The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (13 page)

“What did you do after Monsieur Daziell asked you to call the concierge?” Holmes asked him.

“Don't you care about this man?”

“What more can you tell me?”

“Nothing, but I think he should be found.”

“I will leave that to the police. Tell me what you did after Monsieur Daziell asked you to get Picot.”

“Why, I fetched him, of course.”

“Both the director and the concierge report there was a delay.”

“Perhaps the time seemed to drag because they were worried.”

“But Picot could not have been worried. He knew nothing about the suspicious package until the porter appeared from upstairs and you finally gave him the message. Until then, you had been trying to get him out of the building.”

“That is not my recollection. Obviously, Picot is under a strain.”

“And you are not?”

“Of course, but Picot had more contact with the bomb.” He sighed. “And he saw Ernst carry off the bomb, poor man.”

“Who saw you arrive this morning?”

“The night watchman. As I came in a little before eight, I went to the back entrance.”

“Were you carrying anything?”

Pontell smiled. “I brought nothing this morning. My hands were empty.” He spread his fingers wide before him. “Not even a briefcase.”

A party of police now arrived to interview people in the building, so Holmes told Pontell to return to his desk, advising him that no one was being allowed to leave.

The police took statements from everyone who had been in the building from the hour the doors opened until the minute the suspicious package was removed from the premises. By three in the afternoon, Holmes had a report of their findings. The night watchman had been interviewed at his home and confirmed that he had seen Pontell arrive. Ernst had been confirmed as a victim of the explosion. That morning, Ernst had entered the building with one of his colleagues at fifteen minutes after eight, according to those who had seen him. He spoke of his fiancée, whom he planned to marry at Christmas time. He was described by his colleagues as a frugal young man of no political beliefs.

“Hardly the description of an anarchist,” said Holmes when he finished reading the report the police provided, “and they are too passionate to attempt to disguise themselves.”

A clerk brought in some cakes and tea, and Miss Tarbell, who had rejoined us, set aside her notebook and pen to pour it. Holmes continued speaking, addressing his remarks to me, but of course he was aware that the American journalist was at our side.

Holmes could go without food or drink when he was working on a case, but as a concession to me and Miss Tarbell he partook of our little tea. Past experience of my friend taught me to eat at my own slow pace if food was to do me any good, but Miss Tarbell apparently felt compelled to gulp her tea and swallow her cake as if she would never be allowed another morsel. When the tray was cleared, she laid her hand on her stomach as if in dazed amazement.

Holmes resumed his synopsis of the police report. “Pontell has long-standing ties to the firm. His father, who only recently died, was a physician who attended Darmaux's workers in the northeast. Pontell applied here for a position last May and was quickly hired.” Holmes closed the folder with an air of satisfaction. “He said nothing of his studies of chemistry. Let us go see this gentleman again.”

The secretary was reviewing some reports when Holmes appeared, leading in a group that included Miss Tarbell, myself and a policeman. Holmes demanded to see his key ring. Pontell looked at the policeman in mute, useless appeal and then handed it over. It held five keys, which Pontell identified as belonging to the front door of his lodgings, his own room, and his employer's inner and outer offices. When he came to the fifth and smallest key, he paused. “Ah, that is to my parents' home. I carry it for sentimental reasons.”

Holmes summoned Picot, but he was absent, having gone directly home from the morgue; however, an assistant to the concierge verified that the key looked like it might fit one of the porters' rooms. With that, Holmes led us on a pilgrimage to every door on the floor. We might have proceeded to every keyhole in the building, but the lock of a utility closet gave way to Pontell's fifth key. Inside the closet, instead of cleaning supplies, we found chemicals and wire that were easily identified as the makings of a bomb.

“Monsieur Pontell, you are discovered!” Holmes cried. “Officer,
arrest this man.” The assassin's resistance was instinctive and pointless.

He admitted nothing as he was led away, but his speeches, of course, came later, and we learned that Pontell nursed a grievance against the company that had used his father ill and left his family destitute. He railed against a society that victimized its weakest citizens . . . but as a murderer, these were things Pontell had done himself, and he met his end on the guillotine under his true name, Huret.

A
fter Sherlock Holmes and I returned to London, neither of us gave much thought to the American journalist Ida Tarbell, until one day when Sam McClure, her editor, visited Baker Street to call on us. McClure, who was as rambunctious as any of the street-wise lads in the Baker Street Irregulars, came to us charged with his vision of his new magazine, which would be filled with reports of the wonders being unleashed in the world—X-rays, anti-toxins to diphtheria, and newly discovered portraits of Napoleon. Of course, Holmes had already heard of these things. Then McClure gave Holmes a look at the galleys of Miss Tarbell's story. It was filled with Holmes's brilliance. She glossed over his rudeness in the remarks he had made about herself. For that matter, she minimized her own part in the solution to the affair. I am sure Holmes would have unmasked Pontell/Huret, but the criminal was trapped before he could escape because Miss Tarbell's action was so quick.

Holmes set Miss Tarbell's work aside. “I have but one Boswell,” he told the American. “That is Watson.”

“But Miss Tarbell has written an excellent account,” McClure protested. “You will be one of the most famous men in America, even if you live all your days in London.”

“Nonetheless,” Holmes said, “Watson has a drawer of manuscripts, and he, and he alone, will be writing more. I urge you to publish one of his stories rather than Miss Tarbell's. If you do, I'm sure he'll sell them to you exclusively in America.”

“But what shall I tell Miss Tarbell?”

“Tell her I am loyal to my friends. She won't be angry at you if you pay what you owe her. Not just for this one. The other stories, too. You still owe her for them, do you not?” McClure shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “And why not give Miss Tarbell a job in America? Paris is no place for a woman alone.”

So it was that my stories, published in
McClure's
, introduced Sherlock Holmes to America and made him almost a cult. Holmes's purpose in having Ida Tarbell's story of the Boulevard Assassin dropped was to help me, of course, and make my budding literary career more lucrative. Whether or not she ever knew it, Holmes tried to make it up to her by serving as her collection agent with McClure, who did indeed give her a job. She became one of the most famous journalists in America, writing a riveting biography of President Abraham Lincoln by interviewing everyone she could find who knew him as a boy. Then she turned her skills against John D. Rockefeller.

I ran into Miss Tarbell years later in New York. I walked into her office one afternoon at
McClure's
, where she was reading the proof of one of her articles. Her hair had strands of grey in it by then, but she was as thin as ever and clearly in command. She was peering at some galleys through little eyeglasses held at the end of a chain pinned to her blouse, and was telling her assistant what changes should be made to her copy. Although I interrupted her, she looked at me with a sweet warm smile, until she realized who I was. Her eyes narrowed.

“Dr. Watson, after all these years!” she exclaimed. “You are responsible for a great change in my life. Since the day I met you and Mr. Holmes, I have never allowed myself to use black ink on the worn spots on my dress.” Nor did she have to wear worn and faded clothes after Holmes got her a good job, but I felt it prudent not to point that out.

“You know, Dr. Watson,” she said, as if correcting a schoolboy. “Holmes should have let
my
story run.”

BY
T
ERRY
M
C
G
ARRY

T
he winter of early 1894 eased, for a brief spate of days, into a melancholy overture of the warmer weather to come. It was during this saturated lull that I found myself in a four-wheeler bearing east down Oxford Street towards Bloomsbury. The driver had been told to hurry, and the clatter of wheels over cobblestones sent corresponding jolts through the seats and the spine. I hoped to have all my teeth in my head when we arrived at our destination.

“Richard Addleton,” said Sherlock Holmes, regarding with a frown the hastily scrawled note he held. It jounced in his hand, unreadable. “Low man on the totem pole, as it were, in the anthropology division of the British Museum.”

“What does he say he wants?”

“He is faced with a dilemma of great weight, which he hopes I may help him solve, and he fears to walk the streets, or would never have presumed to summon me. I feel something very dark and very old looming over us, Watson, though for the life of me I can't tell you why.” He lapsed into silence, his grey eyes focused inward rather than on the drear grey day outside.

The carriage slowed to pass with some care a group of workmen. A damp clay smell rose from the pit they had dug, ancient London exhaling into the modern. The scent of deep earth hung heavily on the wet air. Below the wheels of the growler, I reflected, was all the history of our great teeming city, laid down layer by layer, the new over the old.

I had no idea, then, to what astonishing and disturbing degree Holmes's dire presentiments and my own musings would twine together. I set it down here in hopes of easing my own mind on the matters that would so soon confront us—that will haunt me, I fear, forever. Whether or not so soiled a tale can be published remains to be seen.

We arrived at the Addleton house, a sedate old home tucked in among boarding-houses just off Russell Square, to find a young constable outside the premises speaking with a distrait elderly manservant, and a sergeant just venturing inside, his night-stick in his hand.

“Murders, sir,” the young constable reported after Holmes had introduced himself. “Or so this fellow says—”

“Dead, both dead!” The manservant wrung his hands. “I come in as I do every morning at ten—I live with my family, you see, on Goodge Street—and there they was! And their brother gone for over a week with nary a word. What'll I do now? Who'll give me my orders like?”

“This is the home of Mr. Richard Addleton, is it not?” Holmes prompted. His soothing tone, wielded so effectively to calm witnesses into providing a clearer account, worked its magic. The manservant turned to him.

“Mr. Richard indeed, sir, who works round the corner there,
and his brother William the government clerk. Both dead. They'd had an awful row. But who could have done such a thing?”

“And this other brother you mentioned?” Holmes asked.

The servant's eyes went wide. “Oh, sir, it was never him. Raised them like his own sons, he did, him being so much older and all; they'd lived all their lives here in this house, parents died when the two youngest were schoolboys. Went up north on some business or other, Mr. James did—to Manchester, I think he said. They started in fighting right away. Mr. James was always the peacemaker, and it was terrible with him gone, just terrible. The housekeeper took her holiday early just to be away from it. And now this!”

Holmes thanked him, and with the constable's permission we followed his sergeant's path up the stone steps. The interior had the stale mustiness of an antiques shop, less from a housekeeper's absence than from the presence of many antiquated furnishings and tapestries, and mounds of carpet leaving not a floorboard bare.

“They're in here,” the sergeant said, recognizing Holmes and gesturing to the dining room. “I've checked the upstairs; there's no one else about.”

The brothers, dark men of small stature and middle years, were huddled together on a Regency settee, bodies twisted in the paroxysms of death. Their breakfast sat untouched on the table, a fragile crystal vase upright in the center. One chair was pushed back, far enough to ruck up the heavy Afghan rug behind it, and the other had toppled and lay on its back. Across another rug, an expensive Oriental in the center of the floor, a dark stain had spread. The eye naturally took it to be blood, at first, but there were no visible wounds on either man, and a closer inspection showed the liquid to be black coffee, spilled from an upset pot on the dining table. Holmes sniffed at the pot, then at each empty coffee cup in turn. Abruptly he turned away and cast his eye over the rest of the cluttered room.

“Something, Mr. Holmes?” the sergeant inquired.

“Hydrocyanic—also known as prussic—acid,” Holmes said.
He lingered at what seemed an unremarkable lithograph hung over the mantel, then struck out to investigate the other rooms on the floor, calling behind him, “Administered in the coffee. It is a favoured method, as the smell of almonds in such a beverage would not inspire suspicion.”