The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (15 page)

“Perhaps you might start from the beginning,” said Holmes, and we sat down among the scattered bones and artifacts and listened to James Addleton's terrible but disjointed tale.

“I'm a geologic surveyor and contractor, you see,” he said. “Such careers run in the family, a love of the past, a respect for preserving detail. My brother William spent his life cataloguing the minutiae of political events: keeping the minutes, writing the reports and memoranda. Richard shared his love of details, but turned his talents to scientific and scholarly pursuits, though he never could advance past junior curator—too much backstabbing in the division. How ironic, how sad, that our careers should intersect upon such a terrible point! And that we cannot agree on how next to proceed. Oh, if I'd only known how it all would come together, the terrible revenge exacted upon my family . . .”

He took hold of himself with some effort. Holmes and I exchanged a glance; this was not the time to break the news of his brothers' tragic deaths.

“I didn't know, you see, that there was anyone
here
. No one knew who owned the place. All you could get out of the villagers were stories to frighten children, or so I thought—or so they were then, before I—oh, God forgive me. In 1864, I was ordered to open this mound up, for an archaeological excavation, they said. It was a Government commission, they didn't want to use a local man, I didn't know why and didn't ask, I needed the work. And then, a month later, they had me back to cave the entrance in again. I couldn't figure it, but I did what I was told. I did my job quickly, efficiently, and I left. I never heard the screams . . .”

“There were men down here, then? An excavation crew not notified to leave in time?”

“No.” The elder Addleton shook his head miserably. For a moment his eyes went wild, and he clawed at his cheek as if to yank the persistent facial spasm out; then his terror subsided, and he cast
Holmes a piteous stare as he said, “They were slaves, black-skinned men from Africa, kept here on Gladstone's estate for years, working for him, tilling his land, maybe cutting his bog, I don't know. But someone in the Government found out about it, and was going to expose his terrible hypocrisy, and so he had to cover it up. Gladstone! Gladstone, who did so much to end such tyranny—” He began to wail and tear at his hair, and it took all of Holmes's persuasive soothing to calm him back into something resembling a coherent narrative. “The order came down to open this mound up—and then cave it in again,
with the men inside
. I didn't put them in! I didn't know, I heard nothing, I did what I was told!”

“Who found those papers?” Holmes asked quietly.

“William,” said Addleton, wiping tears from his eyes with a soil-blacked cuff. “A stickler for details, for order. He was cleaning out old files in the Government records, and he found those letters, memoranda. The thought of what it would do to Gladstone—an old man, his sight failing, what use in bringing him down now? Then we realized what it meant to Richard's work. I had told him about the barrow, you see, and he'd gotten funding for an excavation, it was a coup for him, an unplumbed Wiltshire barrow when the archaeologists thought they'd all been discovered long since. He let ambition cloud his judgement, for he was bitter about his career, and he lied to the Museum about the location of the barrow. He didn't tell them that he'd never established who owned the grounds. Just came in here with his men and started digging. He preserved and catalogued everything he found, but then Gladstone must have found out. The Museum revoked its funding. Richard was furious. He moved his exhibits to our cellar, secretly, put them under lock and key and told the Museum they'd been disposed of as requested. But William couldn't bear the thought of any evidence that might hurt Gladstone. No matter what terrible things he had done—had ordered—he was still a good man, Gladstone, and William is nothing if not loyal. He wanted the exhibit and the papers destroyed. Richard was horrified. ‘Suppress it, yes; destroy it, never!' he cried. ‘History is far too precious a thing.' We could not agree on what to
do, any of us—and I feared that William would do something terrible, so I took the papers away, I brought them here, I put them in with the grave of the men whose death they ordered. Ever since William found them, ever since I realized what I did . . . I can't sleep for hearing the screams, they never stop . . .”

He covered his ears and curled around himself, rocking back and forth, weeping softly.

I was reeling from his tale, but Holmes seemed more focused on the man than on the information. “They tried to tunnel out,” he said. “They died in a cave-in because they hadn't the means of shoring the sides up adequately. The cave-in killed them, Addleton, not you. You did not know those men were here.”

His words were mesmeric, utterly convincing, perhaps because he was wholly convinced of their truth. Addleton looked up slowly. “But the screams,” he said. “Don't you hear them? Can't you see the shadows lurking? Fifty men, dead. Fifty poor imprisoned men, dead in their final prison under the ground, so that Gladstone might save his reputation . . .”

“Then Gladstone was the killer,” Holmes said. “You were merely an unwitting tool. Unwitting, Addleton.” He rose slowly and held out his hand. “Come,” he said. “We'll take you back to London.”

Addleton followed, docile now, his madness subsiding somewhat under Holmes's calming influence. What would become of him, I didn't like to think, as we climbed slowly up the sloping passageway and breathed again the clear night-time air. The news of his brothers' deaths would surely send him into the chasm of insanity whose edge he already skirted.

But it was not to be. As we came closer to the entrance we saw other lights bobbing outside. We had been followed after all.

Addleton deserted us with a cry, certain these were the Government men he feared, and fled back into the passageway—whether into the side tunnel or the tomb we could not tell, for this time his fears were justified. The men awaiting us were not the groundskeepers; they did not identify themselves. They escorted us
back to the village, silently, unswayed by Holmes's attempts to cajole information from them, stern and unyielding in their task. One of them stayed with us through the late-night carriage ride back to Trowbridge and saw us onto the last train for London. Overwhelmed by all that we had discovered, still I found myself relieved that we had paid for our rooms in advance, for we never saw the publican or his wife again.

“We must go back at once,” I said as the train pulled out of the station. There were no other passengers at this hour. “We cannot leave Addleton like that.”

“For the moment I'm afraid we have no choice. The property is too well guarded, ghost stories notwithstanding, and until we find out who employed those men we can exert no pressure upon them. Addleton has hid well for many days now. We can only hope they got no glimpse of him before he ran. Now, show me the papers.”

I pulled them out of my vest with some reluctance. Gladstone ruined . . . It seemed too much to bear, and yet surely the facts must come to light. We could not suppress such a thing.

“It's all here,” I said, when we had traded the papers back and forth to read them all with care. Ship manifests, schedules, deeds and titles and work orders signed by Gladstone. In 1852, a slave ship had been diverted on its route to Cuba and delivered fifty captive men onto English soil, where they stayed for over a decade, working Gladstone's land in secret—and were then ordered buried alive when it seemed the secret would get out. “It will be Gladstone's downfall. I must admit that I share Addleton's discomfiture at bringing ignominy down on a man at the end of a lauded tenure.”

“Gladstone has brought himself down,” Holmes said, still peering closely at the papers, as if further hypocrisy and death and madness might be woven into their very fibres. Then he looked up at me, and a slow, terrible smile spread across his sallow face. “But not because of this. The claim of failing eyesight is an excuse for him to step down, after his latest defeat in the House of Lords—an admirable effort on behalf of the downtrodden, as was ever his wont.
He has never abandoned his principles, Watson. What we have here is scandal indeed, but of a far more insidious nature.”

“I cannot imagine what you mean,” I said, weariness edging into irritability. I wanted no more ghastly revelations this night.

“These papers are forgeries,” said Sherlock Holmes. “The hand of Burkum Stacy, if I read it correctly, with later additions by Pearce and Kirkland, both dead now. Whatever horrors were done on that estate, Gladstone had no part of them. They were a heinous construct to discredit an honourable man. It would have been too easy, I suppose, to forge documents showing his ownership of a slave-trading ship; he could have disproved such a fiction easily, and none of it would have outraged the public, which is well aware that English ships were engaged in transporting slaves to Cuba, and thence to Virginia, until the American civil conflict put an end to the market. As a nation, we could be proud of having abolished such enslavement on our own land, and later in our colonies, while still profiting from its continuance elsewhere.”

I began to see what he meant, a larger vision of the forces at work. “But for a man like Gladstone to employ such workers on his own land at home . . .”

“It would be more than the public would stand for. Oh, fools, to make such an accusation a reality! Never seeing that what they had done was so much worse than what he would have stood accused of. I will get to the bottom of this, Watson, mark my words. The careers and reputations of Richard and William Addleton were so soiled, so jeopardized, by this that they died tragically, and all to preserve both their precious History and the reputation of an innocent prime minister on the eve of his retirement. Poor, mad James Addleton was the shovel that buried fifty men, but I will find the hands that wielded that shovel and see prison.manacles around their wrists.”

I felt a deep unease at this proclamation, and it only deepened after our return to Baker Street. The forged papers were put safely away and not a word said to the inquiring inspector, as the Addleton
tragedy was solved in every matter but motive, and that, Holmes believed, was well outside Scotland Yard's bailiwick. Then Holmes went off in search of the retired forger Burkum Stacy, and sent me to the Diogenes Club to have a preliminary word with his brother Mycroft, who should know more than any man alive about such an insidious plot—or at the very least be able to find out.

The elder Holmes merely shook his head. “You must stop him, Watson,” he said. “You have some influence with him, a friendship, that I lack. Tell him that this is one case that must be left buried where he found it, no matter what tragedies it may have engendered. What's done is done, and no more harm can come of it. You must convince him, as his friend, for the best result he will achieve is frustration and the worst I prefer not to contemplate.”

It was as dire a warning as I ever hope to hear from those lips. I returned to Baker Street immediately, turning over in my mind the various means I might use to put Holmes off this case, only to find him in a hellish rage, our lodgings a shambles, and Mrs. Hudson terrified and in tears.

“They just bullied their way in!” she cried. “Threw me out of my own house and then turned it all topsy-turvy! I've never been so frightened in my life!”

I looked at Holmes, pacing in helpless anger through the loose papers and debris. His obsessively indexed commonplace books, his scrapbooks and collected biographies and agony columns, seemed undamaged but lay strewn about, their pages fluttering in the breeze of his long stride.

“The forged documents are gone,” he said, as I knew he would. “Taken by force, and with further vandalism that can only be meant as punitive. Do they think this will daunt me?”

I calmed Mrs. Hudson as best I could and persuaded her to return downstairs and fix a cup of tea, hoping the panacea of a routine task would soothe her, and keep her away long enough for me to convey Mycroft Holmes's warning.

I had hoped that Holmes would heed his brother's unimpeachably expert advice in this matter. To my dismay, the caveat,
which I had felt strongly worded, had no effect but to tighten his jaw and sharpen the resolve in his eyes.

“What of the forger, then?” I asked wearily, thinking that his hopes of a resolution might have been fanned from that quarter.

“Gone,” he said, and knelt to begin the task of reassembling his books and papers. “Packed up and left for the Continent early this morning. If I had started my investigation last night, I might have caught him. But it is no matter now. I will not be so tardy again.”

“The other forgers, you mentioned, are both dead?” I said, as a reminder, one more small attempt to dissuade him.

“Syphilis and hanging, respectively.” He shrugged, his back to me. “I've set the Irregulars to watching the Addleton house,” he said. “We'll find out who comes and goes, we'll track them down, unravel the web of connections.”

“It goes very high, Holmes,” I said quietly. “Higher than you or I can aspire, I fear.”

He made no answer, and I left him to his organizing and his thoughts, taking a cup of tea with Mrs. Hudson and assuring her that she could sleep the night safely before going to my own bed in hopes that I had not told her a lie.

It seemed only moments later that I was pulled up through layers of nightmare to find myself buried not in smothering peat but in my own woollen blankets. A street arab was shaking me awake, saying urgently, “Mr. Holmes sent me to fetch you—the Addleton place is burning!”

It was indeed in flames, and its basement exhibit with it. I disembarked from my cab and walked slowly over to stand next to Holmes. His face was unreadable, the conflagration starkly illuminating its harsh angularity. Dawn was a nacreous glow over the house, dimmed by the grasping flames and the firefighters they silhouetted.