by George Mann
The trio sprang into action, opening doors and cupboards, urgently seeking more evidence. My efforts to assist soon bore morbid fruit when I took the corridor leading to the back area and discovered a bloodied hatchet lying on the ground.
“Mr Holmes!” I shouted (though I ought to have called for Lestrade). “In the rear yard!”
Both men were there in seconds, gathering around my hunched form. Mr Holmes’s eyes darted hither and thither over the cornsilk-hued grass and the chipped flagstones but, seeing nothing he deemed important, he sank to his haunches next to me, peering at the dull blade with its encrustation of gore.
“What do you see?” he asked. Lestrade opened his mouth. “No, no, my dear fellow, let us test his mettle a bit further. Inspector Hopkins, tell me what you observe.”
A needle of panic shot through my breast, but I soon rallied. “The blood is not more than five days old, which fits our timeline – it rained on the twenty-eighth, which would have washed much of this away, and the arm was found on the first, quite fresh. Additionally, there is not a large amount of it. While it coats the edge of the hatchet, the ground beneath is spotted, not soaked.”
“Meaning?”
“The body was moved.”
“Or?”
This required thought, but I soon had it. “The body had been dead for long enough for the blood to begin to coagulate.”
“Top marks.” Mr Holmes stood. “This is manifestly the scene of the crime, and it would do to call in –”
“Holmes!” Dr Watson’s face appeared in the door, his pleasant features sombre and still. “You had better see the bedchamber.”
Not twenty seconds later, we were standing in the queerest room I’d ever encountered.
Two beds nestled against opposite corners, indifferently dressed in stale bedclothes. The single round table hosted dirtied teacups and several amber bottles, which the doctor shifted to study.
The rest of us gazed in astonishment at the walls, which were entirely covered with maps. Maps of the world, maps of Great Britain, maps of our dozens of colonies. Maps of America and its southern neighbours, maps of Arabia and Brazil and the Sahara, maps of Japan and the Bering Sea, maps showing entire constellations of islands I’d never heard of before. Stuck into these scores of maps were pins of every colour, some with notes – “tropical, parrots and pineapple trees!” – and some without, creating a dizzying spectacle of a smashed globe spread out flat and fixed to the plaster.
“Well, someone’s taken an interest in geography,” Lestrade muttered.
“This was recently a sickroom,” Dr Watson reported. “Here is a willow bark tonic, elderberry syrup, yarrow extract, ginger… whoever was being treated had a severe fever.”
“By George, Liza was taken ill,” I realised. “And only her brother left to care for her. But did he speed it along, or –”
“Hsst!” Mr Holmes lifted his palm.
I heard nothing, and from their faces neither did the others. But an instant later, dashed if Sherlock Holmes wasn’t out of the room and already halfway down a flight of steps. Quick as we ran, he had the advantage of us, and we reached the cellar (which housed a single combined workshop and lumber room) just as a guttural moan reached our ears.
“Stop! Slowly, now,” Mr Holmes said in a calm, clear voice, and we proceeded at a more measured pace. “Watson, I need you.”
Mr Holmes was half-kneeling with his forearm resting on his upraised thigh, looking for all the world as if he’d happened upon a friend in a quiet lane on a summer’s day. The lad cowering behind a stack of alder planks looked to be around eighteen years old, his face streaked with tears and sawdust, his sandy hair matted into a squirrel’s nest, his blue eyes round and anguished. His lip bled where he gnawed at it, and the boy was thin enough to be a wraith. Lestrade cursed as we stood aside for the doctor to pass.
“Your name is Arlie, I think,” Mr Holmes said with a voice like warm syrup. “I am Mr Sherlock Holmes, and this is my friend, Dr Watson.”
“She don’t need a doctor no more,” the boy replied, almost too thickly to be understood.
“I know she doesn’t, but do you think that you might?” Mr Holmes continued. Dr Watson sat unobtrusively on a crate to Arlie’s left. “We’d be grateful if you allowed my friend to take your pulse. He’s a very good sort and would never dream of harming you.”
Arlie was too far gone to protest when Dr Watson slipped his fingers around the lad’s wrist. Tears continued to stream from his eyes, his wasted body shaking.
“He’s dehydrated, in shock, and in considerable need of food, but otherwise healthy.” Pulling a brandy flask from his coat pocket, the doctor offered it. “Take a sip, if you please. That’s right! Good man – you’ll feel calmer in a moment. You say that your sister needed a doctor but doesn’t anymore?” he added, casting a tense glance at Mr Holmes.
Arlie nodded, choked on more tears, and swallowed them back. “All she wanted were to see more’n that back room. For a long spell we managed on our own, but a week ago my sister done showed signs o’ the sickness, and I’d nary a choice save hiring meself out for the medicines and tonics. It were too soon for her to be ill, too soon by far. She didn’t want to stay in London, in that room, not forever.”
“Do you mean to say your sister was too weak to leave the house?” Mr Holmes prompted softly.
“Aye.” The boy winced. “These ten years she has been, for all the poultices and teas the Wus tried. Me, I done brung all such maps as I could find, and she’d tell me what it were like there, in other lands. Dragons and beasties and tigers ten foot tall. She wanted to see ’em with ’er own eyes. Liza said as the Thames don’t look like much, but the Thames can take you anywhere in the world, anywhere, and one day we’d sail down it together and see something other than Limehouse. But then she stopped breathing. For hours.” Racking sobs did violence to the boy’s lungs. “I done sent her off to the islands and the deserts like she wanted. Down the Thames, she said. She always said as that were the way to get there. She knew the way. I were careful never to lock the boxes. When she lands, she’ll be worlds away from London.”
Horror had spread like a plague across our faces, Lestrade standing with a hand over his mouth and Dr Watson and I staring as if somehow the force of our sympathy could undo what had been done. Only Mr Holmes remained impassive, his skin marble-white and his eyes positively metallic.
“Did anyone notice you?” he asked in the same hypnotic tone. “Packing the boxes, or perhaps carrying them?”
“Not I. I went by night down to the river steps.”
“Hopkins, run and fetch us a constable,” Lestrade commanded with uncharacteristic gruffness.
“No, not on my life,” Mr Holmes growled fiercely.
“Can you be serious?” Dr Watson demanded of my senior inspector.
“Now who’s theorising in advance of facts?” Lestrade snapped, brushing an angry hand over his face. “Get this Arlie lad to his feet, come with me, and we’ll find a cab. Hopkins here is about to report that an abandoned building has been broken into. Aren’t you, Hopkins?” he added meaningfully.
“Yes, sir,” I answered with some passion.
“What of the bloodied hatchet?” Dr Watson wondered as he and Mr Holmes together helped the distraught youth to stand.
“The family had just killed a hare for supper when they suddenly vanished,” I supplied at once. “It’s a great mystery as to where they went. I daresay it’s possible they left a letter of intent somewhere, however, and I daresay I can bring it to the constable’s notice.”
“Right, that’s settled.” Lestrade shook his head in despair. “Lord have mercy. Doctor, can you find him a place?”
“I’ve a friend with a thriving practice for neurotics in the Kent countryside.” Dr Watson sighed. “It’ll be temporary, but I’ll wire him at once. Arlie, we’re taking you to our home in Baker Street where you’ll have a bath and a warm meal, all right?”
Arlie made no sound,
but leaned on the doctor and nodded his tangled head.
“Good,” Lestrade approved. “Gentlemen, are we all in complete agreement?”
After a pause, Mr Holmes said, “Poe referred to the Thames as the River of Silence. Ever since reading that, I’ve thought of it so.”
“Very well,” said my fellow Yarder. “Let no more words be spoken on the subject, then. Ever. Inspector Hopkins, I regret to say that your first case remains unsolved.”
So my first case was a failure twice over, and I am glad of it.
It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do, and the best thing to do.
Yet my heart has been tugged in so many directions today that it feels quite unravelled, loosened sinews and arteries now doing their utmost to weave themselves back together again inside my chest.
Letter sent from Inspector Stanley Michael Hopkins to Mrs Leticia Elizabeth Hopkins, Saturday May 5th, 1894
Dearest Mum,
My first case, once so bright in its promise of removing a villain from our streets, turns out to be the basest of hoaxes. A rogue medical student was guilty of chopping a body into seven parts and setting them adrift. Women of your constitution don’t shirk at such macabre news, yet I loathe telling you, for it means after all that there is nothing of importance to relate. I am nonetheless weary for this having turned out to be a prank, however, and so will write you properly tomorrow or the next day. The bubble and squeak turns out to travel very well indeed in wax paper, and will serve as my breakfast.
Exhausted but hale,
Your Stanley
Entry in the diary of Stanley Michael Hopkins, Tuesday October 9th, 1894
Six months after the business of the false Chinese box, three cases total logged working with the incomparable Sherlock Holmes (and the estimable Dr Watson), and today I received the shock of my life when he arrived at the Yard with fresh evidence for Inspector Bradstreet. Mr Holmes never vacillates once a course is set, sails ahead like a schooner with an aquiline prow. But he paused before my alcove as if he’d expected to find me there.
“A word when I’m through, if you please, Inspector Hopkins,” he decreed, whisking off without awaiting a reply.
I’d no notion of whether to feel excitement or anxiety and settled on a queasy combination by default. Meanwhile, I had need of a case file and thought a brief dash to the archives might settle me. It would have worked, too, had Sherlock Holmes not been seated in my chair when I returned, his fingers steepled and his stork’s legs crossed in front of him. Greeting him as cheerily as I could, I dropped the papers and leaned against my cubby’s dividing wall.
“Can I help, Mr Holmes?”
Inspecting me with hooded grey eyes, the detective considered. “That depends entirely upon your response to a query of mine. Three possible outcomes present themselves. Either you’ll give me a satisfactory answer, an unsatisfactory answer, or you’ll refuse to answer altogether, as I’ve no right to wonder what I’ve been wondering of late.”
“You may ask me anything, Mr Holmes.”
“In that case, I wonder that you didn’t try for another profession,” he observed idly.
“By George, I don’t… why… what do you mean by that, sir?” The effort not to appear slighted was excruciating.
“Dear me, no, put the thought from your head. You’ve a natural talent for police work.” Mr Holmes made a lazy figure eight of dismissal with his forefinger. “It’s the income, you see. Detection doesn’t pay the official Force well, not when they’re honest, which you are, and rewards are rare – maybe more so than you’d hoped. You could easily have been a City clerk with your acumen and risen accordingly, but instead you live week to week, probably because you are forced to support someone who is not in your immediate family but is nevertheless dear to you, following a tragedy which affected that person gravely.”
Someone who’s never spoken with Mr Holmes might think they’d anticipate his omniscience, maybe even expect he’s about to throw open the curtains of their lives and survey the mess in broad daylight. Well, I record it here for posterity: no one save Dr Watson himself fares any better than I did.
“Heavens, lad, sit down!” Mr Holmes tugged me towards my own chair, pivoting so his lean body rested against my desk. “Upon my word, I didn’t imagine you’d react so strongly. The brandy flask I once observed in your top left drawer –”
“No, thank you.” I chuckled weakly as Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street offered me both my own chair and my own brandy. “I’m surprised at myself. Forgive me.”
“Pray don’t ask such a thing. It’s hardly the first time I’ve staggered a stout fellow. Recently, at that.” He glanced away, an unreadable look briefly warping his perfect suavity. “I did you a disservice. Let us abandon the topic in favour of –”
“Not a bit of it!” I exclaimed, recovering. “Now you explain how you knew. I shall catalogue every detail.”
Mr Holmes did not smile, but his wintry eyes warmed. “There were a number of small indications, so many that I must take a moment to sort them. Yes, first I noted that the button on your left ulster sleeve is cheaper than that on the right, and mended in a slipshod fashion by a man unversed in the art of tailoring. Clearly, that man is you, and while you are impeccably neat in appearance, you neither bothered to match the expense of your lost button, which was made of polished horn like its brethren, nor to match the thread colour, using instead whatever you had to hand. That you are a bachelor would have been obvious from your hat brim, but your financial straits speak more clearly through your buttonhole.”
“I’ll have to be more meticulous in future. Why need there have been a tragedy?”
Mr Holmes jutted his bold chin at my torso as he lit a cigarette. “Your watch chain is an old family heirloom, but the type of locket hanging from it with the scalloped edge was in fashion some five years ago, before I met my untimely demise.”
“Thankfully very untimely indeed.”
“Your servant. The locket is a memento, and five years is approximately the amount of time it takes to lose a well-sewn button and for one’s hat colour to pass out of style. No offence intended.”
I shrugged. “None taken. So I have financial problems, and you say they point to a tragedy. Supposing I merely had onerous debts?”
“You’d have pawned the locket or the watch chain or simply the watch to ease your path.”
“What if they were all too dear to me?”
“After having gifted your beloved late father’s Bible to a cousin? Please. You aren’t a man driven by foolish sentiment, and your high expenses haunt you monthly, which is why you know better than to squander your keepsakes at a jerryshop. Economy is the only solution. Your mother posts you dinner, for heaven’s sake, or at least so the writing on your many savoury-smelling packages indicates. No, don’t ask, it’s too obvious and I’ve glimpsed the addresses – you write a male version of her penmanship.”
Despite my distress, I smiled ruefully. “The tragically afflicted – you said not a family member? It might be my sister.”
“If your sister were impoverished or afflicted, she would live with you and reattach your buttons, or live with your mother and eat her mince pies,” Mr Holmes said so smoothly that his tone might nearly have been called kind.
“Quite so.” I cleared my throat. “Mr Holmes, what is this about?”
Sherlock Holmes’s head swivelled to regard me fully, a bird of prey ruminating over a hapless mammal.
“You joined H Division at the age of twenty-five in the immediate wake of the Ripper murders,” he said with clinical detachment. “Why? Men spat at the uniformed constables in the streets, women refused to look at them. I was acquainted with canines that wouldn’t so much as bark in a bobby’s direction. You are intelligent, active, and approachable, and even if you’d no desire to be a clergyman, the world was still your oyster, and you chose to join an institution that had been hung out to dry. Pray refrain from telling me it was all thanks to The Str
and, though the doctor has every right to be flattered some good has come out of his melodramas. There is another, darker reason, and if I am to rely upon your sober judgement, as I wish to do in future, I request you tell me what it is.”
Despite my reluctance to reveal the source of my heartache, there is nothing quite so persuasive as Sherlock Holmes urging a man to prove himself trustworthy. I straightened my shoulders, tugged down my waistcoat, and set to.
“I was engaged to be married in eighteen eighty-eight to a Miss Lilla Dunton. She was – is – a woman of finest character, and I’d known her if only peripherally since childhood. The suburbs in southeast London aren’t populous, Mr Holmes, and she attended my father’s congregation. I regret to say that her family life was not a happy one. Her father was born in West Africa to colonial parents and saw much hatred and degradation along the Gold Coast and as a young man in Freetown.
“Mr Dunton told Lilla tales, even as a little girl, which invested her with waking nightmares, and as her mother died in childbirth, there was no one at home to offset this morbidity save a doddering old nurse. When the Ripper crimes commenced, she was merely appalled, as we all were, but when they continued… she was reminded of brutal stories she never imagined would be brought to life here in England. Tribal massacres, soldiers ruthlessly quashing native unrest. By the time Mary Jane Kelly was left in shreds,” I finished hoarsely, “her mind was in a similar state.”
It’s obvious from Dr Watson’s writing that Mr Holmes can be affected by misfortune and grief – dashed if I hadn’t already seen it myself, when we encountered Arlie in Limehouse. On this occasion, his iron expression did not harden so much as it melted before snapping back into that perfect equilibrium he so famously maintains.
“My dear fellow. What steps did you take?” he asked softly.
“She lives at an asylum in the Sussex countryside – a humane and peaceable one, much lauded by both locals and professionals. The expense is… significant. My locket containing a miniature silhouette is all I have left of her, though I often dream she’ll write me one day. Despite our geographical proximity, during our engagement we used to exchange love letters absurdly often. I’d still give anything to see her handwriting in my post. Meanwhile, I promised myself I’d do everything possible to prevent such a monster from ever desecrating our streets again.”
