Authors: Laurie R. King
“That one, yes. I have not demanded of you an expertise in the study of London, but as you know, I spent most of my life there before I retired. I breathed her air, I trod her ground, and I knew her like—as a husband knows his wife.” I did not react to the simile, despite the Hebraic overtones to the verb, “know.” “Some of her soils I can identify by eye, others need a microscope. The soil I found in the cab and on the washbasin was a not-uncommon variety. My own lodgings in Baker Street were built on top of such a soil, but it crops up in several places, each distinguishable one from the other only by very close examination under a strong lens.”
“And the mud on Small Boots came from Baker Street.”
“How did you know?” he said with a smile.
“Lucky guess,” I answered drily. He raised an eyebrow.
“Low jokes do not suit you, Russell.”
“Sorry. But what does the fact that she chose to walk through Baker Street before going to the park have to do with it?”
“You tell me,” he demanded, in a thin echo from a spring day long, long ago.
Obediently I set to reviewing the entire episode, running my mind over the facts like a tongue over teeth, searching for a gap in the smooth, hard surfaces. The mud, which was on the path, in the cab, on the seats (On the seats? my mind whispered), and in the Ladies’ (grotesque and creative sense of humour) on the floor, in the washbasin (the basin? That means—)
“It was on her hand, the mud. Her left hand, and the right boot.” I stopped, disbelieving, and looked at Holmes. His grey eyes were positively dancing. “She replenished the mud, to keep the path obvious. This whole episode—it was deliberately staged. She wants you to know that she was there, and she put the Baker Street mud on her shoe to thumb her nose at you. She even washed her hands of it in the Ladies’ to leave you that datum, if you hadn’t already worked out that he was a she. I can’t believe it—no one could be mad enough to mock you like that. What kind of game is she playing?”
“A decidedly unpleasant sort of a game, with three bombs and a death thus far, but I agree, the style of humour is a match with the clothing parcel and the exploding beehive. One is forced to wonder…” he mused, and his voice drifted away.
“Yes?” I encouraged.
“Nothing, Russell. Merely speculation without data, a fruitless exercise at the best of times. I was reflecting that the only truly superior mind I have encountered among the criminal classes was Moriarty, which ill equips me for the possibility of subtlety in our current foe. Were I quite certain of, for example, the intent of the marksman who shot at us in Lestrade’s office, or of Dickson’s efforts, or even…Yes, I suppose…” He drifted off again.
“Holmes, do I understand you aright? That the actions against us were not actually intended to be deadly?”
“Oh, deadly, certainly, though perhaps not merely deadly. But yes, you understand me. I mistrust a series of failures when the author otherwise gives signs of great competence. Accidents are not unknown, but I dislike coincidences, and I deny out of hand the existence of a guardian angel. Yes,” he said thoughtfully, and I winced as I heard his next phrase coming, “it is quite a pretty problem.”
“Quite a three-piper, eh Holmes?” I said in hearty jocularity. He could be the most irritating individual.
“No, no, not yet. Nicotinic mediation serves to clarify the known facts, not pull them out of thin air. I do not feel we have all the facts.”
“Very well, but surely you can speculate in generalities. If she didn’t wish to kill us, what are her intentions?”
“I did not say she does not intend to kill us, just possibly not yet. If for the sake of hypothesis we assume that what has occurred over the course of the last few days is more or less what she had in mind, then we are left with three possible inferences: one, that she does not want us all actually dead at this moment; two, that she wishes us to be fully aware of an intelligent, dedicated, resourceful, and implacable enemy breathing almost literally down our collars; and three, that she wants us either to go to ground or leave England.”
“And isn’t that what we’re doing?”
“Indeed,” he said complacently.
“I—” I stopped, shut my mouth, waited.
“Her actions tell me that it is what she wants me to do. She knows me well enough to assume that I will perceive her intent and refuse to cooperate. Therefore I shall do what she wants.”
I decided finally that the brandy was to blame for the dullness of my logical faculties, for though I was certain there was a basic fallacy in his reasoning, I could not put my finger on precisely the juncture. I shook my head and plunged on.
“Why not just disappear for a few days? It is really necessary to…”
“Take flight?” he supplied. “Beat a hasty retreat? Run away? You’re quite right. This morning I should have agreed that a few days’ retreat to Mycroft’s flat or one of my bolt-holes was sufficient for regrouping.” (I shuddered here at the thought of being confined with Holmes in the Storage Room for any length of time.) “But today’s events have proven me wrong. Not the clothing parcel—that was a clever joke. Even the shoes, though sinister, could be got around. But—that bullet. It nearly hit you. I believe it was meant to,” he said, and although he did not look at me, the control in his voice and the small twitch in the right side of his mouth spoke volumes of the rage and apprehension this threat set off in him. To cover his gaffe he rose in a jerk and began to stride up and down, his hands behind him as if tucked beneath the tails of a frock coat, the smouldering pipe he still gripped endangering his clothing. Words tumbled out of him as he paced, spoken in his high voice as if berating himself.
“I begin to feel like a piece of driftwood tumbling about between waves and sand, snatched up and tossed from one place to another. It is a most disconcerting feeling. Were I alone I might almost be tempted to let myself be tumbled, just to see where I washed up. That, however, is not an option.
“What then are the options? Offensive—an all-out attack? On what? Beating a mist with a cricket bat. Defence? How does one defend against a mirror-image? She has read Watson’s tales, and my bee book, the monographs on soil and footprints—not available to the general public—and God knows what else. A woman! She has turned my own words against me, caused me considerable mental and physical distress, kept me off my balance for five whole days, chased and harried me across my home territory until I am forced to go to ground—to sea. Do you know—” he broke off, and whirled around to shake an outraged pipe stem at me, “this…person has even penetrated into one of my bolt-holes! Yes, today, there were signs…. I still cannot believe that a woman can have done this, deducing my deductions, plotting my moves for me, and all the time giving the impression that to her it is a deadly but effortless and highly amusing game. Even Moriarty did not go so far, and he was a master without parallel. The mind, capable of such
coups de maître. Maîtresse.
” He stopped, and straightened his shoulders with a jerk as if to settle his clothing back into place.
“A most gratifying challenging opponent, this,” he said in a calmer voice, and lit his pipe, which had gone out. When it was going again he continued in a completely different vein.
“Russell, I have been considering your words of this morning. I do occasionally take the thoughts of others into account, you know. Particularly yours. I have to admit that you were completely justified in your protest. You are an adult, and by your very nature I was quite wrong to treat you as if you were Watson. I apologise.”
I was, as one might imagine, completely flabbergasted, and highly suspicious, but he went on as if discussing the weather.
“Today while I was on my distressingly fruitless quest for information through the human sewers of fair London town, it occurred to me that the matter of your future has come to a head. This peculiar…present situation has forced it, but it should have come sooner or later. The question I am faced with is, what does one do with a student who has passed every examination laid before her? Eventually she must be removed from
in statu pupularis
and allowed to assume the rights and responsibilities of maturity. In your case every paper I’ve set you, every test, up to the viva voce question of the mud on our opponent’s footwear, has come up an alpha.
“I have, then, a limited number of options. Considering the gravity of this particular case, I feel I should be justified in removing you from the firing line as I did Watson, until I can clear it up. No, do not interrupt. Much to my displeasure, I find I cannot bring myself to attempt that. For one thing, the logistics of keeping you under control are too daunting.
“It has been on my mind since Wales that an apprentice kept from her journeyman’s papers will spoil. Faced with this, what for lack of a better term I shall call a case, I have two choices: I can maintain your ‘apprenticeship’ (as you yourself called it), or I can grant you your Mastery. Having never been one for half-measures, I see no point in delaying the inevitable. Therefore…” He stopped, took his pipe from his mouth, looked into the bowl, put it back into his mouth, reached for the pouch in his pocket, and I very nearly screamed at him with the tension of being torn between “Thank God, here it comes, at last!” and “Oh, God, here it comes, he’s sending me away.”
He opened the tobacco pouch and dug from it a small, much-folded scrap of onionskin, dropped it in front of me, went to the ashtray clipped to the table, and began to scrape the dottle from his pipe while I unfolded the paper. On it, in five lines of minute, cramped, antique, and graphologically cryptic script, were written:
Egypt—Alexandria—Sayeed Abu Bahadr
Greece—Thessaloníki—Thomas Catalepo
Italy—Ravenna—Fr. Domenico
Palestine—Jaffa—Ali & Mahmoud Hazr
Morocco—Rabat—Peter Thomas
Each of the personal names was followed by a series of numbers that looked like a radio frequency. I looked up, but Holmes was at the window again, his unrevealing back to me.
“I have said before this time that I regard it as stupidity rather than courage to overlook a danger that presses as close as this one has. Even my critics will not accuse me of stupidity, else I should not have reached my present age after a lifetime of the rough-and-tumble. I remember vividly, as if it were last week rather than two and a half decades ago, sitting in Watson’s chair and admitting to him that London was too hot for my safety. The current state of affairs is…remarkably similar.
“The admission then caused me some shame. But, that was half a lifetime ago, and since then I have learnt, slowly, and painfully, that time and distance can prove a powerful weapon. It is not one that comes naturally to my hand, I admit. I much prefer direct attack, complete immersion, and a quick finish. However, there is much to be said for the occasional, judicious, prodigious expenditure of time.”
“What sort of time are you thinking of here, Holmes?” I asked warily. His most famous hiatus had lasted three years; that would certainly drive a cart and horses through my University degree.
“Not terribly long. Enough to instill doubts in our opponent—Was she wrong after all? Did I just choose to vanish? Where on earth am I?—and to allow Mycroft and the elephantine Scotland Yard to sweep up the data and begin to sift it over. By the time we return” (we! I snatched at) “the momentum will have been taken from her. She will be furious, and careless, with the knowledge that we have removed ourselves from her rules, that we have opted out of the traditional and expected program of threat, challenge, response, and counterattack.
“For better or for worse, you are in this case.” My brief surge of triumph was quickly submerged in a backwash of conflicting questions and feelings: Was he fleeing because he was saddled with me? And what on earth did he have in mind? Tibet? “What is more, you are in it as, God help us, my partner, or as near to such a creature as I am ever likely to see. Given the circumstances, I have no choice: I have to trust you.”
I could think of no sensible response to this, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
“What should you have done if I had walked through my lodgings door the other night?”
“Hmmm. I wonder. Perhaps unfortunately, that question does not pertain. Here we stand; I can no other. And as a means of noting the fact of your accession to the lofty rights and privileges of partnership, I shall grant you a boon: I shall allow you to make the next decision. Where shall we go to keep from harm’s way for a bit? Do you know, Russell,” he said in a voice that verged on playful, “I don’t believe I’ve had a holiday in twenty-five years.”
In the past seventy-two hours I had seen a bomb on my door and the results of another on Holmes’ back, spent thirteen hard, tense hours slogging towards London, waved a gun at Holmes, seen my first major attempt at high fashion reduced to shreds, been ill-fed, under-slept, half-frozen, and shot at, witnessed Holmes in more perturbation than ever before, and now this wild swing from matter-of-fact confidences to near-teasing merriment. It was all a bit much.
I looked down at the paper in my hand, two inches of nearly transparent onionskin and its five lines of writing.
“Are these our only options?” I asked.
“By no means. Captain Jones is quite willing to steam around in circles if we ask him, or to head for South America or to the northern lights. There are few limits, although if you wish to try breaking the bank at Monte Carlo I shall have to arrange a discreet transfer of funds. Just avoid the United Kingdom or New York for six or eight weeks.”
“Two months! Holmes, I can’t be away for two months, I’ll be sent down if I miss that much time. And my aunt will have the army out. And Mrs. Hudson, and Watson…”
“Mrs. Hudson will embark tomorrow on a cruise.”
“A cruise! Mrs. Hudson?”
“To visit her family in Australia, I believe. And you need not concern yourself with Dr. Watson, either; his greatest danger will be gout from high living, where Mycroft has him secreted. Your college and tutors will grant you an exeat, while you attend to your urgent family business. Your aunt will be told that you are away.”