The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part X

by Marcum, David;

  It was, perhaps, a little over a week later that I read in The Times that a coroner’s court had, indeed, been convened and had delivered, as expected, a verdict of ‘death by misadventure’. For my part, I was content as I saw this to be a judgement that I could honourably accept.

  As for Mycroft, I was greatly relieved when he did not press his brother for further details of the actions of Miss Knight. Even now, as I recall the case, I am still unsettled by it. It is my hope and belief that there will come a time, in the future, when the law of the land will be applied, with an even hand, to all our citizens.

  The Case of the Anonymous Client

  by Paul A. Freeman

  One cold morning in early spring, I was awakened by a sulphurous odour hanging in the air of the apartments I shared with Sherlock Holmes. The smell was somewhat more nauseating than that which accompanies London’s notorious pea-soup fogs - fogs that had much plagued the metropolis in recent months. Unable to sleep further, I put on my dressing gown and descended to the sitting room. To my surprise, Holmes was up and about, working on some elaborate question of practical chemistry.

  “Ah, Watson!” he said. Still dressed in his previous evening’s attire, he peered at me from above a maze of test tubes, retorts, and glass vessels. “It appears my experiment has disturbed you.”

  “How can you possibly breathe this infernal atmosphere?” said I, resentful at being awoken at such an unaccustomed hour. “Are you trying to poison us?”

  Chuckling, Holmes threw open a window. The conditions of asphyxiation hardly improved, however, for Baker Street was once again enshrouded in a choking fog. Across the way, the Georgian façade was nothing more than a grey phantom, the lit streetlamps no more than ruddy smears. Holmes’s good humour immediately deserted him at the sight of the pea-souper. “It seems my effort has been compromised,” he said, and filled the clay pipe he always smoked when in thoughtful mood.

  My curiosity had been pricked, and I could not but inspect the experiment which had so absorbed my friend’s interest through much of the night. What I saw surprised me. “But you’re burning a lump of household coal!” I ejaculated.

  “This humble fossil fuel may well be responsible for keeping you so busy of late.”

  It was indeed true that several elderly private patients had recently called me out, suffering from palpitations and exertions of the heart. Examining the glowing coal more closely, I said, “My dear Holmes, I fail to see that common or garden coal can lead to the recent upsurge in cardiac and pulmonary complaints.”

  Holmes shook his head at my evident doltishness. “The one may not seem related to the other, but if we follow the three separate branches of this experiment, you will see a connection. Here,” he explained, indicating a white filter stained almost black with soot, “are the particulates captured after burning a mere six ounces of coal.” He then traced out the route taken by the gaseous materials emitted from the burning coal. The resulting gas was bubbling through discoloured liquids held in two separate beakers. “The white liquid is a measure of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, the only gasses in my experiment that place you and Mrs. Hudson in any immediate danger.”

  “Very reassuring,” I said. “And what of the yellowish-brown liquid in the other beaker?”

  “A weak solution of sulphuric acid, such as is caused when coal smoke mingles with our London fog.” Holmes pointed a long finger accusingly towards the open window. Beyond it, brown wreathes of pollution floated in the air. “Imagine if you will, Watson, the effect on the lungs of this acidic mist, laced as it is with soot particles and higher-than-normal concentrations of carbons monoxide and dioxide. With the lungs starved of oxygen, what stresses and strains these toxins and irritants must place on the heart. No wonder your elderly patients are suffering so much from cardiac problems. The truth of the matter is academic, however, since the results of my experiment have been contaminated by yet another filthy fog descending on the city.” And with this, Holmes began dismantling his apparatus.

  I was unconvinced by Holmes’s conclusions. “I’m sure the human lung is a more efficient filter, and the heart a more resilient pump, than what you credit.”

  Holmes drew meditatively on his pipe. “This industrial age of ours has produced telephonic sound and promises televisual pictures. Yet for all this century’s wondrous inventions, what a price we are paying in our filthy cities.”

  Further debate on the pros and cons of industrialization was curtailed by a ringing at the front door.

  “It appears your elderly patient, Mr. Farrow, is in need of your ministration,” said Holmes. To my quizzical expression, he explained, “Firstly, the hour is extremely early, so we can infer a medical emergency. Secondly, a fog has formed over the city. Therefore, it is likely the patient is suffering a stressed heart caused by the smoke trapped in the air. Thirdly, we have heard no clattering of hooves. The person ringing the doorbell has thought it quicker to come to you on foot than to flag down a hansom or ready a landau.” With a twinkle in his eye, Holmes asked, “Mr. Farrow lives in the mews behind Baker Street, does he not?”

  Just then, Mrs. Hudson, flustered and ill-tempered at being woken up at such an ungodly hour, rapped on the door to our rooms. “Mr. Farrow’s manservant is here. Can Doctor Watson go to his master immediately?” Our landlady’s words elicited a not entirely modest grin from Holmes, until she added, “What’s that awful smell coming from your sitting room?”

  * * *

  With the hour still early, and the noxious London fog thicker than ever, I was returning home on foot from Mr. Farrow’s when a hansom cab rattled past me. Moments later I heard the cab come to a stop. “This is it,” the cabdriver shouted down. “221b Baker Street.”

  I was wondering whether I was being called out to a second patient when a tall figure sprang out of the shop doorway next to me, pushed past, and hurried off along the road until he was lost from sight in the fog. He had been wearing a brown, wide-brimmed hat made from cowhide, and a black greatcoat with a sheepskin collar and lapels. I thought little of this oddly attired apparition until a cry and the sound of a fight reached my ears from up ahead.

  The hansom cab loomed out of the fog as I ran towards the source of the commotion, and beside the cab two men were embroiled in a life-or-death struggle. From up on the driver’s box, the cabbie was shouting, “Help! Police! Murder!”

  A metal object flashed in the lamplight, a second cry filled the night, and one of the men went down. The second man, the fellow in the greatcoat, took to his heels. His footfalls echoed along the pavement, while the clang of metal informed me he had discarded his weapon.

  “Help! Police! Murder!” the cabbie repeated, jumping down to soothe his skittish horses.

  Within seconds, the street was in pandemonium. Police whistles sounded, guiding constables to the scene of the brutal attack, while those habitually awake at such an early hour came rushing from all quarters.

  Holmes’s voice suddenly cut through the confusion. From above, his gaunt, energetic frame was silhouetted against the open sitting room window. He pointed to the gathering constables toward the direction the assailant had taken. “Your man wears a wide-brimmed hat and a greatcoat!” Holmes shouted after the departing policemen, and to me he said, “See to the victim, Watson. He’s a client, if I’m not much mistaken. I’ll be with you momentarily.”

  I needed no second urging to render assistance to the injured man, though my presence was of little consequence. The young man on the ground - dressed as he was in a frock jacket, beige cotton trousers, and a flat cap - was fatally wounded.

  “Your name, sir?” I asked, but perhaps because of the trauma of the attack, the man could not answer my question.

  In spite of two gaping wounds in his side, the dying man struggled in a determined attempt to pick up his fallen wallet. Evidently the assailant had surprised him in the p
rocess of paying the cabdriver and the object dropped from his grasp.

  As the pale-faced young man fumbled with the catch to the wallet, I became aware of Holmes crouching beside me, his features as stern as cold granite.

  “Your prognosis?” Holmes asked, to which I gave a brisk shake of the head. Gently, he prised the wallet from the young man’s fingers and opened it wide. Then we watched as the man picked out two coins before succumbing to his wounds and expiring in front of us.

  “One-and-a-quarter pennies!” said the cabbie, for the young man had selected a single penny and a single farthing from amongst coins that were mostly of a higher denomination. “My fare was more than that,” he whined.

  “I believe our deceased friend had more on his mind than paying your cab fare when he chose these two coins,” said Holmes, dryly. “And the cab fare is from...?”

  “From Waterloo, guv’na.”

  The cabbie’s answer seemed to surprise Holmes, yet did not distract him from his single-minded task of assessing what evidence was at the murder scene. Having apparently seen enough, he said, “We have sufficient data to trace and identify this man, Watson, so let’s hunt down the weapon which the murderer so ill-advisedly threw away.”

  Hampered though we were by poor visibility, the dull gleam of metal soon caught Holmes’s eye, and once the weapon, a common agricultural baling hook, was secured, we returned to the scene of the heinous killing.

  By now a fair-sized crowd had gathered, including Mrs. Hudson, who stood at the door to 221b, somewhat distressed that a murder had occurred on her doorstep.

  “You said this man was your client,” I said as we forced our way through the gawping onlookers, Holmes holding the baling hook aloft. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Our dead friend arrived in the type of hansom commonly seen touting for custom at the city’s train termini. None of your patients’ lives near a train terminus, so he can hardly be the manservant of a patient. Also, since Mrs. Hudson is unlikely to have young men visiting her at so improper an hour, we must surmise that the visitor’s purpose in coming to 221b Baker Street was to consult with me.”

  The logic behind Holmes’s deduction was undeniable.

  We reached the police cordon, which consisted of several burly constables with linked arms. A Scotland Yard detective was already at work searching the body. To Holmes’s disappointment, the detective proved to be Inspector Lestrade.

  “The murder weapon,” said Holmes, and with a magnanimous gesture handed the baling hook to the detective.

  Lestrade passed the object to a constable, then looked Holmes up and down with those ferret-like eyes of his. “Don’t think that finding the murder weapon gives you special privileges in this case, Mr. Holmes. You’re merely a member of the public doing his duty.”

  “And if I can be of any further assistance...” Holmes offered, with a slight bow.

  Lestrade gave a dismissive wave. “The cabman has already described the assailant to us. Is there anything you can add to his statement?”

  “Not a thing,” said Holmes. “I’m sure you have everything under control.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Holmes. Leave this one to the professionals.” And with that, Lestrade ordered the attendants of the waiting mortuary van to load up our anonymous client.

  Once the crowd had dispersed and Mrs. Hudson had gone inside to lie down with a glass of brandy, Holmes sat on the step leading to our front door. Leaving him to meditate on the tragic events that had so unexpectedly come our way, I went upstairs to freshen up. I could not rest, however, and eventually went back downstairs and sat on the front step beside Holmes.

  The light of the rising sun cut through the pea-soup gloom and began to burn off the foul air that had been trapped by the fog. Ignoring the strange glances we were getting from passing pedestrians, Holmes remained deep in thought until, all at once, he pointed a long bony finger at where the pavement met the road. “There on the curb. Our client has left us that sample of chalky soil. It must have dislodged from his shoe when he alighted from the hansom. I’ve been meditating on its significance ever since.”

  Holmes rose, collected the soil sample, and placed it in his palm.

  To my layman’s eye, the lump of grey soil looked like marl or chalk. Holmes, however, would offer no opinion on the subject, but instead took the soil up to our apartments, where he began reassembling that part of his previous experiment which had tested for carbon compounds.

  “You seemed surprised that the cabbie picked up your client at Waterloo Station,” I noted.

  “Our client!” Holmes corrected. “Our client! And yes, Waterloo has somehow flummoxed me.” He placed some clear lime water in a beaker, set it above a Bunsen burner, and proceeded to crumble the soil into the heated liquid. “This soil, which looks undoubtedly chalky and which was also on the dead man’s shoes, is not consistent with a soil of the Surrey area. Since Waterloo Station deals exclusively with Surrey trains, what business did our client have being there?”

  Holmes took out his pocket watch and began timing the chemical reaction of the soil and the lime water. Gradually the clear liquid became milky, and then more and more opaque until one couldn’t see through to the other side of the beaker. At this point, Holmes checked his watch.

  “The carbon content is too high for marl,” Holmes concluded, “and the consistency is too dense to be conventional chalk.”

  “Then what is it?” I asked.

  “It’s clunch, Watson, a compressed variety of chalk.” He reached for Volume One of his Encyclopaedia of the British Isles, handed it to me, and instructed me to look up the village of Elmswell.

  It transpired that Elmswell, a once prosperous market town, was the location of England’s largest church constructed principally from clunch, and that there were several clunch quarries in the area. Close to the village was a small country train station situated on the Great Northern Line.

  “Our client must have disembarked from his train at King’s Cross,” I noted.

  “And what can we deduce from him making his way to Waterloo before backtracking to Baker Street?”

  “Perhaps he was concerned about being followed and wished to throw off his tail.”

  “It would certainly account for the facts,” said Holmes, his eyes shining in anticipation of this new and intriguing case. “Are you up for a countryside jaunt?” he asked.

  Indeed, I was.

  * * *

  Only after we had left King’s Cross Railway Station, and were wiping the city grime from our hands and faces, did I realise how far from certain of success our task of identifying the victim of the Baker Street attack was. However, Holmes had instructed me to pack only for a single night, so I guessed he knew more about our dead client than he had thus far divulged.

  As for Holmes, on the journey to Elmswell he retreated into that introspective mood of his that was so characteristic when a case was taxing his faculties. With his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped before him as if in prayer, he sat in the corner of our carriage, away from the window.

  Knowing that even the most prosaic observations would invite a sharp rebuke from my friend, I contented myself to watching the newly-ploughed fields of Hertfordshire pass by. The undulating farmland and the budding trees spread beneath a sky free from pollution were certainly a welcome change from the dirt and crowds of “The Big Smoke”, as London had become known. Yet try as I might, I could not turn my thoughts entirely away from the events of earlier that day at Baker Street.

  It was only when the train reached Blinxworth, our penultimate stop, that Holmes spoke. “Did you notice anything unusual about our client’s attire?” he asked.

  I confessed that beyond a general observation of his clothing, I had noticed very little.

  “Although his clothes were not those of a farm labourer,” said Holme
s, “his flat cap and frock jacket were equally not the garments of a gentleman farmer.”

  “Then you believe our client was employed in agriculture?”

  “His rough hands may have suggested a rural tradesman if they weren’t so deeply sun-tanned. I’m of a mind he was a farm foreman.”

  “And was anything else suggestive?” I urged.

  Holmes eyed me as a school master might view an underachieving pupil. “Our client travelled wearing a pair of those beige cotton trousers so beloved by young, outdoor sportsmen these days.”

  “Then perhaps he rode a horse to the train station,” I hazarded. “I gathered from your encyclopaedia that the station is some distance outside the village.”

  “But Elmswell is a small place, hardly big enough to warrant stabling facilities at its train station. The clue, Watson, was in two indentations encircling the cotton material near ends of his trouser legs.”

  “Bicycle clips!”

  “Precisely! We’ll make a detective of you yet. It does appear that our client cycled to the station before boarding the early train to London. Which tells me his bicycle should still be at the station.”

  Which indeed proved to be the case. When we disembarked at Elmswell, we handed the ticket stubs for the forward half of our journey to the station master, passed a tramp who sat begging at the station entrance, and found a single bicycle sheltered beneath the corrugated iron of the bicycle shed.

  Holmes stood thoughtfully for a moment. Then we retraced our steps, once more passing the gentleman of the road at the front of the station, to talk with the station master.

  John Harrison was a genial old railwayman, close to retirement judging by his age, whose tasks at the rural train station included the sale of tickets, collection of tickets, platform maintenance, as well as being the porter.

  When Sherlock Holmes introduced himself, Harrison was all too eager to entertain the “Great London Sleuth” to tea and biscuits in his humble office.