The Return of Sherlock Holmes

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The hansom stops perfectly beside the trio. The cabman’s nose is squashed as if well acquainted with fisticuffs, and under the brim of his cloth cap a short forehead soon meets bushy brows.

  “I’m game,” declares Mason. “I’m a former Oxford Martial Arts Blue.”

  “So! The game is afoot… Hmm, words worth remembering.”

  They board, Mason squashing against skinny Sharma, which pretty much immobilises both men. Holmes throws open the trap door up behind his head and calls, “Limehouse, Cabby.”

  “Guv,” growls the driver and takes off at a fair lick. Scarcely has the cab sped a hundred yards than abruptly it quits the main thoroughfare.

  “Well, that was fast,” says Holmes, in a voice that says, “as I told you it would be.”

  Perilously the hansom corners, narrowly missing a post and going up momentarily on one wheel before slumping back. Surely at least one horseshoe skidded. Poor horse could easily have gone down, breaking a leg. In that case, curtains for the hoss. Thus the “cabbie” doesn’t care a hoot. Now they’re in a cobbled mews, rattling them horridly. No one is in sight ahead, although the door to one stable is open.

  “Hey up there, cabman!” calls Mason in protest.

  Overhead, the reins pull back tight, wrenching the horse’s head. “Whoa!” bellows Beetlebrow. Though not in response to the Oxford man.

  Before the vehicle can fully stop, Holmes has kicked aside the low rain-door and is outside, slashing upward with his cane as the cabman comes to a halt, now parallel with himself. The cabman’s cursing cry of surprise and pain accompanies him dropping a freshly seized bludgeon.

  “Join me, gentlemen! With all due dispatch!” Holmes’s nostrils flare. “I smell stout. Let us wallop the opposition.”

  Out of that dim stable stagger two evident ruffians, both of them clutching strong sticks. One still also holds a bottle from Fuller’s brewery. They’ve been drinking to pass the time, maybe for hours, till their presumed solitary victim arrives. Mason and Sharma disentangle themselves and provide reinforcement, Sharma less boldly, since the stick he confronts is knobby and knotty. Mason rushes at the assailant who clutches the bottle of stout—and manages to execute a full hip throw, oh gosh! This leaves Mason panting, his hands upon his knees, but the cobbles have bashed the assailant’s cranium.

  Holmes pushes in front of Sharma. The detective’s walking cane counters the knobby shillelagh as the weapon whacks at Holmes. It’s easy for a master of singlestick to hit his drunken foe across the side of the neck, causing collapse due to half the brain fainting. Holmes swings smartly around, but the ex-cabman is already legging it away, favouring his sore limb.

  “Did you see me there, Rajit?” Mason gasps as Holmes grips the shillelagh villain by the scruff, since the other miscreant appears to be concussed.

  “Tell me the name that hired you!” demands Holmes.

  The ruffian hides his face with his arm and blubbers. Exasperated, Holmes addresses his companions, for want of other audience: “Of course this creature will not know any useful name. But I swear to you, if London be a giant web and if myself be a spider sensitive to the twitches, that there lurks another spider, cunning and malevolent.” Sharma certainly takes this in, though Mason may still be preening.

  “Well,” Holmes continues more calmly, “it’s said that opium brings peace to the troubled, although many of the Chinese nation may not agree. So let us continue our journey.”

  “But the driver has skedaddled,” Mason observes.

  Whereupon Holmes makes strange clicking noises at the horse, then confidently mounts the rear of the hansom and gathers up the reins.

  “Gentlemen, your carriage awaits. We can leave the horse and hansom at a cabman’s shelter nearer to Limehouse and continue on foot.”

  Before stepping up inside, Sharma winks at Mason. “Sherlock Holmes, no less, is about to chauffeur us by cab through Victorian London. Best that Maggie Mo never knows—she’d never forgive us.”

  “Perhaps another pipe of paradise?” Mason implores Holmes. “I don’t feel stupefied at all.”

  “I did ask Li Yi—the maid—to prepare mild doses for newcomers. But anyway, you have not eaten since arriving at Baker Street. Maybe you’ve worked up an appetite by now?”

  Needless to say, neither has Holmes snatched a bite even of the cold woodcock on the sideboard since the pair first knocked on his study door. Nor is opium normally any booster of appetite. But for Mason, deduces Holmes, a variety of pleasures should ideally succeed one another.

  “I do feel a bit peckish myself,” mentions Holmes suggestively.

  Sharma speaks up. “Mr. Holmes, I don’t wish to seem brash, but I have some sovereigns to burn—in a manner of speaking. Let yourself be our guest this evening, if you would do us the honour.”

  “Well spoken, sir. Where else should one go but to Simpson’s in the Strand?” One of Holmes’s favourite restaurants.

  So here they are. The great dining room is bright with illumination from wall sconces and pendant lamps and white table linen covering the dining tables. By the doorway a grand piano plays unobtrusively, its music mostly drowned by laughter and chatter amid the clink of cutlery upon porcelain. Some theatrical-looking ladies dressed to the nines sip champagne, for it is evening now. A gentleman repairs to the smoking divan upstairs, unlit cigar in hand. The trio have a table halfway down the room, over to the right.

  “Oh, there’s one of the famous carving trollies,” enthuses Sharma. Big domed solid silver dishes cover succulent roast beef of Old England, guided around the tables by a master carver.

  “Indeed. Sirloin of beef, or saddle of mutton? I believe roast beef is appropriate. To accompany which, I would recommend the Quinta do Noval Petit Verdot, a very respectable Portuguese vintage. Do we agree?”

  Thus is the sommelier instructed presently.

  The wine arrives cradled in a towel. Holmes approves first the label and then the bouquet. The sommelier pours what one might call a study in ruby red.

  The meat presently carved from the joint is also a study in red rarity—thick succulent slices, soon joined by the finest horseradish sauce in London, potatoes roasted in goose fat, bright orange carrots, crispy Yorkshire pudding, and a port-wine gravy.

  This done, Holmes leans forward. “I am not unacquainted with pharmacology. So I am well aware that opium by itself does not loosen tongues when smoked. And when dissolved in alcohol as laudanum, any ‘indiscretion’ effect is largely due to the alcohol. At what one might call the ‘molten caramel’ stage of the opium, Li Yi obligingly added a few grains of a substance I provided, the name of which I shall withhold.”

  Sharma gapes at Holmes.

  “Do eat. As shall I.”

  “I never imagined you capable of drugging a pair of strangers,” says Mason.

  “Doubtless because you little know me.” Holmes slices beef, loads his fork, commences.

  Nonplussed, Sharma does as Holmes did, but then covers his mouth with his napkin to speak.

  “In the accounts of your exploits which have come down to us, nothing indicates this as your style.” Sharma’s tone may be bitter; it’s hard to tell, given a juicy mouthful of food competing.

  “Many aspects of my exploits are withheld simply due to lack of a constant chronicler.”

  “But Watson?” asks Mason. “Whom we have not yet met. Does he not write up your deeds?”

  “My dear fellow, Watson is a fiction—a doctor companion invented by Doyle. That is Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scots author who has begun to publish accounts of my cases for ridiculous amounts of money, when he would very much rather be penning,” and he snorts, “historical fictions. Scribbling about my own humble doings to satisfy public demand robs him of time.”

  Mason raises an eyebrow to hear the word “humble” coming from Holmes, but he also raises a lavishly loaded fork. To be
served such a bounty of beef is far from normal in 2050, even at a college feast or gaudy when maybe a single slice of rare Angus might be plated along with nicely boiled Jersey potatoes.

  Mason gestures. “So there is no Watson?”

  “If only I did have a devoted Watson, how useful he would be. Someone who can listen to me think aloud and prompt me with suitable questions. To remind me of the obvious which sometimes escapes me while I’m deep in a knotty problem. Not indispensable, of course, but…useful.”

  Holmes lays down his fork. “What I did deduce in the opium establishment, from stray words of yourself and Mr. Mason, is that your mission here is intended to assist an unexpected great power of the future by altering aspects of the present day, although I know not how, nor why, nor where, nor when. Too many questions, not enough answers. Consequently, I am sorry, gentlemen. In order to avoid that future which you will not tell me about in any detail, you will need another plan. For I am not leaving London. There is an enemy at large, scheming evilly. I neither wish nor dare to leave London except for a quick dash to, say, Dartmoor or Norfolk.”

  Just as salient, perhaps, is that, in the London of the Victorians, Holmes is godlike. He knows all the ashes of tobaccos, the droppings of horses, the printers’ fonts for setting headlines. What would he be in 2050? An object of study. Admiring study, but study nonetheless.

  “Do you have somewhere to spend the night, gentlemen, where a cab may pass by on our departure? Or will you merely disappear into fog?”

  Mason tells Holmes, “In truth, we left our vehicle hidden amidst bushes in Regent’s Park. You are very welcome to visit our ‘egg.’ To come aboard for a while, purely to satisfy curiosity.”

  Holmes smiles. “As you have witnessed, I am well able to evade abduction. I suggest that for now we should devote ourselves to this excellent nutrition.” He raises his glass of Petit Verdot from Portugal, England’s oldest ally.

  “So what do you call this if not a bungle, a botch, and a balls-up!” Maggie Mo is steaming. Maybe not literarily, but scorching vapour is all that’s missing from her fury of frustration. Her eyes blaze at Sharma and Mason like a cinematic dragon’s. Maybe those aren’t actual flames that are roasting Sharma and Mason, it just feels so.

  “It wasn’t a simple mission.” Thus Mason tries to excuse them. “Sherlock Holmes isn’t silly.”

  “Oh, really? That’s the conclusion you arrived at? Using the most advanced ultra-secret technology to send a pair of experts a century and a half into the past to bring back the news that Sherlock Holmes, the most astute, clever, and perceptive of men…‘isn’t silly’! Wow, that’s money well spent.”

  The two Oxonians are seated in a soundproofed private chamber at one end of the long gloomy vestibule which gives access midway to the Divinity School. Their wooden chairs are unpadded. No table protects them from Maggie Mo righteously upright before them. She is an indignant schoolma’am, a pissed-off boss, a colleague cheated—and a caged tigress certain that she would have succeeded if not for sodding bureaucracy.

  Placatingly, Sharma says, “Here’s the problem. We couldn’t tell Holmes anything. If we lied, he’d have known right away. If we told the truth, given his regard for any old royals, why should his interests align with ours? A UK of Europe might have seemed like a champion idea to him.”

  “What’s more,” adds Mason, “our arrival coincided with the first signs of Moriarty. And lo, the bloodhound sniffed the wind.” Mason can be the king of metaphors when he cares. “No human power could drag Holmes aside.”

  “Of course Holmes caught a scent!” bawls Maggie Mo. “He just didn’t express this in his usual forthright and unsubtle manner.”

  Mason can tell that Maggie was about to say “like Westerners do,” but nobody gets to the rank of Comrade Mo without being aware that politically correct diplomacy must clamp down occasionally.

  The pair should have kept close to Holmes. Theirs should have been a long, subtle, meticulous job. Morons! They had enough authentic period banknotes rolled up tightly. Men! Running back to Mummy! Scared by a bit of street violence too, no doubt.

  Finally, she growls in a low voice, “Too much to ask you to spend more time with Holmes, eh? Coming back after one damn day!”

  “Well, we couldn’t really keep the time-egg safely parked in the park for too long… Could we? Risk of discovery. Dog runs into the bushes; child runs after the dog…”

  They don’t need to be great detectives to deduce how much she herself would have given had she been tasked as they had been.

  Mason and Sharma exchange glances, nerving one another. Mason nods approval, so Sharma leans forward in his chair in an almost Sherlockian fashion.

  “The mission isn’t a failure yet. We have an idea. As you say, it’ll take time and a lot of fancy spadework to divert Holmes from his course. He’s a glacier. We don’t want to disappear him, just to divert him gently. That’s a job for someone who’s at his side day after day. Someone who knows him and understands him, someone who knows where to push gently or let fall an opportune remark. Sherlock Holmes needs a Watson.”

  “But Watson never existed! That’s the pen-name of Conan Doyle.”

  “That can change. We just need to come up with the perfect person and plant her at Holmes’s side.”

  “Did you say her?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t wish to sound sexist… We need a person who can entice him with a more challenging and seductive case, if he’s about to rush instead to the aid of some European princess who’s being blackmailed or some heir to a minor throne’s mistress. A person willing to devote years to being Holmes’s shadow.”

  Maggie Mo gazes at Sharma now, her eyes no longer blazing but with a different bright gleam in them.

  “Continue,” she says. Does her voice tremble a tad?

  “Did we mention the candid interest that Holmes showed when he saw your photo?”

  In London it’s getting dark, though fog already took possession of the city a while ago. Streetlamps are lit. Those don’t yet compete with the gloaming, but in less than an hour they’ll be like fireflies or holy haloes. Sherlock Holmes puts his key in the lock. Mrs. Hudson has already withdrawn to her own rooms, and he doesn’t care to disturb her. Whatever that idiot eye-doctor Doyle says, Holmes isn’t inconsiderate.

  “Good night, Mister Holmes.”

  Holmes freezes. It is not the first time somebody utters that same sentence at his back. How didn’t he hear this unknown someone approaching? What a poor show. Unless the someone is really subtle. He turns and regards the newcomer.

  Maggie Mo, dressed as a gent in striped trousers and a short frock coat suspiciously reminiscent of Sharma’s, her black mane in a bun tight under her topper, feels in her pocket for two stars, her lucky charms.

  Holmes beams. “Good night to you too. I was expecting you. Your room is ready.”

  And he opens the door to admit Maggie Mo. With a nod, she enters this Baker Street house as if to the manor born and ascends the stairs.

  Sharma and Mason regard the plates before them without enthusiasm. After pints in the Dowager Duchess of Deutschland pub in Queen Street, they’re in one of the cafés inside Oxford’s Covered Market, the name of which can stay mum. They’d ordered its traditional beef and two veg with boiled spuds and a micro-Yorkshire pudding accompanied by gravy from granules.

  A ghost of what they took in Simpson’s in 1894. The two humble slivers of beef are grey. The Yorkshire pud is part burned, part soggy. Sharma sniffs, cuts, forks, chews, swallows without relish.

  “They might be eating there right now.” Mason has read his thought. “I wonder when the consequences will reach us. Supposing that we realise. With Holmes diverted from his previous course, I do hope there aren’t any stupid conflicts in a patchwork Europe. Oh, why the devil did we come here to eat?”

  “Them. Lunching. At Simpson’s.” Sharma
sighs and sets down his fork. “There’s no worse nostalgia. A La Recherche de Palate Perdu.”

  “I do wonder what Holmes would think of the USA falling apart and the non-stupid states all unifying with Canada.”

  Sharma raises a cup of tea, for this café lacks an alcohol license.

  “Yes, indeed. Here’s to Her Majesty Meghan Markle, long may she reign over them.”

  The Case of the Secret Assassin

  By David Stuart Davies

  Starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes & Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson

  On rising one morning in the early spring of 1942, Doctor John H. Watson was somewhat surprised to discover that his friend and associate, Sherlock Holmes, had already gone out. His long overcoat and tweed fedora were missing from the coat rack by the door.

  “What’s all that about?” he mumbled to himself. “Didn’t say a bally thing to me last night about scooting out at the crack of dawn.”

  He rang for Mrs. Hudson to arrange for his breakfast. “Did you see Mr. Holmes this morning?” he asked, as she handed over a bowl of porridge and he shook his napkin before tucking it into his collar.

  “I did, Doctor,” she replied. “A message came for him around six o’clock. I think it was from Mr. Holmes’s brother. He was out of the house in quick sticks.”

  “Mycroft, eh? Something important, then. Can’t think why he didn’t tell me.”

  Mrs. Hudson raised an eyebrow and gave him a fleeting smile before departing.

  After Watson had finished his breakfast and perused the morning paper, he was about to tamp down a post-prandial pipe when he heard light, quick footsteps moving up the stairs. He easily recognised that tread. Moments later, Sherlock Holmes entered, his eyes sparkling and his finely chiselled features alive with energy.

  “Ah, the wanderer returns,” observed Watson pithily.

  “Indeed, he does,” said Holmes, slipping off his hat and coat. “Is there any tea left in the pot? I could do with a strong brew.”