I felt myself being borne bodily through the water, enfolded by strong arms, the focus of commotion and communal effort. All at once my heels were scraping through gritty seabed sand, and then I was laid out on my back, on pebbles, looking up, gasping. I was aware of a dozen faces around me, peering solicitously down. I was numb and shuddering. I sat up and regurgitated a quantity of mucus and salt water, before lying back down again in a swoon. Voices became distant, the daylight dim. I suspect I passed out for a brief while.
Back in the land of the living again, I found myself swaddled in blankets provided by I know not whom – some kind local hotelier most likely. A mug of hot milk was thrust into my hands.
My rescuers turned out to be the self same swimming club members whom I had seen earlier venturing out towards Pevensey. By immense good fortune they had been on the last leg of their return journey, almost back where they had started, when one of them had spied me toppling from the pier. Exhausted though they were, they had spared no time, nor the final ergs of their energy, diving down to retrieve me from the depths and bring me safely to shore.
I thanked the young men profusely and enquired if any of them had got a look at the rogue who had propelled me into the sea. None had. It was impossible to see up onto the pier from down in the water right beside it, where they had been. The angle was too steep.
I asked the same question of the small crowd that had gathered around us, again fruitlessly. Several of these onlookers’ faces registered scepticism, as though they didn’t believe that I had been the victim of an attempted murder. They assumed I was just some doddery old man who had somehow managed to slip over the railing and was now trying to cover up his clumsiness and retain some dignity by pretending another party had been involved.
Truth be told, I could scarcely believe it myself. Someone had tried to kill me. A man had sneaked up behind me and sent me plunging into the waves, his goal patently my death. What for? What had he hoped to gain?
I resolved to inform Sherlock Holmes about the incident straight away. It could not be mere coincidence. There had to be some connection with Patrick Mallinson. The lad had died after a fall into the sea; so too had I, nearly. The similarity was alarming. Had the assassin been a member of the secret society Patrick had belonged to? Was Holmes’s and my investigation getting a little too close to the truth? Was the cult coming after us now? Was Holmes too in mortal danger?
One of the swimmers owned a car, which was parked nearby, and he offered to drive me home. I accepted gratefully, and once the young man had towelled himself off, got changed, and then spent a couple of minutes cranking the car’s starting handle until the motor grudgingly turned over, we were on our way.
His little open-topped tourer, a “bullnose” Morris Oxford, chuntered gamely along the seafront, and tackled Duke’s Drive, the winding hill road at the end, with gusto if not with speed. Descending the steep gradient on the other side towards East Dean, it began accelerating at a disconcerting rate and the driver fought hard with the steering wheel to keep us from skidding off into the ditch. He laughed all the while, blithe in the face of peril as only the young can be, whereas his passenger clung to the dashboard and prayed. So soon after one brush with death I wasn’t keen on another.
We reached the village in one piece, I’m glad to relate, and exiting the car on unsteady legs I made my way to Holmes’s cottage.
My friend was not in, but he had left me a note:
My dear Watson,
This case is proving most perplexing. I seem to be going round in circles and getting nowhere. With each new dead end, complication mounts.
I’m afraid, therefore, that I am going to have to absent myself from your company for a day or so. There are avenues of enquiry which may only be pursued elsewhere, and alone.
I deeply regret interrupting your visit in this way. You will think me very antisocial, and you would be correct. I shall endeavour to return to your side as soon as possible. In the meantime, Mrs Tuppen will take care of you. I have asked her to accord you the same courtesies and care as she would me,
Your friend, as ever,
Sherlock Holmes
I changed out of my damp clothes, wrung them out and hung them up to dry. The postcard for my wife, which had been in my jacket pocket, was just so much fibrous mulch now. The stick of rock was likewise ruined.
As I performed these tasks, I mentally cursed Holmes. Of all the times to go running off on his own! Little did he appreciate that we had been targeted by a mysterious and ruthless adversary. There was a sinister cult in the vicinity, so secret that not even the local police knew of its existence, and its members did not wish us to pry into their affairs and would stop at nothing to discourage us. If they knew who I was, they definitely knew who Holmes was. My friend’s life was at risk, and he seemed entirely oblivious to the fact.
Sherlock Holmes was a wily and perceptive man, I reminded myself. Many an enemy had tried to eliminate him and failed. He had faced the worst that the criminal fraternity could throw at him and lived to tell the tale. Even Professor Moriarty, the deadliest malefactor this world has ever produced, was unable to vanquish him, though not for want of trying.
Yet the Holmes of 1913 was not the Holmes of yesteryear. He was more erratic, possibly more prone to error.
I was deeply worried for him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AND MRS BEETON ROLLED INTO ONE
Mrs Tuppen showed up that afternoon, a stout, formidable woman with a broad, pleasant face marred somewhat by a plethora of warts on her chin and cheeks.
By the time she arrived, I had established two facts.
The first fact was that my shoulder, though severely bruised from hitting the pier pylon, was not broken or even dislocated. It felt damnably sore but exhibited full rotation, impeded only by the muscular discomfort of moving it. My other shoulder was the one that had taken a Jezail bullet back in 1880, so that, for the moment, I had a matching pair, both of them stiffened and achy.
The second fact was that I had caught a chill from being dunked in the sea and it was fast developing into a fever. My brow was hot, but I felt cold, cold to the marrow of my bones, and however much I stoked the fire in the sitting room I could not seem to get warm. I fashioned a damp compress from a teacloth and swaddled myself in as many layers of clothing as I could, but the fever would not slacken its hold. On the contrary, as the hours went by it merely worsened, until soon I was shivering uncontrollably, my teeth chattering.
Mrs Tuppen took one look at me and ordered me to bed. “White as a sheet you are, sir, and hollow-eyed like a skeleton. I’ll brook no ifs or buts. You do as I say.”
She brought a bowl of chicken broth up to my room and, when I proved incapable of feeding myself because my hands were shaking too much, spooned the stuff into my mouth.
That night, and the whole of the following day, Hettie Tuppen was my guardian angel. I don’t know how I would have coped without her. I might even have perished. She was Florence Nightingale and Mrs Beeton rolled into one. I hovered in and out of consciousness, lucid one moment, debilitated the next. Mrs Tuppen mopped my forehead, kept me fed and watered, and was a constant fussing presence by my bedside.
I cannot fault her nursing skills other than that she insisted on dosing me regularly with a foul-tasting, home-brewed concoction, a tincture of herbs and tree bark whose recipe had been in her family for generations and whose restorative properties she was adamant were second to none.
“Unfailingly efficacious in lowering temperature and soothing inflammation,” she said of this nostrum of hers, sounding like the text of a newspaper advertisement for the latest pharmaceutical wonder remedy.
I myself would have been happier with simple aspirin, but I dutifully gulped down the bitter liquid. In my experience it did one no favours to argue with the person caring for one. As a doctor, I had always found that compliant, obedient patients healed faster than those who were troublesome and contrary. As a pa
tient myself, I elected to submit to the given course of treatment rather than resist. I had no wish to cause Mrs Tuppen to take umbrage, not when I was relying on her to restore me to health.
Strangely enough, it seemed that her homemade medicine was indeed as potent as she claimed. My fever broke only twenty-four hours after it had set in. That evening I was feeling considerably better, almost human again, and by the next morning, the Thursday, I was positively bristling with renewed vigour. I bounced out of bed and wolfed down the substantial spread Mrs Tuppen laid on for breakfast, eating as though I had been on starvation rations for weeks.
“My dear woman, you are a miracle worker,” I told her. I was feeling almost giddy from the rapidity and completeness of my recovery. “I am forever in your debt.”
“Just don’t go over-exerting yourself, doctor,” she said. “At your age, you must learn to take things easy. However did you let yourself get in such a state in the first place? I found all that damp clothing of yours. Were you caught out in the rain?”
“Something like that.” The woman did not need to know about my near-murder. It would only upset her. “Tell me, I don’t suppose Holmes put in an appearance while I was laid up.”
“I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of Mr Holmes since he called round at my house on Tuesday morning, valise in hand, to say that he was taking a leave of absence and that I was to look after you while he was gone.”
“He offered no clue as to where he might be off to?”
“None whatsoever, and it wasn’t my place to ask. Gent wishes to come and go as he pleases, that’s his business. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you anything, though, you being such a friend of his.”
“Sherlock Holmes moves in mysterious ways, Mrs Tuppen, his wonders to perform. I have lost count of the number of times he has pulled a vanishing act on me like this. Usually he turns up again soon enough, and more often than not feeling pretty pleased with himself.”
The confidence with which I spoke belied my true emotions, however. Doubt and misgiving gnawed at me. Holmes’s note had talked of him being away “for a day or so”. Yet two full days had elapsed since he wrote it. Surely he ought to be back by now. What was keeping him?
As the morning progressed, I found it hard to settle. A book was no distraction, and Mrs Tuppen’s company began to grate, for although Holmes’s housekeeper was a decent enough woman and a demonstrably skilled amateur physician, she was also an inveterate chatterbox. I dropped several hints that she should feel free to go home. She must surely be tired, I suggested, having kept watch over me round the clock. What about Mr Tuppen? Was he not curious as to where his wife had got to?
“Oh, my Billy can look after himself,” she replied, “and besides, there’s a barmaid at the Tiger he’s taken a shine to and would rather be spending the time with. Not that a young thing like her is going to give a clapped-out old fool like him anything more than a nice smile and a bat of her eyelashes.” Then on she went with her near-unceasing prattle about her neighbours and their carryings-on and about the shenanigans got up to by members of her extended and somewhat startlingly misbehaved family.
When I could endure no more, I announced that I was heading out to search for Holmes. It was impulsive of me, but I would rather have been doing something active than sit around twiddling my thumbs, waiting for him to return.
Eastbourne was the obvious place to look first. I roved the town, ever cautious and on my guard, for the man who had attacked me on the pier must know that I had survived his attempt on my life and might be keeping an eye out for me with a view to trying again. At least this time I was armed, albeit only with Holmes’s jack-knife which I had taken from his writing desk. It was no pistol but it would do in a pinch.
After a couple of hours spent trawling the streets in vain, I decided to turn my footsteps towards Little Chelsea and pay a call on Miss Elizabeth Vandenbergh at Tripp’s Costumiers. It was a long shot, but Holmes may have called in on her yesterday or earlier today.
You may imagine my shock and amazement when I rounded the corner onto the road where Tripp’s lay, only to find a fire engine parked outside the premises and a small crowd of onlookers gathered nearby. These people were chattering animatedly with one another and gesticulating towards the shop, which was, I saw to my dismay, a charred, gutted ruin. Every window was blackened and shattered, and smoke was still emanating from the upstairs rooms, trailing thinly upward. The pavement in front was littered with debris and slick with water.
I scanned the faces of the crowd but could not see Elizabeth among them. Feeling a pang of dread, I hurried over and introduced myself to the nearest of the firemen. He and his colleagues were busy lowering their ladder and furling the rubberised hose onto the back of their appliance.
“What has happened?” I asked. I could feel heat radiating from the brickwork of the shop.
“Isn’t it obvious?” said the fireman. “Place went up in flames. Early this morning the butcher across the road spotted smoke coming out from under the front door. He tried to enter the building, but the smoke was too dense and beat him back. So he sent his errand boy off on his bicycle to fetch us. We got here as fast as we could, but it was already too late. The fire had taken hold and spread to the upper storeys. All we could hope to do was contain it and stop it spreading to the houses next door.”
“But was it an accident?” I said, aghast.
The fireman shrugged and scratched his head beneath his brass helmet. “In all likelihood, yes. A stray spark from a fire, an untended oven… We’d have to go in and take a look around to know for certain, but we can’t do that as yet. The building’s still too hot inside, and too unstable. The ceilings or floors could give way at any time.”
“So it might have been arson.”
“Who can say? Possible, I suppose. Might I ask what your interest in this is, sir?”
“I am acquainted with the lady who owns the shop,” I said.
“Then,” the fireman said, looking rueful, “I would prepare yourself for the possibility of bad news.”
“Good Lord. You don’t mean to say…?”
“I’m given to understand that the owner lived on the premises.”
“Yes. She has a flat above.”
“And nobody here saw her escape, or has seen her since. The reasonable assumption would be that she perished. Nothing is confirmed,” he added quickly. “Unless or until we find a body, one should not assume the worst. But to be frank, I wouldn’t get your hopes up if I were you. In my experience, there’s almost always a victim in incidents like this. They pass out from smoke inhalation before they can get to safety, and the flames do the rest.”
I reeled under the weight of these grim tidings. Elizabeth Vandenbergh – dead? And meeting her end in the most horrendous fashion, by being burned alive? “A stray spark from a fire,” the fireman had said, “an untended oven…” I remembered the potbellied stove in the shop’s backroom. Perhaps it had been responsible. With those bolts of cloth nearby, it would only take an ember falling out through the firebox grating and lying unnoticed amid the flammable cotton, smouldering, until all at once: inferno.
Or was there something more sinister going on here? Could Elizabeth have fallen prey to the same occult society which had taken her lover Patrick from her? Did she know more about them than she had let on? Were they scared of her in some way? Did they think she might cause them trouble, perhaps threaten to expose them, and thus they felt their only recourse was to do away with her?
In which case, it seemed likelier than ever that Sherlock Holmes, too, had become their victim.
The police station lay not far from the costumiers. Inspector Tasker was hardly the most receptive or sympathetic of audiences, but he was a police officer first and foremost. He had a duty to follow up any report of suspected criminal activity. At the very least it seemed prudent to lodge an official report about Holmes’s absence and recruit the Eastbourne constabulary in the hunt for him.
CHAPTER TWENT
Y-THREE
THE TELL-TALE BRUISE
Tasker made me sit for nearly half an hour in the antechamber to his office before inviting me in. While I waited, drumming my fingers on the handle of my walking-stick, I turned over recent events in my mind: my near-murder, Holmes’s prolonged disappearance, the devastating fire at Tripp’s. Holmes himself would no doubt have been able to divine the common thread linking these things. But I was not Holmes, and the more I badgered and beleaguered my poor brain, the less sense I could make of it all.
When Tasker finally deigned to see me, the first thing I noticed about him was a swelling on his left cheek, a contusion just below the eye. To judge by the colouration – it was blackish purple with a yellow corona – it was a good two days old.
“Ah, you’ve spotted my little shiner,” Tasker said.
To be honest, I could hardly tear my gaze from it. Already a small, awful thought was forming in my mind, a seed of suspicion that swiftly germinated and blossomed.
“Got it manhandling a drunkard the day before last,” Tasker went on. “We were taking him in on charges of vandalism, public indecency and affray. He’d got into a fight at the Counting House on Star Road, threatened the landlord, smashed a window, then as he was departing performed an unmentionable act in the doorway. He was a big brute – a merchant sailor – so it took four of us to subdue him. He caught me a lucky blow.” Tasker fingered the bruise carefully. “Needless to say he paid for it. The demon drink, eh, doctor? The harm I’ve seen it do to lives. It’s enough to make one join the Temperance Society. Anyway, what can I do for you?”
“I don’t know,” I said hesitantly.
Was it possible? Could I be sitting across the room from the very man who had tried to kill me? The bruise on Tasker’s face could easily have been the result of a blow from the handle of my walking-stick. It was about the right size and in the likely location.
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