Thirty-Nine Steps from Baker Street

by J. R. Trtek

  “If you do not mind, Watson, like Mr. Shaw, I should like to be alone with that thought for a while longer. It was not a remark that incriminates the man in any way; rather, it has made me see our Cerebus enigma in a slightly different light. And speaking of light, the landscape is starkly beautiful when stars are the only lamps, is it not?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, recognising my friend’s desire to change the subject of conversation.

  “One perceives shapes,” Holmes went on, “without the distractions of colour. Form, line, geometric relationship—they all are in much plainer sight, as when one grasps a mathematical theorem for the first time or unravels a thorny riddle with a single insight. It is a pity your lark is not about, so that it might add an aural dimension to this nocturnal beauty.”

  I glanced at my friend.

  “I heard it the other day as well, Watson,” he said. “I am not so fascinated with the texture of soil that I am deaf to birdsong.”

  Silently, I nodded.

  Biggleswick came into view as we rounded a small hill, and with the crisp night air wafting into our faces, we made our way to my cottage, where Martha and Scaife awaited us. We assured the former we were in no need of further food or drink, and the woman retired for the night. Scaife, meanwhile, brought to my attention a letter that had arrived while Holmes and I had been absent.

  “It is addressed to you and sent from a Mr. Sigerson,” the man said with upraised brows as he handed me the envelope.

  I took it, dismissed Scaife for the evening, and accompanied Holmes into the small sitting room, where I handed him the letter. “Though formally addressed to me, this is no doubt meant for you,” I said.

  “As always, Watson, you are quick on the uptake.” Holmes opened the envelope and unfolded the letter found inside. “Ha,” he said after a moment. “All proceeds well.”

  I waited for a moment, and then my friend enlightened me.

  “I believe I told you, back when I was still playing the game against Von Bork, that my preference would have been to enlist Frank Farrar and Shinwell Johnson for that endeavour.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “You feared, however, that they might be recognised in London and thus chose not to have them pose as recruits for Von Bork’s apparatus. You employed Hollins and Steiner instead.”

  “Correct,” Holmes noted. “Both Hollins and Steiner have since volunteered for the New Army, however. I assume you applaud such patriotic fervour,” he added in a neutral tone.

  “It is to be admired,” I said evenly.

  “I agree. However, as those two are no longer available to assist in doing Bullivant’s work—”

  “Do you mean M’s work?”

  Holmes arched his brows and cleared his throat. “Since Hollins and Steiner are no longer available to assist in our work for the British government,” he said, “I asked Farrar and Johnson to join us, an offer they eagerly accepted. Farrar has been gathering information in London about our Biggleswick suspects while at the same time searching for any activity that might be associated with the elusive third head of Cerberus.”

  “Has he been successful?”

  “With respect to the latter, no. However, there are some interesting items he has uncovered about those we dined with this evening, as well as Mr. Shaw.”

  “And what of Shinwell Johnson?”

  “Oh, he has been busy travelling about and keeping in regular contact with one of Bullivant’s agents, a man in Glasgow,” Holmes said. “The coded message in this letter confirms that Johnson left for Scotland yesterday. That is a piece of news I was hoping to receive.”

  “Oh? Will Porky Johnson be assisting us there?”

  Holmes smiled. “Yes, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Is the hour too late for explanations?” I enquired.

  “Not at all, old fellow.” Holmes leaned back in his chair. “We are to travel north to Glasgow knowing already that it is one focal point of the Black Stone network. In particular, we will arrive in that city when Abel Gresson, the American whom Blenkiron suspects of being a prime agent for the Germans, will be there. He is supposed to speak to a pacifist assembly at that time, and I hope to observe him.

  “Now, we suspect Gresson of passing along information, which eventually reaches the person or persons in Biggleswick who act upon it. I have suggested to Blenkiron and Bullivant that we fabricate a document and arrange matters so that it passes under Gresson’s nose.”

  “I see. And if a person in Biggleswick somehow demonstrates knowledge of what is in that false document—”

  “We have then identified at least one person at the end of the network,” completed Holmes.

  I thought for a moment. “And Shinwell Johnson will be responsible for placing this fabrication before Gresson?”

  Holmes nodded. “Though Johnson and Farrar have achieved some minor celebrity in London, I should be very surprised if either were recognised in Glasgow. This letter you just handed me is from Bullivant and was posted after Johnson had left by train for Scotland. He has with him a page supposedly torn from a German newspaper, a page carrying a most interesting article—but a page that is a forgery. He will not give the sheet directly to Gresson, but rather display it to one of the American’s henchmen, who, it is expected, will coax it from him in order to pass it along to Gresson.”

  “And do you believe that plan will succeed?”

  Holmes opened his mouth and then paused.

  “Nous verons?” I said for him.

  Holmes smiled broadly. “Indeed.”

  Holmes had hoped to spend several days walking about the region of Biggleswick before leaving for Glasgow, but the month was proving both cold and damp, and so the time before our Scottish trip was spent largely indoors. Aside from one evening spent sharing with Holmes a dinner hosted by the Jimsons, who were admirers of my friend, I saw to duties at Isham while seeking inspiration for the insincere proposal of a new novel that I would attempt to present to Shaw, the publisher. Holmes, meanwhile, devoted the hours to thought alone, in my sitting room.

  On the day before our departure, however, we did take advantage of a brief break in the weather to stroll about the fringes of Biggleswick. I had spent a busy morning at Isham, preparing Major Collins to take command during my absence. When Scaife drove me back to the cottage and Holmes expressed a desire to walk, I did not attempt to dissuade him.

  “Have you prepared an outline of your proposed novel for submission to Shaw?” my friend asked as we tramped west. “I should very much wish it to be ready by the time we return from Glasgow. Your letter of enquiry has already been sent?”

  “The letter will be posted tomorrow by Scaife, and I will sketch out an outline in the carriage during our trip north,” I answered. “I have fixed upon the Matilda Briggs affair,” I said.144 “You said you wanted something sensational, and that case would seem the most promising candidate.”

  “One can only hope that Shaw, let alone the world, is ready for it, old fellow,” said Holmes with a smile.

  As we rounded a hill, I espied Letchford in the company of two children, a boy and girl. The lad was swinging a stick tied with several ribbons, which he occasionally used to strike a mossy outcrop as the girl and Letchford watched.

  “Not so hard, Joseph!” cautioned Letchford as the boy slashed viciously at the rocks. “We don’t want to actually hurt anyone when the time comes, do we?”

  As the boy whirled around in preparation for hitting the rock again, he caught sight of us and stopped abruptly, causing Letchford and the girl to turn round.

  “Well halloa,” shouted the critic amiably. “You have caught my son preparing for his wager of battle.”

  We approached the three, and Letchford put hands on the heads of both children and tousled their hair in a playful manner. They in turn giggled and grasped their father at the waist.

  “These are Joseph and Lucy,” he said, and the boy and girl each greeted first me and then Holmes.

  “You are preparing for s
ome battle?” I asked Joseph.

  “Yes, if I’m brought before Jack-in-the-Green,” the lad said defiantly.

  “I hope you are,” said Lucy, who drew back as her brother attempted to slap her.

  “Here, none of that!” admonished Letchford, who made a face at his children. “It is part of the village’s May Day celebration,” he told us.

  “Which is more than a fortnight away, I should think,” observed Sherlock Holmes.

  “Yes, but the boy suffered a mock imprisonment last year when he was accused of stealing a fruit trifle and lost his trial by combat, and he’s determined to prove himself innocent this time, should the same thing happen again,” his father informed us. “Not that he really did steal that trifle last year, of course. It was part of the usual May Day blather, but it’s blather that these two enjoy, eh?”

  Both children nodded with enthusiasm.

  I chuckled. “No one has told me of these local traditions,” I said.

  Letchford smiled.

  “Be careful, Colonel, lest you be drawn into it. You see,” he explained, “in Biggleswick, just before the Maypole dance, old Jack-in-the-Green holds court and hands out sentences for all manner of mock offenses. These almost always involve children accusing one another of crimes, prompting a handful of trials by combat. Harmless stuff, really. The children don’t hit each other, but rather try to topple each other’s rock pile. It’s all very harmless.”145

  Joseph gave the outcrop a nasty whack with his stick.

  “Harmless,” said his father sternly, and the boy put his weapon behind him.

  “I suppose you shall hope for the best,” noted Sherlock Holmes.

  “I shall indeed,” replied Letchford. “I say, are the two of you trying to slip in a hike between rain showers?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Apparently the same can be said of you and your son’s battle practice.”

  “He insists on practising well in advance of May Day,” Letchford informed us, “and his mother will not tolerate our domestic furnishings being placed in peril. Hence, this venue instead.”

  “Well, good luck to you all,” I said as I led Holmes on.

  We left Letchford and his brood and continued through a field and on toward a small wood beyond which lay a main road.

  “The man was not his usual, cynical self today,” I noted.

  “No, he was not the same person I observed at our dinner the other evening, other than when he spoke of his children,” Holmes agreed. “Letchford appears a different man in the company of those offspring. Perhaps his life is more divided than one might believe.”

  “You mean he might have a secret life as a German spy?”

  “A hallowed practice, trial by combat,” said Holmes, obviously not wishing to pursue my point, as we passed through the small stand of trees.

  “Hallowed, but fortunately obsolete,” I replied with a sigh. “It is disconcerting to think of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors determining innocence and guilt by means of individual battle rather than reason.”

  “I do not disagree, Watson,” said Holmes. “However, the practice came to our island after the Conquest; it was never an Anglo-Saxon method of justice but rather a Germanic one.”146

  “And now, in effect, we employ it with our present-day German adversaries on a mass scale,” I observed.

  “That is war,” said Holmes in a distracted tone. “Not individual combat.”

  Holmes now appeared to be lost in thought.

  “And what is the subject of your current reverie?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” my friend replied, an odd smile upon his face.

  We passed through a stand of trees and found ourselves standing beside the main road that ran past Biggleswick. Gazing down the lane, we saw a familiar figure approach astride a bicycle.

  “Ah, Mr. Wake!” called Sherlock Holmes. “You are drenched, sir.”

  “Yes,” replied the young man, who stopped in the middle of the road and thrust out one foot to support himself upon the bicycle.

  “I’ve gone all the way up to Bledwell and back,” he said haltingly. “I had a fancy for a long pedal, but I should have kept a keener eye on the weather.” Wake’s manner seemed less sullen than usual, and his expression, for once, came close to approximating an earnest smile.

  “We ourselves are only now taking pleasure in the out of doors after a most rainy morning,” Holmes said. “Bledwell, however, would seem too great a journey for us at present, certainly by foot. A main road does not lead there, does it?”

  “No,” replied the young man. “One has to take one of the minor routes. The two of you leave for Scotland tomorrow, do you not?” Wake asked abruptly. “I recall you mentioning such a trip during our dinner at Fosse Manor.”

  “Yes,” replied Holmes. “In truth, the journey was originally planned solely with Dumfries, in Galloway, in mind. Colonel Watson has been there many times in the past and wished to see the region once more. But then, realising I have not been to Glasgow in several years, I imposed upon him to add that city to our itinerary.”

  Wake nodded. “Perhaps we will see one another along the way,” he added hesitantly. “I leave tomorrow on perhaps the same train as yours, for I will be hiking about Skye.”

  “An ambitious plan,” said Holmes, who took a step along the road. I followed his lead, and as we bade Wake farewell, the man gave a push to his bicycle to continue down the path in the opposite direction.

  “I wonder if his wandering round Skye could involve the Black Stone,” I said once Wake was out of earshot.

  “I, meanwhile, wonder if his cycling this morning concerned the same,” replied Sherlock Holmes.

  “How so?”

  “Wake obviously did not bicycle to Bledwell today, Watson.”

  “How can you be certain?” I said. “The man’s clothing was drenched from the rain. You called attention to that yourself.”

  “Oh to be sure, Wake has been cycling much of the morning. Bledwell, however, was most definitely not his destination, for it does not lie on a main road.”

  “I fear I do not understand your reasoning.”

  “Do you recall when, the other day, I paused to briefly expound upon the local oolite limestone?” Holmes asked.

  “Your geological précis is burned into memory so deeply that I cannot expunge it,” I replied.

  “As you may also recall,” said Holmes, ignoring my mild sarcasm, “during the latter stages of the search for Richard Hannay, certain clues led me to Mr. Turnbull, a roadman. That experience drew me into a subsequent, deeper study of road construction and maintenance. It is a subject I found most interesting.”

  “Rivalling that of bees?”

  “Hardly, but compelling in its own right,” Holmes said. “You see, the minor roads in this region are constructed from the local limestone oolite of which I spoke the other day, and after several hours of rain, the stuff becomes quite sticky and impassable on bicycle. Had Wake pedalled to Bledwell in this morning’s weather, he would have had to dismount and walk, and he would not have been able to complete the round trip in time to meet up with us at this hour.

  “The major roads, on the other hand, appear to be paved with chips of hard, dark-blue grit—from Leicestershire, no doubt—which a bicycle’s tyres will take to even in heavy rain. If Wake were cycling at length this morning—and I agree that he was—then his destination was not Bledwell but rather someplace else, a location accessible by a main road.”

  “Ah, and so the most important question is: where did he actually go?”

  “No,” said Sherlock Holmes as we caught sight of the Haven Stones. “The most important question is: why did Wake lie about his destination?”

  * * *

  135 This is probably a reference to Augustus John (1878–1961), a Welsh painter and etcher, and an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in Britain at the time.

  136 A fictional artist referred to in the previous chapter. Significantly, perhaps, this same imaginary paint
er is also mentioned in John Buchan’s Mr. Standfast.

  137 “In jail.”

  138 Fosse Way is a Roman-built road whose remnants still survive. Its name derives from the Latin word fossa, which means ditch.

  139 In this time period, collars were not integral parts of men’s shirts but rather obtained separately and then attached to them.

  140 Galen of Pergamon was a prominent Greek physician in the Roman Empire.

  141 Though Britain did not introduce mandatory food rationing until 1918, attempts were made to encourage citizens to ration on their own and to employ substitutes. For example, “war bread” was made with barley, potatoes, and other materials instead of wheat flour, and sugar was replaced with substances like corn syrup.

  142 The Shell Crisis of 1915 was a shortage of artillery shells caused by a rate of combat fire much higher than initially expected. In Britain, this problem led to the creation of the Ministry of Munitions, as well as the formation of a wartime coalition government. By this time in Watson’s narrative, H. H. Asquith had been replaced as prime minister by David Lloyd George, whose successful tenure as the first Minister of Munitions contributed to his political ascent.

  143 A traditional dish, toad in the hole consists of sausages or meats in Yorkshire pudding batter, usually with vegetables and gravy. There is no consensus regarding the origin of the name.

  144 The Matilda Briggs was a ship connected to the legendary tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, one of the most famous of Holmes’s cases that Watson never chronicled.

  145 A Jack-in-the-Green is a participant in traditional May Day celebrations. The individual in question wears a foliage-covered framework, often pyramidal or conical, that covers the body from head to foot.

  146 Holmes is referring to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: A STUDY IN SUBVERSION

  Accompanied to the Biggleswick station by the Jimsons and Corporal Scaife, Holmes and I boarded a northbound train for Glasgow early the following day. Looking out the carriage window as we prepared to leave town, my friend’s mouth slowly turned upward in a sly grin.