The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes

by Marvin Kaye

  I began to see what he meant, a larger vision of the forces at work. “But for a man like Gladstone to employ such workers on his own land at home . . .”

  “It would be more than the public would stand for. Oh, fools, to make such an accusation a reality! Never seeing that what they had done was so much worse than what he would have stood accused of. I will get to the bottom of this, Watson, mark my words. The careers and reputations of Richard and William Addleton were so soiled, so jeopardized, by this that they died tragically, and all to preserve both their precious History and the reputation of an innocent prime minister on the eve of his retirement. Poor, mad James Addleton was the shovel that buried fifty men, but I will find the hands that wielded that shovel and see prison.manacles around their wrists.”

  I felt a deep unease at this proclamation, and it only deepened after our return to Baker Street. The forged papers were put safely away and not a word said to the inquiring inspector, as the Addleton tragedy was solved in every matter but motive, and that, Holmes believed, was well outside Scotland Yard’s bailiwick. Then Holmes went off in search of the retired forger Burkum Stacy, and sent me to the Diogenes Club to have a preliminary word with his brother Mycroft, who should know more than any man alive about such an insidious plot—or at the very least be able to find out.

  The elder Holmes merely shook his head. “You must stop him, Watson,” he said. “You have some influence with him, a friendship, that I lack. Tell him that this is one case that must be left buried where he found it, no matter what tragedies it may have engendered. What’s done is done, and no more harm can come of it. You must convince him, as his friend, for the best result he will achieve is frustration and the worst I prefer not to contemplate.”

  It was as dire a warning as I ever hope to hear from those lips. I returned to Baker Street immediately, turning over in my mind the various means I might use to put Holmes off this case, only to find him in a hellish rage, our lodgings a shambles, and Mrs. Hudson terrified and in tears.

  “They just bullied their way in!” she cried. “Threw me out of my own house and then turned it all topsy-turvy! I’ve never been so frightened in my life!”

  I looked at Holmes, pacing in helpless anger through the loose papers and debris. His obsessively indexed commonplace books, his scrapbooks and collected biographies and agony columns, seemed undamaged but lay strewn about, their pages fluttering in the breeze of his long stride.

  “The forged documents are gone,” he said, as I knew he would. “Taken by force, and with further vandalism that can only be meant as punitive. Do they think this will daunt me?”

  I calmed Mrs. Hudson as best I could and persuaded her to return downstairs and fix a cup of tea, hoping the panacea of a routine task would soothe her, and keep her away long enough for me to convey Mycroft Holmes’s warning.

  I had hoped that Holmes would heed his brother’s unimpeachably expert advice in this matter. To my dismay, the caveat, which I had felt strongly worded, had no effect but to tighten his jaw and sharpen the resolve in his eyes.

  “What of the forger, then?” I asked wearily, thinking that his hopes of a resolution might have been fanned from that quarter.

  “Gone,” he said, and knelt to begin the task of reassembling his books and papers. “Packed up and left for the Continent early this morning. If I had started my investigation last night, I might have caught him. But it is no matter now. I will not be so tardy again.”

  “The other forgers, you mentioned, are both dead?” I said, as a reminder, one more small attempt to dissuade him.

  “Syphilis and hanging, respectively.” He shrugged, his back to me. “I’ve set the Irregulars to watching the Addleton house,” he said. “We’ll find out who comes and goes, we’ll track them down, unravel the web of connections.”

  “It goes very high, Holmes,” I said quietly. “Higher than you or I can aspire, I fear.”

  He made no answer, and I left him to his organizing and his thoughts, taking a cup of tea with Mrs. Hudson and assuring her that she could sleep the night safely before going to my own bed in hopes that I had not told her a lie.

  It seemed only moments later that I was pulled up through layers of nightmare to find myself buried not in smothering peat but in my own woollen blankets. A street arab was shaking me awake, saying urgently, “Mr. Holmes sent me to fetch you—the Addleton place is burning!”

  It was indeed in flames, and its basement exhibit with it. I disembarked from my cab and walked slowly over to stand next to Holmes. His face was unreadable, the conflagration starkly illuminating its harsh angularity. Dawn was a nacreous glow over the house, dimmed by the grasping flames and the firefighters they silhouetted.

  “The water will put an end to what evidence the fire doesn’t destroy,” said Holmes in a flat voice. He turned to me at last. “Have you seen the morning edition? It’s just out.”

  I shook my head, not bothering to remind him that I was not a nocturnal creature such as he, nor to ask him what efforts had kept him out roaming through the dark hours.

  He handed me the folded newspaper and pointed to the article.

  The barrow in Wiltshire had been destroyed. The item referred only obliquely to reports of a deafening explosion on an unnamed estate south of Trowbridge, and to presumed connections with an unidentified lunatic found wandering. The man was questioned, then given over to the care of a noted asylum.

  “He’ll spend the rest of his life in there,” said Holmes.

  “Perhaps.” I held out some hope that we might contrive for his release upon the grounds that he was grief-stricken over his brothers’ deaths, but said nothing, preferring to withhold encouragement now that the last blow had been dealt. James Addleton had no home to return to now, in any event.

  “The bodies would have disintegrated upon being exhumed,” he added. “Corpora delicti forever unmet. Perhaps that was the intent all along. A master stroke, if so.” There was no tone of admiration in his voice.

  “There is much buried under the decades, Watson, much we do not know, perhaps much tragedy still to come to light. We enslave each other to this day, the brotherhood of mankind enslaving itself. Do I exploit you, as friend, as chronicler? Do you exploit me as your subject? All-powerful Great Britain enslaves her neighbors, and her colonies, and even her own people under the yoke of poverty and the factory—what Gladstone spent a lifetime attempting to rectify. These are cold ironies, Watson. They chill me to the bone.” He fell silent then, and looked past me into the greying shadows.

  I did not think I could be any further amazed, after all that had transpired, but once again, as so often, I was proven wrong. Mycroft Holmes, who so rarely deviated from his customary path, walked slowly towards us, bundled heavily against the rising wind.

  “It is no failure, Sherlock,” he said, coming to stand by us. “It is an old and a dead thing, and better left so.”

  At last expression flickered to life in Holmes’s face. “Better left so? Better for the Addletons? Tell me, Mycroft, how many times have I safeguarded our national security, how many secrets have I kept on behalf of a Government capable of such abhorrent acts? Fifty men criminally enslaved, then caused to die hideously in a foul bog. Mass murder, and England responsible.”

  “You do not know who was responsible.”

  “Don’t I? D—is gone these thirteen years, his secrets lost to the grave. But he was in power then, and well threatened by Gladstone, whom he loathed. His part in this is clear as the day now dawning. And his fondest admirer despised Gladstone, despises him still. Together they contrived this, and obscured it beyond even my powers to reveal.”

  “I will not contradict you,” Mycroft said mildly. “But why this, Holmes? You know what happened in South Africa, what was done to our people and to theirs. Can you be sure that even Watson has told you all of what he saw in India? You know precisely what our Empire is and what she is capable of. Why does this one instance gall so? You are not so naive as to think its like
has never been seen before.”

  “Not on home soil,” Holmes growled. “Not on one of my cases.”

  Mycroft smiled, having proved some personal point. For a moment he let his brother’s words hang in the smoky air, drifting like the bits of charred debris. Then he said, “The murders were done thirty-odd years ago, Sherlock. It’s over. Let it be buried, and be glad you were not buried with it.”

  “Oh, it is buried,” Holmes replied bitterly. “Buried forever and most literally, with priceless historic artifacts, with two misguided brothers who should not have had to die for such a thing. Buried legally by an overwhelming absence of evidence. And buried in a madman’s mind, where anyone who can see it will give it no credence.”

  “An apt summation,” Mycroft said, offering no solace, for there was none to be had.

  “All that remains to be answered is the question of why they never used this weapon of hypocrisy they created.” Holmes turned to his brother and waited.

  Mycroft’s agile brain seemed to be weighing what he knew and what he was willing to divulge. In the end, all he said was, “They concluded that it would misfire.”

  “Too dangerous a weapon, and so they put it in the ground, where it could never discharge? Then allowed local legends to wreathe its tomb in mist? They underestimated the thoroughness of their own bureaucracy, that fosters clerks like William Addleton. It discharged after all. Into innocent faces.”

  There was no more to be said, no more to be done. We moved away from the smouldering remains of the Addleton home. The water that extinguished the flames was now running into the sewers with a noisy gurgle. The winter wind had come in with the dawn.

  I fear that I am as a man in a tunnel deep underground, speaking to himself of dire matters long past. I suspect I will find that I cannot publish this under the current Government; for this one tale, at least, my publisher’s ethics will no doubt flee to parts unknown, as the forger fled to Europe. The very lack of evidence bemoaned herein could cast aspersions on all the other chronicles, cause them all to be read as fabrications with no basis in fact. I would not so damage my friend’s well-earned reputation.

  In the end, perhaps, I will lock this away, like a diary buried under a mattress. Perhaps my heirs will exhume it, when its contents will do less harm. For now, it exists only to ease my own burden, for I could not leave the story untold. It shames me as an Englishman, as it shames Holmes, and as it must shame all England. I only hope that, having committed the events to these pages, I can bury the memory of them deep in my own mind, and dwell on them no longer.

  When the Titanic went down on its maiden voyage, one of its casualties was Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912), author of the short mystery classic “The Problem of Cell 13,” as well as other entertaining mysteries involving Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., etc., better known as The Thinking Machine. Futrelle plays an important role in “The Adventure of the Dying Ship.”

  The Adventure of the Dying Ship

  BY EDWARD D. HOCH

  I write of this late in life, because I feel some record must be left of the astounding events of April 1912. I am aware that prior attempts to record my adventures personally have suffered when compared to those of my old and good friend Watson, but following my retirement from active practice as a consulting detective late in 1904 I saw very little of him. There were occasional weekend visits when he was in the area of my little Sussex home overlooking the Channel, but for the most part we had retired to our separate lives. It was not until 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War, that we would come together for a final adventure.

  But that was more than two years away when I decided, quite irrationally, to accept an invitation from the president of the White Star Line to be a guest on the maiden voyage of R.M.S. Titanic across the Atlantic to New York. He was a man for whom I had performed a slight service some years back, not even worthy of mention in Watson’s notes, and he hardly owed me compensation on such a grand scale. There were several reasons why I agreed to it but perhaps the truth was that I had simply grown bored with retirement. Still in my mid-fifties and enjoying good health, I had quickly learned that even at the height of the season the physical demands of bee keeping were slight indeed. The winter months weie spent in correspondence with fellow enthusiasts and a review and classification of my past cases. What few needs I had were seen to by an elderly housekeeper.

  My initial reaction upon receiving the invitation was to ignore it. I had never been much of a world traveller, except for my years in Tibet and the Middle East, but the offer to revisit America intrigued me for two reasons. It would enable me to visit places like the Great Alkali Plain of Utah and the coal mining region of Pennsylvania, which had figured in some of my investigations. And I could meet with one or two American bee keepers with whom I’d struck up a correspondence. I agreed to the invitation on one condition—that I travel under an assumed name. For the voyage I became simply Mr. Smith, a name I shared with five other passengers and the ship’s captain.

  Early April had been a time of chilly temperatures and high winds. I was more than a little apprehensive as I departed from London on the first-class boat-train to Southampton, arriving there at 11:30 A.M. on Wednesday the 10th. Happily, my seat companion on the boat-train proved to be a young American writer and journalist named Jacques Futrelle. He was a stocky man with a round, boyish face and dark hair that dipped down over his forehead on the right side. He wore pince-nez glasses and flowing bow tie, with white gloves that seemed formal for the occasion. Because of his name I took him to be French at first, but he quickly corrected my misapprehension. “I am a Georgian, sir, by way of Boston,” he told me, “which might explain my strange accent.”

  “But surely your name—”

  “My family is of French Huguenot stock. And you are—?”

  “Smith,” I told him.

  “Ah!” He indicated the attractive woman seated across the aisle from us. “This is my wife, May. She is also a writer.”

  “A journalist like your husband?” I asked.

  She gave me a winning smile. “We both write fiction. My first story appeared in The Saturday Evening Post some years back.” She added, “The maiden voyage of the Titanic might provide an article for your old employer, Jacques.”

  He laughed. “I’m certain The Boston American will have any number of Hearst writers covering the voyage. They hardly need me, though I do owe them a debt of gratitude for publishing my early short stories while I worked there.”

  “Might I be familiar with your books?” I asked. Retirement to Sussex had left me with a mixed blessing, time to read the sort of popular fiction which I’d always ignored in the past.

  It was May Futrelle who answered for him. “His novel The Diamond Master was published three years ago. I think that is the best of his romances, though many people prefer his detective stories.”

  The words stirred my memory. “Of course! Futrelle! You are the author of ‘The Problem of Cell 13.’ I have read that gem of a story more than once.”

  Futrelle smiled slightly. “Thank you. It has proven to be quite popular. My newspaper published it over six days and offered prizes for the correct solution.”

  “Your detective is known as The Thinking Machine.”

  The smile widened a bit. “Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen. I have published nearly fifty stories about the character in the past seven years, and have another seven with me that I wrote on our journey. None has equalled the popularity of the first, however.”

  Fifty stories! That was more than Watson had published about our exploits up to that time, but Futrelle was correct in saying the first of them had been the most popular. “Have you two ever collaborated?” I asked. May Futrelle laughed. “We swore that we never would, but we did try it once, in a way. I wrote a story that seemed to be a fantasy, and Jacques wrote his own story in which The Thinking Machine provided a logical solution to mine.”

  The talk shifted from his writin
g to their travels and I found him a most pleasant conversationalist. The time on the boat-train passed quickly and before long we were at the docks in Southampton. We parted then, promising to see each other on the voyage.

  I stood on the dock for a moment, staring up at the great ship before me. Then I boarded the Titanic and was escorted to my cabin. It was suite B-57 on the starboard side of Bridge Deck B, reached by the impressive Grand Staircase or by a small elevator. Once in the cabin I found a comfortable bed with a brass and enamel head- and foot board. There was a wardrobe room next to the bed and a luxurious sitting area opposite it. An electric space heater provided warmth if needed. The suite’s two windows were framed in gleaming brass. In the bath and WC there was a marble-topped sink. For just a moment I wished that my old friend Watson was there to see it.

  I had been on board barely a half-hour when the ship cast off, exactly at noon. As the tugs maneuvered it away from the dock and moved downstream into the River Test, I left my stateroom on the bridge deck and went out to the railing, lighting a cigarette as I watched our progress past banks lined with well-wishers. Then we stopped, narrowly avoiding a collision with another ship. It was almost an hour before we were under way again, and the next twenty-four hours were frustrating ones. We steamed downstream to the English Channel and then across to Cherbourg where 274 additional passengers boarded by tender. Then it was a night crossing to Queenstown, Ireland, where we anchored about two miles offshore while more passengers were brought out by tender.

  When at last the anchor was raised for the final time Captain Smith posted a notice that there were some 2,227 passengers and crew aboard, the exact number uncertain. This was about two-thirds the maximum capacity of 3,360 passengers and crew.