by David Fable
“How are you feeling, Doctor?” I asked, looking down at the fifty-nine-year-old as he rubbed at his lower back and grimaced.
“Not as young as I used to,” he said good-naturedly. “Anything interesting upstairs?”
“Nothing. I think we should leave Sergeant Hayes to wait here for Scotland Yard as you and I have someone we need to visit.”
“Yes, I thoroughly agree,” answered Watson as I extended a hand and helped him up off the floor.
“I assume that’s all right with you, Sergeant,” I said.
“That’s my job, sir,” the portly policeman answered amiably. We hurried off, leaving Sergeant Hayes to his task.
24
B oth Watson and I were anxious to get over to Kensington to have a word with Mrs. Smithwick. What motive she would have had to set us up for this ambush was hard to divine, but she, without doubt, was in a position to answer many questions, and we were anxious to speak to her before anyone was aware that the plot had failed.
When we pulled up in front of her house on Warwick Road it occurred to me that a weapon might be appropriate in case there was someone in the home in addition to Mrs. Smithwick. It was entirely possible that she had been compelled to make the misleading telephone call. As I walked around to the boot of my mother’s auto to find what might be useful, I resolved that from now I would carry my switchblade, which I had procured in Marseille during a trip in my freshman year at Oxford. I remember spending the rest of that summer indulging in the notion of becoming expertly practiced in it, so that with one movement I could produce the blade and hit my target. I pursued this ambition for many hours and thus made a ruin out of my dormitory wall.
I opened the boot and found the contents to be a pair of my mother’s dirt-caked hiking shoes, an old blanket, the spare tire and a two-foot tire iron; not a very handy weapon to walk around with but usable for this occasion. I grabbed the tire iron and closed the boot.
“What’s this?” asked Watson when he saw the item.
“We no longer have the use of your Webley, and I don’t intend to walk into another trap defenseless,” I responded.
“Quite right. And if there’s no trap, we’ll beat the truth out of the old woman with a tire iron,” he said with no small measure of sarcasm.
“If that’s what’s called for,” was my rejoinder. “I’m not in a very charitable mood.”
Watson slouched up to the front door with me at his side. It was then that I noticed our disheveled state. Watson, very uncharacteristically, had his shirttail out, his coat and forehead smeared with graphite and his hair in a disordered, whirlwind shape. I myself had blood smeared on my clothes and shoes. I knocked on the door. As expected, there was no response, but lights in both the upstairs and downstairs windows made me confident that someone was home.
I decided it was best not to waste time and wedged the tire iron between the frame and the door. A panicked female voice instantly called out from the other side, “Go away or I’ll call the police!”
“The police, I’m sure, are the last people you are likely to call. Now open the door,” demanded Watson.
There was no reply to his directive. I gave two firm yanks on the tire iron, the wood splintered and the door surrendered. I kicked it the rest of the way open and found the diminutive Mrs. Smithwick rapidly backing up in her hallway with absolute terror in her eyes at the sight of Watson and his young, blood-spattered, tire iron–wielding companion. She stumbled onto her rear end on the oriental carpet, took one last look at us coming toward her and fainted dead away.
“I’m going to see if anyone else is in the house,” I told Watson, feeling my lack of compassion for this woman could be excused by the fact that she attempted to lead us to our death earlier in the afternoon.
I went upstairs and took a look around and concluded that Mrs. Smithwick was quite alone and apparently did not expect a visit from us.
When I came back downstairs, Watson was crouched over the still-unconscious woman with an expression of genuine concern. “I’m afraid this is more serious than a fainting spell. We need to get her to hospital. I fear it’s her heart.”
“She better not die on us. She has some questions to answer,” was my retort.
“Call an ambulance unless you want to carry her to the car and take her there ourselves.”
“I’ll call the ambulance,” I said walking toward the telephone. “I want to search the place in the meantime.”
It took approximately fifteen minutes for an ambulance to arrive from the Charing Cross Hospital, during which time I thoroughly checked all the drawers on both floors of the home. The woman had very little documentation regarding her properties or business affairs. There was no question she was well off. The value of her jewelry, which she carelessly kept in the top drawer of her vanity, was easily five thousand pounds. There were pictures of her and her husband, who was of indeterminate occupation but might have been an architect or builder, suggested by the drafting table in the background of one photograph. They had traveled to Greece, Turkey and Italy. There appeared to be a son, who would be in his early fifties by now. The most interesting item I found was a photograph of her at a groundbreaking with Lord Fitzroy in attendance. It seemed to be the christening of some large construction project in some indeterminate part of the city. It struck me as a bit of a coincidence, but beyond that there was nothing to indicate that Mrs. Smithwick was other than a wealthy widow who led a perfectly traditional, privileged life.
Watson and I stood out front as they wheeled Mrs. Smithwick, who was growing more ashen by the moment, to the ambulance. Watching the van recede into the gloom, it occurred to me that today was the vernal equinox. The sun had set six minutes ago, at exactly six o’clock, and there would be equal night and daylight. All things being considered, I should have figured out by now who Holmes’s murderer was, but I had only suspicions. I barely knew the identity of the man who had tried to murder us hours before and no idea who had murdered our assailant and why. Either someone wanted us alive or someone wanted him dead, perhaps both. It seemed Baker Street was our logical next stop as Watson was in no condition to continue the investigation tonight. He groaned as I helped him slump into the passenger seat of the Daimler. The first stars were winking in the half-moon sky as we made the silent twenty-minute drive back to the flat.
25
W hen we arrived home, Watson could barely stand. I directed him to lie down on the couch in his drawers and lit some moxa, which is an ancient Asian remedy of dried mugwort molded into the shape of a cigar. When the end is lit, the glowing ember radiates a penetrating heat which, when held close to afflicted areas, relaxes the muscles. As I warmed the meridians of his back with the mugwort preparation, I couldn’t help noticing that the doctor’s fondness for three meals a day was becoming evident in the form of at least fifteen to twenty excess pounds.
“That smells like the worst cigar anyone has ever lit,” he complained. “What is it?”
“It’s moxa. A Chinese classmate introduced me to it. It helped me overcome a tendon injury I sustained playing rugby.” I placed the smoldering stick of moxa in the ashtray and took out my acupuncture needles from the doctor’s bag that my parents had given me as a Christmas present. “You’re going to feel some slight pinpricks on your back, Doctor. Do not be alarmed. It is called acupuncture, and the Chinese have been using this method successfully for centuries.”
“Pinpricks?” he repeated with a high degree of skepticism. “And that’s supposed to cure my back? Maybe you should get out some leeches as well.”
“I know you’re irritable, but give a try. There’s no harm in it,” I said reassuring him.
“I’ve had my back go out on me before,” he declared. “This will require at least two days of bed rest, which I don’t intend to have. I’ll take a snifter of brandy over Chinese medicine to make this feel better.”
I inserted the first slender needle into the gan shu point, which is on the left side of the spine jus
t below the shoulder blade.
“First I’m shot at and now I’m turned into a pin cushion?” he complained.
“Just give it a chance, Doctor. This should relax you.” I tapped in two more needles along the meridian.
“I don’t find this the least bit relaxing. How many of those needles do you intend to jam into me?”
“I would estimate enough to make you shut up and let me help you.”
Watson heaved a sigh of resignation, and I proceeded to place another twenty-five needles along the proper meridians. As I was preparing to apply heat to the needles, my mother knocked on the door. “I’ve some dinner for you two.”
I opened the door and she entered with a tray of pork chops, applesauce and a Yorkshire pudding. She placed our dinner on the table and her eyes came to rest on Doctor Watson.
He was face down on the couch in nothing but his drawers. With a muffled voice he said, “This is most undignified…Do I smell pork chops?”
“What happened to Doctor Watson?” my mother asked in astonishment.
“He took a bit of a tumble,” I answered, not wanting to alarm her with the truth.
“What did he tumble onto? A pin cushion?”
“No, no. This is a treatment I’m giving him. It’s called acupuncture.”
Mother noticed that my medical bag was open. “Ahh…You’re using the medical bag we gave you,” she said, looking very gratified.
“You’ll have to excuse us, Mother. Thank you so much for dinner.” My mother was used to being shooed out of this apartment, so she gave me a peck on the cheek and quickly retreated. When I turned back around, Watson was snoring. Though I was hungry, I decided to add the recent events to my timeline and wait on dinner until the doctor awoke. Even if it turned cold, I thought it would be more pleasant for us to eat it together.
Two hours later, Watson was still sound asleep. I had taken the needles out and placed a blanket over him. The time had passed quickly as I had been working diligently on my timeline. Now that Watson and I had become targets in this case, I placed notations on the wall for our relevant activities from the day we entered. I annotated those items on the timeline with details that I put in the blank pages of an old college notebook. I recorded every particular of my conversation with Moriarty, Wiggins and the others we had interviewed. Finally, I succumbed to hunger and ate my dinner while standing over the table and studying the flurry of paper scraps on the wall. It was all I could do not to eat Watson’s share of the Yorkshire pudding. Glancing at the clock, I was surprised that we hadn’t heard anything from Scotland Yard regarding the crime scene on Weymouth Street. I telephoned the station, and was greeted by the watch commander, a Lieutenant Mansfield.
“Hello, this is Christopher Hudson. Are Commander Lestrade or Superintendent Gregson there?”
“They’ve left for the evening,” came the world-weary voice on the other end.
“Could you give me some information about the incident on Weymouth Street?” I asked politely.
“What incident on Weymouth Street?” His voice suggested indifference.
“There was a shooting. A man was killed. I left Sergeant Archibald Hayes in charge.”
“I know nothing about a killing on Weymouth or a Sergeant Archibald Hayes.”
“He goes by Archie…Archie Hayes,” I said, hoping to move things along.
“Archie or Archibald, I’d know him if there was anybody by that name.”
And suddenly something to occurred to me. A feeling of dread instantly welled up in my chest. “And what about the killing?” I asked fearing the answer.
“Sir, if there had been a murder on Weymouth, I would know about it.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” I hung up the phone. I felt a thickening in my throat. What a terrible blunder I had made. How could I have been so easily deceived? The urgency of the moment had made me drop my defenses. Clearly “Sergeant Archie Hayes” had been an impostor and, in all likelihood, the very man who had killed our would-be assassin. I had to admire the cleverness of his operation, but, at the same time, I was disgusted by my own ineptness. The muttonchops, moustache and police uniform were all an elaborate disguise. What I mistook for false teeth were certainly stage teeth. In my state of confusion I had been an easy mark. Now my mind was spinning, trying to remember every detail of the encounter. I had to regroup. This was no time to compound my failures. I had to get hold of myself and salvage whatever evidence I could. I dashed off a note to Watson and put it beside his dinner plate. Throwing on my aviator jacket and scarf, I hurriedly retrieved the hand-carved ivory box, which my father had brought me back from one of his journeys around the Cape of Good Hope. In it I kept my childish valuables: a gold-plated medal I received for winning the hundred-yard dash in grade school, a sapphire tie tack given to me by my grandmother, my Oxford freshman pin, a ticket from the Louvre where I spent my eighteenth birthday and my switchblade. I pocketed the switchblade, secreted the box away in my closet, grabbed a torch and quickly slipped out of the apartment.
The hum of the Harley-Davison and the cold night air blasting against my face helped clear my mind. The vibrating solitude of the motorbike always brought me to a calm, internal place. It was as if every part of my being was involved in riding the bike except my brain, which would wander freely though whatever occupied it, finding solutions and posing questions. The traffic was sparse. I zoomed past a quarter-full bus carrying exhausted late-shift workers home from the factories.
Ignoring the traffic signals, I arrived at the building on Weymouth in twelve minutes. Checking the front door, I found it still locked. I drove around to the back and parked the Harley. The back door was unlocked. I stepped inside and turned on my torch, sweeping the area as I proceeded. There was no sign of life in the building and, dare I say it, no sign of the death that occurred earlier. As my beam shot across the lobby to illuminate the area in front of the elevator, I saw that the body was gone. Someone had even gone to pains to wash away any traces of blood. A recently scrubbed wet spot remained where the blood had pooled.
I walked to the rubbish bin, pulled myself up and shined the flash-light on the contents. As far as I could tell there was nothing of any evidentiary value that had been disposed of in it. I walked to the elevator shaft. The car was hovering on the second floor. Any blood that may have dripped into the bottom of the shaft had been cleaned. I positioned myself where our attacker was standing when he was shot. I placed the butt off my torch against my chest, trying to approximate where the exit wound had been on his body. He was shorter than me, so I adjusted for the difference, directing the light outward from the bottom of my ribcage so as to recreate the flight of the bullet. I swept the wall with the beam searching for the bullet hole and found it in the plaster behind the wrought-iron cage of the elevator shaft. I heard something stir from one of the floors above. I turned off the torch and listened. It sounded as if someone was dragging a heavy burden across one of the upper floors. “Rats?” I thought to myself. Often these sounds can be magnified in empty spaces like this. I have heard rats in the attic sound like polar bears moving around when the night is still. I continued to listen, and the stirring stopped. I turned my torch back on, stepped into the empty elevator shaft and found the bullet hole in the wall. I clicked open my switchblade and dug it into the hole. Suddenly I heard a snap and a squeal! It rattled me momentarily, but confirmed my suspicion that the stirring had been rats and it seemed as if a well-placed trap had accomplished its purpose.
I resumed digging around in the plaster until I had hollowed out a one-inch diameter hole. The slug was not there. Someone had already extracted it. Whoever had done this job had been very efficient. I saw little reason to investigate further. I could have checked all the floors in the hope that either the body or some evidence had been left behind, but that seemed more than unlikely. I could find no further evidence of the crimes that had been committed only hours before. It was half an hour to midnight, I was out of answers and there seemed only on
e logical place to go to get them.