Everybody said that he would end up governor of Australia or Canada one day. Casement had been convinced that we the British were blessed with a unique sense of honour, that our values could never be compromised. In those days, he would have happily walked through fire in the cause of the Empire and just as happily give his life in its defence.
He was sent to South Africa to fight in the Boer War and what he saw there came as a shock to him. He witnessed the cruelty with which British officers dealt with all, Boers and natives alike. This rude awakening made him ask himself questions. He spent sleepless nights attempting to justify the actions of men he had admired and ended up having a nervous breakdown. When he recovered he convinced himself that what he had witnessed was an aberration, that it had taken no more than a handful of unworthy officers to dictate the agenda and give us a bad name. In a war situation unsavoury situations arose anyway, he had told himself, although he admitted that this was probably a dishonest conclusion. When Algie began relating the atrocities committed in the name of King and Country, I signified to him that I was well aware of all that as I was finding myself unable to hold back my tears, but he had no intention of stopping his flow. Shortly after the Boer War, Casement was appointed Consul to the Congo.
‘Although supposedly a Belgian colony, it was deemed to belong lock, stock and natives, to King Leopold personally.’ I had heard this before but the enormity of the aberration only now hit me.
One of Casement’s duties was to report to London about the abuses being committed by the Belgian King’s army. Rumours of these atrocities had reached the foreign office. He saw with his own eyes how the natives despatched to collect ivory had their hands chopped off if the Belgian officer in charge deemed that they had not tried hard enough to fulfil quotas. Those sent to collect rubber latex were treated in a similar manner if they were short of the white man’s expectations. Beating, decapitation, hanging and shooting were a daily occurrence, indulged in light-heartedly. He was particularly horrified when he questioned eyewitnesses who confirmed the practice of the common sport of rounding up helpless locals, including women and children, ordering them to start running into the bush, only to be chased by the white administrators with guns. The man who killed the largest number of those unfortunate souls was declared champion.
‘After this,’ Algie said, ‘Roger told me that he understood as clearly as anything that colonialism was only masquerading as a force for spreading enlightenment to folks who were deemed not to have been blessed with it, when it was no more than an organised regime of plunder.’
‘Which is why he threw in his lot with the Irish Liberation Army,’ I said, biting my lips and shaking my head.
We knew that Roger had been negotiating with the Germans who, it was known, had plans for starting hostilities against us. He had been trying to get supplies and arms for the Irish patriots, and had been arrested.
‘Now my dear Irene, they mean to hang him,’ said Algie amid unrepressed sobs. ‘I know they do, since they appointed that fanatical fellow Selbow to judge the case.’ I did not immediately register the name.
‘What are we going to do about it?’ I asked. Wryly I imagined that the impulsive Vissarionovitch would have started planning an attack on the Tower of London where the accused man was, in a bid to rescue him. I supposed that, reckless as I can be, I would have agreed to be part of the action.
‘For the time being I will find out who among the top people I know might wish to lend their support to a massive petition. Otherwise there’s nothing anybody can do.’ Suddenly I remembered Rosa.
‘Algie,’ I said, ‘you never gave me the opportunity to tell you who came in for a consultation not one hour ago, asking for my help in a divorce case against her wicked husband.’ But in the excitable state he was in, Algie had not heard and continued speaking incoherently.
‘She was one Rosa Selbow, wife of a judge, there can’t be two...’ I began and trailed off.
‘Septimus Selbow,’ he ejaculated. ‘The Hanging Judge! He’s the very fellow in whose hands the fate of our dear Roger resides.’ He now gave me his full attention and I put him in the picture. This intelligence had cheered him up for no reason that I understood. Shortly afterwards, expostulating with himself, he left and I continued with planning my campaign to free Rosa from an abusive union.
Needless to say our fellow Club members expressed their complete support to me in my new venture. As none of them had a regular job to go to, they all volunteered to assist me in my investigations in any way possible. Algie knew Judge Selbow by sight and by reputation, although they had never met. As he had friends who knew the Hanging Judge more intimately, he set himself the task of finding everything that was likely to help my client and confound Casement’s putative executioner.
Bartola was quite excited at the prospect of tailing Rosa, something I thought necessary if I were to discover things she might have been coy about revealing to me. As my Italian friend has an excitable nature I was less sanguine about getting her involved, but she’s such a kind soul that when she offered to help I did not have the heart to refuse. It did not take me long to change my mind about her, for in the end I became very impressed by the thoroughness with which she undertook every task.
When she came to Water Lane after her first day’s work, she was in a rare state of exhilaration. I had to urge her to speak more slowly and to calm down while I took notes. The whole of Monday Rosa Selbow never once set foot outside her lovely Regency house in Ossulton Street off the Euston Road, and Bartola had all the trouble in the world avoiding being noticed. This proved exceedingly difficult, as there were no obvious reasons for anybody to pace up and down a narrow residential street aimlessly.
‘I had noticed that every time I passed outside a certain house with a blue door someone from the floor above was peeping at me through the curtains and that made me uneasy,’ she said with a laugh. ‘And I was to discover that I had every reason to be,’ she added repressing a fit of giggles.
‘Why? What happened?’ I asked, but Bartola wagged her finger at me and shook her head, ‘All in good time, cara.’ I always knew that she was quite the raconteuse with an excellent sense of timing. I wryly surmised that she could easily be my Watson, except that she can’t spell.
On the Euston Road there were market stalls. She alternately pretended to be shopping around and looking for a certain house in Ossulton. At seven minutes past eleven a young woman turned into Ossulton Street, looking right and left nervously, all the time as if she expected to be pounced upon by some ruffian. As she was on the thin side she appeared taller than she really was. She was wearing an unspectacular greyish brown skirt, and, with singular lack of imagination, a blouse of the same colour. On her head she had a black felt hat with a mauve ribbon. She might have been a missionary, or planning to become one, Bartola had thought. When their eyes crossed, the lady smiled apologetically and walked faster towards Number 23, the Selbows’ abode, where she rang the bell. The door opened immediately, as if someone had been waiting just behind it. Bartola spent over two long hours hoping for something more concrete to happen and it did.
Passing outside the house with the blue door, she again noticed the curtain twitching and thought it best to stop thinking about it. The curious woman behind it must have already made up her mind about her. Suddenly she heard footsteps behind her and without turning round she understood that they were made by the feet of a man. She became uneasy and thought of accelerating, but the footsteps were clearly echoing her own pace. On an impulse she turned round to confront the man.
‘Are you following me, pray sir?’ Instead of reacting as any man would do in a situation like this, he smiled. He was not bad looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, which is a combination which Bartola told me she would normally have found appealing. His twirly moustache, however, she found repulsive, but she quickly assured me that mine looked quite fetching.
‘Yes, chérie, that I am indeed,’ the fellow had the gall to respond.
‘I saw you pacing up and down my street and it did not take me long to discover what you might be up to in spite of your genteel appearance. Yes, I am Barkis.’
‘What’s that to me sir, that you are Barkis? You must be barking mad.’
‘No,’ laughed the man happily, ‘I don’t expect you saucy French maidens would have heard of our great man of literature Dickens. Me, I’m only a poet, mind you a great poet, but I am Barkis. Means I am willing. You know? Barkis is willing.’
‘Willing for what? Willing to get lost per essempio, Mr Barkis?’
‘No, chérie, it means that I am willing to part with one whole guinea to spend a little time with you, seeing as my good lady wife is visiting her mother in Brighton, and I can’t find rhymes. Won’t you come upstairs with me, you little French seductress?’
‘I think you mean to insult me, sir,’ I said angrily. ‘Let me tell you Mr Barkis that I am not French but Italian.’ At that point he had grabbed my friend by the waist and she felt that she had no alternative but to strike him in that part of the male anatomy which hurts most on contact with an alien knee. She left the man bent double with pain, and took a hansom to Streatham where she bided.
On Tuesday, however, her feet still sore from yesterday’s peregrinations, she was grateful that she hadn’t been on the street five minutes than the door at Number 23 opened and the lady she identified as Rosa from my description appeared. She had an umbrella in one hand and a bag in the other. She too seemed nervous, reminding my assistant, for that was how Bartola viewed herself now, of a hunted animal. A mother and her two children had emerged from a house a few steps down the road. They were manifestly on their way to Euston Road, where the judge’s wife was clearly aiming for, making Bartola’s task a bit easier. She followed her quarry, discreetly, and saw her turn into Euston Road. She immediately deduced that Rosa was waiting for someone, recognising that her meandering from stall to stall with the clear intention of not buying anything was mirroring Bartola’s own action the day before. A lover? She had wondered. In any case not someone she would be happy to be seen in public with. Every time she handled an orange, she looked over her shoulder as if half expecting to see whoever she had her tryst with.
Bartola kept a close watch on Rosa Selbow by moving one step in the same direction for every one Rosa took. She was convinced that never for one moment had she given the game away to her quarry. Suddenly, as she had been half expecting, the lady from yesterday appeared and my friend proudly assured me that she had spotted her a whole minute before the judge’s wife did. They greeted each other by taking hold of each other’s hands and squeezing them.
They were obviously devoted to each other. My Italian helper decided to follow them at any cost. There were any number of hansom cabs outside the station and she had made up her mind to hire one for herself if the two friends who were also aiming for the cab stand took one. It was a pleasant spring morning. Although her feet were still sore from the day before, when the pair changed their minds and decided to go wherever they were aiming for on foot, she took a deep breath, ready to follow suit. Cautiously she walked behind them along the Euston Road and when they turned left into Duke Road, she did likewise. She followed them into Cartwright Gardens where they entered Miss Rosalind’s, a tea-house popular with genteel ladies. Bartola walked in with great self-assurance and sat herself at a fair distance from the two friends with the intention of watching their every movement. Unfortunately the distance made it difficult for her to hear their conversation. She (unnecessarily) explained that if she had seated herself too closely to them, they might have felt inhibited, and end up revealing nothing, whereas someone sitting opposite them at some distance would not cause such a constraint.
‘Yes, yes, Bartola,’ I said hiding my impatience. ‘You did right. Now tell me what you gathered.’ She was slightly piqued and reminded me that I had told her to tell me everything.
‘A detail might appear insignificant to you, but might well contain the key to the enigma,’ I had piously told her.
‘Nothing concrete,’ she replied. ‘Nothing that I can prove by Euclidian methods.’ She had obviously been paying attention to the discussions between the Bishop and Vissarionovitch.
‘Alright, Bartola, what conjectures are you able to put forward.’ Her face lit up on hearing the word conjecture.
‘Si, si...supposizione. As I said, I heard not one word of what they said, but I watched their lips and I can swear that on at least two occasions I read your name there.’ We had perfected a near infallible technique for eavesdropping on conversations between people at a distance not permitting sound capture. It involved watching the shape of the lips as they form syllables, consonants or diphthongs and can reveal the contents of whole conversations to those well-versed in the technique. We had become very proficient at this exercise.
Suddenly Bartola froze, opened her mouth in an inelegant manner and stared at me. ‘What’s the matter? You were saying?’
‘Dai Lernière,’ she said in a strange voice.
‘Yes, what do you mean?’
‘And Irene Adler...they’re the same no? Come si dice? Anagrams, si? She had stumbled upon this harmless little strategy in a sudden flash of illumination, something I’ve always attributed to Dr Freud’s concept of the subconscious stealing a march on one’s thought process. Fortunately she went back on track straight away.
‘As I was saying before interrupting myself, I clearly identified your name being spoken.’ And she mouthed the four syllables, Dai, Ler, Ni, Ère. She followed this by distinctly articulating the syllables Sher, Lock, Hol, Mes,’ in a theatre whisper.
‘And your conclusion?’
‘Conclusion?’ she tut-tutted, ‘my dear Irene, do not ask for conclusion. Ask for conjecture, supposizione...’
‘Bartola, you are becoming impossible,’ I said, and the poor soul laughed merrily. ‘Oh my good friend, if only you knew how much I am enjoying my new position as your assistant.’
Bartola made two important finds. The first was that a matter in which they were both involved was now in the capable hands of Dai Lernière who had been strongly recommended to Mrs Selbow by the great Mr Holmes himself.
‘From these, I deduce that Mrs Selbow was reassuring the other lady—’
‘Ursula,’ I interrupted her, expecting her to open wide her eyes in admiration of my supernatural powers for having discovered by some telepathic means the name of Rosa’s friend.
‘Oh yes, Rosa Selbow mentioned her.’
‘And what else did you deduce or conjecture?’
‘The way they talked to each other, with their faces very close, the loving looks they exchanged all the time, the slow movements of their hands, although never once did I see them touch each other apart from when they first met, almost everything they did ... como si dice ... made my antennae twitch, you know what I mean?’
‘Spell it out,’ I instructed her.
‘Let me put it this way, if they were of opposite sex, I’d have vouchsafed that they were betrothed to each other.’ I was less naive than my friend but kept my counsel to myself.
The verdict on Casement was due today, and when Algie arrived brandishing a copy of The Times, his glum face was all I needed to guess that the judge had indeed passed the death sentence. We had been under no illusion about this eventuality, but it still came as a big shock. We were seated opposite each other in complete silence for at least five minutes before he threw in a dark look at me, as if he was accusing me of being responsible for what had happened.
‘Irene,’ he said aggressively, ‘you are the cleverest woman ... damn it, you are the cleverest person I know. You are supposed to be full of ideas and invention. Why are you not proposing a watertight course of action to save the neck of my friend?’ I immediately thought of our daredevil Russian friend, but I knew any action I might have proposed could end up catastrophically for all concerned.
‘You mentioned a petition,’ I said weakly. I did not really have any faith
in appeals. To my knowledge no one had ever been spared the noose just because twenty thousand citizens thought he should be. Algie looked at me intently and nodded.
‘His enemies are so ruthless, I tell you, Irene. They will stop at nothing. They obviously had wind that a petition was in the making. Anticipating the move like accursed chess players they have blocked that outlet.’
‘What?’
‘They are circulating facsimiles of his diary, the “Black Diaries”, so-called, in which Roger was supposed to have written accounts of his encounters with Congolese men.’
‘But he was a Consul, for Heavens’ sake,’ I cried. ‘Was he not supposed to talk to the people whose welfare the English establishment claimed they were concerned with?’
‘Young men,’ said Algie meaningfully. ‘Handsome young men! Not to put too fine a point on things, sexual encounters with young Congolese men.’
‘So they’re up to their old tricks,’ I said. ‘Give a dog a bad name and then hang it!’ Algie nodded, but then shook his head wearily.
‘I had as lief admit it to you, Irene. How do you think I came to know Roger? Yes, he is a Uranian like me, a member of The Patroclus. What can we do about it? Some people are born male, some female and some are born like us. Damn it all, some of these young Congolese men are dashed handsome. What can a fellow do?’ We said nothing for a while, but an idea had sprouted in my brain.
‘Have everybody sympathetic to Roger proclaim repeatedly that the “Black Diaries” are forgeries,’ I said, ‘the louder we shout the more likely we are going to be believed.’
‘That might well be his only chance,’ Algie said nodding to himself, ‘but, but...’ He trailed off, unable to finish.
‘But what, Algie?’
‘His enemies are one step ahead, I am telling you they anticipated our every single move. My informants have told me that they’ve already despatched Mycroft Holmes to his brother Sherlock with facsimiles of the blasted diary...and of course the latter who is an expert graphologist, will only confirm its authenticity. We’ve lost before we’ve even fired our first shot.’
The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy Page 2
