The Cthulhu Casebooks

by James Lovegrove

In due course we reached our destination, but only when the front door of 221B was shut securely behind us and locked did I allow myself a deep sigh of relief. I tended to the many contusions left on Holmes by the fight with Zhang, daubing them with liniment of turpentine oil. Then he and I bade each other goodnight and retired to our bedrooms. I was so keyed up with nervous energy I thought I might never fall asleep, but in fact I was out almost the moment I extinguished my bedside lamp.

  I was awoken a while later by the sound of someone moving stealthily about in the pitch darkness of my room: the tiny creak of a floorboard, a stifled breath barely audible above the ticking of the mantelpiece clock.

  Then a hand was pressed to my mouth and I heard the voice of Sherlock Holmes, at a whisper, saying in my ear: “Watson. Not a word. Get up. Quiet as you can. We are not alone.”

  ELECTRIFIED, I DIVESTED MYSELF OF THE BED-COVERS and rose as noiselessly as I was able.

  “Someone is in the sitting room,” Holmes confided. Beyond him the door that connected our two chambers stood open. “Whoever it is, they are making only a poor effort to be surreptitious. They have even turned a light on. The glow is visible under my bedroom door.”

  “Mrs Hudson?” I queried. I looked over to the door that connected my own bedroom to the sitting room beyond, and sure enough, could see a chink of light.

  “Hardly. She would not enter my lodgings without permission, and certainly not at three o’clock in the morning. Besides, her room lies directly above mine and I have been listening to… Well, at the risk of being unchivalrous, let us just say the good lady is not the silentest of sleepers.”

  “Who, then? A burglar?”

  “That is what we must go and find out. I wish you still had your revolver.”

  “Not as much as I wish it. Do you not have a gun of your own?”

  “In the sitting room.”

  “Confound it. Is there no household object we can put to use as a weapon?”

  “None to hand. We shall simply have to depend upon our own wherewithal. Are you ready? Follow my lead. If we both rush the intruder at once, we shall have the best hope of catching him unawares and subduing him.”

  We approached my bedroom door. At that moment a shadow moved across the light that shone from beneath it, accompanied by a soft tread, shoes on the bearskin hearthrug. My stomach curdled with the sense of anger that one rightfully feels when the sanctity of one’s home is violated. On the other hand, I was very afraid, my pulse thumping like timpani in my ears.

  “On the count of three,” Holmes said, grasping the doorknob. “One. Two.”

  With “Three!” he thrust the door open and charged through. I was hot on his heels.

  Our trespasser was standing with his back to the fireplace, where the embers of a blaze we had set the previous evening still radiated a faint heat. He looked entirely unsurprised when we burst in, as though he had been expecting both us and our somewhat brutish mode of entry. His stillness, his air of complete unflappability, brought the pair of us up short. We had been braced for startlement, fear, an attempt to flee, even fisticuffs; not a quiet nod, a wry smile, and eyes that twinkled with aloof amusement.

  He was Chinese, tall for his race, with fine angular cheekbones and neatly combed, receding hair. His attire was immaculate, from the wing collar and gold tiepin to the felt spats covering the uppers of his patent leather shoes. His double-breasted Newmarket coat and grey Angola trousers, although I have never been good at judging such things by sight alone, looked expensively tailored, a product of Savile Row. It fit his spare, lean frame with bespoke precision. A Chesterfield overcoat, also of high quality, had been folded in half and draped over an armchair, with his hat and muffler placed on top. This gesture and the lit desk lamp gave the impression that the visitor, notwithstanding his lack of invitation, had succeeded in making himself quite at home.

  “Forgive my calling by unannounced,” the man said in perfect English without a trace of an accent. “I had no wish to disturb your landlady at such an ungodly hour.”

  “Never mind our landlady,” I said. “What about us? State your business, you blackguard. Unless you want to leave by the window rather than the front door.”

  “Watson,” said Holmes, “save your breath. His presence here is not entirely unsolicited.”

  “You know the fellow?”

  “Know of him. Is it not obvious who he is? Can you not tell?”

  Until Holmes said those words, I had not paused to consider the Chinaman’s identity. Now I realised it could be none other than…

  “Gong-Fen Shou.”

  At his name, the trespasser clasped his hands together. “The very same. Mr Holmes I have no trouble distinguishing, but you, sir, have me at a disadvantage.”

  “This is Dr John Watson,” said Holmes, “my friend and ally. As to how you are able to put a name to my face…”

  “You are beginning to garner a reputation in certain circles,” said Gong-Fen. “It is becoming widely known that, for the resolution of problems which the legal fraternity either will not or cannot attend to, Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street is your man. A ‘consulting detective’, is that not right? You advertise in the Help Available columns of several newspapers, but you also benefit from word-of-mouth recommendation.”

  “Look here, this is all very nice and polite,” I said, “but how did you even get into the house?”

  “Ah, there I must plead for clemency. I have some facility as a picker of locks.”

  “You broke in!”

  “Calm yourself, my boy,” said Holmes.

  “Calm? How can I be calm?” I exclaimed. “Holmes, the man is a drug lord. A scoundrel. He has just confessed to a crime. We should haul him down to Scotland Yard forthwith, that’s what we should do.”

  “You did not offer me the same treatment when I told you yesterday that I had broken into Stamford’s lodgings.”

  “Yes, but dash it all, this is different.”

  “Not so different,” Holmes said with equanimity. “What you are forgetting, or choosing to overlook, is that we set out to engineer this very outcome: that Gong-Fen Shou should notice us. Here he is, in person. Mission accomplished.”

  “All the same…” I could have blustered on, but I doubted it would have got me anywhere. Holmes seemed almost enchanted by Gong-Fen’s audacity, as if sheer insolence were a virtue.

  “Allow me to make up for any nuisance I may have caused,” the Chinese millionaire said. “I have a gift for you, Doctor.”

  From his pocket he produced a gun. I was on the point of diving for it before he could turn it on us. There was no question in my mind that he was about to shoot us. I had to seize it from him.

  He, however, held it out with the grip towards me, the barrel in his hand. His fingers were nowhere near the trigger.

  That was when I perceived it was my very own trusty Webley Pryse.

  “I believe this is yours,” said Gong-Fen. “Please accept it as proof of earnest and a sign of goodwill. Li Guiying ought not to have confiscated it. It was ill-judged of him. Ungracious.”

  I snatched the revolver out of his grasp. It looked in good order. I noted, though, that there were no bullets in it.

  “Yes,” said Gong-Fen, seeing me check the cylinder, “I did take the precaution of unloading it. I mean you no harm, but I was not certain you would reciprocate the sentiment.”

  “You would be correct,” I muttered.

  “So,” he said, “now that you have in effect summoned me, Mr Holmes, and I have come, what is it you want? I am told you took my name in vain at a certain premises in Limehouse in which I may or may not have a financial stake.”

  “There’s no may or may not about it. You do. That opium den, thinly disguised as a hotel, is yours. How else would you have come by Watson’s revolver?”

  “I am a prominent figure in London’s Chinese community. Their spokesman, some would say. Their leader, according to others. Perhaps it was passed on to me by Li with a request for
it to be returned to its rightful owner.”

  “Perhaps,” said Holmes, the word salted with doubt. “Certainly someone must have followed us home from Limehouse tonight, else how would you have known to come here?”

  “Again, my standing in the Chinese community means I am privy to every item of intelligence the community gathers.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “Take it how you will. At any rate, you were heard to utter dire prophecies of doom against me and attribute malfeasance on my part. Such assertions, especially of the latter variety, I do not take lightly. I am a subject of the Crown just as you are, Mr Holmes, and prepared to abide by the laws of the land. Anyone who says otherwise had better have hard evidence to back up his claims.”

  A flinty spark came into Gong-Fen’s eyes as he spoke the last sentence, a glint of something cooler than the amicability that had hitherto typified him. He was serious. He was not a man to be trifled with.

  “My interest in your affairs stems from the activities of the late Dr Valentine Stamford,” said Holmes.

  “The name is unfamiliar to me.”

  “I believe that statement to be an out-and-out falsehood.”

  “You may believe what you like, my good sir. Again, without evidence—”

  “I have evidence,” Holmes said, cutting in brusquely. He nodded to the window. “Through the gap in the curtains I have spotted a clarence parked at the kerb outside. Yours, clearly. And it was a clarence that whisked Dr Stamford away from Shadwell in the early hours of yesterday morning.”

  “Of what consequence is that? I am not the only person in London to own such a vehicle.”

  “You did not allow me to finish. I was about to say, whisked him away after he failed to acquire the next in his procession of murder victims.”

  “Murder…?”

  “Stamford having been a regular patron of the aforementioned ‘premises in Limehouse’, the Golden Lotus Hotel, it is hardly difficult to extrapolate a direct relationship between you and him.”

  “It may not be difficult for you, Mr Holmes, but for anyone else…”

  “Stamford was acting as your errand boy. That is my conclusion. He was choosing and fetching the victims on your behalf.”

  “Errand boy? This is preposterous. Why would I employ him as such? I have more domestic staff than I know what to do with, Mr Holmes. One snap of my fingers and they jump to it. If I want anything menial done, I simply ask one of them.”

  “But this was no menial task. This was something else altogether. You cannot send just anyone to roam the East End looking for lost souls to kidnap. You would need someone on whose discretion you can count and whose loyalty is beyond question. Someone over whom you have an unshakeable hold. That would be Stamford, whose enslavement to the poppy would have made him, by extension, your slave too.”

  As Holmes said all this, I could see that it made a grim, dismaying sense. Stamford had been working for Gong-Fen, no doubt in return for free opium. To him it would be an invaluable recompense for his vile labours; to the Chinaman, relatively paltry.

  “You are on thin ice here,” Gong-Fen said, his face still serene but his voice now devoid of its earlier warmth and magnanimity. “To bandy about such accusations is to risk provoking my ire, and I am not a man with whom you would wish to cross swords, trust me.”

  “Where the chain of reasoning leads from that point on,” Holmes continued, unabashed, “is into the realm of pure conjecture. I do not at present have the data from which to build a solid deduction. What I do have is a workable hypothesis.”

  “Would you like to share it?”

  Holmes debated inwardly. “I am loath to, but since you asked… Dr Stamford and you, I would submit, have been collaborating in an experiment.”

  Gong-Fen arched an eyebrow. “Go on.”

  “You have been testing out some powerful new narcotic on a selection of unsuspecting innocents snatched off the streets. Stamford, with his medical knowhow, was aiding you in its design. You have been conducting trials of this exotic drug, but so far the results have not been positive – anything but. Its effects are instantaneous, dramatic, and lethal. It robs the user of his vigour, his physical robustness, his very essence. It rapidly saps the life from him, leaving him a husk. You have then had to discard the depleted bodies at random around Shadwell, passing them off as discrete, unconnected deaths, the results of malnutrition or sickness or both. You have done this on a monthly basis, leaving adequate intervals between experiments so as to prevent your endeavour looking too much like what it is, a rash of killings. Were the deaths to occur too close together, the bodies to begin to pile up one on top of another, even the beef-witted blockheads at the Met might sit up and take notice. Timing the abduction and disposal of each victim to coincide with the arrival of the new moon is simply a practical expedient, darkness affording the best cover for your degenerate nocturnal undertakings. All in all, you and Stamford have developed into a latter-day Burke and Hare, the distinction being that Burke and Hare had the decency to visit their abuses on the already dead, at least to begin with, while the doctors to whom they sold the corpses were engaged only in dissection for the purpose of teaching anatomy rather than the kind of fatal torment through which you have put your ‘laboratory mice’.”

  I was hoping to see astonishment on Gong-Fen’s face. I thought the accuracy of Holmes’s surmise would hit him smack between the eyes like an arrow.

  As it was, he merely laughed and slowly applauded.

  “So near, Mr Holmes,” he said, “and yet so far.”

  Gong-Fen’s derision had the same effect on Holmes as a slap might have. He flinched, then tried to cover up the reaction.

  “As I said, a workable hypothesis only. Perhaps you would be so decent as to tell me where I have gone amiss.”

  “I am under no obligation to tell you anything. You are young, Mr Holmes, and slinging mud around to see if any sticks is something only youngsters do. It would be of benefit to you, and to your sidekick, to leave well enough alone. You have strayed into a world about which you know nothing, and if anything comes of this meeting it should be the realisation that life is infinitely more complicated and more precarious than it seems.”

  “That sounds to me like a threat.”

  “Take it how you will. What you must understand is that we are all at the mercy of forces we cannot control, let alone comprehend. This Valentine Stamford, if I interpret what you say correctly, had a taste for opium. Addiction rode roughshod over him. Now, like many a man before him who has fallen under the drug’s spell, he is dead.”

  “How do you know he is dead? I did not say so.”

  “You referred to him as ‘the late’. You spoke of him in the past tense.”

  “You did, as a matter of fact,” I said.

  “Yes, all right, Watson. Thank you,” Holmes said testily. He had been wrong-footed by his own inattention. Thinking he had bowled on the wicket, he had watched the ball go wide, and he liked it not a bit. “Be that as it may, Gong-Fen, I am convinced his death arose from his connection to you.”

  Gong-Fen waved slender fingers airily. “Another baseless accusation. All I am saying is that death is an easy thing to come by, and some deaths have greater meaning than others.”

  “Again, a threat. Only those who are cornered or have something to hide issue threats.”

  “You misconstrue me. I am explaining more than I should, more than is safe for you to hear. I am, in a manner of speaking, trying to help you.”

  “Very well.” Holmes drew himself up to his full height. “Then, as you are in such an informative mood, tell me what is meant by ‘the Great Old Ones’.”

  Now it was Gong-Fen’s turn to flounder, if only briefly. His aura of refined urbanity evaporated and I glimpsed something beneath it: a level of primal fury all the more incongruous in a man so polished, so much an avatar of modern civilisation. The fury was born not of displeasure, or so I judged, but of dread. It was there and g
one in a fraction of a second, so quickly concealed one might not be sure one had seen it at all. Yet it lingered in my recollection, and made me think that Gong-Fen Shou was both more and less than he wished everyone to assume.

  “Where did you hear that phrase?” he enquired.

  “Dr Stamford himself uttered it, shortly before he committed suicide in a most ghastly fashion.”

  “You were with him before he died.” It was less a question than a realisation. “That is interesting. And perhaps regrettable. What else did he say?”

  “He was far from sane at the end. He spoke in a peculiar language that may simply have been gibberish but was probably not. He also mumbled something ominous-sounding and apocalyptic. It was all most peculiar and rather horrible.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I think you can do more than imagine, Mr Gong-Fen. I am of the view that you were one of the last people to see Stamford before he was reduced to a state of maddened incoherence, and that you were actively responsible for it.”

  “Again you sling mud. Were the good doctor here anything like an impartial witness, I might have you up in front of a judge for slander.”

  “How quick you are to resort to vague menaces. You never repudiate explicitly.”

  “That would be to give credence to your claptrap.”

  “Such tact. Such defensiveness. Mr Gong-Fen, let me be frank.”

  “Oh, please do.”

  “I have developed a surprising liking for you while at the same time being convinced that you are one of the wickedest villains in London. If I could only prove the latter beyond reasonable doubt, we would be holding this conversation with bars between us. You on the wrong side of them, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “It might be best if you were simply to confess. Make a clean breast of it. You would save us both a great deal of time and bother. In the absence of that, you will find me a dogged and relentless pursuer, a veritable bloodhound. I shall not rest until you are brought to justice.”

  Gong-Fen acknowledged this with a slight tilt of the head. “So be it. You are after answers. You seek definitive solutions.”