The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part XI

by David Marcum

  “And yet there was no furniture in the van?”

  “I believe I have already established that point.”

  “Indeed, you have, Holmes. I was merely reviewing the data to get it straight in my mind. One cannot make bricks without straw, you know.”

  “Thank you for your insight. A search of the van revealed nothing other than a few spent matches and curiously enough, a stuffed eel with a Roman coin in its mouth.”

  “How curious.”

  “Yes, which is why I advanced the use of the word ‘curiously’. This set off a train of thoughts in my head, being vaguely reminiscent of the affair of the taxidermist and the archaeologist. You recall the affair, no doubt?”

  “No.”

  “No matter. It is not germane to the solving of the Grosvenor Square furniture van affair, although it did give me pause for a moment. I made my way to Cheapside, in the hope I would find the answers I sought there.”

  “Could not James Morton have supplied these answers?”

  “James Hallam, you mean. I had already ascertained that he knew nothing of the affair. His answers to my questions were honest and straightforward.”

  “Surely he could tell you who had attacked him and the driver?”

  “It appeared not. The attack came out of the blue and he could give no description of the assailant. The visit to Cheapside proved most illuminating.”

  “In what way, Holmes?”

  “That is what I am endeavouring to tell you.”

  “Can I urge you to somehow accelerate the process, I have an approaching appointment with Thurston.”

  “If it had not been for your constant prevarication and interruptions, you would have been in full possession of the facts of the case by now. My inquiries at Williams and Sons pointed me in the direction of a specialist importer of fine furniture who was located in Hackney. No doubt you have connections to the area of a personal nature you wish to regale me with.”

  “None that I am aware of.”

  “A blessed relief for the recounting of this affair. After taking refreshment, I proceeded to make my way to Hackney. The importers had their office in a somewhat dilapidated building, with a small warehouse adjoining that leaned to one side precariously. It was only at this juncture that I realised I had visited these premises before. This was long ago before my biographer came to glorify me. Watson, perhaps you could look at your watch in a more surreptitious fashion.”

  “Apologies, Holmes. Then what happened?”

  “What happened is that you will go and play billiards and I will never mention the Grosvenor Square Furniture Van affair ever again. If you will excuse me, I have an experiment I wish to conduct. Good day, Watson.”

  Some time later, as I was writing an account of the adventure of “The Noble Bachelor”, I felt a pang of disquiet that I hadn’t given Holmes my full attention as he attempted to explain the affair. How to make reparation though? I hit on the idea of the following passage that, now and forever, will have to suffice for the adventure of the Grosvenor Square furniture van:

  “I have very little difficulty in finding what I want,” said I, “for the facts are quite recent, and the matter struck me as remarkable. I feared to refer them to you, however, as I knew that you had an inquiry on hand and that you disliked the intrusion of other matters.”

  “Oh, you mean the little problem of the Grosvenor Square furniture van. That is quite cleared up now - though, indeed, it was obvious from the first. Pray give me the results of your newspaper selections.”

  Dr. John H. Watson and Sherlock Holmes - “The Noble Bachelor”

  The Adventure of the Paradol Chamber

  by Paul W. Nash

  The year 1887 was a busy one for Sherlock Holmes. He was engaged in a dozen cases of note, including the adventures of the Five Orange Pips and of the defeat of Baron Maupertuis, the Hoxton Devil, and the Amateur Mendicant Society, not to mention the very curious case of the Hollow Effigy, all of which are recorded in my notes (though some cannot be made public until the noble and gentle personalities involved have been forgotten). Perhaps the strangest case of the year, however, was that of “The Paradol Chamber”. It represented a triumph for Holmes’s powers of ratiocination, and marked for me the end of an old phase of life and the beginning of a new.

  It began one balmy afternoon in July. Holmes was still in delicate health after his prolonged battle of wits (and fists) with the Baron, but he was in good spirits again after the black reaction to his herculean efforts of the spring, cheered by his successes and the recent Jubilee. We were both lounging in the rooms in Baker Street, Holmes toying with one of his musical compositions, humming short snatches to himself as he scratched with his pen, while I was absorbed in the latest outrageous tale in Blackwood’s. Suddenly Holmes threw aside his manuscript and jumped to his feet.

  “I had quite forgotten,” he cried. “We are to receive a visitor this afternoon.” He plucked a letter from the mantelpiece and threw it into my lap. I picked it up and read as follows:

  Dear Mr. Holmes,

  I am sure you will not mind if I call upon you this afternoon at four o’clock to discuss a little matter which has troubled me. My name will, I am sure, be known to you, but I do not seek any favour on account of my fame. Please treat me as you would any common client.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Beresford Lamb

  “I received it this morning,” said Holmes. “What do you make of it?”

  Knowing my friend’s methods, I addressed myself first to the physical characteristics of the letter. “Well,” I replied, “it is written on very good-quality paper, with a broad-nibbed pen, in a round, confident hand. The writer has not commissioned a printed heading for his letter-paper, but has attached a copy of his calling card to the top of the sheet with a pin. The card gives an address in Endell Street and is somewhat pretentious in execution, with rather too many curlicues. I suppose Beresford Lamb must be well-to-do as well as being, as he remarks, quite famous.”

  “Is he famous?” asked Holmes. “I confess I had never heard of him before I read his name here.”

  “He is certainly known to me.”

  “Really? Is he, perhaps, a celebrated jockey or tipster upon the turf?”

  “No indeed,” I replied gravely, feeling that Holmes was chaffing me rather. “He is an author.”

  “An author? Of what cast?”

  “He writes dramatic stories of crime.”

  “Not reports of crime? Surely, I should have heard of him had he been a recorder of criminal proceedings.”

  “No. His work is pure fiction. But I am surprised, nevertheless, that you have not heard his name. He has become well-known from these very pages.” I raised the copy of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that I had been reading.

  “I see,” said Holmes. “Have you read all his works?”

  “Hungrily,” I replied. Lamb was among the more successful of a group of writers who had taken to inventing bloody and unlikely tales of crime and detection in the past decade or so. I remembered with pleasure Mr. Collins’s Who Killed Zebedee and Miss Green’s The Leavenworth Case, and almost as fondly the serialisations of Dr. Casterman’s cases in The Cornhill and those of “Lupus” in Once a Week. My black bag contained, at that moment, an unopened copy of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, of which I had heard very good reports.

  “Well,” said Holmes. “We have a few minutes before our visitor is due. Perhaps you would tell me a little of Mr. Lamb’s works.”

  “I have just finished reading the final part of his latest story,” I replied, “and will be delighted to give you an account of it. It is a tale of love and attempted abduction called “The Adventure of the Paradol Chamber”, and is the latest in a series of The Chronicles of Lord Pinto. This Pinto, the Viscount son of the Earl of Fullerton, is an am
ateur detective.”

  Holmes held up his hand. “A detective?” he said. “Like myself, rather than of the official variety?”

  “Not quite. Pinto is a rich man who pursues detection as a hobby, while you are England’s foremost professional consulting investigator.”

  I felt a little flattery would do no harm to my friend, or my narrative, at this moment. Holmes smiled with a mixture of pleasure and condescension. “Pray continue, Doctor,” he said.

  “Although Pinto is a noble amateur, I have noticed, once or twice when reading of his exploits, that there are echoes of your own work and methods. Accounts of your successes have been available in the public prints, and I am sure Lamb has taken a little inspiration from you.” Holmes continued to smile.

  “The story concerns a stage magician who calls himself ‘Paradol’. He works with a young assistant on various astonishing illusions, and soon forms a powerful regard for the beautiful daughter of the owner of one of the theatres in which he performs. He pays court to this girl, but she spurns him and, in the way of such stories, her rejection turns his genius from light to dark, and he plots his revenge. The climax of his act is the appearance of The Paradol Chamber. This is a gaudily-painted vanishing-box, six feet tall and three feet wide, with a door on the front, which the assistant brings on to the stage. It is raised to a height of about a foot on four wheels, which allow it to move easily and the audience to see beneath it while the trick is performed.

  “Paradol would invite a beautiful woman from the audience to join him on stage, and ask her to step into the Chamber. The door was then closed and the assistant would turn the Chamber round upon its wheels through three-hundred-sixty degrees to allow the audience to see the back and sides. All the while, Paradol would make exaggerated signs and passes as if conjuring powerful magic. He would then open the door of the Chamber to reveal that it was now quite empty. The audience would inevitably gasp. Then Paradol would bow and step into the Chamber himself and close the door. The assistant would repeat the revolution of the Chamber and this time when the door was opened the beautiful lady was standing again inside the box and Paradol had disappeared. This was the end of the act and, while the lady left the stage and the audience clapped loudly, the Chamber was wheeled into the wings.

  “We are told how the trick was done. It was a very simple matter. The interior of the Paradol Chamber was covered with black velvet and was divided vertically into two compartments by a velvet-covered board which revolved on a central pivot. When the door was opened, only the front half of the Chamber was actually visible, but this was not obvious because of the blackness of the interior. The lady chosen from the audience was, of course, a confederate of Paradol, and once inside the Chamber knew how to revolve the central board and pass into the back compartment. When the door was opened, the audience could again see only the empty black interior of the front half of the box. Clearly, when Paradol himself entered the front compartment, the whole process was reversed and the two compartments changed places.

  “So much for the trick as it was usually effected. But on one night Paradol practised a dramatic and potentially fatal variation.” Holmes snorted. Perhaps I had grown a little caught up in the narrative and decided to continue it without embellishment. “He paid his usual lady accomplice to feign illness, and suggested to the theatre-owner that his daughter might take her place. To this he readily agreed, and the daughter was initiated into the secret of the trick. At the climax of the act she was picked out, seemingly at random, by Paradol and entered the Chamber. While the magician’s assistant turned the box to show its faces to the audience, the young lady revolved the central board and entered the hidden compartment.

  “But the ingenious Paradol had prepared the Chamber differently that day. He had drilled a number of holes in the floor of the hidden half of the Chamber, and beneath them fastened a shallow metal box stuffed with cotton-wool soaked with chloroform. The girl naturally fell into a deep sleep. Rather than enter the Chamber himself, Paradol then bowed to the audience, received their plaudits, and left the stage, while his assistant wheeled the Chamber after him. Usually the Chamber would be halted and opened as soon as it was in the wings, but now Paradol took charge of it and, with his assistant’s help, wheeled it to the stage door, which he opened. Then he departed through it, quickly to return driving a small cart and pair. The Chamber was loaded into the cart and the magician drove off into the night with his sleeping prize.”

  “The next part of the story is a curious dream or vision which Paradol enjoys as he drives away, thinking of his new life with the young woman he has abducted. He fancies he will open the Chamber and take out her sleeping form and lay her on the bed in the cottage he has rented, to recover from the effects of the chloroform. When her head is clear, she will perceive her situation and give herself willingly to her abductor in marriage. Paradol will revert to his own name, which no one in the theatre world knows, and a priest will be called to conduct the service. Then he will choose a new stage-name and continue his career. But when he arrives at the cottage and opens the Chamber he finds it quite empty.

  “In the third part of the story, Lord Pinto makes his appearance, called in by the theatre-owner to trace his missing daughter. The official police have, naturally, failed to solve the mystery and have suggested that the disappearance was merely a carefully planned elopement. Pinto begins his investigation and learns that the magician’s young assistant has also disappeared. After much circumlocution, and not a few co-incidental discoveries, Pinto traces the assistant to a rented room where he is living with his new wife, the theatre-owner’s daughter. It transpires that the assistant too had been in love with the girl and, perceiving at the last moment what Paradol was about, had rescued her from the Chamber while his master was fetching the cart and replaced her sleeping form with a couple of sandbags which were used in the theatre to secure scenery. Upon waking, she had recognized her rescuer, declared her love, and willingly run away with him, believing that her father would no more welcome as a son-in-law a young stage assistant than he would a mature stage magician.

  “The story then turns to the pursuit of Paradol. Pinto gains from the assistant certain clues which allow him to locate the magician’s cottage. He alerts the local police who meet him at the cottage, where they confront Paradol - and Pinto recounts, to the magician’s astonishment, the full story of his abduction of the girl. When he has finished, however, Paradol asks the police inspector what crime he is going to be charged with, since there is no evidence of any of Pinto’s claims and the girl was not, in fact, abducted by him but eloped with his assistant. The inspector scratches his head, but Pinto smiles and leads the party to an outbuilding where they find the Paradol Chamber, newly-painted in a different livery, but still the same machine. He produces a hand-bill for the magic act of one ‘Eggestein the German Wonder’, and opens the Chamber to reveal the unconscious body of another young woman. It is her abduction with which Paradol is charged.

  “Upon finding that he had been cheated of the prize for his ingenuity, Paradol’s heart had turned quite to wickedness, and he had determined to use his skills to take possession of the most beautiful young women of the region, repeating his trick in local halls and theatres under a series of different names. At the last, he is led away to prison, and the girl wakes to find herself in safe hands, with no knowledge of the fate which she has so narrowly escaped.” I paused and looked at Holmes, trying to gauge his reaction to the story. His face was quite impassive however, like a severe carving of granite. “I enjoyed the story very much,” I said. “Indeed, I found it... thrilling. But, I admit, it is a ridiculous tale, full of melodrama and implausible detail.”

  “I disagree,” said Holmes sharply. “It is certainly romantic and melodramatic, even grotesque, but not wholly implausible. I can see only one possible flaw in the logic of the tale as you have related it, and that is the question of the chloroform held in a box
beneath the floor of the Chamber. Would such an arrangement have been effective? And would not the odour have alerted the young woman that she was entering a trap? But then, why would she recognize the scent of chloroform?”

  I had not expected Holmes to consider the story quite so seriously. “Perhaps,” I said, “you should read ‘The Adventure of the Paradol Chamber’ for yourself.”

  “Perhaps I should,” he replied. “But all that must wait, for here, if I am not mistaken, is the creator of that story.” The small clock on the mantel chimed the hour and, in the same instant, there was a ring on the doorbell. After a few moments, we heard the regular footsteps of our visitor, and momently there was a firm rap upon the door.

  Holmes paused a moment then called out, “Come in.”

  A tall gentlemen in a long brown coat entered. His brown bowler was held in the long, elegant fingers of his left hand, and in his right he held a gold-topped cane. He must have been well over fifty years of age, but his hair was coal-black, and swept back from his face in a sharp peak which he must have smoothed down just before entering our door. His face wore an expression of alert interest, and his blue eyes were especially piercing and earnest. At Holmes’s invitation he handed over his hat and stick, removed his coat, which Holmes also took, and sat down beside the empty fireplace.

  “So,” said our guest when he was settled, “you are the famous Sherlock Holmes?”

  “I am he,” replied Holmes. “And this is my friend Dr. John Watson, who is has occasionally been good enough to assist me in my cases.”

  Lamb nodded to me, then turned back to Holmes. “You will know my name, of course,” he said. “Have you read my stories?”

  “I have some familiarity with them.”

  “Very good. I have followed your career too, as far as I have been able, through accounts in the daily papers. I must congratulate you on your triumph in the case of the Baron and the British antiquities. I gather you saved the French government something like a million, and the Greek nation a similar sum, and ended by knocking the Baron down the steps of the British Museum when he took exception to your interference...”