Sherlock Holmes (8 page)

“Lord Knaresfield,” Holmes muttered. “Sponsor of the wager.”

Thumbs in the pockets of his waistcoat, fingers splayed over his fob watch chain, Lord Knaresfield proceeded to expatiate on his personal accomplishments at some length: how he had worked his way up from barrow boy to newspaper magnate; how he had been raised in a house with no running water and now lived in a Georgian mansion with fountains on the lawn; how as a child he had had to share a bedroom with seven siblings but as an adult owned more bedrooms than he could count.

“If I speak without humility,” he said at one point during his peroration, “it is because I know what it is to be humble, and I did not like it. I am still at heart a working-class lad from the Dales, but I am also the millionaire you see before you who relishes the status and comforts his life’s labours have brought him.”

“I’m not sure how much more of this I can take,” I said
sotto voce
to Holmes.

“Let him brag,” came the reply. “It means it will be all the more entertaining when he has to hand over a lump sum of his hard-earned money to me.”

“I do not back a cause lightly,” Lord Knaresfield said. “But I believe Malcolm Quantock’s invention to be one worth supporting. I’m all in favour of entrepreneurship. I’m also all in favour of great leaps in technology. The good professor appears to offer both, and if I can in any way help publicise his work through my involvement, it is so much better for all of us. Now, I see we have amongst us a guest whose presence is an ornament even in this illustrious company.”

He gestured towards Holmes. All heads swivelled in our direction.

“None other than the great Sherlock Holmes himself, who has joined us from London and is doubtless as keen as we are to see the Thinking Engine in action.”

“Your servant, sir,” said Holmes with a bow which most would have deemed sincere but which I could tell contained a modicum of irony.

“I have it on good authority, Mr Holmes,” said his lordship, “that you have taken the time and trouble to look into the tragic business over in Jericho.”

“I have practised due diligence, yes.”

“And have you arrived at a solution to the mystery?”

“I have.”

“Pray do not reveal it yet. First we must set the Thinking Engine going. Professor?”

It wasn’t until then that I noticed a small man loitering at one edge of the black curtain. He had chubby features and thick-lensed spectacles, with a somewhat distracted air about him. This, of course, was Professor Quantock. Unlike his fellow academics, he was dressed for the occasion in just a plain tweed suit. One hand fluttered like a moth as he responded to Lord Knaresfield’s prompt.

“Y-yes,” he stammered. “Absolutely. Set it g-g-going.”

Quantock disappeared behind the curtain, and presently we heard the churn of a motor starting up. A smell of burning petroleum reached our nostrils as the noise of pistons pumping and drive belts whirring echoed around the enclosed space.

Then came another sound, a ripple of metallic clicks and ticks, like the workings of a thousand clocks operating at once. The curtain was drawn back, and there before us it stood: the Thinking Engine.

I once saw one of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engines on display at the Science Museum. I can recall marvelling at its complexity – all those regimented columns of rods, wheels and gears set within an oblong frame, intricate in the extreme – while finding myself not entirely capable of understanding just what it was supposed to do, no matter how many times I read the explanatory text on the card mounted next to the exhibit. It had calculating powers far in excess of any man’s, that much I could glean. A piece of arithmetic which might take a human brain several hours to perform, it could complete in minutes.

Compared to that device, however, the Thinking Engine was of a whole order of magnitude greater, as like it as a whale is to a dolphin.

It filled the far end of the room, occupying hundreds of cubic feet. Its total dimensions were those of three or four omnibuses, I would say, and it comprised a cage-like structure packed solid with moving components. Everywhere one looked, there was a multiplicity of steel and brass parts, all slotting together with an uncanny, wondrous fitness. Wheels were spinning, cogs meshing, rods revolving, rising and falling. So much was happening at once, the eye could scarcely take it in. Sometimes the activity went in waves, like wind across a cornfield. At other times a substantial section of the Engine’s innards would come to a standstill, while all around it continued in frenzy.

There were muted gasps from the audience of assembled dignitaries, and I saw the journalists, to a man, making frantic notes. Forgotten were the loud rumble of the motor and the Engine’s clattering clamour. Forgotten too was the stench of fuel, the exhaust fumes of which were being funnelled up via a pipe to a fan-light window at street level and thence into the outside world, so as to avoid choking all and sundry in the room. Our focus was solely on the feat of engineering in front of us, that great block of machinery more complicated and convoluted than anything any of us had yet beheld, so full of interdependent pieces that it resembled in some strange way an organism or a forest in full leaf.

I aimed a sidelong glance at Holmes. His face was impassive but his eyes betrayed a scintilla of fascination. Inspector Tomlinson, for his part, was moved to mutter, “Well, blow me down.”

A faint, belated patter of applause passed through the crowd. It was generous but guarded. People were impressed by the Thinking Engine itself but were reserving judgement. Now they wanted to know if it was as ingenious as it looked.

“Th-thank you,” said Professor Quantock. His stammer, which I had initially ascribed to nervousness, turned out to be a permanent affliction, although it receded the longer he talked and the deeper he got into his subject. “What you are l-looking at is the f-fruit of a full year’s work, days of concentrated toil, n-nights too. I have ad-adopted many of the p-principles devised by the late Mr Babbage, both for his D-Difference Engine and his proposed An-An-Analytical Engine. I b-believe I have improved on his work in ev-every respect, not least the addition of a motor to deliver operating propulsion rather than a crank handle.

“F-furthermore, I have increased the output level by some significant factor. The Difference Engine was designed to perform logarithmic and tr-trigonometric functions using sets of polynomial coefficients in order to produce tables of figures that are as acc-accurate as they are extensive. My Thinking Engine g-goes far beyond that. Its computational range encompasses values of twenty digits or more, and its speed of iteration is of a kind that Babbage could only have d-dreamed of.

“I have achieved this in part by switching from the decimal system to binary. My Engine utilises d-discrete packets of binary data working in c-concert so as to… so as to…”

His voice trailed off. He seemed to have lost his train of thought. He blinked owlishly at his audience through his spectacles, searching for what next to say.

Lord Knaresfield stepped in.

“What my learned associate is trying to tell you,” said his lordship, “is that this contraption of his does not just look spectacular, it is spectacular. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Professor? Begin the practical demonstration.”

“Y-yes. Of course. R-right.” Quantock pulled up a stool and sat before a lectern-like unit which projected from the front of the Thinking Engine. He addressed himself to a spindly set of typewriter keys and started pecking at them with his fingertips. “I am providing the Thinking Engine with every scrap of information we have about the Jericho murders. Date, place, time, names. This the Engine c-converts into raw numbers, which it then interprets according to certain built-in protocols. I have previously installed comprehensive data r-relating to Oxford and its g-geography and people. Everything there is to know about the city is contained herein, accessible for retrieval. The Engine is a s-storehouse of local knowledge, as crammed as any encyclopaedia. When required, it will winnow through the statistics, sorting the wheat from the chaff, until it finds what it n-needs.”

He tapped at the keys for several minutes, then thrust himself back from the machine and folded his arms.

“It shouldn’t take l-long,” he said, drumming fingers on forearm.

The Thinking Engine began to whir and rattle more agitatedly than before, some of its components flickering as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. The volume of noise increased, until it seemed to drill right through to one’s bones. Many present covered their ears. The floor vibrated underfoot. It was hard not to feel as though we were watching some chthonic force at play, a preternatural energy harnessed by man like the fictional “Vril” in Bulwer-Lytton’s
The Coming Race
.

Gradually the racket diminished. The Thinking Engine grew calm, its movements slowing from their frenetic peak.

Then, with the onset of this relative tranquillity, a tongue of tickertape extruded from the machine not far from Quantock’s typing station. He waited until it had finished spooling out before tearing it free from the slot.

“Would your l-lordship care to do the honours?”

“Happy to.”

Lord Knaresfield took the length of tickertape from the professor, cast an eye over it and said, “The Thinking Engine has made its determination, as follows.”

After a murmur of anticipation from the audience had run its course, he continued.

“It says here, plain as day, that the murderer is one Nahum Grainger.”

“Hardly a surprise,” grumbled Inspector Tomlinson under his breath. “After all this fuss, that’s it? That’s all the thing does? State the obvious?”

“The who of the case,” said Holmes, “is of less pertinence than the how.”

“Well, indeed. Yes.”

“According to the Thinking Engine,” said Lord Knaresfield, “Grainger used the communal attic space that links the houses in his street to travel from his neighbour’s house to his own undetected.”

“Can’t have,” said Tomlinson. “We checked up there. No way through.”

“He disguised his passage through the attics…”

The flamboyant newspaper tycoon paused for dramatic effect.

“By bricking up the opening he used after he had used it.”

Tomlinson slapped his forehead. “Curse me for an idiot. Of course! A bricklayer.”

“The murder weapon, a boathook,” said Lord Knaresfield, still reading, “was selected for the purpose of misdirecting the police by pointing the finger of suspicion at a non-existent bargee. And there we have it.” He directed his gaze at Holmes. “How about it, Mr Holmes? Does the Thinking Engine’s verdict jibe with your own?”

“In every degree,” my friend said tightly. “The crime was no spur-of-the-moment deed. Grainger planned it out in advance, laying the groundwork carefully. He would have placed all the items he needed – bricks, Portland cement, trowel, bucket of water for mixing – in the attic above his house beforehand. Then, having gone to stay overnight with his friend Judd in order to give himself an apparently unimpeachable alibi, he crawled through to his house, descended from the attic trapdoor, and cold-bloodedly killed his family. After that he spent the next hour or so walling up the gaps on either side of the chimney. Quick work for one with his professional skills. The freshness of the mortar between the bricks suggested to me that the partition was relatively new. It had not been smoothly trowelled on the side facing the Graingers’ house, indicating that the work must have been carried out from the
other
side. Grainger would then have left the Judds’ the next morning carrying the tools of his trade, and no one would be any the wiser. May I examine that piece of tickertape, your lordship?”

“By all means.”

Lord Knaresfield handed the strip of paper over and Holmes smoothed it out and perused the sentences that had been hammered into it by the Thinking Engine’s letter wheel.

“Well?”

“I cannot gainsay anything I see here.” Holmes’s lips were pursed, his eyebrows knitted. “It does seem that the Thinking Engine has appraised the situation correctly in every regard.”

Lord Knaresfield let out a laugh that was in part a roar. “So I did not venture my five hundred pounds recklessly. The Engine truly is a miracle of science.”

Holmes’s expression became even darker and more pained. “That would be the obvious conclusion to draw.”

“Then it’s settled. I thank you, sir, for participating in this most intriguing experiment of ours. Professor Quantock? Step forward, man. Take a bow. You have done the remarkable. You have built a machine that is every bit as intelligent as any of us.”

The timid mathematician did as bidden, shuffling to the fore and blushing as loud applause broke out.

“R-really, it was nothing,” he said. “It wasn’t wholly m-m-my doing. I have only gone along paths laid out before me, following the lead of others.”

His protestations were lost in the tumult of approbation. The journalists crowded round him, bombarding him with questions – all except Slater, who turned and stared at Holmes instead, gloating. He held up his notebook, poised his pencil over it, then brought the point forcibly down onto the page. That was all, a simple gesture, but there was no misconstruing its meaning.

A full stop.

In other words:
That’s you done, Sherlock Holmes
.

Holmes departed from the University Galleries in haste and with no observance of the niceties, no gracious words of congratulation for Quantock, no goodbyes for anyone. Tomlinson and I went with him, but we might as well have not been there for all the heed he paid us. He stalked across Beaumont Street and directly into the Randolph. I tried to waylay him in the lobby, but he shook off my hand with a peremptory grunt and hastened up to his room, taking the stairs three at a time.