The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part IX

by Marcum, David;

  “One can only imagine the cost of such loss!” I said.

  “Insurance bore the brunt of it, but we all know who pays for such costs in the end,” said Holmes. “I may have acquired some small fame in certain circles these days, but at that time, I was fresh to London and quite unknown. I had visions of earning a reputation by solving this string of robberies and putting a stop to them.”

  “What was your first step?”

  “First, I ventured to the assay office to consult their registers. All goldsmiths, jewellers, and other allied traders are kept listed in a tidy little directory. From thence, it was easy to put together a map of London marked with pins with colored heads that allowed me to trace the gang’s work, both chronologically and geographically. I trod the streets and looked for common characteristics of the shops that had already been robbed. You understand that even when humans are trying to be random, they are very unsuccessful at it, and there is even a pattern to their randomness. I created a list of three jewellers that, if the gang of women proved true to their habits, were very likely future targets. Having determined this, I thereby found myself temporarily engaged by one shop, so as to have a better chance of catching the gang at work.”

  “Gracious. Did you confess your identity to the jewellers? Were you employed as a guard of sorts?”

  “No, my motives were my secret. While I had every confidence in my eventual results, I was still young in my career, and I did not care to cultivate the expectations of others regarding a project I had assumed upon my own volition. With expectations come time-lines and impatience and other feelings of entitlement that, when not accompanied by adequate remuneration, are tedious at best. But playing the part of a low-ranking shop assistant was excellent experience, and I learned quite a bit about the trade that came in useful in the future, especially concerning such things as paste duplicates. For example, with my maharajah this weekend, my solution would not have been nearly so neat had I not had those few weeks’ education behind me.”

  “I take it not much time passed before the gang struck?”

  “They were quiet for two weeks. I always paid careful attention to any women who arrived clad in any display of mourning, although, being so low in the hierarchy, I generally was not in a position to personally serve and interact with them. One morning, shortly after opening, I did notice a matron being fitted for some rings. Working-class and local, by her accent, but subdued and polite in her manner. She had some mitts made of a very thin, open-worked lace, and through them, I observed smudges of ink upon the top of her knuckles as she considered various mourning rings in pearl, amethyst, jet, and black onyx. Then one of the other clerks then sent me into the safe to retrieve some small objects for a young gentleman, and I went off to do so. In the time it took for me to go to the safe in the workroom, find the box, and return to the floor, the gang of women had descended, struck, and fled. It took them less than thirty seconds to abscond with nearly fifteen hundred pounds’ worth of jewellery.”

  “The woman with the lace mitts - had she been part of the gang?”

  “Certainly so, for it seems the moment her confederates entered the premises, she swept the entire contents of the ring tray into her handbag and swiftly departed amidst the confusion. In addition to my verbal cues indicating her economic status and geographic residence, I had two other clues to her identity: The ink-stains upon her hand, and the odor of mineral spirits clinging rather strongly about her. What would you have made of those observations?”

  “An artist?” I hazarded. “Mineral spirits are used to thin paint, are they not?”

  “Close, friend Watson,” said Holmes. “Rather, I was looking for a middle-aged working-class woman who worked in a printer’s shop, but very possibly was involved in its management. I was a little less certain on that point, as you see, having the extra income from a series of robberies does tend to allow one to dress above one’s station, but one cannot dress too conspicuously, lest someone start to wonder. Her absence from the premises could either be accounted for by not having to seek permission to absent herself for an hour or so, or possibly she could have been performing some regular errand, and took the opportunity for a detour. Yet would such a woman run errands, or would not those tasks be delegated more naturally to a boy? She had the signs of the form upon her hands, so she was not merely loitering decoratively in the vicinity of the letterpress, but a compositor is too valuable to be allowed to be absent from his station for an extended period. So my thoughts progressed as I strove to generate a picture in my head of the individual I sought.

  “A few queries in the proper quarters quickly gave me a short list of printers’ shops that would bear investigating. I sought one not too far removed from the district in which the gang operated, possibly run by a female, perchance a widow - but not necessarily. Disguised as an eager young botanist with a horticultural newsletter in need of a printer, I proceeded to investigate the likely candidates.

  “My primary candidate was a family operation. The father had died three or four years previously, and his widow continued with the business herself. They had eight children. The eldest girl and the three eldest boys did most of the presswork themselves. The middle two children looked after the youngest two. The mother was not present at the time I entered the premises, but the son who was in charge of the business during her absence was happy to show me examples of their work. There was a series of handbills about train expeditions; there was an internal newsletter printed for the Bacon Appreciation Society; some advertisements for things like clock repairs and dressmakers; sundry promotional posters for some local theatre productions; and there was the ‘gouty kidney and softened heart’ handbill that you see preserved before you, which the Temperance Society would distribute to passers-by at the local parks in their efforts to protect the working men of London from the deleterious effects of excessive drink.”

  “And you concluded - ?”

  “I thought my observations not insignificant. I surreptitiously relieved the Temperance Society of one handbill, which you see I have preserved to this day.”

  “So you somehow perceived the Temperance Society to be, in fact, a gang of female robbers secretly imbuing phrases like ‘gouty kidney’ or ‘premature decay’ with felonious meaning? I fail to grasp your chain of reasoning.”

  “That would be an idea! But it would require a code-book, which is not nearly as neat and penetrable as a cipher, from the perspective of law and order. Indeed, by your theory, ‘brittle artery’ may mean ‘Mappin and Webb’ and ‘gouty kidney’ may mean ‘Thursday’ and ‘premature decay’ may mean ‘11:30 a.m.’, and ‘softened heart’ may have no meaning at all, and good luck to an outsider attempting to find a correlation! But a cipher - a cipher may be more easily detected, and more easily cracked, especially when the cipherer is an amateur.”

  “So, out of all the papers in a printer’s office, you lit upon this one as bearing a secret message?”

  “Look at it yourself, Watson, especially at the first five lines. Do you not think that a compositor would, under normal circumstances, consider that to be an acceptable example of his work? It is very deliberately typeset to be so erratic, and it was my hypothesis that the irregularities would bear investigation.”

  “Yet no one in the Temperance Society ever remarked upon it?”

  “It may look odd to the eye in isolation, but handed out to passers-by strolling in a busy park, few minds would dwell for long upon the specifics of its visual effect, as long as the message was still clearly conveyed. I, however, have made a study of typeface, and can say, with reasonable confidence, that if presented with a small newspaper cutting, I am capable of drawing certain conclusions regarding its origins. Frequently, I am capable of identifying the type face and its source foundry, and I have a working knowledge of where it may be commonly encountered in print. If it is my hobby to unthinkingly process such facts when I encou
nter a line of text, is it not unlikely for me to equally be aware of instances where that print may have been clearly misused? And if a client’s copy has been deliberately mis-laid, when no other copy in the shop has been similarly abused, and when even the vast majority of that page has been set correctly, it must be for a purpose. What, then, would make a widow with eight children who is maintaining the family business risk a dissatisfied client with a few lines of careless composition?”

  “So, you had a poorly-composited handbill,” I said. “Tell me what your thoughts were.”

  “It was a germ of an idea that occurred to me when I was fortunate enough to see the handbill, juxtaposed next to the newsletter printed for the Bacon Appreciation Society,” Holmes explained. “That particular issue had a fine article about Baconian epigrams. Sir Francis Bacon! Philosopher, scientist, essayist, statesman. Diplomat. Steganographer.”

  “Steganographer?” I asked faintly.

  “The art of concealing a secret message in plain view,” Holmes explained, warming to his subject. “In his writings, he discoursed upon various methods that served him well over the course of his career, but one remains more famous than the others to this day. It was my hypothesis that this printer, while perhaps involved in printing an article on the subject for the Society, had learned of a method employed by the great Bacon nearly three centuries ago, and decided to employ it herself for her own means. In this case, I suspected I had stumbled across something that can be described as a biliteral cipher.”

  “A ‘biliteral cipher’?” I repeated blankly.

  “The genius of it is in its flexibility,” he continued. “Because a biliteral cipher is binary by its very nature. You need two types of one sort of thing. It can be lit and unlit candles. It can be red beads and green beads. It can be bold type and regular type, or italic type and regular type. It can be male and female. It can be forward-facing and profile-view. It can be eyes open and eyes shut. It can be any sort of thing, as long as there’s one to represent ‘A’ and one to represent ‘B’. The chances of a third party not only stumbling across the message, but suspecting that there’s a second underlying message present at all and taking the trouble to work it out - those chances are exceedingly slim.”

  “Like Morse code, and telegraphs?” I hazarded. “Dots and dashes?”

  “Not exactly, but somewhat,” agreed Holmes. “So, for example, with the Baconian cipher, ‘A’ is represented by ‘AAAAA’, and ‘B’ is represented by ‘AAAAB’, and so on. If I wanted to write ‘DANGER’, it would be ‘AAABB AAAAA ABBAA AABBA AABAA BAAAA’,” he said, suiting the words to his actions, scrawling a string of letters on the back of an envelope. “Now, if I had a piece of paper such as this upon my person, how could it possibly escape arousing suspicion? The secret message is as plain as day, and invites anyone who comes across it to try their hand at cracking it. But! Suppose I have a woolen shawl with a fringe. Suppose I have a piece of fringe knotted in one way to represent ‘A’ and I have a piece of fringe left un-knotted to represent ‘B’. I gift the shawl to the individual I care to warn. And he, being made aware ahead of time of the significance of the fringe, will be able to work out the warning, given sufficient time to examine the shawl in private. That’s rather a clumsy example, but the means of communication could as well be a receipt for roast capon. All I would have to do is write my letters straight to represent ‘A’ and give the letters a subtle tilt, or additional pressure, or whatever we had agreed upon, to represent ‘B’.”

  “I see,” I said slowly. “So, what you’re saying is that this gang was taking advantage of a regular, legitimate customer, who was known to distribute his handbills in public at a certain time and place, and thus coordinate their attack upon the next victim?”

  “Exactly, Watson!” exclaimed Holmes. “It was a cunning plan, for it is the simplest thing in the world to have the women of the gang stroll through the park under some pretext and accept a handbill from the Temperance Society. And the distributor of the message itself would have no clue of the secret message, let alone whether the passers-by were members of a gang or members of the general public. The rest of the world would remain oblivious to the underlying secret message, and the nature of handbills is very ephemeral indeed, so there would be little paper trail that could be expected to last a week before they were transformed into spills to light ever so many London fireplaces.

  “That was the method of communication as I envisaged it, but I get ahead of myself. So, having left the printer’s shop, I went home with my confiscated handbill, and examined it in private to determine if I was correct in my hypothesis. Could I wrest a message from the irregularities in the type? And as it turned out, I could. Taking the normal type for ‘A’ and the italicized type for ‘B’, the message appeared. I will save you the trouble of working it out - ‘LAMBERTS COVENTRY TUE TEN THIRTY’.”

  “How exciting, Holmes! So, armed with advance notice of their next foray into crime-”

  “It was merest child’s play after that,” said Holmes modestly. “A word or two in the correct ear at Scotland Yard, and come Tuesday by ten-thirty-two, we had seventeen of London’s fairest criminals apprehended and in custody. Although some of the gang failed to show up at the appointed time, the remainder quickly fell apart regardless. I considered it rather a coup, for, as I said, I had accumulated little reputation at that point in my career.”

  “Amazing, Holmes! I hope some of the stolen articles were recovered?”

  “A surprising number of the more valuable and distinguishable pieces, for in addition to being amateur cipherers, the women were also rather amateurs when it came to things like fences, although they did have a knack for organization and imagination,” said Holmes. “As it turned out, a number of them were indeed widows, and had banded together in their criminal enterprise. I failed to be sympathetic to their cause, as it is rather disingenuous to steal fifteen hundred pounds’ worth of stock from an honest shopkeeper, and then repeat the process five or ten times, and claim that one only did it for bread. However, the courts were rather indulgent with the criminals, and they got off with a lighter sentence than one would expect, after taking the children into account.”

  “I don’t suppose you know if the children kept the printing business up during their mother’s incarceration?” I asked. “Having any business at all puts them ahead of so many other unfortunates in this city.”

  “As a matter of fact, she was not at Lambert’s on the fateful day,” said Holmes. “The remnants of the gang were exceedingly suspicious, as I heard tell several months later. They wondered why those smaller fish happened to be caught, yet my ringleader was curiously absent on such a critical day. They jumped to the conclusion that she had been warned to stay away beforehand, and were not pleased at having been sacrificed. Although transportation had ended years before, the woman and her family found it prudent to somehow come up with the money for passage to Australia, and set up a very successful publishing business there. The family decided to supplement their earnings from printing with a little journalism, and put together a ladies’ magazine which ended up a very profitable niche for them to fill honestly. If you look a few pages deeper in that stack, you may find an issue or two which ended up in my collection of mementoes past.”

  The Adventure of The Fool and His Money

  By Roger Riccard

  Chapter I

  At the end of my first year of association with the consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I found myself tracked down by an old comrade of mine from the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, a fellow officer named Alexander Sinclair.

  Alex and I had grown close after spending several weeks together while I was treating him for a severely broken leg, sustained in a fall from his horse during a minor skirmish against a gang of bandits in India. I was fortunate to be able to save him from amputation, and he had felt beholden to me ever since.

  His le
tter reached me at 221b Baker Street on Boxing Day 1881. I had gone out that morning to replenish my supply of tobacco. Upon my return, I was informed by Holmes of its arrival.

  “There’s a letter on the desk for you, Watson,” he announced from his position in front of the fireplace. He was reading the morning paper as he lounged in his familiar mouse-coloured dressing gown.

  I put away my Ship’s tobacco tin and retrieved the letter. I was pleasantly surprised at the return address. Sitting down across from Holmes, I reached for my penknife to open the envelope when a thought occurred to me.

  “Over the past year you have demonstrated some astounding powers, Holmes,” I declared. “I confess that I am at a loss as to your thought processes which arrive at such accurate facts on apparently trivial observations. Please tell me what you can about this letter and explain your conclusions, for I am still very curious as to how you perform this trick.”

  I held the letter out to him. He reluctantly looked around the edge of his paper at me in an attitude of impatience, with narrowed grey eyes and furrowed brow. After a few seconds he sighed, folded up his paper, set it on the table, and picked the letter from my hand as if he were snatching a ball away from a dog.