The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (47 page)

‘And the thumb?' Lestrade asked gruffly.

‘Ah, yes, the thumb. I am glad you paid such attention. By keeping your eye upon it, I could be sure that you were seldom too far off to miss the conversation of Benson and his companions. Had I merely asked you to eavesdrop, I fear you might once again have given the game away.'

Lestrade made no reply to this but returned to his rattling of the door-handle.

‘Something must be done, Mr Holmes! They're getting away!'

Holmes had stepped out of the specially-built shoes which had increased his height by two full inches and was now divesting himself of the padding which had given such bulk to James Lester Valence. In the course of this transformation, he spared the Scotland Yard man a glance.

‘Of course they are getting away! Have you grasped nothing, sergeant? In captivity, Benson and Kurr would be of no use to us. The diamond necklace is no more than a necessary bauble in my scheme. Even the Turf swindle and the Paris Loan are little enough. Let us allow Harry Benson a little freedom and he will lead us to the heart of the conspiracy.'

X

As they walked out of the hotel entrance, Sherlock Holmes tightened his collar against a cold street-wind that had come with the darkness of the spring day.

‘Poor Regnier,' he said wistfully, ‘I believe he thought we should never have been released from our room. And now, if you please, Lestrade, we must look lively and take a cab to Canonbury. From there we shall send a telegram to Scotland Yard, while there is still time.'

Lestrade stopped and turned to him.

‘But we could walk to Scotland Yard from here, Mr Holmes, quicker than any telegram might get there. Five minutes would be more than enough.'

‘So it would, Lestrade, and that is precisely why we shall not do it. A telegram describing the day's developments, sent to the duty-officer of the Detective Division from Canonbury, will serve the purpose far better. I have taken the precaution of obtaining a copy of the duty roster from Mr Williamson, so that I may know who the recipient will be.'

As the wind fluttered the gas-lamps, the two men were driven from the elegance of the Strand, through the streets of Clerkenwell, past the smoky brickwork of St Pancras and out to the more spacious suburb of Canonbury. Lestrade's apprehension appeared to deepen as they passed Holloway and Highbury.

‘You know,' said Holmes conversationally, ‘I am a little surprised that someone as sharp as Benson did not sniff me out. I thought from time to time that he half-suspected something.'

‘He was in your room yesterday afternoon, sir, going through the cigarette-ends. That I can tell you.'

‘Was he, by Jove?' said Holmes approvingly. ‘I should certainly have done the same in his place. With such a beard as I was sporting, a man who smoked a cigarette down to the very end would singe his whiskers, if not set fire to himself. He knew that I did not try to do so in company. Had he found that the butts in my room were smoked to the limit, he would have known for a certainty that the beard was false. You see? It was as well that I allowed for that.'

Sherlock Holmes was unknown to the Canonbury police-station in ‘N' Division. However, one or two of the officers were acquainted with Lestrade and this paved the way for the request that Holmes was about to make. When he heard that request, as Lestrade told me long afterwards, he came closer than ever to a ‘turn-up' with Holmes. ‘For two pins, Dr Watson, I should have refused point-blank to have anything more to do with this madcap business.' The detective officer had lost almost all confidence in his temporary employer. Even the unmasking of Harry Benson had led only to the trickster's escape.

At length, on Holmes's insistence, Lestrade asked for a telegraph message to be wired urgently to Scotland Yard. When the form was provided, Holmes wrote upon it in bold pencilled capitals.

HENRY BENSON, ALIAS MONTGOMERY, ALIAS THE MARQUIS MONT-MORENCY, NOW IN CUSTODY HERE STOP. AWAITING INSTRUCTIONS STOP
.

Then he addressed it carefully to the duty-officer of the Detective Division, and marked it ‘Most Immediate'.

Lestrade stared at the message. In a shadowy corner of the Islington police-station charge-room, there was a muttered exchange.

‘But he's not in custody, Mr Holmes! You know he isn't!'

‘Nor ever will be, Lestrade, so long as you continue to obstruct my investigation.'

‘But what's the use?'

‘It has many uses,' said Holmes, in the same muttering tone, ‘one of them being to save your career and possibly to keep you out of prison.'

At this point, Lestrade concluded that his mentor had gone off his head or that, in any case, argument was useless. The wire was sent. Twenty minutes later, the reply rattled out. Holmes read it and showed it to his companion.

FIND THAT BENSON IS NOT THE MAN WE WANT STOP. RELEASE FROM CUSTODY STOP
=
CARTER, INSPECTOR, SCOTLAND YARD
.

Lestrade looked up with a terrible realization dawning in his dark eyes.

‘Carter? I have never heard of any Inspector Carter!'

‘No,' said Holmes grimly, ‘nor has anyone else. However, I would scarcely expect our correspondent to put his own name to this. I had intended to leave the arrest of Benson and Kurr until tomorrow but you may be sure that before this wire was sent to us another was despatched to them, advising them to get out of the country at once.'

‘You know where they are?'

Holmes paused, then he said, ‘They are not unfamiliar to me. Unless I am greatly mistaken, they are in a house owned by Kurr at Canonbury, packing their traps. To say that there is not a moment to lose is generally an exaggeration. On the present occasion it is correct. Gather all the men you can from this division and we shall do this thing by dark. They cannot expect us yet.'

Twenty minutes later a dozen helmeted officers followed Holmes and Lestrade through the darkened avenues of Canonbury.

‘How could you know where to find him?' Lestrade asked uneasily.

‘Benson has a villa on the Isle of Wight. They would scarcely have gone there at this time of night. Billy Kurr is a bookmaker and the owner of two racehorses. The names of the animals and their proprietor are to be found in the breeders guide. Ah, yes! The Laurels, if I am not mistaken.'

They were standing at the gateway of a house set back at the end of a long drive. Through the fir trees and the laurel shrubberies, Holmes could make out a long veranda with two doors and several windows opening on to it. There were lights on behind two of the three windows, though the curtains were drawn. With Lestrade and two of the senior men from Canonbury, he went on ahead. They walked on the wet grass to one side of the drive to silence their footsteps. It was not difficult to keep the thick laurel bushes between themselves and the windows. Yet the wind was so strong that evening and its gusts moved the branches so erratically that it was hard to tell whether anyone was concealed ahead of them.

Where the drive curved to the left, towards the portico of the house, Lestrade was suddenly blinded by a magnesium brilliance. He could hear his antagonist but it was impossible to see him through the glare. Holmes had stopped, his hand shielding his eyes. The flare illuminated him like a stage spotlight. At that moment there was a crash that made his ears ring. The bullet made a sharp crack as it chipped a stone wall.

Lestrade and the two men from ‘N' Division threw themselves flat. Holmes remained upright, without the least movement, like a predator about to spring. Lestrade assured me that he could swear our friend's pulse did not change nor did that steely resolve falter as a second bullet flew past him.

Holmes, however, paid no less a tribute to the Scotland Yard man. Lestrade was on his feet again. He scarcely raised his voice, yet his words rapped across that damp shrubbery as plain and ominous as the bullets.

‘Don't be a fool, Billy Kurr! This means murder!'

There was no sound nor movement.

‘You haven't got enough bullets in that gun for us all, Billy! One of us will catch you if the others don't. And if it comes to that, you'll hang long and hard!'

There was a long minute of silence. Lestrade spoke again, as if someone had just given him news.

‘Give it up, Billy! The others have taken Benson! You can't do it on your own!'

A man walked towards them slowly from the light. Billy Kurr stopped and looked at Lestrade. Then he looked at Sherlock Holmes, who said not a word, and then at the other men barring the driveway. Lestrade, lean and grim, was the hero of the hour.

‘It's no good, Billy. The game's over.'

Kurr, in the same dog's-tooth check and gripping the revolver that he had held on them in the hotel-room, stretched out his hand and surrendered the weapon to Lestrade.

The other men came into the glare of the lamp.

‘You haven't got Benson,' said Kurr sadly. ‘You couldn't have. He's still in the house.'

Sherlock Holmes nodded to Lestrade. He walked forward with long easy strides, pushing open a veranda door to claim the fugitive.

XI

The scandal that broke in the wake of these arrests filled every newspaper in October 1877, when a third of the Detective Division of Scotland Yard stood in the dock of the Central Criminal Court. Both Sergeant Meiklejohn and Inspector Clarke, the second-in-command of the division, were among them.

Benson and Kurr had already gone to prison for a string of frauds so long that there is scarcely room to recite them here. As Mycroft Holmes had told his brother, the Society for Insuring Against Losses on the Turf and the City of Paris Loan were only the two latest in a series stretching back for many years. No sooner were the criminals in custody, however, than Harry Benson offered the authorities what he called ‘Flower Show Information'.

Believing that his Scotland Yard officers, whom he had bribed and entertained so lavishly over the years, had deserted and deceived him, Benson gave his gaolers the full story of systematic corruption within the Detective Division. In Edinburgh and other cities he had practised the boldest and most widespread swindles, knowing that he had only to run back to London to be safe. From police forces throughout the land, even from the Continent, had come letters and wires to Scotland Yard, naming Harry Benson and Billy Kurr as the wanted men. One after another these messages were destroyed by officers so steeped in corruption that to turn back was more perilous than to continue. Detectives and criminals alike stood in fear of their crimes being brought to justice.

Holmes took little pleasure in witnessing the tragedy of such men as Clarke and Meiklejohn. Yet the consequence was that he now established himself as a confidant of Superintendent Williamson and the senior echelons of the Metropolitan Police. Inspector Lestrade, in his new rank, was vindicated as an honest and able officer, despite the occasional strictures passed upon him by Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, though the old structure of the Detective Police was abolished and a new Criminal Investigation Department set up, Lestrade was first to be a senior inspector in the newly-created Special Branch, whose activities were naturally of great interest to Sherlock Holmes.

I have always thought that the arrest of Benson and Kurr, as well as the cleansing of ‘Williamson's Augean Stables', to use Holmes's term for it, was the culmination of my friend's early career. Within a fortnight of being called upon, his skill had put an end to the most dangerous series of frauds and rooted out corruption at the heart of Scotland Yard. In dealing with the swindlers, his keen mind had seen where the weakest point of his antagonists lay. He knew that a sharper like Benson would never be able to resist a ‘mug' like James Lester Valence. Taking the jeweller Regnier into his confidence, Holmes had laid his snare with a skill that few confidence men could have rivalled. He assured me he knew, before he started, that ‘Poodle' Benson had performed a similar trick on a wealthy American in Paris. The chance to repeat it in London would therefore be irresistible. My friend would tell his story, chuckle, and then say, ‘I don't mind confessing to you, Watson, I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal.'

For that reason alone, he was a match for Harry Benson and Billy Kurr. Perhaps, in describing his triumph over them at the Charing Cross Hotel, he might better have called his adventure, ‘The Case of the Biter Bit'.

The Case of the Naked Bicyclists

I

It was very seldom that I felt a sense of oppression during the tenancy of our Baker Street rooms. However, the visit of Mr William Coote, Solicitor to the National Vigilance Association, scarcely promised to be a light-hearted affair.

Holmes and I had met Mr Coote several years previously in the matter of a forged will. During that transaction, the lawyer elicited that Holmes had been a friend and admirer of the late Sir Richard Burton, renowned as an explorer, anthropologist and translator of
The Arabian Nights
. Mr Coote had heard that Lady Burton intended to dispose of a manuscript of her husband's, Sir Richard's translation of
The Perfumed Garden
, a somewhat racy classic of Arabian love-literature. Mr Coote expressed great interest in purchasing this rarity.

We assumed that Coote intended to publish this work in a learned edition or perhaps to offer the autograph to the British Museum. What was our horror on hearing that the relic had been bought so that he and his confounded vigilance association might commit it to the flames! The burning of any book, let alone this monument to a friend's labours, was an abomination to Sherlock Holmes.

It had therefore taken some persuasion before my friend would consent to receive Mr Coote in his consulting-rooms. Had it not been for the inertia of the criminal classes in the warm summer weather, and the tedium consequent upon this, Holmes would scarcely have bothered to listen to Coote's submission. As it was, he promised ‘to hear what the wretched fellow has to say'. I quite expected him to grant Coote an audience merely for the pleasure of telling him to go to the devil. Indeed, I believe that had been his intention. As for Miss Pierce, the client who accompanied her legal adviser to Baker Street, she was described as the tenant of a grim, remotely-situated house near Saffron Walden, and a warm supporter of the Vigilance Association.