The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (20 page)

Drawn by the sundown scents of frying steak in river-front pantries, a small brown dog came trotting past along the bricks and disappeared across Twelfth.

The murder weapon was metal, of considerable more weight than the piece of glass that the Brown—that Charlie Gribble has offered as exhibit A. No, this weapon—I leaned against the
great, comforting tree and waved my crutch at them—this weapon, I said, was metal and tubular and of great weight. In fact, I went on, I believe this crutch of mine will, upon examination, prove to exactly fit the wound.

The dog barked at the screen door. Steaks and homefries and wilted-lettuce and gravy haunted the river wind.

No one spoke. I broke the silence.

Gentlemen, I said, I have given you your murderer. I have not confessed—I have irrefutably demonstrated. In the method of the canon—the technique of the Master.

I paused like a happy child about to leap a crying, country brook.

May I have the Persian Slipper? I whispered almost coquettishly. In perpetuity now.

The screen door slammed. But the supper sweetness dreamed sweetly on the wind and I could smell my azalea, too.

Yes, snapped the Brown Recluse. It's up in the hotel. At what used to be 221
B
. On the mantel.

Will you get it for me?

No, damn you. Get it for yourself.

My progress from the big elm and up the town that sundown evening is legend now. A dozen feet behind me purred Ory's Plymouth cruiser. Lord, did they think I'd make a run for it? It took me one hour and fifteen minutes. Word spread fast. Kids and old people, too, came out on porches and stared over iced-tea glasses at a middle-aged cripple slowly hobbling up brick sidewalks toward her freedom. Oh, the poor fools. Didn't they know I had won—won, at last?

The hardest part was making it up three flights of those hotel steps. And the long hallway with a door open and a poor young colored maid making up a room. I got there at last. I took the Persian Slipper down from its resting place on the mantel, under the patriotic VR. I sank into the Morris chair and, after a long spell, while all of them stood in the hall watching and craning their necks to see, I slipped my expensive hand-lasted shoe off my lovely foot. I wriggled my toes in the almost dark. I put on the Persian Slipper.

A strange thing has happened in the year since that night. I am sitting alone in my little room in a khaki, state uniform. The walls of the room are brown. Everything visible is some shade of brown. There is even a brownish cast to the beams of sunlight that manage to poke through my small window. Perhaps I am brown now, too—I have no mirror here. Only one spot of color blazes like a jewel in that dustbin of a place. Jade-green felt that curls into a cornucopia at the end, like a sweet, subtle pastry; bright sequins of lavender and mauve and cosmos blue, a glitter as of rubies and amethysts from the little gems of paste.

And I am free! No longer am I a flower pinned to earth on one leg—a stork incapable of delivering real babies. I am free. And that's because the Persian Slipper is touched with enchantment and makes it be London out there when the fog comes up. When the fog comes up and makes it be Soho and Limehouse in all that fleecy Dickens world of night. Because you see with my marvelous Persian Slipper I can browse and wander through that strip of Thames just east of Mansion House. And every night—when the fog is up—you'll find me there. If you look.

O, do come looking—do find me in that fog some night!

We can sit till morning and tell each other tales of Sherlock Holmes so wondrous that even he will not believe!

Or, if you prefer, we'll go to haunt a spider.

Poor Charlie Gribble. No one believes him when he tells them he's shrinking.

OF THE MANY
elements of a full life for which Sir Kingsley William Amis (1922–1995) is famous, drinking may well head the list, though womanizing doesn't trail by very much. The fact that he may be the leading British humorist of the second half of the twentieth century should not be forgotten, however, nor his rank (by the London
Times
) as the ninth greatest British writer since World War II.

He was a bestselling novelist with more than two dozen books to his credit, including the first,
Lucky Jim
(1954), which made a great impact both critically and with more than respectable international sales. While regarded as one of the Grand Old Men of British letters late in life, famous as one of the great satiric writers of the twentieth century, he also was a great aficionado of popular fiction, especially mystery fiction and even more especially James Bond. He wrote
Colonel Sun
(1968), a Bond novel, under the pseudonym Robert Markham, and two nonfiction books about 007:
The James Bond Dossier
(1965) and
The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007
(1965) under the pseudonym Lt.-Col. William (“Bill”) Tanner. Other mystery novels written under his own name are
The Anti-Death League
(1966),
The Riverside Villas Murder
(1973),
Russian Hide-and-Seek
(1980), and
The Crime of the Century
(1987).

“The Darkwater Hall Mystery” was first published in the May 1978 issue of
Playboy
; it was first published in book form in a chapbook,
The Darkwater Hall Mystery
(Edinburgh, Tragara Press, 1978). Its first commercial book publication was in
Collected Short Stories
(London, Hutchinson, 1980).

ON CONSULTING MY
notes, their paper grown yellow and their ink brown with the passage of almost forty years, I find it to have been in the closing days of July, 1885, that my friend Sherlock Holmes fell victim, more completely perhaps than at any other time, to the innate melancholy of his temperament. The circumstances were not propitious. London was stiflingly hot, without a drop of rain to lay the dust which, at intervals, a damp wind swept up Baker Street. The exertions caused Holmes by the affair of the Wallace-Bardwell portfolio, and the subsequent entrapment of the elusive Count Varga, had taken their toll of him. His grey eyes, always sharp and piercing, acquired a positively hectic brightness, and the thinness of his hawklike nose seemed accentuated. He smoked incessantly, getting through an ounce or more of heavy shag tobacco in a single day.

As his depression became blacker, he would sit in his purple dressing-gown with his fiddle across his knee and draw from it strange harmonies, sometimes sonorous, sometimes puzzling, more often harsh and disagreeable. Strange too, and quite as disagreeable, were the odours given off by his chemical experiments; I did not inquire their purpose. When he brought out his hair-trigger pistol and proceeded to add elaborate serifs to the patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks in the wall opposite his arm-chair, my impatience and my concern together dictated action. Nothing short of a complete rest, in conditions of comfort and ease such as I could not possibly provide, would restore my friend to health. I moved swiftly; telegrams were exchanged; within little more than twelve hours Sherlock Holmes was on his way to Hurlstone in Sussex, the seat of that Reginald Musgrave whose family treasures he had so brilliantly rediscovered some five years earlier. Thus it was that events conspired to embroil me in what I must describe as a truly singular adventure.

It came about in the following fashion. That same afternoon, I had just returned from visiting a patient when the housekeeper announced the arrival of a Lady Fairfax. The name at once stirred something in my memory, but I had had no time to apprehend it before my visitor had crossed the threshold of the sitting-room. There entered a blonde young woman of the most unusual beauty and distinction of feature. I was at once aware in her of a discomposure obviously not at all derived from the sweltering weather, to which indeed her bearing proclaimed utter indifference. I encouraged this lovely but troubled creature to be seated and to divulge her purpose.

“It was Mr. Sherlock Holmes whom I came to see, but I understand he has gone away and is not expected back for a fortnight,” she began.

“That is so.”

“Can he not be recalled?”

I shook my head. “Quite out of the question.”

“But I come on a matter of the utmost urgency. A life is in danger.”

“Lady Fairfax,” said I, “Holmes has been overworking and must have rest and a change of air. I speak not only as his friend but as his physician.
I fear I cannot be influenced by any other consideration.”

The lady sighed and lowered her gaze into her lap. “May I at least acquaint you with the main facts of the matter?”

“Do so by all means, if you feel it will be of service to you.”

“Very well. My husband is Sir Harry Fairfax, the sixth baronet, of Darkwater Hall in Wiltshire. In his capacity as a magistrate, he had brought before him last year a man known locally as Black Ralph. The charge was poaching. There was no doubt of his guilt; he had erred before in this way and in others, and my husband's sentence of twelve months in gaol was lenient to a degree. Now, Black Ralph is at liberty again, and word has reached our servants that he means to revenge himself on my husband—to kill him.”

“Kill him?” I ejaculated.

“Nothing less, Dr. Watson,” said Lady Fairfax, clasping and unclasping her white-gloved hands as she spoke. “My husband scouts these threats, calling Black Ralph a harmless rascal with a taste for rhetoric. But the fellow is no mere drunken reprobate such as one finds in every village; I have seen him and studied him, and I tell you he is malignant, and in all likelihood mentally deranged as well.”

I was at a loss. My visitor was by now extremely agitated, her vivid lips atremble and her fine blue eyes flashing fire. “He sounds most menacing,” said I, “and I understand your desire for assistance. I chance to know a certain Inspector Lestrade at Scotland Yard who would be happy to lend you all the aid he could.”

“Thank you, but my husband refuses to go to the police and has forbidden me to do so.”

“I see.”

“There must, however, be other consulting detectives in London whom I might approach. Perhaps you know of some of them?”

“Well,” said I after a short space, “it's true that in the last year or so a number of—what shall I call them?—rivals of Sherlock Holmes have sprung up. But they're very slight and unsatisfactory fellows. I could not in honesty recommend a single one.”

There was a silence. The lady sighed once more and at last turned to me. “Dr. Watson, will
you
help me?”

I had half expected this preposterous suggestion, but was none the better armed against it when it came. “I? I am quite unfit. I'm a simple medical man, Lady Fairfax, not a detective.”

“But you have worked with Mr. Holmes on his previous cases. You are his close friend and associate. You must have learned a great deal from him.”

“I think I can say I know his methods, but there are aspects of his activities of which I am altogether ignorant.”

“That would not prevent you from talking to my husband, from making him see the peril he faces. Nor from approaching Black Ralph, warning him, offering him money. Dr. Watson, I know you think me overwrought, fanciful, perhaps even deluded. Is it not the case, that you think so?”

This was uncommonly and uncomfortably shrewd, not only as an observation, but also as a turn of tactics. I made some motion intended to be evasive.

“Thank you for being so honest,” was the smiling response. “Now I may be all you suppose, but I lay no obligation upon you, and would two or three comfortable days out of London in this weather be so great a burden?”

Sherlock Holmes once observed that the fair sex was my department. I never fully took his meaning, but if it was to the effect that I enjoyed any ascendancy in that sphere, he misreckoned. Otherwise I should scarcely have found myself, the evening after the interview just described, alighting at a remote railway halt some miles from Westbury.

At once a tall, broad-shouldered man in black accosted me, mentioning my name in a foreign accent. He was an obvious Spaniard—by name Carlos, as I was later to learn—with the dignified deportment of that race and an address that contrived to be at once courteous and proud. Courtesy
was to the fore while he introduced himself as butler to Sir Harry Fairfax and installed me and my luggage in the smart wagonette that waited in the station yard; and yet his sombre looks bespoke a temperament to which the keeping of pledges and the avenging of slights were of deadly concern. Not that I took much note at the time; I was pleasantly struck by the baronet's civility in sending an upper servant to meet me, and soothed by the unhurried drive through the leafy lanes, where, as the shadows lengthened, a cooling breeze blew. I looked forward, too, to renewing my acquaintance with the charming Lady Fairfax, and, with a lively quickening of curiosity, to uncovering whatever might be the nature of the threat to her husband.

The carriage mounted a crest in the road and these agreeable feelings were soon dissipated. We had come to the edge of the chalky upland that forms most of the county and entered a region of clay and rock. Some half a mile off stood a tall house of grey stone mantled with ivy and of a design that even at this distance seemed ill-contrived. To one side of it lay a plantation of trees with foliage of a deep, almost bluish hue uncommon in England; on the other there wound a stream or small river. I knew at once that the house was our destination, and as soon as a curve in the stream brought the murky, weed-clogged flood close to the road, saw the force of its name. A moment later I was almost spilled from my seat by the wild shying of the pair of cobs that drew the wagonette. The cause was not far to seek—a human figure of indescribable menace lurking in the hedgerow. I caught a glimpse of a hairy fist shaken, of rotten teeth bared in a snarl, no more, but I would have been sure that it was Black Ralph I had seen even if the Spaniard's dark eye had not fixed me with a sufficiently eloquent look.

Darkwater Hall was no more prepossessing at close quarters. Weathering showed it to be not of recent erection, but its bulging windows and squat chimneys belonged to no period or style I had ever encountered. The interior was comparatively conventional. Carlos took me to a more than adequate bedroom and quickly fetched me ample hot water, so I was able to make a very tolerable change and go to greet my hosts in renewed spirits.

With his fresh complexion, steady eye and open, unassuming manner, Sir Harry Fairfax was one of the finest types of English country gentlemen. I judged him to be about thirty years old. His brother Miles resembled him in age and nothing else, a sallow, sneering young man probably addicted to cigarettes and strong waters. From neither brother did I obtain what I had hoped the meeting would furnish, some clue or indication, something that would force out of the subconsciousness of my mind whatever it was that had stirred there when I heard the name of Fairfax; reference books had proved useless. For the moment, the memory stayed buried.

As before, I had no time to ponder the point, for my hostess, in a gown of azure velvet that showed off the brilliance of her eyes, steered me towards the fifth member of the party. Him I identified as an Army man (from the set of his shoulders) who had served some years in the tropics (from his deep tan), but whose career had not prospered (from his disappointed air), and was somewhat tickled to hear him introduced as Captain Bradshaw of the Assam Light Horse. No one who had failed to gain his majority by the age of forty-five, which I estimated Bradshaw to have reached, could be called a successful soldier. I hid a smile at the thought of the “Excellent, Watson!” which a well-known voice might have breathed into my ear, had its owner been present, and took to conversation.

“I was a sort of soldier myself when I was a youngster,” said I.

“Oh yes? Where did you serve?”

“Afghanistan.”

“You saw some action there, I take it.”

“Not the sort that a fighting soldier sees, but enough. I was wounded and at last invalided out.”

“What infernal luck.”

“You're on leave, no doubt.”

“Awaiting retirement,” said Bradshaw in a tone as dejected as his bearing.

Miles Fairfax now cocked his unkempt head at me. “Welcome to Darkwater Hall, Dr. Watson. Life here may strike you as a trifle dull and rustic after the bustle and polish of London, but believe me, it has its points of interest.”

“Indeed.”

“I presume you're a medical doctor, not one who professes law or divinity?”

“Medicine's my trade, yes.”

“Then the following fact, omitted by my brother when he introduced us, might amuse you. Although unlike in every possible way, he and I are twins.”

“That's not so surprising,” said I. “Many pairs of twins are no more alike than ordinary brothers and sisters, and we know how they can differ.”

“Assuredly,” said he at his most sarcastic. “Is it true, Doctor, that twins can be born several or even many hours apart?”

“It is.”

“Not so in our case—eh, Harry? Twenty minutes was all that separated our respective arrivals in this world. But it was enough.”

His sister-in-law put a gently restraining hand on his arm, but the fellow shook it off with a roughness that, had it been my place to do so, I should have considered correcting. I was now morally certain he was intoxicated.

“Yes,” he went on with a growl, “twenty minutes settled the disposal of the baronetcy, the house, the estate, the money. God's will, what?”

“At least, Mr. Fairfax,” said I, “it's evident you're a good loser.”

That shot went home, and it silenced him for a while, but I was relieved when Carlos announced dinner, thus effecting a change of scene and mood. It proved to be a change not wholly for the better, in that the spacious room in which I now found myself was dominated by a most outlandish carving or relief occupying the section of wall above the fireplace. It was of some dark wood and I could not be sure what it portrayed, except that in one corner a human figure, half naked, was being bound to a post by others wearing hooded robes, while further off I thought I saw a scaffold. All in all, it made an unequivocally distasteful impression upon me. The fare, however, was palatable enough, and the service most adroit and pleasant, provided by Carlos and a young woman I learned was his wife, named Dolores. With her raven hair, creamy skin and deep brown eyes she was in striking contrast to her mistress, but female beauty takes many forms.

I was in the midst of recounting, at the baronet's invitation, the full facts of the strange affair at Stoke Moran, when Lady Fairfax gave an abrupt gasp and raised her hands to her throat. I followed her horrified gaze and spied, through a gap in the curtains, a face I had seen for a moment earlier that day, a face once more contorted with malice.

“Black Ralph! At the window!” I cried, and jumped up from my chair. Bradshaw was already on his feet, standing between the lady and the point where the intruder had appeared. Sir Harry and I had left the house within seconds, but, though we searched thoroughly the nearer part of the grounds, we returned empty-handed, much to Miles's scoffing amusement. Some time later, my host contrived to disengage me from the rest of the company, having imputed to me a desire to be shown the contents of his gun-room. He enjoyed some friendly amusement at my expense when I cautioned him to stay away from the windows there until I had drawn the curtains over them.