Sherlock Holmes and the Four Corners of Hell

by Seamas Duffy

  As to the scandal in Soho, however, Sherlock Holmes did indeed have one further trick up his sleeve, as he had warned Inspector Lestrade. One afternoon in July, he called upon an old university associate of his, Mr Langdale Pike, at his lair in St James’s, and laid the story before him. An idealist with an ineradicable iconoclastic strain, Pike had made my acquaintance some years before. Although he had, on that occasion, been of inestimable service to Holmes in a rather complicated case, I must say frankly that I did not like the man, for I found him conceited, arrogant and affected. He was the founder of the Fellowship of the Left Ear – a coterie of writers so cynical and misanthropic, it made Mycroft’s Diogenes Club cronies look gregarious – and was a celebrated society gossipmonger, whose scurrilous columns were to be found in the more salacious magazines and vulgar newspapers, a profession which I found distasteful and effeminate. My friend assured me that despite appearances, Pike often suppressed more scandal than he retailed and that he had become a society columnist largely out of abhorrence at the antics of the upper classes.

  ‘Langdale Pike is justly famous for never having been open to any bribes or amenable to any threats,’ said my friend. ‘He is quite fearless, is quite immune to the vagaries of public, or any other, opinion, and embodies Wellington’s own maxim about writing without fear or favour, regardless of class or status.’

  He assured Holmes that the matter would receive his urgent attention and that he would not be deterred by threats of legal action from naming the parties involved. That the fellow had influence amongst the low-circulation radical newspapers was undeniable, and the following week, the story was splashed across the front page of one such paper, the Clerkenwell Free Press, which made comparisons to the odious days of the Hell-Fire Clubs and Beggar’s Benison. The circulation of many of these newspapers quadrupled for a period following Pike’s revelations. One of the Russian émigré newspapers had got hold of the story, too, as did the Arbeter Fraint and the Fáinne An Lae; and so the scandal ended up being retold in four languages. No qualms were shown about naming either the individuals concerned in the scandal or the organizations which were suspected of covering them up. The story had reached France where the press drivelled over every iota of the scandal, and revelled in the gory details of the murders that had been committed in order to prevent the scandal leaking out. One Boston newspaper leader thundered on about the inbred royal stock of Europe becoming deteriorated bodily and mentally, speculated upon the end of the monarchy, and went so far as to predict that England ‘would never have another king’.

  The ramifications of the affair continued for several months: there were claims and counter-claims in both the mainstream and radical press, and threats of libel abounded. The editor of the Russian journal was deported, questions were asked in Parliament and one radical member was expelled from the Lower House for calling the Prime Minister a liar. A fortnight after Holmes’s visit to St James’s, only a strict recluse could not have heard of the case, and I confess I was, as a result, forced to alter my view of Mr Langdale Pike. It was inevitable, however, that he would eventually become the defendant in a defamation case along with Mr Ernest Fields, the proprietor of the Hackney Clarion. As it happened, Pike and Fields lost the defamation case and received twelve months each.

  ‘As I recall,’ said Holmes when we heard the news, ‘Pike was rusticated on a number of occasions at university for producing outrageous lampoons in a university magazine, so he is no stranger to banishment. It will merely augment his reputation. I had considered raising a subscription for his benefit to take account of his loss of earnings whilst in Pentonville, but he assures me that having foreseen his fate somewhat in the latter days of the trial, he has already negotiated a healthy, large advance from his publisher to produce an account of life in prison. I am informed that Langdale Pike’s Prison Diaries will appear next year! Did I not say what a remarkable character he was, Watson?’

  The case against Meringer was dismissed due to lack of evidence and his accomplice, Titchfield, remained in France, safe from the laws of England. Miller-Beach disappeared completely from public life. The death of the earl’s former coachman was, despite a number of practical objections raised by Holmes, recorded at the coroner’s inquest as an unfortunate accident. When the accused were brought to trial in the Soho case, those who were convicted received between four and six months’ imprisonment. There were many at the time who believed the very lenient sentences handed down to the convicted men in the dock by his Lordship represented a quid pro quo for keeping far more august and eminent figures out of the limelight. After the case was over, Cartwright – on Lestrade’s recommendation and to Holmes’s great delight – joined the ranks of the Metropolitan Police Force in H Division. There was a tragic postscript, however: the royal personage who was implicated in the scandal took his own life with a revolver whilst interned in an asylum on the banks of the Rhine.

  ‘Twelve months for telling the truth, six months for loathsome debauchery, and a whole triumvirate of murderers walk free,’ I shook my head in deep despair as I sat after dinner with Holmes one summer evening.

  ‘One recalls Swift’s epigram, Watson: “The Law is like a cobweb which catches small harmless flies but lets the wasps and hornets through.”’

  The Adventure of the Edmonton Horror

  Throughout my many years of acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes I can recall, from more than a hundred of his adventures (to which he referred, with characteristic self-effacement, as ‘my trifling achievements’), a small number of cases which stretched beyond the merely strange and seemed, perhaps, to have bordered on the supernatural: none more so than that which is recorded in my notes for the year 1897. It was a particular facet of Holmes’s character that whenever he was presented with a problem of this sort, he would scathingly dismiss, a priori, any suggestion of supernatural cause or influence and seek, instead, natural explanations. He also bore a remarkable capacity for gallows humour, or what the French call rire jaune: ‘no ghosts need apply,’ he had once told me with marked sarcasm. However, once my friend had become acquainted with the details of the affair which Inspector Wills of the Middlesex Constabulary called one day in late autumn to lay before us, even his agnosticism towards the supernatural was at first somewhat shaken. It was undoubtedly one of the strangest beginnings to any of the cases I had ever come across, the outlandish features of which resulted in the wildest speculation in the London press at the time.

  At that point in my life, I had retired from regular practice and had gone back to my old quarters in Baker Street. October had been an unusually quiet month, and the brief hiatus in my friend’s consulting work allowed him to labour without interruption on the completion of a number of monographs upon which he was engaged; namely, the provincial accents and dialects of the English language, and a paper on the history of bee-keeping to be presented to the British Apiary Society. I recall that it was the first day of November and the onset of chills and fogs had arrived with perfect seasonality. Holmes was generally immune to the state of the weather, but on this occasion he was in one of his more cantankerous moods – the reason for which will soon become apparent. He could be as capricious as a woman and twice as cutting, and I should have said that I was a fair judge. We had just consumed a most excellent lunch and sat musing over the postprandial coffee. As I glanced over the newspapers, Holmes began to pore over the midday post which lay unopened whilst we had attacked the dish of devilled kidneys prepared by Mrs Hudson.

  ‘A rather mixed bag today,’ he muttered to me, as the maid finished clearing away the crockery. ‘I feel like the poacher’s wife in the fable; you know, the one who discovered the trout in the rabbit traps and the pheasant on the hook at the end of the fishing line. I believe this is your doing, Watson,’ he continued, looking up sharply as he indicated the object of his attention. ‘How often have I railed against your meretricious treatment of my métier? See what it has brought us to now!’

  He tossed over a letter,
very neatly handwritten in purple ink on lilac notepaper, on which he had underlined some of the words:

  ‘… anticipate your support for our proposal to establish a London branch of the Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society to celebrate the glittering accomplishments of your illustrious career … your gracious acceptance of our invitation to address the inaugural meeting which is being held in the Cordwainers’ Hall, Pepys Lane on… .’

  So it went on. I looked up with a mixture of disbelief and chagrin to meet that withering gaze, which could be worse than a dozen of his wounding words – yet another characteristic he shared with womanhood.

  ‘They seem to wish to turn me into some sort of national spectacle,’ he rasped. ‘Perhaps I shall end up on exhibition in a penny gaff in the Whitechapel Road, or on the bill at the Hackney Empire sandwiched between Daisy O’Malley and Conan & Doyle, guessing the occupations of the patrons in the stalls.’

  ‘The intention is well meant, no doubt, my dear fellow,’ I replied soothingly. ‘I see that they go on to mention that your brilliance is especially appreciated at the palace, and indicate the possibility of securing a royal patron for the society.’

  ‘They might at least have waited until I was dead.’ He seemed in no mood to be humoured as he continued, ‘Well, the matter is closed now.’

  ‘Closed?’ I asked.

  ‘At any rate I intend to draft a reply – in the name of Doctor John H. Watson, of course, to which you will afterwards append your signature – explaining that this Sherlock Holmes person to whom they refer does not actually exist and that he is merely a literary invention of your own.’

  ‘Very droll, Holmes,’ I retorted, although my amusement was mixed with some relief in that he seemed to have somewhat recovered his acerbic wit. ‘Of course, no one will believe that.’

  ‘No? Well, I am sure they will take the hint. Now, from the ludicrous to the fantastic: look at this one – it is rather fine, is it not?’ he said, shaking his head as passed me a second slip of paper. The note read:

  Have you ever known of vampires in London? Will call later over Edmonton. Insp. John Norman Wills, Middx. Const.

  I looked up at Holmes in surprise.

  ‘It is certainly the time of year for troubled, restless and wandering souls,’ he said with a sardonic glance at the calendar.

  ‘I cannot recall the name Wills.’

  ‘On the contrary, I believe we can claim the Inspector’s acquaintance. You will recall the Maberley case a year or so ago. Let me see, letter postmarked 8.43, in Lower Edmonton, so our man was up and about in time to catch an early post. One would surmise that something has occurred there during the night. Now then, Watson, what have we learned about vampires since last time?’

  Despite his cold, sceptical exterior and his intolerance towards superstition, Holmes was nevertheless assiduous in keeping what he called, with typical self-irony, his ‘uncommonplace book.’ This contained a collection of some of the strangest and most mysterious occurrences ever recorded in the capital, and a common feature of these phenomena, many of which had passed into myth, was that they had remained in some way either unexplained or unresolved. I forbore to publish such apocrypha, for whatever interest they may have held for a connoisseur of curiosities or a student of the bizarre, it seemed to me that to disclose a problem without revealing a solution amounted to a short-changing of the reading public. Of particular interest amongst the curiosities in this index incredibilis were: a transcription, long suppressed by officialdom, of an account by the magistrate in charge of the Ratcliff Highway Murders which named the true culprits; a deathbed confession by a witness in the celebrated Constance Kent murder case which threw light on a number of factors which had confounded Detective Inspector Whicher at the time; several reports of sightings of the giant black swine of Hampstead; an account of the London tram which vanished with its crew and passengers in a Christmas fog on Highgate Hill and was never seen again; and the discovery of the most extraordinary reliquary in an underground passage in Wellclose Square, thought to have been the site of a long-abandoned coven of Kabbalists. Of bloodsucking creatures of the night, however, there was no mention.

  ‘Nothing under vampires,’ I replied, ‘though, of course, we have since had a recent addition to our popular literature on the subject. Some Irish writer, whose brother is a fellow medical.’

  ‘Utter balderdash, Watson! How people can be diverted by such mediaeval nonsense in this nineteenth century of ours passes all understanding!’

  ‘Well,’ I replied, feeling rather resentful at having the work dismissed so glibly when I had read that it was rather well written, ‘there are people still alive today who can recall when suicides were buried at a crossroads with stakes driven through their hearts; it was not so long ago, you know.’

  ‘Have you read the book?’ he asked.

  ‘In fact I haven’t, though the reviewer in the new Daily Mail seems to have approved.’

  ‘Pshaw! It is not often that I find myself sharing a viewpoint with the Prime Minister, but I must say I am forced to agree with him: vacuous phrase-mongering, gimmicks, and … prizes! He ought to have described it as “fit for school boys” rather than “office boys”. Well, you have seen the note, what do you make of it?’

  ‘The “x” in his abbreviation of “Middlesex” is quite twice the size of the preceding letters and the writing goes off at all angles, here upwards, here downwards, sometimes sloping to the left, sometimes to the right. Going by the untidy scrawl, I should have said it had been written by some uneducated person,’ I ventured, ‘perhaps one of his subordinates?’

  ‘I think not. The note displays all the hallmarks of a man unable to think in a very straight fashion and I should say that is what explains the hurried scribble. Despite the handwriting being rather awry, his punctuation, which is instinctive, is perfect. He also manages to include his middle name, an action which, you must owe, would hardly occur to a subordinate, and which has not the slightest relevance; whereas he has omitted to mention a single useful detail of the case. He has made one rather obvious error too.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘If he wished to engage my urgent attention, surely a reply-paid telegram would have reached me in a fraction of the time taken by a letter, and would not only confirm my preparedness to meet him, but possibly prevent his arriving here in my absence. I presume, therefore, he had dashed this off before he had time to gather his wits. Nothing in the papers, I suppose?’

  ‘Nothing that could possibly be associated with this note.’

  ‘Hm. Wills struck me as the type of policeman who embodies sound, stolid, English commonsense. He has nearly thirty years’ experience in the force; that he should be so disturbed as to pen such a note must give rise to no small concern. I am afraid the dull, genteel northern suburbs are rather terra ignota to me, so if you would be so good as to hand me down the volume containing the Es. Thank you, let’s see now … the Edge Hill Murder, the Edinburgh Poisoning, outbreak of mass hysteria in Beaumaris, Edmonton, Alberta; then there’s Edmonton Street, Mayfair – you remember the infamous Tiger of San Pedro eluded the plain-clothes man there – ah, here it is: “Edmonton: parish in Middlesex, eight and a half miles north east of Charing Cross. Ermine Street, listed in the Domesday Book … blah, blah … town hall built in 1884.” Listen to this, Watson: “The chiefly rural Edmonton has held a reputation for the supernatural. Peter Fabell, known as the Devil of Edmonton, burnt at the stake in the fifteenth century; the Witch of Edmonton, Elizabeth Sawyer, burnt at the stake in 1621”; a stronghold of religious dissent and non-conformism, it seems, which is no doubt why we find an Anglican bishop describing the place as “the head of the serpent” in that strife-torn year of 1666. Rather colourful history, is it not?’

  ‘So much for your genteel suburb, Holmes!’

  ‘Indeed. And it goes on: this brief history mentions the ancient fair of Edmonton “with all its mirth and drollery, its swings and roundabouts, its spiced gingerb
read, and wild-beast shows”; in 1820 a lion tamer was eaten when one of his charges went mad, “a magnificent Barbary lion” apparently. When the parish constables arrived to investigate, the circus owner – a woman – threatened to open the cage and let loose the beast upon them!’

  ‘Strange how the aura of maleficence seems to linger over certain places down the ages,’ I said. ‘I should not be surprised to find that someone has produced a theory upon it.’

  ‘I fear it would be a rather far-fetched one, Watson, but the place is certainly living up to its reputation. Now that I come to think of it, I recall from my university theatrical days a Jacobean play about the Witch of Edmonton. The Puritans banned it in their time, of course, and it remained forgotten and unperformed for centuries until some enterprising person in the Trinity Dramatic Club discovered it amongst the relics of the Stationers’ Register. It was as much pantomime as tragedy, for it involved a case of bigamy, a devil dog, a cat that could speak, and a bewitched codpiece.’ Holmes smiled mischievously.

  ‘Really, Holmes, your ideas of humour can be quite outlandish.’

  ‘And not infrequently objectionable; yes, I am aware of that. Lestrade has mentioned it on a number of occasions.’

  ‘There are times when I don’t quite—’

  ‘Ah, unless I am mistaken, here is the man now,’ he interjected, as we heard the doorbell ring. Very shortly afterwards, a stocky, red-faced, bucolic man in a tweed suit, whom I recognized from Holmes’s earlier reference, appeared at the sitting room door. He looked flushed and agitated, and bore the appearance of a well-dressed ploughman come to town for the day, rather than a police detective. He nodded to us both and sat down in the easy-chair which Holmes indicated to him with the stem of his pipe.