The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6
Page 3
“When I did so I found it contained all the expense claims for the last two years from members of parliament whose surnames ran from N to T. And the claims were for some of the most outlandish things. Alongside claims for things one would expect such as overnight accommodation and travel, one member had claimed to have turrets added to his house, and another had claimed on an invoice from an establishment the nature of which I could not possibly disclose even to you, good brother.”
“And to whom did you report the burglary if not the police?”
“The intruder is a member of parliament from the governing party so naturally I reported the matter to the prime minister.”
“And what was his reaction?”
“As I had anticipated, the burglary was at the prime minister’s behest. He was horrified that the break-in’s objective had been thwarted. Like me, he felt that it was best that the matter obtained the smallest possible coverage. There will be a cabinet reshuffle shortly. The intruder will be appointed to a ministerial post in which he will be in a position to ensure that should any information on the matter gain currency, nothing substantive will be done to investigate it.”
”And what other steps did you take?”
“I went down to the office of the Serjeant-at-Arms and made sure all the filing cabinets with members’ expense claims were completely emptied and their contents burnt. We cannot have the reputation of the mother of parliaments sullied by the egregious behaviour of its members getting into the press.”
“So, what will you do next?”
“In a few days’ time, I shall ensure that a discrete mention is made of the burglary in some minor organ of the press.”
“Why will you do that?”
“Well, obviously, if the main body of the national newspapers should subsequently get hold of the much bigger story of fraudulent expense claims by members of parliament, I can then tell them that all documentary evidence of expense claims has been destroyed and refer them to the burglary, an account of which will already have been published. Their embarrassment at having failed to notice this story will be quite sufficient to dissuade them from pursuing the matter of the expenses of members of parliament any further—particularly as there will be nothing material to show what has happened and why. Thus, all will be well.”
“And did you get all the incriminating evidence of inappropriate claims?”
“The minutiae of investigation are more an area for your expertise than for mine. When I debriefed him, the prime minister asked me if I had searched the intruder’s person, which I had not. It is therefore possible that the intruder had further documents on his person which we failed to retrieve but, as his objective was to destroy evidence of wrongdoing, he will doubtless have taken steps to give effect to that in any case.”
“And I assume you have rewarded the member of security staff who apprehended the intruder. To take on and apprehend an intruder single-handed at night would have taken significant courage.”
“On the contrary, good brother, an entirely separate investigation into the timekeeping of our security staff has revealed some regrettable lapses of accuracy in recording for both for the apprehender of the intruder and some of his colleagues. They have all been advised that no action will be taken at this juncture but that the matter can be re-opened at any time should their behaviour prove in any other way to be unsatisfactory.”
Mycroft evidently considered the matter of the burglary closed and there was a brief pause before he said.
“And now for the matter at hand. This will take you to some of our most far-flung colonies—probably for several months. And I can assure you that there may be a knighthood at the end of it if the task is carried out to my satisfaction.”
“Dear brother, that I cannot treat with someone who suppresses news of wrong-doing in the mother of parliaments.”
“Are you saying, Sherlock, that you will not act on this commission that I would wish you to fulfil in spite of the signal honour that will be bestowed on you following its satisfactory completion?”
“I fear that I cannot allow myself to be manoeuvred out of the country to help you out of a political embarrassment.”
There was a long pause.
“In that case, dear brother, I would advise you and Dr Watson to keep this matter to yourselves. Any public reference to it will have unfortunate consequences for you and anyone else with whom you communicate on it.”
Mycroft was soon on his way and Holmes leaned back in his chair.
“You see Watson, I had no idea at all that a burglary had taken place in the office of the Serjeant-at-Arms, but no other explanation fitted the facts. Only an accounts office would hold personal invoices from a number of different people, and only one located in the Houses of Parliament would hold invoices from politicians. And only a burglary would explain how Mr Foley could have been in possession of such personal documents which clearly did not relate to him and the only value of the documents was that the bearer of them could claim expenses on them. And only an attempt to cover up a scandal would explain why no news of the break-in had leaked out.”
“And you do not want to investigate this matter further?”
“I fear that I can see no good coming out of an investigation—indeed only harm.”
“And why would an establishment such as the Bar of Gold issue a receipt to someone who patronised it? I got no document of any sort when I paid Mr Whitney’s bill?”
“Because the member of parliament who frequented it asked for one—a rather obvious investigative step the omission of which by you I previously forbore to point out.”
“Why would whatever member of parliament it was who visited the Bar of Gold ask for an invoice?”
“Well, obviously, so that he could claim it on his expenses. Being a member of parliament is very far from being an occupation that fills all of one’s time, so our representatives seek diversions to combat their ennui for which they then seek to get recompensed. But they can only be recompensed if they have a bill or a receipt against which to claim.”
“And what do you want me to tell Miss Leckie about her fiancé?”
Having answered my questions until now with an almost dismissive fluency, my colleague paused at this latest one and knocked the ash from his pipe into the grate before responding.
“I cannot give her and her alone information that will undermine the foundations of the country and the possession of which will put her into grave peril. You saw how eager Mycroft is to prevent the matter becoming public knowledge, and I cannot exclude him taking the most extreme measures to protect his secret. Accordingly, you will have to tell her that her discoveries are a matter of state that I cannot divulge. You should not present my refusal to disclose anything more as an endorsement of the conduct of her betrothed. You may also wish to commend her for her investigative ability which is of a calibre far in advance of that displayed by the professionals at Scotland Yard.”
“It will be I who has to tell her?” I asked, somewhat nettled that this task should have been delegated to me. “How do you think she will react to that?”
“Yes, how do you think I will react?” came a voice from under the breakfast table.
Miss Leckie emerged from beneath the table-cloth and stood before us looking quite undiscommoded by her period of concealment.
“I had worked out that my fiancé’s action had serious political consequences, Mr Holmes. I know the role of your brother in government. And, when I saw a man who from the shape of his skull was obviously your brother, mounting the stairs as I left here two weeks ago, that confirmed it. I banged the street door closed but concealed myself in the hallway till the buttons had gone back to his domestic duties, and then crept back up the stairs. I listened outside your door to your brother’s petition and realised that I would not get an answer to my own petition until you wer
e back in the country.”
I glanced at Holmes during Miss Leckie’s account of her actions and was amused to note a look of wonder on his face at Miss Leckie’s detective skills.
She continued. “Accordingly, I met each boat train as it arrived at Victoria Station and watched for your return. When I saw you descend from the train this morning, I sprang into a hansom, and beat you back to Baker Street. On my arrival here, I was asked to wait downstairs as you were not in and Dr Watson had not risen from his slumbers. When breakfast was laid out for Dr Watson, it was an obvious step to conceal myself in the sitting room.”
“You are a remarkable woman,” said Holmes thoughtfully. “You have investigative zeal, insight, and resourcefulness. I fear however for your well-being as you have been a witness to the state-sponsored suppression of a great scandal.”
There was a long pause before Holmes spoke again.
“Although he did not divulge it to us, Mycroft knows exactly who stole the accounting documents at the Serjeant-at-arms office, and although I know that you have exercised discretion in your conduct with Mr Foley, my brother will have the resources to track down your fiancé’s antecedents. He is almost bound to want to investigate how I got to know about this matter.”
“Are you suggesting that I need some form of protection?” asked Miss Leckie. “I am sure I am capable of looking after myself.”
“I have no doubt that you are more than equal to combatting most threats, but here all the forces of the state may be arraigned against you. I do indeed believe you will need someone of courage and dedication to protect you.”
“I should myself be most happy to help,” I heard myself saying, as I realised the happy conjunction of Miss Leckie’s need and my own feelings towards her.
“Good Dr Watson,” said the fair Miss Leckie, and I thrill to this day at the memory of the dazzling smile she gave me as she said it, “I greatly admire both the correctness in your behaviour towards me and your lion-hearted courage in entering the Bar of Gold in pursuit of the prosecution of my case. I can think of no one who I would rather have as to protect me from peril than you.”
A smile ghosted over the face of Sherlock Holmes. “Very well,” said he, “then what Sherlock Holmes has brought together, let no man sunder.”
Death at Tennis
The matter that follows exposes shocking behaviour in a royal family which, although not the British house, will be one well-known to my reader. It also chronicles the closest that Holmes and I came to a permanent rift in our friendship for reasons which have more to do with what I continue to regard as a rare lapse in Holmes’s judgment than to any deliberate slight to me on his part. In the end, however, I formed the view that the benefits of our friendship outweighed the very real hazards to me from our association. There will be others who take a different view—whether to perceive Holmes’s behaviour as justified, or to think that a termination of our friendship justified. I have set out the debate we had at the resolution of one part of the case as it happened and will leave it to my readers to make their own judgment.
After my second marriage in the autumn of 1907, I saw little of Holmes. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who is once more master of his own establishment, absorbed all my attention. For his part, Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, had remained in our lodgings in Baker Street.
I returned to civil practice. One night, as I was returning from a journey to a patient, my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door, forever associated in my mind with my first wooing, I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again. His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in silhouette against the blind. I rang the bell and was shown up to the chamber which had once been in part my own. His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner.
“It is fitting indeed,” he remarked at last, “that your visit here following on hard after your wedding should coincide with my next consultation.”
“What is so fitting about it?” I asked.
“My next client is Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismund von Ornstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Feldstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia, or Count Gustav von Kramm, which was the name he gave himself when we first met.”
“The former lover of Irene Adler, and whose case I chronicled under the title A Scandal in Bohemia as the first case we investigated after the start of my first marriage?”
“The same.”
“What does he want to see you about?”
“His missive did not specify but I hear his feet on the stairs so we will soon find out.”
The King entered.
The intervening nineteen years had not been kind to him. He had been rendered breathless by climbing the seventeen steps from the street to the flat, and his great height had been diminished by a stoop. All that was left of his hair was plastered in grey streaks across his pate. In contrast to his hollowed-out physique, the outfit he had chosen—with heavy bands of astrakhan slashed across the sleeves and fronts of his double-breasted coat—gave him an air of unreality. It was as if he were a character from a fairy story. It was a while before he could summon enough breath to address us at all.
“Mr Holmes,” he said at last in his deep harsh voice with its strongly marked German accent, “I sent you a message that I would call, and, as at my visit in ’88, I see Dr Watson here as well. I hope this coincidence is a portent for a solution to my problem as happy as that of two decades ago.”
“My recollection of that case, Your Majesty, is that I was completely outwitted by your former mistress, Miss Irene Adler,” replied Holmes drily. “She saw through my disguise as a Congregationalist parson, and she realised why I was pursuing her. She then disguised herself as a man and followed me back here. I failed to see through her disguise even when she had the temerity to wish me a good night. And by the next morning she had vanished abroad taking with her the photograph of you and her that I had been seeking to recover on your behalf.”
There was a pause and the King seemed to be in a trance at the mere thought of the behaviour of Miss Adler. He then came to and gave a dismissive wave.
“Your actions dissuaded my former paramour from sending a compromising photograph to my then betrothed, and so saved the honour of my royal house. That was to me an entirely satisfactory outcome.”
But Holmes was by no means finished in his recollection of events.
“Miss Adler even left a sardonic note for me find in the place where she had secreted the photograph I was seeking to recover. The good Watson here chronicled the whole matter with an unsparing accuracy quite uncharacteristic of his accounts of my work and, and it remains, somewhat to my chagrin, one of my best-known cases.”
“Your objections to my conclusion that that case ended well do you great credit, Mr Holmes,” replied the King, “but I would reiterate that I was entirely satisfied with the outcome. Miss Adler was persuaded not to carry out her threat to send the photograph to my betrothed. That to me was better than the seizure of the photograph, and I would be pleased if I could consult with you again.”
“Then, Your Majesty,” said Holmes, putting his fingertips together, and drawing down the lids of his eyes so that they covered three quarters of his eyes, “pray consult.”
“My subsequent marriage to Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, second daughter of the King of Scandinavia, was concluded shortly after the Adler case. It was a brief affair. Within a year an unknown hand sent me a compromising picture of her enjoying the company of a courtier of lowly rank.”
“Did the photographs date from after your marriage?”
“But you were by that time in wedlock. How were you able to dissolve your marriage?”
“You are perhaps not aware of the workings of the Roman Catholic church. After the expenditure of a significant sum from the royal purse, the marriage was annulled, and I was then once more a free man.”
I was troubled by the inconsistency of the King’s behaviour in terminating his marriage after receiving photographs of his wife in the company of another when he had himself been photographed in similar circumstances. I glanced across at Holmes whose face betrayed no sign of emotion, but a long silence ensued with the King perhaps awaiting a further question from Holmes.
Eventually the King, maybe reading the thoughts that were running through my head if not through the head of Holmes, flushed red, and broke the silence. “In this matter,” he barked, “as in all others, my concern is only to preserve the honour my royal house.”
“Quite so,” soothed Holmes. “And presumably, having had your marriage annulled, you were then obliged to repay the dowry that your wife had brought, as an annulment means that there had never been a legal marriage and accordingly no dowry would be payable. Even for a royal purse, that, along with the monies you had to pay the Roman Catholic Church to secure your annulment, must have been a considerable burden.”
There was another pause, shorter this time, and then the King went on speaking as though he had not heard Holmes’s remark.
“I have remained a bachelor since that time. My royal duties are not very onerous, and, while I spend much time in Munich, I travel the world in search of its pleasures. But I have a responsibility to my kingdom to produce an heir who is both legitimate and male. The daughter, who was the result of what I must now regard as a mere dalliance with the Scandinavian King’s second daughter, meets neither of these requirements. In these utilitarian times it is no longer an absolute requirement that I should marry someone of royal blood. I therefore decided to organise an exclusive ball here in London for a mixture of royalty and the most well-to-do eligible young ladies, and to choose from amongst them my future bride and a queen for my Bohemian realm.”