by David Pirie
‘It is not something I have concerned myself with, Dr Bell. He was useful but I had no idea how far he had sunk. And I thought we were to discuss matters scientific.’
‘I promise that is where I am leading,’ said the Doctor. ‘And you say sometimes he had access to your laboratory and that, on these occasions, he was delivering cadavers.’
‘Yes, as I recall.’
‘Which were waiting for you on your return, were they not? You see, I will tell you what I think and you must say whether you agree. I think that, when he had the chance, he found a scientific way to make things far easier for himself. I do not think you knew that, but if you had stopped for a moment and applied your own scientific principles, you would have concluded as much.’
‘Then I would be grateful if you would explain, for I still do not see the scientific application.’
‘You see,’ said Bell, ‘using the box was one thing, but I think he had found a far easier way of drowning them, even than his trap. He only needed to bring his victims here, the very place where their bodies were required, show them the wonders of your laboratory, including this chamber, and then, while they stared at it, he would quite simply step outside …’
As he spoke the Doctor walked out.
‘And close the door,’ he added, and in an instant he too had closed it, tightening the wheeled waterproof seal. I could not believe my eyes and Macandrew was staggered. He came over to the door at once and pulled at it, staring at Bell though the porthole window.
‘It is merely a demonstration,’ the Doctor said, raising his voice so the astonished Macandrew could hear him. ‘A chance for you to experience the effects of science.’
And with that he began to open the second wheel, which released the water into the chamber. I supposed he was joking and would in a second or so stop and open the door, but he kept on. Macandrew was looking away now and I could hear the noise of water. The ducts were opening and it was starting to flow into the room.
‘Doctor, what are you doing?’ I said in shock. But he did not even turn — he was opening the wheel further and further. Looking in I could see the water was already swirling around Macandrew’s ankles, and a great roar was starting as the duct fully opened. Inside the chamber his expression, which had been angry, was turning to fear.
Now, as I remonstrated with the Doctor, Macandrew came and beat on the window, but Bell kept his hand hard on the wheel and did not even look. Soon Macandrew staggered back through the water to inspect the ducts, obviously seeing whether they could be blocked, but it was quite impossible. He had designed it himself so that the velocity of the water was enormous.
Once again I implored the Doctor, ‘You must stop now at once. This is sheer folly.’ I was trying to sound reasonable because I wanted to hide the truth, which was, strange though it is to relate, that I felt more fear now than I had even in the den. For I could quite well see that the Doctor was not himself. I had never before seen him so coldly angry. I shouted to him again as he stood over the wheel but he merely consulted his watch.
Inside the chamber Macandrew had given up on the door and the porthole. He was staring about him, the water already at his knees and coming faster all the time. I looked around desperately, wondering if there was any other safety device beyond what Bell controlled, but I could see none. And when I turned back it seemed to me that the water was nearly at Macandrew’s waist.
I began to scream at Bell as never before in my life. ‘You will stop this. I do not care if the man turned his eye away from what was being done in his name. It is no excuse for drowning him.’
The Doctor turned and I saw the anger still in his eyes. ‘If he has any scientific principles left in him at all, he will know quite well that he probably has another four minutes.’
Macandrew was beating on the door now, his face terrified. I turned back to Bell who was holding fast, but I no longer had any confidence in his calculation. When I looked back Macandrew was staggering around quite likely to collapse any second and drown himself even before the level reached the top.
I could bear it no longer. I hurled myself at Bell and physically dragged him away from the wheel. At first he resisted me and I wondered if I would be able to manage to get him away in time, for he still had his old wiry strength, but then he left it.
In the chamber I could see to my horror that Macandrew had fallen. I turned the wheel as fast as I could. Of course it was far harder this way than the other and there was massive pressure, but slowly I managed to make a seal.
And then I pulled the handle that opened the drain.
Looking through I could see Macandrew had his head up and that the water had stopped. But he was not looking at us. He was slumped against the far wall, his eyes fixed on the inlet.
At least the drainage was designed to be fast, so I could see the level dropping. And, while I made sure of the controls, it was Bell who opened the door. Over his shoulder I saw Macandrew pressed back against the wall, still white with fear.
‘I think,’ said Bell, ‘I have demonstrated to you the alternative method Hanbury almost certainly used to provide you with what you wanted.’
‘You are mad,’ said Macandrew quietly. Though he still had a frightful appearance, he was recovering a little of his dignity.
‘It is a question,’ said the Doctor, ‘of who is mad and who is sane. Some might think that performing scientific experiments on people who had been deliberately drowned was mad. I fully accept you had no legal guilt, but even so these things would never have happened without your contribution. And what sort of world, what sort of century lies before us if your science is to be conducted with that kind of wilful blindness?’
Little more was said as we went back upstairs and Macandrew dismissed us curtly from the house. But I admit I felt only relief. I had been half dreading that he would threaten the Doctor with some kind of lawsuit, for in many respects justice would have been on his side, and I pointed this out as soon as we were in the street.
The Doctor smiled at me. He looked utterly exhausted but satisfied, exhilarated even. ‘I am sorry to have put you through that, Doyle, but not, I fear, for any other reason. If Macandrew had shown the slightest sympathy for the victims I would never have done it, but he is the kind who thinks everything of his science and himself and nothing whatsoever of its effect. Even Hanbury, as I said, had more imagination than that man. But I knew quite well that the famous scientist would never let this affair be made public, so we were quite safe.’
We strolled on slowly, not yet cold despite the weather for we had got warm enough in Macandrew’s house, and also, I suppose, we wished to delay the moment of parting. ‘I also like to think,’ he continued, ‘though it is probably an illusion, that he might have learnt a lesson tonight.’
As we walked down that freezing yet well-lit London street, he counseled me to try and forget about this evening’s horrors and get back to the sanity and warmth of the Morland household. ‘For my part,’ he said, ‘I will be perfectly glad to return to Edinburgh.’ He was taking the train north the next day and there was no way of knowing when we would meet again.
Before he left me he said I should not allow myself to be haunted. But there was something else.
‘I do not want you to mistake me. On our terms, Doyle, yes, but we will never give up the fight. To the death, if necessary.’
And so we parted, and as I watched him disappear in the direction of his hotel in a cab, a part of me felt almost reassured. Of course I knew that by far the greater business stood unfinished, but at least we had dealt with one immediate threat. I had quite forgotten his aphorism that the final and most dangerous stage of a Greek labyrinth is a single straight line.
THE UNCLE
I turned away after his cab disappeared round the corner of the street and buttoned up my overcoat to the top for the walk back to the Morlands. Consulting my watch as I set off, I was amazed to find it was not even ten o’clock. But we had started for the opium den in early e
vening and it was hardly surprising that our sojourn there had felt like an eternity.
Looking around me, I saw that the frost had descended on London in earnest and the pavements were white and pretty. A small sprinkling of snow had evidently come down while we were in the scientist’s house, making the streets seem much more cheerful, and I was suddenly pleased to think of Sally and Martin at their fireside, awaiting me. Of course, telling them of my adventures at the den would only raise unhappy memories for the family, so I resolved that I would hear about their day. At this moment I could think of nothing better than listening to Sally recounting her outings with the children, telling me what they had drawn or said or done, or even to Martin chronicling his endless travails with the printer.
So I walked up to that little door with a light step, full of anticipation, and was not disappointed. For I had hardly opened it when Sally appeared looking radiant and excited in the candlelight which seemed, as I looked around, to be unusually abundant. Sally, who loved candles, had often talked to me about Christmas in the house when masses of extra ones were lit and flowers were everywhere. And now, as I stared round in astonishment, the household seemed to have decided to celebrate it early, for on every surface there were candles, sending out a soft dancing light and shining most of all in her face, which was utterly mischievous.
‘We saw you coming,’ she said, beaming in a way that reminded me of her little girl Lucy’s exultant grin.
‘Has Christmas arrived early?’ I asked, for even I had not anticipated such a pleasant welcome, though it could hardly have come at a better time.
‘No, but we have decided to add to it. And thanks to you it will be such a happy Christmas for we have no debts. But come. Here you are.’
And she picked up a glass from the table with a little smile.
I walked a few paces into that brilliant hallway and thought it had never seemed such a safe haven. ‘What is it?’ I held up the glass which contained a greenish liquid.
‘Oh, it is a wonderful cordial. Prepared for you. You look so tired and anyway it is part of the surprise.’
‘Very well,’ said I, downing the drink in one. It tasted deliciously refreshing, with a hint of apple and lime, though a little bitter.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘someone is here. Someone who wants to meet you so badly. I have spoken to you of Uncle Tim and what his visits are like. It is such a shame Martin has to stay late working on the calendar, but he will be here soon. And the children have had Tim all to themselves and loved every moment of it.’
Of course I recalled her talk of Tim before. Tim, who arrived from abroad, armed with presents for the children. And we moved on as if in a dream to the drawing room which was a little darker but here the firelight flickered merrily. I was happy but I thought also that it was a pity how tired I was, too tired to do justice to such a joyful occasion.
By the fire I saw a rocking chair that was usually in the window. Lucy and little Will were clustered around a smartly clad figure with longish hair who had his back towards me. The children turned around, all smiles and mischief like their mother, laughing uncontrollably at some secret joke, the firelight flickering on Lucy Morland’s fair hair. And before them was the evidence of presents. Oranges and nuts and dates and other fruit, and Will was sucking at an orange.
Sally whispered in my ear, ‘You see, I know now that it was Tim who learned of Dr Small’s visit to Egypt when he was last here a year ago and mentioned you then. We had no idea you were known to Tim.’
I did not quite follow that as I sat down on the armchair, for my legs felt very tired. Yet, as he turned, I looked.
And there he was, smiling, so handsome, as he stroked Lucy’s hair.
Though my senses were all but gone, I glimpsed the whole of it.
‘It is so good to see you again, Doyle,’ said Cream.
Also by David Pirie
The Patient’s Eyes
A Historical Note
People often want to know how much of my writing about Arthur Conan Doyle is based on actual events and whether I have made any fresh discoveries. The fact that the question still looms so large is in its own way a remarkable thing. Doyle ranks among the most famous of all Victorian writers, easily the most durable in terms of film and television, yet even today this man’s life, particularly his early life, is shrouded in quite as much mystery as one of his own stories.
My own interest in the subject dates from a childhood in a Scottish seaside town only an hour away from where he grew up. This gave me an early acquaintance with the atmosphere of Edinburgh, not least its wind, and with Doyle’s work. I still have a battered copy of the complete Holmes stories I bought when I was seven, a book I used to discuss avidly with a school friend, appropriately enough the son of a Professor of Anatomy.
Much to our surprise we were told by one of our teachers that the Holmes detective stories were not serious creations at all, but the playthings of a man who grew tried of their superficiality and killed off his detective. This summary never seemed quite right to me, although I had no idea then that T.S. Eliot harboured the same doubts and was himself so puzzled by Holmes’s ambiguous connection to Doyle, that he called it the ‘greatest’ of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Today, rereading Doyle’s stories with some knowledge of the contradictions in their creator (and a little experience of what it is to write fiction), the whole notion of Holmes as a bit of casual fun, undertaken for commercial reasons, seems to me absurd. Just as Bram Stoker blamed Count Dracula on a meal of crab and Mary Shelley put Frankenstein down to a kind of literary party game, Doyle’s reflections on his own gothic creation, written years after the event, reveal all the telltale hallmarks of a nineteenth-century author carefully, if unconsciously, sanitising a painful literary birth.
What lay behind this birth? Countless biographies have rehearsed what is known about Doyle, but to a very large extent this was dictated by the man himself. Not a single researcher has ever had unhampered access to his personal letters and papers. Indeed, following bitter legal battles, the bulk of these papers have not been seen by anyone for half a century and nobody can even say for sure where they are, or if they have been destroyed. As a result most recent chroniclers have had to do heroic detective work to arrive at new facts. That Arthur Conan Doyle himself suppressed many things is no longer in doubt and even the most cursory study of his life reveals a yawning gap between his public and private self. He could not keep the latter out of his writing, but he could keep it out of everything else with the result that, until quite recently, only the most public facts were available to us while Doyle himself stared out of his photos like a man in disguise. The school friend with whom I shared a liking for Holmes is now a distinguished consultant psychiatrist with a particular interest in the psychology of public people. In his view there is a greater tension between the public and the private in Conan Doyle than in any other historical figure he has ever studied, with the exception of the former American President Richard Nixon.
It is this paradox between the writing and the man which lies at the heart of Doyle for me. Here is the central mystery and every aspect of my own stories is an attempt to elucidate it, sometimes through documented fact and Doyle’s own writing, sometimes by assumption based on evidence, sometimes by invention and metaphor. I was never interested in pure pastiche but I am very preoccupied by material Doyle would have known about, and considered in private, but could never publicly discuss, and also by events which challenge the whole basis of his most precious beliefs (the ending of The Patient’s Eyes is intimately related to his belief in chivalry). He must, there is no way around it, have had to face such challenges, but how he did, and what effect they had on him, we can only conjecture.
I can lay claim to few major detective triumphs but I do still recall my amazement when, during my research, I stumbled on the fact that one of the nineteenth century’s most notorious serial killers, an American and a doctor, studied medicine in Edinburgh in 1878, exactly the year tha
t Doyle – a medical student at the same institution – met Joseph Bell. It seemed to me extraordinary that here, right in his creator’s back yard, was exactly the kind of villain Holmes never encountered. Why?
And what of Doyle’s teacher and inspiration Joseph Bell? Here was the acknowledged basis of Holmes but, before we can reach any understanding of the meeting between the two men, it is necessary to explore the strange and appalling circumstances of Doyle’s life when it happened, circumstances which he did everything in his power to conceal.
His attempts were so successful that thanks largely to a number of intrepid biographers the full story is only now starting to emerge, and it is quite as gothic as any fiction he ever wrote. By the late 1870s, his father Charles appears to have been enduring an agonized twilight existence in the Doyle family home as he made a spectacular decline into drunken insanity. Doyle, living at home throughout his student days, would have experienced this at close quarters. It was years before his father was committed to a mental institution, and even then he made at least one violent escape attempt. All of this was bad enough for the young Doyle in those crucial years and the horror of it is reflected in his work, not least in eerie Holmes stories like ‘The Crooked Man’ and ‘The Yellow Face’. But there was far worse.
During this critical period Doyle’s mother’s affections had strayed. With his older sisters often away, he may well have been the sole grown-up witness to the spectacle of his father being cuckolded in his own home, and by a man who was only five years older than Doyle himself.
Bryan Waller, a young doctor, arrived first in the Doyle family home as a lodger, while Doyle was still away at school, but the emotional attachment to Doyle’s mother was quickly formed and soon Waller took over all charge of the household with Charles Doyle still in it. The arrangement was therefore bizarre and, in almost every contemporary account, Waller emerges as a cruel, arrogant and snobbish (if cultured) man with a notorious temper. A physical relationship between him and Mary Doyle, who was fifteen years older, cannot be proved. It may have been merely a close personal bond. Waller is also thought at one time to have considered an engagement to Doyle’s sister, Annette. In a way it scarcely matters for, given the Victorian penchant for secrecy about such things, Doyle probably had no more idea of the truth than we do. The fact of this usurping father’s presence while his own father failed would have been quite unbearable enough.