The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “A somewhat pointless procedure,” I commented. Holmes said nothing. He merely peered at the lowest segment of the nape of the corpse’s neck, frowned, then wiped one hand against the other while rising from a crouch back to his feet. He asked the sweating manager if the act of assassination had by any chance been observed, either by himself or by one of his underlings, or, failing that, if any strange visitant had, to the knowledge of the management, insinuated himself into the rear area of the hall, reserved exclusively for artists and staff and protected from the rear door by a former sergeant of marines, now a member of the corps of commissionaires. A horrid thought struck the manager at once, and followed by Holmes and myself, he rushed down a corridor that led to a door which gave on to a side alley.

  That door was unguarded for a very simple reason. An old man in the uniform trousers of the corps, though not, evidently because of the heat, the jacket, lay dead, the back of his grey head pierced with devilish neatness by a bullet. The assassin had then presumably effected an unimpeded transit to the curtains which separated the platform from the area of offices and dressing rooms.

  “It is very much to be regretted,” said the distraught manager, “that no other of the staff was present at the rear, though if one takes an excusably selfish view of the matter, it is perhaps not to be regretted. Evidently we had here a cold-blooded murderer who would stop at nothing.” Holmes nodded and said:

  “Poor Simpson. I knew him, Watson. He spent a life successfully avoiding death from the guns and spears of Her Imperial Majesty’s enemies, only to meet it in a well-earned retirement while peacefully perusing his copy of Sporting Life. Perhaps,” he now said to the manager, “you would be good enough to explain why the assassin had only poor Simpson to contend with. In a word, where were the other members of the staff?”

  “The whole affair is very curious, Mr. Holmes,” said the manager, wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief. “I received a message just after the start of the recital, indeed shortly after your good self and your friend here had taken your seats. The message informed me that the Prince of Wales and certain friends of his were coming to the concert, though belatedly. It is, of course, well known that His Royal Highness is an admirer of Sarasate. There is a small upper box at the back of the hall normally reserved for distinguished visitors, as I think you know.”

  “Indeed,” said Holmes. “The Maharajah of Johore was once kind enough to honour me as his guest in that exclusive retreat. But do please go on.”

  “Naturally, myself and my staff,” the manager continued, “assembled at the entrance and remained on duty throughout the recital, assuming that the distinguished visitor might arrive only for the final items.” He went on to say that, though considerably puzzled, they had remained in the vestibule until the final applause, hazarding the guess that His Royal Highness might, in the imperious but bonhomous manner that was his wont, command the Spanish fiddler to favour him with an encore in a hall filled only with the anticipatory majesty of our future King Emperor. Thus all was explained save for the essential problem of the crime itself.

  “The message,” Holmes demanded of the manager. “I take it that it was a written message. Might I see it?”

  The manager drew from an inner pocket a sheet of notepaper headed with the princely insignia and signed with a name known to be that of His Royal Highness’s private secretary. The message was clear and courteous. The date was the seventh of July. Holmes nodded indifferently at it and, when the police arrived, tucked the sheet unobtrusively into a side pocket. Inspector Stanley Hopkins had responded promptly to the summons delivered, with admirable efficiency, by one of the manager’s underlings in a fast cab.

  “A deplorable business, inspector,” Holmes said. “Two murders, the motive for the first explained by the second, but the second as yet disclosing no motive at all. I wish you luck with your investigations.”

  “You will not be assisting us with the case, Mr. Holmes?” asked the intelligent young inspector. Holmes shook his head.

  “I am,” he said to me in the cab that took us back to Baker Street, “exhibiting my usual duplicity, Watson. This case interests me a great deal.” Then he said somewhat dreamily: “Stanley Hopkins, Stanley Hopkins. The name recalls that of an old teacher of mine, Watson. It always takes me back to my youthful days at Stoneyhurst College, where I was taught Greek by a young priest of exquisite delicacy of mind. Gerard Manley Hopkins was his name.” He chuckled a moment. “I was given taps from a tolly by him when I was a callow atramontarius. He was the best of the younger crows, however, always ready to pin a shouting cake with us in the haggory. Never creeping up on us in the silent oilers worn by the crabbier jebbies.”

  “Your vocabulary, Holmes,” I said. “It is a foreign language to me.”

  “The happiest days of our lives, Watson,” he then said somewhat gloomily.

  Over an early dinner of cold lobster and a chicken salad, helped down by an admirable white burgundy well chilled, Holmes disclosed himself as vitally concerned with pursuing this matter of the murder of a foreign national on British soil, or at least in a London concert room. He handed me the presumed royal message and asked what was my opinion of it. I examined the note with some care. “It seems perfectly in order to me,” I said. “The protocol is regular, the formula, or so I take it, is the usual one. But, since the manager and his staff were duped, some irregularity in obtaining the royal notepaper must be assumed.”

  “Admirable, Watson. Now kindly examine the date.”

  “It is today’s date.”

  “True, but the formation of the figure seven is not what one might expect.”

  “Ah,” I said, “I see your meaning. We British do not place a bar across the number. This seven is a continental one.”

  “Exactly. The message has been written by a Frenchman or an Italian or, as seems much more probable, a Spaniard with access to the notepaper of His Royal Highness. The English and, as you say, the formula are impeccable. But the signatory is not British. He made a slight slip there. As for the notepaper, it would be available only to a person distinguished enough to possess access to His Royal Highness’s premises and to a person unscrupulous enough to rob him of a sheet of notepaper. Something in the configuration of the letter e in this message persuades me that the signatory was Spanish. I may, naturally, be totally mistaken. But I have very little doubt that the assassin was Spanish.”

  “A Spanish husband, with the impetuousness of his race, exacting a very summary revenge,” I said.

  “I think the motive of the murder was not at all domestic. You observed my loosening the collar of the dead man and you commented with professional brusqueness on the futility of my act. You were unaware of the reason for it.” Holmes, who now had his pipe alight, took a pencil and scrawled a curious symbol on the tablecloth. “Have you ever seen anything like this before, Watson?” he puffed. I frowned at the scrawl. It seemed to be a crude representation of a bird with spread wings seated on a number of upright strokes which could be taken as a nest. I shook my head. “That, Watson, is a phoenix rising from the ashes of the flames that consumed it. It is the symbol of the Catalonian separatists. They are republicans and anarchists and they detest the centralizing control of the Castilian monarchy. This symbol was tattooed on the back of the neck of the murdered man. He must have been an active member of a conspiratorial group.”

  “What made you think of looking for it?” I asked.

  “I met, quite by chance, a Spaniard in Tangiers who inveighed in strong terms against the monarchy which had exiled him and, wiping the upper part of his body for the heat, disclosed quite frankly that he had an identical tattoo on his chest.”

  “You mean,” I said incredulously, “that he was in undress, or, as the French put it, en deshabille!”

  “It was an opium den in the Kasbah, Watson,” Holmes said calmly. “Little attention is paid in such places to the refinements of dress. He mentioned to me that the nape of the neck was the more
usual site of the declaration of faith in the Catalonian republic, but he preferred the chest, where, as he put it, he could keep an eye on the symbol and be reminded of what it signified. I had been wondering ever since the announcement of the visit to London of the young Spanish king whether there might be Catalonian assassins around. It seemed reasonable to me to look on the body of the murdered man for some indication of a political adherence.”

  “So,” said I, “it is conceivable that this young Spaniard, dedicated to art as he seemed to be, proposed killing the harmless and innocent Alfonso the Thirteenth. The intelligence services of the Spanish monarchy have, I take it, acted promptly though illegally. All the forces of European stability should be grateful that the would-be assassin has been himself assassinated.”

  “And the poor old soldier who guarded the door?” Holmes riposted, his sharp eyes peering at me through the fog of his tobacco smoke. “Come, Watson, murder is always a crime.” And then he began to hum, not distractedly, a snatch of tune which seemed vaguely familiar. His endless repetition of it was interrupted by the announcement that Inspector Stanley Hopkins had arrived. “I expected him, Watson,” Holmes said, and when the young police officer had entered the room, he bafflingly recited:

  “And I have asked to be / Where no storms come, / Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, / And out of the swing of the sea.”

  Stanley Hopkins gaped in some astonishment, as I might have myself had I not been long inured to Holmes’s eccentricities of behaviour. Before Hopkins could stutter a word of bewilderment, Holmes said: “Well, inspector, I trust you have come in triumph.” But there was no triumph in Hopkins’s demeanour. He handed over to Holmes a sheet of paper on which there was handwriting in purple ink.

  “This, Mr. Holmes, was found on the dead man’s person. It is in Spanish, I think, a language with which neither I nor my colleagues are at all acquainted. I gather you know it well. I should be glad if you would assist our investigation by translating it.”

  Holmes read both sides of the paper keenly. “Ah, Watson,” he said at length, “this either complicates or simplifies the issue, I am not as yet sure which. This seems to be a letter from the young man’s father, in which he implores the son to cease meddling with republican and anarchistic affairs and concentrate on the practice of his art. He also, in the well-worn phrase, wags a will at him. No son of his disloyal to the concept of a unified Spain with a secure monarchy need expect to inherit a patrimonio. The father appears to be mortally sick and threatens to deliver a dying curse on his intransigent offspring. Very Spanish, I suppose. Highly dramatic. Some passages have the lilt of operatic arias. We need the Frenchman Bizet to set them to music.”

  “So,” I said, “it is possible that the young man had announced his defection from the cause, possessed information which he proposed to make public or at least refer to a quarter which had a special interest in it, and then was brutally murdered before he could make the divulgation.”

  “Quite brilliant, Watson,” said Holmes, and I flushed discreetly with pleasure. It was rarely that he gave voice to praise untempered by sarcasm. “And a man who has killed so remorselessly twice is all too likely to do so again. What arrangements, inspector,” he asked young Hopkins, “have the authorities made for the security of our royal Spanish visitors?”

  “They arrive this evening, as you doubtless know, on the last of the packets from Boulogne. At Folkestone they will be transferred immediately to a special train. They will be accommodated at the Spanish embassy. Tomorrow they travel to Windsor. The following day there will be luncheon with the prime minister. There will be a special performance of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Gondoliers—”

  “In which the Spanish nobility is mocked,” said Holmes, “but no matter. You have given me the itinerary and the programme. You have not yet told me of the security arrangements.”

  “I was coming to that. The entire Metropolitan force will be in evidence on all occasions, and armed men out of uniform will be distributed at all points of vantage. I do not think there is anything to fear.”

  “I hope you are right, inspector.”

  “The royal party will leave the country on the fourth day by the Dover-Calais packet at one twenty-five. Again, there will be ample forces of security both on the dockside and on the boat itself. The home secretary realizes the extreme importance of the protection of a visiting monarch—especially since that regrettable incident when the Czar was viciously tripped over in the Crystal Palace.”

  “My own belief,” Holmes said, relighting his pipe, “is that the Czar of all the Russias was intoxicated. But again, no matter.” A policeman in uniform was admitted. He saluted Holmes first and then his superior. “This is open house for the Metropolitan force,” Holmes remarked with good-humoured sarcasm. “Come one, come all. You are heartily welcome, sergeant. I take it you have news.”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” the sergeant said, and to Hopkins, “We got the blighter, sir, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Explain yourself, sergeant. Come on, man,” snapped Hopkins.

  “Well, sir, there’s this kind of Spanish hotel, meaning a hotel where Spaniards go when they want to be with their own sort, in the Elephant and Castle it is.”

  “Appropriate,” Holmes interjected rapidly. “It used to be the Infanta of Castile. Goat and Compasses. God encompasses us. I apologize. Pray continue, sergeant.”

  “We got there and he must have known what was coming, for he got on the roof by way of the skylight, three storeys up it is, and whether he slipped or hurled himself off, his—neck was broke, sir.” The printing conventions of our realm impose the employment of a dash to indicate the demotic epithet the sergeant employed. “Begging your pardon, sir.”

  “You’re sure it’s the assassin, sergeant?” asked Holmes.

  “Well, sir, there was Spanish money on him and there was a knife, what they call a stiletto, and there was a revolver with two chambers let off, sir.”

  “A matter, inspector, of checking the bullets extracted from the two bodies with those still in the gun. I think that was your man, sergeant. My congratulations. It seems that the state visit of his infant majesty can proceed without too much foreboding on the part of the Metropolitan force. And now, inspector, I expect you have some writing to do.” This was a courteous way of dismissing his two visitors. “You must be tired, Watson,” he then said. “Perhaps the sergeant would be good enough to whistle a cab for you. In the street, that is. We shall meet, I trust, at the Savoy Theatre on the tenth. Immediately before curtain time. Mr. D’Oyly Carte always has two complimentary tickets waiting for me in the box office. It will be interesting to see how our Iberian visitors react to a British musical farce.” He said this without levity, with a certain gloom rather. So I too was dismissed.

  Holmes and I, in our evening clothes with medals on display, assisted as planned at the performance of The Gondoliers. My medals were orthodox enough, those of an old campaigner, but Holmes had some very strange decorations, among the least recondite of which I recognized the triple star of Siam and the crooked cross of Bolivia. We had been given excellent seats in the orchestral stalls. Sir Arthur Sullivan conducted his own work. The infant king appeared to be more interested in the electric light installations than in the action or song proceeding on stage, but his mother responded with suitable appreciation to the jokes when they had been explained to her by the Spanish ambassador. This was a musical experience more after my heart than a recital by Sarasate. I laughed heartily, nudged Holmes in the ribs at the saltier sallies and hummed the airs and choruses perhaps too boisterously, since Lady Esther Roscommon, one of my patients, as it happened, poked me from the row behind and courteously complained that I was not only loud but also out of tune. But, as I told her in the intermission, I had never laid claim to any particular musical skill. As for Holmes, his eyes were on the audience, and with opera glasses too, more than on the stage proceedings.

  During the intermission, the royal pa
rty very democratically showed itself in the general bar, the young king graciously accepting a glass of British lemonade, over which, in the manner of a child unblessed by the blood, he smacked his lips. I was surprised to see that the great Sarasate, in immaculate evening garb with the orders of various foreign states, was taking a glass of champagne with none other than Sir Arthur Sullivan. I commented on the fact to Holmes, who bowed rather distantly to both, and expressed wonder that a man so eminent in the sphere of the more rarefied music should be hobnobbing with a mere entertainer, albeit one honoured by the Queen. “Music is music,” Holmes explained, lighting what I took to be a Tangerine panatella. “It has many mansions. Sir Arthur has sunk, Watson, to the level he finds most profitable, and not only in terms of monetary reward, but he is known also for works of dreary piety. They are speaking Italian together.” Holmes’s ears were sharper than mine. “How much more impressive their reminiscences of aristocratic favour sound than in our own blunt tongue. But the second bell has sounded. What a waste of an exceptionally fine leaf.” He referred to his panatella, which he doused with regret in one of the brass receptacles in the lobby. In the second half of the entertainment Holmes slept soundly. I felt I needed no more to experience the shame of an uncultivated boor when I succumbed to slumber at a more elevated musical event. As Holmes had said, somewhat blasphemously, music has many mansions.

  The following morning, a hasty message from Sir Edwin Etheridge, delivered while I was at breakfast, summoned me to another consultation in the bedroom of his patient on St. John’s Wood Road. The young man was no longer exhibiting the symptoms of latah; he seemed now to be suffering from the rare Chinese disease, which I had encountered in Singapore and Hong Kong, known as shook jong. This is a distressing ailment, and embarrassing to describe outside of a medical journal, since its cardinal feature is the patient’s fear that the capacity of generation is being removed from him by malevolent forces conjured by an overheated imagination. To combat these forces, which he believes responsible for a progressive diminution of his tangible generative asset, he attempts to obviate its shrinkage by transfixation, usually with the sharpest knife he can find. The only possible treatment was profound sedation and, in the intervals of consciousness, a light diet.