The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes (15 page)

‘I have done many news stories on cloning,' I said. ‘But I take it you weren't exactly cloned.'

‘Not at all,' said Holmes. ‘A cloned human might have physical characteristics nearly identical to those of the original, yet the clone would be different because he would have different memories. In my case, Coleman merely used a technique to create new cells for the existing creature. I am the old Holmes, with the old memories. My memories were preserved in chemical form in my brain while I was frozen, and those memories were revived when I was awakened. As I understand it, all human memory is preserved in chemical form.'

We walked together down and down. Holmes swung his walking stick in lively fashion. The gimpy leg did not seem to bother him except when he had to heft it stiffly over the stiles. At one point we sat down on a steep slope and looked down as dusk began to creep over the valley. He sighed. His mood changed. He said, ‘I don't know, Watson . . .'

‘Wilson.'

‘I don't know if the game has been worth the candle.'

‘No, I suppose not,' I said. ‘But it's an experience.'

‘Yes, yes,' he agreed. ‘And yet . . .' he trailed off.

‘And yet, you have lost your life,' I said. ‘Is that it? Your real life.'

‘Yes. I think you may have put your finger on it.'

‘But you'd have lost your life anyway,' I said. ‘We all do.'

‘But I'd not have remembered it,' he said.

‘Ah, there's a point,' I said. ‘You'd not have felt lonely.'

‘My fear is less of loneliness than of boredom. If a man lives long enough, he is bound to get bored. Don't you think so, Watson? An experience that is magical the first time around is routine the tenth, and tedious the twentieth.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I fear that is so. I remember, for instance, my first trip to Paris was wonderful. The fourth was still fun. Later, Paris was fine, but expected. A bit ordinary. And the lovely first bloom is now forever vanished.'

‘Men have always,' said Holmes, ‘dreamt of living forever – thoughtless men. I suspect, Watson, that even if the body of a man stayed as perfect as that of a twenty-year-old, stayed healthy forever, his mind would petrify from sheer boredom after two hundred years. And he would want to kill himself. To die.'

I wasn't entirely sure I agreed with him, so I was a little evasive. ‘Like so much we think we want,' I said, ‘I suppose eternal life might turn out to be a dreary prospect. I feel better when I avoid thinking too deeply on these sublime topics.'

‘Poor Zimmerman,' he mused. ‘Poor Professor Zimmerman. He died not knowing that he had experienced all the youth that a man could ever experience. He died denying the gift of mortality.'

‘Movement, motion, saves us as we grow old,' I said.

‘Exactly right! We must be up and doing.' He sprang to his feet and brushed himself off. ‘We must be up and doing with a will to work and wait.'

‘Away, then,' said I, and again we started down the hill.

‘Good old Watson!' he cried, and he swung his stick at a thistle.

‘You might just as well call me
Watson
and let it go at that,' I said. ‘It will be easier than me having to correct you all the time.'

‘Fair enough,' said he. ‘Anyway, as Juliet observed,
What's in a name?
'

‘Quoting Shakespeare now?' I cried. ‘You surprise me, Holmes!'

‘I'm afraid that my dear Watson – may he rest in peace – left out a great deal about my personality,' said Holmes. He laughed loud, and his laugh echoed out of the trees.

We descended to the village. We walked rather stiffly to our Cambrai Cottage. We cooked a small meal, and ate it. We went weary and happy to bed.

NINE

Lestrade Presents a Problem

T
he Mystery of the Black Priest, as we had come to call the case of the blood bath at The Old Vicarage, weighed heavily on Holmes. ‘My first case in ninety years, and I can't crack it,' he said one morning, and he laughed bitterly. I could see he was becoming desperate and depressed. Several times I had noticed him eyeing the small morocco case containing his hypodermic needle.

‘Never fear,' I said. ‘A tiny piece of information will come your way, and suddenly the whole case will crystallize, and you will solve it as brilliantly as ever you did.'

‘I wonder,' he mused. ‘I wonder.'

‘By the way,' I said. ‘I met Sergeant Bundle when I was buying the newspaper this morning. He mentioned that Jenkins has returned to his cottage from Scotland.'

‘Ah!' cried Holmes, springing to his feet. ‘Perhaps we should go see him. There may yet be hope of fresh facts.'

We drove to The Old Vicarage in my car. Jenkins was still in his silk pyjamas and dressing gown when we knocked on his door. He graciously invited us in. He was a dapper man in his forties. He had bright green eyes, blond hair worn with studied dishevelment, and he threw his right arm into the air whenever he became excited about one of his own observations.

‘I was in Scotland and I have three friends who were with me to prove it,' said he. ‘I am astonished, Mr Coombes, that you bring the subject up. I have gone over it all with Sergeant Bundle. I can tell you this, if I had a young boy visit me, I might well invite him to bathe with me. But I certainly wouldn't try to drown him in anything but love.'

‘Do you know any actors who speak Pashto?' asked Holmes.

‘I know several actors of Afghan descent, though I'm not quite sure whether they can speak the language. They are perfectly English, so far as I am aware. I doubt that they have ever been to their homeland.'

‘Would they know about this house of yours in Wales?'

‘They might. I throw parties here for people in the London theatre world, and word gets around . . .' He shrugged.

‘Would you mind writing out the names of the Afghan actors you know?'

‘It would be my pleasure, Mr Coombes.' He produced a paper and pen and, with a flourish, he wrote out a list of names.

‘Thank you,' said Holmes.

‘You know,' said David Jenkins, turning so suddenly that his silk robe swished. ‘You remind me of someone, Mr Coombes.'

‘Really?' said Holmes, in a tone that suggested he was pleased.

‘But I can't think who. Wait, I have it! William Gillette,' he cried, whirling and pointing his arm at Holmes affectionately, while smiling a 500-watt smile: ‘The actor, William Gillette!'

Jenkins rushed to a cabinet. He drew out a curve-stemmed meerschaum pipe and thrust it into Holmes's hand. He touched Holmes delicately, a finger on each shoulder, and turned him like a mannequin. He viewed him in profile. ‘Perfect!' he cried. ‘You are, without the shadow of a doubt, William Gillette!'

Holmes looked at me, seeming puzzled.

‘Gillette,' I said, ‘was an American actor and playwright who gained fame and fortune in the early part of the last century by writing and starring in plays about Sherlock Holmes.'

‘Have you ever acted, Mr Coombes?' asked Jenkins. ‘Perhaps it is time for a Holmes revival.' He moved closer to Holmes and looked at his face intently. ‘Of course, you're a little long in the tooth. But make-up does wonders.'

‘I begin to think,' said Holmes, ‘that Sherlock Holmes has been revived one time too often.'

‘Nonsense!' cried Jenkins, as he poured himself another cup of coffee. With a silent gesture of eyes and hands, he offered us each a cup. But we refused.

‘If you revive a man enough times,' said Holmes, ‘he is bound to disappoint.'

‘Oh, Mr Coombes – what a view of life you take! A Holmes revival is always a success!'

Jenkins struck poses and launched witticisms as he ushered us to the front door and bade us adieu.

Holmes later checked out the names on Jenkins's list. They led to nothing. Two of them weren't even Afghans, but Indians.

I spent the next day reading a book that Holmes had recommended,
Martyrdom of Man
by Winwood Reade. Holmes, meanwhile, flung himself first into one chair, then another. I could see he was fading fast, and that soon he would be again in the depths of boredom and despair. This was an aspect of his personality that Watson, writing a century ago, had often mentioned. Holmes, I concluded, suffered a version of manic depression – or, as I believe they now style it,
bipolar disorder
. But beyond this was something new. He now seemed to have self-doubt. I had always thought of him as one who believed entirely in his own abilities, one who knew absolutely that if he were provided with even the slightest chance for success he would succeed. I wasn't at all sure that this was still true. It might have been true most of the time, but not all the time. Not in certain dark moments.

He lurched out of a chair and stood at the window. ‘Maybe the facts are before me and I don't see the obvious. Maybe I need more facts. A single fact, when properly viewed by the intelligent mind, ought to reveal its antecedent, which should reveal the fact before that, and back, and back, till we see the beginnings of the universe! Yes, yes, but that is extreme. Inductive reasoning can only lead so . . .' He flung himself, with an air of exhaustion and exasperation, into the easy chair by the hearth. ‘You know, Watson, I have almost concluded that I'd rather be lucky than good.'

‘I should hope so!' I said. ‘Many a man who has worked hard, acted bravely and thought logically has – for lack of a little luck – failed utterly.'

‘What I fear, Watson, is that this may be just such a case. You know, I must tell you something: not all my cases were solved.'

‘Naturally not.'

‘In the annals of crime, many a criminal has done his dastardly deed and skipped away to live a happy life.'

‘Of course,' I said.

‘Even among the murder cases I have undertaken, some were never solved and the murderers never paid for their crimes. There was the affair at Notting Hill in 1890, in which the man and his dog were both dissolved in acid. The only facts ever discovered about the murderer were that she loved the poems of Wordsworth and that she could not correctly pronounce the words
fissiparous
or
autochthonous
.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes. And then there was the bizarre
Case of the Shrinking Dachshund
. That was what Watson intended to call it. He even wrote it up. But his wife convinced him it was too horrible a tale to present to an unsuspecting public, particularly as it was a tale not only without a point or a moral, but without a real beginning or real ending. There was also the case, back in '97, of the Christmas tree candle conspiracy, in which the candles were tampered with and the angel on the top of the tree exploded, resulting in a whole family being burnt to death as they opened their gifts – a case so outré and grisly that the newspapers of the time would not even print it. I could not solve it, Watson. I couldn't! I lacked one fact. Of course, the bothering thing about an unsolved case is that one can never be absolutely sure whether the failure is due to lack of facts or lack of insight. I tell you, Watson, you are right! So much is chance, so much is . . .'

At that moment his mobile phone began to play
Für Elise
.

He held the phone to his ear. He frowned. Slowly he closed the phone and put it into his pocket.

‘What's wrong?' I asked.

‘That was Scotland Yard. My contact there wants to see me.'

‘A problem?'

‘Could be . . .' He trailed off. He looked worried.

‘Look, Holmes,' I said. ‘Tomorrow is your doctor's appointment in London anyway. So you'll kill two birds with one journey. No use worrying about things. A change is as good as a rest. Do you good. Get away to London for a day or two.'

‘Yes, yes, that's right,' he murmured. ‘Quite right . . . say, uh . . .'

‘What?'

‘I wonder, Watson – would you like to accompany me to London?'

‘It would be a pleasure,' I said.

His proposal really did suit me perfectly. A few days in London would make a nice change from rural life. Accordingly, we drove early the next morning to Hereford, caught the train, and by eleven were at Paddington Station where a black car was waiting to take us to the offices of New Scotland Yard. At Scotland Yard I finally laid eyes on Holmes's so-called ‘contact.' He was a lean man about our age or a little older, with thinning black hair untouched by grey. He moved quickly out of his chair to greet us – ‘Good morning, Holmes – and you, sir, must be Dr . . .'

‘Mr . . . Mr James Wilson – how do you do.'

‘I am Detective Chief Inspector Lestrade.'

‘Lestrade!' I cried, despite myself.

‘Or a reasonable facsimile thereof,' remarked Holmes, with uncharacteristic puckishness.

I tried to back off a little, to excuse my outburst. I said very mildly, ‘Are you two playing a little joke on me?'

‘No, no,' said Lestrade with a brisk smile. ‘But I can see why you might think so. Evidently you are familiar with Mr Sherlock Holmes's personal history, as so eloquently recorded by his good friend, Dr Watson.'

‘I am,' I said. ‘And I am aware that in the very first chapter of that history, titled
A Study in Scarlet
, a certain Mr Lestrade of Scotland Yard appears.'

‘He was my grandfather,' said Lestrade. ‘He was just twenty-eight years old when he met Mr Holmes in 1880. Grandfather married late, and might not have married at all had it not been that Holmes saved a young shop girl named Mary Bates from the clutches of white slave traders who intended to ship her to Burma. Mary Bates was my grandmother. My grandfather's first son, my father, was born in 1910 when Grandfather was fifty-eight. My father went on to serve many years as a London policeman. I was born in 1942 when my father was thirty-two. And now, at the ripe old age of sixty-six, I may soon retire – I've lingered on far longer than most of my contemporaries, I fear. But I like the work, you see? That's three generations of Lestrades with careers at Scotland Yard.'