The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes (18 page)

‘How odd that they remember me still,' he said.

‘You were a bigger celebrity than you thought,' I answered. ‘Bigger than
I
thought, frankly.'

Holmes stepped to the desk, rather awkwardly, and said to the girl, ‘Hello – I'm Sherlock Holmes.'

She laughed. ‘Of course you are,' she said. ‘You even look like Sherlock Holmes. Here, would you care for a Sherlock Holmes map of London?'

ELEVEN

Tetchwick Manor

H
olmes was in almost preternaturally high spirits as we descended into the Underground at Baker Street. We boarded the northbound Metropolitan Line train. Beyond the huge carriage window advertising posters stared at us brightly. Then they began to slide, to blip, to blur – they vanished in a slap of blackness. We passengers sat all bathed in light like objects on display in a shop window, swaying like tulips, and Holmes's eyes darted boldly over the people in the carriage, one by one, stripping them of secrets they didn't even know they had . . . or so I imagined.

‘We rode this line often,' said Holmes, turning his head slightly to look at me slantwise.

‘We?'

‘Watson and I.'

‘I didn't realize the Underground existed back then.'

‘Oh, yes. In fact, it was pretty much the same as it is now, although it was steam-powered. The Metropolitan Railway began in the 1860s I think. They electrified it in '05. At the time we wondered whether electricity would be strong enough to pull a train. Lighting a bulb and pulling a train did not seem the same thing.'

We slid to a halt in the Northwick Park station.

‘Next is Harrow-On-The-Hill,' said Holmes.

‘For a man who hasn't ridden this line in ninety-five years,' I said, ‘your memory is astounding.'

‘Fear does that. Last time I got off at Harrow-On-The-Hill we were trying to crack the Archibald smuggling ring. Lestrade was with me, and Watson too. We were looking for a big dog with a diamond-studded collar. We carried revolvers, all three of us. And we needed them. I was completely in the dark about what was really happening until the last moment when Elsie Frilling's wig slid and she turned out to be Tom Turk, the most dangerous killer in London.'

‘So what happened?'

‘I had to use this—' He tapped the right pocket of his brown overcoat.

‘Holmes!' I cried, and then I hushed my voice to a whisper. ‘I hope you haven't got a revolver in that pocket – they are now illegal in this country.'

‘So Lestrade told me,' replied Holmes, coolly. ‘But the law missed me. It can't be applied retroactively. When I vanished in 1914, Watson and Lestrade went down to my little place in Sussex and collected my belongings – among them the Webley in my pocket at this moment, my reserve revolver. They thought I must be a prisoner of war and would return eventually, so they took my clothes, books, violin, notebooks full of newspaper clippings, syringe in its morocco case, revolver, cartridges and so on, and Lestrade stored all these things at Scotland Yard in a labelled container. His grandson, the man you just met yesterday, produced all these stored items for me when he met me on my release from Dr Coleman's care, but since I had no place of my own just then, I left most of my belongings in his care for the time being. I did want my revolver, however. I pointed out to young Lestrade that I had owned the revolver before the law was passed, and that the law therefore did not apply to me. I am not sure of the legal merit of my argument, but he allowed it. He slid me the revolver and said – and I think I quote exactly – “Get it out of sight, Holmes, and don't shoot yourself in the foot with it.”'

‘My heavens, Holmes. Do you really think you may need that revolver today? Do you intend to bring someone down with it?'

‘A dirty game is afoot, Watson. Colonel Davis's days may be numbered if we fail to intercept the man who is playing it.'

‘And what sort of person are we looking for?'

‘The facts are still circling in my mind like geese, Watson, and haven't found a pond to land on.'

‘You've gotten quirky with your metaphors in your old age.'

‘How very astute of you! I've noticed the same thing. Many of my ideas seem queer to me nowadays. I'm not sure all the chemicals of my brain remained precisely in their proper configuration.'

We rode in silence past Harrow-On-The-Hill, Pinner, Moor Park. All the stops blurred together in my mind like the posters that blurred as we sped away from each station. I looked at Holmes and could not tell whether he looked innocent, worldly or both. According to Watson's account, in the old days he was rather a cold fish, though with a number of endearing quirks. And this was about right. He made such grand efforts to suppress all sides of his mind and personality except the logical side that at times I could not tell whether naïveté or perversity had the better claim. Could he really imagine there was any great advantage – presuming it could be done at all – in draining away all the warm impulses of the human heart and soul, leaving only the cold machinery of calculation to crank away unimpeded by distraction? He sat very straight in the bright modern seat. The huge glass window of the shining carriage held his half-reflection. He wore a brown coat and corduroy trousers and brown leather shoes, and he wore an expression that made him look somewhere between happy and amused. His sharp profile could make me imagine a hawk about to dive on its prey, or an old uncle with a quirky sense of humour and a bag of candy in his pocket for the kids. Also, he wasn't completely on the side of logic. He did have this new theory about the necessity of illogical poetical leaps in the logical process. So it really wasn't true, I thought, that he was one thing. Just mostly one thing. And this made it all the more surprising and rewarding when suddenly, amidst all his enumerating and filing and compiling of facts, he suddenly paused and just frankly admired (for a brief moment) the loveliness of the thing he was observing, irrespective of its relevance to ‘the case': a footprint in dark soil. A face in a train car. A sudden baffle of wind that wakes the mind.

We stood in the blowing street outside the station at Croxley Green. The air was fresh, the leaves half-fallen from the trees, the sun lazy and hazy. We paused at a promising pub to eat a ploughman's lunch. It was a warm place, old wood and mirrors and a ruddy-faced tapster.

‘The English Pub will last forever and never changes much,' said Holmes.

At that moment his cell phone began playing
Für Elise
. He flicked it to his ear. ‘Holmes here. Yes, Lestrade . . . We are at this moment about to set out afoot from Croxley Green to have a look . . . yes . . . Well, I can't say for sure just yet, but I expect to have enough facts within a few hours to be able to explain everything pretty convincingly . . . Watson and I will be staying the night at Tetchwick Manor, in all likelihood . . . yes . . . we have a key . . . No, no, by no means! The assistance of Scotland Yard would be fatal to my plan! . . . I realize, yes . . . I realize I've been saying that for a hundred years . . . I'm afraid it is true in this case. Must not scare away the lion, you know, before the trap is baited . . . of course, of course. Goodbye, Lestrade.'

We paid our bill and set off walking. In examining my Ordnance Survey map I discovered we could cut off half a mile by following the public footpath instead of the road, and this we did. We spotted the typical little Public Footpath signpost. It pointed us across fields towards Saratt. Soon we were walking between hedges, up a hill, along a stream. Holmes knelt and plucked a mollusc shell from the bank. As he did so his revolver pocket bulged.

‘Tell me, Holmes. How much danger is involved in this enterprise?'

‘Considerable. If the information we gather in the next hour or two is what I hope, we may soon encounter the man who created that blood bath at The Old Vicarage – and his intention will be to create another here.'

‘Always bright and cheerful, Holmes!'

Holmes looked at me grimly. ‘It may be more risk than you need to take, Watson. I'm used to this sort of thing, you're not. When we've had our little walk through this lovely Hertfordshire countryside, you may like to go back to London and wait at the Savoy.'

‘In for a penny, in for a pound,' I said. ‘I risked bullets and bombs in Afghanistan. I can certainly risk an adventure with a friend.'

The path ran cheerily through meadows still misty green, past streams mottled with floating yellow and red leaves, through leaf-fallen woods where the path was bright and the trees were beginning to look cold and forlorn.

‘I shall be interested to hear your “take” on this little case, Watson.'

‘I am totally mystified, Holmes. All I can say is that Colonel Davis has more problems than he thinks. Sex is in the air, Holmes. His young wife is evidently having a bit on the side with Mr Simon Bart, the ever-helpful neighbour.'

‘Really?' Holmes looked at me in surprise and raised an eyebrow. He swatted a mushroom with the walking stick he had grabbed in the woods.

‘She meets Simon Bart at a church affair, then at a spiritualist meeting. They spend time walking together. He brings gifts to the family – supposedly for the family, but they are candlesticks, more a gift for a woman than a man. And how do they arrange to get away together? She conveniently becomes so hysterical over a supposed ghost – a ghost that
he
told her of – that this provides her an excuse for her to go off for a ‘spiritual cure.' My guess is that Simon Bart is with her. How does that sound?'

‘I think, Watson, you have got it . . .'

‘I am flattered, Holmes!'

‘I was about to say, I think you have got it
about one-eighth right
.'

‘Ah,' I muttered, trying to recover as best I could. ‘I am flattered to hear you say even so much as that.'

‘She may well be infatuated with Bart,' said Holmes. ‘And that is the one-eighth you have right.'

We noticed a pretty cottage peeking out of the trees off to our right. In the full foliage of summer we might not even have noticed it. Autumn smoke puffed gently out of the chimney, making little smudges on the blue sky. Holmes spotted a woman, and he waved.

She was walking with a rake in her hand. She waved her straw hat and came towards us smiling. Despite her grey hair and her obvious age she reminded me of a young girl – smile on her lips, dancing blue eyes. ‘Hel-lo!' she said. ‘Wonderful day!'

Her name, she said, was Violet Anthem.

Holmes engaged her in conversation on trivial topics. I was surprised at how good he was on trivial topics, when the job required it. Then he modulated into a series of seemingly random questions about the sweetness of the neighbourhood. He asked directions to Tetchwick Manor, and he asked if she knew of a man named Simon Bart. Violet Anthem informed us quite happily that Tetchwick Manor was just a few hundred yards further on, and Mr Bart's cottage, Swale Cottage, was only a quarter mile beyond that, just beyond a copse of mature trees and down in the swale. She said the Davises, an American couple, lived at Tetchwick now. She had met them and thought them charming – well, the wife was charming. The husband was a bit, you know, military. The husband didn't look happy, said Violet Anthem – who looked very happy. She did not know much about Simon Bart, except that he often walked along this path quoting poetry.

‘Poetry?' said Holmes.

‘Poetry, oh my, yes. He speaks it beautifully. English poetry. Keats, lots of Shakespeare. I weed in my garden, he walks, and I hear snatches of his recitation. Quite marvellous, really.'

‘Then he is an actor?' asked Holmes.

‘I think that is so,' she replied. ‘I believe I heard someone say that he was. Judging from his voice, he certainly could be.'

‘Have you known him long?'

‘Oh, no. Let me see, the Davises moved in about a year ago, a year last September, and then a month or two later Mr Bart bought Nancy Deveaux's cottage – bought it or rented it, I don't know.'

‘Then he is a new resident?' asked Holmes.

‘Rather new. A great many new people are moving in everywhere, isn't that so? The countryside is becoming crowded, don't you think?'

‘Then I wonder how Simon Bart knew Tetchwick Manor was haunted,' said Holmes.

‘Haunted?' She smiled up at him, and shielded her eyes from the sun with her small hand.

‘Somebody said it was haunted.'

She laughed. ‘I don't think so. I've lived here forty years and I never heard that it was haunted. Of course, every place is haunted these days. I suppose it gives a house character, to call it haunted.'

We left Violet Anthem to her gardening and continued along the track until the ivy-covered walls and thatched roof of Tetchwick Manor appeared.

‘The insurance rates,' I said, ‘must be astronomical for a large house like that with a thatched roof.'

Holmes strode along with an abstracted look on his face. His left leg seemed perfectly cured, as if the injection of a perplexing problem into his brain had somehow deadened the aches in his body. He gazed towards Tetchwick Manor with a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Everything is coming clear, Watson!' he said. ‘Perfectly clear! Before long I think I may be able to put all the pieces together. Then we can stand back and admire the picture.'

‘I do hope the picture does not include a blood bath,' I said.

‘Ah, Watson. We must bait the trap carefully, very carefully. For a start, if we should meet a man who might be Simon Bart on this path, we must merely say hello and pass on. Let us not call attention to ourselves.'