Sherlock Holmes & The Master Engraver (Sherlock Holmes Revival) (37 page)

It appeared that Sherlock Holmes’ artful cunning knew no bounds.

We were interrupted briefly by Mrs Hudson who set out a very civilized luncheon of boiled beef and carrots, mashed potatoes and cabbage of which I was mightily appreciative, having missed breakfast entirely.

After a short interval I resumed my questioning; “Then what exactly was the content of the message purporting to be from Moriarty to Bormanstein? It must have been extraordinarily compelling.”

“It was – it confirmed that Moriarty had made an agreement with von Huntziger to sell on the stolen materials for a further one hundred thousand pounds.”

“And why did you issue the invitation to meet at von Huntziger’s Belgravia mansion of all places?”

“For the simple reason that to be believable, Watson, Moriarty’s supposed instruction to sell on the plates and paper had to name as the buyer a known and wealthy criminal, with the means to pay the fabulous sum of one hundred thousand pounds. Count Otto-Dietmar von Huntziger is just such a man.

“Bormanstein was aware of von Huntziger’s
curriculum vitae
, as was Moriarty, and concluded that the professor had contrived a means of further capitalising on the stolen goods. They were now becoming too dangerous to possess. And you will recall I warned Mr May that the simple payment of the ransom demand would not ensure the safe return of the plates.

“The telegraph, apparently from Moriarty, simply assured Bormanstein that the ransom had been received from The Bank of England, that the game would soon be up, and that he had contrived a final and highly profitable throw of the dice which would increase their total gain by a further hundred thousand pounds to the enormous sum of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds – enough to fund a criminal empire for decades.

“Hence Bormanstein dutifully appeared precisely at midnight at Eaton House, Belgrave Square, exactly as I bade him. I did tell you, Watson, I can be extremely persuasive!

“Von Huntziger, for his part, was more than pleased to join in the plan, particularly when I suggested that his cooperation would almost certainly occasion an attack of amnesia on my part in connection with the stolen Hartz sapphires!” He chuckled. “It so happens that as unresolved cases go, my heart would not truly be in any further investigation, for I know the previous owner of the stones obtained them by a cruel deception amounting to extortion; at least von Huntziger obtained them through artistry and skill!

“Then there remain just three unresolved puzzles for me, Holmes; how came it that I observed the Gladstone bag of money upon the desk, we saw Bormanstein riffle through a stack of notes, check the bag a second time, shackle it to his wrist and flee, yet today you have handed it back to The Bank?”

“By the childishly simple expedient of a second identical bag beneath the desk – I purchased two; the Count first displayed the bag containing one hundred thousand pounds in genuine currency – it had to be genuine to stand up to the close examination to which Bormanstein would undoubtedly expose it. Von Huntziger removed it from the desk momentarily until he had examined the plates, then artfully re-presented the second bag which contained ten bundles of unprinted Portals paper, each topped-off with a genuine note, each bundle being secured with an official Bank of England paper band.

“This second bag with its deceitful contents was delivered to von Huntziger earlier yesterday by Warburg, and was already concealed beneath the desk when I placed its twin, containing the genuine payment, alongside.

“Had Bormanstein troubled to make more than a perfunctory examination of the second bag, he would have found that what he accepted was ten bundles of plain, unprinted Portal’s paper, and ten, ten-pound notes. But he saw what he expected to see. For all his pains he has earned exactly one hundred pounds! And amusingly, I noted he neglected to take the key which unlocks the bracelet, which will annoy him still further!”

I smiled at the audacious simplicity of the means with which Holmes had tricked the criminal master-mind. “Then what of the plates, Holmes? What on earth was in the heavy leather parcel that Bormanstein snatched?”

“Why, finely engraved plates of highly-polished steel of course! However I doubt that he will trouble to print from them.

“They were fabricated to my order by Mr Julius Kauffman and his engraver – the same who inscribed the thirty-link silver bracelet purchased with the third, counterfeit note. I am sure they are not as accomplished as Mr Petch’s delicate work, but they were the correct size and weight, and wrapped in chamois leather, they served to deceive. I had all along anticipated that Bormanstein would attempt some form of double-deal, and thus defeated his last-minute change of heart.

“I placed them in the humidor upon our arrival.

“At this point we have the adroit Count von Huntziger – and his rare skill with legerdemain – to thank; he is most accomplished in the deft removal of valuable articles and their invisible substitution with others; I am certain it has served him in the course of his profession; you might have observed he spent an unusually long time in preparing and lighting his cigar!

“In the process it was, for him, an effortless move to change the substitute plates for the real, re-wrap them in the leather outer and return them to the desk.” He paused, a mischievous smile on his face.

“However, as I say, I somehow doubt that he will trouble to print any impressions from the plates he snatched. You see, Watson, from the very beginning Bormanstein has been taunting us, he has been parading his true identity at every opportunity, for he is of that arrogant breed that believes his intellect is superior, that he is beyond the reach of the police but more arrogantly still, that he is beyond the reach of Sherlock Holmes!

“He is undoubtedly a clever man, he is certainly a very dangerous man, but on this occasion with his effrontery he has quite overreached himself!”

He turned to his desk and from his printers’ tray, selected a number of the lead type-slugs, which he trickled into my open hand. There were fourteen in all; I arranged them in order – there were three A’s, a single B, E, I and M, two N’s, an O, an R, two S’s and a T.

I looked up quizzically at my friend. “What am to I do with these Holmes?” He handed me the slips of paper I had seen him printing earlier that morning. “Well, Watson, with those characters you could compose this...

BARONESS AMANTI “...or this...

OBANES ST AMARIN “...and this too...

ASA BORMANSTEIN

“...oh, and you can even re-order them to spell out his
real
name...

SEBASTIAN MORAN...

“-or as he prefers to be styled, Colonel Sebastian Moran, formerly of the 1st Bangalore Pioneers, son of Sir Augustus Moran, the sometime Minister to Persia. You may recall he was on my list of Moriarty’s suspected associates? You may also recall the butt of an Indian cigar I discovered upon the hearth in Dulcie Hobbs’ rooms?

“And his supreme arrogance goes further – his first name – Sebastian – also provided the characters for: SS BETANIA and his second readily becomes ORMAN of Orman’s Roofing Contractors – what extravagant vanity!

“Like his colonel-in-chief, Moriarty, he too was a scion of a good family, Eton and Oxford educated and, like Moriarty, he has turned very much for the bad – in fact I now believe him to be Moriarty’s right-hand man, his senior lieutenant; it is rumoured that Moriarty pays him an annual stipend of sixty thousand pounds; henceforth I shall certainly regard him as the second most dangerous man in London! I am confident I have not heard the last of him, for certainly I have made a most ruthless and deadly enemy.”

“Then what, exactly, was engraved on the plates he made away with?”

“Ah those, Watson; I decided to gift him a small keep-sake as a reminder of our first skirmish, and the man who bested him at the end...” and he passed me a sheet of Portals bank-note paper.

“What you hold is, admittedly, a rather crude but still legible impression I made with my somewhat limited printing apparatus... do you not think he will treasure it?”

I burst out laughing. “Masterly Holmes, quite masterly! Indeed this investigation has been the most magisterial example of your science I believe I have had the privilege to observe.”

He looked at me through a dense blue cloud of smoke and smiled. “Elementary, my dear Watson” he said cheerily, a sentiment he had never before in all our adventures together expressed in those particular words, and was never again to repeat; to other spectators it might perhaps have sounded hubristic, but for me it simply confirmed how completely fulfilled and at ease he was immersed in his abstruse but indisputably precise science of observation and deduction.

Beyond the intellectual stimulation he derives from his cases, where does he find, I wondered, that cerebral paradigm he so craves, and in company with a like intelligence? Certainly not at my door – I am at most, the willing whetstone upon which he very occasionally hones his mind; the Boswell who informs ordinary folk of the workings of this man’s stellar mind; the flint from which rarely he may strike the odd small spark of inspiration with his hard, steely intellect. I could think of only two beings on the entire planet that were qualified for the role.

Mycroft, his elder brother, who Holmes readily acknowledged as his equal – on occasion even his master – is undoubtedly the foremost to come to my mind and it is possibly only Mycroft’s innate indolence that saves Holmes from being bested by a superior contender in his unique field. I have witnessed several encounters between these extraordinary siblings, often when they may not have met each other for a year.

To the casual onlooker they would appear to be speaking in some arcane, unintelligible code, or even appear as two bewildered lunatics exchanging disconnected and quite incongruent phrases.

As an exemplar I paraphrase one such exchange (as best I recall it) over luncheon at The Diogenes Club and this after almost a year without meeting each other:

MH: “What do you make of the two strangers at the far corner table?”

SH: “The retired stockbroker or the cashiered army man?”

MH: “The bachelor.”

SH: “Ah, he. Lives in the country, rides to hounds, starting to suffer from gout. Been in the Far East for some considerable time. Still partial to opium I suspect. Just come into a pretty substantial sum...”

And so it would go.

There is, I dread, just one other being of like intellect against whom I fear he will one day relish to test himself. I pray that day will never come, for I refer of course to that monstrously dangerous embodiment of criminal genius that is Professor Moriarty; but should my friend one day seize upon the notion of combating Moriarty, I will feel the very greatest foreboding as to the outcome...

Now today, even after several years in Holmes’ close company, I feel I know almost nothing of his private milieu and past, and such minutiae as I have learned, I have gleaned with approximately the same ease as was I pulling a stubborn tooth. Those few things I have discovered are perfectly disparate in their extremes. To save his life he could not list the planets in their order from the sun; indeed he was cheerfully oblivious even of the fact that our Earth rotated annually around our star, and when I apprised him of this interesting matter, he cared not a whit because it availed him naught in his daily proceedings.

“I am sure you are perfectly correct Watson, but even were we all to rotate daily around Nelson’s column, the knowledge is as valueless to me as knowing the precise number of grains of sand in the Sahara Desert!” was his blithe reply.

And yet I have observed him glance briefly around the study of a man he has not yet encountered and by observation and deduction alone, accurately divine his age, resources and place in life, his marital circumstances, profession, stature, medical afflictions, interests and vices. He has in several instances declined to act for tremendously wealthy supplicants whose motives for seeking his assistance he deemed unworthy, no matter the fee offered.

Too, I have known him compassionately to accept commissions from distressed poorer folk of humble station – with no expectation of recompense whatever – purely for the intellectual satisfaction of resolving their distressing dilemma and easing their anguish.

To my certain knowledge, with the exception of his brother Mycroft, I am the sole friend and confidant of this strange and singular, uniquely clever, subtle and talented bi-polar man; his disposition can metamorphose from high passion into the bluest funk in a moment. On rare occasions he can to me, be as transparent as the window through which, even now, I gaze vacantly down at Baker Street – on others more impenetrably obscure than obsidian.

He can by turns be so supremely confident of his undoubtedly superior intellect that it may be taken by many as utter arrogance, or he may be as full of self-doubt as a life-long atheist on his death-bed preparing to draw his final breath before passing through the great divide into the uncharted dark unknown beyond.

I love him as a brother, and yet he remains no more than my closest acquaintance. I respect him as my father, yet lack the nearness that should spring from that matchless, familial blood-bond.