Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil: And Other New Tales Featuring the World's Greatest Detective

by Donald Thomas

  Because I had seen him, I was pestered a little by the press but I could tell them nothing they did not know already. I thought he was one more paragon of evil who had set out to destroy Sherlock Holmes—and had failed.

  So I sat down to compose our narrative of the Anarchist uprising. Holmes was out and it was a fine February afternoon with the rime of the frost still clinging to the grass of the Regent’s Park. Being a Saturday, our landlady Mrs Hudson had gone to visit her sister in Dulwich. Even Mary Jane, the maid-of-all-work, had gone walking with her “young man.” The house was quiet, the traffic subdued, and I had begun.

  On a morning in early December, three years before the Great War, Mrs Hedges brought us the unusual story of a yellow canary....

  I had written a page or two more when there was a ring at the front door. I cursed to myself but it is a “rule of business,” as Holmes says, to leave no summons unanswered. I put down my pen, descended the stairs, and opened the front door.

  “Mr Hoolmes! Mr Share—lock Hoolmes!”

  I froze with terror—and it was no cliché—or should I say my heart leapt to my throat. There was no mistaking who he was. He had not died in the fires of Sidney Street, whatever the authorities might hope. I thought helplessly that my Army revolver was locked in the desk upstairs and that I was alone in the house. Perhaps if I could make him believe that the landlady or the maid was within earshot he would not dare to murder me....

  “You are alone, I think. But whoever you are, you are not Mr Share—lock Hoolmes. Perhaps when I tell you my name, Piatkoff, you will comprendre.”

  It was the same coat with astrakhan collar, the same broad-brimmed hat. But now the voice was quiet and a fine scorn animated his features with his dark neat-cut hair, the aristocratic profile and beaked nose.

  Had I known of his visit in advance, I could have prepared myself. For the moment the shock was so great that the power of speech was beyond me. He stood up a little taller, his head went back a little and he seemed about to utter a laugh of diabolical triumph.

  Then, as if in my unconscious mind the entire mystery of the past few weeks was revealed, I exclaimed,

  “Holmes!”

  He laughed, drew breath, and then laughed again. It was not the satanic cackle of Piatkoff but the ebullient chuckle of my friend.

  “Holmes, what the devil....”

  “My dear Watson—I could not resis....” Laughter stifled him on the doorstep for a moment. “I could not resist one more little impersonation. I could not forgo the sight of your face when... . Surely, my dear old fellow, you noticed that when Piatkoff materialised before you on previous occasions, I was always conveniently elsewhere? Truly, truly, you see but you do not observe! ”

  I was so shaken that I simply stood back and watched him go up the stairs. He shrugged off the astrakhan-trimmed coat and sent the hat skimming on to the rack. The greasepaint that had subtly flushed his complexion was wiped off. The wads that had heightened those cheeks were pulled from above the gums, he disappeared into his room and disposed of the gum arabic and gutta percha which had made the alteration of his nose possible, and he peeled away the fine set of whiskers.

  By the time that he returned I had almost finished the glass of whisky which the occasion demanded. Wiping his hands on one of Mrs Hudson’s clean towels, he remarked,

  “You must save some of the blame for Brother Mycroft, Watson, for it was his apartment that I used as my dressing room. ”

  “Your brother knows the truth of this charade?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And Lestrade?”

  “The truth is not something that one always tells to a susceptible fellow like Lestrade.”

  “But to what purpose?”

  He sighed and sat down.

  “No one in the Anarchist movement here is certain of Piatkoff. Nor of his appearance, for he has so many. Nor of his voice or manner, for it changes in a moment. Nor of his whereabouts. There are so many spies, so many Anarchist movements spying on one another, that he does not advertise when or where he comes and goes. He is like the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, though far less amiable.”

  “But he cannot be so secret.”

  Holmes reached for his pipe.

  “Secrecy is all to these people. The names of the few are not known to the many, much less their disguises. They cannot betray, even if they wished to. Piatkoff is still in Paris but most of the Anarchist group in London—and the Metropolitan Police—believe him to be in England, dead or alive.”

  “But to what end?”

  “Mycroft and I devised a plan which we divulged to no other person. It hinged upon making the press, the police, and even you, my dear fellow, believe that Piatkoff was in London and that I in my impersonation was he. We were careful to deal only with those who had never met him. Sidney Street was the arsenal of those who sought European revolution and whose first weapon was assassination.”

  “Assassination of whom?”

  He pulled a face.

  “I was told more of assassination than I expected. The list includes the King, the Prime Minister, and Winston Churchill as Home Secretary, who therefore commands the nation’s police force. Among many other names, my own appears. I confess I should have been disappointed had it not been so. You, for some reason, are omitted. My performance as Piatkoff in the street below us and the notoriety which the press gave me for that were of great assistance. The search which you and your two policeman undertook through the streets of Stepney was invaluable. I promise you, it was essential that you should all have believed in my masquerade. There are spies everywhere. Imagine trying to get Lestrade to act a part. He would not last five minutes.”

  “You bought firearms from E. M. Reilly & Co in New Oxford Street and had them delivered to a contact at the Anarchist Club?”

  “Indeed, several very efficient rifles of a kind which the trade of assassination thrives upon. You saw them in action at Sidney Street. One of them I managed to rescue during my visit to the burning house. The comrades come by hand-guns quite easily but they are remarkably short of rifles. I do not believe they possessed one until my gifts to them. Rifles, they believe quite correctly, are ‘the weapons of assassination.”’

  “But this is madness!” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “No, Watson, this is cold and absolute sanity. Mycroft and I agreed that I should become their quartermaster. They would look to me for their supplies and they could not do that without telling me of their needs. By knowing of their needs, I should learn their plans and the objects of their campaign of assassination. I should become not their servant but their master.”

  “And Lestrade?”

  “Lestrade knows nothing of this and never will. As it proves, the charade is over.”

  I tried to compose myself.

  “Let me have this straight. You supplied these men with live ammunition and rifles, which as it turns out were used in an attempt to assassinate the Home Secretary in Sidney Street?”

  “They were supplied for that purpose but we had no idea that Sidney Street would be the occasion. Mr Churchill, of course, was bound to be the target in the circumstances.”

  “And did he know?”

  “He insisted.”

  I did not want to call my old friend a liar. Yet I could not swallow the story that anyone, Home Secretary or not, would agree to face marksmens’ live bullets at lethal range with no protection.

  10

  The last act of this farce, if I may call it that, was the most extraordinary. Holmes promised to convince me, but I did not see how. Next morning, he said only that we should have visitors that afternoon. Once again, it was one of those occasions when Mrs Hudson was engaged elsewhere. Just after four o’clock as the lamps were lit along Baker Street and the shops shone brightly, a cab pulled up and Holmes went down to answer the door.

  There were several voices on the stairs. Into the room came Mycroft Holmes with two strangers who looked, to say the least, curiou
s. I recognised one from his carte-de-visite, which he had left one day on finding that Sherlock Holmes was not at home. He was Chung Ling Soo, the Marvellous Chinese Conjuror of the Wood Green Empire Music Hall. With him was his wife, Suee Seen. My first impression was that they were not Chinese at all, indeed subsequent events revealed that they were William and Olive Robinson.

  “In order that you may be convinced of the safety in which the Home Secretary stood,” Holmes said to me, “Mr Chung Ling Soo and his wife are now going to shoot me. Unless you would prefer to do so.”

  Mycroft Holmes seemed entirely unperturbed.

  “Certainly not,” I said.

  The pantomime proceeded. Two rifles had been brought, one of them purchased by Holmes from E. M. Reilly, the other presumably supplied by the conjuror. Holmes handed me two bullets, inviting me to scratch some identifying mark on each. With growing unease I did so. He handed them to his brother. Each of the rifles was then loaded and the charge rammed home. There was no question that they were using live ammunition. Chung Ling Soo took one of the guns and Mycroft Holmes the other. I truly believed that I was about to see Mycroft Holmes try to shoot dead his younger brother.

  “Stop this!” I said furiously, “Such trickery is dangerous!”

  Gunfire had not been unknown in our sitting-room, as Holmes picked out patterns in the plaster with revolver shots from my own weapon. This was far from such amusements. Holmes took up a silver dish, a tribute from one of our clients, and walked to the far end of the room, a range of about twenty feet. He held the dish out at chest height, as if offering it. I sat in my chair and felt sick with anxiety. Mycroft and the conjuror raised their rifles, taking deadly aim at Holmes’s heart.

  The barks of the guns were almost simultaneous. Flame shot from the barrels followed by a thin cloud of powder and a stink of burnt cordite. Holmes did not even flinch. Instead, there were two sounds, each like a “ping!” as something seemed to fall into the silver dish that he held out to receive it. He walked across and presented to me the two bullets which I had marked with my own initials. It was evident that he had somehow “palmed” these, yet two shots had surely been fired in earnest.

  “Our Home Secretary was in no more danger than I,” he said gently. “By his coolness he drew their fire and gave us their positions before they could do us any damage.”

  “And if they had used the Mausers first?”

  “The gunmen could not aim without moving the curtain. The moment a Mauser barrel appeared, he would have been thrown behind a convenient steel screen. One was already in position. Happily, this was not the case.”

  The secret of the “firing-squad trick,” performed twice nightly to great applause by Chung Ling Soo on the stage of the Wood Green Empire, was now revealed to me. It required a small alteration in the mechanism of a rifle. The barrel and its bullet were sealed off from the detonation. The gases and the force of the explosion were directed down the tube running along under the barrel of the rifle, the gun’s safety valve and a convenient place otherwise for keeping a cleaning rod. By the time that an assassin suspected such a trick, it would be too late.

  As we sat in the aftermath of cordite fumes, I knew at once the answer to the mystery of the soldering-iron fumes at the breakfast-table and Holmes hollow-eyed from lack of sleep. Of course he had spent the night with brother Mycroft or the Wonderful Chinese Conjuror, preparing three or four Lee Enfield rifles for delivery to Jubilee Hall.

  11

  I cannot conclude without adding that some of the actors in the dramas of Houndsditch and Sidney Street were to be heard of again, not least the Home Secretary whose fame was to echo across the world. Chung Ling Soo, Wonderful Chinese Conjuror, fell victim to his own cleverness. Constant removal of his rifle’s breech-block at every performance had worn the mechanism dangerously. One night, the bullet in the barrel was accidentally fired. Our benefactor fell dying on the stage of the Wood Green Empire Music Hall before his Saturday night audience on 23 March 1918.

  As for Peter the Painter, it was certain that before his arrival in Paris, he had been a medical student in his native Russia and that he returned there from Paris soon after the battle in London. Meantime he had worked as a theatrical scene painter and thereby acquired his nickname. To avoid being conscripted into the army of the Tsar in 1914, he travelled to Germany and was not heard of again publicly until the Communist Revolution of 1917 brought him back to Petrograd.

  I have before me a cutting from The Times of 14 April 1920. It was Sherlock Holmes who noticed a letter from Russia and read it out to me at the breakfast table. Its author signed himself only as “S.” He revealed that a list of 189 workers had been published in Moscow, men who had been shot on the orders of the Extraordinary Committee for Combating Counter-Revolution. Their crime had been to hold a mass meeting in Petrograd, at the Poutiloff factory, where they denounced the Commissars and demanded “bread and liberty.” They accused the Bolshevists of offering them only, “prison, the whip, and bullets,” denying them even “the small political liberties enjoyed under the Tsarist regime.”

  As the paper reported, Piatkoff, “the notorious Peter the Painter of Sidney Street fame,” had been despatched from Moscow to supervise the wholesale execution of these dissidents. Before being executed, they were informed that their crime had been to sully the name of liberty, which their great leader Lenin had re-defined as meaning the self-discipline of the proletariat.

  I could not but shudder at this and at the name of the man who had taken up the trade of executioner. He was not the only ghost to haunt the future. Small wonder that when the Soviet Union created its secret service, the “Cheka,” it appointed as chairman the cousin of “The Limping Man,” Yoshka Sokoloff, who had died in the battle of Sidney Street. The new chairman, added The Times report, was “one of the cruellest of Cheka officers during the early years of the Terror.”

  V

  The Case of the Zimmermann Telegram

  1

  For many years after the events which I am about to describe, the papers of Sherlock Holmes relating to them were lodged in the most secure bank vault in the City of London. I held one key to the black metal deed-boxes, a member of His Majesty’s Privy Council held the other. Neither of us could open them alone. Among the contents were letters, telegrams and folded parchments tied with pink ribbon, like the confidential brief of King’s Counsel in a leading criminal trial.

  Some of these folded briefs bore a few words written by Holmes himself in black ink on their outer surface. One of them was dated 1917 and had the name “Arthur Zimmermann” written upon it with the instruction “Twenty years.” That is the period for which Holmes and I were sworn to secrecy concerning the Great War of 1914-18. Our promise had been given to the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, at Buckingham Palace, as all Europe careered into the abyss in August 1914. With the passing of time and the consent of His Majesty’s Government the contents of those papers need no longer remain secret.

  I had never expected that his records of our war against the German Empire would have survived the domestic bonfires of my friend’s final days. Surely he would have burnt this! Surely, surely he would have destroyed that! But I was quite wrong. There they lie, untouched among other letters and memoranda which he made no effort to conceal.

  Perhaps he was satisfied that a certain telegraph message which gives its title to the present story would mean nothing to those who chanced to find it. I have it before me now. It is printed on a Western Union telegram form and it bears the mast-head of that company across the top of its page. It is dated 19 January 1917 and has been wired from Washington to Mexico City, via Galveston, Texas. You may now read it, if you choose. Though it is a little in advance of my narrative, it will illustrate how daunting can be the appearance of a diplomatic cipher from the intelligence service of a great world power. Imagine, if you will, that the lives of millions of people and the fate of the world depend upon your unaided ability to turn the following equation into plain
and readable prose within the next two or three hours.

  TO GERMAN LEGATION

  MEXICO CITY

  Charge German Embassy

  Washington 19 January 1917

  Via Galveston

  130 13042 13401 8501 115 3528 416 17214 6491 11310 18147 18222 21560 10247 11518 23677 13605 3494 14936 98092 5905 11311 10392 10271 0302 21290 5161 39695 23571 17504 11269 18278 18101 0317 0228 17694 4473 23264 22200 19452 21589 67893 5569 13918 8958 12137 1333 4725 4458 5905 17166 13851 4458 17149 14471 6706 13850 12224 6929 14991 7382 15857 67893 14218 36477 5870 17533 67893 5870 5454 16102 5217 22801 17138 21001 17388 7446 23638 18222 6719 14331 15021 23845 3156 23552 22096 21604 4797 9497 22464 20855 4377 23610 18140 22260 5905 13347 20420 39689 13732 20667 6929 5275 18507 52262 1340 22049 13339 11265 22295 10439 14814 4178 6992 8784 7632 7357 6926 52262 11267 21100 21272 9346 9559 22464 15874 18502 18500 17857 2188 5376 7381 98092 16127 13486 9350 9220 76038 14219 6144 2831 17920 11347 17142 11264 7667 7762 15099 9110 10482 97556 3569 3670

  Bernstorff.

  Such is the complete text of this extraordinary document. I will tell you as a clue that no single number corresponds to the same letter of the alphabet on every occasion, though entire words may sometimes be identical. The number “7” may be “a” on one occasion and “q” on another, and “h” on the third. What lies behind this sequence of numbers is an infinitely variable series of ciphers.

  Sherlock Holmes was one of the few men on earth who could break the secret of such a transmission within a few hours. His colleagues in Admiralty Intelligence were an unpredictable company of naval officers, classical scholars from the best universities, puzzle-book addicts, eccentrics of many kinds. There were mathematicians, and pioneers of symbolic logic, among them pupils of the late Rev C. L. Dodgson, better known to fame as “Lewis Carroll.” Holmes several times remarked that had we been able to enlist the creator of Alice, we should have given German intelligence “cards, spades and a beating,” from the first day of the war to the last.