Between the Thames and the Tiber (30 page)

We hailed a cab for the square. Lestrade followed me into the house and then into the cellar. We each chose a corner and put the black bandannas over our faces. It was pitch-dark.

In a few minutes we were no longer alone. Several men entered one by one. None noticed us. One stood up and addressed them in a soft but earnest voice.

“Men, I won’t waste time on words. We have received the signal. We have to move quickly. You know what we are looking for. There will be a lot of it. When you find it put it in one of these barrels. Remember: we have three hours, no more.

“We have to accomplish our work in that short time. You all know and trust each other. I shall be on guard outside. When I return, we leave. Have to it, lads.”

There was a change in the grammar and enunciation, but there was no question that the voice was that of John McHugh, his pot belly almost visible in the shadows.

There was a general commotion, quiet but steady, and then the sound of shovels digging into the earth, followed occasionally by the sound of someone emptying a shovel into one of the containers.

The digging continued steadily into the deep night. Despite the cold outside, the cellar was warm. Sweat poured from us, and we commiserated with some of the other men with grunts and groans.

Then, as he had said he would, Holmes entered the room and lit a large lamp. The men were momentarily blinded by it. Holmes addressed them in a loud firm voice.

“I am sorry to interrupt your excavation, dear gentlemen, but, unfortunately, you have been found engaged in looting an old graveyard, a serious offense under British law. Your leaders have been captured. Men from Scotland Yard are guarding the exit. Please turn and face the wall. Follow the shadow of the man to your right. You will exit now one by one and will be put in temporary custody.”

The men obeyed and went out calmly, though I heard some grumblings about the stupidity of the leaders. Lestrade went before me, and I was the last to leave that awful place with its odor of living human sweat mixed with the rot of mildewed bones. As my eyes grew accustomed to the street lights, I saw Ian Rose, the ringleader whose nocturnal scheme it was. He suddenly turned, however, and, pushing the men to the ground, freed himself and ran into the dark cellar. In a flash, Holmes was after him.

“Follow me, my boys, we’ll get him,” said Lestrade.

From outside I heard the scramble up the stairs.

“Hold your fire, Lestrade, I have him cornered. He can’t move unless—”

I heard the noise of window glass shattering. Suddenly, Rose was beside me, on the ground, stunned by his leap through the window. He tried to grab my gun, but I gave him a blow to the head with it, and he fell to the ground. Cuffed now by Lestrade, there was no possibility of escape. We watched as the culprits were led away and then took a cab to Baker Street. Lestrade joined us.

“Well, Holmes, perhaps you should explain. I am completely in the dark . . .” said I as we entered our cab.

“I could use a few details,” chimed in Lestrade. “The fact is, Holmes, I don’t have any idea of what this is all about.”

“It is simplicity itself, but, unfairly, I think I have all the cards, you two no more than two or three. Shall I begin at the beginning?”

“By all means,” said I.

“As you will remember, Watson, from our conversations with Barbara Davies, we learned that our suspect Ian Rose was a medical student, but was fairly well heeled since he paid six months in advance. The rent was rather high for such a small place, so we must believe that he wanted that flat for other reasons only known to him. We learned too that he kept irregular hours and sometimes did not return until the early morning. He also was a gambler and had enough money to owe John McHugh about a hundred pounds, a good deal for a student. Already you see and feel, gentlemen, the contradictions in this man Rose. From where does he get his money? He must be more than just a medical student. He may be doing something rather unusual for his earnings.”

“And what is that, Holmes?” I asked.

“Something especially out of the ordinary, Watson: grave digging, at first for respectable people bereaved by the loss of a loved one and needing a grave in a cemetery of their choice. Our culprit is greedy, however, and moves up in the chain of chores and their concomitant rewards. He moves from grave digging to grave robbing. Literally by the worst kind of skullduggery, he begins providing cadavers for the university medical students. The university is quite pleased with his supply at first because he makes it a point to remove the freshest examples from what is supposed to be their eternal rest.”

“The man is a fiend, Holmes,” shouted Lestrade with great disgust.

“But we are only at the beginning. Rose has a problem.”

“Not enough cadavers . . .”

“Quite right, Lestrade. He needs a steadier and larger supply of corpses. He hires agents who comb the streets for derelicts and do them in. The number of missing persons in London suddenly increases as the number of agents willing to do this horrible kind of work grows. He has learned through Davies that Lloyd Square was originally owned by a rich merchant, Josiah Lloyd Pepys, who had built in the back of his house a hidden cemetery for rich members of a small sect of religious fanatics known as “The True Brethren of Ekkebu.” The sect was founded in America some seventy-five years ago by one Lawrence Oliphant and his chief successor, a Thomas Harris of London, with whom coincidentally I have already come in deadly contact, but that is another story. Pepys convinced the congregation of Ekkebuites to change its wealth into gold bullion and allow the use of his own embalming methods to preserve their bodies for their future life in the heaven of their world spirit, the god Zandonai.

“Rose now has more than he can handle. The doctors have grown suspicious of these strangely embalmed cadavers. Rose needs a confederate, and he enlists our friend McHugh as his colleague in the gruesome work. McHugh, desperate for money, agrees to do the digging and hire help; but they are an unnatural pair. Rose is meticulous and McHugh is not. Rose’s use of two small telescopes, for instance, and two candles in windows on the square was timed so that the bobby on duty would be at the far end of the square when Rose entered and exited. McHugh several times failed to put out his candle, causing the bobby to try to open the door. Luckily for them, the bobby does not pursue the matter. The bodies continue to arrive at the medical schools in a steady flow. There is no gold found, however, and despite his investigations that support a contrary conclusion, Rose is convinced that gold is still interred with the bones of the members of the Brotherhood. He cannot relinquish the idea, so attractive to a greedy individual is it. Think of it, gentlemen, the individual fortunes of several hundred dead, conveniently changed into gold bullion, lying there in wait for those willing to take the trouble to dig it up.”

‘Never heard the likes of it before,” said Lestrade. “How did you figure all of this, Holmes? It is still beyond anything of its kind that I have heard of before.”

“Rose realizes that he must act immediately. For him, it is all a matter of time. He recruits a few of his cronies to join McHugh and his group. And he chooses this very night to dig out the cemetery because there is no moon. It is the perfect night. He cannot wait another month. At a meeting behind the Pepys house he explains to the men what is at stake. Most naturally, they are ready and able.”

“Let us go back to the suitcases left and not picked up,” said I.

“Indeed, Watson. And here the crime committed is far greater than housebreaking. You must change the charge, Lestrade, to include murder in the first degree.”

I must say that I was stunned when I heard Holmes’s words. And then I realized what he meant.

“Rose, if I am not mistaken, killed Dumond Davies in cold blood. He did this in order to silence him before he brought the cemetery and its contents to public attention. It was indeed Davies who first learned of the strange cemetery and shared what he knew with Rose early in their friendship. Rose became a model of stealth and deceit with Davies, and concluded that he must move quickly. The houses built over the cemetery had been vacant for decades, forgotten by the family, priest, and sect, everyone unaware now of the treasure that lay in that dark chamber, a few feet below the street. Rose had to have it.

“On the day fateful to him, Davies had invited the younger man home to meet his wife. Completely alone with his host, Rose dared not forgo the opportunity. He watched carefully as Davies began to repair an old lamp. Rose looked for a weapon. He saw the shovel in the Davies garden. Dumond was now kneeling on the floor concentrating on putting some wires together. A heavy blow to the back of the head caused Davies to fall forward. A few sparks and it was all over. Rose left unseen with his weapon, fearful that somehow it would be found and traced to him. When he decided to move he cleaned it thoroughly and broke it in two pieces to fit in his valises.”

“But why did he not return and take the valises with him?” I asked.

“Here,” said Holmes, “I can only conjecture. Perhaps he asked McHugh to retrieve them. Barbara surely would have let him have them.”

I looked up as the first silver signs of morning appeared in the sky. I heard someone singing.

“And why did we and Tanner not see the blow to Davies’s head?” I asked.

“
Nessun dorma
,” said Holmes. “Let no one sleep. Listen.”

N.B. The reader of the following story will note, as he progresses into the text, a certain inconsistency in style, particularly at the beginning of the second section. Holmes himself pointed it out to me, and I enter a note of explanation here. Although I have used the same technique in other chronicles, particularly in “The Valley of Fear,” Holmes has convinced me that a word of comment would not be amiss.

Some time ago, on one of our long journeys between London and Rome, Holmes settled himself quickly in his seat and barely spoke, having immersed himself in a very long novel from which he refused to be distracted.

“My apologies, Watson, but as soon as I finish with this I shall hand it over to you.”

It was on the following morning, if I recall correctly, that he read through the final pages and with a flourish, handed me the large tome.

“Here,” he said, “is one of the finest novels I have ever read. I recommend it to you with great enthusiasm.”

I took the book from him and read on its cover: The Betrothed
by Alessandro Manzoni. I confess that I had never heard of either before. I began reading, and once past the first few pages, I was enthralled by the subject as well as its style. Holmes must have found me tiresome as I marveled constantly at the writer’s skill.

I finished the volume after we reached Rome and could not rid myself of its beauty. In homage to the great writer, I have followed his style in a few places in the following story. I beg the indulgence of the reader of these meager fables for the seeming but unintentional impertinence.

John Watson, M.D.

I
T WAS A TIME OF GRAVE CONCERN IN THE HISTORY OF
Britain. The year was 1901, the sixty-fourth year of Her Majesty’s reign. The Queen lay dying, and the world waited with the greatest apprehension for the announcement, now deemed inevitable, that the longest reign in English history had come to an end. Edward, Prince of Wales, stood by, manfully aware of the awful burden that was about to descend upon his shoulders.

During this period, I had seen little of my friend, Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, the national melancholy seemed to have affected him severely. He offered almost nothing beyond rather curt greetings when we met, and appeared to be completely absorbed, possibly in a case of great importance and intricacy. At least so I judged, for I had lived with him long enough to have become familiar with his most peculiar ways. He was as he had always been, only more so during this period, or so it seemed to me. He came and went at all hours, often in disguise, rarely as himself. On these particular occasions, he had a preference for members of the working class. A carpenter, a housepainter, and several varieties of maid were among the figures that came and went from our quarters, almost on a daily basis.

Once at home, he would sit silently or immerse himself in a strange assortment of books. I noted at the time a number of old tomes strewn across the floor in front of his easy chair: Mackey’s
Extraordinary Delusions
and
The Madness of Crowds
, van Noltke’s
British Heraldry
, Wright’s recent biography of Nana Sahib, Prescott’s
History of the Tattoo
, and Lombroso’s
After Death—What?
, the latter a most singular choice considering Holmes’s strong views on such matters. I must confess that I could make neither head nor tail of this odd assortment, strange even for Holmes’ peculiar tastes.

It was towards eleven one night, a cold, rainy one in early January, if memory serves, that the mystery in which Holmes was engrossed began to show the first grim fragments of its still rather shadowy outline. I sat alone in our quarters on Baker Street. Holmes had not appeared for dinner, as he had promised in a rare moment of affability. I supped alone, therefore, and then lit a fire and sat reading, warmed by its flames. I must have dozed off for a time, for I remember being startled awake by the rapid opening and closing of our front door. I jumped up to find an old woman, her hair and clothes dripping from the rain, standing on the threshold, shaking and closing her umbrella.

“Please, Watson, control yourself if you can, and refrain from comment,” said a familiar voice. “I am soaked through, and I can assure you that a tight feminine corset stuck to one’s middle does nothing to improve one’s humour.”

My friend must have seen the smile that flickered across my face as he stretched to his full height and tossed the old woman’s grey wig onto the floor. There, soaking wet in humble feminine attire that would have befitted our landlady, Mrs. Hudson, stood Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest detective.