Sherlock Holmes--The Devil's Dust

by James Lovegrove

  “I would rather take my chances in the Ghazi-infested crags of the Khyber Pass than here,” I remarked to Holmes.

  “Do turn back, then,” my companion offered. “I should think none the less of you for it.”

  “I should think the less of myself if I did.”

  I spoke with more courage than I felt, and indeed mere moments later my nerve was tested when a gruff voice addressed us, unbidden, from the shadows of an alley.

  “You two toffs look like a pair of sheep what has gone sorely astray,” it said. “How about I do you a good turn and escort you back where you came from? For a fee, of course.”

  “How about I put a bullet in your head?” I replied, drawing my revolver. It was obvious, from the man’s tone, that money would have to change hands even if we did not accept the service being tendered. The offer was as much extortion as commerce.

  The villain, whoever he was, said no more. His hurried departing footfalls were his answer.

  A little further on, we fell foul of a trio of toughs armed with bludgeons. Two approached from the front while the third stole up from the rear, all holding their knobbed wooden clubs aloft. They stalked towards us with the poise of predators who are certain their prey will not resist. The area they had chosen for their ambush was unusually well illuminated, attesting to their self-confidence. Their grins glinted in the lamplight like the blades of knives.

  I tensed, ready to draw my gun again.

  Holmes, however, having sized up all three men, spoke to them thus.

  “You would do well to disregard my friend and me, and look to your own affairs. I refer to this fellow here.” He indicated the man nearest us, a leering bravo with a battered bowler perched at an angle on his head. “And to his relations with your sister, sir.” This comment Holmes addressed over his shoulder to the man behind us. “I believe you are unaware of the attentions he has been paying her, and how she has reciprocated them.”

  “That ain’t true,” the man behind us said, addressing his cohort. “Is it, Albie? Tell me it ain’t. You and Becky?”

  “No, no, it ain’t,” said the one called Albie. “Not a bit of it, Luther, I swear.”

  “Is that so?” Luther snarled. “Then how comes you’re tremblin’ all of a sudden, Albie? How comes your voice has gone all high and quivery? Answer me that.”

  “Well, you see, all right, I was going to tell you. When the moment was right, like. I have squired Becky, but only once or twice. God’s honest truth. All polite and proper. It ain’t no more than that.”

  “Oh, I think it is,” Holmes interjected. “That single hair protruding from beneath your lapel tells another story – a hair which happens to be of the exact same flaxen shade as friend Luther’s, yet longer, curlier and altogether more feminine. Becky has lain her head against your chest, Albie, during what one can only assume to be a romantic tryst.”

  Albie, peering down at his lapel, hurriedly extricated the hair from its berth and tossed it aside. His expression was panicked.

  “What have I told you about Becky, Albie?” Luther said. “You know full well what that girl means to me. Apple of our mother’s eye, she always was, and Mum made me swear, on her deathbed, I’d see to it that no man touched her as wasn’t right for her.”

  “Well, ain’t I right for her?” Albie retorted with indignation. “I’m not good enough to be Becky’s beau, that’s what you’re saying. You swine! I’m easily your equal, if not your better. She could do far worse.”

  “Only if she was seduced by the Devil himself.”

  “The Devil?” Albie exclaimed hotly. “You’re the Devil, Luther!”

  Albie threw himself at the other man, and a vicious altercation ensued. Bludgeon blows were exchanged, accompanied by animalistic grunts and growls. The third ruffian attempted in vain to break up the brawl and received a hit to the jaw that had not been intended for him. Dazed, he reeled away, losing his balance and toppling to the ground.

  In all the fuss, Holmes and I were forgotten. We took the opportunity to make a hasty departure.

  “It was long odds but I thought it worth a shot,” my friend admitted, once we had put the scene of the incident well behind us. “When I spied the hair sticking out from behind Albie’s lapel, its similarity to the hair on Luther’s head was too close to ignore. I inferred the existence of a sister. I posited a brotherly over-protectiveness. Human nature, in its worst aspect, did the rest.”

  “So much for honour amongst thieves,” I said. “But what if your ploy had not worked?”

  “Well then, it would have been a matter of us battling our way out of our predicament. How much more satisfying, though, to have prevailed by using our wits rather than firearms and fisticuffs!”

  “Not to mention less potentially injurious to our health. Now that I think about it, Holmes, oughtn’t we to have donned disguises before we went out? Made ourselves look more like East Enders, in the hopes of passing unnoticed?” With hindsight this seemed to me the most judicious of measures, and I wished it had occurred to me earlier.

  “I did entertain the notion briefly,” Holmes replied. “I rejected it. I myself may be proficient at such impersonations, but you, Watson, with the best will in the world, are not. However you dress, even if it were in rags, you would invariably project the air of an Englishman of quality. Disguise is not merely about clothing or make-up. It is about posture, gait, one’s general bearing. You have not studied the art of dissembling, as I have, and without that there is not even the remotest possibility of you being able to pull off the deceit. People around here would spot you for a fake as soon as they saw you, and then it would have gone hard for both of us – harder than if we present ourselves as just what we are.”

  “Very well, but at least we could have invited a constable to accompany us, as an added precaution.”

  “A policeman would draw greater attention to us, not less. We do not want to stand out. Above all we do not want to be directly associated with the law. I think you will see, once we reach our destination, how dangerous that might be.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  INTO THE HIVE

  We continued on our way without any further encounters of note, until at last, in the very heart of Shoreditch, we stood outside the aforementioned destination: a building which even by the modest standards of the East End was ramshackle and unkempt. It was part of a terrace of tall, thin houses each of which teetered drunkenly against the next. The entire area was one of those rookeries into which were crammed far more people than there was space to reasonably accommodate them with any degree of sanitariness.

  The house in question was the so-called Hive to which Holmes had made reference earlier. It boasted walls caked with filth and windows that were broken and patched with whatever materials came to hand, mainly rags and newspaper. Refuse littered the pavement before it, and a host of rats made merry amidst the detritus.

  In these respects the Hive was little different from its neighbours. What set it apart was the din that emanated from within. Sounds of revelry poured forth onto the street, but it was revelry of a savage, raucous sort, more like the braying of donkeys or the howling of wolves than anything human. Guttural oaths rent the air, along with snatches of songs whose lyrics were coarser than any I had heard even in the army. Several times these ditties were counterpointed by the crack of glass shattering, as though a bottle had been dropped or more likely thrown. The Hive was, not to put too fine a point on it, abuzz.

  “You want us,” I said to Holmes, “to go in there?”

  “‘Want’ is not the word,” replied he. “It is a necessity. If Greensmith is somewhere on the premises, we cannot just leave him to languish. It would be unconscionable.”

  “And if he is not?”

  “Then we will have had a wasted journey. We will, nonetheless, have been exposed to a stratum of society well outside our usual ambit, which should at least be instructive.”

  “‘Destructive’ seems nearer the mark.”

  �
��Come, come, my friend. Such querulousness does not befit you. You are a soldier and a doctor, neither of which occupations attracts the faint of heart.”

  “Nor does either attract the suicidal,” I said.

  “Should we run into trouble, I am confident we can reason our way out of it, much as we did with those three louts.”

  “Three louts are one thing, but a house full of them?”

  “You seem to fail to appreciate the urgency here, Watson,” Holmes said. “We need to find Greensmith. This is the most expedient means of achieving that end. Heaven only knows what Starkey might be doing to him right now. The sooner we can prise him from the fellow’s grasp, the better.”

  I was not so confident. All the same, I followed Holmes as he climbed the front steps, both of us navigating around the ordure accumulated thereon, and rapped at the door.

  To those who have read others of my literary works, Holmes’s behaviour here may seem at odds with the characterisation that has become so familiar. What of the cool, detached logician who broods over a problem, sometimes for days? What of the imperturbable intellectual who considers his every move beforehand? What of him?

  All I can say is that Holmes, at the time of this adventure, was still a young man, barely out of his twenties. The impetuousness of youth had yet to ebb in him altogether. The Sherlock Holmes who first enjoined me to share rooms with him after we had known each other for less than ten minutes, who killed a terrier to prove the effectiveness of a poison pill, and who stood up to the bullying of Dr Grimesby Roylott with laughing contempt, was the same Sherlock Holmes whom I depict in this narrative. Where a maturer, wiser Holmes might have feared to tread, that younger, hot-tempered fellow rushed in; and I, often against my better judgement, was drawn along in his wake.

  The door was opened, after some interval, by a hulking great ape in an ill-fitting houndstooth check suit.

  “What do you want?” he demanded, eyeing us much as he might have an earthworm upon which he had accidentally trodden.

  With almost comical politesse Holmes presented his card. The giant took it in one paw and scowled at the text as though it were written in Chinese. Then he crushed the card and tossed it at my companion’s feet.

  “Even if I could read,” he said, “I don’t give a damn who you are. You’ve come to the wrong place. Now scram!”

  “The name Sherlock Holmes, I suppose, means nothing to you.”

  “You could be the Duke of ruddy Wellington for all I care. You don’t belong ’ere, you ain’t welcome, and if you don’t skedaddle right this instant, that massive great ’ooter of yours will be plastered sideways across your fizzog.” He brandished a fist to illustrate his point, and it was a vivid illustration indeed, for his hand was practically the size of my head, with knuckles so thickly callused they resembled golf balls.

  “I believe you are threatening me,” said Holmes calmly.

  “Why, how very perspicacious of you, sir,” said the ape, mimicking the fruity tones of the high-born.

  “Were you to attempt to lay a finger on me, it would not end well for you.”

  The man scanned Holmes from head to toe, then barked a scornful laugh. “Really? A piece of string like you couldn’t beat me even on your best day. I could take on the both of you together, you and old muttonchops there, and win without even breakin’ a sweat.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I’ve been a prizefighter, I’ll ’ave you know. Bare-knuckle stuff. None of your Queensberry Rules. I’ve put down blokes twice your size and thrice as ugly.”

  I felt moved to intervene before Holmes could antagonise the fellow any further. “We apologise for bothering you,” I said. “We shall be going now.”

  “No, Watson,” said Holmes, and my spirits sank. “The gauntlet has been thrown. Only a coward would not pick it up.”

  The ape squinted at him. “You actually want to do this? You’re volunteerin’ to mix it up with me? Me, Ned Maynard, ’eavyweight champion, what never lost a bout in twelve years and sent three of ’is opponents to the ’ospital and one to the morgue?”

  “Are you going to brag all night or are we going to fight?”

  A punch was thrown. A minute later, it was over.

  In a way, I pitied Ned Maynard. He could not have known what he was getting into. The skills which had brought him success as a pugilist – mighty jabs, barrelling roundhouses, piston-powerful uppercuts – were of little use against the nimbler, subtler techniques of baritsu. Compared with Holmes he was a lumbering rhino. Not one of his blows found its mark.

  The scuffle started on the steps and ended in the roadway with Maynard down on one knee, his right arm hanging limp and useless by his side. His eyes had taken on a giddy, unfocused look, as though he did not quite know where he was, and a peculiar whimpering issued from his throat, like that of a perplexed puppy.

  Holmes, standing over him, was poised to deliver the coup de grâce. He refrained, however, and instead extended a hand towards Maynard and helped the dazed giant to his feet.

  “My friend and I,” said he, “are desirous of a meeting with your boss, Mr Starkey. Would you be so kind as to take us to him?”

  Maynard nodded in a baffled manner and tottered back towards the Hive, massaging his benumbed arm. Holmes and I fell in behind him.

  “No tricks now,” Holmes warned Maynard. “Take us direct to Starkey. Don’t try and lead us into an ambush, or there’ll be more of the treatment you just received.”

  The big man, cowed by his humiliation at Holmes’s hands, merely nodded. I think he was too addled even to think of double-crossing us.

  What scenes the interior of the house presented! No novel by Rabelais could do it justice, nor any etching by Hogarth. Everywhere one looked there was licentiousness and degradation. Cheap alcohol flowed like water. Upon the stairs what appeared to be a bundle of soiled laundry turned out to be a sot so inebriated that he had passed out face down while ascending. Through an open doorway on the first floor I saw a pair of delinquents in the throes of argument. What the bone of contention was, I cannot be sure; it may have been the bottle of gin one of them clasped to his breast, or it may have been the weary-looking female who sat in the corner of the room in a state of some disrobement. As they staggered to and fro, exchanging spittle-flecked insults and tripping over their own feet, the two men resembled nothing so much as clowns at a circus, albeit a circus of a profane variety.

  The stench which permeated the building was so noisome it made one choke. It was like an open sewer, with yeasty top-notes of stale beer. There was no item of furniture that was not battered, woodworm-riddled and on its last legs. Kapok and horsehair bulged out through threadbare upholstery. My eye fell upon a book, a startling sight amidst all the orgiastic carnage, lying open on the floor of a landing. I was oddly touched by its presence, thinking it evidence that at least someone on the premises had finer sensibilities; someone aspired to more than being a mindless brute. That was until I realised that the book was situated outside a water closet and that all of its pages had been torn out.

  Our cumbersome guide led us to the topmost floor and knocked at a door into which the word PRYVIT had been carved with a knife. From within came a growled “Who is it?”

  “Me, Mr Starkey. Ned.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve brought up a couple of gents.”

  “Couple of gents? What do they want?”

  “I don’t know, boss. One of ’em, I do know, fights like a ballerina and a viper put together. Stitched me up good and proper, even though ’e’s ’alf my weight and skinny as a rake.”

  “How the devil is that possible?”

  “Can’t say. Why don’t you ask ’im yourself?”

  The door was opened by a man who was much shorter than the gravelly deepness of his voice had led me to expect. He stood barely five feet tall, squat and broad, with a near-spherical head from which his ears protruded like amphora handles. His hair was so close-cropped that he was nea
rly bald, while his unshaven chin sported black bristles with streaks of silver. His clothing was finery gone to seed, the seams of his velvet smoking jacket coming apart, a pocket of his brocade waistcoat missing, his silk cravat moth-eaten, as though he had once had pretensions to sartorial elegance but had found sustaining it too much like hard work.

  “Mr Starkey,” said Holmes, holding out a hand. “Sherlock Holmes. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Likewise I’m sure,” said Starkey, bemusedly shaking it.

  “My colleague, Dr John Watson.”

  Taking my cue from Holmes, I too shared a handshake with Starkey. His grip was damp and I had to resist the temptation to wipe my palm on my trousers afterwards.

  “They’re a rum pair, all right, as you can see,” said Maynard, quirking the corner of his mouth. “I reckoned there wasn’t no ’arm in bringin’ ’em up ’ere. Thought they’d more or less earnt it, on account of ’ow this ’Olmes fellow got the better of me. And of course, you like a bit of novelty, don’t you, boss? You’re always sayin’ ’ow distraction from the ’umdrum never ’urts. But if you want ’em shown out,” he added, “I can arrange it. I’ll rally the lads and we’ll evict ’em together, nice and forceful-like. Nifty footwork or not, they won’t stand a chance against us mob-’anded.”

  Starkey glanced from Maynard to Holmes to me and back again.

  “Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes…” he mused. “Now where do I know that name from? It’s ringing a bell. Wait. You’re that detective, aren’t you?”

  “Your servant, sir,” said Holmes with a bow.

  “You help the Peelers, right?”

  “From time to time I have afforded some modest assistance to Her Majesty’s Constabulary, yes.”