Sherlock Holmes - Gods of War Page 4

  Barraclough took the sack without even bothering to look inside. He lowered his head. “Mr Holmes, I wronged you earlier. I insulted you. I apologise. You have done sterling work. Please accept my deepest, sincerest gratitude.”

  “As long as it comes with a cheque attached, that is all I need,” said Sherlock Holmes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TRUTH AGAINST MYTH

  There isn’t much else to tell about the incident. Young Jeremy Tremlett was discovered that same afternoon, passed out behind the cricket pavilion of Eastbourne College. He did not recall much about the previous night’s events, but had a vague memory of his companions abandoning him to continue their revels after he complained of feeling unwell. He wandered feverishly for a while, then fell into a swoon which lasted the rest of the night and most of the subsequent day. It was later established in court that Searle had slipped a sleeping draught into Tremlett’s beer. Tremlett was intended to be Searle’s dupe, unable to remember with any clarity what he had got up to on the night of the robbery and therefore incapable of attesting to his own innocence.

  The bulk of the jewels were indeed found at Searle’s house, as Holmes predicted, and restored to Barraclough for his safekeeping.

  Although Searle could simply have stolen the jewels himself using his shop keys, this would have entailed too great a risk. He might have been caught red-handed. At the very least he would have been one of the prime suspects for the felony. His stroke of genius – though it was no match for Holmes’s own prodigious intellect – was engaging Reptilio as his accomplice. It allowed him to have a cast-iron alibi: he was at home all night. He could account for his whereabouts when the robbery occurred, whereas the drug-befuddled Tremlett could not.

  Searle’s professed fondness for the junior employee had, it seemed, been an imposture all along. When Barraclough had taken on an extra pair of hands at the shop, Searle had realised that here was just the thing, the perfect scapegoat for a scheme he was already in the process of hatching. Befriending Tremlett meant that he could get close enough to administer the fateful sleeping draught when it was required. The arrival of McMahon’s Circus in town and a swiftly-reached pact of collusion with the supple Reptilio gave Searle the final impetus he needed to set the wheels of his act of larceny in motion.

  “A mildly diverting affair,” Holmes said that evening as he and I enjoyed a quiet supper in the snug of his local public house, the Tiger Inn, which sat diagonally across the village green from his cottage. He ate milk-poached haddock, I a helping of pigeon pie. It was good, solid fare, hardly Escoffier but hearty and filling. Holmes complained that the cook had “gone a bit heavy on the pepper” but he seemed to have no trouble clearing his plate.

  “Proof, too,” I said, “that trust is a commodity which should not be bestowed lightly.”

  “Alas yes. Barraclough unwittingly nurtured a viper in his bosom, while all too readily condemning the one person whose probity was not actually in question. The moral should be: judge not by the outward display.”

  “Does that not contradict your own practices, Holmes? You regularly draw conclusions based on appearances alone.”

  “You do me a disservice, my dear fellow. It is one thing to make reasoned deductions according to how someone speaks, dresses or comports himself, the tiny but telling details of his person. Observable facts reveal inner truths. It is quite another thing, however, to let oneself be swayed purely by a man’s actions, the image he chooses to present to the world. We show to others ourselves as we would wish to be seen. The trained, expert eye penetrates beneath the obvious to the subsurface. When presented with a crime scene, the question I invariably ask myself is not ‘What am I looking at?’ but ‘What am I being allowed to see?’ The same goes when assessing a man’s character and circumstances. Often that which is not present is as informative as that which is. Where Hubert Searle is concerned, his inability to speak ill of Tremlett was a red flag to me. No one is naturally that benign and charitable. Hence I began to harbour doubts about him.”

  “How dashed cynical you are, Holmes.”

  My friend smiled briefly. “Over the years I have come to expect the worst from everyone. It is, shall we say, an unavoidable consequence of the line of work I used to be engaged in. So many murderers, so many blackmailers, so many fraudsters – it jaundices irredeemably one’s perception of humanity. I moved to the coast in the hope that I might encounter less duplicity and dishonesty than in the city.”

  “Yet here you still find crime,” I said, “or rather crime finds you.”

  “Nowhere is perfect,” Holmes admitted. “Have I not expressed to you before my opinion that the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside?” He lowered his voice so that the other patrons of the pub might not overhear. “My one great bugbear with the stout yeomanry by whom I find myself surrounded these days, however, is not that they’re as regrettably prone to delinquency as their urban equivalents. It’s their terrible propensity towards superstition. There was my Mrs Tuppen, all but claiming that Reptilio’s extraordinary contortionist abilities were the stuff of witchcraft, when they are all too easily explicable in medical terms.”

  “Marfan syndrome,” I said. I had come up with the diagnosis earlier in the day and was glad of an opportunity to share it at last with Holmes.

  “Yes, I would have said so too. He had the characteristic symptom of the disorder, the hypermobility of the connective tissues, allowing an unusually large range of motion of the joints.”

  “It would also account for the abnormal shape of his head. All babies’ heads are elongated by their passage through the birth canal but regain their natural roundness subsequently as the bones harden, except for Marfan syndrome sufferers who are often left with permanently disfigured craniums. The capacity to subluxate joints voluntarily and without undue discomfort is a secondary by-product of the condition. In many ways Reptilio’s birdcage act was the ideal one for a man in his state – the career he was born for.”

  “If only he had been able to accept that and not yearn for more. The same goes for Searle. They were a matched pair in that respect. But to return to the topic of superstition,” Holmes continued. “The area is riddled with it. You know that not far from here, on Windover Hill near the village of Wilmington, there is the outline of an enormous figure of a man carved out into the hillside chalk.”

  “The famous Long Man. I spied him from the train when passing between Lewes and Eastbourne.”

  “None other. He holds some sort of rod in either hand fully his own height. Local legend has it that he was a giant who fell out with another giant, his best friend. They fought at length, laying waste to their surroundings in the process. Eventually the other giant won, killing the first giant and striding away. Locals, lacking the wherewithal to bury so vast a corpse, instead drew a line around it in commemoration. The rods are the quarterstaffs with which he battled his foe.”

  “A harmless enough legend.”

  “Yet many here still believe it to be true. A Neolithic chalk figure drawn for who knows what purpose by Stone Age men – perhaps to worship some primitive deity – gives rise to a fairy story about giants, which then becomes entrenched as an article of faith. Even in our modern, supposedly enlightened age you will hear many a person speak of the ‘Wilmington Giant’ as though such a being genuinely existed!”

  “But isn’t the tale more entertaining than a more pedestrian explanation?”

  “To the naive, infantile mind maybe,” replied my friend. “As something to amuse children with, it has its place. But when adults who ought to know better cite as gospel this sort of fanciful fiction, I do find it…” He groped for a suitable adjective, settling on: “Tedious. Truth and myth must never be confused, Watson. Why, just the other day as I was in my garden tending to my pruning, I had a blacksmith come up and lean on the wall and engage me in idle conversation. Soon he was telling me that, as a small boy,
he had seen a ‘witch hound’ over at Harewick Bottom near Jevington, not five miles from here. He regaled me with the story of this ghostly black dog for several minutes, not once doubting that I would credit every word of it. He told me of the thrill of terror he had felt as the thing darted across his path, its eyes aglow in the twilight. ‘An omen of doom,’ he said, and the very next day – who would have thought it? – his father, whose forge he would go on to inherit, died unexpectedly, keeling over while beating a ploughshare into shape.”

  Holmes looked bleakly gleeful as he recounted this.

  “A reasonable assumption would be that the father suffered a sudden heart attack as he exerted himself strenuously at his anvil,” he said. “Yet to this gullible rustic buffoon the only probable, the likelier explanation, was the malign influence of a sinister, unearthly creature. Absurd. At the very best he had stumbled across some stray dog, whose retinas had happened to catch and reflect the rays of the setting sun in an eerie fashion, and the death of his father was merely a tragic coincidence. Eh, Watson? Wouldn’t you agree?”

  I did not answer, instead helping myself to a long, deep sip of my ale, for this talk of eldritch hounds had stirred up a memory I did not care for.

  Holmes interpreted my silence correctly. “Oh, my dear chap, surely you are not casting your mind back to Dartmoor and Baskerville Hall?”

  “I regret that I am,” I said. “Can’t help it.”

  “But the black dog in that instance was real, as real as you or I or this table we are sitting at, a beast born of this world, not some demonic spirit or creature of legend. You know this as well as I do. We both saw its corpse, felled by our bullets. Nothing could have been more corporeal and tangible than that animal.”

  “Yet the horror lingers – the horror of what it might have been, what it purported to be. That is something I can never forget, however well I recall that Stapleton’s diabolical monster dog was, all said and done, just a dog. There must be some reason why the supernatural exerts such a powerful hold over the human mind, Holmes, and why we are so predisposed to believe in it. Is there not the merest chance that there really are forces at work in the world which cannot be accounted for by any empirical means? Is it not possible that one day you and I might encounter phenomena which no amount of rationalisation will explain or debunk?”

  “Are there more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy?” Holmes regarded me levelly across the table. “I cannot in all honesty answer that question. So far I have met nothing, however otherworldly it might appear, that has not revealed itself under the glare of scrutiny to have a perfectly mundane origin. A hellhound is an ordinary dog coated in phosphorus paint. A vampire is a Peruvian mother sucking poison from a wound in her baby’s neck. A mysterious, sinister ‘speckled band’ is an Indian swamp adder. Yet, that said, past form is no guarantee of future performance.”

  “You mean you keep an open mind?”

  “I mean that I wait for something to come along that will defy explanation and prove conclusively that the world we live in is stranger than we can know. It would be refreshing if, for once, I met with some chimera or phantom which would entirely and indisputably overturn my conviction that the supernatural does not exist. I would be willing to discard a lifetime’s scepticism on the subject, just to have that one brush with the genuinely, irrefutably paranormal.”

  “Can it be? Is the hard-headed Sherlock Holmes getting sentimental in his old age?”

  “I am not growing any younger. Neither are you. We are both at that stage where we have many fewer years ahead of us than we do behind. The chill breath of mortality is on our necks. It would be nice to be given a firm hint that the priests and mages are right, that something lies beyond the veil, that death is not mere oblivion.”

  I had never heard Holmes speak in such terms before. There was no twinkle in his eye to suggest this was all some abstruse intellectual jape, perhaps at my expense. He was wholly in earnest.

  “I do wonder,” I said, “if we are to be reunited with our loved ones in some afterlife. It would not be a disagreeable prospect.”

  “I concur. Your Mary, my Mycroft…”

  He pouched his lips wistfully. Holmes’s brother had passed on some seven years earlier, having been taken ill mid-dinner at the Diogenes Club. A ruptured stomach ulcer had led to gastrointestinal bleeding, perforation of the duodenal wall, and ultimately acute peritonitis from which, despite the best efforts of surgeons, he failed to recover. The funeral had been a muted, understated affair, for all that those attending included some of the mightiest and most influential people in the land. Such was Mycroft Holmes’s great bulk that a special casket had had to be built, its proportions sufficient to contain him, its wood reinforced with metal braces. The pallbearers had numbered eight rather than the traditional six, and still they had struggled under their burden. At any less sombre occasion it would have been a comical sight.

  “You know that I am as old now as he was when he died?”

  “Yet, if I may say so, your health is considerably better than his was. Your brother was a man of huge appetites, with a choleric disposition. Your asceticism promises greater longevity than he could ever have hoped for. I should not be surprised to see you live well into your nineties, with your faculties intact.”

  “Still, it feels like I have reached a milestone. I knew it likely that I would outlast Mycroft, but from here on each year seems a step into the unknown. He was always ahead of me, being so much my senior. Now I am venturing into territory he himself never got to chart. I am, for the first time in our siblinghood, the trailblazer.”

  “You always were. Your path in life has taken you to places Mycroft could never have dreamed of going.”

  “You’re kind, Watson, but as you know from having an older brother yourself, the younger brother never truly feels that he has done anything first. Everything he achieves seems like second best – a hand-me-down.”

  I nodded in recognition. Even though my own brother, long deceased, had been something of a ne’er-do-well, the shadow he had cast over me while we were growing up had been a long one. He had been a boisterous soul and, for all his faults, I had never ceased to admire him. Clearly Holmes felt the same way about Mycroft, despite the friction and sometimes downright antagonism that typified their relationship.

  “Anyway,” said he, “enough of this maudlin talk. Let us settle the bill and make the short journey homeward. A nightcap before bed is in order. Perhaps a snifter of Armagnac? And tomorrow we shall start afresh, and I shall make every effort to ensure that your week in Sussex is as pleasant and interesting as it can possibly be.”

  Interesting it undoubtedly proved, although only if one can stretch the definition of the word to mean “hair-raising” and “life-threatening”. As for pleasant? Even a veteran author such as I cannot manipulate the English language to make that an apt descriptor.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A GRAHAME-WHITE TYPE VII

  The next morning I was up well before Holmes. The dawn chorus awoke me as though it were the most deafening alarm clock. In London I was capable of sleeping through any amount of racket. The cries of street vendors, the clatter of passing cabs, the whirring rumble of a tram – these were a veritable background lullaby. Yet here in the silence of the countryside, all it took was a few birds singing in the treetops to rouse me from my slumbers like a gunshot.

  I stoked the kitchen stove, put on the kettle, took it off just before it started to whistle, and made myself tea. Then I went out for a stroll, to inhale plenty of lungfuls of revivifying, brine-tinged sea air.

  The village where Holmes lived, East Dean, lay less than a mile from the coast. If I listened carefully I could hear the susurration of surf breaking on shingles. Along a bramble-fringed lane I was passed by a dray loaded with freshly filled milk churns, pulled by a strapping Shire horse. I saluted the driver, who touched the brim of his felt hat in return. Both his and the horse’s breath steamed. There was, fo
r the first time that year, something of a bite to the air, an intimation of autumn proper. The weather was on the turn, our Indian summer nearing its end.

  Returning to the cottage, I stood before it and took a moment to appreciate its plainness and modesty. Built in the traditional Sussex style – brick and knapped flint – it sat foursquare on the village green and was, from the front elevation at least, as symmetrically proportioned as a doll’s house, with neat windowboxes and a narrow strip of front garden hemmed in by a low wall and a waist-high iron gate. A two-storey extension ran off perpendicular at the rear, clad in wooden slats, and the rest of the L-shaped plot was taken up with the kitchen garden, which covered perhaps an eighth of an acre and was well dug and maintained. The growing season was mostly over, but Holmes’s runner beans were flourishing and his raspberry canes groaned under the weight of ripe fruit. His half-dozen hives stood in a row by one wall, each circled by a few drowsy bees warming themselves up in the thin sunlight before they commenced the day’s labours.

  Holmes, with the savings portfolio he had accumulated over the years, could well have afforded somewhere grander, and it spoke well of the man that he had no wish to flaunt his wealth and was content to live out the remainder of his days in relative obscurity. Yet, given that he had on more than one occasion refused the honour of a knighthood, it was not surprising either. Holmes lived for himself, not for the admiration or recognition of others. He was the most insular, self-contained man imaginable, and I counted myself lucky that he allowed me across the drawbridge into his life, not least since I was so much his intellectual inferior.