The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy (6 page)

‘You mean that horrid pervert they hanged for treason?’ Rosa said, to my dismay. I did not tell her that one of the reasons why they hanged him was his sexuality and that someone with her own inclinations ought to show him some sympathy. Although she had calmed down, she still had to stifle a sob now and then.

‘Mrs Selbow, I have good news for you,’ I heard myself tell her. She frowned and opened her mouth at the same time, making me understand why her husband had used the word pusillanimous.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Within a week, your husband’s going to let you go with a more than generous settlement.’

‘No,’ Rosa protested, ‘we only want enough to start our nursery, we don’t want to be extortionate.’

‘Just shut up and take what we can get you, pusillanimous, gormless woman.’ I found myself thinking, but that was what I said: ‘Go to Miss Verdi, tell her the good news and prepare for happiness.’

‘But I told you, Mr Lernière, we’re not like what you think we are.’

‘I am not here to judge you, Mrs Selbow, but to help.’

It was the fearless Vissarionovich who volunteered for the job, as I knew he would. As the judge emerged from the restaurant in the Portman Square where he had dined alone, he hailed a hansom, and our gruff Russian friend was more than happy to comply.

‘Come in, your lordship,’ he said in a thick Russian accent, thinking that it would be enough to unsettle the judge, and perhaps intimate to him what was in store for him.

‘You vant for me for to take to Ossulton Strasse, ja?’ Ivan, wanting a little fun changed to Prussian. He could feel the temperature of the man, lit up by his copious supper and whatever he had imbibed to help it down, drop by a couple of degrees.

‘Yes, my good man, Os-os-sulton S-street,’ his honour stammered. He would have known that the usual route would be via Oxford Street. He suddenly realised that they were on the Bayswater Road going east.

‘Ex-excuse me, my man,’ said the judge, well aware already that the man sitting in the box was no coachman. ‘D-d-did you hear right? I said Os-os-sulton Street.’

‘Yes,
monsieur le juge
, I ’ave excellent ’earing.’ Armande would have been proud of him.

‘So, why the the... I mean... that’s the wrong way, I order you to t-t-t-urn back immediately.’

‘No,
tovarich
, I promise you to take you to your home sweet home in good time, but I vould like to share a little valk viz you in the Hyde Park ja? To look at the beautiful full moon.’ At the same time he began to whistle the tune of Beethoven Moonlight Sonata. The cab was now going at a typical Vissarionovich pace, making it impossible for the judge to contemplate doing anything drastic.

Once in the middle of Hyde Park, he grabbed Septimus’ arm in a deathly grip and frogmarched him towards a big oak in a secluded place. ‘I am going to ask you, gently first, to consent to your wife’s plea for divorce and give her a generous settlement.’

‘I’ll see her in hell first,’ exclaimed Selbow defiantly.

‘You are an intelligent man,
monsewer
, you know that if I have taken the trouble of kidnapping you and bringing you here, it is because we mean business.’ The judge realised now that he was not going to win this battle. He took a deep breath and asked the Russian to explain himself. Why couldn’t he just pretend to agree, then next day get the police to arrest Ivan and do as he pleased with his wretched wife, he asked.

‘I am glad you asked and gladder to elaborate. Should you do anything that’s likely to cause my friends and me any discomfort—’

‘Bluff and bluster!’ interrupted Selbow.

‘One interesting point you might wish to consider is that whereas I and my friends know
everything
about you
signor
, you do not have the tiniest jot of a tittle’s worth of an idea about who we are, where we live or anything. You stand to lose everything, we’ll destroy your reputation.’

‘Ha! I’ll have you know that you may look with the best magnifying glass and you will never find any blemish against me.’

‘But you are a regular visitor to Cleveland Street,’ my Russian friend told him.

‘Me? Are you accusing me of being an habitué of male bordellos?’ the judge laughed as he said this, so ludicrous the statement was. ‘But everybody knows me to despise unnatural practices. No judge passes harsher sentences on those despicable creatures when they appear in any court.’

‘Your judgeship, you know this, I know this, most people know this, but take any lie and repeat it often enough. Inevitably, a spark is produced which will light up a fuse that will scatter rumours in all directions like Mr Handel’s fireworks. In your shoes can you afford that? You can guess that we have many friends and although they may move in your own circle, they hate you.
Finito
your advancement. How would you like being labelled a prime hypocrite?’

‘You’re a despicable man, sir!’

‘Not really,’ said Ivan. ‘Should you agree to our reasonable terms, we will leave you in peace. Let Rosa go, give her two thousand pounds, call it payment for looking after your two children. You will hear no more from her or from us. It’s a promise. Just remember, we know where you live.’

Septimus did not agree immediately. He tried to negotiate the terms but finally he knocked his King down.

sually the Club meets one evening a week at Water Lane to socialise and indulge in our games. Not that they are games in the ordinary sense of the word. They are more like exercises or charades, mental jousts, designed to sharpen our alertness, our memory or our powers of observation. But above all, to judge by the laughter and good humour generated, these sessions are meant to amuse and entertain.

A popular challenge involves dealing the 52 cards of a pack face up for all to see, and memorising the sequence. They are then carefully dealt in the same order. We are then required to name the cards before they are once more exposed one at a time. At the risk of sounding vainglorious, I am a past mistress at this, rarely making a mistake. We have elaborated many other useful strategies, like identifying silent reading by watching the speaker’s lips—a useful weapon to have in our armoury when we need to discover what our potential enemies are saying, from a distance. Seeing in the near dark is also surprisingly a skill which can be developed. Listening to conversations in a noisy surrounding. Graphology has always been an area of interest to me. I have spent hours studying characteristics of the handwriting, like shapes of letters, their lightness or thickness, the distances between words, punctuation marks, the slope of a whole line of writing, the consistency of letter size. It is surprising how many aspects can be studied and classified. I have always believed that one’s writing style reveals much about a person. A learned article I read suggests that letters that lean backwards often indicate diffidence. The author even advanced the hypothesis that such a person would also have a limp unassertive handshake, or would blink under stress. I can bear witness to the truth of this, albeit based
on no more than anecdotal evidence. I was therefore greatly excited when one day Lord Clarihoe, my Platonic Uranian lover, then not yet my wedded spouse, arrived with a twinkle in his eyes and handed over to me a small packet.

‘My dear, you have often expressed the desire to see what Sherlock Holmes’ handwriting looked like, so you’re gonna like this. Only last week, Pater was clearing his desk and I came across a short missive from the great man. I thought you might wish to have it. Take it and do your worst!’

It was a letter of thanks and a receipt for payment of fees to Holmes for having successfully recovered a gold watch belonging to the old Lord Bickeringstone, Algernon’s father. In itself the content was of no interest to me, but it was surprisingly lengthy coming from a man known for his brevity. It provided me with an excellent sample to work on. It was written in a bold hand. From a distance the words looked like a collection of short vertical rods of varying lengths, in that, for instance, the closed curve at the top of the letter “l” had hardly any space in it. Likewise, his squashed “o” resembled a thin elongated ellipse with scarcely anything enclosed. Although it was on unlined paper, the sentences were so horizontally aligned that you could have credited the man with the invention of the spirit level.

As soon as Algie left—he aways laughs at what he calls my obsession with the man from Baker Street - I immediately got out my magnifying glass from the drawer of my mahogany desk, pens and pencils, ink and paper, sat down and began poring over this lucky find, meticulously copying each letter. Surprisingly, every letter, including “z” appeared (“size”). I was keen to discover as much as I could about the man who held such a strong fascination over me. I must have been closeted in my room for more than two hours that afternoon. In the days that followed I spent most of my waking hours continuing the study of all the relevant characteristics inherent in the written text, recording my findings in charts and tables, and drawing conclusions about my subject, which it might be untimely to divulge here.

It was not until much later that I realised the full extent of one of my idiosyncrasies: when I meet someone I admire, I sometimes unconsciously adopt his or her behaviour patterns, like accents or intonations,
even walking style. I remember that as a child, when on holiday in the Highlands of Scotland, I met a distant cousin of my own age who used the tip of her tongue a lot when she spoke. For weeks afterwards I affected a lisp without being aware of it. I have likewise adopted alien stoops or limps unknowingly. As a joke I kept writing in Holmes’ style and had to make a conscious effort to stop it becoming second nature. The events I am about to narrate happened to be centred on this relentless mimicry of mine and its unforeseeable consequence.

People who don’t know me believe the rumours that I am an immoral woman, a murderess, a courtesan, a thief or a blackmailer. I am nothing of the sort. I have never sold my body to anyone, not even for a plum part in a play. I haven’t killed anybody, except once, but he was an abductor and killer of innocent gypsy children, a sexual pervert whom the police were in awe of. I have never threatened to expose anybody by demanding money. Our secret society,
Le Club Des As
was formed to right wrongs done to the weak who are deemed by the good burghers to be undeserving of society’s protection.

Our methods may be questionable, but our motives are blameless. At least that’s what we all believe with all the fibres in our bodies. We exult in the good life and to further this aim, we are not above indulging in activities punishable by law. We never, repeat, never, steal from people unless we have reasons to believe that they have acquired their fortune, if not by dishonest means, at least by charging exorbitant profits. Jewellers, art dealers, bankers, brokers, purveyors of gourmet food and lawyers are fair game in our book. We only embark on a project if we know for sure that the chance of being caught is minimal. Obviously there is no such thing as a risk-free heist, and none of our members would have wanted that. Call it sportsmanship if you will.

At the beginning of the sequence of events I am about to narrate, I was lodging at Water Lane, Brixton, with Armande, who, if there is any need to recall, had once been a Parisian fan dancer who had married a rich English
négociant en vin
who had had the good taste of dying after six months of wedded bliss, leaving her a small fortune and the large house we live in. The
Club
(pronounced à la française), assemble in Armande’s spacious, if slightly dilapidated abode.