The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (47 page)

Wells grew excited. “You’ve solved it, Holmes? What a remarkable man you are!”

“For the morrow,” Holmes said. “For now, let us enjoy the hospitality of the landlord, and each other’s company. I too enjoyed your
Time Machine,
Wells.”

He seemed flattered. “Thank you.”

“Especially your depiction of the crumbling of our foolish civilization. Although I am not convinced you had thought it through far enough. Our degradation, when it comes, will surely be more dramatic and complete.”

“Oh, indeed? Then let me set you a challenge, Mr Holmes. What if I were to transport you, through time, to some remote future – as remote as the era of the great lizards – let us say, tens of millions of years. How would you deduce the former existence of mankind?”

My friend rested his legs comfortably on a stool and tamped his pipe. “A pretty question. We must remember first that everything humans construct will revert to simpler chemicals over time. One must only inspect the decay of the Egyptian pyramids to see that, and they are young compared to the geologic epochs you evoke. None of our concrete or steel or glass will last even a million years.”

“But,” said Wells, “perhaps some human remains might be preserved in volcanic ash, as at Pompeii and Herculaneum. These remains might have artifacts in close proximity, such as jewellery or surgical tools. And geologists of the future will surely find a layer of ash and lead and zinc to mark the presence of our once-noble civilization – ”

But Holmes did not agree –

And on they talked, H.G. Wells and Sherlock Holmes together, in a thickening haze of tobacco smoke and beer fumes, until my own poor head was spinning with the concepts they juggled.

The next morning, we made once more for the Brimicombe home. Holmes asked for Tarquin.

The younger Brimicombe entered the drawing room, sat comfortably and crossed his legs.

Holmes regarded him, equally at his ease. “This case has reminded me of a truism I personally find easy to forget: how little people truly understand of the world around us. You demonstrated this, Watson, with your failure to predict the correct fall of my sovereign and farthing, even though it is but an example of a process you must observe a hundred times a day. And yet it takes a man of genius – a Galileo – to be the first to perform a clear and decisive experiment in such a matter. You are no genius, Mr Brimicombe, and still less so is the engineer, Bryson. And yet you studied your brother’s work; your grasp of the theory is the greater, and your understanding of the behaviour of objects inside the Inertial Adjustor is bound to be wider than poor Bryson’s.”

Ralph stared at Holmes, the fingers of one hand trembling slightly.

Holmes rested his hands behind his head. “After all, it was a drop of only ten feet or so. Even Watson here could survive a fall like that – perhaps with bruises and broken bones. But it was not Ralph’s fall that killed him, was it? Tarquin, what was the mass of the capsule?”

“About ten tons.”

“Perhaps a hundred times Ralph’s mass. And so – in the peculiar conditions of the Inertial Adjustor –
it fell to the floor a hundred times faster than Ralph
.”

And then, in a flash, I saw it all. Unlike my friendly lift cabin of Wells’s analogy, the capsule would drive rapidly to the floor, engulfing Ralph. My unwelcome imagination ran away with the point: I saw the complex ceiling of the capsule smashing into Ralph’s staring face, a fraction of a second before the careening metal hit his body and he burst like a balloon …

Tarquin buried his eyes in the palm of his hand. “I live with the image. Why are you telling me this?”

For answer, Holmes turned to Wells. “Mr Wells, let us test your own powers of observation. What is the single most startling aspect of the case?”

He frowned. “When we first visited the Inertial Adjustor chamber with Tarquin, I recall looking into the capsule, and scanning the floor and couch for signs of Ralph’s death.”

“But,” Holmes said, “the evidence of Ralph’s demise – bizarre, grotesque – were fixed to the ceiling not the floor.”

“Yes. Tarquin told me to look up – just as later, now I think on it, you, Mr Holmes, had to tell the engineer Bryson to raise his head, and his face twisted in horror.” He studied Holmes. “So, a breaking of the symmetry at last. Tarquin knew where to look; Bryson did not. What does that tell us?”

Holmes said, “By looking down, by seeking traces of Ralph on the couch, the floor, we demonstrated we had not understood what had happened to Ralph. We had to be shown – as had Bryson! If Bryson had sought to murder Ralph he would have chosen some other method. Only someone who has studied the properties of a gravity field changed by the Inertial Adjustor would know immediately how cutting that cable would kill Ralph.”

Tarquin sat very still, eyes covered. “Someone like me, you mean?”

Wells said, “Is that an admission, Tarquin?”

Tarquin lifted his face to Holmes, looking thoughtful. “You do not have any proof. And there is a counter-argument. Bryson could have stopped me, before I cut through the cable. The fact that he did not is evidence of his guilt!”

“But he was not there,” Holmes said evenly. “As you arranged.”

Tarquin guffawed. “He was taking breakfast with my sister-in-law! How could I arrange such a thing?”

“There is the matter of Bryson’s breakfast egg, which took unusually long to cook,” Holmes said.

“Your egg again, Holmes!” Wells cried.

“On that morning,” said Holmes, “and that morning alone, you, Mr Brimicombe, collected fresh eggs from the coop. I checked with the housekeeper. The eggs used for breakfast here are customarily a day or more old. As you surely learned as a child fond of the hens, Tarquin, a fresh egg takes appreciably longer to cook than one that is a day or more old. A fresh egg has a volume of clear albumen solution trapped in layers of dense egg white around the yolk. These layers make the egg sit up in the frying pan. After some days the albumen layers degenerate, and the more watery egg will flatten out, and is more easily cooked.”

Wells gasped. “My word, Holmes. Is there no limit to your intelligence?”

“Oh,” said Brimicombe, “but this is – ”

“Mr Brimicombe,” Holmes said steadily, “you are not a habitual criminal. When I call in the police they will find all the proof any court in the land could require. Do you doubt that?”

Tarquin Brimicombe considered for a while, and then said: “Perhaps not.” He gave Holmes a grin, like a good loser on the playing field. “Maybe I tried to be too clever; I thought I was home clear anyway, but when I knew you were coming I decided to bluff you over Bryson to be sure. I knew about his involvement with Jane; I knew he would have a motive for you to pick up – ”

“And so you tried to implicate an innocent man.” I could see Holmes’s cool anger building.

Wells said, “So it is resolved. Tell me one thing. Tarquin. If not for your brother’s money, why?”

He showed surprise. “Do you not know, Bertie? The first aviator will be the most famous man in history. I wanted to be that man, to fly Ralph’s craft into the air, perhaps even to other worlds.”

“But,” Wells said, “Ralph claimed to have flown already all the way to the moon and back.”

Tarquin dismissed this with a gesture. “Nobody believed that. I could have been first. But my brother would never have allowed it.”

“And so,” said Wells bitterly, “you destroyed your brother – and his work – rather than allow him precedence.”

There was a touch of pride in Tarquin’s voice. “At least I can say I gave my destiny my best shot, Bertie Wells. Can you say the same?”

The formalities of Tarquin Brimicombe’s arrest and charging were concluded rapidly, and the three of us, without regret, took the train for London. The journey was rather strained; Wells, having enjoyed the hunt, now seemed embittered by the unravelling of the Brimicombe affair. He said, “It is a tragedy that the equipment is so smashed up, that Ralph’s note-taking was so poor, that his brother – murderer or not – is such a dullard. It will not prove possible to restore Ralph’s work, I fear.”

Holmes mused, “But the true tragedy here is that of a scientist who sacrificed his humanity – the love of his wife – for knowledge.”

Wells grew angry. “Really. And what of you, Mr Holmes, and your dry quest for fact, fact, fact? What have you sacrificed?”

“I do not judge,” Holmes said easily. “I merely observe.”

“At any rate,” said Wells, “it may be many years before humans truly fly to the moon – oh, I am reminded.” He dug into a coat pocket and pulled out a small, stoppered vial. It contained a quantity of grey-black dust, like charcoal. “I found it. Here is the ‘moon dust’ which Ralph gave me, the last element of his hoax.” He opened the bottle and shook a thimbleful of dust into the palms of Holmes and myself.

I poked at the grains. They were sharp-edged. The dust had a peculiar smell: “Like wood smoke,” I opined.

“Or wet ash,” Wells suggested. “Or gunpowder!”

Holmes frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose the soil of the moon, never having been exposed to air, would react with the oxygen in our atmosphere. The iron contained therein – it would be like a slow burning – ”

Wells collected the dust from us. He seemed angry and bitter. “Let us give up this foolishness. What a waste this all is. How many advances of the intellect have been betrayed by the weakness of the human heart? Oh, perhaps I might make a romance of this – but that is all that is left! Here! Have done with you!” And with an impetuous gesture he opened the carriage window and shook out the vial, scattering dust along the track. Holmes raised an elegant hand, as if to stop him, but he was too late. The dust was soon gone, and Wells discarded the bottle itself.

For the rest of the journey to Paddington, Holmes was strangely thoughtful, and said little.

The Adventure of the Touch of God

Peter Crowther

It was with a mixture of trepidation and eager anticipation that, on a cold and dank November evening, having just arrived back at our rooms in Baker Street from a day-long symposium on glandular deterioration, I greeted Sherlock Holmes’s announcement that we were to journey to Harrogate.

Despite being some 200 or more miles from the capital’s bustling familiarity and drudgery (two indistinguishable sides of the same tarnished coin), the trip clearly promised a return to matters of detection. For though Holmes complemented news of our impending departure with the promise of bracing Yorkshire air to clean clogged and jaded tubes – of both a bronchial and a cerebral nature – I suspected an ulterior motive.

That is not to say that my good friend was not given to displays of impetuosity. Indeed, he had proven to me on many occasions that he was the very soul of immediacy. It was as though he were cognizant of his own mortality. Sometimes, I even thought that he was frightened of idleness, though he was not a man prone to fear or cowardice. Rather it was, or so it seemed, the prospect of inaction that presented the most serious affront to his sense of being. Action, or “the game” as he liked to regard the often heinous crimes whose unravelling he was frequently called upon to master, was what he was here to do. It was for this singular reason that I so welcomed the prospect.

For myself, however, the approach was entirely different. Somewhat in contradiction to the cautious and even begrudging excitement I have already mentioned, it was my custom to regard the prospect of further nefarious activities with some apprehension. On the occasion in question, this feeling was particularly pronounced.

“Might I at least remove my topcoat?” I enquired.

“No time for that, old fellow,” Holmes blustered. “We are to leave within the hour. Here.” He held out to me a single sheet of paper and the envelope in which it had arrived.

Affixing my reading spectacles, I glanced at the letter and its careful and practised copperplate hand. “Read it aloud, old fellow,” Holmes proclaimed with a pride that suggested he himself as the missive’s author.

“ ‘My Dear Mr Sherlock Holmes,’ it begins,” I said. “ ‘Please forgive the brevity of this note and its undoubted intrusion on your privacy but I am in dire need of advice and assistance on a matter of grave importance.’ ”

“ ‘Grave importance’, ” Holmes said, turning his back to the fire crackling in the grate. “Capital!” He glanced across at me and waved a dismissive hand. “Do continue, Watson.”

I returned my attention to the letter.

“ ‘A situation has arisen,’ ” I resumed, “ ‘here in Harrogate which, I feel, requires a level of experience and a depth of knowledge that I am in all honesty quite unqualified to provide, despite some thirty years with the Force.’ ”

“Force?” I enquired of Holmes. “The sender is a policeman?”

“Read on, read on,” Holmes instructed, and he walked to the window and stared into the street.

I returned to the letter. “ ‘We are plagued with a villain the likes of what I have never encountered,’ ” I read, “ ‘a madman in whose wake we now have three deaths and little or no explanation as to the reason behind them. It would be not proper for me to outline the manner of these inhuman atrocities in this letter but I feel sure that they will be of sufficient interest to warrant your visiting us at your earliest availability.’ ”

The letter closed with the writer’s assurance that, in the event of our accepting his invitation, rooms would be arranged for us on our behalf at a nearby hostelry, and at no cost to ourselves. It was signed Gerald John Makinson, Inspector of the North Yorkshire Police.

“What do you say to that, Watson?” Holmes said, warming himself against the fire, his back arched like that of a cat.

I did not know quite what to make of it, save that the Inspector’s grasp of the King’s English was somewhat lacking and I told my friend as much. “For that matter,” I added, “who is this Makinson fellow?”

“I was introduced to him by our very own Lestrade, last June as I recall. The fellow was down in London to attend a series of presentations on the increasing use of behavioural science in law enforcement. His address was most enlightening.”