The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (15 page)

For a few days, as I have said, this theory satisfied me, but a time came when I had to admit it would no longer do. On Thursday, the 15th of November, I received a telegram from Berne in Switzerland, which read as follows: ‘M is no more. Returning Saturday. Holmes.’ This terse message plunged me into a condition approaching panic. Holmes was returning! Holmes would be arriving in two days! But was it Holmes I would see walking in through the door? Was it Holmes’s sinewy hand I would grasp, or the incarnadine paw of Jack the Ripper? Could I sit down before the fire and smoke a pipe and exchange pleasantries with a man who might be the Whitechapel murderer? No! The thing was unthinkable. It was no longer enough for me simply to give my friend the benefit of the doubt. I had to know the truth – and quickly!

Back in 1881, shortly after moving into
221B
Baker Street, I had devoted an idle moment to drawing up a list of my new companion’s personal traits, as I then understood them, hoping thereby to deduce the line of work in which he was engaged. This prosaic method must be congenial to my disposition, for seven years later I once again had recourse to it. But my ‘little list’ was this time of a decidedly more sinister cast. I worked at it until the winter dusk descended outside, and then I lit the lamp and worked on. At last I felt sure that I had overlooked nothing of importance. Here is the memorandum I had drawn up:

Reading through this summary proved a sobering experience. I was amazed to find so much evidence suggesting that Holmes was indeed guilty, and even more shocked to discover no single unequivocal fact that proved his innocence. The case for the prosecution was no doubt purely circumstantial, and any given item by itself might mean little enough. But taken together it had all the force of ‘a trout in the milk’, and when one added the evidence I had gathered with my own eyes that morning in Miller’s Court, it amounted to a very weighty indictment. And what could the defence produce by way of a reply? Nothing but my own testimony as a character witness; my conviction that Holmes was simply not capable of these monstrous atrocities.

Once I saw that this was the case, I naturally started to wonder just how well-founded this conviction of mine was. Not that I wished to undermine it, but if my understanding of Holmes’s character was all that stood between me and the possibility that I was sharing rooms with Jack the Ripper, I needed to test its foundations rigorously. For the remainder of that evening, therefore, I sat down and examined, as coldly and impersonally as I could, everything that I knew about Sherlock Holmes. I tried to put aside all my fixed and cherished beliefs, and to examine Holmes as though I were meeting him for the first time. The results of this exercise were startling. In the end, I found that almost everything I had come to take for
granted about Holmes was at best highly questionable and at worst transparently false.

Where did this leave the case for the defence? The first of its two arguments had been that Holmes was ‘above all a great champion of
the
law – the great champion’. Previously, this had always seemed self-evident. Holmes had devoted his life to bringing criminals to justice. To question whether he was a champion of the law seemed on the face of it as absurd as to enquire whether the Archbishop of Canterbury was a Christian. It was of course true that on more than one occasion, having discovered the guilty party, he had summarily appointed himself judge and jury, and allowed a murderer to die in freedom, or a thief to flee the country. But these were only trivial infractions – one might even say, liberal interpretations – of the great rule. The rule itself still obtained. Or did it? As I thought about it, I came to see that for a champion of the law, Holmes’s manner of going about his work was, to say the least, eccentric. When it was a question of accepting or rejecting a case, did he listen to his supplicant’s tale of woe with the feeling that a wrong had been done which it was his duty to put right? Hardly. Moral fervour was a luxury Holmes allowed himself only after having ascertained that the problem presented the necessary features of interest. That was the criterion by which all pleas were judged, and if the case did not interest him he would have nothing to do with it. Was that the approach of a champion of the law, or of a profoundly abstract intellect, which found in criminal investigation an arena for the exercise and display of certain skills? The answer became clear when I considered that, for a true champion of the law, Utopia would be a land where criminal acts were unknown. To Holmes, such a region would truly deserve the legend: ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’

Once I had grown somewhat accustomed to seeing him in this novel light, I asked myself how I could ever have
been so utterly mistaken about Holmes. But the answer was obvious enough. As a chess player must choose first of all the white pieces or the black, so Holmes, in his search for intellectual challenge, had chosen to side with the forces of the law. And since he manipulated them so well, we had all come to identify Holmes with the white pieces – as if their fate meant anything to him outside the game.
The game
! That was his sole delight. And when it palled, when there were no longer any opponents worthy of his powers, he did not rejoice at the overthrow of the black counters. No, he fretted and sulked, and plunged himself into a world of artificial stimulation. There it was, no doubt, in some dark and dismal cavern of the mind unlocked by the spells of cocaine, that a voice had prompted him to move to the other side of the board. It should have come as no surprise to me, of all people. How many times had I heard him bemoan the dullness and lack of enterprise of the criminal class? How many times had he muttered darkly that it was fortunate for society that he chose to spend his energies capturing felons rather than emulating them? How many times had I listened to his speculations on what he might be doing if it were his place to initiate a case instead of standing idly by until one was committed? All in all, it seemed inevitable that Sherlock Holmes should sooner or later have turned to crime.

This was all very well, as far as it went. But surely it did not go nearly far enough to account for the Whitechapel horrors. If Holmes’s very genius had driven him to crime, as I was now ready to believe, would not the basic humanity of the man have ensured that he confined his operations to crimes against property? Here at any rate I could make my stand. The entire fabric of insinuations and innuendo must fall before the simple declaration I had noted down as my second objection to this monstrous charge – Holmes was not a murderer.
Amoral he might be; above the law he might consider himself; a criminal he might even have become, but a killer he was not. That, as I had written, was all there was to it.

If the matter had been less pressing I would have been content to leave it thus. But the news of Holmes’s imminent return had put me to the question in no uncertain fashion. I could not afford the luxury of a suspended judgment. I had to decide whether or not I was to continue to live in Baker Street, and the decision could not be postponed. Yet again I strove to concentrate my mind. But I was too tired, and I could no longer focus my attention. I lay back in my chair and lit a cigarette. Midnight had struck, and it was now the morning of Friday the 16th. Seven days had passed since I stood petrified before that terrible tableau. Now the full horror of it seized my soul again, and like a boreal blast it swept away the fog that had been obscuring my vision of the truth. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, I knew! Holmes’s manner – that was the key! All my sophistry fell to pieces as I recalled with chilling vividness not
what
I had seen Holmes do, but
how
he had done it. That relaxed deliberation! That air of a master admiring his handiwork! Sherlock Holmes incapable of murder? Nonsense! The man who could coolly flay and gut the body of a pregnant woman while whistling airs from Italian opera – though it be for the best reason in the world – was capable of anything and everything.

Thus far, in this trial
in camera
, I had relied exclusively on the form of argument I had learned from Holmes to call the inductive. Working from the facts as I knew them, I had tried to assess the probability of Holmes being the murderer. Now my vision of the scene in Miller’s Court suggested another way. If my friend was capable of murder, what kind of murder would he be likely to commit? I could not imagine him killing anyone whose life was of
the slightest value to mankind, or a source of pleasure to themselves or others. He would therefore choose for his victims those whose lives were brutal, brief; and beastly. Moreover, his legendary coldness to women made it marginally more likely that his victims would be female. Thus the evidence already suggested that he would seek his prey among the unfortunates of the East End. But there was a further clue, furnished by Holmes’s character, which virtually clinched the matter. This was his almost pathological abhorrence of any reference to the act of which that class of female is but a walking incarnation. If he were to kill, therefore, he might well kill Whitechapel prostitutes. It was, after all, the absolute minimum murder – a mere step away from euthanasia.

And the mutilation? That, of course, followed of necessity once he had come thus far. For killing Whitechapel prostitutes would present no challenge to a man of Holmes’s calibre. It was too easy. In order to make the game difficult and dangerous enough to be satisfying, he would have to handicap himself; and the best way of doing this would be to alert the press, the public, and the police to his intentions. But how was he to attract their attention in the first place? As Lestrade had complained, Whitechapel was a criminal’s paradise. Violent death was an everyday occurrence there, and Holmes’s murders, without embellishment, would have aroused no more public interest than a report of a dog-biting incident in Westminster. But if the same dog was savagely to maul several people in the same area, disappearing each time without trace, then the press would sit up and take notice. Thus Holmes had hit on his final tactics. After killing the unfortunates, he would gratuitously mutilate their remains and leave them in the street for the next passerby to stumble on. The effect was all he could have desired. How strange it was, I thought, that the solution should hinge upon the idea of Holmes disfiguring the
dead. One of the first things young Stamford had told me about Sherlock Holmes before he introduced us, back in 1881, was that he was in the habit of beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms at Bart’s with a stick. It all fitted together. I had come full circle.

On this positive note I fell asleep in my chair. When I awakened I found all my certainties in ruins again. Sherlock Holmes – my Holmes! – the face behind the Ripper’s mask? In the cold light of dawn my conclusion seemed utterly fantastic, and the arguments which had led me to it had all fled. But I could no longer delay. I packed my meagre possessions into two trunks, and moved that very morning to an hotel. The same evening I summoned Mary to dine with me, unchaperoned. We had sherry with the soup, hock with the lobster, Beaune with the beef, and champagne with the soufflé. Over coffee I begged her to let us be married immediately. I explained with passionate insistence that I was finding it quite impossible to sleep soundly whilst these dreadful murders continued, knowing as I did that my all was living in a household bereft of any male defender. In vain Mary protested that respectable women were not threatened, that the scene of the crimes was Whitechapel and not Camberwell, and that the risk was therefore insignificant. I brushed aside these objections. How could she tell what such a maniac might do next? No one could deplore indecent haste more than I, but I could not help my tender feelings. As she had observed, I was looking unusually pale and strained. The remedy was in her hands. Not until the light of my life was safe under my own roof would I recover my health once more. At length she yielded to my importunate demands, and we parted on the understanding that our union would take place as soon as the necessary arrangements could be made.