Die Again, Mr Holmes

by Anna Elliott

  “Did he see anyone else go in or out?” asked Lucy.

  “It would appear not.”

  “And you believe that we can take this man at his word?” I asked.

  Mycroft pursed his lips judicially. “I believe we may be cautiously confident in the veracity of his statement, yes. Business was non-existent, leaving him with no other occupation than to watch the comings and goings of passers-by. And he struck me as less unobservant than the majority of his type.”

  “So that means that someone was waiting for Plank, either outside the Legation or inside,” Lucy said.

  “Since spending any length of time outside tonight was a cold and most unpleasant business, as I myself can attest, I believe we can take the hypothesis that Plank’s killer or killers waited for him inside.”

  “You were just telling us that a part of your tour of the Legation included the kitchen, Uncle John. What did you observe there?”

  The weight of responsibility settled over me once again as I tried to separate my feelings of frustration and anger from the events that I had experienced. “The shelves and workspaces had not enough space to conceal a man,” I began.

  “But there were servants already working there?” Lucy asked.

  “A cook, a Chinese fellow, and two attendants—and a waiter, who was going out. There was a gathering of guests in the dining room. A meal was being served. And there were drinks available for the visitors attending a lecture—”

  “How long were you in the kitchen?” Mycroft interrupted.

  “Only a minute or two. As I said, I only wanted to ascertain the possibility that a man—”

  “Yes, yes.” Mycroft waved that aside. “What was being cooked?”

  “Why, a stew of some sort. Fish I think.”

  “You could smell fish?”

  “Yes, but I do not see what—”

  “Tax your memory. Was the odour strong, faint, pleasant, unpleasant?”

  “It was not particularly noticeable,” I said. “Certainly not overpowering.”

  “Were there seasonings? Garlic perhaps? Peppers, soy sauce, fermented vegetables? Concentrate, and allow your mind to furnish the recollections for you.”

  I did so. “Yes, and now that I think of it, there was also a deep fryer going. Dumplings of some sort. The chef was taking them out of the fryer.”

  “How was the kitchen separated from the dining room and the other gathering rooms?”

  “Why, by the ordinary swinging doors. I remember seeing through the glass panel, just before we went in. The cook had his back to the door. One of the wait staff was coming out, so I stepped back.”

  “And that is a most valuable piece of information,” said Mycroft. “Tell me. Was there a pantry or a storage facility, connected to the kitchen work area?”

  “There were shelves—wooden shelves—with canned goods—”

  “Was there a door to the outside?”

  I remembered. “There was.”

  “Open or closed?”

  “Why closed, of course. The weather—”

  Mycroft sat back in his chair. “Then it had recently been opened and I would expect that was the access point for the killer to go out, commit his crime, and then re-enter.”

  I stared at him in astonishment. “How can you be certain?”

  “Because of what you have told us.”

  It was an answer that might have come from Holmes himself, and it made me feel his absence even more keenly. I frowned. “I still don’t understand.”

  Becky had been silent until this moment, sitting close beside Lucy, but at that she spoke up. “You told us you could see plainly through the glass window before you went in. And you said the cooking odors were faint. If the outside door had been shut the whole time, the kitchen would have been steamy, and you would have smelled more of the fish.”

  Mycroft gave her an approving nod before going on: “Now, I believe you said that one of the wait staff was leaving the kitchen as you came in. Can you cast your mind back to that moment when he passed you, and tell us your impressions?”

  I closed my eyes with the effort, but no recollection came. I shook my head.

  “Did he brush past you, or step aside?”

  I remembered. “He turned away from me.”

  “As you passed one another, was he on your right side or on your left?”

  “On my left.”

  “Excellent. Now, what else can you tell us about this man?”

  “He was taller than I am. Unusually tall.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Why, ordinary attire. He had a towel draped over his forearm. A white towel. It stood out against the black jacket.” I thought harder. “His shirt was white, starched in the usual manner, and his necktie was black. Ordinary waiter’s attire.”

  “Wearing a Chinese cap?”

  “Yes. Black silk. Round top. No brim.”

  “White gloves?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was he carrying—a tray? A tureen?”

  “I don’t remember that he was carrying anything.”

  “That is highly suggestive. But let us pass on to the remainder of your inspection of the ground floor. Can you please describe what you saw?”

  I gave my account as best I could recall.

  “The waiter who had been leaving the kitchen. Was he there?”

  “There were several waiters present, but I cannot recall seeing that one. As I said, he was unusually tall.”

  “They wore similar black caps?”

  I nodded.

  “Where did you go after the dining room?”

  “There was this larger room. A lecture hall of sorts. Twenty-five people. Or perhaps a few more.”

  “What did you hear of the lecture?”

  “The gathering was to discuss a cure—that is—”

  I hesitated. An impression came to me. “The tall waiter. He had turned his face away coming out of the kitchen, but I believe I also saw him at the lecture. He was a former patient of the lecturer, and he had been cured of opium addiction.”

  Lucy sat forward. “What was his name?”

  I remembered. “Kai-chen.”

  She asked, “Was there an older man with him?”

  I nodded. “The lecturer was an older Chinese man, with a scarred face that I will not soon forget.”

  “I know them both,” Lucy said. “This cannot be a coincidence.”

  And then the telephone rang.

  I picked up the receiver and heard the voice of the Secretary of War.

  “Dr. Watson? Lansdowne here.”

  His voice was unusually somber.

  My voice caught with apprehension as I replied, “Mr. Secretary.”

  What I next heard through the telephone receiver caused my entire body to go numb.

  “I very much regret to inform you …”

  The words seemed to come from a great distance. Indeed, they might have come from another universe.

  52. DARKNESS

  WATSON

  I gripped the receiver in shock. The room seemed to whirl around me.

  Lansdowne went on. “… that on the Thames near Limehouse Basin this afternoon, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was shot while on board a small Chinese vessel. My witness says he cannot possibly have survived.”

  I put out my hand, involuntarily, to catch my balance, and realized that my fingers were touching Holmes’s desk. The accompanying surge of emotion made me gasp.

  “Are you there, Dr. Watson?”

  My jaw clamped shut. I saw red. Heard an inner voice.

  Whoever did this will die at my hands.

  But then Lucy was at my side. I heard myself saying, “I am. Go ahead.”

  I held the earpiece out so that we both could hear the voice of Lord Lansdowne. “The murder was witnessed by the captain of HMS Daring, which is now moored at the Royal Naval College. I am on my way to Greenwich now. I have sent a carriage to Baker Street. Will you come?”

  Darkness had fa
llen by the time we reached Greenwich. A few harbor lights glittered over the wide expanse of black river, barely illuminating the low outline of HMS Daring along the dock. Lansdowne was waiting for us, hatless, at the entrance to the West Building, his aquiline features readily identifiable. His tall frame was stooped and hunched against the cold. He gave a momentary glance to our group, which consisted of Mycroft, Lucy and me. We had left little Becky in the care of Mrs. Hudson. As an added precaution, Lucy had insisted on waiting for the arrival of three police constables, who would guard the Baker Street residence until our return.

  To Lansdowne we were all familiar faces. All of us had been inside Lansdowne House and with him in the adjoining Devonshire House, just six months earlier, when the Jubilee Ball had nearly ended in catastrophe.

  On that occasion a traitor had been unmasked, and we had shared with Lansdowne a grim triumph. Now, I could not help thinking that there was no triumph. There was catastrophe.

  “I am so terribly sorry for your loss,” Lansdowne said. “Lieutenant Commander Bradley is inside. I will take you to him.”

  The commander, clean-faced and ruddy, about forty years old, stood in his blue uniform at attention outside a tall door just off the front entrance. His blue eyes looked inquiringly at our little group, then at Lansdowne as we approached.

  “Commander Bradley, I shall introduce you to each of these people in turn. They are the next of kin to Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  We shook hands with him as Lansdowne made introductions. Then he opened the door to reveal a well-lit conference room, with a large oak table surrounded by a dozen empty chairs.

  On the table lay a misshapen dark pile of fabric.

  “His coat,” said the commander. “It’s all we have, I’m afraid.”

  I picked up the coat to inspect it, catching the scent of damp wool and river water. It was Holmes’s black tweed Inverness. I put my finger through a small hole in the front of the cape, through the coat beneath, and then through the heavy wool fabric at the back. As I did so I realized that traces of reddish liquid were coming off on my hands. There was no mistaking the coppery scent of blood, diluted though it had been by the waters of the Thames.

  There was also no mistaking the inevitable conclusion. A bullet passing through Holmes’s cloak in this manner would inevitably have gone through his chest. From the angle between the holes, the shot might have missed the vital organs, but there was no question that significant blood loss would have ensued.

  “A miracle that he survived to take this off and attempt to swim,” said Commander Bradley, looking from me to Lucy and to Mycroft.

  We took chairs around the table. Bradley told us what had happened. Authorized by Lansdowne, Holmes had asked for his assistance to watch the Red Dragon Inn and monitor boat traffic in and out. “Something to do with opium smuggling,” the commander said. “We hove to on the south side of the river, just opposite Limehouse Basin. We had a good view of the Red Dragon. It was a gray afternoon, but the weather was clear enough.”

  “What time was this?” Lucy asked.

  “About three o’clock,” the commander said, “We saw a motor launch pass us, heading straight for the Red Dragon, close enough so that we could see the crew was Chinese. There was no name and no flag. The boat docked briefly under the pier, unloaded a few barrels of cargo, and then maneuvered away from the dock, to head downstream. At that moment Mr. Holmes appeared on the dock, running at full tilt.”

  “You could identify him at that distance?” Mycroft asked sharply.

  “Not at that time. I had my binoculars, but no, I could not distinguish his features as he ran. I did see that he was brandishing a revolver. He jumped onto the Chinese boat just as it was pulling away from the Red Dragon dock. In a few moments, however, I could identify Holmes. He was on the deck, and the Chinese boat was moving rapidly in our direction. Then there were shots fired. The man I now know to be Sherlock Holmes was clearly visible, and he was hit by one of the shots. He fell into the river.”

  “Could you see his face when he was in the water?”

  “Yes. Plainly. It was Mr. Holmes.”

  “You had met him before?”

  “Yes. This was the man who had asked me to keep the Red Dragon Inn under surveillance.”

  “And he had identified himself as Sherlock Holmes?”

  “He did, and to confirm his identity he asked me to call Secretary Lansdowne in his presence.”

  “Holmes made the request to me on the phone,” Lansdowne said. “I recognized his voice. Then he put Commander Bradley on the line, and I gave the authorization.”

  “What happened then?” Lucy asked.

  “I knew the water was dangerously cold. As you know, freezing water can paralyze a man’s limbs in no time. There were blocks of ice here and there, but none close enough for Mr. Holmes to hold onto. We lowered a dinghy to rescue him. I watched throughout. He was struggling to stay afloat. He took off his coat, which was dragging him down, and tried to swim to the dinghy. It was a valiant effort, but before we could reach him, he went under. He was gone.”

  The commander was silent, as were we all.

  After a long moment, Lucy asked, “Did you see blood in the water?”

  “The sky was too dark and the sea too rough and we were too far away. But there is blood on the coat.”

  “What happened to the Chinese motor launch?” I asked.

  “It had gone out of sight by the time we had the dinghy and the coat back on board.”

  “We have given a description of the launch to the police,” Lansdowne added, “and to the harbor patrols.”

  “The body will be impossible for a diver to recover,” the commander said. “The river is nearly eighty feet deep off Limehouse Basin, and this was at high tide.”

  “Tell me again, Commander,” Lucy said. “We need to be absolutely certain. You saw the face of the man when he was in the water. How far away were you?”

  “Perhaps a hundred feet.”

  “Yet close enough so you recognized Sherlock Holmes.”

  “There is no doubt in my mind.”

  She turned to me. “Let me see the overcoat.”

  I picked up the coat once again. The label read, Made by Stanley Lampert, Draper. I handed it over to Lucy.

  “It’s the coat he bought from that little shop in St. Margaret’s, two years ago,” Lucy said. To the commander, she added, “In fact, I selected it. We all waited while the draper’s wife added a pocket.”

  She looked steadily into my eyes and handed the coat back to me. I turned over the wet wool fabric, finding the pocket.

  I reached inside.

  Felt something.

  “There is a small piece of wet pasteboard in the pocket,” I said. “Very wet.”

  “Be very careful,” Lucy said.

  I withdrew a small, soggy, pink-tinged rectangle from the pocket. I flattened the object out on the table.

  It was a one-way railway ticket from Shellingford to London.

  In my memory, suddenly I was with Holmes once again in Scotland Yard. His words seemed to echo in my mind.

  Now I must pursue my own lines of inquiry.

  I turned to Lucy. “We must go to Shellingford.”

  In Lucy’s eyes I saw the same conflicting emotions that I myself felt. I saw her faint flicker of hope that Holmes might somehow yet be alive. Yet I could also see her despair at the weight of evidence stacked up against his survival.

  She came closer and shook her head, her voice steady. “Not yet, Uncle John. These people are very, very dangerous. If we are to return to Shellingford, we must be fully armed with as much information as we can gather. There is something I would have you do.”

  She glanced over her shoulder to where Mycroft had drawn a little apart to speak to Lord Lansdowne. She lowered her voice. “But you must tell absolutely no one.” A shadow crossed her features. “I don’t think I can even tell Jack.”

  I felt my eyebrows rise. “What you plan is illegal?�
�

  Lucy’s expression remained steady, her voice firm. “Extremely.”

  53. OUTSIDE THE LAW

  Friday, January 14, 1898

  LUCY

  “Did you sleep at all last night?” Jack asked.

  I shook my head. It was barely six o’clock in the morning, and Jack had only just come home from Scotland Yard to find me in the kitchen, staring into a cup of coffee that I had no intention of actually drinking.

  “No. But I’m all right.”

  Outside, the weather seemed to be doing its best to match my mood. Last night’s snow had turned into freezing sleet that clattered on the roof and hissed against the windowpanes. Everything felt dull. Even the usual life and bustle of London muted in submission to the winter elements.

  I looked up at Jack. “Do you think there’s a chance that my father is still alive?”

  I knew that I could trust him to tell me the truth, and not what he thought I wanted to hear. “I keep telling myself that he’s done this in the past, and that he’s Sherlock Holmes, so, of course, he can’t actually be dead. But as much as he seems legendary, larger than real life, he’s still human—just a mortal man—and maybe everyone’s luck has to run out sooner or later.”

  I swallowed to keep my voice from shaking. “There’s one thing. One thing I thought of and that I keep holding onto, even though part of me thinks that it’s crazy. That red powder that was found at the scene of Holmes’s kidnapping—the chemicals that produced the smoke?”

  Jack nodded, a line appearing between his brows.

  “Well, it’s used in fireworks, just as Mycroft said. He was looking at it as proof of the Asian connection, and maybe it is. But it’s also used in the theater.”

  Jack nodded again. “In The Mikado. You said.”

  We were both speaking in low voices to keep from waking Becky, who was still asleep in her bed upstairs. She hadn’t wanted to sleep last night any more than I had, but sheer exhaustion had finally taken over somewhere around two o’clock in the morning. I wanted her to get whatever rest she could.

  “Exactly! I’ve seen it used at the Savoy—and Holmes would know that. He’d know I would recognize it. What if it was a message to me? Letting me know that all of this—Holmes’s kidnapping, his apparent death—was something he himself had orchestrated. Another sort of theatrical production, albeit with much higher stakes than The Mikado.”