by Barry Day
“This was in this morning’s Daily Gazette.”
It was a typical item from the daily agony column. There was a single line of type that said …
“OH MY EARS AND WHISKERS, HOW LATE IT’S GETTING!”
… and beneath it a freehand drawing that looked like a smile. Below the drawing it was signed—“The Cat.”
The whole thing was quite incomprehensible to me. I handed the cutting back to Holmes with an interrogative glance.
“It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.”
He was talking to the piece of paper more than to me.
“The Cat, Watson. The Cheshire Cat in Alice. Don’t you see—it’s started. This is Moriarty throwing down the gauntlet. His strategy—whatever it is—is moving into high gear and he’s challenging me to try and stop him. He knows that I am the only man in London who is likely to connect a communication like this with the actual event Don’t you remember the conversation about Alice up at Loch Ness? He’s identifying himself.”
“But what on earth has this to do with yesterday’s debacle?”
“In Alice one of the characters is the White Rabbit and when Alice meets the Rabbit, she hears it say just those words. Moriarty wants me to know that it was he who organised what you call ‘yesterday’s debacle’ in the House and he’s also warning me that it’s getting late. Though late for what we have still to determine …
“The exercise on which I was engaged when you entered was my attempt to piece together a pattern of Moriarty’s recent activities and, as you can see, it is not without complexity.” He indicated with a casual movement of his foot a series of rough circles, one within the other, moving outwards like ripples on the surface of a pond. “Each of these incidents apparently unrelated but, in reality, deviously interconnected. Each of them contributing to a general picture of administrative corruption or governmental incompetence—or both—and most with a probability of financial gain for someone whose name I think we know by now.”
“So you already have our friend by the heels?”
“No, Watson. In all of these cases the trail ends in a cul-de-sac long before it can be traced to Moriarty. I have Lestrade looking into a handful of them but, candidly, old fellow, I am not optimistic about the outcome. Frankly, for the moment our best hope is that his obsession with our personal vendetta may lead him to become careless. That’s probably Lestrade at the door now.”
We had both heard the insistent clang of the front door bell and Mrs. Hudson’s footsteps hurrying to answer it. “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to perform the usual courtesies while I change into more suitable attire. We must not let the law find us less than prepared to greet them. Particularly after yesterday’s debacle. I would have given a great deal to have seen old …” And here he named an eminent Cabinet Minister—“chased by a white rabbit …”
Scooping the cuttings into a loose bundle, he dropped them casually behind his armchair, where Mrs. Hudson would sooner or later find them and agonise over whether or not to attempt to tidy them. He then hurried into his bedroom and shut the door firmly behind him—just as there was a knock on the door that led to the stairs.
“Come in, Lestrade,” I called out, thinking to surprise him with my powers of deduction. Instead, it was the head of our worthy housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson that appeared around the edge of the door.
“It isn’t Inspector Lestrade, Doctor Watson. It’s …”
“It’s Mycroft,” I heard a deep voice say and the next thing I knew the massive figure of Holmes’s elder brother was filling the portals of our sitting room.
“Good morning, Doctor, forgive me for bearding you in your den but I think you know I would not venture so far forth so early in the day—or at any time, come to that—were the occasion not of some significance?”
And indeed, I did know that the virtual giant now lowering himself carefully into Holmes’s chair—having first fastidiously brushed it with the pristine white handkerchief he took from his pocket—was not in the habit of venturing far from the musty confines of the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall, if he could possibly help it. Holmes was always joking that the club, of which his brother was a founder member, was the ‘club for the unclubable’ and one of London’s best kept secrets. Yet from his regular armchair immediately to the left of the fireplace Mycroft Holmes kept a hooded beady eye on the country’s affairs. Although without any official status that one was aware of, he appeared to be the junction of all governmental paths or, as Holmes once described him, “the central exchange, the clearing house” of problems and events. “Watson, if only my brother would bestir himself, he would demonstrate the greatest deductive brain the world has yet seen. His powers far exceed my own.”
This, then was the man sitting opposite me, perfectly relaxed in his chair, despite the weighty matter, whatever it might be, that had winkled him out of his preferred modus vivendi. As we sat there, with me making small talk, I reflected that this was only the third time in my long association with Holmes that I had met his brother. There had been—let me see—the affair of The Greek Interpreter and, only two or three years earlier, the infinitely more fraught case of the Bruce-Partington Plans, where the nation’s very security had been involved.
Nor could I forget—though I had long since forgiven—the fact that it had bee Mycroft and not I in whom my friend had confided the truth during the ‘Grand Hiatus’. If ever two brothers qualified for the term ‘distant relations’, it was these two. Still, there was undoubtedly something telepathic between them that more than compensated for the lack of corporeal contact. This was demonstrated admirably to me as Holmes emerged from his bedroom.
“Good heavens, Mycroft here? The planet has left its orbit …”
“Am I correct in my deduction, Sherlock?” Mycroft did not waste time with the usual fraternal niceties.
“As ever,” replied my friend.
“Loch Ness?”
“And White Rabbits.”
“A bad business.”
“The worst possible.”
It was like watching two people play verbal chess. The moves were stripped down to the bone. Then, as though they became aware of the presence of a third person in the room who must be allowed into the game …
“Our own sources have been receiving the same signals for several months,” said Mycroft, and I noticed that, seated on opposite sides of the empty fireplace, the two brothers had instinctively adopted the identical pose. Sitting back in their chairs, their fingers steepled in front of their faces, each was gazing into the middle distance without ever making eye contact with the other. They looked for all the world like a pair of mismatched bookends. I had no need to ask who ‘our’ referred to but I couldn’t refrain from asking—“But what are ‘you’ going to do about it? Nobody knows better than we what Moriarty is capable of. Just what devilish plot do you believe he is hatching? Is he trying to bring down the Government—or what?”
Two pairs of piercing eyes turned my way and I was glad that their expression was friendly, for I should not have cared to be the object of hostile scrutiny. It was Mycroft who spoke.
“That, my dear Doctor, is the least of his ambitions, I fear. For some time now—and particularly at the last election—we have received reports of certain—shall I say, less ‘orthodox’ candidates receiving considerable financial support from anonymous sources. Many of them are now Members of Parliament, some as ‘Independents’, others creating friction on the back benches of the two main parties …”
“Steel,” I interrupted, “that Steel fellow. Shifty looking customer. I said to Holmes.”
“Just so, Doctor. Creighton Steel has emerged as their natural focus in the House and the country at large—helped immensely, I might add by the visibility given to his every utterance by John Moxton’s Clarion.”
“It would appear, old fellow,” Holmes picked up the thread, “that if it can be so a
rranged that public opinion can be so influenced as to believe that the country is ungovernable by the present conventional means, then an alternative and more disciplined force is waiting in the wings, ready and able to step in and do so.”
“Britain Needs A Touch Of Steel?” I quoted.
“Precisely, Watson. The plot in a nutshell.”
“But the British people will never fall for such a farfetched scenario, surely?”
“Don’t be too sure,” Mycroft interposed. “The heady days of Empire and Britannia ruling the waves by apparent divine right are over—almost certainly never to return. Her Majesty is ageing and her European cubs are already straining at the leash—the Germans in particular.”
“There is unrest around the Empire. War in South Africa seems to me to be inevitable within a year or so. The British people are not political animals but they have a sense of the way the wind of change is blowing and, whether they identify the source of their concern or not, they are beginning to find it blowing chill. And since solutions are infinitely more attractive to them than problems, it won’t take them long to gravitate to someone who seems to offer an articulate and painless way out of the dilemma. Which is why, Sherlock …” and here he looked Holmes in the eye for the first time—“my Cabinet Lords and Masters have delegated me to enlist your help in the national good. Will you help us cut out this worm in the bud?”
My friend, I could see, was enjoying himself. Reaching across, he tapped Mycroft on the knee.
“First of all, my dear brother, I don’t believe you have any ‘Lords and Masters’. What’s more, neither do you! In the second place—as I’m sure your sources have informed you—I have already committed myself to completing the task in which I so singularly failed at Reichenbach.”
“Forgive me for being obtuse,” I interjected, “but precisely how are a handful of rabbits, white, brown or spotted, likely to bring down the British Government?”
“In and of themselves, of course, they’re not, Watson. That was merely Moriarty’s private joke, designed to ensure he kept my attention. His true purpose is infinitely more sinister, I can promise you and I feel sure its expression is imminent.”
“Moriarty has come upon two tools that can be turned to infinitely deadlier effect than any mechanical device the mind of man could dream up,” Holmes continued. “Public opinion and propaganda. Neither of them new but by utilising the new technology the one can work on the other in a way never before possible. An event no longer needs to be true—it merely has to be seen to be so. The perception becomes the truth. I tell you, Watson, the day will come when he who has the biggest lie and the deepest pockets will have the means to turn the world on his axis. It is a grave commentary on the gullibility of human nature and the power of organised rumour. But that is precisely what our friend is about to assay.”
“You really mean one determined man can do that?”
“In fact and fiction men with sufficient nerve have been doing just that down the centuries—all they lacked were the means of sufficient influence,” My croft interceded. “Dickens, you will recall, had his Mr. Merdle and Trollope his Augustus Melmotte. Two more M’s. Swindlers and charlatans operating at the highest levels of society and leading that society by the nose until they were finally unmasked and ended up taking their own lives. I very much doubt that we can expect Moriarty to be quite so fictionally tidy.”
“I find it hard to believe that the British people will swallow this,” I said with more bravado than I truly felt. Sherlock and Mycroft’s logic had all too much of the ring of truth about it for me to feel as sure of my ground as I would have dearly liked.
Holmes, as ever, sensed my distress at the thought of the world I knew being turned upside down.
“We must take change and use it, old friend, or face the certainty that there are those who will eagerly use it for their own ends and invariably to our disadvantage. All of us cling to what we know or think we know. We may well grumble but we respect the need for a hierarchy, so that we know our place. People—and the British people more than most—need to have an underlying respect for those who lead them. And this is the fiendishly clever part of Moriarty’s plot. He realises full well that they will find it hard to sustain that respect when faced with the spectacle of leaders who seem unable to avoid the banana skins of life. What we are witnessing, however, is what I fear will prove to be something of a prologue to Moriarty’s real theme—a grim joke, no more.”
“And a brief one, too, I fancy,” Mycroft completed the thought. As he spoke, he pulled a large turnip watch from his waistcoat pocket. “And talking of time, I must be on my way. In my unofficial ‘official’ capacity I have been asked to attend a function that may interest you both. There is to be an unveiling of a new bust of the Foreign Secretary at Madame Tussaud’s this morning.”
“Ah, a waxwork of a waxwork?” I snorted, not being enamoured of the gentleman in question. Mycroft turned his massive head in my direction.
“Let us say that Her Majesty’s front bench has reverberated with greater animation than that often demonstrated by its present incumbent. And one might, indeed, wonder why an institution as populist as Madame Tussaud’s should choose the Right Honourable Member as a subject of special interest, were it not for one incidental factor …”
In a mere mortal I would have sworn that the eye had a distinct gleam in it. And here he took out a gilt-edged card from a capacious inside pocket and read aloud: “Great Britons. A Commemorative Series of Statues Commemorating Our Nation’s Leaders.” He paused for a beat and the effect was suitably dramatic. When these two brothers took to their respective chosen occupations the stage lost the peers of Irving and Tree.
“Sponsored by The John Moxton Trust and The Clarion …”
Holmes leaped to his feet, suddenly full of purpose. “Come along, Watson,” he cried, as though I were the habitual laggard. “Stir yourself. I have a distinct feeling that Act Two is about to begin …!”
CHAPTER FIVE
I strongly doubt that the vast majority of London’s teeming thousands who pass its doors daily think of Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks as anything but an intrinsic part of the local scene. If they ever paused to wonder at the rather unusual name, they have long since stopped doing so. For them it is as much a part of childhood as one of the parks.
For Holmes and myself it was something we passed regularly to and fro—sometimes several times a day, situated as it is on Marylebone Road, a mere stone’s throw from Baker Street.
Founded at the very dawn of the century by a formidable Swiss lady, Madame Marie Grosholtz, who had herself trained in Paris, it had grown into a peculiarly British institution, though, for the life of me, I have never been able to appreciate its charm. To see an inanimate approximation of those who dominated their times usually by their sheer life force rather than their looks seems to me a contradiction in terms. But presumably, as Holmes so often reminds me, I fail to move with those times.
The fact remains that, on all the occasions I was dragged through the place as a child, I never saw anything half as lifelike as that Oscar Meunier bust of himself Holmes had made to deceive Moriarty’s lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran, when ‘the second most dangerous man in London’ was bent on revenging his supposedly dead master. As I recall, I wrote that episode up under the title of The Empty House and, for once, managed to receive my friend’s tacit approval for one of my narratives.
Perhaps—I thought as Mycroft’s carriage made the short journey from our lodgings to the wax emporium—there might be some small coincidence here. Moriarty … wax … Holmes …? But then, reading tea leaves has never been my cup of tea, so to speak.
The carriage pulled up at the entrance to the establishment and already it was clear that this was no ordinary day. For one thing the crowds lining the entrance were several deep and obviously there to watch those who came in and out, rather than pay their money to go inside. A cordon of uniformed police were holding them back to let the genuin
e visitors through and the usual good-natured banter was being exchanged. As will often happen, the crowd had picked on one unfortunate subject for their so-called humour. He was standing with his back to us as we prepared to alight, wearing a long nondescript coat and a bowler hat that had seen better days.
“Coo, they’ve left one of the dummies outside,” cried one anonymous wag from the back of the crowd.
“Nah, I saw ’im breathe,” a woman’s voice shouted.
“Go on, stick a pin in ’im!”
“Now, see here, my good woman,” the bowler hatted man said, turning to face the crowd and it was then that I recognised our old friend, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. Small and rather ferrety of feature, Lestrade’s path and ours had crossed many a time and oft. The relationship was always inclined to be touchy but over the years a healthy mutual respect had developed and Holmes often referred to him as the ‘pick of a bad lot’—a term I doubt the Inspector would have appreciated as unqualified praise. The fact that he was here in person, however, was due testimony to the fact that the Yard was taking security seriously and this was confirmed for me a moment later by the glance he exchanged with Mycroft, as the latter lowered his bulk to terra firma.
“Morning, gentlemen,” he said touching the brim of his hat to Mycroft and Holmes in turn then, giving me the benefit of the doubt, adding one more for good measure. In reply to Mycroft’s raised left eyebrow, he added: “My men have the whole place sealed off tight as a drum. I think you could say everything’s tickety-boo.”
“You could—but I wish you wouldn’t, Lestrade,” said Holmes, looking at the Inspector quizically. “Her Majesty’s English receives enough punishment in this day and age without your adding further to it. Perhaps you’ll show us to where the ceremony is taking place?”