Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares

by James Lovegrove

  “I don’t know for sure. But I fear very much for Benoît’s safety.”

  “Holmes, there’s a lot you’re not telling me.”

  “I am only just beginning to thread together the elements of this case into a coherent narrative, my friend. I feel I am grasping the outline of a monstrous scheme, something so enormous and potentially devastating that it could change our nation forever.”

  “The bombings...”

  “...are only the start. The hors d’oeuvres, one might say. The entrée threatens to be even more ruinous. Wait!”

  We had reached the far corner of the villa, the large, wrought-iron conservatory at the rear just coming into view. Holmes shoved me back. I fell into a crouch, and he did likewise. He peeked carefully out.

  “Who did you see?” I hissed. “Is it de Villegrand?”

  Holmes crept round the corner on all fours, beckoning me to follow. Arriving at the conservatory, he raised his face just high enough to peer through the glass. I did so too, and saw someone inside seated on a mahogany fiddleback chair. The person’s head was bent forwards. Fast asleep? Or...?

  Then I realised who it was, and perceived at the same time that he was fastened to the chair.

  “Benoît,” I said.

  “Quick,” said Holmes. “We must break in.”

  He snatched up a stone, part of the border of a flowerbed, and used it to smash out a pane in the conservatory door. He snaked an arm through the empty frame and turned the latch. We rushed inside.

  I went straight to examine Benoît. The young manservant was bound to the chair by his wrists and ankles using window-sash cord, and had been most cruelly and sadistically beaten. His face was a pulpy mess of contusions and blood. More blood soaked his shirtfront and spattered the chessboard-pattern floor tiles around him. I felt for a pulse, not expecting to find one. Benoît was so motionless, he must surely be dead.

  At my touch, his head snapped up. He drew in a raspy, lurching breath. I shouldn’t have been startled, but I was, so much so that I nearly fell backwards.

  “Aurélie!” he yelled.

  “Benoît, soyez calme,” said Holmes. “You are safe. Aurélie is also safe.”

  Holmes bent to the task of undoing the knots that secured Benoît to the chair. Together we bore the Frenchman across to a wicker settee which sat adjacent to the rear wall of the house. I made him as comfortable as possible and checked him over thoroughly.

  I gave Holmes my prognosis in the form of a single, sombre look. Benoît was in a very bad way. His injuries were such that he had, I estimated, a few minutes left to live, if that. Nothing I or any other doctor could do would help him.

  “Benoît,” said Holmes. “Please, if you can, tell me all you know. What happened to you? Who did this?”

  Benoît moaned, semi-delirious. The stuffed wolf and boar, de Villegrand’s trophies, looked on with their dead glass eyes, pitiless. They had seen everything but could reveal nothing.

  “Listen to me, Benoît. It is vital that you give me all the information you can. To judge by the fact that it is only the left-hand side of your face that has been hit, whoever hurt you favours his right hand when punching. Could it be that he had no left arm at all? Was it Abednego Torrance?”

  “Torrance...” Benoît murmured. It sounded like confirmation.

  “Torrance is an associate of your master, yes? He works for le vicomte?”

  “Oui.” The word was barely more than an expelled breath. “Works for... le maître. He is... wicked man. Méchant.”

  “He is,” said Holmes. “Très méchant. He and de Villegrand forced Aurélie into taking a bomb to Buckingham Palace, didn’t they? They made her carry it there and told her to throw it over the wall.”

  “Did... Did she...?”

  “No, Benoît. Aurélie is a good girl. When it came to the crunch, she couldn’t bring herself to go through with it.”

  “Dieu de remerciement,” said Benoît. “I knew... hoped... she would not. They made her watch. Le maître, he held her while Torrance, he...”

  “He beat you, yes.”

  “Aurélie, she screamed. Begged them to stop. Said she would do as they ask. Without me she has nothing, so she would do anything to keep me safe. But Torrance, he only pretended to stop. After le vicomte let her embrace me then took her away, Torrance started again. He laughed. He enjoyed.”

  My fists clenched. I could well imagine the vicious Torrance deriving pleasure from pummelling a helpless captive.

  “He said to me it was ‘tying up loose ends’. He was killing me.” Benoît coughed and choked. Blood frothed from his mouth, oozing down his chin and neck in a gory slick. “I think maybe he has succeeded.”

  “You’ll be fine, Benoît,” I lied.

  “Benoît,” said Holmes, “where are de Villegrand and Torrance now?”

  “I do not know. I do not know. Gone. I think they will not be coming back.”

  “This isn’t de Villegrand’s own house, is it?”

  “No. He... lends it?”

  “Rents it?”

  “Yes, rents. To look good. Look like true vicomte, with wealth.”

  “But you and Aurélie are genuinely his servants?”

  “We are. We are all that is left of his father’s household. His father – not a wise or prudent man. Cruel to his wife. Le vicomte is also cruel to women. I have seen... As a boy... There was a young woman, and her lover, and le vicomte, he destroyed them. Used them and destroyed them both. For his own amusement. That is how he is. Yet Aurélie and I, we must still be loyal to him. We owe him our service. But always I must watch out for Aurélie, take care of her, because he is dangerous. She is innocent and sweet and he is a, how you say, prédateur?”

  “Predator.”

  “Yes. Of women. Especially young women. So I must care for her, and we must work for him because he tells me, if we do not, he will have Aurélie, and ruin her. He pays us little money, he treats us like slaves, but I am scared to run away and so make him angry, because of my sister. We run away, perhaps he finds us, and I am not frightened for myself, but for poor Aurélie I am. She is my only family, my world. I must protect her, even if it means we live with a man who might at any time turn on us and do her harm and shame.”

  My fists clenched even tighter. Now it was de Villegrand I loathed, more than Torrance. No wonder Benoît had been so full of glee when he saw Holmes best the vicomte in combat. Holmes had done exactly what Benoît wished he himself could do, but was unable to. It must have been like Christmas come early for the beleaguered, downtrodden manservant.

  “What is de Villegrand’s next move?” Holmes asked. “Do you have any idea?”

  But Benoît was fading fast. The effort of talking was accelerating his decline. Brave man, he realised it, too.

  “I know... so little,” he gasped. “Le Duc Enfer. I hear him say to Torrance about le Duc Enfer. I do not know what he means.”

  “The Duke of Hell? Benoît? Did I get that right? Is that what he said?”

  Benoît burbled out a few more words, the only one of which I caught was his sister’s name.

  “Aurélie will be all right, you have my word on it,” I told him. “Every conceivable measure will be taken to keep your sister safe from harm. And de Villegrand will never again menace her or anyone else, that I also swear.”

  My reassurances were falling on deaf ears, however. That is to say, dead ears. For Benoît had passed away. His head lolled to one side and his eyes stared sightlessly out between their swollen lids. A faint rattle in the back of his throat was the sound of the soul leaving his body, commencing on its journey to, as Shakespeare has it, “that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  GLASS GUILLOTINES

  I straightened up, smoothing out the seams in my trousers. I was calm in my anger, the eye of my own personal storm.

  “This cannot stand, Holmes,” I said. “We must find de Villegrand and Torrance without del
ay. We may not know where they have gone, but they will surely have left behind clues.”

  “Why here, I wonder?” said Holmes, glancing round the conservatory.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why drag Benoît into this room, of all places, in order to torture him? That is a dining-table chair he was tied to, not a conservatory chair. They hauled it, and him, out into the conservatory for a reason.”

  “So as not to get bloodstains on the dining-room carpet. You can scrub quarry tiles clean with a mop and bucket. A carpet is a much trickier proposition.” I was being somewhat glib. In truth, I was none too bothered about the circumstances of Benoît’s beating. I just wanted to lay my hands on the perpetrators. “Now come on, old fellow, we need to get cracking.”

  “The placing of Benoît here seems deliberate. We found him easily. Too easily. Almost as though we were meant to.” He looked up, frowning. “There is something about the design... Those ceiling panes – there are an abnormally large number of them. And the mullions and transoms in between are unusually thick.”

  “You can admire the architecture another time. How about we go into the house itself and you scrutinise that instead? I don’t doubt that you have your magnifying glass on you. There’ll be something indoors that will put you on de Villegrand’s trail, some stray fibre, some specimen of mud, a heap of tobacco ash...”

  Holmes gave no indication that he was listening, or had even heard. Well, I thought, if he is unwilling to take action, I am not. I stepped between the wolf and the boar and grasped the handle of the door that connected to the main part of the house.

  “Watson,” Holmes said, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Not until –”

  But I had already depressed the handle.

  The door did not budge.

  But something else started moving.

  There was a whirring, as of counterweights in action, and a clattering, as of chains running through ratchets. The entire conservatory thrummed loudly around us, coming to life.

  Overhead, the ceiling panes began to turn.

  It was weirdly, beautifully fascinating to watch. Each rectangle of glass rotated, independent of its fellows, spinning on its lateral axis. The panes, en masse, seemed to ripple in waves, as though some invisible giant hand were running fingers down them, stirring them to motion. The sunlight glanced off them at a multiplicity of angles, flashing prismatically in all directions. The entire glass room was filled with brilliant little rainbows darting this way and that.

  As I said: weirdly, beautifully fascinating. I was mesmerised. I had no idea what the revolving of the panes portended.

  Holmes, however, had some inkling.

  “A trap,” he said dully. “Of course. I have seriously underestimated the vicomte’s deviousness.”

  “A trap?” I said. “How can it be? This is just some – some exotic method of ventilation. There will be a sound scientific principle behind it, a horticultural justification, perhaps to do with the propagation of tropical plant species which require cool breezes or shifting patterns of light in order to –”

  Then one of the panes slipped from its mounting. It hit the floor with an ear-splitting crash.

  “Or,” said Holmes, “to reiterate, it’s a trap.”

  “One pane coming loose does not mean –”

  Three further panes fell, landing at various different spots. Holmes had to step smartly aside to avoid being struck by one of them.

  “Yes,” he said. “Quite definitively a trap. With us as the prey and Benoît as the bait.”

  The panes started dropping with insistent and increasing frequency. There was no appreciable pattern. The choice of which fell next seemed wholly random, a lethal lottery. It was impossible to predict when or where one was going to be released from its frame and descend.

  The door to the garden was some half-dozen yards from where I stood but it might as well have been a mile. It would have been madness to attempt to reach it when at any moment a sheet of glass might plummet onto one.

  I tried the door to the house again, but it was locked fast. The handle, it was obvious now, had served as a trigger device, springing the trap. Presumably it functioned normally except when the trap was set.

  Shards were piling up on the floor. As if to demonstrate how deadly the falling panes could be, one thudded into the late Benoît’s throat. It buried itself as far as his spinal column, all but severing his head from his neck.

  “Holmes!” I cried above the din of glass smashing and shattering. “There’s no way out. I can’t break down this door, and we daren’t make a bid for the other door. Chances are we’ll never get there.”

  Holmes, like me, had pressed himself flat against the side of the house. It was not safe doing even that, however. One of those glass guillotine blades narrowly missed my shoulder, and I heard Holmes give a hiss of pain as another landed so near to his leg that a sliver embedded itself in his calf.

  Sooner or later the shower of panes would catch one or other of us, or both. They were thick, heavy and sharp-edged, fully capable of lopping off a limb or cleaving a skull. We were pinned in place, and it was only a matter of time before our luck ran out and the trap claimed us as its victims. If we were lucky, we might get away with cuts and lacerations. But if we were not...

  Then Holmes said, “Watson, was it wolf then boar or boar then wolf?”

  “Good Lord! What?”

  “The order in which de Villegrand patted the stuffed animals’ heads. Wolf then boar or boar then wolf?”

  “How should I know? I don’t remember. I wasn’t paying attention. Does it matter?”

  “Or was it both at once? No, there was definitely an order.”

  “Holmes, have you gone quite mad? We are about to die!”

  “Not if my supposition is correct. Try wolf then boar, Watson. I think that was it.”

  “You mean... pat their heads?”

  “Yes. You’re right next to them. I can’t reach them from here. Wolf then boar.”

  Convinced that my friend had taken leave of his senses, I stretched out a hand towards the wolf to my right. I feared that at any moment a pane would come whooshing down and remove my arm at the elbow.

  “Wait! Boar then wolf,” cried Holmes. “That was it.”

  I stretched out my other hand and patted the boar’s head firmly. Then I did the same to the wolf’s.

  Abruptly the panes that remained in the ceiling stopped turning, coming to a halt. A last one plummeted, adding to the accumulation of sparkling débris on the floor. Then all was silent and still.

  “A failsafe,” Holmes said, limping over to me. “It decommissions the trap. Look.”

  He tilted the wolf back on its hind legs. The tile beneath its front paws was a false one, spring-loaded. A kind of pressure switch.

  “There’ll be another beneath the boar, the two connected to each other. Trip them in the correct sequence and the trap is neutralised. De Villegrand had to do this the other day when he led us outside. His ‘talismans’ indeed!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE FRENCH CONNECTION

  Our brush with death made me less keen than before to enter the house proper. Who knew what other similarly lethal snares awaited within.

  Holmes was of the same view, and so we picked our way carefully across the broken glass and exited the conservatory as we had entered. I aimed a last glance back at poor Benoît’s body. It was spiked all over with a mass of glittering glass fragments, festooned with them like some ghastly festive ornament. The young Frenchman had been abnormally courageous. His death, I vowed, would not be in vain.

  Outside, on the lawn, I examined Holmes’s leg. He insisted that it was nothing, a mere scratch, but I wanted to ascertain for myself that no major damage had been done. Thank the Lord, it hadn’t. I prised out the sliver of glass without much effort, leaving just a shallow flesh wound.

  “I should like to swab that out with peroxide and iodine when I have the opportunity,” I said, �
��to prevent infection.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Holmes dismissively.

  “And Holmes – I apologise. For setting off the trap. In my defence, I had no idea it was there.”

  “Yes,” he said again, no less dismissively. “In many ways I blame myself. I should have been more circumspect. De Villegrand is proving even more formidable a foe than I expected. I had him pegged as a dilettante, shrewd and physically able but no great intellectual. However, if he is the one who devised and built that trap, then there is much more to him than I initially suspected.”

  “He and Torrance are the bombers, though? That’s confirmed?”

  Holmes gave a weary nod. “Torrance I had become certain was involved in the terror campaign. Being a gun-for-hire, he would not need a motive for committing acts of terrorism, beyond money. De Villegrand, on the other hand...”

  “Could he not also be a gun-for-hire? Let’s assume Fenians are employing him. He could be nursing a grudge against Great Britain. Many French still do. There’s been nigh on a thousand years of rivalry and enmity between our two nations. Treaties may have been signed, we may both be drawing closer together politically because of a shared fear of German expansionism, but plenty of Frenchmen still regard Britain as a continuing threat. Over sherry, de Villegrand proposed a toast to the Entente Cordiale, but who knows if he really meant it.”

  “He did not,” said Holmes. “He said many a fine word about our country which he does not, in truth, endorse wholeheartedly. You’re right. Whatever Louis Philippe the First claimed about a ‘cordial understanding’ forty years ago, some French are still fighting the Napoleonic Wars in their hearts. Our two empires continue to spread and sprawl, our colonies and protectorates rubbing up against one another in Africa and South America, often sharing borders. That is bound to cause friction. De Villegrand is one of those who would like to see the atlas of the world covered in French blue rather than British red, and is willing to take drastic steps to see that goal become a reality, even perhaps to the extent of throwing in his lot with his enemy’s enemy, the Fenians. However, consider the possibility that the Irish angle might be a red herring. Does the vicomte need to ally himself with anyone else? Why, when he’s perfectly capable of doing the job unaided? Remove the Fenian issue from the equation, and it still balances. Cauchemar intimated as much last night.”