Sherlock Holmes--The Devil's Dust

by James Lovegrove

  “The last I heard, you had made yourself fairly wealthy from a diamond-mining venture, somewhere down in southern Africa.”

  “‘Diamond-mining venture’. That is one way of putting it.”

  “I know, also, that you are popularly known as ‘Hunter Quatermain’, and sometimes called ‘Macumazahn’ by the African natives, a kind of honorific.”

  “It is my Zulu name and means ‘the man who gets up in the middle of the night’. It refers to a certain watchfulness on my part.”

  “You are sure it does not mean ‘the man who gets up to no good in the middle of the night’?” I said. “To wit, climbing in through the first-floor window of a private residence and hiding behind a bed.”

  “Please forgive Watson and his pawky vein of humour, Mr Quatermain,” said Holmes. “He makes a valid point all the same. Why resort to such an unusual method of entry when ringing the doorbell would have been more polite and more straightforward and, for that matter, less liable to lead to an altercation?”

  “Ah,” said Quatermain. “You must appreciate, Mr Holmes, that I am an unorthodox man. Uncivilised, some might say. What I do, I do in my own way.”

  “That excuses, to some extent, but does not explain. If you wanted a consultation with me, the conventional approach seldom fails.” Holmes’s eyes narrowed. “Of course, it may be that a consultation is not what you were after.”

  “Yes, you fancy yourself a private detective, don’t you? I recall my good friend Sir Henry Curtis mentioning that some fellow by your name has set himself up in that sort of practice and is making headway. That’d account for you nosing about in Notting Hill and all this hypothecation you’ve been doing since. But no, I don’t need any consultation.”

  “Indeed,” said Holmes, nodding, “you did not come here to talk to me, but rather to hear me talking. How long were you in my bedroom, ear pressed to the door, listening to me ‘hypothecate’? Longer, I’ll wager, than it took for me to notice how the fire was flaring in a manner that spoke of the presence of an unaccustomed draught.”

  “I heard not a lot, but enough,” said Quatermain. “Enough to know that you have guessed a great deal about this whole affair but are nowhere near close to comprehending the full picture.”

  “Guessed!” Holmes barked. “I have never guessed in my life, good sir. Schoolboys guess when the Classics master asks them to parse a line of Ovid and they cannot fathom the answer. I deduce.”

  “Guess, deduce – what’s the difference? However you have come by the conclusions you have reached, they remain incomplete, and you are better off that way.”

  “How so?”

  The aged hunter leaned forward in his chair and gestured at Holmes with the stem of his pipe. “These are murky waters you find yourself in, young man. I did not track your spoor halfway across London and shin up a drainpipe in order to deliver a warning, but now that I am here and we are face to face, I feel it would be remiss of me not to do so.”

  “I am all ears.”

  “Drop your investigation,” Quatermain intoned, fixing Holmes with a grave stare. “Walk away and do not look back. You have no idea the peril in which you are putting yourself and your colleague. I do. I know only too well.”

  The old man paused there, his face darkening as though a cloud were passing over it. Sombreness deepened every line in that craggy visage, and I was minded to ask whether he had some personal stake in the affair.

  Before I could speak, however, Quatermain resumed his thread. “Murky waters, like I said, and there are sharks below, circling. I gave the same advice to that journalist fellow, and I trust you will heed it as he appears to have.”

  “Journalist?” said Holmes. “You mean the man from The Times. What is he called? Ellerthwaite.”

  “I mean no such person. You are quite wrong.”

  “Forgive me. I must have been mistaken. Not Ellerthwaite.”

  “See? You are not half as smart as you think you are, Mr Holmes. But that is fine, as long as you are sufficiently smart to take on board what I have been telling you. I would not want your death on my conscience, least of all when you would seem to have much to give the world. It would be a shame for such a promising career to be nipped in the bud.”

  “I consider myself duly cautioned.”

  “Yet you sound as though you have no intention of altering your course.”

  “I sometimes make a facetious impression,” said Holmes.

  Quatermain waited for him to expound further, but nothing more was forthcoming. If he was anticipating a guarantee from Holmes to desist from pursuing the case, he was in for a disappointment.

  “Well,” he said gruffly, “nobody can say I did not try.” He rose, tapped out his pipe in the fireplace, and made a half-hearted attempt at straightening out the creases in his trousers. “If you aren’t going to do as I ask, then at the very least stay out of my way. I tend to ride roughshod over obstacles, be they human or otherwise. Got that? Good. I shall show myself out.”

  “Try the stairs,” Holmes said. “They tend to be so much less precarious than a drainpipe.”

  Harrumphing, Quatermain exited the room. Moments later, the front door clunked shut and we heard footfalls in the street below, northward bound.

  Holmes leapt to his feet. “Quick, Watson! There is not a second to lose.”

  He darted to his bedroom and flung open the window, which he had closed after the fight with Quatermain. He swung a leg over the sill and reached for the same drainpipe by which Quatermain had gained ingress.

  “Holmes,” I demanded, “what in heaven’s name are you up to?”

  “Is it not obvious? We are giving chase. Quatermain will know if we follow him out the front door. The man has the acute senses of a tiger. But if we can catch up with him by an indirect route and see where he goes, we stand a chance of gleaning not only more about him but more about the case. Now hurry. After me.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  HUNTING HUNTER QUATERMAIN

  Holmes scurried agilely down the drainpipe. My own descent was somewhat sedate and more circumspect, for I saw how the drainpipe wobbled beneath my friend’s weight and how the bolts affixing it to the brickwork were not the most secure, and I knew myself to be at least a stone heavier than he. Yet I made it to the ground unscathed, and the drainpipe remained where it was, so no damage was done either way.

  Then we were off along the backs of the houses on our side of Baker Street, moving in the same direction – north – in which Quatermain had travelled when leaving. We vaulted over walls from yard to yard, until at last we came to a narrow passage affording access to the street itself. Halting at its end, Holmes poked his head round the corner and peered into the fog. Putting a finger to lips, he beckoned me to follow.

  We stole along the pavement, keeping to the patches of darkness between the infrequent haloes of gaslight. Distantly ahead I could discern the silhouette of a man whom I took, from the limp evident in his gait, to be Quatermain. The vagaries of the fog lent him an evanescent, phantom-like aspect, for all that he was walking slowly and with an apparent lack of concern. The streets, otherwise, were deserted. On a night such as this, at so late an hour, all sane, sensible Londoners kept themselves indoors; but apparently those adjectives did not apply to Holmes and me.

  Quatermain traced a meandering course through Marylebone, still tending northward, until soon we were at Regent’s Park.

  “Dash it all,” Holmes whispered. “Let us pray that he does not enter the park.”

  For a time it seemed as though my companion’s wish was granted, for Quatermain stuck to the road which demarcated the park’s perimeter, the Outer Circle, following it clockwise along its south-west stretch. Then, just past the boating lake, as if on a whim, he diverted inward.

  We picked up our pace, Holmes almost trembling in his eagerness not to let Quatermain out of our sight. Once we were in the midst of the park’s lawned, wooded expanse, the fog crowded around us more densely than ever. That and the pau
city of illumination meant we were travelling more or less blind. I was almost certain that we had already lost track of our quarry – and indeed that that had been Quatermain’s goal in luring us into the park – but I said nothing. Holmes remained dead set on continuing the pursuit. I heard him mutter to himself, “So you tracked my spoor halfway across London, did you, Quatermain? Well, two can play at that game.” As if in proof, he would drop to a crouch every so often and inspect the pathway gravel, a patch of grass or a clump of fallen leaves, before resuming progress.

  I reckon it was half an hour before, eventually, Holmes gave it up. He let out a grunt, as of someone stymied, and I could swear I heard him grind his teeth.

  “The man is as slippery as the proverbial eel,” said he. “He realises full well we are behind him and has been leading us in circles. He sought to hoodwink me by treading in his own footprints, and I will admit that for a while it worked. Now, however, he appears to have vanished into thin air. The trail has gone dead and I am at a loss.”

  “And that is how it should be, Mr Holmes.”

  The voice – Quatermain’s – echoed towards us through the fog. I could not fathom from which direction it originated, nor from how far away. It was as if Quatermain knew some ventriloquist trick for throwing his voice, so that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  “I really thought you had learned your lesson in Notting Hill,” Quatermain continued. “I am a man who was taught bushcraft by a Hottentot and who has been stalked by lions. You cannot sneak up on me. You cannot follow me without my knowledge. Not on city streets and certainly not here, amidst nature, where I am in my element. You, sir, are frankly in danger of becoming a pest. The next time I catch you attempting something like this, it will go hard on you. You have my word on that.”

  “The next time we meet,” Holmes retorted, “if there is a next time, you will not find me unready.”

  “You will do what, exactly?” said that eerily disembodied voice. “I outmatch you in every respect, you whippersnapper. Even when, while we were fighting, you struck at what you think is my weak point – my bad leg – it availed you naught. I am made of the toughest stuff imaginable. I have been weathered by African sun. I have been seasoned by veldt and desert. I have known starvation and thirst so severe as to bring me to the brink of death, and I have endured. To me, you are a pale, blinkered creature, as soft as a sponge, as clumsy as a sloth. I fear you not.”

  “In that case you will not be afraid to show yourself. Come out, Quatermain, from wherever you are skulking. Come out and face me.”

  The bravado went unanswered. Holmes called Quatermain’s name a couple more times into the fog, and received nothing in return save for the chirrup of a blackbird from somewhere in the treetops.

  Only reluctantly did he admit defeat, and we trudged homeward in silence. As we neared Baker Street, Holmes roused himself from his gloom to say, “The night has not been a complete waste. If nothing else we have a fresh lead. Quatermain unguardedly mentioned a journalist.”

  “That he did,” I said, “but he did not furnish a name, however slyly you tried to prompt him into doing so.”

  “He did not furnish a name, no, but he did furnish the name of the newspaper for which the journalist works.”

  “Did he? I don’t recall.”

  “When he told us about the journalist, how did I frame my subsequent question?”

  “You asked if it was somebody-or-other from The Times.”

  “Not so. Think harder. I said, ‘You mean the man from The Times,’ then offered up a bogus name, Ellerthwaite.”

  “Presumably no such person is employed by that organ.”

  “Not that I know of. But you are missing the point, Watson. It is the ordering of the sentences that counts. When one is on a ‘fishing expedition’, trying to elicit a fact from someone which he will not surrender voluntarily, it is important to begin with generalisations before going into specifics. Ergo, I began by naming a newspaper, for there are far fewer of those than there are journalists. I plumped for The Times, since the so-called Thunderer is the best-known and the one with the largest circulation, and hey presto, I got a palpable hit. Quatermain is many things but he is no master of deceit. His eyes widened in surprise – not greatly, but appreciably – when he heard me say ‘The Times’. They narrowed again, in superior fashion, when I spoke of an ‘Ellerthwaite’. Each of those tiny changes in expression conveyed volumes. The one told me I was right, the other confirmed it by showing how Quatermain looks when he is doing his best to be canny. The face is a terrible unconscious betrayer of truths, if one pays close attention and knows what to look for.”

  “But how does knowing that Quatermain has met a journalist from The Times help us?” I asked.

  “It is at least likely that this journalist is the man who visited Inigo Niemand on Wednesday last.”

  “It stands to reason, I suppose.”

  “More than that, Watson, it is highly plausible. Now, one may justifiably presume that Quatermain was watching Niemand’s flat even then, and this is why he was moved to have words with the journalist as he described, in order to warn him off just as he has striven to with us.”

  “Yes, very well, I can accept that, but we still have no notion of the journalist’s identity.”

  “But we know which newspaper he writes for, and that is a good place to start.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DARING DAN

  Overnight, during the small hours, between our return to Baker Street and the arrival of dawn, the fog receded. When Holmes and I sallied forth the next morning, only a few wispy cobwebs of vapour lingered, hovering in gutters and clinging to the pediments of railings.

  Our first port of call was the telegraph office on Thayer Street, where Holmes wired Inspector Lestrade to say that Ada Biddulph should not be considered the prime suspect in Inigo Niemand’s murder. It was far from a complete abnegation of guilt, but the hope was it would forestall any move by Lestrade to arrest her, should he get it into his head to do so. Holmes had been loath to send the message, but a campaign of persuasion by me and Mrs Hudson over breakfast had forced him to relent. “The presence of Allan Quatermain has complicated things,” he had allowed. “It has made what was a chamber piece a symphony, in which Mrs Biddulph would now seem to be playing a lesser role. She may not even be a part of the orchestra at all.”

  Our second destination was the offices of The Times on Printing House Square. There, amid the hurly-burly that attends the production of a leading national broadsheet running to three editions a day, we began making enquiries about the unknown journalist. It did not go well. We were passed from desk to desk, editor to editor, and at each stop on our circuitous journey we were treated as a nuisance, an additional burden on already hectic lives. Nobody could spare us more than a minute of his time, and that grudgingly. Nor was anybody able to identify our mystery man based upon the scant information we had to offer, namely that he had visited Notting Hill recently in pursuit of a story. Time after time we were dismissed with a curt “good day”, which would very occasionally be prefaced by a semi-sincere “sorry”.

  Holmes was not downhearted. “To be honest, Watson, I did not have high hopes for that particular approach,” he said as we quit the building. “However, I know of a venue where the atmosphere is less formal and the tongues are somewhat looser.”

  By that he meant a nearby public house on Fleet Street where freelancers were wont to gather at all hours. It was barely eleven o’clock but already the place was thronged with men whose rumpled clothing and haggard demeanour, not to mention ink-stained fingers, betokened their vocation as scriveners. Ale was being supped in copious quantities, and although the prevailing mood was one of jollity and camaraderie, I sensed a tension boiling below. There were deadlines to be met, column inches to be filled, stories to be filed, and drinking was a good way of alleviating those pressures, if not negating them.

  Holmes instantly endeared himself to the a
ssembled company by buying a round for everyone. The only person in the pub not delighted by his generosity was me, for he happened to be short of cash just then and it fell to his disgruntled comrade to foot the bill.

  With the journalists’ sympathies apparently secured, my friend set about making the same enquiries as he had at The Times. For a while it seemed, as at the newspaper offices, that his efforts would not bear fruit. Time and again he was rebuffed, sometimes politely, more often with brusqueness. In a couple of instances I had the impression that his interlocutor did know the subject of Holmes’s entreaties but refused to identify him. Some code of honour appeared to be in play – that or an innate suspicion of anyone who was not part of the journalistic fraternity.

  Holmes persisted nonetheless. Eventually his eye lit upon a certain fellow whom he felt confident could be prevailed upon to oblige.

  “Look at him,” he said to me quietly, pointing out the individual, who sat slumped at the bar, on his own, staring into his pint glass. “Have you ever seen such a wreck of a man? Even by the low standards of his peers he cuts a shabby, dissolute figure. Observe the collar of his shirt, which has been laundered so often it has greyed and which no amount of starching can keep upright. Observe, too, the cuffs of his trousers, which have been taken up. Those are second-hand trousers, I’ll be bound, and the sewing is not the work of a professional tailor. It is an amateur job, perhaps his own doing. Here is someone who can barely afford to keep the clothes on his back. This makes him, for our purposes, a good target. A half-crown, if you would, Watson. There’s a good fellow.”

  Grudgingly I placed the coin in Holmes’s outstretched palm. So far I had sunk practically half a day’s wages into this enterprise. I prayed that this would be the last of the expenditure.

  Holmes sauntered over to the man and clapped him on the back. “You strike me as in need of company,” said he cheerily.

  “I am not,” came the curt reply. “Go away.”