Sherlock Holmes - Gods of War

by James Lovegrove

  Back inside the house, I wandered round the cosy sitting room enumerating the items I recognised from our Baker Street days. Here was the Moroccan slipper in which Holmes still kept his black shag, though it was somewhat more threadbare these days and sat not by the fireplace but atop a stack of yellowing back issues of The Times within easy reach of his favourite armchair. Here was the jack-knife with which he used to stick unanswered correspondence to the mantelpiece, much to Mrs Hudson’s despair; it had taken up residence on a writing desk where it now fulfilled the function of letter opener. Here were the copious and wildly diverse textbooks which had served as Holmes’s personal reference library, still as dog-eared as I remembered but looking a trifle dustier and less oft-consulted than of old. Here was his beloved violin, although when I stroked a finger across its strings they let out a plangent, discordant arpeggio that suggested they had not been tuned, and the instrument had not been played, in some while.

  Dotting the room were several familiar pieces of furniture which likewise evoked a prick of nostalgia. Holmes had purchased these from Mrs Hudson for a more than fair price, electing to take with him things he was accustomed to, shabby and worn though they were, so that he would not have to kit out his new home completely from scratch.

  It was like looking at my own past in a warped mirror, everything rearranged, disordered, recognisable but still strange. A bookcase had been added to the room since last I had come to stay. It occupied an alcove by the hearth, filling the space from floor to ceiling, and every volume in it appeared brand new, the leather binding freshly tooled and the gold intaglio lettering immaculate. Examining the spines, I failed to find a single title or author I knew. Most were foreign, so amongst these the very British name of Samuel Chatwood stood out. I had heard the surname mentioned recently but couldn’t at that moment recall precisely when or by whom.

  I was just about to reach for the book when I discerned a queer sound coming from outdoors. It was a low drone, soft but insistent, with a distinct vibrato to it.

  “Holmes?” I called up the stairs to his bedroom. “Holmes, do you hear that?”

  Answer came there none, so I stepped out of the back door to see for myself what was making the noise. It occurred to me that it might be the bees. Perhaps something had disturbed them and the drone denoted the onset of an angry swarm. Having no great desire to be stung, I lingered in the doorway, poised to flee back inside should the situation warrant it. The bees, however, were still languidly circling the hives, looking in no way minatory or aggressive.

  The noise revealed itself to be emanating from higher in the air and to be manmade rather than natural. For, as I stood there peering out, an aircraft came soaring over the rooftops of the terrace of artisans’ cottages adjacent to the pub.

  It was a biplane with an upper wing twice the span of the lower and an undercarriage that consisted of paired wheels attached to ski-like struts. The front end where the pilot sat was a wooden oblong with a rounded nose, not dissimilar in proportions to a coffin. The rear was a wedge-shaped construction of spars and braces leading to a broad flat tailfin with ailerons set vertically above and below at the centre. A large engine positioned behind the cockpit drove the thing along, its propeller a gleaming whirr.

  The plane shot almost directly overhead at an altitude of no more than thirty feet. I ducked reflexively and covered my ears against the machine’s puttering din. As it carried on by, I straightened up, feeling not a little foolish.

  Eager to see more of this rarity, I dashed through the house and out of the front door onto the green. There, I watched the biplane wend its way southward along the shallow valley that led to the coast.

  Just at the point where it would have been above the cliffs, the plane, now no larger in my eyesight than a fly, made a sharp left turn and began following a course running parallel to the shore. Within a minute it was lost from view, the racket of its engine reduced to a faint, almost inaudible hum.

  This grew again in volume, and shortly the biplane reappeared, heading in the opposite direction, due west, still in line with the shore. As it passed from sight a second time, I became aware of Holmes standing beside me. He had thrown a dressing gown over his pyjamas and his feet were sheathed in carpet slippers.

  “A wonder of the modern age, eh?” he said with just a touch of irony. “Progress in motion.”

  “Alarming contraption,” I said. “The thing looks hopelessly spindly and fragile, as though it might collapse at any moment. One strong puff of wind, that’s it, done.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It seems sturdy enough to me. The frame is mostly made of ash wood, strong but flexible, and the skeletal design lends it considerable rigidity. In Europe they prefer a monocoque structure for their aircraft, an outer shell which provides both shape and support, but that plane’s a British one, a Grahame-White Type VII, and uses tension-compression – far more stable and reliable.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about aeroplanes all of a sudden. Is this some new hobby of yours?”

  “Hardly. I know something about this particular plane because I’ve seen it several times before and, out of curiosity, undertaken some research on it. It belongs to a local bigwig, somebody-or-other Mallinson, his Christian name escapes me for the moment. He lives a few miles that-a-way” – Holmes gestured to the northwest – “near Alfriston. Flying is one of his passions. He works up in London most of the week, but at weekends, when the weather’s clear, he’s often aloft and buzzing around in the skies. Self-made man. Worth a fortune.”

  The biplane returned for yet another sweep along the coastline.

  “Though it isn’t his usual habit,” Holmes remarked, “to track back and forth like this.” He shaded his eyes with both hands and squinted. “Normally he darts around hither and yon at random, sporting in the air. This looks more as though he has a specific aim – as though he’s searching for something. Hmmm.”

  We watched the aircraft glide in and out of our eyeline several more times, heading first one way then the other. There definitely appeared to be a purpose to its journeyings, a pattern, though I could not fathom what it might be; nor could Holmes.

  “Well,” I said at last, “you’ll never catch me in one of those, that’s for sure. I read the papers. Aeroplanes are forever plummeting out of the sky. That Frenchman – what’s his name? – Blériot – he barely made it across the Channel, didn’t he? It wasn’t a landing at Dover so much as a controlled crash. And he’s supposed to be one of the experts, a pioneer. No, I’m perfectly content to keep both feet on the ground, thank you very much.”

  “Watson, Watson.” Holmes clapped me on the back good-humouredly. “Your stubborn resistance to change is one of your most appealing features and a true constant in life. You’re a rock, a granite monument, able to weather the storms of time, and I wouldn’t have you any other way. Now, how about some breakfast? There are kippers in the larder and some of Mrs Tuppen’s excellent kedgeree. Then perhaps a walk to Birling Gap and along the beach to Beachy Head lighthouse. What do you say?”

  It seemed a capital idea, and I gladly re-entered the cottage, enlivened by the prospect of food.

  Holmes followed, but not before casting a last glance in the direction of the biplane. His brow was ever so slightly furrowed, his lips pensive, and had I been thinking less about my stomach I might have recognised the signs. Something had intrigued him. What it might be, even he himself did not know then, but his mind was a crystal-set with a highly sensitive antenna, attuned to the anomalous. A mystery was hailing him on some special secret frequency, and he was starting to adjust his inner cat’s whisker, the better to hear its summons.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE BODY ON THE SHORE

  Walking-boots on, we set off down to Birling Gap. Here the undulating run of cliffs known as the Seven Sisters made their deepest dip and access to the beach could be gained by means of a set of rickety steps.

  The tide was out, exposing a rugged sweep of rock pools shagg
y with kelp and bladderwrack and riven with tidal runnels. Ever since his encounter with a lion’s mane jellyfish some years earlier, Holmes had become something of a keen amateur naturalist, especially where littoral fauna were concerned, and he took delight in showing me the dark red, cherry-like globes of sea anemones and in rousting a large greenish crab out of hiding.

  As we toiled on along the beach, sometimes losing our footing on the treacherous pebbles, we reminisced, as old men will. We discussed Inspector Lestrade, now settled in comfortable pensioned retirement in Weston-super-Mare.

  “You know he still writes to me,” I said. “Almost every time a new story of mine is published I’ll get a letter from him, either drawing me up on a point of police procedure or objecting to my characterisation of him, or both.”

  “Ha!” Holmes exclaimed. “If you ask me, you are unusually generous towards Lestrade. He was always infinitely more dull-witted than you portray.”

  “He keeps threatening to pen his own memoirs – ‘to set the record straight’.”

  “That would be a work of fiction I would be most fascinated to read.”

  Wiggins, the former leader of the Baker Street Irregulars, had turned his prospects around entirely and was now a police officer himself.

  “It is the most wonderful volte face I have known,” Holmes said. “From street urchin to uniformed upholder of the law. Perhaps consorting with us had a beneficial influence on him. He is prospering within the force, too. I have it on good authority that he has applied to become detective constable, and I am in no doubt he will make an excellent one.”

  “You wrote him a letter of recommendation, did you not?”

  “Only to help him get a foot in the door at Scotland Yard. Wiggins’s subsequent advancement is entirely his own doing. He was born with a lively, incisive mind, and it is no small pleasure to me that he has overcome the disadvantages of his background and upbringing and put that mind to good use. An Inspector Wiggins, as he will certainly one day become, will be worth a dozen plodding Lestrades.”

  Another old acquaintance of ours had recently been in communication with Holmes.

  “Fred Tilling?” I said. “The engineer fellow?”

  “None other. I contacted him to pick his brains about a few small practical matters, tapping his wealth of expertise. He was only too happy to help.”

  “Does he still sally forth in his other guise? I can’t say I’ve read any reports of his alter ego’s activities in the newspapers lately.”

  “I believe anno domini is creeping up on him as well as us.”

  “He can’t be more than forty-five.”

  “Too old for a double life, especially one as demanding as his. Time gets to us all, Watson, some sooner than others.”

  “Well, what was it you consulted him about?”

  “Perhaps you’ve noticed…”

  Holmes’s voice trailed off, and I would not have the answer to my enquiry for another five days.

  We had just passed the lighthouse, which stood atop a concrete plinth a hundred yards offshore, resplendent in striped red-and-white livery. It was a relatively new structure, built to replace the older clifftop lighthouse called Belle Tout, whose beacon could not always be seen from out to sea. Rounding a promontory, we spied a small knot of people ahead. They were gathered beside an object on the beach which I could not make out but which looked for all the world like a heap of damp laundry. Seagulls strutted and squawked nearby in indignation, as though thwarted of some prize.

  “What’s this?” Holmes mused, and quickened his pace.

  As we drew closer it became apparent that a gruesome discovery had been made. Just above the tide-line lay a sodden, mud-stained body, sprawled on its front. From its stillness and the skin pallor there was no disputing that the individual was quite dead.

  The crowd around it were a meanly dressed lot with gnarled, weatherbeaten complexions and the lean, rangy frames of those who earned a crust through hard physical labour. Holmes quietly informed me that they were fisher folk.

  “There’s a community of them that lives along there.” He pointed out a cluster of dark, spindly shacks which sat hard against the base of the cliffs some quarter of a mile further on. Skiffs and ketches were drawn up next to them just above the foreshore. Between, nets were strung out on poles to dry, resembling giant ragged spider webs. “Winnicks, they’re known as, and they are proud people and wary of outsiders. However, I have had some dealings with them. I shall make the overtures. You follow my lead. Hello!”

  At his cry of salutation, the fisher folk turned. Gimlet eyes studied us. Mouths were tightly set.

  “My name is Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps you remember me. There was that business two years ago when a holidaying family’s baby went missing and one of your number was falsely accused of the abduction. I had some hand in bringing the true culprit to justice.”

  “Aye, uz remembers you well, Mr Holmes,” said the eldest among them, a grizzled old salt with a clay pipe and a moth-eaten peaked cap. “You be no cupboard lover but a true bread-and-cheese friend. Uz be pleased to see you, sure-lye.”

  They shook hands, and the old man, in his broad Sussex accent, continued: “Young Jenny Fitch, what never stole that babby, still speaks gurt highly of the upstanding gentleman what got her out of moil, for if you hadn’t catched the brabagious wretch what truly scaddled the child, Jenny’d be turning crummy in jail even now. Not as uz sees the maid much these days, on account of she’s gone and wed some Chop-back over in Hastings.”

  Chop-backs, I gathered, were a rival fishing community just along the coast. From the way the old man spat the name, there was no love lost between them and Winnicks.

  “May I introduce my long-time colleague and comrade Dr John Watson,” said Holmes. “Watson, this is Tom Enwright.”

  The calloused hand that gripped mine was as dry and tough as boot leather.

  “Any friend of Mr Holmes be a friend of mine,” Enwright said.

  “So what have we here?” said Holmes, glancing at the body.

  “Some poor sock-lamb what has drownded, and it be an ernful dissight and all. Dunnamany get washed up on the shore roundabouts every year in total, but it ain’t a few. That there’s Beachy Head.” He pointed to the steep, towering cliff that rose at our backs. “There be mort what does for themselves off there.”

  I frowned. “Mort?”

  “It means a large quantity,” said Holmes. “Come on, Watson, it’s not that difficult a dialect to fathom.”

  “Yes,” Enwright went on, “lovers what has got into pettigues with the object of their affections, them what feels pick upon or pithered by life, some runagates as want to escape justice and chooses a long leap over the hangman’s noose. Thissun, she be the ninth this year uz has happened upon along our stretch of beach. Common a sight as midges, they be to uz.”

  “She?” I said. “But this is plainly the body of a man.”

  “The third-person singular pronoun is always feminine,” Holmes explained.

  “That be right,” said Enwright. “Like the saying goes, she be always a she, except a tomcat, and she be a he.”

  “How long is it since you found the body?” Holmes asked.

  “Not gone a half-an-hour. Uz sails in with the tide, all beasted but chipper after a hard morning’s dezzick at sea, boco white-herring and dab in our baskets, and no sooner has uz hung up the seines to dry than one of these here ken of mine sets up the hue-and-cry. Was it you, cousin Davey? Sharpest eyes of any of uz, Davey has. So along uz hurries, end-on, for to see if there’s still soul in the body, but she be like this, just as you see, sirs, dead as a hollard.”

  I refrained from asking what a hollard was, but presumed that it was something from which the life had wholly departed. Holmes filled me in later: it was the Sussex word for a fallen, rotten tree branch.

  Holmes knelt to give the body his full attention, scanning it from head to toe. The Winnicks stood back at a discreet distance. Every now and then one of
them shooed away a gull that strayed too close. The birds wished to be free to scavenge from the cadaver and retreated only with much wing-flapping and haughty head-tossing.

  Holmes beckoned to me. “Watson, perhaps you could lend me the benefit of your medical opinion.”

  I squatted beside him. “I shall try.”

  “Does this person look as though he drowned?”

  “From appearances alone, it’s hard to tell. His skin is roughened and pimpled, suggestive of immersion in water for some significant period. I think we can take it as read that he has been in the sea at least since the last high tide.”

  “Anything else?”

  “It would be for a coroner to determine whether the lungs contain water. That is the surest indicator of death by drowning. However, another less common indicator is a fine white froth in the airways which sometimes emerges around the mouth and nostrils.” I bent lower, trying to get a clear view of the dead man’s face, which was half buried in the shingles. “It is often present, but its absence does not automatically rule out drowning. The same goes for haemorrhaging from the ears, of which I can also see no sign.”

  “On balance, you would declare that he died through inhalation of water?”

  “It is the likeliest cause, surely. Asphyxiation due to suffocation by a liquid. The alternatives are hypothermia or vagal inhibition – the sudden stopping of the heart due to shock from being plunged into exceedingly cold water – but the temperature of the Channel is mild at this time of year. I doubt very much our victim here froze to death.”

  “He is not dressed for bathing, which rules out a swimming accident. Those are day clothes.”