Dust and Shadow Page 2

  “It is not a very likely circumstance, is it, my lord?” my friend remarked evenly.

  “So you may think,” his client snarled, “but you have underestimated my—”

  “I am not so foolish as to have arranged this meeting in total solitude,” stated the detective. “My friend Dr. Watson has been good enough to accompany me.”

  I emerged cautiously from behind the stony outcropping.

  “So you have brought your spies!” cried the Baron. “You mean to ruin me!”

  “You must believe, Lord Ramsden, that I have no intention of causing you the slightest harm,” Holmes protested. “My friend and I are prepared to swear that no word shall be breathed of this business to any living person, provided the ring is returned.”

  “It is here.” The Baron placed his hand over his breast pocket. “But do you speak in earnest? It is incredible.”

  “My little career would soon enough suffer shipwreck if I neglected my clients’ best interests,” my friend averred.

  “Not the police, nor my family, nor any other person will ever hear of the matter now I have retrieved the ring? It is far more than I deserve.”

  “They shall not on my account. I give you my word,” Holmes declared gravely.

  “As do I,” I added.

  “Then that is enough.” The Baron’s head fell forward as if in a daze, exhausted by his grief.

  “It is not the first felony I have commuted, and I fear it is unlikely to be the last,” confessed my friend in the same calming tones.

  “I shall be eternally grateful for your silence. Indeed, your discretion has been unimpeachable throughout this affair, which is far higher praise than I can apply to my own.”

  “There I cannot agree with you,” Holmes began, but the Baron continued bitterly.

  “Ellie died alone rather than betray my trust. What have I offered her in return?”

  “Come, my lord. It is hardly practical to dwell on such matters. You acted in the interests of your family, and your secret is safe, after all.”

  “No doubt you are right,” he whispered. “You may proceed to the house, gentlemen. It is over. I shall be more silent hereafter, you may trust.”

  I had turned to go, but suddenly an inarticulate cry from Holmes swung me round again. The pistol fired just as Holmes, in a desperate leap, reached the Baron. My friend caught him round the torso and laid him on the frozen ground. I was beside them in an instant.

  “Quick, man! He breathes—can you not—”

  But Lord Ramsden had already passed beyond the aid of any man. As I loosened his collar, he emitted a low, shuddering sigh and was still.

  “Holmes, he—”

  “He is dead.” My friend passed a hand over the Baron’s eyes, his suavity of movement dulled in the shock of the tragedy. “If only I had—but Lord Ramsden would surely have revealed himself otherwise! No, no, Gregson is an ass, but he can see a brick wall when it is in front of him. Only I could have returned it in safety.” He descended quickly and removed a glittering band from the upper waistcoat pocket of the dead man.

  “What he must have seen to retrieve it,” I muttered in horror.

  “God help us, Watson.” My friend, though outwardly serene, was as shaken as I had ever before seen him. “I would not wish his history on any man.”

  We knelt in silence under the black shadows of the trees, slowly growing cognizant once more of the piercing cold.

  “What are we to tell them?”

  “There, at least, our course seems clear,” Holmes considered. “You and I heard a shot from just beyond the grounds and, considering the hour, went to investigate. We found the Baron already beyond assistance. That is all.”

  I nodded. “I suppose the pressures of financial ruin could account for suicide in a man of sensitive nature, but what of the ring?”

  “As for the ring, I am prepared to go rather further,” Holmes replied softly. “The Baron thought his life a threat to his secret, and I have no intention of allowing his death to be one likewise.”

  The grief which seized the household when we returned with our sad burden and raised the alarm was pitiable to behold. The lady of the house, in the loss of her eldest son, seemed to forget her mother’s ring had ever existed. Finding ourselves quite useless amid the chaos, we arose early the next morning to stop at the inn and bid farewell to Inspector Gregson and the constable he had brought from London to aid in the investigation; they had taken over a suite of rooms, using the simple parlour as an office. The inspector, in his own unique way, expressed considerable distress at our sudden departure.

  “Well, well, you’re quite right, I suppose. Once you know a thing is over your head, you may as well act the man and own up to it. I intend to play the game to the end, though, Mr. Holmes. Simply not capable of leaving a case half finished with so much to go on.”

  “You’ve unearthed fresh leads, then?” my friend responded coolly.

  “Well, there’s that brother of the late Baron’s—a gambler and a rake, if you listen to my sources.”

  “I hardly think it likely that—”

  “And now this suicide!” Inspector Gregson proclaimed. “Under the circumstances, very black indeed.”

  “How so?”

  “Why, guilt! What does a man have to kill himself over if not guilt? Really, with all these developments, Mr. Holmes, if you remained, you might yet get a hint of what’s going on.”

  “I have word of the gem in London.” Holmes shrugged one shoulder dismissively. “A stonecutter friend of mine has given me reason to return to the city, and I find the evidence meager enough here in Colwall to justify following this fresh lead.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” interjected a voice from the side of the room. “Surely there is a great deal of evidence.”

  Holmes swung his head to regard the young constable who had ventured this remark. “Do you think so?” he queried dryly. “I call solving a crime a near impossibility when one cannot even fix the date of occurrence within a twelvemonth.”

  This retort elicited a chuckle from Gregson, who added, “Now, now, my boy, I brought you down so that you could watch a true professional in action. And Mr. Holmes here may have the odd tip as well. But you’d do better to listen, I think, and keep your opinions mum.”

  The officer appeared unperturbed. “But what of the vandalized grass plot?”

  “The grass plot?” Gregson laughed. “What can you see in that? As if gardening had anything to do with the matter!”

  “I thought it rather queer myself, before I met the boys responsible,” Holmes said swiftly. “Yesterday a brief walk through your inn’s stable yard brought me into personal contact with young Fergus MacArthur and his several associates. They were busy rubbing the guests’ saddles with tallow while the groomsman lay snoring. If creativity alone ensured success in this world, that young gang would soon enough rule the Commonwealth.”

  My friend rose gracefully and retrieved his hat from a small bench by the door. “I shan’t hesitate to forward you any news I may manage to unearth in London.”

  “Ah, well. I have no doubt but that we’ll have solved the whole matter by the time we hear from you again, but despite that—my thanks.”

  “Farewell, Inspector Gregson, and farewell to your staff. They are more promising than you realize.” Holmes gave a final nod and shut the door firmly behind us.

  “Back to London,” I mused.

  “Yes, Herefordshire has no further use for the two of us,” my friend replied. “However, I have every confidence of locating the ring through its mysterious buyer.” He patted his own breast pocket and the ghost of a smile appeared on his somber face.

  We had not been long in London before Holmes telegraphed Lady Ramsden with the news that her mother’s ring had been found. Not only was the household’s joy at the ring’s return buried under their misfortune, but to my friend’s evident satisfaction, so was their curiosity at its initial disappearance. Gregson’s case thus remained regrettabl
y inconclusive, but once the ring had safely arrived via Scotland Yard escort from London at Blackheath House, the good inspector’s spirits had risen enough to compliment the private detective on his “extraordinary luck.”

  Stretched upon the settee two weeks later, I was engaged in a medical journal when I heard Holmes’s familiar step bounding up the stairs and into the sitting room. He held a letter to the lamp bemusedly, then with a motion of indifference tossed it onto a formidable stack of documents near the bookshelf.

  “Holmes, I do believe you’ve Irregulars* who are shorter than that monstrous pile,” I observed.

  “Mmm?” he queried distractedly. “Oh, I hardly think so. Little Graves has had an extraordinary bout of growth since you saw him last.”

  I smiled. “What was it, then?”

  “The letter?” Holmes stretched his sinewy arm to retrieve it, paused over it for a moment longer, and passed it to me. It was written in vivid red ink in an oddly erratic script, and it read:

  Mr. Holmes,

  You are a clever one. Arent you? No matter that you may be devillish clever you may be the very devil, but not so clever that Mr. Nobody doesn’t see you. Yes, I see you clear enough, and I may also

  See you in Hell

  Sooner than you think, Mr. Holmes.

  I looked up in chagrin. “Holmes, this letter is an outright threat!”

  “The tone is rather unfriendly,” he conceded, digging for tobacco in the depths of his Persian slipper.

  “What do you intend to do?”

  “Do? Nothing. Your correspondence is not, perhaps, quite as vivid as is my own. When I inspect the mail, desperate for a case worthy of my time and my talent, I all too often find instead the ramblings of the fanciful spinster or the lyricism of the bored newlywed. I’d a priceless example from Brighton last week which I must show you—”

  “You have not the slightest interest in this bizarre missive?”

  “To my deep discredit, I’ve known far too many criminals not to expect this sort of thing occasionally,” Holmes countered irritably. “It is written on cheap foolscap, posted in the East-end of London, no marks of fingers or other identifying features. What am I to do with it? Queer enough hand, though. I’ve hardly seen one like it.” He scrutinized the page.

  “What steps can you take?” I asked once more.

  “The best of all steps, my dear Watson—to throw it in the dustbin.” He tossed the paper in the general direction of his desk and forcefully steered the conversation to Richard Owen’s work in the realm of philosophical anatomy.

  It was only the next afternoon, when I noticed Holmes’s commonplace book open on his desk, that I realized the letter had not been discarded but pasted carefully under “Miscellaneous Posts.” I meant to inquire of Holmes whether he had discovered any clue to the matter, but my fellow lodger’s abrupt arrival with an urgent appeal from Camberwell drove the matter from my mind entirely.

  CHAPTER ONE Two Crimes

  It has been argued by those who have so far flattered my attempts to chronicle the life and career of Mr. Sherlock Holmes as to approach them in a scholarly manner that I have often been remiss in the arena of precise chronology. While nodding to kindly meant excuses made for me in regards to hasty handwriting or careless literary agents, I must begin by confessing that my errors, however egregious, were entirely intentional. Holmes’s insistence, not to mention my own natural discretion, often prevented me from maintaining that exactitude so highly prized in a biographer; I have been forced to change the dates of marginal cases to disguise great ones, alter names and circumstances, all the while diligently preserving the core truth of the events, without which there would have been no object in writing anything at all. In this instance, however, any obfuscation would be absurd, as the facts are known not only to the people of London but to the world. I shall therefore set down the entire truth, as it happened to Holmes and to myself, omitting nothing that pertains to the most harrowing series of crimes my illustrious friend and I were ever called upon to solve.

  The year of 1888 had already proven significant for Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for it was in that twelvemonth that he performed valuable services for one of the reigning houses of Europe and continued forestalling the activities of Professor James Moriarty, whose hold over London’s underworld grew ever more apparent to my friend. Several highly publicized investigations that year displayed Holmes’s remarkable skills to the public, including the appalling affair of the faulty oil lamp, and the matter of Mrs. Victoria Mendosa’s mysteriously vanishing thimble and its consequences. My friend’s talents, which had once languished in obscure specialism, in that year flamed into the most gratifying notoriety.

  Despite the busyness that accompanied Holmes’s ever-increasing reputation for omniscience, we found ourselves at home on that evening in early August, the day after Bank Holiday, Holmes performing chemical analyses of an American snake venom which had recently proven itself a nearly untraceable poison, and I engaged in a perusal of the day’s papers. To my delight, the skies above the buildings burned with that most elusive of all elements, the London sun, and a brisk breeze fluttered about the windows (one of which I’d opened as a safeguard against Holmes’s chemical efforts), when an item in the late edition of the Star caught my eye.

  “I cannot begin to understand,” I said to no one in particular, “what could drive a murderer to such total desecration of the human body.”

  Holmes, without looking up from his work, remarked, “An argument could be made that the ultimate desecration of the human body is to end its earthly usefulness, which would imply that all murderers share equally that specific charge.”

  “This is rather beyond the pale. It states here that some poor woman, as yet unidentified, was found stabbed to death in Whitechapel.”

  “A deplorable, though hardly baffling occurrence. I imagine that she worked the area for food, drink, and daily shelter. Such pitiable unfortunates are particularly likely to inspire crimes of passion in the men with whom they associate.”

  “She was stabbed twenty times, Holmes.”

  “And your unassailable medical assessment is that once would have been enough.”

  “Well, yes,” I faltered. “Apparently the villain continued to slash at her long after she was dead, or so the pattern of blood indicates.”

  The detective smiled. “You are a gentleman of the most sympathetic character, my dear Watson. While you would possibly—for I have seen you do it—condone a crime of passion committed in the throes of despair or of vengeance, you can see nothing permissible about such morbid abuse.”

  “I suppose that expresses it.”

  “I confess I cannot imagine myself in such a rage as to batter my victim beyond all sense either,” he admitted. “Is there anything further?”

  “The police know nothing yet.”

  Holmes sighed and pushed aside his scientific materials. “Would you and I had the power to make all of London safe, my good man, but for the moment, let us leave our musings upon the depths to which our fellow citizens can sink and instead explore whether or not we have time to make a seven-thirty curtain for Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E Minor at the Royal Albert Hall. My attention was directed to the second-chair cellist by my brother Mycroft, and I should be grateful for your company while I observe the gentleman in his natural habitat.”

  It took Sherlock Holmes exactly five days to complete the affair of the second cellist, and once concluded, my friend had the thanks of the premier branches of the British government, of which his brother Mycroft was a pivotal member. My own knowledge of Mycroft Holmes’s exalted occupation was at that time a closely kept secret, for he occasionally engaged his brother upon nationally vital inquiries about which neither Sherlock Holmes nor I ought to have had the slightest inkling. I regret to say, however, that when nothing but the most pedestrian of wrongdoing took place in the following weeks, my friend lapsed into that melancholy torpor which made my own life, not to mention that of our landlady,
Mrs. Hudson, taxing in the extreme. Holmes ever maintained the opinion that we should abandon him entirely when such a fit was upon him, but as a medical man, I dreaded the sight of his tiny, impeccably kept hypodermic syringe and that momentous stop at the chemist’s which promised that my friend would commence to ruin himself for a matter of days or weeks if I did not take any steps to circumvent him. In vain I scanned the papers, and in vain I attempted to convince Holmes that a woman ought not to be stabbed so very many times, Whitechapel or no. At length I found myself longing, fleetingly and against the dictates of my conscience, for the advent of some sensational misfortune.

  I rose early that fateful Saturday, the morning of September the first, and as I sat smoking a pipe after breakfast, Holmes strode into the sitting room, fully dressed and in the process of reading the Daily News. The warmth of his pale complexion announced he had been out, and I noted with relief that his keen gaze betrayed no glimmer of the drug I had come to despise. His chiseled brow furrowed in concentration, he laid the open paper on our dining table and within moments had opened seven or eight other editions to which we subscribed, quickly locating the same story in each and then draping the paper over an article of furniture.

  “Good morning, Holmes,” I remarked, just as our sitting room seemed in danger of disappearing under the crackling storm of newsprint.

  “I’ve been out,” he replied.

  “Yes,” I returned dryly.

  “I hope you have already broken your fast this morning, Watson.”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “It appears that the defilement of corpses is a growing industry in Whitechapel. They’ve found another one, my dear fellow. Abdomen apparently slashed after she was murdered.”

  “What was the cause of death, then?”

  “Her neck was nearly severed.”

  “Good heavens. Where was she found?”

  “In Buck’s Row, it seems, which arrested my interest immediately. I imagined the other matter a bizarre aberration, but here is another on its heels.”

  “The first was bad enough.”