The Adventure of the Skittering Shadow: Sherlock Holmes in Space (5 page)

Presently, there came a faint rhythmic clicking from somewhere within ceiling. I would not have heard it had the air been blowing through the vent. Even having heard it and knowing what I did, I was prepared to dismiss it as some vagary of the ventilation system or perhaps the building settling had not Holmes seized my wrist in a viselike grip.

My heart lurched in my chest and I straightened, straining to see something, anything, out of the ordinary in the low light. I saw nothing. Everything appeared to be as it should have been.

Holmes dropped my wrist and snatched up my walking stick. Leaping to his feet, he lashed at the ceiling with my cane, and on the bed Helen Stoner shrieked and rolled away from him. Cramming herself into the corner, she shouted, “What is it? What’s going on? Lights full!” and abruptly flooded the room with bright light, successfully blinding all three of us.

Holmes nevertheless continued his attack on the ceiling, bellowing, “Can you see it? Watson, do you see it?” while I blinked wildly, willing my eyes to adjust faster.

“No,” I cried, nevertheless lurching to my feet. “I cannot!”

But that was not entirely accurate.

A flicker of movement had caught my eye, and turning to look at it directly I finally saw what Holmes had: a shadow as small as the nail on my smallest finger skittering across the face of one of sickly green stars. It had eight legs, a bulbous body, and a scattering of glowing red eyes.

I smashed it with a space rock.

There was a spark and a flash of heat and I cried out, dropping the rock. Meanwhile, the wall caught fire.

“Stoner, the fire!” shouted Holmes as he spun on his heel. He left the room at a run, my cane still clutched in one thin hand. “Watson, come on!”

Holmes was gone by the time that I made it to the apartment’s door, but there were footfalls running down the nearest stairwell, and I blindly charged after them.

I clomped down the stairs, determined to catch up to my friend before he caught up to the murderer, but after three short flights of stairs, Holmes was still nowhere to be seen. Instead, I found myself pursuing an enormous man whose breadth seemed to span the stairwell from wall to wall. Two landings ahead of me, he was charging down the stairs at a breakneck speed.

It seemed impossible that two unconnected men should both race down the stairs at this late hour, so I redoubled my efforts, determined to catch the stranger even if I could not catch up to Sherlock Holmes.

The stranger looked up at me once, his tanned face twisted into a snarl and his deep-set eyes wild, but he did not stop. If anything, his lowered his head and increased his pace, and I responded by vainly trying to increase my own.

We were careening down the last flight of stairs, each in danger of breaking his neck, when the other man found within himself a last burst of speed. In acute danger of being outpaced, I flung myself forward, my feet leaving the stairs as I committed myself wholeheartedly to landing either on the unknown man or my face. At the same time the stranger stumbled, his arms pinwheeling wildly, and I slammed into his back, knocking the breath from us both as I bore him to the ground at the bottom of the stairs.

“Good show, Watson!” exclaimed Sherlock Holmes from somewhere overhead. I could just see his shoes from the corner of my eye as I wrestled with my captive. “You’ve nearly got him!”

I dared to glance over and found Holmes standing among the shadows to one side of the stairs. He was holding my cane upside down, the silver handle turned so that it might hook a passing stranger’s ankle, causing him to stumble at an opportune moment. An elbow to my gut reminded me of where my attention ought to have been, and I made short work of subduing our captive.

“Watson, do you know who you’ve caught?”

“No idea,” I gasped, the larger man beneath me nearly bucking me off.

“Then let me present to you Dr. Grimesby Roylott. He is the murderer of our client’s sister.”

“I can hardly say it is a pleasure,” I grunted. The man was pinned, but he was not accepting his lot gracefully. “Shall we call the police?”

“I imagine that Miss Stoner already has. Aha! And there they are coming up the walkway. Let me get their attention, and then we shall get this all sorted out.”

“I can hardly wait.”

It took hours to get things sorted to the mutual satisfaction of Holmes and the borough’s police, at the conclusion of which Dr. Grimesby Roylott was locked in a cell without chance of bail. As happy as I was to see such a creature locked away without chance of escape or causing further harm, I was equally happy to learn that the small fire in Miss Helen Stoner’s bedroom had been contained and doused before it could do more than leave an ugly blot upon the wall.

It was not until breakfast, a meal which we shared with Miss Stoner, that I was able to ask about the points on which I was still murky.

“It was you who put me on the right track, old man.”

“I?” I asked, astonished.

“When you summarized the facts of the case, you said that, because the room was locked, nothing could have gotten to the deceased Miss Stoner. My initial thought was that your statement was untrue. If the room were properly sealed so that
nothing
had been able to reach her, then the victim would have died of asphyxiation. Clearly, air had somehow reached her, which in turn meant that regardless of any other feature that the room did or did not possess, there must have been a working air vent in it.

“That gave me two suspects – the sister who knew her pass code and some unknown agent able to move through the air vent. As you noted, the living Miss Stoner was the dead Miss Stoner’s greatest champion, which created in me a willingness to seriously consider the possibility of a third party’s interference via the air ducts. It was not the simplest explanation for what happened, but it was the one that best suited the facts then available to me.

“The home’s ducts and vents proved to be open, functional, and connected to the same source. If the means of murder had been gaseous, certainly the sister, and perhaps the building’s other tenants, would also have died. Therefore, whatever outside agent had killed Miss Stoner had been solid and small enough to pass through an intact air vent. Unfortunately, there I ran into interference.” Holmes pinned Miss Stoner with a fierce look. “You implied that everything in this apartment was exactly as it had been when your sister died.”

“It was!” exclaimed Miss Stoner, glaring. Sherlock Holmes stared her down, and she finally looked away under the pretext of fishing a white handkerchief from her pocket. “I grabbed a few things from the clean laundry and got out. I didn’t disturb anything.”

“A wise decision,” declared Holmes, “particularly since you had already trod upon the paramount clue. Though I cannot guarantee that the borough’s authorities would have taken note of it, they would have had a more sporting chance of solving your sister’s murder had you left Helen Stoner where you had found her.”

Thunderstruck, I gazed blankly at my friend for some seconds before my gaze belatedly swung over to Miss Stoner, Miss
Julia
Stoner. I was just in time to see the surprise fade from her expression; surprise but not censure or even denial.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Holmes,” she said coolly, twisting and untwisting the hapless handkerchief, her gloves softly creaking with her every motion. “However did you leap to such a wild conclusion?”

“You certainly dress the part and I cannot deny that your mannerisms are convincing enough, save for in moments of emotional honesty, but I found the seminal clue in Miss Helen Stoner’s bedroom. No easy feat, I assure you, but impossible save if that room was the true site of the murder. Helen Stoner died in the second bedroom, and, on finding her dead, you switched places with her.”

Miss Stoner carefully put down the unfortunate handkerchief. Her gloved hands, as still and sure as stone, came to rest on the tabletop, her fingers splayed wide. Leaning towards Holmes, she demanded, her voice low and urgent, “What did you find?”

“You do not deny it?” I asked, astounded. And at her damning silence, asked, “How did you manage it?”

“When I accepted my post, all of my individually identifying biometric records were misplaced from the public databases. In them, I do not exist except as a name and Helen’s twin. Information is added and subtracted as needed. The morning of my sister’s death, a carefully timed power fluctuation allowed me to make certain substitutions in our longstanding medical records so that Helen would be positively identified as me. That we possessed the exact same genetic material made everything easier. The clue please, Mr. Holmes?”

Wordlessly, Holmes reached into an inner pocket of his black coat to produce his proof. Miss Julia Stoner took it and examined it for only a few scant moments before murmuring, “Oh yes, I see now. No, I suppose I couldn’t have tracked this anywhere. Not in its current state at any rate.” Still she stared at the little melted blob of plastic, her lips compressing into a thin line and her eyes narrowing in thought. Finally, a surprising hardness in her voice, she said, “And you found this in my poor Helen’s bedroom.”

“You recognize it?” inquired Holmes, visibly startling her. Julia Stoner had apparently been lost in her own thoughts.

“You know that I do.” Leaning back in her seat, Miss Julia Stoner lightly tapped a gloved fingertip against the tabletop. “Although it’s impossible to properly identify now, but that’s rather the point.”

“What can you tell us about it?”

“Everything,” she said with a quick, humorless smile. Angling the bit of carpeting towards Holmes, she said, “These work rather like a child’s remote control rover or spaceship. They’re designed to be small, fast, stealthy, and highly maneuverable. Their purpose is to deliver a lethal injection of poison to a target, the only evidence of which is a microscopic abrasion. The poison will break down with the corpse. All of the components can be printed at the public library.”

“Assuming that you knew how and could get around the printer’s preset limits,” I inserted, and Miss Stoner looked at me as if I had grown another head. Apparently, it was unfathomable that someone might not be capable of bypassing common security features to print esoteric weapons of murder.

“It’s not very difficult,” she said finally. To Holmes, she said, “They self-destruct after one use, leaving behind something that could have been tracked into the room or, in a worst case scenario, a drip of plastic that could be overlooked or seen and forgotten. Because of their size, they have a very short range. Helen’s murderer could have been in the nearest stairwell, on the fire escape, in the apartment above us, or in the one below. But he couldn’t have been any further away when he killed her.”

My blood ran cold at her intimate knowledge of the instrument of her sister’s destruction. If Julia Stoner truly was a researcher – and I found myself to have doubts on that point – then hers was not the sort of research that held my interest. That such a person could have come from such prosaic beginnings disconcerted me.

“He wasn’t,” reminded Holmes, and Miss Stoner grimaced. Cocking his head to one side, he added, “I suppose it is neither here nor there now, but I cannot help but wonder who recommended me to you.”

“A trusted colleague, Mr. Holmes,” she said, favoring him with her quick smile. “He is a great admirer of your career, although he is one that might prefer to remain unnamed under the present circumstances. I’m sure you know who I mean.”

I didn’t, but I could tell from the minute shift in his expression – and the crawl of color up his throat – that Holmes did. He flushed.

“And when he recommended me, was he speaking to you as yourself or to you as your grieving sister?”

“He called me Helen, but I think he knew the truth.” Julia Stoner smirked. “He’s clever like that.”

Holmes inclined his head. “And how much of what you originally told us was the truth?”

“Everything. I simply took Helen’s part in things and gave her mine.”

“Because you assumed that someone seeking to kill you had accidentally killed her instead,” said Sherlock Holmes. “It was sheer luck that the first spider killed your sister and not you.”

Julia Stoner sighed, her body sagging in her seat as if she had lost whatever vital force was driving her forward along with her breath. It was several quiet moments before she said, “I’ve always been lucky.”

We sat quietly and waited while the lady gathered herself. Slowly, breath by breath, she straightened herself out. Finally, she sat up, squared her shoulders, and lifted her chin. She took a very deep breath and held it. When she finally let it out, Julia Stoner was just as she had always been.

“Why did he kill her?”

“He needed money. As you told us at the beginning, Dr. Roylott always had a powerful need for it. When he got out of prison – a few years early, I might add, and ironically for good behavior – the doctor fell into his old vices, chief among them gambling. He lost a small fortune, and it was only the suspiciously timely death of his wife that kept him from his creditors’ worst impulses.”

“Did he murder her?” demanded Miss Stoner.

“I think most likely yes, although discovering the evidence of it would be difficult if not impossible to uncover at this juncture.”

Across from me, Miss Stoner paled. In the grips of some strong emotion, she was white-faced and tight-lipped, but her hands were as still and steady on the table as Holmes had said they would be.

“Unfortunately, one inheritance was not enough for him. He needed more than his wife was worth to him, and he hit upon the idea of paying a visit to his stepdaughters. A consummate gambler, he was willing to bet that, at their relatively young age, the twins had not yet thought to make out their wills. Or, if they had, that he had not been left entirely unprovided for.”

“He thinks rather a lot of himself!” I exclaimed, incensed.

“He was desperate. Dr. Roylott needed another quick infusion of cash to avoid an untimely death of his own, and he was willing to try almost anything. If worse came to worst and there was no profit to be made off of his scheme, he would at least have the advantage of being on an entirely different planet than his creditors. So he came to Mars, no doubt by illicit means, found his stepdaughters, and rented one of the micro apartments beneath theirs.”

“It seems rather convenient that one should come open for him.”

“The micro-apartment’s previous renter has yet to be found, and I very much doubt that he will be.”

Turning my mind to the case’s other loose end, I asked, “What about you, Miss Stoner?”

“I’ll return to work on Monday.”

“Won’t that be… difficult?”

Julia Stoner blinked at me. Finally, she said, “No, not at all. Stranger things have happened. They probably haven’t even closed my personnel file yet.”

“They haven’t,” quietly inserted Holmes. “And I am assured that you are a most valuable resource whose return to work is most eagerly anticipated.”

Julia Stoner’s smile was quick and bright.

That seemed like the end of that, especially when Holmes sat back in his seat and indicated that he was tired of discussing a completed case, but it was not quite the end. Two weeks later, Sherlock Holmes was summoned back to Nerio, this time by certain segments of the police force.

Alone in his cell, Dr. Grimesby Roylott had died an inexplicable death.

Sherlock Holmes inspected the cell, which even to my eye provided several means of entry for a particularly enterprising spider-assassin, but found no telltale blob of melted plastic. Nor did he find anything else of note. Nevertheless, we next went to visit Miss Julia Stoner in her apartment.

“Shouldn’t we call first?” I asked as Holmes flagged down a half-cab. The decal on its side proclaimed it to be part of the line run by Erebus Express. “And make certain that she’s home?”

“Of course she’s home!” snapped Sherlock Holmes impatiently. “Don’t you remember her schedule? The ex-husband said that she always ate dinner between seven and eight and was usually in bed by ten o’clock. It is now nine o’clock at night, and Miss Stoner should be preparing for bed.”

Clambering into the half-cab, he barked Miss Stoner’s address at the half-cab, which at least had the decency to wait until I was safely seated inside of it before zipping away from the curb.