He hastened back down to the road to the jeweller’s, returning some five minutes later.
“I’m getting forgetful in my dotage,” he said, brandishing the magnifying glass at me. “The old grey matter is starting to wane.”
“It comes to us all, my friend,” I said with a rueful smile. “Even the mightiest of intellects.”
CHAPTER FOUR
REPTILIO THE HUMAN COBRA
We arrived at a stretch of elegant park, complete with boating lake, putting course and bowling green. Beyond lay scrubland, and it was here that the circus was situated, within a stone’s throw of the sea. The red-and-white Big Top dominated, its canvas snapping and its guy-ropes twanging in the persistent onshore breeze. People were drifting into the tent, the matinee performance due to begin in half an hour. Barrel organ music played jauntily and, more distantly, a lion roared. A burly strongman in a leopard-skin tunic strode past us carrying a two-hundred-pound barbell on his shoulder as though it weighed no more than an umbrella. A clown juggled a half-dozen balls, much to the delight of a small knot of children.
Holmes did not head for the Big Top but rather diverted past it to a longer, lower tent. Around the entrance a painted hoarding announced that this was McMahon’s World-Famous Freak Show – A Cavalcade of Oddities, Monstrosities, and Curiosities! Holmes paid the sixpence entry fee for each of us, and as we stepped inside he murmured to me, “I don’t suppose you happen to have brought your trusty service revolver along, have you?”
“Holmes, I haven’t fired the thing in anger in nigh on ten years. My wife won’t even allow it in the house.”
“That’s a no, then.”
“Forgive me but I hardly could have predicted I would need a gun. This was meant to be a social visit, old friends catching up, not two superannuated sleuths rushing headlong into danger. There is, I take it, some risk attached to what we’re doing?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. I asked about your revolver more in hope than expectation. It never hurts to take precautions. On balance, however, I believe we are both up to the task of collaring the suspect should he refuse to come quietly. My baritsu skills have not entirely deserted me, in spite of a lack of practice, and I’m sure your military training is still embedded in your muscles, for all that it’s been more than three decades since you were on campaign. The reflexes remember, even if the mind thinks it has forgotten.”
Holmes’s faith in my combat prowess, while I was sure it was hopelessly misplaced, was nonetheless heartening.
The freak show tent smelled of mud, trampled grass, and a strange, indefinable odour which I am going to call “fascinated revulsion”. Holmes and I, along with a handful of other paying customers, strolled past a series of roped-off booths where the bizarrest specimens of humanity disported themselves for our benefit.
There was the Tattooed Man, every inch of his bare skin a network of designs and arabesque patterns. There was Giganta, a lady so fat that she appeared to have three chins and a similar number of folds of flesh over each ankle. And of course the obligatory bearded woman, whose luxurious facial hirsuteness would have been the envy of any pirate captain.
There was also an unfortunate afflicted with Von Recklinghausen disease, which had left him with warty growths all over his body, a twisted pelvis and a distended cranium. The swelling of his skull was such that a conical bony protrusion stuck out from the centre of his forehead, and this had earned him the sobriquet the Rhinoceros Man, no doubt in homage to Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, who had suffered from the same syndrome. Holmes and I had made Merrick’s acquaintance during an adventure I have yet to write up but which I am thinking of bestowing with the title “The Deformed Angel”, and I can honestly say I have rarely met a gentler, humbler, more delicately mannered creature than he, for all the grotesqueness of his outer self.
People peered and ogled at the freaks, buoyed up with a sense of “there but for the grace of God go I”. Children, with the absence of self-restraint that is the mark of immaturity, gesticulated and jeered, although some of the adults present behaved little better. One or two of the women, and not a few of the men, looked visibly unwell.
For my part, I was overcome by curiosity, to such an extent that I couldn’t tear my gaze from the array of weirdness and ugliness on display before me, even as I berated myself for my prurience. As a general practitioner it was my sworn duty to treat all the people in my care alike, no matter what repellent medical condition afflicted them, but here, outside my surgery, I found it hard to maintain a professional detachment. I wanted to stare like anyone else, much though I berated myself for it. Wasn’t that what we had paid for – the liberty to regard fellow human beings as dispassionately as though they were museum exhibits? Sixpence was all it cost to leave our sympathy and our decorum at the door.
Holmes touched my elbow. “Ah. Here we are. Watch, Watson.”
On a wooden podium stood a man. Most of him looked fairly normal, apart from his head, which was flattened on top and pointed in front, so much so that his eyes were set further apart than is customary. He was dressed solely in a loincloth, revealing a frame that was thin almost to emaciation. His sign described him as “Reptilio the Human Cobra”. His looks alone seemed deserving of the name, for the profile of his head, with its low brow and forward tapering, reminded me distinctly of that of a snake.
At the centre of the podium was a wire birdcage. Reptilio opened the door, whose dimensions were perhaps seven inches by nine. He inserted one foot in the cage, then, crouching down, the whole of one leg. Before our very eyes he proceeded to introduce the rest of himself into the cage. He bent, twisted and doubled over in ways that the most limber of contortionists would have had difficulty emulating. He seemed able to dislocate his shoulders and hips at will, with no evident distress, and to flex his hinge joints such as the knee and elbow in completely the opposite direction than the good Lord in His wisdom intended. In less than a minute he was fully ensconced inside the cage, and a small tug of his fingers enabled him to close the little door, sealing himself in.
I have to admit I was more than a tad impressed, and more than a tad disconcerted, and I applauded, as did most of the others who formed an audience for the feat, even as I winced squeamishly.
When I perceived that Holmes was not clapping, but rather merely looking on with a wry fascination, that was when it dawned on me that before us lay the accomplice of whoever had masterminded the robbery at Barraclough’s. Only a man as eerily, unnaturally lithe as Reptilio could have wormed down the lightwell and penetrated the cellar via the tiny window.
“Him,” I whispered. “He’s the one.”
“Indubitably,” said my companion. “Just yesterday the redoubtable Mrs Tuppen described to me a trip to this very circus where she had seen a man climb into a birdcage no larger than the one in which she keeps her own pet parrot.” He mimicked his housekeeper’s thin, querulous voice. “‘Tweren’t natural, Mr Holmes. Not right that a man should be able to fold himself like that, like crumpling up a piece of paper. Almost witchcraft, it was.’”
Reptilio undid the cage door and began to climb out. He emerged head first, his peculiarly shaped skull just fitting through the aperture.
“We should rush him now,” I said. “Grab him while he’s still half in, half out and we have him at a disadvantage.”
“Unwise.” Holmes cast a meaningful glance towards a couple of circus employees – roustabouts is I believe what they’re called – who were keeping an eye on things in the freak show tent. Both were big, beefy men with faces that spoke of former careers as bareknuckle pugilists or else a general, leisure-time fondness for fisticuffs. “I’d prefer not to earn the unwanted attention of those two. Anyway, I have a better idea.”
We repaired outside and waited until the freak show closed briefly to allow the “exhibits” a rest. Soon enough the Tattooed Man, Giganta and the rest filed out of the tent, making for the wooden caravans that were parked haphazardly round the back of the Big Top.
Holmes and I stole after them, at a distance. We saw Reptilio bid the others a casual farewell and climb the steps into his own caravan.
“Now to beard the serpent in its nest,” said Holmes. “I will approach from the front, formally. You, Watson, are to stay here and stand guard. I fear the Human Cobra may prove as slippery as his namesake, so be prepared and on the alert.”
Holmes knocked on the caravan door, and when Reptilio answered, looking surly and not a little suspicious, my friend launched into a monologue about being a talent scout for a rival circus, they were on the lookout for new acts, the terms of any contract would be highly favourable, et cetera. Reptilio was by no means persuaded at first, but such was Holmes’s silver tongue that he soon began nodding his snakelike head, intrigued. He invited my friend inside, and I remained where I was, some dozen yards from the caravan. Behind me the orchestra in the Big Top struck up a rollicking march, accompanied by the tramp and trumpet of elephants and cheers from the crowd.
Further minutes passed, and I regret to say that my eyelids grew somewhat heavy and began to droop. I had reached the age where some kind of nap during the day was no longer an option, more a necessity, and the urge to take forty winks was pressing hard upon me now.
I had almost dozed off where I stood, when all at once I beheld an eerie sight which jolted me out of my somnolence. Reptilio was squeezing out through a tiny window in the side of his caravan: his head, then one arm, then the top half of a wriggling torso. Feeling a crawl of horripilation up the back of my neck, for a moment or so I was too stunned and aghast to move.
Then a sound of splintering wood issued from within, followed by a sharp, urgent cry in a voice which I recognised as Holmes’s. This roused me from my paralysis, and I dashed over and seized Reptilio firmly by the available wrist.
“Watson!” Holmes called out. “He is trying to get away! Do you have him?”
“I do,” I called back. “Do you?”
“By the heels, literally. But the man’s deuced hard to keep hold of.”
I knew this myself, for I was having difficulty maintaining my grasp on his arm. Reptilio writhed and squirmed like an eel, cursing me and Holmes all the while in terrifically colourful terms. He demanded we release him, on pain of damnation to hell, which made me all the more determined not to comply, and doubtless Holmes too.
Eventually Holmes found a means of securing Reptilio’s legs, and the man was trapped, suspended part-way through the window. The commotion drew people’s notice. One of the roustabouts from the freak show tent came up and challenged me. I stated that I was in the process of making a citizen’s arrest and that Reptilio was wanted in connection with the commission of a burglary. The roustabout expressed scepticism and was on the verge of manhandling me very forcefully when Holmes emerged from the caravan bearing a heavy burlap sack. From it he produced several pieces of jewellery and a loose handful of iridescent black pearls, each the size of a child’s toy marble, of the kind Barraclough had described.
“Is this,” he said to the roustabout, “the usual property of a circus artiste? Are you all in the habit of concealing hundreds of pounds’ worth of gemstones in your caravans?”
The roustabout had to allow that they were not.
“Perhaps, then, you’d be so good as to fetch your employer, Mr McMahon, if he is available.”
The roustabout glanced at Reptilio, poking from the caravan window like some huge misshapen tongue from a pursed mouth, and said, “Yes. I think I’ll do that.”
In no time the circus proprietor was on the scene, an affable, ruddy-cheeked fellow in tweed, and once Holmes had shown him the jewellery, McMahon was in no doubt as to Reptilio’s guilt.
“Up to your old nonsense again, eh?” he said to Reptilio, contempt in his voice. “I gave you fair warning last time, after that business with the banker’s strongbox in Dorchester. It was only you could have done it, what with there being no way in save the chimney. I didn’t speak up then, when I ought to have, and I regret it. Now what have you done? Robbed a jeweller? People like you do little for the reputation of circus folk. You bring shame on us.”
Reptilio blustered, but soon the bluff and bravado turned to spite. “You don’t pay us nearly enough, McMahon,” he snarled. “What kind of life is this anyway? Being paraded in front of all those goggling eyes, those slack jaws, those poking fingers, day after day, night after night. I deserve more than this. I deserve a better life.”
It was tantamount to an admission of guilt. The game was up. Reptilio the Human Cobra had been caught with his ill-gotten gains. Now all that remained was for him to surrender up the identity of his partner in crime.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PRISONERS
As we returned to Barraclough’s, Holmes enlightened me as to what had transpired inside Reptilio’s caravan. His talent-scout imposture might have got him through the door, but Reptilio quickly smelled a rat when Holmes was unable to furnish him with proof of his bona fides. Reptilio, sensing trouble, dived into his small dressing-room-cum-washroom with a view to making an escape. He bolted the door behind him and retrieved the stolen jewellery from its place of concealment. Holmes broke down the door, which was little more than a piece of plywood, and seized Reptilio from behind, even as I was struggling with the fellow’s front portion outside. Ultimately Holmes lashed his legs to a coat hook with the man’s own longjohns.
It wasn’t until we got back to Barraclough’s that I learned of the skulduggery my friend had got up to when he had gone back to fetch his mislaid magnifying glass. The proprietor and Searle were still in the cellar, having been imprisoned there by Holmes! Holmes had asked Barraclough to hand him the keys on some pretext of wishing to inspect them. Then he had darted out of the cellar and locked its sturdy door behind him. By this means he had sealed both men in securely, for the cellar door could be opened only from the outside.
Barraclough and Searle were extremely irked by Holmes’s behaviour. I could sympathise. He had practised a deception upon me as much as them. He had not in fact forgotten his magnifying glass at all. That was merely a pretext.
“What is the meaning of this?” Barraclough thundered as Holmes unlocked the door. “Three hours we have been stuck down here. Three whole hours! We’ve cried out for help ’til we were hoarse, to no avail. You had better have a very good explanation, you scoundrel, else you’ll be hearing from my lawyers. To detain a man against his will – unconscionable!”
“Forgive me, Mr Barraclough. Your sequestration was quite necessary. I had to ensure that neither of you was able to leave the premises before I returned.”
“But in God’s name, why? You surely don’t suspect me of robbing my own shop. The idea of it! What could I possibly hope to gain?”
“You are well insured, I imagine.”
“Indeed I am, but… Ah.” Barraclough’s demeanour hardened, fire becoming frost. “I see. So that is what you are accusing me of. You have fallen in my estimation, Mr Holmes. You really think that I would stoop so low? Me, a prosperous businessman with a thriving trade? My lawyers will definitely want to have words with you.”
“As a matter of fact, sir,” said Holmes, “it isn’t you I needed to imprison. It is your subdued and rather sheepish-looking colleague over there, who would surely otherwise have absconded the moment he was sure I had gone.”
Searle was skulking in a corner of the cellar with a very wretched air indeed, like a dog that has been caught with the lunchtime joint of ham in its jaws. He was trapped and he knew it. He couldn’t get past us up the stairs, not without a struggle, and he was no fighter. Certainly, despite being half our age, he would be no match for the two of us. All he could do was pace the floor and fume impotently.
Barraclough, the penny dropping, rounded on him. “Searle? It was you? Not Tremlett? You stole from me? From me?”
Holmes quickly elucidated. Reptilio, now in the custody of the police, had named Searle as his co-conspirator. The whole plan, he had told us, was Searle’s
doing. “Gent came to me, asking if I wanted to earn a great deal of money,” the Human Cobra had said. “He’d got these duplicates made of the safe keys. It seemed like a bit of a bludge – in and out in quarter of an hour – with the proceeds split seventy-thirty. Not sure why I should get the lesser cut, being as I was doing all the hard work, but still it weren’t a sum to be sneezed at.”
“But why?” said Barraclough to his employee. “Granted, the salary I pay you isn’t stupendous, but it’s a living wage. Why did you want more?”
“Searle, would you care to respond to that?” Holmes asked.
Searle offered nothing but a truculent silence, so Holmes answered on his behalf.
“Remember how he complained about not being able to pay for a wet-nurse? This is a man with aspirations, dreams of a lifestyle that he can’t, as things stand, afford. Children can be terrifically demanding, a drain on one’s resources in more ways than one. Searle has been finding fatherhood hard. Is that not so, Mr Searle?”
Again no response, so Holmes continued, “It has stretched him thin, both financially and personally. Perhaps, after all those sleepless nights, he became desperate.”
“He could have gone to his bank manager for assistance,” said Barraclough. “Or even asked me. I would have given you a loan, Searle, to tide you over. I might also have considered a small raise.”
“Why should he need one,” said Holmes, “when a single theft, if pulled off successfully, would set him up handsomely for life? Why abase himself when, in one fell swoop, he could get the better of you?”
Searle’s baleful glare confirmed it. “I’ve had enough of people lording it over me, Barraclough. You. Your snooty clients. Everyone looks down on me. I want more, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t have it. A loan? A small raise? Spare me your charity!”
“But this means Tremlett, wherever he may be, is innocent,” said Barraclough.
“As a newborn babe,” said Holmes. “Searle did everything he could to cast the burden of suspicion on to him, all the while feigning disbelief that Tremlett could ever have done something so heinous. A devious, unscrupulous fellow, aren’t you, Searle? It occurred to me from the outset that you might be the villain of the piece, but I could not reasonably conclude that without compelling, incontrovertible evidence. That is why I took the precaution of corralling you here, along with the unfortunate Mr Barraclough. Here, by the way, is part of the loot.” Holmes handed the burlap sack to Barraclough. “I imagine that when the police search Searle’s house, which they are on their way to do even as we speak, they will find the remainder – the lion’s share.”
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