Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Shakespeare

by J. R. Rain

  “A remarkable man then,” I stated, quite impressed.

  “Indeed, Watson, indeed.”

  “But why are we going to see the Marquis of Tach Saggart?”

  “Why Watson, we are not.”

  I blinked at that and must confess I was baffled by Holmes. This would not be the first, nor the last.

  “Then who are we calling on, Holmes?”

  “We are calling on Mr. John Miller of course.”

  Chapter Four:

  A Robbery

  When Holmes dropped the knocker on the oaken door of Clonmore House, it took several moments before anyone showed up to open it.

  I took my time observing the surroundings, as Holmes had shown me how to do many times. The pillars of the door frame were made of concrete painted white to resemble marble, the doorsteps were the same. I drew the conclusion the house had been built in a hurry and on a budget, though it certainly was not without significant value. The garden was well cared for and I noticed the grass had only recently been cut. I assumed Mr. John Miller had been hired as the new gardener by the Marquis and we were seeking permission to find him on the grounds.

  Yet, the moment the butler allowed us entrance into Clonmore House, Holmes demanded to see the master’s son, although my good friend did not wait for the butler to show us to his young master; instead, he brushed past the man and went straight up the stairs.

  The winding stairs that led us to the second floor of the impressive domicile were made from oak which seemed to have matured in the ten years since it had been installed. In alcoves along the steps were placed busts, which I took to be images of the ancestors of the family. On the third floor of the house lay a plush carpet and the walls were lined with portraits and paintings. They were perfectly aligned and not one was out of place. The walls were spotless and the windows overlooking the lawn had been cleaned that very morning. I could still smell a whiff of rubbing alcohol.

  At the end of the hallway, Holmes halted. He knocked on the door. A strong voice bade him enter. I went in behind him and saw a young man reclined on a chaise lounge. He had a book in his hands and was looking up at us.

  “Good day, Mr. Fitzwilliam,” Holmes greeted him. “I am Sherlock Holmes; this is my associate, Doctor Watson.”

  The man rose and offered us each his hand to shake in turn.

  “Gerald Fitzwilliam,” he introduced himself. “Your fame precedes you, Mr. Holmes.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fitzwilliam.” Holmes gestured to a sofa by the large bay window. “May we?”

  Not waiting for a positive answer, Holmes plunked himself down in the plush velvet covering of the sofa. I sat down next to him.

  “To what do I owe the honor of your visit, Mr. Holmes?” Fitzwilliam began. “I sincerely doubt such a famous sleuth would be calling on me without good cause.”

  “We are looking for a Mr. John Miller, former gardener at Galham House.” Holmes smiled then.

  I knew by the delicate shade of crimson in the face of young master Fitzwilliam that we had come to the right place.

  Holmes continued, “Your father holds similar beliefs as Lord Harcourt, I imagine.”

  Young Fitzwilliam nodded. “He does not exactly approve of marrying within the peerage either. He has an American heiress lined up for me to wed.”

  “Did you know Miss Harcourt before taking up the job at Galham House?”

  Fitzwilliam shook his head. “I did not. I had only seen her from afar, never met her or spoke to her.”

  “How is that possible? You live so near to each other, there must have been ample opportunities to meet,” I demanded of him, interrupting the conversation between Holmes and him.

  “I spent my childhood in America and Ireland and then most of my time here I have been at Eton and at Cambridge.”

  “How does a Cambridge man end up as a gardener at Galham House?” I blurted out, beside myself with curiosity.

  Fitzwilliam gave a wry smile. “Business is rather dull work. I suppose I am good at it, a talent I must have been born with, but I do not enjoy business. Simple tasks please me much more. Obviously, I could never allow a lowly position like that under my own name, so I took an alias.”

  He got up and poured himself a double measure of whiskey at the well-stocked bar located in a corner of his room. He poured the contents of his glass straight down his throat and returned to his seat. “As you are already aware of my alias, Mr. Holmes, I then I assume you are making these inquiries in regard to the manuscript Miss Harcourt and I discovered?”

  Holmes nodded. “You knew instantly it was written by William Shakespeare.”

  “I did.” Fitzwilliam smiled. “I studied him extensively at Cambridge. I even managed to lay eyes on some original handwritten documents. I recognized the handwriting immediately.”

  Holmes said nothing for a while. He did not have the frenzied look he tended to have when working out a problem. I had to remind myself of his claim of having solved the mystery already.

  Eventually, Holmes got up.

  “I do implore you to speak to your neighbor’s daughter and reveal your true identity. She is quite worried about young Mr. Miller. And it is obvious that you care deeply about her.”

  “I assume I exhibited all the characters of a man in love?”

  “You did,” said Holmes. “And then some.”

  Mr. Fitzwilliam smiled meekly and rose to shake our hands again. “I shall, Mr. Holmes.”

  We made our way back to the station to catch the train back to London, but Holmes decided we could catch a later train and guided me into the Penstone Arms Inn across from Penstone Heath Station.

  A helpful hostess seated us in a corner of the pub for a rather well-prepared lunch of roast beef and some very good ale. We entered into a conversation about the various affairs that had kept us both busy over the past month, and all the reasons we had not been able to see more of each other. It seemed Holmes had spent a lot of time solving quite a few uninteresting cases. It was not often he wasted time on those, but it seemed there had been a surprising lack of challenging crimes and mysteries in the last few months, causing him to take up such cases for financial reasons.

  ***

  It was just as we were finishing up our tankards of ale that a boy stormed into the pub. He raced to the bar and asked something of the barkeeper who in turn pointed in our direction and the boy came up to our table.

  “Mr. Holmes?” he asked timidly.

  Holmes nodded as a confirmation.

  “I have a telegram for you, sir.”

  “Thank you, my boy.”

  Holmes fished in his pocket for some sort of monetary reward for the messenger. He ended up handing the boy a sixpence piece, which was rather gladly received. It was a significant reward for a few minutes’ work. The boy looking completely dumbfounded was of no surprise.

  Holmes read the telegram and his face betrayed a look of shock. He shot up from his chair, gave me the telegram to read and went at once to the bar to pay for our luncheon.

  The telegram was from Holmes’s housekeeper. It read:

  “As I was out not half an hour ago, someone entered the premises. There is nothing missing, bar the manuscript you have been researching.”

  I folded the telegram up, put it into my jacket pocket and rushed after my friend.

  Chapter Five:

  A Candle in the Window

  We arrived back at Baker Street with Holmes in a rare, frantic mood.

  He raced up the stairs and into his study. He looked over the place carefully, knowing his housekeeper would have taken care not to disturb anything more than was necessary to establish what was missing. Despite his frantic mood, he looked like a bloodhound with his nose down, tracing the scent of his quarry. He scoured the place for any clue of who might have been there to relieve him of the precious manuscript.

  “This was no ordinary heist I fear, Watson,” he remarked in the end. “Someone knew exactly what he was looking for and possibly even where it w
as to be found. He was in and out without leaving a single trace.”

  “Not a trace?” I asked. “It’s quite impossible to have found no trace at all.”

  “Indeed.” Holmes grimaced and plopped down into his chair. “There is no sign of the doors being forced, or the window. There are no footprints, nothing to suggest anyone’s presence in this room at all.”

  “Then how did he do it?”

  Holmes frowned and grumbled, “That, my dear Watson, is a mystery I would dearly like to solve at present.”

  ***

  After having completed my rounds, I visited Holmes again the next morning only to find him balancing on the roof of the stables located behind his Baker Street residence.

  “What, by Jove, are you doing up there, Holmes?” I exclaimed when I first spotted him there through the open window.

  “Eureka!” he exclaimed in turn, before jumping for the window frame. He pulled himself up with a great effort and came into the house again. “Well, I have discovered the point of entry, Watson.”

  “They came through this window via the stable roof?” asked I. The window was in an unlikely spot. Indeed, it took all of Holmes’s physical prowess to make the leap from the roof and pull himself into the house.

  “Several roof tiles were out of place and there were markings on the window ledge. This window is often unlocked. The key word is ‘often.’”

  I nodded. “Because sometimes it is locked, too.”

  “Of course, Watson. After all, who better than we to know that crime is alive and well in London? Regardless, sometimes we are lazy, and I myself would never have guessed a thief to be so bold as to utilize this high window.”

  “Did he get lucky?” asked I. “And come at the right time, when the window happened to be unlocked?”

  Holmes cocked his head. There was sweat on his brow. I suspected he had been searching for clues all morning and afternoon. “Perhaps, perhaps not. A good thief would have ascertained when the window was left open, though it would have taken a long time of careful study to conclude which window would be left open, and at what time.”

  I blinked. “How long?”

  Holmes shrugged as he dusted himself off. “To thoroughly case this residence, to understand which windows might be left unlocked, and at what time, would require at least one week of careful study.” Holmes looked down at his big, now dirty hands with a displeased frown. He removed a clean handkerchief and begun rubbing his palms meticulously.

  I gaped. “But that would be since the moment you were given the manuscript.”

  “Indeed, my dear Watson.”

  “The thief has been lying in wait this entire time?”

  “It would appear so.” Holmes returned to the study and replaced the handkerchief with the meerschaum pipe, in which he began stuffing with tobacco. He lit it and sat down in his chair. “Of course, that would have required a veritable amount of determination to have spent a week looking over every part of this building to determine a way to enter unseen, to know where he could locate this document and how best to go about getting it without any circumvention,” he mused before taking a long pull on his pipe and blowing a big cloud of smoke toward the ceiling.

  I took my usual seat and looked at him carefully. “Was there more than one person involved?”

  “There was,” Holmes said. “A lookout surely. And I shall determine who played me this prank. Of all the criminal acts, the one I can least abide is the burglarizing of my own home.”

  I could not help but grin at Holmes’s slightly conceited statement. “If there is anything I can do to help clarify this case, I will keep myself at your disposal.”

  “That is very kind of you, my dear friend, but I fear we might not see each other for a short while.”

  “Why would that be, Holmes?”

  “As I shall have to travel in different circles and different places to get to the bottom of this.”

  I spent the rest of the day in Holmes’s company, until such time as I knew the train from Newcastle would arrive. Then I sped to Paddington station to pick up my wife, leaving Holmes with only his cryptic description of what he would be undertaking.

  With the ministering angel of domestic bliss back in residence, I returned to my normal schedule without ado. I went to look in on Holmes at Baker Street several times over the next few weeks, but I was told each time Holmes had not returned. It would be a month until I saw my friend again.

  Chapter Six:

  The Valet

  “Hello, would you mind waiting a moment?” Holmes shouted at the tanned man who, in other circumstances, would not have been so conspicuous.

  There were so many light-skinned servants in the city of London at the time that they practically went unnoticed for the most part. The trend of keeping on the exotic servants from the colonies had taken hold in the city as returning diplomats from India, the West Indies and merchants from the Americas brought their endeared house staff back to England with them.

  He’d always thought it a product of their lingering taste for the exotic but would later realize the truth of the matter was that English servants of distinction had a tendency of being even more snobbish than the aristocrats they were used to serving. It struck him as being tremendously ironic.

  Mr. Paul Kijumbe was just such one exotic servant brought to England by none other than Countess Mary Galham’s father after his safaris in Eastern Africa. He was a member of the coastal Swahili tribe from the village of Nyali near Mombasa. The ancestral intermarriages between the Swahili people and the Arabs who frequented Africa’s eastern coast had resulted in a population who bore striking resemblances to the quadroons and octoroons of the Southern regions of the American state of Louisiana.

  As Kijumbe stood at the bar among his fellow valets and a few footmen from other distinguished London households, Holmes couldn’t help but overhear their conversation. Paul was quite boisterously describing some of the strange errands he ran for his current employer.

  “As utterly bonkers as some of this stuff is, it sure does beat working for that stuffed shirt, Lord Sutton.”

  A-ha! Holmes thought. I do believe I have you now!

  He sat patiently in a corner of the public house sipping a single pint of Irish stout until I noticed the group begin to break up. They were mumbling about getting back below stairs ahead of the ringing of the evening gong. Quickly enough, Paul made his way to the door and out to the street. Holmes was close behind him.

  “Hello, would you mind waiting a moment?” he called.

  The man continued walking down the street, blatantly ignoring Holmes’s call for him to wait.

  “Wait there! I have something I’d like to discuss with you! It’s related to a business venture and it would be worth your time, I swear!” he shouted again. Holmes believed the man’s name was Kijumbe and that he had a very good idea what happened to the Shakespeare manuscript which had been stolen from his flat.

  The man turned into an alley which connected the street he was on to the next street over. The avenue was more crowded, and would allow the man to lose Holmes much faster. Holmes picked up his pace barreling into the entrance of the alley. In quick secession, several things happen all at once. Holmes had been about to take his next step when he suddenly found himself flat on his back; all the air had been struck from his lungs.

  I should have expected that, Holmes thought.

  Before he could have another cognizant thought, the man he had been pursuing was straddling his chest, raining fists into Holmes’s ribs and face. Holmes planted his feet and thrust his hips upward; trying to buck the man off, but his assailant was an experienced fighter. He did not have his weight directly on Holmes’s chest. Instead, he was balanced on the balls of his feet to keep his weight forward and himself more stable. The position allowed him to react quickly when Holmes tried to throw him off, and that meant that Holmes was at a distinct disadvantage. The bucking motion, Homes had made, was intended to bring him to his feet; atop his as
sailant. However, since his assailant was able to rise and avoid all but a glancing blow from Holmes’s legs, the next punch he threw did double the damage. His fist slammed into Holmes’s face and the downward momentum of Holmes’s failed bucking move slammed his head into the cobblestones.

  His vision blurred and he heard the man laughing. Holmes was not sure how, but he still maintained consciousness. He managed to land a kick to the inside of the assailant’s left knee, and the man buckled; his laughter became a grunt of pain. The man launched a haymaker at Holmes’s head, but Holmes managed to slide slightly out of the way. The fist connected with the cobblestones in a meaty crunch. Holmes knew that his assailant was more infuriated than ever.

  This is not the time for honorable tactics, thought the detective.

  And thus, he brought his knee up into the man’s groin. The man’s grunt of pain turned into a high-pitched squeal. Holmes used the momentary distraction to slide out from underneath the man and shift in behind him, from where he delivered a punch to the back of the man’s head.

  Holmes was now certain the man was Kijumbe; based on descriptions he had gathered. The man he believed was Kijumbe turned and flailed with a blind punch that Holmes deftly knocked aside. The problem with a blind punch, however, is that they are normally followed by a punch that is much more precise. This was no exception, and Holmes took Paul’s fist directly to the stomach. For the second time that day, Holmes had had the wind knocked out of him.