A strangled shout came from the mist: “Angel, attack!”
The dog spun and lumbered after me. Such was its bulk that it took several paces to get up to full speed from a standing start. Yet, once it was running flat out, it easily outstripped me.
I heard its paws thundering at my heels. I swear I could feel its hot breath on my back.
The hound sprang.
At the self-same moment, someone bore down on me, bringing me sprawling to the ground.
The dog shot above me, open jaws just missing my head.
It landed without a sound.
Or rather, it didn’t land at all. It hurtled out into empty space, legs flailing. There was a whine of sheer terror, followed by a couple of seconds of silence and then a heavy wet impact far below.
I half sat up. Holmes was beside me. It was he who had been my saviour, knocking me down at the last instant so that the dog had sailed over me and then over the cliff edge, which lay mere inches to my right.
“But you were fighting Jenks a moment ago, weren’t you?” I said when my heart rate had returned to something approaching normal.
“True. I used his torch like a beacon, to guide me to him. When he whistled to the dog, that was when I knew I had him once and for all.”
“Then how were you able to reach me so swiftly, if you were engaging him?”
“As soon as he gave the attack command, I delivered the coup de grâce and ran like the wind to intercept you,” said he. “I had, you see, been hoping to provoke Jenks into just such a precipitate action.”
“You mean I was bait? I was there to lure the dog away, a sitting duck?”
“A regrettable but unavoidable exigency. I needed to separate the two of them so that I might tackle Jenks one-to-one. He is currently lying unconscious, felled by a baritsu palm-heel strike to the nerve cluster just below the jawline. He will live, but the same, I am glad to say, cannot be said of his dog.”
“Angel,” I said with spite and venom.
“A fallen Angel now.”
“And good riddance. Dash it all, Holmes! You could have told me what you were planning.”
“Would you have volunteered to participate if I had?”
“Well, no,” I admitted. “Probably not. But I would rather not be made to feel like a pawn that can be sacrificed at will.”
“I would never sacrifice you, Watson. You are far too valuable a piece on the board. But that isn’t to say I wouldn’t use you to tempt my opponent into committing one of his own pieces.”
He was jesting, but I was not mollified. “What if you hadn’t got to me before the dog did? What if you had been too slow, or misgauged your leap to flatten me? What if that damned animal had –”
I never finished the sentence, for just then a deep vibrant groan resounded through the patch of cliff we were perched on, and suddenly I was falling.
CHAPTER THIRTY
CLIFFHANGER
The cliff had given way. We were, it transpired, atop one of those overhangs Holmes had referred to. It had cracked under our weight and was now shearing off. I was about to meet the same end as the devil-dog Angel.
It is an horrific sensation, to feel solid ground crumble beneath you, to feel gravity abruptly claim you when you thought you had nothing to fear from it. I remember letting out a high-pitched cry that had as much indignation in it as alarm, as though Mother Nature had just played a rotten prank on me. In a way, I suppose she had.
That I didn’t plummet to my doom can be ascribed to two factors. The first was that Sherlock Holmes had been lying inland from me, just the other side of the fissure along which the cliff had cracked. The second was that his reflexes were so spectacularly swift.
He seized my right wrist with both hands, arresting my fall. My momentum dragged him after me but he dug his knees and elbows in and managed to keep most of his body still on the clifftop. With all of the strength in him he kept me suspended, even as several large chunks of chalk tumbled below us to the beach, crashing onto the pebbles in a rocky avalanche.
I dangled by one arm, Holmes my only anchor.
“Now listen, old chap,” my friend said. His teeth were clenched with the incredible physical effort of supporting me. “I cannot hold you like this for long. Use your feet. Find a toehold. Take some of the weight.”
“I can’t,” I said in a paroxysm of terror. “I can’t. Don’t – don’t let go.”
“I’m not going to let go, but you will slip out of my grasp if you do not do as I say. Just in front of you is a crevice, level with your knee. Place your foot there. Concentrate! Do it!”
I somehow wedged my foot into the space. Holmes adjusted his grip. I could feel the sweat lining his palms, making them slick. He was digging his fingers into my wrist to compensate, and it hurt but I didn’t care. My injured shoulder was complaining, too, adding a throbbing bass note to my overall cacophony of pain and panic.
“Good,” said Holmes. “Now, you must push yourself up while I pull. We shall have only one shot at this, so we need to get it right. If we fail, I doubt I can do anything but drop you. Do you understand?”
My only response was a frantic nod.
“On my mark. Three. Two. One. Go!”
I kicked down into the crevice. Holmes heaved with all his might. For a moment I seemed to hang in midair. I was all too conscious of the abyss beneath me, the waves throwing themselves hungrily at the shoreline, the imminence of a two-second plunge that would truncate my life abruptly and very messily.
Then I was sprawled on the clifftop, half of me, my legs still angled out over the edge. Holmes hauled on my sleeve, my coattail, my waistband, anything to help tug me the rest of the way onto the cliff. I clawed the turf with my hands.
Finally I was fully on land again, but I kept going, scrambling along on my belly like a sea lion until I reached what I considered was a safe distance from the cliff edge. I had never been so grateful to feel wet grass under me. I wanted to kiss it.
Holmes left me there to recover while he went to check on Jenks. He returned looking aggrieved.
“He has gone,” he said. “Upped and ran while we were otherwise engaged.”
“I thought you knocked him out.”
“I did. He is made of steel, it would seem. Nigh on impervious to harm.”
“Is he still out there?” I scanned the mist trepidatiously.
“He appears to have fled. His footprints were uneven, indicating that he is limping or at any rate unsteady on his legs, groggy after the blow I struck. He still has his shotgun but it would appear that, despite his remarkable powers of recuperation, he is in no mood to confront us again. Not yet.”
Holmes shook out his arms, wincing.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes. A touch of muscle strain. Would you do me a favour, Watson?”
“Anything, old man. You just saved my life.”
“Lose some weight before you next go gallivanting off the side of a cliff, would you?”
I chuckled, in spite of everything. “Mrs Watson nags me about my expanding girth. Now you too. It is like having two wives.”
“The inestimable Mrs Watson is a well-put-together woman,” said Holmes. “I doubt, however, that she has had the task of bearing your entire bulk by means of her arms alone, which makes my plea more impassioned and pertinent than hers.”
“I think the solution to the problem may not be going on a diet but rather avoiding pursuit by a dangerous dog so close to a precipice.”
“A situation I pray we shall never find ourselves in again.”
“Seconded. Heartily.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
SAFE ROOM
Dirty, battered, bedraggled, both of us feeling as though we had gone several rounds in the ring with “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, Holmes and I fetched up back at his cottage late that night.
I immediately began to make preparations for drawing a bath, but Holmes stopped me.
“No time,” he said. “We a
re not out of danger yet.”
“Surely in your own home we can at least pause and take stock. My feet are soaked and could do with being warmed before a fire.”
“Later. First, we must take steps to render ourselves secure. Given what I have gleaned over the past two days, we are up against villains whose audacity is matched only by their ruthlessness.”
“Then you propose we lock all the doors, barricade the windows and so forth?”
“I can go one better than that,” said my friend, and he made for the new bookcase which had drawn my notice on Sunday morning. He reached for a single volume on the shelves, the one whose spine bore the name Samuel Chatwood, and pulled it down by the upper edge. It proved not to be a real book at all; rather, a false one attached to the shelf by a hinge. Tugging on it triggered a spring mechanism which released a catch. The entire bookcase swung outwards, revealing a doorway and a set of steeply descending steps, more like a ladder than stairs.
“It occurred to me not long ago,” said Holmes as he invited me to climb down first, “that I have a fair few foes left in the world, and that many of those criminals whom I was instrumental in capturing will just now be coming to the end of their jail sentences. They are the sort of men who are apt to hold a grudge, and their resentment will have had years to fester as they sat in their cells. It is likely, then, that one or more of them may come seeking retribution. My whereabouts are hardly a secret. Per my request you have kept the location of this house vague in your writings and called it a farm rather than what it is, a smallholding at best. Nonetheless you have left sufficient clues that anyone of average intelligence might be able to pinpoint this village as my place of retirement, and it would not be difficult then to identify the house itself, since the locals are well aware who I am and have no qualms about mentioning their ‘famous’ neighbour to all and sundry. Hence it seemed prudent to take precautions.”
“What is down here?” I said as I set foot on a flagged floor. I could make out the dim outlines of a subterranean chamber perhaps fifteen feet long by ten wide. “Some kind of cellar?”
“And more,” said Holmes, lowering himself down after me. “I must confess I live in particular fear of reprisals from Colonel Sebastian Moran, Professor Moriarty’s main accomplice.”
“Ugh. That wretch.”
“He remains at large, somehow managing to evade the efforts of countless national police forces to catch him. Last I heard, he was suspected of being at the heart of several major scandals and conspiracies in Europe and, skipping ahead of the long arm of the law, has decamped to Australia where he is wreaking his own kind of havoc in Queensland and the Northern Territories. He belongs there in that land of convicts and ruffians, but that isn’t to say he might not choose to return to England sometime and come looking for me. I doubt that time and age have diminished his hatred of me. Old soldiers never forget – especially foot soldiers of the Napoleon of Crime.”
Holmes reached for a wall-mounted lever which brought the bookcase-door clanging shut. Simultaneously a gas lamp ignited and I was able to discern my surroundings with clarity.
“I engaged a builder from the Midlands,” he continued. “I told him I wanted a wine cellar. He came down with an assistant to do the excavating, shore up the walls and ceiling, and lay the flagstones. I employed nobody from the immediate area, so as to keep the job a secret. The rest of the work, the carpentry and so forth, I performed myself.”
The chamber was furnished with a cot, a chair, books, and a goodly supply of canned foodstuffs, enough to last one man a fortnight. There was a small sink with a tap, and, screened off by a low partition, a toilet. I noted a rack of knife-switches beside the lever which operated the door, and next to them the lower end of a periscope, the shaft of which penetrated up through the ceiling.
“Samuel Chatwood,” I said, referring to the false book. “As in Chatwoods the safe makers.”
“My little joke. I call this place my ‘safe room’. It has something of the prison cell about it, I grant you, or perhaps more accurately the priest’s hole, but one could easily cope with being down here for a week or so, especially if the alternative was death. Fresh air is supplied via that pipe up there, a conduit leading to a hidden grating in the garden. Things might get a little stuffy with the two of us breathing, but we shan’t suffocate.”
“You said you had been in consultation with Fred Tilling. Now I know why.”
“He assisted with the general design of the place and answered a couple of engineering-related queries I had.”
“And how long do you intend we take refuge here?”
“As long as need be,” said Holmes. “I expect, however, that we shall receive a hostile visitation ere long. Would you care to tell me why you and Jenks were talking about ‘swimmers’ and a ‘lucky blow’ from your walking-stick? I’m afraid I caught only the tail end of your conversation at Settleholm.”
I explained about my near-drowning and also about my subsequent fever and the fire at Tripp’s.
“Tut, poor Watson!” my friend exclaimed. “I regret even more that I absented myself the way I did, leaving you to your own devices.”
“It was somewhat brusque of you. Might you not have waited until I had come back, instead of just scribbling a brief note and dashing off?”
“Forgive my impoliteness and my intemperate haste, but I felt that time was slipping away and I simply couldn’t sit still a moment longer. I had to act. And a fire at Tripp’s, you say? But no body has been discovered.”
“None to my knowledge, although a fireman at the scene did not espouse any great optimism. For my part, I would like to believe that Miss Vandenbergh is alive and well. She is a resourceful lady. If she could possibly have escaped from the burning building, she would have. And if she did, it would make sense for her to lie low, so that no one would know the attempt on her life had failed.”
“You think it was an act of arson?”
“I strongly suspect it was, and I strongly suspect that this Horus cult are to blame. Don’t you? They are covering their tracks, eliminating all witnesses.”
“Interesting,” said Holmes. “Well, it seems you have been kept very busy. So have I. Would you like to know what I have been up to while I was away?”
“Very much so.”
“I warn you, it is a long story.”
I glanced around the confines of the safe room. “I don’t appear to be going anywhere in a hurry, and neither do you. How else are we going to pass the time?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE COLONIAL AND OVERSEAS CLUB
“London was my first port of call,” said Holmes. “To be precise, the Colonial and Overseas Club.”
“Mallinson’s club.”
“The very same. It’s one of the grander institutions on Pall Mall, with Doric columns beneath the portico and a liveried ex-serviceman on the door to deter the riffraff. I arrived there shortly after luncheon on Tuesday and was soon able to ingratiate myself with the lobby clerk.”
“How much did this ingratiation cost you?”
“Watson, you are too cynical. The fact is he recognised me.”
“Ah, as the famous detective.”
“No, as the brother of Mycroft Holmes, whose reputation still carries weight in Mayfair. Mycroft was a generous tipper, which endeared him to the ancillary staff of all the clubs he frequented, not just the Diogenes. The lobby clerk at the Colonial and Overseas remembered him with fondness and said that for the brother of ‘that great man’ he might be willing to bend the rules.”
“Might be. So money did change hands.”
“A ten-bob note secured me quarter of an hour alone with the attendance ledger in a backroom,” Holmes said, with a touch of chagrin.
“You wished to verify Mallinson’s alibi.”
“I did, and it proved to be watertight. He arrived at the club at seven-thirty last Friday night and left shortly after two in the morning. The ledger had not been tampered with or falsified; the clerk
himself confirmed the timings. It is still conceivable that Mallinson journeyed to Sussex that same night, although not by rail, since the last train to Eastbourne departs at eleven-twenty.”
“He drove down in his car, you mean.”
“Except that he didn’t. Just today, while posing as a gardener at the manor, I made surreptitious enquiries among the domestic staff. Mr Mallinson never travels any great distance by car, and definitely not to and from London. It is too unreliable a mode of transport, apt to break down en route. His Humberette remained at the house all last week.”
“Someone else might have driven him in another car.”
“Possible. But I am inclined to think Mallinson did not return to Settleholm until Saturday, as he has said. The manor house staff would know if he had, and none of them saw him before the Saturday morning.”
“Well, I, for one, am glad to hear it,” I said. “For a moment there, it seemed as though you still fancied him for the killing of Patrick. Filicide – surely the most heinous form of murder.”
“No. I firmly believe Mallinson to be innocent of that crime.” The emphasis Holmes laid on the word “that” suggested to me that Craig Mallinson might be implicated in some other nefarious deed. “I was simply being thorough. The attendance register confirmed, too, that Sir Josiah Partlin-Gray was also at the club that night, as Mallinson asserted. Also at the Colonial and Overseas that night was another plutocrat, Victor Anstruther.”
“The name does not ring a bell.”
“Cars, Watson. Buses and lorries too. He owns the Mercury marque. You have heard of that, presumably.”
“Ah yes. My next-door neighbour owns a Mercury motorcycle, a Velocity. Ghastly noisy thing. Whenever he starts it up in the street, the windows rattle in their frames and I fear the panes might shatter. Mrs Watson curses it every time. Once, our housemaid Jemima dropped a dinner plate she was drying, so startled was she by the racket. She said she thought a bomb had gone off.”
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