The Cthulhu Casebooks

by James Lovegrove

“Are you sure this man is your brother?” I could not help remarking to my companion. “You described him a few moments ago as corpulent, and you are as thin as a rake. Now I see that he likes things shipshape, whereas you prefer a shambles.”

  “If ever two people could be described as opposite sides of the same coin, they are Mycroft and I,” Holmes replied. “It was always so, even when we were boys. Our father was descended from a long line of soldiers and brought a martial discipline to everything he did. Our mother was different. Her uncle was Horace Vernet, the French artist, and she was altogether of a more Bohemian disposition. Mycroft and I draw traits from both genealogies, but to wildly disparate degrees. He enjoys his food, I treat it as merely fuel for body and mind. He craves consistency and systematisation, I have a bent towards creative chaos. Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.”

  So saying, Holmes set about examining the spacious premises minutely and methodically. He went from sitting room to study to bedchamber to dressing room to bathroom, bestowing upon each a thorough, floor-to-ceiling scrutiny. On several occasions he took out a magnifying glass and peered at something – a section of cornicing, a chair castor, a basin tap, a doorknob – with such intent interest that it could have been a detail of the Mona Lisa. Nigh on an hour elapsed before this exhaustive procedure was done, and at its end Holmes pronounced himself satisfied that his brother had indeed been abducted and that the culprit was Moriarty.

  “Here is a hair which can only have belonged to our errant academic,” he said, holding up the tiny dark filament for me to see. “It is of the appropriate length, and it bears an odour of coconut and ylang-ylang.” He sniffed it. “Yes. In precisely the same ratio as the brand of macassar oil Moriarty uses to style his hair, namely Rowland’s.”

  “That clinches it. Damn it.”

  “But there is better news. I am happy to relate that Mycroft has been so good as to leave us a clue as to his current whereabouts.”

  “A clue? Where? Of what nature?”

  “There is something out of place in this sitting room, something ever so slightly awry.”

  “You’re joking!” I declared. “Awry? I behold nothing that would indicate anyone even lives here. This apartment is like a doll’s house. It is too perfect and pristine to be real, let alone inhabited.”

  “Cast your eye about.”

  I did so. “The inkwell on the escritoire?” I hazarded. “Is it a fraction of an inch off-centre? No? That rug, then. A degree or two misaligned with the floorboards?”

  “You are guessing.”

  “Of course I’m guessing. A book on the shelves? How about that?”

  I scanned the bookcases, of which there were three, all made of burnished walnut and situated equidistant from one another along one wall. Mycroft’s personal library consisted largely of improving novels and anthologies of poetry and essays, and was arranged according to colour of binding and size of book – folio volume with folio, quarto with quarto, and so on. All were set shoulder to shoulder, snug and gleaming.

  “You are still guessing,” Holmes said, “but you are getting warm. It is indeed a book, but not on a shelf.”

  He could only have been referring to the large King James Bible, which rested upon a lectern by the window. It sat very slightly askew on its perch. The angle of discrepancy was so small that one would never have noticed were one not looking; yet, in such a scrupulously orderly set of rooms, this tiniest of variations from true became conspicuous.

  Holmes picked up the Bible carefully. It was a heavy, handsome artefact, printed on sturdy vellum, bound in calfskin, the pages trimmed with gold leaf.

  “You will observe, Watson, that there is a thumb index.” He gestured at the series of small round niches scooped out from the right-hand edge of the pages. “Each cut-in indentation features an abbreviation of three Biblical book names, enabling the reader to jump more quickly to a desired passage. You will observe, too, that one of those indentations bears a scoring upon it. This one, which reads ‘COR GAL EPH’.”

  There was indeed a mark across the little semi-circular pad of black paper and gold lettering, a thin depression half an inch long.

  “The book is in otherwise immaculate condition,” said Holmes. “Mycroft seldom if ever opens it. He owns it more because it is a thing of beauty than for any spiritual sustenance it might afford. The scoring has been put there freshly, is incongruous, and is thus of significance. Also of significance is this scuff mark near the base of one of the lectern’s legs. Do you see?”

  Bending, I was able to make out a lozenge of black boot polish besmirching the veneer of the wood.

  “What does all this tell you?”

  “That even your brother cannot keep his home perfectly tidy?” I offered.

  “It tells me that Mycroft stumbled against the lectern, scraping it with his foot, and at the same time put a mark on the index pad with a fingernail.”

  “By accident?”

  “No, I reckon both actions were quite deliberate. He feigned clumsiness.”

  “You are quite certain of this?”

  “Not beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Holmes replied with some asperity. “I can, however, make an informed inference based on available evidence, just as you with your medical knowhow can assess a patient’s symptoms and make a considered diagnosis. Mycroft would have known I would search his rooms once I learned of his disappearance, and so he took pains to shift the Bible a fraction and subtly deface it in such a way as to leave me a trail to follow. Somehow he had managed to inveigle Moriarty into revealing the location to which he was to be spirited away. That or he had applied his facility for logic and reasoning to the matter, before Moriarty’s mesmerism took hold of him. In that field – the science of deduction – Mycroft is very much my equal, if not my superior.”

  “There is another brain like yours in the land?” I said wonderingly.

  “I would say there are three, if one includes Moriarty. But in the case of Mycroft, the brain, though mighty, is untrained and unfocused. He is content to apply it sparingly and at whim, owing to an innate laziness. He allows the government to tap his intellect on demand, but the rest of the time leaves it idle. That is another way in which he and I are unalike. My brain is never idle. It refuses to be.”

  “But at least, in extremis, he has used it.”

  “Absolutely. To his and our advantage.”

  “I just don’t see what the scoring on the thumb index is supposed to indicate.”

  “I refer you to its positioning. ‘COR GAL EPH’.”

  “Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians.”

  “All three form part of the Pauline Epistles.”

  “And what are we supposed to construe from that?”

  “Think harder,” said Holmes. “Try not to be such a blockhead.”

  “The Pauline Epistles. Paul. He who was formerly Saul of Tarsus, scourge of Christians until his conversion on the road to Damascus, after which he became an apostle and was eventually martyred for his beliefs, by Nero, or so is the general assumption.”

  “Go on.”

  “That is as far as I can take it. I am no theologian, nor any great expert on the life and work of St Paul.”

  “You are so nearly there, it is painful to watch. I would coax you further until you got the whole way, but time is short and so is my patience. St Paul, Watson. Remember I said it was a location. Where in London is there a place that derives its name from him?”

  I slapped my forehead. “St Paul’s Cathedral.”

  “Correct, and also incorrect.”

  “But it makes a perverse kind of sense,” I insisted. “Follow my reasoning. Moriarty has taken Mycroft prisoner, along with Gregson. He has turned his persuasive powers on them, such that they have willingly accompanied him to a destination he has chosen.”

  “Yes, that is my own surmise. He enthralled and led away each one separately, like a Pied Piper.”

  “So why do you think he hasn’t taken them to St Paul’s Cat
hedral? St Paul’s has symbolic value. It is Britain’s foremost religious edifice, after Westminster Abbey. Surely Moriarty would gain a wicked satisfaction from profaning it, turning it into a place of—”

  I caught myself. Holmes completed the sentence for me.

  “Of human sacrifice.”

  “I did not want to say the phrase.”

  “And I appreciate your discretion. But there is no need to tread delicately around the subject. I am fully aware what fate Moriarty likely has in store for my brother tonight, and for poor Gregson.”

  “You seem awfully calm at the prospect.”

  “What you perceive as calmness, Watson, is simply fixity of purpose. I cannot afford the luxury of giving free rein to my emotions. Fear is unproductive, it will only hinder my efforts. In order that we might have a chance to save the lives of Mycroft and Gregson, my thought processes must be as clear as possible.”

  I marvelled at his self-control. Had it been my own brother in Moriarty’s clutches, I would have been beside myself.

  “I take your argument about St Paul’s Cathedral,” Holmes continued. “What you are overlooking, perhaps through ignorance of the facts, is that there is more than one St Paul’s in London. There are several churches going by that name. Off the top of my head, without resorting to an almanac, I can tell you there is one in Knightsbridge, another in Covent Garden, and yet another in Hammersmith.”

  “You’re saying it might be any of those three,” I said, deflated. “Or, for that matter, any St Paul’s in England, of which there must be dozens. Our search is rendered impossible.”

  “Not so. Because there is also a St Paul’s in an area quite pertinent to our case, and logic dictates that it is there that Moriarty has taken Mycroft and Gregson – to St Paul’s Church, Shadwell.”

  “GIRD YOUR LOINS, WATSON,” SAID HOLMES. “THIS is it.”

  We had arrived at St Paul’s Shadwell, and as our hansom rattled off into the distance, we paused and took stock.

  St Paul’s was a Waterloo church, erected by an Act of Parliament some sixty years ago on the site of an older church, and was built in the late Georgian style, with a cupola steeple and something of the Greek temple about its lofty, portico-capped façade. It lay between the Ratcliffe Highway and the Shadwell Basin, near enough to the latter that the creak of moored ships, the groan of anchor chains and the lap of water against wharf pilings were faintly but distinctly audible. A grassy churchyard set it apart from the rest of the city, like a moat around a castle. A further bulwark against its surroundings was provided by high, spiked railings and, just within this iron perimeter, a fringe of tall plane trees.

  The hour was past seven, and rain continued to fall from the darkened sky, as it had all day, in evanescent sheets. It was the kind of precipitation that chilled one to the bone in minutes, and was surely the reason why Holmes and I had marked so few New Year’s Eve revellers on the streets during the drive over. The night was yet young, but it seemed as though the annual carousing would be limited this year. The weather was having a dampening effect on people’s spirits.

  We had spent the day preparing for a perilous undertaking. In Holmes’s case this entailed hours of labour at his chemistry bench, where he had busied himself with a number of complex, often foul-smelling procedures – mixing, straining, boiling, titrating. He had conducted these operations with reference to the notes he had taken in Sequestered Volumes in the days before Christmas. The notebooks spread in front of him contained nothing but unreadable scrawl as far as I was concerned – Holmes’s handwriting was atrocious – but to him they were a source of valuable information.

  For my part, I had given my Webley Pryse a thorough cleaning and oiled all the moving parts. “A gun that works properly is a gun that will save your life,” as my old regimental sergeant major was fond of saying. I had also taken it upon myself to ensure that Holmes ate sufficiently, which he doubtless would have neglected to do had I not insisted upon it. Another of the regimental sergeant major’s aphorisms, drummed into me by repetition, was “An empty-bellied soldier is as much use on the battlefield as a dressmaker’s dummy”, his personal variant on Napoleon’s “An army marches on its stomach”.

  As we stood before the church gate, all I could think was that if Holmes and I were not now ready to confront Professor Moriarty, we never would be.

  Nonetheless, I could not help voicing a concern which had been nagging at me ever since we left Mycroft Holmes’s rooms. I could no longer leave it unaired, this misgiving, not when our destination loomed so close.

  “We could, of course, simply be taking the bait Moriarty has laid for us,” I said.

  Holmes nodded grimly. “Could? There’s no ‘could’ about it. I would say the probability exceeds ninety per cent.”

  “It needed to be mentioned.”

  “I was taking it as read. There is every chance that Mycroft did not leave that Bible clue for us of his own volition and that Moriarty wants us here.”

  “What for?”

  “Why go to the trouble of sacrificing my brother and Gregson to his god, if we are not there to watch them suffer? It would be a concert in an empty hall. Added to that, it is highly likely Moriarty has devised some stratagem that will imperil the lives of anyone who comes to his victims’ aid, which is to say ourselves.”

  “Is that why we have come alone? Why you have not kept Lestrade apprised of developments?”

  “Precisely, Watson. Insightful as ever. We are Moriarty’s target. We are the ones who must bear the brunt of any defensive measures he has put in place as we launch our rescue bid. Why endanger anyone else? We are the ones who aggravated him.”

  “You mean you did, with that telegram of yours. Had you not sent it, Moriarty would have been content to think that you and I were no threat. He dispensed with us easily at his rooms, did he not? He felt he had secured our compliance. But you had to go and provoke him.”

  “It was a calculated move,” said Holmes.

  “Not wholly.”

  “I admit the wording of the telegram could have been somewhat less acerbic, but the act of sending it was designed expressly to keep his attention. While we remained in his sights, there was every chance he would take a shot at us.”

  “You put a bullseye on our backs.”

  “How better to make the sniper reveal himself? What I did not bargain for – and I am castigating myself over it now – was Moriarty drawing others into the affair. I failed to estimate just how low the damnable rogue might stoop! Speaking of which, I feel honour-bound, at this juncture, to propose that you yourself do not participate in the forthcoming endeavour, Watson. You don’t, as the saying goes, have a dog in the fight. Given how hazardous tonight could be, I would not think any the less of you if you were to bow out.”

  “Holmes,” I retorted, “you insult me. I am as keen as anyone, present company included, to see Moriarty stopped before he can inflict any further horrors on the world. Nor could I stand idly by while the good Inspector Gregson and your brother are at risk of death. As your friend, and as a human being, it would be immoral, unconscionable.”

  “Good man. I knew I could count on you.”

  “All the same, I cannot help feeling like a mouse who is sniffing at the cheese, with the jaws of the trap yawning over him.”

  “Ah, but the difference here is that neither you nor I can be described as any old mouse. We come forearmed. Your pistol is loaded with some of the cartridges I gave you?”

  “Yes.” I patted an overcoat pocket. “And I have the remainder of the cartridges to hand.” I patted the other pocket.

  “Excellent. And I have my own unique arsenal about my person. Well, we have prevaricated long enough.”

  Holmes pushed open the gate and we entered the churchyard. Many of the capital’s churches were holding New Year’s Eve services tonight, but St Paul’s Shadwell was not amongst them – the place was deserted. We passed under the leafless boughs of the plane trees and wended our way up a gravel
path. To either side of us lay a host of headstones, the majority of which marked the graves of seamen, for St Paul’s had long served a nautical congregation. The original seventeenth-century building had been known colloquially as the Church of Sea Captains and could count amongst its parishioners none other than James Cook. After it was demolished to make way for its replacement, the tradition it espoused had been maintained.

  As we neared the building, London’s nocturnal clamour became muted, replaced by the sough of the wind and the clatter of bare branches. Shadwell itself resided on what had once been salt marsh, and on that night, in the propinquity of the church, the air smelled like it. In place of the usual sulphurous urban tang there was the reek of dampness, earth, brackish water. It felt as though Holmes and I had somehow left civilisation behind and travelled into the past, to a barren, more primordial era.

  “Now to see where our friend Moriarty is lurking.”

  Holmes produced a stoppered test tube which held a glutinous, murky blue liquid.

  “That single strand of his hair we recovered at Mycroft’s has enabled me to create a lodestone solution, as prescribed in De Vermis Mysteriis,” he said. “I only hope it works. I have followed the ‘recipe’ to the letter, but I am a novice chef so I cannot guarantee that this particular cake, as it were, will rise.”

  “Eye of newt, and toe of frog, eh?”

  “Nitre of potassium and tincture of myrrh, more like. This is no magic, Watson, it is alchemy. A fine distinction, you might think, but an important one. Alchemy is the forefather of modern chemistry, and the two have a lot more in common than one might suppose. In this instance, the dissolved hair causes the solution to respond visibly when in proximity to the person from whose head it came. Skin scrapings are better, so Prinn says, and a sample of bodily effluvium even more preferable, but a hair should still yield results.”

  “Should? Will.”

  “I pray your confidence in me is well-founded. Now, if Moriarty is anywhere within range… Oh-ho! What’s this?”

  The lodestone solution had begun to emit a hazy azure glow. Holmes moved the test tube from one side to the other. When he swung it leftward, the glow faded; when rightward, the glow brightened perceptibly. He ventured a few paces in that direction, waving the test tube aloft and using the solution’s fluctuating levels of luminosity to guide him.