The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (118 page)

Even after that, fate had been crueller to him than any contrivance of our own. While Holmes faced this final duel, two of Jago's men had arrested Colonel Lemonnier in his cabman's cape as he left Charing Cross. Lemonnier protested his innocence of any crime, beyond having changed places at the Mansion House lunch at the request of an acquaintance he had known for only a few days. He had never heard of the Queen of the Night, and offered no resistance. In his pocket, however, lay two small packages containing the two portions of the famous jewel, the unclipped diamond and the sapphire clusters. By what means he had robbed Colonel Moriarty of these in the final exchange of the traveling bag was never revealed. Lemonnier insisted that the colonel had given him the packages as a parting gift and that he understood them to be mere paste, intended as a
pourboire
for an obliging street girl in Piccadilly.

On the evening of that memorable day, Inspector Lestrade was our guest in the Baker Street sitting-room.

‘You see, Mr. Holmes?' he said genially. ‘We're always there when we're needed. Why, now, if I hadn't used a bit of policeman's plain common sense, we wouldn't have had that bridge cordoned off as it was. And in that case, gentlemen, I needn't remind you that the late Colonel Moriarty would have reached Waterloo Station on the far bank of the river. Once he was there, he might have been on a train to anywhere in a few minutes. By now—who knows?—he might have been sitting in Paris, admiring his trinket—as Lemonnier insists it is.'

Holmes muttered something but kept his peace.

Lestrade leant forward in his chair.

‘And you'll both recall that case, gentlemen, when you were both walking through the park a little while back and happened to see a man get his head cut off by a galloping soldier. Well, do you know what?'

‘I have not the least idea what, Lestrade, but you are no doubt about to enlighten us. You were not fortunate enough to identify the assassin, I suppose?'

The inspector sipped his whisky and water, then leant forward again.

‘No, Mr. Holmes. I was fortunate enough to identify the owner of the head, despite his efforts to remain anonymous by having nothing in his pockets.'

‘My felicitations,' Holmes closed his eyes. ‘Pray continue.'

‘Alker was his name. A former petty officer of the Royal Navy provos, identified almost by chance during a visit to the pathological laboratory where the head rests in a jar of formaldehyde. On several melancholy but necessary occasions of overseas service, the records tell us, Alker acted as a military and even a civil hangman. What do you say to that, now?'

‘At least, Lestrade, you may be certain that he was not murdered in revenge by someone he had hanged. Beyond that, I do not think I can assist you.'

Lestrade puffed himself up a little at our lack of appreciation.

‘I may say that I have sent a few criminals to the gallows,' he said portentously, ‘but I can't say I've ever met a hangman at work.'

‘No,' said Holmes dryly. ‘No more have I. With or without his head.'

*
‘The Case of the Unseen Hand' in Donald Thomas,
The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes
, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.

Notes

p. 587 E. Harris Ruddock,
The Homoeopathic Vade Mecum
, Roericke & Tafel, 1889, discusses the treatment of Egyptian ophthalmia at page 373.

p. 621 ‘The Resolution of Enclitic δε' was a problem in classical Greek grammar to which the subject of Robert Browning's poem ‘The Grammarian's Funeral,' like Mycroft Holmes, had devoted his energies.

p. 628 ‘The Five Orange Pips' appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for November 1893.

p. 632 Examples of those who rivaled Sherlock Holmes in building fugues upon popular themes and nursery rhymes include Alec Templeton in the Benny Goodman number ‘Mr. Bach Goes to Town' and Sidney M. Lawton, Music Master of Queen's College, Taunton, England, in his ingenious fugue upon ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.'

p. 633 ‘The Red-Headed League' appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for August 1891.

p. 641 The phenomenon of the body remaining upright after decapitation was witnessed by hundreds of onlookers when Captain Nolan remained upright in the saddle for some time after his head was taken off by a Russian shell, before the ill-fated ‘Charge of the Light Brigade' at Balaclava on 25 October 1854.

p. 645 ‘
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto
.' Sherlock Holmes was, as always, correct when he ascribed this to the Roman playwright Terence in
Heauton Timorumenos
I, i, 25.

p. 647 Nelson's attack on the ‘armed neutrality' of Copenhagen, on 2 April 1801, was the occasion on which he put his telescope to his blind eye and refused his commanding officer's signal to withdraw, saying to his subordinate, ‘You know, Foley, I have only one eye—I have a right to be blind sometimes.… I really do not see the signal.'

p. 647 ‘The Naval Treaty' appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for October and November 1893.

p. 652 The case of Irene Adler was the first story in
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,' which originally appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for July 1891. ‘The Bruce-Partington Submarine Plans' appeared in the same magazine for December 1908.

p. 688 ‘Cold fowl and cigars, Pickled onions in jars' was the midnight feast offered by a London tavern known as the Magpie and Stump. The poet recalled by Watson is by R. H. Barham, whose verses, ‘The Execution: A Sporting Anecdote,' appeared in
The Ingoldsby Legends
(1840).

p. 703 By the Peace of Vienna in 1864, after the British and French failure to support Denmark against Prussia, Christian IX renounced his claim to Schleswig and Holstein, first occupied and then annexed by the Prussians.

p. 763 ‘
Fiat justitia ruat coelum
' was pronounced by William Murray, 1st Earl Mansfield (1705-93), Chief Justice of the King's Bench, in overturning the sentence imposed on John Wilkes in 1768 for publishing an antigovernment newspaper. Four years later, in a momentous judgment, Mansfield freed a slave, James Somersett, who had set foot on English soil during his master's visit to London. ‘Every man who comes to England is entitled to the protection of the English law, whatever oppression he may heretofore have suffered, and whatever may be the colour of his skin, whether it is black or whether it is white.'

p. 788 In his comment on murder by chloroform, Holmes is evidently thinking of Carl Liman's 1876 edition of
Practishes Handbuch der gerichtlichen Medicin
by Johann Ludwig Casper (1796-1864), a pioneer in forensic medicine.

p. 791 John Nevil Maskelyne (1839-1917), born in Cheltenham, England. A stage conjurer at sixteen, he was lessee of St. George's Hall, London, and exposed the stage magic of the Davenport Brothers' so-called Cabinet and Dark Seance. He appeared at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, 1873-1904. His techniques were employed to great effect in the art of camouflage during both world wars.

p. 795 Propter's Nicodemus Pills were made famous by Edward Lear in his poem for children, ‘Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly.'

Like the Ancient Medes and Persians
.

Always by his own exertions

He subsisted on those hills;—

Whiles,—by teaching children spelling,—

Or at times by merely yelling,—

Or at intervals by selling ‘Propter's Nicodemus Pills
.'

p. 824 ‘The Final Problem' appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for December 1893.

p. 824 Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-81), politician and rake, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Postmaster General. As organizer of the Hellfire Club from 1755, he was reputed to have staged orgies with other ‘monks,' including John Wilkes and the poet Charles Churchill, first among the pastoral ruins of Medmenham Abbey on the bank of the Thames and then nearby in caves on the estate of his fine Palladian mansion at West Wycombe.

p. 842 ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' appeared in
The Strand Magazine
for January 1892.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 2012 by Donald Thomas

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