“Inestimably popular, though, are Mercury cars,” said Holmes. “Anstruther’s manufacturing plants run along the production line principle pioneered by Henry Ford in America. Fifty thousand vehicles per annum roll out of his factories and onto the roads. He has a contract to provide vans for the Royal Mail, among other things. Recently he has moved into building steam locomotives and rolling stock, but automobiles remain his primary focus of interest. He considers them the future of transportation, and foresees a world where the internal combustion engine dominates.”
“I have no doubt that he is correct. It would be a shame to see the age of steam come to an end, but I fear steam’s louder, brasher upstart cousin is here to stay and will in time usurp. H.G. Wells, the great prognosticator himself, has stated that a tide of increasing mechanisation is upon us, threatening to engulf us, and that the motor car is at the forefront of it. The car will grant us each an unprecedented level of personal freedom when it comes to travel, and yet will enslave us with its costs and demands.”
“Wells is a peculiar mix of optimist and doomsayer,” said Holmes, “never happier than when he is extolling the wonders of science and at the same time warning of its dangers. His Socialist and pacifist tendencies show that he thinks the best of mankind – perhaps somewhat naively – but I am pleased to say that he stands staunchly opposed to Germany’s current aggressive imperialism. He believes that that nation’s Hohenzollern stance – ‘blood and iron’ – will inevitably drag Europe into all-out war and that this war must be fought if democracy is to prevail.”
“I believe that too.”
“As, alas, do I.”
My friend was lost briefly in sombre contemplation. I chose that moment to remind him that he was still wearing his gardener disguise. With a self-upbraiding cry he began peeling off his artificial sideburns and putty nose.
“Beg pardon, sorr,” he said in his rustic accent. “Most neglectful oi be.”
When he had washed the last of the makeup off at the sink and looked more or less like himself again, he resumed his narrative.
“The lobby clerk told me that Anstruther, along with Partlin-Gray, made up two of Mallinson’s companions for cards on the evening in question. They’re longstanding bridge partners, Partlin-Gray and Anstruther. Mallinson himself was partnered by a Conservative member of parliament, Fowlkes by name. Represents a Home Counties constituency, not sure which. Unimportant fellow. One of those backbenchers who seldom turn up for votes or do much except prop up the bar in the Pugin Room and hobnob with the wealthy in their spare time.”
“With the likes of Mallinson and Partlin-Gray.”
“Perhaps he has an eye on a seat on the board of directors with one of their companies. Politics, for him, would appear to be merely a stepping stone to a more lucrative post. At any rate, Fowlkes need not detain us, a mere rank-and-file public servant with aspirations that lie beyond the House of Commons. We can look on him as simply making up a four. It is Mallinson, Partlin-Gray and Anstruther who matter.”
“How so?”
“They are supremely powerful and influential individuals. Mallinson and Partlin-Gray we already know are firm friends, but they are also intimate with Anstruther. Furthermore these three are, according to the lobby clerk, regularly to be found consorting together at the club with a fourth of their ilk, Lord Eustace Harington.”
“I don’t know of him either,” I said.
“Medicines,” said Holmes, “that’s his line. Owns several large pharmaceutical firms. You will have doubtless prescribed his products to your patients and used many of them yourself. Lord Harington has a warrant to supply the royal household with all their medicinal needs, and has patents on a host of drugs, including a universal vitamin pill made from extracts of rabbit gall bladder and a brand of radium-infused water which purports to lift one’s mood and boost flagging virility.”
“He flirts with quackery, then.”
“His lordship is not immune to dabbling in the more fanciful areas of the health industry, it is true. According to Debrett’s he has travelled extensively throughout South America and brought back a range of ‘miracle cures’ which he picked up from witch doctors in remote corners of Amazonia. Yet this accounts for only a small fraction of his business. For the most part he produces things like bandages, splints and tongue depressors. That’s his bread and butter. That and tablets containing active ingredients such as acetaminophen, sodium bromide and bisacodyl whose effectiveness has been scientifically proven.”
“He could add Mrs Tuppen’s homemade fever remedy to his menu of miracle cures,” I said, not entirely without sincerity. “If he were somehow able to make it palatable.”
“Eustace Harington – Lord Harington of Barnstaple and Knowstone, to give him his full title – can trace his lineage all the way back to the fourteenth century. Burke’s Peerage states that he is descended from Sir Nigel Loring, a Knight of the Garter who distinguished himself during the Hundred Years’ War, most notably at the battles of Crécy, Poitiers and Nájera.”
“I have read of Sir Nigel’s exploits,” I said. “He was chamberlain to the Prince of Wales as well, was he not?”
“His wife gave him only daughters, one of whom married a Sir Robert Harington, a baron. The Haringtons were, and remain, prominent landowners in north Devon, but before Eustace came along the family had become somewhat impecunious, as is sometimes the way with aristocracy. Idleness, inbreeding and a lack of initiative had seen their fortune dwindle to a rump, with nothing but a crumbling stately pile, a title and accumulated debts to pass on down through the generations. Eustace has succeeded in reversing this decline by means of his entrepreneurial flair. He now ranks not far below Partlin-Gray in the list of Britain’s highest earners. Together these four – Mallinson, Partlin-Gray, Anstruther, Harington – represent a good one per cent of our nation’s net wealth.”
I let out a soft whistle. Until then, I had not fully appreciated just how rich a man Craig Mallinson was.
“And,” Holmes went on, “they are habitually to be found at the Colonial and Overseas. I checked. In the past twelve months alone, each has called in at the club on no fewer than two dozen occasions. Quite often their attendances have coincided, so that at least three of them have been there at once, if not all four.”
“So? They are friends. They are wealthy. They enjoy card games and the conviviality of a club environment. They have a great deal in common with one another. Like is drawn to like. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that. I don’t see the significance of any of this.”
“How would you? Neither did I initially. Yet there was something about the four names that niggled at me. I was certain that something united this quartet more than just the Colonial and Overseas and a fondness for bridge – more, even, than an enviable bank balance. What this shared factor was, though, my aged grey cells refused to divulge. The connection was there, like a word on the tip of one’s tongue, but would not make itself known.”
I could hear the frustration in Holmes’s voice. This man, whose ability to retain facts and retrieve them at will had once been second to none, was angry that his powers had temporarily deserted him. When he had chided me earlier about the discrepancies in my writings, perhaps he had also been rebuking himself.
“At any rate,” he said, “I jotted down a note of the dates and times of the four men’s comings and goings at the club before returning the ledger to the lobby clerk. I asked him if he could tell me anything more about them, and at that point a metaphorical portcullis came down.”
“What do you mean?”
“The lobby clerk became tight-lipped, with the full taciturnity and inscrutability required of one in his position. ‘I have stretched the boundaries of club discretion as far as I dare, sir,’ said he, ‘in honour of your brother’s memory. Please do not try and make me reveal anything more about any of our members. I value my job too highly.’ I apologised and handed him a couple of extra shillings, a token gesture to atone for my tactle
ssness and the embarrassment it had caused him. We parted on good terms, and I headed out into the chill of a London afternoon.
“For a while I just walked, ruminating. It felt strange to be back in the capital after so long. Much had changed. Mechanisation has indeed made its mark on the city. The streets are noisier, with all the motorised vehicles, but also less pungent, with fewer horses to foul the roadways. The crowds seemed denser than I remembered, faster-moving, although that could be because I have spent so much time in the provinces that I no longer recall what a truly busy thoroughfare looks like. And so many of the theatres and concert halls you and I once haunted have been turned into moving-picture palaces!
“Yet, for all that, it was at heart the same old London, dank and dark and stalwart. I took tea in a Joe Lyons Corner House in the West End, almost a mechanised procedure in itself, so brisk and no-nonsense was the service; the waitresses more than lived up to their nickname, ‘nippies’. Then I continued on my way to the British Library, with a view to conducting some research in the newspaper archive.
“It was there that I finally hit upon the missing connection between the four men, the one I had not been quite able to summon up. And Watson, it is a sinister, tragic thing indeed.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A CONCATENATION OF DEATHS
“I passed the remainder of that afternoon and much of the following morning at the library,” Holmes continued, “spending the intervening night at a cheap, anonymous hotel in Bloomsbury. I pored over countless bound volumes of papers and periodicals from this year and last, searching for references to our fabulously affluent foursome.
“Here and there one of their names might crop up in the Court and Social sections, to no great consequence. Mallinson’s aviation hobby earned him a captioned picture in The Illustrated London News, him looking keen and intrepid in goggles and leather flying helmet, and I learned courtesy of the Graphic that Victor Anstruther is something of an expert on Ancient Greece. He has given talks on Sparta and the Second Peloponnesian War at the Royal Historical Society and in 1907 published a scholarly tome on the life and work of Thucydides, which was the subject of a fawning review in the Journal of Hellenic Studies from a Cambridge don clearly far more impressed by the author’s worldly status than by his marshalling of facts and presentation of opinions.
“Then I came upon the first clue, the first link in a chain I diligently and painstakingly began to assemble. It was a small headline low down on an inside page of The Times, quite unobtrusive. One could easily have overlooked it. ‘Pharmaceutical Tycoon’s Father Dies After Long Illness.’”
“Lord Harington’s father,” I said.
“The very same. The previous Lord Harington passed away at the end of last year, shortly before Christmas. The cause of death was a stroke, a severe cerebral haemorrhage. It followed another similar stroke a few months before which had left him partially paralysed on one side and with his speech hampered. He was seventy-nine.”
“Regrettable but not surprising in a man of that age.”
“No, but what I found noteworthy about the article was that Eustace Harington was mentioned as having been personally involved in his father’s treatment.”
“Is that so surprising either, given his line of work?”
“Perhaps not, but Eustace was administering a specially concocted nerve tonic to the old man while he was convalescing from the first stroke. It had, apparently, been having a remarkable influence on his recuperation.”
“He was getting better?”
“So it would seem. Then he had a sudden relapse and died. The physician attending to him, a Dr Wilcox, attested to the upturn in Harington senior’s health and professed himself disappointed and dismayed that the patient went into such a steep decline when the prognosis had seemed so encouraging.”
“It can happen,” I said. “Once a haemorrhage has caused a weakening in the wall of a cranial artery, it is perfectly possible that a second rupture will occur, often with more devastating results than the first. Harington’s nerve tonic may or may not have assisted with the father’s recovery. The recovery may, equally, have been entirely spontaneous – and the same goes for his subsequent death.”
“My feelings too,” said Holmes. “But, as a doctor yourself, would you allow the son of a gravely ill patient to dose that patient with an untried form of remedy you knew nothing about?”
“I might if I saw that it was effecting an improvement, or at any rate not injuring the patient. Even if it was functioning as no more than a placebo, that would not be undesirable. He who believes his therapy is progressing well has more chance of regaining his health than he who does not. It’s the psychological factor. I imagine, too, that this Dr Wilcox was more than a little in awe of his aristocratic clients and unwilling to question or dispute Eustace Harington’s authority in matters medicinal.”
“But what if the nerve tonic gave only the illusion of beneficiality? What if it were actually, secretly, causing more harm than good? Can you think of a substance which confers liveliness upon mind and body while at the same time placing chronic strain upon one’s constitution, Watson? I can.”
It took me a moment to follow his train of thought. When I realised that he was speaking from first-hand experience, I alighted upon the answer in a flash.
“Cocaine,” I said.
My friend gave a tight nod of the head. “I did, as you know only too well, fall under the spell of that drug for a time. It seemed to provide me with everything I craved: stimulation, vigour, an acceleration of the mental processes. And yet in between injections, what lassitude overcame me, what depths of depression and torpor I sank into. Under its influence I felt on top of the world; without it, as though the world was on top of me. You yourself saw how cocaine ravaged me. I well recall your hectoring lectures about my use of it.”
“Hectoring lectures? Concerned admonitions, surely.”
“You warned me that I should count the cost. You told me cocaine addiction is a ‘pathological and morbid process, which involves increased tissue change, and may at least leave a permanent weakness’. Your very words. And in the end I heeded your warnings and was able to rid myself of my dependency on the needle and the seven-per-cent solution, thanks to your persistent efforts to wean me off it, and thanks to my own willpower too. I was a young man back then, in my prime, so there were no lasting physical, mental or emotional effects. But if someone in his late seventies were fed repeated quantities of cocaine, in a disguised form, might he not show the exact same pathology and symptoms as Eustace Harington’s father?”
“I agree. Cocaine-induced hypertension alone would be liable to trigger a second stroke, but until then the effect of the drug would be to enliven the fellow and give every indication that he was recuperating well.”
“The nerve tonic, incidentally, went by the name ‘Peruvian Gold’. We know that Lord Harington likes his South American native cures, and what plant is used more often for medicinal purposes in South America than the coca leaf, the source of cocaine? It is chewed in the Andes to overcome altitude sickness and is used among primitive Indian jungle tribes as a means of anaesthesia.”
“Now hold on here,” I said. “You’re telling me that Eustace Harington wilfully killed his own father? To me the thing looks at best like death by misadventure. His lordship may sincerely have believed that his Peruvian Gold was the ideal pick-me-up for the old man. We don’t even know that the stuff did contain cocaine.”
“No, we don’t. Nor would there have been an autopsy which might have revealed the drug’s presence in Harington senior’s system. The death would in no way be deemed suspicious.”
“One could always track down Dr Wilcox, I suppose. See if he harbours any misgivings about it.”
“One could, were he still alive,” said Holmes. “Wilcox was a Harley Street practitioner, a specialist in circulatory diseases. I thumbed through back-issues of the British Medical Journal, looking for his name, and found a reference to h
is obituary. He died in a road accident shortly after New Year, three weeks after Harington senior was laid to rest in the family tomb. A singular coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
“By which you mean no coincidence at all.”
“I am inclined to think it a somewhat convenient state of affairs, the doctor perishing so soon after the patient. Especially since he was struck down late at night outside his house in Marylebone by a motorist who failed to stop and help but simply drove on, leaving the poor man to bleed his last onto the cobbles.”
“Accidents happen.”
“And yet do you remember Mallinson describing alternative, simpler methods that might have been used to kill Patrick than dropping him out of an aeroplane? One of them was ‘mowing him down with a car’. A meaningless casual remark, or something more?”
“This is becoming grim.”
“It gets grimmer,” said Holmes. “In March of this year, Victor Anstruther’s brother blew his own head off in a gun-cleaning accident.”
“Good God.”
“He was a keen shot, Harold Anstruther, by all accounts. Victor Anstruther owns a hunting lodge up in the Cairngorms, on the banks of Loch Morlich, not far from Aviemore. Victor is a huntsman too, but it was Harold who liked to stay there the most. In the summer he would stalk deer, sometimes in the company of a ghillie but often by himself. In the winter and spring he was apt to go rough shooting for pheasant and hare, usually alone. He was proficient with every kind of gun and is unlikely to have made so rudimentary an error as cleaning a rifle with a bullet loaded in the breech. Yet that is precisely what appears to have happened.”
“You think otherwise.”
My friend sounded pained. “What is so accursedly aggravating about all this, Watson, is that I am forced to piece together data from second-hand sources, none of them absolutely unimpeachable. I am out of the game – have been for some while – and no longer do I have the contacts and connections that I used to, and thus the general wherewithal to build cases through the direct, hands-on accumulation of evidence. Newspaper reports lack forensic detail. Journalists have been known to be sloppy. I wonder if I were not retired, if I had remained in touch with the workings of the world, would I find myself reduced to scrabbling around in libraries to scare up facts as I do now?”
Sherlock Holmes - Gods of War Page 19
