Title Page
Sherlock Holmes
THE PEARL OF DEATH AND OTHER EARLY STORIES
GC Rosenquist
Publisher Information
Published in the UK in 2015 by
MX Publishing
335 Princess Park Manor
Royal Drive,
London, N11 3GX
www.mxpublishing.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2015 GC Rosenquist
The right of GC Rosenquist to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious or used fictitiously. Except for certain historical personages, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not of MX Publishing.
Cover design by www.staunch.com
Dedication
Dedicated to my dad
The Pearl of Death
Holmes and I were first made aware of the theft of the Pearl of Death by means of the front page of the Friday morning London Gazette.
The sole property of the Philippine government, it had secretly come in to the Shadwell docks on a steamer named the Valiant for the purpose of display in the National Gallery. The Pearl of Death was a giant natural pearl, the largest ever discovered, coming to some fifteen pounds in weight and over nine inches in diameter. It was found in the throat of a giant oyster that resided in the waters around the Philippine island of Palawan. The diver that first set eyes on the pearl drowned when the cockles of the mighty mollusk closed in on his hand as he reached for it and, the Gazette explained, every owner of the pearl since had died under mysterious circumstance, perhaps by means of an inexplicable curse. Hence the name, Pearl of Death.
“Bah!” I exclaimed from my chair across from Holmes, in our comfortable parlour on 221b Baker Street. “If this pearl is such a horrible thing, why should it come to England?”
“It’s a rarity, Watson,” Holmes answered, his eyes never leaving the lines of text on the paper. Blue tufts of scented smoke came up from the button of a pipe that hung from his thin mouth. “It’s unique. People have never seen a pearl the size of a man’s head before. And the hint of a silly curse makes it all the more tantalizing.”
“So you make nothing of the curse then?”
“Of course not, Watson. And neither should you. Belief in a curse is the sign of a low thinking, superstitious man. We are not in the dark ages any more, my friend.”
I nodded in agreement. “So what could a bloody thing like that be worth?”
Holmes read on for a moment, then answered: “It says here it has been appraised at three and a half million pounds.”
“Good god, Holmes!” I thundered, nearly swallowing my morning cheroot.
Holmes glanced up at me and grinned. “Quite, my dear Watson. I expect we’ll be getting the call from Scotland Yard any moment now.”
As if his words were an actor’s prompt in a play, our landlady Mrs. Hudson, opened the door and informed us that Detective Inspector Lestrade from Scotland Yard has arrived and was asking for an audience.
***
It was a surprisingly easy task to track down the Pearl of Death once Holmes put his exceptionally swift deductive talents to the test. The difficulty came in actually securing it.
The first thing Holmes and I did was to take a cab for the Shadwell district in the East End, where the docks were, to talk to the captain of the Valiant. It appeared that the Pearl of Death was too large to fit in the ship’s safe so the Captain ordered that it be placed in a non-descript leather shoulder bag and stored down in the storage compartment with the other items of trade. It was his opinion that the more it resembled everything else down there, the less chance it would be recognized and pinched. He had been proven incorrect in his assertion and now he stood before us, hunched over and perspiring as if a ton of great worry had been lowered upon his shoulders. He was surely to be relieved of duty, and possibly thrown in prison, should the pearl never be recovered.
Holmes asked for and received the crew manifest whereas he promptly noticed that only one crew member hadn’t signed out for forty-eight hour liberty, Joseph Wayne Thornwald.
“That’s our man!” Holmes said confidently.
“But are you sure, Mr Holmes?” the Captain asked.
“Criminals often display tunnel vision while committing their crimes, they forget to perform even the most rudimentary tasks that would forever cover their tracks. That’s what happened here. The absence of his signature on the liberty manifest is as good as a confession.”
“If you are correct,” the Captain began. “Take great care when approaching him, for he is a man of monstrous height, temper and strength. He’s been our best coal stoker for ten years.”
“There is the motive for the crime, Captain,” Holmes said. “Ten years is a long time to shovel coal into the hellish boiler furnaces of a trade steamer. Thornwald saw the pearl as a chance to make a single monetary windfall that would set him up for life, free him from his daily purgatory. And considering the fact that the storage compartments are one level above the boiler rooms, Thornwald had ample knowledge and opportunity to pinch the pearl. Rest easy, Captain, we’ll get the pearl back and you’ll be spared imprisonment.”
Once outside we took a cab back to the financial district of Central London, to the establishments of five possible black market buyers Holmes was familiar with, only one of which acknowledged he’d met the aforementioned Joseph Thornwald. The buyer, recognizing the pearl, realizing it had been stolen and knowing its true value, had turned Thornwald down cold. No one, it seemed, was willing to pony up the three and a half million pounds for the chance to die mysteriously by curse or risk being imprisoned. Thornwald was never going to be able to sell the pearl while in England so it became even more urgent for us to find him before he booked passage out of the country on a different East End steamer.
Holmes, more resolute than ever, put the dependable children of his Baker Street Irregulars on the case. A shilling to the one who discovered Thornwald’s location. So, all over the squalid rookeries and pubs of the East End an army of street urchins flitted about, asking questions, peeking into the windows of locals, frequenting pubs, while Holmes and I took up headquarters in the St Paul Church on Fox Lane. And it worked. In an hour, as Holmes and I were finishing a smoke, young Peter Lawson rushed into the church vestibule and told us that there was a freakishly big man wearing a leather bag around his shoulder, having a pint in The Red Rabbit, a pub on Little Spring Street not a stone’s throw from the church.
“The man is having a pint in a pub while holding a stolen object worth three and a half million pounds?” I asked incredulously. “The arrogance!”
“Not arrogance, my friend,” Holmes corrected. “Pure, unadulterated ignorance. I expected this. Must I remind you that Thornwald’s only skill and education has been in shoveling coal?”
Of
course, Holmes was right. He had a way of putting things clear in my mind that should have been obvious to me from the start.
“Peter,” Holmes called. The boy rushed up to him and Holmes put a hand on his small shoulder. “Go and fetch the constables that patrol this district. Tell them what you know.”
The small, dirty-faced boy held out an open hand and Holmes dropped two shillings into it, instead of one. The boy smiled in surprise,made a fist, turned and ran away on a pair of filthy bare feet.
“Hurry, Watson!” Holmes shouted as he checked the loaded chambers of his pistol. Then he rushed outside. “Our luck is hot, we must strike fast!”
***
“Give it up, Thornwald!” Holmes ordered, the barrel of his pistol was pointed at the unbelievably large man. “I don’t wish to shoot you, but I will if you force me to.”
We had chased Thornwald out of the pub, through the shabbiest alleys and dens of Shadwell and now had him cornered on the weathered roof of a brick tenement on New Street. I could see all of Shadwell from there, its landscape was black and jagged, like an old man’s teeth, under the darkening cherry red sky. Behind us, cutting through the black, jagged landscape like a glowing red ribbon of blood was the Thames. Sailing cutters with their sails down and steamers with their bellies empty of fire sat moored and quiet on both shores. Night was coming fast.
The roof was large and pitched slightly to the east, in some places it moved when stepped upon. I had distinct visions of falling through, killing myself five stories below. The roofs of the neighbouring tenements were shingle-covered A-frame structures and appeared just as dangerous.
There were communal chimneys made of aged red brick standing in each corner of our roof, the mortar between the bricks of each had dried out and cracked away in some places, giving the chimneys the warped look of a patient’s spine with scoliosis. Strung between the two chimneys on the east side was a thick clothesline where various bits of hosiery and undergarments hung, wafting lightly in the breeze. Pitting the roof every few feet, and probably further weakening it, sprouted the cylindrical metal tips of plumber’s vents. Above and behind us stood a massive water tower perched upon four wooden legs, each of which held the obvious signs of termite decay, it seemed to me the water tower could come down at any moment.
I tell you truthfully, I was more frightful of the roof than I was of the lumbering giant before us.
Thornwald stood there like a stone monolith, every bit of seven feet tall. His shoulders were massive, nearly as wide as he was tall, his thick, stump-like legs were spread apart, ready to spring. He wore a clean blue blouse, black opened vest and black breeches that fell effortlessly into a pair of shiny black leather boots. His hands hung suspended to his sides, fingers splayed open, capable of engulfing my whole head. His fingernails were ringed black with coke at the cuticles, the only clue that betrayed what his true vocation was. His muscular head was covered with short, sweaty, curled black hair and sat directly on his shoulders, dismissing the need for anything that resembled a neck. His eyes were dark and deep set, framed by a pair of thick, bushy eyebrows. His nose was long and proportional, his mouth thin but wide. Around steel cut jowls clung the brown leather straps belonging to the leather bag that carried the Pearl of Death.
Holmes, against my bitter prodding, took a step forward, his pistol still trained on Thornwald. “Look around you. There’s no escape,” he said. “Give me the pearl, Thornwald. I promise you a fair trial. You’ll be released and rehabilitated in five years.”
Thornwald’s eyes went from me, then to Holmes, then repeated the process. I could see the machinery clicking behind his eyes as he weighed every option of escape. A few minutes before, as we rushed up the stairs leading to the roof, Holmes suggested a bold plan of attack should Thornwald decide to fight us before the police arrived. He said that big men tire easy, they have no persistence in their general make-up, so we should cling to him like hungry children cling to their mother, add more weight to his already stressed frame. Then, when the time arrives, one of us should distract him while the other pinches the pearl. The plan seemed sound and in the absence of anything else, I went for it.
Well, Thornwald decided to fight us. In one stunningly quick and graceful movement, he brought his right hand about, grabbed up the leather bag and swung it forward, knocking the pistol from Holmes’ hand. The pistol spun through the air and disappeared down over the roof edge. We were so far up I couldn’t hear it hit the ground. It was then that I cursed at myself for forgetting to bring my service revolver.
I shot a quick glance at Holmes. His eyes were narrowed, his brows were together, a sly grin creased his thin face. He seemed to me the perfect picture of an eagle on the hunt. “Marvelous!” he exclaimed through a half-laugh, then he jumped up on to the giant, his arms locked securely around Thornwald’s protruding jowls.
In surprise, Thornwald stepped back, brought his hands up, grabbed Holmes by the waist and began pushing him away. But Holmes wouldn’t budge, his grip remained solid. They struggled for some seconds before I realized that Holmes was urging me on to do as he had done. I ran around and jumped on to Thornwald’s back, but the only thing my delicate doctor’s hands could gain purchase of was Holmes’ elbows. Thornwald released a series of strained grunts, his boots stomping heavily upon the uncertain surface of the roof as the three of us spun in wild circles. Then, one of those plumber’s vents got in Thornwald’s way and he tripped, sending us rolling upon the roof like spilled marbles.
When the three of us gained footing again, we found our positions had reversed. Thornwald was now standing in front of the deteriorated wooden legs of the water tower.
“Let’s ram him,” Holmes murmured into my ear.
“Ram him?” I repeated stupidly. “Are you mad, Holmes? Those wooden legs will snap like match sticks under Thornwald’s weight.”
Again, Holmes flashed that sly grin. “I’m counting on it, dear Watson. It will make for the perfect distraction,” he said then counted to three. We sprinted across the roof as fast as our young legs allowed, skillfully avoiding the trip traps of the plumber’s vents while doing so and when we hit Thornwald’s chest, our momentum was enough only to move him back one step. But that was enough. Thornwald backed into the northwestern leg of the water tower. It gave out an ear-splitting crack as it broke apart, then the lower portion of it spun and bounced upon the roof’s tarred surface. But, to my disbelief, the tower remained standing on its three remaining legs.
As Holmes and I got to our feet again, Thornwald looked up at the tower, let out a single victorious guffaw, then faced us, a dark leer tattooed on his face.
“What do we do now, Holmes?” I asked.
“Run at the tower, Watson,” Holmes replied. “Out of the way of the tsunami.”
I glanced at the tower, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere and I surely didn’t want to be in near proximity of that angry giant. Had Holmes committed a rare error? Noticing my reticence, Holmes grabbed my arm and pulled me forward. “Come on, man!” he shouted and I blindly ran after him.
Thornwald saw us coming and leaned forward, bracing for another attack, but Holmes took a wide path around him and laid his right shoulder into the northeast tower leg as he ran by. It came apart in a flash of splinters and wood dust, the bottom half of the leg joined the other severed remnant on the roof. Holmes and I ducked and rolled, smashing into the wall of the south side of the roof, almost directly under the water tower. Above us, the two remaining rear legs, unable to support the great weight of the water tower, snapped off in the middle, sounding like a pair of bullet blasts as the tower, holding thousands of gallons of collected rainwater, fell forward.
The normal tick of time appeared to slow as it came down. The rusty conical reservoir cap opened like a great yawning mouth, vomiting long, wide, heavy streams of fresh rainwater. Thornwald turned around and stared up at the oncoming doom, h
is face screwed into a mask of sheer horror, then some low part of the tower itself hit him in the head, he went down faster than the tower. When the tower hit the roof, it was like the detonation of a thousand pound explosion, the entire structure of the building shuddered under the impact. For a brief instant Holmes and I were thrown up into the air, nearly flying off the roof as we came down. On my hands and knees, I watched as the contents of the great water tower spilled out across the roof, the sound of rolling thunder filled my ears with such force I had to cover them with my hands. A great dark wave of immense proportions rolled forth, striking the brick wall of the north end of the roof, sweeping it away as if the bricks had been made of paper. The path of the rushing water continued forward, splashing on to the facing, shingled field of the A-frame roof of the neighboring tenement, where it exploded in a spray of white froth, spinning the weathered arms of a nearby weathervane, then fell some five stories to the ground. Hopefully, no one had been standing down there when it all came down.
Amazingly, those sick, twisted chimneys in the corner of the roof remained unharmed, catching some of the water runoff and sending it back our way where it swept across Thornwald’s limp body. The cool water must have had a reinvigorating effect on our quarry, because he started to moan and move his legs.
Holmes leapt to his feet, rushed over to the groggy giant and stripped him of the bag, then he put the straps around his neck and shoulder. Somewhere below, I heard panicked voices and police whistles echoing. Holmes, also alerted, went over to the side of the roof and waved at them. “Hurry up, Detective Inspector! Before this monster fully awakes!” he shouted.
But it was too late. As Holmes was shouting at Detective Inspector Lestrade, Thornwald had risen to his hands and knees, shook heavy beads of cool water from his curled locks and felt around for his precious bag. Realizing it was gone, he stood up, looked at me, noticed I didn’t have the bag, then turned back towards Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes Page 1
