Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (12 page)

What follows makes for sobering and disheartening reading. I am afraid that the men elected to the highest offices in the land spent the next hour and a half bellowing insults at one another across the Dispatch Box, none of them exhibiting anything approaching dignity or statesmanship. The tone of
Hansard
is invariably dry and factual, yet one can still, perusing these exchanges, detect the note of braying desperation in the parliamentarians’ voices. Had the stenographer been entitled to include exclamation marks in his transcription, I suspect they would have been littered liberally throughout.

Rarely have I seen a more conspicuous example of leaders failing to lead. The phrase “headless chickens” springs to mind. Accusations of incompetence and inertia were hurled willy-nilly back and forth across the chamber, and the level of vituperation and sanctimony from all parties was breathtaking. The upshot was that nothing was achieved beyond the airing of political grudges and some quite uncouth name-calling.

And if those who were supposed to be among the wisest in our country were acting like louts and yahoos, how could the general public be expected to behave any better?

That night will be remembered as one of the most shameful in British history. In all the major cities of England, Scotland and Wales, but particularly in London, mobs went on the rampage. The pelting rain and crashing thunder did not deter them. If anything it served to excite them to greater violence, as though Mother Nature was giving their activities her blessing by wreaking climatic havoc of her own.

Mostly it was the Irish who were on the receiving end of the mobs’ wrath. Businesses run by Irishmen, or simply bearing an Irish-sounding name, were attacked and ransacked. A butcher’s just round the corner from my house in Paddington was one such.

Mary had been buying our meat from Mr O’Flannery ever since we moved to the area, and by her account he had never been anything but courteous, obliging and honest. He was, for that matter, a Londoner born and bred, though his parents hailed from Dublin. This mattered naught to the frightened, enraged men and women who took to the streets armed with crowbars, pokers, rolling pins and other implements. All Irishmen were Fenians as far as they were concerned, and all Fenians terrorist murderers, and so O’Flannery’s shop was broken into, the windows smashed, the fixtures and fittings reduced to kindling, and the produce looted. Not content with that, someone then set fire to the premises, and O’Flannery and his family, cowering in their flat above, managed to escape being burned alive by leaping from a second-storey window onto a mattress they threw into the back yard. O’Flannery’s wife fractured her ankle but, thankfully, all of them survived.

Countless similar stories unfolded across the capital, and across the country, and it was not only those who were purportedly or genuinely Irish who suffered. In some places Jews were singled out as the likely culprits, and Blacks, and Chinamen; in fact anyone who was deemed not sufficiently “British” for some reason or other. The bombers, it seemed, could be just about anybody – a neighbour, that fellow across the road who seldom left the house, that suspicious-looking chap with the shifty eyes and the hint of a foreign accent, he had radical-leftish sympathies, and wasn’t he a vegetarian too? A queer sort. Just the type to be hoarding dynamite in his basement and plotting the overthrow of the government.

The irony is blindingly obvious. The bombers might have some specific political aim, some point to make, but it was clear that their principal agenda was to sow discord and set Briton at odds with Briton. In which case, the mobs were helping them achieve their goal admirably. People were playing right into their hands.

A proper, better response would have been not to react at all, to remain calm and indifferent, to go about one’s affairs as though nothing untoward was happening. That, I would submit, is the one way ordinary folk can resist the tactics of extremist seditionaries.

As it was, a herd mentality prevailed, and the bombers were handed a victory. The whole nation was in uproar. Fear meant that few were thinking clearly or rationally. We had taken it for granted that ours was a civilised society built on rock-solid underpinnings, but that had now been cast into question, the foundations seeming more fragile than we had thought. All at once Britain appeared imperilled, and that in itself was the greatest peril facing us, for the perception of danger was spawning the actuality of it.

The next morning, in the aftermath of that night of countrywide mass hysteria, Holmes and I found ourselves back in Moorgate, in an alley which ran behind a row of tenement buildings. The storm had passed, the rain had ceased, and a pewter-grey sky hung above the city, the sun valiantly attempting to peek through the overcast.

With us was Inspector Lestrade and one of his sergeants, a certain Bryant. At our feet lay a corpse.

The body was that of a flaxen-haired woman known to both Holmes and myself.

The Abbess.

In life, she had been lusty and lascivious. Dead, she was sad and pitiable, as the dead so often are. Rainwater had pooled in the sockets of her eyes, which were now dulled and fish-like. Her rouged lips were fixed in an everlasting cry of dismay. Her sodden dress clung to her ample frame in a clammy embrace. I had not warmed to the woman, but in no way had she deserved this cruel fate, dying alone in the mud of a filthy alley. Few do.

Holmes crouched beside her remains, inspecting them minutely. He looked tired and drawn, even more gaunt than usual. I recognised the symptoms. He was in one of his manic phases, so utterly consumed by an investigation that he neglected the basic necessities of eating and rest. I doubted he had slept more than a couple of hours since we last parted. He was subsisting on raw nervous energy alone.

“Death would appear to have come from a crushing blow to the upper thoracic,” said Holmes, feeling the body carefully. “Would you not concur, doctor?”

I knelt and examined her too. There was a deep concavity in the front of her chest, centred around the manubrium. Broken ribs gave to the touch with a palpable crackle.

“The absence of visible blood suggests a penetrating wound to the heart rather than, say, the lungs,” I said. “Fatal traumatic cardiac arrest would have resulted. In other words, she would have died more or less instantly.” I offered this as though it were some consolation.

“No other bruising or breakage,” said Holmes. “No evidence of defensive wounds, either.”

“Meaning she didn’t see the attack coming?” said Lestrade.

“Or wasn’t expecting it, which is not quite the same thing. I would be able to tell you more, but that wretched storm has obliterated every last scrap of evidence. I can find no footprints, no physical traces, nothing. All washed away by the rain.”

“I’ve been into the knocking shop and interviewed the dollymops,” said Sergeant Bryant, nodding to the rear of the nearest house. At various of the windows, distraught female faces could be seen peering out at us from behind curtains and blinds. “They report that the Abbess stepped outside around midnight.”

“In the storm?” I said.

“Apparently she had a rendezvous with someone. None of the girls know whom. Some prearranged clandestine meeting.”

“When did they first become aware that she had not returned?” Holmes asked.

“Not until first light. It was, by all accounts, a busy night. Plenty of comings and goings.”

“What?” I said. “With everything else that was happening?”

“You would be surprised, Dr Watson,” said Lestrade. “Trade at a place like the Abbess’s isn’t affected by social unrest or the vagaries of the weather. Clients will visit come hell or high water. Their urges know no bounds.”

“Needless to say, none of the girls saw or heard a thing,” said Sergeant Bryant. “What with the storm in full spate, it’s hardly surprising. It was only at daybreak that one of them ventured outside and found her.”

“If you ask me,” said Lestrade, “this is the handiwork of Baron Cauchemar.”

“I seldom do ask you, Inspector,” said Holmes. “However, on this occasion I’m moved to enquire how you arrive at that conclusion.”

“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? Cauchemar takes a dim view of anyone who breaks the law of the land. The Abbess is just the latest in a line of his victims. He sneaked up on her and slew her without mercy, in cold blood.”

“‘Sneaking up’ is hardly Cauchemar’s thing. But, more to the point, he hasn’t killed before.”

“There’s always a first time. It could be that he never meant to kill the Abbess. She was more physically delicate than he thought, or else he hit her harder than intended. That, or this is something he has been working up to over the past few weeks. Not content with dishing out beatings any more, he has taken it to the next level. It is often the way, in my experience. Killers don’t become killers just overnight. They evolve into the role. An apprenticeship in petty violence, graduating to murder, that’s how it goes.”

“We’re slightly outside the baron’s East End stamping ground, though.”

“He has been too successful for his own good. The pickings have got thinner there of late. He is expanding his territory.”

“And this is a being whose existence, three days ago, you cavilled at,” said Holmes, rising from his crouch. “Indeed, were happy to dismiss as sheer conjecture.”

The barb found no purchase in the CID inspector’s thick hide.

“I’m ever willing to shift my viewpoint. You were the one, were you not, who insisted adamantly to me that the Bloody Black Baron
is
real.”

“What if this is a killing made to look as though Cauchemar committed it? A put-up job? What would you say then?”

“I would say that the simplest explanation is almost always the truest one. And what’s more, Mr Holmes... Mr Holmes? Hullo, Mr Holmes? Can you hear me? Am I talking to myself?”

My friend had become distracted, no longer listening to Lestrade. His attention had been caught by the appearance of an enclosed black brougham which had drawn up at the end of the alley. Its driver sat hunched at the reins, face almost entirely obscured by the brim of his trilby and the upturned collar of his ulster, although I noted a bristling moustache and a fierce, forthright nose. He summoned Holmes over with a slow curl of the forefinger, and my friend complied, setting off towards the carriage.

I made to follow, but the brougham driver barked, “Stand your ground, the lot of you. Just Mr Holmes. No one else.”

“Stay put, Watson,” said Holmes. “I shan’t be long.”

“But...”

I couldn’t fathom quite why the black brougham so disturbed me, but disturb me it did. There was something sinister in the way all the blinds were drawn down, rendering the interior entirely in shadow. The very fact that the coach had turned up at the scene of a murder, out of the blue, set my nerves on edge. Who could be in it? What did they want with Holmes?

Had I known then what I know now, I would have gone down on my hands and knees and pleaded with Holmes not to clamber inside the brougham, which squatted like some huge malevolent beetle, ready to consume him.

For, as I was shortly to learn, the carriage belonged to none other than Professor James Moriarty.

The driver leaned round and opened the brougham’s door, revealing a rectangle of pure darkness. Holmes stepped in and was swallowed from sight. The door shut, and thus the carriage remained for the next quarter of an hour, stationary, with Holmes and its passenger engaged in who-knew-what within. The horse, a jet-black gelding, stamped its hooves and whinnied a couple of times, the driver smoked a cigar, and Lestrade, Sergeant Bryant and I watched and waited.

I’m minded to say a word or two about Professor Moriarty here. I first made mention of the “Napoleon of crime” – to use Holmes’s own striking epithet – in the story entitled “The Final Problem”. There I detailed how my friend apparently met his end locked in mortal combat with his arch-enemy. This marked the beginning of Holmes’s three years of self-imposed exile from these shores, the period now commonly known as the Great Hiatus which saw him wandering the world’s more exotic, far-flung regions and during which he was believed by all and sundry, not least me, to be dead. (Only Mycroft was apprised of the true state of affairs.) I wrote in that tale about a conversation Holmes and I had during which he asked me if I had ever heard of Professor Moriarty and I declared, “Never.”

The events in “The Final Problem” occurred in 1891, yet in
The Valley of Fear,
which I published in 1914 but which harks back to the year 1888, Holmes and I chat freely about Moriarty in the very first chapter.

Critics who take huge delight in spotting inconsistencies in these narratives of mine have gloated over this apparent chronological discrepancy. Perhaps I ought to be flattered that they care enough about my works, and about Sherlock Holmes, to devote so much time and effort to finding fault, scrutinising the texts for flaws like chimpanzees grooming for nits.

To these people, I reply: in 1893, when “The Final Problem” first saw print, I was reluctant to admit publicly that I knew anything about Moriarty at all, so sinister were the man and his machinations. My true recollection of that conversation with Holmes, backed up by my notes, is that I of course
had
heard of him, only too well; but I chose to amend the record. At the time, I felt that people were not ready to learn the true extent to which the latter’s criminal empire had spread through society, its tentacles insinuating into nearly every walk of life. I quoted Holmes’s description of Moriarty as “the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city” but spared my readership the full, precise details so as not to alarm or disquiet them. Not only that but certain of the examples I could have cited were
sub judice
, still undergoing prosecution and trial, and I did not want to interfere with the workings of the justice system in any way.