Holmes Entangled

by Gordon McAlpine

  “Questions?” she inquired.

  In the next few minutes, I dismissed and thanked my Irregulars (quite the reunion), who took with them Madam Du Lac’s two black-clad assistants and the disarmed Officer Keene for an enforced night of drinking or opium smoking or whatever might be necessary to render her duplicitous trio unconscious until morning. Meanwhile, Madam Du Lac, Mrs. Watson, and I settled ourselves comfortably in the parlor, where our humbled but still spirited hostess insisted on opening a good bottle of wine to toast our agreement.

  The wine proved excellent. (Both Mrs. Watson and I watched Madam Du Lac drink first, to insure that the grape was not of a poisonous character.)

  When I complimented the vintage, she smiled.

  “The Château Lafite Rothschild, 1881, was paid for by the ‘wealthy, deluded clientele’ to whom you so recently alluded,” she said. “They can afford it. After all, I don’t do sittings for paupers. Besides, my well-heeled clients get their money’s worth. More, actually.”

  When I failed to accede, she continued: “Perhaps you misunderstand what I do, sir. My clients leave my séances with newly found peace of mind, often about terrible losses they’ve endured. Indeed, a peace of mind they’d likely never achieve any other way, regardless of my ‘inauthenticity.’ So, drink. Enjoy.”

  “I didn’t come here to discuss either the efficacy or the morality of your business, Madam Du Lac.”

  “Fine, what is it you want to know ?”

  “I’ve come here to ask about Stanley Baldwin.”

  She hesitated. “Our prime minister?” she inquired.

  “No, the other one,” I said. “The crippled one, from the séance you conducted at the home of Lady Vale Owen.”

  At this, she looked away. Her complexion paled just perceptibly, a physical effect nearly impossible to consciously manipulate. This, then, was the first genuine vulnerability I had observed in her (even during her chaotic exposure in the séance room she had maintained aplomb).

  “Well?” I pressed. “Who put you up to concocting this other Baldwin and why?”

  She said nothing.

  “A man who attended that séance was nearly killed for revealing the strange ‘apparition,’” I continued, setting my wine glass on a side table and leaning toward her. “A somewhat distinguished man of letters, quite innocent, perhaps to a fault. Or did you already know about that shooting, Madam Du Lac?”

  She shook her head.

  “Perhaps you ordered it,” I continued.

  She looked at me with confusion, but remained silent.

  “No,” I said, “you haven’t the power to make all that has happened, happen.”

  At this, she closed her eyes. “What’s happened?”

  “The Society for Psychic Research has been rendered virtually nonexistent, or, rather, captured by imposters, without anyone seeming to notice,” I answered. “You can’t have engineered all that. Who hired you?”

  Her continued silence began to irritate me.

  “Talk, damn it,” I insisted, nearly rising from my seat.

  Mrs. Watson put her hand on mine, a subtle exhortation that I soften my approach. Taking her sex into account, I concluded that John’s widow might possess insight regarding Madam Du Lac, whose sudden emotional diminishment seemed genuine. So I lowered my voice and sat back on the divan. “I ask myself, Madam Du Lac, what is the logic behind an apparition of a still-living subject, who, apparently, is at once himself and someone else in some ‘other’ incarnation? Surely such a visitation breaks with Spiritualist convention. Still, its public exposure oughtn’t to be of such alarm that keeping the thing secret would be worth killing for, true?”

  Madam Du Lac put her wine glass down. She took a breath before speaking. “My real name is Jane Richardson and I come from Liverpool, where my father was a welder at the shipyards, my mother a fervent believer in Spiritualism, and I an outstanding student of the dramatic arts. I ran away to London at age fifteen in search of stardom in the West End where, instead, I encountered a failed impresario, known to you now as MacNeil, who shortly thereafter became my paramour and partner in crime, which brings us up to the present.”

  “I didn’t ask for a biography,” I said.

  “It’s the truth, which I said I’d give you.”

  “I don’t care who you are. Our agreement was that you answer my questions.”

  “But that’s just it . . . I can’t answer what you’re asking.”

  “Why?”

  She stood. “The séance at the Vale Owen residence didn’t even feature most of the visual effects we produce here,” she said. “It was a simple affair, using only the rigged candle, a darkened room, and my assistants moving about, unseen, with the luminescent props. At least, that was the plan. Look, you can ask around the Spiritualist community. I don’t engage in the life-sized photographs that some mediums attempt to pass as spirit manifestations. Shoddy. Unreal. You’ve seen my work. I’m more subtle than that. And I certainly don’t produce full-sized, moving, vaguely transparent, speaking spirit manifestations. I wouldn’t even know how. I wish I did. But that’s what appeared in the room, even as I was supposedly in thrall to my Egyptian spirit guide. The thing was real, and I became a mere spectator along with the others. It whispered something into the ear of one gentleman. The writer.”

  “Real?” I pressed, doubtfully.

  “Yes, the spirit of Stanley Baldwin. But crippled, bent about the back and walking with a cane.”

  I stood, angered by the bald-faced absurdity.

  Mrs. Watson, remaining seated, reached up and touched my arm. “Keep calm, Sherlock.”

  I hadn’t lost my temper. I was merely tempted to vehemence.

  “Sherlock?” inquired Madam Du Lac, the name by which I prefer to remember her now, rather than the mundane Jane Richardson acknowledged moments before. “Are you Sherlock Holmes?” she asked.

  I said nothing.

  Mrs. Watson compounded her mistake by whispering to me, just loud enough to be heard by the medium, “Oh, sorry Sherlock.”

  I shot Mrs. Watson a glance.

  “Yes, you are him,” Madam Du Lac said. Fame is a strangely energizing and distracting phenomenon. “I should have guessed,” she continued. “Who else could have managed so expertly the disruption in my séance room tonight, afterward dispensing with my assistants as if they were mere children? Oh, Scotland Yard, perhaps. But you’re no copper. And you’re old enough to be Holmes. Too old to be in this business at all if you weren’t him. You can remove that silly moustache now.”

  I had underestimated my need for adequate disguise. “You’re wrong about Scotland Yard,” I said.

  She looked confused. “You’re working for them?”

  “No. You’re wrong that they could ever have managed as I did tonight.”

  She shrugged in acknowledgement.

  Perhaps in an attempt to atone for her blunder, Mrs. Watson stood and stepped threateningly toward the spiritualist. “Enough of your lying, Missie!”

  Quite uncharacteristic. Madam Du Lac looked at me.

  “You can rest easy, Mrs. Watson,” I instructed.

  Mrs. Watson turned to me. “I was just trying to help.”

  “Of course,” I said. “But I think our work here tonight is done.”

  “Done?” Mrs. Watson inquired. “But we still don’t know who hired her.”

  “No one hired her,” I said. “She’s telling the truth.”

  “What?” Mrs. Watson’s face betrayed her confusion.

  I looked hard at Madam Du Lac. “If ever you reveal that Sherlock Holmes was here or that I have in any way been involved in this case, I will immediately instruct my agents to publicize the details of your trickery and deceit in the séance room. You will first be a newspaper scandal and shortly thereafter a convicted felon. In short, I will destroy you. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Mrs. Watson said. “Sherlock, are you suggesting that the crippl
ed spirit who appeared to Conan Doyle was real?”

  Lest you toss these pages across the room in outrage, allow me to assure you that I was not suggesting the apparition that appeared to the gathering some weeks prior at the residence of Lady Vale Owen was real. At least, not in the sense that Mrs. Watson’s question implied. Nor in the manner of Conan Doyle’s interpretation. In short, I had not suddenly become an adherent of Spiritualism, which, to this day, I consider to provide no greater channel to mysterious shores than any other human endeavor, including crossing the street or standing in line to post a letter; however, by merely acknowledging the possible existence of mysterious shores I am breaking faith yet again with Dr. Watson’s dictum that a narrative be told in chronological order. After all, while standing in the parlor of Madam Du Lac’s fashionable home in St. John’s Wood, such possibilities were not yet among my thoughts. Rather, I’d simply concluded that Madam Du Lac’s denial was truthful because I’d observed none of the seventeen tiny facial impingements I have catalogued as subconsciously occurring, singly or in groups, whenever one lies; additionally, I’d realized that she possessed neither the resources nor the knowledge to have accomplished such an illusion (particularly away from her “rigged” home) and, since deception was her only true area of expertise, she was therefore useless as an agent to whatever more powerful villain lay behind the mysterious incitements.

  “We’re off,” I said to Mrs. Watson.

  I had my midnight appointment.

  “So, do you think we’re on the right track now, Sherlock?” Mrs. Watson asked as we settled into the back of the motor cab.

  I nodded.

  “But you’re not going to let me in on any of your conclusions?” she continued.

  “That’s right, my dear. Not yet.”

  She smiled, settling for my diversion.

  How often had I employed just such maneuvers with John, which he faithfully interpreted and later depicted in his chronicles as my being one or more steps ahead, my playing coy or laying a trap, when, in truth, it was occasionally the case, as now, that I simply found myself deluged with questions and, temporarily, felt no better equipped to discover their answers than were the court jesters over at Scotland Yard? But I had learned the prudence of withholding one’s doubts and questions, even at the risk, or, sometimes, to the purpose, of misleading one’s partner, especially when he is your most admiring friend and chronicler. Was it the American writer Mark Twain who said, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt”? John’s ever-allegiant assumptions and subsequent affirmatory chronicles long ago insured that when I kept my mouth shut I appeared anything but stupid, my silence seeming instead a profound, rich, and knowing contemplation. However, don’t misunderstand: most often, my silences on cases with John were profound, rich, and knowing. It’s just that, well, sometimes . . .

  From the front seat of the motor cab, idling outside Madam Du Lac’s house, the driver turned back to me and asked, “Where to, governor?”

  Mrs. Watson looked at me.

  “First we drop you at your home,” I said to her. “I’ve a midnight appointment most pertinent to this case.”

  “Drop me?” The disappointment on her face was evident.

  “My dear Mrs. Watson, tonight you proved yourself quite capable at the Great Game. Thank you.”

  “Sherlock, if your investigation is not yet finished tonight then why should mine be? I’m old, but I’m not tired. Where are we going next?”

  “I’m expected alone,” I said. “Besides, my meeting will be of a different nature than what we just experienced.”

  “You mean more dangerous?”

  I nodded.

  “No matter,” she answered, dropping herself into the corner of the back seat as if the decision had been made. “I was made for danger.”

  “You’ve read one too many penny dreadfuls, Mrs. Watson.” I looked at my wristwatch. It was already after eleven o’clock, which was somewhat later than I thought. I doubted I had time to drop Mrs. Watson at her home and still make my appointment at the Society for Psychic Research. And I daren’t be late. “You will wait in the cab nearby,” I said. “I will undertake my actions alone but will rejoin you after they’re completed. It ought not to take long. And that is nonnegotiable, my dear.”

  A small smile appeared on her lips. “I suppose that will do.”

  I leaned toward the driver. “Take us to Hyde Park, near the Palace Green.”

  The driver nodded, and we started away.

  I removed a leather bag I had left on the floor of the cab, and then I turned to Mrs. Watson. “Now, if you would be so kind as to avert your eyes, I must eschew dignity and change clothes here in the cab to prepare for my next meeting. It would not do to show up looking like an American millionaire.”

  She made a show of turning her head.

  But it wasn’t modesty that motivated my request.

  It was that I did not want her to see me remove John’s old service revolver along with the ragged clothes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Having exited the cab near Kensington Square Garden, where I’d instructed the driver and Mrs. Watson to await my return, I approached the Eldon Road offices of the Society for Psychic Research. It was ten minutes before midnight. In the moonlight, the neighborhood, which by day had bespoken only tidy prosperity, now seemed composed of shadowed, landscaped spaces, where, potentially, countless variations on the theme of violence might be concealed. Such is the contextual acuity of perception. I had adopted the guise of an ordinary, professional class Englishman, my appearance altered (a wig and false teeth) only enough to conceal my identity as the most famous consulting detective in the world. After all, it was Siddhartha Singh who’d claimed to have had a séance experience akin to Conan Doyle’s. It was he for whom they’d be lying in wait. I had no intention of being shot from a distance. So, as I walked toward the house, I made a point to move with seemingly unguarded ease, a slightly intoxicated sway to my gait, betraying nothing of my defensive attitude.

  I’d slipped the revolver into the pocket of my coat.

  I stopped on the pavement near the society’s office, lighting a cigarette to allow for the possibility that my location was mere coincidence. Casually, I took a long drag and turned in a slow circle, as if taking in both the tobacco and the quiet evening.

  The windows of the offices were dark.

  This was a strange place for an assault, I thought. An affluent residential neighborhood located a mere stone’s throw from numerous embassies, the Natural History Museum, and Kensington Gardens; additionally, there were at least half a dozen houses on the block through whose windows any resident might happen to glance and gain an unobstructed view of . . . well, whatever was to occur. However, everything about this newly counterfeited Society for Psychic Research suggested an uncanny boldness and, perhaps, a troubling competence. It would be redundant for me to acknowledge the villain who again came to my mind (perhaps I remained transfixed by his evil genius because in the years after his death no case ever rose to the complexity and challenge of those that came before, at least not until this one).

  All was quiet; nothing on the dignified street stirred.

  So I turned and walked through the front garden and up the four brick stairs leading to the door of the darkened offices. I did not knock, but instead sat on the top step, facing the street, and took another long, steady draw on my cig.

  Yes, I was the mouse tap-tap-tapping at the spring-loaded trap.

  Surely, whoever lay in wait for poor Mr. Singh would now have to consider me either the Rajasthani’s agent or an insulant Londoner who paid no heed to private property when pausing in his evening constitutional for a smoke, thereby inadvertently mucking up their operation.

  Either instance would require a response.

  Thereby, I would make a new acquaintance. We would talk.

  And I would learn far more from him than he from me.

  After a
nother two or three minutes sitting on the stair, my opportunity showed himself.

  A tall, blond man rounded the corner, striding at a military pace; he continued up the street toward my position. Dressed in a well-cut suit as fashionable as the houses and accoutrements of this neighborhood, he was thick in his chest and arms and moved with the heavy grace of a rugby full-back. He did not look at me or the house on whose doorstep I casually sat even as he drew nearer.

  But I knew he saw me.

  Arriving at the path that led up to my perch, he made a hard right and approached through the front garden toward me.

  I took another long, languorous draw on my cigarette, smiling as I exhaled.

  “Lovely evening, mate,” I said, slurring my words enough to suggest drunkenness.

  His broad shoulders relaxed, just perceptibly. Nonetheless, he drew close enough for me to smell his cologne, St. Germain Premium Rose Water, a new brand preferred by British veterans of the Great War who’d made it back to Paris as tourists in the past two or three years. However, he was no ordinary ex-soldier. No more than thirty years old, the hardness in his eyes suggested even more than the hardness of his body that he could still be a one-man expeditionary force. He looked me up and down and seemed to relax further when he concluded that I was merely an old man in his cups.

  “Cigarette?” I offered.

  “You’ve got to go,” he said, pulling me up by the collar of my shirt. “This isn’t your house. And I’ve an appointment here.”

  I turned my head and nodded back toward the door, still in his grip. “But the lights are all out. Nobody’s home, no harm done. Sit down and have a smoke with me, young man. It’s good for you.”

  That’s when he tossed me like a rag doll from the top step into the small flower garden along one side of the walkway.

  It was a long way down.

  The landing hurt.

  Luckily, nothing felt broken. It seemed that at seventy-three I was still sufficiently well put together to remain in one piece. But I didn’t like it. My rheumatism was bound to be inflamed. The behavior was rude even for a professional assassin. So I sat up and spat out a mouthful of soil. “You took me by surprise, young man,” I called up to him, unsteadily rising to my feet. My back and shoulders ached. But I stayed in character, resuming the slight slur in my speech. “Otherwise, you’d never have gotten the drop on me. So why don’t you come down here and we’ll settle this like gentlemen?” At this, I planted my left foot forward, pulled my shoulders back, raised my fists, and assumed a boxing stance. Of course, I had no intention of boxing him.