Contents
Cover
Also Available from Titan Books
Title Page
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Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Author’s Note
About the Author
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Sherlock Holmes: The Spider’s Web
Print edition ISBN: 9781785658440
Electronic edition ISBN: 9781785658457
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: September 2020
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© Philip Purser-Hallard 2020. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
In memory of my dad, Terry Hallard, who never passed up an
opportunity to say ‘A handbag?’
PREFACE
Many of the cases with which I was privileged to assist my friend Mr Sherlock Holmes require a degree of delicacy in the recounting. In some instances this has been because of the shocking nature of the secrets which our investigations revealed, but in others it is simply that the social status of those involved precludes their publication.
The former kind may, I fear, remain forever unpublishable, but as far as the latter goes it has been my habit to change the names and recognisable details so as to obscure the identities of the principals. This has allowed me to write with discretion about incidents that involved a number of the more eminent personages of our age.
The adventure which I have termed The Spider’s Web is not amenable to such treatment. One fact of biography was so well publicised at the time, and so unique to the person concerned, that mentioning it would make his identity inescapable. Yet, as it turned out to be of vital importance to the case, I cannot permit myself to obscure it. To do so would entail falsifying some of the links in the chain of reasoning that led Holmes to his conclusions, and he would rightly take grave exception to any such liberty.
Furthermore, the persons in this drama were eminent indeed, including a former Cabinet minister and members of the aristocracy, as well as others prominent in the London society of the nineties. Some were young at the time and are of respectable middle age twenty-three years later, and there is no reason to suppose that their children will not live long and healthy lives.
I have therefore instructed my solicitors that this account must be sealed unread, only to be opened a hundred years from now. At that time it can be supposed that anyone living who still remembers the principals will have other matters to concern them than the protection of their memory.
In any case, by then I can only imagine that the populace at large will have long ago forgotten the name, and the remarkable personal history, of Mr Ernest Worthing.
John H. Watson, MD, 1920
CHAPTER ONE
THE USES OF PALMISTRY
Lord Arthur Savile stared at Sherlock Holmes in dismay. ‘What crime?’ he asked.
‘The most serious of crimes, Lord Arthur.’ The detective returned his gaze sternly. ‘Ten years ago you murdered Mr Septimus Podgers of West Moon Street, by drowning him in the River Thames close to Cleopatra’s Needle.’
The nobleman gasped and turned very pale. His footman, a forbidding, thickset man whose tight-fitting livery bulged as he moved, stepped forward, presumably to throw Holmes and me out into Belgrave Square. Savile waved the man away with a resigned air, however, and said, ‘I think perhaps you had better leave us, Francis.’ My friend’s shot had reached its mark.
‘So she’s been talking, then,’ His Lordship said, with a sigh. ‘I had supposed she might.’
Judged by appearances alone, Lord Arthur was an admirable specimen of his class. In his middle thirties, handsome, tall and elegantly presented, he had been charming and scrupulously polite to us since Holmes had requested a private audience with him at his home in Belgrave Square.
The room, too, was furnished elegantly and austerely, even ascetically, although the carpets looked rather venerable to my eye. Bright forenoon light shone in from the green spaces of the square outside, where early spring flowers were beginning to speckle the earth with colour.
Holmes said sternly, ‘I can assure you, Lady Arthur has been the soul of discretion.’ I knew, having followed his painstaking investigation of the Winckelkopf case through all its stages, that there had been no information received from any such quarter. Indeed, I had some opportunity to watch the Saviles together at Lady Cissbury’s soirée the week before, and their devotion to one another had seemed to me quite exemplary.
Holmes added, gesturing at Savile’s hands, ‘The chief witnesses agai
nst you are these, my lord. You are quite literally betrayed by your own hands.’ He clicked his fingers for me to pass him his leather portfolio, which I did without demur. Sherlock Holmes always enjoyed his stagecraft.
‘My hands? Good gracious,’ said the aristocrat, becoming if anything rather paler. He raised both hands and stared at them as if they bore an ancient inscription he must decipher. He stammered slightly as he enquired, ‘May I ask how?’
‘These photographs,’ Holmes replied, opening the portfolio and brandishing the prints in question. ‘I obtained them last week at Lady Cissbury’s, under the pretext of photographing your spirit energy. A deplorable and unscientific practice, the feigning of which pained me but proved indispensably useful in this instance.’
Savile looked surprised. ‘I say. There was a funny whiskered fellow with glasses and a stoop. Lady Cissbury had him installed in the summer room, so her guests could have their auras photographed. Was that really you?’
Holmes bowed slightly. ‘I admit to some small skill in the art of disguise.’
I had been there too, concealed in a closet in case Holmes found himself in need of assistance, but Lord Arthur could hardly be expected to be aware of that.
The aristocrat leaned across to peer at the photographic prints Holmes had placed on the wooden chair beside us, the room being bereft of any writing desk or even a coffee table. Each was a life-sized image of one of Lord Arthur’s palms, spread out against the background of a black baize cloth, each line marked clearly in the photographic limelight. In each case Holmes had placed a luggage label next to the little finger, the number written on which distinguished these hands from those of forty-seven other guests. He was still pondering the usefulness of keeping the remainder on file for future use.
‘I can’t see any spirit energy here,’ His Lordship observed peevishly.
Holmes sighed. ‘That is what you may expect to see when I take your spirit photograph. More to the point, however, the hands photographed here are indisputably those of the killer of Septimus Podgers.’
‘I’m afraid I understand very little of this, Mr Holmes,’ Savile said a little plaintively, and I could understand his puzzlement. The Winckelkopf case had been an unusual one even by Holmes’s standards, beginning with no more than a name and a time, and leading to a trail of suspicious activity that ended in the death of Podgers the palmist, a decade in the past.
Our involvement in the affair had begun shortly after Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard came into possession of a ledger-book, stolen by a cleaning woman from her late employer, an elderly German resident of Soho who had recently died from a severe chill. It seemed that the woman had entertained suspicions that her employer’s business was of an illicit nature, and had retained the book in the hope of blackmailing his customers with it, but being unable to locate any of them she had instead turned to the police in hope of a reward. From its contents, Lestrade had realised that the deceased had been a dangerous criminal whom the Yard had been seeking for some decades, a prolific manufacturer of bespoke bombs known by the name ‘Herr Winckelkopf’.
The ledger book was a list of sales of explosive devices, and accordingly in many of the entries, alongside the buyer’s name or alias and the fee charged (for Winckelkopf had been happy to sell his skills to all comers, whether anarchists, nihilists, Fenians or common assassins, at a price), was a record of the precise time at which the bomb was set to explode.
‘Do you mean to say that Winckelkopf wrote down my name?’ Lord Arthur asked, when Holmes told him all of this. ‘That seems very slipshod practice for a man in his line of business.’
Holmes said, ‘On the contrary, you were listed as Mr Robert Smith. It was to identify the owner of that alias that Lestrade asked for my assistance.’
By comparing these times and dates with those of known revolutionary outrages, Lestrade and his men had been able to establish the identities of many of those who had used Winckelkopf’s services, but a few eluded him. ‘Smith’ in particular, who on Tuesday 24th May 1887, ten years previously, had paid the German four pounds, two shillings and sixpence for a mechanism timed to explode at noon on Friday 27th of that month, could not be identified. The police had no record of any explosion occurring at that time, the name was surely a pseudonym, and even if it were not, they could hardly track down and interview every Robert Smith in London. Rather than waste his men’s time, Lestrade had invited Holmes to look into the matter.
Holmes had adopted the theory that on this occasion Winckelkopf’s normally reliable mechanisms had failed him, and that the bomb had not exploded, or perhaps had exploded sometime later, when its intended target had been absent. He sifted through reports in every newspaper he could find for May and June of 1887, looking for any anomalous occurrences that might indicate something of the kind, until eventually he found, of all things, an account in the Chichester Express on Monday 30th May of a sermon preached in the cathedral by the dean at matins on the previous day.
In it the cleric had alluded to an amusing joke played on his family, an ormolu clock sent as a present which had, at that same preset time, emitted a small report and shaken loose an allegorical figure of Liberty, which had broken on the floor. He drew from this some sententious lessons about the limitations of freedom as an ideal, but for Holmes’s purposes the important point was that Winckelkopf had been known to use clocks, and ormolu clocks specifically, as a basis for his bombs.
‘I can only suppose that the batch of dynamite was defective, or more probably that the explosive was exposed to damp during its journey through the postal service,’ Holmes commented.
‘I suppose that would explain the outcome,’ said Lord Arthur. ‘But how did this lead you to Mr Podgers? I confess, Mr Holmes, I am agog.’ His enthusiasm seemed sincere, as if he had entirely forgotten the capital predicament in which he found himself.
‘Well, the question was naturally who might have wished to assassinate the Dean of Chichester. He is a man of quiet habits, not given to controversy or, as far as I can ascertain, to any firm beliefs at all. But we knew that Herr Winckelkopf was pleased to sell his services to all, and not only those of a political bent. I wondered, then, about the dean’s relatives.’
Lord Arthur smiled. ‘Ah.’
Like many senior clergymen, the Dean of Chichester was well connected, and with the help of Debrett’s Peerage, Holmes had been able to compile a comprehensive family tree. This had provided the interesting information that the dean’s first cousin once removed, Lady Clementina Beauchamp, had died, apparently of a heart attack, a mere ten days before this putative attempt on the dean’s life. Lady Clementina had left much of her property, including a house on Curzon Street, to her cousin’s son, Lord Arthur Savile.
Less than six weeks later, Lord Arthur had married the society heiress Sybil Merton, now Lady Arthur Savile, in a ceremony that, according to the gossip columns, had already been twice postponed. His uncle, the Dean of Chichester, had presided.
‘The connection between these various events was not altogether clear,’ Holmes observed drily. ‘As I said, all the indications were that Lady Clementina’s death was a natural one. And the dean had issue of his own, meaning that a nephew would have no hope of inheritance and little reason to attempt an assassination. But the connection was sufficient to prompt me to examine all the deaths reported in the papers during May and June that year, in case there were some other pattern linking them.’
‘And so Mr Podgers enters the story,’ Savile guessed, apparently quite enthralled.
‘Indeed. Podgers’ body was washed ashore in Greenwich on 2nd June. It was clear that he had drowned. His death was ruled a suicide, ascribed to mental derangement brought on by overwork. As it happened, I recognised the name. Podgers had been a cheiromantist, and was the author of a posthumously published treatise on palmistry that I had read myself, at a stage in my career when I was gauging the merits of physiognomic theories of criminology. It had stuck in my mind because of a vivid ac
count he gave of reading a young man’s palm at a party and deducing that its owner would become a murderer.
‘Now you may say,’ Holmes suggested, ‘as Dr Watson did at this point, that cheiromancy is as nebulous a farrago of poppycock and claptrap as spirit photography.’
I had indeed said as much, quite vocally, when Holmes’s investigations reached this stage. As a medical man, I must acknowledge that biometrical descriptions have some validity in predicting criminality – the shape of the skull, for instance, is said to be an indicator of character, and I myself have noticed in my work with Holmes that pickpockets tend to have slim, delicate hands compared to the powerful fists of habitual brawlers – but even at their best, such inferences are general and imprecise. I considered it profoundly improbable that any feature in a man’s palm could reliably predict that he would commit a specific misdeed.
Holmes continued, ‘Nevertheless, from reading his account of his own theories and practice, I have no doubt that Septimus Podgers believed in it entirely.’
‘My wife tells me that Lady Windermere became quite convinced that Podgers was a fraud,’ Savile put in. ‘The late Lady Windermere, that is, the aunt of the present viscount.’
‘Perhaps she did,’ said Holmes. ‘It was at one of her soirées that you met him, I believe? The society pages place you both at Bentinck House on 29th April.’
Savile nodded, his face paling once more.
Once he had learned of Podgers’ connection with Savile, Holmes’s interest in the palmist’s death was piqued. He had worked out, using tide tables and navigational charts from 1887, along with his compendious knowledge of the Thames’s flows, currents and obstacles, approximately where and when the deceased must have entered the water. Accordingly, amid much grumbling from Lestrade about having to chase up the fading paperwork, Holmes had spoken to all the policemen who had been on duty near the Embankment during the 30th and 31st May 1887. At ten years’ remove their memories were naturally hazy, but Holmes had the news stories of the day at his fingertips following his perusal of the press archives, and by mentioning contemporary events had been able to jog one man’s memory.
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