The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (90 page)

‘Black magic!' I said uneasily.

He laughed and shook his head.

‘Not in the least, my dear Watson. Have you noticed, by the way, that each pair of numbers in the ciphers appears to stand for something like a letter or a syllable? Taken together, they must certainly equate to an alphabet in some form. In every one of the ciphers the double digits run from one—with a nought before it—to eighty-seven. Now consider this. That is far too few for a system like the Chinese, where each ideogram stands for a word and many thousands of symbols are required. At the same time, it is rather too many for a purely alphabetical system as we know it. Our alphabet has only twenty-six letters, after all, and the Greek has only twenty-four.'

‘Very well, then eighty-seven symbols cannot be an alphabet.'

He chuckled.

‘Not as you or I think of it, Watson. However, I would bet a good deal that what we are looking at is a code written in syllables rather than letters, though based upon an alphabet. That should narrow down our hunt considerably.'

‘I wish I could see how. As yet we do not even know which alphabet it may be. This is worse than your looking-glass nonsense.'

Before he could reply, there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Hudson came in.

‘Mr. Lestrade and a lady to see Mr. Holmes, supposing it might be convenient.'

I would have suggested it was anything but convenient. Holmes beamed at her.

‘By all means, Mrs. Hudson. It will be a sad day when we are too busy to see Inspector Lestrade.'

Our landlady withdrew, and after several measured steps upon the staircase her place in the doorway was taken by Lestrade, our small but wiry bulldog as I thought of him. The lady in his company seemed not the least remarkable. She looked very much what she proved to be, a widow of sixty obliged to take in lodgers, dressed on this occasion in a dark red hat, a brown travelling-cloak and a fox fur of uncertain quality about her neck.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,' said our Scotland Yard friend. ‘Allow me to introduce you to Mrs. Annie Constantine of Nile Street, Sheerness.'

Holmes bowed as if before a duchess.

‘My dear lady, my dear Lestrade, you are both most welcome. Please take the chairs by the mantelpiece and tell us to what we owe the honour of this visit. I confess I have been expecting something of the sort for two or three hours.'

Lestrade did not look best pleased by this. When Mrs. Constantine had been arranged in a chair by the fireside and fresh tea had been ordered, he sat down opposite Holmes and said: ‘Expecting what exactly, Mr. Holmes?' His eyes widened and he looked more than a trifle put out. ‘I do not see how you can have been expecting something you knew nothing about.'

Holmes laughed merrily but there was no merriment behind his eyes.

‘Allow me to explain. Several days ago it was arranged that Superintendent Melville of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard should be informed by his inspectors of any unusual entry by beat constables of the London area in their station Occurrence Book. Not crimes, you understand, but anything out of the ordinary that was reported—the results were to be conveyed to me. Special attention was to be given to the Thames estuary.'

‘Ah, then you were not being so very clever just now, were you, Mr. Holmes?'

My friend ignored this snub.

‘I said to myself at the time, if there is anything worthy of note, it will be an officer with the capacity and shrewdness of Inspector Lestrade who recognizes it and acts at once.'

There was a pause while the morning tea tray was set down and then Holmes began to pour.

‘Perhaps I had better hear what this good lady has to tell us,' he said genially, handing her a cup.

Mrs. Constantine looked at Lestrade, as if for permission to speak, then turned to Holmes.

‘As you mayn't have heard, Mr. Holmes, I keep a lodger. Usually a young single gentleman that has the first floor back. I breakfast him, but otherwise he does for himself. Last year Mr. Henshaw came to me, Mr. Charles Henshaw, a very genteel young man. He teaches French, not at school but to professional young men with examinations to pass. They come to the house and he has the use of the downstairs drawing room to give them lessons. Otherwise, the upstairs is his domain.'

‘Really?' said Holmes indifferently, though for reasons I could not see he was missing neither a word nor an inflection of her voice. ‘A nice young man?'

‘Ever so nice. Regular at the Congregational chapel on Sundays. And I don't mind telling you that if I'd known there was to be so much trouble as this, I'd have acted otherwise on Monday morning.'

‘What trouble precisely, madam?'

‘Well, Mr. Holmes, it was the middle of this last Monday morning and everything in the street was as quiet as you could wish. Nothing but Mr. Lethbridge the constable, that lives two roads away, coming down on his beat. Then it happened.'

She sat back and folded her arms, as if the matter was at an end.

‘What happened, Mrs. Constantine?'

‘The bang, Mr. Holmes. I was at the back, where the maid was taking out the clothes from the washhouse to dry on the line. I was just tipping out ashes from the grate of the copper. Then there was a flash that lit up the window of the upstairs back room—Mr. Henshaw's study—brighter than day and a bang that rattled every windowpane in the street. My first thought was the gas fire had gone up. Seeing Mr. Lethbridge patrolling the street, I rushed out and called him. He ran back and went up the stairs first and I went up behind him. I half expected to find poor Mr. Henshaw stone-cold dead. But there he was, sitting on a chair, just looking a bit shocked. And the strange thing was—after such a bang that might have wrecked the entire house, not a thing in the room seemed harmed.'

‘Curious,' said Holmes gently.

‘It was curious all right. Ever so sorry, he was. Went to light the gas fire and it somehow blew back. Only thing is, Mr. Holmes, there was no match that had been struck, the fire wasn't lit, and there was no smell of gas. But there was a horrible smell of something else. Till that moment I never really thought about it, but I think I smelt it up there before, from time to time, only not so strong. Anyway, that was the end of it. Mr. Lethbridge went back to his beat and I suppose Mr. Henshaw went back to reading French. Then, last night, there was a knock at the door and I'm told I'm wanted at Scotland Yard today.'

If my friend felt any excitement at this, he concealed it admirably under an appearance of casual interest.

‘Tell me about the flash, Mrs. Constantine. Did it at all resemble the bright flash you see when the metal poles of a tramcar cross a connexion?'

‘Now you mention it, sir, it was just like it. That hadn't occurred to me.'

Holmes stood up and walked past the worktable to a jumble of books, papers, bottles, and implements on an old sideboard. He came back with a small six-sided clear-glass bottle and drew the stopper from it.

‘Will you tell me, Mrs. Constantine, whether the smell that you say was not like gas was anything like this? You need not get too close to it, just enough to be able to smell. Just smell and do not inhale.'

He held it at a little distance and waited until the fumes drifted across to her. Mrs. Constantine gave a slight cough, screwed her face up, and exclaimed, ‘Ugh! Nasty, beastly stuff! What he wanted with it I do not know. But that's it, sir.' She took a long sip from her cup of tea.

‘Perhaps, Mr. Holmes,' said Lestrade, ‘you might let us into your little secret.'

‘I have no secret, Lestrade. What Mrs. Constantine could smell was sulphuric acid.'

‘What's he doing with sulphuric acid?' the inspector asked suspiciously.

‘What's he doing short-circuiting a battery, Lestrade, and a fully charged battery at that, on a Monday morning? Tell me, Mrs. Constantine, does your Congregational chapel have electric light?'

‘I think its Sunday school hall does. That was only built three or four years back.'

‘Then I daresay that is how he charges his accumulator battery—and why it was fully charged on Monday morning. Tell me a little about this nice young lodger of yours. Does he travel much, for example? Abroad, perhaps?'

She laughed at him.

‘Lord bless you, Mr. Holmes, I shouldn't say he'd been further abroad than the end of Margate pier. No. He does go to Oxford every week or two, on a Saturday, to buy books for his French.'

‘Rather odd, is it not, that he should not buy them in London, so much closer?'

‘Well, you see, Mr. Holmes, I was given to understand that he has a friend he meets in Oxford. They take tea together.'

‘Ah,' said Holmes, ‘that must be it. One more question, dear lady. From what part of the country does he come?'

Mrs. Constantine looked troubled and then replied,

‘I don't know that I could say, Mr. Holmes. Not from round our way, I should think. He talks quite like a gentleman, that's all.'

‘Very good.' My friend looked thoroughly satisfied. ‘One more word, Mrs. Constantine. I am quite sure you have nothing to fear from the young gentleman. The police are merely looking for unusual occurrences over a very wide area—is that not so, Lestrade?—and that is the sole reason you have been troubled. This is clearly nothing more than a trivial domestic mishap. You will continue to allow him to lodge with you, shall we say for the next six months? He seems, after all, an admirable tenant in every other way.'

‘I can't say as I know about that,' she said with a slight coloring of indignation.

‘I do not believe you will have further cause for complaint, but I must have your promise upon this. Nor must you say a word to him or anyone else about our conversation. I must have your solemn promise upon that, too.'

She hesitated and I intervened.

‘Perhaps you have a sister or a friend with whom you might care to stay for a few weeks, until the upset of this has worn off. Provided the maid could look after Mr. Henshaw.'

‘I might, sir. However it may be, you shall have my promise for the next six months. As to what has passed between us here, mum's the word.'

To meet Mrs. Constantine was to know that the promise would be kept. She was the type to sweep Napoleon and his invaders out of England with a broom and a bucket. As our visitors left, it was only Lestrade who seemed in a fit of the sulks, piqued that he was not to be let further into the secret.

Holmes was jubilant. He was not a man much given to wine, but that evening we shared a bottle of Dom Perignon, one of six dozen presented to him several years before by a client and as yet untasted.

The next morning there was no sign of him. He was not an early riser, and until I inquired of our landlady's maid-of-all-work, I had supposed he was still sleeping. His room was empty and my day passed idly but agreeably, a day chiefly remarkable for the autumn's first flurry of snow. At six o'clock I heard his shout to Mrs. Hudson on the stairs. He was back.

‘I thought you had gone missing,' I said, half joking.

He flung down his hat and stick on the chair; his cloak followed. ‘My dear Watson, I have spent the day in that most admirable of institutions, Somerset House. In painted halls and palatial apartments, enjoying unrivalled views of the river steamers on the Thames, one may study the records of births, marriages, and deaths to one's heart's content.'

‘Whose birth, marriage, or death?'

‘No one's. There is a far smaller section where those who have changed their names by deed poll are obliged to register the fact. I confess that the name Charles Henshaw sounded to me like—what shall we call it?—a light adaptation of something else. I was not entirely surprised to find that at Chatham Registry Office—not a million miles from Sheerness—it was adopted several years ago by Karl Henschel.'

‘A German?'

‘I confess, I should have thought so. In this case, when he changed his name, he was already an Englishman, or rather a German who had become a naturalised Englishman on a visit to Australia. You could hardly bury a secret much deeper than that.'

‘But Mrs. Constantine has not the least doubt that he is English, through and through.'

‘He is a linguist, my dear chap. A German linguist, particularly, will often speak more correct English than an Englishman born and bred. As for teaching French to English youths—or English to French youths—what better cover could there be? You might suspect him, perhaps, of being French by birth or sympathies. If he were German, you might say, the last thing he would do is to teach French in England.'

‘And his Saturday visits to Oxford, what about those?'

‘We shall be at Paddington tomorrow for the early train. On my way home, I paid a brief visit to Scotland Yard. Whitehall and the Embankment looked quite charming in the snow, quite like a Camille Pissarro sketch in oils. Superintendent Melville has deputed Inspector Tobias Gregson to shadow Herr Henschel, as we had better call him now. Gregson is one of the best men at the game. Even were Henschel to suspect that he was being followed, he would see that Gregson had slipped away from him in London. At Paddington I shall look for Gregson on the platform for the Oxford trains. He will tip us the wink, as they say, and identify Henschel. I have our man's photograph this afternoon, taken without his knowledge yesterday. Then, my dear Watson, Gregson will be on his way and the game will be in our court again.'

5

‘You may as well pack your razor and a clean collar,' said Holmes at breakfast. ‘I have wired ahead to engage rooms at the Mitre Hotel. I daresay it may prove an unnecessary precaution, but it is as well to be prepared. Your army revolver you may bring if you please. I cannot suppose it will be necessary on this occasion.'

Saturday morning had dawned bright and cloudless as midsummer, giving the lie to ‘drear November.' Under his travelling cloak, Holmes wore a dark suit with a gold watch-chain over the waistcoat. This formal attire was scarcely what a lounger would choose for a weekend. As our cab rattled along the Marylebone Road toward Paddington station, I could not help wondering what our spy might look like. Would Karl Henschel be the bearded agent of romance or merely a young man who might be mistaken for an insurance clerk? One thing seemed certain, he could not be the traitor in the Admiralty. Sir John Fisher had assured us that there was no Charles Henshaw on their records.