The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (16 page)

“The water will put an end to what evidence the fire doesn't destroy,” said Holmes in a flat voice. He turned to me at last. “Have you seen the morning edition? It's just out.”

I shook my head, not bothering to remind him that I was not
a nocturnal creature such as he, nor to ask him what efforts had kept him out roaming through the dark hours.

He handed me the folded newspaper and pointed to the article.

The barrow in Wiltshire had been destroyed. The item referred only obliquely to reports of a deafening explosion on an unnamed estate south of Trowbridge, and to presumed connections with an unidentified lunatic found wandering. The man was questioned, then given over to the care of a noted asylum.

“He'll spend the rest of his life in there,” said Holmes.

“Perhaps.” I held out some hope that we might contrive for his release upon the grounds that he was grief-stricken over his brothers' deaths, but said nothing, preferring to withhold encouragement now that the last blow had been dealt. James Addleton had no home to return to now, in any event.

“The bodies would have disintegrated upon being exhumed,” he added.
“Corpora delicti
forever unmet. Perhaps that was the intent all along. A master stroke, if so.” There was no tone of admiration in his voice.

“There is much buried under the decades, Watson, much we do not know, perhaps much tragedy still to come to light. We enslave each other to this day, the brotherhood of mankind enslaving itself. Do I exploit you, as friend, as chronicler? Do you exploit me as your subject? All-powerful Great Britain enslaves her neighbors, and her colonies, and even her own people under the yoke of poverty and the factory—what Gladstone spent a lifetime attempting to rectify. These are cold ironies, Watson. They chill me to the bone.” He fell silent then, and looked past me into the greying shadows.

I did not think I could be any further amazed, after all that had transpired, but once again, as so often, I was proven wrong. Mycroft Holmes, who so rarely deviated from his customary path, walked slowly towards us, bundled heavily against the rising wind.

“It is no failure, Sherlock,” he said, coming to stand by us. “It is an old and a dead thing, and better left so.”

At last expression flickered to life in Holmes's face. “Better left so? Better for the Addletons? Tell me, Mycroft, how many times have I safeguarded our national security, how many secrets have I kept on behalf of a Government capable of such abhorrent acts? Fifty men criminally enslaved, then caused to die hideously in a foul bog. Mass murder, and England responsible.”

“You do not know who was responsible.”

“Don't I? D—is gone these thirteen years, his secrets lost to the grave. But he was in power then, and well threatened by Gladstone, whom he loathed. His part in this is clear as the day now dawning. And his fondest admirer despised Gladstone, despises him still. Together they contrived this, and obscured it beyond even my powers to reveal.”

“I will not contradict you,” Mycroft said mildly. “But why this, Holmes? You know what happened in South Africa, what was done to our people and to theirs. Can you be sure that even Watson has told you all of what he saw in India? You know precisely what our Empire is and what she is capable of. Why does this one instance gall so? You are not so naive as to think its like has never been seen before.”

“Not on home soil,” Holmes growled.
“Not on one of my cases.”

Mycroft smiled, having proved some personal point. For a moment he let his brother's words hang in the smoky air, drifting like the bits of charred debris. Then he said, “The murders were done thirty-odd years ago, Sherlock. It's over. Let it be buried, and be glad you were not buried with it.”

“Oh, it is buried,” Holmes replied bitterly. “Buried forever and most literally, with priceless historic artifacts, with two misguided brothers who should not have had to die for such a thing. Buried legally by an overwhelming absence of evidence. And buried in a madman's mind, where anyone who can see it will give it no credence.”

“An apt summation,” Mycroft said, offering no solace, for there was none to be had.

“All that remains to be answered is the question of why they
never used this weapon of hypocrisy they created.” Holmes turned to his brother and waited.

Mycroft's agile brain seemed to be weighing what he knew and what he was willing to divulge. In the end, all he said was, “They concluded that it would misfire.”

“Too dangerous a weapon, and so they put it in the ground, where it could never discharge? Then allowed local legends to wreathe its tomb in mist? They underestimated the thoroughness of their own bureaucracy, that fosters clerks like William Addleton. It discharged after all. Into innocent faces.”

There was no more to be said, no more to be done. We moved away from the smouldering remains of the Addleton home. The water that extinguished the flames was now running into the sewers with a noisy gurgle. The winter wind had come in with the dawn.

I fear that I am as a man in a tunnel deep underground, speaking to himself of dire matters long past. I suspect I will find that I cannot publish this under the current Government; for this one tale, at least, my publisher's ethics will no doubt flee to parts unknown, as the forger fled to Europe. The very lack of evidence bemoaned herein could cast aspersions on all the other chronicles, cause them all to be read as fabrications with no basis in fact. I would not so damage my friend's well-earned reputation.

In the end, perhaps, I will lock this away, like a diary buried under a mattress. Perhaps my heirs will exhume it, when its contents will do less harm. For now, it exists only to ease my own burden, for I could not leave the story untold. It shames me as an Englishman, as it shames Holmes, and as it must shame all England. I only hope that, having committed the events to these pages, I can bury the memory of them deep in my own mind, and dwell on them no longer.

BY
E
DWARD
D. H
OCH

I
write of this late in life, because I feel some record must be left of the astounding events of April 1912. I am aware that prior attempts to record my adventures personally have suffered when compared to those of my old and good friend Watson, but following my retirement from active practice as a consulting detective late in 1904 I saw very little of him. There were occasional weekend visits when he was in the area of my little Sussex home overlooking the Channel, but for the most part we had retired to our separate lives. It was not until 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War, that we would come together for a final adventure.

But that was more than two years away when I decided, quite irrationally, to accept an invitation from the president of the White Star Line to be a guest on the maiden voyage of R.M.S.
Titanic
across the Atlantic to New York. He was a man for whom I had performed a slight service some years back, not even worthy of mention
in Watson's notes, and he hardly owed me compensation on such a grand scale. There were several reasons why I agreed to it but perhaps the truth was that I had simply grown bored with retirement. Still in my mid-fifties and enjoying good health, I had quickly learned that even at the height of the season the physical demands of bee keeping were slight indeed. The winter months weie spent in correspondence with fellow enthusiasts and a review and classification of my past cases. What few needs I had were seen to by an elderly housekeeper.

My initial reaction upon receiving the invitation was to ignore it. I had never been much of a world traveller, except for my years in Tibet and the Middle East, but the offer to revisit America intrigued me for two reasons. It would enable me to visit places like the Great Alkali Plain of Utah and the coal mining region of Pennsylvania, which had figured in some of my investigations. And I could meet with one or two American bee keepers with whom I'd struck up a correspondence. I agreed to the invitation on one condition—that I travel under an assumed name. For the voyage I became simply Mr. Smith, a name I shared with five other passengers and the ship's captain.

Early April had been a time of chilly temperatures and high winds. I was more than a little apprehensive as I departed from London on the first-class boat-train to Southampton, arriving there at 11:30
A.M
. on Wednesday the 10th. Happily, my seat companion on the boat-train proved to be a young American writer and journalist named Jacques Futrelle. He was a stocky man with a round, boyish face and dark hair that dipped down over his forehead on the right side. He wore pince-nez glasses and flowing bow tie, with white gloves that seemed formal for the occasion. Because of his name I took him to be French at first, but he quickly corrected my misapprehension. “I am a Georgian, sir, by way of Boston,” he told me, “which might explain my strange accent.”

“But surely your name—”

“My family is of French Huguenot stock. And you are—?”

“Smith,” I told him.

“Ah!” He indicated the attractive woman seated across the aisle from us. “This is my wife, May. She is also a writer.”

“A journalist like your husband?” I asked.

She gave me a winning smile. “We both write fiction. My first story appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
some years back.” She added, “The maiden voyage of the
Titanic
might provide an article for your old employer, Jacques.”

He laughed. “I'm certain
The Boston American
will have any number of Hearst writers covering the voyage. They hardly need me, though I do owe them a debt of gratitude for publishing my early short stories while I worked there.”

“Might I be familiar with your books?” I asked. Retirement to Sussex had left me with a mixed blessing, time to read the sort of popular fiction which I'd always ignored in the past.

It was May Futrelle who answered for him. “His novel
The Diamond Master
was published three years ago. I think that is the best of his romances, though many people prefer his detective stories.”

The words stirred my memory. “Of course! Futrelle! You are the author of ‘The Problem of Cell 13.' I have read that gem of a story more than once.”

Futrelle smiled slightly. “Thank you. It has proven to be quite popular. My newspaper published it over six days and offered prizes for the correct solution.”

“Your detective is known as The Thinking Machine.”

The smile widened a bit. “Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen. I have published nearly fifty stories about the character in the past seven years, and have another seven with me that I wrote on our journey. None has equalled the popularity of the first, however.”

Fifty stories! That was more than Watson had published about our exploits up to that time, but Futrelle was correct in saying the first of them had been the most popular. “Have you two ever collaborated?” I asked. May Futrelle laughed. “We swore that we never would, but we did try it once, in a way. I wrote a story that seemed
to be a fantasy, and Jacques wrote his own story in which The Thinking Machine provided a logical solution to mine.”

The talk shifted from his writing to their travels and I found him a most pleasant conversationalist. The time on the boat-train passed quickly and before long we were at the docks in Southampton. We parted then, promising to see each other on the voyage.

I stood on the dock for a moment, staring up at the great ship before me. Then I boarded the
Titanic
and was escorted to my cabin. It was suite B-57 on the starboard side of Bridge Deck B, reached by the impressive Grand Staircase or by a small elevator. Once in the cabin I found a comfortable bed with a brass and enamel head- and foot board. There was a wardrobe room next to the bed and a luxurious sitting area opposite it. An electric space heater provided warmth if needed. The suite's two windows were framed in gleaming brass. In the bath and WC there was a marble-topped sink. For just a moment I wished that my old friend Watson was there to see it.

I had been on board barely a half-hour when the ship cast off, exactly at noon. As the tugs maneuvered it away from the dock and moved downstream into the River Test, I left my stateroom on the bridge deck and went out to the railing, lighting a cigarette as I watched our progress past banks lined with well-wishers. Then we stopped, narrowly avoiding a collision with another ship. It was almost an hour before we were under way again, and the next twenty-four hours were frustrating ones. We steamed downstream to the English Channel and then across to Cherbourg where 274 additional passengers boarded by tender. Then it was a night crossing to Queenstown, Ireland, where we anchored about two miles offshore while more passengers were brought out by tender.

When at last the anchor was raised for the final time Captain Smith posted a notice that there were some 2,227 passengers and crew aboard, the exact number uncertain. This was about two-thirds the maximum capacity of 3,360 passengers and crew.

As I watched us pull out at 1:30
P.M
. on Thursday, April 11, I
suddenly realized that an attractive red-haired young woman had joined me on deck.

“Is this your first trip across?” she asked.

“Across the Atlantic, yes,” I said to discourage any discussion of my past.

“I'm Margo Collier. It's my first, too.”

Women seldom have been an attraction to me, but there were exceptions. Looking into the deep, intelligent eyes of Margo Collier I knew she could have been one of them had I not been old enough to have sired her. “A pleasure to meet you,” I replied. “I am Mr. Smith.”