The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes (5 page)

6

In his writing, Watson touched lightly on Stanley Hopkins, the young and promising Scotland Yard detective whom I assisted to solve the murders of Sir Eustace Brackenstall, Peter Carey, and Willoughby Smith, among others.

Hopkins, who was thirteen years my junior, was born at Maiden Wood where his family had been farmers for generations. My great grandfather had made over a large farm to Hopkins’s great grandfather in gratitude for saving the life of his son, Parkford, who was to be my grandfather. Parkford had been working in a large harvest barn storing corn for the winter when the building caught fire from an oil lamp explosion. Hopkins’s great grandfather fought his way through the inferno, climbed up into the high loft and threw Parkford down onto the thick sheathes of corn below. Then, jumping down himself, he slung Parkford over his shoulder and made his way through the flames to an opening in the lower portion of the doomed barn leading to four box stalls where horses had been stabled. They both escaped alive just as the flaming barn collapsed onto itself; another few minutes and they both would have been killed.

Hopkins attended Thanet School, excelled and was sent up to University College, London where he studied geography and geology for two years before leaving to seek employment when his family could no longer afford to maintain him at university. Knowing I was in London, his family contacted me requesting an introduction to people of my acquaintance who might have a position for young Hopkins. A discreet inquiry and a good reference led to an interview and he was soon offered employment within the administrative staff of Scotland Yard. Within two years, he was given an opportunity to transfer to investigations and his career as a detective was begun. Ultimately advancing to the rank of Chief Superintendent, he retired in 1917 and lives at Kew.

Hopkins was a favourite of mine during his years at Scotland Yard. Among the many official detectives I have known in my long career, the best of whom were mediocre, Hopkins was the exception. He alone came close to understanding something about my methods and applied himself to learning from me through observation. He requested my assistance in twenty-three cases from 1887 to 1888 and from 1891 to 1910. Hopkins gained positive notice from his superiors early in his career, during 1888, when he was one of many detectives working on a disturbing series of murders. He brought me a great deal of information and I consulted with him as to possible threads that would lead to the killer. By using my methods and following my lead, Hopkins explicated numerous obscure points about the killings in Whitechapel that impressed his superiors and led to his future rapid advancement to the rank of Inspector and beyond. While the killer was not apprehended due to the reluctance of several ranking Chief Inspectors to allow me to investigate over fear of the possible public exposure of Scotland Yard’s inability to deal with the situation, the superior investigation of elements of the killings by Hopkins resulted in internal support for scientific methods that would, one day, lift Scotland Yard out of the anti-intellectual slough of despond inhabited by the likes of Inspectors Gregory, Gregson, Jones, and—to only a slightly lesser degree—Lestrade. While not inherently bad men, the bog-standard Inspectors all possessed willing but plodding minds incapable of advanced reasoning, deduction, synthesis, and accurate conclusions. To his credit, Hopkins never allowed his ego to dominate his reasoning capacity, a valuable trait that, I believe, I assisted him in appreciating.

To their credit, those in the highest ranks at Scotland Yard did immediately request my assistance in 1900 just prior to the queen’s visit to Ireland. The Boer War had caused a great deal of unrest and the government had uncovered evidence of an assignation plot against the queen to take place during her visit. The success or failure of the plot revolved entirely on a series of encrypted messages giving the details and timings of the movements of the assassins. The knowledge of the messages flowed immediately to the Prime Minister through Mycroft and, within hours, I was given full access to the coded communications. As the queen neared the coast of Ireland, I successfully isolated the book from which the messages were coded, using an encryption device Watson and I had encountered in an earlier case. The book’s specific page number, line, and words are enumerated and the message assembled from the various words so selected. The difficulty is in finding the exact book and edition that both the sender and the recipient would have access to and that would provide the identical content to be referenced in the messages. Once I reasoned the identity of the book, I was able to interpret the messages and the assassination was prevented. The book was a newly published and obscure work titled
The Great Boer War
by a British author named Doyle. A copy was found in a London library with pencil markings associated with the messages, and the writer of the coded messages had conveniently provided his name when requesting the book at the library. Even Scotland Yard was able to effortlessly apprehend the would-be assassins following my deductive work. Sometime later, Mycroft advised me of a forthcoming knighthood, but it was forgotten in the turmoil ending a great era upon the death of the queen. In any case, I should have respectfully declined the honour, the successful solving of the problem through the application of a superior brain being sufficient reward.

During the many years I assisted Scotland Yard, there were numerous instances of my having advanced the Yard’s acuity in the forensic sciences. After Faulds and Galton introduced the potential of fingerprints, I began studies of methods of classification for use in comparing prints recovered during crime investigations. Advising both Haque and Bose, who had partially developed the Henry System of fingerprint classification out in India, I was able to make sixty-three specific improvements in both identification and sub-classification that led to the adoption of their basic system in 1901 by the Metropolitan Police. These improvements were detailed in a monograph I wrote on the subject titled
Improvements on the Henry Fingerprint Classification System with Emphases on Whorls, Loops and Arches and the Importance of Accurate Dactyloscopy.

Scotland Yard also quietly accepted my research into the deterioration of dead tissues over time. Using amputated limbs requisitioned from hospitals, I placed tissue samples in dozens of glass laboratory plates and exposed half of them to the elements on the roof of a hospital and the other half in a windowless storage room on the same roof. All of the samples were examined every three days for a one-year period and notations made as to the process of necrosis, colour, weight, consistency, infestation of maggots, and other changes associated with the putrefaction of skin and muscle tissue. Across the dozens of samples, a measured scale of necrosis was developed that allowed me to accurately determine the age of dead tissue to within two days and whether the tissue had decayed indoors or out of doors. To my certain knowledge, seven murderers received the final justice in the first two years alone following my forensic advances in this important byway of investigation.

Another body of research was shared with Scotland Yard and became a singular reference source for most of the police throughout Europe. Titled
Toxic Plants and their Efficacy in Murder
, the reference work contained descriptions of over three hundred poisonous plants and plant parts and their individual toxicities, symptomologies, laboratory identification, and systemic effects along with a compendium of known instances of their use in murders. Nearly thirty-five years after its publication, it remains the last word in the criminology of biological poisons.

My relations with Scotland Yard have been symbiotic over the years and across the varied capabilities of those in charge. The Inspectors and their ilk, as well as the senior command officers have been both helpful and obstructive. They welcome my inevitable successful outcomes, but disdain my methods, although the public credit for solving the crimes is invariably theirs. I am left with the balm of knowing none of them are my equal and all of them can but only admit the verity of that fact.

7

There was one extraordinary case that came to me on Thursday 1 June 1882. The case was never written about and never received any notice, but it has its own
outré
elements and should be recounted for its uniqueness in my experience. I will attempt to relate it as the good Watson might have done.

* * *

We had just completed a late breakfast and were making our way through our various newspapers when Mrs Hunter announced a caller at half ten. The look on her face indicated extreme disapproval, often an auspicious harbinger of an interesting case.

The caller mounted the stairs one at a time, the sounds of which clearly indicated a deficiency of the right leg. Upon entering the sitting room, he only partially filled the door, being less than five feet in height and of slight build. He was oddly bundled in an open great coat, with the collar raised to obscure his face, unusual for such a mild day. He leaned upon a blackthorn stick, worn at the end and scarred by gouges and gashes as if used by a beater raising pheasant from the gorse on a shoot.

“You would be Mr Holmes,” said the high, wheezing voice muffled by the coat.

“I am,” Holmes replied. “And this is my associate, Dr Watson. I perceive you have come from Gravesend from a berth on a five-master in the China trade.”

“How you know that is beyond me, but your powers of insight attest to your reputation.”

“It’s merely inferential observation. The mud on your boots is that of the silt from the Thames, of a colour found only in the Bermondsey loop of the river. The cross-hatch weathering around your eyes is seen only on sea-faring men with long exposure to lengthy voyages, but the pierced Chinese coin hanging from your fob is conclusive. The head of your stick has been carved skilfully in the likeness of the Chan patriarch which is often used by first and second mates in the China trade as a superstitious talisman of good fortune and a mark of identification among the sailing brotherhood. Of course, the China trade is dominated by five-masted ships. The conclusions, therefore, are inevitable.”

“Correct on all points, Mr Holmes.”

“How may we assist you, Mr …?”

“It’s Farkin. Toresh Farkin, First Mate of the
Shorin
, recently arrived from Shanghai.”

Farkin turned and removed his coat. Turning back to face Holmes and me, we saw a face—indeed, a thoroughly malignant presence—as ugly as the senses can conjure. The grotesque standing before us was not only misshapen, but so horrible as to instantly create fear within the minds of those gazing upon it.

“Yes, I do that to people,” said the First Mate, aware of the spreading sense of revulsion in the room. “You see in me the ravage of a diseased birth in Bengali. Only a cruel mother would allow such a cursed product of gestation as this to live.”

“The world is furnished sufficiently with the misfortunate,” Holmes replied. “But you have risen far in your trade to reach First Mate of a five-master, Mr Farkin.”

“Knowledge and seamanship when spliced with the unnatural fear I inspire can be a powerful source of discipline and leadership when twisted properly. I’ve been fortunate to serve under an understanding captain for over twenty years, beginning as sail-mender, working my way up to t’gallant-man, then to Bo’sun, Third Mate and now First Mate these last six years. It is the good captain for whom I have come to seek your help.”

Holmes has an infallible sense for knowing when a case will be sufficiently
outré
to engage his interest and his energies. The sharp, piercing look in his eyes signalled his desire to know more from our freakish visitor. He reached for his cherry churchwarden and a generous pack of shag from the Persian slipper, a sign of a long and thoughtful focus on the story to be told.

“Please, lay the essential facts and details before us,” he said, indicating a chair and motioning the visitor to be seated.

The First Mate filled little of the chair with his underwhelming body, but his essential ugliness seemed to fill the sitting-room, seeking escape from the light exposing it to view. His skin was yellow-gray, blanched in places, pustular in texture, made taught and shiny by scar tissue and old lesions of an undetermined aetiology. His hair was gray, what little was left. Great patches had withered and thinned, leaving him looking moth-eaten. Even his malformed ears no longer had anywhere to hide without long hair to cover them. Such physical damage could only have come from an obscure tropical disease apparently infecting his poor mother prior to his birth. The result was the most appalling physical specimen I have ever experienced in my medical career. He began to speak.

“It all began fifteen years ago while the captain was coasting the
Shorin
out in the Malays. We picked up bits of cargo anywhere we could, filling the hold with odd-lots of spices, wood, oils, textiles, anything we could buy cheap or trade for and sell at a profit in the Asian and European ports. In November of 1866, we called at Kuantan where we loaded tin and rubber bound for Singapore. We were four days in Kuantan and the captain turned over the cargo loading to the Ballast and Cargo Master and disappeared ashore. On the third night of his shore leave, an old Jakun man came aboard with a note addressed to me on a small piece of dirty rice paper on which was written in Bengali, ‘Follow this man and come to me.’ It was initialled by the captain, ‘N. P.’ The familiar initials showed me the note was indeed from Naprush Palahl, my captain.

Leaving the ship, I followed the Jakun man through the twisted and narrow alleys leading from the docks into the dark heart of Kuantan, a quarter filled with evil houses offering every possible perversion and vice within their dank and rotting cells. Ancient Malay crones pulled at my sleeves, seeking money or my desires for their opium or spirits; old men with blackened teeth leered with their promise of slave trade pleasures. Finally, upon reaching a low house with mould covering its exterior boards, signed only by a carved five-leaf lotus on the teak plank door, the Jakun motioned me to follow him into the dark interior. The floor was covered with filthy rugs, and smoke-grimed woven fabric was hung from the beams to divide the space into small compartments where sallow-faced men lay prone on hard pillows, oblivious to reality, lost to the vapours of their narcotic mixtures.

‘Farkin. Here.’ The voice of the captain’s laboured whisper broke the dead-silence of the vile hole. Looking through the curtain, I was brought to my knees as if struck between the eyes with a belaying pin. Curled on the filthy rags covering the cell was the captain, wan and pale, and attached by its hideous mouth to the vein on the right side of the captain’s neck was a giant rat, fat and bloated from its nocturnal blood feast.

‘Don’t’ kill it, Farkin,’ came the plea from the captain. ‘We need each other; there can only be death if it is killed.’

‘It’s monstrous, captain,’ I cried.

‘Yes, but it is my monster and it must continue to live. Help me back to the ship, Farkin. I am so weak now, and unable to walk without help.’

I carefully detached the rat’s mouth from the neck vein using a long opium pipe as a pry bar. Once detached from its unholy communion, the rat stretched itself and I could see it was at least a yard in length and its thickness had to be a foot or more in diameter. Coming as close as I dared, the stench from its horrid hair was so repulsive I had to turn my head and wretch from the wave of nausea that engulfed me there in that disgusting and degrading Kuantan hole. When I turned back to the captain, I was horrified to see the rat crawling into a leather bag that the captain then secured with a tight square knot. When I helped him to his feet and we started out from that foul pit, the captain lifted the bag holding the rat and brought it with him as we emerged into the darkness of the Kuantan night and the drear, diseased air of that accursed port.

Back aboard
Shorin
, the captain made his way down to his cabin, clinging to the bulkheads for support, dragging the leather bag with its unspeakable contents behind him. Turning to me, he whispered, ‘Thank you, mate. When we are stowed and ready for sea, set sail on the first tide for Singapore. I will be here in my cabin.’

We eased out of Kuantan harbour at two bells on half-sail. As we cleared the Kuantan River Reach, I gave orders for a two-day course and we braced into the South China Sea under full sail. Pacing the deck behind the helmsman, I thought about the contamination hidden below decks and was filled with dread for the days ahead.

On making Singapore for offloading our cargo at the docks, the captain with his leather bag left the ship and I fearfully watched him disappear into the village of shanties extending a mile or more from the docklands. He was gone only a few hours and returned aboard empty-handed and sober. For the rest of the trading season, there was nothing abnormal about the captain; he was his usual quiet self. He never mentioned to me the horrid night of the giant rat or offered any explanation for the abomination I had witnessed in that Kuantan opium house. For nearly fifteen years now we have sailed together, increasing our trade and moving from coasting to the long runs of the China trade with all of the profits those cargos bring.”

Holmes asked, “What has brought you to me?”

“Mr Holmes, it has begun again,” replied the Bengali mate.

[Editor’s Note. Here the narrative abruptly ends with the ink notation ‘to be finished after April’ and the initials ‘S.H.’]