The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part II (25 page)

Sigerson offered his magnifying glass and the Inspector took a look.

“I dare say you are correct, Mr. Sigerson, but I don't see how this proves the rifles are missing, much less the serious plot you have alleged,” he said.

“You have to ask yourself, Inspector, why nails were substituted in the endpieces. The most rational explanation is that longer nails were necessary to contain something extra added to the ends of the crates. My surmise is that this something extra is lead which Patterson senior, the armourer, crafted in sheets to fit. This additional weight was necessary to compensate for rifles which had been removed.”

At this repeated allegation, Colonel Saunders erupted.

“This is a farrago of absurd suppositions and theories and I intend to expose it. Patterson, open this crate at once,” he ordered the carpenter.

“Yes, please do,” added Sigerson.

The cover was quickly off, revealing a top layer of three neatly arranged bundles. Despite the thick cloth swaddling, we could discern the tell-tale shape of a rifle.

“Go ahead, take one out and unwrap it for this gentleman,” the Colonel told Patterson.

In a moment, the young man held out for inspection a Martini-Henry rifle still shiny with protective grease from the factory.

Sigerson stepped forward. “Mr. Clarke, would you be so kind as to remove a bundle from the second layer and unwrap it for us.”

The Colonel moved so quickly that he eluded the outstretched arms of the Inspector and two constables. The third brought him down with a classic rugby tackle. When we looked round, Clarke was holding out a wooden replica of a Martini-Henry. Further investigation revealed that the crate had contained three actual rifles, nine replicas and sheets of lead in the endpieces.

“Copying the rifle stock in pine was a simple matter for a carpenter,” Sigerson said. “But he needed something ready-made in the shape of a barrel. I attempted without success to interest Mr. Evans in the absurdly large supply of wooden dowelling here.”

Inspector Wells was motioning his constables to take away the Pattersons and Colonel Saunders. “We will get the details of this plot from them back at the station, Mr. Sigerson.”

“I have no doubt that you will, Inspector. But there is something much more serious about which you will also want to question these men than theft and this half-baked plot, as it would be called in Devon.”

Without another word, Sigerson then led the entire company to that mostly empty drill practice room on the next floor.

“Here is where Constable O'Reilly was beaten to death, and these are some of the men who did it,” he announced with more emotion than he had shown previously. This was the story he then unfolded.

The constable was indeed on the job Monday night and he had followed one of his smuggling suspects to the Couillard Hotel. Sigerson matched soil from O'Reilly's boot to the mud sample from outside the inn. (“I have written a small monograph about soil identification,” he said.) Somehow the “Society” members drinking there concluded, erroneously, that the constable had tumbled to their plot. They overpowered him and took him to the Commissariat, where they roused the Pattersons in their living quarters.

Sigerson walked over to the wall and lifted out a ladderback chair. Then he gathered the top coil of rope from the corner.

“The constable was tied to this chair with that rope and systemically beaten to discover how much he knew. But it was all a terrible mistake. By the time the conspirators realized O'Reilly was following another trail altogether, it was too late. He now knew they were up to something even more diabolical. They felt they must kill him, which they did with blows to the head. They then doused his body with liquor to make it look as if he had been in a bar room brawl. After that they dropped him head-first onto the stones on the bottom of the empty lock in an attempt to conceal the true cause of the fatal head injuries. The inference would be that O'Reilly had stumbled into the lock in a drunken stupor - which is in fact the conclusion leapt to by his superiors.”

From the looks the constables gave the Colonel and the Pattersons, I feared it would go much harder for them now back at the station.

Before going our separate ways, we had agreed to meet later for a final summing-up. It was a sombre group which gathered that afternoon in a conference room attached to the Prime Minister's office.

Sir John himself was present and listened with great attention as Sigerson recounted the events at the Commissariat and explained his deductive trail. Inspector Wells then reported that three other crates of rifles had been similarly tampered with, and that the missing rifles, along with numerous articles of official Canadian army gear and uniforms, had been recovered from a cache. Under vigorous questioning, the three men had confessed their participation in the plot and implicated others, including many members of the Hibernian Debating Society.

All but a few were American citizens, of Irish ancestry, who had been posing as Canadians from the Ottawa Valley. Colonel Saunders, however, insisted he was British, although of Irish sympathies, and denied any part in the fatal beating of Constable O'Reilly.

“I still can't quite fathom what they hoped to accomplish by all this,” said the Prime Minister.

“Their plan contained far more passion than reason,” Sigerson replied. “As latter-day Fenians, they were looking to thwart Britain at every turn. A strong federation of English-speaking people could only delay Irish independence, in their perverted view. So they came to Canada a year ago and began what amounted to a whispering campaign to make it seem that Canadians were becoming increasingly anti-American. The raid across the border would be the culmination, with your army's rifles and uniforms abandoned to implicate the Canadian government. No matter how strenuous the denials, there would be no way that the American public would accept stronger ties between our two countries under the guise of the proposed federation.”

“What first alerted you to this plot, Mr. Sigerson?” asked the Prime Minister.

“The Pattersons' accents. It was obvious at once to my trained ear that the overlay on their Irish background was American, likely Eastern Seaboard, not from the Ottawa Valley. That started me along the line of investigating why Irish Americans might be trying to pass themselves off as Irish Canadians.”

“I assume you will be heading back to London to report.”

“Not for a few weeks, Prime Minister. My report to Sir William will be sent by diplomatic pouch. I have a good acquaintance who suggested that I visit his farm out West. But first I must stop in Toronto.”

“Why is that, Mr. Sigerson,” asked the Prime Minister as he rose.

“My acquaintance urged me to get shod there. His bootmaker is Meyers. Perhaps you've heard of his establishment?”

Postscript

It was to be seven more years before Meyers the Bootmaker achieved immortality through publication in 1901 of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, an adventure that actually took place in 1889, five years before our Ottawa story, according to Dr. John Watson's account. A reader of this tale today may well marvel how I could not have recognized an investigator who spoke of a “three-pipe problem”, yearned to play the violin, employed a magnifying glass to such effect, and appeared to have written monographs on every aspect of criminal deduction.

In my own defence, all I can say is that the whole world believed that the Master Detective had died that terrible day in May 1891 when he plunged over Reichenbach Falls in a fatal embrace with his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty. In reality, he was to reappear to Watson's astonished eyes the month after the visit to Ottawa, but his return did not become general knowledge until October 1903, when
The Strand
magazine published a story entitled
“The Empty House.”

You can imagine my astonishment while reading that tale to learn that while Sherlock Holmes roamed the globe between May 1891 and April 1894, he often assumed the persona of a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson.

Ottawa References

The Dominion Police
- Organized around 1870 to monitor and infiltrate the Fenian movement and protect cabinet ministers. Later responsible for security on Parliament Hill and for most federal policing services east of Lake Superior. Colonel Arthur Percy Sherwood became head in 1885 and held that post for a generation. In 1919, the force was merged with the Royal North West Mounted Police to form the RCMP.

Russell Hotel
- Built in 1865 on the east side of Elgin at Sparks, the Russell was the fashionable hotel in Ottawa until the Chateau Laurier opened in 1912. It was first building in the city to boast bathrooms and steam heat. Prime Ministers John A. Macdonald, Charles Tupper and Wilfrid Laurier all lived at the Russell during their terms in office. The hotel suffered a fire in 1901, was rebuilt, but closed in 1925. It stood derelict until April 14, 1928, when another fire gutted the building and the land was cleared for the War Memorial.

George M. Dawson
- Director of the Geological Survey from 1895 until his sudden death in 1901.

An inn on Duke Street
- The Duke Hotel, later the venerable Couillard, was at 101 Duke Street.

Commissariat Building
- Now houses the Bytown Museum.

Beamster, wheel tapper, drayman, pot burner, knacker, guard lacer, plate-maker
- Tannery worker, railway worker who checked the wheels of locomotives, goods carrier by horse cart, pottery worker, dealer in old/dead horses, someone who laces up ladies' bicycles to prevent dresses getting caught in the mechanism, engraver of printing block plates.

Sherlockian References

Sometimes constituted the entire British government
- The phrase “sometimes the British government” was applied to Mycroft Holmes, older brother to Sherlock and a senior public servant.

Attended Oxford or Cambridge
- A contentious and unresolved issue in Sherlockian scholarship.

Have written a small monograph
- Holmes wrote monographs about the identification of tobacco ashes, tattoo marks, the tracing of footsteps, ear shapes, the effect of trades upon hands, and ciphers. He planned ones about the use of dogs in detection, malingering and the typewriter in crime.

You see, Evans, but you do not observe
- A recrimination Holmes directs at Dr. Watson more than once.

A three-pipe problem
- A classic Sherlockian description.

The bimetallic question, the great herd of bisons of the fertile
plains
, and
the stormy petrels
- The names of three Sherlockian scion societies in Canada.

Meyers
- The title given to the leader of Canada's premier Sherlockian society, the Bootmakers of Toronto.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This story could not have been written without the plot advice and editing skills of J.A. (“Sandy”) McFarlane. Valuable assistance was also provided by librarians in the Ottawa Room of the Ottawa Public Library, Gideon Hill, BSI, and Rideau Canal enthusiast Ken Watson.

The Adventure of the Willow Basket

by Lyndsay Faye

“An artisan of considerable artistic skill,” Sherlock Holmes answered in reply to my latest challenge, pulling a thin cigarette from his case. “A glass-blower to be specific, although I nearly fell into the rash error of supposing him a professional musician. Shocking, the way the mind slips into such appalling laxity after a full meal - I'll be forced to fast entirely tomorrow in case my wits should happen to be called upon.”

Staring, I marvelled at the man before me, who scowled at his now-exhausted supply.

“Dear me, I shall have to stop for tobacco on our - “

“No, I won't have it!” I lightly slapped the white linen tablecloth between us, causing our whiskys to shiver with a sympathetic happy thrill. “Eight in a row is quite too many, Holmes! Even you cannot pretend to clairvoyance.”

“You wound me, my boy.” He lit the cigarette, suppressing an impish expression. “I have never pretended to clairvoyance in my life, though I have placed eleven such repellent creatures in the dock for swindling the credible out of their hard-earned savings. One, a Mr. Erasmus Drake, defrauded over a dozen widows using only a mirror, a pennywhistle, and a cunning preparation of coloured Chinese gunpowder. He won't be free to roam the streets for another three years, come to think of it.”

“Well, well, never mind clairvoyance then, but you have just identified the professions of eight individuals at a single glance! I shall have to commence approaching complete strangers and demanding they give us a full report of their lives and habits in order to corroborate your claims.”

“My dear fellow, surely you know by now that you needn't trouble yourself.”

“All right - how do you know he is a glass-blower?”

The detective's eyes glinted as brightly as the silver case which he returned to his inner coat pocket. We sat at our preferred table in the front of Simpson's, before the ground-glass windows where we so often watched the passersby; but despite the glow bestowed upon London minutes before by her army of gas-lighters, the illumination beyond the wavering panes no longer sufficed for even my friend's keen gaze to pick out those details by which he had built his reputation, and thus we had shifted in our seats to examine the restaurant patrons instead. Holmes's turbot and my leg of mutton had long since been whisked away following our early repast, and we sat in a small pool of quiet amidst the throng of hungry journalists and eager young chess players, their sights fixed upon sliced beef in the dining room or cigars and chequered boards up the familiar staircase. There seemed not a man among them my friend could not pin with the exactitude of a lepidopterist with a butterfly; and, while his remarkable faculty always gives me as much pleasure as it does him, on that evening we reposed with the more luxurious complacency of two intimate companions who had nothing more pressing to do than to order another set of whiskys.

“I know he is a professional glass-blower because he is not a professional trumpet player,” Holmes drawled, gesturing with slight flicks of his index finger. “His clothing is of excellent quality, only a bit less so than yours or mine, suggesting he is neither an aristocrat nor a mean labourer, but rather a respectable chap with a vocation. His cheeks are sunken, but the musculature of his jaw is strongly developed, overly so, and there are slight indications of varicose veins surrounding his lips. His lungs are powerful - I don't know if you heard him cough ten minutes ago, but I feared for the crystal. He has been expelling air from them, with great strength and frequency. At first I nearly fell into the callow error of supposing him an aficionado with some brass instrument, possibly playing for an orchestra or one of the better music halls, for which failing I blame the exquisite quality of Simpson's seafood preparations. However, when I glimpsed his hands, I instantly corrected my mistake - his finger-ends display no sign of flattening from depressing the valves, but they do evince a number of slight burn scars. Ergo, he is a glass blower, one I would wager ten quid owns a private shop attached to his studio if the cost of his watch chain does not mislead me, and you need not disturb his repast, friend Watson.”

I was already softly applauding, shaking with laughter. “My abject apologies. I was a fool to doubt you.”

“Skepticism is widely considered healthy,” Holmes demurred, but the immediate lift of his narrow lips betrayed his pleasure at the compliment. My friend is nothing if not gratified by honest appreciation of his prodigious talents.

For some forty minutes and another set of whiskys longer, we lingered, speaking or not speaking as best suited our pleasure, and I admit that I relished the time. My friend was in a rare mood - for, while he is tensely frenetic with work to energise him, he is often brooding and silent without it. The extremities of his nature can be taxing for a fellow lodger and worrying for a friend, though I suspect not more so than they are burdensome for Holmes himself. It was a pleasure to see the great criminologist at his ease for once, neither in motion nor plastered to the settee in silent protest against the dullness of the world around him.

I was just about to suggest that we walk back to Baker Street when we wearied of Simpsons's rather than flag a hansom, for it was mid-June and the spring air yet hung blessedly warm and weightless before the advent of summer's stifling fug, when my friend's face changed. The languid half-lidded eyes focused, and the slack draught he had been taking from his cigarette tightened into a harder purse.

“What is it?” I asked, already half-turning.

“Trouble, friend Watson. Let us hope it is the stimulating and not the unpleasant variety.”

It was then I spied our friend Inspector Lestrade casting his dark, glittering eyes around the dining room, turning his neatly brushed bowler anxiously in his hands. His sharp features betrayed no hint of their usual smugness, and his frame, already small, seemed to have shrunk still further within his light duster. When I raised a hand, he darted towards our table with his head down like a terrier on the scent.

“By Jove, there's been a murder done!” Holmes exclaimed, as usual failing to sound entirely displeased by this development. “Lestrade, pull up a chair. There's coffee if you like, and - “

“No time for coffee,” Lestrade huffed as he seated himself.

Holmes blinked in urbane surprise, and I could not blame him. I, too, suspected that beneath the inspector's obvious anxiety lurked another irritant - while Lestrade is often officious, he is never curt, and he had not bothered to greet either one of us.

Musing, I took in the regular Yarder's rigid spine and brittle countenance. My examinations drew a blank, save for the obvious conclusion that his nerves had been somehow jangled. I could not imagine what the matter might be, for the year was 1894 and I had not seen the inspector since April and the arrest of Colonel Sebastian Moran, a dramatic event indeed, but one which paled significantly in comparison to the fact of Sherlock Holmes being alive at all. Following my friend's return from his supposed death at the grim plunge of Reichenbach Falls, I had wrestled briefly with powerful conflicting emotions, the pain of abandonment and the joy of an unlooked-for miracle foremost among them - but by June of that year, the occasional haunted, hunted looks in Holmes's eyes, which even he could not conceal, combined with the rueful courtesies he showed me when his natural impatience ought to have driven such considerations clean from his vast mind, had convinced me he could not have done otherwise than he did. Excluding the deep pangs caused by my recent marital heartbreak, I felt as ebullient as any shipwreck survivor, and only wished our old friend Lestrade the same felicity.

“Tell me about the murder,” Holmes requested, “since you decline to be distracted by coffee.”

“Beg pardon?” Lestrade growled, for he had fallen into a reverie with his fingertips pressing his temples.

“Report to me the facts of the homicide, since you refuse the stimulating effects of the roasted coffee berry.”

“I do speak English, Mr. Holmes.” Lestrade tugged at his cuffs in fastidious annoyance, recovering himself. “It's a bad business, gentlemen, a very bad business indeed, or I should not have troubled you. I applied at Baker Street, and Mrs. Hudson said you were dining here.”

“That much I have deduced by your - “

“Shall we skip the parlour tricks, Mr. Holmes?” Lestrade proposed with unusual asperity.

Holmes's black brows rose to lofty heights indeed, as did mine, but he appeared more curious than offended. As I had not observed the pair interact other than a terse welcome back to London from Lestrade at Camden House in April, followed by some professional discussion of the charges Colonel Moran would face, I sat back against the horsehair-stuffed chair in bemusement which verged upon discomfort.

“It is a murder,” Lestrade admitted, clearing his throat. “Mr. John Wiltshire was discovered in his bedroom in Battersea this late morning, stone dead, without a trace of any known poison in his corpse, nor a single wound upon his body to suggest that harm had been done to him.”

“Remarkable, in that case, that you claim a murder has been committed.”

“He was drained of blood, Mr. Holmes. His body was nearly free of it.” Lestrade suppressed a shudder. “It disappeared.”

A chill passed down my spine. As it has been elsewhere mentioned in these chaotic memoirs that Holmes rather admires than abhors the macabre, I shall not elaborate upon this quirk of his nature - I must mention, however, that Holmes's entire frame snapped into rapt attention, while Lestrade's bristled in what I can only describe as animosity.

“There's some who would think that horrible, but you're not to be named among them, I suppose.” The inspector levelled a challenging stare at Sherlock Holmes.

“I readily admit to thinking it varying degrees of horrible based upon the character of the deceased,” Holmes replied with a yawn, reverting to his typical supercilious character. “The facts, if you would be so kind.”

“The facts as I have them in hand are these: Mr. John Wiltshire dined with his wife and an old friend on the night of his death, and later Mrs. Helen Wiltshire called for a bath to be drawn for her husband. The housekeeper asserts that the ring occurred, the water was heated, and nothing else of note took place. The upper housemaids all confirm that Mrs. Wiltshire slept in her own room that night, afraid to upset her husband's apparent need for quiet and solitude. Other than the fact a man has apparently been bled to death by magic, you'd not find me disturbing your supper.”

“You know very well that we would hasten to come whenever you have need of Holmes,” I asserted, only noting in retrospect my grammatical error.

A glass of whisky appeared before the inspector. Nodding subtle thanks to the jacketed waiter, Holmes ordered, “Do have a sip - it seems as though the circumstances merit it.”

Lestrade's countenance dissolved into what might - save for his own restraint - have been a sneer even as he tasted the drink. “Another deduction?”

“You have clearly been much taxed,” said Holmes, as dismissive as ever. “Pray, what would you have us do? I require an invitation or a client, and presently I have neither. Shall I look up
vampires
in my commonplace book and wire you upon the subject, or test your patience so far as to accompany you to the crime scene? Has the body been moved?”

“No. I came straight to you,” Lestrade retorted, taking another swallow, “whether I liked it or not.”

My mouth fell open, and Holmes's deep-set eyes widened fractionally. I fully expected a scathing retort to follow close upon this subtle hint of dismay. To my great surprise, he merely rose, however, nodding at the quaint tobacconist's shop nestled inside the restaurant, and said coldly, “I am at your disposal, Lestrade, after buying more cigarettes. You are giving me the distinct impression I shall have need of them. Watson, settle the bill if you would be so good.”

Never will I forget that crime scene, for it occurred after what had been so casually glad a day for me, and the shift into horror was as swift as our cab ride. John Wiltshire lay dead in his tastefully appointed bedchamber, its heavy emerald draperies thrown wide to let in the sunlight and now forgot under the shrouded gaze of invisible stars. He reclined in a bath over which a muslin cloth had been draped, the atmosphere in the room stale with police traffic and tense with revulsion, and a still-damp rubber tarp on the rug nearby informed me he had been examined by the coroner and then returned to his original attitude. Mr. Wiltshire's head and upper torso were visible, his mouth slack and lips white as chalk. The setting and the centerpiece were utterly jarring, with the stately furnishings surrounding a body that appeared horribly - nay, obscenely - withered. Should I have reached out and touched the late Mr. Wiltshire's skin, I could picture it crumbling to dust like paper left to desiccate for centuries. He had in life been a slender man, with deep pouches beneath his eyes and a thin, downturned mouth.

The coroner was finishing his notes wearing a grim expression and, after a gesture from Lestrade, he stepped aside to allow Holmes and myself to view the deceased. My friend whistled appreciatively, which garnered a dark look from Lestrade.

“Skin white as that cloth and utterly parched, vessels drained, form shrunken, as if he had shriveled into a husk,” I summarised. “But are we
certain
there were no epidermal wounds inflicted which could have caused this? He was examined on this tarp, I take it.”

“Indeed, Doctor. A minute examination was made in this room, but Inspector Lestrade insisted the deceased be replaced lest his original positioning or the water itself provide a clue for Mr. Holmes here,” the coroner answered, nodding politely.

“By the Lord,” Holmes said mildly, “and here I supposed the circumstances of the killing itself the only miracle which took place today. Admirable, Lestrade.”