Sherlock Holmes and Young Winston - The Jubilee Plot

by Mike Hogan

  “These documents, Mr Holmes, sir,” said Josiah in a business-like tone. “Should they be in Russian or French?”

  Holmes called across the stage to Mr Melas and repeated the question.

  “French, Mr Holmes,” said Mr Melas instantly. “The Russians subjugate their serfs in Russian; they whip them in Russian. Aristocrats and men of power communicate in the language diplomatique.”

  Josiah nodded. “I am thinking a personal note from Ambassador de Staal at the Russian Embassy to Captain Barshai of the steamer Biarritz. And a flimsy from some functionary at the embassy attached to a promissory note on the London and Counties Bank for a hundred pounds.”

  “So much?” I asked.

  “Let us not stint,” said Holmes airily. “Make it two hundred, in guineas.”

  “Now, passports,” Josiah continued. “I’m afraid that I cannot manage a Greek passport in the time, sir. What I can do is a pair of British passports that would fox Lord Salisbury himself. I have some suitable forms.” He shuffled through his sheets of velum and found several sheets ready-printed with the Royal Arms.

  “We’ll date the passport 1883,” said Josiah with a grin. “I’ll leave off the sixpenny stamp. The gentleman can say that the Russians faked it up for him, the hounds.”

  “Very well, Mr Wiggins,” said Holmes. “I see that I can leave the documents in your capable hands. And may I trespass on your time a moment more when you have finished? I have some interesting documents on which I would like your professional opinion.”

  I drew Holmes’ attention to a new arrival in the auditorium. The district nurse who had looked after Mrs Hudson earlier that year waved to me.

  “Ah, Nurse Levine,” Holmes said. “Thank you so much for answering our call. I would ask you to play Churchill’s nurse or nanny. His actual one is far too volatile or we would have included her. Perhaps you could join Mr Carte up here for a run through? You need say little until the final act.”

  Mr Carte sent the beginners off to costume and called for the players in Act Two.

  “Inspector Lestrade,” Holmes called. “Pray come up with your men and join in our little travesty. You will play a Scotland Yard detective. You must try to conceal your natural shrewdness and investigative acumen. You must pretend to be easily gulled and a little slow; you must pretend to be a plodder. Can you do that, Inspector?”

  “I will do my best, Mr Holmes,” said Lestrade looking doubtful.

  “A seedy detective, eh,” said Mr Carte as Lestrade led his constables onto the stage to a general round of applause. “Yes, I think your present attire may suffice. Your men look moderately authentic. They need not be too officious; they might lounge about, looking insouciant. We do not want to frighten our bird too early.”

  “Insouciant it is, sir,” said Lestrade. “I will apprise the constables.”

  Mr Carte drew the police to one side of the stage and ran them through their parts.

  The young man with the ginger curls appeared on stage again leading Mr Melas and Churchill. I found it hard to contain my laughter. A waxed Crown-Prince Wilhelm moustache with sharp, upturned points and a short goatee beard had replaced Mr Melas’ own moustache and beard. He wore a white, tight-fitting jacket, and grey pantaloons glittering with sequins. He carried two swords and had a dagger tucked into his stockings. On his head was a red fez.

  Churchill wore a similar outfit made more ludicrous by gold slippers with curled toes.

  “Tut, tut, Willy,” said Mr Carte after a moment of consideration. “Not one of your best efforts, I fear. They look like refugees from a Turkish bath.”

  “That’s where we got the clothes from, sir; the one in Mitre Street that closed.”

  “Ha!” cried Mr Melas. “Turkish!” He pulled off his fez and dashed it to the ground. He stamped on it and ripped his tunic across his breast with a wild cry in what I supposed was emphatic Greek.

  “Excellent, Monsieur Melas,” said Mr Carte, smiling. “I see that you are already in character. Frock coat and orders, Willy.”

  “Steamer trunk, is it Mr Carte?” he asked.

  “No, they left in a hurry. Just a couple of Gladstone bags. Fill them with clothes. Let them be untidy and hastily packed. Money: they’ll need cash. A roll of sovereigns perhaps, Mr Holmes, for grease (not the country, I mean palm oil)? We have a bag of farthings painted gold that might suffice.”

  Willy led Mr Melas and Churchill off the stage as the pageboy handed out glasses of brandy from a tray.

  “Let our cast assemble for dress rehearsal of Act One,” said Mr Carte. “Mr Melas, nurse, maid and son alight on the dock from a furiously driven four-wheeler. Mr Melas goes aboard and demands to see the captain. Madame Levine and the maid help the boy up the gangplank. Master Spencer-Churchill may cough; he has succumbed to the putrid exhalations of London.”

  Mr Melas mimed jumping from a cab. He now wore his own frockcoat and top hat with a scarlet sash across his breast covered in glittering orders and medals. He and Mrs Levine helped Churchill, clad in his sailor suit, out of the carriage. A young girl carried two bulging bags.

  “My dear Spencer-Churchill,” said Carte. “You may not swoon in such an eighteenth-century fashion; be a brave little trouper. Try to look a little more Greek.”

  Carte played the Captain. He and Mr Melas concluded their discussion and a heavy leather purse changed hands. The boy, Churchill, was hustled offstage to a cabin. After a short interval, the police arrived in the person of Inspector Lestrade and his men. His men lounged most effectively as Lestrade braced the captain and insisted on going aboard the ship. He said that they were searching all outbound vessels for a man and boy, with servants. He gave a poor description of the fugitives and was unclear regarding the reason that the Greeks were sought. Rebuffed by the Captain, he retired stage right.

  “Not too bad, considering,” said Mr Carte as he shrugged on his frock coat. “They’ll do. The police inspector is a natural. He has just the right ratty expression, and a perfect wheedling voice.”

  “I can’t thank you enough, Mr Carte,” said Holmes shaking his hand. “Not only for your directorial skills, but also for the loan of your theatre at this ungodly hour.”

  “The Queen, my dear fellow,” Mr Carte said with an airy wave. He took a fresh brandy from the tray and raised it in salute. “God bless her. Are you quite comfortable with the Third Act and Finale, sir?”

  “I believe so. I want it to be fresh. We will have a short run-through at the dock.”

  Carte nodded. “Break a leg, Mr Holmes.” He drank his brandy and strode out of the theatre to general applause as Mycroft Holmes arrived.

  “Ah, Brother,” said Holmes. “You know your part?”

  “I do, Brother. I am leaving immediately. I believe that if you can hold the Biarritz until noon, I will be able to gather enough members of the Judiciary, dead to the world and hung-over though they will be, to sign an order to detain and search her. If she sails before then, we are lost.”

  He marched to the door, then turned in the doorway. “You achieved your ambition after all, Sherlock,” he said with a sly smile.

  “Ambition, Brother?”

  Mycroft smiled again and left with the two Indian princes. I saw them to the entrance of the theatre and into a cab. I looked a question as Mycroft settled himself.

  “Sherlock wanted to be an actor at one point in his childhood, an actor manager, in fact. He likes to be in charge.”

  I waved goodbye as Wiggins passed me with his uncle. I shook their hands. “No change at the Russian Embassy, Doctor. The Life Guards is having a quiet smoke.”

  Holmes gave me a narrow look as I joined him again on stage. I said nothing.

  “Did you hear that Wiggins’ uncle refused to accept a fee, Watson? We are a noble race, from top to bottom. I shall send him a Dundee cake.”
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  Holmes darted on to the stage. “Gentlemen and ladies to the carriages outside. We will have a final rehearsal at the wharf.”

  I ushered everyone outside the theatre, then I remembered that I had left my gloves and stick on a bench at the side of the stage. I hurried back inside. The electric lights were extinguished, and an old woman was dousing the gaslights in the empty auditorium. A single forgotten spotlight lit a small section of the stage. As I stomped down the aisle, a blue-uniformed figure stepped into the limelight.

  Holmes lifted his arm to the gods.

  I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

  Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot;

  Follow your spirit: and upon this charge,

  Cry God for Victoria, England and Saint George!

  Just be yourself

  “What is my part, Holmes? I have not rehearsed.”

  We walked arm-in-arm across the Embankment towards the Thames. Holmes was dressed in a naval uniform I did not recognise.

  “You do not need to, old chap. You play yourself. Ah, here we are.”

  A steam launch waited at the pier. Two heavyset men in bowlers sat huddled at the stern. The engineer nodded to Holmes and we started downriver at an easy pace. He did not introduce the men and I was too tired to ask who they were.

  We passed under Waterloo Bridge, along the Embankment and slowed as we negotiated the congested steam packet wharf at London Bridge. The engineer did not increase speed until we were through the piers of the hideous opening bridge under construction at the Tower. Most contributors to the letters columns of the Times had expressed distaste for the design. It is as much a blot on the manly face of London as Monsieur Eiffel’s monstrous iron mast would be on the gentle visage of Paris.

  The hundreds of barges moored out from the southern, Bermondsey, side of the River created a logjam that narrowed the fairway. We clung to the northern bank, manoeuvring between cargo vessels and avoiding numerous skiffs and ferries.

  I must have dozed, as I woke with a start as the launch nudged against a small pier opposite the Surrey Docks at Wapping. Holmes and I stepped off. He pointed to a large paddle-wheel steamer berthed at a quay fifty yards downstream. We could see in the light of a blazing naphtha lamp that her gangplank was down.

  “Biarritz.”

  “Good Lord, Holmes. She is huge.”

  I followed him along the waterfront. We saw nobody on the dock. We ducked into an alley between two warehouses and crossed a railway line. A four-wheeler waited beside an empty signal box. Standing by it were Churchill, Mr Melas, Mrs Levine and the maid.

  Another carriage drew up and Lestrade and his constables alighted. Holmes lit a cigarette and checked his watch. “Two minutes.”

  He turned to Churchill. “Try to look sad.”

  Churchill instantly burst into tears.

  Holmes nodded, puffing on his cigarette. “Good.”

  “Oh, my dear fellow,” I said softly, putting my arm around the boy’s shoulder. “There is no need to be worried. I am sure that Holmes has everything in hand.”

  “I was thinking of my first school. I was unhappy there.”

  “Oh, well, you will be at Harrow next year. I am sure that will be great fun,” I said doubtfully.

  Holmes stamped out his cigarette half-smoked. He nodded to Mr Melas, and he and his group, including Churchill, boarded the cab. Holmes opened an official-looking briefcase and took out a brush, a tin and a small bottle of water. He poured the water over the cab horse’s back and shoulders. He opened the tin and stirred the contents with the brush.

  “Your shaving powder,” he murmured. “I got Billy to pick it up from home.” He applied the powder to the damp patches on the horse and produced a foam as if the horse had been driven hard and fast. The horse looked back at him with a puzzled expression and its ears flicked anxiously back and forth.

  “Very well,” he said to the driver. “Drive like fury.”

  The cab rumbled away, gaining speed as it followed the road curving across the railway tracks towards the dock.

  “We wait.” He lit another cigarette and passed me the packet.

  I imagined the scene at the Biarritz: Mr Melas striding up the gangplank followed by his ailing son and followers, his interview with the captain, the palm grease applied and a cabin procured. That was what I hoped was occurring.

  “What if there are no free cabins, Holmes?”

  “Melas will offer a further inducement for ship’s officers to double up and make one of their cabins available. I have done so myself on two occasions.”

  Holmes checked his watch. Lestrade watched him nervously. Holmes leaned towards him and whispered something in his ear that seemed to buck him up. He and his men climbed into their carriage and set off at a spanking pace, turning across the rails in a shower of sparks. They passed the empty four-wheeler coming back.

  The cabman reported that the Melas family had boarded the vessel and that he had seen nothing untoward. Holmes gave him another bottle of water and the man washed the foam from his horse.

  “So far so good, Doctor,” said Holmes. “We have given the Melas story some reinforcement. You are on in about twenty minutes. Yours is the crucial performance.”

  “What did you say to Lestrade, Holmes?”

  “He plays a seedy detective. I told him that the secret of great acting is to be yourself. It is almost dawn.”

  I heard a far-off screech and a woman ran across the tracks ahead of us. As she got closer, I saw that it was the maid who had been with Mr Melas. She ran up to us, panting.

  “Gawd love us,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice. “Anyone got a fag?”

  She looked at me and winked. I saw to my astonishment that under the rouge and powder was Willy, the costume attendant at the Savoy Theatre.

  “Monsieur Melas sends the maid for a doctor,” said Holmes. “His young son is feverish. She runs to the Port Authority Office.”

  I offered Willy a cigarette from Holmes’ pack.

  “Now, Doctor,” said Holmes, “what disease strikes the greatest fear into every man’s soul?”

  “The plague,” I said without hesitation.

  “We must therefore give Churchill the plague.”

  “Do you think that I carry plague-ridden rats about my person, Holmes?” I asked stiffly.

  “No, my dear fellow. Kindly instruct Mr Willy how he may simulate that dread disease with his paints.”

  I blinked. “I don’t understand. How will Churchill having the plague stop the ship from sailing? They will throw the Greeks off and depart on schedule.”

  “They will be in quarantine,” said Holmes.

  “Quarantine for a ship leaving a port?”

  “A new medical inspection agency for London Port was formed this year,” said Holmes. “The new regulations are not well known. I intend to trade on that uncertainty and make a departure inspection. I am an official of the newly formed London Port Sanitary Authority. You are a doctor co-opted to the Authority. You simply diagnose the plague, I am sent for and I issue a quarantine notice. Britain does not want the Russians to be infected with the plague. You know how much we regulate and nanny the world. I have the forms here, courtesy of Wiggins’ uncle Josiah.”

  “Holmes, a deliberate misdiagnosis? It is sailing close to the struck-off-the-medical-register wind. I am not sure -”

  “It is a play, Watson, a badinage. You are not you; you are Doctor Ambrose of the LPSA.”

  “I’m not at all sure -”

  “The Queen, Watson,” he said sternly.

  I sighed my own, almost Continental, sigh.

  “Very well.”

  Holmes pulled out his watch. He nodded to the cabman, and Willy and I climbed aboard the four-wheeler.

  Our
cab took off at a spanking pace, rattled over the railway lines and turned onto the wharf. We stopped at the gangplank of the Biarritz. Close to, the ship was even more massive than I had thought when I first saw her. Holmes and Willy followed me up the gangplank and onto the main deck of the ship. A young officer saluted us and ushered us up a steep ladder to the bridge, where an imposing Russian officer awaited us.

  Captain Barshai was everything I could have expected. He was well over six feet tall, and powerfully built. He had white hair under his cap, a large, white, spade beard and twinkling blue eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He shook my hand with a manly grip.

  “Good morning, Captain,” I said. “I am Doctor Ambrose of the London Port Sanitary Authority. Where is the lad?”

  He pulled out his watch and showed it to me. “We sail in forty-minutes, Doctor,” he said in heavily accented English. He gestured for me to follow the maid - Willy.

  Willy and I descended two decks down. The smell was a strange combination of coal, turpentine and stale tea. Willy opened the door of a starboard-side cabin and revealed Churchill on the lower of an arrangement of twin bunks, groaning softly. He grinned up at me and let out a long gasp of pain. Mr Melas sat in a desk chair with his legs crossed, smoking a cigar in a holder; he looked very Greek. Nurse Levine sat on a sofa quietly knitting.

  Willy pulled a box of make-up from a Gladstone bag and looked expectantly at me. I tried to recall my medical training of so many years ago.

  Fifteen minutes later, I made my way up on deck. The Russian Captain chatted with Holmes.

  “How long has that boy been aboard?” I asked the Captain in as stern a voice as I could manage.

  “One hour, or less,” the Captain answered.

  I shook my head. “Come with me.”

  Holmes and the Captain followed me down to the cabin. I instructed them to make masks from their handkerchiefs and I made a mask of my own. The Captain gave me an anxious look.

  “Do not enter the cabin; hold your breath,” I instructed as I opened the door. Churchill was still in bed, attended only by a white-faced Nurse Levine. On my nod, she pulled back the bedclothes.