Sherlock Holmes--A Betrayal in Blood

by Mark A. Latham

  “Let us not risk it,” said Holmes. “Van Helsing has both money and influence. Who knows how far that influence extends? Even if our findings tonight are taken seriously by your superiors, Van Helsing will deny any involvement—he might even claim to be the victim of trickery just like the rest of us.”

  “So what are we to do?”

  “First of all, we must find people we can trust to keep an eye on the tomb. I can call upon a few agents, and perhaps you can persuade Cotford to take up the mantle of investigator once more. It would appeal to his pride to be involved in any case against Van Helsing. Not only that, but if you stress that we cannot trust even the chiefs of Scotland Yard, he will feel at last vindicated in his paranoia. Play it true, Inspector, and I think you will find Cotford a valuable ally.”

  “Very well, Mr Holmes; Dr Watson,” Bradstreet said, and extended a hand, which Holmes and I shook in turn. “I rather think this Van Helsing bit off more than he can chew when he took on Sherlock Holmes.”

  “I do hope so, Inspector,” Holmes smiled. “I do hope so.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A GRIEVOUS BLOW

  We had barely reached the landing of 221B when Mrs Hudson appeared. It was not the kind of unsociable hour that our landlady would usually keep, and her presence set me at once on guard.

  “Mr Holmes, Dr Watson, something terrible has happened!” she cried.

  Holmes sprang to action before she could even explain, and barged into our rooms. I followed, alert to danger. The rooms—never the tidiest by any stretch of the imagination—were now in complete disarray. Whomever had come here had been thorough in their search, and utterly callous in their destruction of property. Every drawer of the desk was upturned on the floor. Every book was strewn from the shelves. Holmes’s unopened correspondence had been taken from its place upon the mantelpiece, where it traditionally sat transfixed by a knife-point, and now only one lonely page remained behind. Our armchairs had been overturned and the fabric across the undersides ripped open to search for concealed items. Papers, broken crockery and even our clothing lay on the floor. The open doors to the bedrooms told us at once that we would find a similar situation there. 221B Baker Street, so long our headquarters and sanctuary, was compromised.

  “I did not call a constable, Mr Holmes,” sniffed Mrs Hudson, entering the room behind us. “I know how you always complain about the police stomping all over your evidence. I am only sorry I could not stop them.”

  Holmes spun around. “You saw them?”

  “Yes. They… they…” she trembled, unable to say more.

  I patted Mrs Hudson’s hand. “There, there,” I said. “Surely they did not threaten you?”

  Our landlady, who always seemed so formidable, now shook like a leaf, and nodded, tears in her eyes. “They threw me down into the armchair and told me to say not a word, or they would… they would…” She could not finish.

  Holmes’s features contorted into a violent thunder for a second. He strode over to the Persian slipper by the hearth, and fumbled about in the toe for his tobacco. Only when he had filled his briar and lit it did he finally speak.

  “Mrs Hudson, I am so terribly sorry you were involved in this unpleasantness. You have my word that it shall not happen again. As for the men who did this—were they two large, foreign gentlemen perchance?”

  “They were, Mr Holmes.”

  “Fair of hair?”

  “I could not tell. It was dark—they wore hats, and had scarves about their faces. I only knew they were foreign when they ordered me to be quiet.”

  “Was anyone else with them?”

  “I saw no one else.”

  “What time did you discover them?”

  “I heard a noise, just a few minutes before midnight. At first I thought you had returned. Even when the banging and crashing began, I thought it might be you, if you’ll pardon me, Mr Holmes. You have been known to keep strange hours and peculiar habits. But as time went on I thought better of it.”

  “Can you remember anything else that may assist us? Any detail, no matter how trifling?”

  “I can do more than that, Mr Holmes. I remembered how much you value these things, and so I followed them downstairs.”

  “Mrs Hudson!” I exclaimed.

  “Watson is right,” Holmes said. “These are dangerous men. However, if you have learned anything that may be of use, it is possible that the risk was worth taking. What did you see?”

  “They got into a carriage—a private one.”

  “Liveried?”

  “No, plain black.”

  “But a driver?”

  “Yes. I got close enough to hear their instruction to the driver, though they spoke foreign.”

  “They spoke to the driver in German?” Holmes mused. “Mrs Hudson, did you make out any part of what they said? Think! It is of the utmost importance.”

  “They said only three words, and I did my best to remember them for you. But… but it sounded so vulgar.”

  “That’s German for you. Lean forward, Mrs Hudson, and whisper it, to spare Dr Watson’s blushes.”

  Mrs Hudson whispered in Holmes’s ear, and at once my friend stepped back and laughed.

  Mrs Hudson turned beetroot red. Holmes apologised at once and adopted a more sober expression.

  “Oh, Mr Holmes. Is… is this what comes of your line of work?” Mrs Hudson asked tearfully.

  “Do not fear, Mrs Hudson, I shall have all of this made right. Watson—perhaps Mrs Hudson requires one of your tonics, for the shock.”

  “Of course, Holmes,” I said, and at once ushered Mrs Hudson away, seeing that Holmes needed some peace to make a thorough examination of our rooms, which were now a crime scene.

  When I returned, I found Holmes writing a letter, creating an awful frowst while he was at it by puffing incessantly on his pipe.

  “Have you found anything of use?” I asked.

  “Nothing I did not already know. The letter that was left behind on the mantelpiece was the missive sent to me by Van Helsing. It was not there originally, because as you know only unopened post is kept there. The letter had been removed from the desk drawer and pinned to the mantelpiece—an obvious message from the good professor that he now has the upper hand. We are dealing with professionals here, Watson. They wore gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints. Their shoes were clean, and they were careful not to drop anything that might incriminate them. I found a small mound of ash from an imported German cigarillo on the carpet over there, but it is not of an uncommon type, and not the cigars smoked by Van Helsing. It tells us nothing new about the intruders.”

  “This is an outrage, Holmes,” I said. I had contained my anger in Mrs Hudson’s presence, but now it spilled forth. “Twice now these Germans have threatened a defenceless woman. I would like to see how they fare against men!”

  “You may have your chance, Watson, but these men are not the immediate danger. They have what they came for, and I imagine they shall leave us be, for a while at least.”

  “And what have they taken?”

  “The Dracula Papers, Watson,” he said. “Every scrap of evidence we have gathered so far. They have it all—the log of the Demeter, Cotford’s journal, Kate Reed’s letters, even Pike’s message… confound it all! I have inadvertently put lives at risk.”

  “Holmes, you weren’t to know.”

  “I should have known. We must have been seen about Whitby carrying a ledger from the harbourmaster’s office, which is now in the hands of our enemy.”

  “Will you at least tell me what Mrs Hudson said to you that so amused you?”

  “Oh, yes,” Holmes said. “The phrase that Mrs Hudson thought she overheard, and made a fairly bad fist of repeating, was ‘Die Botschaft, schnell’. That adds to my suspicions.”

  “My German is not what it once was, Holmes. What does it mean?”

  “Among other things, it means ‘the embassy, quickly’. Our German friends may not be mere ruffians—they could be spies of
the German government. It is reasonable to imagine, therefore, that Van Helsing is a spy also.”

  “You are saying we now find ourselves embroiled in espionage? Against the German government, no less! Should we not call upon Mycroft at once?”

  “Not yet. We have lost our evidence, and now only have the hearsay of our landlady. Mycroft would disavow us immediately, and Van Helsing would probably sue us for barratry.”

  “A fine state of affairs! Well, what are we to do now, Holmes?” I asked, weary and utterly downhearted over this latest setback.

  “I need to make a further search of these rooms to see if our burglars left any other clues behind. While I do that, you must go out, Watson, at once.”

  “Holmes, it shall soon be dawn…” I groaned.

  “Which is why I must send you—there will be no messengers about, but you may be able to persuade a cabbie.”

  I sighed. It was not merely the prospect of hard work and a night without rest—I felt deeply guilty about Mrs Hudson’s predicament too.

  “What am I to do?” I said, resigning myself.

  “Take these letters. This one must be given in at Langdale Pike’s club—for all his influence, Pike has made himself a target by assisting us, and it would be remiss not to warn him. These two letters must be sent to Exeter. One is a warning for Miss Reed, the other a note for the police inspector there, asking him to remain vigilant lest the woman receives any unwelcome visitors. Lastly, you must give this missive to Bradstreet.”

  “He won’t be happy about that! We’ve only been apart this last two hours.”

  “We must be careful in whom we place our trust. Bradstreet is in our confidence, and only he will do for now.”

  There was little more to be said. Before long I was on my way, feet leaden and head fuzzy. The fog had by now reached the city, and would soon take on an ominous, orange glow when the dawn’s light struck it. I sighed. There were no hansoms about, and so I began the walk to the nearest livery stable office at Regent Street, at least thankful that the lack of sleep would stave off nightmares about bloofer ladies and headless corpses.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE MAID’S TALE

  It was a surprise to me that Holmes allowed us some scant hours’ sleep before embarking once more on the trail of our villains. Holmes himself appeared none the worse for yet another long night of toil, while I was beginning to feel like the Un-Dead myself. It was well after midday when we finally struck out, engaging a hansom to ferry us around for most of the afternoon, making enquiries about town.

  The objects of our search were the former servants of the Westenra family at Hillingham. Holmes and I concurred that their role in Lucy Westenra’s final days was one of the strangest and most inexplicable details in the whole narrative.

  The version of events that the Dracula Papers gave was as follows:

  A few days before the death of Lucy Westenra, on the night that her mother died, Lucy was left alone. Despite all of her ills, and the belief that Dracula was attacking her, Van Helsing was called away on some other business abroad. He sent a letter to Dr Seward, summoning him to Hillingham to look after Lucy, but incorrectly addressed the envelope, so that the letter was a day late in reaching the doctor. Meanwhile, in a conveniently timed assault, Dracula supposedly entered Hillingham by impelling a wolf—stolen from London Zoo—to smash through a bedroom window, thus destroying the safeguards placed upon the entry points of the house by Van Helsing. That would have been curious enough, but for the strange detail that followed.

  The shock of the attack caused Lucy’s mother to die of a sudden heart attack. Lucy was able to tend to the body with the help of her four maids, but then instructed them all to go to the dining room and take a glass of sherry from the decanter to calm their nerves. When later Dracula attempted to gain access to the house, Lucy called upon the maids, but found that they were all asleep—the wine had been drugged with laudanum.

  The question Holmes posed was a simple one: who drugged the sherry? Van Helsing and Seward were not in the house. The implication was that Dracula was responsible, but why, given his great powers of hypnotic suggestion, would he even bother to steal into the house, drug the wine, and then return later in such theatrical fashion? The only way to answer the question conclusively would be to question the maids, but their names and eventual fates were not recorded in the Dracula Papers. Only Frank Cotford was likely to still have the maids’ names in his personal library of notebooks, and Bradstreet had gone to call on him, as advised by Holmes in his letter of the previous night.

  Holmes and I wondered if the inspector’s house call would prove fruitless, but some hours later a telegram had arrived for us, providing the name of one of the maids, and her last known employer.

  In the months following her dismissal, the maid had changed situations several times, and our wending route through London, which had begun in the leafy suburbs around Hampstead, took us to gradually poorer territory. Now, after three stops, we found ourselves back in the East End, looking out at a dark, squat building, which loomed out of the fog.

  “You are awake at last,” Holmes said. “Good; we are here.”

  “Where?”

  “A poor laundry, where our former lady’s maid now works for two shillings a day.”

  “So she has fallen on hard times?”

  “Of course. Van Helsing had her dismissed and she received no reference. A girl with no reference will always struggle to find work in a respectable house, and if she manages it she will find herself out on her ear at the first sign of a mistake. I have spoken with two of her subsequent employers while you slept, Watson, and although they did not accuse her of any great fault, neither did they think her services remarkable enough to retain. And so here we are.”

  “If you think the young woman is innocent of any wrongdoing, then this is a terrible thing to befall her.”

  “I doubt Van Helsing has ever given those four maids a passing thought. They are merely collateral damage in the workings of his devious machinations. Come, let us interview the girl, and hope that she can shed some light on events.”

  * * *

  Betty Hobbs was a meek woman of few words, whose lined face and rough hands made her look considerably older than her probable true age. I had seen her like many times—the product of a hard life, with sunken, dark eyes and a hacking cough brought on by poor working conditions. Persuading the manageress of the cramped workshop to let us speak with Miss Hobbs had been no easy task, and had required the production of enough coin to constitute her girl’s entire day’s wages, let alone the few minutes that we required. Persuading Miss Hobbs herself to speak with us privately was equally tricky; it took some cajoling for Holmes to win the woman’s trust enough to question her, and even then he had to disavow Van Helsing several times before she would talk.

  “Now, Miss Hobbs,” Holmes said gently, “I have given you what assurances I can. All I require from you is that you tell us, in your own words, what really happened on the night of 17 September last year.”

  “It was more or less like people been sayin’,” she replied.

  “More or less?”

  “Yes, sir. We was all woke up by a scream—Mrs Westenra had taken a funny turn, and was havin’ a heart attack.”

  “A scream? Whose?”

  “Miss Lucy’s, I think.”

  “And no other noise woke you? It was definitely the scream?”

  “I know what you’re going to ask, sir, and I swear it now as I swore it to that copper at the time—I didn’t hear no dogs, an’ certainly no wolf.”

  Holmes exchanged a severe glance with me. I recalled that a note in the Dracula Papers for the evening in question had recorded that the entire household had been woken by the howling of the neighbourhood dogs, agitated by the appearance in the vicinity of a large wolf, named “Berserker”, that had escaped from London Zoo that night.

  “Which policeman did you speak to?”

  “Dunno. Some fancy inspe
ctor.”

  I guessed she was referring to Cotford, whose subsequent disgrace would have seen to it that the maid’s statement was never heard.

  “Did you speak to any policemen at the scene?”

  “The scene? The house, you mean? No, sir, that Dutchman arrived and dismissed us, just like that, after two years’ service.”

  “Hmm. We shall come to him in good time. Think back again to the moments leading up to Mrs Westenra’s tragic death. Were you the first to wake?”

  “I think Mary was first… I can’t be sure. I remember waking Wendy and Alice, so I was one of the first up.”

  “I am sorry to repeat myself, but the official record states very clearly that there was a broken window, followed by the howling of many dogs, and that is what woke the household. Are you saying this was not the case?”

  “That did not happen, sir, I swear on my life.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Miss Hobbs; I believe you.” Holmes attempted a charming smile. “What happened when you found Mrs Westenra?”

  “We ran into the bedroom, and found Mrs Westenra dead, but in her last moments she had fallen upon poor Miss Lucy, and we had to lift her off, with Miss Lucy being so frail and all. Miss Lucy was beside ’erself, as you’d imagine. When we’d laid the body out, like, and Miss Lucy had calmed down, she sent us off to get the sherry, and told us all to have a glass first to steady our nerves. That’s what we did, but it’s the last thing we remembered before we woke up and the Dutch doctor was there.”

  “There was laudanum in the sherry.”

  “So they say.”

  “Yet you did not smell it at the time?”

  “’Course not, sir, we were all at sixes and sevens. Besides, I for one wouldn’t recognise the smell o’ the stuff. Mrs Westenra used it sometimes, but I never saw to any of that.”

  “The official account states that the bottle of laudanum was on the sideboard, open and empty.”

  “It was not, sir. If it had a’ been, we’d have seen it and not touched the stuff.”

  “Quite. Was the elder Mrs Westenra in the habit of putting her laudanum in her drink?”