The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes

by Sherlock Holmes

  Similarly, I find myself in much the same position regarding religion. Those who believe find it impossible to question or doubt; and those who doubt find it impossible to rely on faith. Non-believers reason based on scientific refutation; believers parrot based on supernatural acceptance. Neither can observe and synthesize from or to the truth. Therefore, it is an impossible position and one in which I have no interest.

  Distilled to their essence, politics should embody equality and religion should embody truths of Nature. In both cases, I have my own conclusions.

  24

  At this late date, I see no reason to continue my long opaqueness regarding Moriarty’s informer, Fred Porlock, who brought my attention to the Birlstone case.

  Porlock was highly placed in the Moriarty web. He was one of a very few who received his instructions from Moriarty directly, a sign of trust from the master and a position to be granted only after years of repeated testing. Of course, no one was ever fully trusted by Moriarty who maintained his empire through fear and final retribution for those who failed him.

  Like most of Moriarty’s agents, Porlock was a simple man essentially faceless in the human parade of London. He was European but had lived in England for many years. He spoke flawless English and easily passed as a native of London. He had worked in a number of the best hotels and had come to Moriarty’s notice when he was a waiter at the Grosvenor, a favourite of Moriarty’s for its excellent food.

  Initially, Porlock was employed as a valet to Moriarty and travelled with him throughout Europe as body-man to the mathematician, although initially he had no knowledge of Moriarty’s criminal activities. As he became trusted, he was given periodic tasks conducting messages and instructions to the lower layers of Moriarty’s organisation. As he tested true, he was slowly advanced in rank until he became involved as an accessory to such a degree that he was thereafter in thrall to Moriarty who ultimately came to possess his soul.

  Porlock had a son who he had raised in Europe after his wife died giving birth. His son was unaware of the true nature of his father’s work and Porlock had been diligent about keeping Moriarty from ever reaching into his son’s life. That desire for good may have been the goad that moved him to act as an informer and provide me with information vital to my removal of the evil Moriarty from this life.

  The tentacles of the Moriarty empire reached throughout Europe. At a moment’s notice, he was able to install his agents in various positions, or to establish them in temporary situations in order to achieve any outcome he desired. His operatives were all given faultless aliases, identities and papers. These were never forged, as Moriarty had his own creatures within the government agencies who could issue any official document required. Even Mycroft was at a loss to trace or even explain Moriarty’s access to the highest reaches of international government, banking, diplomacy, even the police and military of the major powers.

  And so, Porlock had unusual knowledge that had been slowly gained over the many years he served Moriarty. His words in the note to me in 1888, ‘I can see that he suspects me,’ were chilling for their implication. Yet, Porlock remained in Moriarty’s inner circle for three more years. When Moriarty disappeared over the falls, Porlock gained his freedom and he adopted one of Moriarty’s stock of identities and returned to London where he evened the score by meeting with Mycroft to whom he gave the particulars that would break what remained of the Moriarty organisation. He then quietly disappeared into the human mass forever.

  Porlock was present during that ultimate struggle between evil and good at Meiringen. He played his part to the end as directed by his master, guiding and staging the events leading to the ultimate solution. Fred Porlock was Peter Steiler, the Elder.

  25

  As this third decade of the Twentieth Century comes to a close, I believe the world is ready to accept the revelations of one of the most disturbing cases in my experience, an acceptance it was not ready to extend in 1887.

  The month was July. The place was a squalid half-timbered house in Tripe Alley, Lamb’s Conduit, off Park Lane, a fetid, dank quarter housing a population of human denizens that can only be described as vile mammals. All that was wrong with London was quartered in Lamb’s Conduit and its warren of crooked arteries, a nether-world that—were it not already there—would necessitate Dickens to conjure it into being.

  Extending under the quarter for several blocks in all directions is a great, subterranean cistern built centuries earlier by engineers of the early Roman city of Londinium. Once a marvel of fresh water storage, the cistern now is a rat-infested settling pond for the refuse of thousands living in the tenements extending south to the river.

  The half-timbered house in Tripe Alley, sagging and leaning from a hundred years of age and neglect, presented a low, beamed door to the cobbled alleyway, windows shuttered against time, and nothing other than silence and darkness to recommend its brooding interior. It was within this ill-promise of a house where human cruelty reached the heights of the bizarre and grotesque.

  London and, indeed, all major cities of Europe and Asia, generated massive demands for certain commodities that could only be supplied by human donors. These included raw organs, fresh bodies, skeletons, limbs, heads, brains, eyes, and even complete sets of teeth and fillets of skin. Nothing of flesh or bone was ever wasted; all found eager takers at good prices on any given day of the year.

  For the London medical colleges, there was a particular demand for preserved bodies, body parts and organs. These were used for dissection and study in order to teach anatomy and physiology. Privileged was the future surgeon who obtained his own collection of embalmed organs of the abdominal cavity in order to perfect his art over the course of several years of training, or the nascent oculist who was able to possess sets of preserved eyes of various sizes and conditions upon which to perfect the delicate surgical techniques of his chosen trade. Orthopaedists, apprentices or journeymen, required a constant supply of bones in order to experiment and perfect their mechanical and structural efficacies. The growing specialisation of medicine and surgery in the 1880s by itself added to the swelling need for bodies and diverse parts. All in all, the flesh and bone trade of London was a significant and profitable subterranean trade and one that could not be supplied sufficiently only through the brutish expedients of body-snatching and grave-robbing. Demand outpaced supply and that always creates a lucrative criminal alternative. Ever since the emergence of the sailing ships, the demand for sailors to man the ships has created a criminal trade in fresh seamen. The demand for diamonds, gold, silver and coal doomed countless men to a life of forced labour in the world’s pits. The demand for tobacco, rum and sugar created the inhumanity of the slave trade. No matter where one looks in history, the human body—in one state or another—has had value and been the subject of criminal trade. And, in Tripe Alley, that trade reached a new height of efficiency.

  For several years, Lestrade and his fellow inspectors at Scotland Yard were aware of a growing catalogue of missing persons from a seemingly random group of classes of society, including gentry to servant classes and all classes between. There was no borough or area of the city where the missing were concentrated, and none where they were spared. The list of missing, which had grown over three years to more than five-hundred as close as could be determined, was random as to male and female, age, occupation, class, education, or any other classification. The only thing in common was that their physical bodies had simply disappeared. Great care had been taken not to inform the public about this out-of-control and unexplained record of missing people.

  One fog-laden afternoon in the winter of 1887, Inspectors Lestrade, Morton, Hill, Forbes, Patterson, MacKinnon, and Jones called upon me in Montague Street. In turn, they each spoke of their combined knowledge and experience with numerous missing persons and asked for my assistance in finding what they felt to be an organized malevolent causation for the disappearances. I, of course, readily agreed to look into the matter and, to assure myse
lf a free hand in applying my own methods, indicated my preference for remaining in the background and giving the official police all credit where due.

  Suffice it to say that my investigations over the next four months were exhaustive, requiring a great amount of my time. It was necessary to discover the circumstances at the time of the disappearances of nearly four-hundred individuals who were at least partially known to Scotland Yard, and another one-hundred who were not. For many of these unfortunates, the official records contained the information I sought; for many others I had to interview those who last had contact with the missing. All of that data then had to be arranged and synthesized in order to arrive at some nominal working hypothesis. By May of 1887, I had completed my foundation work and was able to look at the indications of this enormous investigative effort.

  Two facts emerged: the victims were truly random and had nothing whatsoever in common except that they were alive and human; and most of the victims, when last viewed, had been either walking, riding, or intending to travel in a direction that—when plotted on a map—pointed most often to Hyde Park. From these findings, I made the working hypothesis that the victims were taken by others who were traveling in the same direction; and that direction and—therefore—ultimate destination of nearly five hundred Londoners was Hyde Park or its nearby environs.

  A subsequent series of five deductive steps of inference, logic, fact, overlay, and observation extending over a period of thirty-two days, had led me to Lamb’s Conduit and Tripe Alley, in the immediate Hyde Park area, as the one potential destination that nearly all of the victims may have had in common. The fifth step in my process—observation—required my concealment, and that of my agents, twenty-four hours a day for a fortnight in a filthy service area at the bifurcation of Tripe Alley from Lamb’s Conduit where we observed twelve occurrences of different parties of three inebriants entering the half-timbered house and, shortly after, two of the original three re-emerging from the house, sober, and making their way out of the quarter. The missing inebriant was always the individual in the middle of the staggering group of three when they entered the house, a person who apparently was either drunk or drugged and was supported and propelled by the outer two, the two who always re-appeared and departed the area. I had now made a connection between the random disappearances of hundreds of Londoners from all walks of life and the sinister house in Tripe Alley.

  I required additional information that could only be obtained from the wretched cast-offs who lived in the dark existence of Lamb’s Conduit. Disguised as a soup and suet-man, I frequented the grime-caked gin hall that served as the quarter’s drinking establishment. For over two weeks, after gaining acquaintance by liberal standings to glasses of gin and hot water, and through subtle inquiries of numerous broken men and women, the details of which need not detain us here, I developed a complete understanding of how one could earn four bob by simply conveying an unsuspecting visitor to the house in Tripe Alley for ‘a spot of drink and pleasure.’ None of my informers knew what took place in the ancient house after they delivered their ‘four bob visitors’ nor did they know who the inhabitants of the house were except to say they were Lascars or Malays and probably opium sellers.

  By promising my informers four bob each and with the surety of an added four bob from the receivers, I contracted them to convey me inside the house late the next evening. I took the precaution to arm myself with a six-cartridge pistol secreted inside one of my boots and instructing Lestrade to have his men ready to secure the house and its occupants at any sign of trouble.

  When we had gained Tripe Alley, my conveyors did not knock at the low door, but pushed it open and motioned me inside, a fast entry that made for a fast disappearance and less chance of being seen. Inside was a vestibule with a second door. Three raps quickly resulted in the opening of a sliding view hole and the appearance of a Lascar’s greasy face and menacing black eyes. The door opened and I was inside. My companions were each paid their four bob and hurried away. Immediately, the Lascar encircled my neck with a thick rope, taking me by surprise, while two others suddenly appeared, pinioned my arms, and walked me to a large room with three others, two men and a woman, tied to large iron rings in the overhead beams. In front of us was the most grotesque chimera I had ever witnessed.

  Three human beings were inside a narrow glass chamber at the end of the room. Another three were just emerging from the chamber and three more—the three tied to the rings with me—were apparently being readied to be next to enter the narrow glass booth. On three surgical tables were an additional three bodies in process of dissection by three bearded men with long boning knives wearing bloody, leather aprons. The bodies being cut apart drained their fluids through a large grate in the floor leading, doubtless, to the ancient cistern below and its foul human wastes of all descriptions.

  The glass chamber, having received its next three victims, was closed and a large, wheel valve opened. It filled the glass chamber with a thick, yellow cloud of gas and the odour was unmistakable, taking me back to my laboratory days at university: Paradol, the taxidermic embalming gas first developed for preservation of animals for museums that permeates the pores and, with a living specimen still breathing, fixes the tissues of the body through saturation oxygen bonding. Only three minutes of living respiration are necessary and the body emerges from the Paradol chamber, fully, permanently, and perfectly preserved in perpetuity. Here, in this chamber of horrors, Paradol was being used by the three bearded dissecting taxidermists to preserve living human beings. The horrific house in Tripe Lane was a human abattoir, an Industrial Revolution processing plant for bodies, bones, organs and flesh for the Victorian medical trade.

  Noting the mechanical process for the processing of the human victims, I concluded that these vile vivisectionists had, long since, dropped their guard as victim after victim succumbed to their industrial mechanisation. When they untied me from the rings, preparing to move me to the next phase of the process, my hands were momentarily free and, pistol to hand, I struck the nearest Lascar in the temple, felling him unconscious. Each of the other two, I fired at a femur and shattered their legs rendering them helpless. The three dissectionists laid down their knives and surrendered themselves to the remaining four cartridges in my pistol pointed at them.

  The sound of the gunshots brought Lestrade and his men who stormed the house, taking the Lascars, the taxidermists and two others, found in a below stairs warehouse of bodies and body part specimens, into custody.

  The Home Secretary, unable to reconcile the horrors of the Paradol Chamber and the Tripe Alley charnel house of unspeakable atrocities with the sensibilities of the British public, placed the records of the entire matter in the Most Secret vault. The butchers led Scotland Yard to the men at the top of the inhuman ring of flesh sellers and, as one might expect, found several of the wayward scions of two of the most respected families in England. In the end, all of the participants in the Horror of the Paradol Chamber were executed in anonymity and their body parts taken to the anatomical dissection laboratories of each of the medical universities to disappear forever from the list of British humanity.

  26

  There is a bench at the north side of Russell Square, facing south, where the sun warms one in the morning, penetrating the broad leaves of the ancient plane trees shading the park. A coffee seller, close by in a small building bordering the pathway, offers the finest coffee of my experience: hot, strong, rich and velvet with Devon cream. This is one of my favourite places in the whole of London.

  From my seat on the bench, I observe the world through the years. I have been perfecting my powers of observation for so long that every person strolling through the park is known fully to me with a glance. Since Mycroft’s passing from life, I have had to be content with observational contests with myself. Mycroft was always the better of the two of us; his powers were far greater than mine, but he seldom employed them. He would look from my window in Montague Street and describe each perso
n walking past as to age, occupation, physical health, marriage state, degree of wealth or poverty, and even an accurate appraisal of their sins and vices. Mycroft possessed what can only be described as ‘the mind’s eye.’

  We once were engaged in our game of observation while having coffee in the Officers’ Room of the Foreign Office where we observed a man sitting reading a newspaper. Only his lower body and his fingers extended from the pages of the newspaper, all else being hidden behind. My attention focused on his trouser cuffs and his shoes. I asked Mycroft, ‘What do you make of him?’ and he immediately replied, ‘Visiting classical guitarist from Spain.’ I had already deduced Spain from the cut of the last of his shoes, but Mycroft had added ‘visiting’ from the Spanish newspaper he was reading and ‘classical guitarist’ from the slanted filing of the elongated fingernails of the first three fingers of his right hand.

  I had a great regard for my brother. Our brains bound us together in a way that was different from our other siblings. We seldom saw each other, yet we sensed each other constantly, as if we drew on each other’s brain power for interpretation or monitoring. I believe Mycroft was aware at moments when I was faced with danger, and I knew—or more accurately, felt—whenever he was charged with great responsibility for the security of Britain. Together, we were far more effective than we were individually. Had we both gone into government service, we would have been able to alter, at will, the history of Great Britain or Europe; had we both gone into the detection of crime, we would have been more successful than Scotland Yard or any other police force; and if we had both gone into crime itself, we would have dominated the underworld.

  Our latent potential, however, was held in check by our essential laziness. Mycroft could barely be induced to stir outside his rooms, his offices or his club and if the problem did not involve the government, it did not involve Mycroft’s mind. I picked and chose only the problems that interested me. We were both pre-eminent in what we did, and we both did do great work, but we did only that which was within our spheres of interest.