by Janina Woods
“You just listen to her because it makes her feel important.”
Sherlock had risen from Watson’s armchair and snatched the strangely coloured Persian slipper from the fireplace, fumbled with the contents, before also grabbing a hold of one of his pipes, which had lain discarded between other junk on the mantle.
“Perhaps. But is that such a bad thing? A good part of my life is in her hands, and if that puts me in her good graces, I’m willing to listen. Besides, she has had some brilliant ideas before.”
“You should tell Dr. Watson about that. He never mentions her contributing anything more than the tea in his little stories.”
“I shall, perhaps, remedy that. But it has to be done delicately. Wouldn’t want it to go to her head. Speaking of Watson, how is he?”
“Just over there. See for yourself.”
I watched my brother stuff his pipe with the tobacco from the slipper... and almost averted my eyes. How he could even smoke those grubby leftovers I would never know. I found it frankly disgusting, but the need for a proper smoke rose in me as I saw Sherlock light his pipe with a coal from the fire. I’d forgotten to sneak a few more cigarettes from Lou, as I always did when I met up with her. I usually pretended not to need them, and Lou pretended not to notice.
“He’s asleep. If he weren’t, he would’ve called for me after I arrived. You’ve talked to him earlier and he is as well as he can be. You wouldn’t be this relaxed otherwise,” my brother mumbled as the smoke started to rise.
“Both a lucky and an unlucky place to get hit, but yes, he seemed well enough given the circumstances. I suppose he keeps himself dosed up with morphine to escape the pain.”
My brother nodded knowingly and I eyed his profile, as he stared into the flames.
“You will make sure that Dr. Watson has the opportunity to use all his morphine on his own?” I asked, the implication out in the room, as open as I dared.
Sherlock just showed me a tired face, without any of the usual vitriol I received when asking about his unwise method to pass the time. How many arguments we have had in the past and how futile they have been. But now he looked at me like he’d grown tired of it all and his eyes turned briefly towards the good doctor’s bedroom.
“Watson shall have all the pain relief he needs. I wouldn’t prey on that.”
“Of course,” I muttered, feeling almost apologetic.
The silence that ensued was too heavy, so I cleared my throat.
“I saw Clarke in Newgate and he confirmed my suspicion. A moron, who is now eternally out of a job, let Clarke participate in the prison workhouse since June. The course of what happened is simple: Clarke meets someone, who has been involved in his business back then. He talks them into a revenge plan. The other convict goes free after a trial. They become the spider in the web, coordinating one large attack on many fronts, on the Secret Service and myself. They recruit a sizeable number of accomplices - Chapman himself included - to help them achieve a series of terrorising events surrounding my person and those close to me. Apparently there is no shortage of people, who’d jump at the chance to do me harm. Some of them are only willing to write threatening messages on my doorstep. Others are willing to kill. Why their own people? I don’t know, and it doesn’t actually matter. Their goal is presumably to expose me and my work for the Service, thereby discrediting the organisation. They will want to kill me as soon as that’s done. Have I missed anything?”
“Taking a breath.”
“Very funny,” I huffed.
“The woman who confronted you at Chapman’s party. She’s the spider.”
“Yes, that’s my assumption as well. Clarke confirmed her involvement and I got her name from prison records. She was in for stealing a rather large sum of money, but the lack of conclusive evidence set her free in July. Or a bought judge.”
Sherlock puffed a cloud of smoke into the air.
“Name?” he asked.
“Sarah Deville.”
My brother’s eyes narrowed and he jumped up from the armchair to disappear into his bedroom. I could hear him pull out a number of objects from a shelf. They all landed on the floor with so much noise, I could barely believe that Watson was still asleep next door. The morphine did its job rather well.
If he was so out of it... No, there was a guard on the door, at least. I wondered, not for the first time, how much trust I could ultimately put in a young man like Henry Clifford. He seemed well-meaning enough. I shook my head. Watson’s safety wasn’t my primary concern. My thoughts drifted to Hawkins, but as soon as I realised that, I pushed them out and followed my brother into his room. The doubt receded with every energetic step.
“Are you actually searching?” I asked Sherlock, who was standing in the middle of a pile of books and documents, flipping pages in a folder that was still partly dust covered. “I thought you had an impeccable filing system.”
“Please. It took me only one minute to locate documents from twenty-two years ago. I challenge you to find someone else to do it as quickly.”
“Quicker, no. With less of a mess perhaps. But you have Mrs. Hudson to clean up after you, isn’t that right?”
I took the offered pages and eyed them with curiosity. A handwritten, short report by Sherlock himself - and a newspaper clipping.
“If Mrs. Hudson so much as touches my files I’ll have her replaced. I have to put them back exactly how they’ve been. Dust and all.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” came a voice from the sitting room. “I’m just here to inform you that dinner will be ready in about half an hour. Is your guest with you, Mr. Holmes?”
“Not yet,” I replied, the earlier worry creeping back into my head.
“I’ll prepare a plate all the same. I had to make extra for Henry anyway.” The housekeeper walked away without a single scathing comment about my brother’s behaviour. Too bad.
“Hawkins could be in danger,” Sherlock said into the silence.
“More than you think.” I sighed.
I outlined the smaller incidents to my brother. The paint on my doorstep. The almost abduction and subsequent fight. The way I had stolen myself away from Newgate, when he asked me if I had taken care not to let anyone follow me. He trusted his own skill, of course, but somehow in his vast intellect he had actually forgotten that subterfuge and stealth had been my occupation for almost twenty years.
It was then I realised that I still held the papers in my hand and returned to peruse their writing. Sherlock climbed gracefully over the small hill of paper surrounding him and slipped out into the sitting room again. I followed him, slowly, head down on the pages.
The newspaper clipping caught my eye first. It was a small one, a single paragraph, short column. The headline read ‘Abducted daughter found. Parents overjoyed.’ It was an account of the abduction in the title. The daughter of a wealthy family from the vicinity of Bromley had gone missing. The parents had caused quite a stir, apparently accusing the police of not trying hard enough to find their child. After a month, she suddenly appeared at home to be reunited with her family. A very abrupt happy ending. Odd.
The daughter’s name was Sarah Deville.
I absentmindedly took a place on a chair that Sherlock had pulled out and placed in my path, crossed my legs and turned towards the note that my brother had penned. It wasn’t long either. He had taken an interest in helping out to find the girl, while he was still in school himself. So there wasn’t much he could’ve done, but he documented his investigation anyway. In the end, he didn’t manage to locate her, but the reasons for her reappearance were listed very differently from the newspaper account. Sherlock cleared his throat and I looked at him to explain.
“The text in the newspaper doesn’t say that the parents refused to pay the ransom money. She was sixteen, about my age as I investigated it, w
hen it happened. I talked to Sarah briefly, before she disappeared for good, managed to track her down just barely. The papers don’t mention it, but the kidnappers pulled out her nails, one every other day, and sent them to the parents. Told them that after the last, they’d kill the girl. But the parents didn’t give in. They made their money in breeding race horses, and never paid any attention to their child anyway. So when the deadline was up, even the kidnappers felt bad for Sarah and they let her go. She returned to her parents to cut all ties and left soon after.”
“Small statue, dark blonde hair.”
“Yes. Did you see her hands?”
“She was wearing gloves when I first encountered her, like almost all the ladies at the party, but I saw them during the fight on the Thames. It is her, no doubt. You think she went to Edinburgh after... all of that?”
Sherlock eyed his pipe for a few seconds, then inhaled another lungful of smoke.
“We have to assume it, given the clues you’ve uncovered. But now she’s back here. At least she was yesterday. I don’t think she’ll still be with Chapman, not after the investigation today. If she has us observed, she’ll know that we know.”
“We can now conduct a proper search for her. It should be easy to identify someone who’s missing all their nails.”
I shuddered. I had seen a lot of things in my time. But parents abandoning their child, just like that? For the money? It made me feel sick.
“Her parents are still alive. But I think they wish they weren’t,” Sherlock said.
“Why?”
“Their stables went up in flames thirteen years ago. Both had been locked into one of the horse boxes and tied up. They barely escaped the inferno with their life... but also with severe disfigurations from the burns.”
It was a classic revenge tale. She took off, found herself with the means to perform her act of payback, came back to execute it. Thirteen years ago. Had she been with Clarke, then? She had to be. The whole Edinburgh affair had happened not long after.
“Alright. Now that we have confirmed her identity, we should immediately track her down. I also don’t think she’ll still be at Chapman’s. Too obvious,” I said, more for me to get my thoughts in line than for Sherlock to follow them. “The question is how much of the web can we unravel by cutting off the head? According to Clarke, the whole thing is only loosely organised. Everyone acts for themselves.”
“And you really believe that?”
I grabbed my arm, where it was still wrapped in bandages beneath my jacket. Just because I had chosen to ignore the wound, didn’t mean it wasn’t still there.
“Of course not,” I stated. “This has clearly been orchestrated and runs on a tight schedule. People are watching me. And you. They communicate, coordinate. Not always via the spider, but they are tangled up in the strands. So maybe we destroy a part of the web and make the queen look where the damage is. She seems to be one to take matters into her own hands.”
“You have a plan then?”
I looked towards the door, which was still slightly open. No sign of Hawkins, no calls at the entrance, no messages. Where the hell was that man? Had he been intercepted by a second person when we split ways?
“An idea of a plan. But for now...”
“Yes. He really is unfashionably late.”
In that moment I heard Henry shout and a piece of wooden furniture fall over. From the sound I concluded that it must have been the side table in the hallway below. There was no need to communicate with Sherlock - we both jumped up as one, grabbing the closest thing to us that could function as a weapon, which made me end up with a letter opener.
When I exited the sitting room and looked down the stairs there was no one to be seen. The front door was still closed and showed no sign of having been opened earlier. No one had entered through there: The carpet was still dry. I surveyed the area while I all but jumped down the staircase, following the sounds of a muffled fight into Mrs. Hudson’s rooms on the ground floor.
Letter opener brandished, I made it to the door before Sherlock and kicked it open all the way. I didn’t have to bother. On the floor in front of me was an unknown man, pushed face down into the carpet, Constable Clifford on his back, already drawing back both hands to secure them. Over them towered the housekeeper herself... a heavy frying pan in her hands, which she held out like she was carrying a weapon, and I figured it had just served as one. There was blood welling up, colouring the unconscious man’s short hair even redder than it already was.
“Well I never...” I muttered, blade now pointing down to the floor, useless. The housekeeper and I seemed to share a preference in blunt weapons.
“Bloody well done, Mrs. Hudson.” Sherlock laughed.
“Oh, don’t give me all the credit, Mr. Holmes. I think young Henry here has just earned himself some dessert.”
We quickly carried the man upstairs and tied him to a chair. Neither of us could say how long he would be unconscious for, and we didn’t want to risk him bolting. Of course I assumed him to be sent for another attempt of my brother’s life, and I told the others as much. They had failed once before, so he had probably been called to finish the job. Or he had been sent to get rid of both of us.
Curious then that we couldn’t find any kind of weapon on his body. Both Clifford and Mrs. Hudson denied taking any from him, and even a thorough search didn’t turn up any discarded items in the rooms he had entered.
The man had broken open the window of Mrs. Hudson’s bedroom, in the back of the building, from which he had entered the hallway. I don’t know if he hadn’t expected to see Clifford, but the constable had seen him and immediately jumped to catch the man. The intruder had run, and in his shock not turned back towards the bedroom, through which he could have escaped, but towards the kitchen, where he had run into Mrs. Hudson.
“I grabbed the closest thing to me, which was the frying pan I was cleaning, and ran towards him. I think he might’ve been a bit surprised at this old woman attacking him. He seemed very confused.”
“You’re quite calm about all of this,” I remarked.
“I’ve seen many things in my life,” Mrs. Hudson said and looked at me as if everything was explained by that. “I hit his arm as he ran past me. He stumbled into my sitting room, and Henry threw himself on top of him, like the brave policeman he is. But the intruder was still struggling, so I hit him again.”
“Mrs. Hudson,” Sherlock said gravely. “You are aware that a misplaced hit on his head could’ve killed the man?”
“He was here to kill you! What else should I have done?”
“I’m not reprimanding you. Just a tip for next time.” Sherlock smiled and put a hand on his housekeeper’s arm, who had taken a seat in his armchair while we had tied the intruder to a chair, which I had pulled into the centre of the room.
While the others were occupied by discussing just why the man had entered into the building, I had an opportunity to observe him more closely. We had determined the extent of his injury, and could say with some certainty that it looked worse than it actually was. The intruder’s head hung sideways, his body was propped up and held upright by the ropes around his torso.
He was dressed in a very ordinary, dark suit with a waistcoat underneath, and a white dress shirt, with the topmost button undone. We had removed the thicker coat and large scarf from his body to give him less room to twist out of his restraints. Sherlock had by now turned to rummage through the coat’s pockets and find a clue about our captive. He wasn’t a spindly man, but he was quite tall and slender. Almost as tall as me, I estimated, but quite a bit lighter, which had made it easier to carry him up the stairs over my shoulder.
His hair was blonde and slightly reddish, even in the artificial light, though not as fiery as that of Hawkins. It was short, non-descriptive in its cut. His face was slack in unconsciousness, a bit narr
ow perhaps, though the brow was a bit more pronounced than usual. With curiosity I catalogued his features, but there was no clue to be found here, except maybe for the creases in his forehead that showed he often frowned. Well, we had that in common, but it didn’t help in the slightest. I didn’t recognise the man then, but I had a creeping suspicion that I should.
“Alexander Thompson,” my brother said into the silence. “The fool went to ambush someone with a calling card in his pocket. Did he want to leave one in case he wasn’t able to murder me?”
“Mr. Holmes! This is not a time for that kind of talk!” Mrs. Hudson said, slightly scandalised. “We’ve just apprehended a dangerous man!”
“I should really get a message to the Yard. Inspector Lestrade will be furious if I don’t notify him about this,” Clifford mumbled.
I shot Sherlock a look, who in turn raised both eyebrows at Mrs. Hudson and indicated she do something about this with a motion of his head. The housekeeper huffed and rose to her feet. With one hand, she grabbed the frying pan, and with the other poor Constable Clifford.
“I’m really feeling quite faint,” she said. “You’ll have to help me with the dinner, Henry.”
“But the inspector-”
“Can wait. I’m sure Mr. Holmes and his brother would appreciate the time to talk to the man without interruption,” she explained, now actively pulling the lad from the room. “Come on, you can taste the pudding.”
“This is highly irregular,” he muttered, but his voice told me he’d already given up.
I closed the door behind them. Sherlock had already drawn the curtains earlier, so there was no one who could disturb us now. Two attacks in one night were unlikely, at least in such a quick succession, so I figured we could spare the guard for a while. He really had earned his pudding.
“Alexander Thompson, you said?” I asked, and then something in my mind neatly slotted into place. “He’s one of the missing people!”
