The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (10 page)

“My good luck piece benefits me yet again. I took it from a German ironmonger who thought to ingratiate himself with Chancellor Bismarck by flooding the British market and devaluing its currency. Our educated friend inside is neither a liar nor a myopic. His price would exceed Littlejohn’s ability to pay, and it’s a very good counterfeit.”

“Then we’re licked,” Earp said. “I met Woods. He’s short as a rooster and fat as a hog, just like Doc said. No one would confuse them with the moon out.”

“I should like to see the scene of the atrocity.”

We followed Earp to an open area a hundred yards from the nearest structure, barren but for rocks and scrub and grading downwards from the mining camp, our guide reminding us to be alert for rattlesnakes. The dry earth was scored and spotted with wagon tracks and complex patterns made by overlapping hoof prints.

“A train of supplies and provisions came in from Tucson that night,” Earp said. “Littlejohn and Dundy came out to visit, and the teamsters sat around passing the jug. They say Doc came to the top of that rise, coughing and cussing and calling for Littlejohn to show himself. When Littlejohn got up from the ground, Doc plugged him in the belly. That’s the story they told, anyway, to the last man.”

“Where was Littlejohn standing when he was shot?”

“Right where I am.”

“Doctor, will you stand where Mr. Earp indicated that Doc Holliday stood?”

I went to that spot.

“Mr. Earp, could you mistake Dr. Watson for Holliday under these circumstances?”

“No, sir. A bat wouldn’t. Watson’s a head shorter and twice as thick through the chest.”

“What about at night? Disregard for the moment his mode of dress.”

“The moon was just shy of full that night. What clothes he had on don’t feature. You can make a skinny man look fat in the right clothes, pillows and such, but you can’t make a fat man skinny, nor a short man tall, without a pair of stilts.”

“I think it’s time we met Mr. Woods.”

A crude wooden placard hung suspended by twine above the open flap of a tent with wooden framework, reading
Tailor’s Shop & Undertaking Parlor, A. Woods, Prop.
, in whitewash. We ducked inside and were greeted by a man who rose from a canvas chair. The fellow was neatly dressed in a striped waistcoat, black garters, and grey flannel trousers, but the first thing one noticed was his unnaturally brief stature—four feet two at the outside—and cherubic roundness. He was highly coloured and close-shaven, with clear blue eyes, and were I his physician I might have treated him for obesity, but never consumption. His welcoming expression became a frown when he recognised Earp.

“Mr. Algernon Woods? I am Sherlock Holmes. This is Dr. Watson, my associate, and I believe you know this other gentleman.”

“We met.” His voice, astonishingly deep for the size of its chamber, had a harsh edge. “He accused me of hiring someone who looked like Holliday to kill Littlejohn.”

“I considered and rejected that hypothesis in the case of Jasper Riley. Youngblood is small and lightly populated as yet. Any local resident who resembled Holliday would be certain to fall under suspicion, and no stranger could fail to be noticed and questioned. In the absence of other suspects, I must conclude that one of three men is a murderer.”

“Your man’s in jail.”

“I understand Holliday made use of your tailoring services.”

“He’s particular. Grey coats, never black, and he likes his shirts coloured. I doubled the size of my scrap pile with the stuff he rejected.” He indicated a heap of odds and ends of cloth between trestle tables covered with bolts of material.

“A man of distinction,” Holmes said.

“A man that likes to stand out.”

“In his condition he can hardly hope not to. As undertaker, did you conduct a post-mortem examination upon Littlejohn?”

“I dug for the slug, but it passed on through.”

“Hardly exhaustive. Has he been interred?”

“Buried? Not yet; he’s in back. What are you, Pinkerton?”

“I am merely a visitor with a passion for justice. Would you object if Dr. Watson examined the corpse?”

Woods began to speak, but at that moment Wyatt Earp spread his coat casually, exposing the handle of his revolver. The small man closed his mouth and led us with a waddling gait round the edge of a canvas flap bisecting the tent.

I won’t belabour the reader with the clinical details of my examination. At Holmes’s direction I probed the ghastly wound, then covered the naked body with a sheet and wiped my hands.

“Downwards trajectory through the abdomen,” I said. “Thirty degrees.”

“Holliday was taller than Littlejohn,” Woods said. “It’s natural he would fire at a downward angle.”

Holmes didn’t appear to be listening. “Mr. Earp, would you say the ground sloped thirty degrees at the scene of the crime?”

“About that. I worked on a track gang once and learned a thing or two about grades.”

“Thank you. My compliments, Mr. Woods, upon your reconstructive skills. With rouge and wax you’ve managed to make Mr. Littlejohn appear in excellent health. Would you allow me to buy you a whisky at the Mescalero Saloon, to apolgise for having wrongly suspected you?”

“I won’t drink with Holliday’s friend. I don’t trust him.”

Holmes took Earp aside. The pair spoke in low tones. At length the frontiersman left, but not before casting a dark glance back at Woods over his shoulder.

“Mr. Earp understands and has recused himself from our celebration,” Holmes said.

One whisky became three, then four. I am not a man of temperance, but neither am I bibulous, and I measured carefully my ingestion whilst marvelling at the little man’s capacity and Holmes’s. Their speech grew loud, their consonants less crisp. I had not seen my companion in a state of inebriation and felt embarrassed for him and for my country. I became distinctly ill at ease as darkness fell and the saloon filled with teamsters and miners, all of whom seemed to share my tablemates’ fondness for spirits. I remembered what Holliday had said about a bright moon being ideal for a hanging. Although I had not yet come round to Holmes’s point of view regarding the prisoner’s innocence, I believed no man should be denied his day in court. The guard at the jail could not withstand a drunken mob, and Earp and I would not greatly alter the odds with my friend in an intoxicated state.

Holmes was insensitive to the danger. He suggested we escort Woods back to his establishment, but in truth, when he rose he was as unsteady on his feet as our guest. I kept my hand in my revolver pocket as we walked through that den of smoke and evil intentions, feeling very much upon my own.

My fears for my companion’s clouded faculties were realised when he steered Woods in a direction opposite the path to his tent.

“Holmes,” I said, “this isn’t—”

He cut me off with a sloppy hiss, a finger to his lips and his other hand clutching the little man’s collar, essentially holding him up; Woods was nearly comatose.

Holmes winked at me then. In that moment I knew that he was sober.

Confused and only partially encouraged—for three just men against an enraged herd is scarcely better than two—I accompanied the pair outside the mining camp and down the slope where the murder of Hank Littlejohn had occurred.

“Holmes!” I jerked out my revolver.

A group of men stood at the base of the descent. I recognised Elmer Dundy, Littlejohn’s truculent teamster partner, and the miners who had been with him when he’d accosted us in the saloon.

Holmes grasped my wrist. “Spare them, Doctor. They’re witnesses.”

“Let’s get this done with.” Dundy’s tone now was free of bluster. I considered him more dangerous in this humour than ever. “I came prepared.” He held up a length of rope ending in a noose.

“One moment. Mr. Earp?”

“Here.”

That fellow strode out of the shadow of a piñon tree into the light of a moon that was, in Holliday’s words, “as big as a pumpkin.” His revolver was in his hand.

Dundy and his friends fell into growling murmurs. Algernon Woods, who until this moment had been talking and singing to himself, grew silent, and to a great measure less incoherent. “What’s this about? Where’s my tent?”

“It’s Holliday! He’s busted out!” One of the miners pointed.

We turned to observe a tall, emaciated figure at the top of the slope, wearing a voluminous pale coat and a broad-brimmed hat that shadowed the top half of his face and the hollows in his cheeks. One bony wrist stuck far out of its sleeve as the figure raised his arm to shoulder level and pointed a long-barreled revolver directly at Holmes and Woods.

Several of Dundy’s friends clawed at their overalls, only to stop at a harsh command from Earp, accompanied by the crackling of the hammer as he levelled his weapon at the crowd.

Holmes, with a foolhardiness I could attribute only to the bottle, left Woods weaving to ascend the slope, straight towards the gunman. When he stood beside the figure at the top, he said, “Observe his stance. Is it habitual with Holliday?”

“Ask anyone,” Earp said. “Only fools in dime novels fire from the hip.”

“Mr. Dundy?”

The teamster conferred with his friends, nodded. He was hesitant, and with good reason: All could see that Holmes stood two heads higher than the man identified as Holliday.

Holmes produced a ball of string, one end of which he tied to the barrel of the gunman’s pistol, then relieved him of it and assumed the former’s stance. “Watson!”

I abandoned my weapon to its pocket, the better to catch the spool as he threw it in my direction.

“Mr. Earp, you are Littlejohn’s height, are you not?”

“Give or take an inch, I reckon. I only saw him horizontal.”

“Kindly take Mr. Woods’s place.”

But there was nothing kind in the way Earp shoved the little tailor aside and supplanted him. He stood, holding his aim upon the group of witnesses as, seeing Holmes’s purpose, I unwound the spool.

“Taut, dear fellow! A bullet observes no principle other than the shortest distance between two points.”

I pulled the string tight and placed the spool against Earp’s person. It touched him high on the chest.

“Littlejohn was struck low in the abdomen. You will observe, gentlemen, that I stand at about Holliday’s height.”

No objections were raised. Holmes then returned the pistol to the much shorter man at his side, who raised it to shoulder level and aimed it down the slope. When at this angle I tightened the string, it touched Earp at his abdomen.

“Perspective, gentlemen. A short man standing at an angle thirty degrees higher than the man he is facing must appear taller; but the laws of physics are inviolate.” So saying, he snatched the hat off the man dressed as Holliday.

“So sorry.” The Chinese opium seller smiled and bowed to his audience. “One pipee apiece, courtesy of Mr. Holmes.”

“The thing was simplicity itself,” said Holmes, once we were settled in Mrs. Blake’s boardinghouse, across from the room where Doc Holliday snored and coughed by turns, resting from his incarceration; or more precisely, from his celebration of same at the Mescalero Saloon. “Woods knew Holliday’s sartorial preferences and designed a similar wardrobe for himself whose cuffs fell short of his wrists and whose trousers swung free of his insteps; he was foolish enough to leave it among his scraps, where Earp found it whilst the rest of us sampled the fare at the Mescalero. Had he been unsuccessful, he was to interrupt our drinking session and whisper in my ear. The fact that he did not satisfied me that I had surmised correctly, and I proceeded as we had discussed.

“The subliminal impression created by the costume is of a man too tall for his garb, hence tall. A loose coat implies emaciation regardless of the portliness contained, and an undertaker’s knowledge of cosmetics paints hollows in plump cheeks as easily as it fills in the ravages that scoop out flesh in the final stages of debilitating illness. Stir in a pale moon and the shadows cast by a hat with a broad brim, and you have the recipe for a clever sham.

“I am guilty, through Earp, of burgling Woods’s store. I also took the liberty of palming a spool of his string during our visit. Coughing and cursing, in Holliday’s distinctive Georgia drawl, could only have contributed to the illusion,” he continued. “As Woods said himself, Holliday is a man who likes to stand out. The rest was theatre.”

I said, “I’ll wager it cost you another sovereign to enlist the Chinese’s cooperation.”

“I rather think he enjoyed performing, and would have done it for half. But what price a man’s life, be it even so tenuous and sinister as Holliday’s?”

“And what of Woods? That tiny cell won’t hold off Dundy’s vengeance for long.”

“Wyatt Earp has pledged to protect him until the circuit judge arrives. I do believe his passion for justice is equal to mine; as his loyalty to his friend is to yours.”

This warmed me more than I could say. I felt that a barrier between us had fallen.

“And what is your gain,” I said, “beyond justice?”

He rubbed his hands.

“The chance to drub Wyatt Earp at the game of Faro. I take my profits as they come.”

“Y
ou know, Watson,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, “that I am not a religious man. Neither, however, am I a blasphemous one, and I trust I won’t offend one of your fine sentiments when I wish that the Great Miracle could be repeated in the case of the late lamented Professor Moriarty. I do miss him these foul evenings.”

The date of this pronouncement, according to the notes I have before me, was the twenty-third of December, 1901. The fog that night was particularly dense and yellow, and to peer out through the windows in Holmes’s little sitting-room in the quarters we used to share was an exercise in futility: as well gaze into a filthy mirror.

Beneath that Stygian mass of coal-exhaust and vapour, the fresh snowfall of the morning, which had carried such promise of an immaculate Yuletide, had turned as brown as the Thames and clung to hoof and boot alike in sodden clumps. It seemed as if the Great Grimpen Mire of evil memory had spread beyond Devonshire to fill the streets of London. The heavens themselves, it appeared, had joined us in mourning the loss of our good queen, dead these eleven months.

I was concerned by my friend’s remark; not because it stung my faith, but for the evidence it gave of the depth of his depression. Weeks had passed since he had last been engaged upon one of the thorny problems that challenged his intellect and distracted him from the unsavoury pursuits that endangered his health. He was never wholly immune to their sinister charms, no matter how long he stayed away from them. Indeed, although the ugly brown bottle and well-worn morocco case containing his needle had gone sufficiently untouched for an industrious spider to have erected a web between them and the corner of the mantelpiece, that gossamer strand posed no barrier to inactivity and
ennui
, which were the only things on the earth that Holmes feared. He dreaded them no more than I did their artificial remedy.

“I should think there are dark enough hearts abroad in a city this size without resuscitating Moriarty,” said I, “even in the present season.”

I hoped by this to begin a debate that might stimulate him until such time as his thoughts turned in a more wholesome direction. However, his humour remained unchanged.

“Dark enough, perhaps. But black is an exceedingly dull colour without the scarlet stain of imagination. Even the agony columns have nothing more original to offer than the common run of spouse beatings, lost luggage, and straying children. It’s enough to make one cancel all his subscriptions.” He waved a slim white hand towards the mountainous rubble of crumpled newspapers that had accumulated round the chair in which he sat coiled like Dr. Roylott’s adder.

“I imagine those complaints are original enough to the people concerned. Really, Holmes, at times you can be most solipsistic.”

He shrugged his shoulders in response, scooped up his charred brier, and filled it with shag from its receptacle of the moment: a plaster cast of the skull of the murderer Burke, the original of which was currently on display at Scotland Yard. The crown of the facsimile had been hinged to tip back for convenient storage.

I plunged ahead. “You once ventured the opinion that your absence from London for any length of time encouraged boldness in the criminal classes. Perhaps you should consider a trip to Paris.”

He smiled without mirth. “Good old Watson. You were less transparent when you urged me as my physician to go on holiday, without resorting to subterfuge. I should be just as bored there as here, with the added exasperation of all those cream sauces. No, I shall stay here and await the diversion of a good poisoning.”

I should have argued the point further had not someone chosen that moment to ring at the street door.

“Hark!” exclaimed Holmes, shaking out the match with which he had been about to light his pipe. “There is a merry bell, and there to answer it the sturdy tread of our esteemed Mrs. Hudson. She may bring us glad tidings yet.”

I heartily joined with him in this hopeful anticipation.

Within moments, his prediction was confirmed. I swung open the door in answer to the landlady’s gentle tap and beheld in her hands a curious-looking parcel, a cylinder wrapped in ordinary brown paper and bound with string.

“A delivery for Mr. Holmes, Doctor,” said she. “I gave the fellow tuppence.”

I handed her that sum and accepted the parcel. It was so light it might have been empty.

“Who delivered it, pray?” asked Holmes, who had unwound himself from his chair with panther quickness at the first touch of her knuckles against the door. He stood behind me crackling with energy, the indolent lounger vanished.

“A commissionaire, sir. He said the package was waiting for him when he reported for duty and no one seems to know who left it.”

“Did you believe him?”

That good Scotswoman drew herself up to her not inconsiderable height. “I’d sooner question the character of the prime minister than a veteran.”

“The king himself could not have said it better,” Holmes said, when we were alone once again. “What do you make of it, old fellow?”

“I should say it’s a package of some sort.”

“Pawky elf!” He snatched it from my hands and carried it over to the gas lamp, where he studied the object thoroughly from end to end and all round. It was less than five inches in length, with a diameter of some two and one-half inches, and as I said weighed rather less than a common box of matches.

“No return address or postmark, just ‘Sherlock Holmes, Esq.’ And the address, written in block.” He sniffed it. “Petroleum-based ink, obtainable in any stationery shop for less than a shilling. One might wish that obfuscation involved more trouble and expense; but if that is the only conundrum it presents, it’s preferable to sitting round pining for a new Napoleon of Crime.” He shook it. It made no noise.

“Careful, Holmes! It may be an explosive device.”

“If so, it cannot contain enough powder to snuff out a candle. I’ve examined quite thoroughly the heft and volume of the various volatile compounds in my monograph on demolitions.” Absorbed in his contemplation of the bundle, he fished a hand inside his pocket, appeared to realise tardily that he was wearing his dressing-gown, and charged to the deal table where he kept his chemical apparatus and instruments. He used a surgeon’s scalpel to cut the string.

The gaily decorated cardboard canister that emerged from the wrapping brought an expression of chagrin to his face that nearly made me smile. Events of a far more startling nature seldom caused him such consternation. The red-and-gold lettering described an undulating pattern across the adhesive label, spelling out ‘E
DISON
G
OLD
M
OULDED
R
ECORDS
’.

“It’s nothing but a wax recording cylinder!” I cried.

“Your grasp of the obvious is as sound as ever. Its significance is somewhat more obscure.”

“Perhaps someone knows you’re a lover of music. An anonymous admirer.”

“Perhaps.” He removed the lid and peered inside. Then he tipped the contents out onto the table. The glistening roll of hardened wax rotated to a stop against the base of his microscope.

“Nothing else inside,” Holmes reported, groping at the canister’s interior with the ends of his fingers. “The cardboard doesn’t appear to have been tampered with. I doubt any messages are hidden between the layers.” He set it down and lifted the cylinder, submitting it to the same scrutiny.

“Play it,” said I. “It may be a recorded message.”

“My conclusion precisely. I shall make a detective of you yet.”

He carried the cylinder to the parlour phonograph, a present from the grateful captain of the Pope’s Swiss Guard, and slid it into place. He gave the crank a few turns and applied the needle to the recording. A second or two of hoarse scratching issued from the horn, then the sweet strain of strings, accompanied by the singing of an accomplished male tenor:

The refrain was repeated, after which the recording scratched into silence. I could make nothing of it, other than that someone had gone to some length to play a joke on the famous detective; but Holmes was galvanised. He charged towards his chair, and there on his knees sorted feverishly through the wrecked newspapers, snapping open the sections and raking them with his eyes, disposing of each as it disappointed him and seizing upon the next. At length he shot to his feet, folding one over.

“Hullo, Watson! Listen to this.”

He read:

“‘After the Ball’ is a popular song in America,” said I. “Friends in Chicago have written me that they’re quite weary of hearing it everywhere they go. How can you be certain the recording refers to this event?”

“You must agree that this particular song arriving on the night of this affair is an unlikely coincidence. Use your imagination: ‘Many a heart is aching’; ‘Many the hopes that have vanished.’ What cataclysm might we expect to cause these tragic considerations?”

I frowned. “War?”

“Bravo! The friendship between duBlac and our government is a slim barricade against the centuries-old differences that have plunged England and France time and again into mass bloodshed. Certain foreign powers would have much to gain by eliminating so well-known a French dignitary on British soil.”

“Good heavens! Are you suggesting he may be assassinated at that ball?”

“There is no time to discuss the matter. How soon can you be dressed for a gala evening?”

“Ten minutes from here to my house, and twenty minutes to change.” I snatched my coat and hat off the peg.

“I shall be there with a hansom in thirty minutes. Do not forget to add a revolver to your ensemble. A well-armed man is dressed for any occasion.”

“How are we to get in without an invitation?”

His eyes were bright. “I am Sherlock Holmes. My presence is always welcome among the law-abiding.”

Balderwood House had been built under Charles I, upon the foundations of a monastery burned to the ground during the Reformation. In those days it had occupied a country plot far from the bustle of medieval London: The great fire that had destroyed most of the city under Charles II had been but a glimmer observed from its casement windows. In the ensuing three centuries, however, the metropolis had spread to encompass its walls. A twenty-minute hansom ride deposited us at the gate, which stood open for the convenience of the evening’s guests. Notwithstanding the gay occasion, the dour fog, and beneath it the stark fact of a nation bereaved, cast over the estate a sombre, even baleful aspect. The candles burning in the windows created the impression that we were under the hostile scrutiny of a many-eyed beast from pagan mythology. Despite the clammy chill of the evening, drops of perspiration prickled beneath my boiled shirt.

The butler, a cherubic enough fellow, bald of head and pink of cheek, frowned decorously at Holmes’s admission that we had not been invited, but accepted our cards and asked us to wait in the entryway. Moments later we were joined among the room’s baronial trappings by a handsome woman in her middle years, attired in a black evening dress of dutiful mourning and a minimum of jewels, who introduced herself as Lady Alice Whitsunday, wife of Sir John.

“And which of you is Mr. Holmes?” asked she eagerly, looking from one of us to the other. “You do us a great honour, along with embarrassment that we omitted you from the list of our guests.”

Holmes accepted this well-bred rebuke with equal grace, removing his silk hat.

“I am Holmes, dear madam, and by that confession the man who must apologise for this breach of protocol. This is Dr. Watson, my friend and confidant. It is my belief that someone intends to do your party a great deal more mischief than mine.”

“My stars! A theft?” Her hand flew to the pearl choker at her neck.

“No, Lady Alice. A murder.”

She paled suddenly, and I stepped forwards. However, she was an estimable lady, and instead of swooning tugged at a bell pull. Instantly the butler reappeared.

“Gregory, please fetch Sir John.”

The servant bowed and withdrew. Within a short space of time, the doors to what once must have been the Great Hall slid open, emitting music, sounds of merriment, and the lord of the manor, who drew the doors shut behind him and stood looking down at his two unwanted visitors from his astonishing height. He was a full head taller than my friend, but weighed not a copper more; beneath a shock of startling white hair the very bones of his face protruded beneath his bluish pallor like stones in a shallow pool. The black satin mourning-band sewn to the sleeve of his evening coat was not darker than his gaze.

“What is this outrage?” he demanded coldly.

Holmes wasted no time in niceties.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It has come to my attention that your guest of honour is in grave danger. He may not leave this house alive.”

“The marquis? Indeed. Where did you obtain this information?”

“There is no time, Sir John. Is there a room where we can be alone with the gentleman?”

Parliament has never been known for swift action. I was impressed, therefore, when this esteemed member directed us immediately to a room at the top of the stairs and joined us there within five minutes, accompanied by the French dignitary. The room was Sir John’s study, spacious and scholarly, with books on all sides and claret and cigars on a table opposite his desk, an uncommonly fine one of carved mahogany.