The Wilhelm Conspiracy (A Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery)

by Charles Veley

  As Mrs. Hudson hovered in the doorway, Holmes scanned the contents and thrust the yellow paper at me. “What do you make of this, Watson?”

  I read:

  MY HUSBAND ASKS I ENGAGE YOU TO HELP HIM WITH A DIFFICULT BUSINESS PROBLEM. MAY I CALL ON YOU TOMORROW AFTERNOON AT YOUR BAKER STREET ADDRESS?

  —SOPHIA RADNAR

  “Funeral services for Harriet Radnar and Lord Kerren are being held today, in Dover,” Holmes said, as though musing to himself, without giving me opportunity to voice my own opinions. “So Lady Radnar will be occupied there until evening. Mr. Arkwright’s memorial service is Sunday, here in London. I doubt that Lady Radnar plans to attend. I shall accommodate her request for a meeting tomorrow afternoon.”

  He took his pen, wrote “Four o’clock,” at the bottom of the message, and gave it to Mrs. Hudson with half a crown. “Tell the boy it is to be sent at once.”

  He turned to me. “We shall need to make preparations. Watson, might I trouble you to telephone for Lord Lansdowne?”

  As four o’clock approached the following afternoon, Lucy and I grew progressively more apprehensive as we anticipated what was about to happen. Holmes, in contrast, appeared calm, even languid, seated in his armchair before the fire. Against my wishes, he had donned a white shirt and his customary black necktie, though Lucy had been required to slit the shirt fabric up the back to allow for the depth of the bandages that covered his wound. He had also insisted on not wearing the sling. In his dressing gown he appeared as normal as on any other occasion. But for a slight stiffness in the way he moved, one might never have suspected that barely a week had elapsed since he had been struck down by a bullet on that seaside cliff in Dover.

  The outside bellpull rang. Lucy, who had been sitting, got to her feet. So did I. We heard Mrs. Hudson’s voice, then the familiar sound of footsteps on our stairs. “Lady Radnar, sir,” she said, ushering in a heavily veiled woman dressed in black mourning garb and carrying a black purse.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hudson. You may leave us.”

  Our landlady departed. When the door closed behind her, Holmes said, “Please pardon me if I do not get up. I do require medical care from time to time and Miss James here has been assisting Dr. Watson in that regard. I am still not yet entirely recovered from a bullet wound I received last week.”

  Then his voice took on that silken tone. “I believe it was you who fired the gun, did you not, Miss Harriet Radnar?”

  The veiled woman stood mute. I thought I saw movement beneath her heavy black cape.

  “Come, Miss Radnar, you really ought to remove your veil. I do not believe you have the capacity for feelings sufficient to warrant wearing mourning garb for others, although you surely ought to mourn your own many misdeeds.”

  With an abrupt gesture, the woman swept back her veil. The defiant face of Harriet Radnar stared brazenly at the three of us. From the folds of her cape, she had extracted a large long-barrelled pistol of the German style. She now held it trained on Holmes, but her gaze alternated between Holmes and Lucy.

  “Which one of you killed Adrian?” she demanded. “That one will watch the other die.”

  “Arkwright lives,” Holmes replied evenly.

  “You lie!” She brandished the pistol. “I saw you strike him, Lucy. I heard the gunshot. I saw him fallen inside the army carriage. I saw you and Holmes get out unharmed. Now, answer me! Which one!”

  “His death in Dover, like your supposed death in Germany, was merely an illusion. We thought you might be watching from the cliff as we had him led away to the army carriage. We improvised a bit of drama to induce you to show yourself,” Holmes continued.

  “I do not believe you.”

  “You will see Arkwright momentarily. However, you should prepare yourself for a change in his appearance. Your bullet, after passing through my torso, did cause him some harm.” He turned towards the barely opened door to his sleeping room. “Lord Lansdowne, if you please.”

  The door opened. Lansdowne emerged. Arkwright followed, his hands manacled behind him, his face bandaged and badly swollen. Behind him came two strapping Army officers, holding their pistols at the ready.

  Harriet gasped at the sight of Arkwright’s once-handsome face.

  “Is it all that ghastly, Harriet?” His tone was imploring.

  “I truly thought Holmes or Lucy had killed you,” she replied, her face twisted in revulsion. The barrel of her gun, however, was trained on Holmes and never wavered.

  “I wish I could have warned you off.”

  “But you failed.”

  “But we shall recover. My face will heal, and we will soon be together, away from this accursed little island. We shall play—” His voice broke, though he quickly cleared his throat and concluded, “—beautiful music.”

  “You will be away indeed, and for a very long time, Mr. Arkwright,” said Lansdowne. “But I doubt you will have time or energy for your Stradivarius in the Andaman Islands. Miss Radnar, put down your pistol.”

  “You will take us both to the German embassy immediately,” Harriet said, continuing to hold the gun. “Mr. Arkwright has written a journal—”

  “So he has informed us. We are prepared to take that risk. We will bring you to trial, Miss Radnar, for the murder of your father, Lord Radnar, and of Lord Kerren. We will try you, Arkwright, for treason, and for the murder of Sergeant Phillip Stubbs.”

  The brown eyes widened in Arkwright’s ruined face. His tone was one of mock bewilderment and innocence. “Murder a police sergeant? Why would I do that?”

  “Come, Arkwright,” said Holmes. “You know exactly why. In order to conceal the truth, you even wrote a note for us to find in Miss Radnar’s purse. You were smitten with Miss Radnar. You would do anything she asked. She needed you to prevent Stubbs from continuing his attempts to blackmail her stepmother.”

  “You are absurd, Mr. Holmes,” said Harriet.

  “To the contrary,” said Holmes. “Stubbs was standing guard on the Dover passenger dock one month ago as travellers boarded a steamship bound for New York. He saw the local draper, one Mr. Lampert, coming up the gangplank dressed in unusually fine attire. Mr. Lampert believed he was on an important governmental mission to impersonate Lord Radnar. Quite possibly, Miss Radnar, you showed Mr. Lampert some credentials of yours from the War Office to gain his trust. You may even have asked him to design new military uniforms. In any event, as Lampert boarded the ship for America, he was recognized by Sergeant Stubbs, who heard the ticket clerk read out the name of Lord Radnar. Stubbs thought there was some illegal activity afoot and imagined that he could profit from his knowledge. He approached Lady Radnar. She mentioned the approach in your hearing, Miss Radnar. You could not allow him to tell Lady Radnar what he knew.”

  “I was nowhere near Stubbs when he was killed,” said Harriet.

  “But Mr. Arkwright was. Arkwright, you shot the sergeant twice with the rifle Miss Radnar provided from her father’s collection. A difficult shot, and the rifle’s aim was not as true as it might have been, so neither shot was fatal. When you learned he had survived, you donned your black knit mask—the same mask you had worn here in Baker Street two days earlier—and you broke Stubbs’s neck. It was significant that no human hairs were found in the wool fabric of your mask. You then pretended to arrive on the Calais ferry the next morning, and to be surprised by the exploding military balloon as you sat with us in the garrison castle. You had been in Dover all along, however. You may even have helped Kerren with the explosive and the timing device.”

  “A tenuous web of wild surmise,” said Arkwright, airily confident. “You cannot prove any of this twaddle. Lansdowne, I demand to see my solicitor before I say another word.”

  52. THE INTERVIEW CONCLUDES

  Holmes shrugged. “Very well. At this point it is of no consequence what you say or do not say, Mr. Arkwright. However, I know what it is to stand for an extended period while recovering from a bullet wound. Pray take a seat.”

  Arkwr
ight hugged his manacled wrists close to his chest. At a nod from Holmes, his two military guards propelled him towards our dining table and pressed him down into a chair.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Holmes. “Now let us return our attentions to you, Miss Radnar. According to the records of the White Star Line, Mr. Lampert plans to return from New York under his own name. His final task was to send Lady Radnar the telegram from New York that induced her to arrange this appointment. You might more conveniently have sent the telegram yourself to arrange the appointment, under the pretence that it was being sent to me by your stepmother. But you had the foresight to realize that such a course of action bore with it an unnecessary risk. You correctly anticipated that I would be cautious enough to telephone Lady Radnar to confirm that her message was genuine. Then this afternoon, you awaited Lady Radnar here. Your accomplices—I would expect them to be our old friends Richter and Dietrich—accompanied you, positioning themselves at either end of our Baker Street block and signalling the arrival of her carriage, so you could enter here without her observing you. I expect you have ordered them to commandeer her carriage and take her away.”

  “They may already have done so,” Harriet said sweetly.

  “You have arranged to meet Mr. Lampert next week here in London, in some anonymous hotel. He is expecting you to deliver the final payment for his successful completion of his very, very secret mission. Instead, you plan to kill him and leave his body without identification. You have grown quite accustomed to killing, have you not, Miss Radnar?”

  “I shall thoroughly enjoy killing you,” she said.

  “Your enjoyment would be short-lived. In the pocket of my dressing gown I am holding my Webley revolver. It is aimed at your face.”

  Harriet flinched momentarily, but she continued to hold her German pistol trained on Holmes.

  “You shot your father more than a month ago, on the day he was to depart for America,” Holmes continued. “You wrapped his body in a hessian sack and hid it in Kerren’s icehouse. When you learned Kerren was returning, you had to dispose of the body. You had noticed the gypsies fishing and seen the smoke from the fire pit below the wire frame they used to cook their fish. Fortunately for you there was a storm coming in. You warned the gypsies of the oncoming storm. They left their campsite, making their fire pit available to you for your grim purposes.”

  Holmes shook his head, as though saddened by the appalling details he was about to recount. “It was difficult for you to manage, Miss Radnar, but you accomplished all the tasks reasonably required of you to permanently conceal your father’s murder. That night, before the storm, you dragged his body to the edge of the cliff and let it fall. You also tumbled some sacks of coal over the cliff. You buried the body amidst the coals in the fire pit, soaked them with petrol, and set the combustible pile ablaze. Had your father’s body not been frozen, it would have soon been reduced to ashes and would have vanished into the tide. But the storm intervened. Even so, the Channel waters very nearly concealed your crime. It must have been distressing for you when the charred body washed up on the beach and caused your stepmother to become so very agitated.”

  “You have no evidence for any of this.”

  “The coal sacks left dark traces on the white chalk. The measurements I took of the charred body match the records Mr. Lampert, the draper, kept of your father, who was his customer. There were no teeth, which is consistent with your father’s dental history. We found his blood intermingled with the sawdust and hessian fibres in the icehouse. We found his bones oddly fragmented, due to the fall from the cliff and the frozen condition of his flesh.”

  “You still cannot prove I had anything to do with his death.”

  “We will have Mr. Lampert’s testimony. He will no doubt recall the various telegrams you instructed him to send in the name of Lord Radnar. Also, when you warned the gypsies away from the beach, you spoke to a woman in their party, one Madam Drina. You told her that you were Lady Radnar. When I first interviewed Madam Drina, I took her account of that conversation at face value. However, I later thought to bring her to where she could see Lady Radnar from a short distance away, and she assured me that this Lady Radnar was not the woman she had spoken with. I examined your room and found you had removed all the photographs of yourself, so I was unable to obtain positive identification until D’Oyly Carte’s assistant provided photographs of you. But Madam Drina has seen them now. She will bear witness in a court of law if requested.”

  “You are a commoner,” Harriet said curtly. “You cannot know what it is to have your father tell you that your birthright has been squandered—that all that is rightfully yours has been spent on lavish parties in order to elevate the social position of a scheming, jealous woman—and to advance the career of her dilettante, self-deluding brother.”

  “And the Germans would pay handsomely for the assassination of the Prince.”

  She gave a short laugh. “We even had a forged packet of letters from the Prince’s paramours, ready to be released just before the funeral. Fat Bertie’s memory would have been disgraced forever.”

  Holmes’s tone was calm and inexorable as he went on. “But you could not live in the manner you desired if the world was looking for you, as it surely would have done if you had simply gone missing. To create the illusion of your death, you first staged your own kidnapping. You left a note on your bed, and another in your purse, this one from Arkwright to distance him from any association with you. The following morning you went to the Baden-Baden railway station in a wheelchair pushed by Dietrich, who had put on the uniform and cap of a nurse. You used a simple white wig and makeup to appear as his wheelchair-bound elderly patient. You timed your entrance to the station to coincide with the departure of the southbound train, when travellers and soldiers were in place to bear witness, and with the arrival of the northbound express. You jumped from the northbound railway platform onto the tracks, and then after shamming an injury until you were no longer visible to the northbound express engineer, you flung yourself to safety and concealment between two cars of the southbound train. Mr. Arkwright was waiting for you, on the tracks between those cars, in the company of an unconscious young woman whose physical characteristics resembled yours.”

  Arkwright’s shoulders slumped. He closed his eyes as Holmes continued.

  “Arkwright had drugged the woman on the journey from Bad Homburg, so she could offer no resistance as he moved her from their first-class compartment to the space between the cars. In his locomotive, the driver could not see either Arkwright or the woman, for she was on the left side of the locomotive and the driver’s window was on the right. He could see you, of course, up until approximately thirty feet remained between you and the front of the locomotive. With the train advancing towards you at twenty miles per hour, decelerating due to the frantic application of the locomotive brakes, you had one full second for your leap to safety, and for Arkwright at the same moment to push the drugged young woman onto the track. The impact of the locomotive made it impossible to recognize her. She was dressed in your clothes, with your scarf around her neck. Do not waste the effort of a denial, Miss Radnar. I found the Baden-Baden railway timetables in your room. And Mr. Arkwright has already confessed to his role.”

  “Traitor!” Harriet’s eyes blazed at Arkwright.

  “I did no such thing!” he replied. “Harriet, I did not tell him! I swear it!”

  “Then you tricked me, Holmes.”

  Holmes shrugged. “And your reaction has betrayed you. Still, the evidence against you for your other crimes is sufficient to warrant a death sentence, so the consequences of my trick will be immaterial to your ultimate fate. But yours was a brilliant plan, fraught with risk and boldly executed. You could have readily assumed a new identity in a new country after the Prince had been assassinated.”

  Holmes’s compliment was clearly intended to induce Harriet to talk, and it succeeded.

  “With this plan,” Harriet said, “no one would look
for me. I was dead, wasn’t I?”

  “Indeed. And where did you obtain the young woman?”

  “She was a London doxy, about to go to prison for practising her trade.”

  “And was it you, Mr. Arkwright, who secured her release on bail and brought her to Germany? You may as well answer.”

  “The little fool thought she was about to entertain an English nobleman at the spa hotel,” said Arkwright.

  I shuddered involuntarily at Harriet’s response, for she seemed to find Arkwright’s remark amusing. “Well, she lies beside a nobleman now,” Harriet said. “In our cemetery plot.”

  “What was her name?” asked Lucy.

  “Her name? What does her ruddy name matter to me?”

  “Her next of kin should be notified.”

  “They can rot in hell.” Harriet stared hard at Lucy, who had edged closer. “Did you know?”

  “I kept recalling an incident at school,” Lucy said. “You and I had agreed to meet at the stables. But when I arrived, you weren’t where I thought you would be. I realized you weren’t where I thought you were at the railway station either.” She shrugged. “Also your silver pen was missing from your purse. And you kept calling attention to that purple scarf of yours. I think you overdid that part.”

  “You think yourself so very clever, Miss Lucy James. But I am still holding this gun.”

  What Harriet would have done with her pistol at that moment is unknown, for behind her the door from our stairway opened. We saw Lestrade, about to enter. As Harriet involuntarily took her eyes off Holmes to see the new arrival, Lucy lunged forwards, chopping her hand across Harriet’s wrist. In the next instant, Lucy wrested the pistol from the smaller woman’s grip. One of the military escorts moved to stand behind Harriet, holding his gun to the back of her neck.

  Lestrade’s narrow face was flushed with pride and excitement. “My men surrounded the carriage, sir,” he said. “Lady Radnar is safe. Richter and Dietrich are manacled and shackled. Richter appears to be in genuine pain from his bonds—some kind of skin disorder, it appears, for his face and hands are very red and blistered, as if he’d been in the tropics, perhaps. He had a few choice words to say about you, Dr. Watson—doesn’t seem to like you very much. He and Dietrich are also protesting their harsh treatment and claiming diplomatic immunity. Oh, and we found Mr. Arkwright’s journal in Dietrich’s valise.”