Sherlock Holmes (19 page)

Then it was in position. Holmes and I had manoeuvred it through ninety degrees, and it now fully shielded Llewellyn’s supine form. Holmes hooked a toe over one of the flattened trestles, dragged it towards him and stuck it up under the boat as a prop. This enabled the boat to continue resting at a shallow angle with my friend taking a lessened proportion of the weight. I was at liberty to crawl on all fours over to Llewellyn.

The Welshman was babbling incoherently, his lips smeared with a froth of blood. The bullet had pierced a lung. It was what is known as a sucking wound. Air was entering the pleural cavity during inhalation and was unable to escape during exhalation, as though trapped by a one-way valve. The pleural cavity was inflating, in turn squeezing the lung flat. Llewellyn was developing a tension pneumothorax. Pressure would continue to build inside his chest until his lung collapsed and, after that, his vena cava would be compressed, leading to catastrophic heart failure. He was mere moments from death, and every breath he drew pushed him that little bit closer.

I tore open his shirt, then took out my handkerchief and my penknife. I wadded the handkerchief up and clamped it over the wound. Then, holding the penknife in my free hand and opening it with my teeth, I attempted chest decompression by inserting the blade through the intercostal muscle between the second and third ribs, just below the clavicle. Blood sprayed out over the knife’s handle. Escaping air hissed wetly. Llewellyn writhed.

I thought I had saved him. At the very least I had relieved the tension pneumothorax, giving him a fighting chance.

He looked at me with a flicker of gratitude in his terrified, pain-wracked eyes.

“Gas,” he said.

“Gas?”

“Par.”

“Par? Gas par? Did I get that right? What does it mean? Llewellyn? What are you trying to say?”

But no further words emerged. Llewellyn went into convulsions. He began choking. Blood welled in his throat and gurgled out of his mouth like crimson lava from some ghastly volcano. Under my hands, with my penknife still embedded hilt-deep in his chest, he perished.

I reared up from behind the boat.

“You!” I yelled across the river. “Villain! Murderer! Animal! Happy? Proud of yourself? He’s dead!”

“Watson,” Holmes said, “are you mad? Get your head down.”

Mad? No, I wasn’t. Furious was what I was. Incensed beyond reason. So irate, it did not even occur to me I was putting my life in danger.

“We’re coming for you, whoever you are,” I roared. “You won’t get away with this.”

I don’t know if I was expecting an answer. None came, at any rate.

I could have sworn, however, that I heard a faint ripple of mocking laughter.

After which, silence.

My surge of anger abated and common sense reasserted itself. Panting, I slid down behind the boat.

“Never, ever, do anything so imbecilic again,” Holmes admonished. “You’re lucky you didn’t get your brains blown out. Not that you have any, on current showing.”

“I— I just…”

“He’s an expert marksman. Can’t you tell? To have made that first shot through this mist – that was no mean feat. Your great fat head would have presented an easy target. You damn fool.”

My friend was quite right, of course, but he could perhaps have expressed his sentiments with a little more tact. I consoled myself that he would have been less insulting, had he not cared so much. His vituperation was a marker of his concern.

“So what do you propose? Should we rush him?”

“You are thinking like a former serviceman, Watson, which is tantamount to not thinking at all. Rush him how? By swimming across the river? Some kind of amphibious assault?”

“We run round to the bridge and—”

“—and get shot before we’ve gone a dozen yards.”

“Not if the mist stays thick enough.”

“Can you guarantee that? Do you have divine powers that I’m unaware of? Are you a weather god?”

“Damn it all, Holmes, are we just to huddle here and hope he gets bored and goes away?”

“It is about the only viable option,” my friend said. “We are pinned down. We have no weapons. To attempt to move on him would be suicide. We must play the waiting game. Besides…”

“Yes?”

“If I am right, he has got what he came here for. He has achieved all he set out to do. You have handily announced to him that Llewellyn is dead. If he has any sense, he will now withdraw. He knows that our fear will keep us
in situ
for the next few minutes. Plenty of time for him to make a clean getaway.”

“You’re saying he might not even be there any more? We’re ducking down here for nothing?”

“It is likely. But it is not a theory I am eager to put to the test just yet.”

We remained doubled over behind the upturned boat for another quarter of an hour before Holmes, very tentatively, poked his head up over the hull to take a peek. He raised a hand and waved, in a spirit of experimentation. No gunshot came. He rose to a half-standing position, then straightened fully upright. Still no gunshot.

“I would venture,” he said, “that the sniper has gone.”

Not without reluctance, I stood too. Now that I was no longer clad in the false armour of rage, I felt exposed and vulnerable. I imagined gun sights aimed at me, a finger on the trigger, a bullet in the breech destined for my body.

It was a long time before my heartbeat settled into a stable, steady rhythm.

Holmes and I made our way to the boathouse, where the Oriel men bombarded us with anxious questions.

“Who was that?”

“Is someone trying to kill us?”

“Is he still out there?”

“Is Llewellyn really dead?”

“What on earth is going on?”

Holmes deflected their entreaties with a shake of the head. “There is little I can say at this juncture that will be of any benefit, other than to tell you that I believe you are all safe and have nothing to worry about. The assassin has fled the scene. His work here is done.”

“Brasenose would stop at nothing to make sure we don’t beat them,” Knight said. “It can’t be their doing, though. Can it? It can’t be.”

“No, your intercollegiate squabbles are not the issue here. It’s about Llewellyn alone.”

“Why him?” Stevens asked. “What did he do wrong?”

“Nothing, apart from fall in with a bad person who preyed on his insecurities and deceived him. Did he ever mention that he had made a new friend this past month? Did he talk to any of you about a co-conspirator, someone who helped him devise his scheme for deposing Trenchard?”

Llewellyn’s crewmates returned blank looks.

“We aren’t in the habit of socialising with him that much,” said Jenkins. “I mean weren’t. Weren’t in the habit. Bit of an outsider was Taff. A loner.”

“He might join us for a pint at the Wheatsheaf now and then,” said Allardyce, “but otherwise we wouldn’t see him except at the river.”

“I feel awful,” said Preston. “Perhaps if we had—”

At that point Trenchard put in an appearance. Clearly Gill had gone to the storeroom and untied him. He was a hulking, barrel-chested figure, and he was quite understandably in a state of near apoplexy.

When he had finished bellowing at the other rowers and threatening them with all manner of dire ramifications, he grew somewhat more tractable. The sight of Llewellyn’s corpse certainly sobered him.

“My God,” he sighed. “This is a pretty mess, isn’t it? How can this have happened?”

Holmes asked him the same questions he had put to the rest of the crew, and received much the same response. Trenchard, indeed, was the last person who would have known anything about the Welshman’s private life, given the antagonism that existed between them. “We rowed at opposite ends of the boat,” he said, “and that is about as close as we ever got.”

Holmes despatched two of the crewmen to the police station with instructions to fetch Inspector Tomlinson. Then he and I went round to the opposite bank via Folly Bridge in order to pinpoint the spot where the sniper had lain. Along the way Holmes interrogated me about Llewellyn’s last words. He had seen the dying man speak to me but had been unable to discern what he said.

“‘Gas par’? You’re sure about that?”

“Quite sure.”

“Not Casper, by any chance?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So it might have been?”

“Well, maybe, but it definitely sounded like a
g
at the beginning, not a
c
.”

“Casper is a name. A first name and a surname. Perhaps it is the name of Llewellyn’s secret associate, our agent provocateur. Mind you, Gaspar is a first name and surname too, one of Mediterranean origin. Either way, was Llewellyn trying to tell us who he had consorted with? Did he know who shot him?”

“It could be a Welsh word or phrase,” I suggested. “
In extremis
, Llewellyn might have lapsed into his native tongue.”

“Doesn’t sound very Welsh, does it? ‘Gas par’. But I take your point. My knowledge of the Cymric language is limited.”

We traipsed up and down the section of the river’s west bank opposite the boathouses until Holmes ascertained exactly where the sniper had hidden. As I had surmised at the time, he had secreted himself in a thicket of evergreen shrubbery. Holmes indicated broken twigs and a patch of flattened earth.

“He has left barely any trace, though, Watson. To the casual eye, it is as if no one was ever here. This is a man practised in the art of concealment. I would not be in the least surprised to learn that he has a military background. And see? No spent shell casings littering the ground. A professional killer knows to pocket those and take them with him, so that he cannot be identified by his choice of weapon. We may assume it was a high-powered bolt-action rifle of some sort, a Lee-Metford perhaps. No, more likely it’s the gun that is superseding the Lee-Metford, the Lee-Enfield.”

He sniffed the air.

“I smell cordite, rather than black powder. Cordite is smokeless and less pungent, leaves less telltale residue, and is becoming the common propellant in rifle cartridges. The Lee-Enfield takes smokeless rounds, and also has the appropriate effective firing range. Then again, our assassin might have used one of those brand new Mannlichers. They are becoming popular. Without the shell casings to determine calibre, one may only speculate.”

“Not only is he a master manipulator and a cold-blooded murderer, then, but a crack shot to boot,” I said. “What have we got ourselves into, Holmes? This business becomes murkier and more insidious by the minute.”

Holmes nodded sombrely. “Death seems to be dogging us, and we are never quite quick enough to catch it before it strikes. It is as though we are being toyed with.”

I too had that impression. Innocents were being slaughtered, right before our eyes, and us powerless to prevent it. Our enemy seemed to be deriving great satisfaction from our inability to catch him. He was a ghost, as opaque and evanescent as the mist around us.

As a footnote to this chapter, I must relate that Torpids did not go ahead as planned. The records of the Oxford University Rowing Clubs for 1895 state simply that there were “no races” that spring, citing poor weather conditions. In truth, a terrible frost set in the day after the mist, the Isis turned to ice, and although proposals were made to postpone the event by a week, it wound up being abandoned altogether.

Ice, however, was not the only reason or even the main reason for the cancellation. The killing of the Oriel 1st VIII’s bow man, Hugh Llewellyn, was. The rower’s death cast a pall over the proceedings.

Just as it cast a pall over my spirits.

Just as it cast an especially deep pall over Holmes’s.

I elected to remain in Oxford for the next few days. I can’t say there was a rational basis for the decision. It was instinctual more than anything, a feeling in my vitals. Holmes needed me. Or rather, I sensed I might be needed. Not for any practical assistance I might provide, not even for my companionship and moral support, but for his own good. He was troubled and frustrated, the worst possible combination under the circumstances. To Sherlock Holmes, nothing counted so much as forward motion. If he was not making progress in a case, he was apt to brood and the consequences of that were rarely agreeable.

When I told him that I was staying, I expected him to be pleased. I also expected him to volunteer to put me up at the Randolph at his own expense. Neither outcome occurred. Holmes greeted my announcement with an air of indifference, almost of disdain. “As you wish,” he said. I had hoped for at least a modicum of enthusiasm. That he exhibited none was a telling sign, not to mention hurtful.

Since I could not afford the Randolph’s exorbitant room rates on the income of a general-practitioner-cum-freelance-scribe, I found myself more modest accommodation. Inspector Tomlinson recommended a guesthouse up in Summertown, which is a pleasant residential area in the north of the city, full of large villas, neat terraces and quiet, secluded avenues. The guesthouse, run by a Mrs Bruell, boasted decent amenities, although I was obliged to share a bathroom with four other lodgers and the hot water boiler frequently failed to keep up with demand. Mrs Bruell provided a good, solid cooked breakfast, however, and was not one of those termagant landladies who make unreasonable demands about tidiness, punctuality, outside visitors and the keeping of hours. Guests were free to come and go as they wished, with the stipulation that they make as little noise as possible when returning at night, her husband being a light sleeper.

The weather that week was miserable. The mist had been merely a harbinger of worse to come. A low pressure system moved in from the north and overnight the mercury plummeted. I can honestly say I have never been as cold as I was in Oxford in late March, 1895; not even the windswept foothills of the Hindu Kush in midwinter could compare. The damp chill seemed inescapable, and even beside a blazing hearth or tucked up in bed, one could not mitigate it. The only remedy was to get the blood flowing. Accordingly, wrapped up in several layers of clothing, I would head off on brisk walks, with frequent stops for hot toddies or pots of tea.