Sherlock Holmes and The Case of The Bulgarian Codex

by Tim Symonds

  ‘Which explains why he - ’

  ‘Scowled? Yes. His first thought must have been I was about to expose his trickery to the world. Within seconds it dawned upon him we must have been silenced. Why otherwise would I hand him the evidence which could indicate the disappearance of the Codex was part of a murderous plot? Why not simply put such information in the hands of Messrs. Reuter or the Balkan correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette and let public uproar take its course? The Prince realised our own Government had hamstrung us. That was when he burst into laughter.’

  Holmes shook his head with a glance of comic resignation and gave a chuckle. ‘There never was, and never will be another Prince as foxy as Ferdinand. We must hope to encounter him again.’

  I pondered on this unexpected revelation.

  ‘Holmes,’ I returned, ‘that leads me to something which puzzles me still - even now there are matters still dark to me.’

  ‘Ask on, my friend. I shall be your fellow prisoner for some hours in this contraption. You are very welcome to put any questions you like.’

  ‘My first is, I am sure, a very minor one, Holmes, so please don’t jump down my throat - when we left the Barrington villa after our first visit, you asked me if I had noted the presence of a tantalus containing brandy and whisky. I had not. Nor had I noted decanters of gins or vermouths and kirsches. Was the absence of spirits of especial importance?’

  ‘The lack of a tantalus struck me as odd. It followed on the heels of my first observation, that Barrington’s mustachios had changed not a jot between his marriage photo and the painting by Sargent a year later. I can see that a Captain in the Connaught Rangers could conceivably have settled into the life of a teetotaller upon marrying - I recall you giving up drink when you tied the knot with Miss Morstan - but surely he would not inflict his new-found temperance on every one of his guests? What of visits by officers of his old regiment? What choice words would they use in the face of an offer of a milky Advokaats?’

  ‘How do you explain this oddity, Holmes?’

  ‘Simply by deducing the Barringtons invited no-one to hobnob at their villa, particularly anyone who could discuss military affairs or might have served in Africa with the real Captain Barrington. You and I were allowed in only in extremis. And we can deduce neither Mrs. Barrington nor Julia touched alcohol themselves except for the Advocaats.’

  I digested his words for some moments and continued, ‘Holmes, I have a further question. When we were in the forest glade, you said that Julia’s cold-blooded killer deserved the hangman’s noose, that of the 40-odd murderers in your career so far - ’

  ‘ - he, most emphatically of them all,’ Holmes affirmed.

  ‘Yet as soon as you deduced it was Colonel Kalchoff you invented a device to expose him in front of Ferdinand of all people - and in the Prince’s private quarters. Why didn’t you oblige Kalchoff to face a Court of Law? Who could possibly listen to your reasoning and have any doubts as to the man’s guilt!’

  ‘Where was our evidence? What violent enmity did he bear towards this murdered woman, a complete stranger to him and everyone else? Where was the note calling Barrington to the obrok? What of the monogrammed handkerchief he didn’t drop?’

  He gave a short, sardonic laugh. ‘No, my friend, no gallows awaited him. Even an Old Bailey jury packed full of honest Englishmen would have set our Colonel free in the blink of an eye.’

  It dawned upon me. I stared at my companion aghast.

  ‘Holmes, are you saying you engineered the photographic session at the Palace solely to lure Kalchoff - ’

  ‘ - to his death? Of course! It was a deliberate ambuscade, a private court-martial. How else would a great danger to England be removed? How else would the dead woman have been revenged? How else would Mrs. Barrington be freed of this cousin before he could take her lands - and probably her life? It was serendipity indeed when the Prince gave you the Sanderson camera. Kalchoff saw us flinging ourselves from the theatre. No more than a day would pass before he discovered our destination was not the midnight train to Paris but the body in the Mausoleum. From there it would be a matter of moments before he worked out that the one clue pointing towards the murderer lay with those mustachios, that his foolhardy use of them for the Sherlock Holmes competition now threatened his liberty, even his life.’

  ‘Holmes,’ I protested, ‘surely you could not anticipate the Prince would stick a sword through Kalchoff’s throat the moment you - ’

  ‘ - proved the mustachios could only have been Julia’s in her disguise as Captain Barrington? Not only did I foresee it, I depended upon it. Any delay in ending Kalchoff’s life would have given him time to perpetrate some fresh atrocity. I smiled to myself when upon our entry I saw the Prince held the paint brush in one hand, the sword stick in the other. Our client knew that even he may not be safe from the War Minister’s obsessive ambition once Kalchoff realised the Prince’s intentions towards Mrs. Barrington.’

  ‘But what of your maxim that justice must be done, that the depravity of the victim is no condonement in the eyes of the law?’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Holmes replied calmly, ‘once in a while we must make our plea to a higher, purer law. You recall your words upon the murder of Charles Augustus Milverton, “that it was no affair of ours; that justice had overtaken a villain”, and my words which you quote so inimitably in the Adventure of the Speckled Band regarding Dr. Grimesby Roylott, that I cannot say his terrible death is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience?’

  Not for the first time in our long career together I realised it was Holmes’s contradictory nature, his Celtic insight that faith in reason cannot be absolute, which was and remains the engine propelling him so swiftly and inexorably along the path from mortal to myth.

  My thoughts returned to the beautiful Bulgarian women we had left behind. None of us is the youngest we have ever been, I thought ruefully, but Holmes’s unthinking offer of me as her next Best Man was a forcible reminder of my advancing years. What would happen to her now?

  We came to a long straight stretch of road. The chauffeur reached to one side and passed back a bulky package wrapped in French serge. It contained a butcher-blue tunic, high collar with three stars, and a hat adorned with pale-green feathers, the ceremonial uniform of an Austrian cavalry general. Beneath the tunic lay black trousers with red stripes down the sides and a gold-braided Bauchband with tassels. A page of fine pink notepaper lay half tucked into a pocket. I could hear Foxy Ferdinand’s voice as I read his words to my comrade-in-arms:

  ‘“Dear Mr. Holmes, my tailor Hammond in the Place Vendôme created this uniform for your brother. When I am next in London I should like Mycroft to receive me in it at Victoria Station where he and I will pose for Dr. Watson and his camera. I have pinned to the tunic a new Order which I have just invented, the National Order of Military Merit, Grand Cross. Let me know if you would like me to invent a similar Order for you in recognition of your great service to my country in recovering the Codex Zographensis”.’

  There was a scrawled post-script. ‘If not a military order, I am cultivating a new type of rose with four very pretty scarlet petals which I could name Rosa sherlockholmesia.’

  This was followed by a Post-post-script: ‘I forgot to inform you during your stay that His Imperial Majesty, The Sultan Abdülhamid II, Emperor of the Ottomans, Caliph of the Faithful (also known as The Crimson Sultan), wished you to travel on to an audience with him in the Sublime Porte, as he is a long-time admirer of your skill as a consulting detective. Apologies for failing to pass his invitation on to you in time. It quite slipped my mind.’

  Chapter XXII

  WE CONTINUE OUR JOURNEY HOMEWARD

  BY early evening we were comfortably reinstated in the Prince’s magnificent carriages aboard the Orient Express tucking into Venison and Red Wine pie followed by Orange Crème Caramel with Cointreau o
ranges. After dinner Holmes laid out a box of matches in front of him and lit up a Dublin-clay pipe primed with an especially rank shag purchased in Sofia, thick blue cloud-wreaths spinning up from him. His eyes sparkled.

  ‘Watson,’ he reminisced, ‘it is a pity you are not able to lay this most exotic case on the desk of your Editor. We shall console ourselves that the secret history of a nation is often so much more intimate and interesting than its public chronicles. Do you remember the unusual reception afforded us on our arrival at the Stone Wedding?’

  ‘Of course!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘How will you look back on it?’

  ‘It was the damnedest close-run thing. A few more yards and we’d have been blown to smithere - ’

  ‘A few more yards may have seen us killed, certainly,’ my comrade interrupted, ‘but it would have been entirely accidental.’

  I stared at him. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It would not have been part of the script.’

  ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to explain? What script?’

  ‘Do you recall Penderel Moon’s words on the Prince’s linguistic abilities?’

  ‘I remember them exactly. I am a great admirer of anyone who speaks so many languages so fluently.’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘He said: “the Prince is the finest of linguists. With his mother and foreign diplomats he converses in brilliant French. He addresses the Sobranje in excellent Bulgarian. He boasts in perfect English and Italian. He swears in the coarsest Hungarian, Macedonian and Russian, and he employs his native German dialect with the servants he brought with him from the family seat in Coburg”.’

  ‘Superb, Watson! Tell me, despite the effect of the explosion on your ears, did you notice which of those languages he employed to shout at our attackers?’

  ‘Only that it sounded guttural.’

  ‘It was Ostfränkisch, a German dialect which I have studied. Why should such a polyglot use a tongue of his native land to shout at Russian or Macedonian assassins if he swears like a trooper in both their languages?’

  ‘I have no idea, Holmes,’ I responded. ‘Why would such a polyglot do that?’

  ‘He wouldn’t.’

  ‘Then - ?’

  ‘Our robust welcome at the Stone Wedding was a piece of theatre arranged entirely for our entertainment. The fact that the incompetence of the Palace staff nearly blew us to smithereens is another matter.’

  ‘So what did he shout if it wasn’t what he told us at the time - ’ I looked at the note-book ‘‘‘ - You Macedonian assassin scum, lackeys of the crazy people in St. Petersburg, run for your lives. I have here with me Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson!”?’

  Holmes replied, ‘His exact words were, “You bloody fools, you nearly killed Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, let alone me! I’ll have your arses for breakfast. I told you to detonate that stuff after the picnic, not now!”.’

  We laughed uproariously. I patted my pocket. In it lay the Knyaz’s Philadelphia Baby Derringer used by John Wilkes Booth in his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It would go well in my small armoury with several other Baby Derringers, each sold as the very one employed to kill the American President on that terrible April night when I was just twelve years of age.

  Chapter XXIII

  AFTERWORD

  A FEW weeks after their return from Bulgaria, a package addressed to Watson arrived at 221B Baker Street from Capri. It contained a magnificent cat’s-eye and diamond tie-pin. A note in the Prince’s hand accompanied the gift: ‘To my great friend Dr. Watson, a small memento of your visit to my country. I am certain the blood of a Crusader runs in your veins. I feel that, should circumstances require it, you are quite capable of rising in your stirrups and dealing an infidel a blow with a mace which would cause him profound astonishment.’ A separate card stated: ‘This pin was purchased in Constantinople in 1890. Worn for 10 years by the Prince Regnant and future Tsar of Bulgaria.’

  Accompanying it, for Holmes, was a scarlet shirt of the Tirailleurs de la Garde, ‘In token of sincere regard - and to brighten up your wardrobe’.

  Six months after Holmes and Watson returned to England an unsigned note in a woman’s hand arrived at their Baker Street lodgings which read, ‘It may please you to know the ashes of the young woman found dead on Mount Vitosh have been retrieved from their resting place in the Church of St. Louis at Philippopolis and reburied in a quiet and beautiful glade in the grounds of the Kalchoff estate.’

  ‘Foxy’ Ferdinand did eventually remarry, in February 1908. His bride was the Princess Eleonore Caroline Gasparine Louise Reuss zu Köstritz. She was considered “a plain but practical... capable and kind-hearted woman.” It was another marriage of convenience and dynastic necessity.

  In October 1908, Ferdinand proclaimed Bulgaria’s de jure independence from the Ottoman Empire and titled himself Tsar. A few years later he made a rare but grave error of judgment by taking his adoptive country into the Great War on the side of Kaiser Wilhelm. In 1918, by now a widower again, Ferdinand left Bulgaria for luxurious exile in Coburg for the final thirty years of his remarkable life. The ex-Tsar of Bulgaria died peacefully in his sleep during the night of September 10th 1948, at the age of eighty-seven. His surviving children, daughters Eudoxia and Nadezhda, were at his bedside. Heaven’s gift to the political cartoonists of Europe from his accession to the Bulgarian throne in 1887 to his fall in 1918 was no more.

  Sir Penderel Moon remained for a while as British Legate to Bulgaria. On his departure from Sofia he received an official despatch from Sir Edward Grey, as follows:

  ‘I desire to take this opportunity to convey to you the high appreciation entertained by His Majesty’s Government of the manner in which you have filled the post of British representative at Sofia. Your interesting and able reports on the situation proved invaluable to His Majesty’s Government in their efforts for the maintenance of peace, and the moderating influences which you successfully exerted.’

  Ten years after the events portrayed, Sir Penderel Moon, now honoured with the Most Distinguished Order of (military saints) Michael and George, was appointed British Ambassador to the great white Capital St. Petersburg. He was ambassador at the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

  His autobiography titled My Mission to Bulgaria Recollected at Leisure was published in 1923.

  Acknowledgements

  Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. To help reflect the atmosphere of those faraway days I have here and there taken favourite words and phrasing straight from the canon.

  The superb historian Judith Rowbotham at Nottingham Trent University whose researches on Victorian and Edwardian crime and its historical context offer detective-fiction writers wonderful tools of the trade. I particular appreciate the attention to detail in going through the several re-writes of the Bulgarian Codex and making suggestions, most of which I took up.

  Alun Hill FCIJ for running a sharp eye over both text and layout.

  Ditto Ann Leander, formerly of the Bangkok Writers group, for running a further eye over the text and making valuable suggestions.

  And Robert and Aileen Ribeiro, for going through with such a knowledgeable eye (as befits the owners of the house built by famous Holmes and Watson illustrator Walter Paget) as they did earlier with Sherlock Holmes And The Dead Boer At Scotney Castle (MX Publishing 2012).

  Andrew in faraway Russia for mapping Holmes’s and Watson’s journeys to and within Bulgaria. (There are plans to translate the Bulgarian Codex into Russian)

  Dim & Distant Rare and Second-hand Bookshop. Heathfield, East Sussex TN21 8HU. Dave Berry’s hidden treasure of a bookshop. Don’t miss the chance to pick and choose wonderful books, including bargains outside the shop. A sister store opened in Eastbourne Summer 2012.

  And to the following for their valuable research assi
stance:

  V&A Theatre & Performance Enquiry Service, a superb, friendly resource on matters Victorian and Edwardian. For example, ‘We have checked our archives and relevant reference works and the earliest evidence we can trace of Vesta Tilley performing as a soldier is during World War One. In particular, she had two characters - ‘Tommy in the Trench’ and ‘Jack Tar Home from Sea’ - which formed part of her recruitment drive. This was accompanied by singing suitable topical songs such as The Army of Today’s Alright , Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Marries a Soldier , and In Dear Old England’s Name. She visited hospitals and sold War Bonds, as well as encouraging men at her shows to enlist (during the early part of the war before conscription was put in place).’

  Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS, Director-General, The Royal Photographic Society, for technical advice on the advances in cameras and photography in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries, viz ‘When abroad, Watson, being a doctor and probably a keen amateur photographer, would most likely have developed his plate in his hotel room and then made a contact photograph from it which he would have sent to the Strand by post, or perhaps had a fellow traveller hand-carry it back to London.’

  Jeff Sobel, son of Eli Sobel, my favourite Dean of Honours at UCLA, for technical advice on contemporary weaponry, especially the very unpleasant Apache revolver.

  For friendly and encouraging reviews of my recent novel, Sherlock Holmes And The Dead Boer At Scotney Castle:

  Felicia Carparelli in faraway Chicago, who writes under the pseudonym ‘maurice chevalier’ (quote: the Dead Boer contains ‘Lots of action and plot devices and a villain who Holmes says rivals Moriarty. This is a healthy Sherlock pastiche with many commendable elements.’)

  Ditto Britain’s former Foreign Secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind who emailed, ‘Dear Tim Symonds, just to say that I have just finished reading The Dead Boer at Scotney Castle. I greatly enjoyed it and found it a great yarn! It kept one guessing right to the end which all good crime novels should do. Sherlock Holmes (and Conan Doyle) would have been impressed!’