The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (136 page)

“Who is that I'm speaking to?”

Holmes chuckled mirthlessly. “You don't recognize the voice, colonel? We've met occasionally.” He leaned over the railing. “Mr. Sherlock Holmes at your service.”

“Holmes? What is this?”

“You thought I'd be dead by now, eh? Poisoned?”

“What are you talking about?”

“We had better discuss it after you've saved your accomplice.”

And, indeed, Moran had set to with his oars. Before long, the exhausted mate had been pulled into the lifeboat.

“Now in the name of decency, Holmes, let us aboard!” Moran cried.

“You have a great deal of gall using that word, colonel. What is that box behind you, sir?”

Moran uncovered a huge cage in which skulked something large and black, looking from our deck like a small bear. “It is nothing more than a giant Sumatran tree rat, Holmes. I was taking it to the London Zoo. It was the only thing I could save from the ship.”

“Before you blew it up?”

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying you sacrificed your entire crew so that we would naturally pluck you and your giant rat of Sumatra from the lifeboat. You thought by now that Watson, Captain Wagner, and I would all be dead and that no one would think to question your rescue.”

“No!”

“That rat is infested with bubonic plague, and you yourself are host to its deadly carrier fleas. Both you and Jeffers are inoculated, but once you or the rat comes aboard this ship, the England we all love is gone.”

At the word
plague
, a general murmuring arose from the men behind us. Holmes turned and addressed them. “You heard me correctly. All your officers, including Jeffers, had been briefed—no one from Moran's ship was to board a British ship of the line. Would any of you let Moran and Jeffers aboard?”

“What should we do, sir?” one of the men asked.

“Run to the stateroom and ask the ranking officer to take control here. Be off now!” Holmes
turned back to the lifeboat. “Drop the cage overboard, Moran. Now!”

We could hear the vicious growls and squeals of the caged beast. It stalked back and forth, beady eyes fixed on the lights of our ship. Moran hesitated a moment, then reached behind him.

“Holmes, have pity…” he began.

“Fire a shot into the boat, Watson.”

I did so.

Holmes continued: “Colonel, you're going to have a hard time staying afloat with a hull full of bullet holes.”

“Please…”

“Another, Watson, if you would.”

After the second shot, Moran quickly lifted the cage and dropped it into the black water. It sank like a stone, leaving no trace.

One of the officers came running up. “What's going on here, Mr. Holmes? Where's Mr. Jeffers?”

In a few dozen words the situation had been explained.

“What should we do with these two men?”

Holmes smiled. “I should think that that lifeboat, if towed at a goodly distance behind us, would make for an interesting journey back to England. Both men should be deloused by the time we arrive.”

Back in our digs in Baker Street, Holmes put his feet up before the fire. We'd been back for nearly three weeks, and the trials of Moran and Jeffers were coming up, yet there were still elements unclear to me. “When did you know, exactly?” I asked.

Holmes exhaled a heady Cavendish smoke. “I believe I have mentioned before, Watson, that when all other possibilities have been exhausted, whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth. As soon as I saw the lifeboat in the water, a conjecture occurred to me. No lifeboat could have survived that explosion. Therefore, it had been lowered before the explosion. It follows, then, that the explosion was planned. When Jeffers did not hesitate to try to bring the survivor aboard, I surmised that he was in on the plot. Of course, I had to risk mutiny to prove it, but Jeffers's involvement was the only thing that fit all the facts.”

“But he was bleeding when we came upon him and Captain Wagner.”

“Nothing is more convincing and easier to self-inflict than a superficial head wound.”

“And our—ahem—my poisoning?”

“The crewman said that the tea was from the bridge. We both assumed he meant from the captain. But a man of Captain Wagner's personality would imprint it on his men, and if he had personally sent the drinks, the crewman would have said, ‘Captain Wagner sends his compliments,' or some such thing.”

“Now that you explain it, it seems so clear.”

“Don't punish yourself, my friend. Neither of us saw it at the time. It was not until I saw Moran in the lifeboat that I was forced to reconsider the smallest events in the chain.”

The fire burned low. “And what, finally, of Professor Moriarty?” I asked.

Holmes sighed. “Not Moran, nor Jeffers, nor Culverton-Smith will implicate him. For the present we've foiled him, but I fear Moriarty and I must await another confrontation.”

“And what then?” I asked, looking into my friend's troubled face.

Sherlock Holmes gazed glassy-eyed into the fire. “And then, Watson,” he said, “then one of us must surely die.”

IN ADDITION TO
writing nearly thirty mystery novels and a half-dozen short story collections, Julian Gustave Symons (1912–1994) was an outstanding scholar of mystery fiction as well as one of its foremost practitioners. In addition to biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and a critical study of Dashiell Hammett, he wrote an excellent history of the genre,
Bloody Murder
(1972; titled
Mortal Consequences
in the United States), in which he also defined the genre as he thought it ought to be, insisting that it move away from pure puzzle-solving to a greater reliance on psychological elements of crime; it won an Edgar. He has been honored with lifetime achievement awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the (British) Crime Writers' Association, and the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy.

Symons, a great admirer of Sherlock Holmes and an even greater one of Arthur Conan Doyle, chided Sherlockians for their game of treating Conan Doyle as merely the literary agent for Dr. Watson. In addition to the present story, Symons wrote two short story pastiches, “How a Hermit was Disturbed in His Retirement,” published in
The Great Detectives
(1981), and “The Affair of the Vanishing Diamonds” (1987). He also wrote two modern-day Sherlockian novels:
A Three Pipe Problem
(1975), in which a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character; and, more than a decade later, the less successful
The Kentish Manor Murders
(1988), featuring the same character.

“Did Sherlock Holmes Meet Hercule…?” was originally published in the April 1987 issue of
The Illustrated London News
. It was collected in
The Man Who Hated Television and Other Stories
(London, Macmillan, 1995).

Did Sherlock Holmes ever meet Hercule Poirot? This is not so unlikely a supposition as it might seem. The last recorded Sherlock Holmes case takes place in 1914 on the eve of World War I, after which he retired to bee-keeping on the Sussex Downs. At that time Poirot, according to the best information we have, was fifty and still active, the account of his retirement in 1904 (in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
) being no doubt a printing error.

It is this possibility that gives peculiar interest to the following story, particularly as it does not come from Dr. Watson's battered tin despatch-box containing details of many important cases which he placed “somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox & Company at Charing Cross,” where it presumably remains. It was found, rather, among the papers of Poirot's friend Captain Arthur Hastings, who recorded a number of the great Belgian detective's cases. Why should a case involving Sherlock Holmes and narrated by Dr. Watson be among the Hastings papers? Perhaps the narrative itself answers the question. It is unfortunately not quite complete, but there can be no more than a few lines missing at the end. Of course, no absolute guarantee of its authenticity, or of its relevance to the two great detectives, can be given.

SHERLOCK HOLMES WOULD
shake his head when I mentioned the name of Mulready and say the world was not yet prepared to hear about an affair that involved a chief Minister of the Crown, secret papers, and the threat of war. Yet it can do no harm to set down the extraordinary series of events involving the inhabitants of Mulready House while they remain fresh in my mind.

It was an autumn morning a couple of years before Holmes's retirement, and I had spent the night with my old friend in Baker Street. Breakfast was finished, he had done with the papers, and was roaming about the room, talking discursively as was his wont, when he stopped at the window.

“Halloa, Watson. Our humble lodgings are about to be unusually honoured.”

“Holmes, if you are going to give me some of those far-fetched deductions about——”

Holmes laughed. “No, no, my dear fellow. It is true that when I see a man being driven up in the latest model of Rolls-Royce motorcar, and when that vehicle has a crest on the door panel, I know a person of some distinction is likely to step out of it. But in fact I recognized the man himself. It is Lord Rivington.”

A moment later, our Secretary for War was in the room. His features were familiar to me through many photographs and cartoons, but none had done full justice to the force in those craggy features, the intensity of the deep-set eyes behind the bushy brows. He looked from one of us to the other.

“Mr. Holmes, I have come to ask your help in a matter of great importance, and one that is absolutely confidential.”

I rose, but Holmes stopped me. “You may speak in Dr. Watson's presence as freely as you would if I were alone.”

“Nevertheless…” Sherlock Holmes was
filling his pipe. He said nothing. Lord Rivington looked at him fiercely, then shrugged. “Very well, there is no time for argument. You are aware that negotiations are going on between this country and France that involve a plan for joint action if the Kaiser's sabre-rattling should turn to the drawing of swords?”

“I know what is said in the newspapers, nothing more.”

“The negotiations have reached a most delicate stage. You can imagine my feelings when I discovered through our Intelligence Service that everything we have discussed was known in Berlin, down to the last detail. And it was shown to me quite inescapably that the information must have reached Germany through the office of the man in charge of negotiations, Sir Charles Mulready. He is one of my oldest friends, we were at school and the Varsity together. I could swear that he is a man of honour. Yet these papers have passed through no hands but his. You may ask how I can be so sure of this, Mr. Holmes. The answer is simple. I heard it yesterday from Sir Charles's own lips.”

“Nobody in his office had access to them?”

“Nobody. They were kept in a safe, and were under lock and key when he took them home. And there has been no betrayal from the French side.” Lord Rivington coughed. “Allies may have their own secrets. Certain matters mentioned in memoranda accompanying the documents have not been discussed with the French, yet these, too, are known in Berlin. They have not been stolen, hence they must have been either copied or photographed.”

Holmes had been following with the keenest attention. “Does Sir Charles have any family links with Germany?”

“There you've hit it, Mr. Holmes. He married a German lady who had been left a widow with a young son when her husband, Count von Brankel, was killed in a hunting accident. The boy, Hans, has been brought up as if he were Charles's own son. He is intelligent, but I fear not manly. He was expelled from his public school—I am sure I need not enter into details. Then he studied medicine for a year, but gave it up and expressed a wish to become a stage actor, something which of course could not be countenanced. Accordingly, he follows no profession, lives at home, and sponges on his family. They have a daughter of their own, Lilian, who has some ridiculous idea that women should be allowed to vote, and that what she calls weapons of murder should be abolished. My friends have not been fortunate in their children.”

“One more question. Am I right in thinking that our French allies would be interested in the memoranda they have not seen?”

For a moment the Secretary for War looked surprised. “Possibly, but the relations between our countries are entirely friendly. Monsieur Calamy, who is handling the negotiations, is in London and staying at Mulready House.”

Holmes nodded.

“And now I come to the tragic climax. A draft known as Plan X has been prepared, setting out in detail our military and naval commitments to France in the event of war. Together with it was a memorandum about the defence of Britain which was for our eyes only, not those of M. Calamy. Both of these were in Sir Charles's possession. Yesterday, when what had been suspicions became certainties, I asked him to come and see me. He had been away from Whitehall corridors for a couple of days with an attack of gout, but he limped along to see me, and I told him what I had learned.

“He behaved as I would have expected, was first incredulous and then horrified. He protested his innocence, and I believed him.” The great head bent down for a moment, then he looked from one of us to the other in despair. “Yet last night he made a confession of guilt, not in words but in his actions. He took an overdose of a medicine he used to ease his sufferings from gout. And there is worse to say. Both Plan X and the memorandum were with him, taken home for study. Both are missing.”

A few minutes later, we were sitting in the Rolls-Royce, on the way to the Mulready home in Mayfair.

The blinds were drawn over the long windows, and within the house we felt the sombre atmosphere of sudden death. Lord Rivington led the way up to Sir Charles's suite, separated from his wife's by a dressing-room.

“Lady Mulready found him in pain at some time in the night and immediately called his doctor, whose name is Cardew. He said Sir Charles must have suffered an acute attack of gout and taken an overdose of his medicine, but I fear it was taken deliberately.”

“I know Dr. Cardew,” I said. “A most reliable practitioner.” I approached the bed where the body lay, decently covered by a sheet, and looked at the distorted features. An empty glass stood on a bedside table, with a bottle beside it, perhaps one-third full, labelled
Colantium
. “This is a medicine often used for gout. It contains colchicum, which relieves the pain. I see no unusual circumstances here.”

“Do you not, Watson?” Holmes had been prowling the room and the dressing-room beyond, examining pictures, ornaments, a pipe rack, using his magnifying glass to look closely at a bureau in the dressing-room. Now he, too, lifted the sheet, then looked carefully at the glass and bottle, tipping the latter and holding it to the light.

“Colchicum is a poison, like many plants and flowers that play a part in relieving pain. Yellow jasmine, spotted hemlock, the foxglove, the Calabar bean, and the paternoster pea—these can be as deadly as the poppy or laburnum seeds. I have in preparation a little pamphlet called ‘The Poison Garden,' which should be useful to every medical practitioner. And colchicum may ease pain in small quantities, but in larger ones it can kill. Did you remark the amount of precipitation in that bottle, Watson? It should not be there, and there are marks of sediment in the glass. Somebody added more colchicum to the bottle, and made this gout remedy a poisonous drink.”

I looked again at the bottle. “Holmes, you are right. But how——”

“That is what we must discover. And colchicum is bitter, the first taste should have warned Sir Charles.” He turned to Lord Rivington. “I take it that Plan X and the memorandum were kept in the dressing-room bureau. The lock has been picked skilfully, but scratches show under the magnifying glass. Perhaps we may now talk to Lady Mulready.”

The widow was a tall, stately grey-haired lady. Lord Rivington called her Ilse, and she spoke to him as Gerald. She greeted Holmes warmly.

“Mr. Holmes, I know what Lord Rivington believes, but I can assure you he is wrong. I am a German and proud of my ancestry, and I know my husband's equal pride in being British. Some terrible mistake has been made.”

“I believe we shall find an explanation that will be entirely honourable to his name. If you could tell me what happened yesterday after his return from Whitehall, I should be grateful.”

“My husband told me little or nothing of political affairs. When he returned home, I could see that he was upset, but he said nothing of the cause and I had learned that it was useless to ask. He remained in his private rooms until dinner. We were five at table, our children, Hans and Lilian, and M. Calamy making up the rest of the party. It was not a cheerful meal. My husband's gout was troubling him and he hardly spoke, except when Lilian provoked him by speaking of some suffragette meeting she had attended. Hans seemed preoccupied and M. Calamy was concerned, as always, with his food.”

A fleeting smile crossed her face. “We live simply here. My husband did not care what he ate, and the years have reconciled me to English cooking, but M. Calamy cannot endure it. He has brought his chef as well as his valet, but although his meals are specially prepared he still grumbles. So he did last night. After dinner, my husband called me aside and said, “I have painful decisions to make, Ilse, and I fear the results will cause you grief.” Those were his last words to me.”

“When was the tragedy discovered?”

“At three o'clock this morning. I heard cries coming from my husband's room. I went in and
found him in terrible pain. Dr. Cardew was summoned immediately, but by the time he arrived Charles was in a coma and he could do nothing. The end came just after seven.”

“Were your son and daughter present?”

“Lilian, yes. Hans…” She hesitated. “It proved almost impossible to rouse him and, when at last the housemaid did so, he staggered, as though under the influence of drink. Coming from his room to his father's, he slipped, fell down several stairs, and, as it proved, broke his ankle. He had to be carried back to bed, and Dr. Cardew says he must stay in his room.”

“A last question, and I have done. You said your husband didn't care what he ate. Was there a special reason for that?”

“Yes. A nasal operation a few years ago almost deprived him of taste and smell, so that he could barely distinguish chicken from beef or claret from brandy. Surely that cannot be important?”

“It is one piece in the jigsaw, no more.”

Outside the drawing room, we were met by a young girl. It was easy to see this was Ilse Mulready's daughter, although there was a light in her eye and a spring in her step that her mother lacked. She held out an envelope. “Which of you gentlemen is Mr. Sherlock Holmes? Here is a letter for you.”

Holmes looked at the envelope, tore it open, read it, and passed it to me. Some words were printed in capitals on a single sheet of paper:

MISTER HOLMES GO AWAY YOUR PRESENTS HERE IS UNNECESSARY

“Written with a Waverley nib on a standard Ranelagh-weave paper,” Holmes said. “Was this delivered by hand, Miss Mulready?”

“No, one of the footmen found it on the hall table. What does it say?” Holmes showed it to her, and she flushed. “I think he's right. Of course, I am sorry my father is dead, but he should be allowed to rest in peace. I know he died because he was a man of war, as you are, Lord Rivington. He hated poor Hans, because Hans had no interest in fighting and killing people. I heard them arguing last night in Father's room.”

“And what was the subject?”

“I don't know. And if I did, I shouldn't tell you.” She turned away from us and ran upstairs. Lord Rivington coughed, hummed under his breath, said nothing.

“Surely this note is important, Holmes,” I said. “It was obviously written by somebody almost illiterate.”

“Or somebody who wants us to think so. Or——”

He was interrupted by the appearance of a gentleman dressed with rather too obvious elegance, his hair glossy, his beard wonderfully neat. My feeling that there is something unmanly about the French is reinforced by their use of pomades and perfumes. This, of course, was M. Calamy, who now expressed his regrets to Lord Rivington, smiling as he did so.

“Perhaps after this tragedy our negotiations should be given up—postponed, as you say.”

“Not at all.” Lord Rivington spoke sharply. “They are more than ever urgent, and I shall take charge of them in person.”

“That will make me happy. We shall, of course, conduct them on both sides with entire frankness.” The Frenchman's smile perhaps broadened a little. “Later today I move from this house of sorrow to our Embassy.”