Sherlock Holmes (25 page)

“On the contrary. How is it gullible to be angered when a friend does something you disapprove of?”

“I have been a pawn nonetheless, just as Grainger, Bancroft and Llewellyn were the agent provocateur’s pawns.”

“No, because he uses deceit. I have not deceived you. My adoption of Chlorodyne was genuine.”

“It is a fine distinction.”

“It is a valid one.”

I sighed. “How did you come to think of this deception?”

“I took my inspiration from Tabitha Grainger.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Cast your mind back, Watson.”

I did so, thinking of that cursed house in Jericho, the bed with its blood-stained sheets. “Dalby’s Carminative!” I cried.

“Just so, Watson. The bottle on the woman’s bedside table. How easy it is to seek refuge in drugs, and how commonplace. People do it all the time.”

“So says the cocaine user.”

“The former cocaine user, Watson. You have seen to that. And soon I shall be a former opiate user too, again thanks to you.”

By the morning of the fourth day Holmes had rallied and was almost back to his old self. There was some colour in his cheeks and he had visibly gained weight. The tremors and sweats had subsided, although he was still prey to stomach cramps and bouts of anxiety. During one especially anguished spell he begged me to forgive him for enticing Gasparini to get so close to me.

“Followed you into a pub!” he wailed. “He might have murdered you on the spot.”

“He wished to send you a message. I was the courier.”

“A stronger message would have been your death. That would certainly have got my attention.”

“And for all he knew, driven you right over that precipice you spoke of. It is not part of his plan that you die yet. He wants you alive.”

“Still, I left you out there, alone, unprotected, just so that he would see you at a loss and it would tempt him to tip his hand. I should not have done that. I should not have been so casual with your life.”

After weeks of thinking my friend had abandoned all care for me, his words were greatly appreciated, and I could afford to be magnanimous. “I’m still breathing, aren’t I? Like all your risks, it was a calculated one.”

Later, when he was calmer, Holmes said, “I need you to tell me everything you can about Gasparini.”

“We should wait until you are stronger.”

“I am strong enough.” My friend, with some struggle, propped himself up on his pillows. I had removed the dressing gown cord restraints not an hour earlier, deeming them no longer necessary. “He presumably appeared to you in heavy disguise.”

“I wouldn’t know about any disguise, but he managed not to reveal his face to me. My impression of him was—”

“I am not interested in impressions, Watson! You know that full well. Pure facts, that’s what I am after.”

I had never thought I would be glad to hear Holmes chide me with his customary severity, but I was. It signified once and for all that he was on the mend.

I related my exchange with Gasparini at the Turf as best I could remember it. Holmes pressed me about certain turns of phrase my interlocutor had used.

“‘Bagging my game’? Those were his exact words?”

“I believe so.”

“Believe so or know so?”

“He used an extended metaphor about hunting, that’s for sure. One about fishing too. Cards as well, if memory serves.”

“And you say he referred to a snake charmer.”

“He had the ability to mesmerise like one, he told me. He was not a little boastful.”

“The pub landlord spoke of… ‘piercing blue eyes’, was it?”

“Along with a large nose. The queer thing is, Holmes, I’m convinced I’ve met Gasparini. Before the other day, I mean.”

“You say that on what basis?”

“I’m loath to call it a hunch – yet a hunch is all it is.”

“Nothing specific led you to that conclusion? His hair perhaps?”

“It was nothing out of the ordinary. Dark, collar-length. Very dark, in fact.”

“So dark it might have been dyed?”

“Now that you mention it, yes. Lord Knaresfield dyes his hair, does he not? But it wasn’t him, I don’t think.”

“No, his eyes aren’t blue. They’re brown. He was wearing a wig, then.”

“Possibly. I’m sorry, Holmes. I’m trying my best. Your analytical methods seem so straightforward until we mere mortals attempt to apply them.”

“You are doing adequately, Watson. What else can you tell me? He spoke of an ‘associate’, yes?”

“He is in league with someone, definitely. Reading between the lines, I think he is the subordinate in the partnership. The other gives the orders, he executes them.”

“And their mutual goal is my downfall,” Holmes mused. “I suppose I should be flattered.”

“He implied he is an old opponent of yours.”

“I’ve no doubt that is true, from what you’ve been saying. In point of fact, I have a notion that this man is one of the deadliest opponents I ever faced.”

I asked him to expound on that remark, and after a moment, he did.

“If Gasparini is who I think he is, Watson, then we are both still alive only by his good graces. He could have slain us a dozen times over. He has had the chance to. Instead, he has led us a dance, calling the tune and watching us caper. He and his partner in crime have been keeping us preoccupied while some other subtler plot unfurls.”

“Good grief,” I said. “Well, out with it. Who is he?”

Holmes counted off attributes on his fingers. “A hunter. One who has spent time in India, judging by the snake charmer reference. Enjoys cards. Blue eyes. Prominent nose. It’s all there, my friend, plain as day. But the principal clue is the name Gasparini itself. I would have spotted the significance of it sooner, had I been… clearer-headed than I was. It is by way of a joke.”

“Some kind of pun? Wordplay, as in the poison pen letters?”

“Not as such. Call it a taunt. There is a relatively well-known Gasparini, a Swiss pastry chef who lived during the first half of the last century and whose main claim to fame is the invention of the meringue. Most cookery books, at any rate, ascribe its creation to him.”

“The meringue?” I said, bemused.

“Bear with me. Gasparini was a resident of the village of Meiringen, from which the confection derives its name. Meiringen lies in the canton of Bern, in the Hasli region of Switzerland, on the banks of the River Aare.”

“As I know full well. It was where we stayed when we were on the trail of Professor Mori…”

My voice tapered off. My blood ran cold.

“Oh no,” I breathed. “Oh, this is too much, Holmes. You’re telling me…”

“It is my firm opinion,” Holmes said, “that Signor Gasparini, the unnamed Doctor of Divinity, and the friend of Nahum Grainger who provoked him into slaughtering his family, are guises adopted by a certain rogue shikari of our acquaintance, formerly an infantryman in the 1st Bangalore Pioneers, veteran of the Jowaki Expedition and the battles of Charasiab, Sherpur and Kabul, author of
Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas
… Need I go on?”

“You need not, and I would prefer that you
did
not.”

I looked down at my hands, which had developed a slight tremor.

“All along,” said Holmes grimly, “we have been contending with none other than Colonel Sebastian Moran.”

I tried to deny it but I could not. The evidence fit. All too well did it fit.

Moran was a callous, cold-hearted killer. We knew that from experience. He had twice made an attempt on Holmes’s life, first at the Reichenbach Falls as Holmes was returning from his gruelling and deadly hand-to-hand tussle with Professor Moriarty, then three years later in London. He had hurled boulders at Holmes in the first instance, shot at him with an air-gun in the second, both times only narrowly failing to achieve his lethal objective, thwarted by my friend’s quick wits and resourcefulness.

To Moran, life was not precious. Far from it. Not only had he bagged a larger tally of tigers than any other man, but he was wont to kill humans with as little compunction as he did big cats, and often for the slenderest of reasons. His murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair, to take one example, was motivated by nothing more than the fear that Adair was about to expose him as a card cheat and thus cause him to be barred from the Bagatelle and every other London card club worth being a member of.

As Moriarty’s confederate and enforcer, Moran had been responsible for keeping the criminal mastermind’s underlings in line and disposing of anyone who might compromise Moriarty’s plans or rise in opposition to him. I recalled how we had come face to face with him in Blandford Street after he had shot at a wax bust of Holmes positioned as a decoy in a window of our rooms in adjacent Baker Street. Even under police arrest Moran had been like a wild animal – a raging tiger, one might say – and I had got the sense that here was someone with the soul of a barbarian, someone who wore only a thin veneer of sophistication and truly belonged in a bygone, more brutal age. I could see how he was able to play various roles, such as Signor Gasparini, because, for him, being any kind of human at all was a role. Holmes had been right when he had told Inspector Tomlinson that the jungles of the subcontinent were Moran’s spiritual home. Moran was a bestial throwback, a savage who had learned to pass for civilised.

Who else but hawk-eyed Moran could have gunned down Hugh Llewellyn through the mist? He had carved himself out a hide on the riverbank opposite and lain in wait, utilising all the skills he had honed in the Eastern Empire as a soldier and a hunter. Likewise he had shadowed me through Oxford to the Turf Tavern, not once giving me cause to suspect I was being followed.

“An Oxford man himself,” said Holmes. “This city is familiar terrain for Moran. He knows it as well as he knows anywhere, and he has used that to his advantage. Its lore, its byways, its quirks, its idioms – nothing will have changed much since his graduation back in the sixties.”

“To think that I was within a few feet of him,” I said. “Moran. I see now why he was wearing gloves and did not take them off in the pub. His swarthy skin might have been a giveaway.”

“The question remains, who is he working with? Or rather, for. It must be someone whose antipathy for me dovetails with his own.”

“Could it be that that was just a bluff? That Moran is trying to muddy the waters? Why throw his lot in with another when he has the incentive and the wherewithal to topple you all by himself?”

“Colonel Moran is a follower, not a leader, Watson,” said Holmes. “He lives to take orders. There is a Japanese concept I learned about on my travels in the Orient – the
ronin
. It refers to a samurai warrior who has lost his
daimyo
, his master. In feudal-era Japan, this was a shameful status. If the daimyo died or committed ritual suicide to atone for some disgrace, his samurai guard were obliged by their
bushido
code to join him in death, which they would administer to themselves with their own swords. Anyone who refused to do so became a ronin, and thereafter was considered to lack honour and had to find some illegal means of earning a living, usually as a mercenary or a bandit. Moran is, I would argue, a ronin. In the absence of Professor Moriarty, he has lacked direction and guidance. That is why I was confident he would not trouble us, even after he escaped from custody. He sought to silence me over the Adair affair and failed. He would not risk trying again now, not unless given an incentive by another.”

“So some new master has stepped in to fill the breach, and Moran is active once more?”

“Very much so. And furthermore, I am quite convinced there is a direct connection between Moran and the Thinking Engine.”

“What makes you say that?”

I was almost glad to hear the irritation in Holmes’s voice. “Think, man, think. When he accosted you in the Turf, what did he say? ‘You know me best as a gentleman of Italian extraction, surname of Gasparini’, or words to that effect.”

“Yes. So?”

“Watson, how could he know that we knew about a Signor Gasparini in the first place? It was the Thinking Engine that furnished us with the name. All we had before then was Llewellyn’s ‘gas par’.”

“I see,” I said slowly. “Damn it, yes. You’re right.”

“Of course I am. Even if he had heard Llewellyn’s dying words from across the river, which I doubt, Moran wouldn’t necessarily have been aware that we had made anything of them. The only way he could have been confident that you would recognise the name Gasparini is if he was present when the Engine supplied it, or else is in regular contact with someone who was.”

“Was he eavesdropping on our last visit to the Engine somehow?”

“Conceivably. There isn’t anywhere in the Thinking Engine chamber itself where a man could easily hide, though. What space the Engine does not occupy is open, without niches or recesses. It is more likely that his associate is someone closely linked to the Engine, someone willing and able to relay to him whatever information the machine yields up.”

“You mean Quantock? That mouse of a man? Surely not.”

“We cannot rule him out. But it may be that the associate is another person, one to whom Quantock is beholden, a more senior and authoritative figure.”

“That would be Lord Knaresfield.”

“Quite so. I imagine if Knaresfield insisted Quantock share with him everything the Engine says, Quantock would do so without demur. There is also the charming Archie Slater. It wouldn’t be hard for him, like Knaresfield, to browbeat Quantock. And Slater, as we know, despises me.”

“So Quantock, Knaresfield, Slater – they’re all three of them candidates for the role of Moran’s new overlord.”

“There is one other you haven’t listed.”

“Who?”

“Inspector Tomlinson.”

“No!”

“My recollection of the event is a tad hazy,” Holmes said, “but I do seem to remember that when he arrived in the chamber with the party of dignitaries from London, I was in the midst of a diatribe against the Engine. I’m sure I used the word Gasparini in his presence.”

“But Tomlinson has been our ally. He is a self-professed admirer of your work and mine. He has been nothing but accommodating since we came to Oxford. He is a Quaker, what’s more. Frankly, if he is our enemy, I’m a Dutchman.”