The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (24 page)

‘I care nothing for flummery,' Holmes said, his fingers never more than a few inches from the pistol, ‘nothing at all. I care, however, a good deal for honour and, in general, for truth.'

‘But evidently not for the truth which I have revealed!'

‘No, sir.'

‘I did not do it for money,' Professor Moriarty insisted, his eyes staring and his large head rolling a little. ‘I have more than I need. I hoped you and I, in sympathy, might forge a revolution that would change the world. There will be such a revolution, you may be sure. Why should it not be ours, the work of men who stand above the vulgar herd, the hero whom Nietzsche promises?'

‘If you know the least thing about me,' Holmes said brusquely, ‘you will be aware that such a suggestion can hold no charms for me.'

The stranger sighed with a regret that seemed entirely genuine.

‘Then I must tell you that you will stand in the way not merely of an individual, Mr Holmes, but of a mighty organisation. Within it, you might have untold influence. If that is not for you, however, you must stand clear or be trodden underfoot.'

Holmes stood up and spoke with the coldest insolence he could muster. ‘I regret, Professor Moriarty, that in the pleasure of this conversation I am neglecting business of importance which awaits me elsewhere.'

Moriarty now stood as well.

‘It has been a duel between us, Mr Holmes, this matter of the royal papers. As yet, however, we have exchanged but the first shots. You hope to place me in the dock. I tell you I will never stand in the dock. If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.'

How those words were to echo, after the two men met on that dreadful day at the Reichenbach Falls. All ended well, I suppose, though the missing years of Sherlock Holmes were like missing years in my own life too. When, three weeks after that day on which I last saw him, an invitation to Sandringham arrived in the hand of Sir Arthur Bigge, my own state was such that I was obliged to present my humble duty to His Royal Highness and decline, on a card that was edged with black. Three years were to pass before death gave back my friend and Holmes was able to collect his diamond tie-pin after all. His return to London was final confirmation that Professor Moriarty, the second man who sought to blemish the reputation of our royal house, was dead. What secrets there might be were now safe for as long as it should matter.

In those three years of separation, when I believed my friend dead, not a day passed without my thinking that he had gone willingly to his death to ensure the simultaneous destruction and silence of Professor Moriarty. The secrets of the stolen papers could not be safe again until both men who had known them were dust. The documents might be recovered but the knowledge was stolen for ever. Did Holmes take a secret vow that both Moriarty and Howell must die—so that the knowledge should die with them—even at the cost of his own life?

I thought that was why he had gone without protest to his fate at the Falls of Reichenbach. But what of Charles Augustus Howell? Was Lestrade right, after all in his suspicion that he and I had been tricked to provide an alibi for Sherlock Holmes? It would be hard to imagine a better witness than a Scotland Yarder!

Night after night I lay awake and thought. Could Holmes have left the rooms at 221B Baker Street, while Lestrade and I watched them? Could he have been absent for an hour while we thought him there, so that he might track down Howell in Chelsea as a matter of cold necessity, cut the man's throat, wedge the half-sovereign between his teeth, and return home? I would get up from my bed, light the lamp, and examine for the hundredth time how such a trick might be performed. We had seen Holmes's outline against the blind. But my friend had once shown me that perfect bust made of him by Oscar Meunier of Grenoble, a masterpiece of reality if ever there was. And then we had heard the snatch of Holmes playing Mendelssohn upon the fiddle at a time when he must have been several miles away slitting Howell's windpipe, if he were the murderer. But Holmes was an enthusiast of the American phonograph and had acquired a machine as early as 1889. I later watched as he recorded Joachim's music for
Hamlet
by playing into the mouth of the great horn on to the cylinder of wax. What had we heard? The music of Holmes or his ghost?

Sitting in my chair on such sleepless nights, I pictured to myself a scene in which Mycroft Holmes was the muffled figure who arrived by cab, responding to his brother's most pressing request. While Mycroft Holmes from time to time adjusted the shadow of the bust against the blind, adjusted the wax cylinder upon its spindle and wound the phonograph, his brother slipped out by the back door of Baker Street, met the cab by appointment, kept the fatal rendezvous and returned. Was it an absurd midnight imagining or the truth? After so much of his cleverness with locks and strong-rooms, was not the simple truth that two men knew the secrets of royal scandal in all their facts and all their truth—and that those two men must die to ensure silence? Colonel Sebastian Moran, a bad enough man indeed, was merely a name thrown in to confuse Lestrade. If all this was true, Holmes had gone to the Reichenbach Falls to meet destiny in the only way that would put an end to the case, as a soldier will sacrifice himself in battle to save his comrades.

He would never discuss it after his return, or rather he laughed it off. Meantime, the removal of Professor Moriarty had happier consequences than that of Howell. Even before Sherlock Holmes's triumphant reappearance, Prince George was betrothed to Princess May of Teck. Two months later, the future King and Queen were married in the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace. Charles Augustus Howell lies in Brompton Cemetery, a victim of ‘pneumonia'. I did not hear that the body of Professor James Moriarty was ever recovered.

The Case of the Camden Town Murder

I

In the course of his professional career, Sherlock Holmes seldom worked in collaboration with the great legal names of his day. Yet on the few occasions when his advice was sought, he owed the recommendation to a famous barrister whom he once helped as a young man and never met again.

The encounter took place late one evening, in the very last months of the nineteenth century. I was about to wish Holmes goodnight and turn in when there was a clang of the bell at the street door of our rooms. It was repeated almost at once with a note of greater urgency. In a few moments, the housekeeper, who had been roused from bed herself, announced that a young gentleman of the most respectable appearance insisted upon seeing Mr Sherlock Holmes at once and would take no refusal. I quite expected my friend to make some protest at the lateness of the hour, but he said only, ‘Dear me, Mrs Hudson. Then, if he is so very insistent and respectable, I suppose we must grant him an audience.'

The good lady showed up a tall and thin-faced young man, a saturnine and somewhat satanic-looking figure in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers. A handsome dark-haired young devil he looked, with eyes that were black in an intensity of natural passion. He appeared, Holmes afterwards remarked, as if immaculately shaved and barbered not an hour before. Only when the housekeeper had withdrawn and the door was closed did he tell us that he was Mr Frederick Edwin Smith, a junior barrister on the Northern Circuit, and that he had killed a man in Liverpool the night before.

Holmes seemed little surprised but insisted that Mr Smith should tell us his story carefully and calmly from an armchair with a glass of brandy and soda in his hand.

For fifteen minutes my friend and I listened without interrupting to the man whom the world later knew in succession as F. E. Smith, Member of Parliament, Attorney-General, Earl of Birkenhead and Lord Chancellor of England in the government of Mr Lloyd George. His tale that evening was dramatic and yet curiously commonplace. This young man, not long called to the Bar at Gray's Inn, had been on a municipal tram-car in Liverpool late the previous night. A ruffianly fellow had attempted to get on at a stop near the centre of the city, just as a young lady was getting off. He had thrust her aside so hard that she stumbled. Mr Smith's chivalry brought him to his feet and he struck the ruffian hard on the jaw. To his dismay, he saw the man fall backwards from the boarding platform of the tram. The poor devil dropped heavily into the street and hit the back of his head with terrible force on the stone kerb of the pavement.

Our visitor knew at once that the man was dead, as the next day's newspapers confirmed. At the time of the accident, with instinctive panic or great presence of mind, our young client had leapt from the tram and had run as fast as his legs would carry him from the scene. In a torment of indecision, which was quite out of character, he had come from Liverpool to London to consult Sherlock Holmes, the one man in England whose discretion and resource he trusted. Money was no object and, as to his immediate course of action, he put himself entirely in our hands. Holmes showed not the least hesitation.

‘I have no doubt, Mr Smith, as to what you must do. First, tell no one else of this event. I make it a habit to read a little of the
Law Quarterly Review
from time to time and have seen some excellent pieces of yours on Maritime Law. It is a sphere of commerce in which you seem admirably informed. I assume from this that you have certain business connections thereabouts. Go to a friend whom you can trust implicitly, preferably a man in the shipping trade. Arrange to travel as secretly as you can and as far as you can—and stay away for as long as you can. I should say that six months would probably be sufficient. I concede that you are more expert in law than I, but I believe I may claim an advantage in knowledge of the police and their methods. If nothing is discovered in six months about this mishap—for one can scarcely call it a crime—the Liverpool police will have lost interest in the investigation. I think you may return then without risk of being called to account for it.'

The young Frederick Smith did as Holmes advised and found his confidence in my friend well placed. In the years that followed, several cases of greater interest came our way, most of them I believe on the recommendation of the famous barrister to whom Holmes was a good friend and counsellor on that evening in his youth.

These occasional investigations were usually in cases over which Sherlock Holmes was approached by solicitors whose clients faced the gallows or long prison sentences. Among the most famous defenders of innocent and guilty alike, he had known very few. It was not until 1907 that he first met the great Sir Edward Marshall Hall, though the two men had been equally celebrated in their respective fields for almost twenty years by that time.

Holmes and Sir Edward shared that curious balance of a passionate temperament and a cold dedication to forensic analysis. Both were expert in the mysteries of firearms and medical curiosities. Yet there was a deeper sympathy between them. Holmes was one of the few men to know the details of the great private tragedy that had made Sir Edward Marshall Hall turn his back upon hopes of domestic happiness for many years and throw all his energies into a public career. As a young barrister, Sir Edward had married a beautiful wife, a match that was the envy of the world of London society. Within hours of the wedding ceremony, his young bride told him that she never had and never could care for him. She would be his wife in name only. Why she should have married him at all was a mystery that only a physician might resolve.

On their honeymoon in Paris, the poor deranged young woman disappeared for days or nights at a time. She sought in the habits of the street-walker some solace for her dark cravings. After a few years of unutterable misery for them both, she died at the hands of an abortionist and in the presence of a young lover whose child she feared to bear. To those who knew him professionally, Holmes had a mind that was cold and precise to the point of seeming pitiless. Yet I had seen him moved to tears by human tragedy, never more profoundly so than in the secret agony of Sir Edward Marshall Hall.

Their first meeting was the result of a few paragraphs in the morning papers on 13 September 1907. Like the death of the ruffian who had fallen from the Liverpool tram, the story was dramatic but commonplace in the twilit world where it had occurred.

A young London prostitute, Emily Dimmock, who went by the name of Phyllis Shaw, had been found with her throat cut in shabby lodgings, in the little streets of Camden Town. The wound was so deep that her head was almost severed from her body. The police surgeon's examination suggested that she had been murdered in the small hours of the morning of 12 September. Her body was not found until her common-law husband returned a little before noon from his overnight duty as Midland Railway cook on the express between King's Cross and Sheffield. He, at any rate, was innocent of her death. The poor girl's naked body lay face-down on the bed. In the other room were several empty beer bottles and the remains of a meal set for two, the sole evidence that she had had a companion with her that previous night.

Several days passed and little was added to the reports of the crime. There were no arrests, despite the appeals of the police and the offer of a £500 reward. It was three weeks later when Holmes folded his morning paper and leaned back in his chair. This was the hour after breakfast when he was accustomed to deliver his opinions on the news of the day. He handed me the paper.

‘From the point of view of the criminal investigator, Watson, the Camden Town murder promises a most interesting suspect. They have charged an artist, a
protégé
of the late Mr William Morris, with cutting the throat of that unfortunate young woman.'

‘An artist?'

He leaned forward and tapped the newspaper report with the stem of his pipe.

‘Mr Robert Wood, twenty-eight years old. A painter of designs on glass for the Sand and Blast Manufacturing Company of Gray's Inn Road. A young man whose talent was praised by no less a patron than the last of the great Pre-Raphaelites. You see? When an artist turns to murder, Watson, it augurs well for the student of unusual psychiatric syndromes. You should read again De Quincey's “On Murder Considered One of the Fine Arts”, if you have not done so of late.'