Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares (20 page)

The crowd, incredibly, parted for us. Holmes had addressed them with commanding authority, not to mention a soupçon of Lestrade’s nasal-inflected pomposity. He also mimicked the inspector’s bustling comportment. No one doubted for a moment that he was what he pretended to be.

As he frogmarched me along, a localised hubbub grew around us.

“Another one. They’ve collared another one!”

“Copper’s bringing a second one in.”

“Look at the state of him. Bet he’s been hiding out in someone’s coal cellar.”

“Oi, you lousy mick! You’ll swing for what you’ve done.”

Some kicks came my way, and the odd clumsy punch. Holmes deflected the worst of the blows and kept us moving, although what he couldn’t prevent was a number of people showering me with spittle. I could scarcely believe my friend was taking such liberties with my welfare, but I showed willing and played my part, muttering the odd “begorrah” and “to be sure, to be sure” in order to reinforce my credentials as a son of Erin.

As soon as we reached the police cordon, Holmes went straight up to the first constable he recognised. His memory for individual officers’ faces was remarkable. To me, they were all too often indistinguishable, one bobby in a dark blue tunic and conical helmet looking much like another.

“You,” he said. “Mitchell, isn’t it? You know me.”

“That I do, Mr Holmes. I was there when you solved that murder at the Theatre Royal, the one where you worked out who poisoned the female lead in her dressing room by how many strawberries had been eaten from the bowl on the table and by the way the hem of her petticoat had been adjusted so as to –”

“Yes, quite. Let us through, this instant, or I fear Watson here may wind up dangling from a noose, and London will have lost one of its pre-eminent general practitioners and I my closest confidant and friend.”

“Right you are, Mr Holmes,” said Constable Mitchell, and within moments my companion and I were free from the buffeting, agitated crowd and were passing through the arched doorway of the Yard, that grand Gothic, castle-like structure which was both beautiful and imposing. The door closed behind us, shutting out the worst of the mob’s ruckus, and Holmes at last let go of me.

“I would rather we never did that again,” I said, mopping saliva from my face with a handkerchief. “Did I have to be an Irishman? Wasn’t that tempting fate, given the antipathy of the people out there to all things Irish?”

“I needed to impart a sense of urgency,” said Holmes. “If I had announced you as just some average criminal, we would never have made any headway. I calculated that, for all the hostility on display, more of the crowd would wish to see a Fenian bomber tried and convicted and then hanged, than simply hanged. Not only that but they would, by habit, not wish to impede a policeman in the performance of his duties, either out of deference or fear of getting arrested themselves. We were never in serious danger.”

“You
were never in serious danger,” I grumbled. “What if they had become bold and wrested me from your grasp...?” I shuddered to think of the potential outcome.

“But they didn’t, and now we are where we want to be. Let us go in search of a friendly face or, failing that, a familiar one.”

New Scotland Yard still smelled of fresh paint and recently dressed stone. We weren’t yet used to the layout of the place, having visited only a couple of times since its inauguration. It was a sign that the Metropolitan Police was thriving, this brand new headquarters. The force had outgrown its original premises on Whitehall Place and required somewhere modern and purpose-built to accommodate its expansion. The crime rate had risen commensurately at the same time, so one might argue that the police’s increased prevalence and prosperity came at a cost to the general public.

As we traversed a seemingly endless succession oflabyrinthine corridors, I recalled how Holmes and I had been summoned to the site while the building was under construction some two years earlier. Workmen had stumbled upon a female torso in a cellar they had recently completed. It was wrapped in black cloth, a sort of grisly parcel, and it was found to match an arm and shoulder which had turned up on the shore of the Thames at Pimlico a fortnight previously. Holmes had successfully linked this murder, which the newspapers dubbed “the Whitehall Mystery”, to the Jack the Ripper killings which were then in full spate. The woman was never identified, mainly because her head was never discovered, but she bore the marks of having been a prostitute like the Ripper’s five known victims and her uterus had been excised, much in the same way that internal organs had been removed from most of the other murdered women. Holmes averred that the body parts had been placed at the building site in order to taunt the police. The Ripper, after all, was fond of sending letters that mocked the vain efforts of the Yard to catch him; one, mailed to George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, even contained a half a human kidney. This was just another such jibe, on a larger, grislier scale.

Holmes spent a significant proportion of 1888 in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, taking on no other cases and devoting himself exclusively to ending this one brutal killing spree. He confided to me at the time that it was one of the most gruelling and exhilarating challenges he had ever been set. I have somewhere in one of the battered tin dispatch boxes that hold all my papers a full account of the hunt for the Ripper and how Holmes finally trapped and unmasked the villain, and perhaps someday the public will be permitted to learn the truth about his identity and why the whole affair was hushed up by the powers-that-be, with Holmes’s connivance; but not yet, not yet. There are some revelations the world is just not ready for.

I digress, again. An old man’s prerogative, and curse.

As luck would have it, Holmes and I ran into Inspector Lestrade, who informed us that he had just sat in on a conference with the commissioner Colonel Sir Edward Bradford, William Melville of Special Branch, and various other higher-ups in the Met, with regard to the bombing suspect. Melville, he said, was cock-a-hoop that there had been a breakthrough in the case and was pressing for the terrorist’s immediate arraignment on charges.

“That’s my news,” Lestrade said. “You two evidently have a story to tell, judging by the state of you.” His nose wrinkled. “And the smell of you. I dread to ask what you’ve been up to.”

“Then don’t,” said Holmes. “Tell us what you can about the suspect. Where was he caught? What grounds did the arresting officer have for apprehending him?”

“The ‘where’ you will find hard to believe. The sheer nerve of it! On Grosvenor Place, just outside the grounds of Buckingham Palace. A stone’s throw from the person of the Queen herself.”

“No!” I ejaculated.

“Yes, Doctor. And to answer Mr Holmes’s second question, we have recently doubled the number of patrols around the periphery of the palace, for obvious reasons. The suspect aroused the suspicion of a pair of constables by acting oddly, erratically, and was found to be carrying a canvas knapsack inside which was a bundle of dynamite fitted with a long, slow-burning fuse. Doubtless the knapsack was destined to be flung over the wall into the palace gardens.”

“Put like that,” I said, “one would be hard pressed to find a more open-and-shut case.”

Lestrade nodded in agreement.

“The terrorists have grown audacious,” said Holmes.

“Or reckless,” said the policeman. “Either way, we have one of them in custody now, and before long names will have been named and we’ll be rounding up the rest of the gang. There is just one thing, however.” Lestrade’s face turned sneeringly sly. It was evident that he knew more than he was letting on, and that he relished having the upper hand over Holmes, an event that occurred rarely.

“Out with it, then, Inspector,” said Holmes. “What am I missing?”

“You said ‘him’ when referring to the suspect.”

“Repeating what I heard the crowds outside say. Am I wrong on that front?”

“You are, and so are they. You’re all assuming the suspect is male.”

“He is not?”

“
She
,” said Lestrade, “is anything but.”

Holmes immediately sought permission to interview the prisoner. He was excited and intrigued. All the residual lethargy and soreness, the legacy of the events of the previous night and the sleepless days prior, had left him. He was fully reinvigorated, the sparkle back in his eyes, the colour in his cheeks.

Lestrade steadfastly refused his request. There were protocols to consider. The suspect was Special Branch’s charge, not his. He did not have authority to take someone down to see her. Besides, the woman, at present, was not talking. Indeed, she had not uttered a word during her arrest or since. She refused to identify herself, despite repeated entreaties to do so. Nor had she shouted any slogans in support of her cause, or yelled any kind of defiance, or crowed about her and her fellow terrorists’ accomplishments. She had remained mute the entire time, and docile, and in light of this, Melville’s policy was to leave her alone in her cell, without food or water. In due course, having stewed in her own juices long enough, her will would be broken. She would be begging to speak to somebody, to tell all. It was only a matter of time.

Holmes persisted. “If anyone can get her to open up, it is surely I. You know my methods, Lestrade, my powers of insight. A few judiciously chosen words, and I can crack a person like an egg.”

Remembering the man in the garden square, I knew how right he was.

“Mr Holmes, it is just not possible,” said Lestrade. “I don’t have the jurisdiction. Only Mr Melville can grant permission to visit her, and I can assure you he will say no. His mind is made up.”

“In which case...” Holmes produced a notepad, scribbled a few sentences down, and tore out the page, which he folded in half and passed to Lestrade. “Would you be so kind as to take this to him. See that it is delivered direct to his hand.”

“May I...?” Lestrade made to unfold the piece of paper, but Holmes stopped him.

“The note is for Melville’s eyes only.”

“I could always peek at it later, when I’m out of your sight.”

“That you could, but it would be ill-advised,” Holmes said sternly, and the look on his face brooked no dissent.

Lestrade strode off with a more than usually disgruntled air about him, muttering that he was a CID inspector, not an errand boy.

In years to come I would ask Holmes time and again what he wrote in that note, and he always refused to divulge. It was a personal matter relating to Melville, that much I could glean, and connected with the previous year’s state visit by the Shah of Persia, for whose protection the head of Special Branch had been directly responsible. From hints Holmes dropped, and reading between the lines, I can only surmise that the married Melville had contracted a short-lived liaison with one of the eighty-four wives in Shah Nasseredin’s harem during the visit, and that Holmes was cognisant of this fact. “I have many of these useful titbits of knowledge squirreled away for a rainy day,” he once told me. “One might call them insurance policies.” One might equally call them blackmail threats, although I am content to think that my friend would never resort to such an underhand tactic unless it was wholly necessary.

Regardless, it worked. Lestrade returned not ten minutes later, accompanied by a Special Branch officer. It was the intimidating-looking fellow we had encountered at Waterloo Station, Grimsdyke. Lestrade proceeded to make introductions, but Grimsdyke forestalled him with a curt, “We’ve met.”

“Well, miracles do happen, Mr Holmes,” Lestrade said. “Your request has been granted, although to say Melville was grudging about it would be an understatement. Whatever was in that note, it made him go white as a sheet. Makes me think I should never get on your wrong side. In fact, if you ever decided to turn to a life of crime, I think I should run for the hills. Grimsdyke is here to escort us, by the way.”

The Special Branch man folded his hands together in such a way that his thick knuckles bulged.

“And to demonstrate that William Melville is not a man who responds kindly to being strong-armed,” Holmes said in an aside to me as we made our way down to the basement, Grimsdyke in the lead.

Two rows of cells stretched on either side of a long gaslit corridor. All were full, occupied by the various anarchists and Fenians who had been detained earlier in the week. Shouts of protest and complaint resounded from behind steel doors, echoing off the tiled walls. The atmosphere down there was rank with caged resentment and despair.

Grimsdyke unlocked the furthest door along, and Holmes, Lestrade and I trooped inside the cell.

There, seated on a bunk of the narrowest and meanest proportions, was perhaps the last person I would have expected to see.

It was the Vicomte de Villegrand’s maid, Aurélie.

“The young lady is known to you?”

Lestrade had noted our reaction to the sight of Aurélie.

“She is,” said Holmes.

“How?”

“That’s not important right now.”

“I think it is.”

“Inspector, I doubt highly that this woman can be a terrorist.”

“With all due respect, Mr Holmes, what rot. I’ve told you the circumstances under which she was arrested. There were countless eyewitnesses. There’s no question but that the girl was making a direct attempt on the lives of the royal family.”

“She could not have been responsible for the Waterloo bomb, at any rate.”

“Says who?”

“Do I need to remind you that the dynamite was placed in the
gentlemen’s
lavatory?”

“Yes, I thought of that,” said Lestrade. “Could be she wore a disguise, dressing herself in men’s clothing, passing herself off as a man. Some of the toms I’ve met do a very good job of it. You’d hardly know, to look at them. A bloke could be forgiven for mistaking them for members of his own gender.”