by Otto Penzler
“I had this in my pocket tonight,” he said, taking out a letter. “I would have loved to mention it when one of your members was talking about cryptography, codes, ciphers, and so on. The best codes are the simplest, not methodical at all but based on some completely personal association. She’s safe at home now, so I can show you how Violet used to get her stuff out of Berlin when it wasn’t easy. Sometimes it was only a few words on a picture postcard; the Nazis never seemed to suspect anything so naïve as that. When she had more to say she used some stationery she swiped from the Museum of Natural History, to look professional, and then overprinted a new letterhead.”
I examined the paper. At the top of the sheet was the legend AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, and under it:
Professor Challenger’s Expedition
Oceanic Ornithology
c/o S.Y. Matilda Briggs
“She couldn’t get much on a postcard, not with a handwriting like that,” I said, glancing at the lines of large heavily-inked script. “Very different from the small neat hand of her uncle.”
“She has several handwritings, as occasion requires. Go ahead and read the letter.”
It went thus:
Dear Friend:
Everything very interesting, and German scientists most helpful. Hope to come back by way of Pacific, Hawaii and Alleutians, studying migrations of gulls and goonies. If can take Kodiak will have wonderful pictures. Goonies (phalacrocorax carbo, a kind of cormorant, dangerous to lighthouse keepers) have regular schedule, fly Midway or Wake in October, Alleutians in June. Hope to get mail at Honolulu before you take up Conk-Singleton papers.
Yours always,
Violet H. Hargreave
“She really is an ornithologist, isn’t she,” I said.
“So the Berlin censor thought, as he let it come through. Does nothing else strike you?”
“Well, I haven’t got my convex lens,” I said. “Are there any secret watermarks in the paper? The only thing I notice is that surely a scientific investigator should spell geography correctly. Isn’t there only one l in Aleutians?”
“Good man. Of course that would tickle the German censor; he’d just think another ignorant American. You can be quite sure any member of the Holmes family would know how to spell. That’s our private signal. Whenever Violet spells something wrong I know there’s a double meaning. So the gulls and goonies are Japs.”
“Say, she’s good! And the allusions to the Holmes cases—sure, I get it. Cormorant and lighthouse keeper—that suggests politician; the story of The Veiled Lodger; it means get this warning across to the government. But what about Conk-Singleton?”
“Don’t you remember the end of The Six Napoleons? Holmes says, before you get out the Conk-Singleton papers put the pearl in the safe. Just what we didn’t do with Pearl Harbor.”
“But what’s the date of this letter?” I exclaimed. “Why, it’s spring of ’41, six months before Pearl Harbor.”
“I told you we have to work ahead of time,” Dove said. “Violet had just been tipped off, in Berlin, about the secret terms of the German–Japanese alliance. Hitler told the Japs he’d be in Moscow by Christmas, they’d be perfectly safe to strike in December. And you can check those goony dates, which by the way are correct for the bird migrations. The Japs landed at Attu and Kiska in June, just as she said.”
“I always wondered what they thought they could do up there on those godforsaken rocks.”
“Maybe they were attracted by the name of that group. Ever notice it on the map? The Rat Islands.”
I was beginning to get the inwardness of this Baker Street code. “Goodness, even the name of the yacht, Matilda Briggs—in the Sussex Vampire; why, yes, that was the story of the Giant Rat of Sumatra—”
“For which the world is not prepared,” Dove finished for me.
“Golly, the State Department must have turned handsprings when you decoded this for them.”
Dove was discreetly silent.
I looked over the letter once more. “Kodiak…they thought she meant Kodak. I suppose you couldn’t make any mistake, it was sure to refer to the Japanese?”
“Well, there Violet was really cute. You spoke of the handwriting.”
“Yes, she must have used a very broad pen, a stub.”
“She picked up the idea from her Uncle Mycroft. Don’t you remember his immortal remark, in The Greek Interpreter—about the letter written with a J-pen, that is a stub pen—by a middle-aged man with a weak constitution.”
“I guess that’s me,” I said feebly. “Still I don’t get it.”
“J-pen, Japan.”
—
We finished what Dove called our auld lang snort. I was thinking hard. “Whenever you get a letter with a wrong spelling,” I said guiltily, “do you suspect a secret meaning?—Gosh, do you suppose when broadcasters mispronounce a word on the radio it’s really a code?”
“Get out of here,” said Dove. “I want my rest.”
Mrs. Hudson’s Case
LAURIE R. KING
AUTHORS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES parodies and pastiches have taken many liberties with the character but few were as controversial as the decision made by Laurie R. King (1952– ) to marry him, a condition in which few readers of the canon expected to find him. Nonetheless, the series about Mary Russell and Holmes has gone on to be so admired and loved by readers that the books have become regulars on national bestseller lists.
When Mary was fifteen years old, she encountered an elderly gentleman who she soon came to know was Sherlock Holmes, retired and keeping bees in Sussex. He mentors her in her early years as a crime solver, and they develop a close friendship, resulting in a marriage arrangement seven years after that first meeting. Mary Russell was introduced in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994), the first of more than a dozen adventures.
With Leslie S. Klinger, King has coedited several Sherlock Holmes works of nonfiction (the two-volume The Grand Game, 2011–2012) and two anthologies of short stories inspired by the Holmes canon: A Study in Sherlock (2011) and In the Company of Sherlock Holmes (2014).
King has also produced a second successful series of detective novels featuring Kate Martinelli, a lesbian police officer in San Francisco, introduced in A Grave Talent (1993), which won the Edgar Award for best first novel of the year, as well as the (British) Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Dagger for best first novel. Among King’s seven novels in neither series is Califia’s Daughters (2004), a science fiction novel released under the pseudonym Leigh Richards.
“Mrs. Hudson’s Case” was originally published in Crime Through Time, edited by Miriam Grace Monfredo and Sharan Newman (New York, Berkley, 1997).
MRS. HUDSON’S CASE
Laurie R. King
AS HAS BEEN noted by a previous biographer, Mrs. Hudson was the most long-suffering of landladies. In the years when Sherlock Holmes lived beneath her Baker Street roof, she faced with equanimity his irregular hours, his ill temper, his malodorous and occasionally dangerous chemical experiments, his (again) occasionally malodorous and even dangerous visitors, and all the other demands made on her dwelling and her person. And yet, far from rejoicing when Holmes quit London for the sea-blown expanses of the Sussex Downs, in less than three months she had turned her house over to an estate agent and followed him, to run his household as she had formerly run her own. When once I dared to ask her why, late on a celebratory evening when she had rather more drink taken than was her wont, she answered that the devil himself needed someone to look after him, and it made her fingers itch to know that Mr. Holmes was not getting the care to which he was accustomed. Besides, she added under her breath, the new tenants had not been in place for a week before she knew she would go mad with boredom.
Thus, thanks to the willingness of this good woman to continue suffering in the service of genius, Holmes’s life went on much as before.
Not that he was grateful, or indeed even aware of her sacrifice. He went on, as I said, much as before, feelin
g vexed when her tidying had removed some vital item or when her regular market-day absence meant that he had to brew his own coffee. Deep in his misogynistic soul, he was not really convinced that women had minds, rights, or lives of their own.
This may be unfair; he was certainly always more than ready to dismiss members of his own sex. However, there is no doubt that a woman, be she lady or governess, triggered in him an automatic response of polite disinterest coupled with vague impatience: it took a high degree of determination on the part of a prospective client who happened to be female to drag him into a case.
Mrs. Hudson, though, was nothing if not determined. On this day in October of 1918 she had pursued him through the house and up the stairs, finally bearding him in his laboratory, where she continued to press upon him the details of her odd experience. However, her bristling Scots implacability made little headway against the carapace of English phlegm that he was turning against her. I stood in the doorway, witness to the meeting of irresistible force and immovable object.
“No, Mrs. Hudson, absolutely not. I am busy.” To prove it (although when I had arrived at his house twenty minutes earlier I had found him moping over the newspapers) he turned to his acid-stained workbench and reached for some beakers and a couple of long glass tubes.
“All I’m asking you to do is to rig a wee trap,” she said, her accent growing with her perturbation.
Holmes snorted. “A bear trap in the kitchen, perhaps? Oh, a capital idea, Mrs. Hudson.”
“You’re not listening to me, Mister ’Olmes. I told you, I wanted you to fix up a simple camera, so I can see who it is that’s been coming in of rights and helping himself to my bits and pieces.”
“Mice, Mrs. Hudson. The country is full of them.” He dropped a pipette into a jar and transferred a quantity of liquid into a clean beaker.
“Mice!” She was shocked. “In my kitchen? Mr. Holmes, really.”
Holmes had gone too far, and knew it. “I do apologize, Mrs. Hudson. Perhaps it was the cat?”
“And what call would a cat have for a needle and thread?” she demanded, unplacated. “Even if the beastie could work the latch on my sewing case.”
“Perhaps Russell…?”
“You know full well that Mary’s been away at University these four weeks.”
“Oh, very well. Ask Will to change the locks on the doors.” He turned his back with an optimistic attempt at finality.
“I don’t want the locks changed, I want to know who it is. Things have gone missing from all the neighbours, little things mostly, but it’s not nice.”
I had been watching Holmes’s movements at first idly, then more closely, and now I took a step into the room and caught at Mrs. Hudson’s sleeve. “Mrs. Hudson, I’ll help you with it. I’m sure I can figure out how to booby trap a camera with a flash. Come, let’s go downstairs and decide where to put it.”
“But I thought—”
“Come with me, Mrs. Hudson.”
“Mary, are you certain?”
“Now, Mrs. Hudson.” I tightened my grip on her substantial arm and hauled, just as Holmes removed his finger from the end of the pipette and allowed the substance it held to drop into the already seething mixture in the beaker. He had not been paying attention to his experiment; a cloud of noxious green gas began instantly to billow up from the mouth of the beaker. Mrs. Hudson and I went with all haste down the stairs, leaving Holmes to grope his way to the shutters and fling them open, coughing and cursing furiously.
Once in her kitchen, Mrs. Hudson’s inborn hospitality reasserted itself, and I had to wait until she had stirred up a batch of rock cakes, questioned me about my progress and my diet up at Oxford in this, my second year there. She then put on the kettle, washed up the bowls, and swept the floor before finally settling in a chair across the soft scrubbed wood table from me.
“You were saying,” I began, “that you’ve had a series of break-ins and small thefts.”
“Some food and a bit of milk from time to time. Usually stale things, a heel of bread and a knob of dry cheese. Some wool stockings from the darning basket, two old blankets I’d intended for the church. And as I said, a couple of needles and a spool of black thread from the sewing case.” She nodded at the neat piece of wooden joinery with the padded top that sat in front of her chair by the fire, and I had to agree, no cat could have worked its latch.
“Alcohol?”
“Never. And never have I missed any of the household money I keep in the tea caddy or anything of value. Mrs. Prinnings down the road claims she lost a ring to the thief, but she’s terribly absentminded, she is.”
“How is he getting in?”
“I think he must have a key.” Seeing my expression, she hastened to explain. “There’s always one on the hook at the back door, and one day last week when Will needed it, I couldn’t find it. I thought he maybe borrowed it earlier and forgot to return it, that’s happened before, but it could have been the thief. And I admit I’m not always good at locking up all the windows at night. Which is probably how he got in in the first place.”
“So change the locks.”
“The thing is, Mary, I can’t help but feel it’s some poor soul who is in need, and although I certainly don’t want him to waltz in and out, I do want to know who it is so that I know what to do. Do you follow me?”
I did, actually. There were a handful of exsoldiers living around the fringes of Oxford, so badly shell-shocked as to be incapable of ordinary social intercourse, who slept rough and survived by what wits were left them. Tragic figures, and one would not wish to be responsible for their starvation.
“How many people in the area have been broken into?”
“Pretty near everyone when it first started, the end of September. Since then those who have locks use them. The others seem to think it’s fairies or absentmindedness.”
“Fairies?”
“The little people are a curious lot,” she said. I looked closely to be sure that she was joking, but I couldn’t tell.
Some invisible signal made her rise and go to the oven, and sure enough, the cakes were perfect and golden brown. We ate them with fresh butter and drank tea (Mrs. Hudson carried a tray upstairs, and returned without comment but with watering eyes) and then turned our combined intellects to the problem of photographing intruders.
I returned the next morning, Saturday, with a variety of equipment. Borrowing a hammer, nails, and scraps of wood from old Will, the handyman, and a length of fine fishing twine from his grandson, by trial and error Mrs. Hudson (interrupted regularly by delivery boys, shouts from upstairs, and telephone calls) and I succeeded in rigging a trip wire across the kitchen door.
During the final stages of this delicate operation, as I perched on the stepladder adjusting the camera, I was peripherally aware of Holmes’s voice raised to shout down the telephone in the library. After a few minutes, silence fell, and shortly thereafter his head appeared at the level of my waist.
He didn’t sneer at my efforts. He acted as if I were not there, as if he had found Mrs. Hudson rolling out a pie crust rather than holding out a selection of wedges for me to use in my adjustments.
“Mrs. Hudson, it appears that I shall be away for a few days. Would you sort me out some clean collars and the like?”
“Now, Mr. Holmes?”
“Any time in the next ten minutes will be fine,” he said generously, then turned and left without so much as a glance at me. I bent down to call through the doorway at his retreating back.
“I go back to Oxford tomorrow, Holmes.”
“It was good of you to come by, Russell,” he said, and disappeared up the stairs.
“You can leave the wedges with me, Mrs. Hudson,” I told her. “I’m nearly finished.”
I could see her waver with the contemplation of rebellion, but we both knew full well that Holmes would leave in ten minutes, clean linen or no, and whereas I would have happily sent him on his way grubby, Mrs. Hudson’s professional pride was at s
take. She put the wedges on the top of the stepladder and hurried off.
She and Holmes arrived simultaneously in the central room of the old cottage just as I had alighted from the ladder to examine my handiwork. I turned my gaze to Holmes, and found him dressed for Town, pulling on a pair of black leather gloves.
“A case, Holmes?”
“Merely a consultation, at this point. Scotland Yard has been reflecting on our success with the Jessica Simpson kidnapping, and in their efforts to trawl the bottom of this latest kidnapping, have decided to have me review their efforts for possible gaps. Paperwork merely, Russell,” he added. “Nothing to excite you.”
“This is the Oberdorfer case?” I asked. It was nearly a month since the two children, twelve-year-old Sarah and her seven-year-old brother Louis, had vanished from Hyde Park under the expensive nose of their nurse. They were orphans, the children of a cloth manufacturer with factories in three countries and his independently wealthy French wife. His brother, who had taken refuge in London during the war, had anticipated a huge demand of ransom. He was still waiting.
“Is there news?”
“There is nothing. No ransom note, no sightings, nothing. Scotland Yard is settling to the opinion that it was an outburst of anti-German sentiment that went too far, along the lines of the smashing of German shopkeepers’ windows that was so common in the opening months of the war. Lestrade believes the kidnapper was a rank amateur who panicked at his own audacity and killed them, and further thinks their bodies will be found any day, no doubt by some sportsman’s dog.” He grimaced, tucked in the ends of his scarf, buttoned his coat against the cool autumnal day, and took the portmanteau from Mrs. Hudson’s hand.
“Well, good luck, Holmes,” I said.
“Luck,” he said austerely, “has nothing to do with it.”
When he had left, Mrs. Hudson and I stood looking at each other for a long minute, sobered by this reminder of what was almost certainly foul murder, and also by the revealing lack of enthusiasm and optimism in the demeanour of the man who had just driven off. Whatever he might say, our success in the Simpson case two months earlier had been guided by luck, and I had no yearning to join forces in a second kidnap case, particularly one that was patently hopeless.
