Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes Page 8

“I’m not happy at the idea of sitting and waiting for evidence to come to me, Mr Holmes. Not only was there a murder in broad daylight, there was almost the added attempted murder of a fellow policeman! And as for Lestrade, Dr Watson can’t guarantee he’ll wake up in time to find the killer.”

  “I fear not.” Watson scowled, a little nettled, just as I would be if I felt my profession was being belittled.

  “So while the facts are the facts as I’ve reported them to you, a policeman is taught to pay attention to things that don’t fit. And of all the strange things about this murder, these funny little spectacles do not fit!”

  “You still have them, Gregson?”

  I held out the envelope. It was sticky from drying blood on the inside. Mr Holmes pulled on the thinnest gloves I’ve ever seen, prised the lips of the envelope apart and pulled the spectacles out with the help of a pair of Dr Watson’s surgical tweezers.

  The doctor whistled softly. “Genuine gold. That looks like an expensive pair of spectacles!”

  “And incongruous, wouldn’t you agree, with the brass accoutrements of the owner?” said Holmes. He turned his head to look at me like a hawk before a fresh mouse. “Gregson, perhaps it is time to hear the rest of this story?”

  “There were deeply lined impressions in the sides of his face.” I ran my fingertips from the outer corners of my eye straight to the back of the ear. “Those spectacles didn’t fit at all. His nose was red from the pinch in the front. It must have hurt him to wear them at all, I’ll be bound. Mr Holmes, why would he wear glasses with clear lenses? The blind do wear spectacles but the lenses are smoked or tinted to show they are blind.”

  Mr Holmes didn’t answer me at first. He busied himself packing more of my tobacco into his pipe with a long, cool stare into the little fire burning in the grate.

  “The answer is before your own eyes, Gregson,” Holmes said at last. “If a blind man does not need spectacles, why does he wear them?”

  I felt myself turn red, but I cooled off just as quick when I realised he wasn’t showing off or criticizing my workmanship. “I feel there is something you know but aren’t telling me, Mr Holmes.”

  “A theory without evidence is a poor answer on its own. The facts are with you, and you have the most important clue here: these singular spectacles.”

  I took them back and peered more closely. Now that I was in a quiet room, out of the rain and not surrounded by shouting constables, I was able to pay better attention to the details. The arms were twisted like a pair of vines, with tiny dots cut into the metal; some sort of delicate floral engraving.

  “These are a woman’s!” I blurted out. I was so shocked I almost dropped them in my lap.

  “If I may?” Dr Watson asked. The man is always very polite. He took up the tweezers and turned the frames back and forth. “And they would appear to be of a strength for reading glasses, not for distance.” He pointed to the sides of the frames, which were thicker around the lenses. “My friend Doyle has been showing me some of the tricks of his trade in ophthalmology. Whoever bought these had a stigmatism.”

  “That would hardly fit the description of your murder victim, Gregson,” Holmes murmured.

  “No, not at all,” I grumbled. “Look, if I’ve had all the help I’ll get here, I’d best be on my way and return to the case.”

  “For such as it is, Gregson,” Holmes smiled. “I daresay it won’t take you long to crack this little riddle.”

  That wasn’t my worry. If I didn’t solve it before Lestrade woke up, it wouldn’t be my case any longer. I took back the spectacles and sent a sad thought for my missed appointment with The Flying Tree’s cold roasted lamb.

  On the way to the Yard I went through the facts. Lestrade had been “working” with Hollowell, but for what reason? It was all too queer. If Hollowell was frightened enough for his life that he wanted Lestrade to guard him… who wanted to kill him? The killer had attacked Lestrade first. If you want someone dead really badly, you plan a way past the guards first – otherwise you waste time taking them out, giving the victim time to get away. Lestrade was covered with mud in the front where he’d fallen – a hasty killer would think he’d dispatched them both and run off.

  Or a first-time killer. They make mistakes like that; their nerve fails or they kill under an impulse they regret. Which was which? Or… was it an unrelated case, with a killer operating under separate motives? It wouldn’t be the first time Lestrade fell victim to his own bad luck and worse timing – his ugly face makes him a natural for work in disguise, and someone might have recognised him from those jobs.

  I needed to find the answers if I wanted to solve this case before Lestrade recovered. I had stumbled onto it by virtue of being the only uninjured detective on the scene. But if Lestrade woke up on the morrow with the full story and the identity of his attacker, it wouldn’t be my case any more.

  * * *

  I know we Yarders have a reputation for being disorderly, but at least we’ve lived among the mess enough that we know how to navigate in it. Somewhere on paper were the missing pieces of this nasty little puzzle. Lestrade was watching over Hollowell for a reason, and that meant the Home Office knew about it. I decided to start with the one man who was friends with us both: Inspector Bradstreet.

  I found him easily enough – it would be a lot harder not to find him, considering you could project a silhouette theatre between his shoulders. He was perched in his usual spot in the archives, examining a book on nautical knots and trying to draw copies with the hand that wasn’t holding his mug of tea.

  “Still looking for that strangler?” I said as hello.

  He rumbled under his moustaches. “Such as it is. How many left-handed ropewalkers are in the world anyway?”

  “In the world? It doesn’t matter. You just have to worry about this city of millions.” I took the chair in front of him. “Hear about Lestrade?”

  “Eh, terrible. Was it blood loss or a concussion?”

  “Watson says blood loss.”

  “He’ll be fine then. Better than his client.”

  “So you know something about his case?”

  “Lestrade complained about it. A lot.” Bradstreet shrugged. He’s single-minded and doesn’t like to think about more than his own work. “Private contract. He got approval for it because of the quality of the client. Somebody important with the government; he said he wanted an escort for a while because he was being bothered. Didn’t say what, didn’t tell Lestrade what either. It was driving him half to the madhouse.”

  “Hmph.”

  I got the fish eye. “Are you trying to steal his case from him?”

  “I don’t see how that could happen. I’m just trying to find out who attempted to kill a fellow detective.”

  Bradstreet is one of the most sceptical men I know, and that makes him a good policeman. He’s less suspicious when it comes to other detectives, so he just nodded his approval. Well, Bradstreet wasn’t being a complete mark; a blow against one of us looks bad for all of us. The attacks on both Lestrade and Hollowell were from behind, so this worm had no problem with cowardly attacks.

  “Lestrade was steaming in his collar over it. Told me he hated every bit of it but couldn’t say no.”

  I thanked him and went to the morgue. That’s never a cheerful place, as they built it to be a natural ice-cave. The police surgeon already had the victim on the slab. With the blood washed off and the wound cleaned he was a sight easier on the eyes.

  I took his box of personal belongings and went through it. The new staff are delightfully meticulous, so the box was divided into sections labelled by location: coat pocket; trousers; sleeve; shoe. Most of it I’d already seen: his brass bits and bobs (the watch was still running); a tooled leather porte-monnaie from the left coat pocket; a mechanical crayon in the right pocket; an ink pen in the left; some loose coins; and the tiniest tool kit I’ve ever seen in the possession of a respectable, law-abiding man.

  I opened the port-monnaie, thinking
to find something that would help; gentlemen do not carry large amounts of money about them because it is, to put it bluntly, for the lower sort of man. But if he had a large amount on him, that could imply something suspicious.

  This was not the case, just three one-pound notes, carefully folded once in the upper right corner. I’d seen the blind use that trick of marking their paper money so they could price by touch. I pulled it all out and my fingers found a small square plate of metal – brass like everything else. It was an engraving, deeply cut, but I couldn’t make out the image.

  Rubbings are something police are expected to know how to do, but dashed if I could tell you the last time I’d had to pull that trick. I tore out a page from my notebook and went to work with a pencil. Before long I was looking at a woman in an old-fashioned bonnet. There was a book in her lap and she was wearing a pair of very familiar-looking spectacles. The letters “LB” were in the corner.

  If I felt smug, it lasted until I was halfway out of the morgue. That was when I realised I’d missed a vital clue: the pen in one pocket and pencil in the other strengthened my theory about the strange callouses on Hollowell’s hands. Hollowell was ambidextrous.

  Well, that was one mystery solved. Off to solve the rest. If I kept on my feet, I might be able to arrest someone in a few hours. The hard part was identifying the murderer; after that it would be a matter of sending out a search. Even the French know we Englishmen are the best in a mass manhunt. That was why desperate men tried to flee for the Continent.

  The rain that erased the crime scene’s evidence was helping me, a little. Weather would slow the usual departure off the island, but it wouldn’t cut it entirely. I had a little time yet before I could call for a manhunt.

  All I needed was one shred of evidence – one good idea of the killer’s identity.

  I went to the archives and pulled down every directory and newspaper I could find in the right area. Our intelligence is better than most, but we’re often restricted to what the Home Office thinks we should know.

  Gunpowder, however… gunpowder happens to be something that makes everyone a little uneasy. And not even the Foreign Office could keep the Yard from collecting newspapers.

  I soon found our Mr Noah Hollowell, a “talented inventor and patent-collector of good family”. An accompanying photograph of Hollowell as a young man showed him without spectacles and with plenty of hair. One photograph led to more, and I spent the night taking books off shelves and tearing up foolscap for bookmarks.

  Hollowell was a clever man according to the records of 1860, if famous for his stubbornness. He’d taken to the family business like a duck to water, but wanted things his own way from the first. This didn’t sit too well with his cousin and co-owner of the family empire, Jerimiah Wentforth.

  Wentforth was a man of vision, it was said, always seeking innovative ways to create different ignitions and explosive matters. Despite prickly feelings, the two were able to get along for at least five years. They shared the same grandparents, and Wentforth was planning to marry Lucinda Bateman, the daughter of a business partner in the American South, even though Miss Lucinda couldn’t decide between the cousins.

  “1860” and “outside business partner” and “gunpowder” gave me a sick feeling of dread. Sure enough, the tale exploded, literally, with Fort Sumter in North America. Wentforth was one of the Englishmen who supported the slave owners (like Lucinda’s father), and his cousin supported the North’s interests, citing old family ties in New York. The cousins were at each other’s throats, both sent before the magistrate for public fighting multiple times, but neither one gave an inch until Hollowell walked into one of the family mills and a case of arson, which Wentforth claimed was saboteurs bitter about England’s neutrality. Hollowell survived the blast, but his eyes and half his workers did not. He was still bedridden when Miss Lucinda swallowed poison.

  That brought me up sharp. The last picture I could find was a grainy image of the woman at some social event. Her father stood on one side, Wentforth on the other.

  And there my circumstantial evidence dried up, but if I needed it by that point, I would have been even thicker than Lestrade.

  Mr Holmes had seen through this entire case. My account had just been a final note on a story he’d already known! Lestrade had been saying “Wentforth” not “went for”. And those spectacles?

  Like a clap of thunder I recalled his voice: “The answer is before your own eyes, Gregson.”

  Why would a blind man wear spectacles like that?

  So they would be seen.

  Smoked glasses hide a blind man’s eyes, show the world he’s blind but discreetly, hiding white cataracts or empty sockets…

  Hollowell wanted his ruined eyes to be seen… by one particular person.

  And when I’d bawled out Watson’s address to the driver, everyone in earshot had heard me.

  I swore, and then put poor Constable Georges in charge of setting all the relevant newspapers aside in one stack for later.

  I issued the order for the manhunt.

  Then I sent every spare man to Dr Watson’s practice.

  * * *

  We stopped a full street back from the practice and sent the wagons on without us – with any luck Wentforth wouldn’t know the sound an empty carriage makes as opposed to one loaded down with policemen. The rain was as heavy as ever; you could barely make out the halos of brown light from the streetlamps, but the lamps in Watson’s consulting room were still burning, long past decent hours.

  I crept to the front of the building while Bradstreet went to the back with his men. I could hear three raised voices, two of which I knew: Dr Watson’s, angry and soldierly, and Mr Holmes’s, cold and sharp like a pair of scissors. The third voice was high-pitched and reedy, on the edge of panic. It made a yelping sound, and I knew where I’d heard it before. I pulled back and signalled Brewster and Rees. They’re big lads and used to dancing with criminals; two shoulders drove in the door with a single blow and I ran into the consulting room for the second time that day.

  The heavy table was on its side, shielding a still unconscious Lestrade. Dr Watson and Mr Holmes stood before him, with Watson brandishing a poker, and Holmes didn’t look any less dangerous with a shovel in his hand. They were holding off the fourth man—a little fellow in a striped suit trying to get through their defences with a nasty looking Elgin pistol—half gun, half large knife.

  “Hello, Mr Wentforth,” I said. “I don’t suppose you remember me?”

  Wentforth could hold his own against two able men like Mr Holmes and Dr Watson, but now he had a room full of men and an Elgin can only shoot once. He spun and ran wild, straight into Inspector Bradstreet. I almost felt sorry for that little blighter. One does not try to kill Bradstreet’s friends when he is around to do something about it. He plucked the man off the floor like a child and coolly freed him of the Elgin and set him back down, perhaps just a little too hard, because Wentforth took a sudden nap after that.

  * * *

  The details were easy enough to figure out after it was all over. Hollowell always swore Wentforth had sabotaged the mill and caused the explosion. Evidence of arson had been found, but claims against Wentforth went nowhere. England was trying for “noncommittal” to the Union and Confederacy; too many people were worried about the stability of Britain while America was at war, and every mill needed to run. Wentforth was the only man capable, as Hollowell was no longer sighted. Lucinda had killed herself out of disgust at the sacrifice of life as well as the blinding of her other beau.

  * * *

  Hollowell never contested the ruling, but he never went outside without wearing Lucinda’s spectacles. It gave Wentforth a double horror in the sightlessness of his rival behind her spectacles. Everyone else called it eccentricity but Wentforth knew what it really was: a silent accusation of Lucinda’s suicide and the loss of life and limb – and eyes – in his own family’s mill. A man who can spend years planning models can easily spend decades i
n revenge. After years of this frankly terrifying relationship, Wentforth began to crack around the edges. Hollowell had sensed the moment and hoped to catch his cousin in the act of attempted murder – or at least in an act of violence that would lead to his arrest and perhaps open up the arson case. So he asked for a temporary police escort, and this request was granted because no one wished to anger such a useful genius with so many connections in the government. He didn’t tell Lestrade any of this interesting information because he knew any policeman would clap the irons on him for instigating a crime.

  Mr Holmes claims he had an eye on Wentforth for some time – only for more boring crimes, what he calls “petty paperwork crimes of fraud and inventing fees for his clients” – and he knew all about that mucked-up past. He had expected he and Watson would trap the man in the act of finishing off Lestrade, only Wentforth had moved faster than he had expected, and Watson, for once, left his revolver at home (and that’ll be for the last time, I bet). So when Holmes saw Wentforth coming up the steps they shielded Lestrade behind the overturned table. An Elgin can blow a hole through one man, but that leaves the blade for the next and with their own weapons and Wentforth’s cowardice the three of them were at a stalemate until we showed up.

  I could be angry at Mr Holmes for not telling me he’d solved the case while I was telling him the details, but that would be two-faced. I’ve done the same thing myself, withholding evidence because I needed to let the prey come to me. Wentforth did a lot more than return; he was determined to finish the attack on Lestrade because he knew the runt could identify him, and nothing spoils a good exodus to France like your face in the newspapers. I’m assured that Holmes relied on my intelligence to come through in time. I am the cleverest of the Yarders; he’s said so.

  Mr Holmes knows a lot about the circumstances that lead up to crimes. But while he could likely rival the biggest gossips for knowing scandal, the man’s a professional and he doesn’t blab what he knows like a truant with something to prove. Being the man’s client isn’t a guarantee that he’ll give you everything he learns. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it’s all part of his peculiar ethics. It isn’t his fault that he misjudged my nose for gossip; I listen to it as well as the next man who works with the public, but gunpowder magnates are out of our usual jurisdiction.