An Ensuing Evil and Others (31 page)

“Holmes, this is amazing!” I cried. “How can you possibly have deduced that? Where did you get your information from?”

Holmes shot me a pitying glance. “We have been in possession of the main clues the whole time. All we lacked was the key to interpreting them. It was only when our Republican friend referred to ‘language’ that I realized that chat key was.”

“Then let us in on the secret before we proceed, Mr. Holmes, for we are curious,” pressed the silverhaired man. “Our colleague’s action has proclaimed his guilt but how—?”

“My brother knew that he was in some danger. He had to warn me. He knew that he was facing a combination of two elements—the extreme Unionist faction and the extreme Republican faction. Between the two, little moves in Ireland that is not known about. Any telegraph sent from the GPO would be reported on by their agents, spies, and informers. Mycroft had to send the information to me in London in case the worst happened. So he encrypted a message to me, hoping that I would understand.” He gestured to the telegraph.

“How could you interpret this through the Irish language?” demanded the silver-haired man.

“They key was the Irish language itself. Mycroft knew that I have made a study of the ancient Celtic languages and had worked, now and then, on preparing a monograph on the Chaldean roots that I perceived therein.”

“How does that help?”

“Simply enough. I realized that Mycroft was identifying someone. The very man whom he was going to warn you against. What does he say?”

“He warns you not to trust a gentleman but does not say who,” I said, peering at the telegraph.

“No!” Holmes almost exploded in irritation. “Observe more carefully! He says do not trust a man who is Gentle. Look, he uses a capital G in the word
Gentle
.

“A mistranscription by the clerk at the telegraph office?” I hazarded.

“It is deliberate, That was when I suddenly realized that an Irish word for
gentle
is
caomh.”
He pronounced the word
ceeve
. “That is the root of the name
O Caoimh
, which we commonly Anglicize as O’Keeffe.” They were looking at him with wonder on their faces.

“Certain things O’Keeffe claimed now endorse this view. He said he was a witness to Mycroft s kidnapping and described Lord Maynooth’s carriage. I suppose he knew your carriage?”

“Of course,” agreed Maynooth. “But why describe it as the kidnapper’s vehicle?”

“A clever fellow is O’Keeffe. He wanted to confuse me, put me on a wrong scent. All he needed was twelve hours to bring his plot to fruition. He also mentioned that he was acting as ADC to the Viceroy tonight. What would possess the Viceroy and his Chief Secretary to be walking outside the Viceregal Lodge in the darkness of the evening alone? Where was O’Keeffe? Did he suggest that exercise and lure them into that fatal ambush?”

“Very well, Mr. Holmes. We will bring O’Keeffe in. But how did you learn of the house in Kerry?”

“Once I understood the code Mycroft was using, the rest was obvious. The land of the race of Ciar was simple. The race of Ciar were called the Ciarraighe—Anglicized as Kerry—who gave their name to their territory. So now we must look for the place called lump of goats.’ The word
lump
is
meall
in Irish, but mall in a place name is usually interpreted as a knoll. The knoll of goats—
Meall na nGabher
. Mycroft and I spent a vacation, when we were children, near a place Anglicized as Maulnagower in Kerry. He presumed that I would recognize it.”

It did not take us long to discover that the Irish Party representative had been playing a double game and had plotted Parnell’s re-arrest so that he would emerge as leader of a new extreme party. A short while later we were embarking at Kingsbridge Station, in the west of the city, on a train to Kerry with a score or so of armed men from the Royal Irish Constabulary. The train clattered through the darkness to a place called Killarney, where we switched to a slower local train heading toward a town called Cahirciveen. In the dawn light, the house at Maulnagower was surrounded. There were only four armed men guarding it.

Called upon to surrender, they put up a fight. One was killed, another wounded, before we burst in. In an upstairs room, bound hand and foot on a bed, was the person of Mycroft Holmes. He was badly bruised, and there was a cut over one eye. When he was sitting up on the bed and rubbing his wrists to restore circulation, he finally smiled dourly at his younger brother. “It took you a while to fathom my cryptogram,” he admonished. “I expected you to be here yesterday.”

Holmes regarded him with sibling disapproval. “I expected you to be dead. Why did they keep you alive?”

“Oh, they certainly had planned a Kerry bog for me. But firstly they wanted to know exactly what I knew and who I had passed it on to before they rid themselves of my company. O’Keeffe was due to come down later today or tomorrow and then…” He shrugged. “Where is O’Keeffe, by the way?”

“Hopefully, he has been arrested by the good Superintendent Mallon,” Holmes assured him.

“Capital! A strange fanatic, is O’Keeffe. The worst kind. But I believe that there were more important people manipulating him—powerful politicians’ and military men who do not want to see any devolution of power to the Irish people.”

“So O’Keeffe was only a minor cog in the wheels of this conspiracy?”

“An important cog,” corrected Mycroft. “He was acting as an intermediary between the powerful factions involved and those who were set to do the dirty work.”

Holmes sighed. “I suppose that we’d best return to Dublin and see what O’Keeffe has to confess.”

O’Keeffe had nothing to say. Superintendent Mallon had led the raid on O’Keeffe’s rooms in Merrion Square and had not been too subtle about it. He had charged up the stairs with a dozen men of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. As they had begun to break in the door there had been the crack of a revolver. When they had finally broken in, O’Keeffe was no longer in this world. He had shot himself in the head.

Mallon, considered the hero of the day, was not admonished for this. Between May 14 and June 9 of the following year, five of the Invincibles were duly executed for the Phoenix Park murders; eight others were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The informer who had turned state’s evidence to secure the convictions was eventually shot dead on the SS
Melrose Castle
off Cape Town some months later. The Invincibles, as an organization, disappeared as quickly as it had materialized.

However, Holmes regarded the case as one of his worst failures, for he had not solved it in time to prevent the Phoenix Park murders and public outrage over the killings forced the Government to disregard the Kilmainham agreement. Parnell and other Irish leaders, having been released from prison only four days before the murders, were subjected to harassment and arrest, Gladstone was compelled to abandon his movement toward Home Rule, block further land reforms, and introduce more coercion acts in Ireland as troop reinforcements were poured into the country. Ireland, which had stood on the brink of a peaceful settlement, was plunged once again into chaos. Whoever had pulled O’Keeffe’s strings to induce him to manipulate the extremist Invincibles took those secrets to the grave. No one ever determined who it had been.

Mycroft Holmes, for his own personal safety, left service in Dublin Castle and, with the personal patronage of Gladstone, removed to London as an interdepartment Government adviser. Tragedy stalked Lord Maynooth, who was sent to be governor of one of the Australian colonies. His second son was shot dead in his locked bedroom at his Park Lane residence, a crime Holmes was able to lay at the door of Colonel Moran. Holmes, for public consumption, proposed that the motive had been a disagreement over cards. Privately, he thought it had been a more sinister political assassination designed to keep Maynooth in line.

The upheaval in his native land brought about by the murders had a profound effect on Sherlock Holmes. It was shortly after the closing of the case that his long periods of lethargy and indolence began, along with his use of narcotics when he had no puzzle to concentrate his gifted mind upon—to ease what he described as the “unutterable boredom” of his life.

I know that the case of his brother s kidnapping had changed his character into more cynical extremes by a realization of just how far those close to the center of power would go to protect their selfinterest. In the year before he finally retired to the Sussex coasts, Sherlock Holmes caused a furor by refusing an offered knighthood from Edward VII. Why did he refuse that accolade? Holmes told me that he had done so because he believed that Ireland had been shabbily treated by the Imperial Establishment. Nevertheless, he had made me agree that I would not allow any of the cases involving his Irish background to be released to the public until long after his death.

A STUDY IN ORANGE

Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box, with my name, John H. Watson, MD, late Indian Army, painted on the lid. It is filled with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine
.

—”The Problem of Thor Bridge”

T
his is one of those papers.

It was my estimable friend, the consulting detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who drew the printing error to my attention.

“Really, my dear Watson!” he exclaimed, one morning over breakfast, as he thrust the copy of
Collier’s Magazine
toward me. “How can you let something like this slip by? I have often found myself remarking on the considerable liberties that you have taken in your accounts of my cases, but this date is an error in the extreme. Detail, my dear Watson. You must pay attention to detail!”

I took the copy of the magazine from his hands and glanced at the page on which his slim forefinger had been tapping in irritation.
Collier’s
had just published my account of the case of “Black Peter,” in which Holmes had been able to clear young John Neligan of the accusation of murder of Captain “Black Peter” Carey. He had caused the arrest of the real culprit, Patrick Cairns. The case had occurred some eight years before, in 1895 to be precise. Indeed, it had only been with some caution that I had decided to write it at all. Although the events happened in Sussex, all three men were Irish sailors, and Holmes was always reticent when it came to allowing the public to read anything that associated him with Ireland.

This was, I must hasten to say, not due to any bigotry on the part of Holmes. It was simply a stricture of my old friend that no reference be made that might associate him with his Anglo-Irish background. He was one of the Holmes family of Galway. Like his brother, Mycroft, he had started his studies at Trinity College, Dublin, before winning his demyship to Oxford following the example of his fellow Trinity student Oscar Wilde. On arrival in England, Holmes had encountered some xenophobic anti-Irish and anticolo-nial hostilities. Such prejudices so disturbed him that he became assiduous in his attempts to avoid any public connection with the country of his birth. This eccentricity had been heightened in later years by public prejudicial reaction to the downfall and imprisonment of the egregious Wilde, whom he had known well.

While Holmes allowed me to recount some of his early cases in Ireland, such as “The Affray at the Kildare Street Club,” “The Specter of Tullyfane Abbey,” and “The Kidnapping of Mycroft Holmes,” purportedly by Fenians, I had faithfully promised my friend that these accounts would be placed in my bank with strict instructions that they not be released until fifty years after my death or the death of my friend, whichever was the later event.

I was, therefore, fearful of some error that I had associated him in some manner with the nationality of the three men involved in the case of “Black Peter,” that I took the magazine from him and peered cautiously at the page.

“I was very careful not to mention any Irish connection in the story,” I said defensively.

“It is where you pay tribute to my mental and physical faculties for the year ‘95 that the error occurs,” Holmes replied in annoyance.

“I don’t understand,” I said, examining the page.

He took back the magazine from me and read with careful diction: “In this memorable year ‘95, a curious and congruous succession of cases had engaged his attention, ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca—an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope….”

He paused and looked questioningly at me.

“But the case was famous,” I protested. “It was also publicly acknowledged that the pope asked specifically for your help. I kept some of the articles that appeared in the public press….”

“Then I suggest you go to your archive of tittle-tattle, Watson,” he interrupted sharply. “Look up the article.”

I moved to the shelves where I maintained a few scrapbooks in which I occasionally pasted such articles of interest connected with the life and career of my friend. It took me a little while to find the six column inches that had been devoted to the case by the
Morning Post
.

“There you are,” I said triumphantly. “The case of Cardinal Tosca was recorded.”

His stare was icy. “And have you noticed the date of the article?”

“Of course. It is here, for the month of November 1891….”

“Eighteen ninety-one?”
he repeated with studied deliberation.

I suddenly realized the point that he was making.

I had set the date down as 1895.1 had been four years out in my record.

“It is a long time ago,” I tried to justify myself. “It is easy to forget.”

“Not for me,” Holmes replied grimly. “The case featured an old adversary of mine whose role I did not discover until after that man’s own death while in police custody in early 1894. That was why I knew that the date that you had ascribed to the case was wrong.”