The Patient's Eyes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes

by Pirie, David

  ‘I do not believe that for a moment,’ I said, still infuriated by the sheer trivia and time-wasting cruelty of what had turned out to be Cullingworth’s so-called ‘drama’. ‘And there is an injured party. Baynes has spent time in prison.’

  ‘I will gladly compensate him and I am sure he does not want to pursue the matter.’

  Baynes agreed, as Cullingworth knew he would. He was still euphoric about his freedom and was in any case hardly likely to challenge his employer.

  ‘But it is perfectly clear what you intended,’ I pointed out, marvelling at Cullingworth’s idiotic vanity, ‘for you said you wished the thing to take on a life of its own. So you were quite happy to see us both rot.’

  There was just a flicker of reaction, which made me sure I was right. But the old arrogance returned quickly enough. ‘I fear, laddie,’ he said, ‘your sense of humour is almost as lacking as your powers of observation. For heaven’s sake, man, see the fun of the thing. It is a mere fiction played out in the arena of real life, Doyle! Enjoy it.’

  And he turned to leave.

  THE REANIMATOR’S CODE

  At least Cullingworth was required, along with the rest of us, to make a long statement to the police. I am sure Warner hoped he would find some charge to bring. But there was nothing. Cullingworth had taken care to have no dealings with the police directly so he had never lied to them. His hire of the body was a cruel liberty, but he had paid the seaman’s bereaved sister over the odds through a lawyer. At every turn his money helped him to escape punishment and to my great disgust at the end of the day he walked out of that police station with a reprimand, which I am sure the man took to be a compliment.

  Later Bell and I walked on the front to clear our heads. ‘It is just the nerve of the man,’ I said. ‘To think I once liked and trusted him. Is it true you said he was remarkable?’

  ‘I referred only to the development of his egotism. If his medical skills had kept pace, he could have been a legend.’

  I stopped. We had come to a low flight of steps that gave on to the beach.

  The Doctor knew quite well that, after what happened in Edinburgh, I had always hated beaches. He turned away tactfully and we started to walk back to my house in silence. ‘Remember,’ he said very quietly after a moment. ‘There has been some progress, especially with regard to Chicago, though we still have a long way to go.’

  ‘I hardly call it progress,’ I said. But neither of us continued the discussion. Indeed, it is almost all we said of it during his stay.

  There is an awful inevitability in the way one memory triggers another. As we walked back through the streets to my practice, I was powerless to stop them flooding back. Once again I saw in my mind the image of that small upstairs room. In itself that room might once have been ordinary enough but for me it has long seemed one of the most horrible in the world, my own gateway to hell. As I raced up the stairs and into it on that awful night in Edinburgh the first thing I saw was that a fire of newspapers was burning on the hearth in front of the grate. The flames sent flickering shadows dancing around the walls and added to the hellish effect of the place. The flames also picked out a glass jam jar, which lay beside the bed and contained something crimson.

  A woman I had seen once before lay on the bed, which was sticky and wet with a clear yet viscous liquid that later I realised was chloroform. Her nightdress had been jaggedy slashed as if by a knife but, not seeing the smaller cuts, she appeared untouched. She was certainly breathing. It took a little while before I saw the second slash in her nightdress below her waist and the redness under it. Yet this was merely another deceit. The redness was natural, obscene only in its flagrant display of her most personal features. It had been cut here for just this display and there was more. For mad ink writing was on the skin beside her exposed thigh and what was above. One word was ‘come’ and I think the other ‘in’. A twisted scrawled arrow of ink pointed beside it.

  And I saw him, as I saw the writing …

  The Doctor’s voice cut into that dreadful memory and wrenched me back to the street and the shops, and a crowd of men laughing by one of the front’s public houses. He had obviously seen where my mind was straying and wanted to bring me back. ‘You perhaps feel I could have taken you into my confidence.’

  I stared at him blankly. Then I realised he was talking about Cullingworth. Only a few hours ago I had feared for my liberty, now it seemed trifling beside that memory. But I was glad enough of the interruption. ‘Could you not?’ I asked. ‘It would have been pleasanter to know you believed in me.’

  The Doctor smiled. ‘But if I had, Doyle, your anger with Cullingworth might have threatened a safe conclusion.’

  I was about to reply but we had turned into my street and, to my astonishment, outside my house was a carriage and a woman seemed to be approaching the door.

  ‘Ah, see!’ said the Doctor. ‘A patient by the look of it. Your luck may be changing, Doyle.’

  I was struck dumb. And I could not have asked for a better cure for my own bitter memories than what followed that day. Three patients came to my door and I relished the chance to work. Indeed, I must have given them value for their money, for I remember taking great trouble with each one including a painstaking analysis of a gentleman’s digestive complaint, which concluded with the discovery that his cook had misunderstood her instructions and was serving his beefsteak almost raw. It was all a blessed relief.

  After I had shown the last one out, I did not wish a moment of inactivity and walked at once to the grocer to make my own purchases. I chose a fresh loaf, a roast guinea fowl, some butter and milk, and a small cheese and bacon, and even a modest flagon of cider, which the grocer enthused about. I had returned with my spoils and was laying them out in the consulting room when the Doctor entered.

  ‘Three patients, Doctor. My luck has changed and it has enabled me to buy you dinner at last.’ But then I stopped for his face told me the truth. ‘No, it is not luck, is it?’

  He looked at me very directly. ‘Well, I have an old colleague who retired here. I asked him to put word around. I am delighted to say news came while you were out that one of your new patients has already given a glowing report.’

  Perhaps I was a little disappointed that I owed the little start of my new practice not to my own efforts, but to my old mentor again. Yet I put such foolish pride aside. I knew I should be grateful and in my heart I was, and so I thanked him for his help and poured him a glass of the local cider. Dr Bell’s religion was strict, his father had been a member of the Scottish dissenting free church, but he was not a complete teetotaller. And we sat down companionably together.

  ‘There is’, he said, as he buttered his bread and cut a thin slice of cheese, ‘still a last puzzle to examine before we conclude this business.’ From his pocket he took the cipher we had been scrutinising so intently the evening before and handed it to me.

  I stared at the thing up to the line which had baffled the Doctor:

  59 13 17 8 16 12 8 7 5 2 11 11 3 7 13 20 5 14 8 10 3 6 6 5 14 21 4 2 7 11

  12 12 13 20 8 10 2 14 11 7 5 20 8 15 11 12 5 16 15 7 13 17 13 19 2 7 11

  12 8 8 15 5 22 5 10 13 11 5 2 14 2 19 13 6 6 10 2 14 10 8 7 14 8 15 13

  14 15 18 13 7 11 5 10 3 6 13 7 6 1 11 2 13 15 20 13 14 10 8 17 1 10 6 13

  5 17 11 2 12 13 20 8 10 7 8 13 11 8 15 13 14 8 14 11 5 7 8 6 1 14 8 4 19

  2 7 17 2 19 15 7 13 17 13 4 12 5 10 12 4 5 6 6 5 14 19 2 6 19 8 7 8 13 6

  18 8 2 18 8 13 14 15 7 8 13 6 16 5 11 3 13 11 5 2 14 16 11 12 8 11 12 5

  14 20 16 12 2 3 6 15 12 13 20 8 13 6 5 19 8 2 19 5 11 16 2 4 14 9 3 16 11

  13 16 12 8 10 7 8 13 11 5 2 14 15 2 8 16 5 14 17 1 5 14 16 18 5 7 13 11 5

  2 14 4 12 5 10 12 5 16 17 13 7 1 4 2 6 6 16 11 2 14 8 10 7 13 19 2 11 16

  8 2 5 10 8 18 11 5 2 14 13 6 17 13 14 3 16 10 7 5 18 11 2 19 1 8 1 8 19 7

  ‘You had a problem with this eleventh line and its “19 1 8 1 8 19” I recall.’

  ‘I did,’ sa
id the Doctor taking a drink of the cider, which I was delighted to find was as sharp and fruity as the grocer promised. ‘You see, Doyle, in many ways this is a child’s cipher. A serious expert would probably resolve it very quickly indeed, far quicker than I. It is true that the part which puzzled me would puzzle them, but I feel sure they would break the cipher quickly even so.’

  ‘But how?’ I asked.

  ‘Merely,’ he said putting down his glass, ‘as I started to show you last night, by analysing the frequency and pattern of the numbers which we take to represent letters. With the exception of that oddity in the eleventh line, the code appears to be fixed, but it is not sequential. By which I mean that while “8” is indeed as I guessed an “E”, it does not follow that “F” is “9” or even “7”. It seemed to me at once from studying the thing that the sequence of numbers for letters here has been determined not by the order of the alphabet (which is the most childish of all methods) but by some other text, presumably a page of prose. So the nineteenth new letter which appears on that page, or possibly the first letter of the nineteenth word on it, would tell us what “19” stands for here.’

  ‘Then the thing is impossible, for we have no way of knowing what the page is.’

  ‘No, it is not, for even if we cannot discover the key,’ said the Doctor, ‘we can, as I say, revert to analysing the pattern and frequency of the numbers. The cipher is open to this method of decryption because the person who created it has constructed it in a somewhat childish way as a fixed cipher. If he had not, I can assure you the numbers would run far higher than twenty-three and many different numbers would refer to the same letter. I have seen treasure-hunting codes with variable keys based around the words of long manuscripts, which run as high as 2000 and higher. These are desperately hard, as so many modern treasure seekers have found.’

  I laughed. ‘Doctor, you are not going to tell me you have examined a cipher of buried treasure lately?’

  ‘Certainly I have,’ said Bell. ‘A gentleman from Virginia who knew of my interest in such things sent it to me and I believe it to be perfectly genuine too, but I was doubtful I could ever solve it for precisely this reason. It utilises a shifting cipher and its key is a very long piece of text. In that kind of key cipher, unlike the present one, what the creator does is to utilise an entire manuscript and number each word. Then a message is encrypted by taking the first letter of each numbered word as your changing alphabet. The number 500, for example, will refer to the 500th word in that text and if that word is “yellow” then the 500 will stand for “Y”, but then if the 300th word is “year” then the number 300 can also be utilised as “Y” and undoubtedly many other words can as well. Without the key on that kind of cipher, what hope is there? But this is entirely different.’

  ‘I would very much like to see your treasure code,’ I said. ‘But on this one you say with each letter fixed, you look for patterns?’

  ‘Precisely.’ The Doctor seized the piece of paper. ‘I felt at once there was a strong probability that “8” equals “E”, for as I said, “8” is the most frequent number here and “E” is the most frequently used letter in English. Now, once I have made an assessment of what stands for the letter “E”, the word I look for at once in a cipher such as this is “the”. And if the encrypter has been fool enough to number his letters using as a key the order in which they appeared in a page of English prose rather than taking the first letters of words, then the chances are he too will have come across a “the” early and if so, we will get two consecutive numbers repeating themselves before the letter “E”. Can you see such a thing here by any chance?’

  I stared at the page with interest. I was determined to do better than I had over Garcia. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘“11 12 8” is there early on. And it reappears at least nine times. Here on the seventh, twelfth, and fourteenth line, twice on the eighteenth and another four times after.’

  ‘Admirable,’ said Bell. ‘This was exactly the point I had reached when my eye fell on that damnable eleventh line. I had decided “11” was “T”, “12” was “H” and, as we have seen, “8” was “E”. I foresaw some detailed work and a long night ahead but I was sure I was on my way. Then, you recall, my eye fell on that line and I faltered. “19 1 8 1 8 19” threw out all my plans. If “8” was “E”, then unless I was going mad, “1” and “19” from their distribution through the document must surely be consonants. We can state quite categorically the order of commonness of English letters. It is “e a o i d h n r s t u y c f g l m w b k p q z”. Bearing this in mind, in a document so long “1” and “19” had to be consonants or “U”, which I had discarded. If, however, you try every consonant in the combination “19 1 8 1 8 19” you will get gibberish. Indeed, I began to wonder if the thing was Latin. I was on the point of giving up in disgust as you recall. And then I looked down at your table here and I had the answer in a trice.’

  ‘But how?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘I will show you,’ he said. ‘I have told you it is childish.’ And he held up the book Frankenstein and its frontispiece. At first I could not see what in the world he meant.

  FRANKENSTEIN;

  on,

  THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.

  IN THREE VOLUMES.

  Did I request ther, Maker, from my day

  To would me was? Did I solicit thee

  From darkness to promote me?——

  PARADISE Lort.

  VOL. 1.

  London,

  PRINTED FOR

  LACKINGTON, HUGHES. HARDING. MAYOR. & JONES,

  FISSBURT SQUARE.

  1818.

  And then I saw the date at the bottom, and I stared at it and then back at the cipher. And back at the date. And I laughed out loud. ‘So …’ I said, ‘“1818” is not a code at all. It is a date! Left in there to add confusion.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bell. ‘But also as a thumping clue. I told you the person who encrypted this was childish. You had been provided with the cipher’s key! You already had it here, Doyle, as I saw at once when I made the connection. I went straight to the first page of the novel, the first sentence, in fact:

  You will rejoice to hear no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

  ‘As you see, the last word on the first line is “the”. I was quite sure now I had the key to the cipher. And I studied that page carefully. The sentence gave me most of the cipher key. He had numbered his keys in the order the letters appear in it.

  ‘Y=1

  O=2

  U=3

  W=4

  I=5

  L=6

  R=7

  E=8

  J=9

  C=10

  T=11

  H=12

  A=13

  N=14

  D=15

  S=16

  M=17

  P=18

  F=19

  V=20

  G=21

  B=22

  ‘I could have proceeded at once,’ continued Bell, ‘but, in fact, later in the page I easily picked out his “K” as “23” here in this sentence down the page:

  I am already far north of London and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.

  ‘He did not need a “Q” or an “X” or a “Z”. After that, of course, it was merely a matter of going and writing the thing out and adding some punctuation. He had used the cipher to communicate with “Garcia” in the personal column so I could now translate the messages myself and the man’s address, and summon him to the house. I have the complete translation of the message that was found in “Garcia’s” pocket here if you have to see it, but I warn you it will not please you.’

  I took it from him eagerly and this is what I read.

  I, James Heriot Turnavine Cullingworth, have contrived this drama for the edification of all concerned and particularly to advance my claim to ha
ve created an entirely new form of drama which will involve real people and real situations. The thing should have a life of its own just as the creation does in my inspiration which is Mary Wollstonecraft’s exceptional manuscript of 1818, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. I am therefore using the book as a key to this cipher though I suspect nobody and certainly not Doyle will be clever enough to disentangle it. If they are, then of course I take the credit, if not I fear the players will have to endure the game mutatis mutandis.

  I will use this cipher to communicate with those players like Garcia whom I have hired but they will know nothing of its larger purpose or indeed of this note.

  The coup at the centre of it is of course a body I have bought quite legally from its rightful inheritor Mrs Anya Tabares.

  Let the play commence.

  As so often, Cullingworth’s arrogance took my breath away. Here was still further proof the man would have left me to rot. I was expected to ‘endure the game mutatis mutandis’. After I read it, I was so incensed I almost made up my mind to take the thing round to Inspector Warner immediately, but a moment’s cooler reflection told me why the Doctor had withheld it. There was nothing here we did not know, it would only mean more questions and more statements, and Cullingworth would no doubt take it all as further tribute to his genius. We were both wearied of the whole affair.

  Once we had finished our early dinner I was rather surprised when the Doctor asked if he might do some work upstairs undisturbed in the spare bedroom where I had first encountered him. I did not see him for the rest of the evening, but I heard him moving about and now I recalled hearing some banging and thumping on the stairs earlier in the day while I was absorbed in interviewing my patients. Thinking about it, I decided he probably had some academic materials that needed to be packed for the return trip to Edinburgh and that the inn had not proved a suitable facility for the purpose. If so, I was delighted to be of service.