t.”

  She stared at the burning house. There could be no stopping the fire now. It had become the funeral pyre of her hopes and dreams, the wretched houseboy and his savage pet cremated along with the rest of Lord Trelawny’s Indian legacy.

  “Let me look at that arm of yours,” Holmes said, carefully pulling back my ragged shirtsleeve to assess the damage beneath. There were five clean cuts but the blood was already starting to clot.

  And that was all the distraction Loveday needed. Looking back on it now, I suppose with her lover and her pet and what little that was left of her inheritance going up in flames, she decided she had nothing left to live for. Or perhaps she realised that the only future that awaited her was interment within the county asylum for the rest of her life, a prospect she could not stomach.

  Whatever her misguided reasoning, as Holmes tended to my arm, she rose and, before either of us could stop her, strode through the front door of the house and into the welcoming flames.

  And so it was that the real Beast of Bodmin, Miss Loveday Trelawny, died, but the legend did not die with her. As I said before, legends have a habit of persisting, and the counties of south-west England seem to have more monsters than most.

  THE CASE OF THE BLIND MAN’S SPECTACLES

  Marcia Wilson

  My readers know I tend to use Lestrade as the John Bull, but Gregson demanded his turn. I don’t think Arthur Conan Doyle could create a boring character if he tried, and Gregson is fascinating. Sherlock Holmes calls Gregson and Lestrade “the pick of a bad lot”. The two bitterly compete for advancement within the Yard’s meritocracy, and they even look like complete opposites. Gregson has always fought me for his voice – smug, confident, and unthinkingly brave. He runs to, not away from, trouble. I respect the man but hope he would never arrest me. He plays no favourites and never lets his emotions colour his work. I’ve never lost the suspicion that he thinks of everyone, even Sherlock Holmes, as a possible suspect in a crime somewhere. In a lot of fiction, you see policemen wrestle with the question “Could so-and-so do it?” Gregson never wastes time with that. As a military policeman I know keeps saying, “You’ve got to stop underestimating people.” Gregson lives by that rule.

  —Marcia Wilson

  “Well, Mr Holmes,” and I put it to him just like that, “if I might be so bold, why would a blind man wear glasses he doesn’t need – and glasses such as these?”

  “Ah, that is an excellent question, Gregson.” And Sherlock Holmes smiled.

  We were having this stimulating debate in the most unlikely of places under even more unlikely circumstances. I was giving my case to Mr Holmes as we sat in Dr Watson’s new surgery, waiting on Lestrade’s stitches. I knew it would make that runt rot from the inside to know I was consulting Holmes whilst he laid about dead to the world (Watson hadn’t even needed the chloroform), but I would take that satisfaction later. I won’t admit it to anyone, but if anything makes me happier than beating Lestrade, it’s the satisfaction of watching Sherlock Holmes light up like a lamp when he’s got a murky case before his eyes.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

  I’d known what I was getting into, but it wasn’t like I had much choice in the matter. I was in a cab under weather conditions that were better suited for sleds, and Lestrade was bleeding all over my lap. It was no simple matter, holding a compress to that fool’s thick skull whilst grappling on to the seat for dear life.

  But you don’t hesitate in this line of work, and once I’d made up my mind, I got us to Dr Watson’s surgery (I reasoned he’d be new enough that he wouldn’t be very busy) and then threw twice the normal fare to the driver to go collect Sherlock Holmes from Baker Street.

  Watson’s a decent enough sort and he’s military to the core so you can usually count on him to choose to treat a bleeding man of law over a lassitudinarian with a cold. Sure enough, it took one look at us on the step before he had us inside his surgery and asking the maid to kindly call for the locum to take the front-room patients, thank you.

  By the time Mr Holmes got there Lestrade was halfway through his surgery. With no more than a brief greeting he hung up his raincoat next to ours, pulled out his already-packed travelling pipe, and sat down in the guest chair by the fire for me to give the details. This is where my story to Mr Holmes starts, and I’ll tell it to you the same way I told it to him, though due to the sensitive nature of this case, some things have been altered.

  * * *

  If there’s rubbish gadding about London, you can bet I’ll find Lestrade not far from it. The man has no discretion. For all his years in the CID and the fact that he wears a suit to work, he thinks and acts like he’s still a constable; even keeps his time-worn truncheon under his coat for old times’ sake. It is embarrassing, and I’ve polished him for it. But he just glares at me with his shifty black eyes and says some of us need a bit of extra help. As if it’s my fault he’s a runt.

  Now, the way of it is, I’m right more often than he because I see things better. I’ve got discretion, and I want to live long enough to be promoted. So I stop when the whistles go off around me. Six constables, all from old Parker’s divisions, running with their clubs up, splashing through the puddles and emptying them almost as fast as the rain fills ’em back up. I was on my way to a cold supper at The Flying Tree, but duty forever calls, and you never know which case will be the one that recognises your hard work and dedication.

  And, one ought to be alert within twenty minutes’ walk of any powder mill.

  I’m sure you know the exact place where it all began, Mr Holmes. That crumbly old canal on the eastern side? What a nightmare of a patrol! If you’re going to run into trouble it is usually in one direction.

  Those policemen were running for whatever-trouble in the direction of one of the pellet houses, and I followed with, I confess, a bit of apprehension. We cut our teeth as beat police hearing stories of the explosion at Waltham back before the Americans’ war, but I couldn’t hear anything suspicious. And it was rather quiet; the whole cut was shut down for repairs. Even the Irish wouldn’t bother to throw tacks in the mills right now – there was nothing to damage until the mills were finalised for the Royal Artillery, and that wouldn’t happen until the spring flooding dropped low enough to let the canal drain enough for dredging and patching.

  It got my attention that there were a few people who weren’t police headed for the trouble too. There’s the usual chasers, mostly street Arabs hoping to find something to steal or information to sell to one of our own informers, but a few men were in the hurly-burly too, and they were dressed well enough that it seemed they would have better things to do than poke their noses into affairs that didn’t concern them. A milk-faced little swell in a striped suit even bumped into me, nearly making me
fall, and I sent him flying with a shove. He whined like a dog but kept away from me after that.

  The fuss stopped and swarmed at a section of broken canal. The water was halfway down and the smell was getting through the meltwater of spring. Mr Striped Suit and his fellows in sensationalism pulled back, their fine white handkerchiefs to their prim noses.

  Lying on the path along which the horses drew the powder barges was a man’s corpse. He was flat on his back with a snow-white beard pointed to the heavens. He hadn’t been there long; the clothes weren’t yet soaked through with the rain, but there was a thin red puddle spreading from under his head. An umbrella sprawled broken by his side and his walking stick was in pieces about his feet. I wasn’t surprised to see that amongst all the running and pushing and shoving of the policemen against the curious, Lestrade was there. As I said, he’s always in the middle of a mess. He wasn’t looking too well, and for him that’s quite an achievement.

  I yelled at the top of my lungs and pulled out my warrant card, managing to barge through the throng. I took another look at the body, then decided to taunt Lestrade for letting his men get out of control. Any group with Constable Smerdon in it means trouble; the man wants to get promoted so badly he doesn’t ask himself how he’s going to do it.

  Lestrade’s colour was even worse than normal, yellow like a malarial, and he was holding his head in his hands against his muddy knees. As usual, he’d put on his best-looking suit and shoes to start the day and ruined it all before the end – man can’t solve a case in his head; oh, no, he has to get down in the dirt. Really. He was covered with mud from where he’d fallen face-first into the muck. I don’t know how his wife can keep him.

  What got me was that he was missing his hat. Lestrade’s stupid, but he does answer the Yard’s minimal requirement for intelligence, so he’s never without his bowler. None of us would dare otherwise, as they’re as good as a leather helmet and there’s always someone trying to throw something at your head. I started looking for it in the weeds.

  Lestrade finally noticed me. “What’re you doing here?” he mumbled, and he sounded foggy like he was having trouble thinking.

  “Looking for your hat.”

  “I think it was knocked in th’canal.”

  I took a closer look at him. On the back of his head was a nasty gash making a mess of his collar, coat, and probably that expensive shirt underneath. I was about to point that out when I saw there was something queer about the gash. It went straight down like someone had tried to cut a stripe on his head with a knife, and it was deep enough to score the bone. The blood was coming out like a fountain. Constable Brewster knelt and put his handkerchief on Lestrade’s head to stop the bleeding.

  “What happened, man?” I asked but Lestrade was all grey now and his eyes were rolling up. I’d wasted my time asking him the wrong question.

  I looked around. There was a dead man, but no sign of a trail left by his murderer. Even if we’d blocked the scene off before it was trampled by muddy boots, we wouldn’t be able to do a thing against the rain, which was really starting now. If a man had set out today to plan murder, it couldn’t have been more perfect. The rain was so thick you could barely see to the next road marker, the roar of water swallowed up most of the sound, and every clue on the path was washing straight into the canal. Constable Smerdon was glaring over his chinstrap at me like I was stealing his case, and I could feel the temperature dropping. It takes time for the cold to settle in the lowlands, but when it does you need to be careful.

  A closer look at the dead man wasn’t any better. He didn’t have eyes; his lids had been sewn shut long ago. The rest of him was short and fat inside a coal-black suit and matching frockcoat, with bright brass cufflinks at his wrists, which matched the tie-pin at his throat, and his brass-plated watch in his waistcoat pocket. All four items had the same stamp: a circular belt buckle. It had the look of something like the Freemasons about it, and I decided it was a clue to study later.

  A finely made pair of wire-rimmed spectacles lay under his shoulder. I could see that the lenses were thick but not much so – maybe a sixteenth of an inch at the most. So far they were the oddest thing on the scene, so I wrapped them up in a wax envelope.

  The man was bald, which made it easy to see how he had been killed; his skull had been opened by a single slash. He had thick, glossy white moustaches and an arrowhead beard, with none of the yellowing and staining from tobacco smoke, snuff, or that vulgar chew. His hands were clean as a baby’s, nails trimmed like a gentleman’s, but when I picked up the left one there were some funny little callouses on the insides of his index finger and middle thumb-joint, and some tiny line-thin callouses on the tips of the pads.

  Looking at his right hand, I expected to see something to prove he was left-handed, but I was surprised to see the same callouses. You get to see a lot of strange marks on a man’s hands in police work; a criminal can’t hide their skin as easily as a dyed beard or a new suit of clothes. But for the life of me, I never saw anything like this. Everyone favours one hand or the other, but who favours both? And what tools would he be using to make these marks?

  I was still trying to think this out when Brewster called out that he couldn’t stop Lestrade’s bleeding. Duty to the Brotherhood called, and I ordered a tarpaulin spread over the body and for it to be guarded until collected and taken to the morgue. The police surgeon wouldn’t tolerate any nonsense; the dead man would be safe from interference of evidence.

  I sent Smerdon to call a cab. Protocol prefers a wounded man in an ambulance, but cabs are faster. Somewhere in the middle of this circus, I came to the conclusion that I’d best bring in Sherlock Holmes.

  Lestrade sagged like an old stocking and I had to pull out my own handkerchief to staunch the flow from his head. It was all over his back, and my wife wouldn’t be pleased with the state of my sleeve. I’d almost got his blockhead bandaged up when the cab showed, and I bundled him up in it and slammed the door with a final bark loud enough for everyone to hear that Sherlock Holmes needed to meet me at Dr Watson’s surgery.

  I’d lost valuable time in looking around. I should have tried harder to get Lestrade’s account of the attack. After a few minutes of poking I managed to get through his groggy brain.

  “What happened, Lestrade?”

  “Escorting Mr Holloway,” he mumbled (I’m translating because he didn’t sound at all that clear). “Got jumped.”

  “So I see. What did they look like?”

  “Went. For… for… for… ’is throat… told’m’t’run… forgot…”

  “Forgot what?”

  “H’can’t see. Couldn’t see t’run.”

  And then the fool fainted in my lap.

  * * *

  Mr Holmes listened to my story politely through his cloud of smoke. I could understand his snort of laughter – it was a little funny when you thought of it. Lestrade would be spitting nails once he came around – whenever that would be. Dr Watson had been listening as well, but I can imagine it wasn’t so easy to pay attention while sewing up Lestrade. At least Lestrade was behaving himself, still being unconscious.

  “He ought to be more like his old self when he wakes up,” the doctor said. “I would give him the full day and one night; that was a lot of blood lost in a very short time. Why, he might have bled to death if you hadn’t brought him here.”

  “Lestrade doesn’t like it when the constables are too solicitous. Thinks it makes him look bad.”

  “He looks bad enough. That’s quite a cut.” Watson washed his hands in the basin as Holmes wrote in a small notebook.

  “Well, I’ve got questions of my own. First of all, Mr Holmes, the late Mr Holloway, whoever he is, was wearing a suit and coat worth more than a two-year coal budget, yet he was wearing brass trim like a commoner trying to ape his betters.”

  “Ah, Gregson,” Holmes said at last. He lowered his pipe long enough to blow a ring. “That is a good question. Could it be that this ‘Mr Holloway’ is act
ually Lestrade’s slurred attempt to say Mr Noah ‘Hollowell’ of the gunpowder manufactory fortune? Members of that trade wear brass, for it cannot strike a spark like iron nor conduct electricity like gold or silver. The symbol you describe is an alchemical symbol for saltpetre, the oxidizing element in gunpowder.”

  I sighed – both because Mr Holmes had managed to draw what had to be the proper conclusion, but also because that still wasn’t enough to solve the case. “Well, there you are. That would be more than likely. The name’s familiar to me, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen his face in the papers. Nor does it explain his odd callouses.”

  “Mr Hollowell lost his eyesight in a gunpowder explosion. It ended his career in grains and measurements, but after his recuperation he discovered a new talent in building fine models for the military. You may not have seen his visage in the papers, Gregson, but you have seen his work countless times. It would be his models you marvelled over at the Great Exhibition, or in the museum exhibits for artillery. Of late his fame was centred about a toy cannon that fired a cork bullet over the Tower of London with minimal reactive impact upon its base.”

  “What? It was in the papers as a new model for the army! Well, that explains why I’ve never seen callouses like that before.”

  “The man’s life motto was discretion.” Holmes frowned a little as he smoked, for he was almost out of tobacco. I offered him my cut of Cavendish, just to see if he would take it over his usual shag. He did, and leaned back. “Hollowell has spent years building models, working on as many as ten at a time. His patience is extraordinary, but so are the rewards he reaps from it. But this is all window-dressing, Gregson. You don’t need to know the murderer’s identity quite as urgently as all that, do you? Not if your cohort can wake up and tell you.”