The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part VII

by David Marcum

  Lestrade cleared his throat. “Now, Mr. Holmes, I should like you to keep your part of the bargain. How did you know that Mr. Stoker was innocent?”

  “As I said previously, because of what I observed. There were three particular points of interest. As the police photograph of the unfortunate Miss Rinehart will show, she had no ink smudges on her white blouse, so it was unlikely that Mr. Stoker, whose ink-stained fingertips were quite apparent, placed her in the coffin.”

  “He might have worn gloves.”

  “He might have. But he did not wear gloves when removing his collar, for smudges were apparent there, and there were also smudges on the white silk of his tie. Yet there were no smudges on his neck where the puncture marks had been made.”

  “Perhaps he put on the gloves after he exposed his neck.”

  “Unlikely, but possible. However the third point of interest was quite conclusive.”

  “What was that?”

  “The police photograph will also show that Miss Rinehart’s blonde hair had been carefully spread, fan-like, over the velvet pillow cushion of the coffin. That proves it would have been impossible for her to have written out the three letters of Stoker’s name with her right hand, using the blood from the wound on the left side of her neck. In order to do that, she would have needed to twist her body and move her head, which would have disturbed the careful and artistic arrangement of her hair. For her to have restored that fan-like effect would have been impossible for her to do without leaving bloodstains on the blonde fibres. So by eliminating the impossible, I knew Stoker was innocent. To find the guilty party, I needed to utilize the motive of the attack on Mr. Stoker, which was obviously not meant merely to cause him harm.”

  “I follow you there. I agree the perpetrators did not merely wish to cause him harm. But what did they want from Mr. Stoker?”

  “When they drugged and then terrified him, they expected him to reveal the location where he had hidden the gold sovereigns.”

  “Why did they think he would do that?”

  Holmes took a deep breath, closing his eyes momentarily as though he were recalling something of emotional importance to him. Finally he said, “When a person has just undergone a shocking experience, the immediate instinct is to confirm the safety of other persons important to him, or to rush to be sure that whatever possession most valuable to him is still intact. I myself have used the technique to advantage on several occasions. Though not, I must admit, with complete success.”

  Again, his eyes shut for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “In this case, however,” he said, “Mr. Stoker did not react in the predicted manner. That was probably due to the effects of the drug and his own active imagination, which had been inflamed by the fearsome aspects of the supernatural villainies with which he was preoccupied.”

  He gave a brief bow. “So, Inspector, Dr. Watson and I will leave you to your mission. When you have confirmed that Mr. Stoker is on his way to his wife and home, I invite you to join us in the celebratory toast to which Mr. Irving referred.”

  The Adventure of the Mind’s Eye

  by Shane Simmons

  “It is absolutely uncanny, Mr. Holmes! I have never seen the likes of it.”

  This I heard from the man with the great whiskers as the two men came up the steps to Madam Katarina’s flat in Bethnal Green. I was not in Mr. Holmes’s employ that day, so I made myself scarce and assumed my assigned position.

  Not more than a few moments later, the pair came in through the door and were greeted by Madam Katarina, who was wearing all her baubles and bells for the occasion. She jingled and jangled as she walked across the sitting room and bade her callers to be seated at the small round table in the middle of the floor.

  “I have every confidence you will be greatly impressed with Madam Katarina’s results,” said Mr. Whiskers to the detective.

  Mr. Holmes, I could tell, was already unimpressed with the exotic gypsy fortune-teller in her colourful headscarf and shawl, adorned with a seemingly endless array of rings and bracelets. It was in his voice.

  “I have not had the pleasure of your acquaintance, Madam,” he said, dry as a bone. “Nor experience with your - profession - as soothsayer and converser with departed spirits.”

  “You are a skeptic, Mr. Holmes,” Madam Katarina noted wryly.

  “An obvious observation,” he replied, “hardly up to your reputation as a renowned psychic.”

  “As yours is unworthy of your reputation for great leaps of deductive reasoning.”

  “I hope to better serve you in short order, Madam.”

  “As do I, Mr. Holmes.”

  Madam Katarina dimmed the gaslight to a low flicker and joined her guests the table.

  “Link hands,” she instructed the two men, and all six hands were clasped around the tabletop in short order.

  Madam Katarina closed her eyes and swayed back and forth as she entered a trance.

  “Once more, we summon the past essence of Naddy Hooper. Your beloved is here and longs to speak with you again. Come and make your presence known! Are you with us, Naddy Hooper?”

  As if in reply to the invitation, the gas lamp suddenly flared, spouting a blue column of flame straight up to tickle the ceiling, only to die down again a moment later.

  “She is here,” Madam Katarina announced coolly.

  Mr. Whiskers had nearly leapt out of his chair, even though he’d already been through this routine before - several times in fact. For all the reaction it got from Mr. Holmes, however, you’d have thought he’d been to dozens of séances at Madam Katarina’s.

  “Naddy,” said Whiskers, shaking with emotion, “can you hear me?”

  “I hear,” said Madam Katarina, though the voice was not her own. Her usual Eastern European accent had vanished, replaced with one that sounded very tosh and British.

  “She’s channelling her, Mr. Holmes,” Whiskers explained, excited. “My poor Naddy is speaking to me through Madam Katarina!”

  “Oh how I miss you, my darling,” said the spirit, and I could hear the moustachioed gentleman sob, trying to hold back tears in front of the third party who had joined him that day.

  Back and forth this exchange went, as the dead was apprised of all the living had been up to since last they spoke. The familiarity touched on the intimate enough for me to dare not repeat the conversation. It’s enough to say the man’s affections lived on, even as his love mouldered in her grave.

  The connection lasted only a few short minutes before the table where the trio sat began to jostle in place, as though it had a mind of its own. It rose up several inches off the floor and twisted back and forth before settling down again.

  “The spirit grows restless,” announced Madam Katarina in her own voice again. “The ties between worlds become unbound.”

  With that, things calmed in the room. Madam Katarina took a deep breath and then withdrew her hands from the two men.

  “Allowing the departed to enter my mind, mingle with my soul, is tiring,” she said. “I must rest a moment. Please, gentlemen, make yourselves comfortable and I shall serve tea shortly.”

  Rising from the table, Madam Katarina retired to an adjoining room, leaving her client and the consulting detective alone together.

  “Do you see, Mr. Holmes?” Whiskers said like it was a plea. “Do you believe now, how the living can still hope to speak with those already passed?”

  “Not in the least,” declared Mr. Holmes, without so much as a second thought on the subject.

  “But the voice! You heard the voice!”

  “I heard a gifted actress put on a convincing accent that matched your own description of your late love. Think back. Did you not discuss Miss Hooper’s background, education, and upbringing in some detail, prior to the first summoning Madam Katarina performed for you?”
r />   “It was important I provide as much information as I could so that Madam Katarina could summon the correct spirit,” stammered the man.

  “Or muster her best impression.”

  “But you saw the moment the spirit entered the room. You felt it, as I did!” was his next protest to the detective.

  “I saw a burst of flame from a gas lamp. If I felt anything, it was a momentary wave of heat from the conflagration.”

  “I have never seen a lamp behave as such. Have you? There was a manifestation before us, and the flame reacted to it.”

  Mr. Holmes stepped over to the lamp on the wall until his great angular nose was poised over the glass bowl.

  “The residue is slight, but the odour lingers. Do you smell it?” he asked.

  Whiskers sniffed at the air like he was having a harder time sucking in the scent through so much moustache.

  “Yes, I suppose I do,” he agreed at last. “More like a candle than gas, I should say.”

  “Precisely,” said Mr. Holmes. “A drop of oil wrapped inside a small ball of wax, left near the flame when Madam Katarina lowered the light. I am certain she has done this enough to be exact in her timing. The oil briefly ignites at a dramatic moment, and her clients are suitably impressed or frightened, thinking it announces the arrival of a spirit from the next world into our own. A fire hazard, but effective. She should be careful not to burn the whole block down. The scorching on the wallpaper suggests she may be overplaying this trick.”

  “What of the table?” ventured Whiskers hopefully, even as the possibility of a genuine mystical event faded. “I felt it trembling beneath us, and all our hands were accounted for above the surface.”

  “What of it, indeed?” asked Mr. Holmes, prompting his associate to exercise some newfound skepticism of his own.

  “I suppose Madam Katarina might have jostled it with her own feet,” he said.

  “A likely possibility,” agreed Mr. Holmes, “but quite impossible. Her feet were tucked behind the front legs of her chair the whole time. In fact, she was quite eager for me to observe this very fact. The length or her dress is intentionally revealing. A view of a shapely bare ankle, meant to draw the eye of a masculine client, has the effect of both distraction from the ruse, and assurance that she could not possibly be manipulating the furniture.”

  “Yet you think this too smells fishy?” Whiskers asked the detective.

  “I more detect the scent of urchin,” said Mr. Holmes.

  “Sea urchin? Here?” the man wondered, sniffing at the air once more, wondering what other aroma he may have missed, or what might be on the boil in some nearby kitchen.

  “No,” clarified Mr. Holmes, “the street variety.”

  He grabbed one corner of the table cloth and, with a single sharp pull, yanked it away, leaving the crystal ball that had been sitting atop it now standing directly on the wooden surface, unmolested by the vanishing fabric it had rested upon a moment before. Had he been a magician on stage, Mr. Holmes could not have made a better show of it.

  Once my cover was gone, I lay exposed, curled around the centre pillar of the table I had been raising and lowering and twisting about, following the script of Madam Katarina’s reading.

  “Wiggins,” said Mr. Holmes, firmly but without anger, “get out from under there.”

  I scrambled to my feet and tipped my hat to him, as though reporting for duty at Baker Street.

  “What sort of petty criminality have you involved yourself in here?” he asked.

  “A lad who works odd jobs has to do odd things to pay his way,” I explained. “Anyway, it’s no crime to tell people what they want to hear for a bit of coin. I help out Madam Katarina like I help you out.”

  “Wiggins, you help me discover the truth. What you’re doing here is helping Madam Katarina tell lies.”

  “I think of it as allowing people to believe what they most need to believe,” said Madam Katarina, suddenly reappearing behind the beaded curtain that separated rooms. She parted it with her fingers. “I see you have discovered my trusted assistant.”

  “It seems we share a staff, Madam,” said Mr. Holmes.

  “A bit of illusion and stagecraft helps sell the illusion of my contact with the beyond,” she said, walking over to me and putting her hand on my back.

  “Deceit and trickery is what you use to perpetrate fraud against the vulnerable and the gullible,” Mr. Holmes countered.

  “I would argue against gullibility,” Whiskers harrumphed in his defence. “Nor will I concede to being the least bit vulnerable.”

  “Tut tut, Major,” said Mr. Holmes, raising a hand to silence the man. “You have been wronged, and let us at least agree to that much.”

  “Weegans,” as Madam Katarina called me in her unplaceable accent, “you may go.”

  “That’s all right, I can stick around,” I said.

  “Outside Wiggins, at once,” Mr. Holmes commanded. “And do not wander. I will have a word with you in short order.”

  It was a pity I was forbidden to watch the fireworks between my two employers, but I did as I was told and took to the stairs. Standing watch across the street, I kept my eye on the window of Madam Katarina’s flat for the next half-hour as words were exchanged, a few of them choice I’d bet. At last, the lady herself came to the window to open the curtains and let some daylight in. She was some distance away, but I was sure she spotted me and gave me a wink. Only moments later, Mr. Holmes stepped out onto the street with the other man and said farewell to the fortune-teller’s whiskered client - now, doubtless, an ex-client.

  Mr. Holmes beckoned to me and I cut through the street traffic to join him, eager to hear if I still had one, both, or neither job to my name.

  “What was the upshot of the negotiating and what-not?” I asked.

  “A partial refund for all past engagements,” announced Mr. Holmes.

  “Only partial?”

  Mr. Holmes may have been the greatest detective the world had ever known, but that didn’t mean he had a great head for finance. In my experience, what he charged for solving all those mysteries was always an afterthought to him at best.

  “Madam Katarina claimed a dearth in her current finances. At any rate, I suppose she’s owed a modest compensation for this one-woman show for which she is the playwright and entire cast.”

  “Not the entire cast,” I reminded him.

  “You, young Wiggins, were a prop master at best.”

  “How were you put onto us?” I wondered.

  “Under normal circumstances, I would never lower myself to exposing such transparent trickery. I do this as a favour to Watson, who asked me set one of his old army associates straight after he had been taken in by this psychic claptrap to the tune of forty pounds and counting.”

  “Why didn’t the doctor come along?” I asked. “He could have written this mystery up as one those stories he’s composing.”

  “Absolutely not!” exclaimed Mr. Holmes. “Watson knew it would be a waste of his time, as it was most certainly mine. Besides, such a tale would be short to the point of inconsequence. Even Watson’s readers, limited of attention, impatient with substantial works, would balk at so slight a conundrum.”

  “Hasn’t he started working on a whole bunch of short ones for publication?” I asked, remembering what I myself had witnessed during my recent visits to Baker Street. Dr. Watson had seemed most preoccupied with his pages of scribbles and notes, which he carried with him everywhere, and worked on diligently when he was hanging about at his old rooms, away from the missus.

  “Perhaps the shorter format will encourage him to get to the point all the quicker. Such case studies should restrict themselves to the facts and evidence, not pad out the pages with melodrama and embellishment.”

  “All the better an argument for thi
s one then, don’t you think? The Case of the Crystal Ball, or some such title. One page and you’re done reading it.”

  “Watson seems set to call them all Adventures, which I can hardly approve of. They are most certainly not ‘adventures’. They are journeys within, to the critical core of the human mind, where reason and logic prevail over all flights of fancy.”

  “The Adventure of the Crystal Ball then,” I echoed, only really listening to the parts I could grasp.

  “Wiggins, no.”

  “But I did enjoy how you solved it so quick!” I said, my admiration unchecked. “One look at the scam and you figured it all out in a flash.”

  “A child could have unravelled it in as much time.”

  I had to admit, I’d gotten the gist of it as soon as Madam Katarina started to show me how her routine went. It was a wonder it fooled grown men and women, but some dim lighting and a bit of theatre go a long way to convince a receptive audience.

  “Well, I still think someone ought to write it up,” I declared. “Maybe I’ll do it myself one day.”

  “Do me a service and change my name in the text if you do so,” said Mr. Holmes to the notion.

  “And lose my best selling point? Come now, Mr. Holmes, I thought you wanted me to earn an honest wage.”

  “As you say,” he agreed. “I suppose if Watson can supplement his income on my name, I shouldn’t deny you the same opportunity. Especially if it keeps you honest. Only please, I beg of you, learn from Watson’s missteps and focus on the facts, not the fanciful.”

  He smiled as he clapped me on the back, and I knew he thought the likelihood of me ever carrying through with my threat to write an account of some of his adventures was scant at best. Which goes to show, Mr. Sherlock Holmes may have known near everything, but he wasn’t any more psychic than Madam Katarina when it came to foreseeing the future.

  I didn’t see Madam Katarina again for over a year. In that time, much had happened. Sherlock Holmes, bane of the criminal underworld, hero to lovers of order, justice, and rousing adventure stories, was dead. Sacrificing himself to end the evil reign of Professor Moriarty - a villain with a mind as great as Mr. Holmes’s, but set to wicked intent - he had dropped to his death off the side of a waterfall, breaking the hearts of a million admirers in the process.