Sherlock Holmes (24 page)

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You are his foe, you harbour a deep grievance against him… and you are concerned for his wellbeing?”

“Only in as much as I would not wish him to perish too soon. His end should not be of his own choosing. Its time and manner should be for others to decree.”

Gasparini stood, shunting his chair back.

“I have said my piece, Dr Watson,” he said. “You would be advised to act upon it. Now, do not attempt to follow me as I leave. Stay for at least another quarter of an hour. In fact, here.” He tossed some coins onto his table. “Have another pint. It’s on me. My treat. I shall know if you come after me. I shall be watching out for you, and believe me, I have the eyes of a hawk. You are a brave man and might not fear for your own life, but remember – you are not the landlord of the Turf Tavern, and it would be a great shame if some harm were to come to that fine upstanding citizen.”

He left by the nearest door, in such a way that I still did not get a good look at his face.

I was tempted to disregard his parting shot and give chase. I knew, though, that the life of yet another innocent would be forfeit if I did, so there was no alternative but to sit and stew while the minute hand of the pub’s clock crept through a quarter turn. The landlord came and cleared Gasparini’s table, pocketing the change that lay on it. He expressed delight at having been left such a generous tip and opined that the Turf could do with more patrons like the gentleman just gone and fewer students, who were often rowdy and for whom the notion of giving gratuities was an alien concept.

I enquired in a roundabout way whether he had seen the fellow’s face at all.

“Not directly, no,” he said. “Something of a nose on him, he had, and a piercing blue eye, but that’s the extent of it.”

The landlord had had a better angle than I, but still Gasparini had managed to evade his eyeline. It was agonising how adept our agent provocateur was at masking his identity. Rarely had I had such a sense of being manipulated and outmanoeuvred as I did that sunny Oxford afternoon. I felt as helpless as a mouse in a cat’s clutches or a rabbit in a fox’s maw, forced to lie limp in the vain hope that the predator might lose interest and drop me. Even when the allotted fifteen minutes was up, I waited a further ten. Just to be on the safe side.

“Holmes!”

I knocked on the door to his room.

“Holmes!”

I knocked again.

“Holmes, open up! I know you’re in there. There’s no point pretending you’re not.”

I heard a slither of shifting bedclothes, a heavy thump as of a human form tumbling to the floor, then a soft groan.

“Holmes, open the door this instant, or so help me God I’ll break it down. You see if I don’t!”

Further indistinct sounds came from the room. I gave it another minute, then took myself to the opposite side of the corridor. This afforded me a run-up of some ten or eleven feet. It might be enough. I tensed, lowering my shoulder and lining it up with the point where the edge of the door met the jamb. I imagined hurling myself into the thick of a maul on the rugby pitch, bent on getting the ball but also on biffing a couple of the opposing team’s forwards into the bargain. Never let it be said that rugger is a gentleman’s game. In my experience it is only a shade less brutal than war.

I charged across the corridor.

The door swung open a split second before I reached it.

I went stumbling through, headlong. My shins struck a coffee table some three yards beyond. I plunged prostrate onto the carpet, fetching up at the foot of an armchair. I lay stunned and dazed, feeling not a little foolish. I looked up to find Holmes, in pyjamas and dressing gown, staring down at me with mild bafflement, as though I were an exhibit in a cabinet of curiosities.

“Well,” he said, “you certainly know how to make an entrance, Watson.”

I scrambled to my feet. “Damn it, man. Couldn’t you have told me you were going to do that?”

“Open the door? But isn’t that what you were demanding of me? Why should it have come as a surprise, then?”

I dusted myself down and rubbed my barked shins, glancing around as I did so. The room was dingy and unkempt. The curtains were partially drawn, the grate brimmed with cold ashes, and the bed was a landslide of sheets and blankets. The air was stale and malodorous, musty with the smell of unwashed body, and as for Holmes, he was a caricature of himself, a living scarecrow: gaunt almost to the point of cadaverousness, hollow-eyed, his hair lank and tangled, his skin sporting a greyish pallor, his cheeks and chin unshaven.

“Good grief!” I ejaculated. “The state of you. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You’re a fright.”

“And how nice it is to see you too, Watson.” Yawning, Holmes closed the door. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Or have you come purely to bandy insults about?”

“I have come,” I said, “because I could not bear the thought of you debasing yourself any further. Look at this.”

I indicated the various empty bottles of Chlorodyne which lay haphazardly around the room. Holmes had clearly quaffed prodigious amounts of the stuff, so much that it was a wonder he could function at all.

“You have been contributing far too freely to the coffers of that quack Collis Browne,” I said.

“And, in one instance, to his rival’s coffers,” Holmes said, pointing to a bottle of Freeman’s Chlorodyne, one of the many imitative products that had sprung up after Collis Browne’s concoction became a roaring success. “The boots bought the wrong brand, in spite of the very specific instructions I gave him. A much bitterer taste, and in my view a less efficacious recipe.”

“Holmes, Chlorodyne is poison. Deaths have been attributed to it. There have been articles in
The Lancet
calling for it to be banned. People are apt to become so infatuated with it that they lose all sense of themselves and waste away. A child in New Zealand died last year after his mother inadvertently gave him an overdose.”

“I am not a child.”

“You are acting like one!” I shot back. “It is childish to be this irresponsible with your body, this wilfully neglectful of your health. If that is not obvious to you, then you are not the man I have known all these years; you are, to put it bluntly, a blithering idiot.”

“Please, Watson, do not shout.” Holmes winced, clutching his forehead. “It makes my ears ring and my head thump.”

“I
will
shout if it is the only way to get through to you. What you are doing to yourself is neither sane nor profitable. Is this some act of self-martyrdom? Is that it? Are you doing it out of a perverse sense of nobility? You would rather die than concede defeat? The word for that is
cowardice
.”

“You know I am merely finding consolation in numbness. I have told you so already. Haranguing me will solve nothing, and if that is the sole reason you are here, then I would be grateful if you would do me the kindness of leaving.” He held an arm out towards the door. “The exit is that way.”

I was sorely tempted to grab him by the lapels and give him a good shake. “Holmes,” I said, straining not to lose my cool entirely, “the reason I am here is that I have new information about the case. I was intending to share it with you, but the condition in which I find you makes me ask myself why I should bother. You seem unreceptive to any form of assistance or succour. I’ve half a mind to accept your invitation to leave, and to make that leaving a permanent state of affairs.”

Something – a faint intimation of the old spark – glinted in Holmes’s eyes.

“New information?” he said.

“I have had an encounter. A most unnerving one.”

“With whom?”

“No less than our killer, Gasparini. He accosted me in a pub, of all places.”

Holmes’s reaction to the news surprised me. I had anticipated concern about my welfare, a demand for further detail, an expression of amazement at the agent provocateur’s boldness.

I had not anticipated that he would collapse into the nearest armchair as though in a swoon and would lie there for a minute with his hand over his eyes, intoning, “Oh, thank God. Thank God. Thank God.”

“Holmes?”

He removed his hand and peered at me through half-closed lids, much like someone squinting into bright sunlight.

“Finally,” he said. “Finally the wretch makes his move. I had begun to think he might never. What has it been, a week? I wasn’t sure if I could last much longer. I was starting to lose my grip. The Chlorodyne… Glorious, insidious substance.”

“Holmes, I don’t understand.” I said this, but I had a glimmering of what he was getting at.

“Watson, you must help. I have gone as close to the edge of the precipice as I dare. Perhaps too close. I am teetering on the brink. It’s up to you. You must pull me back. Only you can do it. Only you have the skill. Save me, my friend. I beg of you. Save me.”

It was just what the agent provocateur had said, the very proposition he had put forward in the Turf Tavern. “Save him.” Now I was hearing it from Holmes’s own lips. “Save me.” How could I possibly refuse?

For the next three days I occupied myself with nothing other than extricating Holmes from the toils of the Chlorodyne. According to the medical literature, there were two ways of doing this: the tough and the slightly less tough. One entailed simply denying him any more of the so-called medicine. The other entailed weaning him off it by giving him progressively smaller doses or else substituting a milder equivalent such as paregoric. I put it to him that the latter option would be the less painful of the two but the more protracted. He plumped for the former. The sooner he was restored to normal, he said, the sooner he could get back to work. I expressed the hope that his constitution was up to the challenge of going from heavy dependency to none at all. He said that he hoped so too and that we were about to find out.

The bulk of my task lay in keeping vigil over Holmes, monitoring him round the clock and nursing him through the withdrawal symptoms. It was an ordeal for me but more so for him. He was afflicted with all the classic side-effects that come with ridding one’s body of the craving for opiates. His muscles ached. He trembled. Sometimes he was feverishly hot, other times shivering with cold. He sweated profusely and complained of nausea. His digestive system was in uproar, and he was often agitated to the point of frenzy.

I made sure he drank plenty of fluids – camomile tea and plain water, for the most part – to keep him hydrated. I ordered up simple soups and broths from the hotel’s kitchen, and spoon-fed these to him when his hands were shaking too much to hold an eating utensil.

I synchronised my sleep patterns with his periodic catnaps, allowing myself to close my eyes and nod off only once he had. I needed to be awake whenever he was, else I could not regulate his behaviour or offer palliative care. On one occasion I was so tired that I failed to register that he had roused himself. I woke up to find the door wide open and Holmes almost at the head of the staircase. He would have gone further but his legs had given out under him and he now lay in a twitching heap, somewhat to the consternation of other guests, who were having to step over him to get past. I bundled him back into the room, but a few hours later much the same thing happened again. This time I had taken the precaution of locking the door and pocketing the key, but that did not deter him. A blast of outdoor air stirred me from my slumber, and there was Holmes, halfway out of the window, three storeys above street level, bent on shinning down the drainpipe. I coaxed him back inside and resettled him. His goal both times had been to get to the chemist and purchase more Chlorodyne. “Just a drop or two,” he said. “It will ease my suffering.” I doubt any self-respecting shopkeeper would have served someone in such a dishevelled state, clad in nightwear and slippers, plainly unwell, but you never know. It was a chance I could not take. There are unscrupulous types in every profession.

To forestall further escapes I fastened Holmes, with his consent, to the bedpost, using the cord of his dressing gown. It was a token gesture. He could have slipped his bonds with little difficulty, and we both knew it. I just needed to reinforce psychologically the knowledge that he should not stray.

“Were I Harry Houdini,” he said, testing how securely I had tied his wrists, “you would require something more substantial than this.” His voice was hoarse and thin, barely a wisp of sound.

“But you are not Harry Houdini, Holmes, and this is not some carnival entertainment. This is serious.”

“Houdini spoke of death and rebirth as touchstones in his act – what could be more serious than that?”

“Your recovery,” I replied, only partly in jest.

As the hours wore on, Holmes revealed piecemeal how he had surrendered himself to Chlorodyne on purpose, with a view to luring the agent provocateur into precipitate action.

“I could have feigned addiction,” he said, “but our adversary – Gasparini, for want of a better name – is cunning and observant, and there was a danger of being caught out. The crucial thing was not that I appeared to have given in but that you, Watson, were in no doubt that I had. Your despair was more important than mine. You are not, with the utmost respect, an expert in dissimulation. I mean that as a compliment. You are the model of sincerity, your every emotion abundant on your face. I could not give Gasparini the least cause to suspect that I was trying to goad him out of hiding, thus my capitulation had to be real, and you had to see it was real and react accordingly, with resentment and disapproval.”

“I was your stooge, in other words.” I remembered the long years thinking my friend dead. He had used the same excuse then for keeping me in the dark.

“Come now, don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“If I am being hard on anyone, it is you,” I said. “You could not count on me to play along convincingly with any kind of pretence, so you went ahead and did it for real, despite the danger. You used my gullibility as a tool.”