by Barry Day
“Hello, that will be Lestrade …”
Down below the front door bell rang and we heard a few murmured words from Mrs. Hudson before the familiar clump of the Inspector’s boots on the stairs.
It was a dejected Lestrade who was shown in. Even the loss of the lugubrious moustache did little to cheer his expression. “You were quite right, Mr. ’Olmes. We found the bottle of cyanide in the pocket of one of the waiters in the cloakroom. Young French chap, obviously scared out of his wits. The bottle had been wiped clean, of course. I took him in for questioning but more as a formality than anything else. It’s pretty clear that it was planted where we were sure to find it. I can’t get over the gall of that Moxton feller. He must think we’re stupid or something.”
“To be fair, Lestrade, we haven’t given him any reason so far to think otherwise. That situation, however, is about to change.”
Lestrade opened his mouth to say something but I could have told him to save his breath. With his consummate sense of theatre our principal actor was not about to give any more encores this evening. After a few more civilities on my part, I saw the Inspector to the door and retired for the night, leaving Holmes to smoke as many pipes as he thought fit in splendid isolation. My last glimpse of him was of him leaning back with his head sunk in the cushion of his chair, the half-closed eyes belying the activity within that teeming brain. The following morning, as I have indicated, I pursued my attack. “Come along now, Holmes—what do you mean … a Second Act? And what part have I been assigned, pray?”
“Well, my dear chap, I would suggest a leisurely lunch at your club, a post-prandial stroll through St. James’s Park—the weather looks as though it should hold—and then I’ve managed to get you a ticket for the opening night of La Bohème at Covent Garden. You’ll find it waiting for you at the box office. I’m afraid no one of consequence is singing but Puccini is always good for a tune or two, though personally I prefer a bit of Teutonic Sturm und Drang, as you know.”
“Are you serious, Holmes?” I began to splutter, when he added—“Oh, and when the performance is over, you might do me the favour of strolling over to that other Palace of Varieties, the House of Commons. There is to be a speech by the Right Honourable Mr. Royston Steel on which I would particularly value your opinion. On this occasion Mycroft has made the necessary arrangements.”
Once the idea had sunk in, I must admit it did have a certain charm. If Holmes thought there was nothing more to do for the time being, who was I to argue?
After the stress of the past few days, lunch at the club was decidedly pleasant. I ran into several old chums and we exchanged our theories of how to prevent the country from going to the dogs over a very fair lamb chop and a more than decent bottle of Beaune. After which I took the prescribed stroll through the park, where a spell of unseasonably late sunshine was tempting London’s usual cross section of humanity to temporarily forget their differences and share God’s good fresh air. Perhaps the Beaune had a certain something to do with my sense of wellbeing but I found myself thinking that each of these very different people had their own joys and sadnesses, which they had to arrange every day into the best possible pattern. The pattern they made might not be perfect but it was their pattern to make—not one imposed upon them by some outside force.
I decided there and then that whatever I, a simple retired army doctor, could do to defend that right I would do, whatever the cost. Not all the important battles were fought on a field of battle. I also reflected how clever it was of my friend, Sherlock Holmes to create the time for me to come to that conclusion.
As he himself would attest, when I get an idea into my head, I tend to be as tenacious with it as the bull pup I once owned. For the rest of the day I found myself thinking about the magnitude of the fraud Moriarty was perpetrating and with what apparent ease someone with nerve and resource could distract public attention from what he was truly about. I also found myself worrying about the part we were asking a certain young lady to play in this deadly business.
With thoughts like these racing through my brain, I barely took in the fact that the opera I found myself watching later that evening was La Bohème. Then Puccini’s soaring romanticism suddenly took on a whole new meaning and when the tenor began Che gelida manina, I vowed that, if this ugly business were ever brought to a conclusion, by way of celebration, I would invite a certain young lady to occupy the seat next to me and share these glorious sounds with me.
It must have been close to eleven o’clock when I found myself approaching the House of Commons. Although I had passed by those familiar buildings more times than I could possibly recall, I have to confess I had never been inside them and, therefore, had no knowledge of their layout. Consequently, it took me some little time and helpful direction from several policemen on duty before I arrived at the entrance to the Visitors’ Gallery.
As Holmes had anticipated, Mycroft had duly worked his magic and the attendants handed over a pass with my name on it in elegant copperplate script. By this time I had laboured up the stairs and passed through the doors into the Gallery itself, I was more than a little flustered. The thought had just sunk in that I had not the faintest idea what I was doing here. As I had done so often in the past, I had accepted Holmes’s instructions unquestioningly.
It was only then that I realised I was alone in the Gallery and I wryly reflected on the very real influence Mycroft must have exerted to achieve such a result. The noise from the debating chamber below brought my thoughts into focus. In the press of the day’s events it had not even occurred to me to discover what the topic of the debate might be about. Now it rapidly became clear that there was at least as much drama being enacted on this stage as I had witnessed earlier in the evening, although with rather less tuneful result.
From what I could immediately glean, the topic under discussion was national security and feelings were clearly running high. Several times as I was trying to identify the various speakers I heard impassioned mention of the Clarion’s coverage of recent events. In answer to one specific question the man I identified as the newly-appointed Home Secretary murmured something almost inaudible about the need to protect the essential freedom of the Press—only to be jeered at from the Opposition back benches.
“Helped you get your job, didn’t it?”
It took the Speaker several minutes of serious gavel pounding to restore some semblance of order to the emotional maelstrom the hallowed Chamber had become.
As the debate—if such it could be dignified—continued, it became increasingly clear to me that underlying the anger was a genuine fear. These men, some of them vastly experienced statesmen of world renown, were manifestly out of their depth. They were faced with a situation totally outside their experience—and they did not know what to do! If I needed further proof that Moriarty’s scheme was working, I was witnessing a perfect example of it in action.
My philosophical reverie was dramatically broken by what happened next. By now it had become virtually impossible for any speaker to say more than a few words before being interrupted by abusive call and counter-call from across the floor of the House.
But now a new figure was rising to his feet and the noise began to subside. It was clear that members of both parties wanted to hear what Royston Steel had to say.
The man cut an impressive figure, I have to admit. Tall and sleek and with an arrogant curl to his mouth, he paused like an actor waiting for his audience to settle down. I find it hard to believe that any of the orators in that gathering—many of whose names were household words—could have exerted the same power over the mob that our elected representatives had become as Steel did that day.
Then he began to speak …
… and as he did, you could feel the collective blood run cold. For the words the man spoke were the ravings of a madman, made all the more frightening by the cold, intelligent, apparently reasoned way he spoke them. He began by castigating the various races, colours and creeds he said were insidiously
undermining our country.
“Maggots in the fabric,” I remember him saying. There was a certain amount of tentative nodding and a muffled “Hear! Hear!” from the shires, but soon even that stopped. There was something viciously racist in phrases like “the serpentine Levantine” that reduced that opinionated group to an uncomfortable silence.
Then Steel turned to “the enemy within,” all those who were plotting to sell their own country to “the semite and the barbarian” and others who were “ethnically inferior.”
Now he began to lace his accusations with the names of individuals, many of whom were in this very Chamber. These men were traitors who should not be allowed the luxury of resignation but should be tried and, when found guilty, executed for treason.
By now the shock was wearing off. I had the distinct feeling that for the first part of his speech many of his audience had thought the man must be staging some sort of elaborate and extended joke and that at some point he would let them all in on it. Perhaps he was parodying some admittedly extreme points of view in order to discredit them. But this was now all too obviously not the case. Angry murmurs began to reverberate around the hall.
Steel himself seemed to be losing his icy composure. The voice was louder and the gestures wilder. Parliament should be disbanded, the Monarchy banished. A few men of vision that he had already hand-picked could lead Britain out of the mire of shabby corruption. Yes, there would be sacrifices, cankers would have to be ruthlessly cut out but then a racially pure society, a greater Great Britain would be ready to cross the sea and emulate Henry at Agincourt. Today Britain, tomorrow Europe … then why not the world? As he reached his peroration, he began to throw up one hand in a demented militaristic sort of salute. He was screaming in an effort to be heard above the tumult in the Chamber.
Members on both sides of the House were on their feet, howling and shaking their fists and order papers at Steel in one of the rare moments of unanimity Parliament has ever seen. Several of the more agile Members began to clamber over the Tory benches in an obvious attempt to reach Steel and do him physical harm and it was at that point that I noticed some counter movement at one end of the room. For some time the Speaker had been trying to make himself heard in an effort to ask Steel to withdraw. Realising the effort was futile, he had clearly signalled for the attendants to perform a duty that had hardly ever proved necessary in the history of that august assembly. Now the black garbed attendants were forcing their way through the gesticulating Members of Parliament for the purpose of removing one of them from the seat of government.
It was the saving of Steel, there is no doubt in my mind about that. His harangue had turned a group of civilised and reasonably orderly men into a mob that would not have disgraced the French Revolution. All that was missing were the tumbrils and the guillotine and bare hands looked ready to make good the difference.
As if the whole thing were happening in slow motion, the attendants parted the crowd like the Red Sea, surrounded Steel—who now seemed calm and quite content to be taken into custody—and suddenly they were gone, as if they had never been. The floor of the Chamber below me was left a seething cauldron of emotion and noise, with old enemies for once united in a common—or perhaps I should say, decidedly uncommon—cause.
It was a sight I never expect to see again and an extremely disturbing one, the more I thought about it. What one person and the weapon of words could achieve!
It was clear that there was nothing more to be seen here. I hurried down the stairs to try and see the end of this remarkable affair, in time to see the distinctive police carriage move away from the gate and the black clad attendants begin to file back into the building. Holmes’s criticisms of police efficiency were a little harsh on occasions like this, I thought. Nothing could have been smoother or more expeditious than the way Steel’s exit had been handled. Even the gatekeeper wished me good evening as calmly as if we had both just been witness to an everyday occurrence.
I decided to walk for a while as I tried to sort my thoughts into some kind of order. I had just watched a man commit political suicide. Whether the words he had uttered were those of someone in the grip of some sudden seizure or whether there was some other explanation was irrelevant. Nothing could expunge those vile sentiments from the minds and hearts of those who had heard them—and on the morrow the rest of the world would share that disgust. How could a man whose reputation had been built to so great a degree on the golden opinions of the Press fall into such an obvious trap? And what would this do to Moriarty’s schemes? Was it in some bizarre way part of those schemes? None of it made sense, I concluded and hailed a passing cab.
As I opened the front door of 221B I could hear the murmur of conversation from the room above. I hastened up the familiar stairs. Holmes would be anxious to know how I had fared on my mission.
“Holmes, the most amazing thing …” I said, as I entered the room … to find My croft Holmes ensconced in my chair and Holmes’s place occupied by—Royston Steel.
CHAPTER TEN
“You may cease and desist from your celebrated impersonation of a fish, old fellow. And please shut the door. There is an infernal draught in here. I must have a word with Mrs. Hudson.”
It was Steel who spoke—with the voice of Sherlock Holmes!
As if in response, Mycroft rumbled from the depths of his—my chair.
“‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of many things …’”
“But—but—I saw you, I mean, Steel, in the House only a few minutes ago …”
“No, Watson, you saw but you did not observe …” Holmes was now pulling off the sleek black wig and the face putty that had once again transformed his features and allowed him temporarily to inhabit someone else’s skin. As he towelled his face vigorously with the cloth Mycroft tossed to him, he continued—“You were in Steel’s milieu. You expected to see Steel. Ergo, you saw him. As did everyone else. In the past most of them had taken him for granted, an irrelevant irritant. Tonight they took notice—and they will never forget him.”
Thinking back to the performance I had seen little more than an hour ago, I knew, of course, that he was right. Not for the first time I reflected that when Holmes put on a disguise he did not impersonate, he became his subject. He transformed his appearance, his bearing—even, I suspect, his soul.
I looked at him. He had the contented look I imagine comes over every actor at the conclusion of a performance that has clearly impressed his audience. Finally I managed to say—“But Holmes, you were masterly. You were the man …”
“Thank you, Watson. It’s good to know the skills I picked up in America as a young man have not totally atrophied. Oh, have I never related that part of my pre-Watson existence? Remind me to do so when we have rather more leisure. It may serve to pad out one of your more lurid tales.”
Suddenly a thought struck me.
“But what about the real Steel,” I stammered, “suppose he had walked in while you were impersonating him?”
“I have too much confidence in my brother’s ability to exert his personality when he so chooses,” Holmes replied, looking in that direction. Mycroft acknowledged the compliment with the merest inclination of his head.
“Mycroft intimated that there were those in the highest echelons of the Government who would value Steel’s opinion on matters of national importance. To ensure security the meeting was arranged away from prying eyes in the privacy of Mycroft’s private rooms with catering provided by the Diogenes Club opposite. So tell us, Mycroft, what state secrets did you manage to impart?”
“I’m afraid that, owing to the excitement of entertaining so distinguished a guest, I was a little carried away. As I recall, the conversation barely moved beyond the topic of Coptic scrolls and how they might conceivably undermine the very foundations of revealed religion—a topic which seemed to exercise Mr. Steel considerably as the evening wore on.”
“I told Mycroft to keep him occupied until I knew his name wou
ld have been called to speak. I was fairly sure that what he would have to say was likely to produce a certain—shall we say?—frisson.”
“That it certainly did,” I attested fervently. “I thought they were about to lynch him—you. It reminded me of some of the accounts I’ve read of the French Revolution. You could have cut the emotion in the House with a knife. But gentlemen, put my simple mind at rest—what precisely was the point of it?”
“A riposte in the battle for the hearts and minds of the British people,” Mycroft replied gravely.
“I’m not sure I’d pitch it with quite such gravitas,” Holmes added. “While the ‘British people’ are undoubtedly possessed of both, they scarcely consider them in those elevated terms—at least, not in my observation. No, Watson, in simpler terms my aim was to put a spoke in Moriarty’s wheel and that we have undoubtedly done. He was expecting some sort of frontal counter-attack and had prepared his defences accordingly. Yet any student of his methods—and I flatter myself that I am one—knows that our dear Professor’s modus operandi contains one unifying thread. He never soils his own hands with the minutiae of the execution of his plans. Therefore, he is vulnerable through his minions.
“Removing Steel—for be in no doubt we have done just that—may be no more than a temporary inconvenience, as I say, a mere spoke in the wheel of Moriarty’s plan but in a complex piece of machinery one wheel meshes in with the working of another and another, so that a change of speed may lead to disaster for the whole machine. More important, we have shown Moriarty that his plans are capable of disruption. Perhaps just as galling for a man of his vanity will be this …”
And he picked up a piece of paper from the table next to him and handed it to me. “He thought that only he was ingenious enough to pursue his course with one hand and orchestrate his literary conceit with the other. He now knows differently …” On the paper was printed in Holmes’s distinctive hand …