“I shall indeed, because the matter lies heavily on me. I was not the murderer myself, but merely the unwitting accomplice. I was then working for Mr. Fairfax, who owned this shop in better times—you see how little trade we do now. Late one afternoon, he took me to one side and said: ‘Now then, young Cromwell, I have something I want you to do and you must follow my instructions to the letter, do you understand?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Fairfax,’ I said. ‘Very well,’ Fairfax continued. ‘Tonight, after the shop has closed, a fine gentleman will call. He will ask you for something and, whatever that thing is, you must give it to him—no questions asked. And there is no need to enter what you give him in the sales ledger. He has already paid me very well. Then, when he has gone, you will forget that you ever saw him.’ ”
“Did that not arouse your suspicions in any way?”
“It now seems to me a strange way to do business, but I was then only an apprentice and did not question my master’s judgement.”
“Go on,” said Holmes.
“At six o’clock there was a knock at the door. A very well-dressed and quite portly young gentleman entered the shop. His hair was fair and curled and he wore a nobleman’s gown—in those days, noblemen wore silk gowns that were very different from the normal student’s gown. I asked him what I could do for him, and he said that he needed some cyanide to kill rats that were troubling him in his rooms. I measured out a little of the powder, but he demanded that I double the amount, since the rat he wished to kill was a large old one. It had come over on a ship from Germany some years before, he said, and it was high time somebody dealt with it. I did as he asked and would have done so even if Mr. Fairfax had not ordered me, because the gentleman had an air about him of one who was not used to having his instructions questioned. He took the cyanide powder in a small phial. I bowed to him. Then he handed me a guinea. ‘It’s all paid for, sir,’ I said. ‘That’s to make sure you say nothing,’ he snarled. ‘And if you do, you’ll regret it all your days.’ ”
“And you never saw him again?” I suggested.
“Not exactly,” said the pharmacist.
“What do you mean?” asked Holmes.
“I mean that I was very troubled,” said the pharmacist. “By the guinea as much as anything. I recognised the gown as being a Trinity College one and so, the following day, after my duties here were done, I set out for Trinity to see if I could spot him again and find out who he was.”
“And did you see him?”
“No, sir, I did not. But I met with a bedmaker from Trinity, who lived close to the shop and whom I knew well. I described my customer and his request to her and she let out a gasp. ‘But that can only be the Prince of Wales,’ she cried. ‘You know him well?’ I asked. ‘Indeed. By a remarkable coincidence, I am his bedmaker,’ she replied. ‘This is terrible.’ ‘Terrible that he wishes to kill rats?’ I enquired. ‘No, Mr. Cromwell,’ she muttered. ‘I now see what he plans to do. Oh, Lord have mercy on us both.’ And with that, she fled.”
“Did she clarify what she meant?”
“No, though later I worked out what must have happened. But it is better that she explain it to you herself.”
“How will we find her?” I asked.
“She is still a bedmaker at Trinity College,” said the pharmacist. He looked at his watch. “Her name is Mary Fleetwood. She finishes her work at three o’clock. If you walk back slowly to Trinity, you should catch her as she leaves. She has grey hair and wears a red dress and a black shawl.”
“Thank you,” said Holmes. “We shall do that. By the way, your sign says closed. You will not get many customers that way.”
“Ah,” said the pharmacist.
But he made no move to change it.
“A strange shop,” I said to Holmes, as we proceeded southwards again.
“But very much as I expected,” he said. “Even down to the closed sign on the door.”
“And have you already formed an opinion of the lady we are going to meet?”
“I am not sure. She will be one of two things. Let us see which of those things she is.”
“And will that help us solve this puzzle?”
“No, it is purely incidental. But it will tell us something about the methods of our adversaries.”
“Adversaries?”
“Oh yes. As we try to work upwards toward the light, there are those who are trying to pull us down to our destruction. But fear not. I think we are ahead of them, Watson, and I plan to stay ahead.”
We were outside the gates of Trinity at three precisely and, at one minute past three, a small grey-haired lady in a red dress emerged.
“Is that what you expected?” I asked.
“It is the less likely of the two possibilities, but I now understand something that Mr. Cromwell—Mr. Richard Cromwell—told us.” He turned in the woman’s direction and called, “Mrs. Fleetwood! A word with you, I pray!”
She stopped abruptly. “And who might you be?” she demanded.
“I am Sherlock Holmes. I am a consulting detective. I think you may be able to tell me about a murder that occurred a little over thirty years ago.”
“Lord have mercy on our souls!” she exclaimed. “I always feared this would happen.”
“You have nothing to be frightened of for the moment,” said Holmes. “Perhaps if we stepped into that public house, we might be able to find a quiet table at which we can talk.”
“I’ll have a gin,” she said. “A large one.”
At that time in the afternoon, the barroom was almost empty, and drinks were quickly ordered and a quiet table secured.
“You say you’ve already spoken to Mr. Henry Cromwell,” she said. “So you know the worst of it. Early that afternoon, Prince Albert had shown up at the college unexpected and in a fine temper. He and young Albert Edward, as I always called him, had had a row and Prince Albert had gone for a walk by the river to cool down. The moment he had gone, the young prince summoned me. “I have need of some very special medicine,” he said. “Do you know a pharmacist who can be trusted, somebody you know personally?” I nodded. Lots of my young gentleman got a dose of the French pox from time to time, so I was used to requests of this sort. “Take this money,” he said, “and this note explaining what I want. Say I’ll call by early this evening and collect the special powder. When you’re done at the chemist, I want you to go to the confectioners over by St. John’s and buy a dozen marrons glacés. My father loves them, and I need some sort of gift to pacify him. He usually eats one a day, so a dozen will last him the better part of a fortnight. Then bring them back here.” I thought little of it at the time. I wasn’t sure a dozen would be enough, but otherwise everything seemed in order. Then the following day I met Mr. Cromwell—Mr. Henry Cromwell, I mean—and he told me about the cyanide. But Prince Albert had already left for Windsor with the poisoned sweetmeats in his greatcoat pocket. Of course, I read the newspapers with trepidation. Within days there was news of his indisposition, then that he had taken to his bed with sweats and stomach pains. Finally came news of his death. His face and hands were black, sir—cyanosis. I could not doubt that he had been slowly poisoned with the cyanide that Mr. Cromwell had sold Albert Edward.”
“But…” I said.
Holmes held up his hand to silence me. “Thank you, my good woman,” he said. “Here is half a crown to buy enough gin to drown your sorrows very thoroughly.”
“I shall do so,” she said. “But you do believe me, don’t you, sir?”
“Why should I doubt you?” he said.
“Well,” said Holmes, when we were again seated in a first-class compartment and his pipe was poisoning the air, “I think that we have had a very satisfactory day.”
“But that woman…” I said.
“She is not an expert on poisons,” said Holmes.
“Even so…”
“I have brought
my notes on Lassus,” said Holmes. “I shall occupy the journey to London rereading them. I would not want anything to delay the delivery of my monograph to the printer.”
“And the case we have been investigating?”
“It is solved. There is nothing more to be done. On Friday at ten I shall be at your consulting rooms to await the arrival of the man sent by The Strand magazine to collect your latest case report.”
“But I still do not know the ending.”
“It will take you only a moment or two to add the necessary paragraphs, once the man has arrived. I shall dictate them to you, if you wish.”
“And what will be in those paragraphs?”
“I cannot yet say.”
“But surely all is clear. Some foreign power, anxious to discredit the heir to the throne, has sent us on a wild goose chase to Cambridge where we were to unearth what are, frankly, some very spurious facts from some very doubtful witnesses. We were expected to make them public, without informing Mycroft, who would most certainly have been able to tell us the truth and stop us. The editor of The Strand magazine has been tipped off and has most disloyally decided to profit from it by being the first to publish the rumours. Royal scandal always sells well. I shall not send him any further cases and shall tell him in no uncertain terms, when his messenger arrives, that he may not have this one.”
“Oh no, I think you can let him have it. Though the fee may sadly be less than you expect. You have spotted some of the clues, Watson, but you have clearly missed others. All will be revealed on Friday.”
For the next hour, my friend silently read and occasionally hummed some rather archaic tune. Later he relit his pipe and for a long time stared out of the window with apparent satisfaction at the flat East Anglian countryside. Slowly pipe smoke filled the compartment. It was a relief when we arrived at Liverpool Street and I could open the carriage door and get out into the relatively fresh and pure air of London.
“I wonder what sort of dinner Mrs. Hudson has prepared for us this evening,” he said, as we joined the queue for a cab.
“I think she said it would be some sort of pudding,” I said.
“Let us hope she has not over-egged it in the way that our adversaries have,” said Holmes.
On the Friday after our visit to Cambridge, Holmes arrived at my consulting rooms at ten o’clock.
“I am not too late?” he enquired. “The messenger has not been and gone?”
“No,” I said. “Are you going to explain to me now what the end of the story is?”
“Once the messenger is here, I can begin. Ah, the doorbell is ringing—hopefully we can now conclude this.”
A man of middling height with a dark, bushy beard and enormous eyebrows was ushered in. His hat was pulled down low over his face.
“You are from the the Strand magazine?” asked Holmes.
“That’s right, guv. Give us the story and I’ll be on my way.”
“You shall indeed have the whole tale,” said Holmes, “but in exchange I’m having your beard.”
Before the man could even protest, Holmes had grabbed one side of the beard and tugged it, with a ripping sound, from his cheek. The man made to pull away, but that only aided Holmes in removing the false hair entirely.
“Mr. Cromwell!” I exclaimed. “I mean, Mr. Richard Cromwell…”
“And Mr. Henry Cromwell,” said Holmes. “For a while I thought that he might prove to be Mary Fleetwood too, but that was somebody else. Your wife, I assume, Mr. Cromwell? I could not at first understand why you, as a married man, insisted you were a bachelor. Then of course it occurred to me: your wife had a part to play in the plot that you were weaving and you did not wish us even to suspect her existence.”
“How did you know who I was?” he said.
“How did I know that Henry and Richard were the same person? First, I took the natural precaution of checking that Cromwell’s Pharmacy really existed. To that end, I visited the British Museum and consulted various trade directories. There was not and never had been a pharmacy of that name in Cambridge. It was clear therefore when we visited you that you had taken a derelict shop for a few days and smartened it up as much as you could and added a few jars and other suitable props. Of course you wanted no real customers, so the closed sign remained firmly in place. It amused me to let you stew for most of the day behind your fake shopfront, while you added unnecessary embellishments to what you planned to tell me. That it really was you behind that rather pathetic disguise was confirmed by some of the things you said—for example you, as Henry, repeated word for word some of Richard’s remarks about the matter lying heavily on you and being an unwitting accomplice. Your wife was good in her supporting role as the ancient bedmaker. But she slipped up by clarifying at one point that she meant Henry Cromwell, when she had no reason to know that Richard Cromwell even existed—much less that I might have ever met him. She also made a mistake that Watson immediately spotted concerning cyanosis. You’d think, from the word itself, that it would be a feature of cyanide poisoning—and they do both derive from the Greek for ‘blue’—but cyanosis has nothing at all to do with the poison. It was a tempting little detail thrown in at the last minute, but completely wrong. Over-egging the pudding. The thousand pounds for the story was also a little too much—none of Watson’s tales are worth half that. The reply-paid telegram was a good idea though—Watson’s reply went to you as the sender, not to the real Strand magazine, which remains innocent of the whole thing.”
“So,” I said, “Cromwell here—Richard or Henry as you choose—would have obtained a full account of the Prince of Wales’s guilt, from an impeccable source, and then sold it to a foreign power to bring down our next king? I can see why that source had to be you and not Merrivale. His word would have counted for nothing.”
“I beg to differ,” said Cromwell, indignantly.
“I’m sure you do,” said Holmes, “because Richard Cromwell is not your real name either, is it? Shall I pull off those eyebrows before I name you?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “They are stuck on very firmly.”
“Very well, false eyebrows and all, this is that master of disguise and employer of modern techniques, Mr. Herbert Merrivale.”
“But…” I said.
“Like so many of my cheap imitators, Merrivale was aware that he could not compete with the real thing. He needed to discredit me. So, he hatched a plot to make me denounce the Prince of Wales, publicly, as a murderer. The denunciation would take the form not only of an ultimately embarrassing meeting with the prime minister, but also of the write-up of the investigation by you, Watson—an utterly improbable tale of slow cyanide poisoning with impossible symptoms and a dying prince continuing to stuff himself with marrons glacés—a tale that I would apparently have been taken in by. And it would not have appeared in The Strand, but in some inferior magazine or newspaper that Merrivale would actually send the manuscript to. And in case you hesitated, he was prepared to offer, though almost certainly not actually pay, a thousand pounds for your cooperation.”
“How did you see through me?” asked Merrivale (as I must now at last call him).
Holmes laughed. “Who, other than Merrivale himself, would have spoken as highly of him as you repeatedly did? Who, other than a man who was trying to imitate me, would have sat there pathetically trying to light and relight such an enormous pipe? Who…”
Merrivale held up a hand. “There’s no need to rub it in,” he said.
“Just clear off and take your eyebrows with you,” said Holmes.
“So,” I said. “I do now have the end of the story. Thank you, Holmes. I shall write it up for The Strand.”
“You just need a title for your account,” said Holmes. “What about A Scandal in Cambridge? Or what about The Slandered Prince?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve thought of a better title than
that—one that applies to all imitators of your work…and indeed of my own.”
Sherlock Holmes and the Butterfly Effect
By Cristina Macía with Ian Watson
Few people are aware that certain actions which Sherlock Holmes undertook on behalf of the British Admiralty in China’s Shandong province during the First World War unintentionally led to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1923.
Thus the reigning Chinese Politbureau of the mid-twenty-second century regard Holmes with a certain respect, as for an ancestor—at the same time as they abhor all the help which Holmes constantly gave to the ruling houses of Europe, resulting in the creation of the United Kingdom of Europe, capital in Brussels, adversely affecting China’s growth.
To ensure the continuity of the Chinese Communist Party while preventing a pan-European Kingdom will require fine-tuning of events every bit as skillfully as for a Stradivarius, preferably with the cooperation of the virtuoso though vain detective…
The two time-travellers, David Mason and Rajit Sharma, lie semi-hallucinating on adjacent tolerably clean and comfortable mattresses upon bed frames of carved Burma teak in an opium house in London’s Limehouse district, near the docks. Comfortable damask cushions cradle the users’ heads. A maid passes softly by, seeing that the clients’ long pipes remain upon the oil lamps, all flames turned low. Brown smoke hazes the air. Reality trembles like a child prostitute meeting their first client.
Opium expands time and space. Mason trails a hand through the air, copies of itself staying visible to his gaze in a disconcerting way. It is and it isn’t there, many times over. At least Holmes supposes that is what is going through the Oxonian’s mind. Such assuredly is the burly man’s clipped, but nevertheless plummy, accent. An accent shared, be it noted, with self-proclaimed Doctor of Philosophy Sharma—although a nasal whine of Birmingham Brummie faintly underlies the Hindu’s impeccable English, which is odd.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes Page 26
