The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
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Authors: Ted Riccardi
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Collections & Anthologies
THE ORIENTAL CASEBOOK
OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
THE ORIENTAL CASEBOOK OF
Sherlock Holmes
Nine Adventures from the Lost Years
Ted Riccardi
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
For Ellen
CONTENTS
The Singular Tragedy at Trincomalee
PREFACE
F
OR ALMOST TWO DECADES,
I
HAVE BEEN AWARE OF
the great public interest that surrounds the lost years of Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, those
Wanderjahre
between his disappearance at the Reichenbach Falls and his return in the case of Ronald Adair have occasioned much speculation in the press as well as in literary circles.
It is only now, however, that I am free, with Holmes’s expressed permission, to bring before the public what I have termed here
The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
. His adventures in Italy and the rest of Europe still await his final approval and will be published separately.
The cases here described took place or have their origins during those momentous years between 1891 and 1894 when Holmes, unbeknownst to the world, travelled the globe locked in mortal combat with some of his most implacable enemies. He began recounting these events to me shortly after his reappearance in London in 1894. Those first fall and winter months after his return were at times a period of deep melancholia for him, but the narration of the events often provided him with a measure of relief until new challenges from the world of crime made him active once again.
Many of the readers of the following tales will be already familiar with the dramatic circumstances of Holmes’s disappearance in Switzerland and his return to London three years later. They were accurately if not fully reported in the press in Europe as well as in England. The reader unfamiliar with these events may wish to consult my more complete accounts, in what I have entitled
The Final Problem
, and
The Empty House
. These are still in print, and I have little to add to them.
At the risk of dwelling overly on the personal, however, it might be of some use if I add a word here of my own circumstances and actions after Holmes’s disappearance. Those familiar with my previous writings will recall that Holmes and I had journeyed to the Reichenbach Falls, with Moriarty fresh on our heels. Even now as I write, after several decades, the memory of those last few hours still haunts me. As Holmes and I walked towards the falls, a message from our hotel, delivered to us by a young Swiss servant, urgently requested my immediate return. An Englishwoman in the last stages of consumption, it said, had just arrived and had requested the emergency services of an English doctor. Leaving Holmes in the company of the Swiss servant boy, I hurried back. As I returned, I noticed a tall figure striding rapidly along the upper path of the falls, but I thought nothing of it, so intent was I to help a patient who was seriously ill. When I arrived at the hotel, Peter Steiler, the owner, informed me that there was no sick person and that he had sent no message. I realised immediately to my dismay that I had been duped and that the letter was a ruse. I fairly flew back to the falls, but I arrived too late. Holmes was gone; only his Alpine stock was there. A note written by him explained that he surmised that the note was a ruse but that he deemed it better if he confronted Moriarty alone in what he knew to be their inevitable and probably their last meeting. As I gazed over the falls thinking that Holmes had perished in that awful abyss, I was overcome by my own failure to realise that the tall figure who approached as I left was indeed Moriarty himself. Grief-stricken at the loss of the friend I valued most in the world, and filled with remorse at my own obtuseness, I returned to London, where my wife saw me through the first disconsolate days. The only ray of light in the darkness was a visit by Lestrade, who reported on the successful arrest of many of the Moriarty gang. Over forty criminals had been apprehended and scheduled for trial. Unfortunately, several of the inner circle, including Moriarty, had avoided the net and were presumed to have left England. One, Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s chief lieutenant, was also thought to have accompanied him to Switzerland. The others had scattered and were at large.
Despite my wife’s ministrations and the distractions of my medical practice, both she and I realised as the days passed that something more was needed if I were to recover from my loss. Indeed, it was she who first suggested that I take a trip to the Continent and spend a few weeks exploring places that I had not visited hitherto. I placed my patients in the hands of a trusted associate at St. Bart’s, and booking passage on a steamer bound for Naples, I soon found myself at sea on my way to the Mediterranean.
The stormy Atlantic did nothing to alleviate my sorrow, but after we passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, the clouds began to break, and I began to recover that sense of well-being that the sun-starved Londoner experiences when he reaches the warmer climes of the south. The ship, the
Albrig
, was a Danish freighter bound for Alexandria and Constantinople, with a return in a few weeks to England. I left the ship at Naples and journeyed south along the coast, where I stopped for a time at Ravello. It was here that I received word of James Moriarty’s slanderous remarks concerning Holmes and his outlandish defense of his dead brother. Distracted from my sorrow by the gaiety of the Italians and my anger at Moriarty’s false account, it was here that I decided to write my own account of those last few days in Switzerland in response.
Upon my return to London I benefited greatly from the many kindnesses of Mycroft, Holmes’s older brother. Mycroft invited me to dine with him at the Diogenes Club on several occasions. Though his corpulent appearance was so different from that of Holmes, his mental acuity and habits of mind were so like those of his younger brother that they led me to feel that something of my friend still lived on in our world. On one of these occasions, Mycroft asked that I accompany him to the quarters that I had once shared with Holmes on Baker Street. Before his disappearance, sensing that his meeting with Moriarty might not go entirely according to his desire, Holmes had left Mycroft instructions as to how to dispose of his personal effects, including his papers. Mycroft, among the most physically inactive of men, had decided to leave things as they were for the present, paying Mrs. Hudson the modest rent until such time as his physical energy might rise to the point where he could begin the grim disposition of Holmes’s effects. It was my first visit to our quarters since Holmes’s disappearance, and my eyes misted over as I entered, half expecting to see my friend sitting in his accustomed place. But he was not there, and the ample tears of Mrs. Hudson on seeing me only confirmed what I then regarded as the greatest loss of my life.
In the spring of 1892, as well as the spring of the following year, I re-visited the Reichenbach Falls. My grief and remorse had dissipated to a great degree, and it is still not entirely clear what inner compulsion made me return to that fearful spot. In part, I think, it was the indeterminate nature of Holmes’s death. I harbored no doubts or suspicions that he was anything but dead. For me that was the bitterest of certainties. Beyond his Alpine stock and the note that he had left behind, there was nothing. He was simply gone. The small hope that I would uncover something more of him at the falls, that there would be there still some unnoticed trace after the lapse of so much time, a further clue to exactly what had happened, lingered on, but it was a failed hope. There was nothing but the menacing voice of the falls. And, to speak with the utmost frankness, there was also the small but persistent illusion that I could relive my actions during those last moments and change my decision to leave him, as I had, to confront his archenemy alone. This illusion too went in time.
During those visits, I stayed again at the hotel in Meiringen, and had long conversations with Peter Steiler, especially about those last hours before Holmes disappeared. The figure I saw striding towards the falls was Moriarty, without question, and the young Swiss servant who brought the note to me was obviously in his employ. He had appeared looking for work but the day before. Steiler, thinking that he looked honest enough, hired him on the spot. He did little to confirm the young man’s story, however. He knew only what the boy told him, that he came from Bellinzona, the capital of Ticino canton, that his first name was Giacomo, and that he aspired to be a painter. He disappeared without a trace.
In the spring of ’94, as the cruel days of April ended and the third anniversary of Holmes’s apparent death approached, I decided to remain in England and not to visit the falls again. By now the passage of time and the distractions of work had assuaged my grief. I began to allow the full and unguarded return of Holmes’s memory without the searing pain that I had felt previously. I experienced anew the interest that I had in crime while he was alive. Whatever else he had done, Holmes had conferred upon me such an interest in crime that I often felt compelled to follow in detail the more sensational cases reported in the London press. My constant companion in these cases was of course Holmes himself, with whom I now once again engaged in fruitful, if imaginary, dialogue. I heard his voice often as he repeated some of his emphatic utterances about his theories and his methods: “You see, Watson, but you do not observe”; “My method, Watson, is based on the detailed analysis of trivia”; “You know my methods, Watson, apply them.” Although I had become sufficiently familiar with his methods during our time together, I remained slow in their application. I solved no crime about which I read, nor could I voice convincing opinions about the solutions found by the great sleuths of Scotland Yard, whom Holmes so often deprecated. Without him, the solutions of crime in London fell still to their hands—Lestrade, Tobias Gregson, and Athelney Jones, were still at work, the best of a bad lot, as Holmes had said so often, but necessary nonetheless.
And so, that spring, my attention was directed towards the untimely death of Ronald Adair, the murder of whom had shocked much of London’s fashionable society. So engrossed did I become in this awful crime and its details that I ventured even to make a visit to Park Lane, the scene of the crime, compelled, I felt, somehow by Holmes’s long influence upon me. I can still remember looking up towards the room where poor Adair had been found shot. As I stared upwards intently, I must have moved backwards slightly in balancing myself, for I bumped unintentionally into someone behind me. I turned to see an old wizened gentleman who had just bent over to gather up a number of books that he had dropped in our encounter. I leaned down to help him, but he was so unpleasant in his words and demeanour that I left him to fend for himself. I looked towards the house of Adair again and stayed on for a few minutes longer, listening to the idle gossip coming from the small crowd of curiosity seekers that had gathered below his house. I then turned and went home.
It was no more than a few minutes after I entered that there was a knock at the door. I opened it and was surprised to find the old man that I had bumped into facing me, his arms still laden with books. He muttered an apology for his rude behaviour and said that he had recognised me too late as a neighbor, for his bookshop was nearby. He wondered if I might not like to purchase some of the volumes that had fallen from his arms. “These,” he said holding a few forwards in the long fingers of one hand, “would fill nicely the space on the top shelf.”
As he spoke, I turned in the direction in which he was pointing. When I turned again to face him, he had disappeared, and Sherlock Holmes stood there instead, a broad smile on his face, the old man now a pile of rags and a wig resting on the floor between us. I have never been able to say clearly what happened next. Holmes later told me that I went pale and fainted before his very eyes. I must have regained consciousness almost immediately, however, and once I ascertained that Holmes was real and no illusion, I began the inquiries that in the end resulted in this volume. He told me how he had escaped Moriarty’s hold on him at the falls, how the great criminal had fallen into the abyss, and how he had decided on the spot to let the world think that he had perished as well so that he could deal more effectively with his remaining enemies. He then spoke briefly of his travels, of his escape to Italy, his time in Tibet, and his visits to Persia, Mecca, and Khartoum. It was out of these very brief remarks that my inquiries grew, finally resulting in the present volume.
