Sherlock Holmes: The London Terrors by William Meikle

by William Meikle

  “No, sir,” our self-appointed guide said. “Them’s down the way a piece. We don’t mix with the likes of them.”

  That was when I saw that there might be something to Holmes’ hunch after all. If it wasn’t outright terror I saw in the man’s eyes at the mention of the night shift, it was something dashed close to it.

  “Well, then, I shall need to see that area too,” Holmes said calmly. “We can’t have a job half-done, now, can we?”

  Our guide looked around, as if beseeching one of the other workers to volunteer their services, but they had all turned away, rather too sharply for it to be coincidence, and gone back to their work, leaving the foreman to deal with us.

  The man pointed down the tunnel. “It’s down that way. About fifty yards down, then left into the newest cut—the night shift always does the newest cuts—they use them for breaking new ground, see, and they have them working like Trojans from nine till nine with scarcely a break. Hard work is the night shift—too hard for the likes of me. I need to sleep in the dark, not when the sun’s high in the sky. It ain’t natural.”

  The man was babbling and still showing no sign of moving to join us, until Holmes insisted.

  “Show us, please,” Holmes said. “Or I could arrange with your employer for a night stint for you, if you would prefer?”

  The threat worked immediately, as if the night shift was the worst possible thing the man could imagine. I wondered just how bad it could be for it to have put the man in such a funk.

  He led us down the tunnel slowly and haltingly, with frequent glances back, as if seeking confirmation that his own workplace was still there. A few minutes later he led us off the main tunnel to a freshly worked area.

  A quick tour of the site did not yield much in the way of information. The area was remarkably neat and tidy, having been cleared of rubble to expose a smooth stone rock face that showed signs of having been worked, with the pick marks on the rocks showing clear as silver streaks and scars. There was no trace of any tools in the immediate area.

  I pointed this fact out to our guide.

  “They brings them with them—the tools, I mean,” the man said. He stood off to one side near the entrance through which we had reached the work-face, and he showed no sign of approaching any closer.

  Holmes took some time inspecting the area again before turning to the man. “George Pemberton—do you know the name?”

  “No, sir,” the man said.

  “I believe he is one of the men working this area,” Holmes said, still probing.

  The man looked almost too terrified to answer. “We ain’t met any of the … the night shift.”

  He had been about to say something else, but no amount of cajoling on Holmes’ part would get anything more out of him. When Holmes decided he had seen enough, our guide was only too happy to show us a quicker way out of the workings, and we emerged, blinking, into the afternoon sun some ten minutes later.

  I was none the wiser for our visit down below, but Holmes had gone quiet, a sure sign that he had once again spotted something I had missed. We caught a carriage on Vauxhall Bridge Road and Holmes remained quiet all the way back to Baker Street.

  Chapter Three

  EF

  Holmes was lost in his reverie for the remainder of that day, either smoking by the fireplace in his armchair or standing by the window looking out over the city. Meanwhile I busied myself with reading The Thunderer from cover to cover, smoking too much tobacco and drinking too much of Mrs. Hudson’s strong, sweet tea. It was only after she cleared away the supper dishes that Holmes finally spoke.

  “The night shift needs looking at more closely, Watson. But not tonight—news of our visit will have already spread, and they will be on the lookout for strangers. No—we must be circumspect. But it is with the night shift that we will find our answers, I am sure of it.”

  “What did you see?” I asked. “There was obviously something that caught your attention in that working.”

  “It is what I didn’t see that worries me,” Holmes replied. “The day shift left behind the normal debris and detritus of a team of working men—spilled tea, discarded cups, and several small piles of cigarette ends, matches and ash. There was none of that material at the night-shift site—which leads me to think that it has been cleaned thoroughly, in order to hide something important.”

  “Hide what?” I asked.

  Holmes smiled. “If I knew that, we might not have to answer Lestrade’s summons.”

  I had heard the carriage pull up outside, but had paid it little heed while listening to Holmes. My friend, on the other hand, paid heed to everything, and was shown to be right when Mrs. Hudson came up minutes later with a telegram.

  “How in blazes do you know it’s from Lestrade?” I asked.

  “By paying attention,” Holmes replied. “You should try it sometime, Watson. One of the Yard’s carriages has a squeaky front axle—it is quite distinctive. I have reminded Lestrade about it several times, for if I have noted it, you can be sure that the criminal element will also have been paying attention. Such a squeak will make it doubly hard for the Yard to catch anyone at all. Now, shall I read this note, or do you have any more questions for me?”

  I waved for him to continue.

  He read the telegram quickly, then crumpled up the note and threw it in the grate.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, addressing his back as he made for the door.

  “The Yard,” he shouted as he went down the stairs two at a time. “They have someone for us to look at.”

  By the time I reached the street outside Holmes had already hailed a cab. Once we were inside, he lit up a cheroot before deigning to explain matters to me—not that his explanation made me any the wiser.

  “Lestrade has what he has called ‘a corpse that ain’t exactly a corpse’ for us to look at, Watson,” Holmes said through a fug of smoke.

  “And what in blazes does he mean by that?”

  “You now know exactly as much, and as little, as I do on the matter, Watson. We do not yet have enough facts to form a theory,” Holmes said. “Indeed, we only have one fact, but it may prove pertinent. The body was found in Vauxhall.”

  3

  As we made our way through the evening streets I was starting to regret not taking a nap when the opportunity had presented itself earlier in the day. When Holmes was on the scent of a case, he lost all thought of rest; indeed I have often had to remind him of the need for sleep and sustenance if his body was to keep up with that prodigious mind.

  Tonight was no exception. Holmes was full of nervous energy, eager for the chase, and I had a feeling it might be quite some time before I came within touching distance of a bed. I tried to catch forty winks in the carriage, but the streets of the city are not conducive to smooth journeys and I will admit that my mood was darkening even before we saw the body.

  3

  I have had occasion to visit the morgue in Scotland Yard numerous times. It never becomes any more pleasant. Despite the heat that had lingered in the night air, the corridors of the Yard’s headquarters were as drafty and forbidding as ever. A deep cold gripped me on entry to the morgue itself, situated as it was deep in the bowels of the building and far from any of the warmth prevalent outside. On another night I might have taken the drop in temperature as a welcome respite from the sultry city. But I was in a pessimistic mood already, and the damp chill that ate deep into my very bones was worse than any night watch I had ever endured in the foothills of Afghanistan. We had hardly been in the room thirty seconds, and I could already feel my fingers going numb.

  The cold never seemed to bother Holmes. He strode forward, ignoring Lestrade and the three officers next to him, and started a close study of a body that lay on the slab in the center of the room.

  I hung back, giving Holmes time, and sticking my hands in my pockets in the hope of getting some respite from the cold. I heard a young constable gasp in astonishment as Holmes bent to sniff at the dead man�
�s hair, like a dog investigating something new in its domain. There was another gasp when Holmes lifted the corpse’s right hand, sniffed at the fingers, then, slowly and quite deliberately, licked the tip of the thumb.

  I heard Lestrade hush his junior to silence, but Holmes himself was oblivious to any extraneous diversions. He spent five minutes giving his total concentration to the body before he beckoned me over to join him.

  “What do you make of this, Watson?” he said. “I do believe I have never seen its like before.”

  I joined Holmes beside the slab and looked down. I had assumed, being in the morgue, that the chap on the slab was dead. Indeed, at first glance he certainly appeared to be so. His skin had the same pallor seen on the recently deceased, and dark bruises of blood had started to pool around the area of his kidneys. But closer inspection only served to confuse me. Loath as I was to do so, I removed my hands from my pockets and bent to examine the body more closely. When I opened his left eyelid, the pupil reacted to the light and I stepped away, quite taken aback.

  When I had recovered my composure I bent forward again for a closer look. His eyes tracked my movement, as if watching me.

  “Dash it, Holmes. This man needs to be in a hospital. He is still alive.”

  “Is he?” Holmes said softly. “Take his pulse, Watson.”

  I did as I was bid, and dropped the wrist seconds later. “He has none. And he is as cold as ice.”

  “He is not breathing either,” Holmes said. “At least not enough for it to be perceptible.”

  I put a hand on the man’s chest. There was no rise or fall, and no sense that there was a heart beating inside the ribs. But his gaze followed my every move, and his lips trembled, as if in an attempt at speech.

  “Some new opiate, perhaps?” I said.

  Holmes was staring at the body as if trying to penetrate its secrets by sheer force of will.

  “It is nothing with which I am familiar,” Holmes replied. “And if there was a new den in the city, I would surely have heard of it by now. No, Watson, I fear this is something else—something with the potential to be quite monstrous.”

  Lestrade was getting increasingly agitated on the other side of the room. “Well then, is he alive or ain’t he?”

  “That has yet to be determined,” Holmes said, which only served to rile Lestrade further.

  “Watson’s a bleedin’ doctor, ain’t he? What in the name of all that’s holy is there to determine?”

  I realized I had no reply at the time that would satisfy Lestrade in any way, so I kept my mouth shut. I tested for a pulse again, with the same result as before. And as before, the pale blue eyes watched me. His lips quivered, still straining to speak, but no words came. I wondered if there were any conscious thought behind those eyes, and rather hoped, for the sake of the man himself, that there was none.

  I dropped the man’s hand. It fell to the slab with a sickening thud—there was no attempt on his part to arrest the fall.

  “Catalepsy of some kind, I should imagine,” Holmes muttered. “But is it a sickness or has it been induced? That is the question.”

  “I cannot see how such a state might be induced,” I replied, keeping my voice low so that only Holmes might hear. “This is beyond my ken.”

  “But it is something tangible we can focus on, Watson: something more real than a woman’s stories and frightened men in dark places. We have somewhere to start.”

  Lestrade was fit to burst. “Look, if you two can’t tell me any more than my own man is able to, then what’s the point of you being here?”

  “Can you have someone draw some blood?” Holmes replied calmly. “This needs further investigation.”

  “And what do we do with the body in the meantime?” Lestrade asked, but Holmes had already turned his back, and I was at quite a loss as to how to proceed.

  Matters were taken out of my hands when the corpse sat up abruptly and swung his legs off the slab.

  3

  The movement had been so sudden that it quite took me by surprise. When I recovered, I reached out for the man, hoping to steer him back to a resting position. Holmes stayed my hand.

  “Leave him be, Watson,” he said quietly. “It might be to our advantage to see what happens next.”

  The man stepped down and stood, somewhat unsteadily. His eyes stared straight ahead, and his lips continued to quiver, as if he was mumbling to himself. He ignored Holmes and me completely as he headed for the door. Now that he was upright, the blood bruises on his back could clearly be seen. I’d seen them before—but always on corpses at least a day dead, and never on a man standing and walking away from me. He had lost some of his unsteadiness already and was striding with intent toward the doorway.

  Having seen a man I could have sworn was long past being capable of movement rise up and walk, I was too dumfounded to do as much as twitch. Holmes, however, managed to keep his wits about him quite admirably, given the circumstances.

  “Let him go,” he shouted, just as the man reached the doorway.

  In the same instant, Lestrade also called out. “Stop him!”

  The policeman did their duty, and obeyed their senior officer. Or at least, they attempted to. The naked man seemed to have the brute strength of an ox, and he also seemed to be completely impervious to pain. The first officer to reach him was knocked aside with a blow that took no apparent effort but sent the young policeman sprawling across the morgue floor to lie, groaning, against the far wall.

  The other two, incensed by the attack on their fellow officer, leapt forward, attempting to bring the man down. Several stout truncheon blows to the head had little effect, and the young constables were hard pressed to prevent the man from leaving. He was almost out of the door now, dragging the two officers with him as if they were of no more hindrance to him than fleas on a dog.

  “Stop him,” Lestrade shouted again. He helped the fallen officer to his feet and they joined the other two in attempting to slow the naked man’s progress. The uniformed police kept hanging on to the naked figure as he swung them round in a grotesque parody of some drunken highland reel. In any other circumstances it might have been almost comical, but matters took a darker turn when the man threw out an arm, as stiff as an iron rod. It caught an officer full on the face and sent him tumbling aside, his nose mashed across his features, blood spurting between his fingers as he tried to stem the flow.

  I immediately bent to the fallen man’s side to see what I could do to help.

  “That’s enough of this nonsense,” Lestrade shouted. He managed to trip the naked man up from the back with a two-footed challenge that would have gotten him sent from the field in a soccer match, and finally, between them, they wrestled the body to the ground. The man struggled mightily for several seconds, then without warning went as limp as a fish.

  The injured policeman’s nose was badly broken, and Lestrade sent him off at a run to the infirmary before we joined Holmes in once again looking down at the naked body. When I bent to examine the man he seemed once more to be as near death as makes no difference. His lips trembled again, and his gaze continued to follow my movement, but there was no sign that he had so recently been up and about breaking bones and causing mayhem.

  Lestrade had the two remaining officers lug the body back onto the slab, a task they finally managed after no little huffing and puffing on their part. Lestrade stood over the body, waiting to see if it would make another move.

  “Find a sheet to cover him up,” he said. “And fetch some rope. We need to strap this bugger down. Can’t have a half-dead man walking the corridors of the Yard, can we? The brass would have kittens.”

  Holmes had watched the proceedings with a sardonic grimace on his face.

  “Now do you think we can draw some blood?” he said, with a touch more sarcasm than I thought necessary.

  3

  I joined Holmes in the corridor for a smoke while we waited for the samples to be taken. Lestrade, for want of a better option, arranged for
armed officers to guard the body, with instructions to shoot first and ask questions later should he try to escape his bonds. That did not seem likely, for they had wrapped an inordinate length of rope around both arms and legs, and they would have to bodily carry him to the cells once the samples were taken. He was not going anywhere under his own steam at any time soon.

  Holmes had withdrawn into his shell again, staring into whatever place he went to when pondering a problem, but he came out of it long enough to answer the question that bothered me.

  “Why did you want to let him go?”

  He sucked in a deep breath of smoke before replying. “I believe that if we had allowed it, he might have led us to, if not a solution, at least the start of some answers,” he said. He went no further, for Lestrade came out of the morgue and handed me a small leather wallet.

  “Hair, skin and blood, Doctor Watson. The same is going to our team here. But I’d be grateful for anything you can give me.” He looked at Holmes. “And the same applies to you, Holmes. Have you anything for me to go on?”

  Holmes nodded. “I believe the body’s condition is related to a case I am currently investigating. You should begin a thorough search of the new tunneling works at Vauxhall,” he said. “There may be more—perhaps many more—bodies yet to be found in this condition. Although if I’m right, it might be more fruitful to wait until it is time for the night shift.”

  Lestrade thanked Holmes, and muttered, almost to himself, “I’ll be buggered if I know what I’m looking for. Or what I’d charge anyone with if I did find them.”

  Chapter Four

  EF

  It was almost midnight by the time we left the Yard. The warmth of the day had scarcely dissipated, and we left the cool of the interior corridors to walk out onto the street and into a wall of clammy heat that raised a sweat within seconds.

  “We need a good thunderstorm to clear the air,” I said.

  “Oh, there is most definitely a storm coming, Watson,” Holmes said. “And I am afraid of what it might bring with it.”