Sherlock Holmes and the Four Corners of Hell

by Seamas Duffy

  ‘Who are you, Sir, and what is your business here?’ Holmes barked brusquely.

  ‘I am unable to reveal my true identity to you, but let us say that you may address me as “M.B.” In the course of our conversation—’

  ‘I fear there will be no conversation, unless you state your identity and the precise reason for your visit. If you require my assistance—’

  ‘I did not exactly say that I required your assistance,’ the visitor replied smoothly. ‘Let us put all the cards on the table at once. I am here on a very important matter of state. I work for Sir James Cardew and I am here at his express insistence.’

  ‘The head of the Audit Board?’ Holmes asked.

  ‘In theory, yes. In actual fact, he is head of one of those arms of the state whose activities must, by their very nature, be shielded from the public gaze. The Audit Board of Administration does not exist in reality, but is merely a convenient, and publicly credible, façade. You see, I said I would put the cards on the table, and I have done so. However, you are at perfect liberty to confirm this with Sir James if you wish – I have his private telephone number which you may call,’ the visitor said, handing a card to Holmes. ‘I am aware that you two gentlemen visited a certain house in Cleveland Street,’ the man continued, ‘and from that I was able to work out the reason for your visit to the Diogenes. You intended to report the discovery which you made there to your brother, Mycroft, in order that he could seek the advice of his fellow members. Characteristically astute, Mr Holmes, and I applaud your judgement in avoiding turning the matter over to the police, in whom, no doubt, you have as little confidence as we do. Sir James holds you in very high regard, for I believe you were of some assistance to him in the espionage affair, which led to the unmasking of the Sussex MP who had been spying for the Germans. Something to do with a seabird trained to carry messages across the Channel, though quite why Sir James thought it necessary to involve a private detective agent in such a simple matter, I am at a loss to understand.’

  ‘It may have been because this simple matter dragged on for months and confounded your colleagues – who had every force of the state at their backs – whereas I solved the case in forty-eight hours, singlehandedly, and without any material reward.’

  ‘Nevertheless, if the present matter had been left to me, both you and the doctor would have been arrested for breaking and entering and held incommunicado until this affair had reached its conclusion. But, as I do not have the authority—’

  ‘You would do well, Sir, to come quickly to the point,’ interjected Holmes warmly.

  Our visitor looked astonished. ‘I may say, Mr Holmes, that you are quite living up to your reputation! I do believe you would have no compunction about throwing me down the stairs! It seems that Sir James has also not forgotten your efforts in recovering the Italian treaty, and I agree with him that both your patriotism and that of Doctor Watson are above suspicion, which is why I am here at his instigation.’

  ‘Pray continue,’ said Holmes.

  ‘As we are, I trust, speaking openly, I must confess that I am completely at a loss to understand how you came to know about this house in the first place. To the best of our knowledge, only seven people in this country, at least on our side, were aware of what was going on – and your name does not appear on that list.’

  Holmes turned over Sir James’s card again before he replied.

  ‘You put me at some disadvantage, Sir,’ said Holmes. ‘It is, by now, rather too late for me to go rousing Sir James’s household.’

  ‘Then I shall attempt to assuage your concern. You had no doubt worked out that the present offensive is merely a continuation from the Jubilee Plot.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There were undoubtedly a number of agents involved in that operation, an entire cell in fact. When the plot was discovered, some escaped in the heel of the hunt, though only at the expense of leaving incriminating evidence behind, which helped convict others who went down for long spells. Their code name for the present offensive is “Operation Red S” – after the Prime Minister’s personal scarlet monogram. The very fact that such a minute detail of Lord Salisbury’s private seal are known in these quarters is extremely alarming, and points to one of their agents having succeeded in infiltrating a position of trust at the very highest level. It hardly requires an encyclopaedic knowledge of political affairs to understand that were this plan to succeed in the current volatile situation, the entire Irish question would be opened up yet again in the most dramatic manner; and in the ensuing political disorder, the likely balance of forces at home and abroad, particularly in America whence this offensive emanates, would turn against our interests. However, despite all their precautions, we managed to intercept the communications by which the London cell is being commanded. To bring the matter within your own sphere of interest, I can inform you that the entire operation is being directed by General James Moriarty, who is their Chief of Staff in England, and his associate Colonel Sebastian Moran, both of whom are staunch, but covert, Irish patriots.

  ‘General Moriarty?!” said Holmes.

  ‘Indeed. That is the rank he holds in the Brotherhood.’

  ‘This cannot be the same man, the man who fought his death struggle with me four years ago. I saw him plunge several hundred feet, strike the sharp point of a crevice, then sink in the swirling foam. He cannot possibly have come out of that gorge alive.’

  ‘Whatever or whoever you may think you saw, Mr Holmes, I can assure you that the man whom you once described with no exaggeration as the Napoleon of Crime is living and breathing. There can be no doubt, as you suggest, that the man who fell to his death in Switzerland could not possibly have survived. But no body was ever found by the Swiss Police at Meiringen. A shoe and a cravat are all that were discovered; therefore, no identification was ever properly made. But we have never been deceived by the campaign of deliberate misinformation which had been conducted following Moriarty’s apparent death. We afterwards trailed him from Geneva to Philadelphia. He returned to England last month following what was quite literally a Council of War. He is the “A” referred to in the messages.

  ‘Despite his Eton and Oxford background, his allegiance is to the land of his grandfather’s birth. You will recall how his organization pursued John Douglas through South Africa to St Helena to dispense vengeance on behalf of the Irish Americans – that was not a business proposition for once; it was done out of political sympathy. He also managed to arrange a convenient accident to happen to our informer in the Jubilee Plot affair, his fellow General, Francis Millen. As to his second in charge, Colonel Moran, his Army service in India, we lately discovered, had long provided a valuable cover for his fraternization with the Indian Nationalists with whom his organization made common cause. There is little doubt that Moran had a hand in the murder of Mrs Stewart, in revenge for her husband testifying against one of the Land-Leaguers, and also in Pigott’s carefully-arranged suicide in a Madrid hotel following the Parnell forgeries. We later discovered that the bullet which killed him did not match the gun which lay beside the body, and Moran was suspected of shooting him through the open window. We managed to hush the matter up so that they were unaware of our suspicions.

  ‘You will recall the Adair murder last year; it was also politically motivated. The public believed otherwise, Mr Holmes, and so did you, but you were not party to the information we had. Adair came from an old Plantation family – his father was the Earl of Maynooth. Prior to his appointment in the Colonies, the Earl had sentenced one of the Fenians to hang for a crime which he was afterwards proven not to have committed. It is of no import, for the low scoundrel had certainly committed others, but the murder of young Ronald, his father’s favourite, was an act of revenge. This is the third attempt by that organization on the Mansion House; there have been several at various Whitehall offices, not to mention others in the House of Commons; there was even one at the Carlton Club. Alderman, the code-breaker, cracked the ciphers contained
in the cable traffic from America, and we have had that house watched for the past three weeks. That is how we came to know that you had been there. Their ordnance operation is now complete, the dynamite and charges stored, and we have now called off our watch until the final day. On Saturday morning, two men will return to the house and bring the dynamite and charges across the city—’

  ‘And place them in the manhole at Mansion House Lane,’ said my friend.

  ‘You had worked that out, too!’

  ‘It needed no genius; the code was a mere variation of the A for Z, and the directions were simple to follow.’

  ‘The bomb is meant to go off at eight o’clock in the evening, by which time the agents expect to be on a boat from Liverpool. The plan shall not, of course, come to fruition because the entire cell will be captured red-handed. There are four men in it: Thomas Allen, the man who escaped in the Jubilee Plot, has been traced to a public house – the Rock Of Cashel – in Coventry Close, just off the Kilburn High Road. Desmond Corcoran, from Limerick, was followed to a shebeen in Ratcliff when he went to pick up the first message. The other two we have already spoken of. I have, with Sir James’s permission, revealed to you secrets of the state of which many of our own high-ranking officials are ignorant, including those in the upper levels of the Metropolitan Police. Now I must ask you to be equally candid with me as to how you came to be at the safe house yesterday.’

  ‘That is a fair request,’ said Holmes. ‘I had come to a view that the Soho Picture Gallery in Cleveland Street was a front for something nefarious, and in investigating that, I discovered the safe house. I remain undecided as to whether there is any connection between the two.’

  ‘What exactly did you think the picture gallery is a front for?’ our visitor asked.

  ‘It seemed to me that the place may have been used as a sort of clearing house for forged paintings, and I had begun to think that the deliveries to number thirty-two were the stock in trade.’

  ‘Then that is outside both my jurisdiction and my interest,’ he replied with a shrug, though it seemed to me there was a quiver of relief in his answer. ‘What led you to the picture gallery in the first place?’

  ‘I had been asked by Scotland Yard to assist in their hunt for the City Murderer, as the popular press have called him,’ Holmes replied. ‘The trail led me straight to the gallery.’

  ‘Ah, the City Murders,’ said the man sententiously and relapsed into a brief silence. After a while, he continued, ‘You place me in a great dilemma, gentlemen. Your information forces me to reveal even more than I had intended to, and I am taking a great risk upon my own head by doing so. I must swear you both to secrecy.’

  ‘Providing what you have told me is true,’ replied Holmes, ‘you have my word as a man of principle that this will go no further. I must warn you, however, that I shall do all that is in my power to corroborate your story first thing tomorrow morning with Sir James.’

  ‘I should expect no less from a man of your integrity and intelligence, Mr Holmes. Let me explain further, then: we have uncovered evidence that the murders which you have been investigating have been carried out by the Brotherhood. The motivation for this seems to be the discovery of the safe house by a woman who either lived or worked near Cleveland Street. It seems that this discovery was made quite by chance by the second victim, Patsy Harvey, who recognized Corcoran – they came from the same town. She was down on her luck and on the street; she followed him quite innocently to the house, probably to ask him for a bit of help and surprised him there. He had been incautious enough to leave the door unlocked and she must have seen something incriminating. They determined to silence her before she could let the secret out, and they must have followed her and kept a watch on her. It is suspected that the other three victims must have been associates of hers and they have suffered the same fate. The whole paraphernalia of ritual killings has been introduced purely as a blind to throw the press and the public completely off the scent by insinuating some Masonic involvement – you recall the newspapers were full of that sort of nonsense on the last occasion. It is designed to implicate the Quattuor Coronae because some of the senior policemen who are members have a record of acting against the Irish who have not forgotten Bloody Sunday.’

  ‘You are absolutely certain of this?’

  ‘There can be no doubt.’

  ‘But don’t you think that the symbolism has been rather overdone?’ asked Holmes. ‘What with five-shilling pieces, and what was the other. …’

  ‘The ears of corn,’ the man replied. ‘Well, it has served to cover their traces thus far.’

  ‘But why does Inspector Lestrade know nothing of this?’

  ‘We operate completely independently of the police and have had no official communication with Scotland Yard over this matter for very good reason. Even at the higher echelons, it is not only spectacularly incompetent – look how they botched Moran’s case only last year – but notoriously corrupt. Do you know how much money was stolen from banks in London last year? It is an astronomical sum – some ten per cent of it ended up in the pockets of Metropolitan Police officers. Many criminals get their information by bribing policemen. If Scotland Yard were to be appraised of our intelligence at this present time, it could blow our entire counter-operation apart. It is not a risk that we can possibly countenance. With the public pressure which is mounting upon them to find the culprits, they would be bound to do something desperate. Consider how they handled the Addleton business – a simple operation that ended in tragedy. It is a case of sacrificing a platoon, as Doctor Watson would understand, to save a battalion.’

  ‘I am not amongst those who would rank the lives of those four women as any less worthy than those of the Prime Minister and the Lord Mayor. Surely if you had these men followed, then you could have prevented innocent people from being killed?’

  ‘No, we have no idea who actually carried out the murders. All we know is that it is none of the men whose every step has been dogged for the last six weeks – but they are the instigators, that is certain. I expect they have trawled the gutter to find some miserable wretch who would do this for the money. Then again, there is no shortage of hired killers amongst Moriarty’s criminal associates, as you will know better than anyone.’

  ‘These men will not meekly surrender, but will happily go down fighting. They may live by the sword, but they are resigned to dying by it. And with a house full of dynamite, who knows what may happen,’ warned Holmes.

  ‘There will be no dramatic siege. The men will be taken by surprise the minute they step across the threshold on Saturday morning. At that point we will hand them over to Scotland Yard, who will be waiting in the wings. But nothing can be allowed to jeopardize this operation, and that is why the Yard has been kept in the dark: surely you can see the logic of this, Mr Holmes. I appeal to your patriotism and that of Doctor Watson!’

  ‘Then, what is it you want of me?’ Holmes asked.

  ‘Nothing, Mr Holmes. All I ask is that you hold off until the affair is resolved. Call off your boy who stands at the shoe-blacking stall during the day, and the one who hides himself in the workhouse grounds by night. Their continued presence there may alarm our enemies. Once we have our men under lock and key you may resume your investigation into the gallery. It will do your reputation no harm in exalted circles should it be known that—’

  ‘I was not aware that my reputation was in need of repair, and I am as jealous of it amongst the lower orders as amongst the higher ones, but I will call the boys off immediately, as you request.’

  ‘Thank you; my time has not been wasted then.’

  No sooner had our visitor’s footsteps died away on the stair, when Holmes dashed to the coat-stand and seized his coat and hat. Though taken aback by this departure, I rose expectantly, but Holmes shook his head.

  ‘No,’ said he, ‘two would be one too many,’ and he hurried off downstairs in pursuit. I sat silently in the sitting room till long past midnight pondering o
ver the strange conversation I had just witnessed. Then I began to nod off and eventually decided to go up to bed, so that I never knew at what hour my friend returned.

  Chapter 8

  When I appeared at breakfast next morning, Holmes was already draining the last dregs from the teapot. I had rarely seen him in such a vexatious and troubled state.

  ‘You have had a busy night, by the look of it,’ I ventured.

  ‘I have not slept.’

  ‘You followed the man, then?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where did he go to?’

  ‘Exactly where I had expected him to go.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Deanery Street.’

  ‘Titchfield’s!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There you take me into the realm of speculation again, Watson, though the picture is becoming clearer. What did you think of him, by the way?’

  ‘I must confess I was quite repelled by the noxious suavity of his speech.’

  ‘You noticed that too, did you?’

  ‘One could hardly fail to: there was something positively reptilian about the man. Did you discover whether his claim to be working for Sir James was true?’

  ‘Yes, I had not doubted that, though I did take the trouble to confirm it personally. I sent a wire first thing this morning and here is the reply. You do not seem convinced, Watson, and as usual, you are unable to conceal your scepticism; come, tell me what is troubling you.’

  ‘I did not sleep well myself last night; I tossed and turned a bit. I noticed something else about that fellow. It may be a small point, but he seemed to contradict himself.’

  ‘That is correct, Watson, he did so in no less than three separate instances.’

  ‘He said that they had had no contact with Scotland Yard over the murders,’ I began, ‘nor did he know who the murderer was: in that case, how he could possibly know about the ears of corn, which have been kept from the public?’