Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) (4 page)

Chapter III

My Brother’s Keeper

At precisely the quarter-hour there came a soft rap upon the door.  The visitor was tall, more than middle-aged, stern of countenance and decorum, impeccably garbed.

“Mr Holmes?  I am…”

“Yes, please come in, Sir Reginald Dunning,” Holmes said hurriedly.  “I greatly appreciate your promptness, and your indulgence by coming at this late hour.”

“It is I who owe you thanks, for seeing me at all,” Sir Reginald replied.  “Your brother speaks very highly of you and seems to think you can discover what has become of my brother, William.  I have told no one I was coming to see you.  Your brother was quite explicit that I keep your return to London an absolute secret.”

“Yes, there was a reason, but the reason has passed,” Holmes replied.  “By the time the morning papers hit the streets, all London will know I did not die, as my friend Watson believed and so passionately reported.  Please be seated, Sir Reginald, and give me the details, as far as you know them, of your brother’s disappearance.”

“I fear that William has become the latest victim of the so-called Vanishments,” Sir Reginald said.  “I trust the phenomenon is familiar to you.”

“Yes, the endemic rash of disappearances is part of what drew me back to London at this time,” Holmes explained.  “It is why I agreed to see you right away after Mycroft forwarded your letter.  Pray continue, sir.”

“My brother is many years my junior and there has always been a tremendous gulf between us,” Sir Reginald said.  “In many ways we are antithetical to each other, in disposition and outlook.  I have always been the practical one, solid and down to earth, responsible for William and myself ever since the deaths of our parents.  I have always looked out for William, perhaps too much so, some might say.  I am not being immodest when I say that it was I and I alone who built the Dunning Commodities and Trading Company into the concern it is today.”

“Your brother took no interest in the company?” Holmes asked.

“When I first started the company, he was too young to be allowed any real hand,” Sir Reginald explained.  “Later on, I assigned him as much responsibility as I thought he could bear.  It is not that he is a bad worker, for he always does as he is told, to the best of his ability, but he always has trouble focusing on the task at hand.  There always seems to be something, some fancy, that distracts him.”

“Drink?” Holmes ventured.  “Women? Gambling?  The lure of narcotics of bliss?”

“No.  I would not have condoned those vices, but at least I would have understood them,” Sir Reginald replied.  “He has always been a flighty lad, prone to too much thinking and reading, always yearning for adventure, for lands beyond the horizon, romantic nonsense.  I hoped he would lose his romantic inclinations as he matured, but, if anything, they seemed to worsen.  One of his jobs is to inspect cargoes and manifests, but he always seems to spend more time chatting up sailors and wharf-side riffraff, and his reports are always late.  Despite my best efforts to…”

“Tell me of your brother’s disappearance,” Holmes urged.

“It was four nights ago,” Sir Reginald began.  “He was inspecting some newly berthed ships at the Albion Dock.  It was a simple enough task, easily completed well before the advent of night, but the dockmaster reported he did not leave the dock until very late.  Instead of heading straight home, it appears he stopped at a tavern called The Neptune, one of those sailors’ haunts of which my brother was inexplicably fond.  An enquiry agent I hired reported that William departed the tavern alone, but I thought it possible he attracted the wrong sort of attention with his flash, was followed out, then set upon.”

“Your agent could find no evidence of that though?”

“No.”

“There was no sign of him in the hospitals or in any of the other establishments in the area?”

“No, Mr Holmes.  They were all thoroughly checked.”

“The morgues?”

“That, too, sir,” Sir Reginald replied, shifting nervously.

“There have been no demands for ransom, I take it.”

“That is correct.”

“Is it conceivable that your brother finally gave in to the yearnings harboured for so long?”  Holmes asked.  “If he really wanted to run away to sea, he would hardly do so on one of your own ships.  Have you explored that possibility?”

“Yes, Mr Holmes,” he answered.  “Thoroughly.”

“Which brings us to the likelihood that your brother is indeed the latest victim of the Vanishments,” Holmes mused.

“That is my fear,” Sir Reginald admitted.  “I avoided even considering it until there was no escaping its probability.  I would much rather believe that William is knocking around some tropic port, even that he is ensconced in some foul opium den in Limehouse, but I have never been good at self-deception.  I believe in facing problems full on.”

“You have already consulted New Scotland Yard?”

Sir Reginald’s brow furrowed deeply.  “And of less than no help they were!  This whole matter of the Vanishments is casting a bad light upon them, and what they don’t want now is yet another victim, especially one not poor and wretched.  They ran me every which way to Sunday in an effort to convince me William had run afoul of everything but the Vanishments.  And don’t mention the East End Ghosts, I was warned, unless you’re the Home Secretary himself.”

“Some view the so-called Ghosts as being no more real than the Vanishments,” Holmes pointed out.  “And none admit to a connection.”

“Well, there was one fellow at the Yard who didn’t seem to be chasing his own tail,” Sir Reginald admitted.  “He told me on the sly he thought there was a connection between the two, swore he would look into William’s disappearance.”

“His name?”

“Inspector Charles Kent.”

“Ah, Inspector Kent,” Holmes murmured.  “By all accounts, he’s too bound by convention and his own prejudices at times, but he’s a good man.  True to his word, methodical, tenacious as a ferret.  What has he discovered?”

Sir Reginald shrugged.  “When I tried to call upon him the next day, I was told he had been reassigned.”

“Kent has a talent for infuriating his superiors when he feels he is on the right track, and it goes against their grain,”  Holmes said.  “But I’ve never heard of him going against his word.”

“Be that as it may, Mr Holmes, I cannot sit around and wait,” Sir Reginald declared.  “I must know what has happened to William…even if it is the worst.  Will you help me, Mr Holmes?”

Holmes glanced at the clock.

“I will.  Do you have a likeness of your brother I may keep?”

He reached inside his jacket and retrieved a small photograph.  “This was made less than a month ago.”

“Thank you, Sir Reginald.  Now, if you will excuse me, I must bid you good night,” Holmes said, walking his visitor to the door.  “Try not to worry.  I will do everything in my power to find your brother and keep him safe.”

“Bless you, Mr Holmes,” the man effused.  “People consider me a hard man, heartless, caring only for the accumulation of gold and power, but I would give it all away if it meant seeing William again.  If I have seemed to be hard upon him in the past, it is only because I do not want to see him make the same mistakes I observed in others.”

“You are your brother’s keeper?”

“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” he admitted.  “If you find him, you will, I pray, convey…well, tell him why…if, when you find him…if he…”

“You will have the opportunity to tell himself, I hope,” Holmes said, sparing further embarrassment to a man as unaccustomed to stammering as he was to baring his emotions. “Good night, Sir Reginald.”

Holmes closed the door and hurriedly pulled a black bag from behind a chair.  From the bag he removed several small canisters familiar to any actor.  He had to seek information in low places, and the best person to do that was not Sherlock Holmes.  In a few minutes he transformed himself from a gentleman of the West End to a man who could move invisibly among the docks and tangled warrens of London’s dismal eastern half.

At the door he hesitated.

For once in his life he was more full of doubts than confidence.  He felt himself upon the border of an undiscovered country, and his misgivings had nothing to do with his three-year absence, for London is always London, always his home and ever the centre of the world.  His glimpses of the path ahead had been infuriatingly cryptic, serving more to obscure than illuminate.  But he had no choice but to push off into unknown seas, putting all his faith in logic and himself.

He closed the door.

Already abandoning the character along with the likeness of Sherlock Holmes, he loped down the stairs with a sailor’s gait and vanished into the brisk early morning air, the enfolding darkness.

Back in his chamber, a lock clicked, a door swung open.

Chapter IV

Holmes, The Meddler

The atmosphere of the Neptune Tavern was heady with blue swirls of strong tobacco smoke and alcoholic exhalations.  It was choked with songs and conversations that melded into a polyglot babble, forcing listeners to linger close to each other, making it difficult, though not entirely impossible, for those who wished to overhear without being noticed.

Clasping only his second pint of the evening, and it only done in by a few sips despite the length of time it had been nursed, Inspector Charles Kent lounged from place to place, apparently wrapped in an alcoholic haze, yet keen to every conversation that drifted his way.  No one looking at him would have recognised him as a Scotland Yard jack.

With his two-day beard and his thready coat, he had more the appearance of a flying cove or a macer than anyone even remotely respectable.  Strictly speaking, however, he was not working for the Yard at the moment, having been summarily dismissed by his superiors from pursuing any line of investigation even remotely connected to the Vanishments.  A bunch of weepy simps, the lot of them, he thought as he took another slow slip and subtly shifted to another part of the tavern.

“…and the Vanishments, aye, like what took the toff…”

Interest peaked, Kent moved closer to the speakers, his intentions masked by the apparent randomness of his movements.  They were at a table in a shadowy reach of the tavern, near stairs that led to upper chambers of dubious intent.

Three ancient tars were in low converse with a fourth man, a gaunt fellow dressed in sombre black.  He was not a man of the sea just as he was plainly not of the East End, and it was obvious the three clove to him more from the pints of ale he provided than any sense of commonality.  Though the fourth man smiled as he listened attentively to their ramblings, there was an inherent superficiality, as if the joviality went no deeper than his skin, and there was a haunted quality to his gaze that belied any trace of gaiety.

Kent let his chin sink to his breast, his gaze furtively peeping between the rim of his ale mug and the brim of his lowered hat.  He seemed ready to slump, oblivious to his surroundings, yet he heard nearly everything and saw almost as much.

“The Ghosts rise up from the ground, they do…”

“Grab people…”

“Drag them down to where beat the hearts of the dark machines…”

“Infernal machine splashed in the Thames…”

“The Vanishments…”

“The Ghosts…”

“Where one goes the other happens…”

“Like the toff!”

“Billy-boy was a swell, not a nose-liftin’ bloke…”

“Poor, poor lad. taken by the flitten’ Ghosts…”

“Aye, a Vanishment…”

“Taken into the hungry black down under…”

A fifth man had gravitated slowly toward the four, moving as aimlessly as Kent had in positioning himself.  He was skilled in his efforts, for he managed to attract no one’s attention, no one but Kent, who was wary of everything and everyone.

The fifth man was  tall, thin, dark complexioned, obviously a Lascar, yet there was something odd about him as well, something not entirely belied by the masque of a simple Lascar, and a masque it might be, Kent thought.  He, too, seemed interested in the rumours and gossip uttered by the three tars for the benefit of the fourth man, about the mysterious events afflicting East London and a victim who could be none other than William Dunning.

Despite the never-ending flow of ale, or perhaps because of it, the three old sailors eventually muttered their way into silence, and the man who had been so free with his coppers made to get up.  As he did, he was approached by the Lascar, who bent low and whispered into his ear.

The man glanced sharply at the Lascar, then nodded.

They headed for the stairs.

Kent unslumped his body and started toward the stairs, thinking to creep after them and station himself where he could listen unobserved.  In the shadows of the stairs he could make out murmurs above, but nothing distinct.  As he started stealthily toward the upper regions of the tavern he felt great beefy hands grip his shoulders and spin him about like a moppet’s top.

“Inspector Kent, you playin’ copper’s narc on yer own now, are you?” demanded a man nearly as wide as he was tall, heavily muscled with a face that looked as if it had come up on the poor side of a brawl.  The hands that had spun Kent about now gripped his lapels.  “You can’t hide a blue bottle behind a little spinach,  you damned rozzer!”

It was Dinky Clabber, the nobbler Kent had sent to Dartmoor a few years back for breaking the legs and arms of  a dollyshopper who had refused to buy up some nicked merchandise from a gang of petty crib-breakers.  Had the victim been more worthy of the jury’s sympathy,  Clabber would still be sporting broad arrows and a convict’s cap rather than a mothy brown jacket and a battered bowler.

“You’ll get yours for setting me in the dock!”

All eyes were turned toward Kent and Clabber, and Kent knew any further pretence was useless.  Additionally there was some sort of commotion up the stairs demanding Kent’s attention.

Kent slammed his nearly full mug into Clabber’s face.  He pushed away the hands from his lapels, kneed him hard in the dabbers, then delivered a brutal uppercut when he gasped and snapped forward.  Clabber hit the floor like a tipped bull, and everyone in the Neptune went back about his business.  A knock-down drag-out was not that unusual an occurrence in the Neptune’s common hall, the only aspect bringing it slightly above the usual was that such a bruiser could be despatched in such short order by a man who was, at least in comparison, such a little fellow.

As Kent made his way up the stairs, he heard the breaking of a window and knew it was too late to seek any information from the man in black who had been so interested in the Vanishments, the East End Ghosts and William Dunning.  At least there was still the Lascar to hold to account.

“Hold it right there,” he told the Lascar in the shadowed corridor.  “Scotland Yard.  I have some questions for you.”

“Good morning, Inspector Kent,” the man said dryly.  “Your encounter with Clabber seems to have bollixed it for both of us.”

“Christ Almighty,” Kent swore softly.  “Mr Sherlock Holmes.  Three years dead, and still the meddler.”