CHAPTER TWELVE
“Why, Watson, do you maintain that it was your fault that the man eluded capture?” Sherlock Holmes, in dressing-gown and slippers, put the question to me as he stood before the fire in our sitting room. It was nearly midnight, an hour after the climax of the affair at Barley’s. A chill rain had begun to tap upon our windows, and Holmes’ hands were spread toward the blaze while he turned his penetrating eyes in my direction. The wrinkles and black hair-dye of his disguise were gone, and he seemed in general none the worse for his desperate struggle to escape Gregson, Moore, and myself. Yet I did not much care for his pale, finely drawn appearance.
“Why should it have been your fault?” Holmes repeated. “I understand that the suspected killer had already made good his escape before you chose me as your quarry. And even if you had not stopped me, I would not have caught him—I must admit that I was in pursuit of other game myself.”
I took a chair beside the fire, and tasted the brandy he had just poured for me. “Holmes, I saw no point in confessing to the police that it was I who collared one of their men, and thus deliberately gave the murderer his chance to get free. But I must confess it now.”
Holmes sat down across from me. “You collared a policeman?” His voice sounded too tired to express the full surprise that he must naturally have felt. “My dear old fellow—why?”
“It is very simple. Because I did not know the man escaping was the maniac whom the police had launched the raid to capture. I was convinced that the man escaping was yourself.”
Holmes leaned back in his chair, and there was a long pause before he spoke. “He looked like me, then. Very much like me.” The words were quiet, with a fatalistic lack of emotion in them.
Peering anxiously at my friend’s haggard features, I went on: “With the first good look I got at the fellow’s face, I recognized—there is no other way to put it—I recognized it as yours. The same aquiline nose, the same strong chin and piercing eyes. Yes, even the same figure, tall and lean and very active.”
“The very same. I see,” Holmes echoed in that doomed voice.
“Oh, there were some differences, I admit.” I frowned at my friend’s uncharacteristically passive acceptance of this news. “I think he was an older man than you. His hair was longer and grayer, and his eyebrows bushy. His color was less healthy.” Although, even as I was speaking, I thought that there was no longer much difference of complexion.
“You heard him speak?”
“No.”
“Go on.”
“There is little more to tell. I am well acquainted, of course, with your skill at disguise, and it struck me as perfectly natural that you should have altered your appearance before visiting a place like Barley’s, where some enemy might otherwise recognize you.”
Holmes’ eyes glittered. “Did it not then seem strange that you could recognize me at once?”
“Perhaps,” I went on, somewhat wounded by this petulance, “you do not believe the resemblance was as strong as I have painted it?”*
•Readers who doubt the strength of this similarity would do well to re-read the descriptions of Holmes and myself set down by our contemporary chroniclers in the 1890s.—D.
“My dear fellow,” he muttered, “excess imagination is not your great fault. Yes, Watson, I believe you. I only wish that I did not... but go on.”
I did not know what else to say, and with a gesture tried to convey as much. Then we were both silent for a time. A coal falling in the grate made what seemed a loud, intrusive noise. Holmes’ gaze had turned in that direction, introspectively, and the look of his face now made me fear a return of his illness of the early spring. “Yes, I believe you,” he repeated at length. “And it is no blame to you that the fellow got away. If we are to assign blame for that, we must charge the Fates, or Fortune... but what good ever comes of that? You were quite right, too, not to speak of the incident to Lestrade or the others.”
“You did not see this man at Barley’s yourself, Holmes?”
“I?” He roused himself, as if surprised to find me still in the room. “No, not to my knowledge, save for a fleeting glimpse of his ragged back. I had never thought that Fate would send the waterfront killer there... but the identification seems well-founded. I am told that Jones—as Lestrade’s latest pet informer calls himself—is completely positive that the man whose presence at Barley’s he reported is the same who was with him at the hostel, and there broke down the doors. I mean to speak to Jones tomorrow, and form my own estimate of his reliability. Meanwhile...”
Holmes sighed sharply. With an air of casting introspection to the winds, he raised his hands and clapped them down decisively on the chair arms. “Watson.”
“Yes?”
“What do you know of vampires?”
“Vampires? Some species of tropical bats.”
“Good old Watson! I am speaking of vampirism in human beings.”
I was chilled by my friend’s apparent seriousness. “Walking corpses? Of course it is all pure-rubbish.” I had been about to say, pure lunacy; but with that pale, tormented, utterly intent face before me, I found myself suddenly unable to use the word.
“Not corpses, Watson.” Holmes studied me carefully. Then his manner became—deliberately, as I thought—more casual. “It is in the realm of legend, of course. But think of it nevertheless. You will do that much if I ask it, will you not?”
“Certainly, but... “Again, I did not know how to continue. The silence this time stretched on until I, at least, felt it grow painful, and was constrained to speak. “Lestrade said that the fellow killed again.”
“Meaning the constable killed on the roof.” Holmes stood up and stretched, an action reassuringly normal. “Join me, Watson? I perceive a cold partridge upon the sideboard, and a bottle of Montrachet. Have I told you that I now know the name of the man impersonating Scott? It is David Fitzroy-a thoroughly bad man, and a clever one. He is a doctor himself—I think you have heard me say before that when a doctor does go bad, he has the nerve and the knowledge to make him the worst of criminals. I should not be at all surprised to find a medical man at the very bottom of this evil tangle.”
“But not, in this case, a killer.”
“In that I think you and Lestrade are wrong. The constable was shot, remember. Fitzroy fled through the trapdoor to the roof just ahead of the man from the docks, and I rather doubt whether my look-alike was carrying firearms, or would have used them.”
“Why on earth not, seeing that he killed so savagely before?”
Again Holmes bestowed a long, speculative look upon me before he answered. “I think you may take my word for it, that pistols would not be consistent with his—peculiar madness.”
I did not understand, but neither did I wish to concentrate my friend’s attention any further upon that individual whose exploits seemed to disturb him so. “Are the two men somehow in league, then? I wonder what the connection can be between them?”
We were at the sideboard now, and. Holmes poured each of us a glass of wine. “For one thing, Watson: rats. Fitzroy wanted—I think he wanted desperately, for some reason—to purchase a thousand or more of them, and soon. He said he intended using them in some kind of show, similar to Barley’s—all purely a blind, of course, though in my guise as fellow entrepreneur I pretended to believe him, and expressed a wish to sell him some.”
Holmes moved to take down the Medical Directory from my shelf, and opened it. “Aha. We see here, that as late as two years ago, Dr. David Fitzroy was one of the young physicians working with Sir Jasper Meek himself, in precisely the same field of research as that which sent John Scott off to Sumatra. Fitzroy has accompanied Sir Jasper on at least one expedition to that area.”
“The connections grow, then.”
“They do indeed.”
I picked at the food upon my plate. “Is it possible, I wonder, that Lestrade is right? That the madman who killed Frau Grafenstein is Dr. Fitzroy’s escaped patient?”
“I have wondered, but could think of no good reason for her presence.”
“You should endeavor, then, to think of a possible bad one. According to my informants, the Grafenstein woman was considered, some ten years ago, to be one of the most brilliant young biologists on the Continent. She was forced to resign her university position, under a cloud whose exact nature I have as yet been unable to discover, but which seems to have had some substance. I have as yet no clue as to just what she was doing here in London—aha.”
As he spoke, Holmes had moved near the window. The drizzle continued, with fog, and traffic was light in Baker Street. At such a late hour, it was evident that only business of some terrible urgency could bring us visitors. Yet, as I saw when I moved closer to the window myself, an unmarked carriage had certainly just stopped before our door.
Mindful of earlier days when assassins had watched us from below, I moved to draw Holmes farther from the window. He allowed himself to be turned away. But at the same time remarked in a tired voice: “I don’t think these visitors have come to shoot at me, old fellow. If my conjecture regarding their purpose is correct, they mean us no harm; but still I ask very earnestly that you do not retire just yet.”
“Of course. But whatever they want, you had better send them away; we are both of us already exhausted.”
“I shall, if such a course is possible. I fear it may not be.” With these words, Holmes seemed to shake off in a moment all his fatigue and dullness. With the air of a man plunging into cold water, he went out our door and down the stairs, so quickly and lightly that when he pulled open the street door he surprised a distinguished-looking old gentleman in the very act of reaching for the bell. Another man, younger and even more elegantly attired, stood beside the first visitor on the steps, and both gazed with some amazement at our two dressing-gowned figures that had so suddenly appeared.
“Come in, gentlemen, come in,” Holmes invited, his tone completely business-like. New energies had been mobilized from somewhere in his great reserves, and he might just have risen from a refreshing sleep.
One of the men who now ascended to our rooms was Sir Jasper Meek himself, the elderly and very eminent physician whose name had come up in our talk only minutes before. However striking this coincidence might have seemed ordinarily, at the time it was all but lost upon me, in the great wonder that I felt upon recognizing our second visitor. Although I am writing for posterity and not for immediate publication, I fear that prudence prohibits my naming him, or even describing his person in any detail. Nor shall I recount the first introductory remarks that passed among us.
Suffice it to say, that when we were all of us settled round a replenished fire, this younger of our visitors wasted not a moment in getting down to business. “Mr. Holmes, I need not tell you that only a matter of an importance impossible to exaggerate has brought us to your door, without notice and at this late hour.”
“No, you need not tell me that,” Holmes answered quietly. “Pray continue. You may speak as freely before Dr. Watson as before me.”
“Very well. It is a crime of attempted blackmail with which we are concerned.”
“I am not surprised.”
“Not blackmail such as you must have dealt with in the past, Mr. Holmes. No affair of the heart. And this case is not confined to any single personage, however—eminent.” The speaker gestured with a practiced flourish. “This great city about us, the heart of empire, is itself being held for ransom.”
I actually sprang to my feet with an exclamation, but the effect upon Holmes was nothing like so strong. His gray eyes had taken on a hard, penetrating stare, but he merely nodded, as if receiving confirmation of an idea already held in private.
The two men on our settee exchanged glances. “You will understand, Mr. Holmes, and you, Dr. Watson,” the speaker continued, “why no public announcement of the peril has yet been made, and why in fact none is contemplated. Even the official police have not been notified, though our full appreciation of the danger is now some hours old. The city is bursting with visitors from every corner of the Empire, nay, of the world, come to do Her Majesty honor. Any mass panic under these conditions would...” Here our exalted visitor had to pause, to try to master his emotions.
Sir Jasper Meek cleared his throat, and passed a hand over his high, pale forehead, so in contrast with the tanned parchment of his cheeks. “Gentlemen, the thing is this. There have already been several cases in the metropolis of London... of a most contagious and most terrible disease.” Now he, too, hesitated.
“These cases you mention,” Holmes snapped, “are of course meant as proof of the blackmailers’ power to accomplish what they threaten, which is to loose an epidemic among us. And the disease is plague. Well, how much do the villains demand, and how and where is it to be delivered?”
Had Holmes presented a revolver and ordered our visitors to hand over their purses, their astonishment could scarcely have been greater. Both of them, faces frozen, stared at him in silence for the space of several breaths. Then the man I have not named pulled from a pocket a small piece of paper, which he handed over to Holmes. My friend took it eagerly. Looking over his shoulder, I read part of the note, which had been composed by pasting onto a sheet of white paper printed letters and words evidently clipped from one or more newspapers. The closing words of the message were:
UNLESS OUR DEMANDS ARE GRANTED, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN INDEED AND THE EMPIRE TOO. LET THERE BE NO TRICKERY OR A MILLION WILL DIE AS THIS MAN DIED.
The speaker continued, in a voice that came near breaking: “No instructions have as yet been given us for the delivery of the ransom. But what is demanded—in an earlier note, that we at first dismissed as the work of a mere crank—is nothing less than a million pounds.”
I burst out again with some exclamation, at which, I think, no one bothered to look up. Our eminent visitor went on: “The note you hold, Mr. Holmes, was found pinned to the garment of the third and latest victim, an elderly man still unidentified. His body was dropped from a vehicle of some sort, earlier this evening, directly in front of the house of Sir Jasper in Harley Street. Sir Jasper had earlier received a message warning him to expect something of the sort.”
“Have you that note, too? Excellent! Thank you.” Holmes held the two papers for a moment to the light. Then he asked: “The victim was, I suppose, dressed in a peculiar kind of hospital shirt or gown, the sleeves held on by small cloth ties?”
If our visitors had been stunned by Holmes’ earlier remark, this question cast them into a state approaching paralysis. At last they stammered out some confirmation; and from a small bag which he had been carrying, Sir Jasper now produced a garment which, when unrolled, looked like the twin of the shirt discovered on the pier.
“Gentlemen,” he advised us, “I have treated this with carbolic, as was necessary to eliminate the danger of contagion. Otherwise it is just as I myself removed it from the latest plague victim’s body.”
Holmes accepted the garment and held it up, spread out. “I see no bullet-holes,” I remarked, no doubt rather thoughtlessly, in my excitement. Sir Jasper gave me a peculiar glance. “We have said, Dr. Watson, that the man died of plague.”
With a quick half-smile in my direction, Holmes bent to open a lower drawer of his desk. From the drawer he took out another roll of cloth, and spread it out upon his desk beside the first. The bewilderment in our visitors’ faces could scarcely be said to increase, but their expressions seemed to acquire a frozen permanence as they beheld the two shirts side by side.
“Two things I must assure you of, gentlemen,” Holmes’ voice crackled now, and he smiled no more. “The first is that the threat you have received is in the most deadly earnest; and the second is that there is a good chance of its being
carried out.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I can only describe the pressure that kept me from entering Sal’s apartment by comparing it with the force that would prevent either breathing man or vampire from leaping in a single bound to the top of a hundred-story building; just so impossible was it for me to move a centimeter past the threshold without invitation.
“The coat!” Matthews rasped at me again, from across the squalid room. “Just tyke it off now, real easy-like.” The knife in his hand prodded with precise calculation at the girl’s soft throat, where one small bright drop of blood appeared.
My own right hand, extended at shoulder height, was hidden from his view behind the frame of the doorway in which I stood. It had gone to work with all its strength on the old masonry that mouldered there. Tired mortar crunched and cracked beneath my rage-driven talons, and a fist-sized stone was loosening.
To cover the sounds made by my busy fingers, and to try to gain time for them to complete their work, I endeavored to draw my enemy into an argument. As he obviously took me for some detective or other, I played the role. “Think what you are doing, Matthews. This is not a killing matter—not yet. Put down the knife, release the girl, and you shall never stand in the dock for any crime you may have committed so far. You have my solemn word on that.”
Matthews had no intention of believing me, or even of listening. “Your coat, I said! Or, by God, I’ll carve her!”
My straining fingers at last pulled the stone out of the wall. Time was when my right hand knew cunning with spear and lance and javelin. I twisted my body and threw with all the force that I could muster. The hurled stone cracked Matthews’ wrist, jarring the blade out of his hand—but from there the stone glanced on in a way that I had not foreseen, to smash into his forehead. He fell without a groan, to hit the floor almost before his clashing weapon.
Sal cried out, and she too went down, although the blade had left only the merest scratch upon her throat. For a long moment there was stark silence in the cellar, save for her solitary, gasping breath, and the uneven thumping of her heart. Then she raised her head, grasping the fact that the deadly peril of the knife had somehow been averted. She jumped up, hysterical though still almost silent, and would have run past me to the street.
The Holmes-Dracula File Page 13