The Empty Birdcage

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  C O N T E N T S

  Cover

  Also by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, and available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

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  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Anna Waterhouse

  Also by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse,

  and available from Titan Books

  Mycroft Holmes

  Mycroft and Sherlock

  TITAN BOOKS

  Mycroft and Sherlock: The Empty Birdcage

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785659300

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659317

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: September 2019

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any

  responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse assert the moral

  right to be identified as the authors of this work.

  Copyright © 2019 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  It has been both an honor and a privilege to have the opportunity to create an addition to the canon of an author like Arthur Conan Doyle. The positive response to my efforts has been a highlight in my life. I would like to thank my friends at Titan Books and my manager Deborah Morales for their constant assistance and encouragement. Most of all my co-author Anna Waterhouse has been superb. Thank you, one and all!

  KAJ

  For my mother Carmen who nurtured me.

  For Nadine and Isabel, who mentored me.

  For Donna, Sestina and Luisa, who walked the ancient paths with me.

  AW

  P R O L O G U E

  Three Crosses in Gower, Swansea, Wales

  Tuesday, 1 April 1873, 9 a.m.

  HE COULD FEEL HIS HEART BEAT HARD AND STRONG against his chest. In terms of its physiological functioning, it was alive and well. But when it came to human emotions, that font of endless sonnets to love was irreparably damaged, he was sure of it. How else could he have so little regard for such an exquisite day? Or snuff out a life with nary a qualm?

  He had pursued her for several days running, keeping well back so she would not notice him, observing until he was assured of her patterns: where she walked and, more importantly, where she lingered. He had plotted her death for so long, down to the smallest particular, that it felt as if he were merely following a well-trod path.

  At long last, this was his moment. If anything went awry, he would be forced to end it, and it would be his corpse, not hers, that some passerby stumbled upon. But if he succeeded, there would be more. Many more.

  She lived alone in a rundown shack in Three Crosses, an inland village that housed the workers of the local collieries. At eight each morning, when the fog was still wrapping itself about the limestone ridges and hillocks like ghostly ribbons, and other women of her age and station were cobbling together breakfast for their families, she would latch her front door behind her and leave, without looking back.

  And why not? She was still early in her years: twenty-four or -five, he assumed. She no longer had a husband or a child to tend, having buried her only son a scant eleven months before she had buried her man. Just another miner delivered to his doorstep in a coarse brown sack that bore a perfunctory stamp: REMAINS, PROPERTY OF SOUTH WALES COAL.

  Passing the cemetery where man and boy lay side by side, she would mouth a little prayer and remain a moment with head bowed and hands folded. Then she would all but fly to Three Crosses Bay, arriving in time to see the fog lift off the water like the twirling of petticoats.

  He had heard the townspeople say of her: “Mae hi’n wallgof!”

  “She is daft!”

  Sick with grief, more like, he thought.

  Regardless, her problems and sorrows were none of his affair. If anything, her agony encouraged him. A quick, all but painless death was the gift he could bestow upon her.

  Though tall and slender like her father, she walked with the heavy gait of her mother’s peasant forebears. Still, it was gratifying to observe her from above, to watch as she removed her shoes, kneading her square naked feet in the moist seagrass like a cat. From there, she would amble closer to the rocky shoreline, always on the hunt for her precious objects, as he—her unseen, unknown nemesis—hunted her.

  After loading up her treasures in the pockets of her sooty black skirt, she would drop to her knees upon the soft wet beach, her back to the cliff, her face towards the water. She would remove her black mourning bonnet, lay it beside her, and place a rock upon one of the ribbons, so that it would not fly away. That done, she would pull out her treasures one by one, blowing off the silt and dirt.

  He was always careful not to make any noise as he watched, careful to shift slightly so that the light would not cast his shadow beside her but would remain behind her, where it belonged. The sun’s rays bent and warped his image until his elongated head appeared to be nestling against the nape of her neck.

  It was lovely, that neck: not coarse and reddish like the rest of her skin but soft, and white as alabaster against her dark blouse. Her thick hair, twisted into a knot at the top of her head, was the color of burnt umber. As she studied one of her finds, a tendril worked itself loose, swinging to and fro, to and fro…

  He glanced to the sky. The sun was already high upon the horizon. Soon, even this desolate spit of sand and rock would draw a sojourner or two. He dared not tarry.

  He looked down at her again. She had pulled the rocks and sticks from her pocket. Soon she would begin to construct the most peculiar little bridges: arched pathways that commenced in one spot and ended in another, all of them leading nowhere, and close enough to the water that at night the creeping waves would wash them away, as if they had never been.

  He had nothing against the girl. She would die, of course. As would others. In that, he fancied that he mimicked death itself: it was not personal. Sooner or later, it was
everybody’s turn.

  1

  London, England

  Tuesday, 1 April 1873, 9 a.m.

  MYCROFT HOLMES WAS WAGING A VALIANT BATTLE against the narcotic that was coursing through his veins. Though it came as friend, not foe, he despised it. It made his keen mental faculties seem suddenly unreliable; placing him if not at the mercy of his emotions, then at least in thrall to them.

  In truth, he was also hallucinating, another hideous corollary to the drug. Though thankfully spared winged horses and the like, he seemed to be staring through a tunnel at a small puddle of water. Floating therein was a medical journal yellowed by a hundred years of time. He recognized it straight away; he saw himself reach for it, clutching it in his hand. He could see his fingers carefully separating one sopping page from the other, then pausing at an article he well recalled, about the physician William Hunter.

  In 1775, Hunter had declared that ‘Anatomy is the basis of Surgery. It informs the head, guides the hand, and familiarizes the heart to a kind of Necessary Inhumanity.’

  For years, that phrase—‘Necessary Inhumanity’—had clung to him as a useful concept, for it shut off the spigot of emotion so as to accomplish the greater good. He and his dear friend Cyrus Douglas had once debated it at length, in the back room of Regent Tobaccos, the two of them sunk into those padded red leather chairs by the fire, Armagnac at their elbows, while a winter storm moaned outside.

  Douglas—who had never been fond of ends justifying means—had made clear his disapproval.

  “There is no such thing,” he had declared. “Either a thing is humane, or it is not.”

  “It all depends,” Mycroft had posited—rather cavalierly, it seemed to him now.

  “Upon what?”

  “Upon the mindset of the one who makes the rules. For example, I aspire to live by Mozi’s dictum: ‘It is the business of the benevolent man to seek to promote what is beneficial to the world and eliminate what is harmful. That which benefits, he will carry out; that which does not benefit, he will leave alone.’ Surely even you can find no fault with that!”

  “It all depends,” Douglas had parried. “Will this ‘benevolent man’ be benevolent to me in particular? Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that he is as well intentioned as he believes himself to be: he could nevertheless think me less capable than he of forging my own path. What if to him I am a brute and a savage who needs his tutelage and protection? And even if I were precisely as he supposes, both brute and savage, does that give him the moral imperative to decide my fate?”

  Mycroft could still taste the smoky flavor of the Armagnac as it warmed his mouth, could see Douglas smile and lean forward in his chair as he spoke, his umber skin glowing in the firelight, his expression open but challenging.

  At the time, Mycroft had had no reply at the ready. He had even less at the moment, lying as he was on an unyielding marble slab.

  He began to shiver. And, just as quickly as they came, the images of Douglas, the fireplace, and Regent Tobaccos crumbled into dust, and he was left with nothing but the cold.

  Barely twenty-seven years of age, Mycroft had felt for a while as ancient as Methuselah. And though the procedure he was to undergo was so rare that he could not even glean its odds of success, his rapid deterioration had made it worth the risk. He would proceed on the shred of hope that his life would continue better, once and if he opened his eyes again.

  Buck up, old man! he adjured himself. Count the blessings of the present circumstance!—for in fact, there were several.

  Given the agony that physicians were forced to inflict upon patients in Hunter’s time, ‘Necessary Inhumanity’ had been an essential component to surgery. Whereas he himself would undergo little physical torment, for modern physicians used chloroform. Even the Queen had made use of it for two of her confinements. Besides, much progress had been made in the understanding of the heart’s functions and therefore humankind’s ability to repair it. And although his heart per se could not be operated upon, the goal was to aid the pericardium: the sac that lubricated it, that limited its erratic motion, that prevented excessive dilation, and insulated it from infection. Patching it up could restore his stamina and breath.

  To say nothing of his reputation. His long attempt to mask his failing health had turned him into a curmudgeonly recluse, a final indignity: for ‘curmudgeonly recluse’ was surely a more fitting description of his younger brother, Sherlock, than he!

  High time to reacquaint his small portion of the world with his more gregarious, good-natured self.

  “Hands clean…?” he muttered aloud.

  He heard Dr. Joseph Bell’s soft Scottish brogue as if from an adjoining room: “Aye, Mr. Holmes. We have scrubbed hands and arms to the elbow, as you requested.”

  “With soap?”

  “Aye,” Bell replied in a stentorian tone that Mycroft did not care for. “And done you one better: added five percent carbolic to the mix and so now are as clean as a clergyman’s knickers.”

  He felt a needle pierce his skin. More morphine, he ventured; for, like a feral cat in a sack, he had been refusing to capitulate.

  Why spar with the very operators who are attempting to better your life, he asked himself, however lengthy or brief it turns out to be…?

  A damp kerchief was pressed down upon his nose and mouth. Chloroform, a tricky proposition. Too little, and one awakened screaming in the midst of the cut; too much, and the lungs collapsed, causing the patient to sleep forever in the arms of Morpheus. He fought a fleeting sense of panic before sinking deeper and deeper until the rational part of himself seemed to him a shadowy figure standing upon the platform of a train station, waving goodbye.

  “I mention hands solely because Pasteur,” Mycroft mumbled, “is of the mind that washing eliminates s…”

  The word he sought was ‘sepsis.’ But all he could manage was the longest ‘s’ sound in the world, like a tire going flat, before darkness overcame him.

  2

  Cambridge, England

  Thursday, 8 May 1873, 10 a.m.

  MOST OF DOWNING COLLEGE, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF the East Lodge, was built of an oolitic limestone known as Ketton stone. On bright days it would glimmer in shades of yellow, from pale daffodil to butterscotch. Students and faculty alike would remark upon its beauty, taking especial pride in its sparkle, as if it were an earthly corner of the New Jerusalem.

  Sherlock Holmes assumed that he was alone in finding it insufferable.

  A cigarette dangled from his lips, its smoke forcing his eyes into a squint as he walked. His long fingers grazed the newspaper columns that he had carefully cut out, rolled into a bundle, bound with twine, and stuck into his jacket pocket. He’d reached for that little bundle a half-dozen times since leaving his rooms, for lately he had been feeling all nerves, and knowing it was there, close at hand, helped him to concentrate upon his case.

  And what a case it was. Eight murders across Great Britain. Though geographically disparate, and though none of the victims had anything in common, they had surely been felled by the same killer, who had commenced his killing the first day of April and had continued with macabre but admirable regularity since then, at the rate of approximately one every four to six days, with one notable week’s hiatus.

  The victims thus far included, in order of demise: a young widow; a small-town banker; two boys, aged seven and fourteen, killed separately; a chaplain of middle years; a retired barrister of eighty-four; the proprietor of a horse stable; and a ten-year-old girl. None had enemies to speak of. None had died with any mark of violence upon them. All, in fact, would have been decreed to have succumbed to ‘natural causes’—a catch-all phrase used by law and medicine when no clear reason made itself apparent—were it not for one thing.

  The note.

  At each murder site, a note had been left in the proximity of the body, almost always at the moment of death, though twice it had appeared upon the spot several days after the fact, as if to ensure that credit would
be given where credit was due.

  The message was always the same, four little words:

  The Fire Four Eleven!

  In terms of clues, those four little words were all but useless, in that they contained too many possibilities, which was to say none at all. Not to mention that newspapers carried a mere illustration of the note in question, so that one could discern neither paper stock, nor the finer details of the original handwriting. Nevertheless, Sherlock had gleaned a few facts, ones that he now mulled over as he walked along.

  The artist’s rendering revealed that the killer’s handwriting had a looped ligature. Clearly, he had been steeped in classic copperplate, the proper penmanship of the proper English schoolboy, each letter meticulously formed, tops and bottoms obsessively uniform. But he had taken it one step further: even the spacing between the words was uniform, none exceeding the width of the letter ‘m.’

  It was a ‘right fair hand,’ composed by a person who was proud of his skill. Sherlock further posited that the man had had no academic training to speak of, beyond the first few years of school. Someone so punctilious would never have abandoned his penmanship altogether. But, had he been allowed to continue his studies, neither would he have held onto it as a capstone of scholastic achievement.

  If Sherlock could but have a look at the originals, if he could calibrate fluidity, combined with pressure exerted upon each letter, he could begin to gauge the author’s level of anxiety, his sense of righteous judgment, perhaps a specific reading of his age and nationality. But even without the originals, it was absurd to assume that a man so punctilious would choose his victims at random, as the newspaper accounts were conjecturing.

  That the author was male was indisputable, for there were absolutely no deviations: the copperplate was roundhand from start to finish. Women by and large had a finer touch; their handwriting tended to be more individualistic and less static than a man’s, either due to a lack of proper schooling, or as a nod to socially approved ‘rebellion’; or simply the feminine inclination to be more choleric and melancholic than a man.