The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes (7 page)

11

Every case—and there were many—that I was concerned with over my long career was stimulating. I can recall all of my cases even now, and I can present the salient facts and deductions leading to their linear classification and storage. Another method of classification, however, presents far more interesting possibilities. I have, from time to time, sifted my cases into their degree of stimulation. Some were barely stimulating, others moderately so, and some were highly stimulating. But, a few were supremely—exquisitely—stimulating. One recalls these cases in much the same way as one recalls the three or four bottles of vintage Bordeaux that go beyond all other vintages and produce a sublime taste memory that endures forever.

At the summit of stimulation is the case Watson called
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Next is
The Speckled Band.
Third is
The Musgrave Ritual
. Fourth is
The Devil’s Foot.
And fifth is
The Dancing Men
. Of course, Watson had his own preferences; these, however, are mine and, in the end, it is my mind that is stimulated or not. These five cases were more than just interesting puzzles and each offered differing degrees of the narcotics Danger and Death.

Many of my cases were concerned with deduction alone; some inferential and some mathematical. Often they simply involved the finding of a notable gemstone, or a government document, or an indiscreet photograph. Deduction, to be maximally stimulating to me, is best associated with Danger and Death. The three elements become symbiotic; each sets each of the other in motion; the three in motion together cause my brain exquisite pleasure. And that pleasure is the only exquisite pleasure I allow into my sphere of experience. In the opposite dark side of the mirror, it is the same pleasure that the murderer feels at the moment life leaves his victim. Triumph. Supremacy. Power over life. Blood lust. The ultimate consuming stimulation.

The essential act, however, is to keep the mirror intact. Should the mirror ever be allowed to crack, the opposites will be forced together and—in suspension like oil and water—will fight for dominance. To be a genius in one’s chosen world, one can never allow control to shatter or an internal fight for dominance to begin. The moment one allows the mirror to crack, genius departs and brutishness ascends. That is what happened that morning on the precipice of Reichenbach Falls. So much depends upon the strength of the glass.

12

I have reflected on the potential for the perfect crime of murder during my long career. Only one case involved a perfect murder by trickery, but Culverton Smith may have come as close as anyone in my experience to creating the perfect death by the use of poison. Of all the poisons available to the murderer, bacteria are a particularly virulent and ambiguous form of poison. If the delivery of deadly bacteria to the victim’s bloodstream is sufficiently ambiguous, proof of intent to murder is exceptionally difficult. As with Smith’s attempt on my life, it was not even necessary for him to be present.

Potentially lethal bacteria can be had for the taking quite easily. Septic dressings and the suppurations of necrosis can be had from any hospital bin. The infection of a needle, or a thorn or a splinter of glass is straightforward and, generally, not particularly unusual. Similarly, the use of bacteria from animal husbandry, resulting in unusual but not suspicious death, such as anthrax, does not immediately suggest murder; rather, it suggests only that the victim contracted a deadly disease from an animal or a farm. If the murderer is only reasonably intelligent and minimally clever, premeditated, bacteria-induced murder can be easily mimicked. With an acute mind behind the crime, perhaps only one out of twenty investigators will consider even the slight possibility of murder.

Other lethal toxins lend themselves superbly to the perfect murder, provided they have a direct and immediate route to the blood or the nervous system of the victim. Curare paralyses the nerves of respiration, causing almost immediate suffocation; the fumes of
radix pedis diaboli
produce near-instant insanity followed by death when the concentration is sufficient; the natural toxins of the swamp adder or the
cyanea capillata
, when their bite and sting appear accidental, can effectively shield the quiet murderer from exposure; and, of course, the oft-encountered charcoal poisoning and asphyxiation due to carbon monoxide have been used with great success by legions of subtle killers.

Of the fifty-odd murderers I encountered in my career, there was only one who staged a perfect murder, and one that I recognized only after the killer was long out of reach in Brazil. Young John Hector McFarlane was duped not by Jonas Oldacre, but by Oldacre’s actual murderer, Otho Cornelius, who had assumed the identity of Jonas Oldacre when I flushed him from his priest’s hole at Deep Dene House in Lower Norwood. Cornelius had murdered Oldacre and, in league with his wife, established himself and her as Jonas Oldacre and the house keeper, Mrs Lexington, in order to plunder Oldacre’s wealth and implicate the unsuspecting young McFarlane. The brilliance of Cornelius lain in the fact that the circumstances of his dramatic emergence created the expectation of acceptance of his identity as Oldacre by McFarlane, the spurious housekeeper and, by extension, the police. No one questioned whether Oldacre was, in fact the real Oldacre. After killing Oldacre, Cornelius had transferred all of Oldacre’s money into his bank account under his own name and, during the period immediately after the discovery when McFarlane was released from police custody and the matter was resolved, Cornelius and his wife, upon his release as Oldacre for want of evidence of conspiracy or attempted murder by Scotland Yard, quickly transferred their illgotten monies to Brazil and set sail for Rio de Janeiro under new names. Both the real Oldacre and his money had disappeared; his body was never found. Cornelius was never traced and the murder of Jonas Oldacre was perfected by a cunning murderer whose greatest accomplishment was in using my own ego as the instrument of his success. Lestrade’s praise, “… this is the brightest thing you have done yet …” was sufficient to close my eyes momentarily to the potential of an imposter.

Watson was kind in his setting down the case of the Norwood builder, particularly as he was privy to my failure to pursue the thread to its end. In some ways, I believe, it was a
quid-pro-quo
for one or two of his own eclipses which are not found in the stories and that best remain in shadow.

One confessed murderer—Leon Sterndale—benefited from my mother’s compassionate bent which, from time to time, has kept me from acting upon all that I have deduced. It can be argued that the perfect murder is, perhaps, accomplished far more often than thought as a result of the selected non-intervention by a compassionate investigator. For me, there has existed a line of demarcation between premeditated homicide and justifiable homicide. Often, that line has described the boundaries of love, honour, fidelity, and, yes, revenge. Across the boundary, however, there exists only savagery, cruelty, pathology, and horror. It has not been difficult for me to place myself on that line of demarcation on those occasions where the line was true and defined. My responsibility is to Reason. Atonement does not signify and is best left to those who practice in the realm of spiritual mythology.

13

Langdale Pike. A most extraordinary person. No one in London knew more about the gentry, the aristocracy or the Royals than Langdale Pike. He studied society as intensely as I studied crime. He organised and filed relationships, indiscretions, infidelities, affairs of the heart, addictions, bankruptcies—all the flotsam and jetsam of the upper class and the individual foibles of the most and least prominent of its members. This encyclopaedic knowledge was contained wholly within his formidable brain equipped with its photographic memory. The workings of his mind were those of an automaton. A new fact stimulated a file of older facts and aligned them into new relevancies with other facts about other people pigeon-holed in perfect reason and deduction. Pike and I were equals operating in different disciplines, but using the same powers of observation, knowledge and synthesis.

Pike was born in London in 1855 to a wealthy family of long establishment in the law of admiralty, the insuring of vessels, and sole owners of a large shipping fleet. Through being the lawyers and the insurers, as well as the ships owners, their cases never went against themselves and, regardless of the verdict, the Pikes claimed either the reward or the fee. In consequence, the family amassed a fortune and ranked in the upper strata of London society.

Young Langdale went up to Cambridge where he studied the arts of the dilettante. His knowledge of fine art, porcelain, literature, music and theatre was sufficiently broad to equip him as a highly accomplished raconteur and favoured dinner quest. After coming down with an Ordinary in Humanities, Langdale took to spending his days at Swithin’s, his club in St. James Street, lunching at the St. James Hotel where he daily sampled liberally the prize French wines in the hotel’s extensive underground vaults, and returning to sit in Swithin’s bow window to observe the to and fro movements of his specimens and be available to all who curried his favour by informing him of the latest gossip above and below stairs in the great homes of London society. Pike was created to be precisely what he was: a handsome mannequin, an arbiter of taste, and the repository of all of society’s most intimate secrets. He was invaluable to me as a source of information, and I was invaluable to him as a source of hints and directions as to where to turn his energies.

Now, three years since his death, it is possible to accord Langdale Pike his proper place in history. London’s most accomplished dilettante and gadfly was, in reality, Great Britain’s most important intelligence officer from 1875 through his last years in the early 1920s. For nearly forty-five years, Pike filtered the endless river of gossip and innuendo that came his way daily and sieved from it those national and international bits and bobs that signalled threats to the monarchy, the government, and the people of Great Britain, passing them on to his one contact in Whitehall: Mycroft.

During the Great War, Pike was the human dial upon the surface of war. He alone was privy to the sacrifices and heroisms of the British upper class, as well as their perfidies, acts of treason and war profiteering. Masterfully inhabiting his well-developed role as social gadfly, Pike was instrumental in successfully forestalling forty-seven national threats to my certain knowledge and there may well be numerous others of which I am unaware. Only Mycroft knew for sure, and Mycroft was a closed book.

My intersections with Pike notably occurred in the business of the Bruce-Partington plans, and that of the naval treaty, the Greek interpreter, the red circle, Mrs Mary Maberly and, of course, the matter concerning Baron Von Herling. Not once in all the years was Pike ever wrong in his analyses or conclusions.

Langdale Pike was an example of what can emerge when privilege, wealth, education and class combine to benefit society. Just as easily, he could have been exactly what he seemed to be, but he wasn’t. In many ways, like me, the Langdale Pike known to the world was partially a figment. Only through the successes of his work did we catch a glimpse of the real man.