Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (2 page)

When the police arrived on the scene, I directed them towards the victims in direst need of proper medical attention, and soon enough, hackney cabs, private carriages, and even a grocer’s wagon, had been commandeered to ferry the injured to hospital.

Once the situation seemed to be under control and the concourse was free of all but corpses, I was able to halt and take stock. The surge of adrenaline that had borne me through the past couple of hours receded, and I found myself starting to tremble. Nausea nearly overwhelmed me. My hands, coated in the blood of others, shook uncontrollably. I had not been in such close proximity to so much slaughter in years and, unsurprisingly, I had not become inured to it in the interim. It was as horrific to me now as it had been a decade ago on the subcontinent.

Two thoughts brought me some slight comfort. One was that my Mary had not been there to witness this appalling massacre or, worse, be a casualty of it. She was some seventy miles east, in the town I had just travelled up from.

My wife was, as it happened, recovering from a miscarriage, her third since we were wed two years earlier. I have not referred to our childbearing misfortunes anywhere in my published writings, as I deem it too private a subject for public consumption and anyway of no real interest to my readers. Here, though, in this account which is likely to be seen by no eyes but mine, I can at least mention how Mary and I, in spite of our best efforts, failed to produce offspring. It is a source of great regret to me, even now, that I have no heirs, no children and grandchildren to lighten the burden of old age. My only hope for posterity, such as it is, lies in the written works that I leave behind.

Mary had taken this third setback particularly hard, so I had prescribed a stay with a cousin of hers who owned a cottage on the Kent coast. There she might find calm and relaxation and recover her mental equilibrium. Her condition had undoubtedly improved, and it had been mooted that she would accompany me on my return to London that very day, but I had seen how wan her features still were and how her eyes continued to lack their usual lustre, and had pronounced her not yet ready to resume city life with all its demands and vicissitudes. I thanked providence that I had made the decision I had.

The other comforting thought was that the perpetrators of this outrage would face the full might of the law.

I knew this for a fact, because I happened to have a dear friend who had dedicated his life and his vast intellect to the pursuit of justice and who would, if charged with the task, stop at naught to see the malefactors apprehended and arraigned.

Thinking of Sherlock Holmes, I resolved to pay a call on him there and then. Outside the station I hailed a cab and presently was on my way to 221B Baker Street.

After the carriage had deposited me at my destination and pulled away, I paused to peer up at the house where Holmes and I had once, until quite recently, shared rooms. The autumnal twilight lent a golden glow to the plaster façade of the ground floor and the bare brickwork of the upper storeys. I felt a brief pang of nostalgia for the period when the two of us had lived here together and for the adventures that had always been a knock on the door away. Anybody might turn up at the residence of the world’s first and foremost consulting detective, at any hour, and most likely the result of their visit would be Holmes and I haring off on some wild, extraordinary, often dangerous investigation.

I was now a happily married man, approaching forty and with a thriving general practice. I had every reason to be content with my lot and not to wish to jeopardise it, or myself, in any way. Yet I could not help but miss those younger, helter-skelter bachelor days when, with scarcely a warning, my friend and I might find ourselves confronted with a lethally venomous swamp adder or a vexing mystery arising from something no more apparently innocuous than a few orange pips in an envelope. There had seemed so much
possibility
in the world back then, and for all that I continued to assist Holmes on numerous cases, I doubted life would ever be quite so thrillingly unpredictable again.

As I stood on the pavement, lost in these maudlin musings, the front door of 221B opened before me, and out stepped a telegram delivery boy.

I say “boy” but he stood a good six feet tall and, by his broad shoulders and well-proportioned, generally sturdy physique, I took him to be in his early twenties at least, if not older.

What struck me about him, however, apart from his being a grown-up when most in his profession were too young even to shave, was that he was hideously disfigured. I can put it no less plainly than that. His face bore extensive scarring, particularly on the right-hand side. Waxy-looking tissue distended both corners of his mouth and drew down the edge of one eye, giving him an air of perpetual grievance and mistrust. A chunk of his hair was absent at the temple, just below the band of his peaked cap, and his right ear was all but nonexistent, just a few nubs of cartilage fringing a puckered hole like the rim of a volcanic crater.

Through my work, I was accustomed to the many distortions and mutilations which birth and accident can visit upon the human anatomy. Nonetheless I could not avoid staring at this poor creature as he came down the front steps towards me. Manners ought to have prompted me to avert my eyes, but doubtless I was still in shock from the bombing and its aftermath, so much so that my normal sense of decorum temporarily deserted me.

The telegram delivery boy met my gaze and held it. He must have been used to receiving unwelcome, searching looks from strangers. His eyes, in contrast to the physiognomical ruin that surrounded them, were among the sharpest and clearest I have ever seen. They seemed to dance like starlight amid stormclouds. I was conscious of being assessed by them, appraised, judged, with a keenness I had beheld in only one other pair of eyes before – and their owner was surely sitting upstairs at this very moment, ruminating on whatever message the delivery boy had brought.

Unless...

Could it be that this individual was none other than Holmes himself, decked out in one of his many disguises?

No. The eyes were the wrong colour, a piercing blue rather than Holmes’s flinty, perceptive grey. Altering the hue of his irises was beyond even my friend’s great powers of self-camouflage.

The telegram delivery boy took in my somewhat dishevelled state, the dried blood that still caked my hands, the dazedness that I must yet have been exhibiting. Then he smiled and saluted.

“Good day to you, sir,” he said.

“Good day to you,” I replied mechanically, with a tip of my felt bowler.

More would have been exchanged, but at that moment a first-storey window casement rattled up and Holmes himself leaned out, once and for all quashing any notion I might have had that the delivery boy was actually he.

“Ah, Watson, there you are,” my friend barked. “I thought I heard a familiar voice. What are you dawdling for? Hurry on up. There’s work to be done!”

Accordingly I hastened indoors and, firing off a swift salutation to Mrs Hudson in her parlour, mounted the stairs.

“Good Lord, man, look at you,” said Holmes as he ushered me into the sitting-room. “What a sight. Been in the wars, have we? Or,” he added somewhat more soberly, “a bomb explosion at Waterloo Station by any chance?”

“Then you already know about that?” I said.

“I heard the detonation and was able to deduce its location based on the volume of the sound and the direction it came from, namely south-east, just across the river. The likeliest venue, the place where a terrorist bomb would cause the most disruption and loss of life, would be a frequented and crowded spot, such as a railway station at the peak hour of busyness. Waterloo lies more or less due south-east of here. That seemed to fit the criteria. My supposition was corroborated not long afterwards, as word began to spread and I overheard someone in the street gossiping loudly about the incident. Final confirmation arrived just moments ago in the form of a telegram from my brother Mycroft.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “A bad business, my friend, a very bad business indeed. And how terrible that you had the misfortune to be caught up in the blast.”

“I hardly need ask how you know I was there.”

“It is perfectly plain. Even if you were not so clearly distressed and your hands and clothing did not bear the marks that they do, it would have been apparent to me where you had been this afternoon. You are dressed for travel, and there’s a copy of
Bradshaw
just protruding from the pocket of your topcoat, its yellow wrapper binding unmistakable. I am aware that you have been making day trips recently to visit your wife in Ramsgate, the line from which terminates at Waterloo. She is improving, by the way?”

I nodded. I had not vouchsafed to Holmes the real reason for Mary’s sojourn on the coast, stating merely that she had been unwell and that the bracing sea air would aid her recuperation. I suspect he had a pretty shrewd idea of the truth but he had the good grace not to let on.

“Excellent,” said he. “So the deduction was child’s play itself. I must say I’m glad that you managed to escape unscathed.”

“Unscathed?” I said, lowering myself into an armchair. “Physically, maybe.”

“A brandy,” Holmes declared. “And perhaps some soap and a basin of hot water, so that you may clean yourself up. Mrs Hudson!”

A snifter of brandy went some way to restoring my equilibrium, and it was a relief to wash off the blood and all that it signified.

“I did what I could for the victims,” I told Holmes, drying my hands, “but it felt like far too little.”

“I’m quite certain you acquitted yourself with honour,” said Holmes.

“Who do you think is behind this beastly bombing campaign? Is it Fenians, as some of the papers say? Anarchists? Opponents of the monarchy?”

“Hmmm.” Holmes had not really paid attention to my questioning. With fingers pressed to lips, he was contemplating some other matter. “Tell me, Watson, what did you make of our recent guest?”

“Guest? You mean the delivery boy?”

“Indeed.”

“I do not see how he can be of more consequence than the bombings.”

“Humour me.”

“Well, if you insist,” said I. I was well accustomed to my friend’s sometimes impenetrable thought processes and the way the locus of his interest could shift sharply and unexpectedly from one matter to another. “Do you wish me to apply your own deductive methods?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then, first of all, I think it queer that he was permitted to enter the house. Could Mrs Hudson have not signed for the telegram at the door, as is customary?”

“I told you the message was from Mycroft,” said Holmes. “It was an important one, and the delivery boy insisted that it must be placed directly in the hands of the named recipient.”

“Odd,” I said.

“Singular,” said Holmes, “but I can see the reasoning, and he was adamant about it. In the end, Mrs Hudson had no choice but to relent and allow him in, even though she is under strict instruction not to disturb me unless it is to bring up a client. What else about him did you notice?”

“I don’t know if ‘notice’ is the word, but one’s eye couldn’t avoid being drawn to that face of his. Terribly badly burned. A house fire perhaps?”

“You are guessing.”

“My powers of observation are not the equal of yours,” I replied with some asperity. “We all know that. No one’s are. In the absence of any further evidence, all I can suggest is that the man was unfortunate enough to have had his face destroyed by fire. The nature and extent of the scar tissue allows for no other conclusion. That he is an adult in a job usually reserved for boys leads me to assume –”

“Never assume!” Holmes rebuked me.

“Leads me to infer, then, that he has been unable to find any other form of gainful employment; no doubt as a consequence of his looks”

“In that respect, I am sure you are on the right track, Watson. Nobody, looking at him, could think otherwise than that his repugnant appearance has barred him from most lines of work and obliged him to accept a low-paid, menial position of the type usually offered to someone far junior”

“I get the impression that you know better.”

“No, no,” said my companion airily. “Not necessarily.”

“But there’s more to him than meets the eye.”

“Sometimes a man is exactly what he seems, no more, no less.” Whatever Holmes had hoped to gain by taxing me about the deliverer of the telegram, he had evidently pursued the issue to his satisfaction, for he changed the subject – or rather, reverted to the topic I had originally broached. “It is, of course, about the bombings that Mycroft wishes to see me.”

“The telegram was a summons, I take it.”

“Very much so. An urgent one.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” said I, rising. “We must leave for the Diogenes Club at once.” I consulted the pocket-watch which had been bequeathed me by my not long deceased and sadly rather wayward eldest brother. “It is past a quarter to five and still just shy of twenty to eight, so if we hurry, we will undoubtedly catch him there.”

“And I would be delighted for you to accompany me, Watson. On condition that you are quite recovered from your ordeal...”

In truth, I was still not feeling fully myself. However, a call to arms could not go unheeded, especially one that related to a disaster which had ended so many lives and nearly accounted for my own as well. The sooner we got onto the culprits’ trail, the nearer we would be to bringing them to book.

As we headed downstairs, I said, “Is the game afoot, Holmes?”

My friend grinned wolfishly over his shoulder.

“In so many ways, Watson. In so very many ways.”

A hansom took us to Pall Mall, and on the way we saw around us a London in ferment. The third and deadliest yet of the bomb attacks had made the headlines of the late editions of the papers. On every other street corner people gathered to hear someone read the relevant article aloud, and cries of shock and groans of dismay greeted almost every sentence. Several times there were loud and angry denunciations of the Irish and their desire for independence and home rule, since Fenians seemed the likeliest perpetrators of these barbaric acts. They had had some form in that department since the Rising in 1867 and the Dynamite Campaign of the early eighties. I regretted my fellow countrymen’s readiness to condemn an entire nation for the deeds of a single political faction, and moreover without proof or verification. Nonetheless I harboured the same suspicions and felt the same burning need to find someone to blame, perhaps even more strongly than the average person did owing to my first-hand experience of the effects of the Waterloo Station bomb blast.