“I would prefer you address me as Your Grace, Mr. Holmes. The old gent died, you know.”
“Yes, well, I heard you had died as well.”
“Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated,” the other answered, with the utmost coolness. “As I see were your own, Mr. Holmes. I myself wore a black armband when I heard you were lost over the falls.”
Holmes smiled. “You always had a rather daring attitude, Your Grace,” said he, with hardly a trace of sarcasm in his voice. “It is a great shame that you turned your cunning brain to the role of murderer, smasher, thief, and forger.”
“So you say, Mr. Holmes. Only the third was ever proven.”
“You draw ever closer to the hangman’s noose, Your Grace.”
“For a simple robbery? I think not.”
“And what about murder?”
“You will have a hard time sticking such a charge upon me, Mr. Holmes, especially since I am innocent.”
“That is not what Colonel Moran here just told us. He claims you pitched a man from a balloon not two nights ago, a balloon mighty similar to the one that you just arrived on.”
Clay’s eyes widened slightly before he glanced over at the silent Colonel. “A good bluff, Mr. Holmes, but you will have to do better than that. The sun will set upon the British Empire before an Eton man peaches on one of their own.”
“This may be your last chance to tell all, John Clay, before the quality of my mercy is strained past the point of no return,” said Holmes, severely.
“Ah, yes, well, it has been some time since England last shed a drop of royal blood. I fear not,” said he with utter insouciance.
§
As that was the last word that John Clay or the others would utter, we soon left the five captured criminals in the capable hands of Scotland Yard and decamped back to Mycroft’s rooms, though Holmes was careful to take the eight foot tube with him as we left.
I remained silent during the cab ride back, turning the events of the case over in my mind. However, once we had settled in to the study’s armchairs, I turned to my friend. “There are a few things, Holmes, that I still do not fully understand.”
“Pray tell, Watson.”
“I see that Clay, Archie, and the Beddingtons planned to land upon the roof, cut their way through the glass dome, and then rappel down into the lobby. But how did they plan to crack the vault door while under the constant view of the guardsman in Mr. Pycroft’s watchtower? Was the guard eliminated in some fashion? Or did they bribe him?”
Holmes laughed. “Neither, Watson. Your methods would have been considered by the mastermind of this scheme, but both would have been rejected as excessively risky. Mr. Pycroft did far too good a job ensuring that the guard’s position was both unassailable, but also well-recompensed. I learned that Mr. Pycroft had an ingenious method of dealing with bribed guards. They were expected to report any such approaches, and said report would immediately generate a payment to the guard from the bank in the same amount offered. Only once or twice has he actually been required to pay out, for most criminals have learned that Silvester’s is far too tough a nut to crack. Instead, our friends employed a rather curious strategy, which can be found within this tube.” He hefted the eight-foot long cylinder.
“What is it?”
“See for yourself, Watson.” Holmes unscrewed the end and drew forth a rolled canvas. It proved to be a perfect reproduction of the lobby of the bank, but curiously devoid of any people. I immediately recognized it.
“The painting of Mr. Silvester!” I exclaimed.
“Very good, Watson. Yes, I recognized the hand of Victor Lynch, the forger, in the brush strokes of the supposed Achille Pendré. It was then I realized how they planned to fool the watchtower guard – by showing him the empty lobby that he expected to see each time he peered through the grill.”
“And what were they trying to steal from Silvester’s?”
“Ah, now you come to the heart of the problem, Watson. Given the involvement of Colonel Moran in this matter, one cannot but wonder if perhaps his old master had stashed some old deposit box within? One that escaped the attention of both myself and Inspector Patterson when we were cataloging the list of his assets. It would be curious to identify it and see what secret documents lie within.”
“So you believe Moran to be the mastermind? Is he our Mortlock?”
“Honestly, Watson, I reject that possibility. Moran is a weapon. He can be pointed at something or someone, but he is no brilliant thinker. I fear that we may be putting out small fires when we enable the arrest of Windibank, Parker, Clay, Archie, the Beddingtons, and even Moran himself. But the bonfire still blazes. We have yet to identify the man himself, and I am certain that he still possesses forces that he has kept in reserve. The question is where shall he deploy them next?”
I had no answer for this question, but we had not long to wait before our secret adversary reared his head. The door to the study opened and Mycroft’s ancient butler, Stanley, appeared with a note for Holmes. It had been folded over twice and sealed with a red wax pressed down with an 1889 Victoria Jubilee Crown coin. The note was superscribed to “Sherlock Holmes, Esq. To be left ‘til called for.” It was written upon ordinary cream-laid paper without an identifying watermark. My friend tore it open, and we read it together. It was not dated, and ran in this way:
atuaoltrnfntaxeenwieimeaefgieoihrfritnoetigohetiirsntraeyaeehrmryulfrmsprmeyaanlytsdrauyaethkdmevhnsopiohdhefelaceaogtohlpeeothtiliegmneoaafhttodtsuyortte. – MORTLOCK
Holmes studied this for some minutes, his face grave with unease. Finally, he set it down, and looked over at me. “As you are aware, Watson, I am familiar with virtually all forms of abstruse cryptograms, from the absurdly simple extra words of Mr. Beddoes, to the fiendishly clever little men of old Patrick. I believe, from the frequency distribution of the characters, that this is a rail-fence cipher. You can see that Mr. Mortlock has given us a fairly long strand to work with, and we can thus tell that the letter ‘E’ appears no less than twenty times. As ‘E’ is the most common letter in the English alphabet, one can hypothesize that this is not a complex polyalphabetic cryptogram, such as was devised by Mousier Vigenère, where one letter is substituted for another using multiple shifting alphabets. Rather this is a transposition, where the plain-text is written downwards and upwards on successive rails of an imaginary fence, with the cipher-text then read off in horizontal rows. It is an ancient technique, dating back to the scytale rods of the Greeks, and has been widely used in recent wars as a battlefield code. It is easy to decrypt if you know the number of rails used by the authors, and even without that key, it can be done by brute force and sufficient time.”
“But we have the key,” said I quietly.
“We do?” he exclaimed.
“Try ‘Four.’ As in ‘The Sign of.’”
He stared at me for a moment, a curious expression upon his face. He then bent to work for some time at the table. Finally he looked up and handed to me a piece of paper, covered with agitated scribblings that were far removed from Holmes’ usual precise hand. I had to mentally insert spaces in order to form the string of letters into words, and when I had done so, the result turned my blood cold:
Again I tell you, it is harder for a guilty man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a sphinx to thread the eye of a needle. What crimes are you guilty of, Mr. Holmes? Prepare to meet thy fate. MORTLOCK
“What does it mean, Holmes?” I whispered.
He looked at me, his face a somber mask. “It is a threat, of course, but from whom exactly I still cannot be absolutely certain. Not yet. I now hold in my hands several of the scarlet threads that are running through the tangled skein of one of the strangest cases which ever perplexed a man’s brain, and yet I lack the one or two which are needful to complete my theory. But I will have them, Watson, I’ll have them!”
§
THE ASSASSINATION OF SHERLOCK HOLMES will conclude in…
THE FALLING CU
RTAIN
§
About the Author
In the year 1998 CRAIG JANACEK took his degree of Doctor of Medicine of Vanderbilt University, and proceeded to Stanford to go through the training prescribed for pediatricians in practice. Having completed his studies there, he was duly attached to the University of California, San Francisco as Associate Professor. The author of over seventy medical monographs upon a variety of obscure lesions, his travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of his fictional works. To date, these have been published solely in electronic format, including two non-Holmes novels (The Oxford Deception & The Anger of Achilles Peterson), the trio of holiday adventures collected as The Midwinter Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, and a Watsonian novel entitled The Isle of Devils. His current project is the short trilogy The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes. His first in-press work will be included in the forthcoming MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (Fall 2015). Craig Janacek is a nom-de-plume.
For augmented content, connect with him online at: http://craigjanacek.wordpress.com.
§
Literary Agent’s Foreword: Annotated
As detailed in the Foreword to The Adventure of the Pharaoh’s Curse, herein we present for your enjoyment a newly discovered tale by Dr. John H. Watson, the friend and biographer of the world’s first and foremost consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. The manuscript was found in a much damaged condition, and in the restoration, a conscious decision was made to adopt American spellings of such words as ‘colour’ and ‘humour.’ Furthermore, for reasons known only to the author, and contrary to his more typical-style,[1] Dr. Watson divided into three separate narratives a unified tale of Holmes’ temporary return from the Happy Isles of retirement.
A synopsis of the first narrative: In late 1909, Sherlock Holmes has been drawn out of retirement by the pleadings of Inspector Lestrade, who is distraught that Holmes’ one-time ally, Inspector Patterson, has been cruelly murdered. With Dr. Watson at his side, Holmes journeys to the British Museum, where priceless items have been vanishing. In the Egyptian Gallery, strange things have been seen and there are whispers of a curse laid down by the mummy of a disturbed Pharaoh. The Director, the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities, and four guards are all suspects, but one guard has vanished and another proves to be the son of an old enemy of Holmes. When Holmes’ first solution fails to solve the case, Dr. Watson helps to set him back upon the right track. Finally, Parker, the garrotter, and James Windibank, are unmasked by Holmes as the villains. But just when Watson is ready to celebrate the successful conclusion to this final case, a coded message arrives for Holmes. The mysterious Mortlock has asked them a continuation of the riddle of the Sphinx: ‘what has no legs at midnight?’ And Holmes deduces that the answer can only be: ‘a corpse.’
We now commence, reader, where Watson left off, with that eerie message threatening all that they had accomplished together over the years and perhaps even the very life of Sherlock Holmes. But fear not, friends of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for ‘beyond this place of wrath and tears… and yet the menace of the years, finds and shall find [Holmes] unafraid.’[2]
§
THE PROBLEM OF
THREADNEEDLE STREET:
Annotated
It was with some measure of hesitation that I took up my pen in order to chronicle the incident of the Sphinx’s Riddle, for never before in the long and storied career of Mr. Sherlock Holmes had I witnessed such a mysterious conclusion to a case. At first glance, it appeared that Holmes had very neatly tied up all of the loose threads, sending both Parker and Windibank on well-deserved trips to Newgate and possibly even the gallows after that. However, the arrival of the encoded telegram, with its Sphinx-like riddle ascribed to one Mortlock, whomever he may be, suggested that we swam in far deeper waters than I had originally suspected.
I nonetheless did my best to set down the facts as I knew them at the time. Over the nearly three decades of our association, I have learned several artifices from my good friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes. One is to conceal the links between a series of deductions, so as to suddenly present the conclusion and thereby produce a startling effect. He has performed this act innumerable times for the benefit of his clients, the inspectors of Scotland Yard, and even me. However, in this particular case, I felt that some cruel trick was being played upon Holmes himself, for he had been presented with a disquieting close to an apparently simple case. Could he shake off the mental rust that must have accumulated over the last six years of his retirement and reason back from this message, and the crimes that preceded it, to the prime mover of the drama? Who was Mortlock?
It was with these thoughts turning over in my brain that I lay down for a restless sleep. When I finally awoke the following morning, I found the lanky form of Holmes pacing back and forth in the sitting room of the hotel’s suite, his chin sunk upon his breast, and his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. His aquiline face was drawn and his grey eyes shone with grim determination. I could deduce from the fact that the room was literally ankle-deep in newspapers that Holmes had experienced little repose the prior night.
“Ah, good morning, Watson,” said he, amiably. “I see that you too had a late night.”
I was heartened to see that he was in a good humor, despite the threat which loomed over us. “Let me guess, Holmes. You deduced this from the dark circles under my eyes and the hasty way by which I have shaved my cheeks.”
He laughed merrily. “You are making progress, Watson, my dear fellow, but you forgot the most important clue of all, from which the final inference could be made.”
I glanced over at the mirror hanging upon the wall. Even after all this time, I was still somewhat surprised to not find the once thin-as-a-lath fellow of nine and twenty years, but rather a stout, thick-necked, middle-sized man of fifty-seven. Only the moustache over my square jaw remained unchanged, even as it fell from the passing tides of fashion. Some things simply fit a man’s face and cannot be altered. But I could not spot Holmes’ final clue. “And what is that, Holmes?”
“I believe that I have stressed to you before, Watson, the critical importance of observing any peculiarities upon a man’s hands. In this case, your right hand has both a heightened redness upon the callus of the second finger and numerous stains of a blue iron gall ink. From this, one may safely conclude that you have been engaged upon the task of setting down the events of the last two days into one of your little sketches. Since I am well aware that once you start upon such a task, you like to see it through, it is simple enough to hypothesize that you remained up late through the night working upon it.”
“Indeed, Holmes, and I must say that I am disquieted by the message from the so-called Mortlock.”
He nodded in agreement. “As you know, Watson, when I was in active practice, it was my method to never miss any advertisements in the agony columns. They are a wealth of information and a hunting-ground for the student of the unusual. During my retirement, I have entirely given up such habits. But if I am to deduce the identity of our Mr. Mortlock, I need to revert to my previous ways. As you can see, I have therefore arranged for the local news agent to send up not only fresh editions of every paper, but as many older copies that he could get his hands upon. I have just been looking though all of them in order to master the particulars of what is transpiring in this vast city teeming with over five millions of people.”[3]
I glanced at the jumble of newspapers on the floor, from the Times to the Morning Post to the Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, and many others. “Would it not be simpler to just question Parker or Windibank? If they were put up to the job by someone, surely they must know the identity of the mastermind?”
Holmes shook his head. “It is rare to find an informer, for their lifespan is short and filled with fear.”[4]
“And did you discover anything of note in the papers?”
“Nothing conclusive. But there are some interesting items worthy of following up. P
erhaps one of them will prove to be the thread that I require.”
“So you plan to remain in London for some time?”
“Indeed. I cannot conduct this inquiry from Sussex, that much is certain,” said he, chuckling. “If I may ask for your co-operation, my dear Watson, you would confer a great favor upon me by staying on as well.”
“On the contrary,” I answered, “I should wish nothing better.”
Holmes raised one of his bushy eyebrows. “We may have several hard and dangerous days’ and nights’ work in front of us. Are you certain?”
“Of course, Holmes.”
“Very good,” said he, smiling. “I have often said that there is no man who is better worth having at my side when I am in a tight place, and I think we may find ourselves betwixt the devil and the deep sea before the matter is clear.[5] Ha! This is like the old days, then! Well, if we are to continue this, we shall need a London base. The Northumberland Hotel may be fine for a night or two, but it is hardly an adequate headquarters for conducting an investigation. And our sanctum at Baker Street is no more. It is a great pity that Mrs. Hudson has sold the flat to an insurance company and retired to Brighton.”[6]
“Unfortunately, I sold my house on Queen Anne Street as well.”
Holmes snorted with amusement. “I think not, Watson. Even if you had not set up your shingle in Southsea, I fear that your good wife would little stand my particular habits for very long.”
“You do her a discredit, Holmes.”
“Ah, I did not mean to offend you, Watson. Of course, I do not mean to disparage your lovely wife, of whom I wholeheartedly approve. But my ways would be difficult for any woman to become accustomed. Not to mention that there may be an element of danger, to which I would fain expose her.”
The Problem of Threadneedle Street (The Assassination of Sherlock Holmes Book 2) Page 8
