The Adventure of the Plated Spoon and Other Tales of Sherlock Holmes (30 page)

“A sovereign to you if you can get us there in five minutes,” he called out to the driver.

As we lurched forwards, flung back into our seats, Holmes fetched the floor a sharp blow with the ferrule of his stick. “I am a dunderpate, Watsons, worse than Lestrade and Gregson rolled into one arrogant fool! I count myself clever for taking in the doctor with a simple disguise and then fail to detect one far more obvious.”

“What do you mean?” I was far at sea, for the address he'd given the driver belonged to the first parlour we'd been to.

“Of course, I did not meet Snipe in his fancy dress, but I should have marked the signs in his alter ego. I attributed the redness in his cheeks to high emotion, or possibly accelerated circulation, a medical condition, when I should have taken note of his overall fairness and the likelihood of an allergic reaction to greasepaint.”

“Osbert, the ice cream man?” said Mary. “Snipe in disguise? Impossible!”

“That was no disguise; not in the physical sense of the term. There is no Snipe.”

“No Snipe!” we exclaimed together.

“He is a wig, putty, and paint, with a dash of gin and onion to taste: an old country recipe for impersonation. I ought to have known from Mrs. Watson's description, echoed by Osbert, that the man is a caricature out of Dickens, too broad for truth.”

“Surely Gloriana described her accomplice to you,” I said.

“Letter perfect. Salt in the wound, and well earned. Of course she would not provide me with the picture of the real man, lest he return for retribution. Pray, Watson, write this one up. No man can live up to the paragon you've made me out to be.”

He lit a cigarette, took two nervous puffs, and threw it outside. “Beekeeping in the South Downs looks better and better. To err this way or that would cost but the lives of two or three hundred Apidae, which regenerate by the month.”

I squeezed Mary's hand, communicating to her the futility of any attempt to draw Holmes out of his characteristic bouts of melancholy.

Finally—within the requisite five minutes, but hours in the imagination—we arrived at our destination. Holmes tossed the driver his disk of gold whilst the coach was still rocking on its springs, and was at the door of the parlour before I could help my wife down to the pavement.

The constable who had greeted us before let us in. When Holmes demanded the whereabouts of Osbert, he said, “Why, he's in back, sir. When I told him the inspectors will want to ask him some questions, he went in to settle his nerves with a pot of tea. There it goes now.”

The kettle could be heard whistling from the other side of the door behind the counter. Holmes raced that way with Mary and me close upon his heels.

It was a plain storage room much like the one at Valardi's, but with a coal stove in one corner, atop which the kettle was pouring steam towards the ceiling. No one was inside. As I removed the noisy thing from the stove, Holmes snatched up a shaggy wig from a pile of soiled clothing, padded ticking, and a disheveled tall hat on the floor. Mary took one look and nodded.

“Here is the rest of him,” said Holmes, indicating a stained rag on a table with a shaving mirror propped upon it surrounded by sundry jars and bottles. “Cold cream to strip off the makeup, and peppermints to cover the spirits and onions that finished the disguise. I'll wager a quid our man Osbert trod the boards at one time or another.”

He held a palm above the stovetop. “Ten minutes at least to bring the pot to a boil at this temperature. Ten hours would not be less convenient to us.” He opened a door that looked into an alley behind the building.

“He seemed quite harmless,” suggested the constable, who had followed us into the room. “I overheard you say it yourself.”

“So I did. You are not the blunderer.” He turned towards Mary. “I failed you. Believe me when I say that whatever disappointment you feel about my performance I share tenfold.”

She shook her head. “You have been instrumental in foiling a foul business. Osbert, or Snipe, can hardly continue his activities while he is in hiding.”

“At all events,” said I, “it would take much time and money to create another establishment such as this. You must consider this a victory, measured in the number of women you have saved potentially from his clutches.”

“Osbert was a flea on the back of the hyena, Watson, and a trained one at that. There are others. I shall not rest until I make an example of him that will shatter their complacency.”

“Surely the fellow will never again show his face in England.”

“He may never have shown it anywhere else.”

“But, ‘fold your tent'—”

“Snipe, of course, alarmed his legitimate competitors in order to stir up dust to cover his tracks. Don't you think he'd choose his language towards the same purpose? Anyone casually acquainted with
The Thousand and One Nights
knows the phrase. Our lecherous sheikh is a comforting image, lulling us into the belief that no fellow countryman would ever stoop to manipulate a machine so vile, yet the brothels are always recruiting, and the poorhouses are never in short supply of broken women. We look at Snipe and think, ‘There's a fellow worthy of his work,' and look right past an Osbert because of his tidy appearance. Our culprit may have shared a box with the Anstruthers, and gone backstage to shake Irving's hand and bow over Terry's.”

“Perish the thought,” I said with a shudder.

Mary lifted her chin. “Mr. Holmes, you may count upon us.”

He smiled for the first time since we'd left the third ice-cream parlour. “Then Mr. X must be on his guard, for we are a formidable force.”

I must now ask the reader to consider that four months passed after my wife's adventure, with little but the usual to occupy our time. When our friends returned from Scotland, curious about the reason for our abandonment of them on theatre night and my mysterious wire, we explained that I had been called away to attend to a patient, and Mary had stayed home with a sudden headache. Upon returning home and finding no sign of her, I'd acted without stopping to consider that she had gone to a chemist's for powders. They were an amiable couple, who accepted our apologies for neglecting to cancel, and there seemed no point in troubling them with the truth.

“I was certain it was something of that nature,” said Anstruther. “Henrietta fretted, but we had an early train, and little enough time as it was to rest before our journey.”

Throughout this period I saw almost nothing of Holmes. He was some ten weeks on the Continent, probing an affair of such delicacy on behalf of the state that he could not share the details even with me, and then, with nothing taking place in the criminal world to excite his attention, spent many days and nights in the reading room of the British Museum and the libraries of the city's newspapers researching
The Whole Art of Deduction
, his own equivalent of Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
. It was grueling work, and on those few occasions when I dropped in upon him I did not stay long, marking his plain exhaustion.

Osbert the ice-cream man vanished like a drop of water on a hot stove. A likeness based upon his description appeared in all the papers, and a reward posted by
The Times
for information leading to his apprehension, but no one came forward with anything useful. There was no record of a man bearing that name and resembling him to be found, and it was quickly decided that Osbert was an alias as surely as Snipe. With nothing new to report (and with Gregson and Lestrade's stern admonition not to mention the parts played by Holmes, Mary, and myself), the entire episode was soon supplanted by other items of interest.

Soon the columns were filled with the mysterious disappearance of Jane Chilton, the grown daughter of Sir James Chilton, whose textile mills in Middlesex produced uniforms for the British military. She was an heiress, and it was at first conjectured that she had been kidnapped for ransom, but when the anticipated demand failed to materialise, a darker suggestion emerged, that she had been slain for her purse and jewels and the body discarded. Grisly sensation was the specialty of the house in those days, and the illustrators found no limit of inspiration in Eugene Aram and Sweeney Todd. Given my own recent association with a vanishing-woman case, I had suspicions of my own; however, as there was no mention of her ever having been seen anywhere near an ice-cream parlour, I assigned them to personal sensitivity.

Holmes was abroad when the story reached its crescendo. It presented some arcane features I felt sure would attract his curiosity when he returned; but then Sir James received a letter in his daughter's hand, postmarked San Francisco, informing him that she had eloped with that fixture of romantic fiction, a penniless young man Not Suitable for marriage with a woman of good breeding, and after the inevitable flurry of sentimental claptrap, the curtain descended upon this act as well.

In the middle of August, with the streets hot and fetid and a white sun nailed to a burnt-out sky, I found my friend bright-eyed and cheerful, his feet propped upon an ottoman beside an open window and holding something close to his face. With a start I recognised it as the silver-plated teaspoon Mary had torn from the waistcoat pocket of the man she'd known as Snipe.

“Not my favourite trophy by any means, in view of the unsatisfactory conclusion,” he said. “Why it should fascinate me enough to interrupt my work in my magnum opus has posed a vexation until this very hour. Exercise your faculties, Watson. What do you surmise is the reason?”

“Dissatisfaction, as you indicated. To you an unsolved case is worse than a failed chemical experiment.”

“The reasoning is sound, but the explanation is inapplicable. I never dwell on past mistakes, only seek not to repeat them. Does nothing else occur to you?”

I sat down opposite him, defeated. “You've remarked before upon my matchless talent for grasping the obvious. I've fired my one round.”

“I was a prize ass to accuse you of a crime I've committed myself. When the spoon first came to light, we both assumed that Snipe had stolen it out of old habit. At that time we thought him to be a thief who had expanded his operation—“changed his lay,” as the Americans say—to embrace abduction. Now that we know he owned the establishment to which the spoon undoubtedly belonged, the theory is groundless. Why, then, did he have it on his person?”

“Perhaps it was his answer to a lucky rabbit's foot.”

“Possibly. Criminals are often superstitious. It's a hazardous vocation, after all. But let us widen our loop and consider other solutions. Gogol tells us the Zaporozhye Cossacks carried their dining utensils on their belts wherever they went, but there was nothing remotely Eurasian about Osbert's features. Judging by the lice in Snipe's wig, he wasn't overly fastidious, so we can eliminate any phobias about filth.”

He pointed the spoon at me, like a conductor his baton. “Do you remember something I said about fraternal organisations? I thought it profound at the time.”

I produced the notebook I am seldom without. In time it will join its hundreds of ancestors in the box I keep at my bank for the edification of future generations. I paged back four months, scanning my personal shorthand. “Of Snipe, you said, ‘He is a white slaver, and this, like the Freemason's apron, is the symbol of his order.'”

“Hum. I remembered it as more lyrical. I should have listened more closely to myself in any case, because I believe I had hit upon the truth. In the absence of a more compelling argument, I consider this to be Snipe's bona fides, providing access to others in his racket. These types haggle and trade amongst themselves, bartering in human chattel, and they are constantly on the lookout for infiltrators. A tangible badge of office saves paragraphs of challenge and response.”

“Surely anyone can obtain a spoon.”

“All the more reason to keep it secret. And should a suspicious constable waylay and search you, a cheap utensil would hardly be cause for arrest. For want of a better name, let us call this baleful brotherhood the Society of the Spoon, and put the hypothesis to the test.”

“What sort of test?”

He remarked that it was hot, and asked if I had a yearning for ice cream.

“I shall go with you,” said Mary.

I shook my head. “Not this time. If you won't heed my advice about the danger, consider that having a woman along would tip our hand.”

“Will you dress up as gypsies, with rings in your ears and bandannas wrapped round your heads?”

“Holmes says no, as regards me. My face is not as well known as his, thanks to the illustrators at
The Strand
, so no disguise is necessary in my case. I think also he sought to spare my feelings, as there is more to carrying off a role than fancy dress and a false nose.”

“I have never known him to give any thought to your feelings at all.” Her expression softened. “I withdraw that remark. I saw quite a different side of him last spring. But surely you're dressed too well to masquerade as a brigand.”

She excused herself, to return from the pantry a minute later, dragging a bulky burlap sack. “Here are some of your old clothes I've been saving for charity. See what suits your pretense.”

I retired to the bedroom, where I found the favourite pullover I'd missed for weeks. There was plenty of wear left in it in spite of the tiny balls of wool that had erupted upon its surface, but it was too heavy for the season. After clucking my tongue over some other unpleasant revelations (women are born for subterfuge), I selected a seersucker suit, a pair of brogans worn round at the heels, and a bowler beyond blacking. The crowning touch was a cravat a patient had given me one Christmas, with a Balinese dancer hand-painted on it in bright colours. Standing before the glass, I saw a shady character staring back, ready to pick my pocket or offer to sell me the Tower. I stepped back into the parlour and asked how I looked.