The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part X

by Marcum, David;

  “Such as ‘You did it,’ I presume?”

  “Lacking your spelling skills, Watson. Rather, ‘U did it’,” as he made the shape of a “U” with his index finger.

  “How did you manage to shoot Huber in the shoulder with a bare hand, Holmes? That’s a trick I would appreciate you teaching me!”

  “Happy to, Watson. It’s an unusual device called a ‘Lemon Squeezer’, which I had sent to me from Chicago. I modified it by affixing a faux watch-face on one side to enhance the deception.”

  Holmes opened up his palm and displayed a large pocket watch with a protruding tube. He wedged the device between his two hands and unscrewed it. Inside, I spied a wheeled ratcheting mechanism with seven blunt spines. Just as quickly, he reaffixed the twin edges.

  “Seven rounds, I note. You were prepared for violence.”

  “Clearly the man had no regard for human life,” Holmes replied.

  He emphasized his point by extending his arm away from me and fired four times into the burgundy wallpaper. I looked through the gun smoke across the room, feeling a slight sense of pity for Mrs. Hudson. When the blue haze cleared, I noticed the addition of an ! to the right of the V and R-shaped bullet holes (which one may recall from my mention of them in “The Musgrave Ritual”).

  While I have criticized Holmes’s untidiness in the past, as the sunlight streamed in through the bow window on this particular afternoon, I was grateful for his eccentricities. His shrewd preparation and marksmanship had saved us both.

  The Adventure of the Future Funeral

  by Hugh Ashton

  A pair of muddy shoes was on the doorstep as I arrived at 221b Baker Street. The minor mystery of who might have left their shoes outside the house was resolved when I took the seventeen steps to the rooms I shared with Sherlock Holmes and discovered him deep in conversation with a stranger, seemingly a client seeking Holmes’s services.

  “No, Watson, I would not have you leave for the world,” Holmes told me, as I apologised for my intrusion and hastened to back out of the door. “Mr. Urquhart has been telling me of a most interesting circumstance.”

  I regarded the visitor with some interest, attempting, in the manner of my friend, to deduce some facts from his appearance. His black mourning clothes marked him as someone who had recently suffered a loss, and his generally lugubrious aspect confirmed my suspicion. My professional training informed me that he appeared to be an asthmatic, and I noted with some interest the signet ring, which bore the initials S.O. His feet were missing their shoes, presumably to be seen on the doorstep, with the left great toe protruding through a hole in the sock, but the heel had been darned. I therefore deduced that it was his wife had quit this world, following the repair to the heel of the sock, but prior to the more recent damage at the toe.

  “I must commiserate with you on your loss, Mr. Urquhart,” I said to him. “It is indeed hard to lose one’s wife.”

  Holmes’s visitor looked perplexed. “What in the world are you talking about, er - ?”

  “This is Doctor Watson, my friend and colleague, who is kind enough to write small fanciful romances based on some of my more interesting cases,” Holmes answered him. “Tell me, Watson, by what process did you arrive at this conclusion?”

  “The fact that Mr. Urquhart is in mourning points to a loss, probably recent, as the garments are relatively new. I must apologise, Mr. Urquhart, but the state of your left sock indicates that at one time there was someone in your life who would mend your socks for you, but that state of affairs has sadly ceased to be.”

  Holmes clapped his hands together. “Bravo, my dear Watson! You are coming on splendidly.”

  “Then I am correct in my deductions?”

  “Wrong in every particular. For example, why does a man wear mourning weeds?”

  “Because he has lost one who was dear to him?”

  “Indeed, that is one possible reason.”

  “There are others?”

  “Naturally. Let us suppose Mr. Urquhart to be an undertaker - that is, a man whose professional dress is one of mourning, and which must, moreover, always be in a state of good repair so as not to cause offence to the bereaved mourners.”

  “I see. And the sock?”

  “You may have noticed that it has been raining heavily for the past week.”

  “So?”

  “This has made it impossible to dry the laundry, and I am drawing a bow at a venture here, but I would guess that Mr. Urquhart, when he donned his socks this morning, was reduced to a pair that he would not normally have considered appropriate.”

  Urqhart chuckled. “You’re right there, sir. The missus was not well pleased that this was the only pair left to me, but needs must, eh?”

  “Quite so, quite so. The rain is also responsible for the last clue in the identification of Mr. Urqhart’s profession.”

  “The boots on the doorstep?” I enquired. “The rain has made them so muddy that they were not fit to walk on Mrs. Hudson’s carpets?”

  “Indeed so. And the mud, or rather the leaves adhering to them that I noticed when I opened the front door to Mr. Urquhart, confirmed my immediate suspicions. That species of broad-leafed oak is to be found only in Highgate Cemetery, or in a small arboretum on the outskirts of Shrewsbury. I chose the nearer location as being the more likely.”

  “And once more you are right, sir,” said Urqhart. “It’s a wonder to me how you can see these things.”

  Holmes waved a languid hand. “I see only what other men see,” he explained. “It is what happens in here,” tapping the side of his head, “that is different. But tell me, what is your reason for coming here?”

  “Well, sir, it was last Tuesday that this gentleman came to see me. Well, not quite a gentleman, perhaps. Though he spoke well enough, there was something about him that didn’t quite ring true.”

  “His boots, perhaps?” suggested Holmes.

  Our visitor started. “Why, that was exactly it,” he exclaimed. “I was just about to say that it was his boots that gave him away, as you might say, and you put the words into my mouth. Well, then, this man-”

  “He has a name?” Holmes asked.

  The other smiled. “He gave me the name of John Blenkinthorpe, and requested that I collect the body of his wife.”

  “Hardly an unusual occurrence, I would have thought?” I interjected.

  “Indeed not. It is, after all, the way in which I earn my living,” replied Nathaniel Urquhart. “In such cases, we naturally enquire what time will be the most convenient for us to make the collection. In this instance, I was given a date and time a year from now.”

  Holmes raised his eyebrows. “Indeed? That would seem to be an unusual development.”

  “Not merely unusual, Mr. Holmes. Absolutely unheard-of. Why, you can imagine the state of a body after a year, can you not?”

  “Indeed so. Most singular. There is more?”

  “Yes, the whole business is confoundedly queer. I was taken aback by his request, but asked for the name of the deceased. He thereupon informed me that he was unmarried at present.”

  “And yet he had asked you to collect his wife’s body?”

  “That is correct.”

  “You would appear to have been the victim of some form of practical joke,” I suggested.

  Our visitor smiled. “It goes further than that,” he explained. “As you may guess, I had been given an address from which to collect the body of this non-existent wife, before I had even been given a date on which to perform the operation.”

  “And the address was a false one?” suggested Holmes.

  “Not quite. When I passed by 23 Belvedere Gardens some time later on my way home from my business premises, I noticed that a sign proclaimed that it was to let. Out of curiosity, I went to the nearest letting-agents an
d enquired regarding the lease of the property, describing to them the man who had given his name as John Blenkinthorpe. Not only was the name unknown to them, but they had no knowledge of a man who answered the description which I presented to them, and, even stranger, the property was not to let through them. They recommended several other agents in the vicinity, given that I had expressed an interest in the property, but I likewise failed to obtain any information about Blenkinthorpe or the property.”

  “Most curious,” remarked Holmes. “But I fail to see where my services may be of value to you. In what capacity do you wish to engage me?”

  “Why, none, sir,” replied our visitor. “I knew that the unusual held some interest for you, and remembered you from the time of poor Lady Frances, and thought you might find my story to be worth the hearing.”

  Holmes threw up his hands in exasperation. “I am a busy man, Mr. Urquhart, and even though your story may be interesting of itself, unless you set the puzzle for me to unravel, with a definite solution and goal to attain, I consider the telling of it to be a waste of time. Goodbye to you.” With these words, he turned away, and thereby brought any further conversation to an end.

  Urquhart turned to me, but while Holmes was within earshot I was unable to offer him any advice, or to do other than to usher him silently to the door.

  “I have no doubt that Mr. Holmes has an interest in your story,” I told him, when I judged us to be out of my friend’s hearing. “However, it is hardly reasonable to expect him to take on any kind of investigation without a definite end in sight. I can assure you that it is not the financial aspect of the matter that is of concern - I have known him to take many cases without fee - but it is the intellectual challenge that stimulates him to action. I therefore wish you a very good day.”

  I saw him down the stairs and returned to the room.

  “Thank you, Watson,” Holmes remarked to me, without turning or raising his head. “You have an admirable gift of tact on occasion, a gift which I all too often seem to lack.”

  “And what of our friend’s story?” I asked.

  “Do you believe it?” my friend asked me in reply.

  “Why, yes. What possible reason could he have for telling us such a fable?”

  “I can conceive of at least three reasons why we have heard this story,” Holmes told me. “You surely have not forgotten the story of Mr. Jabez Wilson, with the remarkable head of red hair. His story to us seemed too preposterous to be true, but it ended in the very satisfactory capture of Mr. John Clay, who had been a thorn in the side of Scotland Yard for some years. Could not this story be a similar ruse to lure Mr. Urquhart from his business?”

  “And the other two reasons?”

  “I am reminded of a case in Baden in 1865, where a Herr Hufschmidt made a similar request for a coffin for person or persons unknown, to be filled in the future. The motive in that case was to deflect any suspicion of murder, for what murderer would signal his motives in advance in so brazen a fashion? In this instance, the murderer is himself the maker of the coffin to contain his future victim.”

  “But surely you do not consider Mr. Nathan Urquhart to be a potential murderer?”

  “All men, even you, Watson, may be said to be capable of that crime, given appropriate circumstances and motivation. However, I do not say that I consider this to be a likely probability, merely one of several possibilities.”

  “And the third?”

  “That Mr. Urquhart is not of sound mind, and has recounted a dream or some other delusion to us, in the sincere and firm belief that this incident really occurred.”

  “That last should be easy enough to check,” I laughed. “It is a simple matter of making our way to Belvedere Gardens and examining the premises.”

  “And if they turn out to be empty, pray, what would that tell us? Merely that Mr. Urquhart has passed an empty house in his everyday journey and had remarked the fact that it was empty somewhere at the back of his mind. He then proceeded to spin an elaborate fable around the fact.”

  I sighed. “It is a shame that we are not able to take the case further.”

  “Case, Watson? Case? There is no case. There is merely a procession of bizarre and outré events related to us by a stranger, which may or may not have a basis in reality.”

  “At all events, I propose to take myself to view the premises in question.”

  “By all means do so, though I fail to see what you will discover of interest there. In the meantime, it is of importance to me that I should finish these notes on the derivation of harmonies in the motets of Lassus.”

  I therefore took myself off, and proceeded to Belvedere Gardens. No. 23 proved to be at the end of a red-brick terrace, and presented a forlorn aspect. One of the front windows, bare of any curtains or hangings, was cracked, and the paint was peeling from the front door.

  Since the house stood at the end of the row, it was a comparatively simple matter for me to make my way to the rear of the building, where I entered the back yard through an unlocked gate. The back of the house was, if anything, more unprepossessing than the front, but it was noticeable that the handle of the back door appeared clean and free of grime.

  On a whim, I turned the handle, and to my surprise, found I was able to open the door, which moved easily and silently on its hinges, allowing me to enter the small room that served the house as a primitive kitchen. Though I am well aware that I lack Sherlock Holmes’s powers of observation, it was clear to me that this place had been used in the very recent past. There were vague imprints of feet on the dusty floor, and there were signs that the range had been in use not too long before. A half-burned scrap of newspaper bore a date of only two weeks before.

  There were few other signs of occupation, and on my trying the door that led to the other rooms of the house, I discovered that it was locked. I was therefore forced to the conclusion that whatever had taken place in this house had taken place only in this room.

  * * *

  I returned to find my friend engaged in looking through the voluminous scrapbooks that formed such a large part of his working tools.

  “This case is almost unique in the annals of crime,” he remarked, glancing up from a page of newspaper cuttings. “I now recall a similar event in Brussels in 1876, and the one in Baden in 1865, as I mentioned previously, but as far as I am aware, this is the first time that such a thing has occurred in this country.”

  “You believe there to be a case, then?”

  “Indeed I do. Of its precise details, I am as yet unable to say, but we may take it as certain that some devilment is afoot, and that of a strange nature. But tell me, what have you discovered?”

  I informed him of the nature of the house and its internal arrangements.

  “Indeed, most singular,” he commented.

  “What, then, are we to make of this funeral ordered for a year hence?”

  “For me to answer that, you must inform me of what the neighbours had to say about this house and its inhabitants.”

  “I feat that I did not talk to any of them.”

  “Tut, Watson. Was there no twitching of the net curtains, as a stranger walked through Belvedere Gardens?”

  “I did not observe.”

  “And you entered only the kitchen from the rear of the house?”

  “That is correct.”

  “You have been most confoundedly careless about the whole matter, Watson. No matter. Prepare to leave here in twenty minutes.”

  “Where to?”

  “Why, Belvedere Gardens, of course.”

  “You regard this as significant, then? I have discovered a clue?”

  “In the sense that you have discovered some parts of this business which have whetted my appetite, yes. In the matter of clues leading to the solving of this mystery by the forces of justice, no. I must
therefore conduct this investigation myself. I can ill-afford to take time away from my investigation of the Duchess of Hampshire’s diamonds, but the case is almost at an end, and I believe that even Lestrade will be able to apprehend the criminal with the hints that I shall give him.” So saying, Sherlock Holmes turned to his writing-desk and proceeded to write a few lines on a scrap of notepaper, which he folded and sealed in an envelope before ringing for Billy, our page, with instructions to hand it to Inspector Lestrade personally.

  “And now,” he announced, entering his bed-room, “I shall make myself ready to visit Belvedere Gardens.”

  It was precisely twenty minutes after Holmes had announced his intention of visiting the house that we caught a cab to Southwark. I guided Holmes to the back of the house, where I once more entered the back door into the kitchen.

  Holmes cast a quick eye over the scene, as if to confirm for himself what I had previously communicated to him, and made for the door connecting the kitchen to the rest of the house.

  “It is locked, as I told you,” I informed him.

  “No matter,” said he, and indeed, his ever-present picklocks were already in his hand as he spoke. “Ha!” he exclaimed as the lock sprang open.

  The hallway likewise was bare of furnishings and furniture, presenting a dismal aspect.

  “Curious,” I remarked.

  “Let us look further,” Holmes answered me, and led the way to the other room on the ground floor. This, too, proved to be a room empty of all furniture, with bare floorboards. “And upstairs,” Holmes added, bounding up the bare boards of the staircase. The rooms at the front of the house on the first floor were also bare and empty, but those at the back were furnished, albeit meagrely, with a bed and washstand, and on my drawing my finger across one of the ledges, these rooms appeared to have been used and cleaned relatively recently.

  Holmes bent over one of the beds and removed something from the pillow, which he placed carefully in an envelope.