That Inspector Lestrade was on duty was perhaps predictable. He was unmarried and faithfully devoted to his job. Few others of his brethren would have given up their Christmas Day to sit at their desks, but Lestrade seemed positively glad to be there. I imagine he found it preferable to staying at home, alone, while all the world around him celebrated in the bosom of family and friends.
“Gone you say, Dr Watson?”
“Without warning, without explanation, without trace.”
“You are his great intimate, but even I know that Mr Holmes is liable to vanish at a moment’s notice. He is as contrary and unpredictable as a cat. What makes you so certain the reason for this absence is sinister?”
“He has not been himself in recent days. He has been… difficult.”
“Well now, it’s funny you should say that,” remarked the sallow, ferret-faced official. “Only yesterday he paid us a visit, out of the blue, and I noted then that he seemed distracted. I put it from my mind, thinking it just another facet of a complex personality.”
“In what manner distracted?”
“He had called to see Athelney Jones and discuss the affair of the Red-Headed League. The case is shortly coming to trial, where I suspect the jury will have no trouble finding John Clay and his accomplice guilty as charged, and Holmes averred that he had a couple of minor details to clear up. Inspector Jones was not in, however, so I had the pleasure of his company, but not for long. We exchanged pleasantries but Mr Holmes’s thoughts were elsewhere. He kept muttering to himself.”
“Muttering?”
“Yes. I had the impression he was only vaguely aware of my presence, even as we chatted. He returned again and again to a single short phrase.”
“What was it?”
“‘Greek philosopher in translation’.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That was it. Over and over he mumbled those words: ‘Greek philosopher in translation’.”
“But it makes no sense.”
“Did I say it did?” Lestrade shrugged his shoulders. “I am simply relating the facts of the matter. I assumed it pertained to some investigation he was busy with.”
“It must refer to a book. Off the top of my head I can only think of Jowett’s Plato, but there are countless others. I recall from my schooldays an English version of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that induced panicked bewilderment in me every time I opened it, but I cannot remember the translator’s name. Memory has drawn a veil over the trauma.”
“Possibly it was some clue he was mulling over. Hence the repetition.”
“Yes. If only I could make head or tail of it.”
“You mentioned a telegram earlier, which brought you here. You’re quite sure it referred to me?”
“I am sure of nothing right now, Inspector, other than that I am in the dark, floundering.”
* * *
I paused on the front steps of the building, in the lee of the arched doorway, and pondered. How did a Greek philosopher relate to this Scandinavian client of Holmes’s? Was there any connection at all? The randomness of it unsettled me. I began to fear that the balance of my friend’s mind had been severely disturbed. Had overwork placed too immense a burden on him? Had he cracked under the strain? Worse, had he overindulged in cocaine? He was apt to flee into the embrace of the drug both when he was bored and under-stimulated and when he was under pressure. Its detrimental effects on the psyche were well-known to those in my profession, and Holmes was no casual user of it.
I decided to run through the names of every Greek philosopher I could think of, hoping against hope that this might furnish me with an answer to my predicament. The Classics were not my field of expertise, and once past Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras and Zeno I came unstuck.
Then one further name popped into my head: Diogenes.
* * *
Quarter of an hour later I was knocking on the door of a certain exclusive gentlemen’s club on Pall Mall. I could not escape the feeling that I was grasping at straws, but it was better to try something, however desperate, than do nothing.
The Diogenes Club was considerably better attended that day than it had been when I previously passed through its hallowed portals some three years earlier. Its members, united in their antisociality, had flocked there in preference to enduring Christmas at home with their kin. They thronged its panelled libraries and other nooks and chambers, observing the strict code of silence that was the club’s unique and primary rule. The one concession to the season was a single small sprig of holly attached to the front of the reception desk in the hall – more an ironic joke, I felt, than a decoration.
I was soon able to inveigle a meeting with Mycroft Holmes in the Stranger’s Room, the only place on the premises where conversation was allowed. My friend’s corpulent older brother chuckled when he learned of the wayward path that had led me into his presence.
“What an absurd and outré conundrum,” he declared. “‘Greek philosopher in translation’. What on earth is Sherlock up to?”
“You do not think I am right in seeking you out to consult you?”
“On the face of it, you are. The club does of course derive its name from the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, whose espousal of Cynicism, specifically the rejection of social norms, informs our own practices. Furthermore, do you not recall the circumstances under which you and I first met, Doctor?”
“It was during the affair involving the interpreter Melas and the kidnapping of Sophy Kratides.”
“Quite so. Hence the ‘in translation’ part of that quaint ditty – an oblique nod towards Melas. It seems Sherlock is revisiting old haunts, old cases.”
“That rather confirms the unfortunate theory I am forming. Your brother has succumbed to an infirmity of the brain. He is wandering the palaces of his mind, becoming lost.”
“That is as may be,” said Mycroft, “but I meant literally what I said about revisiting old haunts. Yesterday lunchtime Sherlock was in this very room.”
“You don’t say! How did he strike you?”
Mycroft Holmes puffed out a sigh of airy indifference. “Much as he usually is. A touch off hand, I thought.”
“But lucid?”
“More or less.”
“What was his reason for coming here?”
“He gave none. I presume it was to bid me a merry Christmas, but in the event he neglected to do so. We Holmeses don’t really go in for that type of thing. For the most part he and I chatted inconsequentially while Sherlock leafed through a newspaper he had brought. That very newspaper there, as it happens.”
He gestured to a folded copy of the Daily Telegraph that lay on the cushions of the window seat. I picked it up to discover that it was open at the advertisements sheet and moreover that one advertisement had been carefully and emphatically circled in red ink.
“Your brother’s handiwork?” I enquired, pointing to the circle.
“Perhaps. I cannot swear I saw him do it.”
I knew well that Holmes was an aficionado of the advertisement columns, as he was of the agony columns. He liked to clip out certain entries and paste them into his voluminous commonplace books, for future reference. They were to him a map of modern civilisation in all its multifarious yearnings and hungers, and frequently afforded him clues to crimes both past and present.
The one he may or may not have singled out as notable read as follows:
Watson – I give generously in northern Scandinavia
“My goodness!” I ejaculated. I was more than a little taken aback to see my own surname printed on the page.
“Whatever is the matter?”
I showed Mycroft the advertisement. “It is beyond coincidence, surely, that Holmes found this when he is currently in the service of a client from northern Scandinavia. Some nefarious conspiracy is afoot.”
“It does seem somewhat irregular,” Mycroft opined.
“But how am I a part of it? Why does my name feature? I am at a loss to account
for it. I have no knowledge of the client’s identity. Holmes has vouchsafed to me almost nothing about the person.”
“‘Give generously’ could conceivably be construed as sly criminal slang for causing harm, even murder. Could it be that Sherlock believes you are, without your realising it, in danger?”
“It is more than plausible. It might well explain his recent behaviour. I am the unwitting target of some villain’s plan – an old enemy of ours, maybe – and until such time as he can ensure my safety Holmes is pushing me aside, out of the line of fire. By warding me off, keeping me at arm’s length, he has been protecting me. With much the same justification he himself is on the move. He has been crisscrossing London, travelling hither and yon, in order to throw the miscreant off the scent.”
“Then there is logic in his apparent illogicality. Nothing irregular about it whatsoever.”
It was the second time in the space of a minute that Mycroft had uttered the word “irregular”, and all at once a thought occurred to me. I studied the wording of the advertisement again, closely this time. An idea had snagged in my brain, one that was bizarre, fantastical, too ridiculous to be true – and yet the solution lay in front of me, hiding in plain sight, right before my eyes.
* * *
The bells of Westminster Abbey were chiming. Londoners from near and far filed through the huge oaken Anglo-Saxon doors for the Christmas service. All were in their best dress and eagerly anticipating a panoply of carols and good cheer.
Lounging beside the entrance to the Abbey was a young man of scarecrow-like appearance and nonchalant bearing, who looked as if he were there just to admire the well-heeled congregants as they paraded by. Really, though, he was eyeing them up with a view to robbing them.
This was how Wiggins, of the Baker Street Irregulars, liked to spend his Christmas Day. The putative leader of Sherlock Holmes’s gang of street Arabs was not woven from the purest cloth. When he was not running errands on Holmes’s behalf he was wont to revert to criminal ways, supplementing his honest income with ill-gotten gains.
As I approached, I debated inwardly the rationality of my being there. Was I deluded? Or had the advertisement genuinely contained a cryptic intimation, steering me towards Wiggins? Holmes was adept at spotting patterns in things and extricating secret messages from the most abstruse texts and artefacts. What if the advertisement was a coded reference to a threat, which imperilled not just my life but that of another of his associates as well? It could be no accident, I thought, that the initial letters of the words “Watson – I give generously in northern Scandinavia” spelled out Wiggins.
No sooner was I within hailing distance of the youngster than I saw him lurch forward from his position and barge shoulder-first into a stooped, elderly gentleman coming the opposite way. Wiggins apologised profusely to the white-haired, bewhiskered figure, and the other assured him that he was unhurt and no harm had been done.
How wrong he was. For I had spied Wiggins’s hand darting inside the man’s overcoat and relieving him of a plump calfskin wallet.
“Hullo!” I cried. “Wiggins! I saw that!”
Wiggins turned towards me, and his face fell, his expression lapsing into consternation and alarm. Without further ado he took to his heels, sprinting off in the direction of the Houses of Parliament and the Thames.
I saw no alternative but to give chase.
* * *
He led me a merry dance, did Wiggins. For fully half an hour he threaded through byways and backstreets, and several times nearly gave me the slip. He was younger than me by a good couple of decades, but I had a stamina tempered by my service in Afghanistan and many an afternoon on the rugby pitch. I stayed upon his tail, even though I was panting hard and my lungs burned. After a while I forgot about the elderly gentleman’s wallet or the advertisement. I ran on, consumed by the simple desire not to let this rascal get the best of me.
Up through the West End I pursued him, and into the doctors’ quarter around Harley Street and Wimpole Street, until we were in Marylebone and only a stone’s throw from Baker Street.
That was when I at last had to concede defeat. I slowed to alleviate the ache in my chest and the soreness in my legs, and finally stopped altogether while Wiggins trotted unattainably and irredeemably out of my sight. I braced myself on a railing until I caught my breath. I needed a rest and something restorative, and since I was so close to 221B I made my way there, planning to throw myself on Mrs Hudson’s mercy and beg a cup of tea and a snifter of brandy.
To my utter astonishment, who should I see entering the house but the very same elderly gentleman whose pocket Wiggins had picked.
In a matter of seconds I too was inside and climbing the seventeen stairs to Holmes’s apartment.
I had a fairly good idea who would be awaiting me within.
I was both correct and incorrect in my surmise.
* * *
Sherlock Holmes tugged off the white wig and whiskers of his disguise and straightened up so that he no longer affected the bowed back of old age. He was smiling broadly, his grey eyes twinkling.
Beside him was Wiggins, looking inordinately pleased with himself. Mrs Hudson was there too, setting the table for dinner. So – and this was the first great surprise – was my old army friend Colonel Hayter, with whom my readers may be familiar from his appearance in the story “The Reigate Squires”. The second great surprise was the presence of my own darling Mary.
Holmes led a prolonged round of applause.
“Well done, old friend,” said he. “Well done indeed.”
Hayter shook my hand warmly, while Mary linked her elbow with mine and planted a brief, affectionate kiss on my cheek.
I shook my head, weary but wise. “You scoundrel, Holmes,” I said. “The nerve of you.”
“Have you had fun?”
“The answer to that is both yes and no. You had me going there, with that sham of yours. The dark mood. The introspection. The disaffectedness.”
“Not wholly feigned, as you will soon learn,” said my friend, “but exaggerated certainly, for effect.”
“And then this whole elaborate rigmarole, starting with the telegram… The chain of clues and puzzles…”
“A game. A charade in which Mrs Watson, Mrs Hudson and Wiggins all had roles and played them admirably, as, I trust, did Lestrade and Mycroft. We are expecting the latter two to arrive shortly, by the way. As you can see, Mrs Hudson has laid places for seven, and that smell you may detect permeating up from the kitchen is the aroma of a turkey of sizeable proportions roasting in the oven. The bird is big enough to satiate six average appetites as well as the exceptional appetite that is my brother’s.”
“I am myself more than a little famished, after the wild goose chase you have sent me on.”
“A metaphorical wild goose chase, compared with the actual one last Christmas.”
“And all in aid of…?”
“Come, come, Watson. Can’t you tell? This has been my Christmas gift to you. A mystery of your very own to solve. How many times have you doggedly accompanied me on an investigation, required to do not much more than be a sounding board and a Boswell? I devised something that would give you a taste of the limelight for once, putting you centre stage while I stood, for the most part, in the wings.”
“There is no ‘northern Scandinavian client’, is there?”
“Not unless you count a certain jolly, red-cheeked fellow who resides in the Arctic Circle and makes his annual rounds at this time of year.”
“Holmes, you have a well-buried sentimental streak.”
“You concoct amusing confections out of my cases, Watson. It seems only fair that I should concoct an amusing confection for you in return. In truth, this has been nothing more than a mere Christmas bauble, I think you’ll find. But then there’s your story title, should you ever choose to set this escapade down in print: ‘A Bauble in Scandinavia’. You will doubtless appreciate the wordplay.”
* * *
; I treasured the memory of that Christmas Day throughout the three years that followed, when Holmes was missing, presumed dead. It kept me warm during some very cold, long, mournful nights. The seven of us round the table – friends, colleagues, kin – and food aplenty and fine wine flowing.
Holmes never did take to that calabash pipe, though.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DEADLY SÉANCE
First published in The Sign of Seven, ed. Martin Rosenstock,
2019, Titan Books
One of the great paradoxes about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is that, for someone who created the most logical, empirical character in all of literature, he himself was an ardent spiritualist. He believed firmly in mediumship, as well as ghosts and even fairies, and was not shy in promoting those beliefs, even when it brought him ridicule and damaged his reputation.
For me, the idea of having Sherlock Holmes confront spirit mediums was too intriguing to resist. Their whole ethos, after all, is anathema to his. Where he demands proof, they demand faith. Where he relies on data, they rely on human frailty and susceptibility. “The Deadly Séance” is a story Conan Doyle would never have written, but that, as far as I was concerned, was all the more reason to give it a go.
The Adventure of the Deadly Séance
Those who were in London during the autumn of 1889 may recall the fog that descended upon the capital near the end of October. It was fog like no other, lasting nearly a fortnight and in its density and ubiquity putting to shame even the fog in the famous opening passage of Bleak House, the literary yardstick by which all London Particulars must be measured.
For the twelve days it persisted, holding the city in its grip, the fog impinged upon every aspect of life. One ventured out in the daytime only if absolutely necessary, lest one’s lungs suffer as a result of exposure to the clammy, acrid vapours, while at night one kept the curtains firmly closed, for the mere sight of the fog swirling outside, aglow with gaslight, was disconcerting. It seemed to caress the windows like some vast octopoid beast wishing to insinuate its tendrils indoors.
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 24
