“Use this,” a voice said at my side. Simeon Forward stood there, a lantern in his hand. “Alice is with the woman,” he said. “I told her to keep her talking, but she’ll have no trouble with that. She never shuts up, that one.” He did not smile but held the lantern so that it shone some light into the darkness of the palace interior. It was impossible with such poor illumination to see anything clearly, but I fancied I made out the glitter of something golden in the darkness – and then a woman’s face and hand stretched towards me!
Forward gasped in horror at my side, and I stifled an oath and turned to Holmes, who had also been staring into the palace. “Only a painting, I suspect,” he said, with the smallest of smiles. Forward, ashen-faced, nodded his relieved agreement.
Inspector Fisher had no interest in the contents of the palace vault, however. Whatever lay within would have to wait until later; his only concern was the capture of Hopkirk.
He would not be difficult to track. A red streak on one of the shards of glass indicated that he had cut himself in his abortive attempt to break into the palace, and drops of blood stood out starkly against the white snow behind the building. The presence of more trees and the natural lie of the land meant the snow was not so deep here, and we were able to make good time as we raced along the uneven scarlet trail.
He seemed to be heading back towards the house, but on a more elliptical line than we had taken, moving across country between a plethora of follies and wooded copses, presumably to provide himself with cover from any pursuers. This, combined with the fading light, meant we could not actually see him as yet. Still, we had the blood trail to follow, and though the further we went from the main paths the slower our pace became, the same was equally the case for Hopkirk.
A few hundred yards from the ruined palace, we stumbled over a deep, bloodstained crevasse in the snow, and I was reminded of the similar indentation in which Alim Salah’s body had been dumped.
“We may yet catch him,” Holmes commented, barely breaking his stride to examine the area. “He fell here and lay a while. This snow has not only been compacted by his weight, it has been melted by his body heat.”
Fisher’s face was grim as he barrelled past Holmes and reached a crest in the landscape, which afforded him a longer view of the surrounding countryside.
“There he is!” he called back softly, dropping to his knees as he did so, in order that Hopkirk should not see him. “He’s going slowly, and he’s walking funny, dragging one leg,” he reported.
“How far away?” asked Holmes.
“A few hundred yards, at most.”
“He is definitely headed for the manor house?”
“I’d say so.”
Holmes closed his eyes and I knew he was picturing the map of the estate that hung in the main hall.
“A quarter mile, as the crow flies,” Forward interrupted. “With a bit of luck, we might catch him before he gets there.”
“We need to,” said Holmes. “Frederick Schell’s carriage is still hitched up. If he reaches that and gets away, we will not apprehend him.”
Luck did not seem to be on our side, however; as we crested the little hill, Hopkirk chanced to look back and see us, and doubled his pace. The effort cost him – as we closed on him I could hear the laboured sound of his breathing and see how he dragged his feet through the snow – but the distance between us was too great and the distance from Hopkirk to the house too small. He made it to the back entrance while we were still a hundred yards away. It appeared that all was lost. We would never get close enough to prevent him taking off in Schell’s carriage.
And then he fell, hard, against the bottom of the steps to the house.
As he slowly dragged himself upright, we put on a burst of driven speed and were only thirty yards away when he seemed to decide that the stairs were beyond him. He looked back at us once more, then half stumbled and half fell down the ramp which led to the cellar, whose doors had remained unlocked following the discovery of Alim Salah’s body.
* * *
When we reached the rear of the house, there was no sign of Hopkirk. The trail of blood stopped at the open doors of the cellar, though, and there could be no doubt he had gone inside. Fisher quickly ran up the steps and bolted the door which led down to the cellar, then returned to stand beside us as we caught our breath and planned our next move.
We could not know if Hopkirk was armed. He had stabbed Cairns and struck Julieanne Schell on the head, and he had made no effort to shoot at us, even after he realised how close we were. Even so, the possibility could not be ruled out, which made a frontal assault through the cellar doors inadvisable. One of us would have to go down and check on the captain’s whereabouts. Before anyone could object, I pressed myself against the wall and began to edge my way down the slope.
Hopkirk was nowhere to be seen, but the door to the catacombs hung open. I beckoned the others to come down and pointed to it.
“It’s possible this is a bluff and Hopkirk is somewhere concealed in the cellar,” whispered Fisher.
“Unlikely,” Holmes replied. “Even with a weapon, he cannot hope to overcome all four of us, and his only means of escape without doing so is through the cave system.” He turned to Simeon Forward. “Where do the caves come out?” he asked.
Forward scratched his head and considered the question. “All over,” he said eventually. “There’s a dozen places within two miles of this spot where a man can walk out onto solid ground.”
“Then we’ve no time to waste,” said Fisher.
He pushed past Holmes and me, but Forward put out a hand to stop him. “Careful, policeman,” he said. “Rushing about in the catacombs is a quick way to an early grave.”
We followed him into the cellar and approached the open door. The smell of wet rock coming from the darkness was strong, and I felt myself shiver as I stepped over the threshold.
The ground was dry underfoot, but even in the flickering torchlight, I could see a thin sheen of water running down the wall to my right and disappearing into a crack at its base. To the left, the sloping passageway we had entered continued for twenty feet, then was lost in the darkness.
“Wait,” Simeon Forward said, directly in front of me, as he fiddled with a bracket bolted to the rock face. A second later, a flame sputtered fitfully into life, then steadied and cast its warm glow in a pool around us. Ten feet further on, another light blinked into being, and beyond that another and, I assumed, so on for some distance.
“Gas lights were the first thing we put in,” Forward explained, but I was no longer paying attention. Instead I was staring down at the suitcase at my feet. The lock had obviously been broken, and it lay open, its contents spilled on the wet ground.
Holmes too had noticed the discarded case. He knelt down and tugged a heavy scarlet tunic from the heap of spilled clothing. There was no doubt it had belonged to Alim Salah. An image of a snake coiled round a ruby stamped on the lid of the case merely confirmed that we had found the dead man’s missing luggage.
Forward was uninterested in our discovery, however. He moved ahead along the passageway until it opened up into a wider cavern. Gesturing for us to wait where we were, he slowlyc inched along the wall, keeping his back pressed firmly against the stone. As we watched, he lit a match then reached along the wall with his left arm. A second later, a light flared into life, and we had our first real view of the Thorpe catacombs.
We were standing, we discovered, at the entrance to a cave, which stretched into darkness high above us. Forward stood to our left, part way along a narrow pathway, no more than four feet at its widest, which ran round the perimeter of the cavern in both directions. Iron poles, three feet high and with a circular hoop at their top, were spaced every six feet along the edge of the path, suggesting that once a rope barrier had been intended to prevent unwary travellers from stumbling over the edge. Of the rope, if it had ever been put in place, there was no sign. No force on earth would have convinced me to go close enough t
o the edge to judge the depth of the cavern, but Forward saw me looking and provided an answer to my unspoken question.
“It’s as deep as it is high, Doctor, and there’s no soft landing,” he called over quietly. “So, all of you, follow me, one at a time, and keep close to the wall.” He crouched down and examined something we could not see.
“Your man’s been this way. There’s blood on the ground,” he said as he rose to his feet. He took a step towards us – and fell to the ground as a shot rang out.
In an instant, Holmes and Fisher had ducked back down the pathway from which we had come but I, a little further ahead, had no time to do so. Without the option to stay where I was, I threw myself to my right, away from Forward and onto the dark section of perimeter path. In my terror of the drop, however, I misjudged its width. I collided hard with the wall, now on my right-hand side, and bounced away from it, pitching me towards an undoubtedly deadly fall. I landed on the ground with my head and one shoulder hanging over the abyss, and was only saved from plunging to my death by one of the iron poles, which collided with my midriff and round which I gratefully wrapped myself.
I lay there for a second, attempting to quiet my breathing, then pulled myself wholly on to the path and rolled against the relative safety of the rock wall. A large boulder had fallen from the roof at some point in the past half century and I swiftly scuttled behind it. From the security of its shadow I glanced across at Forward, hoping he had not been too badly hurt. But there was nobody in the circle of light cast by the lantern he had most recently lit. I was sure that he had not fallen over the edge, and he could not have crawled back towards Holmes and Fisher. I turned my face from the light and allowed my eyes to become accustomed to the dark, then closed them and slowly moved my head in an arc so that when I reopened them I was staring into the blackness on the other side of the lantern’s glow. Sure enough, I could just make out a long, low section of shadow, which was slowly edging along the ground, moving further into the catacombs.
Holmes had evidently seen it too, for rather than make any attempt to outflank Hopkirk (not that I could think of a way in which he could, given the captain’s unknown position and possession of a firearm), he shouted out to him.
“Captain Hopkirk!” he called. There was no reply. “Captain Hopkirk!” he repeated, with identical result.
The shadow, which I presumed to be Forward, had disappeared out of sight, and I wondered if Holmes would cease his attempts to engage Hopkirk in conversation. In the silence, however, I heard the sound of a small rock falling somewhere in the dark corners of the cavern. Whether it was Hopkirk or Forward who had dislodged it, it could not be good news, for one indicated that the captain was on the move and we might easily lose him, and the other, if overheard by our quarry, might mean the death of the elderly villager.
Holmes evidently thought the same, for suddenly he stepped into the light and shouted “Hopkirk! We have you trapped!” then dived full length towards me. A bullet slapped into the wall near where he had recently stood and then ricocheted away, followed by another, which clipped the rock behind which I crouched, just as Holmes joined me.
“That was rather too close for comfort,” he panted, smoothing back his hair. “The captain, for all his other military failings, is obviously an excellent shot, even when wounded.”
“Why didn’t you stay where you were, Holmes?” I snapped, irate at his apparent foolhardiness, but I should have known there would be method in his madness.
“Simeon Forward is getting closer to Hopkirk by the minute, and it is essential that we continue to hold the captain’s attention until he is in a position to overcome him. We must each keep on the move so he cannot be sure how many people are down here. In that way, Forward may get his opportunity.”
“Fisher knows this too?” I asked, and Holmes nodded.
“He does. In a moment, I shall return to my original position while he runs in this direction. As soon as he gets here you must make a dash for that kink in the wall—” He indicated a spot fifteen yards farther along where the wall bent back on itself, creating a small, enclosed section of path. “There is a lantern directly above it. Light that if you can, and then wait there.” He laid a hand on my arm. “Be quick though, Watson. We have no idea how much ammunition Hopkirk has and, even at this distance, he will not miss his shot for ever.”
There was no need for the reminder. I had been under fire before, but it was not an experience that became more enjoyable with repetition. “And you,” I said, as he counted to five and then thrust himself away from our shelter and into the line of fire. Simultaneously, Fisher did the same from the other side. Two quick shots rang out and the inspector was spun round just as he passed Holmes. Without breaking stride, Holmes grabbed the wounded man under the arms and continued to run, reaching the sanctuary of the sheltered entryway.
There was no time to consider my actions. I rose to my feet and sprinted as well as I could in the direction of the kink in the rock wall. The gradient in this direction was uneven and the ground wet and I slipped almost immediately, half pitching forward and grazing my palms as I used my hands to prevent myself falling entirely. It was fortunate I did, for a bullet smacked into the wall directly above me, exactly where I would have been standing were it not for my stumble. I reached safety just in front of another bullet, which whipped past me and rebounded off the rock surface, to who knew where.
As the echo of the shots died away, a peculiar stillness came over the cavern. I could hear Fisher groaning and Holmes urging him to be quiet and, faintly, water running somewhere far off. The air was cold and there was a slight breeze, and the ever-present smell of wet rock was overpowering in the enclosed nook in which I found myself.
I remembered Holmes’s instruction to light the nearest lantern and struck a match.
As though the match scraping along sandpaper was a signal, the cavern exploded into life. Suddenly, the dead air was filled with the sounds of a furious struggle.
What I recognised as Hopkirk’s voice gave a cry of alarm, instantly cut off. Small stones skittered and bounced against the rock face opposite and tumbled into the abyss. A bellow of rage echoed around us, and then Forward’s voice called out that we should make our way towards him.
I was doing no good where I was, so I darted from my shelter and ran round the pathway, with Holmes following on my heels a moment later. The long curve of the cavern ended in a small chamber with a low stone wall at one end, which looked out over the dark chasm and towards the spot at which we had originally entered the catacombs. The effect was reminiscent of a box at the theatre, where the show, for a few dangerous minutes, had been performed by Holmes, Fisher and myself.
Captain Hopkirk sat with his back against the rock face, both hands pressed to a dark stain on his left trouser leg, just below his waist. A dirty gash on his forehead testified to Constable Cairns’ dying truncheon blow. Simeon Forward stood a few feet away from him, a revolver in his hand. As Holmes stepped into the chamber and held up the lantern he had stopped to retrieve, Forward held the gun at arm’s length.
“There’s no bullets left in it,” he declared. “And there’s no fight left in this one, either.”
I walked towards Hopkirk, but he pulled himself, groaning, to his feet as I did so, and placed one foot on the low wall. “Take another step closer, old man, and I’ll be forced to do myself in,” he gasped in short breaths. “There’s nothing you can do in any case, Doctor. The artery’s cut or some such. Even I’m enough of a soldier to know that’s me done for.”
He pulled the bottom of his bloodstained waistcoat down to straighten its lines, and reached into his jacket. I saw Forward stiffen and begin to move, but Hopkirk pulled out only a silver case and a box of matches. He lit one of his stinking cigarettes, then let the case fall to the ground.
“I’d offer you one,” he said, “but that was my last.” He laughed, but there was the sound of bubbling blood in it, and it quickly turned into a cough. “No Inspect
or Fisher, I see,” he said once he had recovered. “Did I do for him then? Not bad shooting with a revolver in the dark, you have to admit, eh?”
“The inspector is wounded in the arm, but he will make a full recovery,” Holmes informed him quietly. He laid the lantern down on the floor between himself and Hopkirk. “As you rightly say, however, you will not. With that in mind, perhaps we might discuss recent events?”
From his tone of voice, Holmes might as easily have been discussing the price of tobacco or the latest play in the West End, and Hopkirk replied with a similar lack of drama.
“A deathbed confession, eh? How I killed my old batman for messing up our plans and murdered an innocent policeman as I tried to escape?” Hopkirk inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then flicked the glowing butt into the chasm. He watched it spiral down and disappear in the darkness, then turned his attention back to Holmes. “A chance to tell my side of the story for the benefit of the readers of The Strand? Is that what you have in mind, Mr Holmes?” He shook his head. “Sadly, there is no ‘my side’ to tell. I am exactly what I appear to be – a lazy man and a bad one, probably, with a taste for expensive things and no particular desire to work for them. Could you make much of that, do you think, Dr Watson? Could you make your readers feel sympathy for me? Or would I be one of your black-hearted villains, another Charles Augustus Milverton?” He smiled and cocked an eyebrow in amusement. “I lied about that, too. I have read your stories, old man.”
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes--Sherlock Holmes and the Crusader's Curse Page 22
