Sherlock Holmes - Gods of War

by James Lovegrove

  Holmes looked at me and said, “Watson, I believe the time has come for us to practise the better part of valour.”

  “Meaning run?”

  “Meaning run.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  YOUNG BUCKS, OLD CROCKS

  It wasn’t so much a run as a stiff-kneed canter, but we did our best, putting distance between ourselves and Jenks as fast as we were able. Once the gamekeeper had slotted the two new cartridges in place he hastened after us, but by then we had become engulfed by the mist. We heard him cursing and raging behind us, his voice gradually dwindling.

  A few minutes later, after we had gone the best part of half a mile, I begged Holmes to be allowed to stop and rest. He consented, and I stood with my hands braced on my thighs, heaving for breath. I felt sick and lightheaded and my heart laboured within my breast. Holmes, though not quite as fatigued as I, was nonetheless red in the face and puffing hard.

  “What fit young bucks we once were,” he said with a rueful grimace, “and what broken old crocks we are now. There was a time when a dash like that would have left us barely winded at all.”

  “Speak for yourself, old chap,” I said, forcing the words out between stertorous gasps. “I am in as fine a fettle as a racehorse. I would have gone faster, but I didn’t want to show you up.”

  “Funny, I was about to say the same thing.”

  “Deuced good to see you, though.”

  “And you, you great inimitable oaf. You somewhat ruined my stakeout, you know, forcing me to break cover, but I shall forgive you.”

  “I was frantic with worry. I had no idea what had become of you. I even thought you might be dead.”

  “Not yet, Watson. I am as alive as can be – and also stuffed to the gills with new information. But that must wait. It is imperative that we carry on going and get as far from Settleholm as we possibly can.”

  “Why? We have shaken off Jenks, and there is precious little chance of him finding us, not in this mist. Surely we are safe.”

  “That is where you are wrong, I’m afraid. We are anything but safe.”

  The seriousness with which my companion said this put me on edge. “Would you care to elaborate?”

  “First, let us resume our flight.”

  We set off again, not attempting to run this time but adopting a loping pace that was somewhere between a walk and a trot. The mist had begun to darken and turn grey, becoming yet more impenetrable. Somewhere to the west the sun was creeping towards the horizon.

  “You see,” said Holmes, “Jenks may choose to pursue us still, and if he does, it will not be without assistance.”

  “He will set up a hue-and-cry and dragoon in others from the estate staff to form a search party?”

  “Not as such. He would not wish to involve witnesses. At least, not any who can talk.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “How rarely you do.”

  “Perhaps if you were to be less exasperatingly cryptic…”

  “Very well. Cast your mind back, Watson, to when Craig Mallinson was telling us about the hunt for his missing son.”

  I did my best to recollect the conversation. “Are you suggesting Jenks might come looking for us in Mallinson’s aeroplane? But that would be absurd. He would be no more likely to see us from above, in this mist, than on the ground. Besides, he would be flying blind, as it were, and that would be suicidally risky.”

  “No. Think harder. Mallinson was describing how he and Jenks scoured the grounds of the estate.”

  “I’m sorry, old fellow, but just at this moment I’m drawing a complete blank.”

  “Are your powers of recall really so poor?” Holmes snorted. “No wonder so many inconsistencies and discrepancies crop up in your published oeuvre. Mallinson said that he hoped Patrick was in an outbuilding or the woods, so he –”

  Holmes was interrupted by a far-off noise, one which I myself found unduly hackle-raising.

  It was the barking of an enormous hound.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE HOUND OF THE MALLINSONS

  “A dog,” I breathed.

  “Indeed,” said Holmes. “I spied its kennel earlier today in a courtyard at the rear of the house. The creature was ensconced within and I failed to get a good look at it. I can tell you, though, that a thick chain led into the kennel and the other end was fastened to the ground by an iron stake. And when I say kennel, it was actually more like a small shed.”

  “My God…”

  “A sizeable beast,” my friend said with a confirmatory nod, “and probably not of the most amiable temperament. What’s more, we must assume it has been trained to follow a scent. Regrettably you have left your walking-stick behind. Years of use will have imprinted your smell on the handle.”

  “I am an idiot.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. But the set of circumstances you have helped to create is not ideal. We may yet be able to shake the hound off, but for that to happen we will have to find the Cuckmere river.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Somewhere to the south, the way we are currently headed,” Holmes said, but did I discern a faint note of uncertainty in his voice? Was he trying to sound more confident than he genuinely was?

  We hurried onward through the dreary, darkening haze, while to our rear those gruff, ferocious barks continued, unabated. Sometimes they seemed near, other times far away, but it was hard to know if this was truth or just a trick of the mist. The conditions seemed designed to confound one’s every perception. Holmes kept taking a bearing from the position of the sun, but it was, I thought, an imprecise method of reckoning direction, for all he really had to go on was a paler stretch of the sky, a broad expanse where the gloom was slightly less intense. As long as that was to our right, then notionally we were travelling southward, but the margin for error was considerable.

  We passed from field to field, using gates or stiles where we could find them but otherwise cleaving through hedgerows by brute force. In many instances the earth underfoot had been ploughed and we had to trudge through the furrows, our boots becoming clogged and heavy with mud; or else there was stubble to stumble over, or late-season root crops whose leaves entwined around our ankles. In short, it was slow, cumbersome going, and the unseen dog’s ever-present barking made it seem all the slower and more cumbersome. I had had nightmares like this, where I was being pursued by some marauding monster and could make little headway, my feet becoming ever more bogged down in swampy ground.

  The present situation was all too horribly reminiscent of that night in 1889 when, at the Grimpen Mire on Dartmoor, Stapleton’s dreadful coal-black hound would have savaged Sir Henry Baskerville to death had Holmes and I not managed to shoot it in time. I recalled my friend’s scorn at the Tiger Inn just a few days back when his talk of an eldritch black dog had sparked an involuntary shudder in me. Now my fear was even greater, and justified, because it had a solid grounding in reality. Jenks’s dog was flesh-and-blood, and it was leading its master to us, and in the unlikely event that it wasn’t the sort of animal that was capable of killing a man, the gun its master carried certainly could.

  In the distance a church bell tolled the hour – six o’clock.

  “St Andrew’s at Alfriston,” said Holmes. “It can only be. The peal of a bell with a side clapper is distinct from that with an internal clapper, and St Andrew’s has the only side clapper bell in the area.”

  “Is this good news?”

  “It is. It confirms we are on the correct course.”

  “Can we not head for the village and find sanctuary there?”

  “We have passed it already. The bell was behind us. To double back now might prove fatal.”

  On we forged, as the daylight waned still further. It felt as though the world was disappearing around us bit by bit, leaving us in a benighted limbo.

  Then at last came the susurration of running water.

  “The Cuckmere,” said Holmes, veering off towards it. “Co
me along, old chap. One final push.”

  I was at a low ebb and Holmes knew it. He coaxed and cajoled me along. Shortly we reached the river bank, down whose grassy slope we slipped and slithered, landing in shin-deep water at the bottom. We set off across to the other bank, which was only just visible from this side. The water deepened until it was up to our thighs, but thankfully, though the river was tidal at this point, the tide was low and the current not strong. Each supporting the other, we waded across without incident or mishap.

  Climbing the other bank proved problematic. It was steep, and thick with brambles and stinging nettles. Our boot soles could not obtain easy purchase. We scrambled up on all fours like rats, and eventually – scratched, stung, sodden – we gained the top. I lay there panting, wishing I could just go to sleep on the spot. Sleep would be such sweet oblivion.

  Holmes, however, urged me to my feet. “No rest yet.”

  “Why not? Hasn’t fording the river destroyed our scent trail?”

  “It is far from guaranteed. Remember Toby, Mr Sherman’s spaniel-lurcher cross? How he tracked that wooden-legged fiend Jonathan Small halfway across London, following the scent even over one of the city’s busiest, most heavily trafficked roads? Never underestimate the power of the canine nose, Watson. It is many orders of magnitude more sensitive than our own. Besides, we have left spoor on the opposite bank. An experienced countryman like Jenks may have little trouble inferring what we have done.”

  “Then perhaps you should leave me here,” I said, “and carry on without me. It is my scent the dog has caught. You will be able to get away scot-free without me holding you back. Live to fight another day.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Watson. You insult me simply by saying that. Now come on, up with you.”

  Wearily I allowed myself to be led across several further fields. A chalk footpath offered itself to us but Holmes eschewed it. “Too obvious,” he said. “It’s safe to assume that Jenks is intimately familiar with the lie of the land round here and believes that we are not. Therefore he would think us liable to take a path if we find one, and for that very reason we shouldn’t. We must not make his task any easier for him.”

  Jenks’s dog began baying that very moment. Whether this was in excitement or frustration, I could not tell. I hoped that the sound signified that it had lost our trail and was venting its dismay, but I feared the opposite – that Jenks and the dog had traversed the Cuckmere too and were hot on our heels once more.

  The last of the daylight leaked from the sky like the embers of a fire dying out. Holmes and I had nothing on us to illuminate our way, not even a pocket lantern. We were surrounded by an infinite, impenetrably dense blackness. Every step we took, we took more or less blind, groping our way forward as though we were condemned prisoners with sacks on our heads. The smallest rock, the slightest declivity in the ground, could trip us up, and did.

  All the while, Jenks’s hound kept up its eager ululation, and there was no question but that the two of them, man and dog, were getting closer to us now. Not only were the dog’s howls growing in volume, and moreover exultancy, but we also caught glimpses of a beam of light flickering intermittently like a firefly. Jenks’s electric torch.

  “How?” I said. “How can we possibly escape? We cannot see, and Jenks can. We’ve done our best to foil the hound, to no avail. It’s hopeless.”

  “Do not despair, Watson. We have been in tighter scrapes than this and lived to tell the tale. Have I ever steered you wrong? Let you down?”

  “Never.”

  “Then trust in me once again. If my calculations are correct, very soon we shall have guidance. After all, what does a ship’s captain do when he’s close to shore on a night as murky and fogbound as this?”

  I could not fathom an answer to this riddle just then. I wondered if Holmes was perhaps trying to divert my mind from the futility of our predicament, the way one distracts and soothes a fretful child by focusing its attention elsewhere.

  Within moments, however, all was explained as I perceived a distant, ponderous sweep of light, a moving glow which sustained itself for several seconds before fading out. It came again, and then again, filling the mist with enough lambency that I could make out the contours of the landscape and essay my next few steps with confidence.

  “The lighthouse,” said Holmes. “Beachy Head lighthouse. We are not far from East Dean and safety.”

  But not near enough, as it turned out. Our ordeal was not yet at an end. Several further trials awaited us that night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  FALLEN ANGEL

  “Take care,” said Holmes. “We are close to the cliff edge now. It is not simply that one misstep might mean your undoing. Chalk is a friable substance. Parts of the cliff have been known to break away spontaneously, and where there is an overhang, often all it requires is the weight of a human being to cause it to give way.”

  I would have asked why we needed to be so near the cliffs at all, but Holmes had already expounded his reasoning. The illumination from the lighthouse was better up here. The pulses from its revolving lamp array revealed more. Therefore we could make quicker progress.

  There was, however, a corollary, namely that we ourselves became more visible. Our silhouettes would stand proud every time the light came round. Holmes was gambling that thanks to the lighthouse we could keep sufficiently far ahead of Jenks for this not to matter. Jenks’s shotgun, given that it had full-choke barrels, was accurate and effective up to sixty yards, the maximum range for such a weapon. As long as we stayed beyond that, the chance of being hit was remote.

  The dog, of course, was another matter.

  The terrain undulated. We were travelling across the craggy shoulders of the Seven Sisters, tracing the cliffs’ series of rises and falls. At our backs Jenks’s hound was setting up a damnable frenzy of yips and howls, knowing that its quarry was almost within reach. The only reason I could posit as to why Jenks had not let the animal off the leash yet was that without it he might very easily lose track of us. Until he himself could see us and keep us within sight, the dog was serving as his eyes.

  All at once, I was alone. Holmes was not to be found. Somewhere our paths had diverged.

  I called his name softly. No answer. As the light from the lighthouse flared, I gazed all around, seeking his shape amid the thickets of mist. Nothing. No sign of him.

  I fell prey to a deep pang of dread. Not only did I feel abandoned, cast adrift like a marooned mariner, but I entertained the notion that Holmes had succumbed to the very danger he had warned me against. His footsteps had taken him accidentally over the cliff edge, whereupon he had plunged to his death without a sound. Awful memories of the Reichenbach Falls went parading through my head.

  I froze, terrified of following him to the same fate. I felt hapless and helpless.

  Then, to compound my alarm, I saw the bright flash of Jenks’s torch. It could not have been more than a hundred yards away.

  Abruptly the dog ceased to cry.

  That could mean only one thing.

  Sure enough, I heard the galloping thump of paws on grass. They sounded as loud as a horse’s hooves.

  Next I knew, a hunched, massive animal was before me, a hulking beast as large as any dog I had seen – larger, even, than that dog, the Baskerville hound. There was mastiff in its ancestry, and Alsatian, and perhaps Rhodesian ridgeback as well, to judge by the bristle of fur along its spine. In short, it was made up from a whole gallimaufry of breeds that were prized for their size, muscularity and ferocity.

  It was phenomenally ugly, too. Dr Frankenstein himself could not have sewn together an atrocity as misshapen and grotesque-looking as this. Folds of skin drooped around a pair of baleful bloodshot eyes. Jowls dangled either side of its maw, dripping threads of drool. Lower teeth protruded up over its muzzle, the canines each as long as my little finger, the incisors not much smaller and certainly not much less sharp. I have seen pleasanter sights in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch
.

  Ears pricked, tail hung low, this thing pounded to a halt in front of me. It regarded me for several long seconds, and then emitted from its throat a growl that resembled the rumble of an earthquake.

  I nearly lost all control of myself. It was as much as I could do to keep from whimpering.

  The dog took another couple of steps closer. Unthinkingly I moved the same number of steps back. I was heedless of my proximity to the cliff edge. I simply wanted to maintain a decent gap between me and this enormous, hideous creature.

  Again the dog growled, and at the same time bared all of its teeth. There were more fangs in its mouth than one would have thought possible for any single animal to own. I felt that I was looking at an arsenal of ivory daggers.

  “Angel!” Jenks called out from somewhere not far removed.

  The dog stiffened and replied with a short, sharp bark.

  “Hold, Angel. Keep ’em pinned. I’ll be right there.”

  Jenks knew that his hound, so inaptly named, had at least one of us at bay, if not both. How many poachers must he have apprehended in this way, working in perfect concert with the dog? The animal was clearly practised at cornering people and intimidating them into immobility while it awaited the arrival of its master.

  I retreated a little further. Angel padded forwards. The dog must have a fixed pouncing distance, I realised, a span it knew it could cover in a single leap. It was trained not to let me get out of range.

  I heard Jenks’s heavy breathing as he laboured upslope to join the dog. He gave a whistle, and Angel barked to help orientate him.

  It was only then that I remembered the jack-knife in my pocket. Did I dare to try and slip it out somehow? Or would the dog consider this a provocative act and respond with aggression? Would I even have time to get the knife open before the beast’s jaws closed on me? I doubted it.

  Then there was a thump; a crash; the sounds of a scuffle.

  Angel twitched and half turned round.

  I made a desperate bid for freedom while the dog’s attention was not fully on me. I darted to one side.