The Whole Art of Detection

by Lyndsay Faye

  “You are afraid of something?”

  “Well, I am.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of air-guns.”

  “Yes, the worst ones affected him,” said I. “Quickly now, there’s a decent chophouse just this way, and the rain is starting.”

  We arrived without incident at a pub with tarnished mirrors and a charred atmosphere. Chestnut husks crunched beneath my boot soles. Some sort of food I cannot recall passed my lips as the inspector talked on briskly of the Abernetty case, his cadences as familiar as the ticking of my pocket watch.

  It was a tremendous kindness. I never told him that I recalled every detail as if it were yesterday, and—though he knew as much—he never reminded me of the fact.

  Excerpt from the unpublished manuscript

  “The Adventure of the Abernetty Family”:

  “I know you’ve never believed in evil spirits, Mr. Holmes,” Lestrade said, jerkily tugging at his cuffs. I had seen the inspector irritable countless times, but never had I seen him so unnerved. “I didn’t either—I don’t, I mean, that is to say. But you can see all that I can see, still more I’ve no doubt, and God help us, if ever a man did watch a curse ravage a household, it would look exactly like this.”

  Sherlock Holmes, his expressive mouth thin brows drawn together in a taut line, shook his head emphatically. The sun seeping through the half-pulled curtains of the ill-fated Abernetty house was now well past its meridian, and my friend had taken on the air of a tethered greyhound straining against the implacable grip of its leash. The sinews beneath the quiet tailoring of his coat were tense with anticipation. Now that the three bodies found in various attitudes of grisly agony in the allegedly haunted abode had been examined and taken away, and the most minute search for traces of a poisoning agent come to nothing, the passion beneath Holmes’s phlegmatic exterior had grown more visible by steady degrees.

  “I just mean,” Lestrade again attempted, his lean face likewise tight with worriment, “that supposing the Devil had a hand in the affairs of—”

  “It won’t wash!” Holmes exclaimed, striking an impatient fist against his palm. Waving his hand as if in regret dismissal at of his outburst, he leaned against the windowsill. “These circumstances may have all the trappings of a lurid ghost story, but only children are untutored enough to actually be frightened of spectres. Let us sum up, so as to clarify our thoughts: five members of a family said to be accursed owing to their bloodthirsty dealings in the South American coffee trade are dead—the ruthless patriarch at his offices, the complicit mother at an art benefit, the innocent sisters over cards here in their parlor. Time of death for all five was practically simultaneous despite the three separate murder scenes. Now. I grant you that the Devil may have inspired such events, but he never executed them.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I am not yet certain. I need more data, not fanciful embellishments of facts which are already before us.”

  “But it is impossible, I tell you, that they should all have been struck down at once despite being miles apart.”

  “Of course it isn’t impossible!” Holmes flung his arms wide. “What heights of rarefied nonsense are you subjecting me to today, Lestrade? Are you through with them, or should I fear further inanities? It happened, ad oculos, therefore it is possible. The Abernetty family was poisoned.”

  “How?” Lestrade pleaded. “We’ve found nothing at any of the crime scenes to indicate such. And the servants might be foreigners, right enough, but the individual accounts they give corroborate each other—nothing save the usual midnight shrieks and freakish alteration of clock hands and such has been afoot. Are you telling me that invisible assassins drove needles simultaneously into—”

  “Lestrade, you flatter my mind’s expansiveness me, but even I have not such a fanciful imagination as that,” my friend groaned. “Simplicity is much more elegant. They all died within five minutes of each other. Therefore, they were commonly poisoned and the effect was inexplicably delayed.”

  “I cannot think of any poison to match such terribly grotesque symptoms,” I put in, greatly troubled. Just contemplating what the three sisters’ final moments must have been like sent hoarfrost down my spine. Their corpses would live in my nightmares, I was already certain of it. “They all suffered acute respiratory distress, fluid on the lungs, and seizures before finally suffocating before one another’s very eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it before in all my days—it’s as if they drowned on dry land.”

  “Precisely so!” Lestrade cried. “What horrible drug could have achieved such an effect?”

  “I know of none. What causes drowning in the midst of a clear blue day? It isn’t arsenic, cyanide, belladonna, any of the common—”

  “Watson,” Holmes demanded with exquisite asperity, “were this crime of the common herd, would I be here?”

  Excerpt from the diary of Dr. John Watson,

  March 23rd, 1894:

  I had expected by this time a return of appetite if not relish, and comfort in writing of Holmes despite the fact that the exercise often feels like pressing upon my old injury. Neither has resulted so far.

  I begin to wonder what, if anything, I can do to pull myself from this mire of stupefaction.

  My twice-yearly rendezvous with Mrs. Hudson took place as usual, at the tea shop on the corner of Baker Street and Melcombe Street, despite the fact she had written me to say that I need not come if I was unable. I could think of no plausible excuse, however, not even for myself, and so assured her that I was quite well enough and met her over thin sandwiches and an excellent pot of Ceylon.

  “Oh, you poor dear,” she said, embracing me when I reached the low chintz-covered table. “My most heartfelt condolences, Dr. Watson. If there’s anything, anything at all—”

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Hudson.” I hung my hat on a peg. “You look very well.”

  She looked precisely the same—Mrs. Hudson has a crown of snowy hair and a perfectly oval face, bright blue eyes, and amiable, even features which must have gladdened the late Mr. Hudson’s heart whenever he saw them, the lucky chap. I thought she must have been pretty and knew she must have been slyly clever as well as shy. While she had always treated Holmes as if she had a tame dragon for a lodger—deferential, admiring, cautious—she also held considerable affection for him, and for me by extension.

  “Well, I’m sorry to tell you that I can’t return the compliment. You look almost as thin as when you took rooms in Baker Street, and you’ve dreadful dark circles under your eyes,” she fretted, pouring the tea. “I do wish you would come to two-twenty-one, Doctor, and let me cook you a hearty meal for the sake of old times.”

  Though I smiled, I said nothing—for Mrs. Hudson knows why I will not visit her there, and our talk turned to other matters.

  Our former rooms have been kept as a strange monument to my lost friend by his brother, Mycroft Holmes, a man of most narrow and concentrated habits. More accurately, Mycroft is an acolyte at the temple of fixed daily patterns. I could not help but conclude that even the practice of having a brother had become so ingrained in the poor soul that he simply refused to act as if he didn’t have one any longer. This was the only sensible explanation I could conjure, for Mycroft was seven years Sherlock’s elder, and must have been a great influence on him. Surely the loss of a gifted younger sibling he had protected in youth would be enough to tilt even a great mind—perhaps especially a great mind—a few degrees off kilter. Thus the sitting room, my old room, even Holmes’s bedchamber were regularly dusted, paid for monthly by the elder Mr. Holmes, and madly, miserably empty.

  As tragic as this was, it would be perjury to suggest I found his behavior shocking. Though the peculiar siblings utterly forswore demonstrative sentiment, they were in their own silent fashion devoted to each other, and the immaculate preservation of 221B proves as much. Mrs. Hudson probably feels like the
caretaker of a highly specialized museum, and in a way she is.

  If the mummification of our lodgings makes Mycroft Holmes feel that his brother is alive, well and good. I write short stories. The measures are not dissimilar. But I cannot be in those rooms again. Not unchanged, not after all he suffered, not as if Sherlock Holmes had not begged me to leave him behind for my own safety for half an hour in the Strasbourg salle à manger, not as if he had never looked at me with an unidentifiable shadow over his brow, half-obscured by an attempted smile, and remarked, “I think I may go so far as to say, Watson, that I have not lived wholly in vain.”

  “After your last publication came out, I worried for you,” Mrs. Hudson was saying. Plucking myself from my reverie, I poured her more tea. “It was Christmas and all, and that choice of topic . . . It didn’t sound like you, Doctor.”

  “ ‘The Final Problem’?” I picked up an egg sandwich, took a bite, and set it down again. “I thought it sounded rather like me—at least, it sold very well.”

  The kindly old woman bit her lip, nodding, and I mentally chided myself for my incivility.

  “Please forgive me. It was high time, Mrs. Hudson.” Taking her hand, I smiled as best I could. “I am still writing of our exploits, do not doubt it. However, when Mary’s ever-worsening condition was considered . . . well, I had begun to sense that I must look life square in the face, in all matters, and that is what I did. What I will continue to do, without undue morbidity or self-pity. I promise you.”

  She pressed my hand and returned my warm expression. “You’ve eased my mind, then, and I thank you for that. And I’ll trouble you no more over what can’t be remedied anyhow. I’ve one more question, though—why on earth did you write that you had never heard of Professor Moriarty?”

  “Tricks of the trade, Mrs. Hudson,” I returned affably, making a manful effort at the remaining sandwich fragment. “Explain too much at the start and the reader revolts.”

  “Ah, I see. It was better for the story that you didn’t know.”

  The memory of a Swiss boy—out of breath, cherry-cheeked, eager—caused my vision momentarily to lose focus. Three years ago, Holmes thumped his Alpine-stock against the grass and gave me a resigned shrug.

  “No, no, go on back to Meiringen, my dear fellow. This lad will keep me from straying off of any cliffsides, and you shall catch me up at Rosenlaui. We’ve seen the Falls, and anyway I must not be selfish. Surely if the unfortunate woman wants her last memory to be that of a kindly English doctor easing her path into the undiscovered country, you cannot deny either her excellent tastes or her wishes in the matter, can you?”

  I pressed my thumb so hard into my wrist that I could feel the bruise forming, took a breath, and sipped my tea.

  “You have it exactly, Mrs. Hudson.” Edging the plate toward her, I watched her take another cress sandwich. “It was better for the story that I didn’t know.”

  Walking toward the Underground after I left her, I thought well of my vow to my former landlady. It was the best I could make and no better, but I believe it an efficacious one nonetheless. Once finished with this journal entry, I shall put myself to a more useful occupation and continue work on the Abernetty matter. It is not as if—my mind having been so thoroughly consumed with my wife for these six months and more—I’ve any patients to distract me.

  Excerpt from the unpublished manuscript

  “The Adventure of the Abernetty Family”:

  “But nothing!” Inspector Lestrade growled in the front hall, arms burrowing into his coat sleeves. “There is no evidence here to find, I tell you—you cannot contradict me.”

  “I think you’ll find that I can,” Holmes snapped.

  “Then you would be wrong for the first time, and what of that! It’s useless. And either all the servants are telling the truth, and spiteful phantoms meddled with timekeeping and lost books and unravelled hems and put salt in the sugar bowl for years, or else all the servants are lying. In either case, best of luck. I’m for the morgue, where pray God they’ve made some progress with the bodies. Anyway, it’ll be a sight more cheerful than this wretched place.”

  My friend gnawed at his cheek for a moment, but soon gave up the matter as lost. “Go on, then. Wire me the instant you have news. I shall remain here and find what is missing.”

  “What could possibly be missing, Mr. Holmes?”

  “The answer, for the love of heaven!” the detective cried.

  Shaking his head, Inspector Lestrade departed, slamming the front door behind him.

  “Come, Watson.” Holmes sighed, fingers pressing winglike at the bridge of his arched nose. He walked down the hall and I followed, deeply discouraged. “Back to work.”

  Holmes seemed to fall fell into an uncharacteristic reverie upon re-­entering the parlor where the three young Misses Abernetty had been discovered. The air in this room was thick with the intangible atmosphere of recent death—not an aroma, but a feeling like an echo of stopped watches, of missed trains, of misdirected love letters, of all that will now never come to pass. He shook his sable head, jaw tense with chagrin.

  “You and I may not credit curses,” I mused, my eyes likewise upon the arrangement of spent hands of whist and scattered tea things, “but despite the fact the strange events in this household smack of chicanery and harassment rather than demonic influence, there is certainly a depressing air about rooms where young people have died untimely.”

  “Quite so,” Holmes agreed, squinting somberly at the table. “For a man who drove Amazonian tribes to slaughter one another wholesale, all to swell his already fat coffers, to be struck down—the universe approves of balanced sowing and reaping. I cannot help but think it fitting that a greedy sensualist who made it his practice to incite evil in others should himself be felled by an evil deed. But the daughters were blameless. That they should have died so, having committed no sin worthy of such a punishment, is offensive to the rational soul.”

  My friend froze over the tabletop, his lips parted on a stifled gasp and his slender hands floating with palms down before him. He could have been Moses readying himself to divide the waters, or a magician casting his final hex over a bubbling potion.

  “Whatever’s the matter?”

  “Watson, look!” he cried. “The parsley has sunk into the butter!”

  “But what of that?”

  “Watson,” he hissed, gripping my wrist convulsively, “it is scientifically impossible for parsley to sink into butter.”

  Excerpt from the diary of Dr. John Watson,

  March 25th, 1894:

  If I continue no better, at least I continue no worse. But God, how weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, etc. . . .

  My poor friend always claimed that finding the line of least resistance was the starting point of every problem; he insisted that once the astute reasoner discerned a path by identifying an anomaly, blazing a trail through the bracken would prove simple thereafter. It is this very belief that has begun to chill me of late. I see no gentle byways, no sinuous and subtle markings in the landscape whereby traversing them the weary wanderer might glimpse a friendly spark of light through a many-paned cottage window.

  But I stray from the point. Hearing Holmes’s voice commanding, as he had used to do, “Refrain from poetry, Watson, it hardly suits at the moment,” I shall make a better effort to explain myself, if only to myself.

  I have been considered a bold campaigner. Every man finds himself at times without a map to guide him, however. Returning from the Second Afghan War, I felt aimless—until I quite by chance met a crusader fully as solitary as I and discovered that, while his greatness of character far exceeded my own, our temperaments were so wildly antithetical as to be perfectly matched, and thus I felt enormous pride at being recruited to serve upon the singular missions of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. At the loss of this latter commander, I felt similarly directionless, and I mourned him wit
h all my heart, though I could not actually bury him. I had a wife then, however, one as warm as the sun around which more minor bodies orbit, and thus retained a certain groundedness in spite of my grief.

  One sees patients, one runs his household, one kisses his beautiful spouse when he finds her lost in one of his seafaring novels, caresses her hair where it gleams like the tufts of midsummer meadow grasses, blesses the fact she was ever born in the first place, and one remains tied to the gritty ache of life on earth and heartily glad to be so.

  Having now lost Mary, I cannot but feel as if the very laws of gravity have deserted me. I may as well be Holmes, and have erased the principle from the garret of my mind.

  Confound it, I appear to have resorted to poetry after all.

  Excerpt from the diary of Dr. John Watson, March 30th, 1894:

  Enough.

  Seeing a patient out the door this morning with a tonic, a prescription, and a false smile, I returned to lock up my small private stores and found my eyes lingering on the cocaine bottle.

  Reprehensible. And this after all my hard urgings on poor Holmes, whose lambent mind was capable of inventing torments I could no better comprehend than I could prevent.

  I find I cannot even write of him with pleasure at present, and that is the hardest blow of all. At the time of the Abernetty business, he was in the thick of preparing to topple James Moriarty’s empire, and dreams of waterfalls and Alpine-stocks grow more unbearable nightly.

  I can continue like this no longer, I have concluded, and have thus set certain plans in motion. Let me say no more at present, but I harbor hopes for recovery.

  Excerpt from the diary of Dr. John Watson,

  April 3rd, 1894:

  A note arrived from Lestrade day before yesterday suggesting that I could earn a few extra quid per year assisting the Yard in a medical capacity. He knows my practice has suffered heavy blows following my wife’s decline. It was well thought of, and for that reason have I turned him down in person.