“Oh, please doctor, do not look so nonplussed. Surely, you must know from the medical literature concerning identical twins that we are simply not the same as other people, not even as other brothers and sisters or even fraternal twins. We share a part of our identity with our twin. I do with Mary just as Sam did with Seth. When Seth suddenly died last fall I could not only see the pain that my sister was suffering, I could feel it. To the depths of my soul, I knew what she was going through and I experienced it along with her. As I wept in my pain, Sam held me and comforted me as my loving husband. I knew that the most loving thing I could do for my sister was to share him with her and let him do the same for her.
“So I did. I sent him over there several times a week to look after some household chore or some fabricated matter of Seth’s estate. I attended endless ladies’ prayer and sewing meetings –‘stitch and snitch’ I call them—on weekday evenings to make his absence convenient. When he returned in the evening to our bed I could smell her lavender perfume on his body and it gave me a sense of warmth and love toward him and I thanked God that I had been given such a gift of a loving and compassionate husband. As I said, Doctor Watson, I do not expect you to understand all of that, but it should not come as a complete shock to you if you have been reading your medical journals.”
I had read some about some of these phenomena but I had to ask about what I really could not comprehend.
“Speaking of God,” I said, calmly but firmly, “what I fail to understand is how you justify what has taken place before Him. You are people of severe faith and I do not believe that this type of behavior is allowed, regardless of the peculiarities of birth or of marriage.”
She looked back at me and did not flinch. “God, in His wisdom, make me and Mary twins and did the same for Seth and Sam. So, as far as I am concerned that is His problem to sort out. He can jolly well explain it to me when I get to heaven, and until that time, He will just have to live with it.”
Inside my head, I was shaking my head in amazement. I did not have an opportunity to respond before Mrs. Cushing turned to the other part of our conversation.
“I can also tell you, Doctor, that no matter what your brilliant friend, Sherlock Holmes, has deduced, there is something that does not make sense about arresting Alec Fairbairn for the kidnapping and torture of my children.”
“Would you mind, Mrs. Cushing, explaining what you just said?”
“I have known Alec all my life; first as a scholar in the same Sunday school and a member of the same church youth fellowship, and then for many years as my brother-in-law. He is greedy, wayward, foppish, worldly, angry, vindictive, and occasionally lazy. However, he is not a monster and he could never do to my son and daughter what has been done to them. That, sir, does not make sense and I cannot believe it.”
I knew enough not to argue. I had seen enough during my war years, in my medical practice, and in my observation of scores of cases of Sherlock Holmes, to know that the most horrendously unbelievable things could be done by the least suspected of persons. I said no more and thanked this quite unusual lady for the tea. The man-servant let me out and hailed a cab.
I returned to Baker Street, expecting to be able then to go to my practice. There was, however, a note waiting for me from Holmes. It ran:
Fairbairn apprehended mid-morning at Barings. On our way now to Scotland Yard. If possible, please join us immediately.
Chapter Seven
The Wrong Right Man
IT TOOK ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES to get to the Yard building on the Embankment. I was ushered into Inspector Lestrade’s office, where he and Holmes were sitting in silence. Holmes looked up at me as I entered.
“Our Mr. Fairbairn is clever enough to refuse to be interviewed without his lawyer being present and advising him. One has come over from the Middle Temple and is meeting with him now. They sent a note saying that they will be ready to talk in two minutes from now.”
On schedule a fellow, who I assumed to be a solicitor, entered, followed by a very nicely dressed and remarkably handsome gentleman of about forty-five years of age, who I assumed to be our culprit.
The lawyer opened the conversation. “Gentlemen, whatever evidence you have regarding charges of blackmail may be presented in court. I assure you that they will be challenged most vigorously. I fully expect that the case will be dismissed immediately. My much greater concern is the utterly slanderous and libelous false accusations that Mr. Sherlock Holmes has made against my client concerning the kidnapping and torture of the Cushing children. My client fervently denies any involvement or even any knowledge whatsoever of these matters. You have not a scrap of evidence linking him to this horrific crime and I demand that you drop all these utterly baseless charges immediately. While you, Inspector, are protected by your position in Scotland Yard, I can promise, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, that you will be sued endlessly and forever until you are bankrupt and unable to ply your amateur trade anywhere in England, or the Empire, or even America. Is that understood, sir?”
Sherlock Holmes had been threatened more times by more lawyers than I could count. This blustering pettifogger was nothing new. Holmes ignored him completely and spoke directly to Alec Fairbairn.
“Where are the Cushing children, Mr. Fairbairn? You have taken them and are harming them and I assure you that you will be spending the rest of your life in Newgate for doing so. And if you do not release them to us immediately then I assure you that you will end your life on a gallows.”
“How dare you threaten my client!” exploded the lawyer. Holmes continued to treat him as if he did not exist.
“Alec,” he continued, “They are your niece and nephew. They have never done you any harm, ever.”
“Mr. Holmes,” said the accused in a puzzled tone, “I do not know what you are talking about. I know nothing whatsoever about Sam’s and Sarah’s children other than what I have read in the papers. I thought they had run off to enjoy the fun things in life that all youth should be able to enjoy, and to get out from under the fanatical yoke of religious oppression. What harm are you talking about?”
Here, Lestrade interrupted. He stood up and said, “Come with me please, Mr. Fairbairn, and bring your solicitor. Please follow me.”
“Where are you taking us?” demanded the lawyer.
“To the basement. The morgue is down there.”
We descended the stairs into a sub-basement and passed into the chilled unit in which bodies and, in our case, body parts were stored. We followed Lestrade over to a table that was covered with a cloth.
“Mr. Fairbairn,” he said. “This is what I am talking about. These are the appendages of the Cushing children that we believe you have removed and sent to their parents.”
In one long tug, he quickly removed the cloth, exposing the fingers, hands, feet, and forearms of Aaron and Miriam Cushing. He picked up one of the forearms and turned back to the accused and his lawyer, ready to wave it in their faces. The dramatic gesture was not necessary. I heard some anguished noises behind me and spun around in time to watch Alec Fairbairn drop to the floor in a faint and the lawyer make a beeline to a hand basin by the door, into which he hurled his breakfast.
Holmes said nothing as we made our way back to Baker Street. Upon entering our parlor, he immediately lit up his pipe, sat in his chair, pulled his legs up underneath his body and closed his eyes. I knew that he would remain in that position for hours as he went back over every detail we knew about this most horrible of cases and tried to put the disparate pieces together in his mind.
There was no point to any attempt on my part with conversation so I changed my clothes and departed to attend to my medical practice.
I returned by suppertime. Holmes sat at the table and picked at his dinner, saying nothing. At ten o’clock in the evening, a knock came to the door. I descended the stairs and received a note from a page boy. It was addressed to Sherlock Holmes. He opened it, read it, and handed it to me. It ran:
Thank you for arresti
ng the wrong man. For a famous amateur detective, you most certainly are stupid, stupid, stupid.
For want of something to say, I offered an observation.
“Is there any chance that one of Moriarty’s minions could be behind this? It would be in their character to taunt you, would it not?”
He looked at me and in a weary voice replied, “Yes. Moriarty himself may be dead but some of his web are still alive and active. And yes, it would be in keeping with their past actions to taunt me. But no, doctor, this is not his work. There is a tangle here that needs straightening out. Moriarty and his web of evildoers may have been enormously greedy for ill-gotten gain and power, and respect from the criminal world, but they would never stoop so low as to torture children. And, so far, there is no motive, no demand for material gain, nothing other than the inflicting of incredible pain on the children and their parents. No, my friend, we are not up against a master criminal. We are doing battle with an utterly depraved, evil, vile man. Whoever is behind this is unlike any monster I have ever fought. And so far, he is winning.”
He said no more and I retired to bed. For the next three days, I filled my time with attending to my patients and forced myself to think of matters other than this horrible case. Late on the third evening, Lestrade came by to visit. He was likewise looking exhausted and I knew that he had slept no more than had Holmes.
He entered and placed two more tarot cards on our table.
“Temperance and The Sun. Minus their left legs from the knee down. The box came with them. I had my men remove it before the family could look inside, but with the cards, they knew what it was. I am not sure how much longer they can bear up. I have placed one of our nurses in the home to keep watch. The mother is in such grief that I fear she might take her own life.”
He walked over to the mantle and helped himself to a snifter and the bottle of brandy.
He sat down on the sofa, took and slow sip and let out a weary sigh. “I don’t know about you Holmes, but in my thirty years in this business, I have never encountered anything so utterly diabolical. What can this devil possibly be wanting? What reason, then? If Fairbairn was not behind it with his blackmail demands, then who is?”
He looked at Holmes. For the past three decades, they had often been adversaries, never hesitating to give the other a competitive poke or take a strip off. Now they just looked at each other, both at a loss. It was if they were hoping against hope that the other might have some flash of insight, some spark of brilliance that would lead them out of the morass in which they were mired.
There was no such relief.
Holmes simply shook his head and said nothing.
“What,” queried Lestrade, “happens next? How far will he go?”
“The next step will be horrible disfigurement of their young bodies, and, then as a final painful indignity, he will murder them.”
Lestrade sighed his forlorn agreement, rose, and departed.
Chapter Eight
The Press Learns All
THE NEXT MOVE WAS NOT what Holmes had predicted. It happened three days later and I ran into it as soon as I opened the door on to Baker Street first thing in the morning while on my way to my practice. Four newsboys from four competing newspapers were shouting at the top of their lungs. All were screaming about the gruesome dismemberment of the Cushing children. Somehow the details of the story, which all the parties to it had kept under wraps, were now fully known to the press.
The responsible papers, of which we did have a small number, merely carried out factual reporting and gave the public the information about each letter, each tarot card, and each horrifying box delivered to the Cushings’ house. The tabloids and even several of the broadsheets that had a sensationalist bent to their coverage expanded the stories with gut-wrenching speculative details about the slow and painful dismemberment process. The perceived screams of the young people as their fingers, hands, feet arms, and legs were slowly cut from their bodies were described in anguished colorful detail. Prints of the tarot cards were added to the stories with the appropriate appendages removed. Some went so far as to predict which body part would be subtracted from the victims next. I leave it to your imagination, as depraved and you can force it to be, to think on what parts they suggested.
That most depraved indignity to the human body that was predicted by the vermin in our tabloid press did, in fact, take place. Lestrade dropped by late in the evening several days later. He placed a single card on the table. It confirmed my worst possible fear. The card was The Devil, the fifteenth card of the Major Arcana. It depicts a young man and a young woman, both naked and chained around their necks and attached to the Devil. The young woman’s breasts and young man’s private parts had both been cut out.
“The box came to the house this evening,” said Lestrade. “We were able to intercept it before the family could open it, but they saw the card and they know what has taken place. The lady has taken to her bed with brain fever and the father is bumbling around as if in an imbecilic daze. It is very hard on them. There was a note in the box. As cruel as you could imagine. Beyond imagining.”
He placed the note on the table. It read:
No need to worry about blood loss. Cauterizing with a hot iron cures that.
“Any insights at all, Holmes? I confess, we are at a loss. Whoever is doing this must have some connection to either you or me for he seems to know exactly what our moves have been. Anything?”
Holmes shook his head. “No, my friend, there is nothing. Nothing. We are simply not dealing with our standard criminal. Not even a diabolical, brilliant mind like Moriarty. This is a lone-wolf and he is beyond evil and completely demented. I have not slept a wink and it looks as you have not either. All we can do is keep going. Keep going over the evidence. Keep trying to put our heads inside that of a monster.”
Lestrade shrugged his shoulders and rose, and made his way to our door.
“I will catch up with you tomorrow. I have asked the morgue to have all of the boxes put out for me in the morning. I am going to look them over one more time. It is likely pointless but you never know. You are welcome to join me.”
“I will do that,” said Holmes as Lestrade turned and descended our seventeen steps with a slow, heavy tread.
The following morning, I was again occupied with my patients, forcing myself one more time to direct my mind to anything other that this soul-destroying case. At ten o’clock, a page boy came bursting into my office and right into my examining room while I was checking over the prostrate body of an elderly woman. This was a terrible breach of rules and an embarrassing violation of the patient’s privacy. I shouted at the lad to get out.
To his credit, he did not. “I’m sorry, doctor. I’m so sorry, but I was ordered to get this to you no matter what. I’m sorry. It’s come from Scotland Yard. They said I had to get it to you and to interrupt you no matter what you were doing. Please sir, I’m terrible sorry.”
He handed me an envelope. As I opened it the dear older lady who was lying prone on her stomach on my examining table rolled over, covered her sagging body with the sheet and looked up.
“Owww, Scotland Yard, you say. Oh my, well that sounds a whole lot more fun than peering up me arse, don’t it, Doc? Well, don’t just stand there, boy, open it up and let’s see what you got.”
I tore open the envelope. The note inside, scribbled hastily in Holmes’s cramped handwriting, I read:
Come immediately to the morgue. Now! Break in Cushing case. COME IMMEDIATELY!
The dear woman had been looking over my shoulder as I read the note.
“Owww, Doc, you better get on your way. Don’t you worry about me. Probably nothing wrong that a bowl of prunes won’t fix. And don’t I have a story now to tell all me old biddies. None of them ever had their doctor called away on the case in the headlines while bare-arsed on the table. Away you go, Doc.”
I could not help smiling at her as I tore off my white coat and rushed out of the building. I stopp
ed for just a few seconds to apologize to the patients sitting in my waiting room. The dear old patient’s voice rang out from my the examination room as I did so.
“On your way, m’boy! Don’t worry, I’ll tell them all about it. Best story we’ll have this week. Off you go!”
I leapt into a cab and shouted the destination to the cabbie. A smile appeared across his face and he laid a whip on the back end of his horse and we tore through the city. He quite seemed to enjoy being able to shout “Scotland Yard! Emergency!” repeatedly as we raced from Marylebone all the way to the Thames. I jumped out as soon as we arrived at the headquarters of the Yard, tossed the good fellow a sovereign, and ran into the building. The front desk was expecting me and immediately opened the doors down the stairwells to the morgue. I was huffing and puffing and sweating by the time I got to the room where Holmes and Lestrade were waiting for me.
“Merciful heavens, Holmes,” I gasped while trying to catch my breath. “What in the world is it?”
“We need you, my friend,” he replied. There was almost a touch of happiness appearing on his face. “You are the doctor, we are not. But come, please. Take a look at all of the body parts. Use my glass. We have also prepared several slides. They are by the microscope. Look at them too.
“What am I supposed to be looking for?”
“Just look, and tell us if you see the same thing we think we might have.”
I looked first at the section of lower leg than had been severed from Miriam Cushing and then at the corresponding piece from her brother, Aaron. There was nothing unusual. Both were obviously limbs from young bodies that one might expect from athletic healthy people. I looked up, perplexed, at Holmes, and Lestrade. They just smiled.
“Just keep looking, Watson,” said Lestrade.
I moved on to the young woman’s breast. Something did not make sense. I went back to her leg and then back to the breast.
Sherlock Holmes Never Dies- Collection Four Page 20
