The Curse of the Singing Wolf (11 page)

“I thought duelling was
unlawful?” said the Prince.

“It is,” replied Moriarty
dryly, “and so is murder.”

Everyone laughed.

“Go on, Gustav,” encouraged the
Singing Wolf. “A duel sounds very romantic.”

The German licked his lips.
“Well, the two men faced off one morning on the firing range in the
grounds of the academy. Someone managed to procure two old duelling
pistols – magnificent weapons with some nice copper-nickel alloy
embellishment, also known as German silver which -”

“We don’t need a description of
the pistols,” interrupted the Baron. “We all know what antique
duelling pistols look like, just as we did not require a
description of the dinghy or the furniture in the green
bedroom.”

“Yes, quite,” mumbled von Gunn,
licking his lips, “well, one of the pistols failed to fire. One man
survived and the other didn’t.”

“And the reason you suspect
murder as opposed to bad luck?” quizzed Moriarty.

“Oh, yes, the firing pin had
been deliberately jammed. The dead man’s second accused the
survivor of tampering with the pin - the survivor denied it. The
dead body was left on the firing range and when target practice got
underway the next day it appeared as if the dead man had been
accidentally shot. Only those present at the duel knew
otherwise.”

“I suppose several people had
access to the duelling pistols?” quizzed the doctor.

“Yes,” replied von Gunn. “They
were in a display case in the gun room and the survivor had been
seen admiring them the week before he issued the challenge.”

“Laissez-faire,” dismissed the
Baron. “I’ll go next if no one objects?”

Everyone nodded.

Reichenbach took a sip of
brandy to wet his whistle. “My story involves two men, not brothers
– a father and son. The father is a cruel sot. When he is not
debauching the housemaids he is horse-whipping the grooms and
kicking the hunting dogs. His wife has long since died of shame and
ill-treatment. The two eldest sons have long since fled the foul
nest. The third son is much younger, one of those change-of-life
babies who come late in life to women past their prime, conceived
in a drunken rage. The boy spends most of his time hiding from the
old man. He cowers on the servants’ stairs where he may receive
advance notice when to run. He watches as each servant trips on the
same step – always the ninth. He is a bright boy. He finds a ruler
and measures each riser and discovers that the ninth riser is a
fraction of an inch out. It is a miniscule difference and yet
everyone trips going up and coming down. He gets an idea. He waits
until the old man is called away to business in town and must stay
overnight. He dismantles the fourteenth plank on the main stairs
and then replaces it. The servants are baffled but they know how to
hold their tongues. The sot returns the next day and trips going up
the stairs. Later that same night as he comes down to dinner he
trips and falls to his death at the base of the staircase.”

Everyone clapped. The Baron
knew how to tell a good story with just the right amount of detail.
The inference was clear. The boy had murdered his father by
altering the height of the riser a fraction of an inch. If any of
the servants suspected foul play they stayed silent for they had no
love for the tyrant who had tormented them.

“I wonder if the boy went on to
commit other murders,” mused Dr Watson circumspectly. “Having
succeeded early in life and finding murder an easy thing to get
away with, well, it might have gone to his young head.”

“Yes,” said the Baron, “I see
what you are getting at – the next time the bright boy comes across
a despot he dreams up a clever plan to get rid of him too.”

“Have there been a spate of
step murders in Europe?” asked the Prince with an ironic grin.

“Dr Watson might be the best
one to answer that,” responded Moriarty drily, “since he worked
alongside the famous London consulting detective, Mr Sherlock
Holmes.”

Astonishment was registered all
round and the doctor turned pink, not because he was embarrassed
about the association but because he was suddenly the centre of
attention, something that always made him feel uncomfortable,
moreover, he did not wish to discuss his time with Sherlock or
expound on the tragic incident in Switzerland. It was the Singing
Wolf who came to his rescue.

“We are getting off piste. We
have not all had a turn yet. James, you go next.”

The Irishman pushed to his feet
and moved to the fire where he prodded the embers with a poker.
“The men have been hogging the limelight all evening. It is
generally the rule that ladies should go before gentlemen and we
have two ladies present.”

The two women insisted that he
go next. He resisted. They persisted.

“In that case,” he said,
conceding defeat, “my story involves murder on a mass scale yet is
not half as interesting as the baron’s simple tale. A young radical
is filled with the zeal of the political revolutionary – there are
so many unhappy men roaming the streets, hungry for bread, hungry
for reform, hungry to overthrow the ruling elite. He decides to
punish the Jewish owner of a large glove factory who grows fat from
the sweat of his workers. He breaks into the factory one night and
sets up some amateurish homemade bombs. They fail to detonate.
Before he has time to check what had gone wrong he is spotted by
the night-watchman and must make a run for it. A few hours later
the workforce, mostly women, arrive. They settle at their
work-stations and the first bomb suddenly goes off. It sets off the
others. Those who are not blown to kingdom-come are burned to death
or trampled in the stampede to get to the exits which are all
bolted from the outside as is the normal practice in factories to
stop late-comers sneaking in. The Jewish owner is enjoying his
breakfast across town when the terrible news reaches him. He opens
a new factory the following year. The young radical is never
caught. He remains free to roam.”

“The zealot didn’t actually
intend to commit murder,” pointed out the Prince.

Moriarty cocked a blond brow.
“One may reason that making a bomb and planting a bomb inside a
large factory is likely to result in the death of many whether the
intention was there or not. Otherwise a murderer might argue that
he had his eyes closed when he pulled the trigger and thus cannot
be held responsible for the death of the man he shot at point blank
range. Actions have consequences. Idiotic actions have unintended
consequences.”

“The only problem,” said Dr
Watson, “is that with the other stories there was one suspect who
was known to someone. In your story the culprit is unknown.”

“I did not say he was unknown,”
replied the Colonel. “Only that he remained at large.”

Dr Watson conceded the
point.

The Singing Wolf thanked the
colonel and looked at the Countess. “Your turn,” she said.

There was something in the dark
flash of the eyes that alerted the Countess to the fact her hostess
was looking forward to her story with uncommon interest. The
Countess had several murder stories she could pull out of her weird
grab bag of worldly adventures, having travelled widely and having
been exposed to situations both strange and dangerous. But she
intuited something intensely personal in tonight’s recount and
decided to stay true to theme.

“My story is set in Australia.
A group of people go for a picnic to a place called Hanging Rock –
it is an extraordinary place, not dis-similar to the rock on which
Chanteloup is perched. It is also the setting for the supernatural
disappearance of three girls on Valentine’s Day several years
before my story is set. While the picnickers picnic in the shade of
a gum tree a tiger snake bites one of the women. She consequently
dies. She was bitten on the hand. The snake was inside the picnic
hamper. Now, since the hamper had a lid it would have been
impossible for the snake to have slithered inside. It must have
been placed there by someone who wanted one of the picnickers to
die. The snake was not able to discriminate between victims. It bit
the first hand that went into the basket. Was the murderer
successful? The wealthy niece of the woman who died married a
handsome rogue shortly after the tragic picnic. She would never
have contemplated marriage if her aunt had not died. The rogue was
not present at the picnic but the hamper had been a Valentine’s Day
gift from him to the niece the day before the picnic. The question
is: did he place the snake inside the basket? Did he wish to kill
the young woman who had turned down his initial marriage proposal?
Or did he know the aunt would fuss as was her wont and pay the
price with her life?”

“An interesting story, Countess
Varvara,” said the Singing Wolf. “Did the young woman marry the
handsome rogue knowing he may have orchestrated the death of her
aunt?”

“No, she was overcome by grief
and was not able to think clearly. It was about three years later
when the possibility caught up with her. By then it was too late -
her husband had also died.”

The clock chimed the ninth hour
when the Singing Wolf commenced her tale.

“My story is set in
Switzerland. It involves two men, two murders and two murderers. It
is a story of intrigue, arch enemies and a fight to the death
between two powerful men – not physically powerful but
intellectually powerful. One man sets a trap for the other and
lures him to a treacherous spot where he plans to murder him, at
the same time exposing himself to grave danger since the man he
intends to kill also plans to kill him. When the two men finally
confront each other they battle it out, neither wishing to fail in
the attempt to kill the other, determined to succeed even if it
means suicide. In the struggle they both fall to their deaths into
an abyss. No bodies are ever recovered. And then several years
later, rumours start circulating that one of the men has survived.
How? It seems impossible! And yet the rumours persist and grow
louder! Will the survivor return to public life? Will he be charged
with murder? He cannot claim self-defence since his actions were
pre-meditated. What will he do? What should he do? Will anyone seek
to avenge the death of the other man? Will one murder beget another
murder and so on ad infinitum until there is no one left who cares?
Is one murder ever enough?”

Dr Watson listened to the wind
hurling itself against the ramparts of Chanteloup. He felt under
siege and full of fear. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the
Countess came to his bedroom. She arrived a few minutes after
ten.

“Nest of vipers,” he hissed as
she tip-toed across to the four-poster, navigating her way using
the red glow from the fire.

“Keep your voice down,” she
warned.

“No one will hear me – the
walls in this wing are three feet thick.”

“That should keep the vipers
out.”

“The vipers are inside
already,” he said peevishly. “To tell you the truth, I was feeling
relaxed until that last story. What did you make of it?”

She sat on the end of his bed
and wrapped a quilt around her shoulders to keep warm. “There was
only one thing I could make of it – it was a reference to
Sherlock.”

“If our hostess is trying to
put the wind up me she has succeeded. I feel rattled. I’d like to
put it down to the rockslide and that howler battering the walls
but I’m spooked. I think we need to give serious consideration to
fleeing this place at first light. We can grab four horses from the
stable and make a run for it to Lourdes. The luggage can be sent on
later.”

“What? We flee across lawless
terrain rife with roaming brigands? That’s not a plan, that’s a
deathwish!”

“What’s the alternative? Stay
here and end up like the Cathars – a footnote in history: Here lies
the final resting place of Dr John Watson and Countess Varvara
Volodymyrovna. I read that some Cathars were walled alive inside
caves and were never seen again. They were the lucky ones. The rest
got barbecued and ended up as appetisers for wolves. I think a
sprint across bandit territory by comparison is a walk in the
park.”

“No, no,” she tempered, “we are
not the main game here. Remember we only arrived at the last
minute. Our presence here is pure chance. Nothing was contrived to
lure us here.”

“Do you mean game as in prey or
game as in play?”

She thought for a moment. “Both
– prey and play. A game is being played out but we are not players,
we are spectators. We are not prey, we are observers of the
hunt.”

“Who is being hunted?”

“One of the men, or possibly
all four.”

“But that story about
Sherlock?” he bleated, backtracking.

“It was designed to unnerve
you.”

“Well, it succeeded.”

“It is no secret you are the
best friend of Sherlock Holmes and worked alongside him. Our
hostess was just letting you know that she knew it. There was
nothing sinister about it. It may even have been her way of warning
you to keep your nose out of things.”

“What things? How can I keep my
nose out of something if I have no idea what that something is? It
is like playing a game that has no rules.”

“All games have rules even if
the rule is that there are no rules.”

“Don’t start with that
gobbledygook logic – my brain is fagged out.”

“Tread warily, that’s all. This
game is like blind man’s bluff.”

“I hate games!” he moaned.
“Especially blind man’s bluff. I shall refuse to play.”

“Too late! The game’s afoot and
tonight was the opening gambit.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Our hostess insisted on the
session of story-telling. The men squirmed in the seats and looked
uncomfortable. Herr von Gunn tried to beg off. She cut him off at
the knees. The others quickly fell into line. You went first and
paved the way. That spared the men. It gave them some breathing
space. By the way, your story was excellent. I never knew green
wallpaper was loaded with arsenic. I think the drawing room in
Mayfair has green flock wallpaper. I shall be reviewing it as soon
as we return to London.”