Sherlock Holmes and the Seven Deadly Sins Murders

by Barry Day

  “That, my good man, is precisely what we are here to find out. I believe you have as one of your tenants a Mr. Robert McKay?”

  Now the concièrge—who had given his name as Judson—was distinctly worried, although, like any good professional, he attempted to hide it behind a courteous manner.

  “Oh, Mr. McKay? Indeed, yes. A very—private gentleman, Mr. McKay. In any case, Inspector, I’m afraid you’ve missed him. He went out some little time ago and it must have been something important, for he was in a great hurry.”

  “So much so that he didn’t even have time to address a word to you?” Holmes enquired.

  “As a matter of fact, that’s quite right. We always take a moment to exchange pleasantries. We’ve quite a pride in these little courtesies at 36. Why, I’ve had tenants say to me …”

  Whatever the tenants had to say to Mr. Judson we were not to learn, for Lestrade—now with the bit firmly between his teeth—took command of the situation.

  “I shall have to ask you to use your key to let us into Mr. McKay’s flat, if you please. My colleagues and I are investigating a series of serious crimes and we have reason to believe there may be evidence on the premises. Of course, if you insist on an official warrant, that can be here in a matter of minutes—along with several uniformed constables who will probably traipse up and down Eaton Square for the rest of the day. Still, if your tenants don’t mind that …”

  Judson visibly shuddered. Pulling a bunch of keys from his pocket he led the way up the front steps and into the lobby.

  As we did so, a cab pulled up and Mycroft levered his bulk to the pavement, ordering the cabbie to wait.

  “A useful trick I learned from our friend, Oscar Wilde,” he explained, as he puffed up the steps to join us. “If you find a good cab, keep it all day.”

  In a few terse sentences Holmes brought his brother up to date.

  “I believe I have done justice to your thinking, have I not, Lestrade?”

  “Oh, certainly, Mr. ’Olmes.” Turning to Mycroft. “Quite obvious, really, when you use what I like to call ‘deductive reasoning’.”

  “Well, well, McKay, eh?” said Mycroft. “He always was something of a queer fish, but even so …”

  Lestrade motioned imperiously to the concièrge to lead the way.

  Up a grand and sweeping staircase we went, an ill-assorted little group, until on the first floor we came to a solid oak door bearing a highly-polished letter ‘4’. Judson produced a key from his ring and opened the door with the flourish of an impresario presenting an act.

  We entered another world.

  The room was like another chamber in the British Museum—except this one would have been closed to the general public, for it was a shrine to erotica.

  The late afternoon sunlight illuminated carvings and paintings that bore the signs of their different indigenous cultures but otherwise had only one thing in common. They depicted every possible variation of the sexual act and the fact that most of them were exquisitely rendered by craftsmen of no mean skill made them all the more insidious in their appeal. Heaven knows why, but I found myself thinking how grateful I was that my darling Mary was not there to see this lewd display.

  “‘L’ for Lust.”

  It was Mycroft putting into words what the rest of us were feeling.

  Only Holmes seemed unsurprised by the sight. While the rest of us stood there transfixed, he examined every corner of the flat—checking the bedroom and bathroom that opened off the main room. He returned to us, shaking his head.

  “The bird, I’m afraid, has flown.”

  Then, turning to Judson, who was rivetted by a bronze of two young men that owed more to Sparta than SW1 …

  “You have failed to tell us of what transpired here earlier today. I would be grateful if you would relate everything you heard and saw. The slightest detail may be of the utmost importance.”

  Judson’s jaw, which had been slightly ajar from his perusal, now dropped appreciably.

  Holmes gave the man no quarter.

  “Any faux gentility on your part will do nothing to help the people who employ you and may significantly impede the progress of a criminal investigation. Your failure to be entirely and immediately frank with us may well constitute a criminal act in its own right. Isn’t that true, Inspector Lestrade?”

  “A very serious offence,” Lestrade chipped in with his best official tone.

  “I assure you, gentlemen, I had no intention of withholding information. I was merely concerned with the privacy …”

  “Of your tenants,” I offered. I have learned in working with Holmes in this mood that it often helps if the person being questioned feels that one of us, at least, is sympathetic to his plight. It certainly worked on this occasion.

  “Exactly, sir.” Judson looked gratefully in my direction. “I thought there was something amiss the moment Mr. McKay arrived back earlier this afternoon. He wasn’t himself, if you know what I mean.”

  “In what way ‘not himself’?” Mycroft boomed.

  “Brusque, almost rude. Not himself at all. Why, we usually enjoy a few friendly words …” Then, seeing Holmes’s granite expression—“You see, the strange thing was that when he came in, I thought he was in already,” he finished lamely.

  Then he remembered something. “And then he started talking to himself …”

  “What do you mean—talking to himself?” Lestrade was looking a little less ebullient than he had when we entered the flat.

  “Well, I just happened to overhear as I was going about my duties, you understand. He seemed to be arguing with himself. Naturally, I couldn’t hear the actual words …”

  But not for want of trying, I thought.

  “… and his mood seemed to come and go. At one moment he laughed—a rather unpleasant laugh …” His face clouded at the memory. “Then everything went quiet. And a little later, as I told you, I saw the back of him as he went out. And that is positively all I can tell you, gentlemen.”

  As he had been talking, Holmes had been pacing around the room and I noticed that he was careful to touch nothing. Suddenly his head snapped in the direction of the unfortunate Judson.

  “Who cleans Mr. McKay’s rooms?”

  “Oh, no one, sir. Mr. McKay is most particular that nothing should be touched and now I can see why. Some of these pieces appear to be most—unique. He made a point when he took the flat that he would look after that aspect of it himself. No one is allowed to enter these rooms. Why, I myself have never seen inside since the day he moved in.”

  He looked, I though, a little wistful, as he surveyed the room.

  “And yet someone else has been in here,” said Holmes. “Someone has moved all the larger pieces, as well as the pictures—anything that might contain an aperture …”

  He did not need to add “… that might contain a small book.”

  “… and I fail to see why someone who was clearly a perfectionist …”

  “Oh, indeed. Mr. McKay would often say—‘A place for everything and everything in its place’. It’s a creed I’ve lived by myself …” His voice faded away as he caught Holmes’s eye.

  “… would bother to move objects that he had taken great care to arrange in the first place. You see the marks in the dust and the slight scratches where the heavier items were moved in a hurry?”

  And, indeed, looking closer where Holmes had indicated, the marks were evident.

  “McKay was not talking to himself. There were two men in this room, as is perfectly clear from the indentations in these two armchairs. Men of habit like McKay have a favourite chair and will use no other …”

  I thought that I could name at least one other person in this room of whom that was also true. Perhaps even two, if I were honest.

  “There were two men who argued. One of them left. Which leaves us with one …”

  “But Mr. ’Olmes,” Lestrade objected, “there’s nobody in this ’ole flat except us.”

  Now Judson in
terrupted excitedly.

  “I’ve just remembered something else. I did hear one thing Mr. McKay said. He said—‘I think it’s time somebody paid a visit to the lady’. Do you think he could have had a woman in here?”

  I was surprised that Holmes did not answer at once. Then I saw that he was looking at a large object that dominated one end of the room. I was surprised now that I had not taken more notice of it earlier but the contents of the room were so bizarre that one’s visual sense became blurred.

  It was made of wood and stood about seven feet high. At first glance I thought it might be an Egyptian mummy case but the surface design was all wrong for that. Although time had faded it, it looked like a primitive depiction of a woman with an enigmatic smile. She stood there with her hands primly folded in front of her but there was something wholly malevolent about her.

  I saw that Holmes was not kneeling in front of the object, as if giving obeisance. He put his finger on the richly-patterned carpet, then lifted it for our inspection. It was stained with a drop of blood that the pattern had concealed.

  “‘It’s time somebody paid a visit to the lady,’ I believe you said, Mr. Judson. I might reply—‘Cherchez la femme’. Except I very much fear that we have found the lady in question.”

  “Of course,” Mycroft murmured close to my ear, “an Iron Maiden.”

  Quietly as he had spoken, his words had carried to Holmes, who rose to his feet and began to examine the object from all angles. He seemed to be speaking to himself, as if reading from one of the volumes in his Index.

  “A medieval instrument of torture, fashioned with cruel irony in the shape of a woman by someone who clearly had no love of women. Few escape her close embrace and I fancy this is a case where she has been overly affectionate. Ah!”

  He seemed to press something on the side of the casing and slowly the whole front of the accursed thing swung open. There, impaled on the metal spikes that lined the whole contraption, was the man I had seen leave the cab and enter the building earlier that day. Hair, beard, moustache, just as I remembered them.

  Holmes was examining the dead man’s face minutely, running his fingers along the jaw, as if seeking to find the pulse that was long gone.

  Behind me I heard Mycroft reciting under his breath—

  “An age in her embraces passed

  Would seem a winter’s day,

  Where life and light with envious haste

  Are torn and snatched away.

  “Our friend, Pope had a word for every occasion, however lugubrious. Wouldn’t you agree, Doctor?”

  Before I could answer, there was a loud noise from the doorway that made us both turn in that direction.

  The genteel Judson had fainted.

  Chapter Eight

  “Oh, that’s the real McKay right enough,” said Sherlock Holmes.

  We were back in Baker Street with the curtain drawn against the darkening skies that threatened rain—a fitting accompaniment to our collective mood.

  Lestrade had been left behind to handle the routine associated with sudden and suspicious death. While he had not been happy to have his pet theories exploded, he was taking solace in doing something with which he was familiar.

  “And despite what Lestrade might like to think, I think it highly unlikely that the man committed suicide! For one thing, his hands were tied behind him and there was a gag in his mouth—both of them peculiarly difficult feats for a man to carry out on himself. I have tried more than once in the course of my own experiments.”

  We were sitting in the half light, nursing well-earned whisky-and-sodas.

  Mycroft picked up the conversational ball.

  “So presumably what the Doctor saw was our murderer, disguised as McKay, entering No. 36, where he argued with him …”

  “The ‘talking to himself’ Judson overheard?” I interposed.

  “Precisely so. Then overpowered him, searched the flat but again failed to find what he was looking for …”

  “Then punished the Sinner,” Holmes added. “Perhaps you did not get close enough to the body to notice it, but there was a letter ‘L’ smeared on McKay’s forehead in the dust from the room. ‘L’ for Lust. A title well earned, if that room is any indication of the life he has been leading.”

  “You know, Holmes, the thing that strikes me is that each of these fellows seems to have adopted one of the sins as some sort of joke to begin with and then grown into it. How do you account for that?”

  Holmes smiled a wintry smile.

  “Saving your presence, my dear Mycroft, I would venture to guess that somewhere deep in the recesses of the human mind—an area that we have yet to chart—we are all of us yearning to find the part we are destined to play in the human comedy. Without doing so deliberately and perhaps without even fully realising what they were doing, each of them found this charade answered that need for them. Once they had decided that in their different ways, they had no need for the society. Indeed, the last thing any of them would want was to have six other people observing them live out their fantasies.”

  “And now one of those remaining fantasies involves the deaths of the rest,” Mycroft suggested.

  “So it would seem,” Holmes agreed. “Along the way something has perverted someone’s personal fantasy, so that revenge and retribution have become key components of it and the Book of Kor the excuse for his actions.”

  I had to get it off my chest. “I still don’t understand where the Book comes into the murders.”

  “The Book is merely a symbol to all connected with it. To the Emerald Lady and the simple people of Zakhistan it represents their destiny and their hope for the future. To our disturbed friend the symbolism is quite different. The theft of the Book by the Sinners—as he sees it—must be paid for. Not that he cares a fig for the content of it or its religious significance to others. He has chosen to believe that it is now his mission to retrieve it and punish the original sin of stealing it. It legitimises his own personal motive.”

  “Briggs, Pelham and now McKay …” Mycroft mused. “Which leaves Pascal and—in the absence of Challenger and Summerlee—my good self …”

  “What about—what’s his name?—Staunton? Shouldn’t he be on your list?” I asked.

  “At this point I don’t believe we can afford to leave anyone off our list,” said Holmes. “Except you, of course, Mycroft,” he added with a brief smile. “Somehow I don’t see you donning a false beard in the back of a hansom, then temporarily shedding approximately half of your avoirdupois by some sublime act of prestidigitation.”

  The glance his brother returned to him was opaque to say the least, then the image overwhelmed even Mycroft’s innate dignity and he dissolved into a fit of laughter mingled with coughing that left him red-faced. By this time we were all laughing and the tension in the room palpably relaxed.

  Holmes went over and stood by the mantlepiece and stared into the empty fireplace, as he reviewed the situation.

  “My examination of McKay, cursory though it was, confirmed my belief that he was not the man Watson and I saw in Scotland—the same man who followed us to the Museum. You recall my theory of the individuality of the ear, old fellow?

  “Our murderer simply assumed the identity of McKay during the cab ride and did it very well, too. It is a subject in which I have some little expertise myself, as you know …”

  I remembered Uma’s account of the many faces of ‘Mr. Smith’.

  Holmes continued—

  “He was not his usual friendly self with Judson for the simple reason that, although he could pull off the look of McKay, he could not afford to engage in any conversation with our loquacious Cerberus which would inevitably give him away. That in itself was enough of a clue.

  “The result is that we now have three deceased ‘innocent’ Sinners—with all but one of the rest at possible risk. That one is the murderer himself. And we have seen that the fact that a Sinner does not happen to possess the Book does not save him.”


  “But surely, Holmes, we only have Staunton to worry about now? Mycroft is safe enough with us watching him and Pascal, Challenger and Summerlee are out of the country and harm’s way.”

  “I think I can add a little something there.” Mycroft had recovered his mandarin-like composure. “Just before I received your summons I had been given some further information.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved a handful of papers, several of which could probably change the future of nations. Selecting one, he put on his spectacles and consulted it.

  “It would appear that Monsieur Pascal has temporarily deserted his native France for our own shores. There is to be a Fête Gastronomique at his West End restaurant, Chez Pascal tomorrow evening and Pascal himself will be in attendance to prepare with his own hands his pièce de résistance dessert, Surprise Pierre. He appears to have been here for some days already preparing for it.

  “Members of the public are welcome on a first come, first served basis. I think, under the present circumstances, that we may be well advised to be among those who are first to come and even be served.”

  “And talking of being served …” Holmes turned from the fireplace, rubbing his bony hands and with a rare smile on that saturnine face. “I do believe we have earned ourselves a decent dinner this day. Equally, I have little doubt, my dear Watson, that my brother Mycroft values our services as his personal Swiss Guards highly enough to insist on paying. So where shall it be, old fellow—Rules or Simpsons? The choice is yours.”

  Simpsons it was and by the time I sought my bed, relaxed and replete, the long day was beginning to take its toll.

  I tried to review the sequence of events and their meaning, as Holmes had taught me to do. It was his habit to rationalise aloud using me as his audience, for it was his contention that it helped him to arrange the facts and to discern the pattern in them. I could also hear him repeat in my mind his mantra—“It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and which vital, otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated, instead of concentrated.”