Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years

by Michael Kurland

  The colonel managed to laugh heartily while at the same time conveying a “not in front of the ladies” disapproval.

  “Of the last praise,” the explorer continued blandly, “I can be no judge.”

  The shocked but secretly pleased expression of the colonel’s wife’s face was priceless. To a man with a love of the theatrical, playing a part offered a rich banquet of pleasures. Unfortunately, this particular actor had forgotten he was playing a role.

  He was Sigerson, who vaguely remembered having heard the name Sherlock Holmes, but couldn’t quite place it.

  After dinner, the ladies withdrew, and the colonel poured brandy into snifters and handed it around, offering soda as well. By this time, Sigerson was well enough to accept a proper drink.

  “A native meal requires a native smoke,” Colonel Prothero said with a wink. Into the room stepped the prettiest of the female servants, bearing a large silver bowl. Long white tubes wrapped with red foil bands stuck out of the bowl; the girl picked one and handed it to Sigerson.

  “Ever had a genuine cheroot?” The colonel beamed approval as the explorer examined the cigar intently. “These are the best cheroots in Burma, came from the king’s own stores in Mandalay. Took ’em from the palace myself as a little souvenir.”

  “The colonel,” Louis felt constrained to point out, “was present when King Thebaw was exiled to India in 1885.”

  The lithe brown-skinned servant girl pulled out a matchbox and lit each man’s cigar with an expert hand, then retreated, leaving the bowl on the table.

  Sigerson puffed several times, his face knotted in concentration. He blew a smoke ring, looked up at the elaborately carved teak ceiling, and said, “Thanat leaves, dried, a touch of wood seasoned with tamarind, crushed tobacco leaves, wrapped in a betel nut palm frond. Excellent. Mild enough for a lady—and I am told the ladies of Burma enjoy their cigars as much as any man.”

  “That they do, sir, that they do.” The colonel’s smile was wide; he was a man who loved showing off, and he loved it even more when his gestures were properly appreciated.

  “I have written a monograph,” the explorer continued, “on the 140 varieties of ash I have encountered in my studies. I believe the Indian lunkha was number 135 and the Burmese cheroot was 136. Of course,” he went on, “this is, as you say, the highest form of the art; the peasants smoke a vile green weed.”

  “Why,” the colonel wondered aloud, “would anyone write a monograph on ash?”

  For the life of him, Arne Sigerson had no answer to that question. He had no idea why those words had escaped his lips.

  Louis Leonowens was beginning to believe, not only that his visitor was not the much-anticipated Castor, but also that he was quite mad.

  The evening’s entertainment did not end with the smoking of the cheroots. The colonel had arranged another local treat for his distinguished visitor—an exhibition of Siamese fighting fish.

  “Betta splendens,” he said as he gestured toward the two small bowls on the teak table.

  “Splendid indeed,” the explorer remarked. The fish were gorgeous, one deepest indigo and the other flaming orange. Each boasted long feathery fins and tails, and each swam with a delicate grace.

  The colonel scooped the indigo fish up with his hand and thrust it into the bowl occupied by the orange betta. The two lunged at one another, struggling in the water like wrestlers, colors flashing and water churning.

  Within seconds, it was over. The water ran pink with blood, and the flame-colored fish lay on top, dead, while its victorious blue rival swam in swift, agitated circles around the bowl.

  As he watched the two creatures locked in mortal combat, Sigerson had the strangest sensation. It felt as if he were falling. He heard the sound of rushing water, swift and deadly, and felt himself plunging to his doom, arms clasped around the body of another man. As with the fish, one must die, the other must live.

  But which was he?

  He gripped the side of the table, but it was not enough. He slid to the floor in a dead faint.

  When he awoke, there was one word on his lips. “Watson,” he said weakly. “Fetch Dr. Watson.”

  “There’s no one here by that name,” Louis said uncertainly. The man was either mad or relapsing into his fever. Since he was calling for a doctor, the latter seemed more likely. But when the doctor who had attended Sigerson at McCormick’s Hospital came to see him, he pronounced the explorer fever-free and said he was on the mend.

  Louis was not the only person in the room to doubt the explorer’s sanity. Sigerson himself, sitting quietly in the samlor on the way back to his host’s house, had come to a similar conclusion. The colonel had been most inquisitive about his journey to Lhasa, and these questions he had answered with ease—but when the conversation turned to his life before Tibet, he had turned silent and awkward.

  He remembered Tibet. He remembered nothing before Tibet.

  He might as well have been born in the temple where he sat at the feet of the head lama.

  And why would anyone write a monograph on ash?

  The next day, Louis offered his guest a tour of Chiang Mai, an invitation gratefully accepted. As they strolled past the Foreign Cemetery, dominated by a life-sized statue of Queen Victoria, they noticed that one of the graves was open and two Siamese were lifting a coffin from its burial place.

  “Taking him home for a proper burial, no doubt,” Louis remarked. “Some families dislike the idea of their relatives being buried so far away.

  Just then, one of the workmen’s hands slipped on his rope and the coffin rolled over onto the emerald green lawn. It fell open and out tumbled, not an embalmed body wrapped in a winding sheet, but a pile of brown-stained bones that looked more like dried firewood than the remains of anything human.

  The native screamed and ran away. His fellow stayed only a second longer, but left with even more speed.

  “Bad luck,” Louis explained. “No doubt they think evil spirits are at work. They will make an offering at a spirit house to placate the demons.”

  Sigerson stepped quickly toward the open coffin. He knelt on the smooth lawn and examined the bones, turning them in his hand and peering at them as if trying to read a message in their fissures and cracks. He turned his head and gazed up at Louis with a serious expression on his thin face. “If there is such a thing as a policeman in this city,” he said, “we had better summon him.”

  “Why?” Louis demanded. “I can see that the body did not receive proper preparation for burial, but surely that’s no crime.”

  “This body,” the explorer replied, “is not that of a European. What’s more,” he continued, “it was female. Finally, it was murdered.”

  The police station in Lampang was a long building on stilts with rooms at either end and an open space in the center in the Siamese fashion. It was painted white above and black below, and its garden plot brimmed with brightly colored blooms. Behind his teak desk Sergeant Taed Chutima sighed as he read over the reports from his six officers. Several drunken mahouts had driven their elephants through a farmer’s rice paddies, a Chinese merchant had been robbed of three freshly caught fish, and one sampan had been reported stolen only to turn up in the river outside the house of the owner’s brother-in-law.

  Taed sometimes wondered why he’d become a policeman. He’d learned English and a bit of French from the missionaries and loved reading stories of crime in those languages. He’d admired Vidocq, and he’d considered C. Auguste Dupin the world’s greatest detective—until he’d found an old copy of the Strand Magazine in a bookstall in Bangkok. There he’d read with fascinated interest the story of a detective far more brilliant than all the rest: Sherlock Holmes.

  But the crimes the great Holmes solved in the city of London were real crimes committed by real criminals, not the petty day-today wrangles of country people who’d had too much to drink or who borrowed things without permission. He longed for a murder, a mystery, a case.

  The bones in the Foreign
Cemetery in Chiang Mai held promise, he told himself as he boarded the steam launch that would take him upriver. At least it would be a respite from the ordinary, a chance to go into the field and interrogate witnesses. He smiled contentedly as he savored the familiar sharp taste of betel on his tongue and watched the rice barges making their way downriver toward Bangkok.

  The witnesses who awaited him at the burial grounds were three farangs: one tall and lean with a hawk nose, who introduced himself as Sigerson; one mustached and balding, who said he was Louis Leonowens of the Borneo Teak Company; and the third a white-haired, ramrod-straight man with a red face who demanded to know the meaning of this outrage.

  “Colonel Prothero,” Taed said with a tight smile. “How good of you to come and take charge of this unfortunate situation.” Politeness was integral to the Siamese way of life; it would never have occurred to Taed to tell the old buzzard to go away and let him investigate in peace, even though every fiber of his being longed to do just that. The former Army officer seemed incapable of realizing that Siam was not a British colony.

  “The coffin and the gravestone belong to a British Army veteran. Of course I must take responsibility. It is the least I can do for the poor boy’s family.”

  “Wherever your ‘poor boy’ is,” Sigerson pointed out gently, “he is not in his assigned grave.”

  “How can you be so sure?” the colonel asked. “All we have here are bones. Who’s to say whether they’re male or female, European or Asian?”

  “As to the sex,” the explorer replied calmly, “look at the pelvis. It’s wider than a man’s, for obvious reasons. By measuring the shinbone, we can see that she was only five feet tall. Add to that the fact that her cheekbones are more prominent than a European’s and she has a shovel-shaped indentation behind her upper front teeth, and I say she is of Asian ancestry. And look at her tibia, there.”

  “What about it?” The colonel had never been a patient man, and Taed was interested to see that he treated his fellow Europeans with the same disregard for feelings that he used toward those he referred to as “natives.”

  “See those lumps at the end of the bone nearest the ankle?” Taed followed the explorer’s finger as it pointed toward the long leg bone. In a flash he understood what the farang meant and his eyes lit with recognition and admiration. He ought to have seen it himself.

  “What of it? Are you saying she was deformed?”

  “Look at that man squatting beside the food stall,” Sigerson commanded, pointing a bony finger. A broad-faced beggar hunkered down on his heels, chewing betel and gazing at the passersby with a contented expression. “See how he squats with his knees in the air and his buttocks on his heels? That squatting creates facets of bone on the lower tibia. Have you,” he challenged the colonel, “ever seen a European who could squat like that?”

  Taed suppressed a smile. The vision of the colonel, or any other red-faced farang for that matter, squatting on his heels and rolling betel leaf was too precious not to be savored.

  “All right,” the colonel conceded crossly, “she’s a native. But what is she doing in Robinson’s grave and why do you say she was murdered?”

  Taed could have answered that question himself, but he’d learned to keep himself in the background as much as possible when dealing with the European community. He would take over the case when they’d tired of their game. Once the novelty had worn off, he knew they would have little interest in the murder of a native woman.

  In this he was wrong. Leonowens, the teak wallah, pleaded the press of business and returned to his office, but the tall lean man and the colonel remained at the site. The colonel’s Shan servant, Khun Seng, fetched baskets and sieves, brushes and small metal tools. Taed accepted the role of assistant, helping Sigerson lay the bones in proper order, large ones first, small ones as they were retrieved, using the sieves to sift dirt and collect even the smallest fingers and toes. Sigerson and Taed used the brushes and instruments to clear away the dirt after the bones were removed from the basket. In all his years as a policeman, Taed had never seen a body handled so deftly, and with such scientific precision. He wasn’t sure even the great Holmes would have taken such care.

  At one point, Sigerson plunged his tweezers into the dirt and pulled something out. “Sergeant,” he called, “come look at this if you will be so good. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it may be significant.”

  Taed hurried toward the gravesite. He took the tweezers from the European’s hand and examined its contents.

  “Elephant tail hair,” he said. “Twisted to make a ring. It’s a custom among some of the hill tribes.” With a sudden smile that lit his nut brown face, he called out, “Khun Seng, have you seen a ring like this before?”

  “How dare you address my servant without my permission,” the colonel said. “I won’t have insubordination from a native.”

  But he was too late. Khun Seng stood over the diminutive Taed, his eyes fixed upon the braided ring with a look of horror in their dark depths. His cocoa-colored face had paled, making his blue scar-tattoos stand out like lines on a map.

  “These rings are quite common in the Shan States,” the colonel said, taking it from the tweezers and tossing it onto the ground. “It’s just an amulet for good luck, that’s all.”

  “This poor creature had little of that,” Sigerson remarked. “Look at the scars on these bones. She was beaten to death.”

  Khun Seng gave an animal cry and ran from the graveyard as if all the demons of hell were after him.

  “Superstitious,” the colonel said with a snort, “like all these Orientals.”

  Two days later, Khun Seng appeared at the Leonowens bungalow to announce that the colonel was ill and could not attend that day’s racing at the Turf Club. The Shan had an amiable smile on his tattooed face as he repeated the colonel’s self-diagnosis: “Prothero thakin say it is dengue fever, the curse of the tropics.”

  “He’ll be all right in a day or two, then,” Louis replied. He explained to his guest, “The colonel picked up all sorts of foreign bugs in his Army days; he doses himself and comes out right as rain in a few days.”

  But the next day Colonel Prothero was dead.

  Siam was not England, and Chiang Mai was not Bangkok, let alone London. There was no Inspector Lestrade to stand over the body and proclaim the death a natural one, daring the world’s first consulting detective to pronounce otherwise. The man called Sigerson accompanied his host to the colonel’s house to pay respects to the widow without any thought other than that the military man must have succumbed to his tropical illness.

  The visitors were met at the door, not by Khun Seng, but by Sergeant Chutima. “Please to come in, gentlemen,” the small brown man said with a bow. “I am conducting an investigation into the colonel’s death and would be very glad of your assistance.”

  “Investigation?” Louis was visibly shocked. “What is there to investigate?”

  “As to that, sirs both, I am not yet certain. It is the lady of the house who called me here. She is of the firm belief that her husband did not die a natural death.”

  “What were the colonel’s symptoms?” Sigerson asked with every appearance of keen interest. Taed replied that the colonel had shown all the signs of an acute gastric attack, along with fever and sweats—in short, his symptoms matched those of malaria and dengue fever, as well as those of several poisons. It was no wonder that the household had no suspicion that the death was not natural.

  “What caused the lady of the house to change her mind?” Sigerson inquired. He sat at what appeared to be an excessively languid ease upon the settee, yet his deep-set gray eyes sparkled with interest.

  “A single word, Mr. Sigerson,” the Siamese replied. “A single word in the Burmese language. The word padamya.”

  “What does it mean?” Leonowens cried. “Does it mean revenge or murder?”

  “Ruby,” Taed replied. “It means ruby. The rubies of the Mogok valley in Burma are well-known for their
beauty. I do not know why the colonel should leave such a dying message, or what it means, but I do know that the former king of Burma had a fortune in rubies in his palace in Mandalay.”

  “A palace the colonel admitted he looted during the conquest of the capital,” Sigerson reminded Louis.

  “I say, isn’t ‘looted’ going a bit far? The man admitted to taking a few cheroots from the royal palace, that’s all.”

  “A man in uniform who will steal cheroots might well steal precious stones as well, given the opportunity,” Sigerson replied. “Gems of great value are the devil’s pet baits; they are the nucleus and focus of crime all over the world. I once knew a blue carbuncle to appear in the unlikeliest of places, the crop of a Christmas goose.”

  Louis Leonowens’s face wore an expression of polite disbelief, but his expression paled in comparison to Sigerson’s own. For the hair stood up on the back of his neck as he remembered, as vividly as if it were yesterday, the excited man who had brought that goose, purchased from the Alpha Inn, into his rooms in Baker Street.

  He who had begun to suspect he was not Sigerson at last knew his true identity. He was Sherlock Holmes, he was supposed to be dead, he was halfway around the world from his home, and he was once again staring into the face of a baffled policeman who needed his help.

  “In my experience,” he began, then swiftly corrected himself, “I have heard that some criminal investigators keep records of unusual crimes and refer to those records when something similar takes place. Have you,” he asked Taed, “ever known of a death with symptoms like this that was not caused by illness?”

  Inspired by the great Holmes and his commonplace book, Taed had kept such records, written in his meticulous hand in the beautiful flowing Siamese language. The records were mainly of robberies, seldom of murder, but he had managed to solve a crime in which all the members of the household were drugged by a poison root thrown into the fireplace while their house was looted by bandits thanks to an article clipped from the Irrawaddy Gazette. It was this brilliant solution to a puzzle considered insoluble that had won him his promotion to sergeant.