Sherlock Holmes (21 page)

“I see,” said Quantock. “Then the Engine is a l-last resort. All else has failed, so you come cr-crawling to my door.” For the first time I saw a flash of spite in the little man’s eyes.

“That is not what Holmes meant,” I said, interceding. “What he meant is he has come to the realisation that there is more to be gained through co-operation than competition. Isn’t that right, Holmes?”

“If you say so, Watson.”

“To which end, if your invention can shed any light on the mystery that is currently plaguing us, professor, we would welcome it.”

It seemed to me wiser to help Holmes than hinder him. The sooner his consultation with the Thinking Engine was over with, the sooner we could move on. I was taking the path of least resistance, with the view that once this particular caprice of Holmes’s had been sated, I could get on with the more important process of pulling him out of the vortex of despair into which he had fallen.

“When you p-put it l-like that,” said Quantock, “I suppose it would be churlish of m-me not to accommodate you. I built my Engine to help others, after all.” He settled down at his typewriter station. “What do you req-require to know?”

“Anything it can tell us about the Oriel 1st VIII incident earlier in the week,” said Holmes.

“The killing at the river, yes? A very b-bad business.”

“Also, the meaning of the phrase ‘gas par’ or ‘cas par’. It may be Welsh, it may not. I have referred to the latest edition of the Anwyl brothers’ revised version of Spurrell’s Welsh-English dictionary. I browsed through a copy at Blackwell’s. However, the results I have drawn are inconclusive. There is a Cymric word ‘
cas
’, meaning ‘hatred’. There is no ‘par’ but there is a verb, ‘
peri
’, which is a close analogue and translates as ‘produce’ or ‘cause’. So ‘
cas peri
’ might simply be an expression of intense dislike, which, given the event that precipitated its utterance, would not be inapt whatsoever. I am not sure the grammatical or syntactical construction is authentic, but one has to make allowances both for the speaker’s compromised condition and the possibility that the listener did not hear with absolute clarity.”

Quantock typed energetically for several minutes, nibbling his lip in concentration.

“You didn’t tell me you had looked up ‘gas par’,” I said aside to Holmes.

“It was just something I did,” he replied airily, “for something to do.”

“So you have not been entirely idle since the shooting.”

“Not that it availed me much.” He heaved a sigh of deep futility. “It was a vain attempt to breathe life into a moribund investigation. The game no longer seems in any meaningful way afoot.”

“We shall see, shall we not?” I said with a jollity I did not feel.

Quantock ended his typing with a flourish, and the Thinking Engine commenced the loud, protracted chattering and clattering that attended its calculations. The noise went on for quite some while, reaching a pitch of intensity such as I had not heard from it before. I was obliged, indeed, to stop my ears with my fingers, so boomingly raucous did it become, and even then I found it painful. The mighty cotton mills of Lancashire in full flight could not have been as deafening. The entire chamber around us vibrated until the high fan-light windows were rattling in their frames.

Then, all at once, a stunning silence fell. Echoes of the Engine’s activity faded away.

And the machine spoke.

Its voice – such was the label Professor Quantock had assigned to it, so voice it must be –issued from the amplification horn in fits and starts, sometimes pausing part way through a word, other times cramming syllables so close together that they overlapped, and every so often giving a monosyllable a peculiar double-stress as it conjoined two phonemes. It was staccato and monotone, lacking the cadences and variations in intonation which humans habitually use. It lacked, too, many of the niceties of the English language, such as pronouns and definite and indefinite articles. On first hearing, it little resembled speech.

Yet speech it was, indisputably. The Thinking Engine was talking to us, sounding crackly and etiolated but still eerily like its progenitor, Quantock. I could not help but think of a son who grows up to emulate the vocabulary and phrasing of his father, the proverbial chip off the old block. Quantock had not merely created a lifelike machine; he had fashioned it in his own image. The Engine now possessed not just intelligence but the ability to express itself audibly. It was to all intents and purposes a sentient being. I found this notion both thrilling and repellent. What next? A face? A working mouth? An automaton-like body? Where might it all end?

“Oarsmen rebelled against disliked captain,” the Engine said. “Replaced cox with straw figure. Cox rowed for captain.”

I watched the needles slide along their armatures in the voice cabinet, propelled by small pistons. Reaching the appropriate notch, they pecked down onto the wax cylinders, which rotated obligingly and played whatever syllables the machine required.

“Substitution veiled by mist,” the Engine continued. “Captain was held in captivity.”

“All of which is common knowledge,” Holmes muttered.

“Bow man Llewellyn was shot dead.” The machine stumbled over the Welshman’s name, teasing it out like a child encountering a difficult word for the first time in a storybook. Perhaps the double
l
’s confused it. “Assassin lay in wait on opposite side of river. Assassin was bow man’s collaborator. Assassin was getting rid of witness who might incriminate.”

“Again, nothing new.” Holmes rubbed his face languidly.

“Llewellyn’s dying words: ‘gas par’.”

The Thinking Engine seemed to hesitate. Cogs reeled. Rods pulsed up and down. The needles in the voice cabinet were poised on their armatures. We all three of us looked expectantly at the amplification horn.

“Maybe it has drawn a blank too,” Holmes said.

“Surname,” said the Engine. “Not in full. Unfinished. The first section. Italian. Gasparini.”

I turned to Holmes to see what effect the machine’s declaration had on him. He, in his state of narcosis, did not reveal much. I observed a narrowing of the eyelids, an almost imperceptible flaring of the nostrils, but these tiny fluctuations in expression gave scant clue as to his inner processes.

“Does that signify anything to you?” I prompted him. “Ring any bells?”

He pursed his lips. “Is that all you have for me?”

“Are you add-addressing me,” said Professor Quantock, “or the Engine?”

“Whichever. It makes no difference. An Italian surname, Gasparini. I am being given no more to go on than that?”

The Thinking Engine ceased its computations, which implied it had said its piece and had nothing further to add.

“It is, perhaps, just a s-suggestion,” said the mathematician. “The Engine, like any of us, ex-extrapolates from existing data. It c-could not resolve the con-conundrum of the St Peter-in-the-East tombstone inscription, after all, only submit likely scenarios to account for the impossible d-death date. I have n-never pretended the thing is infallible. Gas par, Gasparini – an ed-educated guess, maybe that is all. B-but at least it has offered you a p-potential direction for your investigation that you did n-not have before. You m-must give it credit for th-that.”

My friend let out an abrupt, derisive laugh. “Shall I hunt through Oxford, then, for a Signor Gasparini who may or may not be our unseen gunman?”

“In the past, you have chased down considerably slimmer leads,” I said, “with great success. The murder by Boscombe Pool, for instance. From just the words ‘a rat’ gasped out by the victim, you deduced that the killer hailed from Ballarat in Australia.”

“There was ancillary evidence which aided me in reaching that conclusion. The words alone would not have been enough. Likewise a name alone.”

“Mr H-Holmes,” said Quantock, “far be it for me to c-criticise, but is it not at the l-least unwise, if not downright foolhardy, to ignore the Engine’s conclusion? If you l-look for this Gasparini but find that no such person exists, what h-have you lost? Whereas, by not looking for h-him at all, you c-could be letting a mur-murderer slip through your grasp.”

“What he’s saying, old chap,” I said, “is don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.”

“P-precisely.”

Holmes regarded us both with lofty disdain, much as if we were traitors ganging up against him, Brutus and Cassius to his Julius Caesar. “You know better than me, eh?”

“Far from it,” I said. “But I do think you should give the Engine the benefit of the doubt. It was right about Parson’s Pleasure. What if it is right about this Gasparini too?”

“If the machine is so deucedly clever, why doesn’t it provide a Christian name for the man? An address? Why doesn’t it tell us exactly where he is at this very moment?” Holmes brandished a hand for emphasis, as though rapping an invisible door with his knuckles. “That would be preferable to it spewing out a name and leaving me to do the legwork. You have clearly taken the Engine’s side, Watson. You should go the whole hog, switch allegiance fully and make
it
the hero of your future stories rather than me. I can see it now. The front cover of
The Strand
. A strapline above the masthead. ‘Inside: Sensational New Thinking Engine Adventure – Complete This Issue.’ I’m sure your readers will be captivated by your descriptions of a machine delivering vague, sibylline hints which someone else then has to interpret. They’ll be on tenterhooks as you fill your narratives with repeated depictions of the Engine talking like someone with a stutter reading out a telegram. No offence, professor.”

“Some t-taken.”

“Put simply,” Holmes went on, as oblivious as a steamroller, “if there is a Gasparini, which I sincerely doubt, let the police find him. It is a task better suited to their resources than mine. Let him be their responsibility. I’m quite happy for Inspector Tomlinson to take up the burden on his donkey-like shoulders.”

“Holmes…” I said.

“In fact, Watson, there’s the secondary protagonist of your new series of stories. ‘The Thinking Engine and its sidekick Inspector Eden Tomlinson.’ What a team. The soulless machine and the mindless bobby.”

“Holmes…” I said more insistently.

“I’ll enjoy seeing you try to make capital out of such unpromising material as that. The pair of them could not be more undynamic. The one permanently stationary, the other moving at a snail’s pace, thinking he understands my methods and can put them into practice but really—”

“Holmes!” I barked, frantically gesturing for him to turn around.

“What?” he sighed testily, and swivelled.

A half-dozen individuals had entered the chamber while he had been ranting. Amongst them were some very eminent figures indeed. I recognised Sir William Thomson, the President of the Royal Society, and Colonel Sir Edward Bradford, the London Commissioner of Police. I had met neither man in person but their faces were familiar from the newspapers, as was that of the Home Secretary, no less, H.H. Asquith.

Accompanying them were a pair of thickset, round-shouldered men whose deportment marked them out as plainclothes police – Special Branch officers, there to provide protection and security. I recognised one of them, a glowering gorilla called Grimsdyke whom Holmes and I had had a run-in with five years earlier during the Baron Cauchemar case. He had gained a cauliflower ear in the intervening period and, as his unkind grin revealed, lost a couple of teeth.

It was not the judgements of these men or any of the others that I was concerned about, however. They looked bemused to have walked in on Holmes lambasting me, but with them the worst he would have done was embarrass himself.

It was the man escorting the whole party whom I felt sorry for. Inspector Tomlinson had arrived in time to hear every excoriating adjective Holmes had used about him, from “donkey-like” to “mindless” to “undynamic”.

The official’s face was a picture of hurt, disappointment and dismay. He struggled manfully to hide it but could not. In front of some of the most important men in the land, at least two of them knights of the realm, he had just been openly and patronisingly traduced by Sherlock Holmes – by the person he idolised and thought of as a friend. More complete a humiliation could not be conceived.

Reddening, in choked tones, Tomlinson said, “Forgive the intrusion. I’m minded to return at a more opportune moment – when, say, Mr Holmes has calmed down or, better yet, absented himself from the room.”

On any other occasion Holmes would have shown remorse. But on that day, whatever he might have been feeling deep down, he exhibited none. He shot a blank, unrepentant look at Tomlinson and said, “I can see I am not wanted. Surplus to requirements. Very well. Good day to you all, gentlemen.”

With a tip of an imaginary hat – his real one was under his arm – Holmes swanned past Tomlinson and the august entourage he had brought with him. At the door my friend paused.

“Are you coming, Watson?”

“No,” I said. “Frankly I think not.” Holmes had behaved so abominably, I had no desire to remain in his company just then.

“You’re sure?”

I dug my heels in. “Adamant.”

“So be it.”

And with that, he was gone.

After Holmes’s departure an awkward silence hung in the air, which I felt honour-bound to break.

“I must apologise,” I said. “My friend Holmes… Well, he is extremely busy. He is not himself. The stress…”

Asquith, consummate politician that he was, smoothed things over with a few well-chosen words. “That was Sherlock Holmes, eh? On the face of it, hardly the cool, cerebral superman we have been led to believe. But I imagine once one gets to know him, his decent side emerges. I am acquainted with his brother, of course. Few in Westminster are not. He too makes a poor first impression.”