The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes (9 page)

Whether it did or not I have no way of telling. Soon after Teddy Venables’ arrest, the Major moved away from the district, no doubt too ashamed to face his friends and neighbours. I never heard from him again and do not know what happened to him subsequently nor to his son after he had served his prison sentence.

In case Venables should still be alive, I have for his sake refrained from publishing an account of the case apart from making a passing reference to it in ‘The Five Orange Pips’, which I doubt my former army companion will ever read. He was not a man who found much pleasure in books and as neither his name nor his son’s is mentioned in the relevant passage, no one is likely to connect them with the case of the Amateur Mendicant Society.

There are two short postscripts I wish to add to my account. The first concerns Inspector Lestrade who claimed all the credit for the uncovering of the fraudulent charities.

Whether it was for this reason that he failed to inquire why Holmes and I were concealed in the lower vault of Buckmaster’s premises and how we had gained access to the building in the first place, or whether, in the flurry of official business after the arrests, the question slipped his mind, I do not know.

As for the forgery case which Lestrade was investigating when he burst so unexpectedly into Buckmaster’s vault, this was later solved on information received from one of the gang in return for an undisclosed remuneration. The forgers had set
up their printing-press in the cellar of the Britannia public house, in the very doorway of which one of Lestrade’s own officers had been posted, disguised as a tramp, on the night the Inspector had raided Buckmaster’s premises; the same man who, as Holmes had observed at the time, had failed to change his boots.

One of the most extraordinary cases in which my old friend, Sherlock Holmes, was involved and with which it was my privilege to be associated began with a dramatic abruptness one hot Friday evening in August, some time after my marriage to Miss Mary Morstan.

Having not seen Holmes for several weeks, I had called on him at my old lodgings in Baker Street to find him in a wry mood, inveighing with mock exasperation against the dearth of interesting stories in the newspapers.

‘What has happened to all the criminals, Watson?’ he complained in a half-serious, half-humorous fashion. ‘Has the warm weather driven them all out of London to seek refuge at the seaside for the season? Not even the
Daily
Telegraph
this morning could produce a single noteworthy case. It contained nothing but reports of regattas and garden parties. If this continues, I shall be forced to retire to the country and keep bees.’
*

Hardly were the words out of his mouth than we heard through the open window the sound of wheels rapidly approaching and then drawing to a sudden halt outside, footsteps hurrying across the pavement and, seconds later, an agitated ringing at the front-door bell.

Holmes, who had been lounging back in his chair, sat up, instantly alert.

‘A woman judging by the footsteps,’ said he, ‘and in considerable distress, too. I believe, my dear old friend, that we are about to receive a new client and that my beekeeping will have to be postponed.’

At that, the door flew open and the woman in question rushed into the room.

It was a dramatic entrance, worthy of Grand Guignol or one of Verdi’s masterpieces for she had about her a dramatic, not to say operatic, intensity. Young, beautiful, with her black hair tumbling loose and wearing a light cloak which even my unprofessional eye could detect had been hastily thrown over her shoulders, she confronted Holmes, who had scrambled to his feet, with this impassioned entreaty: ‘Come at once! Is Isadora! ’E say, “Fetch Mr ’Olmes!”’

The message, spoken in a strong foreign accent, meant nothing to me but Holmes responded immediately. Seizing his hat and gesturing to me to accompany him, he ran after her down the stairs and out into the street where the four-wheeler in which she had arrived was still waiting.

There was only time, as the young woman was giving the driver an address in Kensington, for him to murmur to me, ‘The man is Isadora Persano, a well-known, international journalist and an old acquaintance of mine.’

Once the cab had started off, Holmes was able to question her and it was possible to piece together some account of what had happened; no easy task because of her broken English and the hysterical and barely coherent manner in which she expressed herself.

It seemed that Isadora Persano had retired to his study earlier that evening to write an article. At some point during the evening, quite when it was not clear, a small parcel, addressed to Persano, had been delivered to the house and had been taken upstairs by Juan Alberdi, a Mexican manservant.

Some little while later, she, Persano’s wife – although her hesitant manner in using the term suggested that their relationship had not been legalised – had heard Persano cry out and, on going up to the study, had found him, in her own words, ‘very, very bad, Mr ’Olmes’.

‘“Bad”?’ Holmes inquired. ‘You mean ill?’

‘Bad in ’is ’ead.
Demente.
Crazy. He look at this box in ’is ’and. Inside is a little creature; small; like a snake. But is not a snake. I do not know the English. It live in the ground.’

‘A
worm
?’

Holmes sounded quite incredulous.

‘Yes, yes; a worm!’ she cried, seizing eagerly on the word. ‘A little worm. Isadora crazy when he looks at it.’

However, it appeared that Persano had managed to recover his sanity for a few moments, long enough to gasp out the one word ‘Holmes!’, an exclamation which she had perfectly understood as Persano had previously warned her that, should anything happen to him, she was without delay to contact Mr Sherlock Holmes, Persano’s old friend the consulting detective, at 221B Baker Street.

Holmes was about to ask her why Persano had thought it necessary to give her these instructions when the cab drew up outside a tall house in a quiet Kensington side-street and Señora Persano leapt out and was running up the steps to the front door which was set wide open.

Holmes and I hastened after her, Holmes pausing only to fling some coins at the cab-driver.

Inside the house, I had a fleeting impression of a small, dark-faced man, presumably the Mexican manservant, cowering in a state of great terror at the back of the hall, before I followed Holmes and the Señora up three flights of stairs to a landing at the very top of the house where she unlocked a door and threw it
open.

The scene which met my eyes almost defies description.

It was a study, lined with bookshelves and with a desk, on which was burning a single green-shaded lamp, placed at right angles to an open sash window which overlooked the back of the house.

A man was seated at the desk, crouched over and gazing down with great intensity at a small box which was lying in front of him. He was tall and well-built, with a deeply sunburnt face of a strong, hawklike cast, marked with a scar on his left cheek, and would have been handsome apart from the
expression of mad frenzy which convulsed his features, setting his eyes rolling in his head and clenching his lips open in a terrifying grimace.

In the green light from the desk-lamp, he had the appearance of a tortured soul from a medieval illustration of the inferno.

Hardly had I time to absorb these details when, with a dreadful cry, the man jumped to his feet, overturning the chair as he did so and sweeping the papers off the desk with one wild lunge of his arm.

As they fluttered to the floor, he flung himself at the open window and, while we stood, horrified and transfixed in the doorway, disappeared from sight over the edge of the sill with another ghastly scream, as if all the demons of hell were at his heels.

There was a moment of absolute silence before the room erupted.

With a wild cry of her own, Señora Persano rushed to the window and would have hurled herself after him had not Holmes seized her by the waist and, spinning her round, slammed the sash down. The next moment he had bundled her out of the room on to the landing where he locked the door and pocketed the key before setting off down the stairs, I at his heels.

We raced through the house, past the cowering manservant in the hall and into a kitchen where a fat, red-faced cook and a thin, sharp-featured maidservant looked up from their tasks to gape at us, and from there through a door into the back garden where we found the body of Isadora Persano.

Despite my own experiences of violent death and appalling wounds in battle when I served in India as Assistant Surgeon during the second Afghan war, I hesitate even now in describing the scene.

Persano had fallen from the top storey on to the railings which surrounded the basement area with such force that two of the iron rods, tipped with spear-shaped spikes, had penetrated his chest to a depth of several inches.

Although I knew the task was hopeless, I felt for the carotid artery in his neck and, finding no pulse, I turned to Holmes.

‘I am so sorry; there is nothing I can do. I am afraid he is dead.’

Rarely have I seen my old friend in such a state of shock. In the light streaming out of the open kitchen door, his features looked bleached, his lids drawn so far down over his deep-set eyes that they appeared hooded, like those of some gaunt, brooding, melancholy bird. But even in this first moment of horrified awareness of the tragedy, he was still in command of his reactions with that icy self-control which has led me at times to accuse him of deficiency in human sympathy.
*
I fear I may have maligned him. It was not always lack of emotion on his part but a deep-seated dislike of revealing to others those feelings which lay closest to his heart.

Within seconds, he had recovered sufficiently to take charge of the situation.

With the curt comment, ‘We must send immediately for the police,’ he strode back into the kitchen where, tearing a page from his notebook, he hastily scribbled a message which he handed to the servant girl with orders to deliver it immediately to Inspector Lestrade at Scotland Yard.

The girl having departed with the note and the money for the cab fare, Holmes turned to the red-faced cook.

‘You speak English?’ he demanded.

‘That I do, surr,’ the woman replied in a strong Irish accent.

‘Then accompany Dr Watson upstairs and see what you can do to comfort your mistress.’

Indeed, we could hear even on ground level the young woman’s hysterical sobbing echoing down from the top of the house.

Between us, the cook and I supported Señora Persano into her bedroom on the second floor where I administered smelling-salts and brandy. Once she had grown a little calmer, I left her in the care of the cook, who seemed a sensible enough woman, and returned upstairs to the study to join Holmes, who had passed us on the landing.

On entering, I found that he had lit the gas jets over the fireplace and it was possible to see more of the room.

It was a low chamber with sloping attic ceilings and a small hearth in which was set a basket grate, empty because it was summer of anything except some crumpled sheets of paper, covered with handwriting which I assumed was Persano’s.

As I came in, Holmes, who was kneeling in front of this grate, carefully examining its contents, leaned forward with an exclamation of satisfaction and retrieved a square of coarse yellowish paper, quite different in colour and texture to the others.

‘What do you make of this, Watson?’ he inquired.

In my absence, he seemed to have recovered some of his usual control, apart from a certain grimness about the set of his mouth.

I said, ‘Judging by the creases in it, it has been folded up to form a kind of packet. In fact, it reminds me of the old-fashioned apothecaries’ method of wrapping up powders. Isn’t that a small blob of wax still adhering to it where the edges had been sealed?’

‘Correctly deduced, my dear fellow. The packet was indeed fastened with wax and then the seal was broken; fairly recently, too. The piece of paper was lying on top of the others in the grate but, while they were sprinkled with fine soot from the chimney, this was quite clean. However, you failed to remark that the paper is of a poor quality, foreign make and that some small grains of a brownish powder are still adhering to the folds; too few, though, I fear, for successful analysis. We shall see what Lestrade has to say about it,’ Holmes concluded, placing the square of paper in his pocketbook before conducting me across the room.

‘And the desk, Watson? What deductions can you draw from this?’

It was a large desk but apart from the evidence which suggested that Persano had been working at it shortly before he plunged to his death, demonstrated by the open book – in Spanish, I noticed – and the scattered papers lying on the floor, I saw nothing.

Except, of course, for the worm.

I stooped down to peer at it gingerly.

It lay curled up in a matchbox and was a most curious creature. About the size of an ordinary earthworm, it was quite unlike any other I had ever seen before.

Along the length of its back ran a line of tiny, black spots which spread out over the head to form a V-shaped pattern, similar to the markings on a viper.

It stirred and I hurriedly backed away.

‘What is it, Holmes?’ I asked. ‘Is it venomous? Was Persano bitten by it and this caused him to go mad?’

‘It would certainly appear so,’ Holmes replied. ‘It would also seem that the small parcel which was delivered to the door earlier this evening contained the matchbox inside which was placed the worm. You no doubt noticed on the desk the piece of brown paper in which the package was wrapped with Isadora Persano’s name and address written on it; not in an English hand, however. The writing has a foreign look about it.’

I could no longer contain my curiosity.

‘Who is Isadora Persano and where did you meet him?’

‘Persano
was,’
Holmes corrected me quietly, his eyes again hooded over with their lids, ‘an internationally renowned journalist, who specialised in South American affairs. I met him several years ago under unusual circumstances in Paris where he was investigating the sale of forged Peruvian works of art for a newspaper article. Indeed, he claimed to have Inca blood in his veins. There was also a Spanish mother and a Quechua Indian grandfather. However, his antecedents are of little relevance to his death.

‘A few weeks ago, I received a letter from him, informing me that he had recently returned from Mexico where he had been for the past six months, researching for a particular assignment, of what exact nature he did not specify. He suggested we should meet but unfortunately at the time I was engaged with the case at Longwater concerning the stolen diamond necklace.

‘Once the investigation was completed, I had every intention of writing to him again to suggest a date for the proposed meeting. I fear I have left it too late.’

The last remark was spoken in a tone of deepest despondency.

‘Did he mention in his letter that his life was threatened?’

‘Not in so many words. He merely wrote that he had made many enemies while in Mexico but, as he was an expert duellist, both with sword and pistol, and was used to defending himself, I did not regard it as significant. He received that scar on his face during an attack by hostile Indians while on an earlier expedition to the Amazonian rain-forests. I very much regret that I failed to take his statement more seriously. He clearly considered himself in danger if he warned Señora Persano to contact me.’

To comfort him a little, I said, ‘The Señora will surely be able to tell you who his enemies are.’

‘Yes; indeed I must question her.’

‘But not tonight, Holmes,’ I urged. ‘She is in no fit state to be cross-examined.’