Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares

by James Lovegrove

  “My oneirogenic gas is very fast-acting,” he said. “The chloroform is augmented with a mixture of distilled ethanol and oil of vitriol, amplifying its effects by several orders of magnitude. You will feel some discomfort when you come to, and I apologise in advance for that. But I can’t have you leaving here by any other means. Another journey by Subterrene might enable you, Mr Holmes, with your keen mind, to triangulate the whereabouts of this place, and that cannot be permitted. Secrets. Secretsss. Sssecretssss...”

  The words dissolved into meaningless sibilance, and my eyes closed, and cold blackness swamped my brain like the waters of a lake, and I knew nothing further.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE COMPROMISED STOCKBROKER

  When I awoke, it was to a splitting headache and vision so badly blurred I could barely make out my hand in front of my face. My mouth felt as dry as a desert, my tongue like sandpaper, and as I attempted to rise from my supine position I was overcome by a nausea so intense, I only narrowly avoided vomiting. Every single one of my muscles ached, and most of my bones as well, a state of affairs not ameliorated by the hard wooden bench I was lying upon. Baron Cauchemar had drastically undersold the after-effects of his oneirogenic gas. “Some discomfort” my eye!

  To add to my woes, a loud rapping sound started emanating from nearby, which seemed to pierce my brain like a hammered rail-spike. At the same time a gruff voice growled, “Get up. Get up, you lazy beggar. How dare you. These are private premises, not for the likes of you to use.”

  I blinked hard, and my focus sharpened to the extent that I could just make out another bench a few yards away. A man was stretched out on it, and a second man stood bent over him, hitting the back of the bench lustily with a walking stick.

  This latter was a stranger, a rotund and extravagantly muttonchopped gent with a correspondingly tubby Cavalier King Charles spaniel at his feet on a lead. The subject of his angry attentions was Sherlock Holmes, who, like me, was gradually coming round from his gas-induced stupor. Holmes’s face was pinched and grey, his eyes so bloodshot the whites were almost wholly red. He looked as wretched as I felt.

  The man with the spaniel, unable to prompt more out of his victim than a groan, took to prodding him in the belly with the walking stick’s ferrule.

  “I pay a handsome subscription, as do all who live in this square, for exclusive access to these gardens,” he said. “We expect to be able to stroll round them of a morning without bumping into riffraff like you and your friend over there. If you’re going to sleep off a gin hangover, do it somewhere else – in the gutter, preferably. By the looks of you, the smell of your clothes in particular, that’s where you belong.”

  Holmes had had enough. He sat bolt upright, parrying the walking stick aside.

  “You do me a great insult, sir,” he snapped. “I am here neither by choice nor of necessity. Poke me one more time and I shall not be held accountable for my actions.”

  The other man took umbrage. “You threaten me, you wastrel? As a trespasser on private property? I’ll have you know I share a degree of affiliation with several of the most influential men in this city. I am not someone you cross lightly.”

  The spaniel elected to match its owner’s bark by starting to yap incessantly. The dog’s din could not have improved Holmes’s delicate frame of mind; it certainly wasn’t helping mine.

  The man might yet have emerged from the altercation unscathed if he hadn’t then taken one last vicious jab at Holmes with the walking stick. That was the final straw as far as my friend was concerned, and he went on the offensive.

  “I realise how important you think you are,” he said to the man. “But how would your wife take it if she found out that your overseas investments have failed and you are dangerously close to penury?”

  The man looked shocked, utterly flummoxed. His mouth opened and shut like a goldfish’s.

  “Not only that,” Holmes continued, “but you have sworn to her that you have abandoned your unseemly practice of accosting men in public places, soliciting them to join you in indecent acts, but it is a habit you have yet to break.”

  “I... I...” The man’s thunderstruck discomfiture was almost painful to behold.

  Holmes pressed on. “The United Grand Lodge would surely have something to say about that behaviour, not to mention about the funds of theirs which you have embezzled in order to cover your financial losses. My associate and I may appear to be riffraff, but you, sir, are proof that even the most respectable-looking of persons has his seamy side. Smart clothes and fine words cannot hide the true riffraff of this world.”

  The not-so-gentlemanly gent tottered backwards from Holmes and collapsed onto the lawn on the other side of the pathway. The spaniel whimpered up at him as he buried his head in his hands in horrified disbelief. Holmes had unravelled the man’s entire life in a matter of seconds, ransacking closets to allow countless skeletons to come tumbling out.

  Holmes, his work done, levered himself off the bench and helped me to my feet. Then together, the groggy pair of us, we stumbled to the gate which afforded egress from the gardens. In the street, we caught our breath and took our bearings. The garden square we found ourselves in was in Bloomsbury, one of London’s more prestigious addresses. Cauchemar must have dropped us off here after gassing us into unconsciousness, no doubt deriving an ironic amusement from making us look like inebriated vagabonds dossing in a high-class part of town.

  “I apologise, Watson,” Holmes said.

  “For the way you treated that man back there? Think nothing of it. He was unforgivably high-handed. He pushed you too far. He deserved what he got.”

  “Did he? Well, maybe. Actually, I was apologising for not anticipating that Cauchemar would move to incapacitate us the way he did. I should have seen it coming. The fact is, he impressed me to such a degree that I let my guard down. His prowess, his praise, his blandishments, all appealed to my vanity, and I allowed myself to relax when I should have stayed on my mettle. As for that fellow in the gardens, one can understand why he made the assumption about us that he did. You and I both look a mess, old chum, and do not smell of the freshest. Perhaps I could have been kinder to him. Yet I cannot abide a hypocrite.”

  “It was all true? Everything you said to him?”

  “Every word. His precarious financial situation was easy to infer. One of the first things he mentioned was how much his subscription for use of the gardens was costing him. Money, clearly, has been preying on his mind. He happened to have a copy of the Financial Times folded under his arm, with the overseas investment statistics column uppermost. The newspaper was dog-eared and the ink on that page smudged. The same ink was smeared on his fingertips. All of which would signify that that section of the paper had been well pored over. Now, a successful investor would not dwell on a single portion of a financial journal obsessively. He would glance at it contentedly, then move on. An unsuccessful investor, on the other hand...”

  “What about his inclination towards his own gender?”

  “He wore a wedding band but also a green carnation in his buttonhole. The latter is a secret emblem allowing those of his persuasion to recognise one another. The playwright Oscar Wilde famously sports one. He was out walking his dog, yet the animal was overweight, bordering on obese, which suggested it does not get as much exercise as it ought. Logically, therefore, when the dog should have been taking its constitutional with its master, it was in fact spending most of the time tethered to a bush or a set of railings while he was otherwise engaged. Now, I have nothing personally against such proclivities, especially if conducted with discretion, but they contravene the law of the land and, as far as this individual is concerned, make a mockery of his wedding vows.”

  “And the Freemasonry?”

  “A ring on his right hand with the Square and Compasses made that perfectly apparent. Like the carnation, the badge of a clandestine brotherhood. He also employed a singular turn of phrase: ‘I share a degree of affiliation with
several of the most influential men in this city’. This perhaps was once a little in-joke of his that has since become a fixture of his everyday vocabulary, a ‘degree’ of course being an order of Freemasonry.”

  “But you claimed he was embezzling funds from them.”

  “That, I admit, was a stab in the dark, but it seemed one worth taking, and in the event proved a palpable hit. The Financial Times has not been around long but has already earned the sobriquet ‘the stockbroker’s Bible’, which gives us a strong hint as to our friend’s line of work. As a Freemason, might he not offer his services pro bono, managing his lodge’s investment portfolio? And if his own finances were compromised, might he not be dipping his hand into someone else’s pockets in order to make up the shortfall and continue funding his affluent lifestyle? Such an act would be in keeping with a man who is not continent in other areas of his personal conduct. And now, Watson,” said Holmes, “I propose we make our way – gingerly – to Baker Street, where we shall prevail upon Mrs Hudson to brew us some strong tea and cook us a fortifying breakfast, so that we may recoup our strength and alleviate the effects of Cauchemar’s damnable gas.”

  But this happy prospect was not to be realised, for as we began our trek westward, we discerned a raucous hue and cry echoing over the rooftops. It was reminiscent of the baying of wolves who have caught the scent of blood.

  Fearing we were about to get embroiled in another riot, we took a detour away from the source of the noise, going southward. The hullabaloo, however, seemed to change direction as we moved, or else was coming from all directions at once. Whichever way we turned, it was ahead of us.

  We rounded a corner, to find a small group of people hurrying towards us along the pavement with obvious purpose. I shrank away, retreating into a shop doorway, but Holmes did the opposite, stepping into their path. They veered around him, but he waylaid one of them, a baker’s boy barely out of his teens, and rapidly interrogated him.

  “What is all this? What is happening? Where are you running to?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” replied the panting youth. “They’ve only gone and got one.”

  “Who have only gone and got what?”

  “One of the bombers. Peelers have nabbed him, caught him in the act, so it’s said, and they’re taking him to Scotland Yard. We want to have a look.”

  Holmes relinquished his hold on the youngster, who raced off to catch up with his comrades.

  “Can it be true?” I said. “Can the nightmare finally be over?”

  “Who knows? The police may be bringing in a suspect, but whether or not he’s the culprit is entirely another matter. We must, I’m afraid, put our other plans on hold and go and see for ourselves, Watson. It’s the only way.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  FEIGNING FENIANISM

  Within quarter of an hour we had circumnavigated Covent Garden, crossed the Strand, and were travelling southward along the Victoria Embankment. Ahead rose the Palace of Westminster and its clock tower, home to Big Ben, and before that lay the Met’s newly constructed headquarters, popularly known as New Scotland Yard even though it was no longer situated near the street, Great Scotland Yard, from which the name originally derived.

  A tide of chattering, eager people hastened along the Embankment in tandem with us, moving faster than the incoming flow of the river. News of the arrest had spread like wildfire, and it seemed as though fully half the population of London had dropped whatever they were doing and headed out in order to catch a glimpse of the terrorist being brought in for questioning.

  By the time we came within sight of the Yard itself, the building was surrounded by a turbulent sea of curiosity-seekers and gawkers. The throng surged against a cordon of uniformed constables who stood, arms linked, before the main entrance.

  The mood of the crowd was turning restive and ugly. Teeth were bared; fists pumped the air. The bomber, it transpired, was already on the premises, and there were calls to send him out, give him to the public, let them deal with him. It was, in short, a lynch mob in the making. Someone shinned up a tree with a length of rope in hand, giving some idea what sort of justice the crowd had in mind to mete out.

  “There isn’t a hope of us pushing through,” I said to Holmes. “They’re too tightly packed together.”

  “There is a way,” he replied. “Watson, do you trust me?”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of this.”

  “Answer the question, yes or no?”

  “Yes. Of course. Implicitly.”

  “Then bear with me. There will be some risk, but if you do exactly as I say, you should be safe.”

  “‘Should be’?” I echoed querulously.

  Holmes grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and yanked my arm up behind me in a half-Nelson. “Keep your head down. Move fast. Act Irish.”

  “Act...?”

  “Coming through!” Holmes yelled out. “Make way! Undercover police officer, escorting another bombing suspect.”

  The crowd, incredibly, parted for us. Holmes had addressed them with commanding authority, not to mention a soupçon of Lestrade’s nasal-inflected pomposity. He also mimicked the inspector’s bustling comportment. No one doubted for a moment that he was what he pretended to be.

  As he frogmarched me along, a localised hubbub grew around us.

  “Another one. They’ve collared another one!”

  “Copper’s bringing a second one in.”

  “Look at the state of him. Bet he’s been hiding out in someone’s coal cellar.”

  “Oi, you lousy mick! You’ll swing for what you’ve done.”

  Some kicks came my way, and the odd clumsy punch. Holmes deflected the worst of the blows and kept us moving, although what he couldn’t prevent was a number of people showering me with spittle. I could scarcely believe my friend was taking such liberties with my welfare, but I showed willing and played my part, muttering the odd “begorrah” and “to be sure, to be sure” in order to reinforce my credentials as a son of Erin.

  As soon as we reached the police cordon, Holmes went straight up to the first constable he recognised. His memory for individual officers’ faces was remarkable. To me, they were all too often indistinguishable, one bobby in a dark blue tunic and conical helmet looking much like another.

  “You,” he said. “Mitchell, isn’t it? You know me.”

  “That I do, Mr Holmes. I was there when you solved that murder at the Theatre Royal, the one where you worked out who poisoned the female lead in her dressing room by how many strawberries had been eaten from the bowl on the table and by the way the hem of her petticoat had been adjusted so as to –”

  “Yes, quite. Let us through, this instant, or I fear Watson here may wind up dangling from a noose, and London will have lost one of its pre-eminent general practitioners and I my closest confidant and friend.”

  “Right you are, Mr Holmes,” said Constable Mitchell, and within moments my companion and I were free from the buffeting, agitated crowd and were passing through the arched doorway of the Yard, that grand Gothic, castle-like structure which was both beautiful and imposing. The door closed behind us, shutting out the worst of the mob’s ruckus, and Holmes at last let go of me.

  “I would rather we never did that again,” I said, mopping saliva from my face with a handkerchief. “Did I have to be an Irishman? Wasn’t that tempting fate, given the antipathy of the people out there to all things Irish?”

  “I needed to impart a sense of urgency,” said Holmes. “If I had announced you as just some average criminal, we would never have made any headway. I calculated that, for all the hostility on display, more of the crowd would wish to see a Fenian bomber tried and convicted and then hanged, than simply hanged. Not only that but they would, by habit, not wish to impede a policeman in the performance of his duties, either out of deference or fear of getting arrested themselves. We were never in serious danger.”

  “You were never in serious danger,” I grumbled. “What if they had bec
ome bold and wrested me from your grasp...?” I shuddered to think of the potential outcome.

  “But they didn’t, and now we are where we want to be. Let us go in search of a friendly face or, failing that, a familiar one.”

  New Scotland Yard still smelled of fresh paint and recently dressed stone. We weren’t yet used to the layout of the place, having visited only a couple of times since its inauguration. It was a sign that the Metropolitan Police was thriving, this brand new headquarters. The force had outgrown its original premises on Whitehall Place and required somewhere modern and purpose-built to accommodate its expansion. The crime rate had risen commensurately at the same time, so one might argue that the police’s increased prevalence and prosperity came at a cost to the general public.

  As we traversed a seemingly endless succession oflabyrinthine corridors, I recalled how Holmes and I had been summoned to the site while the building was under construction some two years earlier. Workmen had stumbled upon a female torso in a cellar they had recently completed. It was wrapped in black cloth, a sort of grisly parcel, and it was found to match an arm and shoulder which had turned up on the shore of the Thames at Pimlico a fortnight previously. Holmes had successfully linked this murder, which the newspapers dubbed “the Whitehall Mystery”, to the Jack the Ripper killings which were then in full spate. The woman was never identified, mainly because her head was never discovered, but she bore the marks of having been a prostitute like the Ripper’s five known victims and her uterus had been excised, much in the same way that internal organs had been removed from most of the other murdered women. Holmes averred that the body parts had been placed at the building site in order to taunt the police. The Ripper, after all, was fond of sending letters that mocked the vain efforts of the Yard to catch him; one, mailed to George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, even contained a half a human kidney. This was just another such jibe, on a larger, grislier scale.