Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman

by Tim Symonds

  ‘Last week I gathered my courage and returned to “the tin house”. I could not get away from the Foreign Office until the last train and arrived about midnight, after a moonlight drive from Winchester, thinking all the way about the walk with Dorothy along the same road at the same time of night. The following day was filled with her presence beside me, here and there some place or tree lit, as I looked, by a happy memory, like a gleam of light falling on it.’

  I read the next sentence and lowered the page. Tears sprang to my eyes. Grey was expressing exactly how I felt about my own dear, dead wife. He wrote,

  ‘Her life was like a soft white cloud which came out of nothing into a summery, hazy heaven and as softly disappeared’.

  Those words would have been entirely appropriate etched on Mary’s stone in the tiny Brightling cemetery, adjacent to the church where we were married, in whose nearby wooded valleys we spent our honeymoon. In the event the mason carved the exquisite line from The Rubaiyat - ‘The Bird of Time has but a little way/To fly...’

  I returned to Grey’s letter.

  ‘The Saturday after your feet touch England’s soil once more, I hope you and Dr. Watson will accept an invitation to lunch at Chequers Court, the home of the Clutterbucks at the foot of the Chiltern Hills. I plan to be there. The oak-roofed hall is said to date to the time of King John, a remnant of a former house. It has its own ghost, of course. The Clutterbucks will introduce us to more recent, more tangible residents - an eider duck, a tufted duck, a red-headed pochard, two wigeons, and an elderly Shoveler duck. The Shoveler dines at table with the family, on special food.

  ‘I have heard you are inclined to refuse honours created by Man. I hope you will accept one from the great Deity who commands our fate. We shall plant a tree on the East Lawn, a specimen of Quercus ithaburensis macrolepsis, one of the valonia oaks returning with you from the Dardanelles. For centuries the Sherlock Holmes tree will flourish in the grounds of Chequers in abiding recognition of the many services you have performed for our country.

  ‘May I count on - and look forward to - your visit?

  ‘L’un de vos fervents.

  ‘E. Grey’

  A Most Surprising Letter Arrives From Mycroft

  At Chequers on the Saturday a further communication arrived, addressed to Sherlock Holmes. It was deeply scored in red ink and marked ‘Most Secret’. We were clustered in the grounds with Sir Edward Grey and the Clutterbucks, having planted the commemorative Valonia on Coombe Hill. The sapling stood next to an ancient clump of chequer trees after which the house was named. Holmes squinted at the pages of foolscap and handed them to me. I excused myself and moved away from our hosts.

  The letter was from Mycroft, penned in duck-egg green ink. It was one of the most stupefying documents I have ever read.

  ‘My dear Sherlock, I must immediately thank you for returning with a good supply of saffron and allspice and am pleased to welcome you back intact. By now you will have deduced that my views on matters Ottoman differ in kind from Edward Grey’s more absolutely than I could ever describe in words. He may be standing next to you as you read this but I do not hold it uncharitable of me to say the Foreign Secretary lacks every skill a diplomat requires, social brilliance, the smiling falsehoods, the cunning to move gracefully among traps and mines, the ruthless outlook.

  You solved the riddle of the Sword(s) of Osman in short order. In doing so, I hold you have, single-handedly, made a great war in Europe inevitable. If the British Government should have had the intention to embroil the political situation and lead towards a violent explosion, they could not have chosen a better means than to send you to Constantinople. You and I came up against each other for the first time, and you came out in front.

  I do not absolve myself from a charge of deviousness. I knew the Sword of Osman had been shanghaied before your arrival. I hoped the Sultan would awaken from his torpor and eradicate his most dangerous enemy, the Young Turks and their Committee of Union and Progress, root and branch. A badly weakened CUP could ensure the sultanate would fall instead to their rival, Prince Sabahedrinne. It was my calculation and those of other members of the Diogenes Club (several of whom sit in the Cabinet alongside Grey) that precisely because the Prince fully intends to implement reforms and espouses liberal principles the edifice of a fractious Empire would collapse - on the proven principle of give an inch and an invigorated populace will take a mile. Within months, like Russia’s reformist Tsar Alexander, Sabahedrinne would in turn be assassinated.’

  ‘So that’s what they really get up to at the Diogenes,’ I breathed.

  Mycroft continued,

  ‘As with Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg last year, economic paralysis and disorder would incite large-scale political demonstrations. The Ottoman Empire would shatter. The chaos would open up access to untold quantities of oil and once-in-a-half-millennium pickings in the Near East for the Empires of Europe. Germans, Arabs, Kurds, Russians, Armenians, French, Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians, Italians and Israelites would fight for the scraps. There would be rich spoils for the French in Lebanon and Syria, for the Italians in Libya and the Dodecanese islands. Britain would take effective control of the lower Red Sea littoral and the island of Tiran, the only good anchorage in the Gulf of Akaba. The last vulnerabilities on our routes to the Far East would thus be closed, and with Abd-ul-Hamid’s departure his fiddling among the Mussulmen of British India too.

  ‘The Prussian mischief-makers will allow Grey to keep the peace only as long as it suits them. They hunger for a full share of the mastery of the world. Far from intimidating Germany, Dreadnought has rather backfired on us. Telegraphs went immediately from Constantinople to Prince Henry, the Kaiser’s younger brother, commander of the High Seas Fleet. He has ordered the Wilhelmshaven Imperial Shipyard to construct half a dozen identical battleships for the Kaiserliche Marine. Henceforth we must converse upon how we should conduct ourselves in a European war, no longer how a war can be avoided. It will bring in the whole of our Empire and shake it like a terrier shakes a rat in a wheat-field. The much-feared East Wind has begun to blow. I doubt if England will spring out from it the wiser and better.’

  I turned to the final page.

  ‘Inadvertently, Sherlock, you have put me to work. I am to piece together a plan, a War Book, at the instance of Haldane, the Secretary of State for War. This War Book will be a first in our Island nation’s long history. As yet no-one has the slightest idea what happens if a major European war breaks out. Which branch of the Royal Navy will, within minutes of the Declaration, slice through the German undersea cables and cripple their communications to the outside world? Can we blockade Germany in the face of the gathering might of the Kaiserliche Marine? What if the Sauerkraut eaters use their Zeppelins as bombers and scouts? What if they drop poison gas on French and English cities - do we retaliate in kind? I don’t believe Lloyd George or Winston Churchill will hesitate a moment. When do we start cutting down iron railings to melt down for our munitions factories? When do we introduce rationing? Should we prepare an evacuation plan for coastal towns? How do we coordinate our railways so that cram-full trains carrying troops south from Scotland and the North to the coasts of Kent and Sussex don’t collide with trains hurrying our imports of food west to east, from the docks at Bristol and Liverpool to London? How do we raise a million men in short order - equip them, supply them, transport them to the Continent? How soon should we think the unthinkable - get the fairer sex out of their kitchens into the factories to replace men lost fighting for King and Country? Where do we find tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of horses? What if the harvest season approaches when the guns begin to fire? It takes three good horses to pull a single harvester. We can hardly remove every horse from every small-holding and still bring in the size of crop we need to feed a country of forty-five million human-beings, surrounded as we shall be by German mines floating on our seas and German boats lik
e grey sharks beneath them, and German airships above. The loss of a horse will become of greater tactical concern than the loss of a human soldier.

  ‘Childer’s shocker The Riddle of the Sands predicting a German plan to invade our green and pleasant land has frightened the general public beyond all rationality. Who will neutralise the German spies around our Docks and Army bases and seaside towns like Hastings? The parish peeler? The Daily Mail reports there are 65,000 German spies in Britain, mostly waiters and hairdressers, each hiding a monocle in his back pocket. We can’t fit them all in the Tower. Do keep a close watch on the bushes on your walks on the South Downs.

  ‘I start work on the War Book in the morning - the last first, what shall we put in the precautionary telegram to send around the Empire, that within days, perhaps hours, England will be at war?

  ‘Shall we say lunch soon at the Automobile Club? They are thinly populated at this season.

  ‘I remain, even more, dear Sherlock, your admiring brother.

  ‘Mycroft.

  ‘P.S. - Ironically I have been offered a KCMG for ‘services rendered’ to foreign affairs. I shan’t refuse. We must celebrate. I have a bottle of Imperial Tokay said to be from Franz Joseph’s special cellar at the Schoenbrunn Palace.

  ‘P.P.S. - Pity about Shelmerdine. Have you heard? Mortuus est. An hour after your departure, at exactly a quarter past nine, a cannon was fired. Shelmerdine was on Galata Bridge. At that instant a deadeye as skilled as a Boer sniper hit him in the head. According to a nearby fisher (who seems now to have fled the city) the shot was fired from the slopes on which Yildiz sits. What remained of Shelmerdine’s head would have fitted in a coffee-cup. The fellow was spared peine forte et dure at least. Tarik, the official organ of the Ottoman government, mourned the passing of a “well-known Stambouli from deadly Syrian malaria”. You would be in error if you assume Shelmerdine was a double-agent. He was, strictly speaking, not. He adopted the religion and ways of his targets but acted separately on different issues for different masters.

  ‘His Imperial Majesty has sent condolences to the widow and four children. It means the flow of completely fake expressions of loyalty telegraphed to Abd-ul-Hamid from every quarter of the Ottoman Empire has come to a juddering halt, at least for a while. Shelmerdine was originally commissioned by the Sultan Valide to write them as from ordinary citizens. The practice continued upon her demise with the patronage of the Sultan’s Ministers.’

  According to Shelmerdine’s successor, newly appointed as Mycroft’s agent, hardly two hours after I presented the Sultan with the powerful Ross military binoculars the gift had been put to use. A deaf eunuch lip-read my conversation with the dragoman at the landing-pier while the cases and cages were being loaded on the boat. Every word I spoke was relayed to the Palace. The instant I called out, bitingly, ‘But don’t worry, the skeleton in your closet is perfectly safe with us’ I had inadvertently betrayed his true role to the Palace. Shelmerdine was doomed. The death of Mycroft’s paid agent - and my central role in it - horrified me. Had I not felt so overwhelming an urge to prove the man had failed to bamboozle the greatest ‘gumshoe’ in Europe, Shelmerdine would have survived. Even reading my lips would have been more difficult if the custom for medical officers at sea hadn’t obliged me to shave my moustache.

  ***

  The party by the lake dispersed. My comrade rejoined me. The Foreign Secretary and the Clutterbucks went back to the house to change for Dinner. Holmes pointed at the letter.

  ‘Did you notice Mycroft had the misfortune to get a smear of ink upon the outer side of his right digitus minimus?’

  I passed the pages back to him to read and waited in silence. He cocked an eye at me.

  ‘You look mournful, Watson.’

  ‘Aren’t you dismayed by the news about Shelmerdine?’ I asked with some asperity. ‘After all, he was an excellent companion. So what if he was involved in a plot to overthrow the Sultan – if he was.’

  ‘I might normally be disturbed,’ came Holmes’s enigmatic reply. ‘Except...’

  ‘Except what?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Except for the fact he met his fate on Galata Bridge.’

  ‘Galata Bridge?’ I echoed. ‘How would it matter if he was shot crossing a bridge or climbing the Mountains of the Moon?’

  ‘Not any old bridge. The bridge. Also, if you return to the letter, Mycroft doesn’t say he was shot crossing the bridge. It only says he was on the bridge when he was shot.’

  ‘I know this will shake your confidence in me to the very core, Holmes,’ I retorted, ‘but I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. What difference does it make if he was crossing the bridge or just standing on it?’

  My comrade’s thin fingers tapped at the letter.

  ‘We are told the shot came from ‘the slopes on which Yildiz sits’, a distance of several hundred yards.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Even for a rifle with a state-of-the-art scope and chamber pressure of 20 tons a square inch it’s a considerable range.’

  Holmes was right. It was a very considerable distance to hit any sort of moving target. My years in India hunting the occasional man-eating tiger had taken place in the jungle, invariably at close range, where jungle-craft and steady nerves were more important than long-range marksmanship.

  ‘For the bullet to strike someone in the head he had to be standing as motionless as a pillar of salt - and for several seconds,’ Holmes continued. ‘But you saw the fishermen jerking about as though they suffered from Saint Vitus Dance.’

  ‘So?’ I pursued.

  ‘Why would our dragoman be standing so still?’

  ‘How do you explain it,’ I demanded.

  ‘Cast your mind back to the newspaper photograph which revealed our presence to the whole of Stamboul.’

  ‘What has that to do with Shelmerdine?’

  Holmes laughed, delighted at my perplexed expression.

  ‘Watson, your bafflement is a perennial delight. In a word - everything! The revelation of our true identity has everything to do with Shelmerdine. How many people knew we were disguised as Royal Naval officers?’

  ‘A good number. I counted Grey and the Prime Minister, your brother Mycroft. Fisher at the Admiralty. The Commodore. Three or four of the most senior officers aboard Dreadnought. The Sultan’s close entourage. And, yes, Shelmerdine.’

  ‘Excellent, Watson! Fifteen at least. Now tell me, who knew we would choose to go ashore when the entire crew from Commodore downwards was on deck awaiting the arrival of the Royal barge? Which of them knew we would be stepping off the ship at that moment? Someone was ready and waiting with a camera. Only one person other than Mycroft and the Commodore knew in advance both our assumed naval ranks and that you and I would quit the ship at that exact time. That person was...?’

  ‘Shelmerdine!’ I exclaimed, my certainty badly shaken. ‘We’d arranged to meet him at 8 o’ clock.’

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t note the state of his boots that first time we met him. If he’d taken the carriage straight from his dwelling why would they have been so covered with dust and horse-droppings? I’ll wager he was shot taking a photograph of Dreadnought’s departure exactly where he took the newspaper photo of us jumping into the Haroony. The Sultan’s spies would have been well-acquainted with Shelmerdine’s custom of setting up his tripod at that very spot.’

  I stood in silence while my companion tapped tobacco into his briar.

  ‘Poetic justice, Watson,’ Holmes resumed. ‘He told us he’d converted to Mohammedism. If he’d benefit by it he would switch to any belief - Gnosticism, Yarsanism, Samaritanism, Shabakism, Ishikism, Ali-Illahism, Zoroastrianism. Even Buddhism. A man of such expediency can have many masters and will take many sides, sometimes simultaneously. Nevertheless he is due our thanks. By revealing our presence he enabled
us to catch Saliha Naciye. The news that Sherlock Holmes had arrived in Stamboul panicked Saliha Naciye into snatching the sword before the engraver could complete his work.’

  ‘The treachery of it all!’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘Shelmerdine must have known that revealing our arrival might have laid us open to assassination.’

  ‘As you say,’ Holmes returned.

  ‘There’s something else which mystifies me, Holmes. Why did Saliha Naciye engineer Mehmed’s murder before we snared her? I can see why she might...’

  ‘It was essential to cover her tracks. Not even a Sultan’s wife could gain access to the sword. She needed Mehmed’s help. Until she saw the ghillie suit and hit upon the idea of becoming a spectre she had no way to carry out her plan other than through an alliance with him. He hedged his bets and pretended to be her accomplice. After that, Saliha Naciye needed only one other - the Daughter of Jerusalem. The Jewess’s life too might have been in danger except for her enduring value as the principal negotiator with whichever band of conspirators would agree to terms in exchange for the sword. Once Saliha Naciye had hold of the sword Mehmed was not only unnecessary for her plans, he was a definite threat. He could blackmail her - even be a witness against her if the need arose to save himself. It’s not impossible it was Chiarezza who pointed this out.’

  ‘Did Mehmed know the Sultan’s wife was the spectre?’

  ‘I doubt it. She had no need to tell him. His fear was genuine.’

  ‘What aroused your suspicions about Shelmerdine?’

  ‘The photographs. First, the German submarine. A camera could have been placed almost anywhere along the length of the bridge. However, soon enough I realised it was taken from the exact vantage point as the picture in the newspaper of us getting into the pinnace. Then, if you recall, after we caught Saliha Naciye in flagrante, we took another look at the photograph Shelmerdine handed to us on our arrival, the close-up of the sword.’