by Pirie, David
Table of Contents
Title Page
PROLOGUE - 7.13 p.m., 12 October 1898
AUTHOR'S NOTE
THE RED CORRIDOR
THE FAERIES OF DEATH
THE IRRITATION OF THE CLERK
THE MURDERS OF MR CARSTAIRS
THE SEALED CHAMBER AT CANNING’S
DR BELL’S METHOD
THE PATIENT’S EYES
THE STRANGE PRACTICE
THE SOLITARY CYCLIST
THE LOCUM’S SECRET
THE DESPERATE DOCTOR
THE QUESTION OF GARCIA
‘THE WORKSHOP OF FILTHY CREATION’
THE REANIMATOR’S CODE
THE HORROR OF ABBEY MILL
THE BLACK HOUSE IN THE WOOD
THE COLLECTION OF MR CHARLES BLYTHE
THE DARK WINDOW
THE STAND-UP GRAVE
THE MAD NOTE
THE DEATH IN THE CORRIDOR
THE BEDFORD COUNTY CIPHER
SWALLOWED BY MIST
THE HUNTER IN THE DARK
THE DANCE ON WATER
THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN
THE STRAIGHT LINE AND THE MINOTAUR
EPILOGUE
Notes
Copyright Page
For Joyce Pirie
PROLOGUE
7.13 p.m., 12 October 1898
And so finally I come to them. This moment, this bright autumn of 1898, when I have decided for better or worse that I will have to try to translate the cases with the Doctor into words.
They were always my secrets, sixteen in all, though I had knowledge of two others. And I can be sure only of one thing. If you are reading these words, I am dead.
Occasionally, of course, there were hints of them in my fiction. Some detail which had imprinted itself upon my memory – a weapon, an article of clothing, the furnishings of a room, a particularly strange object – would find its way into a story. ‘The Copper Beeches’ in particular flirted with events that had actually happened. Fortunately for me, the Doctor did not see it until many years later. Naturally he did not care for it at all or any of these other hints. He would reproach me with one of the looks I knew so well: that withering straight-arrow glance that felt as if it could pierce a man’s soul. You knew the terms, it seemed to say. Absolute confidentiality.
Not that there was any real need for his concern. How could there be when the cases themselves contained so much that was acutely painful to me? Matters of such darkness and depravity could never be considered material for fiction, let alone a history. Especially when any such history would inevitably take me back through the years to that awful afternoon on a beach near Dunbar where we found Elsbeth. Here was, I suppose, the true beginning of our story when the Doctor stood by the waves and declared his fight against the future. The words may sound foolish unless you know all that prompted them. For me then, as we both recognised how profoundly we had failed and all that must lie ahead in our own branch of interest, it was the very least he could have said.
I was a young man then, only nineteen and in the second year of my medical degree at Edinburgh, where I had met the Doctor about six months previously. It is true there were problems in my family but even so I had everything to live for, before that moment on the beach all those years ago seemed for a time to bring my life to an end.
Until now, that was the worst moment. So unbearable that I have usually tried to avoid thinking of it. But in general nobody could have such experiences as I had with the Doctor in my younger years and not return to them. They would come to me while I was sailing on the Arctic whaler Hope, the first expedition I ever took. Or when I stood alone in the evening air outside the Tennison Road house in South Norwood, which I bought years later after I abandoned medicine for good. I would reflect on each extraordinary episode with Bell, considering what it told me about my fellow humanity, and about the darkness within my own sex.
No full accounts were ever compiled of our cases. But the truth was I had not been entirely true to my pledge. For each of them I still held boxes containing records of a kind: a map worked and reworked, diagrams, objects, odd hieroglyphs and puzzles and clues, which reflected for me and no one else the intimate details of each adventure. I came to think of these materials as my Murder Rooms. Although one box, containing all that led up to that beach and followed on from it, has remained at the back unopened.
Naturally I never attempted to explain these relics from years ago to anyone, not even Louise, my wife, when she was still in good health, though she often saw me studying some of the boxes and adding small details. The assumption, of course, was that I was planning a story, an assumption that now, in a way I never dreamed, almost comes true.
But before I write I must be clear about what has happened this autumn and why I am taking this step now. I will not pretend it has been a happy year, for despite my success there has been much inner turbulence in my life. But when two weeks ago I took Louise for a drive in the landau up on the heathland north of Hindhead, I had no idea of what was coming. Both of us share a love of this lonely and somewhat uncharacteristic stretch of wild country running above the home we built in the hope the air would improve her health. Since first setting eyes on it, the countryside here has reminded me of my native Scotland with its glens and valleys. But that day we did not travel far for, as we came on to the spur that is known locally as White Hill owing to its frosts, Louise began coughing.
It went on a few minutes only and, though she insisted we go on, I could see how glad she was when we turned for home. There I sat beside her bed for half an hour and was relieved at last to watch her sleep. I waited a little before coming down to my study, a room with broad windows offering a view of the woods behind the house. I sat down at my desk. And then I noticed the small brown-paper package.
It had been placed at the corner of my desk, as late deliveries often are. I receive a great deal of post, but there was something different about this parcel, perhaps because it was done up very elaborately with yards of knotted string. It bore my typewritten address and the postmark was Bristol, a city I barely know. After observing these details I ignored it for an hour while I worked. But I think even then it gave me a tiny sense of unease. There was something so painstaking and excessive about those intricate lengths of string winding around it. As I worked I found myself reflecting that it was too thin to be a book, yet too broad and wide to be a personal item like my watch, which was soon due back from its annual clean.
Eventually, while I was drinking my late-morning tea, I took up the package. Cutting the string, I pulled the layers of brown paper back; all I could see were several pages torn from a periodical. I picked them up and stared at a familiar illustration of a woman removing her veil. This was an early story of mine, published in the Strand Magazine in the winter of 1892.
Naturally, I supposed it had been sent for my autograph, though it was the first time I had ever been asked to sign loose pages. I leafed through them and soon reached the last illustration, which shows the detective holding a candle aloft in front of the stricken villain. I could find no accompanying letter at all. There was nothing else here, absolutely no indication of who had sent this or why.
My first assumption was that there must be something in the pages themselves, which might explain the parcel: a typographic flaw, perhaps, or some other oddity that a reader had thought I would be interested to see myself. And so it was that I put my work aside and scanned the Sherlock Holmes adventure ‘The Speckled Band’ for the first time in years.
What struck me most, reading it after so long, was its sheer wish-fulfilme
nt. This may seem a strange expression to use of a story in which a sadistic stepfather attempts to murder his stepdaughter in the night by sending a poisonous swampadder down a bell rope into her room. But in my heart I know well enough that wish-fulfilment is indeed what gives it life. And anyone aware of the events I witnessed at Abbey Mill in Hampshire in 1882 after I had left Edinburgh and started out as a doctor, events which began with the eye condition of my patient Heather Grace, would see at once why I use the word.
Not that the connection is obvious in any banal way. I went to some trouble to change, soften and simplify those terrible events, and also to rework them into what I would have wished. The model for the stepfather, Dr Grimesby Roylott, for example, was a landowner and natural historian called Charles Blythe, who was uncle and guardian to my patient, and who did indeed keep snakes and other poisonous creatures. But how often I have had occasion to wish that the truth about the whole affair had more closely resembled the fiction.
Having no desire to return to reflections of this kind, I turned the pages in front of me more rapidly. But they appeared to be from a perfectly ordinary edition of the magazine. There was nothing remarkable about them at all that I could see and I could think of absolutely no reason why they had been sent.
I was on the point of throwing them away when I saw the writing. I had missed it partly because I had not looked closely at the last page and partly because the tiny ink letters had been placed with such meticulous care. They were on the minuscule white line, marking the top of the stepfather’s table in the very last illustration, where the man is found dead and seated bolt upright, the fearful snake clamped like a yellow band round his head. I took my magnifying glass to be sure but, once seen, I could read them anyway.
Herne House,
Alton Road,
Harrow
That meant nothing to me at all. It was an ordinary enough address in an area where I knew nobody. But I could hardly avoid reflecting that some care had gone into the placing and the execution of this lettering. Naturally, I now went through the whole text again, casting a detailed eye and a magnifying glass on all the illustrations. But I found nothing else. If this was a clue to the sending of the package, it was the only one.
That evening Louise did not feel well enough to get up for dinner and I read some of Wells’s story The Invisible Man to her in her room. Later, downstairs, as I drank a glass of port, I cast my eye over the pages again, debating what to do with them. My curiosity was certainly aroused but I was also aware that the thing could easily have come from a half-crazed admirer of my work. If I visited the address and was greeted by some crackpot who saw himself as a detective or, worse, a master criminal and hoped to employ me in his self-publicising schemes, I would have only myself to blame. Yet something in the choice of story, and the care that had gone into that writing, made me doubt this explanation.
Eventually, I decided the best course was to enlist help. Three years ago, while I was writing ‘The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard,’ my editor at the Strand, Herbert Greenhough Smith, put me in touch with a useful member of his staff called Henry Walker, who was mainly concerned with proofing but was always happy to undertake bits of practical research. That night I wrote to Walker, telling him only that I had been passed some information and wished him to discover anything he could about the occupants at the Herne House address I had been given. Just to be safe, I added as an afterthought that the address might be fictitious.
Walker replied with admirable speed in little more than a day. But his answer puzzled me even more.
Dear Dr Doyle,
I am not surprised by your interest in this tragic business though there has been very little in the press and you are clever to have sought it out. I had no knowledge of the matter until I received your enquiry, but it was not long before it led me to the details of the case.
I can confirm Herne House was indeed the address of Alice Macmillan. As I suspect you are aware, the lady was returning from a trip to New York on the steamship Oregon which docked at Southampton the day before yesterday. Two days before disembarkation she was seen at breakfast but did not appear for lunch. One of her dining companions became worried when she found her cabin empty and a search of the boat was instituted without success.
The weather was stormy and the lady was known to enjoy walking alone on deck so the Captain feared there had been some kind of accident, and this was reported by a few newspapers, though not in any great detail. His fears proved justified, it seems, for a fishing vessel has brought ashore the body of a woman at Gravesend. From the description of her clothes alone it seems clear this is indeed Alice Macmillan. Barring any further developments, the inquest seems likely to share the Captain’s conclusion.
As to the personal situation of Alice Macmillan, the shipping company, who provided me with most of my information, confirm she was a woman of means, aged around forty who was not married. And I understand the heir to the property is an aged aunt, for this poor lady had not been alerted and came quite unknowingly to meet the boat. I have not actually been to the house, which I believe is quite grand though there are only servants living there at present.
I rather fear, sir, this may well be providing you only with facts you already have and little more is expected in the way of news on the matter, but I am more than happy to go on searching if you wish. Mr Greenhough Smith wanted you to know he thought it could well have potential as a story, and might even involve the man himself from the time before the matter in Switzerland, though as I told him that, of course, is entirely your affair. I would only conclude by thanking you for enabling me to be of some small service. And we all join here in our fervent hope that Mrs Doyle is gaining some benefit from the country air.
Yours truly,
Henry Walker
What on earth could this mean? I was so baffled by this intelligence that I did not even feel much irritation with Greenhough Smith and his ceaseless badgering for more of my detective (or ‘the man himself as he has persisted in calling him ever since I forbade him to mention the name).
I had never heard of Alice Macmillan and knew nothing of the matter at all. Nor could I see what this sad but entirely unremarkable story (for all Greenhough Smith’s humbug about its ‘potential’) might possibly have to do with me. Of course, it occurred to me to wonder if my correspondent could have some involvement in her death. But pushing someone off an ocean liner is not the easiest or subtlest of murders and any lingering doubts were dispelled by a study of the dates. The boat had docked two days before, on 30 September. My package was postmarked 29 September from Bristol. The sender could not possibly have been on board the ship but must have read the news story about the disappearance.
It was, I supposed, just possible to conjure up a criminal conspiracy and someone on board communicating with the sender by telegram. Yet, even supposing such an improbability, surely they would have contrived a less risky method of murder, far less advertise their whole scheme to me? And on top of everything else, an aged aunt was the sole beneficiary, hardly the most likely accomplice of such people. No, this appeared to be an accident, of a kind that was not so unusual in bad weather, but what it had to do with me I was at a loss to understand.
The time had come for me to dismiss the package as the work of an imaginative joker. I wrote back a highly appreciative letter to Walker, for he deserved it, telling him his help had been invaluable to me and he was among the reasons why I felt so much loyalty to the Strand. I hoped Greenhough Smith would read that, and added for his benefit I was not for the moment planning a detective story around the incident, especially since my detective was not in the land of the living.
While writing this, I had quite made up my mind to tear up the pages and be done with the whole business. But that night, as on every other night since I had received the thing, I found myself staring at the drawing of Dr Grimesby Roylott and the tiny writing inscribed on his desk in the final illustration of the story. Why was it there and nowhere els
e? Was it possible that someone had made a link through Roylott and his snakes, which was in effect the only real clue, to the actual events of 1882, events which began with my patient Heather Grace? It could hardly be anyone involved, that much seemed sure. Indeed, there seemed to be only one other option and I refused to think of it. But something had been at the back of my mind ever since I had seen the string on the package. Something that took me back to the beach and worse. I would not go down that road.
I did not wish to involve Walker further but I had to set my mind at rest and, after a series of telegrams, it proved surprisingly easy to arrange a meeting with the police in Gravesend. The body was still in a mortuary, awaiting an inquest, though nobody seemed to doubt the death was accidental.
It was three days ago that I travelled there and met the policeman responsible for the case, a straightforward ex-army man with lank hair and a sweating brow called Hector Murray. In his cramped office filled with smoke from a spluttering fire, I capitalised on my credentials as a doctor and scientist, explaining I was making a study of the properties of bodies that had been exposed at length to salt water. Fortunately there was no reason for him to doubt me, in fact, he did not even indulge in humorous speculation that I might be returning to detective fiction. But he was kind enough to offer me a rough draft of some details of the case he had compiled for the coroner.
And so, finally, I was escorted to the mortuary and there an old attendant, who smelt of tobacco and peppermint, led me to the slab to see the body of Alice Macmillan. I remember that I felt little expectation or excitement. I was sure I would satisfy my curiosity, prove finally and for ever this was all a false trail and throw that foolish parcel away for good.
The sheet came away rather slowly. I saw a pale shoulder, a ravaged face. And then I saw the eyes.
