The Cthulhu Casebooks Page 6

  “Tut, my friend!” Holmes declared. “You must stay. Unless I miss my guess, the inspector is here on the self-same business in which the pair of us were caught up yesterday evening.”

  “If you mean Dr Valentine Stamford,” said Gregson, “then yes, I am.”

  “That is exactly what I mean.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Stamford was the main topic of conversation between the two of us when last we met, and I cannot think why else you would have come to me with such urgency, first thing in the morning, if not to convey some fresh development in the case. You have not visited before. You are not, as it were, here in the capacity of a prospective client. Thus I can only infer that it is Stamford that brings you to my door.”

  “Harrumph. Yes, well, I ought to be used to your deductions by now, but they always still seem like magic.”

  “It was hardly a deduction, more a statement of the obvious.”

  “Man can’t take a compliment,” Gregson muttered under his breath.

  “So anyway,” Holmes said, affecting not to have heard the remark, “I’m hoping your news is positive. Stamford is in your custody.”

  “As a matter of fact, he is.”

  “Hurrah!” Holmes was in a transport of delight. “You cannot know how glad I am to hear that.” His expression turned sombre. “Please tell me he hasn’t added a fifth victim to his tally.”

  “No. To the best of my knowledge, this series of murders you are convinced Dr Stamford has been committing has not claimed another soul.”

  Holmes brightened again, and it occurred to me that he was of the most mercurial temperament, his moods switching from one to the next with ease. This, I concluded, must be a by-product of having such an alert and fast-moving brain.

  “Then that is all the greater cause for celebration,” he said. “Pray enlighten me as to how he has come to be under arrest. What were the circumstances?”

  “It’s… ahem, a somewhat irregular state of affairs,” said Gregson. “He is highly dishevelled and not what one might call in full possession of his faculties. We’re not even completely sure it is Dr Stamford. We found calling cards in his wallet identifying him as such, but who’s to say the wallet is actually his own? It might have been stolen, its present bearer a pickpocket or an opportunistic thief. At any rate, since I have never clapped eyes on the man before and since he is behaving in so startlingly obtuse a manner, I thought it would be best if you were to come to the Yard with me, Mr Holmes, and corroborate that he is who he appears to be.”

  THUS IT WAS THAT, NOT HALF AN HOUR LATER, WE were at 4 Whitehall Place and had entered Scotland Yard. Prior to leaving Baker Street I had again made my excuses and offered to absent myself from the proceedings. Holmes, however, would have none of it. He said that I was as much involved in the Stamford affair as he was; and besides, from the sound of it, the opinion of a medical man might be needed. The more I cavilled, the more adamant he became, until all I could do was give in. I felt browbeaten but at the same time flattered and even a little honoured. I was also, without question, curious to see Stamford once more and discover what had befallen him between last night and this morning. The mystery had its hooks in me. More to the point, I had nothing else to do, certainly nothing better.

  Stamford had been consigned to a holding cell in the basement of the building, and we heard his voice even before we reached that long, dank corridor lined with cast-iron doors. He was sending forth a stream of guttural vocalisations that barely sounded like words, much to the annoyance of prisoners in the other cells, who shouted oath-peppered imprecations, inviting him to shut up and promising dire retribution upon him should they ever get the chance.

  “He’s been ranting like this, on and off, since we took him in,” Gregson said.

  “And when was that?” Holmes asked.

  “Around five. Couple of constables coming to the end of their night-time rounds nabbed him on Aldgate. He was acting erratically, they said, yelling and trying to do himself mischief. They restrained him, but not without difficulty. One of them received a broken nose for his pains.”

  As we neared the cell, Stamford’s cries dwindled, subsiding into silence.

  “Thank God for that,” came a gruff voice from the berth opposite. “Peace and quiet again. Long may it last.”

  The officer whose job it was to supervise the detainees and escort visitors into this underground domain produced his impressive ring of keys and unlocked the door. He remained outside the cell while the rest of us went in.

  Stamford sat on a wooden cot in the corner, wrists and ankles manacled. At the sight of him I could not withhold a gasp, for he was barely the same man I had encountered the previous evening, and if I had not happened to meet him on that occasion, I might not have recognised my former fellow student.

  He was wild-haired, mad-eyed, with a froth of saliva on his lips and a ribbon of mucus dangling from one nostril. His skin had gone so pale it was almost grey, and his clothing was ragged and sodden. My sense of smell told me he had soiled himself recently, but even more arresting than that fact were the multiple abrasions and contusions on his face. His forehead was a lumpen jigsaw of black and blue bruises, and his cheeks bore the marks of having been raked by fingernails.

  Holmes was only somewhat less taken aback than I. This was undoubtedly Valentine Stamford, and we both affirmed as much for Gregson’s benefit – yet he was radically changed. In a mere few hours he had been transformed from a still apparently sane human being into a raving lunatic who looked as though he belonged in Bedlam.

  He scarcely registered our presence in the cell. He was staring at his hands, murmuring to himself in low tones.

  “His injuries…?” said Holmes.

  “All self-inflicted,” Gregson was quick to assert. “Well, nearly all. My boys were as gentle as they could reasonably be, under the circumstances. He may have sustained a scratch or two as they bundled him into the wagon, but the noteworthy bumps and scrapes you can see were already there. They caught him hitting his forehead against the Aldgate Pump, as like to dash his brains out. Then, when they remonstrated with him, he started dragging his nails down his face. They think he may have been trying to gouge out his eyeballs.”

  I shuddered. “This is appalling. What do you reckon, Holmes? Do you think he is suffering symptoms of opium withdrawal?”

  “Is that your view, Watson?”

  “I am no expert in such things, but it is at least a feasible explanation. Normally there is shaking, convulsions of the limbs, excessive sweating, hallucinations. I daresay, though, that more extreme reactions can occur, and one such sits before us. I would have to consult the literature to give a more definitive diagnosis, but…” I shrugged to indicate that I had pronounced on the topic to the best of my ability.

  Holmes nodded. “You are proving a useful companion. Our meeting is beginning to seem highly fortuitous. Perhaps—”

  He was unable to finish the sentence, for at that moment Stamford sprang abruptly to his feet with a clank of chains and began screaming.

  “Fhtagn! Ebumna fhtagn! Hafh’drn wgah’n n’gha n’ghft!”

  The three of us – Holmes, Gregson and myself – took an involuntary step back.

  Eyes bulging, spittle flying, Stamford repeated the incomprehensible outburst. “Fhtagn! Ebumna fhtagn! Hafh’drn wgah’n n’gha n’ghft!”

  “What is that?” I breathed. “Is that even a language?”

  “Search me,” said Gregson. “He’s been spouting similar mumbo-jumbo all morning. Someone thought it might be some Cornish dialect, or Gaelic. Someone else thought it might be Welsh, but I brought along our resident refugee from the valleys, Inspector Athelney Jones, for a listen, and he says not.”

  Once more Stamford gave vent to the string of sounds, and then again, and again, without cease. Reiterated over and over, the words gained the rhythmic insistence of a chant or incantation. I found it hard not to want to stop my ears. There was something eerily famili
ar in their formulation. They pricked a memory in me, stirring the recollection of an incident that I had done my level best to suppress, and I felt a nauseating dread begin to well up inside. I smelled ancient dust and damp. My skin prickled as though in proximity to walls carved out of cold subterranean rock. I heard voices lost in cavernous echoes, and glimpsed scaly skin, slit-like pupils, flickering forked tongues…

  Oh dear Lord, it was a language, one that I knew only too well and would have recognised sooner had I not spent several months trying intently to forget it. This was not the first time dark, clotted syllables like these had wormed their way into my ears. It was as though a shovel were being dug into the earth of my mind, disinterring a buried horror.

  “Watson? Watson!”

  Holmes’s voice sounded above Stamford’s, clear as a bell, fraught with concern.

  “Whatever’s the matter with you, man? You’ve gone white as a sheet.”

  He reached out a hand, grasping me by the shoulder to steady me. Without it I might very well have fainted. As it was, his grip – which was strong, exceptionally, indeed painfully so – restored me to my senses. My thoughts sharpened and the wave of light-headedness that had come over me receded. I was myself again.

  My stomach continued to churn, however, and my heartbeat to race.

  “I’m fine,” I said, brushing off Holmes’s hand. “Fine, I tell you.” And then, to myself, I added: “A Jezail bullet. Only that. The bullet from a Jezail.”

  “Hold up!” Gregson cried out, leaping forward. “Stop that!”

  My vision regained focus in time to see something that will remain with me to the end of my days. Even now, nearly fifty years on, I can conjure up the image as clearly as though it were yesterday. I have been exposed to many a shocking sight in the interim, and I ascribe several of the white hairs on my head to those experiences, but this particular one is imprinted more deeply and ineradicably than most.

  Both Holmes and Gregson had been diverted by my sudden queer turn, and their attention had not been on Stamford. He, perhaps taking advantage of their momentary distraction, or perhaps simply deciding now was the time to do what he had intended all along, bent his head to his forearm…

  …and began to chew.

  His teeth dug hard into the soft skin, and with a wrench of both neck and arm he managed to excise a significant chunk of his own flesh. Even as the blood began to flow, he spat out the lump of meat onto the floor and brought forearm back to mouth in order to take a second bite from the wound.

  That was when Gregson sprang into action, but he was too late. This time Stamford had his teeth around tendons and veins, including amongst the latter the radial and ulnar arteries. He tugged and gnawed, snapping both in twain. Gregson fought to disengage the arm from his jaw, but his efforts succeeded only in helping Stamford complete the ghastly self-mutilation. Blood jetted from the roughly-severed ends of the rubbery tubes in thick, pulsing streams, and Stamford beheld his handiwork with a gleam of awe and amazement in his eyes, his gore-smeared mouth gaping in a weirdly serene grin.

  “It’s over,” he said, and it was akin to a sigh. “I’m done. There’s only peace now.”

  He collapsed back onto the cot, and I rushed to his aid. Unstrapping my tie from my collar, I wrapped it round his bicep and fastened it with a tight knot. In this way I fashioned a tourniquet, closing off the brachial artery, the supplier of the two lesser vessels.

  Blood continued to pour from the edges of the gash itself, and I had every certainty that the injury Stamford had done himself was fatal. Yet I could not have stood by without at least trying to save him.

  He began to go into shock. Tremors ran through his body, deepening into spasms. I slapped his cheeks. “Stamford,” I urged. “Stamford, stay with us. Stay conscious. Don’t pass out.”

  But his blood pressure was plummeting, and I did not have my medical bag so I could not inject him with a stimulant. Nor could I bind up the wound with cotton wadding and carbolised bandages. I would have needed to do either or both of those things within the next couple of minutes to guarantee a good outcome, and that was time Stamford did not have.

  He rested his gaze on me and said wanly, “You’re a decent chap, John Watson. I always thought that about you. Solid old Watson. By-the-book Watson. I regret that we could not have been better chums.” He glanced at the makeshift tourniquet. “Thank you for this. A sterling effort, if futile. In return, a piece of advice. Forget about Shadwell. Steer clear of the place. Never go back there. There are forces at work… Men who would be more than men… They consort with the Great Old Ones. They seek power from where they should not, and God help us if they succeed. God help… usss… allll…”

  His voice faded. His eyes clouded. His breath crackled in his throat.

  He was with us no more.

  “WELL, BLOW ME DOWN,” SAID GREGSON, KNUCKLES pressed to brow in bewilderment, staring at Stamford’s lifeless remains. “That’s… That’s not what anyone would have wanted.”

  “Anyone but Stamford,” Holmes pointed out. “It took some willpower to do what he just did. An iron determination.”

  “He must have been quite mad.”

  “Or else horribly sane. Did you not hear him at the end? His address to Watson? Those were the words of someone entirely lucid. It was as if a fog had lifted and in his final dying seconds he saw everything with perfect clarity.”

  “Are you quite sure?” said Gregson. “What I got from it was pure babble. I mean, ‘Great Old Ones’. What’s that about? ‘Forget about Shadwell.’ ‘Men who would be more than men.’ Lunacy not lucidity, if you ask me.”

  “Gentlemen,” I said sharply, “a man has just died. Someone I used to know. I would appreciate it if you didn’t straight away set about forensically analysing his mental status, and would instead, if only for a moment or so, accord his passing some respect.”

  Chastened, both Holmes and Gregson apologised.

  I would not perhaps have spoken to them with such asperity had I not been so thoroughly discombobulated by the turn of events. From Stamford’s use of that strange language to his grisly suicide and his grave warning, everything about the episode had impinged on my nerves. Compounding my agitation was my failure to keep him in the land of the living. He had slipped through my fingers like water.

  “You are right of course, Watson,” Holmes said. “We were insensitive.” He withdrew the grey horsehair blanket from beneath Stamford’s body and draped it over him, covering his face. “There. Inspector? Let us repair to your office, where we may partake of a restorative nip of whisky. Watson needs it, and I could do with some myself.”

  “Whisky? I don’t—”

  “The hip flask I can see forming a bulge in your left jacket pocket – it doesn’t contain lime cordial, now does it?”

  Shortly we were ranged round Gregson’s desk, which was heaped with manila folders. His in-tray was overflowing with cases pending, while his out-tray was almost empty. Gregson tended to be busier than the average detective inspector, mostly because he was more conscientious than his peers and less apt to leave stones unturned and avenues of enquiry unexplored.

  A few sips of his whisky did something to revive me, but I still remained dazed and detached as he and Holmes argued over the implications of Stamford’s untimely demise. As far as Gregson was concerned, the matter had been resolved. If Stamford was responsible for the murders as Holmes claimed, then with his end came an end to his homicidal campaign. Gregson liked to think of himself as a thorough man, keen to see things through all the way, but surely in this instance a case had tied itself up with a bow, all nice and neat, no further attention required. A killer now lay beyond the capacity to kill again, and whilst he may not have faced trial and undergone the due process of British justice, the outcome had been much as it would otherwise have been, presuming his guilt was never in doubt.

  “Mind you,” he added, “the paperwork on this one is going to be hellish. I hope I can call on both of you to sign af
fidavits swearing that Dr Stamford took his own life and was not a victim of police violence. This is just the sort of thing the liberal reformers will jump on and use as a stick to beat the Met with, if I don’t square it away properly.”

  “Do you genuinely think the affair is over, Inspector?” said Holmes.

  “Isn’t it? It appears to be. Taking your own avowed belief that Dr Stamford is a repeat murderer, and factoring in the lack of a fresh victim in Shadwell, can we not draw the obvious conclusion?”

  “There are still unanswered questions.”

  “Such as?”

  “How did Stamford commit his crimes?”

  “You mean what method did he use to dispose of his victims? It was starvation, no? Judging by the emaciation of the bodies. Isn’t it as simple as that?”

  “I see. You are saying he held them captive without food or water until they perished.”

  Gregson spread out his hands. “Wouldn’t you agree that’s the logical assumption?”

  “‘Logical assumption’ is, in my view, an oxymoron. The words do not even belong in the same sentence. But let us parse your proposition anyway.”

  “Oh dear,” Gregson groaned, with the weariness of a man knowing he was about to watch his newborn brainchild be coolly and mercilessly dissected.

  “How long does it take to starve a person to death? I would estimate a fortnight. Wouldn’t you concur, Watson?”

  “Much depends on the individual’s general state of health beforehand,” I said, “but yes, it would be two weeks, give or take, before death occurred from catastrophic organ failure or myocardial infarction. Three at the utmost if he was strong or had significant reserves of fat to draw on.”

  “Stamford would thus have had to select and abduct each victim a substantial period of time in advance, then hide the poor wretch somewhere, unfed, unwatered, and wait for nature to take its course. What that fails to allow for is the precision of his timetable. Each body showed up the morning after the night of the new moon. How could he guarantee that cessation of life would take place precisely on schedule? It is not possible, not when death by starvation is, as we have ascertained, a moveable feast.”