The Empress of India (37 page)

“If he should ask you for my hand, Father,” Margaret said patiently, “I just want you to know that it would be all right with me if you were to seriously consider it. And then if, after a suitable period of consideration—say, ten or twenty minutes—you were to say yes, I would think that was perfectly fine.”

“And when is he going to ask me?” St. Yves inquired.

“I don’t know,” Margaret confessed. “He hasn’t asked me yet.”

St. Yves thought this over carefully for a minute. “And what makes you so sure he’s going to?” he asked, venturing into territory in which no man is safe.

“A woman knows these things,” his daughter told him.

“I see,” St. Yves said. “Has he any money? Any expectations? Will he be able to support you?”

“I have no idea,” Margaret said, blithely throwing aside the notion that money was of any importance. “Besides, won’t I have a sufficient income on my own when I marry? I always supposed I would.”

“True,” her father admitted. “You come into a sizable sum from your maternal grandfather when you marry or reach the age of thirty-five, whichever comes first. But do you really want a husband who lives off of your money?”

“If we’re married,” Margaret said reasonably, “then I don’t suppose it will really matter whose money it is.”

“It might,” St. Yves said. “It could come to pass that it would matter a great deal. A man should be able to support his wife.”

“If a couple is living on inherited wealth,” Margaret asked reasonably, “then which of the partners has done the inheriting is more a matter of pure chance, wouldn’t you say?”

“Humph,” said her father.

Captain Iskansen stood again. “The gold vault door will be closed tonight for the last time until we dock,” he said. “If any of you want to take one last look at our precious cargo—not as precious as the lives and fortunes of our passengers, but precious nonetheless—you have one more hour.”

He paused for a sip of wine, and continued, “I will ask you all to be patient with us when we dock. As a final safety precaution the gold will be unloaded before the passengers debark. It will be quite early in the morning, and it should take no more than an hour and a half, so none of you should be inconvenienced. I hope and trust that you’ve all had a
pleasant voyage. Well, barring that one unseemly incident, of course, as pleasant as we could make it for you. And I thank you all once again.” He raised his glass, nodded his head, and sat down.

“There is going to be some people awaiting at the dock what is going to be most unhappy at the turn of events,” the Artful Codger remarked into his pea soup. “They will consider themselves greatly inconvenienced.”

“That’s the truth,” Cooley the Pup agreed. “It’s funny how things turned out, ain’t it?”

“Angelic Tim McAdams ain’t exactly a philosophical bloke,” the Codger said. “He’s going to require a bit of explaining, and I’m glad I ain’t the one as is going to have to do it.”

“Maybe you are the one,” said the Pup. “I don’t fancy that Mr. Sherlock Holmes, as he is now calling himself, is going to be any too eager to do it for himself.”

“Do you suppose that Holmes is right?” the Codger asked. “About the Bank of England giving us a reward for helping save the gold?”

“He sounded like he meant it,” said the Pup. “But I ain’t counting on it till the guineas is clinking together in my pocket.”

“Won’t that be something?” marveled the Codger. “Why, it’ll be almost like getting paid for honest work.”

“Mind how you talk!” said the Pup. He pushed his chair back and stood up. “I want to go take one last look at the gold, which is as close as we’re going to get.”

The Codger rose. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “You know, it’s a shame Holmes got that second bump on the head. If he was still Pin, he’d have a way for us to get at that gold.”

“Maybe if we cosh him again . . .” suggested the Pup.

“It don’t work like that,” said the Codger.

“Pity,” said the Pup.

_______

The Empress of India
steamed up the Thames and tied up at Queen’s Dock at quarter to five the next morning, while the passengers and most of the city were still asleep. The two following ships, the cruiser H.M.S.
John of Gaunt
and the revenue cutter
Ajax,
which had kept the
Empress
in sight since she rounded Gibraltar, went their own ways, replaced by a pair of police boats, a company of the Household Guard, a squad of London constabulary, a bevy of Scotland Yard plainclothes men, and a pride of bowler-hatted special guards employed by the Bank of England, who were to oversee the transfer of the gold from the ship’s vault to the two special armored wagons which were pulled up at dockside. The dock area was lit by gaslights and lanterns on posts, and two powerful electrical floodlights from the ship, and many of the men were carrying lanterns; but a cold, damp fog had settled in for the predawn hours and no object more than a few feet away could be clearly seen.

Inspector Giles Lestrade was in charge of the Scotland Yard contingent, and he had just finished placing his men when he heard his name called by someone standing in the open hatch to the cargo hold. “In-spector Lestrade, is that you? Come up here, please, you’re needed!”

Lestrade swung his lantern around. He knew that voice. “Holmes?” He shone the light up toward the hatch. “What are you doing there? For that matter, what are you doing anywhere? Where have you been?”

“Later,” shouted Holmes. “Come up here, please. Bring your men!”

Lestrade paused and contemplated the possibilities. Holmes wasn’t supposed to be there. Holmes was missing, presumed dead. Still, perhaps—

“Well, Lestrade,” Holmes bellowed from his perch in the cargo hatch. “Are you coming or aren’t you coming? This is a matter of the utmost urgency; no time for you to ponder.”

“Coming, Holmes,” Lestrade called back. Holmes, if it was Holmes, was right, pondering could come later. And questioning. He gave two brief blasts on his police whistle and led his quartet of plainclothesmen up the ramp to the hatch.

It was indeed Holmes standing there. The same well-remembered arrogant posture, the same familiar overweening gesture as he beckoned them forward. “This way,” the world’s foremost consulting detective said, leading them into the ship and around a corridor.

“This had better not take too long,” Lestrade said, huffing to keep up with Holmes’s long strides. “We have the gold to look after. The unloading is due to begin any minute now.”

Holmes stopped short halfway down the corridor, where a cluster of men in a variety of uniforms and mufti were standing by what looked like an open bank vault door. “The gold appears to have already been unloaded,” Holmes said.

“How’s that?” Lestrade halted and looked over the group in front of him: several army officers, a few ship’s officers, and assorted civilians. They all glowered at him as he approached, as though he were responsible for something, although he had no idea what. Holmes introduced him to a general, the ship’s captain, and some people of lesser importance. Lestrade would have been greatly impressed had he time for such thoughts. He took a breath. “What do you mean, it’s been unloaded? The armored wagons just arrived a few moments ago.”

Holmes indicated the open vault door. “This is where the gold was,” he told Lestrade. “A bit over two tons of the stuff. It was there last night. As you can see, it is no longer there.”

Lestrade went over and peered through the door. There was an inner door of iron bars, which was still closed. Looking through the bars, Lestrade saw a room about twelve feet square and eight feet from floor to ceiling. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the room were made up of riveted iron plates. There was no apparent entrance to the room except
the door through which Lestrade was now peering with interest. The room appeared to be empty, save for a few scraps of charred wood. “The vault?” Lestrade asked.

“Indeed,” said Captain Iskansen.

“Two tons of gold?”

“A bit more, I fancy,” said Holmes, “just a bit more.”

“Gone?”

“Afraid so,” said General St. Yves. “They were here yesterday. I saw them. Gold bars all boxed up in stacks of tidy boxes, six to a box.”

“I imagine it took up much of the vault, this gold.”

“It made a pile about so high in the center of the room,” St. Yves said, holding his hand on a level with his chin.

“There was a space a foot and a half wide from the walls to allow walking around the, ah, pile,” Captain Iskansen said.

“And it was here yesterday?”

“I closed the outer vault door at nine in the evening,” Iskansen told him. “Twenty people—at least twenty—saw it there just before the door closed.”

Sighing a long and wheezy sigh, Lestrade unbuttoned his inverness, reached into his suit-coat pocket, and retrieved his notebook and a stubby pencil. He examined the pencil with interest, and then gave the point a few swipes with the blade of a pocket knife laboriously produced from another pocket. “All right, then,” he said, licking the tip of the pencil and opening the notebook to a fresh page, “I might have known it wouldn’t be no ordinary kind of case, not with you here, Mr. Holmes.”

Lestrade turned to General St. Yves. “Tell me about it.”

The group of men around him took it in turn to explain how the gold had been kept and secured and guarded, from Calcutta to London, in constant view, until that very morning.

“These gentlemen and I came down here at precisely five A.M. to
open the outer vault door and await the arrival of the representative of the Band of England,” Captain Iskansen ended the story. “And we found”—he waved a hand at the empty vault room—“this.”

Closing his notebook, Lestrade turned to Holmes. “I’m surprised that you’re not in there at this moment, crawling around on your hands and knees, examining the cracks in the floor for bits of dust.”

Holmes smiled. “The captain has not seen fit to open the inner door yet,” he said. “When he does, I will avail myself of the opportunity to, as you say, crawl about the floor. Unless, of course, you have a solution to our conundrum.”

“I can assure you,” said Captain Iskansen, “that there are no hidden panels, trapdoors, or other concealed entrances to or exits from this vault room. Except for the doorway in which we stand, there is no way in or out of the vault.”

“When was the last time that there inner door was opened?” asked Lestrade.

Captain Iskansen took an envelope embossed with wax seals from an inner pocket. “This has been in my safe since we left Calcutta,” he said. “In it resides the only key to the inner vault door.” He flicked it with his finger. “As you can see, the seal has not been broken.”

Lestrade scratched his head. “It’s beyond me,” he confessed. “If what you say is so, then you’d best let Mr. Holmes into the room as soon as possible to crawl about and get the knees of his trousers dirty. There’s nothing else for it, and I don’t see how that can help. But then, I never see how Mr. Holmes solves his little problems until he explains them. And often not then.”

Holmes smiled a tight little smile. “I can’t say how the trick was accomplished yet,” he said, “but would it surprise you to know that our old friend Professor Moriarty is aboard this ship?”

“Moriarty? Here? No!” exclaimed Lestrade, stretching the “No!” out into something like a cat’s wail of surprise. “What the bejiggers is the professor doing here?”

“Returning from a very interesting visit to Calcutta,” came Professor Moriarty’s voice from down the corridor, “very profitable.”

Lestrade turned to see the professor and a heavyset man who walked with a military bearing approaching. “I hear there’s been an unfortunate occurrence in the gold vault,” said Moriarty.

Holmes took two steps forward and thrust a jabbing finger in Moriarty’s direction. “And just how did you know that, Professor?”

“Why, it’s all over the ship,” said Moriarty. “News like that can’t be kept secret.”

“Say,” said General St. Yves, “I posted guards at the ends of the corridor with instructions to let no one pass. How did you get by the guards?”

Moriarty smiled grimly. “I told them that you wished to speak to me,” he said. “Surely that’s true, isn’t it, Holmes? As soon as a crime happens anywhere on earth, Sherlock Holmes wants to talk to me about it.”

“You’ve outdone yourself, Professor,” Holmes said. “An impossible crime on a ship at sea, and you right there in the same ship at the same time. It’s as though you’re challenging me.”

“Someone may be challenging you,” Moriarty said, “but it isn’t I. And I doubt whether the challenge was deliberate—no one, myself included, had any way to know you were on the ship until the attack. If it comes to that,
you
didn’t know you were on the ship until—”

“What attack?” Lestrade asked, looking from one to the other.

“And just what was so profitable about your trip to Calcutta?” Holmes demanded.

Moriarty made motions with his hands as though he were piling small invisible boxes on top of larger invisible boxes in the air in front of him. “I have arranged for English translations of two ancient Hindi astronomical texts: the
Grahanayayadipaka
by Paramesvara and the
Yuktibhasa
by Jyesthadeva,” he said. “Dr. Pitamaha of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Calcutta didn’t have the funds to have it done. Now he does.”