Sherlock Holmes--A Betrayal in Blood

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Sherlock Holmes--A Betrayal in Blood Page 10

by Mark A. Latham


  “It seems our Mrs Harker is a more formidable opponent than I gave her credit for,” Holmes said, after we had walked some distance from the house in silence.

  “That is the opposite impression to the one I formed,” I grumbled.

  “Of course it is, Watson, for she managed to find your weakness quickly and clinically, and exploited it. In doing so, she found my weakness also.”

  “Oh? Does the great Sherlock Holmes have a weakness?”

  “Of course. It is you, Watson.”

  “A fine how-do-you-do!” I remarked. “After all that we have been through, I am now reduced to the weak link in the chain.”

  “In matters of deduction, Watson, that has always been the case, and here it has played out accordingly. But do you not see how you also lend me strength? You temper my scientific brain with your empathy. And tonight, Mrs Harker’s cunning use of your kind-heartedness allowed me to make a close study of her techniques, which I doubt she even realised I had noticed.”

  I did not quite know what to say, or whether I had been paid a compliment or simply painted once more as another tool in Holmes’s armoury.

  “I still do not see how she is so cunning, Holmes. Why, you make her sound like another Irene Adler.”

  “No,” he said, quite shortly. “She is brilliant, doubtless, but not quite in the same league as that woman. Mrs Harker’s motives are entirely different—they stem, I believe, from self-preservation.”

  “I do not see it. It looks to me as though you are persecuting that poor girl.”

  “I have only theories for the moment, Watson, and I must ask that you trust me until such time as I can support them. There are a good many questions I should have liked to ask Mrs Harker, but they will have to wait for another time.

  “Think further on her journal entries, for instance. Is it not ridiculous to think that she would have returned home after talking to an old man in Whitby, and written down his words in his own dialect, verbatim? It is just like Seward, in his phonograph recordings, imitating Van Helsing’s dialect and irregularity of speech. Is it deliberate? There seems to be no real reason for it to be, for in the latter case it has only given away Van Helsing’s real nationality. More likely, it is an attempt to lend some ‘authenticity’ to the accounts, which suggests that many of these passages were made up after the fact. Van Helsing doubtless dictated for Mina directly, and she dutifully recorded his words. The old man she spoke of never existed, or at least not how Mrs Harker described him. His strange way of speaking is lifted directly from Robinson’s Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Whitby, a copy of which I have at Baker Street. Such dialect would certainly have been otherwise unintelligible for an untravelled stranger to these parts, especially a young woman from Exeter. If we were to question the locals about this old man—Swales, she called him—we may find some contradictory reports, for Swales is a common enough name hereabouts. It is just as likely that the name was taken from the obituaries, coinciding with a memorable event—the wreck of the Demeter, for instance; so if anyone were to ask, ‘Do you recall an old sailor who lived hereabout, whose name was Swales and who died on the night of the Demeter wreck?’ we would find half a dozen witnesses to swear to his existence.

  “Think also on how Mrs Harker became associated with Van Helsing. The Dracula Papers tell us that the professor seized all of Miss Westenra’s correspondence upon her death, which is how he learned of Mina and Jonathan. Van Helsing is a clever man; he would have guessed just as I did that the Harkers played a role in the death of Peter Hawkins. It is hardly a stretch to say that Van Helsing read Lucy’s letters and diary during her illness, and thus contacted Mina much earlier, probably to confront her with his suspicions and to discuss the terms of her blackmail. Oh, yes, Watson—it is quite possible that Mina Harker came to this affair because she was impelled to; the reason for the blackmail, however, and the things I suspect she has done since, go beyond mere coercion.”

  “I think you do Mrs Harker the greatest disservice,” I said. “She appeared to be a woman wronged by a callous and inconstant husband; a woman who herself has been manipulated by a group of men who may or may not be unmasked as villains yet. You reduced that poor woman to tears, Holmes, and they were genuine enough.” I stopped, realising I had become somewhat emotional in my defence of Mina Harker, and could not think why.

  “Oh, Watson, how many times must you be lured from the path of scientific deduction by female wiles. A pretty face and neat ankle never fail to soften your brain. When you passed your kerchief to Mrs Harker, did you not detect a strange odour?”

  “No, Holmes. Do you mean her perfume, perhaps?”

  “A lady who has settled down for the evening after a busy day, unprepared for visitors, would be unlikely to prepare herself quite so thoroughly—that in itself was a peculiarity. Yet I speak not of perfume, but of what the perfume was meant to hide. If you had not been so well deceived by Mrs Harker’s performance, you would have smelled the unmistakeable odour of menthol.”

  “And what if I had? I often give my patients a little menthol to ease a cold—perhaps Mrs Harker has been suffering as a result of the change in air.”

  “Or perhaps she was inducing tears with a menthol balm, a common practice in the theatre.”

  “Her tears could genuinely have been the result of anguish.”

  “Your generosity of spirit knows no bounds, Watson. I shall endeavour to keep an open mind.”

  “As well you should, Holmes, by the doctrine of your own method. Besides, it is highly unlikely that a lady of Mrs Harker’s years would have any involvement in the theatre—she simply cannot have pursued a successful teaching career and been an actress too.”

  “She would not have to be an actress to acquire a few tricks, Watson. Besides, I think it is clear that Mrs Harker knows at least one budding young thespian. Don’t you see?”

  At first, I did not, and to Holmes’s amusement I pondered the question as we walked in the brisk sea air back to our lodgings.

  When the fact came to me, I realised I had been a fool, and exclaimed, “Lady Godalming!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE FATE OF THE DEMETER

  I woke next morning later than I would have liked, mouth dry and head fuzzy from one too many glasses of Tokay—the only acceptable tipple available in the bar of the Angel Hotel. I had ignored Holmes’s advice to moderate my drinking, too obstinate and cross with him was I over his patronising nature earlier, and too heartsick with the memories of my late wife, which had come tumbling back into my mind following our visit to Mina Harker. Now, it was after nine o’clock, and Holmes was nowhere to be found. He had clearly been up long before me; our portmanteaus were gone, though Holmes had left a few essential items in the sitting room, including my revolver and my medical bag. I placed my gun in my overcoat pocket, and went down to breakfast alone. Almost an hour later, and at a loose end, I left the hotel, only to have Holmes bump into me on the street. He had a copy of the Whitby Gazette tucked under his arm, and a cheerful look about him.

  “Excellent, you are up!” he said. “While you slumbered, I have been busy indeed. You recall I mentioned those fair-haired men following us yesterday? Well, they had this place under watch last night.”

  “They are here?”

  “Not now. I struck out early, and made a feint of not noticing them. I led them a merry dance back towards Mrs Harker’s residence, and ensured that I lost them. They would have to be well trained indeed to keep up with me. Since then I have sent a telegram to my old informant Langdale Pike, and should hope to find a reply waiting when we get home.”

  “How long have you been up?”

  “Since before dawn. I was watching those men as they watched us… they were not terribly circumspect about it. Perhaps they underestimate us, or perhaps they are rank amateurs. Best keep our wits about us today in any case.”

  “I thought we were returning to London?”

  “Not immediately, although I had our
bags sent ahead so that we would not have to return here under observation—the more mobile we can remain, the less chance there is of our enemies catching up with us. Before we depart, we need to pay a visit to the docks. Come now, a walk along the harbour may do you good.”

  Holmes was right—the walk down to the West Pier did certainly blow away the grogginess from my head to some degree. Indeed, it was such a bright, fine morning, with a brisk, salt-spray breeze blowing in across the Esk, that it now seemed ridiculous to me that I held such fear over a supposed apparition the previous night. That fear, and the dreadful longing for that which was lost, now drifted away from me like the last snatches of a dream.

  Holmes was in fine fettle—too much so considering he had not had a wink of sleep. Any suggestion that he should rest would be met, as always, with derision. I could only observe, therefore, and offer my services as a doctor should he require them.

  As we strolled along the harbour wall, we pieced together from memory the mysterious events surrounding the stricken ship, Demeter. The vessel had sailed from Varna on 6 July the previous year; it was, according to the Dracula Papers, carrying boxes of earth from Dracula’s homeland, without which the vampire was unable to rest. During a long and perilous voyage, the crew were slowly wiped out. At first, the captain believed the murderer to be a Roumanian crewman, but soon there came reports of a mysterious stranger aboard, believed to have stowed away. One by one the crew perished, until only the captain remained. Lashing himself to the ship’s wheel, the captain steered the course alone to Whitby, where he had the great misfortune to perish in one of the worst storms to hit the town in many a year. Eye-witnesses saw an enormous dog leap from the ship as it was wrecked—Van Helsing later explained that this was Dracula himself, in the form of a wolf. The captain’s log was found tucked in a bottle, and was translated for an unnamed newspaperman by the Russian consul.

  “There are so many irregularities in this affair that it is hard to know where to begin,” Holmes said. “Take, for instance, Count Dracula’s motives. Van Helsing would have us believe that Dracula was behind every misfortune to befall the Demeter. He conjures a fog to throw it off course; he slays its crew; finally, he summons a great tempest to wreck the ship. This leaves the Count the onerous task of recovering his earth-boxes from the wreckage, and transporting them to London. The Dracula Papers tell us that the Count left instruction with a local solicitor to take charge of fifty boxes of earth from the wreck, an instruction that was carried out in defiance of all salvage laws and in advance of both the official inquest and the intervention of the Admiralty Board. I also put to you that Dracula is not normally described as utterly insatiable—indeed, the Count is generally depicted as a masterful tactician, with considerable control over his bloodlust. We know that Dracula does not even need to kill his victims—he could slip from his hiding place each night, drink from a victim, hypnotise him so that the man remembers nothing, and then slip away. He demonstrated this ability with poor Lucy Westenra, after all. So why endanger his only means of transport? If he can control the winds, why not assist the ship in reaching his destination swiftly and safely, rather than jeopardise his whole plan?”

  “When you put it like that, Holmes, it does sound rather far-fetched.”

  “More so when you consider that, eventually, Dracula was forced to flee England on board another ship, the Czarina Catherine. Somehow, upon the return voyage, he managed to abstain from killing the crew. Are we to believe that the Count simply wished to make the most dramatic arrival possible? For whose benefit? Consider, too, the events in the Dracula Papers, the section where the ‘Crew of Light’ pursue Dracula from Varna to his home in the Carpathians. That journey, conducted at great speed, takes considerably longer than six days. According to Harker’s journal, however, that is precisely how long the Count took between leaving his castle and boarding the Demeter at Varna. I put it to you that Count Dracula was never aboard the Demeter at all, and that some other misfortune befell the crew.”

  I confessed that these things had not occurred to me, so engrossing had the tale been, and told from the point of view of a neutral reporter.

  “Neutral?” Holmes scoffed. “A sensationalist, perhaps. An agent of Van Helsing more likely. I was at the offices of the Whitby Gazette this morning.” He waved the newspaper at me to illustrate his point. “This is a copy of the paper printed the day after the storm, 9 August. The fate of the Demeter is mentioned only as a footnote, and yet it was a lengthy story in the ‘Dailygraph’. I presume this is meant to be the Daily Telegraph, a London paper. That is logical, as the ‘Russian consul’ that translated the Demeter’s log is in London. Verifying this fact will be devilishly hard—not only is the newspaper article retyped by Mrs Harker, but so too are the excerpts from the Demeter’s log reproduced therein. There are far too many possibilities for error within these transcriptions, and thus too much opportunity for plausible denial of any conclusions we may draw from them.”

  “So what do you propose, Holmes? That Van Helsing was the mysterious stranger, slaying the crew for who knows what awful purpose?”

  “Unlikely. I certainly believe that Van Helsing was present in London much earlier than we are led to believe by the Dracula Papers, although it would be a stretch to place him on a ship sailing from Varna to Whitby. No, the Demeter was stricken by some mysterious misfortune at sea that we may never fully understand; one of those vagaries of naval misadventure that old sailors tell tales of for generations. However, I would guess that the story of the Demeter was so evocative that Van Helsing seized upon it, twisting the facts to make his story appear even more plausible. However, it is a fiction too far.”

  There was no time to press Holmes for his precise theories, for we at last reached the harbourmaster’s office, and were forced to join a queue of new arrivals to the docks, all of whom had to be registered and have their goods accounted for by a despairingly small staff. My own huffs at the interminable wait were drowned out by the more colourful opinions of visiting seamen, who were only too willing to give loud voice to their complaints.

  When at last we found someone to attend us, Holmes used all of his powers of persuasion and haughty manner to speak to the harbourmaster himself, and eventually we were admitted to the records office, whilst being told every step of the way that it was “most irreg’lar”. In a dingy, windowless room crammed with thick ledgers, we were left to our own devices for some time. It was all I could do not to nod off more than once as, poring over crinkled pages by the light of a paraffin lamp, we searched diligently for the log entries of the Demeter.

  “Aha!” Holmes exclaimed after our interminable search had taken us well into the afternoon. “I have the very transcript here, of which some small fragments made their way to the Dracula Papers. The original pages, written in Russian, are enclosed also, although they are barely legible.”

  “Looks like there are large portions missing,” I said. “Indeed, there are. Even if the log is complete, it appears that almost a quarter of the entries are smudged beyond recognition, or torn to pieces. They were recovered amongst the wreckage.”

  “If the papers were in such a state when the transcript was made…”

  “Then we have no way of knowing what was a factual recording, and what was a complete fabrication,” Holmes finished.

  “And the transcript in English—it concurs with the Dracula Papers?” I asked.

  “Remember that the Dracula Papers contain a reporter’s rescript of these very notes. They are the same, though they omit many of the mundanities found here in this ledger. Weather readings, soundings, supply rationing, watch rotations and so on. The boring minutiae that have been included purely to throw an investigator off the trail.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Without an expert witness to assist me, I cannot. I would need someone with a great deal of sailing knowledge to verify all of this technical information. However, that probably will not be necessary. I have ascertained all I r
eally need from the study of the handwriting in this ledger.”

  Graphology was something of a specialty for Holmes, but here in the gloomy conditions, with a ledger so scruffily presented, I could not see how it could help us, and said as much.

  “While much effort has been taken to disguise the style of writing,” Holmes replied, “such copious amounts of text—undoubtedly written from dictation—could not have been quickly produced without some errors; that is, without incorporating just a few of the natural flourishes of the writer’s true hand. See here,” Holmes pointed to a line of sloped text that barely fit upon the lines of the page. “Note the capital ‘S’, and all of the lower-case ‘d’s. They are much more rounded than those found in the first paragraph on the page—the writer was evidently becoming tired. But the hand is confident, the control of the nib elegant. This is a woman, of strong will, and aged between twenty and thirty, in my humble opinion.”

  “Mina Harker?”

  Holmes produced a letter from his pocket, unfolded the paper, and placed it next to the ledger. He took out his magnifier and studied the two pieces of writing, side by side.

  “There can be no doubt, Watson,” he said. “This is the letter from Mina Harker given to us by Miss Reed. The penmanship is identical in those places where she allowed her concentration to slip. And of course, this tells us something else about Mina Harker that ought to be invaluable in this case.”

  “Oh?”

  “She is a skilled forger. Much of this work has been meticulously written in the same hand as the previous entries, probably that of a clerk of this office. It is only the tedious length of this ship’s log that gives the true author away. On shorter texts—letters, signatures, and diary entries, for instance—I imagine Mrs Harker’s skill would make her hand undetectable. With this log, however, we have our first piece of real evidence against her. I could have a world expert in the forensic science of handwriting testify on this sample in our favour, of that I am certain.”

 

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