The Cthulhu Casebooks Page 4

  The irony is that by the time I began work on A Study in Scarlet, seven years on, virtually everything about his worldview had altered, so that he was propounding in print a manifesto to which in life he no longer adhered. This is so with all my published chronicles of his adventures. Together, over the course of fifty-six short stories and four novels, Holmes and I colluded in an extravagant scheme of misdirection, in order to offer reassurance to the public at large and allay any suspicions regarding the true, unsettling nature of his cases. I feel no guilt about this. It was the politic thing to do, a fraud perpetrated in the service of the greater good.

  “You have heard, of course, about the recent spate of deaths in the East End,” Holmes said after I had been made thoroughly au fait with the intricacies of his unique vocation. We were each on our third drink, and I was finding myself developing a grudging fondness for the man sitting opposite. Brash and abrasive as he was, I intuited a noble heart beating within that wiry physique and knew that I was in the presence of a powerful force for good. Not only that but, since we were drinking Boutelleau, he served a decent cognac.

  “Regrettably, I have not been keeping up with current affairs,” I allowed. “I have been… preoccupied.”

  “The yellow press has made some noise about it. See for yourself.”

  He tossed a newspaper across to me from a small stack on the floor by his chair. It was a month-old edition of the Illustrated Police News; the sight of the masthead made me chuckle.

  “I never would have pegged you as the kind to read this sort of twaddle, Mr Holmes. It appeals to the lowest common denominator, a readership with an insatiable thirst for gore and scandal.”

  “Yet the Police News, Famous Crimes, the Police Budget and their ilk prove an invaluable resource for someone like me. Therein lies coverage of the crimes and misdemeanours that more highbrow periodicals are wont to shun. In many respects they paint a more authentic portrait of British life – violent, unrefined, occasionally outrageous – than do the daily broadsheets. At any rate, for the price of a penny a week, it is an investment I am willing to make. Turn to page two, if you will, and read the second lead article.”

  It was a short piece headlined “Another Emaciated Body Discovered!”:

  An appalling and grisly sight greeted residents of London’s Tarling Street on the morning of November 3rd. A man’s body was found lying in a back yard at the foot of a passage leading to a boarding-house in said thoroughfare. The body was withered and shrivelled in a manner suggesting extreme starvation, and was identified by those residents of the neighbourhood who saw it first-hand as belonging to a Jewish vagabond notorious in those parts, rejoicing in the sobriquet Simple Simeon. No other name for the individual is known.

  The cause of Simeon’s demise is adjudged to have been heart failure brought on by a chronic lack of sustenance. This would seem to accord with his itinerant existence and lack of gainful employ, yet fails to jibe with reliable accounts, which aver that only a few days prior he had appeared in reasonable health and comparatively well-nourished for a man of his indigent status, owing to the charitable ministrations of a local baker, another Israelite, who had been known to spare him a loaf every so often.

  The death brings to four the total number of corpses that have turned up in the vicinity in a similar condition of abnormal gauntness. Furthermore, there is the unnerving fact of the expressions on the faces of the deceased, which were uniformly fixed in a position of what more than one eyewitness has described as “abject terror”.

  No connection has been descried between the various victims beyond their state of significant carnal diminution. However, it may be wondered whether the deaths are not unrelated to the sightings of strange “shadows” in the Shadwell area, predominantly around Cable Street, St George Street and Cannon Street. For the past few months natives of the district have been claiming to have seen patches of darkness at night-time which appear to move in a most unnatural manner and which elicit feelings of debilitation and dread in any who stray into their propinquity. It is impossible to dismiss outright these stories, however implausible and extraordinary they may sound, by dint of the fact that descriptions of the “shadows” and their effect on the beholder vary little from one account to the next.

  Might the aforementioned shadows be some malign influence stalking the streets of Shadwell and environs, depriving inhabitants of their lives? We can but speculate.

  Accompanying the article was a neatly engraved picture showing how the mortal remains of Simple Simeon may have looked. The artist rendered him skeletal, like a bundle of twigs wreathed in tattered garments, and did not neglect to include the expression of “abject terror” on his face. This was echoed in the faces and indeed the postures of the small crowd of onlookers depicted in the background, their eyes and mouths wide, rearing back, halfway between ghoulish fascination and fainting.

  “Well?” Holmes said. “What do you make of it?”

  “Personally, I think there’s nothing more here than the mundane tragedy of a tramp perishing on a chilly late autumn night. This Simple Simeon’s constitution cannot have been the strongest. It is no surprise that he might succumb to sudden cardiac arrest. I’m sure the same thing happens on almost any given night somewhere in the land to someone living as he did.”

  “Agreed, but what about the emaciation?”

  “What about it?”

  “Does it not strike you as singular that the corpse was quite so markedly shrunken? Especially when Simeon was alleged to have been in fine fettle before he died.”

  “We have only the word of one or two local residents to vouch for that. Besides, you are ascribing an accuracy to the journalist that seems out of keeping with the shoddy tenor of his work and the nature of the paper he is writing for. Take this ‘look of terror’, for example. That is a frequent misconception about corpses. I have seen many a cadaver whose face might be described as looking horrified, even though I know the person to have died peacefully in his sleep. A rictus of the mouth is a normal by-product of rigor mortis, sometimes giving the illusion of a scream. Also, the skin tightens and recedes post mortem due to desiccation, meaning the lips pull away from the teeth and the eyelids from the eyes. To the layman that might denote terror in the deceased’s final moments, but it is all perfectly natural, trust me. Merely an initial phase of the process of decomposition.”

  “I bow to your professional expertise, Doctor,” said Holmes. “I imagine the penultimate and last paragraphs likewise meet with your disapproval.”

  “As to that,” I replied, “it would be easy to discount this talk of sinister ‘moving shadows’ as pure superstitious bunkum.”

  “I discern a certain hesitancy in that avowal.”

  “No. No. You are quite wrong.”

  “Really?” He looked at me askance. “‘It would be easy to discount…’ That is hardly a comprehensive rejection. It is as if you are saying what you think I should hear rather than what you would like to say.”

  “Then you misinterpret me grievously.”

  Holmes was silent a moment, then nodded. “I shan’t press the point. In the event, I too am of the opinion that it is, as you put it, superstitious bunkum. The stews of the East End are a breeding ground for legend and phantasmagorical rumour. Vampires haunting rooftops, spectres loitering at crossroads where criminals were once hanged, humanoid beings with blazing eyes able to leap about like kangaroos, all such kinds of absurdity. It is as though some people’s lives are incomplete without a dash of fantasy, and the mania for such woolly-headed nonsense is fuelled by papers like the one you’re holding, which see their circulation increase the more credence and column inches they give to it. No, the world is big enough for us, Watson,” he concluded with finality. “No ghosts need apply.”

  I observed that he had dropped my title and addressed me by surname alone, a sign that we had travelled some way down the road to amicableness. Automatically I reciprocated. “If we discard the supernatural aspects of the ma
tter, Holmes, then what are we left with? The phenomenon of four people dying in superficially similar circumstances in a corner of London that is both heavily overcrowded and rife with disease and dissipation. I remain to be convinced that it is anything more than grim coincidence. And somehow Stamford is bound up in all this?”

  “You have not listened to the full narrative yet,” said Holmes. “Lend me an ear, be patient, then give your verdict.”

  HOLMES SETTLED HIMSELF DEEPER INTO HIS CHAIR and commenced his account.

  The first of the deaths had passed him by altogether, he said. He failed to register it, even though since setting up his practice as a consulting detective some three years earlier he had become quite diligent about trawling the newspapers for reports of unusual and unexplained fatalities. Only once the subsequent deaths had begun to occur did he go combing back through earlier editions for articles about other incidents that fit the same pattern. The first body was that of a street pedlar selling spices and dried fruit, and was found huddled in a doorway on Juniper Road. A police statement mentioned that it had been “in a parlous condition” but did not explicitly allude to the kind of emaciation that had befallen Simple Simeon.

  That was in August. The second body cropped up a month later, that of a crossing sweeper, a boy barely in his teens. Opinion had it that he had been suffering from consumption or some other ailment that causes wasting and atrophy of the flesh. Given that he was a mere sweeper, the illness would have been neither diagnosed nor treated. Stoically and uncomplainingly he had endured his symptoms until such time as he collapsed.

  October brought a third body, that of a match girl, and the general consensus was that she had succumbed to phosphorus poisoning. That particular affliction tends to blight the lives of those who work in the match-making factories, manifesting as “phossy jaw”, the rotting of the mandible that first causes tooth loss, then abscesses and creeping necrosis, and is invariably fatal if left unchecked. Presumably even one who only sells matches, as opposed to one involved in their manufacture, might not be immune to it. Thus it would come as no surprise that the lass was rail-thin when she died, riddled and hollowed out by her disease.

  “Now what unites these three unfortunates, Watson?” Holmes said. “What is the binding thread that ties them?”

  “Other than that they died alone and in misery?”

  “That is some of it, but what else?”

  I pondered. “They were hardly pillars of society, any of them. Quite the reverse.”

  “Indeed. Indeed!” Holmes clapped his hands, clearly delighted by the scintilla of intelligence I had shown. “They were nobodies. A street pedlar, a crossing sweeper, a match girl – anonymous individuals, whom the average citizen pays barely any heed. I doubt there is a Londoner who saw any of the three on a daily basis and knew his or her name.”

  “The same can be said for Simple Simeon, save for the name.”

  “Yet his surname was a mystery to all. His only appellation was that slightly derogatory nickname. These, the four of them, were people who might pass unnoticed and” – his look turned sly – “whose passing might go unnoticed.”

  I let that sink in for a moment, as he no doubt wished me to. He was enjoying leading the conversation, drawing me along, letting me be Plato to his Socrates. I saw no harm in indulging him.

  “You mean they were specifically selected for murder because their killer knew no one would make much of a fuss about their deaths.”

  “That is what I mean, in a nutshell. And the conjecture is borne out by the evidence.”

  Holmes resumed his narrative; each of the four was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at the municipal cemetery, accorded the bare minimum of respect and rights in death just as they had been in life. No one thought to perform an autopsy on any of the bodies. No one was prompted to suggest that the cause of death in each case had been anything other than some illness, whether specified or not. Had the victims been in some way prominent or publicly renowned, it would have been a very different story. But who is going to care about one less crossing sweeper? Who is going to miss a match girl?

  Even the police failed to link the deaths together. The officials of the Met seemed quite happy to treat them as discrete and isolated and to overlook the telling detail that all four corpses appeared unnaturally starved.

  “Why wouldn’t they?” I said. “We have established that the four were all impoverished and very likely in bad health.”

  “Quite so.”

  “In point of fact, the only person to have drawn the same conclusion as you, that the deaths share commonality, is the nameless author of the Police News article.”

  “I can reveal his identity, if you wish. He sits before you right now.”

  “You? I may hardly know you, Holmes, but I would lay a thousand to one against that.”

  “And you would lose your money, something you can ill afford after your run of bad luck at the card table earlier this evening,” my interlocutor said with a wry smile. “I am, on my honour, the journalist whose literacy and accuracy you so roundly impugned. I placed that article myself, posing as a neophyte freelancer. Papers like the Police News aren’t too fussy about the identity of those from whom they accept a submission, as long as it accords with their editorial policy of offering the most lurid take on a subject.”

  “Why did you want it published? And why yoke the deaths to this bizarre business about shadows, which you yourself have just denounced as nonsensical?”

  “I shall come to that shortly. In the meantime, let me spin my yarn a little further.”

  * * *

  Holmes’s career as a consulting detective had not got off to a flying start, he admitted. There had so far been a mere smattering of clients, bringing with them some “pretty little problems” such as the Tarleton murders, the case of Vamberry the wine merchant, the singular affair of the aluminium crutch, and Ricoletti of the club foot and his abominable wife. There had also been the altogether more intriguing conundrum involving Reginald Musgrave, a contemporary of Holmes’s at university, and the strange observance known as the Musgrave Ritual. And how could he forget the queer adventure of the mummified hand in the Gloucestershire attic? These had provided him with enough income to keep body and soul together and give him cause to feel that he was justified in pursuing his chosen livelihood. Each successfully concluded investigation was a notch in his belt and a feather in his cap, promising greater things to come.

  Yet there were fallow periods in between. Weeks and sometimes months would go by without a visitor calling at his former rooms on Montague Street, and when not occupying his time furthering his researches into scientific fields and deepening his knowledge of various practical skills such as singlestick and an Eastern martial art called baritsu, he was constantly on the lookout for anomalous events that might merit enquiry. If clients failed to come to him, he would be his own client, appointing himself to solve crimes that were of no interest to anyone else. It was all practice, grist to the mill.

  Hence, having read in September about the death of the crossing sweeper and the following month about that of the match girl, Holmes cross-referenced them with the death of the street pedlar back in August and divined the possibility of an association between the three and a human agency behind it all. That inspired him to delve further into the matter.

  With scant evidence to go on other than a handful of brief news reports, he decided his best approach would be to pinpoint the precise locations where the three bodies were discovered, then scour the surrounding areas for clues and interview local residents for whatever information he might glean. This he duly did.

  On learning that the deaths had all taken place in the district of Shadwell, Holmes became more convinced than ever that the three were related. On perceiving that they had occurred at regular monthly intervals, he discerned the hand of someone with an interest in the calendar. On working out that each death had fallen squarely on the night of the new moon, he distinguished a r
itualistic sense of calculation on the part of the perpetrator.

  “The darkest night of the month,” I said.

  “The better to conceal dark deeds,” said he.

  “Might the timing be in some way related to the lunacy that is said to coincide with the phases of the moon?”

  “The lore has it that certain states of madness are at their peak when the moon is at its fullest. This is the opposite of that and seems to belong at the other end of the scale, a deed perpetrated with cold, artful rationalism.”

  It was by that time late October, and the moon was fast waning, due to disappear from the night sky on November 2nd. Conscious that that date marked the next scheduled death – a deadline in more ways than one – Holmes redoubled his efforts. He took to roaming the bystreets and backwaters of Shadwell in various guises. He had been a keen exponent of amateur dramatics during his undergraduate days and had been commended in several reviews for his ability to submerge himself into a role, altering not just his face and voice but his very posture, his every mannerism, so as to make the performance seem utterly alive and authentic.

  “In consecutive terms I played a fresh-faced Hamlet, a hoary Lear, and a blustering Othello,” he told me, “and not one bore a shred of resemblance to either of the others. I was hailed as a chameleon of the stage.”

  In Shadwell, he manifested over the course of five successive nights as a decrepit seaman, a French workman, an Italian priest, an amiable Nonconformist clergyman, and a harmless old crone. He loitered and patrolled, doing all he could to ferret out potential victims and protect them.

  “But I failed,” he said. “As is obvious.”

  “Simple Simeon.”

  “He slipped through my net.”

  “Do not berate yourself. You were just one man, watching over thousands. You could not hope to keep an eye on them all.”

  “I know, but nevertheless…” He exhaled a sullen sigh. “I saw nothing untoward on the night in question. Whoever is responsible for the deaths eluded my vigilance and struck again, precisely according to his predetermined timetable, and I was powerless to prevent it.”