The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6

by Orlando Pearson

  Having looked at the posters, Holmes seemed to have no desire to linger further at the theatre. Without a word to me or even a glance in my direction, he turned and made for the cab. I followed and called out, “Gare du Nord—le plus vite possible” to the cabbie but, hard though he drove the horses, we missed our train to Calais and had to find what was, at such short notice and with the depressed exchange rate, some rather costly overnight accommodation in Paris before we got back to Baker Street late the following evening.

  Even back in his familiar surroundings, Holmes’s company was most disconcerting.

  At this stage of our friendship Holmes still regularly injected himself with cocaine. I have commented elsewhere that his regular dosage was three syringes a day. On his return, this frequency increased greatly so that his arm, which he bared to me at each new injection, soon looked like a battlefield with its mottling of scabs, scars, and puncture wounds. When not exhilarated by cocaine, he would sit staring out of the window smoking cigarette after cigarette.

  Rather than the mellow Virginia tobacco he was wont to smoke, Holmes’s extended sojourn in France had given him a taste for that country’s own style of cigarettes with their bitter-smelling black tobacco, and these altered the ambience of the little Baker Street sitting room even though they offered no attraction to me. Sometimes he would talk to me or—more correctly—at me. The subjects made no sense either individually or taken as a whole—probability theory, barometric readings, and brotherly love were amongst the topics—and I did not attempt to respond. Sometimes he would sing a strain of a melody that I did not recognise, to which he would append words in what I knew to be French but from which I could obtain no meaning. He would then break out into hysterical laughter.

  It was at this point that my old friend, Colonel Hayter, tendered another invitation to me to visit. He had come under my professional care in Afghanistan and had taken a house near Reigate in Surrey. He had asked me to come down to him upon a visit on previous occasions and I chanced to go to my club—if the truth be told, to give myself a break from ministering to Holmes—at the same time as the colonel was there. He remarked that if Holmes would only come with me, he would be glad to extend his hospitality to him also.

  I felt a change from the centre of London would do my friend some good, but I was unsure how much I should tell Hayter about Holmes’s volatile condition. It so happened, however, that when I returned to Baker Street from my club, it was to find Holmes in much the best frame of mind he had been in since his return from France. Once he understood that the colonel’s establishment was a bachelor one, and that he would be allowed the fullest freedom, he fell in with my plans. For my part, I confined myself to warning the colonel that Holmes had been suffering from nervous exhaustion.

  While we were at Colonel Hayter’s house, Holmes conformed to a pattern of behaviour that gave no cause for alarm—no trace of his verbal outbursts or drug addiction—and, like the colonel and me, he confined himself to smoking no more than a modest thirty or so cigarettes a day. The colonel, it emerged, also had a weakness for French cigarettes, and the two of them placed a special order for them at a local tobacconist. Holmes also pulled off the coup that was his resolution of the Reigate Squires mystery. I thought our troubles were behind us when Holmes said on the conclusion of the case, “Watson, I think our quiet rest in the country has been a distinct success, and I shall certainly return much invigorated to Baker Street tomorrow.”

  Soon after Holmes had said this, Hayter and I met with the groom to discuss arrangements to get to Reigate Station the next day. When we returned to the lounge, it was to find Holmes unconscious on the couch with a needle in his arm. Whether he had taken a more concentrated cocaine solution than the 7% which was his normal preference, or whether he had overreached his body’s capacities with a larger injection than normal, I had no way of telling, but he was comatose.

  “What has been happening under my roof?” exclaimed the colonel.

  But I was too busy tending to my friend. Although Holmes’s unconscious state made the administration of brandy impossible, I did my best to rouse him by pounding at his ribs and shouting in his ear. To no avail.

  In the end, a doctor from the local hospital was summoned and, just as my brother-physic crossed the threshold, Holmes, very sheepishly, sat up.

  “I fear,” he said unsteadily, “as the good Dr Watson has always warned that I might, I have over-taxed my physique.”

  He passed out again almost immediately before making a steadier recovery about an hour later.

  Dr Glitheroe was insistent that Holmes be examined at the local hospital, and my friend was conveyed thither in a carriage. There he was examined by the famous psychiatrist, Henry Maudsley.

  “What do you think it is, Dr Watson?” Maudsley asked me.

  “A collapse brought on by overwork,” I replied cautiously.

  “I fear I cannot help you if you will not be straightforward with me,” he retorted, and raised Holmes’s pock-marked arm. “Have you, as a medical man, not sought to prevent him resorting to these hallucinogenic drugs to which he has so evidently become addicted?”

  This was the first of a series of questions which became more and more a reproach to my skills as a physician—indeed they often sounded like the sort of comments I had made previously when trying unsuccessfully to dissuade Holmes from pumping himself full of cocaine. It was not long before I was told that Holmes would be detained in a secure hospital and that I would not be allowed access to him.

  It was with a heavy heart I returned to Baker Street. Difficult as Holmes sometimes made the business of sharing our lodgings, not sharing our lodgings for an undefined period was much harder. It was two days later that Hayter came to see me.

  “You look washed out, Watson,” said he. “Living with your friend can hardly be a picnic if he is an addict of the needle. Why don’t you join me on a trip to Paris? If I am not fighting for queen and country somewhere, I often go to Paris in the springtime.”

  I could think of no more attractive alternative, and the following Thursday saw Hayter and me sitting on the boat-train as it drew out of a chilly Victoria.

  “‘By the old Moulmein Pagodo, lookin’ lazy at the sea, there’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks of me,’” murmured Hayter an hour and a half later as we caught our first glimpse of the azure of the English Channel from the train. “That’s a line I quote every time I head abroad,” he said, a light coming into his eyes. “I miss the heat and the excitement of the East when I am in Reigate,” he added, as we crossed to Calais on what was an unexpectedly warm afternoon, and there was a pause as he mopped his brow in the heat, before he continued, “but Paris is the next best thing.”

  Apart from my recent journey through Paris on the way to and from Lyon, I had never visited the French capital, but Colonel Hayter had found us comfortable accommodation in the city centre at a price rendered surprisingly reasonable by a sudden strengthening of the pound. I was exhausted after my recent travails and retired to my room early after a quiet supper.

  I was fast asleep when there was a tap on the door.

  I padded across the room and opened. Outside my room were two gendarmes. “Est-ce que vous êtes Doctor John Watson?” I was asked.

  After confirming my identity, I was told that Colonel Hayter had been involved in a brawl at the Folies Bergère. Between awkward transmission of data in French and English, I was told that the colonel had given my name, and the police wanted me to go along to the station to confirm his identity.

  When I got to the police station, my friend was far from his normally chipper self—he had a split lip, a black eye, and burst knuckles on his right hand.

  “A pretty mess I have made of things!” he lamented. “I saw a rather attractive lady at the Folies who had, I thought, surrendered her amateur status. I assumed our dialogue would then follow
a fairly predictable course, but mademoiselle turned out to have a husband, and he took a rather dim view of my proposition. One thing led to another, and I was as you see me now when the gendarmes arrived.”

  “So, what is to happen next?” I asked.

  An English-speaking officer was present—agent Gilbert, he told me his name was—and he said, “It is already after midnight, so we are into Friday morning.”

  “A tough night for you,” I said, trying to be ingratiating.

  The policeman smiled wearily. “En fait,” he said at length, “the lot of a policeman is a far from happy one on a night like this. Your friend will have to be detained until Monday when we can get him into court for causing an affray. You may visit him tomorrow and Sunday at six o’clock for half an hour, but otherwise you may have no contact.”

  My reader may imagine my feelings. My closest friend was incarcerated in an asylum and my oldest friend was in gaol. So here I was, in the most beautiful city in the world, with not a soul to spend my time with, and no desire to stay. And yet I felt that I had to stand by Colonel Hayter. Accordingly, I decided I would remain at least until the Monday in the hope that Hayter would be released with a fine. To fill my time, I bought a tourist guide and went to the sites—the Louvre, Versailles, and Notre Dame. I also looked in the newspaper for events that might keep me entertained, and I noted that on the Sunday lunchtime there was a concert at the Paris Conservatoire.

  It was not due to start until one o’clock but, to make sure I arrived in plenty of time, I got to the large park in which the Conservatoire stands at well before the appointed time. The building was not yet open, and the park was deserted. It started to drizzle, and I sought shelter on a bench set in an arbour some way back from the main path.

  I confess I felt completely wearied and fell into something between a doze and a reverie. My semi-conscious thoughts flitted through my recollections of my adventures in Afghanistan with Colonel Hayter and the cases I had investigated with Holmes. I would have been happy in the company of either and being deprived of any sort of companionship at all was hard to bear. In this brown study, Sherlock Holmes seemed all but tangible but, when I came to, it was to find that the rain had departed, and the Conservatoire’s park was filled with people going to the concert. A smell of black tobacco hung in the air.

  The main piece being performed was a quintet for piano and strings by another composer whose music had been introduced to me by Holmes—César Franck. The bearded Belgian gave the audience what I assume was a brief introduction to the piece. My French is limited but I picked up “mon quintette dedié à mon bon ami, Camille Saint-Saëns,” and noted that he handed the piano score in manuscript form to the equally hirsute Saint-Saëns, when the latter mounted the podium to play the piano part.

  It has been said of the English that they do not understand music but that they love the noise it makes. This accords with the way I normally listen—as when I heard Sarasate at St James’s Hall with Holmes, or now, as I listened to a new piece by one of Europe’s great composers performed by another. I again had the strange feeling that Holmes was present in the auditorium and scanned the audience, as my attention occasionally wandered, but he was nowhere to be seen and I focused back on the music.

  The four string players and the pianist were as absorbed in their music as now was I. They were all men, but they were joined on stage by a tall, spare, auburn-haired female who acted as a page-turner for the pianist.

  I felt, as I watched, that Saint-Saëns was in some way disconcerted by the music, although I could not put my finger on why I had this feeling. But the accuracy of my instinct was confirmed at the end of the piece. Franck came onto the stage as the audience burst into applause and made to embrace Saint-Saëns. But the latter flung his piano score onto the floor, and then strode brusquely past Franck and into the wings whence no amount of applause would persuade him to return. Somewhat nonplussed, Franck brought the string players to their feet and then, oddly, seized the page-turner round the waist, and advanced with her to the front of the stage to take a bow. I could see that the page-turner was unsure of whether or not to take a bow of her own, but she did so eventually to further rapturous applause.

  At length, the clapping came to an end and the audience started to drift out of the auditorium as the quintet was the last piece on the programme. I was probably amongst the last to leave and wandered back out into the conservatoire’s garden, which I took the decision to explore as I had nothing else planned until my visit to Colonel Hayter in the evening.

  The garden is laid out in a mixture of open lawns and dense clumps of trees with a crisscrossing of gravel-covered and often windy paths. The weather had turned fair with small fluffy clouds dotted across a clear sky and a friendly sun illuminating the trees’ fresh blossoms. I strode out, enjoying the mixture of landscapes, for once feeling heartened and not alone, even though my only companion was the comforting cigarette I had just lit.

  It was when I turned the corner on one of the paths, which was taking me round a group of dense trees, that I was astonished to be faced by Sherlock Holmes, arm in arm with the striking-looking page-turner from the concert. The lady herself held an infant on the shoulder of her other arm. I would add that my friend, for the sole time in our acquaintance, looked astonished as well, but it was his appearance that shook me. Emaciated and haggard, he was a wreck of the man with whom I shared quarters.

  It was the page-turner—the only composed adult out of the three of us—who broke the silence.

  “So, my Sherlock,” she drawled, although in her heavily accented English, it sounded like “Chère Loque,” with a distinct pause between the two syllables, “I observe from the smell of this man’s cigarette that he is an Anglais, and, from your reaction to seeing him, I deduce that he must be the Dr Watson with whom it is my fate to compete for your affections.”

  There was another silence before the angular page-turner, after a glance at my friend, continued.

  “Perhaps, Chère Loque, you might like to continue your walk with this Dr Watson, for I suspect the two of you have much to discuss.”

  She turned on her heel and soon disappeared around a corner.

  “What is the meaning of this, Holmes?” I exclaimed. “I left London with you confined to an asylum; I come to Paris, and find you arm in arm with a woman unknown.”

  My friend looked abashed and it was a while before he responded in a quavering voice quite at variance from his normal incisive tones.

  “I was able to get myself discharged from the asylum and returned to Baker Street to find you gone. I still felt weak from the ardours of the Maupertuis case and the subsequent excitement at Reigate. I came to Paris where I had some small business to attend to arising out of the Maupertuis case and some ancillary matters that arose at the same time.”

  “Small business? Ancillary matters? The decision to keep you in confinement was not taken lightly and nor will your discharge have been.”

  “Perhaps it would help you if I explained fully the matters in which I have been involved,” said Holmes, sounding slightly evasive.

  “Pray do so,” said I, slightly stiffly.

  As I have indicated, the events associated with the Maupertuis business were something from which I had been excluded and, as so often with me, finding out what my friend had been doing was of far greater moment to me than any other concerns I might have had. We found a bench, and each of us lit up a pipe. This is my friend’s account of events

  Earlier this year, I was summoned to the Treasury where I again had an interview with Sir Joseph Porter, who, as he anticipated at our meeting about weather forecasting, had become its first lord.

  “We are very concerned by the activities of the Netherlands-Sumatra Company,” he began.

  This was a name that was new to me and I asked Sir Joseph to elaborate.

  “The Netherlands-
Sumatra Company is a currency speculator and is quoted on the French stock exchange or the Bourse as it is known in French. It takes large positions on foreign currencies which require it to predict the movement of the French Franc against other currencies, but it has a particular predilection for trades involving sterling.”

  “What is the problem with that?” I asked. “There are lots of companies doing the same thing.”

  “That is so, but the Netherlands-Sumatra Company takes much larger positions and so takes much larger risks.”

  Sir Joseph was about to continue when a civil servant burst in. “Sir Joseph,” he exclaimed, “the last quarter’s economic growth has just been announced and was below half a per cent. It is surely time to lower interest rates to stimulate the economy.”

  Sir Joseph leant back in his chair and considered. “I feel,” he said at last to the mandarin, “the moment is not ripe for such a move. I would not wish that the markets got the impression that each strong quarter of economic growth is followed by an interest rate rise, or that a quarter of weak growth results in a cutting of such rates.”

  When the civil servant had departed, Sir Joseph turned to me and commented, “Interest rates as an instrument of policy are much over-rated in their effectiveness for steering the economy, irrespective of financial climate. But, to return to the Netherland-Sumatra Company, we would expect it to be hedging its risks with counter-parties which will counter-balance the risks it is taking and yet it does not.”

  “What, never?” I interjected.

  “No never, Mr Holmes. On the contrary, it speculates against future positions in a manner most reckless. And yet its currency bets—for bets is what they are—have a remarkable record of hardly ever being wrong. The Company takes highly risky positions, stakes very large amounts of money on its judgments, and yet its speculations have a remarkable record of success.”