Sherlock Holmes and the Seven Deadly Sins Murders

by Barry Day

  She nodded miserably. “I did not know how to prevent it.”

  “Which means that he cannot be taken by Lestrade while he is there,” I interjected. “The house is technically on foreign soil.”

  Then Holmes seemed to go off at a tangent.

  “I want you to describe to me in detail the layout of the main reception room and its relation to the rest of the house and grounds.”

  Although she looked slightly surprised at his request, Uma did as he asked, while Holmes took copious notes and even drew a rough diagram at which she nodded her approval.

  Then he asked something even stranger to my ears.

  “And the holy serpents—are they in good health?”

  “They are kept in a special cage and Khali himself feeds them—I was about to say religiously—every day. Why do you ask?”

  “Merely to suggest that you refrain from feeding them for the next few days. Make whatever excuse you think fit to Khali. Can you do that?”

  “Why, yes. He will obey the word of the High Priestess designate without question. But why …?”

  “It may save the lives of many,” was Holmes’s simple answer. “And now, my dear lady, may I suggest that you return to your post, for all of us have much to do before we can rest easy in our beds. Nonetheless, I promise you there is light at the end of the tunnel. Watson, would you be so good …?”

  As I escorted Uma down the stairs, she stopped me in the hallway.

  “Tell me, John, does he mean what he says? How can he be so sure?”

  “I have never known him promise what he did not think he could deliver,” I said with honest conviction, though for the life of me I could not fathom what Holmes was about.

  When I had placed her safely in her carriage and seen her on her way, I returned upstairs in thoughtful mood to find Holmes curiously cheerful for someone who had seemingly promised the impossible.

  “What do I intend to do, old fellow?” he said, anticipating my question. “Staunton set out to find the Book of Kor. We shall find it for him.”

  For the next twenty-four hours I saw little of my friend, except on the rare occasions he came back for a brief refreshment and to pore over the stream of telegrams that kept arriving for him.

  When the mood is upon him, Holmes uses the telegram as though it were running water. Her Majesty’s Post Office need never worry about its solvency while there are criminals abroad and Sherlock Holmes to track them down.

  That evening—having not the slightest idea of Holmes’s movements or intentions—I decided to dine at my club and enjoyed a most convivial evening. I find it does me good to get back into the real world every now and then after the chaos of Baker Street—an ordered world where a yarn or a game of billiards with a chum is the predictable height of excitement and brutal baffling murders are virtually unknown and strictly against club rules.

  Several of the fellows, knowing of my association with Holmes, came over to say how relieved they were that Mycroft had pulled through his recent illness.

  Old Archie Sennott put it best, I thought.

  “Sticky wicket for our side if Mycroft had been caught and bowled. Straight bat. Nobody better.”

  Then for some reason or other we got to talking about India. Archie had been up in the north about the same time as I had, although we’d never met.

  It turned out—something I’d never known before—that when it was all over, he’d pottered about a bit to see more of the country and had ended up right on the border with Tibet.

  “Amazing part of the world, amazing. Places up there nobody’s ever heard of …”

  This was too good an opportunity to miss.

  “Ever come across a little place called Zakhistan?” I asked innocently.

  And then the flood gates opened. When Archie’s had his quota—which he had this evening—it’s only a question of what the topic will happen to be when the needle on the record gets stuck.

  Tonight it was Zakhistan and although I happened to know that much of what he said was inaccurate, it was still interesting to have some of the details of Uma’s story confirmed from another source. Then, just when I was thinking I had heard all that was remotely useful for our present purpose, he said one thing that made all the rambling and repetition worthwhile.

  “Well, if you really want to know about those strange little blighters, the man you should really talk to is Challenger. His old man was one of the first white men to get in there. Years ago now, of course. And I hear he had to get out a lot faster than he got in. Quite a stink about it at the time. Forget the details now …”

  So it was with cheerful tread that I climbed the fourteen steps to our rooms in Baker Street later that evening. Watson, the man who sees and observes, listens and learns, sifting the facts and missing nothing.

  From above I could hear the strains of Holmes’s Stradivarius. The barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffman, if I was not mistaken—a sure sign that he had had a successful day. It was when I heard Wagnerian scratchings and wailings that I was inclined to make straight for my room.

  “Holmes,” I said, as I entered the room, “I have good news to report.”

  “So have I,” he replied. “Careful, old fellow you’re about to sit on it.”

  From an ungainly half sitting position I managed to retrieve a brown paper package that was on my chair. I looked at Holmes, who nodded for me to open it. The knots in the string that held it together were not too tight and I soon had it open.

  In my hands was …

  “The Book of Kor!”

  “Not the Book, Watson—but most certainly a Book of Kor and a good enough fake to deceive the most rabid Zakhistani for, if I remember rightly, the only person permitted to actually handle it is the High Priestess herself and the current incumbent is several thousand miles away.”

  I examined the volume carefully. If it was a fake, it was brilliantly done. The leather cover was worn and stained, as if with much use, and the paper brittle and flaking at the edges of the pages. Seeing me shake my head in admiration, Holmes went on—

  “The work of Isaac Goetz, an antiquarian bookseller in Hackney and an old friend of many years’ standing. You remember the day of my return from Reichenbach …?”

  How could I ever forget seeing the man I knew to be dead standing before me in my own consulting room?

  “… I had disguised myself as a disreputable old bookseller who wished to interest you in his rare collection. Those books, at least, were the genuine article, loaned to me—somewhat nervously, I must admit—by my old friend Goetz.

  “He was the only man I knew who could manufacture such a thing at all, let alone in such a short time. I watched him at work today. Watson, I felt humble. There is genius all around us and in the most unexpected places. The paper and ink are of the period of the original …”

  “But the content?”

  “Ah, there we must take our chances, I fear, since we have no idea what the original contained. However, I am reasonably confident that it will pass muster for the purpose I have in mind.”

  I knew better than to enquire what that purpose might be. He would tell me when he was good and ready and not a moment before.

  I then recounted my conversation with Sennott at the club.

  Holmes looked pensive.

  “Well done, Watson. You have just put the last piece of the puzzle in place and confirmed what my own researches indicate.

  “In 1859 the Schumacher Expedition—made up of scientists and explorers of several nationalities—spent several months in Nepal and Tibet. In the accounts published on their return, there is some mention of a splinter group that made off on their own. No details are given but one gains the distinct impression from the way it is written that something went badly awry, for the whole expedition was cut short and returned to England several weeks earlier than planned.

  “And there was one other interesting fact buried among the small print …”

  “Which was?”

  �
��The leader of the splinter group was one Edmund Challenger—Professor Challenger’s father.”

  “Good heavens, so he was the one who stole the Book in the first place?”

  “So it would appear. And tomorrow we can ask the one man who may have had the key to this whole business all along. You and I and Mycroft will meet Professor Challenger’s train at Waterloo tomorrow at 2:15.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Waterloo Station bore all the markings of the battlefield from which it took its name when Holmes, Mycroft and I arrived there the following afternoon.

  As luck would have it, Challenger’s train had arrived a little early and we needed no Arrivals Board to direct us to the relevant platform.

  Platform 7 looked more like a rugger scrum than its usual orderly concourse of travellers and, as the crowd surged to and fro, I was reminded of the days when I used to play for Blackheath myself and would think nothing of piling into such a melée of bodies.

  Then I saw that there was an eye to this storm. A furled umbrella was being raised and waved about in an agitated manner and a singular voice could be heard over the din of the train whistles and escaping steam.

  “Idiots! Nincompoops! I’ll sue every last one of your editors. How dare you question the veracity of George Edward Challenger?”

  Mycroft and Holmes exchanged glances and wry smiles.

  “We appear to be in the right place,” said Holmes.

  “It beggars belief to think there could be two of him,” Mycroft replied.

  Before we left for the station I had studied the entry for this clearly unrepentant Sinner in Holmes’s Index. It read—

  CHALLENGER, PROF. GEORGE EDWARD

  Educated at Largs Academy, Edinburgh; Edinburgh Univ. followed by post-graduate course at Christ Church College, Oxford … winner of Crayston Medal for Zoological Research … holder of various prestigious offices in departments of anthropology, from all of which he either resigned or was fired in acrimonious fashion … endless other academic awards and learned publications—“Some Observations Upon a Series of Kaimuck Skulls”; “Outlines of Vertebrate Evolution”, etc., etc., Recreations: Walking, Alpine climbing. -Address: Enmore Park, Kensington, W.

  To which Holmes had added a handwritten note to the effect that Challenger must hold some sort of record in terms of police court fines for assaulting members of the Press who asked him questions he found offensive.

  “Ah, well,” Mycroft sighed, “I suppose we’d better bale George out one more time or Staunton will find him by the sheer decibel level alone.”

  With Mycroft’s bulk as the point of it, the three of us formed a human wedge and forced our way through the crowd.

  At the heart of it stood three bewildered porters, their trolleys piled high with Challenger’s assorted crates and portmanteaux, and a ring of journalists, all of them keeping a wary distance—except for one who was on his hands and knees striving to find the pieces of his broken camera. Standing over him, his umbrella poised like the sword of Damocles, stood Professor Challenger.

  The first thing that struck me about the man was the contrast between his imposing presence and his physical size. Listening to his bull-like roar from a distance, I had deduced that he must be huge but now I saw that he was a foreshortened Hercules, for he stood well below my height, and I am not a tall man.

  But what he lacked in height, he more than compensated for in breadth and, presumably, brain. The spread of his shoulders taxed the limits of his jacket, as did the barrel of a chest.

  The head was perhaps the largest I have ever seen on a man and again I was reminded of a bull, for he had the face and beard I have only ever seen in pictures of Assyrian bulls. His complexion was florid—I might say, choleric—and the beard, which was spade-shaped and extended well down his massive chest, was so jet black that, when it caught the light, it almost seemed to have hints of blue in it.

  The brow was equally impressive from what I could see of it under his panama hat. They eyes—when they had ceased to flash fire—would be blue-grey under those beetling black brows and would miss nothing and trust no one.

  Finally, there were the hands. Large enough to rival a navvy’s and covered with long black hair, they gripped the umbrella with unequivocal menace.

  All in all, Professor George Edward Challenger looked more like one of the primates he had undoubtedly been studying in the back of beyond than one of the most highly qualified academics of his generation.

  “We seem to be in the right place,” said Holmes.

  “I hardly think there can be two of them,” Mycroft replied

  And this was the man we were counting on to resolve our dilemma!

  If he was surprised to see Mycroft, he showed no sign of it, merely observing—

  “Ah, Her Majesty’s Government have sent you to welcome me home, have they, Holmes? Perfectly appropriate, too. And who are these people? Minor civil servants of some sort, I suppose. Perhaps they can take care of the luggage?”

  Introductions were duly effected, though there was a saurian glint deep in Challenger’s eye that told me he knew perfectly well who we were.

  “Consulting detective, eh? What sort of job is that, pray? Sounds more like some quack who overcharges you for telling you you’ve got a headache you told him about in the first place. And you, Mycroft. Always thought you could have added up to something more than a glorified office boy, if only you could have been bothered to stir your stumps.”

  With that last he went too far. For the next two minutes the voluble Professor was rendered mute, as Mycroft—giving us a rare glimpse of what made him central to affairs of state—told him, in a tone that brooked no interruption, what had happened in his absence and why we were here.

  “And so, my dear George, you would do us all a great favour if you would, for one brief and shining hour, set aside your natural tendency towards the theatrical and come with us.”

  Although he had come in like the proverbial lion, Challenger allowed himself to be led out like a veritable lamb. There was the quality of the basilisk in Mycroft’s expression that said enough was enough.

  Even the Professor’s admonishments to the porters attempting to maneouvre his luggage on to their trolleys was positively mild for him—

  “I hope you realise you are not delivering coal but handing unique artefacts that will revolutionise all our present theories of evolution!”

  Our little party reached the station entrance, where, I was amused to see, Mycroft had once again had his cab wait upon him. Seeing my quizzical expression, his face for the briefest of moments transformed itself into a creditable impersonation of Oscar Wilde and then returned to its normal enigmatic expression.

  “My dear Doctor, I have long since learned that a good idea does not mind who has it—or, indeed, how often.”

  Now Holmes was whistling up another cab and directing the winded porters to pile Challenger’s luggage into it. As he watched them at work, the Professor asked in a dangerously mild tone—

  “Since I am obviously to be kidnapped, am I allowed to enquire where you are taking me?”

  Then, with a glance at Mycroft—“Is it the Tower of London for my heretical views on the origin of species? Or for calling the President of the Zoological Society an underdeveloped primate in print? Pray tell.”

  By way of answer Holmes instructed the driver of the lead cab—

  “Enmore Gardens, Kensington, driver. We are taking you home, Professor Challenger. You see, we want to borrow a book.”

  The room was exactly what one might have expected if a stage designer had set out to create the study of an eccentric professor for a West End play. Books and papers were piled on every available surface and in several cases had begun to cascade on to the somewhat threadbare carpet. Shelves were littered with strange fragments of bones and other, less savoury objects which defied immediate identification. The walls were crowded with a variety of framed diplomas and certificates attesting to the Professor’s pre-eminence i
n this field or that and a virtual gallery of photographs in which Challenger, invariably centre stage, adopted the identical self-satisfied pose.

  The light from the large bay window illuminated the myriad dust motes that hung in the air and every time an object was moved, a myriad more rose to join them. It was clear that Mrs. Challenger and her maid were forbidden to disturb this holy of holies on pain of death, although the rest of the house that we had seen as we entered shone like a new pin and it was quite apparent where his domain ended and hers began.

  “My dear wife is always telling me that this or that terrible catastrophe is about to engulf me ‘for my sins’, but I doubt that even she—the romantic that she is—could have envisaged such poetic justice.”

  Challenger stroked his great beard thoughtfully and his eyes looked over our heads, as Holmes—with occasional interpolations from Mycroft—gave him a detailed account of the events of the last few days.

  “Well, Holmes …” Then he paused thoughtfully. “The fact of there now being two of you called Holmes forces me to change the habit of a lifetime and call you ‘Mycroft’. I have always deplored this modern habit of over-familiarity, but I suppose needs must. This man Staunton has much to answer for.”

  Then the old Challenger returned momentarily.

  “Did I not warn the rest of you at the time I was foolish enough to indulge in that undergraduate nonsense that the man was a charlatan and a poseur? But would you listen? Not one of you!”

  He banged on the table in his shabby sitting room in annoyance, causing several objects to fall to the floor. The noise caused the door to open and his wife—a diminutive but fierce little woman—to put her head around it and fix him with a lion-tamer’s glare.

  “George!”

  “Yes, my dear,” he replied meekly and the door closed again behind her.

  “Gentlemen,” he went on in a nearly normal tone, “I seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here you have been having all the excitement, while I have been incarcerated in the wilds with that fool Summerlee, questioning my every move. Naturally, I validated my theories in short order and headed for home. But—can you credit it?—Summerlee refused to join me and insists on retracing every step of our journey to find the mistake he is convinced I made. Pah!”