Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

‘Clear, Mr Holmes? We do not even know who the dead man is.

‘The dead man was a native servant of this hotel. He was without doubt murdered. But his death was an accident, in the sense that he unfortunately placed himself in a situation where the real victim should have been instead.’

‘Then who was the murderer really after?’

‘None other than myself, I should imagine.’

‘You, Mr Holmes?’

‘Oh, I must admit to a certain notoriety in criminal circles,’ Holmes chuckled, ‘but it’s a long story and….’

A vague memory that had been bothering me for the last few minutes now suddenly sprang crystal-clear in my mind. ‘The boat, Mr Holmes,’ I cried.

‘Well, what about it?’ said Strickland irritably.

‘The
Kohinoor
should have docked at least by midday, instead of which it could only do so late in the afternoon. If everything had gone according to schedule, Mr Holmes not only would have been in this hotel by the evening, but could have been in his room, maybe even this one, at the time of the incident.’

‘And Mr Holmes would then have been the unfortunate victim instead of the other fellow?’ asked Strickland.

‘Possibly,’ said Sherlock Holmes softly.‘Only possibly. I assure you gentlemen, that I am not boasting of undue prescience when I say that I was anticipating an attack upon my person. I have had four such attempts made on me just this month, though I must admit that this particular one presents the most features of interest.’

‘But the room,’ Strickland exclaimed.‘How could the murderer have known that …?’

At that moment a dour looking police officer in khaki drill walked into the room. He tugged at his ragged grey moustache worriedly as he spoke.

‘The body’s been taken down to the mortuary, Sir,’ he said to Strickland in a strong Aberdonian accent. ‘In all my years in the force I’ve never seen a bloodier mess than this. What could have caused such a horrible death?’

‘It’s anybody’s guess, at the moment,’ Strickland replied. ‘But things should become a littie clearer once the body’s properly examined. Who’s on duty at the laboratory now?’

‘Probably old Patterson, Sir.’

‘Tell him I want the autopsy performed right away. I’ll be down as soon as I finish questioning Mr Sigerson and his native guide here. Mr Sigerson ministered to the dying man and may have seen or heard something that could have bearing on the case.’

‘Estrekeen’ sahib could lie like a thief when he had to.

‘Then would it be all right if the hotel people were to clean up the mess? We’ve gone over everything with a fine tooth comb, but haven’t turned up a thing.’

‘All right. If you’re sure you haven’t overlooked anything.’

‘Nae, Sir. I’m pretty sure I haven’t,’ replied the inspector, and then chuckled. ‘They’re having an old boy’s reunion dinner downstairs — the United Services College, I think — and the manager is in a fair dither, what with the blood on the staircase and all.’ He walked over to the door adjusting his topee. ‘I’ll leave Havildar Dilla Ram and two boys here on duty.’

‘Thank you, MacLeod. Good night.’

After the inspector had left the room Holmes raised his eyes to to the ceiling and sighed. ‘So the official detective force of the city of Bombay functions in much the same manner as old Scodand Yard.’

‘Look here, Mr Holmes,’ said Strickland in an injured tone of voice. ‘I admit that all of us are absolutely baffled by this mystery, and I am sure you’re not. You have thrown out hints here and hints there but I think we have a right to ask you straight how much you know about the business.’

‘My dear fellow, I did not at all mean to hurt your feelings. Just a few more details to be confirmed, after which I assure you, all will be revealed. Now, I want you to be there at that autopsy and note every detail carefully. I have no hesitation in saying that the results may be crucial to the solution of the case.’

‘Well, Mr Holmes,’ said Strickland, somewhat mollified, ‘you have a deuced round-the-corner way of doing things, but I’ve put up with your reticence for so long, that I ought to be able to bear it a bit longer, I suppose.’

‘Good man,’ laughed Sherlock Holmes, clapping him on the shoulder. ‘And, now, for one last thing, and this may be more in Mr Mookerjee’s field of interest; where could one obtain some books dealing with the flora and fauna of this country?’

‘Well, Sir,’ I replied, somewhat puzzled by his unexpected request, ‘the best place would be the library of the Bombay Natural History Society. I happen to know the Secretary, Mr Symington, quite well (I had demi-officially provided him with rare specimens of Tibetan primroses) and their library facilities are excellent. But I fear they will be closed now.’

‘Ah well, then tomorrow must serve,’ said Sherlock Holmes compliantiy. ‘I expect you here, Mr Mookerjee, bright and early tomorrow, to take me there. Now let us proceed downstairs to arrange my accommodations and have a bite of supper.’

‘You must be famished,’ Strickland said ruefully.‘I really should have…’

‘Not at all, my dear fellow,’ Mr Holmes interrupted, leading the way out of the room. ‘It has been a most instructive evening. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Would you mind closing the door behind you? It would not do to let people know we have been snooping around here.’

The manager had lost no time in straightening things out, it seemed, for the hotel-sweepers were busy scrubbing the staircase. They had not yet got to the landing which was still awash with blood. Holmes stopped suddenly before descending the stairs and looked with a puzzled expression at the floor.

‘Do you happen to notice anything peculiar about this blood?’

‘Why, no,’ said Strickland. ‘There just seems to be a lot of it around. Why? Is there anything unusual?’

‘Never mind,’ Holmes replied, descending the staircase, but I overheard him muttering to himself,‘Remarkable, most remarkable.’

We were crossing the lounge to the reception desk, when the manager hurried over to us. ‘A thousand apologies, Mr Sigerson. I have been most remiss in my duties as a host. But this terrible accident and…’

‘It’s quite all right. I’ve spent a useful half hour working out the details of my proposed excursions in this city with my guide, Mr Mookerjee, here. Now if I could trouble you…’

‘Most certainly, Sir.’ Mr Carvallo!’ He beckoned to the clerk at the reception desk. ‘A room for the gentleman.’

Mr Carvallo, a plump sleek young gentleman, probably of Portuguese descent, reached under his desk for a key and then rang the desk-bell with a thump of his palm. A native porter in hotel livery shuffled up. He was given the room key with some instruction. He retrieved Mr Holmes’s meagre baggage from the manager’s office and shuffled up the staircase. Sherlock Holmes started to follow the porter, but then turned around to us. “If you’ll just wait for me in the dining room, I won’t be a minute. I have to get a fresh handkerchief from my valise.’

Strickland and I walked over to the dining room where we were at a small table in a corner of the room. Obviously, the United Services College Old Boys’ (with ladies) reunion dinner had not ended, for the centre of the hall was lined with large banquet tables and occupied by the formally dressed ladies and gentlemen who earlier in the evening, had received such a rude shock from our dead friend. Needless to say, the banquet did not appear to be a particularly cheerful one. As a turbaned waiter in white livery silently filled our water glasses, Mr Holmes stepped briskly into the dining room, laughing silently in his strange way as he seated himself and unfolded his napkin.

‘It is most piquant. Can you guess which room I have been given?’

‘Surely not…’ I cried in amazement, but I was anticipated.

‘Yes, 289.’

‘By Thunder!’ exclaimed Strickland’ ‘It must be that smirking manager. Let me take him down to the thana and I’ll make him talk, as quick as Jack Ketch’s gibbet.’

‘Hold your peace, Strickland,’ Sherlock Holmes held out his hand in an imperious fashion. ‘I assure you that I anticipated this very move. Furthermore, we have no proof of the manager’s

complicity in this business. Anyhow, whoever it is, we mustn’t scare him off at this initial stage of the game.’

‘But your life, man! Surely you’re not going to sleep there tonight?’

‘My very intention. Nothing will happen in that room tonight, my dear fellow. I am staking more than my poor reputation on it. And now let us not vex ourselves any further with these conundrums. Ah, this Solferino soup and roast chicken a la Moghul is the very thing. Could I propose a bottle of Montrachet to celebrate my…umm, somewhat eventful arrival onto the shores of the Indian Empire?’

3

Sherlock Holmes Reminisces

Over coffee Mr Holmes told us the story of the great deception he had performed on the world.

Over ‘You have by now heard of Professor Moriarty,’ said Sherlock Holmes, pushing his chair away from the table and stretching his long legs.

‘The Times of India
carried an article about his criminal empire simultaneously with your obituary,’
¹
I ventured.

‘We received information from London about the Professor and his gang,’ Strickland said. ‘I also read quite a lively story about the whole business in the
Strand Magazine!

‘That would be my friend Dr Watson’s account of what he thought had happened,’ Holmes remarked thoughtfully as he filled his pipe. ‘In this entire business my only regret is the unnecessary alarm and distress I have caused him. But that couldn’t be helped, I suppose. The stakes were too high, and Moriarty’s minions too desperate.’

‘Ay, there was a genius,’ said Mr Holmes, puffing on his pipe. ‘The greatest criminal mind of the century, but no one had heard of him. There lay the wonder of it. No doubt you have read the more lurid details of his career. In fact he was a man of most respectable origins. From a very tender age he displayed a precocious mathematical faculty which an excellent education developed to phenomenal heights. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a thesis on the Binomial Theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities. He is also the celebrated author of
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
—a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticising it. Unfortunately a criminal strain ran in his blood which was exacerbated and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the university town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and to come down to London.
²

‘For some years I had continually been conscious of some sinister and ubiquitous organising power behind the criminal world of London. For years I worked to uncover this conspiracy, and at last the time came when my researches led, after a thousand cunning twists and turns, to the late Professor Moriarty of mathematical renown. He was the organiser of nearly all that was evil and undetected in England, and possibly beyond. He sat motionless like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web had a thousand radiations, and he knew well every quiver of each of them. He did little himself. He only planned. But his agents were numerous and splendidly organised. This was the dark domain that I discovered, gendemen, and which I devoted my whole energy to expose and break up.

‘But the Professor was fenced round with safeguards so cunningly devised that at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal, if not superior. But I persisted with my investigations until one day the Professor made a mistake. It was a small mistake, I will grant you, just the merest oversight; but it gave me my chance. Starting from that point I wove my net around him.’

It is not necessary to relate here the full story that Sherlock Holmes told us about the brilliant way he managed to expose and trap the Professor and his organisation; and how Scotland Yard through its bungling allowed the Professor and some of his top henchmen to slip out of Mr Holmes’s net. The reader will undoubtedly have read that special issue of the
Strand Magazine
where the entire story, including the subsequent meeting of Professor Moriarty and Mr Sherlock Holmes was excitingly related; and also, where, to the grief of an Empire, the mistaken conclusion was drawn that the great detective had perished in the thundering waters of the Reichenbach Falls.

Strickland and I listened entranced as Sherlock Holmes told us of his final moments with the professor.

‘I had littie doubt, gentlemen,’ continued Mr Holmes, sipping his brandy, ‘when the somewhat sinister figure of the late Professor loomed ahead of me, at the end of the only narrow track that led to safety, that I had come to the end of my fruitful career. His grey eyes were set with bitterness and malicious purpose. But he greeted me civilly enough. We had an interesting but brief conversation, and he gave me a sketch of the methods by which he had confounded the police force. I reciprocated with a few details of how I had managed to unearth his organisation and activities. I then obtained his courteous permission to write a short note for Dr Watson which I left with my cigarette case and my stick. I walked along the pathway, Moriarty still at my heels, until I reached the end. Before me the thundering waters of the fall plunged deep down into a dreadful cauldron of seething and swirling foam. I turned around. Moriarty drew no weapon, but the mask of his calm exterior visibly began to break down. The great bulge of his forehead throbbed like a live thing. His eyes flashed a dreadful hatred, the like of which I had never seen before, and his mouth moved incessandy, no doubt uttering some curse for the damnation of my soul, but which I fortunately could not hear for the noise of the waterfall.

‘Then with a snarl he hurled himself on me. He was like a madman and had the strength of one. Physically I am equal to most, but the fury of the Professor’s charge initially confounded me. His long cadaverous fingers seized me by the throat, and proceeded to thrtftde me in a most alarming manner. His mouth, distorted with revengeful hatred, trickled with foam like a rabid dog.

‘“Die, Holmes. Damn you! Die!” he screamed, spraying my face with his vile spittle. We teetered together on the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of
bujitsu,
³
which includes the Japanese system of wrestling, and which has more than once been very useful to me. Gripping him firmly by the collar and applying a judicious foot against his stomach, I rolled over on my back throwing him clean over me.
⁴
With a scream he fell over the precipice. But the desire to live is a strong and desperate one in all beings. When I got up, rather shaken, I perceived that the Professor had managed to grip the edge of the precipice and somehow arrest his fall. He lay dangling over the dark furious chasm, his fingers scrabbling desperately to maintain a hold on the edge of the cliff. His eyes, wide with fear, met mine.

‘ “Help me, please,” he croaked.

‘At that instant I lost my sense of animosity towards the wretched man. I moved a step forward, not suspecting the base treachery that lurked in his heart. His right hand snaked towards my leg, nearly getting a grip on it. That was his undoing. His other hand, unable to bear his full weight, lost its grip. After a momentary effort to restore his hold, he plunged down the chasm. I saw him fall for a long way. Then he struck a rock, bounded off, and splashed into the water.

‘For a while I was unable to move. Many men have hated me, but the implacable malevolence that Moriarty had directed at me left even my usually strong nerves somewhat shaken.

‘I was just about to start back on the track when it struck me what a really extraordinarily lucky chance Fate had placed in my way. Moriarty was not my only enemy. There were at least three of his lieutenants who had escaped from the police net and would not hesitate to seek vengeance. They were formidable and dangerous men, and it would have been a willful act of self-deception if I thought I could avoid them perpetually. Foremost among them was Moriarty’s own chief of staff. A man of the vilest antecedents but with a brain of the first order; as secretive and unknown to most as his late master. The others were more openly notorious. You may recollect the case of L’Oiseau, the circus acrobat, of Niagara Falls fame, who murdered the Greek prime minister in his bed but escaped from police custody without a trace; and Luff, the so called ‘Mad Bomber’, whose explosive exploits filled the pages of our dailies just a couple of years ago. You see, Moriarty believed in the American business principle of paying for the best talents in their fields. And these fellows were the very best. One or the other would certainly get me. On the other hand, if all the world was convinced that I was dead they would take liberties; they would lay themselves open, and sooner or later I could entrap them.

‘I managed to hide myself on a high ledge when the search party, organised by Dr Watson, arrived at the scene. At last, when they had all formed their inevitable and totally erroneous conclusions, they departed, and I was left alone.

‘Suddenly a huge rock thundered past me and crashed into the chasm. For an instant I thought it was an accident, but a moment later, looking up, I saw a man’s head against the darkening sky. Another stone struck the very ledge upon which I was stretched, within a foot of my head. Of course, the meaning of this was obvious. Moriarty had not been alone. A confederate — and even that one glance had told me how dangerous a man that confederate was — had kept guard while the Professor had attacked me. From a distance unseen by me, he had been witness to his master’s death and my escape. He had waited and then, making his way round to the top of the cliff, had endeavoured to succeed where his master had failed.

‘It did not take me very long to form my conclusions, gendemen. I scrambled down onto the path, once nearly falling off into the chasm, when another stone sang past me. Halfway down I slipped, but by the blessing of God I landed, torn and bleeding upon the path. I took to my heels from the spot and managed to do ten miles over the mountains in the darkness. Finally I came upon one of those shepherd huts that you find in the upper reaches of the Alps. It was empty and only a short beam of wood served to bar the stout door. I stumbled in, and fumbling in the darkness managed to find a battered tin lantern. By its cheerful light I proceeded to make myself at home. The household effects were somewhat primitive, but more than ample for my few needs, and indeed luxurious, considering the state of my present predicament. I washed and bound my wounds, which were, thankfully, of a superficial nature.

‘It was with a light heart that I strode through the Alpine meadows the next morning. Though I took due precautions, I relegated most thoughts of Moriarty and his gang to the back of my mind. After all, the sun was shining, the snow on the mountain tops was virgin white, and my old cherry wood, which had survived my precipitous descent, was drawing very nicely. That evening I came to the town of Hospenthal. With the help of a guide I proceeded over the St Gotthard pass, which was deep in snow, and continued southward to the border town of Como. After ten days I reached Florence, the city of Dante—who when he remarked
“Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita,”
could have been describing the position of my own life at that moment.

‘I had wired to an old acquaintance in London for money.
⁵
He was my only confidant, and it was he who wired to Colonel Creighton to assist me here in India. For you see, by then it was quite clear that I would require some active assistance especially when in unfamiliar surroundings, if Moriarty’s avengers were not to succeed altogether. Four separate attempts were made on my life: the one that came closest to taking it was in front of the Gezirah Palace Hotel in Cairo, where I was set upon by two black-cloaked figures wielding over-size scimitars. I had fortunately taken the precaution of purchasing a hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, so the conflict was rather one-sided.

‘And now we have this bizarre murder, which if my theories are correct, is the latest, and so far the most interesting attempt on my life. But the temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession. Nothing can be concluded till the results of the autopsy are released. I expect you, Strickland, to fit in this final piece of the puzzle tomorrow. Until then, good night.’

As my ghari moved along the dark streets of the city carrying me back to my lodgings, I tried to sort out in my head the events of the day. How had that poor man been murdered? Why all that blood? How did it all tie in to the manager and Moriarty and the ferret-face? But it was beyond me. I knew I had to wait till the morrow for an answer.

That night I had frightening dreams.

1. Probably the Reuter’s despatch that appeared in all English papers on 7 May 1881, mentioned by Dr Watson in
The Empty House.

2. A near identical thumb-nail biography of Prof. Moriarty is provided by Holmes to Dr Watson in
The Final Problem
and
The Valley of Fear.

3. One of Dr Watson’s less celebrated gaffes as a reporter is cleared up here. In
The Empty House
Watson records Holmes as crediting his defeat of Moriarty to his knowledge of …
‘baritsu
or the Japanese system of wrestling …’ In point of fact the word baritsu does not exist in the Japanese language. The actual term used by Holmes and cor-recdy reported by Hurree is
bujitsu,
the generic Japanese word for the martial arts, which includes the Japanese system of wrestling
{jujitsu)
in addition to fencing, archery, etc. The Japanese statesman-scholar, Count Makino, also offered a similar explanation to account for Watson’s error, in a paper read at the founding meeting of the Baritsu chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars in Tokyo, on 12 October 1948. (See
Foreign Devil: Thirty Years of Reporting in the Far East,
Richard Hughes, Andre Deutsch, Great Britain, 1972.)

4. Very similar to a sacrifice throw in Judo called
Tomoe-nage.

5. This was his brother Mycroft, as Sherlock Holmes was to later inform Dr Watson when he returned to London (see
The Empty House).
Holmes had also previously confided to Watson, though in a somewhat roundabout way, that Mycroft was actually the chief of British Intelligence. In
The Greek Interpreter
Holmes remarks that Mycroft occupied ‘some small office under the British Government’ though he was in truth ‘the most indispensable man in the country.’ In
The Bruce Partington Plans
Sherlock Holmes further confides to Watson that Mycroft’s unique governmental position was that of a ‘central exchange for incoming data’ and that ‘Again and again his word has decided the national policy.’