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

by Donald Thomas

  With one exception, these watchers were never interfered with. Our only mishap, early on, was the arrest of a gingerhaired giant with an entirely Germanic face. This was done by my intervention, largely to placate our nervous landlady, Mrs Hudson. Holmes was not in the house at the time. The man proved to be a plain-clothes sergeant of the Criminal Investigation Division, stationed at Paddington Green police station specifically for our protection. Needless to say, this well-intentioned error on my part delighted my friend.

  His letter denouncing the futility of war, from Holmes to the Morning Post, had duly appeared. It was written with sufficient feeling to carry conviction to the unprejudiced reader. I feared we should receive a deluge of hostile post from wartime patriots but such was not the case. We were at an early stage of the conflict and tempers were not as hot as they subsequently became.

  Every morning Holmes went by cab to the St James’s Library, off Pall Mall, to resume his work on the counterpoint of Orlando Lassus. The St James’s was a private library, founded by the great John Stuart Mill in the 1840s and restricted to members only. Membership was granted after personal recommendation and election, so that it was easy to check the names of those who made use of it. Holmes the musicologist appeared to work there until late in the afternoon, when he was driven back to Baker Street.

  We were informed by Naval Intelligence that those who spied upon the library during the day probably did so from the rooms of an otherwise respectable European Club on the far side of the square. Its windows overlooked the library building. Yet even if these hidden onlookers in St James’s continued to keep watch, they no evidence of Holmes among the readers leaving or returning between his arrival in the morning and his departure for home at the end of the afternoon. They must content themselves with a young carpenter, who had been at work erecting shelves in the reading room, swinging his long bag and whistling as he went on his way to another job. Perhaps a bluff middle-aged fellow in a country suit arrived from Sussex or Surrey for an hour’s browsing among the shelves. An elderly scholar with pince-nez and an old-fashioned stove-pipe hat might appear from the Oxford train or the ecclesiastical figure of an avuncular rural dean would set out for his return to a West Country parish.

  Those who have followed the adventures of Sherlock Holmes may at once guess the identity of the whistling carpenter, the bluff countryman, the shrivelled old scholar or the rural dean. Happily it was a fact unknown to German intelligence that in 1879, as an anonymous understudy and at short notice, Holmes had played Horatio to Sir Henry Irving’s Hamlet at the Lyceum. It was his one and only appearance on the London stage. Almost at once he was engaged to sail on an eight-month tour of the United States with the Sasanoff Shakespearean Company. It was not merely that he adopted the costume of the role he played. He assumed the expression, the manner, and the very soul of that part.

  Yet I believe my friend considered that he reached the height of impersonation when the cab stopped in the Piccadilly square, the familiar figure strode up the library steps, the driver whipped up the horse and clattered round the corner into Pall Mall. As so often, the spies saw what they expected to see. Yet it was a trustworthy amateur, perhaps resting from the stage, who went up the steps to the library door, while the consulting detective covered by a shabby coat and hat drove the hansom smartly round the corner. Fifteen minutes later, he brought the horse and cab to rest in the securely guarded precincts of Old Admiralty Yard.

  If anything more was needed to lay German suspicions to rest, Holmes published in the following spring two impeccable reviews of the polyphony of Orlando Lassus. His learned references to texts and manuscripts were in themselves several pages long. Orders for the journal were placed with Lindemann in neutral Geneva. The destination of two copies proved to be the Bureau of Military Intelligence in Berlin. It was from this moment that a noticeable falling off began in the numbers of those who tracked the hero of Baker Street on his daily journeys to Piccadilly and, presumably, among those who watched forlornly from the windows of the European Club.

  4

  If my friend expressed his reservations in the first months of the war, when the hopeful belief was that it would be over by Christmas, you may imagine his feelings as the Western Front settled into mud and slaughter. On a pleasant June evening, after almost two years of the conflict, we were sitting either side of our window, discussing the losses of British battle-cruisers in the engagement off Jutland, a fortnight earlier, and the loss of Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, in the sinking of the cruiser HMS Devonshire the previous week. Holmes seemed to be at his lowest ebb.

  “I fear that we and Germany may end as two corpses, manacled together,” he said gloomily. After a pause, he stared down into the quiet street and added, “Even were we to defeat the powers of central Europe utterly, the result could only be to destabilise that area completely for fifty years to come.”

  “That is something beyond the power of Room 40 to remedy,” I said philosophically.

  He stood up and went to the cigarette-box on the mantelpiece. It was a few days before midsummer and the setting sun glowed like molten gold on the far wall of our sitting-room.

  He lit his cigarette, shook out the match, and said,

  “I cannot make Hall understand that the only way to control German intelligence is to let them read our ciphers.”

  As he returned to the window, I wondered if I had heard him correctly. Possibly I had missed a tone of irony in his words. He stood in the golden light, tall and gaunt, emaciated by months of constant work. I was struck by the sudden impatience of his grimace, a growing sense of his consuming energy, an onset of that passionate reasoning power, which I had learnt to recognise with some disquiet.

  “You want the Germans to penetrate our codes and ciphers?”

  “Of course!” he said emphatically, “We cannot control their thoughts simply by reading their cables. The time has come to let Germany win a battle of the ciphers. It will not do for Hall’s handful of spies to feed them stories of our intentions. That trick is done with. Tirpitz is not a Teutonic clown but the equal of Hall or Fisher. He has been stung too often and will now believe only what he reads for himself.”

  “Then what is the answer? Surely not to give away our secrets?”

  He shook his head impatiently.

  “We must give him the means of reading our codes and ciphers. We must make him feel that he is winning, rather than losing. There has been too much triumph on our side and the braying that goes with it. He must read our wireless messages and signals with the assistance of our own code-books. He must read our confessions of being baffled by his new ciphers.”

  “He will not believe any of that!”

  To my surprise, he smiled.

  “Suppose that we should present him with our Secret Emergency War Code, containing a complete set of our cipher tables for the next six months.”

  “He will not believe anything that we give to him!”

  “I think he will, if we allow him to steal the emergency code book. You and I could arrange that on our own. I hardly think we need trouble Admiral Hall. Let this be our own enterprise. I believe we could be successful in passing such information to Berlin.”

  In that moment my heart seemed to stop.

  “I believe we could be shot by our own side!” I said desperately, “Or assassinated by the Germans!”

  “My dear Watson, they will be only too happy to believe in the value of a code-book, provided that it is served up to them in the right way. In every neutral country their spies are now ready to pay for whatever information our so-called double-agents betray to them. This is far better. All we need in this case is an apparently indiscreet leakage of our naval and military intelligence, including codes and cipher-tables. I grant you, we shall also need an impersonating agent of our own who must appear simple enough and gullible enough to carry conviction.”

  “And what sort of man is that?” I asked scornfully.

  “You are,” he said.
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br />   Holmes declined to discuss the matter further just then and I was left to my own thoughts. I confess that I had never imagined myself as a secret agent. Now that the suggestion was made, I was surprised to find that I was not entirely averse to the challenge. So far, I had played my part conscientiously in the Watchkeeper’s Office of Room 40. I had collected copies of intercepted telegrams as they fell from the pneumatic tubes and filed them as “Admiralty,” “Military,” “Diplomatic” or “Political.”

  That work was so humdrum that I would scarcely have been human if I had not felt that I was cut out for more exciting things. Without telling Holmes, I had offered my skills to the War Office the previous year as a military surgeon, on the basis of my experience in Afghanistan. To my chagrin I was turned down as being at least twenty years too old! At least, if I became a make-believe agent, I should find myself on active service. I recalled the famous saying of Dr Samuel Johnson that a man always thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. In Holmes’s wistful adventure, I might answer the call to arms.

  Sir John Fisher summoned me several days later. He assured me that our enemies were ravenous for whatever information might come their way, provided their appetites were suitably stimulated. I knew that he had just been talking to Sherlock Holmes

  “How will you know if they believe what is given them?” I asked.

  He chuckled.

  “If they believe it, they will come back for more. That is to say, they will continue to pay for it. Oh, yes, doctor. Our most successful and most valued agents in neutral Europe are those who have posed as traitors with secrets to sell. The money that comes to them from the German Abwehr, as their military intelligence is called, goes into our special fund at Room 40. We shall share it out among deserving causes when we celebrate victory at the end of the war.”

  “Then you are offering them a traitor?” I had not liked the sound of this.

  “I think not, on this occasion. We may have played that card too often.”

  “Then whom?”

  “We need a....” His eyes wandered a little as he avoided the words “fool” or “buffoon.” Then he smiled. “An innocent is what we want. One who appears naive enough to have information stolen from him.”

  Within two more days, Holmes had put to Fisher a plan for selling to German Intelligence a bound volume of a counterfeit Secret Emergency War Code. Its contents had been devised by my friend, as a permanent means of introducing false information to the Wilhelmstrasse, including variations in codes and ciphers, for as long as the war might last. The way would be cleared by one of our best double-agents in Holland, working under the cover of being an importer of Sumatra tobacco, but in German pay since before the war began.

  This agent was fastidious. He did not claim access to British intelligence. He was merely an international businessman and an admirer of Germany who had an old school-friend in the Foreign Office, William Greville. From this garrulous source, he was now able to alert his German clients to the forthcoming revision of our Secret Emergency War Code. Copies would be restricted to a handful of officers authorised to receive it. On previous occasions, the agents of the Wilhelmstrasse had no hope of laying hands upon it.

  The tobacco importer did nothing so foolish as to offer the code himself. That would have alerted German suspicions at once. He merely passed on a piece of information that his easy-going friend at the Foreign Office had let slip. As the threat of war spread, the distribution list of the code would include for the first time the British Consul in neutral Rotterdam. Greville, a Foreign Office courier who had acted in the past as a King’s Messenger, was to deliver it at the beginning of August. The story had only come out between trusted friends because this affable diplomat had let slip that he was greatly looking forward to a weekend of peacetime luxury in the neutral Dutch city. So much for William Greville, the long-serving Foreign Office courier, an old Army man, genial but not formidably sharp-witted.

  So I was to travel as “William Greville.” Before I assumed that role, our own people had watched me at home for several weeks and found no visible interest in me on the part of German agents. With the addition of horn-rimmed glasses, the temporary absence of my whiskers, a darkening of the hair, and an inch or two added to my height by the aid of built-up heels, I became the emissary and an assistant secretary to a junior Foreign Office minister. Or so my diplomatic passport described me.

  Before I left the Pool of London on a Dutch ship, the nature of my mission was allowed to leak out by means of several loud and indiscreet conversations in hotels and bars frequented by neutrals with German sympathies. I was not convinced that this would be sufficient bait but my guardians thought otherwise and, after all, they knew best. The proof of the pudding would be in the eating. It was in this frame of mind that I sailed for Holland on the first Friday evening in August.

  In Rotterdam, rooms had been booked for me at a hotel near the docks, where the hall-porter was known to our naval intelligence as being in German pay. By the time I came ashore, I could be assured that my presence in the city was not unnoticed. The time of my arrival was of the essence. It was the Saturday afternoon of an August bank holiday weekend, observed in England but nowhere else. The British Consulate behaved as though it were in England. In other words, it had shut on Saturday morning and would remain closed until Tuesday.

  I acted the part of a frustrated emissary, spending my time reading newspapers in the hotel foyer, drinking whisky and twiddling my thumbs. After an hour or two, the hall-porter fell into conversation with me, as hall-porters are apt to do in such places when business is quiet. I complained of a tedious wait, caused by offices that did not open on the first Monday in August. After that, there could be little doubt who I was or where my business lay. In any case, the porter had only to glance at my passport which now lay behind the hotel desk. Whether or not he knew that the British consul was due to receive a copy of the Secret Emergency War Code, I could not say. I was quite sure by now that his masters had been warned.

  Nothing more was said until the following evening—Sunday—when the obliging porter suggested that it was a pity I could not have a little “fun” while delayed in Rotterdam. I complained again, this time that I was a perfect stranger in the city and had no idea of where fun was to be found. He tendered the name and address of a house, also near the port, where a warm welcome and a good deal of amusement could be depended upon by the lonely stranger. I began to brighten up at this information. I went up to my room and changed. While there, I opened the locked briefcase with its code-book and papers, in order to take out some cash. In my apparent eagerness to experience the delights on offer, I omitted to lock the case when I put it back, clumsily hidden under a pile of clothes in the wardrobe drawer.

  I now followed the plan prepared for me. It was simple in the extreme. I made sure that I was not followed immediately I left the hotel. Then I ordered a cab from the rank and loudly gave the address of the “house” recommended to me. Once round the corner and out of sight, I ordered the driver to drop me as I had decided to have my dinner first. He shrugged and drove off. Making sure again that no one had followed me, I diverged from the hall porter’s route. On my way to the hotel the previous day, I had noticed a pleasant enough quayside brasserie and now took a table outside it. This looked directly back across a stretch of water, giving me a view of my own window.

  The window of that room was the third along from the right on the second floor and I had naturally left it in darkness. I waited for more than an hour, drinking my schnapps slowly on the quayside. Another twenty minutes passed and then, to my relief and excitement, the light went on in my hotel window.

  This was no visit by a maid, turning down the bed. The light remained on for over an hour, quite long enough for someone to photograph every page in the Secret Emergency War Code, as well as to search my effects and confirm my assumed identity as William Greville. Before they began the search, the intruders had allowed me time to get to the house w
here amusement might be found and to immerse myself in it. No doubt the hall porter was on guard at the desk, watching for any unexpected return, but they had every reason to believe that there was ample time in hand, more than enough to copy the bound cipher volume.

  I waited for a little while after the light had gone off. Then I made my way to a restaurant near the famous statue of Erasmus and spent another hour or so eating my dinner. As for my return to the hotel, I have seen and heard enough drunkards during my career to put on a pantomime of being a little the worse for wear. I welcomed help from the kindly hall-porter in climbing the stairs and getting into bed. He was very insistent in seeing that I got there.

  I tipped him generously and, as soon as he had gone, went to look for the attaché-case. It was once again under the pile of clothes but not quite as I had left it. Moreover, someone in closing it had caused it to lock automatically. Such was the end of my three days of active service in the pay of British Military Intelligence. I cannot pretend that I found it exciting, it was more than anything tedious and a matter of waiting around for something to happen. However, Holmes seemed well pleased with the result and Sir John Fisher appeared positively affable towards me.

  5

  For more than six months after this, Admiral Hall and his colleagues were able to transmit messages from our own chain of wireless stations in a code which the Germans could decipher, thanks to the present I had made them, but which meant nothing to our own side. All the same, this advantage was only to be exploited with great care.