The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6

by Orlando Pearson

  “Perhaps,” I asked, hoping to raise his spirits, “you could give your final insights in this case.”

  “The steps I took to decipher the code—the search for repeated characters, the fishing expedition—were straight out of the code-breaker’s text-book.”

  “Of which the author is one Sherlock Holmes.”

  A smile came over Holmes’s face at this interruption, and he continued.

  “But the use of commas to fool the eye into seeing sets with three characters rather than two was an ingenious one. Once the commas were in the right place, the code was fairly easy to crack. You will note all the messages in this code were transmitted on paper rather than being telegraphed, all bar one had a number of letters divisible by three, and the one that did not had a rather clumsy X in it to make it fit the code.”

  Writing in 1916 and knowing that most of Holmes’s war work is embargoed sine die, it is hard to know how much of what followed will be at the front of my reader’s mind. But, for the record, the Belgians, tipped off by both the French and the British, were waiting for the Germans at Liège and Namur. They conducted a most gallant defence of both, and this delayed the Germans getting through to northern France, thereby giving the French time to get their forces into the right places and to build up their own defences. Had the Belgians been routed in the first days of August 1914, it is likely that the Germans would have broken through to Paris by the end of the month.

  It is thus not too much to say that the cracking by Sherlock Holmes of what I shall continue to call the pi code, while not preventing the war or ensuring its final victorious outcome, did ensure that an early defeat for the Entente powers (France, Great Britain, and her empire) was averted.

  The Sorceress and the Sea-Lord

  The 1880s were a time of major financial shocks in the global economy with large swings in exchange rates, interest rates, and terms of trade. As is the way with such things, the wealthy seemed largely unaffected by this instability, while those of us of more modest means—for example, an invalided-out army surgeon with a weak leg and a weaker banking account, as I describe myself in The Sign of Four—viewed the uncertainty with dismay.

  The Reigate Squires of ’87 occurred right in the midst of this economic turmoil and was one of the earliest of the investigations undertaken by my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, that I chose to set before the public, although it did not appear in print until as late as 1894. In it I told of a case that chanced to come Holmes’s way while he was recuperating from what I then described as his brilliant resolution of the matter involving the Netherlands-Sumatra Company and the now notorious Baron Maupertuis. I also commented at the time that the events of the latter were too fresh in the public’s memory to require enumeration and focused instead on the murder that Holmes investigated at Reigate as this had received only local coverage at the time.

  Some years have now elapsed since 1887, and this story now sets out the Netherlands-Sumatra Company case. What I relate will come as a surprise to those who may have thought they knew already the facts of my friend’s investigation into that company through what they had seen in the press. As my reader will discover, the way the press presented the matter, as well as the way I presented Holmes’s disturbed state of mind at the time of The Reigate Squires, were at complete variance with the facts—even though what I presented in the Reigate story was a reflection of what I knew when I wrote it.

  I am under no illusions that the disjunction between the appearance given at the time and the reality I present now will result in the text that follows being suppressed for many years, but it is as well that a true and fair record is made. This narrative also includes a discovery about my friend, which will, I am sure, be of the greatest interest to his many followers, and which also, in its own way, demonstrates how deceptive appearances can be. The story is presented in the order in which I became aware of events, as I would like to place my readers in my shoes as matters unfolded with the complexity of an operatic plot. Should they at times feel disoriented by this mode of narration, then they will be sharing the confused emotions that I myself felt during 1886 and the first half of 1887.

  The fraud case referred to above had its inception just over a year before it came to the public’s attention and in a most unexpected way, which at first sight had nothing to do with any financial matter. In the 1890s and the first years of the twentieth century, my friend was often consulted by politicians—even up to the rank of prime minister—but the summons by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Joseph Porter, for Holmes to come to the Admiralty was the first instance of this. To the surprise of both Holmes and me, the invitation stipulated that I too should be in attendance. When we entered his office in Admiralty Arch on an unseasonably warm day in early 1886, we were further surprised to find that he was accompanied not just by a civil servant but by a veritable entourage of followers—sisters, cousins and aunts, we were told—who chimed into our discussions at every moment.

  “I reckon them up in dozens,” said Sir Joseph with a breezy wave in the direction of his relatives, before he began the exposition of his case, “I am at present the First Lord of the Admiralty. But I am advised by the Prime Minister that I am soon to be made First Lord of the Treasury.”

  “Is that not rather a major change of tack?” asked my friend.

  Sir Joseph Porter was one of the wealthiest politicians in the land. He had started his career as a lawyer but had ended up developing a chain of stationery shops whose outlets are still to be found in every high street and railway station in the country.

  “All in a blind trust now,” he assured us, “but when I was a lad,” he continued, “I served a term as office boy to an attorney’s firm. At this, I made such a mark, I was soon promoted to be a junior clerk. And so, by degrees, I rose to the firm’s partnership. And that, Mr Holmes, was the closest I ever got to a ship before I rose to my current position.”

  Sir Joseph paused to smile at his own joke, and his sisters, cousins and aunts burst into peals of laughter.

  “By contrast,” he continued, “being First Lord of the Treasury is much closer to the desk-based roles I occupied before I rose to my current office. But it is really all a question of management—whether of ships and fleets, or of interest rates and spending. And in any case, one should not overestimate the influence that politicians can have either on our mariners or on the economy. Admiral Nelson said, ‘I cannot command wind or weather.’ And so it is for me. As first sea-lord, I cannot ensure that our sailors always enjoy a calm sea and a prosperous voyage and, as First Lord to the Treasury, I will not by any means be able to ensure that our economy always runs on an even keel.”

  “You make yourself very plain,” said my friend, intrigued, I think, as was I, at where this introduction was leading.

  “Before I leave my current office,” continued Porter, “I would like to do something for which I will be remembered. It has struck me that giving our brave tars improved information on the weather would be of the greatest benefit to them. The better they are informed of the vicissitudes of the weather, the safer will be their passage to defend our great empire’s interests. To that end, I would like to commission you to become the Admiralty’s first official weather forecaster.”

  I am not sure what my friend thought he had been summoned to the Admiralty for, but I am sure that being given a commission to forecast the weather had not featured among the list of possibilities. He sat in silence for several seconds.

  “I have always considered,” he opined at last, “that the weather is largely something that takes its own course. Consequently, attempts to forecast it are based on quackery rather than science.”

  “That, my dear Mr Holmes,” replied Sir Joseph smoothly, “runs quite contrary to what your friend Dr Watson quotes you as saying in his recent work about your activities, A Study in Scarlet. Indeed, it was a reading of your friend’s book that cause
d me to invite you here.” Somewhat to my embarrassment, Sir Joseph picked up from his desk my newly published novel, and quoted from it a section he had underlined in red. “‘From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So, all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.’”

  There was a pause as Sir Joseph held up the book opened on the relevant page. He then continued, addressing Holmes. “Your own words, Mr Holmes, quoted by your friend here, and presented under a heading that you yourself bestowed, The Book of Life. And what is more, your friend’s work then demonstrates your ability to live up to them. Surely you would not wish to resile from so sweeping a statement just as your reputation as one of the great thinkers of the age is so in the ascendant.”

  Porter looked at me, I think in the hope that I might support him in his petition. My friend was and remains susceptible on the side of flattery, but it was nevertheless quite a minute while Holmes considered.

  “I play the game for its own sake,” he said, at length, “and have no desire to move my focus away from criminal investigation. Furthermore, whoever provides the Admiralty with information, will need to be as adept at providing it on Pondicherry as on Portsmouth and I do not have the means to do that for you.”

  Sir Joseph looked crestfallen at Holmes’s remark, but my friend continued. “There is, however, surely no reason why you should not run a competition between interested and reputable parties as to who is best at forecasting the weather. I would be happy to provide you with assistance in establishing such a contest.”

  “And how might we judge between them?” asked Porter.

  Holmes thought for a while.

  “You require a means of adjudication that is easy to establish, transparent in its results, and impossible to manipulate. Why not ask them to forecast the next day’s London Docks noon temperature and compare their forecasts to the actual temperature as reported in The Times for that day? That is simple, not susceptible to contrivance—”

  “And most admirable,” broke in Sir Joseph, his visage visibly brightening. “We shall do exactly as you suggest.” He paused, as though another thought had occurred to him. “We could, if you wish, call the weather forecast the Holmes Forecast as that would provide its users assurance of its reliability, as well as giving publicity to your intellectual services.”

  Again, my friend looked disconcerted by the first sea-lord’s suggestion. Seeing his uncertainty, Porter soothed, “Well, if you do not wish for that, we will perhaps say that the weather forecast comes from the Home Office, even though it would be of most use to the Admiralty. You and I, Mr Holmes, would know the reason why the forecast would bear that name, although we would have to turn a Nelsonian eye to the slight mismatch in what I propose. And the choice of name would not signify anything to anyone else.”

  And that was the end of the consultation.

  I knew that Holmes was further involved in the matter over the next few weeks, but I confess that in the whirlwind of cases in which I joined Holmes’s investigations, the peculiar petition I refer to above rapidly slipped my mind. Holmes commented drily to me that the forecasters’ main technique seemed to be to assume that the next day’s weather would be the same as that of the current day, but I did note with amusement the additional coverage provided by newspapers to weather reporting and to weather forecasting, and how they acknowledged the Home Office as the source of their information.

  A year later, the events described in The Reigate Squires opened with me travelling to Lyon to tend to my friend whose health had given out following the Netherland-Sumatra case referred to above.

  I had been aware of my friend’s involvement with a French case as I sometimes picked the mail up on the mat when on the way up from the entrance hall at Baker Street to our flat. Holmes received letters from every country on earth, but the number of missives from France had seen a notable increase. Most came in envelopes with the Baker Street address typed on, while a few—generally letters in small envelopes—came with hand-written addresses. And there was a regular stream of mail which came in bulky white envelopes with the address written in the same hand. These latter epistles stood out to me as, uniquely, the addressor of the envelope applied a downward sloping or grave accent to Holmes’s surname thus rendering it Holmès (bold font for the è in the word Holmès mine).

  I picked one of these missives off the mat one morning as I was returning from a trip to the tobacconist’s and, when I did so, I was startled to note that one of these envelopes addressed to Sherlock Holmès bore a faint but distinct scent of jasmine. 1887 was still early in my friendship with Sherlock Holmes and, had he moved out of Baker Street, it would have meant that I too would have had to vacate the quarters I had come to regard as home, for paying the full rent of the rooms at 221 b would have been too heavy a burden for my pocket on its own. My reader may therefore imagine that I came to regard these missives addressed to Sherlock Holmès (emphasis mine) with some trepidation, although I knew not what matter my friend was investigating. This concern was exacerbated by Holmes’s reaction to them, for, rather than going through them, as he did with the rest of his correspondence, by the fireside in our little sitting room, he retreated with them to his own room. As the early months of 1887 passed, Holmes spent less and less time in Baker Street and more and more time in France—this I knew because it became one of my tasks at this time to redirect his mail to a variety of hotels in Paris and Lyon. And so it went on for several weeks.

  It was on the unexpectedly cold 14th of April 1887 that I received the telegram which informed me that Holmes was ill and delusional in his room at the Hotel Dulong in Lyon. Within twenty-four hours I was there. Here he sat, cross-legged and bolt upright in his dressing-gown at the far end of the bed, wracked with the blackest depression. He was unable to focus his eyes on me, and I am not sure that, at my first entry to the room, he even recognised me.

  My reader will have noted from previous cases that my main form of medical treatment is to administer a dash of brandy to my patient. In this case, however, I felt a more robust medical intervention was required. Accordingly, rather than ordering a mere glass of brandy, I ordered a large tumbler of the spirit for him, not stinting at its cost in spite of the eye-watering price that a recent devaluation of the pound had imposed. Holmes drained the tumbler in one draught, and it soon brought some colour back to his blanched face, although he continued to sit cross-legged on his bed, maintaining his stony silence.

  “I have spent the last two months in a fever of labour,” he whispered from time to time in a voice that never seemed to be addressed to me. “I never worked less than fifteen hours a day and more than once kept at the task for five days at a stretch.”

  “Time for you to come back to Baker Street with me, my friend,” I said, and started to put his very limited personal effects into his suitcase.

  I wrote at the beginning of The Reigate Squires that when I entered Holmes’s room, I had to wade through congratulatory telegrams to get to his bedside. I was unsure what to do with these sheaves of paper but decided in the end that I should make some effort to preserve these paeons to his triumph—as the press described the resolution of the Netherlands-Sumatra case—particularly as Baker Street too was full of messages of congratulation. Without paying attention to any one item, I started to add these to the contents of his case. Holmes, for his part, continued to sit upright in bed, his gaze distracted, and so distanced from his normal persona that he did not even smoke.

  I got at length to the telegrams lying under the bedside table and was about to start picking them up when a scream issued from Holmes. He mustered his last reserves of strength to leap from his station and seize one telegram which, in the blur as he thrust it deep into the pocket of his dressing gown, I saw was addressed to Mr Sherlock Holmès. When he resumed h
is position at the end of the bed, it was to shiver uncontrollably.

  I felt there was no point in intruding into a matter that was obviously important to him and continued to clear the room. We left a chilly Lyon on the same day. My more attentive readers will have wondered at the timing of our return to Baker Street, which I commented at the time took three days, and now is the time to reveal why it took me twenty-four hours to get to Lyon and three times as long for the two of us to make the journey back.

  Although the clearance of Holmes’s room at his hotel referred to above was a contributory factor, the main reason for the delay was an incident in Paris on which I have never previously remarked.

  As one might expect, the train from Lyon to Paris arrives at the Gare de Lyon in the south-east of the city. During the five-hour train journey, Holmes did nothing other than stare vacantly out of the window and addressed no word to me. On arrival, I hailed the Parisian equivalent of a hansom cab to traverse the centre of the city to Paris Gare du Nord to catch the boat-train to London.

  We were rattling through the centre of Paris in good time for the next boat-train, when Holmes, who had maintained his silence, leant forward, and said something to the cabbie. Suddenly our cab struck out westwards and soon, to my astonishment, we found ourselves outside the Paris National Opera House. Holmes descended without a word, and, after using some halting French to ask the cabbie to wait, I got out of the cab to follow him.

  I had no idea what Holmes wanted at the Paris Opera at a time such as this, and any lengthy tarrying here would mean we would miss our connection and be forced to make an overnight stay in Paris. I stepped out of the cab into a cold night and, when I caught up with him, I saw he was staring at the posters of forthcoming productions. There was Don Giovanni by Mozart, Fidelio by Beethoven, and Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns, a composer whose music I had got to know through Holmes. But the poster on which Holmes seemed to be focusing his attention bore the legend “Annulé” or “cancelled” marked across it. The cancelled production was of a work, La Montagne Noire or The Black Mountain, and its creator one Hermann Zenta. Both work and composer were unknown to me and the original advertising made much of the fact that the performance of the now cancelled work was to have been its première.