Warlock Holmes--The Sign of Nine

by G. S. Denning

  Here Lestrade paused to indicate the table just before the corpse. It was still set for two. Or… no, let me say, there were two glasses. Between them stood so much liquor, it might be fair to say the table had been set for twenty. Only a bottle of cheap rum had been opened, lending the room a stink of sickly-sweet inebriant, which mingled with the smell of recent death. On the side of the table farthest from Black Peter, a half-wrapped parcel lay upon a battered ledger. Amongst the many bottles I spotted a cutlass, a flensing knife, a gaff hook and a heavy belaying pin. Here were half a dozen tools for nautical-themed murder, interspersed with enough liquid inspiration to virtually ensure it.

  “…most of the time,” Lestrade concluded.

  “It’s a wonder anybody would sail with him,” I remarked.

  “Well he wasn’t all bad,” Holmes chirped. Grogsson, Lestrade and I turned dubious glances at him. “I only mean he had a reputation for success,” Holmes sniffed. “If a man of the sea found himself in need of coin, he could do a fair deal worse than signing on for a berth with Black Peter Blackguard McNotVeryNice. Was he a bit hot tempered? Yes! Did he often return to shore with a few mysteriously empty bunks aboard his ship? Of course. But he always turned a profit. Whether whale or seal, he always knew which hunt would fetch the best market price and he always came back with his hold full. His command was absolute. Not only was he capable of inspiring fear in others, he was utterly devoid of it himself. On his very first voyage as captain, he became famous for an encounter off the frigid coast of Greenland. It seems a killer whale was trying to knock a clutch of seals off an ice floe, but Black Peter wanted the seals for himself. He grabbed a harpoon, dived into the water, speared the whale straight through the head and then punched it in the face until it died.”

  “Preposterous,” I declared.

  Holmes cleared his throat politely, then indicated the wall just behind me. Turning, I beheld a huge orca skull, mounted on a plaque with a weathered harpoon driven through its left temple, then out through the right. Plus, one broken cheekbone.

  “Oh!”

  “I don’t blame you for doubting the tale, Watson,” Holmes confided. “Yet apparently anybody who sailed with Black Peter Blackguard McNotVeryNice came to regard such occurrences as commonplace. It is possible to respect a person and yet to revile him. Almost everybody did, it seems.”

  “Which presents us with our first difficulty in solving his murder,” said Lestrade. “A wide field of suspects. It seems everyone who met him wished him ill.”

  “Perhaps not everyone. Let us not give in to hyperbole,” I suggested.

  Lestrade raised his eyebrows at me, then turned to Grogsson and said, “Torg, why don’t you read Dr. Watson the statement you took from Mr. Carey’s daughter?”

  Grogsson produced his battered notebook and read, in a halting monotone, “He was a bastard and a crook. I am glad he’s dead. I wish I killed him. I wish I speared him. Would it be all right if I speared his body? Like, maybe in the face?”

  “Little Ophelia turns eight next month,” Lestrade informed me. “She likes ponies and tea parties.”

  “Very well, I concede the point,” I said. “Nevertheless, it seems unlikely she is our prime suspect. Unless little Ophelia has unusually developed musculature, I find it unlikely she is the one who drove this harpoon through not only her father, but the brick wall behind him.”

  “Ah! Therein lies our second difficulty,” Lestrade agreed. “Though there seem to be a wealth of people who would have killed Black Peter, there is a distinct shortage of people who could have. Not like this, anyway. The funny thing is that if any of his acquaintances were asked who might be capable of such a thing, Black Peter himself is the one they would name.”

  But Holmes shook his head. “I don’t know, though… It just doesn’t seem like a suicide.”

  “I should think not,” I said. “I suppose this explains your little porcine-transfixion experiment this morning. I gather Grogsson was the only one with the physical strength to pull it off.”

  “And there you begin to hint at our third difficulty,” said Lestrade. “This case is neither mine nor Grogsson’s. It has been assigned to our colleague, Inspector Stanley Hopkins.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve heard of him,” I said.

  “Nor would you, if his wife’s father had not been a retired chief inspector. Young Hopkins is not well suited to this line of work, I fear. Though he is technically of equal rank to Grogsson and me, he has yet to solve a case.”

  “A blow to the safety of the average Englishman, surely. Yet I cannot see how this presents any particular difficulty to us.”

  “Because when Scotland Yard has somebody who cannot perform his duties—and whom they cannot fire—they assign a mentor to that person,” said Lestrade.

  “A sound practice, I would say.”

  “They assigned Inspector Lanner.”

  I groaned. The last time we’d dealt with Lanner, he’d been trying to get Grogsson hanged for tearing two men’s ears off and boxing them up to give to a pretty girl. Though, in all fairness to Lanner, he’d been absolutely right. Torg had done that. “So now we fear Hopkins has become nothing more than an inexperienced extension of Lanner’s will and that Lanner will try to find a way to blame Grogsson for this crime?”

  “Well done, Watson!” said Holmes. “You’ve deduced our third difficulty. It’s the worst one.”

  “It is,” Lestrade agreed. “Especially as Grogsson happened to be staying at the Brambletye Hotel, barely two miles from here, at the time of the murder.”

  I looked over at Grogsson, who shrugged and mumbled, “Had a case there.”

  “I see,” I said. “And did you happen to transfix this particular little piggy?”

  “No,” Grogsson said and blushed with shame. One must not assume that this action belied his words. It absolutely confirmed them. Torg Grogsson never lied. Then again, he had a particular love of battle and feats of strength. For him to realize he’d been idle, less than two miles down the road, while someone else was up here being more Grogsson-like than Grogsson himself must have been galling indeed.

  “So though there is no direct link between Grogsson and this murder, circumstance is our enemy,” said Lestrade. “There may be no other man in Sussex who is even physically capable of this crime. Also, Peter Carey was known for bringing out the worst in people. Anyone who spent five minutes in his company might have been moved to make an attempt on his life and Grogsson—as we all know—is famous for his temper.”

  “Hey!” the hulking detective protested. “Talk nice or Torg will kill you!”

  “And there is a witness,” said Lestrade. “A stonemason named Slater was walking down the lane last night. He says he heard raised voices—though they sounded merry—and saw the silhouette of two very large men in the window.”

  “Yes but that could have been anybody,” Holmes scoffed. “Or anybody large, anyway.”

  “Not in Lanner’s eyes, I would think,” I said. “And, by extension, not in Hopkins’s. I think it best if we could solve this one quickly.”

  Shaking the last of the mystic cobwebs from my mind, I began my investigation. Of particular interest to me on Black Peter’s table were the partly unwrapped parcel and the ledger it lay upon. As they were at the opposite end of the table from Black Peter’s corpse and the book was turned away from him, I judged it was most likely they belonged to the other man who’d been present. Yet the first item gave me reason to doubt that supposition.

  Within the parcel lay a sealskin tobacco pouch, emblazoned with the initials “P.C.” It was filled with fresh tobacco and tied up with its pull-cord. It seemed new, the skin being lately tanned with no signs of wear.

  “So,” Holmes reasoned. “Whoever sat at this side of the table was in the process of opening a gift for the man tacked to the wall, eh?”

  “Unlikely,” said Lestrade and I together.

  “But it’s new. And it has Peter Carey’s initials on it.”
/>   Holmes was right—though those facts baffled me, they could not be disputed.

  The second item—the ledger—proved more promising. According to the inscription, it had once belonged to John Hopley Neligan, and it contained a long list of negotiable financial securities. Each entry had space to record the sale of the security in question, but these were all blank. Nevertheless, several of the entries had checkmarks by them. The ledger drew a worried expression from Lestrade, who paced the floor looking vexed and confused for a few moments. Suddenly he snapped his fingers and cried, “Dawson and Neligan!”

  “Eh?” said the rest of us.

  “Dawson and Neligan! Don’t you remember? They were West Country bankers. They failed for a million and ruined the fortunes of many of the great families of the region. Neligan left for Norway with a number of valuable securities, but he never arrived. Of course, the bank could not withstand the loss and it went under. A few of the securities have come back through the London market over the last few years, but Neligan has never been caught.”

  “Well, here’s his ledger, anyway,” said Holmes.

  Yet the true prize was still to come. On one of the shelves in Black Peter’s cabin we found a battered tin box, with the initials J.H.N. upon the lid. Though it had once been locked, the latch had since been forced. Inside lay a pile of stocks that must have been worth hundreds of thousands. Sure enough, they exactly matched the unchecked entries in Neligan’s ledger. Those securities with checkmarks beside them were missing. My companions swelled with triumph at what we’d found, but I will confess I had a certain gnawing discomfort at what we hadn’t.

  No pipe. No ash. No lingering scent to tell us this cabin was the haunt of a man who smoked.

  And if the gift was intended to be Peter Carey’s new tobacco pouch, there was certainly no sign of his old one.

  I even looked at the dead man’s teeth. They weren’t pretty, but I could not detect the telltale yellowing of tobacco stains, or the notch some fellows have in their teeth from habitually clutching a pipe stem.

  Of course, I was the only one to worry of such things. The other three were ecstatic with their find, noisily trading theories as to what it all might mean. So distracted were they that none of us heard the tread of feet on the path outside, until a shrill voice in the doorway declared, “Oh, look, it’s Grogsson! Just as Lanner said: the murderer always returns to the scene of the crime!”

  Holmes and Grogsson gave little cries of surprise. Lestrade snarled, turned towards the doorway and said, “No they don’t, Hopkins. That is a myth.”

  There in the doorway stood an exceedingly wiry young man. He looked as if he might weigh no more than a hundred pounds. His hair was black and straight-cut, exactly as per regulations, and he had a well-groomed black moustache that I could already tell he must be fiercely proud of. He began feverishly scribbling in a notebook: Ah-ha! Found Detective Grogsson at the scene of the crime! A clue? Seems highly indicative!

  “If it’s clues you want,” said Lestrade, with a close-lipped scowl, “there are plenty of real ones. I wonder, Inspector Hopkins, have you heard of Dawson and Neligan?”

  “Dawson and Neligan? What’s that?” Hopkins wondered.

  “In this case, a motive,” said Lestrade, and began explaining what we had discovered. I found myself impressed by the earnest interest the young detective displayed as he leaned in to learn from the seasoned veteran. True, Hopkins could likely be used as a tool to discredit, perhaps even to cause the execution of Grogsson, but he seemed also to be possessed of a curious and eager personality. He was an honest-seeming fellow, and diligent. Also to his credit, he was the first to realize that if John Hopley Neligan had been making his way to Norway by sea, he must surely have found himself in waters frequented by Peter Carey’s Sea Unicorn.

  “Yes! Of course!” cried Lestrade, so loudly that he nearly showed his teeth.

  Lestrade and his new nemesis-in-training spent the rest of the day working together, with Grogsson following them about. The only other clue of worth at the cabin was the lock to the door, which was scratched all over, as if somebody had been trying to force it. Hopkins thought Carey himself might have done the damage—being as famously powerful as he was famously drunk. Yet it seemed too extensive to be accidental and likely resulted from an attempt to force the door. But why so much damage? The lock was so cheap it could have been forced with almost anything. I tried it myself with a stick and had no trouble.

  Next, we interviewed Peter Carey’s widow and daughter, neither of whom seemed overly concerned at being bereft of his company. Indeed, his wife appeared fiercely proud of the fact that he’d been murdered. She declared that whatever hand had ended Black Peter’s life was surely the hand of a friend. I was tempted to ask why she’d remained married to him so long if these were her feelings, yet something about her eyes stopped me. They were sunken with long wariness and the stress of misuse. One glance was enough to tell that she considered herself less married to Peter Carey than trapped with him.

  As for little Ophelia, she was mostly just curious to know if there were any life insurance payments forthcoming and whether there might be sufficient surplus to furnish her with a pony.

  Our trio of detective inspectors then searched the house to see if any more clues might be gleaned, or even information on how Peter Carey had lived when he… you know… lived. This left Holmes free to pursue his new hobby—staring queerly at me and pursing his lips. I’d caught him at it several times that day already. As we were now alone, I had the opportunity to hiss, “What are you doing, Warlock?”

  “I was just wondering… are you quite well, John?”

  “I… What? Me?” My hand flew instinctively to my arm, to cover the multitude of black and blue needle marks. Of course, the touch of fabric reminded me that I owned sleeves and had already tasked them to that purpose. Relieved but guilty, I stammered, “No, I am… I’m quite well.”

  “Are you sure? Because you’re looking a bit green about the gills, if you don’t mind my saying. I mean, I expected you’d be less than your best after two weeks flat on your back, knocked out by poison lipstick. But that was weeks ago, Watson. I thought you’d look better by now. So why do you look worse?”

  How hard it is for me to describe the dread his words engendered. Of course, it had not escaped my notice that the seven percent solution was destroying my body. I could feel how poisonous my blood was becoming to me. I seemed to spend a good portion of every morning vomiting some of it up.

  “Well… perhaps I still have that cold, you know?”

  “And what about all this doom you’ve got?” Holmes continued. “True, you were rather rife with it when we faced Miss Adler. But then instead of killing you—which would have been the easiest thing—she kissed you into a coma and buggered off to America. Quite charitable, I thought. Now, common sense would seem to dictate you’d be significantly less doomed with her gone, and I’ll swear you were. So why are you so very doomed now, John? You haven’t been doing anything doomy while I wasn’t looking, have you?”

  “I don’t know… um…”

  “You’ve got to be careful, Watson. Promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “Yes. Fine. I’ll be careful. Look, can we talk about Inspector Hopkins?”

  “Why? Is he dooming you?”

  “No, but Inspector Lanner clearly intends to use him to doom Grogsson.”

  “Yes but Hopkins seems like such a fine fellow, don’t you think? Take it from me, he’ll go far in the force.”

  “I’m not so sure of that, Holmes,” I said. “Remember, he has yet to solve a single case.”

  “Ha! A formality,” Holmes declared. “Why, I’d say his investigative prowess is every bit the equal of my own!”

  “Yes… I’m not going to comment on that,” I decided. “What I am going to suggest is that if we could hand him his first victory, he might prove more friendly to our cause, mightn’t he? Look at him hanging upon Lestrade’s every word. I think his
loyalty might easily be turned.”

  “So be it!” said Holmes. “Inspector Stanley Hopkins shall remain one of our company until we help him to solve his first case!”

  Just the tiniest bit of green fire lit in Holmes’s eye.

  “Holmes… you didn’t just cast a spell, did you?”

  “Did I? I don’t think so, Watson.”

  “It’s just there was this little… pop…”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t worry about that. Come on, Watson, let’s see what the others are up to, eh?”

  Very nearly nothing. It seemed Scotland Yard had exhausted the available clues. They puttered about for a while longer, but to little effect. Once or twice I caught Holmes twiddling his fingers at Hopkins or me, although he always stopped as soon as he realized I’d seen it. I’d have asked him what he was doing, if I had not feared the conversation might veer towards what I’d been doing with Holmes’s irreplaceable slipperful of shredded sorcerer. After half an hour of fruitless searching, Lestrade suggested we head home for the night and hope the case might develop further.

  Which it did—rather sooner than any of us expected.

  As we left the Carey home, we saw a man standing in the lane, periodically engrossed in a newspaper. That is to say, when he thought himself unobserved, he would gaze nervously at us or hungrily at the door to Black Peter’s cabin. Yet the instant any of us turned to look at him, he whipped the newspaper up in front of his face, as if it was no strange thing to wander out onto a country lane, half a mile from anywhere, to read your daily papers in the failing light. He was even thinner than Hopkins and sweated with such alacrity that his newspaper was getting soggy where he gripped it. Lestrade gave Hopkins a meaningful glance, then marched straight up to the stranger.

  “Hello there,” said Lestrade.

  “Um… yes… good morning,” the man replied.

  “Evening,” said Lestrade.

  “Oh. Yes. That. Good evening.” He turned his back to us, raised his newspaper and thrust his nose right against it, folding it back as far as he could, in an attempt to shield himself from our gaze.