Crime at Christmas (31 page)

B
EFORE
revealing the amazing Secret of the Pudding Bag, I, Herlock Sholmes, detective
of Shaker Street, London, desire to explain my action to my readers.

For years
my faithful friend, Dr Jotson, who assists me to pay Mrs Spudson's exorbitant
rent, had acted as the official recorder of my cases. Never was there a better
man. Although a general practitioner, he is an expert on disordered brains. As
I have told him many a time, he should be in a mental asylum—as house-surgeon,
of course. Yet his great talents have not been wasted altogether in Shaker
Street.

But his
very devotion to me has one draw-back. He refuses to record any but my
astounding successes. And the case of the Pudding Bag can hardly be classified
as one. But because of its Christmas flavour the Editor desired it greatly—the
story, not the pudding bag.

One day
just after I had successfully solved the mystery of the Poisoned Doughnut, in
Tooting Bee, I found the Great Man in our consulting-room at Shaker Street,
begging Jotson to narrate the tale for the benefit of his readers. Jotson
refused.

Therefore,
I insisted on recording this amazing case myself. . . [
And on pocketing the fee usually awarded to
poor Jotson.—Ed.
]

For long Dr
Jotson had been run-down and depressed. Ever since that day when he left his
best pair of silver-plated scissors inside the patient upon whom he had
operated for liver trouble, he had not been himself.

For some
time I must admit it did not occur to me that there was anything else wrong
with poor Jotson save worry for the loss of his patient and the scissors. But
shortly before Christmas it was borne on me that something else was amiss.

One night
as I sat in my armchair playing Schnoffenstein's Five-Finger Exercise in B Flat
on my violin, curious rumbling noises assailed my ear. At first I thought the G
string wanted tightening; then it occurred to me that the strange, deep sounds
were proceeding from the next room.

I ceased
playing. Creeping stealthily towards the bed-room door, my fiddle grasped in my
right hand ready for any emergency, I stooped down with the skilled grace of
long practice, and applied my ear to the keyhole.

Now I could
hear the rumbling clearly. Dr Jotson was talking to himself. Throwing open the
door, I stood a tall and, I hope, dignified figure in my purple dressing-gown
with the little green birds on the holly branches round the hem.

'Jotson' I
cried. 'You are distraught.'

My old
friend Jotson, who had been pacing the bed-room, stopped, his hands behind him.
There was a startled look on his face, his sandy, walrus moustache drooping
guiltily.

'Sholmes,'
he said, 'you have been listening. What have you heard?'

'Aah.' I
said. 'What! Well might I ask you a question. What are you concealing from me,
Jotson? What have you behind your back?'

'He, he,
he! Only a couple of patches,' replied Jotson, faintly laughing at his own
feeble joke. 'Now pray go and resume your amateur vivisection on my guinea pigs!'

Candidly, I
felt offended, and I left the room. But I resolved to keep my eye on my old and
faithful friend for any further symptoms before formally notifying Colney
Hatch.

Gradually,
as the days sped by, I became more convinced that Jotson was ailing mentally.
Several times I heard him mumbling behind closed doors. Occasionally, too, he
left the house in the evenings on some pretext or another. But I felt that when
Jotson needed my help he would tell me. So I snuffed my cocaine, played my
violin, and solved a couple of dozen poison mysteries which had baffled
Scotland Yard and the Continental police, and temporarily left Jotson to look
after himself.

On
Christmas Eve Dr Jotson made one more of his mysterious disappearances. For
long I sat before the fire in the consulting-room, casually perusing the evening
paper as I smoked my pipe. Outside the snow snowed and the waits waited—I was
hard up that Christmas.

Suddenly a
paragraph on an inner news page riveted my attention. It was headed: 'Proposed
River Trip for Crown Prince', and read: 'The Crown Prince of
Schlacca-Splittzen, who arrived this afternoon in London from Paris, has
expressed a desire to see the London County Council Hall from the river. He
remarked to reporters that his view of this magnificent structure from the
railway reminded him of the municipal Torture House in Tchmnomzyte, the capital
of his own state of Schlacca-Splittzen, which lies to the south of Russia. The
Crown Prince is being carefully guarded by Inspector Pinkeye and three other
well-known detectives from Scotland Yard. These precautions are being taken
because it is rumoured that the Schlacca-Splittzen Co-operative Society of
Anarchists have threatened to drop a bomb into his porridge if he visited
Britain's shores.'

As I read
this little paragraph a dark suspicion entered my mind, and there I determined
that Jotson must be watched.

It was at
eleven o'clock on Christmas Eve. Mrs Spudson, her hair in curl-papers, had
retired to rest. I damped down the fire, covered the canary's cage, turned the
consulting-room lights out, chained up the dog, put out the cat, and left the
key under the front doormat for Jotson. Then I went to my room.

I was about
to doff my dressing-gown when I heard Jotson enter the house. Slowly he came
upstairs, and I heard him switch on the consulting-room light. Leaving my room,
I crept along the passage and quickly opened the door of the consulting-room.

As I did so
Jotson leaped from the hearth as though stung.

'Great
porous plasters!' he gasped. 'What a fright you gave me! For a moment I thought
you were the ghost of Old Man Scrooge. You see, I've been attending the recital
of the "Christmas Carol.'" He, he, he!'

The halting
words of my old friend and his musical cackle told me he was not speaking the
truth.

'Jotson,' I
said sternly, 'you've no more been to any recital to-night than I've been to
the tax-collector to pay next year's income-tax in advance. Now, tell me. Where
have you been?'

As I spoke,
my trained eye swept the fire grate. From the flames and ashes which I saw
there I deduced that Jotson had been burning something. Quickly I averted my
gaze so that he should not know I knew.

My old
friend tugged nervously at his moustache.

'It's
nothing, really, my dear Sholmes,' he said nervously. 'If I told you, you would
only laugh at me. And I hate being laughed at!'

'Nonsense,
Jotson!' I said heartily. 'Everyone laughs at you—er—except your patients, of
course. And they usually don't last long enough to laugh long.'

This I said
in a gentle, bantering tone to cheer Jotson up. To my surprise, it seemed to
have the opposite effect, and he stumped out of the room in a huff.

That was
the opportunity I wanted. In a moment my nose was in the fender. Quickly I
peered about. Before you could say 'forcemeat stuffing' I had found a narrow
strip of torn paper bearing some typewritten words. Hearing Jotson's footsteps
returning I hastily crammed it in my pocket, and was innocently cracking Brazil
nuts with my teeth when he entered the consulting-room to apologise for his
former rudeness.

I said
nothing about my discovery, but in my bedroom I examined the find carefully. To
my stupefaction the typewritten words, which were in English, read as follows:

' . . .this
honour. You have been chosen, comrade. See you fail not.'

Ding, dong!
Clatter Bang! Ding dong!

The merry
Christmas bells were chiming as Jotson and I met at breakfast on the following
morning and exchanged greetings.

My eagle
eye was quick to notice that Dr Jotson was not himself at breakfast. Quite absent-mindedly
he helped me to the larger half of the breakfast kipper, and then gave me the
first cup from the coffee-pot, instead of the usual dregs. All my old fears for
my poor friend's condition returned with renewed force.

Sitting in
my chair, daintily flicking the kipper-bones from the lapel of my mauve
dressing-gown, I watched Jotson as he went to the window and tried to entice
the friendship of a robin redbreast by means of a fish-head.

'What do
you say to a walk round Marylebone Station or the Waxworks, to get an appetite
for our Christmas dinner, Jotson!' I remarked casually.

Jotson's
walrus moustache gave a perceptible quiver.

'Er—I'm
afraid you will have to excuse me, my dear Sholmes!' he stammered. 'A new
patient of mine, a dear old lady who is suffering from a temporary attack of
suspended vibration of the right bozookum, and wishes me to test her high
tension battery to enable her to get 2LO for the Christmas glee singers. I'm
afraid—'

'Tut, tut!
I said. 'I'll come with you, Jotson.'

'No, my
dear Sholmes,' said Jotson very firmly. 'I shouldn't think of taking you to a
case like this on Christmas Day. Why don't you take the bus up to the
Zoological Gardens, or, if you prefer it, remain in front of the fire cracking
a few monkey-nuts yourself?'

I said no
more, but I thought a lot. For a time I sat myself in the armchair.

Speedily it
became apparent that Jotson was up to some game. It seemed almost impossible to
keep track of his movements. He was a slippery as an eel in an old pail. But at
last I heard him stealthily take his hat and coat from the peg in the hall and
leave the house.

Within a
minute I was tracking my old friend down Shaker Street. Dr Jotson had a large
brown paper parcel under his right arm. The parcel looked innocent enough. What
did that parcel contain? That I was determined to find out.

Poor Jotson
was worried. I deduced that from the absent-minded way that he pushed the face
of a little boy who asked him for a cigarette-card. Stopping at the corner
outside the Goat and Gooseberry Bush, he hesitated a moment, and then leaped on
a passing bus. I waited until he had gone inside with his parcel; then I swung
myself on the step and darted aloft.

Peering
from the bus top, I saw Jotson alight at Charing Cross. I waited a few moments
until the bus had started to move again, and then I ran nimbly down the steps.
As I did so, with consummate cunning I knocked off the conductor's hat and
leaped into the road. As he prepared to stop the bus I swiftly tossed him my
own cap, and retrieved his fallen property. Then replacing the peaked, blue cap
on my head and gumming a false black moustache to my upper lip, I followed in
the track of my old friend.