The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy (8 page)

There was nothing I could do for him, and I went to attend to my household chores. Two hours later, I went to check whether he had come out of his torpor and wanted anything.

‘Oh, Miss Adler,’ he began falteringly. ‘You tricked me that day, eh? Come sit down here.’ He extended an arm in the direction of a chair opposite him, usually reserved for his visitors and whose most recent occupant had been Signor Amedeo Frostini.

‘Miss Adler,’ he went on the moment I had occupied the seat. ‘I hope you never indulge in heroin as I do. I wish I could wean myself away. I have tried, but it’s damn difficult, I’m telling you.’ I nodded but said nothing.

‘As someone who makes a living by using his mental faculties, I took the worse decision in my life when, in my misguided search for knowledge I tried that accursed stuff. It’s only today that I realise the full extent of its potential to harm. Far from enhancing your clarity of thought, it dulls it.’ I looked at him questioningly.

‘Take a look at this note.’ I took it from him and pretended to study it intently.

‘Do you know what it tells me?’

‘I hope not that its author is one Irene Adler,’ I refrained from saying, and only demurred.

‘I know exactly who wrote it—’

‘Yes?’

‘The perpetrator is in this room,’ he said.

‘Oh.’ I hoped he was not going to do anything to cause damage to me and my friends.

‘But I will own to having no memory at all, none whatsoever of breaking into the Frostini Fratelli’s establishment. Neither can I discover how I got hold of all the stuff which was delivered.’ I was too stunned to react. Had I heard right? Had he come to the conclusion that he was the one who carried out the heist? ‘How could you have carried out the heist, Mr Holmes, sir?

‘As I was saying.’ He pointed to the syringe on his desk, ‘This vile stuff makes even the strongest individual lose all touch with reality, all inhibitions, all sense of what’s right and wrong. Why, Miss Adler, under its noxious influence, a good man might even commit a murder without batting an eyelid.’ I was completely dumbfounded.

‘I must have had an accomplice. I could never have moved all that merchandise by myself and I’m damned if I know who helped me. Certainly not the virtuous Dr Watson. Do you believe that in my drugged state, I might have developed superhuman strength? I had never heard of those wretched brothers before. Miss Adler, do you believe in the supernatural?’ I knew that he did not expect an answer.

‘But what makes you arrive at this extraordinary conclusion, sir? I mean that you—’ He taps the letter which was now in front of him.

‘The note. There isn’t the slightest doubt that it was written by me. As you may know... or perhaps not... I wrote a monograph on Graphology, a subject on which I have devoted considerable time and energy studying, in which I describe how I arrived at the conclusion that no two people can have the same handwriting. You must promise me that you will read it one day.’ He passes to me my note and a sheet of his notes which he had been studying all afternoon.

‘Here, compare the formation, the shape and the size of the letters in the two…eh… identical in every respect.’ I began to see the light, but I had no memory of having consciously copied his style of writing. The ghost of Herr Professor Freud must have held my hand as I wrote out the note.

‘That’s not all. Look at the spaces between the words, look at the slope of the lines, look at the distances between the punctuation marks and the words on their side. Exact identity in every respect! No one on earth could have...’ he did not finish his sentence and shook his head most vehemently before adding emphatically. ‘Impossible!’ You could hear the exclamation mark clunk in besides the word.

What can I say? My hitherto lukewarm acceptance of Mr Freud’s theories of the subconscious immediately hardened. ‘Oh, Miss Adler, you must promise me that you will never reveal a word of this to any soul.’ I nodded vigorously, at which he opened his eyes wide, stared at me and said, ‘Ah Mrs Hudson, what are you doing here? Ah yes, I would indeed like that pot of Darjeeling, thank you kindly.’

t the risk of being tiresome and repetitive, I will (at Mr Reynold’s suggestion) briefly mention the membership: Armande was the owner of the premises and I was her only permanent lodger. Lord Clarihoe rented a room, but he did not, as a rule, stay here more than once or twice in any given week. There was the Bishop (an ex-vicar really), the thespian Hugh Probert, now forcibly retired, the Russian revolutionary aristocrat Ivan Vissarionovich Chekhonte, Artémise Traverson the unrecognised genius of a painter who was a friend of Edouard Manet, the tenor Coleridge, whose grandfather was a slave, Bartola, once a
chanteuse
from Montepulciano who definitely did
not
poison her husband, and the Swiss financial wizard Anatole Frunk. They all had their own places now but had at one time or another been a lodger here. As Armande’s place was huge, she often provided them with free accommodation in her basement when the need arose, or on a whim. She had money to roast, was how she put it.

In the beginning the
Club
was just a pretext for friends to gather round a few bottles of champagne and a plate of pâté de foie gras or bonbons, play games and put the world to rights. Both Clarihoe and Armande had deep pockets and were generous to a fault. If any blame is to be apportioned regarding the turn the events would take later- and I dispute the necessity for that- then I must offer my shoulder with the words
mea culpa
writ large on it. Having witnessed Coleville-Mountdown’s clumsy kleptomania, I had first parried and then in an unexpected
contra-riposte
, ended up with
his
laden wallet. That was a seminal moment in the history of the
Club
. To begin with I was invited to one of their soirées where I was fêted as a heroine and declared a
natural for the
As
. My new friends never tired of asking me to recount the episode, and the actress in me, thriving in public applause happily obliged.

One evening a short while later, Bartola, in her meek unassertive voice, out of the blue asked what was wrong with stealing from the wicked. It all started from there, and the association was redefined. The
Club
had then set itself the aim of righting wrongs. We always tried to act for the have-nots. As we were all iconoclasts, the criteria for our actions were not always geared to what was generally considered legal. We never used violence (except on rare occasions), we never killed (except once) and we would only steal from the undeserving rich (and give most of our acquisitions to the poor).

We would usually assemble at Water Lane two or three evenings a week for games, gastronomic indulgences, discussions and story-telling. Wednesday night was when most people made it a point to turn up, and this was the night when we dealt with official business and asked questions: Are we in need of resources? Did any deserving creature require our help? Should we plan a heist? Was there someone who needed to have some sense knocked into them?

Although Lord Clarihoe had never hidden his homophile nature from us, he seemed to be spending more and more time at Water Lane. This was a bit unsettling for it was obvious that I was the cause of this. I adored him as a friend, but preferred an uncomplicated life.

One morning the three of us we were having breakfast when Armande went to fetch some fig jam in her
cave
. Algernon looked at me suddenly and said, ‘If you were a man, Irene, you and I would have been made for each other.’

‘But I might not have been a Uranian,’ I objected. He was not listening.

‘Or if I were a woman,’ he mused.

‘I have no Sapphic inclinations,’ I countered.

‘Come off it, all women do.’

‘Algernon, wouldn’t it have been much simpler if we were
both
heterosexual?’ He looked at me, eyes and mouth open, shook his head and in a whisper said, ‘You know I had never envisaged that.’

‘Envisaged what?’ asked Armande as she came back in. But she was not to find out. There was a loud knock at the door, and a messenger handed a note, breathlessly saying, ‘For Lord Clarihoe.’ All the blood drained from his face as he looked at it. ‘Must go, something awful has happened, Alice has been stolen.’ And in a matter of minutes he had disappeared, mumbling something which sounded like, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow.’ Armande and I stared at each other.

‘Who is Alice?’ I asked, whereupon my friend and landlady told me about Clarihoe’s aunt Cordelia. She had eloped with a Catholic violinist and had been, as a result, repudiated by the family. Algernon had been forbidden all contact with the renegade aunt, but stealthily he had kept in touch with her. Emilia was her daughter who was a few years younger than him and was married to Vincent, a schoolteacher. They had been blessed by a baby Alice who was only three weeks old.

‘Who would steal a three week old baby?’ I mused aloud.

‘I ’ope,’ said Armande, ‘that... no, it can’t be... not even criminals... you’ve ’eard ’ow they steel leetle girls and make them work in those
bordels
... but surely not bebbies...’ Choked with tears, she was unable to express herself and left the room. I had no alternative to offer, but somehow I thought that Armande was formulating an outlandish scenario.

Many people believed that London was no longer as dangerous a city as it was only twenty years before. They talk of the laws that have been passed in the recent years for the protection of minors, stopping girls as young as eleven or twelve from being coerced into prostitution, or trafficked to France or Belgium by
placeurs
. I know of these laws like everybody else, but although the age of consent has been raised to sixteen, it is a common belief that the Metropolitan Police turn a blind eye to infringements. The gambling dens of Wellington Place were still doing a thriving business and the Mrs Jeffries of Chelsea were left in peace to carry out their obscene trade unhindered by the police. Although we were to become dreaded presences in casinos on the continent because of winning systems devised by the financial genius Anatole Frunk, the
Club
despised Wellington Place because the bulk of their clientèle consisted of the most deprived among the population, who ended up getting fleeced of their meagre earnings in the vain attempt at augmenting
their resources. We did not by any means consider ourselves guardians of morality, but whilst we did not disapprove of people paying consenting adults for sex, we thought that there was no greater abomination than involving innocent children in prostitution. As we were defenders of the weak, children were on top of our list. There had been many cases of missing children that the police have been unable or unwilling to solve. The only time we had found it necessary to kill anybody was when Lord Stonehead, powerful untouchable and perverted, had been stealing Romany children for sexual purposes and killing them afterwards. The reader can find copies of
Reynolds News
in any borough library and read for himself or herself the story of how Lord Stonehead got his just deserts (see:
The Avengers
). We used to rage when we heard of the helplessness of parents whose children had been stolen.

We had expected Algernon the next day. We were impatient to discover the fate of baby Alice but it was three days before he showed up. We were greatly alarmed when we saw the state he was in. He had obviously not slept a wink since we last saw him. His face was haggard and sallow and his eyes were ringed. The moment he came in he started ranting incoherently. It was obvious that little Alice was still lost.

‘Sit down and calm down
mon cher Aljèrenonne
, I’ll bring you some
tarte
and mocha,’ said Armande. The two of us sat opposite each other. Algie took out a handkerchief and began wiping his face although it was dry and pasty. I knew that no progress had been made. Armande came back with a laden tray and we served ourselves.

‘Tell me baby Alice is now safely in her mother’s arms,’ said Armande with forced gaiety. Clarihoe said nothing but shook his head violently as tears streaked down his cheeks.

Armande’s reaction was the sort of thing I’ve only seen on the stage before. She let her prized Denbigh cup drop on the floor and smash to smithereens, jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and, throwing up her hands in the air she gave a fearsome scream.