Young Sherlock Holmes 6: Knife Edge

by Andrew Lane

  ‘Is this the spirit known as Invictus?’

  Bang!

  ‘Can you write the message for us on this slate?’ Albano asked, touching the slate in front of him.

  Bang!

  Albano picked the slate up in both hands and held it up so that it was clear there was no message on it. He turned it over so that everyone could see both sides, and then clutched it to his chest with both hands. He rocked forward and backwards a few times, still holding the slate, but Sherlock noticed that as he rocked he moved the slate further and further down, until it was beneath the level of the table, relying on the movement of his body to keep everyone’s attention. Sherlock watched his upper arms carefully, and spotted the moment when Albano let go of the slate with his right hand, slipped the thimble on his index finger beneath the table and blindly scribbled a quick message.

  The psychic threw his head backwards as if in some kind of trance state or fit, but Sherlock noticed that he used the movement to distract attention from the fact that he had brought the slate up from beneath the table again. It wasn’t that he was trying to convince the watchers that the slate had always been above the level of the table – he had already gone to some efforts to show them that there were no tricks or props beneath the table – but it was more, Sherlock assumed, that he didn’t want them thinking too much about where the slate was or what was happening to it. Albano held the slate up, facing the watchers. ‘Is there a message?’ he asked.

  That was a nice touch, Sherlock decided. Of course there was a message – he had written it himself – but asking the question made it sound to the watchers as if he were being taken by surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ von Webenau exclaimed.

  ‘Please, read it out.’

  ‘Someone around this table,’ von Webenau read slowly, ‘does not believe! ’

  The chalk message on the slate was perfectly legible – at least, to Sherlock – but having it read out was a touch more dramatic.

  Albano glanced around the table. ‘Is it true?’ he asked, shocked. ‘Is there someone here who does not believe? It is not an easy thing for the spirits of the dead to pierce the veil between the worlds. If they thought their time was being wasted, they might decide to stop.’

  Von Webenau and Holtzbrinck protested their belief loudly; Shuvalov, Crowe and Sherlock protested in slightly less voluble terms. Albano nodded. ‘Very well.’ He raised his voice. ‘O spirit, we beseech you, please continue to communicate with us. Is there any other message – perhaps for someone specific?’

  Bang! The table vibrated, knocking the wooden plaque sideways from where it rested in the centre.

  Albano went through the same routine as before, rocking back and forth and holding the slate beneath the table. This time Sherlock knew that he was wiping the first chalk message away with the side of his white gloves before writing a new one.

  When he brought the slate up from beneath the table, the chalk writing said: I have a message from the wife of one present.

  Sherlock’s eyes were drawn to Amyus Crowe. He knew that Crowe’s wife had died on the ship that had brought the family from America to England. Crowe rarely talked about his wife, and Sherlock wondered whether the man would react now.

  Crowe’s jaw was clenched tight. Sherlock could see the muscles tense beneath his cheeks. He said nothing.

  ‘Is there someone here who has lost their beloved wife?’ Albano asked. ‘If so, rest assured that she is happy and well.’

  Sherlock looked around the table. Shuvalov, he knew, was unmarried. Mycroft had mentioned it at some time in the past. Von Webenau and Holtzbrinck he wasn’t sure about, but judging by the expectant looks on their faces they were both waiting for someone else to come forward. Quintillan had lost his wife, of course, but he was part of the plot, not a victim of it: none of the foreign representatives would be impressed by a message from a psychic to the man who was organizing the séance. No, this had to be aimed at Amyus Crowe, and Sherlock felt a spark of anger fan into flame within his chest. This was a step beyond trickery and into abuse. Quintillan and Albano must have researched each of the international representatives before they arrived, looking in particular for any relatives or friends who had died. They had played on Holtzbrinck’s dead brother the night before, and now they were using Crowe’s dead wife. There would, if Crowe came forward and accepted the communication, be some meaningless message about her being happy, and urging him not to grieve for her. For some this might be a comfort, but Crowe would know that he was being tricked, and the anger he would feel might cause him to do something that, as a representative of his government, he might later regret.

  ‘Sir Shadrach,’ Sherlock whispered, looking across the table at the man in the bath chair. ‘Is it possible that the message is for you?’ He knew that it wasn’t, but he wanted to give Crowe the chance to calm himself down.

  Quintillan’s gaze flickered to Albano and then back to Sherlock. He obviously didn’t want to accept the message himself – he wanted Crowe to accept it – but theoretically it could have been for him.

  ‘Is the message for Sir Shadrach?’ Albano asked the air above the table, coming to Quintillan’s rescue.

  Bang! Bang!

  ‘Then there must be someone else here who has lost their beloved companion,’ Albano persisted. He glanced around the table, not letting his gaze fix on Crowe, as that would have given away the fact that he knew very well who was being targeted, but making sure that he at least glanced at Crowe on the way. It was a battle of wills between the two men; one that Sherlock knew he had to interrupt, otherwise there might be violence. Crowe was not going to come forward and admit that his wife was dead. He would not let her memory be defiled by trickery and deceit.

  ‘Is the message for von Webenau?’ Albano continued.

  Bang! Bang!

  Sherlock knew what was going to happen. Albano was going to go around the table. Given that he was making the knocking sound himself, he would be able to choose the man he wanted – Amyus Crowe – and Crowe would either have to accept that he was going to be the victim of their trickery or he was going to have to protest.

  Sherlock slipped the knife – the one he had taken from the dinner table – from his sleeve. The weight rested in the palm of his hand beneath the table. He turned it over so he was holding the blade, and the handle – the heaviest part – was pointing up.

  ‘Is the message for Mr Crowe?’ Albano asked, deliberately not looking at Crowe.

  Before Albano’s foot could hit the table leg, or whatever he was doing to make the noise, Sherlock hit the handle of the knife hard against the underside of the table, twice.

  Bang! Bang!

  The noise wasn’t quite the same as the one Albano had been making, but it was near enough. Most of the men around the table took it in their stride, but Ambrose Albano and Sir Shadrach Quintillan twitched. They knew that it wasn’t Albano making that noise. More than that, they knew their plan to get Crowe to accept a fake message from his dead wife was now finished. The problem was that they couldn’t say that this knocking was a fake without admitting that they had been doing the knocking up to now.

  Albano’s mouth twisted in anger – a momentary expression that only Sherlock, and probably Crowe, noticed. His gaze flickered around the table, trying to spot who it was that had made the unexpected noise. One by one he asked a succession of spirits if they had a message for the rest of the men – Herr Holtzbrinck, Shuvalov, von Webenau, Sherlock himself and even the absent Mycroft – but his heart obviously wasn’t in it and the repeated double-knocking was perfunctory. When he had exhausted all the possible candidates, he announced: ‘I fear that the spirits must have become confused by the turbulence of the psychic currents. The message they hold must be for another person, somewhere else. Never mind. We shall press on.’

  Sherlock glanced briefly across at Amyus Crowe. His friend and mentor’s face was white and strained, his lips tight with anger, but he nodded his gratitude towards Sherlock.
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br />   ‘I sense that no more messages will be forthcoming tonight,’ Albano continued testily, ‘but if we are fortunate then one of the spirits may feel able to manifest itself directly in front of us. Please, everyone, concentrate on making the spirits feel welcome here. Ask them, in your minds and your hearts, to appear for us. Suppress any disbelief in your hearts.’

  He bent forward and raised his hands to his face. This time, knowing what was to come, Sherlock realized that he was using the theatrical gesture to mask moving something from his hand to his mouth – almost certainly a tightly wadded pill of thin material from his hidden box, the one that he would then produce as ectoplasm – but he couldn’t spot the actual moment of transfer.

  Albano now waved his hands in the air. Sherlock looked closely at him, and saw that his right cheek was slightly swollen. Something was in his mouth that hadn’t been there before.

  ‘I can feel them!’ he cried, his voice slightly muffled by the object in his mouth. ‘They come!’

  His hands were making clutching motions at the air, and Sherlock realized that he was feeling for very fine hooked threads that must be hanging from the ceiling and which would be used to pull the material into the shape of a shroud, or a spirit. In the darkness of the room, they would be invisible. The night before, his gestures had looked reasonable, if exaggerated, but now that Sherlock knew what the man was doing he couldn’t see how he could have been fooled.

  Albano’s grasping hands must have found the hooks at the ends of the threads, because he pulled his hands back towards his mouth and coughed convulsively – once, twice – to expel the material and surreptitiously attach the threads to it. Jerking his head back, he slowly brought his hands away from his mouth again. Between them, a ghostly white shape began to expand.

  Gasps filled the darkness as the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and German representatives reacted to the appearance of the spiritual form.

  The hooks and threads pulled the material into a rough approximation of a shrouded human form. Inside the shroud, a face swam into existence. Last night it had been a young girl’s; tonight it was an old woman’s, lined and creased. Sherlock glanced around, trying to place where the light projector had to be, but he couldn’t see it. The lens must be shrouded somehow, so that only the person directly in front of it – Albano – would be able to see it, but the expanding material provided a perfect screen for the illusion.

  Sherlock could still feel the anger in his chest that had been there since Albano had tried to force Amyus Crowe to accept a fake message from his dead wife. He couldn’t sit there and let this farce go on any more. His brother would almost certainly have let it continue, but Sherlock felt cheapened by it.

  ‘Stop!’ he cried, and stood up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Before anyone could stop him, and before Albano could dispose of the fake ectoplasm, Sherlock leaned forward and snatched it from the air above the table. The light material was almost weightless in his hands, but he could feel it against his skin. The invisible threads snapped, one by one, and the material floated down and came to rest on the table.

  ‘Turn the gas lamps up,’ he said, but as the words were leaving his mouth the light in the room suddenly flared into brightness. Glancing over, Sherlock saw that Amyus Crowe was moving from gas lamp to gas lamp, turning them up to full strength.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ Quintillan shouted. His face was livid. ‘You are a guest in my home. This is an intolerable abuse of my hospitality!’

  ‘The intolerable thing here,’ Sherlock said loudly, ‘is the way you and this man –’ he indicated Ambrose Albano – ‘are using trickery to try to convince us that you can communicate with the dead, and you are doing it just so you can make money from governments who should know better!’ He gathered up the white material on the table and held it out. ‘This is not ectoplasm. It has not been produced by spirits, and it did not appear out of nowhere. It’s just a magical trick.’

  Holtzbrinck and von Webenau were staring at him, open-mouthed. Count Shuvalov was less emotional, but he was still paying rapt attention to Sherlock’s words. ‘But – the face?’ he asked.

  ‘A projection.’ Sherlock pointed to the far side of the room, where he knew the light projector had to be, based on the way the light had shone on the cloth. ‘You’ll find it up there, hidden behind the wall. There will be a hole for the light to shine through.’

  ‘But . . . where did the ectoplasm . . . the material . . . come from?’ von Webenau stammered.

  Sherlock said nothing, but instead wadded the material up, tighter and tighter, until it was a small knot the size of a walnut. ‘Easily hidden,’ he said. He ran his hand across the table until he found the black threads. Letting the material expand out again into a fluffy cloud, he laid the threads across it. They were stark: black against white. ‘Manipulated from outside the room to take a particular shape.’

  ‘The shape of a woman,’ Holtzbrinck said.

  ‘A shape which you believed was a woman.’ Sherlock shrugged. ‘Have you ever looked at a cloud in the sky and thought it looked like a dragon? The mind can play tricks.’

  ‘You accuse me of trickery?’ Albano protested in his high-pitched voice. ‘Ectoplasm, when touched by human hands, becomes manifest as an ordinary substance. Every psychic knows that! You have proved nothing!’ He stared defiantly around the table, his white false eye seeming to stare at everyone at once. ‘I will not listen to these accusations any more!’

  He turned to go, but found Amyus Crowe standing directly behind him.

  ‘Oh, you will stay,’ Crowe said genially. ‘The moment you used mah dear wife’s memory as a prop in your obscene game you lost any claim to bein’ treated with respect. Sit down.’

  Albano sat abruptly, white-faced.

  ‘An’ you,’ Crowe added, pointing at Quintillan, who was quietly ordering a foot-servant to wheel him away, ‘you stay where you are. We have things to say that we want you to hear.’ He turned back to Sherlock. ‘Go on, son. You’re doin’ fine.’

  ‘The whole thing is a series of tricks, one after the other,’ Sherlock said, ‘designed to convince you that Ambrose Albano can communicate with the dead, so that you would all bid whatever resources your countries had granted you.’

  ‘Tricks?’ Von Webenau seemed mesmerized. ‘But what about the writing on the slate? How was that done? I am a scientist, and I cannot see how it was accomplished.’

  ‘Elementary,’ Sherlock said. He walked around the table to where Albano was sitting and reached into the right side of his jacket, to where he knew the white thimble had to be hanging from its elastic. He had a bad moment when it wasn’t where he expected, but after a few seconds of moving his fingers up and down he felt a hard object. He pulled it out into the open. As the elastic tightened it jerked Albano’s jacket out of shape.

  ‘This thimble has chalk on the end. Albano used it to write on the slate. The elastic snapped it back out of sight when he had finished with it.’

  ‘But the messages disappeared,’ Holtzbrinck pointed out.

  ‘Wiped away by his white gloves. White chalk against white gloves – invisible.’

  Holtzbrinck and von Webenau exchanged glances. They seemed genuinely shocked. Sherlock had the impression that, for whatever reason, they had really wanted to believe in Albano’s powers.

  Count Shuvalov leaned forward. ‘You are very convincing about the writing on the slate and the ectoplasmic materialization. The information about Herr Holtzbrinck’s brother Fritz and –’he glanced apologetically at Amyus Crowe – ‘my American colleague’s wife could have been obtained by standard investigation beforehand. I work in intelligence – I know how these things are done.’ He paused, staring intently at Sherlock. ‘But the disappearance of Mr Albano from the carriage before it crashed – surely you must admit that such a thing would be impossible to fake. That was no trick. The man really did disappear.’

  ‘There was a disappearance,’ Sherlock said quietly, ‘b
ut it wasn’t by Mr Albano.’ He glanced at the four foreign dignitaries. ‘The carriage crash was faked to give Mr Albano an opportunity to make himself look even more powerful – to make it look as if he was so valuable to the spirits on the astral plane that they would transport him there and back if he was threatened. But there was no kidnap.’

  ‘We all saw four kidnappers,’ Holtzbrinck pointed out.

  ‘No, we saw three kidnappers – the driver and the two men who got out and grabbed Mr Albano. The fourth figure we saw was just a shape – a silhouette inside the carriage. It was easily accomplished by hanging up a coat with a black scarf bundled up to form a head.’

  ‘Four men ran away,’ von Webenau said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sherlock agreed. ‘And one of them was Mr Albano.’ He stared at the men, one after the other. Shuvalov was already ahead of him, as was Crowe, but he had to persuade von Webenau and Holtzbrinck. ‘When Albano was thrown inside the carriage, he quickly put on the coat that was hanging up there, and wound the scarf around his face. When the coach crashed, which it was supposed to do, he ran away with the other three men.’ He turned to Quintillan. ‘Were they servants, or did you hire them from the village?’

  Quintillan just stared at him darkly.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ Sherlock continued. I was just interested to know.’ He turned to Amyus Crowe. ‘Have I left anything out? I think I’ve covered everything of importance.’

  ‘The attack on your brother?’ Crowe prompted.

  ‘Ah yes.’ He looked from von Webenau to Holtzbrinck and then to Shuvalov. ‘That was nothing to do with the séance, or the attempt to get money from your governments. That was an attempt to reduce the playing field. I presume someone thought that the British Government, being the closest and perhaps the one with the most resources, was most likely to win the auction for Mr Albano’s services, so they decided to take my brother out of the running.’