Sherlock Holmes (27 page)

“And what’s in it for me?”

“Spoken like a true pressman. By way of an incentive, once Holmes has accomplished his goal, he will grant you an hour-long, one-to-one interview during which you may ask him any questions you like. However personal or impertinent their nature, he will answer them with absolute frankness.”

Slater’s tongue darted out to lick his lips. He jotted further shorthand notes. “How obliging of him. I daresay our paper’s readership would lap that up. Forgive the scepticism, but where’s the catch?”

“The catch?”

“Come off it, doctor. I wasn’t born yesterday. He’s up to something, isn’t he? He wouldn’t all of a sudden be getting cosy with me if he didn’t stand to profit by it.”

“Your choice, Slater,” I said, gathering up my coat. “Take it or leave it. Plenty of other journalists I could approach. This pub is full of them. I could throw a stone and hit someone who’ll snap up the opportunity I’m handing you.”

“But Mr Holmes doesn’t do interviews. He’s shy of publicity. Doesn’t even take credit for half the cases he solves.”

“All that means is that your piece on him will have an even greater impact.”

“Why me, though? Why, of all people, the man who regularly criticises him?”

“To show he’s unafraid. To meet your hostility head-on.” I turned as if to leave. “You’d better hurry, Slater, if you’re going to take me up on this. Holmes wishes his challenge to the Engine be announced as soon as possible. Your deadline for copy is tonight, isn’t it?”

“Ten p.m.”

“Then there’s still time for you to cobble something together. Do that, get your article in this Saturday’s edition, and the interview is yours.”

As I headed for the exit, I heard rapid footfalls behind me. My hand stole to my pocket, ready to draw my pistol.

I did not need it. Slater shouldered past me with a perfunctory, mumbled apology and barged through the door. By the time I got outside, he was halfway down the street, hastening in the direction of the Strand.

“Hook, line and sinker,” I said to myself.

I prayed that Holmes had gauged his move correctly and we hadn’t just handed the initiative back to the opposition. We needed Moran and his master rattled but not to the point where they resorted to drastic measures. They were to know that we were gunning for them, but must not know how.

Slater was running to reach the
Illustrated London News
offices, but I also hoped that, if he was Moran’s master and our true adversary, he was running scared.

Holmes crouched beside one of the fanlight windows that provided the Thinking Engine chamber with illumination during the hours of daylight. In his hands was a jemmy, the tip of which he inserted between the window frame and its setting.

“Hold that light steady, if you will, Watson.”

I focused the beam from his pocket lantern onto the spot where he was working. The window itself was a solid artefact of metal, lead and glass, but it was embedded none too securely in the mortar surrounding it. By dint of levering the jemmy around its rim, Holmes soon began to pry it loose.

I glanced about, eyes peeled and ears pricked. We were in a courtyard on the St Giles’ side of the University Galleries, to reach which we had climbed onto a low wall and vaulted the railings surmounting it. I tried to shield the lantern’s glow with my body, lest it catch the eye – and arouse the suspicions – of a passing pedestrian. At this time of night, there was every chance that such a pedestrian would be a policeman out on patrol. Had it been term-time we would have had Proctors and Bulldogs to worry about as well, so at least the odds of being apprehended by the authorities were partially reduced.

Bells chimed in the dark, heralding midnight. The peals came from Oxford’s score of chapels and churches, all seemingly vying with one another to announce the time, in prolonged concatenation, near and far. Loudest and lengthiest was the monotonous song of Great Tom, the bell in the gate tower at Christ Church which every day at that hour tolled 101 times in commemoration of the number of scholars who enrolled at the college when it was founded. This lasted twenty minutes and helped cover the noise Holmes was making as his efforts with the jemmy became more strenuous. Not for nothing had he chosen precisely this time of night to effect our break-in.

The jemmy kept grinding, mortar crumbled, and then at last, with a screech, the fanlight window came free. Holmes caught it with a deft hand.

“We have ingress,” he said. “Come, Watson.”

He slithered through the semi-circular aperture, down into the Thinking Engine chamber. I picked up the knapsack he had brought and lowered it in after him. He took it from me, then bade me follow.

During some of our investigations in the past, Holmes and I had engaged in practices which might not strictly be considered illicit but which certainly nudged at the boundaries of legality. My friend was not above bending the law when it suited his purposes.

What we were doing now, however, was a flagrantly criminal act: breaking and entering, with intent to steal. If discovered, we would have little hope of justifying or excusing ourselves. No court in the land would exculpate us on the grounds that it was all for the greater good; no jury would take pity on us. A hefty jail sentence would be warranted.

Thus I hesitated, feeling that by passing through the window I would be irrevocably crossing a line. Here was a moral Rubicon.

“What are you waiting for?” Holmes said from below. “We haven’t got all night.”

“I’m not sure—”

Holmes cut me off abruptly. “This is no time for cold feet, man. I said I’d be asking a lot of you. I explained what was in store. You consented. Back out now, by all means, but don’t expect ever to be held in my full esteem again.”

“Oh I say, that’s rather harsh,” I declared, but Holmes had touched on a truth. How could I look him in the eye hereafter, having failed him at a crucial moment?

I thought I heard the shade of Mary Watson, née Morstan, tutting heavily as I slid feet first, backwards, through the window.

“A… tight fit…” I gasped.

Holmes grabbed my legs and pulled, making some disparaging comment about my girth which I affected not to hear. With him manhandling and me wriggling, we managed to insinuate me into the room, on whose floor I landed with something less than balletic grace.

The Thinking Engine hulked at the far end of the chamber, a bristling geometrical silhouette in the gloom. The odours of grease and metal were strong as ever, and strong, too, was the sheer presence of the thing. Though silent, the machine seemed pregnant with potential noise, the thrumming racket which lay latent in those myriad moving parts. As I stared at it, I was overcome by the impression that it might spontaneously spring into life. Worse, it might speak, addressing Holmes and me in those uncanny, halting quasi-sentences. I felt as one might in a room full of marionettes or clockwork automata, well aware that they were inanimate but nonetheless afraid that at any moment they would start to move of their own accord, impelled by some hideous otherworldly force. It was not a rational fear, but that did not make it any less potent.

“Watson? Are you planning to stand there forever, gawping? We’ve work to do.”

I started at the sound of Holmes’s voice, then shook off the creeping apprehension. I nodded. “Yes. Work to do.”

Holmes shouldered the knapsack, which clanked with larceny-related paraphernalia, and made his way out of the chamber and up into the main body of the museum. I of course went with him, not displeased to be leaving the proximity of the Engine.

As we tiptoed up the staircase, I reflected on the fact that this was the second time in as many months that Holmes and I had been nocturnal visitors in a museum. At least during our previous escapade – unravelling the mystery of the revenant Pharaoh Djedhor – we had been granted permission to be there. This time we were intruders, little better than common thieves.

Holmes had ascertained beforehand that the University Galleries boasted but a single nightwatchman, one who, it had been established, was far from being the most conscientious exponent of his trade. Holmes, while spying on him as he settled in for his duties at closing time the previous-but-one evening, had observed a bulge in his jacket pocket corresponding in size and shape to a hip flask. In addition, he had followed him home from the museum the next morning and noted that he appeared well rested, much as someone would who had slept the night through rather than diligently staying awake and making his rounds. Indeed, the lackadaisical watchman did not go to bed when he reached his house on Osney Island but instead set about energetically weeding his front garden, then took himself to the pub for lunch.

“I don’t think we have much to worry about where he is concerned,” Holmes had said, but just to be sure we peeked into the entrance hall, where the watchman’s booth was situated. As anticipated, the booth’s occupant was fast asleep in his chair, feet up, arms folded, snoring softly. His hip flask sat on the desk in front of him, uncapped, beside an unlit oil lamp.

Skirting the hall, we negotiated a path through the building, through room after room housing Elias Ashmole’s extensive collection of Raphael drawings, pre-Dynastic Egyptian artefacts, Minoan sculpture, Anglo-Saxon treasures and majolica pottery. To this had been added Old Masters, bas-reliefs, tablets, swords, coins, statuary and papyri bequeathed by other benefactors such as John Tradescant, along with unique oddities such as the death mask of Oliver Cromwell and the lantern used by Guy Fawkes during the Gunpowder Plot.

Amongst this gallimaufry of treasures, our goal was a golden chain, kept under glass before a portrait of its erstwhile owner, none other than Ashmole himself. The portrait, painted in 1681 by John Riley and set in an ornate gilt frame carved by Grinling Gibbons, showed its subject resplendent in full-bottomed wig and rust-red velvet coat, posing beside a leather-bound book on the Order of the Garter, which stood on end with the selfsame golden chain snaking about its base. Antiquary, astronomer, astrologer and alchemist, Ashmole had been a highly influential man in his day, qualities captured in the haughty stare with which he transfixed the viewer and the emblems of eminence surrounding his likeness.

Holmes paused briefly before the portrait, as though in reverence, one accomplished polymath paying his respects to another. Then he turned his attention to the lock which secured the display case. Producing a set of picks and torsion wrenches, he made short work of it, while I again held the lantern to shed light on his labours and tried not to think how, with every passing second, I was sinking deeper into a swamp of transgression as sucking and relentless as Dartmoor’s Great Grimpen Mire. Yes, we were not planning to hold on to Ashmole’s golden chain indefinitely. Yes, we would return it as soon as was convenient. This was not so much a robbery as a necessitous borrowing. We did not stand to profit financially from the deed in any way. All the same, we were committing a felony. There was no denying it.

The case door opened, and Holmes fished out the chain from within and passed it to me for safekeeping. I installed it in the left-hand pocket of my overcoat, where it sat in almost perfect counterweight to the revolver in the right-hand pocket.

From the knapsack Holmes then produced a replacement chain which he had commissioned from Oxford’s premier forger of valuables, paying over the odds in order to guarantee timely delivery of the item. The forger had used a print of the portrait as his guide in creating the replica, which matched the original exactly, link for intricate link.

Holmes arranged the counterfeit chain in the same position the real one had sat in, then closed and refastened the door. He surveyed the substitution and gave a satisfied grunt. The fake chain was made of copper with a minimal amount of gold blended in to give it the requisite aureate lustre. An expert would spot the difference in a trice, but to the untrained eye it looked the part.

The worst was over. All we had to do now was make our exit from the museum the same way we had come in. I allowed myself to think that we were going to pull off the theft successfully, without coming to grief.

Beside me, Holmes stiffened.

“Watson,” he hissed. “Did you hear that?”

I had heard nothing except the throbbing of my pulse in my ears. “No. What was it? The watchman?”

“I don’t know. No. He would be using his lamp. Quick! Douse the light.”

I closed the pocket lantern’s cover and turned down the wick until the flame was extinguished. In the ensuing darkness – made all the darker by the sudden absence of artificial illumination – I strained my eyes, looking for movement. All I could see were the shapes of the exhibits, their edges limned by the faint streetlamp glow coming in around the window shutters.

“Holmes,” I whispered, after standing stock still and barely daring to breathe for at least a minute, “are you sure you weren’t mistaken?”

There was no reply.

“Holmes? Holmes? Holmes!”

I scanned to the left and right, then behind me. Of my companion there was no sign. He must have stolen off while I was preoccupied staring into the dark. If a foe was present – if, God forbid, Sebastian Moran was in that very room with us – Holmes evidently was trying to outflank him. I only wished he could have warned me that he was going to leave my side. I supposed that he feared any sound at all, even a few murmured words, might have given away his intentions.

I slipped the revolver out of my pocket and cocked it as noiselessly as I could. Gun held to the fore, I began to move, going slowly not just for reasons of stealth but also to avoid accidentally bumping into any of the exhibits.

In this fashion, painstakingly, half blind, I travelled from room to room, encountering no one until I reached the entrance hall. The watchman was still there, pursuing his endeavours as assiduously as ever. If anything, his sleep was deeper, his snores more stentorian, than before.

I padded past his booth, debating whether or not I should wake him. Assuming there was an intruder on the premises – another, that is, besides myself and Holmes – ought I not to alert the museum’s official guardian and enlist his aid? It would be good to have an ally, someone to share my burden of anxiety.