Sherlock Holmes and the Alice in Wonderland Murders

by Barry Day

  “That is because you were looking for obvious clues, old fellow, when the little things are infinitely the most important. Let me explain. The room is not particularly large, yet six small metal beds were crammed into it. That suggests the men in them were intended to be kept together as some sort of group. Since there was ample accommodation for them to have had a room each, they must be servants of some kind, and since Moriarty could have afforded to provide them with a degree of comfort, the deliberately spartan conditions suggest men trained to subsist—possibly in a military environment. The fact that the beds were iron cots arranged with symmetrical precision tends only to confirm that hypothesis, as do the distinctive scratch marks on the parquet floor boards.”

  “The Frenchmen?” By the side of two of the beds were traces of ash from two different brands of peculiarly revolting French cigarettes and I find it unlikely that one man cooped up in this situation would have two different brands available to him—ergo two Frenchmen. The Spanish peasant was in the habit of sitting on the bed with his head against the wall. The type of macassar oil with which his hair was liberally doused is common in the south-west of Spain, an area which is also known for a particularly vicious type of assassin.

  “The Germans, I confess, are something of a guess. Their beds were set square to the wall and showed no trace of movement. Their boots had been placed neatly at the end of the bed and the adjacent area scrupulously swept. No other race in Europe would be capable of such behaviour. I rest my case.”

  “And Krober?”

  “Oh, the boots again. Our friend affects a boot with a curiously patterned rubber sole, designed for gripping in the wet. The marks were everywhere. Krober was clearly the leader of the group and most probably supervised the evacuation.”

  “Yes, of course,” I muttered. “Perfectly obvious, now I come to look at it.”

  “All of which tells us who was here but not where they’ve gone.”

  Holmes was once again talking to himself, as he paced up and down in his impersonation of a caged tiger. “And what would they do with Miss Creighton?” The same thought had been preoccupying my thoughts since we entered the house.

  “Come, Watson, let us take another look at her room.”

  Alicia’s room was that rare combination—feminine without being fussy. I tried to look at it with Holmes’s eyes. What did it tell me about its occupant?

  Wherever he had taken her, Moriarty had not given her time to pack properly. In fact, my heart sank at the thought that he may not have given her time to pack at all. There were remarkably few personal possessions in the room and I felt sure that this was not because she had recently removed them. Alicia Creighton simply did not wish to leave her mark on a room that she regarded as little more than a glorified prison.

  Holmes confirmed my thought process. He was standing by her open wardrobe and rifling through the clothes that were hanging there—an activity that made me feel slightly embarrassed.

  “Look here, Watson, this is interesting.”

  At one end of the cupboard, carefully separated from the rest were a few simple working dresses, neatly hung and pressed. “These are clearly the clothes she brought with her from her old life, while these …” and he indicated a number of much more expensive garments shoved higgledy-piggledy in one corner: “… these tell us what she felt about the finery her ‘guardian’ provided.”

  “But even more interesting is this …” He had closed the wardrobe and moved over to the window where a dressmaker’s dummy stood dressed in the Alice costume Alicia had worn to the party. “Why did she not consign this to her pile of rejects, I wonder? Could it be because she has now begun to identify with the heroine of Moriarty’s fantasy and is determined to emulate the Alice who found her way successfully through the strange imaginary universe by refusing to believe in it?”

  As he spoke I found myself scanning the room. There was the dressing table with the two ebony hair brushes. I could imagine her sitting there using them on that mane of dark hair. By the mirror was a single framed photograph of a beautiful dark haired woman, obviously Alicia’s mother. The face was a little drawn but the resemblance was uncanny. And then it struck me. What woman would willingly leave, even overnight, without her hair brushes and such an important personal memento?

  The urgency in Holmes’s voice underlined my own concern.

  “Think, Watson, think! The lady knew she was in danger and she also knew that we would surely come looking for her. However suddenly Moriarty decided to decamp, she must have had time to leave some sort of clue …”

  And then I noticed the book.

  It was a battered old copy of Alice In Wonderland which Alicia had probably picked up at some secondhand bookstall when this Alice business had begun and she knew she had to contrive her costume. It had every reason to belong there, yet there was something about it that puzzled me. Then I realised it was the way it was placed on the dressing table. The handles of Alicia’s hair brushes seemed to be angled so that they pointed to the book.

  “I’ve got it, Holmes,” I cried triumphantly, “she’s left us a message in the book.” It was the work of a moment to snatch it up and shake it. I fully expected to see a slip of white paper flutter to the surface of the table. Instead—nothing!

  Holmes, I noticed, was running his fingers over the surface of the dressing table and now he appeared to find something. As he held it up, I saw that it was a bent hairpin that caught the light.

  “Allow me,” he said taking the book gently from my hand. Then, as an afterthought—“Remind me, Watson, never to take you for granted. On occasions you see straight to the heart of a problem while I am still busy defining its boundaries. Ah yes, here we have it, I believe …”

  Now he was holding it up to the light and riffling through the pages.

  “Most ingenious. Miss Creighton was too clever to commit her message to paper. Even slipped between the pages of a book, it might well be discovered. Instead she hit upon the idea of pricking out a tiny pin hole under certain words. I seem to remember seeing a pad and pencil on Moriarty’s desk. Watson, if you would be so good …?”

  By the time I returned with the writing implements, I could tell from his expression that his intuition had proved correct.

  “Take this down, Watson, if you please …” And he slowly began to dictate as he turned the pages. When he had finished, what I had written down was this …

  THE KNAVE WAS STANDING … WITH A SOLDIER ON EACH SIDE TO GUARD HIM … THE JUDGE … WAS THE KING … THE KNAVE … TOOK QUITE AWAY!… INTO THE COURT … “YOU CAN’T SWIM, CAN YOU?” HE ADDED, TURNING TO THE KNAVE.

  “What do you make of it?” I asked when I had read it back.

  “Some of it is obvious enough, I think,” Holmes replied. “The King’ is clearly Moriarty who will ‘judge’ the prisoner who is being guarded. The ‘soldiers’ would seem to be the men we were discussing earlier …”

  “And the ‘Knave’ …” I interrupted, “the Knave must be Steel. Don’t you remember—at the party Steel was dressed as the Knave of hearts?”

  “Quite right, Watson, so he was. And in Lewis Carroll’s story the Knave was put on trial for supposedly stealing the jam tarts. In Moriarty’s book I fear Steel’s crime will take on rather more significance.”

  “But what does the rest of it mean, in Heaven’s name? The court and the swimming?”

  “That is for Moriarty to know and for us to find out, I’m afraid. Miss Creighton has done wonders to leave us this much information and it is for us to fill in the blanks—and quickly, too. Certain things seem clear. Even before Tweedledum went to battle with Tweedledee, Moriarty was planning a new phase in his operation. The presence of his ‘soldiers’—mercenaries would, I feel, be a better word—suggests some form of urban terrorism. A few determined and unscrupulous men, acting apparently at random, can paralyse a densely populated city at will. There have already been several such examples on the Continent in recent months. Naturally, they made li
ttle impact on the xenophobic British press—simply those foreigners being foreign. But if they were not somehow connected, I should be very much surprised.”

  “Then there is the vanity factor. We have disrupted Moriarty’s meticulous timetable. If I know my man, he will need to wrest back the advantage to prove that he is still in control. He will feel the need to do something highly visible and extremely destructive. It is up to us to determine precisely what in time to forestall it. And now I think we can leave any further tidying up to Lestrade and his men.” He patted his pocket. “There are one or two samples here I wish to analyse … Explosive in nature without a doubt. If I can identify their type, dozens of our countrymen may continue to sleep soundly in their beds.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The next two days passed more slowly than any I can ever remember. Moriarty and his men seemed to vanish from the face of the earth. Lestrade and his men—even Holmes had to admit—did a remarkable job of quartering the city and following every lead and whiff of rumour. Lestrade himself would arrive at Baker Street with monotonous regularity, his ferret face looking increasingly drawn, to report on progress—or, rather, the lack of it. Even Wiggins and his Baker Street Irregulars had nothing to report—a situation which irked those young men particularly, since they saw themselves as amateur competitors to Scotland Yard and were never so happy as when they were able to find a lead the police had missed.

  The employees at The Clarion seemed equally and genuinely mystified. The official story was that Moxton and his entourage had taken off for an unknown European destination for an undisclosed period of time. Meanwhile, the paper was to pursue its set policies. It was a well-oiled machine that could function perfectly well without its proprietor for a few days. What appears to be the problem, gentlemen?

  Amidst the frenzy of activity Holmes was, as usual, the still centre. Shrouded in his old dressing gown he padded about the sitting room in the pursuit of various mysterious activities. Meanwhile, a stream of telegrams came and went. The information they contained appeared to confirm whatever he was thinking but I knew my friend well enough to know that none of them contained the answer to the problem that was occupying us both. In moments when he did not think himself observed I could see his brow furrowed in a frown and the lines around his nose and mouth deepen. He was too sensitive not to realise that this was one case where my professional involvement touched upon the personal.

  As for myself, I was constantly reproaching myself for letting that brave young woman return to a situation all of us knew to be fraught with risk. I should have insisted, I told myself more times than I care to recall. But then I had to remind myself that this was a modern young woman—no Mrs. Pankhurst, perhaps—one who made her own decisions and lived by them.

  It was late afternoon on the second day after our search of the Chester Square house and Holmes and I were sitting by the fire.

  Mrs. Hudson had served us a light lunch of some cold collations, as I recall, but neither Holmes nor I had any appetite and for once Mrs. Hudson decided not to reproach us for it. His long thin fingers steepled in front of his face, Holmes stared into the fire, as though the answer was hidden somewhere in its dancing flames. When he spoke he did not look in my direction.

  “Except for the one vital piece, the puzzle is almost complete but that piece is the key to it all, Watson.”

  As I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, he continued: “I know how this apparent inactivity weighs upon you but we cannot afford to make a mistake now. The net is tightening around Moriarty and his accomplices and you may be sure he is well aware of the fact. The last two days have not been without some small success, old fellow. My little experiments …” and with a wave of his hand he indicated the array of chemical apparatus on its zinc-topped table—“even though they may offend your olfactory sensibilities, have clearly identified the substances from Moriarty’s war room which, indeed, is what it was. As a result I have been able to provide Lestrade and his colleagues with enough ‘ammunition’—if you will permit the pun—to apprehend certain undesirable characters in six of our larger cities.”

  He reached for a bundle of telegrams on the table next to him. “Let me see … two Frenchmen in Cardiff and Glasgow, two Prussians in Birmingham and Leeds and a particularly unsavoury Spaniard in Manchester. All of them were carrying identical explosive devices, clearly designed to create the impression of a Nihilist network at work within our midst. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole business was the little experiment I urged Lestrade to try, which was to have a series of bloodhounds sniff out the presence of the explosives. When exposed to the ingredients I had in my possession, their sense of smell was unerring. Do you know, Watson, I believe I may have hit upon something here of considerable significance.”

  “But surely the risk of detonation … I mean, those poor dogs must have been in danger—and the police, too, of course.” I finished lamely. But Holmes was in no mood to be bothered with trifles. “All of which makes it even more imperative for Moriarty to pull off the one big coup with which he was hoping to crown a series of smaller incidents. And it is that which we have to anticipate. Somehow I cannot bring myself to believe he will find himself able to act without using it to goad me first.”

  “You mean Moriarty will have to show himself again?”

  “I think not, Watson. I very much believe we have seen the last of John Moxton, though certainly not the last of Moriarty. Though wearing what face?”

  At that moment the telephone rang.

  It was rare to see Holmes startled. It was some months since he had bowed to the march of progress and had the instrument installed but he continued to view it with a certain suspicion and rarely used it to place a call. I think he had a superstitious feeling that it might undermine the world of commonplace books, cables and the face to face consultations in which he felt at home. He glanced instinctively in my direction, as if for help, before gingerly picking up the receiver.

  When he heard the voice on the other end of the wire, however, his nervousness fell away immediately. He beckoned me over and held it far enough away from his ear so that I could hear too.

  There was no doubt about the identity of the speaker. It was Alicia Creighton and she was a frightened woman. She spoke hurriedly and it was obvious that she was keeping her voice low, so as not to be overheard. It gave what she said a sinister intensity.

  “Mr. Holmes, thank God you’re there! Did you find the book?”

  Holmes spoke soothingly in an effort to calm her.

  “We did, Alicia. May I compliment you on an ingenious solution. Dr. Watson is here with me. Where are you? Alicia? …”

  There was a silence and I could imagine her perhaps going to a door to make sure that she was not being overheard. Then she continued. “We’re in some place where all the windows are barred, so that I can’t see out. I was brought here blindfold. There’s hardly any furniture, so I’m sure he doesn’t intend to stay here long. The man hates you, Mr. Holmes. He can talk about nothing else except you and whatever it is he’s planning. It’s soon, that’s all I know, and it’s big. He keeps saying the world will hear from him.”

  “What about Steel?” I said into the mouthpiece.

  “I haven’t seen him since those men took him away. I didn’t like the man but he was so frightened … Mr. Holmes, I …” Her voice broke off, there was a crackle on the line, then a different voice. Moriarty’s voice …

  “Good evening, Holmes … Dr. Watson … I can almost see you sitting in front of one of Mrs. Hudson’s good coal fires. You, Holmes, are wearing a dressing gown—the blue or the mouse, I wonder? I’m inclined to think the mouse, for this is certainly a two pipe problem, is it not? With any luck, three. The faithful Doctor is well into his Arcadia mixture …”

  I put the pipe down immediately. The man had second sight.

  “I wish I could describe the setting in which Miss Creighton and I are sharing this convivial conversation with you but I’m afrai
d that is not possible at the moment. In any case—what is Shakespeare’s phrase about ‘summer’s lease’ having all too short a time to run? We must shortly be on our way to pastures new—or at least, one of us must …”

  “If you harm one hair of that woman’s head, you devil …” I found myself shouting. Why is it that at times of stress the cliches of melodrama come first to mind? Holmes’s expression helped me to control myself. He was quite right, of course. We had to keep our heads in the hope that Moriarty would let slip some clue as to his whereabouts. My outburst seemed to have amused him.

  “Precisely the reaction I would expect from an officer and a gentleman, Doctor! I think I can assure you that your sentiments are greatly appreciated. Unfortunately, the lady in question is unable to come to the phone at the moment to thank you in person. But we are all busy men, gentlemen, and I’m afraid the social niceties will have to wait for another occasion—should there be one …”

  “I must congratulate you, Holmes. The passing years do not seem to have impaired your ability to be disruptive. I must admit you have caused me to, shall we say, ‘adapt’ my plans a little and I shall now play a slightly longer game than I had first intended. Nonetheless, our little cut and thrust once again more than compensates for a little delay.

  “I had hoped to be present to both take part in and report on my own ‘coronation’ when the time was ripe. Now, I shall have to devise a new persona to receive that honour but receive it I shall, make no mistake about it. I hear that you have taken a few of my pawns but they are expendable. Next time I must remember to use knights or even bishops. It never does to deal at too low a level, don’t you feel?”

  “I must say, my dear chap, I am a little disappointed in your sense of historical inevitability. I would have thought it obvious to the merest tyro that the country had reached a crisis of identity. Something is rotten not in the state of Denmark—ah, the Bard again!—but right under your noses. Change can be encouraged or—as I prefer to think—it can be forced. The country is—how can I put it?—a powder keg. All it needs is a match. But I digress …”