Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon Read online

  Again, I caught the young woman’s eyes upon me. She averted her gaze and resumed her business, namely scribbling industriously in a small journal. Nevertheless I had the impression that she found me interesting, and were I not a happily married man, I might have paid her the compliment of a brief word or two after Holmes and I were finished with our coffees.

  “It was no great leap in logic,” Holmes said, “to deduce that Seamus Flynn and Barney O’Brien were one and the same person. I knew of the latter’s considerable height and girth, which were matched by the former’s. I even had a strong suspicion that during his brief exchange of words with russet-haired Clarice, she could have surreptitiously passed a pearl or two to him, which he had then palmed with a view to inserting them into his crown later, when no one was looking.

  “To prove this beyond a shred of doubt, however, I would actually have to observe the swap taking place. Hence I returned to the store today, this time as myself, and again shadowed Father Christmas on his perambulations. In the jewellery department I watched closely as he spoke to the shopgirl. There it was! Subtle but clearly visible to one who was looking for it. A glimpse of tiny, pale objects moving from her hand to his.

  “I decided to wait until after he had secreted the pearls inside his mistletoe crown. In this, I was indulging my theatrical streak somewhat. I wished to provide a dramatic dénouement to the case, by exposing not just the villain’s identity but his modus operandi, in one fell swoop.”

  “Much as you did.”

  “Yes, but it was nearly not to be. As O’Brien was leaving the jewellery department, I saw him pause and remove the crown as though to make some small adjustment to it. It was then that he stealthily inserted the pearls in amongst the mistletoe fronds, before returning the crown to his head. I, spying my chance, pounced.

  “‘You scoundrel!’ I declared. ‘I have you now!’

  “Unfortunately, I had underestimated the full extent of his strength and he was able to give me the slip. I gave chase, secure in the knowledge that he would not be able to leave the building unimpeded, since I had taken the precaution of enlisting the aid of Lestrade and his men – and yours too, of course – and the exits were covered. All the same, I feared I was to be denied my moment of glory. It was a close-run thing!”

  “What about the shopgirl?” I said.

  “As to her, she will doubtless confess her complicity in the crime in due course.”

  “Do you think O’Brien duped or coerced her into it?”

  “Neither. On the contrary, my feeling is that Clarice was actually the mastermind and O’Brien her willing foil. O’Brien has in the past not shown himself to be the shrewdest of operators. He is a skilled enough burglar but not what one would call cunning. Clarice already had the job at Burgh and Harmondswyke. She was the one who put O’Brien forward, under a pseudonym, as a candidate for Father Christmas. She could well have worked out a means of stealing the pearls and then simply inveigled O’Brien into participating in her scheme. It would not have been difficult for her. She is not unattractive.”

  “Nor would O’Brien have taken much persuasion, I’d have thought, an inveterate larcenist like him.”

  “Indeed. And now you have the long and the short of it, Watson. Let us congratulate ourselves. We have scored a notable success, doing our bit to ensure that this remains a time of peace on earth and goodwill to all men.”

  With this ironical flourish, my friend completed his disquisition, and I put away my notebook.

  Lowering his voice, Holmes then said, “That young woman who has been proving so diverting to you – do you recognise her?”

  “What young woman?”

  “Come now, old friend. I have seen where your eyes keep straying.”

  “Well, I… I mean… She is the one whose eyes keep straying.”

  “And how could any female resist a square-jawed, well-whiskered fellow such as yourself? Yet I regret to inform you that it is the both of us who fascinate the girl, not just you, for some of her glances have been directed at me. Moreover, we have seen the lass before.”

  “We have?”

  “She was a customer in the stationery department at Burgh and Harmondswyke. I noticed her watching us during our exchange with Lestrade. Her scrutiny was quite intense. I am surprised you were not aware of it then. And now she has followed us to this coffee house, which I cannot believe to be a coincidence, and indeed, even as I speak, she is standing up and approaching our table.”

  Sure enough, the young woman was making her way towards us with a certain nervously resolute air, as though after a period of prevarication she had made up her mind to introduce herself.

  “Please forgive the intrusion, gentlemen,” she said. “You are, am I right in thinking, Mr Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr John Watson?”

  “None other,” said Holmes.

  “Your servant, madam,” said I, rising a little from my chair and bowing. “But you have us at a disadvantage. You are…?”

  “Eve Allerthorpe. I would never normally be so forward, but when I saw the two of you in action at Burgh and Harmondswyke, and heard you address each other by name, I said to myself, ‘This is fate, Eve. Here I am, on a visit to London, and who should I chance upon amid all the millions in this city but the celebrated detective Mr Holmes, in the flesh. A rare chance has presented itself, and you must take it, girl.’ And that, after some inward debate, is what I am doing.”

  “Please, have my seat,” I said, ushering her to it.

  “You are too kind, Doctor. I don’t rightly know whether I should trouble you with my predicament or not. Sometimes it seems ridiculous even to me, while at other times it seems the deadliest and most serious set of circumstances and I fear that my sanity, even my very life, might… might be…”

  All at once, Miss Eve Allerthorpe broke down in tears. I tendered her my handkerchief and she sobbed into it copiously. A few inquisitive glances came our way from other patrons of the coffee house, and I offered them a reassuring wave of the hand, as if to say all was well.

  “Oh, I vowed I would not give in to my emotions,” the young woman said after her crying fit had run its course. “It’s just that I have been under such strain lately. You can hardly begin to imagine what it has been like. First my mother dying, and now this…”

  “I think,” said Holmes, “that Watson and I should escort you to my rooms at Baker Street, Miss Allerthorpe, and there, away from prying eyes and eavesdropping ears, you may feel at liberty to unburden yourself to us in full.”

  Chapter Two

  THE ALLERTHORPES OF FELLSCAR KEEP

  Not half an hour later, we three were ensconced in the first-floor drawing room at 221B. Mrs Hudson had banked up a roaring fire, which did much to dispel the chill, and had drawn the curtains against the onset of dusk. I had relieved Miss Allerthorpe of her overcoat, mantle and sable muff and pressed a glass of brandy into her hand.

  Now Holmes, having allowed the young woman a few moments to compose herself, embarked upon a gentle interrogation.

  “Miss Allerthorpe,” said he, “am I to take it that you hail from that distinguished clan whose family seat is Fellscar Keep, in the East Riding?”

  “You would be correct in that assumption,” she replied with a nod.

  I saw Holmes bristle somewhat at her use of the word “assumption”. It was a particular source of pride to him that he never assumed anything. However, tact and his customary politeness towards the gentler sex prevented him from upbraiding her.

  In the event, the woman herself realised she had committed a solecism. “But of course, I am familiar enough with Dr Watson’s writings to know that you possess a knack for gleaning information about a person upon first acquaintance, much as though reading a page of a book. That was the case here, was it not?”

  “The trace of a Yorkshire accent was a clue,” Holmes said. “Those flattened vowels, discernible even in one who is otherwise well-spoken. But also the surname Allerthorpe is an uncommon one
, and given your evident affluence, it seemed more than likely that you are one of those Allerthorpes.”

  “Our renown has obviously spread further than I thought.”

  “It would be hard not to have heard of one of the richest families in the north, if not all of England, whose collective wealth derives from coal mining and wool, in which trades Allerthorpes became preeminent during the Industrial Revolution.”

  “I wonder what else you can tell about me,” Miss Allerthorpe said. “Something more obscure, perhaps.”

  “Well, since you have thrown down the gauntlet, madam, allow me to accommodate you. Judging by your youth – you can be no more than twenty years of age – you belong to the most recent generation of the Allerthorpe dynasty. You are as yet unmarried, as you wear no wedding ring. You are also fond of poetry.”

  Miss Allerthorpe’s eyes widened. “How on earth can you know that? Outside of my immediate circle of acquaintance, there can be no one aware that poetry is my passion.”

  Holmes flapped a dismissive hand. “As Watson took your overcoat and hung it up, I spied the slim, well-thumbed volume of Keats protruding from the pocket. That was all the evidence necessary. You write poems of your own, what is more.”

  Her surprise at his deduction was this time not as great. “I suppose that is obvious. The odds are high that those who read poetry are versifiers themselves.”

  “Odds have nothing to do with it,” said Holmes. “I observed you at your table in the coffee house. Thanks to our relative positions I could not see precisely what you were writing in your journal, but the distance your pen covered when moving from left to right was shorter than the full breadth of the page by some margin. Short lines customarily denote poetry. Added to that, you crossed out and rewrote several times, actions suggestive of someone in the throes of creative composition.”

  “I see. Anything further?”

  “I would submit that you are in a state of high tension and have been for some days.”

  “I already told you that I am under great strain.”

  “And it is plain not only in the slight tremble that attends your every gesture, but in your recent significant weight loss.”

  “It is true I haven’t had much of an appetite in the past few months,” Miss Allerthorpe confessed. “I scarcely dare ask how you divined that.”

  “Your blouse has been recently taken in, as is evident from the thickness of the new seams. A woman of your means and background would not wear an item of clothing that was not tailored to her figure. Her blouse would neither be borrowed nor hand-me-down. Yours has been altered because it no longer fits you as once it did, a state of affairs which must be recent, else you would by now have purchased a whole new wardrobe better suited to the slimmer you. And would I be mistaken in inferring that you have a younger sibling? A brother?”

  “I do. Erasmus.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “Perhaps you have read about him in the society pages. Raz has been known for his boisterous activities, reports of which sometimes appear in the gossip columns.”

  “No, I had not the faintest idea about his existence until I observed the small scar on your face.”

  “You mean here?” Miss Allerthorpe’s hand went to her left eyebrow, just above which lay a small, all but imperceptible blemish.

  “The very one. Its faintness bespeaks a wound sustained some years ago, in other words in your early youth, when, as the good Doctor here will attest, the body heals more quickly and efficiently than in adulthood. Your brother is the one who inflicted it upon you during a bout of horseplay.”

  “It is absurd that you could know that.”

  “I will admit I was somewhat chancing my arm with the deduction,” said Holmes. “I felt moved to venture it regardless, and the gamble paid off. You see, my own brother, Mycroft, has a very similar scar in almost the exact same spot, and I was the culprit. I gashed him with the tip of a wooden sword while we were playing at pirates one afternoon. It seemed at least plausible that your wound was inflicted in a similar manner. It tends to be younger brothers who are to blame for such malfeasances, and older siblings their victims.”

  “I was ten, Erasmus eight,” Miss Allerthorpe said. “He was pretending to be Saint George, riding a hobby horse and wielding, like you, a wooden sword. I was saddled with the role of the dragon he was bent on slaying. Raz was always a bumptious boy, lacking in self-restraint, and his enthusiasm for the game got the better of him. He has marred my features but I have forgiven him.”

  “Hardly marred!” I declared. “Why, if Holmes had not mentioned the scar, Miss Allerthorpe, I would never even have realised it was there. Your looks are quite undiminished for its presence.”

  “Thank you for saying so, sir.”

  “Watson’s gallantry exceeds mine,” said Holmes, feigning chagrin. “Consider me rebuked for my temerity in raising the subject at all. But now that I have discharged my duty by making these few small observations about you, Miss Allerthorpe, perhaps you are ready to expand upon the nature of this ‘deadliest and most serious set of circumstances’ in which you find yourself.”

  “Where to begin, Mr Holmes?”

  It was a rhetorical question but Holmes answered it anyway. “You mentioned that your mother is dead and that this heralded the onset of your woes. There might be a good place to start.”

  Eve Allerthorpe steeled herself with a sip of brandy and commenced her narrative.

  “My mother passed away a year ago almost to the day,” said she. “She was never what one would call the most stable of characters. Her temperament was mercurial, her mood as changeable as the weather over the Yorkshire Moors. Some might even go so far as to call her mad. She could be angry and vituperative, downright venomous at times. Yet she could also be tender and loving, and on the whole was devoted both to Papa and to her two children. That made her death in one sense surprising and in another sense not surprising at all.”

  “How so?”

  “Mama took her own life, you see.” Miss Allerthorpe faltered. “Even now it is difficult for me to discuss.”

  “I understand. Take your time.”

  “Our home – Fellscar Keep, as you have said – is an immense, rambling edifice of towers, wings and battlements, perched on an island in the middle of a lake. One evening last December, my mother was in a particularly volatile frame of mind. She had endured some minor setback during the day – a maidservant had, as I recall, accidentally scorched one of her favourite dresses with the smoothing iron – and it threw her into a fit of rage and recrimination, as such things were apt to. Her anger, though it could often be visited upon others, was just as often visited upon herself, and so it was in this instance. Mama somehow blamed herself for the damaged dress, saying that it was no better than she deserved and that a wretch like her should not expect anything ever to go her way. All my father’s efforts to placate her were to no avail. Eventually she went to her room and locked herself in.”

  “Her own bedroom? She and your father slept separately?”

  “She was a restless sleeper. Papa preferred his slumber not to be disturbed by her wakefulness. At any rate, from past experience we knew we were unlikely to see any more of her until the following morning, when she would doubtless emerge all smiles and laughter, as though nothing untoward had occurred. Around midnight, however, she was heard rushing along the corridors of the castle, wailing at the top of her voice, and…”

  Miss Allerthorpe strove to maintain her poise.

  “And then,” she said, “she took herself to the top of the tallest tower, which lies in the castle’s east wing, opened a window and threw herself out, into the lake. The servants dragged the water all night, under Papa’s supervision, but it wasn’t until first light that the… that the body was eventually recovered.”

  I made sympathetic noises, while Holmes quietly steepled his long fingers and pressed their tips to the groove above his upper lip.

  “You can well imagine the horror
of the incident,” Miss Allerthorpe said, “and the shock Mama’s death wrought upon us. Erasmus and I, in particular, were distraught with grief. Our mother would never have abandoned us in this way if the equilibrium of her mind had not been seriously disturbed, we knew that. But looking back, we had perhaps known all along that it was not unlikely she might meet such an end. Often when Mama’s depressions became profound, she would cause harm to her own person, by pricking her arms with a hatpin, for instance, and raking her fingernails down her cheek. My father had consulted the best alienists in Harley Street, to no avail. There seemed no cure, no hope of change. All any of us could do was accept and endure. Yet it was never wholly bad. There were happy times, too. When she was in one of her ‘up’ phases, my mother had the sunniest of dispositions and there was nobody whose company I would rather have kept.”

  “A tragedy is no less appalling when one can see it looming,” I said.

  “Quite the opposite, Doctor. The inevitability makes it worse. I will not say that my present difficulties stem directly from Mama’s suicide. I will say, though, that the death has cast a pall over the household, which has yet to lift fully. Put simply, none of us has been the same since. Papa, always a rather remote person, has become positively aloof, and his temperament, once equable, now tends towards the irascible. Erasmus… Well, his behaviour was troublesome to begin with, and has done anything but improve. It was hoped, though, that this Christmas might bring about a change in our fortunes.”

  “Why should that be?” asked Holmes.

  “If there is one thing that unites the Allerthorpes, Mr Holmes, it is a love of Christmas. At this time of year, the wider family travels from near and far, converging on Fellscar Keep to celebrate the season. It is a tradition going back a good five decades, instituted by my grandfather, Alpheus Allerthorpe, and rigorously, one might even say religiously, maintained ever since. The castle opens its doors and plays host to a week-long revel. There is feasting, carolling, gift-giving. There is also an opportunity to renew family ties and mend any fences that might need mending. Only once has the event ever been cancelled.”