I must have still looked perplexed, for Holmes said, “Tut, man! Think about it. Consider the data. Data, data, data. What does it all add up to? You style yourself a detective. You have studied my methods. Apply them.”
I did. “The strong-room, you say, has an iron door and window shutters. It is all but hermetically sealed. That is suggestive.”
“Suggestive at the very least.”
“As for the paint, its smell may have been intended to disguise another smell.”
“May have been, Barker? Was!”
“A smell such as that of gas.”
“A-ha! Very much so.”
“He killed them – Dr Ernest and Mrs Amberley. He gassed them to death in the strong-room.”
“But how?” said Holmes. “How did he manage it?”
“Do you not know?”
“I have an inkling, but tell me your thoughts.”
“Well, I imagine he set the jet for a lamp going, without lighting it. Then he inveigled the two of them into the room on some pretext and slammed the door on them. Unable to escape, they would have asphyxiated within minutes.”
“My interpretation precisely, Barker. And the ‘We we’?”
“I cannot but think that it was scribbled by one or other of the doomed couple as they lay gasping their last on the strongroom floor. It represents a desperate last-ditch attempt to leave a clue for anyone who might inspect the room looking for signs of foul play. The first ‘we’ is an abortive attempt to write a sentence. The second ‘we’ likewise met with failure.”
“Or,” said Holmes, “the second ‘we’ is part of a new word, which was left unfinished: ‘were’.”
“As in, ‘We were here’. ‘We were innocent’.”
“Or, ‘We were murdered’.”
“That seems plausible,” I said, nodding, even as a slight chill ran through me. “And if Amberley was not at the theatre as he maintains…”
“Then his alibi crumbles like a sandcastle before the incoming tide,” said Holmes. “He may be diabolical, but he is not as clever as he thinks he is. We have him. All that remains is for us to extract a confession out of him. Would you, pray, care to assist me with that?”
“Holmes,” I said, “I should like nothing better.”
It seemed I would not be getting the portion of Amberley’s worldly wealth that I had been hoping for. That was a source of great regret. I would, however, be on hand to see a double murderer brought to justice and play a significant role in his apprehension. The glory would be an almost adequate substitute for the money.
* * *
Events played out more or less as Watson has described in the closing passages of “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. Amberley attempted suicide by poison pellet when Holmes confronted him with an accusation of murder. Holmes’s extraordinarily swift reflexes prevented him from cheating the hangman’s noose, and together we wrestled that great brawling brute of a man to the floor, subdued and secured him. Inspector MacKinnon took him into custody. In all, it was a satisfactory conclusion to the proceedings.
Save in one respect.
There was still the question of where the money and securities had gone. If they were not in the strong-room, where were they? Dr Ernest and Mrs Amberley had, obviously, not made off with them. Their bodies were revealed to have been buried in the garden of The Haven, down a disused well whose opening was concealed by a dog-kennel. In the breast pocket of Ernest’s jacket was a purple indelible pencil. One can only presume Amberley tucked it there after finding it on the strongroom floor and failing to spy the truncated message Ernest had scrawled with it on the skirting.
Holmes submitted that Amberley must have hidden the cash and documents elsewhere in the house, in a safe place, as part of his scheme to frame the adulterous couple as thieves and throw the police off the scent. Accordingly, constables searched The Haven the following day and found a bureau with a secret drawer capacious enough to hold all those papers and sheaves of pound notes. The drawer, however, proved to be empty, and although they continued to comb the house from attic to cellar, they discovered no other suitable potential location.
Amberley himself refused to divulge where he had concealed the items. Throughout his trial, all the way to his appointment with the scaffold, he kept the secret. I think that, even to the bitter end, he felt there was a remote chance he would escape justice. He anticipated that he might somehow receive a custodial sentence instead of a capital one, on grounds of diminished responsibility perhaps, the balance of his mind disturbed by jealousy, that sort of thing. He might even – for all that it was an almost impossibly unlikely outcome – be exonerated.
He was not. Amberley went to his grave knowing that the bulk of his competence was not where he had stowed it but believing that it was still recoverable should he ever be set free. The cash might be forfeit but the bonds would be impossible to sell through any legitimate outlet and would fetch a tiny fraction of their worth on the black market. Even if they were disposed of somehow, it would not be beyond the bounds of feasibility to track them down and through them trace a path back to the original seller, the thief.
This, I am sure, was his logic. In his imagined future, where he was released at some stage to resume life as a free citizen, Josiah Amberley would hunt down the individual who had raided the bureau and its secret drawer and exact a terrible vengeance upon him.
* * *
That I am sitting here writing down these words is proof, if proof were needed, that Amberley did not get to fulfil his desire. He was hanged that autumn, after a trial in which the jury took no more than ten minutes to return a guilty verdict. He never knew who it was that had made off with his fortune.
The securities that I extricated from the bureau, I burned. I could not take the chance of them being found in my possession, and trying to sell them posed an even greater risk.
As for the few thousand pounds, I eked it out and made the most of it. I spent it carefully and judiciously, little by little, a bit here, a bit there, using it to prop up my finances during lean times when business was not good. I was not rash with it. I did not make any extravagant or ostentatious purchases, lest this alert someone – specifically Sherlock Holmes – that I was living beyond my means. It was Holmes whom I feared, above all else. He, more than anyone, might deduce where the loot had gone. He might work out that I had broken into The Haven the night after Amberley was arrested. He might realise that I had, as a change from solving crimes, elected to commit one.
Because Holmes never troubled himself to enquire further into the matter, I can only assume that the mystery of the missing lucre was too petty for him. Maybe he felt it was beneath his dignity to follow up on a case he had so triumphantly cracked. The money was a minor loose end. Why not leave it to the police to tie up? He, the mighty Sherlock Holmes, had bigger fish to fry. It is highly likely that the subject slipped his mind altogether, for soon after the Amberley case another problem engaged his attention, the vexing affair of Lady Eva Brackwell and “the worst man in London”, the blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton.
I do wonder, though, whether he actually knew all along that I had taken the money. By all accounts he lives in Sussex now, near Eastbourne. He is in his twilight years, keeping bees. Does he ever think of me, down there in his retirement villa by the sea? Does he smile fondly, perchance, as he recalls his former Irregular and one-time collaborator Clarence Barker?
Does he ruminate on how he let me get away with an audacious act of thievery?
If so, why did he not pursue me at the time? Why did he not apprehend me, as he did so many other wrongdoers?
I like to think that he felt I had earned the money; I deserved it. It was due to me not because I joined forces with him and went unpaid for my efforts, but rather because he was ashamed by the way he spurned me when I approached him with my offer of a partnership. He felt guilty that he did not take me on as a protégé and help me make the most of my talents. Deliberately allowing me
to slip through the net was his penance.
Perhaps. Perhaps.
At least he never knew that I had urged Dr Ernest on in his romantic pursuit of Mrs Amberley and his bid to steal from her husband. He never learned about that.
In that one regard, I am unequivocally Sherlock Holmes’s better. I got away with something that virtually no one else has: pulling the wool over the great detective’s eyes. I outwitted him. He failed to see through me, as he did so many others, Josiah Amberley among them.
There is this sentence in one of the final paragraphs of “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”:
“Pure swank!” Holmes answered. “He felt so clever and sure of himself that he imagined no one could touch him.”
The subject is Amberley, of course, and it is as apt a description of that fiend as any.
But it could just as easily be me.
Signed,
Clarence Barker
January 1926
THE ADVENTURE OF THE INNOCENT ICARUS
First published in Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets,
ed. David Thomas Moore, 2014, Abaddon Books
Here is Sherlock Holmes in a world somewhat removed from, but not all that dissimilar to, his customary milieu. It is a world where almost everyone is born with a form of super-power, and the minority who aren’t are considered inferior, not unlike untouchables in India’s caste system.
Holmes himself is one, a “Typical”, possessing no innate paranormal ability. Thus he is forced to rely solely on his remarkable intellect and his faculty for keen observation in order to make his way. He’s still a detective, but when people are able to fly, for example, or are immune to physical injury, or can start fires with their minds, then the crimes he investigates are liable to have an added layer of complication.
The anthology Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets consists of stories like this, reimagining Holmes in various inventive and fantastical ways, and is an excellent read.
The Adventure of the Innocent Icarus
“Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes as we took breakfast in our rooms at 221B Baker Street, “we are about to receive a visitor – and, one hopes, an interesting case to solve.”
I would have commented to my friend that he was exhibiting remarkable powers of precognition, but for the fact that he was gazing out of the window onto the street as he voiced his observation. It transpired that a conveyance of some sort was pulling up outside our door, visible from his vantage point but not mine. The clatter of its wheels on the cobblestones was lost amid the usual rattle of early morning traffic and the cries of roving vendors.
“A two-man rickshaw,” Holmes added, “privately owned. A person of some means, then.”
By the time I got to the window all I could see was two liveried strongmen of the Hercules Category, panting hard as they took their rest between the rickshaw’s traces. The vehicle’s occupant had already disembarked and was at the front door, out of my eyeline.
Whoever it was, they had no need to knock, for Mrs Hudson was already bustling down the hallway to let them in. That worthy woman, unlike Holmes, did possess powers of precognition. She was not gifted with the highest level of foresight, certainly not enough to land her a commission with Her Majesty’s trusted inner circle of clairvoyants, among whom was counted Holmes’s brother Mycroft, one of our nation’s pre-eminent Cassandras. Mrs Hudson’s abilities were limited to the anticipation of guests arriving and the purveyance of refreshments that were exactly what the recipient desired. These skills suited her ideally in her role as landlady and housekeeper.
She ushered our visitor upstairs, and presently Holmes and I were in the company of a well-attired female in her mid-to-late forties, comely in appearance and refined in manners. She introduced herself as Lady Arabella Lanchester, and gratefully accepted the cup of tea that Mrs Hudson brought her.
“Darjeeling,” she said. “My favourite. And weak, too.”
Mrs Hudson retired with a small smile of satisfaction. She was never wrong when gauging someone’s taste in beverage or foodstuff.
“You are the wife of the industrialist Sir Hugh Lanchester,” Holmes observed. “No. Correction. The widow.”
Lady Arabella nodded briefly and bitterly.
“Indeed,” my friend continued, “you have only recently been bereaved – within the past few hours. My deepest condolences.”
The steely composure that Lady Arabella had been displaying up until then broke. A lace handkerchief appeared, and she dabbed at the corners of her eyes, trembling.
“I have been told,” she said, “that you are something of a mind reader, Mr Holmes. It seems I was not misinformed.”
“On the contrary, madam, I can lay claim to no mental capabilities beyond those of the normal human brain, albeit one that has trained itself to note the minutiae and correlate them into meaningful conjecture.”
“You are… a Typical?” said Lady Arabella, somewhat surprised.
“Indeed I am,” said Holmes with hard-won, pardonable pride. “I belong to that vanishingly rare species, the man who is without powers of any description. I thought this was common knowledge. I am not in any Category. I cannot fly. I cannot light fires with but a thought. I cannot swim underwater indefinitely like a fish. I cannot, like my Achilles friend Dr Watson here, withstand almost any physical injury. I can only think. But usually, thinking is sufficient.”
“I am sorry.”
“Don’t be, madam. Your compassion is wasted. I have never felt that I have lost out, that I am somehow the lesser for my accident of birth. I am more than content with what I have made of myself. I resolved at an early age not to wallow in self-pity. Instead, I vowed that I would be anyone’s equal, and superior to most, through the simple application of cerebral discipline. This has resulted in my attaining the position of the world’s first and foremost consulting detective – whom you have come to see on a matter of pressing urgency connected with your late husband’s demise.”
“That is so, Mr Holmes,” said Lady Arabella. “You see—”
“Let me stop you there if I may, your ladyship,” said my friend, cushioning his peremptoriness with an affable laugh. “I have already perceived a great deal about the situation from your appearance. You dressed in some haste this morning. Your blouse is misbuttoned, although you seem unaware of the fact, which suggests distraction, an unbalancing of the mind’s equilibrium. Furthermore, one of your hairpins has worked itself loose. The wife of a knight of the realm would not normally go abroad in public in anything but an immaculate state of dress. You have rushed here from your home at the earliest opportunity. Am I mistaken?”
“You are not, sir. I did not even call upon my maid to help me, but put on my outfit myself as best I could.” She plucked at the misfastened blouse buttons absently and tried to locate the lock of hair that had come astray. “It has been a trying night, the worst of my life.”
“The calamity which has befallen Sir Hugh,” Holmes went on, “was a violent one, if I do not miss my guess. And you were there to witness it, or at least its after-effects.”
“Does it show in my face?”
“Yes, but more so on your hands. Your fingernails, to be precise. You have washed thoroughly, I have no doubt, but alas, the evidence is still there.”
Lady Arabella examined her fingers, and her lips took on a shape of appalled, crushing horror. “My husband’s blood.”
“Yes,” said Holmes gravely. “Still encrusted beneath the tips of your nails. You held the body, cradled it in extremis.”
The poor woman paled. The recollection was all too fresh, all too vivid. She went into a swoon, there in the chair, and I moved to seize her before she might slip to the floor.
Mrs Hudson entered at that very moment with a jar of smelling salts.
“These are called for,” she said, passing the jar to me, and I unstoppered it and applied it beneath Lady Arabella’s nose, swiftly reviving her from her faint.
“I apologise,�
�� said her ladyship as Mrs Hudson discreetly withdrew.
“No need,” said Holmes with casual dismissal. “Frankly, I am amazed you have the presence of mind, not to mention the inner fibre, to be here at all. Most in your position would have succumbed to hysteria or shock by now. Your fortitude is impressive.”
“My husband is dead,” said Lady Arabella, resolute. “The police are of the view that he met his end through misadventure. I, Mr Holmes, am convinced it was murder.”
* * *
She laid out the facts of the incident before us with remarkable poise and self-possession, given the circumstances. Sir Hugh Lanchester had not been dead some ten hours, yet his widow was able to furnish us with an account of events that was exceptional in its clear-eyed accuracy.
Sir Hugh had, the previous evening, taken a turn on the second-floor balcony of their home, as was his wont. The Lanchesters owned a large mansion on Richmond Hill, one of the benefits accrued from Sir Hugh’s chain of cotton mills, an industry that had been so profitable to him that he had become one of Britain’s richest men. After dinner, he liked to enjoy a cigar outdoors, weather permitting. His wife could not stand the smell of smoke in the house. She was unusually susceptible to all odours, she told us.
“You are an Olfactory,” Holmes said.
“Just so.”
“I noted the lack of perfume or any fragrance. I assumed you neglected to put any on in your haste to travel, but I did wonder whether it might be that you have a more than averagely acute sense of smell. Your preference for Darjeeling, one of the least pungent tea blends, seemed to confirm your Category.”
While her husband was partaking of his cigar, Lady Arabella continued, she herself got ready for bed. She was startled by a short scream and then a loud, hideous thud. Hurrying outside in her nightgown, she discovered Sir Hugh on the lawn immediately below the balcony, dying.
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 14
