In the Company of Sherlock Holmes

by Leslie S. Klinger

  “You just got out,” Duffy said.

  “Yeah. My two mates didn’t, though, and I wouldn’t have made it myself if I hadn’t seen that nag on the way in and remembered where it was.” A fresh round of heavy artillery drowned his next words. “. . . not much time.”

  “No, I don’t expect there is.”

  Sigerson looked up and saw Duffy turn, then in another second heard the muffled roar of the boat’s engines. “Are you coming aboard?”

  “It would be quicker, I’d expect.” He boosted himself up and over the hull. “There’s slight cover if the Bosch haven’t come around behind us yet.”

  “Beautiful,” Duffy said. “How far is it?”

  “Five hundred meters, maybe a bit more. You’ll see it.”

  “I don’t doubt I will.” But he’d already put the boat into gear.

  Running dark, the Doll came around a slight bend and suddenly the noise of battle was all but deafening. A pontoon bridge crossed the entire canal in front of it—this was as far as the boat could go. Hagin’s men had dug in on this side of the thing, but the Germans now had them pinned down and had begun to concentrate a withering fire on the steeply banked levee where they huddled in the partial shelter of the bridge.

  The sound of gunfire was coming from the opposite side of the canal as well, which Duffy Black, on the bridge, read correctly as a bad omen. It meant the enemy now had Hagin’s men effectively surrounded, with the only possible escape now by water they way he’d come in. But the Doll itself presented a huge, slow and absolutely defenseless target. Once the Germans made any concerted movement across the pontoon from the opposite side—and Duffy thought he saw crouching forms advancing in the darkness even now—Hagin’s men would be done. They would either have to surrender or die, and from what he’d seen so far of Hagin and his men, Duffy didn’t doubt which option they’d choose.

  But all wasn’t lost yet. In their intense concentration on Hagin’s position, the Germans hadn’t yet noticed the Doll’s approach—either that or they had not yet identified it in the dark as an enemy vessel. In either event, so far Duffy wasn’t taking any fire as he eased the boat though the still, dark water. In about a hundred meters, he’d be to the pontoon, where he would turn the Doll around and try to get the men to board.

  Still, he hesitated for one last minute. Say what he would about his plans to help the men escape, he knew that as soon as he committed to the rescue from this point, he and Wilkes and the wonderful crew of three that had done such heroic work over the past days—Sigerson and the boys—were in all probability going to be dead. Certainly they would at least be captured. The Germans controlled the levee on both sides and the pontoon directly ahead. Three out of four compass points. As soon as the Germans identified the Doll, it would be over.

  He decided to turn the boat around here where he had greater maneuverability. Maybe the Germans would even take the gesture as if not exactly friendly, then not hostile either—a local boat running into a firefight and turning around to get away from it. Duffy knew that at this remove, the Doll was at most a black shape in the water. And neither he nor Wilkes nor anyone below had fired a weapon yet.

  They still had a few more moments.

  He turned the boat around and put it into reverse. Now it really was only a matter of time until their intent would become clear and the Germans would commence firing at them. Wilkes was directing him to Hagin’s men’s exact position and they were quickly closing the gap. To seventy-five meters, sixty, fifty.

  And then suddenly, they clearly heard commands being screamed out in German—it seemed as though it was all around them—and just as suddenly, the noise of the barrage fell by a half, then half again. This time, from close enough to see now, there was no mistaking the forms—it looked like an entire platoon or two—double-timing across the pontoon.

  But astoundingly, Duffy thought, even though the German troops on the bridge continued to take small arms fire from Hagin’s men, they did not stop to finish the small job right underneath them. Instead, they kept moving rapidly back toward the town. Thirty seconds later, as the Doll nudged into the levee’s bank, nearly all the firing had stopped. All they heard was the occasional spurt of submachine gun fire from back over the levee wall, toward the town. Wilkes and the boys were down on the deck, everyone screaming to Hagin’s men—“Move! Move! Come on, now! Move!”—to get aboard.

  Duffy wondered briefly where Sigerson was, thinking with a pang that he must have been hit, but there was no time for contemplation. He didn’t know the cause of this blessed hiatus nor its possible duration. All he wanted to do was get the men aboard and get out. With what he recognized as typical esprit from Hagin’s men, they had passed the living wounded aboard first, and now the last of the men were hoisting themselves up and over onto the deck.

  “Get down! Stay low! Go below!” The boys were getting the wounded down on board. At first glance, Duffy thought there might be as many as ten of them. As the able men came aboard, Wilkes had several of them take up defensive firing positions up at the bow and on the stern. Then Duffy heard him cry out, “All right, Duffy! Everybody’s on. Take us out.”

  “Where’s Hagin?”

  “Dead.”

  Duffy threw the throttle forward and the Doll responded with a roar of her engines and clouds of exhaust. But she was moving now, on her way at top speed down the canal back to the safety of the Channel.

  Wilkes was back up on the bridge next to him. “What happened back there? Why did they stop?”

  “No idea, mate. The hand of God, maybe. How many men made it?”

  “Eighteen, half of ’em hit.”

  “What about Sigerson?”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Damn.” He brought his hand up to his eyes. “God damn.”

  “Yes, sir. My thoughts exactly.”

  From behind them near the pontoon, a German machine gun opened fire again, its tracer rounds striping the night. The men at the stern, guided by the reverse trajectories, returned the fire steadily, but to no apparent effect. Duffy, keeping as close as he could to the precise center of the channel, guided the Doll around the bend and finally out of the sight lines of the scene of the battle. Half a minute after that, there was no other sound but the throaty roar of the boat’s engines and the occasional groan or cry of agony from one or another of the wounded men below.

  Wilkes knew that the below decks cabin was filled to overflowing with the wounded, so along with the rest of the survivors, he sat on the deck. Not only was he an officer, but he’d been the man who’d risked his own life to get back to the Doll, so the men had left him a spot on one of the stowage lockers, with the bulkhead behind him to lean against. He sat exhausted but in modest comfort, his knees up with his arms wrapped around them for some warmth. He’d gotten wet again—he’d never completely dried out since the morning—during the events of the night, and now he put his head down and tried to let the engine’s vibrations lull him into something approaching rest.

  “Give your poor ancient grandpa some room, would you?”

  The old man’s voice seemed to come from far away—maybe Wilkes had dozed a little after all and was imagining it—and now he looked up and even in the darkness could recognize Sigerson’s weary face. “Am I dead, too?” he asked.

  “What do you mean? Too?”

  Wilkes shook some of the cobwebs out. He could see that they’d crossed the breakwater and were now somewhere out in the Channel. He sat up and stretched. “Duffy and I lost track of you. We thought you’d been cashiered.”

  “No such luck. I was just now up on the bridge with him. He says in a couple of hours we should be dockside at Dover.”

  “Where were you back there?”

  “Stuck below.”

  “And how are the men down there?” he asked.

  “We’ve lost three more. The rest are holding up. At least they’ll make it home.”

  “Not to speak ill of the dead, but damn the colonel! It wa
s a suicide mission from the start. We’re all of us lucky to be alive at all. Thirty men striking a blow for the bloody king against three hundred Krauts, maybe even three thousand for all it seemed! That’s not striking a blow. That’s walking into a death trap.”

  Sigerson was silent a moment, then said, “Actually, it was a hundred and twenty.”

  “What was?”

  “The garrison left behind to rearguard the pontoons. A hundred and twenty men.”

  “Still,” Wilkes said, “four to one against isn’t . . .” He stopped in mid-sentence. “How do you know that? The number of men they had?”

  Sigerson gestured back behind him. “The radio. I said I was stuck below. Just before we headed upstream, I tapped into their frequency. When I realized that they were guarding the pontoons outside of Arquez, I knew it had to be the group we were holding against, so I established contact.”

  “You talked to them?”

  “Ich bin Hauptmann Braun, Offizier im Stab von General Guderian. Dies ist eine Angelegenheit der höchster Priorität.” He broke a tight smile.

  Wilkes translated. “I am Major Braun with Guderian’s staff. This is a matter of the highest priority.”

  Sigerson’s teeth showed his grin in the dark. “I asked them to report their strength and position.”

  “And they did?”

  “Jerry is an efficient boy.”

  “So then what?”

  “Then I’m afraid as Major Braun I must have given them the impression that an immense, highly mobile and unexpected counterattack of nearly a full division of Allied troops who’d somehow evaded our pincer movement was moving through the town, their objective being to take control of the bridges. The few skirmishers at the pontoon were undoubtedly decoys deployed to draw our fire and keep our rearguard occupied until their main force had moved through Arquez without resistance. Major Braun’s orders—my orders,” Sigerson said with a satisfied chuckle, “direct from Guderian himself, were to abandon the bridges immediately—immediately—and try to hold the town against the Allied assault. It looks like it worked.”

  “Worked? I’d say it worked. You bloody well saved us all.”

  Sigerson waved that off. “I should have told them to blow the bridges, too. That would have iced the cake.”

  “Forget the cake, man. What a plan! Duffy thought it was an actual bloody miracle. Hand of God, was what he said.”

  Sigerson shook his head. “Hardly that. Mostly a bit of luck when we needed it.”

  “What was the luck, then?”

  “Stumbling on their radio channel.”

  “Thinking to look for it, more like. No luck about it.”

  “Well, the important thing is it got us out of there.”

  “That may be the important thing, but you ought to get a medal for it.”

  “That’s nonsense, Wilkes. Right now I’d settle for a little space on this locker. I’m about done in.”

  In five minutes, Sigerson was snoring, an old man finally taking a bit of a rest.

  After nine days, Operation Dynamo, the Dunkirk evacuation, concluded on June 4, 1940. Approximately 800 British boats, pressed into emergency service as the Dover Doll had been, managed to rescue and return to England a total of 338,226 soldiers. The Doll itself ran a total of thirty-eight missions, eighteen of them after the attack on the Aa Canal pontoons.

  Mostly because Frank Duffy returned to his daily job at the War Office and told everyone he encountered about it, news of the heroism and brilliance shown by the oldest member of the Doll’s crew, a civilian known only by the name of Sigerson, gained a nearly legendary status—apparently it was true that the pontoon skirmish on the Aa had led to a substantive German retreat that had delayed the Bosch’s final assault on Dunkirk by at least a couple of days, saving countless lives.

  Eventually, the story reached all the way to the top of the British High Command. Winston Churchill launched an investigation into the incident, corroborating the actual events, and verifying their strategic results. But even after an exhaustive search for the hero of the encounter, the old man was never further identified or located. No one by that name lived in or around the Sussex Downs, and that was all that Frank Duffy had known about him or his history.

  Nevertheless, in October, 1940, Churchill awarded Britain’s highest military decoration, the Victoria Cross, for valor “in the face of the enemy,” in absentia to an unknown volunteer seaman surnamed Sigerson.

  That medal was never claimed.

  THE PROBLEM OF THE EMPTY SLIPPER

  Script by Leah Moore and John Reppion

  Illustrations by

  Chris Doherty and Adam Cadwell

  LOST BOYS

  by Cornelia Funke

  Dear Holmes,

  You always took care to hide your past under a cloak of mystery. No man is more aware of how dangerous a weapon it can be in the hands of an enemy. Only one case lifted this cloak for moments and I followed your wish—one may even call it an order—to destroy everything we gathered or wrote down on it. But I know you well enough (though you don’t make it easy to gain such knowledge, my dear friend, as I dare to call you by now) to be sure that one day you’ll wish to look back at what I am going to preserve with this letter: the shadow of a past that made you the man you are.

  I often wondered whether you unveil the crimes and secrets of others so passionately because they remind you of secrets you hide from the world. This case—let’s call it “The Case of the Lost Boy”—proved that suspicion more than any other. It made me understand that my best friend covers his emotions with layers of frost because he is haunted by memories that are only bearable in such a frozen, lifeless state. The demons the great Sherlock Holmes fears live all within himself, and his best-kept secret is the place from which they hatched.

  “I felt a foreboding the moment I cast eyes on him.” How often we use this phrase knowing that we only project onto the past what we learned from the future. But yes. I felt a foreboding the moment I set eyes on the boy, who at first introduced himself as Nicholas Hawkins. It is and remains the truth.

  Even Mrs. Hudson who, bless her heart, is not the most perceptive of women, couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  But this is not the beginning. I try too hastily to get to the core of the story.

  It began with one of the meals that you so graciously grant to the Baker Street Irregulars whenever they bring useful information for a case. Sometimes 221B Baker Street hosts more than twenty of the dirty little rascals. At most of these occasions Mrs. Hudson needs my assistance at some point, because she caught their dirty fingers on far too many things dear to her. You, in contrast, always loved the company of these underaged criminals. Along with your passion for outrageous disguises and your ability to think in a more organized fashion than your fellow men—even when surrounded by self-created domestic chaos—this affection is by far the strongest proof for your true Inner Self, which despises authority. You would probably add: of doubtable foundation. But I suspect it includes any authority, especially the religious and political kind.

  Sherlock Holmes believes in the necessity of rules and is the fiercest fighter for the principle of justice, but he rarely sees it reflected in human laws. Therefore, he feels free to ignore or even break them, whenever he considers them to be in the way of true justice.

  The boys who call themselves, with considerable pride, the Baker Street Irregulars share these views—they probably understand them much better than our adult collaborators on the quest for justice. Life taught these boys at an early age that human laws protect property far more efficiently than their health and well-being. The Irregulars never had the chance to build trust in the justice of the world and you respect them for their grim perception of the world while around them grown-ups wear the comforting glasses of illusion.

  It was not the first time Billie Leaside, the leader of the gang, brought a new boy to participate in the Baker Street Feast as they call it. The Irregulars constantly recruit new me
mbers on the streets or amongst the garbage of the river banks. I know of several boys whom they saved from abusive fathers. Sometimes they even free them from the workhouses. Billie always brings them to me to make sure their bruises don’t hide broken bones or damaged organs. For most of the Baker Street Irregulars, “family” means danger and “home” translates to battlefield. In fact, I think the violence they encountered did even more harm to their young souls than to those of uniformed soldiers, as there is no cause to be fought for on the domestic battlefield, no comrades to shield their backs, just helpless fear of the ones who are supposed to love and protect them.

  It was not the clothes that gave Nicholas Hawkins away. The Irregulars often wear fashion of suspiciously well-tailored origin. After all, they are very talented thieves, as they prove regularly when we send them out to acquire an evidence we cannot get in more respected ways. Yes, the new boy’s clothes were very well tailored. All the stains and dirt couldn’t hide that. But I also noticed that the expensive shoes were neither too large nor too small, as so many of the shoes the other boys were wearing. (After all, you didn’t teach me your methods of deduction in vain.) The skin under the grime was pale, but not working-house-bad-nourishment-pale. It had the paleness of a rich boy’s sheltered skin. The hands that took the plate Mrs. Hudson offered him were lean and soft, and when I asked for his name, every vowel and consonant betrayed a privileged upbringing, though I didn’t hear the distinct accent of Eton or Westminster.

  It was not so much the lean face that reminded me of you, my friend, though there was a slight resemblance. No, it was the boy’s gaze. Both rebellious and fearless, though scarred by fear: passionate emotion, shielded by intelligence and frozen by pain. And then the way he held himself—so upright, so proud . . . fighting everything in himself that was weak . . . young . . . vulnerable. It all felt so familiar.