The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy (5 page)

‘There is always the risk that they will contest his expertise. Or they might
mislay
Sherlock Holmes’ report. Anything is possible. So my dear lady, in the name of the
Justice for Casement Committee
, I urge you to think of ways which might strengthen our case.’

‘I will try of course, Mr Doyle. I am honoured that you think I am capable of making a contribution.’ The famous author nodded, looked at his watch and indicated that he ought to be leaving. He picked up his hat which he had placed on the stand, but I could not let him go before asking him a question.

‘Mr Doyle, tell me this please: Professor Challenger strikes me as being so authentic, I mean his mannerisms, his speech patterns and everything. It is as if you were describing a real person. I can almost see him, so vivid is his description.’ The famous campaigner seemed heartened by this. ‘My dear lady, I am honoured that you have recognised this. I based him on my own Professor William Rutherford to whom I owe what little human physiology I had to learn to become a medical practitioner.’ He bowed to me. Algie saw him to the door. I was thrilled by this meeting and the upshot was that they had no sooner turned their backs on me than an idea had sprouted in my head.

Later Algie arrived and we discussed my plan of action. He immediately approved of it.

Number 221B would be unattended! Having obtained the intelligence from Mr Doyle himself that its occupant had gone to Suffolk, I jumped on a tram and made my way to Baker Street. Algie undertook to find Artémise and Bartola and bring them to Warren Street. We were going to do what we had already done once before, when Clarihoe was being blackmailed by that puppy, Douglas Mill de la Marelle.

I hadn’t the least difficulty entering the premises as Mr Holmes has that self-assurance common among powerful people that no one would dare trifle with them. I should advise him to use more secure locks—not
that they would have stopped
me
. Once inside, I located the facsimiles I had come for without difficulty, for he never changes his habits. I rushed to Warren Street with my finds and was disappointed that none of my three accomplices had yet arrived.

I lit a powerful gas lamp as I wanted to study the documents I had just purloined. One was the defiant speech the Irishman had made to the tribunal, in which he protests against the jurisdiction of the Court and claims that his argument was addressed not to the English Court, whose jurisdiction he did not recognise, but to his own Irish countrymen. My first observation was that the characters often varied in size. The other facsimile was of the passage in his diary where he writes about the feelings aroused in him at the sight of a young Congolese wrestler’s muscular rear. The similarity was striking. No one would fail to recognise the two as having been written by the same person. The only difference I could detect was that the ink in the speech was black and fresh with the letters boldly formed, whereas the diary was sepia and had faded a bit. This struck me as natural seeing that the latter specimen was older and had at the same time probably deteriorated in the conditions prevalent in the tropics.

When the others arrived, we sat down, Traverson, Bartola and I and pored over the documents. After looking at the individual letters in each case, and other factors like the spaces between words, the slants, we were unanimous in our opinion that they were written by the same person, confirming our fear that the diaries were genuine. I proposed that Traverson helped me create a fake copy of the page which Bartola would then take to a photographer she knew in the Elephant and Castle to obtain another reproduction. I would then stealthily re-introduce this in Sherlock Holmes’ drawer where I had found the original, before he returned from Suffolk.

Artémise and I copied a sample of the letters onto a large sheet of paper, and then we worked on subverting them in such a way that on the surface the two specimens would look similar, but a closer scrutiny which Mr Holmes would indubitably subject them to, would reveal striking differences. Mr Reynolds asked me to append an illustration of the facsimiles used, and my faithful readers will see for themselves what we
were trying to do. It was Mr Reynolds who said that one photograph has greater power than a thousand words. The discerning reader would wish to spend some time studying the chart below and will note, for example how Sir Roger never entirely closes his ‘a’ or his ‘o’. In our reproduction, we naturally keep the shape but close them.

(i) Casement’s alphabets above our forged ones

Again the ‘t’ in the original is crossed by a line sloping downward, whereas we make our line incline in the opposite direction. Note how Casement’s ‘g’ and ours differ by our curlicues at the top of the circle, in that they are mirror images of each other.

(ii) From Casement’s Black Diaries with our version below.

The return of the papers to Baker Street was carried out without a hitch. As we anticipated, Sherlock Holmes declared it a fake. This gave added momentum to our cause. Mycroft was given a report which stated that there was no doubt in Sherlock Holmes’ mind that the “Black Diaries” was a forgery.

Unfortunately, that did not stop Roger from being hanged on the third day of August without warning. Later we would find out that Mycroft had fulfilled the role we had planned and handed over the report
to his minister. The latter having read it, and not liking what he saw, decided not to publicise it nor pass it on to the Privy Council. These actions can easily be construed as knowingly sending an innocent man to the gallows. In parallel, the bad publicity arising from the story of the “Diaries” had managed to cool down the ardour of many lukewarm supporters, to whom a promise of proof of their falseness had been given, with none delivered. The American lobby thought they hadn’t got a leg to stand on and became less vociferous, thus emboldening our enemies. The night of the execution, we held a wake for the hanged man at Water Lane. The Crown Prosecution had refused to give the broken body to the family. Mr Conan Doyle did us the honour of attending. He was clearly heart-broken, and gave vent to his anger by talking of the barbaric practices of King Leopold. His men felt free to cutting off the arms and limbs of the natives as punishment for slacking. Doyle had written a tome on this:
The Crime of the Congo
, and this had caused quite a ripple, and not only in Brussels. Algie averred that the establishment needed to punish Casement because he was thought in certain quarters of being a danger to the Empire. By voicing strong disapproval of King Leopold’s ruthlessness, the establishment claimed, he was inviting unpatriotic sections of the population to draw a parallel with what was happening in our own colonies and dominions. Casement was therefore deemed dangerous, and his execution was to protect the Empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the latter, Doyle had found himself in the slough of despond.

Algie read a funeral oration, and quoted from Doyle’s book
The Crime of the Congo
, and we all had tears as he read an extract from Casement’s report:

“...Men still came to me whose hands had been cut off by the King’s soldiers during those evil days, and said there were still many victims of this species of mutilation in the surrounding country. Two cases of the kind came to my actual notice while I was on the lake. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt-ends of rifles against a tree, the other a young lad of eleven or twelve years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. This boy described the circumstances of his mutilation, and, in answer to my inquiry, said that although wounded at the time he was perfectly
sensible of the severing of his wrist, but lay still fearing that if he moved he would be killed. In both these cases the soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth, and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit. The old woman had died at the beginning of this year, and her niece described to me how the act of mutilation in her case had been accomplished.”

Even tough Vissarionovich joined us in shedding copious tears for the little mutilated Congolese children as well as for our dead friend who we had been unable to save. Our blood boiled when we remembered that it was Judge Selbow who directed the jury to pronounce the sentence and who had rushed to take out his black cap from its box. Perhaps with another judge the outcome would have been the same, but then Septimus Selbow was the chap who was terrorising poor dear Rosa.

First I sent word to Rosa asking her to come to my office in Warren Street. Early next morning she arrived in tears and told me that she had mustered all the courage she had in her body and had approached Septimus in the library. She told him she had something to say to him. He had stared at her in disbelief.

‘
You
have something to say to
me
? Is that what you are saying? Woman, if I want to talk to you, and I can’t for the life of me imagine when such a situation might arise,
I
will signify to you
my
intention. Now make yourself scarce.’ She had bent her head and was ready to turn back, but she didn’t know what devil possessed her. She raised her head again and took one step towards him. ‘You better sit down and listen to what I have to say, Septimus,’ she heard herself say in an untrembling voice. In eight years of marriage she had never once done anything like that. It was more the surprise that made him gape at her, and he sat down.

‘Well?’ he grunted.

‘I want a divorce,’ she had said without preamble. He burst out laughing.

‘Are you insane, woman? And how are you supposed to live? Who’s going to give you food? Clothing? A roof over your head? Have you
turned into a lemming? They are the most stupid creatures in existence—apart from you- now I discover. Of their own volition, they make for the cliffs and plunge to their deaths below.’

She had started blinking and was stunned into silence. He had only just started, and went on for what seemed like half an hour, deriding her pusillanimity (she admitted that she had never come across the word and had to look it up in the morning), her gormlessness (she discovered that the two words meant more or less the same thing), her complete lack of social graces, her ignorance and lack of learning (idem). Yes, he hated everything about her, the way she looked, her fried fish eyes, her pallid face, her shapeless nose (in truth Rosa had a fetching one), her laziness and inertia.

‘If you want to leave, you are welcome to do so. Just pack up your things and move your miserable carcass out of the way.’ He had grown red all over and was shaking his fist at her. She feared, no she hoped that he might end up with an apoplectic fit. She was still undeterred in her resolve.

‘But I want a proper divorce,’ she said.

‘Why? What grounds have I given you? Have I ever lifted a finger on you? Am I a drunkard or an alcoholic? A gambler? Do I have mistresses, do I visit whorehouses? No ma’am.
I
will divorce
you
and no magistrate is going to give you a penny. But I will lodge a penny in the bank in your name and you can live on the interest, ha! I don’t need you, the children don’t need you now that they are in boarding school. You are at liberty to do as you please.’ She was drained of all energy and had no fight left in her. She turned round to go to her room and have a good cry, but he had a final thing to tell her.

‘Without me you will end up either in the workhouse or in a whorehouse where you will die a slow death of the pox. Mark my word.’

How she wished she had the courage to do away with herself. How she wished that he would strike her rather than insult her. Rosa told me that she was still staying in Ossulton Street, but dreaded that any day now he would throw her out. I reassured her on this score. He will do nothing of the sort, because as a High Court Judge he wouldn’t want it known that he’d cast his lawfully wedded wife out of his house. If he is ill-advised enough to choose this course, I shall enlist the help of my
journalist friends to propagate the intelligence to the public. There were many people who would relish the possibility of tearing him to pieces after what he had done to Casement.