Sherlock Holmes (23 page)

The famous sleuth has taken to his room at the Randolph Hotel, one can only assume because he has succumbed to the notoriously uncongenial Oxford climate and been afflicted with an infection of the lungs. This while the poisoner of Magdalen College student the Honourable Aubrey Bancroft has yet to be found and the murderer of Oriel College oarsman Hugh Llewellyn roams free. Mr Holmes has allegedly been investigating both deaths, yet of late he has been anything but active. It must be a serious malady, to have laid him so low. One can think of no other reason why he has been making so many trips to the chemists, save that it is to seek some form of analgesic or cough suppressant, in copious quantities.

Slater knew exactly what he was doing. The words “analgesic or cough suppressant” would conjure up only one thing in most people’s minds: laudanum. He had, whether by intuition or observation, hit upon the truth of Holmes’s condition.

The mention of “so many trips to the chemists” ought to have come as a surprise to me but somehow did not. Slater must have been keeping a weather eye on Holmes’s comings and goings, or else bribed hotel staff to keep him apprised of my friend’s movements. By this reconnaissance he had divined that Holmes was becoming an habitual opiate user. I did not doubt that this was so. Holmes, with his personality and propensities, was unlikely to stop at just the one bottle of Chlorodyne.

I was incensed by the article, more for its sly, wink-and-nudge tone than for its content, which after all could not be gainsaid. I was tempted to tear it out of the paper, but knew this would alter nothing so left it there.

I am not the sort to document dreams. I consider them of little material significance and the recital of them tedious and irrelevant. They interest the dreamer himself and none other. However, I will break my rule and mention here that that night I was visited in my sleep by Aubrey Bancroft and Hugh Llewellyn. The former had streams of greenish-yellow bile leaking from the corners of his mouth, while the latter emitted a pulsing jet of blood from a hole in his chest. Their faces pallid, they berated me for my inability to pull them back from death’s door. Call myself a doctor? I was an insult to the medical profession. I should be struck off.

I protested that I was not the one who had fatally harmed them and I could not have worked harder to save either man, but my objections fell on deaf ears. The two corpses shambled towards me, arms menacingly outstretched, while behind them I glimpsed the hazy, featureless outlines of a woman and two girls whom I could only assume were Tabitha, Elsie and Flora Grainger. In moaning, high-pitched voices these three urged Bancroft and Llewellyn on. It seemed the deceased students wished to seize me and tear me limb from limb in hideous recompense for their suffering, and the female Graingers approved.

I tried to turn and run, but found myself incapable of moving. Cold fingers clawed at me. The stench of blood and putrefaction filled my nostrils. I remember pleading for clemency, and my assailants laughing coldly in response, saying that here, in Oxford, only the dead held the power over life. The dead held sway. It was a city of the dead.

I awoke in such a state of agitation and panic, my heart racing so hard, that I did not sleep again for the rest of the night. I found it hard to shake off the impression of terror the dream left upon me. Even in the cold light of morning, when I was able to reason to myself that the dream was simply my subconscious mind working through the residual guilt I was feeling about Bancroft and Llewellyn, still the recollection of those ghastly ambulatory corpses would not leave me. Their censure was somehow, I felt, merited.

Two days later, when the sun was out and there was a delightful breath of crisp vernal warmth in the air, I went for a walk. My mood had lightened, the corpse dream all but forgotten. Oxford wore a mellow glow and for once I was able to see it for itself, not as a place where a spate of foul deceptions and murders was in train but rather as a venerable and eternal institution, ancient but lent a kind of perpetual youth by the tides of students who came and went, year in, year out, washing through its archways and portals, leaving traces of their copious, invigorating energy on its well-worn stones. I lingered beside Merton College’s playing fields, watching groundsmen lower the rugby goalposts and mow the grass in readiness for the cricket season. I whiled away some time in the Botanic Garden, wandering the paths between the beds and stooping to inhale the scents of a lemon verbena plant and an ornamental hyacinth just coming into bloom. I loitered in the mazy interstices of Blackwell’s, where I was pleased to see that the quartet of books I had published so far –
A Study in Scarlet
,
The Sign of the Four
,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
and
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
– were all prominently displayed. I toyed with the idea of introducing myself to the proprietor and offering to inscribe every copy with my autograph, but I am innately reticent about such things anyway, and was further hampered by my current difficulties with Holmes, which had the effect of making me somewhat less proud of my opuses than usual.

My footsteps took me along Catte Street and beneath the covered outdoor walkway which links the two parts of Hertford College and is known as the “Bridge of Sighs” for its resemblance to the Venetian bridge of the same name. Thence I ventured down a winding, shoulder-width alleyway in the shadow of New College. Halfway along this I came upon a tiny, dim-lit, low-ceilinged public house, the Turf Tavern, which judging by its higgledy-piggledy half-timbered construction dated back to the thirteenth century. It seemed like a pleasant enough place to halt and whet my whistle, and shortly I was seated inside with a tankard of foaming ale before me. There were no other patrons. I was alone with my thoughts.

Not for long, though. A man entered the pub barely three minutes after I did, ordered a stout from the landlord, and took it to the dingiest corner of the snug. Sitting with his back to me, he supped his beer. His coat lapels were drawn up, so that I saw nothing of his face other than one edge of a set of dark whiskers. His hair was glossily black. His hands were gloved.

I paid him no more heed than that, giving him the cursory glance that one does any stranger in a public place, then resuming my drinking.

A moment later, the man spoke.

“Dr Watson,” he said.

I glanced up. “Yes? Do I know you, sir?”

“Know
of
me, perhaps. You are Dr John Watson, that is correct?”

“I am he. And you are…?”

The man gave a gruff chuckle. “I go by many a name, many a different alias. At the present time I believe you would be most familiar with my identity as a gentleman of Italian extraction, surname of Gasparini.”

My jaw dropped and I felt the electrifying sensation of the hair across my entire scalp prickling and going erect.

“Gasparini?” I echoed. “My God…”

I made to stand, but the other, without looking round, raised an admonitory finger.

“I would not do that if I were you, doctor. I would stay put, compose yourself, and listen. I have a proposition for you.”

I did as he recommended, if only because he gave the order with a certain chilling authority. The landlord had gone to the back room. There was nobody else around. I might as well hear what this Gasparini, or whatever his real name was, had to say. I was in the presence of a multiple murderer, our elusive agent provocateur. What did he want with me? What might this “proposition” of his be?

“Your mind is racing,” he said. “Your thoughts are in disarray. ‘Should I call for the police?’ you are thinking. ‘Should I launch myself at him? Should I at least alert the landlord?’ I advise you against any of those courses of action, especially the last. Breathe one word to mine host when he returns, give him the slightest hint that all is not well, and I will be forced to act. And I think you know what I mean by ‘act’. You have twice dealt with the consequences – with a signal lack of success.”

“You fiend,” I said. “You unmitigated scoundrel.”

“I might be that. I might be worse. But I am, I assure you, not one to make idle threats.”

“Turn around. At least show me your face.”

“And why would I do that, my dear doctor? So that you may describe my features to your friend Sherlock Holmes later? I think not.”

I was oddly heartened by his use of the word “later”. It implied he did not mean to kill me. Not just this moment, at any rate.

“You don’t sound Italian,” I said. I was stalling, playing for time so that I could come up with a plan.

“Because I am not. I can be, of course.” He affected a lilting Italian accent. “How about-a now, signor
dottore
? Does thees sound Italiano enough for-a you?”

“Not terribly.”

“Well, it did to young Mr Llewellyn. He didn’t doubt the nationality of his newfound chum Gasparini, not for one instant. Very engaging company, he found me, in fact. Both of us outsiders in this city, foreigners, ill at ease amongst the English. It helped forge a bond between us.”

“And Aubrey Bancroft? You were able to forge a similar bond with him?”

“He liked me as a don. I was affable and approachable, unlike many of them.” His voice went up an octave to an effeminate, fluting register. “‘I am a Doctor of Divinity, ever so pious, on the side of the angels… but with a devilish streak.’” It dropped again to the low guttural rasp which might have been his normal speaking voice but might equally have been as artificial as either of the others. I had no way of telling.

“I do not rate myself a great actor,” he continued. “I would not give Sir Henry Irving a run for his money. But I am good enough for my purposes. I can do what needs to be done when bagging my game. Stalking, camouflage, staying downwind of my quarry, making sure it doesn’t suspect a thing – those are my skills. I can be your best friend, I can sneak up right beside you, I can smile and mesmerise like a snake charmer, and you won’t even see the blade in my hand, not until it’s too late.”

“How very… picturesque.”

“I’m telling you how it is, that’s all.”

“You are confessing, then, to the murders of Bancroft and Llewellyn. Nahum Grainger too.”

“I am confessing nothing,” said Gasparini. “Nor am I denying anything. I will say that it is a joy to see the mighty Mr Sherlock Holmes so flummoxed. He seems to have no idea which way to turn. He flops and flounders like a landed trout. How is his health, incidentally? I hear from backstairs staff at the Randolph that he seldom orders food to be sent up from the kitchen any more, and the trays almost invariably sit outside his room untouched. He goes out only to visit the chemists. Sometimes he pays the hotel’s boots to run that errand for him. He must be in a bad way. I don’t believe what I’ve read in the paper, about a lung infection. Not for one moment. I’d say it’s the cards not falling as he’d like, that’s what ails him.”

“How Holmes is faring is none of your business.” I nearly added that it had become none of mine either.

“Oh, but it
is
my business, doctor. While it is a pleasure to see him brought low, I do not wish him crushed utterly. Not yet. The privilege of destroying him belongs to another. My job is to soften him up first.”

“Then this has all been about Holmes?” I said. “The intent behind your entire design has been to cause his ruination?”

“Is that so hard to credit? Sherlock Holmes has made many enemies in his life and put many a man behind bars. Should it surprise you to learn that some of them might seek recompense?”

Before I could respond, the landlord came back, drying his hands on his apron. He had heard our voices, and for a while he indulged in inconsequential chitchat about the weather and England winning the Ashes in Australia despite the absence of W.G. Grace from the team. Gasparini and I both joined in the conversation, he with gusto, I in more desultory fashion. Moments earlier Gasparini had been softly crowing about his sinister achievements, and now he was debating the merits of the respective team captains, our Stoddart and their Giffen, for all the world as though he was just an ordinary man in an ordinary pub on an ordinary afternoon. The landlord was addressing him across the bar as he might any customer, blissfully oblivious to the fact that his life was in jeopardy, while I sat pretending hard that everything was normal. It was a disconcerting exercise, to say the least.

“Can I get you gents anything?” the landlord asked. “Refills?”

“Not for me, thank you,” I said.

“Nor me,” said Gasparini.

“Fair do’s. Give me a shout if you change your minds.”

The landlord disappeared into the back room again, leaving me alone with the killer once more. Gasparini had not shifted position at all during our exchange with the publican. He had contrived not to turn his head any more than a few degrees, so that I still had no clear, unimpeded view of his face.

Nonetheless I had become convinced there was something familiar about him. I was sure that we had met before. The set of his shoulders, the timbre of his voice – these were features I recognised but could not put in context. Sometime in recent history our paths had crossed. Holmes would have identified him in a trice, had he been here, but I was not Holmes, I did not have Holmes’s incisive powers of observation and encyclopaedic memory, and Gasparini knew it. Hence he felt he could present himself before me, more or less openly, with impunity.

“You mentioned a proposition,” I said. “Of what sort?”

“I wish you to do me a service.”

“Is this one of your wicked pacts? I perform some self-interested deed, something seemingly for my own benefit, upon completion of which you kill me?”

The other laughed low and long. “No. I am not so rash as to think you would fall for that. I am asking you to save Sherlock Holmes. That is my proposition.”

“Save him?”

“Before he can sink any further. I have, it transpires, pushed him harder than I intended. It is possible that he is made of less stern stuff than I thought. I do not relish seeing him collapse entirely before my plans come to a head. He needs to be around to witness my triumph and that of my associate. Otherwise where is the fun in it? What would be the point?”