The Final Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Volume 1 (9 page)

Chapter XIV. Conan Arthur.

‘I apologise for my half-educated grandson's behaviour, Snowy. He is young at the game of life as yet. I rather fear that my daughter made a significant mistake in marrying a mere Welshman, rather than a Yorkshireman. There may be some… simplicity there. I taught him some basic mathematics and literature and it went to his hairless little head. His knowledge of ciphers is skimpy, to say the least. But he is surely handy with a butcher's knife. And Gilbert & Sullivan, of course. Not so handy with a gun, fortunately. It was his decision to take a pot shot at Holmes in The Stranger's Room, not mine. I had to have words with him about that. He came close to depriving me of my final piece of performance art.'

Doyle reclined his bony skeleton upon an oil canister and lit a strange-looking cigarette. He blew smoke up towards the ceiling through the corner of his mouth and narrowed his piggy eyes. That was when I realised he was smoking marijuana, as I believe it is called nowadays.

‘I wonder how well you know your glorious colleague, Dr Watson? How well you know the real William Sherlock Scott Holmes, the great detective? He of the hooded, chiselled features and the furrowed, intellectual brow? The violinist, cocaine addict and chemistry playboy? Not at all, I suspect. I knew him as a boy when we played together in the fields near Hillcroft House in Yorkshire. That was a long time ago. A lifetime.'

My captor paused, in what I imagined was an attempt to look tragic.

‘My lifetime, actually. The real name's Conan Arthur, by the way. I adopted the other name after my first stint in the snake pit. Changed my accent, too. Nobody was going to know anything about my past life. I was turning over a new leaf, a new page in the book, if you like.'

Doyle jumped off the canister and started to walk around the garage. I continued my attempts to slide one hand through a shackle. And listened.

‘He was a very good sportsman in those days, your friend. There was a time when we discussed the chance of a career for him in county cricket – I was nowhere near as good – but his interest in ball sports waned later on, to be replaced by his private little scientific world and some wierdo Japanese fighting nonsense. As you see, I have been following very closely the exploits of the Bobbsey Twins in The Strand Magazine. I know a lot more about your lives than you might imagine. Hah! Dozens and dozens of years spent stalking the pair of you, and never once caught! One evening I plucked up enough courage to pass by the pair of you in Baker Street and mutter, “Good Evening, Sherlock Holmes”. And you thought it was Irene Adler in disguise! Then there was the occasion, during what you subsequently called your investigation of The Solitary Cyclist, that I imagined Holmes recognised me in some pub I'd followed him to in the country. He'd got involved in a boxing match and done rather well. I was almost proud of him. All this was after I got out of Bethlem, of course. Deemed to be mended, I was, and fit for re-entering the community. Hee-hee-hee. Oh, hah! Hah! Wheee!'

At this, Doyle went into a fit of giggles, which only came to a halt when he had a coughing seizure. It took him a while to recover. The rattling within his chest gave me the pleasurable hope that he might be seriously ill. Not that it mattered, if he was intent on bringing Holmes down with him. I struggled yet again with my ropes, but to no avail. Strangely, hanging from a wall seemed to ease the pain from my old war wound.

‘Don't bother,
old fellow
. You are bound with those ropes until the next stage of our plan. The final solution, you might call it. You should really hope that Holmes can't crack our last cipher and clue to get here, as that is when you will both meet your Maker. Now where was I? Oh, yes. The true story of the childhood of Sherlock Holmes. I don't know what he has told you about that subject, but prepare yourself for a shock, Watson. The humble, loyal and faithful servant. I bet he didn't tell you that we were lovers, did he?'

Again I pushed and pulled to contradict his filthy lies. Doyle ignored me. He seemed to lose himself in some fantasy world of the past.

‘We were teenagers, and I was living in a cabin out in the Carperby woods around Richmond. I'd run away from home, actually. My parents couldn't stand my feminine traits and the idea of their son being a bundle of sticks, a
faggot
who liked dressing up in his mother's clothes. A
homosexual
. What a nasty word that is. Not half as acceptable as the word
heterosexual
, eh, Snowy? But not for broad-minded Sherlock. Handsome, intellectual, beautiful Sherlock. He was hungry for all the experiences that life could offer him in those days.'

Doyle stood in front of me again, and gazed into my eyes, as though to emphasize the point he was making.

‘Yes, we were lovers,' he said dreamily. ‘Young lovers for all of two weeks. Every night we experimented with ways of expressing our feelings for each other. It was his first, innocent experience of the perils of the flesh.'

Doyle threw away his cigarette and returned to sit on the canister.

‘That is to say,
I
was in love with
him
. In exactly the same way that you were in love with each of your two wives, Snowy. Both of whom you have lost, so I would expect you to know how I felt then. Sherlock? Apparently he was merely in
lust
with me. Not the same thing, I think you'll agree. Then it was all over. He told me that he wasn't
cut out
– his very words – for that sort of thing, that he was too conventional and didn't want to end up in
queer
street. He left me in my cabin to my own devices. Walked away one day without a backward glance. My God! I had never imagined that such exquisite pain could exist! It turned my mind to sawdust. I stopped eating – there wasn't that much anyway, without his contributions, apart from berries – and sleeping. I'd wander the woods at night, baying like a wolf at the moon. I didn't care about anything. Whether I lived or died was immaterial to me. I stopped washing and defecated and pissed anywhere and everywhere. All I wanted was Sherlock back in my arms at night and his lips upon mine.'

I heaved away at those cursed ropes to take my mind off what that damned rotten liar was saying. Holmes kissing another man! The very idea!

‘Things came to a head one evening. I shall never forget it. I decided to approach his house to plead with him to take me back. He met me at the gate, enraged that I should attempt to
destroy his life
– his actual words, Snowy. We came to blows and he hurt me badly, being a much better boxer than myself. I limped back into the forest and my cabin and lay there for about a week without moving an inch. Then the treacherous bastard decided that my presence even in the woods was too much of a risk to his precious future, and sent for the white coats. That was in… let me see – 1872. Do you know how many years I spent in bedlam, Snowy? No? Twenty. Two zero. Twen-tee! Over a quarter of my life shoved down the toilet by that devious charlatan. The subsequent incarcerations were also due to him, in my opinion, although he was by then a famous personality and I just a little-known librarian. With a deadly secret in his heart, admittedly. One that I could never announce, because… because I
still
love him, even now. Can you understand that?'

I gave up struggling and tried to stand on the ground as much as I could with my good leg, to soften the excruciating pain in my lower back. But I could not bring myself to look into the eyes of this madman.

‘Of course you can't. I wouldn't expect you to.'

Suddenly Doyle doubled over and fell off the canister. He lay groaning on the ground for a full minute, and then twisted around to vomit profusely onto some leaves on the floor. His face reached a shade of puce. He retched again and again. Then he took something out of a pocket and swallowed it. After a short while he recovered slightly and stood up, rubbing his stomach.

‘Sorry about that,
old fellow
. Just a spot of stomach cancer. Nothing to worry about. Not after a few more months, anyway. That's all I've got left. You might wonder why am I bothering to extract my vengeance on the goats at this late stage? And why those particular goats? Well, here's one you'll remember:
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord
, and all that. When you get the old come-hither, that's the time to settle scores. With the people who destroyed MY life!'

Doyle had turned around to me and screamed the word in my face with his foul breath. Those piggy eyes were popping out of his head. The goatee shone with spittle and he stank to high heaven. His body was obviously rotting away. The man's reason hung by a slender thread and he looked like he should be back in Bethlem at that very moment. In a straitjacket.

‘Yes. Perhaps you'd be interested in knowing how these people destroyed my life, Snowy. I observed your career with Sherlock closely and I have come to the conclusion that you are a decent, loyal, straightforward human being, in a world of deviants. One righteous man in sorrow, as my old man used to say, before he stopped talking to me. I may even let you live after I punish Sherlock, so that you can immortalise me in print. What shall we call it?
Sherlock Holmes And The Vengeance Of Conan Arthur
? Sounds good to me.'

He had calmed down and returned to his canister.

‘There was always a plan. I spent my entire adult life outside hospital, constructing an appropriate revenge for all those people who had taken love from me and promised love in return, without delivering. And there are so many! Can you imagine what happens to a person like me in a mental hospital, Snowy? The vicious lunatics who attacked me every night and left me bleeding and half-dead? They used me as a pin cushion. Twenty years of it. I can't get back at them now, as most of them are either dead or still incarcerated. But the others. Well.'

Doyle folded his hands around his knees, leaned back and stared into space.

‘Mycroft wasn't the first, you know? Oh, the others will never be found, I can assure you. I was on my own then, without any of Ifan's silly ciphers or the knife stuff. I was strong enough to strangle them and lose their bodies in the Thames, with a cement necklace. You wouldn't know them, but they were guilty of the same crime. Pretending to love Conan Arthur. Using me for their own pleasure, and then dumping me. Now you're probably asking yourself: Why Mycroft? Why old man Holmes? Why Partridge and Garnett? Why the Bloomsbury Group, who were so good to me after Mrs Woolf helped me to recover from my illness and introduced me to their wonderful world of literature, politics and art, a world that I had never known before?'

The lunatic was silent for a moment. He wet his lips with a snake-like tongue.

‘When I was that teenager, before I fell in love with Sherlock, I had been introduced to the world of sex by Sherlock's father, old Mr. Holmes himself. I was thirteen then and had no idea what was happening to me. Totally ignorant, I was. He forced himself upon me one day in the hay barn. He was just a smelly old drunk and I was disgusted and felt filthy afterwards, but at the same time, I knew that if he had treated me differently…? Well. He must have talked to his eldest son about me, as he started in on me as well. That was when I began to wax clever and demanded payment from them each time.'

I was struggling to close my ears to this horrifying story, but failing badly. I noticed the murderous rat had started to cry.

‘Needless to say, Sherlock knew nothing about me and his father and brother. I didn't want him to, as I valued what we had together so much. I don't know if they ever told him, or if he worked it out for himself. He is the great brain, after all. And so I gained my just revenge on Edward Holmes. He even provided lunch for us that day, he was so pleased to see me, and to meet my grandson, who sang him one of his witty ditties. Little did he know what we had in mind for him. Then it was clever little Ifan's idea that I straddle the wheelchair, so there'd only be one set of footprints on the way to the barn. And a piggy-back on returning to the kitchen. Another puzzle for Sherlock! Mycroft was even easier, as I am a member of the Diogenes Club, and all we had to do was wait for him to fall asleep in his chair, and for everyone else to leave. As for Partridge… well, same, same really. Although we were interrupted before we had finished with him by the return of Strachey and his ugly wife, and had to make a hurried exit out the back door. Hah! Good old Ralph enjoyed his bread buttered on both sides. Man or woman, he didn't mind which.'

Doyle pulled his sleeve across his eyes to wipe away his tears.

‘And now it seems there's one goat left, the only person I ever really loved, who abandoned me at a critical time in my life, and who was responsible for everything that came afterwards – all those years in and out of mental hospitals. I can't describe to you what that was like. You would have to experience it for yourself. Mrs Woolf rescued me, right enough, and I'll always be grateful to her. She gave me copies of her books to read, but I couldn't make sense of them. And I couldn't keep up with that Bloomsbury set, no matter how hard I tried. They seemed to know everything about everything. I was lost inside the group, and had to get out as soon as I could. For the sake of my own self-esteem, if for no other reason. Meeting Mycroft again was fun, though. He pretended not to remember me, but I knew that he did. So I made a point of staying close to him, and making myself available to him, if you know what I mean? He didn't respond, being so far up the chain of government by then that being seen with a dirtbag like me might damage his career. I embarrassed him. Hah! Do you know why I call myself the Goatslayer, Snowy? Because goats butt each other. And they are fastidious about cleanliness and they like a frequent change of feed. That's why. Oh, Holy Mother Of God! Sweet Jesus!'

Doyle had fallen off the canister onto the floor and lay clutching his stomach in agony. He struggled to get something from a pocket and put it into his mouth. Some sort of morphine tablet, I assumed. I found myself hoping that he might not die just yet, and leave me in the hands of his lunatic knife-wielding grandson. But the pill did its work and he recovered.