Sherlock Holmes & The Master Engraver (Sherlock Holmes Revival)

by Husband, Ross

After some thought, during which May and I remained deferentially silent, Holmes eventually continued: “I believe I may now set your mind at rest Mr May – I am confident that the appearance of this note is not an augury as you fear, that ‘it has begun’. Very far from it; in fact I much doubt if the criminals’ principal is even aware of the note’s circulation.

  “We know the villains are pinning all their hopes on cowing you into handing over a vast ransom for the return of the stolen materials, or face a deluge of harmful fraudulent currency being unleashed into your carefully-balanced economy. They would not knowingly reduce the gravity and menace of their own threat. They know well that you are fully aware of their competence to print and circulate – what need is there of a third reminder?

  “From what I have learned tonight, therefore, I believe I may state with considerable confidence that it is most unlikely you will be required to meet their terms. Should you be minded so to do, it would be the most needless, the most costly, and the most monstrous of travesties of all that is decent and right.

  “With the appearance of this note I now feel certain that they foolishly and unwittingly have revealed their Achilles heel and it is within range of my arrow.”

  At this the distinguished banker appeared almost to grow in stature; his back straightened, his brow became smooth once more, his tensely clenched hands slowly uncurled, and a look of infinite relief flooded visibly over him.

  “I will not enquire the basis for your evident confidence Mr Holmes, for your abilities in such delicate and sensitive matters are legend, and I can find no flaw in your logical analysis of the situation. I have read Doctor Watson’s accounts of your methods of observation and deduction and though it appears to me that while they have been, on occasion, most unusual, we do find ourselves in a most unusual, perhaps unique situation. You have greatly buoyed me up.”

  I observed just the smallest flash of a self-satisfied smile pass almost invisibly across Holmes’ lips. And while my clever friend always eschewed the public spotlight, he very occasionally permitted himself a tiny moment of self-indulgent satisfaction at the praise of those whom he considered his peers.

  “You are exceedingly kind Mr May” said my colleague “but let us hold a little longer for our laurels – and certainly until the Derbies are securely upon the villains’ wrists, they incarcerated and enjoying the hospitality of Inspector Lestrade’s tender mercies, and your plates and paper are once more safely under lock and key. Now, if you have no further matters to bring to my attention, I shall terminate this little meeting, for there is a great deal I must set in place, for one of our five days is now elapsed.”

  When eventually Mr May departed, clearly somewhat more reassured than upon his arrival, Holmes collapsed limply in his chair before the fire. My friend looked drawn and care-worn, and I began to suspect that the immense responsibility of solving this case of national importance was starting to bear down upon him like the heavens upon the shoulders of Atlas. I wanted to quiz him more about the evening’s unexpected development, but already he had withdrawn completely into that strange and taciturn world of his own creation, in which nothing existed for him save his extraordinary intellect, the grand engine that powered his unique deductive abilities.

  “Have a care to take some rest old friend” I said gently. “There are only two ends to burn on even the mightiest candle. Sooner or later they must meet and consume it entirely.” He opened his weary eyes and smiled lazily. “Fear not my dear Watson – this is my rest; it is stultifying inactivity that so fatigues me.” And he reached for his pipe.

  Silence descended once more; aware that any further attempt at conversation would be as rewarding as attempting conversation with a Trappist monk, I stole noiselessly to my room and retired for the night, leaving him to his introverted silence of deduction...

  When I awoke the following morning my first chilling thought was that this was the commencement of the second day; I conceived it must have been inordinately early, for only the faintest glimmering of dawn penetrated the drape, yet strangely my watch upon the bedside table reported that it lacked only five minutes of nine o’clock. Upon parting the bedroom curtains I realised the cause; the overnight fog had curdled into a vile and impenetrable miasma, fuelled by the innumerable meagre soft-coal fires, each battling feebly against the winter chill in countless thousands of dwellings across the city. Our modest hearth was but one of the guilty culprits.

  Outside, the gloomy consequence was that the windows at 221B appeared to have been swaddled during the night with dense, dirty, ochre-coloured gauze. Even at this morning hour, the street lights were still lit, but to miserable effect. Save for one or two hardy souls groping blindly through the murk on foot, the street beneath was perfectly empty; no street-vendor cried, no tradesman’s wagon or brewer’s dray rumbled by, no hansom plied its brisk business; such was the horrid, sinister stillness that had descended across the paralysed city.

  While dressing I sombrely reflected that as a dismal consequence of this unhealthy air, my medical practice would inevitably be beleaguered by wheezing asthmatics, chronic bronchitics and every other manner of poor suffering soul certain to be afflicted by the jaundiced atmosphere, and I had no doubt that many would succumb to these noxious vapours long before the primroses next bloomed in Regents Park.

  It is a sad commonplace of our modern metropolitan times.

  I entered the parlour to find Holmes seated at the window, still in his night attire and dressing-gown, glaring moodily out at the sickly glow of the near-invisible gaslights in silent Baker Street below; I perceived upon the instant that he was in the vilest of humours. “Ah, good morning Holmes” I said cautiously.

  Tetchily he retorted “I defy you, Watson, to present me with one single redeeming feature of this benighted morning. There is, for my purpose, nothing good about it in the least part. The hunt cannot ride with blind hounds, and hope for a kill. And no more can I! I am unsighted like Polyphemus! I am blind as Lear’s Gloucester! Quite as sightless as a common bat!

  “How are we to comb the rookeries in The Isle of Dogs in such conditions?

  “Pah! You could barely see to comb your hair in this murk; I much doubt that any cabbie would venture to take us so far without an army of torch-men to lead the way! And still time marches inexorably onward. These infernal fogs can last for days...”

  Knowing that this gloomy and self-indulgent mood would serve only to obscure my friend’s powers of concentration at this most critical of times, I sought to lighten his disposition. “That is quite true Holmes, but we have too, on occasion, known them to lift unexpectedly and quickly. Come; let us hope for better weather, while you tell me of your plans for the day if you will.”

  He glared balefully for a final moment at the fog outside and softened. “Of course you are right my wise and prudent counsellor! We must hope that the winter sun may burn its feeble way through this miserable gloom, so let us bank up the fire and I shall tell you of what I yet hope to achieve this day.”

  Pleased at this welcome upturn in my friend’s blue funk, I loaded a generous shovel of coal upon the fire, placed the old Malacca cigarette box and some vestas upon the table between our easy chairs, and took my place alongside him before the cheery blaze. He drew deeply on his cigarette, exhaled long and slowly, and after some moments he spoke.

  “Some of what I will now summarise, Watson, I readily concede, is informed assumption and some, informed deduction, and it is now that I look to you to moderate by playing the devil’s advocate, as ever you have done.”

  I was surprised and not a little flattered by such uncommon deference shown me by Sherlock Holmes, and I sensed it signalled perhaps a rare moment of self-questioning under the weighty responsibility he had shouldered.

  He continued. “Have you considered the matters I recently brought to your attention? The speed at which a strong, agitated man may walk when pressed by exigent circumstance; the rate at which a Koenig press may operate; the circle I inscribe
d upon the map – you have noted its centre and radius I know; and the odd tainted odours your keen sense of smell detected upon the three banknotes that have appeared thus far? To which I might add the curious matter of the threatening letter from Asa Bormanstein pinned to the wall, which strangely was not in evidence when Lestrade was present at the scene of the crime, still not there when Warburg made his ill-advised foray, yet was so prominently displayed precisely for me to discover later next day; and this despite what we believe to be a more-or-less continuous police guard upon Slater’s Yard. Do not those finer points, when considered together, become highly suggestive to you?”

  I had already struggled to comprehend whatever connections the great detective clearly saw between these incongruent events, but save for my earlier estimate of a man’s walking speed, had failed miserably to establish any intelligent thread of logic between them; and while Holmes’ notoriously acerbic comments upon my attempts at deduction had without doubt mellowed of late, there was certainly no theory which I was emboldened to advance for his pitiless scrutiny. However, of one thing I felt reasonably certain – that of all these diverse factors he had brought to my awareness, there was one which stood out quite signally.

  “I regret, Holmes, I am unable to make full sense of these matters, save to opine that the most significant must be the circle you inscribed upon the map, and it is my belief that the answers to all the other strange questions have somehow directed you in its placing and size.”

  “You improve; I declare you improve almost daily Watson!” He lit another cigarette and after inhaling a few enthusiastic puffs, reached for the map and flattened it upon the table between us. “The circle, Watson, which is the focus of this hunt, has a particular radius and a particular centre. You may care to give further close thought to the placing of the circle’s centre on Cubitt Town, its radius – approximately three miles or so, and the interval within which we can estimate quite closely that the envelope was introduced to the scene at Slater’s Yard. Too, it might be worthwhile to consider why and how the letter and envelope came to be written and placed there precisely during PC Clarke’s brief absence, and a few minutes before the particular moment we discovered it.

  “The speed of the press becomes significant in view of the fact the letter demanded that the ransom be paid in five days, failing which the counterfeit money will be released far and wide, which implies, does it not, that it will all be printed within that period of time?”

  “That is certainly possible” I replied. “It is more than that – it is probable.”

  He closed his eyes, placed his elbows upon the arms of his chair, fingers steepled as always when preparing to deliver one of his pedagogical explanations “You have before you, Watson, all those data that I have. The perfect logician, and to my knowledge there is none-such, might observe a single one of these facts in its context, and deduce not only its causes, but also its likely results. The great naturalist Cuvier could describe a complete animal merely by contemplating a single bone – how I would have enjoyed an encounter with that man and his mind!

  “Imagine, Watson, merely by holding a mandible in his hand he was able to pronounce with certainty:

  ‘if an animal's teeth are such as they must be in order for it to nourish itself with flesh, we can be sure without further examination that the whole system of its digestive organs is appropriate for that kind of food, and that its whole skeleton and locomotive organs, and even its sense organs, are arranged in such a way as to make it skilful at pursuing and catching its prey. For these relations are the necessary conditions of existence of the animal’ – that, Watson, is deduction in its finest, purest, most elevated instance.

  “And in the same manner in which nature binds its creations with inviolable laws both of genesis and of evolution, so I have found the world of criminal enterprise to be constrained along similar lines. When I observe one particularly singular event, it may be that I can deduce its past cause and its future consequences. As an example, do you recall our encounter here at Baker Street at the time of the case presented by the King of Bohemia? You may recollect that I startled you by observing that you were back in harness?”

  “I recall it quite vividly Holmes, for you pointed out the clumsiness of our maid from the abuse she bestowed on my boots when scraping away the crusted mud, and then you correctly declared me to be back in general practice because, if my memory serves, you detected the odour of iodoform, black stains of nitrate of silver upon my forefinger, and the tell-tale bulge in my top-hat where I, like most practitioners routinely secrete their stethoscope!”

  “Child’s play Watson, mere child’s play.

  “But back to the matter in hand; research is easily had. For example, I have already established that the Koenig press – for that is what Warburg reports he saw is capable of generating up to eighteen-hundred impressions per hour, each of two banknotes – thus, three thousand six hundred ten-pound notes in an hour – thirty six thousand pounds per hour. Thereafter the calculation of the mathematics is simplicity itself and, given the time-scale imposed, and some hours of diligent application, this indicates to me that the villains are already most likely well under way in their enterprise, and perfectly competent to realise their threat.

  “Warburg observed three discarded Portal’s wrappers; each contained five thousand sheets, each of which yields two ten-pound notes. We may surmise, therefore, that at that point in time, they had already printed at least three hundred thousand pounds sterling. The question is, where are they now – where have they gone to ground? Which question returns us in a most circular manner to the circle inscribed upon the map there before you.”

  He leaned back and became still and silent, evidently awaiting my thoughts on the seemingly intractable problem there before me. However, not only could I now perhaps see my way dimly through part of the serpentine maze of Holmes’ convoluted reasoning, I suddenly realised as I looked over his shoulder, for he sat with his back to the windows, that I could now see the rooftops on the far side of Baker Street; the vile fog was giving way to pallid watery sunshine!

  Swiftly I reviewed all the factors that Holmes had clearly deemed central to the puzzle and, with not a little trepidation, I hazarded all. “I judge, Holmes that the two heavies with the massive hound we encountered as we entered Cubitt Town are certainly members of the gang, and were no doubt instrumental in delivering Warburg’s savage beating; they seemed much unnerved at our appearance, and presumably, while we took lunch and interviewed the landlord at the inn, they visited Slater’s Yard and placed the ominous letter addressed to you. Clearly, it was designed to frighten us away, and also to be conveyed to The Bank. The fortuitous absence of Constable Clarke from his post for some twenty or so minutes no doubt made their mission considerably easier in its accomplishment. As to the rest, I need to consider more deeply.”

  Holmes beamed amiably. “All that you surmise is close to what I believe occurred Watson, with some notably vital exceptions and omissions. And your foretelling of the weather is just as accurate, for I observe this infernal gloom is even now lifting, and there below our window passes the second hansom since we have been seated. Let us try for a third and see what we may discover at Messrs. Kauffmann Brothers in the Whitechapel High Street...”

  We eventually located the pawnbroker’s establishment, positioned next door to a garish Penny-Gaff shop advertising the forthcoming exhibition of one Joseph Merrick, tastelessly billed as ‘The Last Appearance of The Elephant Man’. Despite the waning public appetite for so-called ‘freak-shows’ I believe I will never cease to despair at man’s vile and salacious interest in viewing the maimed, the deformed and the slow-witted, for the sake of vicarious amusement and entertainment.

  Had I the requisite skills in attending to such specialised medical needs I believe I should have wished to rescue any human-being in these desperate straits from such a miserable, humiliating and sickeningly debased existence. Holmes broke into my sombre chain of thought.
“Mayhap one day the human race will become a kinder, more civilised species, Watson. Until that time, I fear we must bear such unpleasantness and hope for a more enlightened age. Come; let us see what we may learn at Mr Julius Kauffmann’s emporium of debt.”

  For all its modest exterior, Kauffmann Bros was surprisingly well-appointed within. I surveyed our surroundings as the clanging of the large brass bell upon the door subsided into reluctant silence. There were no other customers. The place smelled of dust, floor-wax, metal polish and the melancholy remains of other peoples’ lives. To left and right were glass-fronted cabinets rising the full height of the shop, filled with the most amazing variety of articles, all, I supposed, testimony to lost fortunes, hard times, broken relationships and dire straits.

  With a pang of sadness I perceived upon the instant a waste-paper basket fashioned from the dried foot of an elephant, quite crammed with sticks and walking canes of every conceivable style and taste, standing sentinel over piles of gold and silver watches, chains, rings, cravat pins and the like. Another cabinet was filled with further sad remains of long-dead pachyderms – entire six-foot tusks of finely incised ivory, paperweights, delicate fan-tracery screens and inlaid boxes, all surrounded by a small menagerie of intricately-carved netsuke.

  Another display was filled with musical instruments sufficient, it seemed, to equip a small symphony orchestra, and a further, with workmen’s tools – another reflection of the trying economic times borne by the ordinary working man.

  Across the full width of the far end of the shop was a worn dark-wood counter, surmounted by a stout brass grille that extended to the ceiling; behind it were three counter-stations, much as one might find in a bank. Two were occupied; one by a slight, elderly, frail-looking patriarch of Hebrew aspect, the other by a sturdy looking lad of perhaps five and twenty years who appeared to be deeply engrossed in sorting pledge-slips and the like. Both wore yarmulkas. The older man greeted us with a sad, gentle smile.