Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (19 page)

He brought his hands to the fore, and in them were a pair of small canisters which he must have fetched from the table of assorted spare parts.

He raised these until they were level with Holmes’s and my faces.

“I truly regret this, gentlemen,” said he. “Were there any other way...”

“Watson!” cried Holmes. “Quick. Cover your –”

But the warning came too late for me, and Holmes himself was a fraction of a second too slow to act.

Cauchemar depressed triggers on the canisters, and two jets of mist sprayed out. The smell of the stuff was sweet, cloyingly so. I recognised it instantly as chloroform, albeit a more pungent variety than I was familiar with.

I was aware of falling, Holmes falling beside me, both of us choking and spluttering. My vision telescoped down to a narrow field. Cauchemar’s masked face loomed over me, framed by a wondrous iridescent corona. His voice came as though echoing down a speaking tube.

“My oneirogenic gas is very fast-acting,” he said. “The chloroform is augmented with a mixture of distilled ethanol and oil of vitriol, amplifying its effects by several orders of magnitude. You will feel some discomfort when you come to, and I apologise in advance for that. But I can’t have you leaving here by any other means. Another journey by
Subterrene
might enable you, Mr Holmes, with your keen mind, to triangulate the whereabouts of this place, and that cannot be permitted. Secrets. Secretsss. Sssecretssss...”

The words dissolved into meaningless sibilance, and my eyes closed, and cold blackness swamped my brain like the waters of a lake, and I knew nothing further.

When I awoke, it was to a splitting headache and vision so badly blurred I could barely make out my hand in front of my face. My mouth felt as dry as a desert, my tongue like sandpaper, and as I attempted to rise from my supine position I was overcome by a nausea so intense, I only narrowly avoided vomiting. Every single one of my muscles ached, and most of my bones as well, a state of affairs not ameliorated by the hard wooden bench I was lying upon. Baron Cauchemar had drastically undersold the after-effects of his oneirogenic gas. “Some discomfort” my eye!

To add to my woes, a loud rapping sound started emanating from nearby, which seemed to pierce my brain like a hammered rail-spike. At the same time a gruff voice growled, “Get up. Get up, you lazy beggar. How dare you. These are private premises, not for the likes of you to use.”

I blinked hard, and my focus sharpened to the extent that I could just make out another bench a few yards away. A man was stretched out on it, and a second man stood bent over him, hitting the back of the bench lustily with a walking stick.

This latter was a stranger, a rotund and extravagantly muttonchopped gent with a correspondingly tubby Cavalier King Charles spaniel at his feet on a lead. The subject of his angry attentions was Sherlock Holmes, who, like me, was gradually coming round from his gas-induced stupor. Holmes’s face was pinched and grey, his eyes so bloodshot the whites were almost wholly red. He looked as wretched as I felt.

The man with the spaniel, unable to prompt more out of his victim than a groan, took to prodding him in the belly with the walking stick’s ferrule.

“I pay a handsome subscription, as do all who live in this square, for exclusive access to these gardens,” he said. “We expect to be able to stroll round them of a morning without bumping into riffraff like you and your friend over there. If you’re going to sleep off a gin hangover, do it somewhere else – in the gutter, preferably. By the looks of you, the smell of your clothes in particular, that’s where you belong.”

Holmes had had enough. He sat bolt upright, parrying the walking stick aside.

“You do me a great insult, sir,” he snapped. “I am here neither by choice nor of necessity. Poke me one more time and I shall not be held accountable for my actions.”

The other man took umbrage. “You threaten me, you wastrel? As a trespasser on private property? I’ll have you know I share a degree of affiliation with several of the most influential men in this city. I am not someone you cross lightly.”

The spaniel elected to match its owner’s bark by starting to yap incessantly. The dog’s din could not have improved Holmes’s delicate frame of mind; it certainly wasn’t helping mine.

The man might yet have emerged from the altercation unscathed if he hadn’t then taken one last vicious jab at Holmes with the walking stick. That was the final straw as far as my friend was concerned, and he went on the offensive.

“I realise how important you think you are,” he said to the man. “But how would your wife take it if she found out that your overseas investments have failed and you are dangerously close to penury?”

The man looked shocked, utterly flummoxed. His mouth opened and shut like a goldfish’s.

“Not only that,” Holmes continued, “but you have sworn to her that you have abandoned your unseemly practice of accosting men in public places, soliciting them to join you in indecent acts, but it is a habit you have yet to break.”

“I... I...” The man’s thunderstruck discomfiture was almost painful to behold.

Holmes pressed on. “The United Grand Lodge would surely have something to say about
that
behaviour, not to mention about the funds of theirs which you have embezzled in order to cover your financial losses. My associate and I may appear to be riffraff, but you, sir, are proof that even the most respectable-looking of persons has his seamy side. Smart clothes and fine words cannot hide the true riffraff of this world.”

The not-so-gentlemanly gent tottered backwards from Holmes and collapsed onto the lawn on the other side of the pathway. The spaniel whimpered up at him as he buried his head in his hands in horrified disbelief. Holmes had unravelled the man’s entire life in a matter of seconds, ransacking closets to allow countless skeletons to come tumbling out.

Holmes, his work done, levered himself off the bench and helped me to my feet. Then together, the groggy pair of us, we stumbled to the gate which afforded egress from the gardens. In the street, we caught our breath and took our bearings. The garden square we found ourselves in was in Bloomsbury, one of London’s more prestigious addresses. Cauchemar must have dropped us off here after gassing us into unconsciousness, no doubt deriving an ironic amusement from making us look like inebriated vagabonds dossing in a high-class part of town.

“I apologise, Watson,” Holmes said.

“For the way you treated that man back there? Think nothing of it. He was unforgivably high-handed. He pushed you too far. He deserved what he got.”

“Did he? Well, maybe. Actually, I was apologising for not anticipating that Cauchemar would move to incapacitate us the way he did. I should have seen it coming. The fact is, he impressed me to such a degree that I let my guard down. His prowess, his praise, his blandishments, all appealed to my vanity, and I allowed myself to relax when I should have stayed on my mettle. As for that fellow in the gardens, one can understand why he made the assumption about us that he did. You and I both look a mess, old chum, and do not smell of the freshest. Perhaps I could have been kinder to him. Yet I cannot abide a hypocrite.”

“It was all true? Everything you said to him?”

“Every word. His precarious financial situation was easy to infer. One of the first things he mentioned was how much his subscription for use of the gardens was costing him. Money, clearly, has been preying on his mind. He happened to have a copy of the
Financial Times
folded under his arm, with the overseas investment statistics column uppermost. The newspaper was dog-eared and the ink on that page smudged. The same ink was smeared on his fingertips. All of which would signify that that section of the paper had been well pored over. Now, a successful investor would not dwell on a single portion of a financial journal obsessively. He would glance at it contentedly, then move on. An unsuccessful investor, on the other hand...”

“What about his inclination towards his own gender?”

“He wore a wedding band but also a green carnation in his buttonhole. The latter is a secret emblem allowing those of his persuasion to recognise one another. The playwright Oscar Wilde famously sports one. He was out walking his dog, yet the animal was overweight, bordering on obese, which suggested it does not get as much exercise as it ought. Logically, therefore, when the dog should have been taking its constitutional with its master, it was in fact spending most of the time tethered to a bush or a set of railings while he was otherwise engaged. Now, I have nothing personally against such proclivities, especially if conducted with discretion, but they contravene the law of the land and, as far as this individual is concerned, make a mockery of his wedding vows.”

“And the Freemasonry?”

“A ring on his right hand with the Square and Compasses made that perfectly apparent. Like the carnation, the badge of a clandestine brotherhood. He also employed a singular turn of phrase: ‘I share a
degree of affiliation
with several of the most influential men in this city’. This perhaps was once a little in-joke of his that has since become a fixture of his everyday vocabulary, a ‘degree’ of course being an order of Freemasonry.”

“But you claimed he was embezzling funds from them.”

“That, I admit, was a stab in the dark, but it seemed one worth taking, and in the event proved a palpable hit. The
Financial Times
has not been around long but has already earned the sobriquet ‘the stockbroker’s Bible’, which gives us a strong hint as to our friend’s line of work. As a Freemason, might he not offer his services
pro bono
, managing his lodge’s investment portfolio? And if his own finances were compromised, might he not be dipping his hand into someone else’s pockets in order to make up the shortfall and continue funding his affluent lifestyle? Such an act would be in keeping with a man who is not continent in other areas of his personal conduct. And now, Watson,” said Holmes, “I propose we make our way – gingerly – to Baker Street, where we shall prevail upon Mrs Hudson to brew us some strong tea and cook us a fortifying breakfast, so that we may recoup our strength and alleviate the effects of Cauchemar’s damnable gas.”

But this happy prospect was not to be realised, for as we began our trek westward, we discerned a raucous hue and cry echoing over the rooftops. It was reminiscent of the baying of wolves who have caught the scent of blood.

Fearing we were about to get embroiled in another riot, we took a detour away from the source of the noise, going southward. The hullabaloo, however, seemed to change direction as we moved, or else was coming from all directions at once. Whichever way we turned, it was ahead of us.

We rounded a corner, to find a small group of people hurrying towards us along the pavement with obvious purpose. I shrank away, retreating into a shop doorway, but Holmes did the opposite, stepping into their path. They veered around him, but he waylaid one of them, a baker’s boy barely out of his teens, and rapidly interrogated him.

“What is all this? What is happening? Where are you running to?”

“Haven’t you heard?” replied the panting youth. “They’ve only gone and got one.”

“Who
have only gone and got
what?”

“One of the bombers. Peelers have nabbed him, caught him in the act, so it’s said, and they’re taking him to Scotland Yard. We want to have a look.”

Holmes relinquished his hold on the youngster, who raced off to catch up with his comrades.

“Can it be true?” I said. “Can the nightmare finally be over?”

“Who knows? The police may be bringing in a suspect, but whether or not he’s the culprit is entirely another matter. We must, I’m afraid, put our other plans on hold and go and see for ourselves, Watson. It’s the only way.”

Within quarter of an hour we had circumnavigated Covent Garden, crossed the Strand, and were travelling southward along the Victoria Embankment. Ahead rose the Palace of Westminster and its clock tower, home to Big Ben, and before that lay the Met’s newly constructed headquarters, popularly known as New Scotland Yard even though it was no longer situated near the street, Great Scotland Yard, from which the name originally derived.

A tide of chattering, eager people hastened along the Embankment in tandem with us, moving faster than the incoming flow of the river. News of the arrest had spread like wildfire, and it seemed as though fully half the population of London had dropped whatever they were doing and headed out in order to catch a glimpse of the terrorist being brought in for questioning.

By the time we came within sight of the Yard itself, the building was surrounded by a turbulent sea of curiosity-seekers and gawkers. The throng surged against a cordon of uniformed constables who stood, arms linked, before the main entrance.

The mood of the crowd was turning restive and ugly. Teeth were bared; fists pumped the air. The bomber, it transpired, was already on the premises, and there were calls to send him out, give him to the public, let them deal with him. It was, in short, a lynch mob in the making. Someone shinned up a tree with a length of rope in hand, giving some idea what sort of justice the crowd had in mind to mete out.

“There isn’t a hope of us pushing through,” I said to Holmes. “They’re too tightly packed together.”

“There is a way,” he replied. “Watson, do you trust me?”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of this.”

“Answer the question, yes or no?”

“Yes. Of course. Implicitly.”

“Then bear with me. There will be some risk, but if you do exactly as I say, you should be safe.”

“‘Should be’?” I echoed querulously.

Holmes grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and yanked my arm up behind me in a half-Nelson. “Keep your head down. Move fast. Act Irish.”

“Act...?”

“Coming through!” Holmes yelled out. “Make way! Undercover police officer, escorting another bombing suspect.”