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

by Pirie, David

  ‘Then you have done it?’ I asked.

  ‘I have the start of one. I believe that, unlike the other, the numbers denote a combination of words and letters. The readings are variable on account of the problems I have mentioned, yet the thing translates. I could hardly believe my eyes when I first began work and almost at once I had for “48 94 63” “City of Carolina”. But although I was making sense I soon saw it lacks the proper flow of the other cipher and is more of a cryptic message. Much of it remains obscure but the full beginning of the cipher seems to be: “It is a white beach three miles from the City of Carolina”. Then later: “Make the point three miles from the glass.” ’

  ‘But that is exactly what the treasure message is like in the story itself!’

  ‘Precisely,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘I suspect that is the point of the thing. The treasure message in “The Gold-Bug” begins as follows: “A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat forty-one degrees and thirteen minutes — … shoot from the left eye …” Now, this seems to be gibberish, yet in the story the hero uses it to deduce how to find Kidd’s treasure. Perhaps I am forgoing a great opportunity, but I am driven to the conclusion that, despite the similarity of the message I have decoded, no such option is available here. The code is genuine but I have finally come to the belief, I regret to say, that the Beale cipher, while partly translatable and not without serious interest, is probably a hoax. It may even be a Masonic one for the first cipher text I deciphered has various links to Masonic ritual, with its talk of a stone vault and iron.’

  Despite the lack of pirate gold, I was persuaded by this solution and thrilled to find a direct connection to a writer who had long been my hero. But above all I was impressed by the Doctor’s scrupulous decoding and now we reapplied ourselves to the object of the exercise and stared again at that page of Greenwell’s notebook. ‘Is it possible,’ I asked, ‘that the letters and numbers are not some kind of cipher but rather a cipher key?’

  The Doctor sighed. ‘That has occurred to me. If so, numbers of the code would equal the letters here: “1” would be “I”; “2” would be “L”; “3” would be “O”; “4” would be “V” and so forth. Not many letters, but then perhaps they are all you need to break the rest, especially if you have “E” and “O”. But I fear that in this case our position is hopeless, Doyle. What use is a key without the message itself? Perhaps that is what was taken and without it we had as well throw this away. And yet …’ He stared back down at the notebook. ‘It is that one odd symbol where hope lies. If we could read that I am sure all would be clear. Well, I will keep on trying and I hope you have found some instruction.’

  I yawned and lay back in my bed. ‘Certainly,’ I said, ‘perhaps it will come to me in my sleep.’

  ‘I will be quite happy’, said the Doctor, picking up all his papers, ‘merely if you sleep.’

  I could see his approach had had the desired effect for my mind was less agitated. ‘As for Beale,’ I asked, feeling very drowsy now, ‘will the second cipher, you think, ever be completely decoded?’

  ‘I do not know. It is certainly intriguing,’ he answered, standing over me with a smile. ‘In fact, I may come back to it one day. Perhaps if men invent thinking machines, which can tabulate and quickly cross off all permutations, we will get further. But the truth is I have a suspicion we never will and this cipher is on a level of difficulty that will always ultimately defeat us, at least beyond my modest efforts. Now I will put away my games though I am glad they have diverted my patient. It is time for you to sleep more and we have much to do tomorrow.’

  Certainly, as I recall the memory of that strange night, I note his words have proved true. Despite much ink and erudition, nobody has got further with Beale’s ciphers than Joseph Bell.3

  SWALLOWED BY MIST

  Next morning, the Doctor would have me rest but I felt far stronger and absolutely insisted I should accompany him back to the rectory, where he intended to persuade Mrs Blythe that the time had come for some urgent precautions. Whatever the resistance of her husband, Bell planned to make sure that Heather Grace was away from that place.

  It was the mistiest day I had yet seen; a white pall hung over the trees and the edge of the road, as our cab turned into the wooded road. ‘So,’ the Doctor was saying as we went along, ‘we have a list of boarding establishments quite near us, which seem to be safe and dull in the extreme if she can stand the tedium.’

  He suddenly broke off and I could see why. For ahead of us were lights, and I recognised Inspector Warner and other police. Clustered around the side of the road, they made an eerie sight in that ground mist, for their feet were hard to see and it looked almost as if they were floating. Nearer the wood two other policemen stood looking down at the ground.

  We climbed out of the cab and I was hardly surprised to see how worried Warner looked, for now he had two unsolved murders on his hands. ‘Dr Bell, Dr Doyle,’ he greeted us, turning to me with special attention. ‘I am glad to see you better, sir, it is a terrible business. I am very sorry.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bell. ‘We have decided it would be best to bring Miss Grace into town here, where she would be safer. You have found nothing?’

  Warner looked concerned. ‘But I don’t understand. I sent a sergeant round to you with the news.’

  Bell spoke sharply. ‘We made a call at the telegraph office. I had to send some telegrams, so he would have missed us. What is it?’

  But as he spoke, I made it out. One of the policemen on the edge of the wood moved and I saw the handlebars. It was Heather Grace’s bicycle.

  ‘She was on her way to see you,’ said Inspector Warner.

  I do not have a very complete memory of the events of that day. My concussion of the previous night, together with the awful news of the disappearance, combined to send me into a fever of activity. I know that while the police themselves searched, the Doctor and I combed through large areas of the wood and that I must have walked almost three miles, trying to find anything around the spot where the bicycle was found. The mist had lifted a little by the time I reached the ugly abandoned cottage in the clearing where I had been pushed out of a window. It was empty and I moved on. But wherever I looked, I found nothing and saw nothing except those accursed brambles and briars. I was sick to death of that wood now and hated the sight of every tree in it.

  There was no better news when I went back to the road, so I returned to search further. More hours passed, the light was starting to go and I was ploughing through thicket after thicket until they all looked the same. Bell had been following a nearby path but his fixed frown told me his mind was elsewhere.

  Eventually Inspector Warner came to us both. He looked grim and exhausted. ‘Gentlemen, we have been through the area twice now. You can do no further good by staying here. I will put some men on watch overnight and we will try again at first light. It is all that can be done.’

  ‘What of her uncle?’ I asked.

  ‘We have questioned him. He seems upset.’

  ‘Of course, what do you expect?’ I said angrily, thinking of his display of strength in his study the previous day, the awful gleam in his eye and his tactical withdrawal. ‘He is an actor. Give me time with him alone.’

  ‘We cannot do that, sir.’

  ‘Well, I am not leaving.’ I strode back into the wood.

  The Doctor did not follow me at once, but stayed talking with Warner. Some time later I was standing, steeped in misery, looking fruitlessly at the ground around a copse of ash trees, when he appeared. We stood there for a moment in silence.

  Finally, I broke it: ‘So, Doctor, have we lost?’

  He was quiet for a moment. ‘I do not know.’

  ‘I wanted to bring her back earlier, you recall, if only we had done so …’ This was unfair of me but I felt such bitterness at the thought of the missed opportunity.

  ‘That too I do not know. If her uncle is responsible, he could probably have abducted her from a boarding hou
se.’

  ‘So it is as before. We have failed again, Doctor.’ The mist wafted at my feet almost like a tangible proof of my despair.

  ‘We have not failed yet.’ He fixed his eyes on me. ‘And as you know, we have had our successes.’

  ‘But what is the good if we lose when it matters?’

  We stood there a moment. The sun was casting its few last rays through the branches of the ash trees in the copse. I know my words were harsh but it is difficult to convey the sheer weight of my anguish. I felt that all the shadows I had been dodging since that awful case in Edinburgh had now returned to haunt me. It was as if I were doomed to see all the things I loved mutilated and destroyed. And was this not some kind of punishment for the hubris Bell and I had shown in thinking we could solve even the worst crimes?

  ‘Perhaps mistakes have been made,’ conceded the Doctor. ‘In the most serious cases they often are. It is part of the pattern. But we have not yet finally lost.’ I was about to scoff, but he went on with more severity, ‘And currently, Doyle, I am afraid to say you are impeding my progress.’

  ‘That is arrogance.’ I was ready to walk away.

  ‘No, it is fact.’ He was less angry now, more patient. ‘Last night there was active work I could have done on the question of Baynes’s death, a matter I need to research. Have you ever heard of Majuba Hill.’ He had turned and was looking away into the trees.

  ‘The Boer massacre.’ It was rare for him to throw out a hint like this in the middle of an enquiry and it says something of my state of mind that I was barely interested.

  ‘Exactly. I have had to content myself with cables in order to stay by you and see you were all right. That is as it should be. But now you are physically whole I cannot possibly waste my time nursemaiding you. Let me get on with the case, which I accept is a very difficult one, and in some ways agonising or else’ — and here he turned back to me — ‘we part for good.’

  I could see something in his eyes. There was anger, of course, but much more. It was pain. I realised now of course what I should have seen before, if I had not been so caught up in my own feelings. The Doctor was in many ways as emotionally engaged as I was. I felt somewhat chastened. ‘Very well,’ I said simply, ‘if it helps your progress.’

  ‘It may. And you should not lose heart. Believe me, in the darkest hour sometimes …’

  ‘But that was just how she felt,’ I interrupted with passion for I wanted the Doctor to understand how she had suffered. ‘It is what makes it so sad. If only this man Horler had not treated her so badly. He was her one great love. But she had hoped to move on from it.’

  While I was talking, Bell had fixed his eyes on something in the tree in front of us and now he started and turned to me. ‘What did you say?’ he asked somewhat flatly but quickly.

  I was surprised by this odd tone. ‘That he was her one great love and she hoped to get past it. Why? What is it?’

  For the Doctor appeared to have lost interest again and was moving closer to the tree. He was excited. ‘Yes! Yes, of course. You have heard of lovers carving their initials? A pledge of their love.’

  I looked and saw he was staring at some ancient letters someone had carved in the tree, dated 1801. They could not possibly have any bearing on our case, for they were almost a hundred years old.

  ‘But these initials are ancient. They can have nothing to do with this case.’

  ‘You are quite right,’ said the Doctor. ‘In themselves they can have no relevance, but I am still grateful to whoever made them. You see, Doyle, if you follow two chains of thought, you will at last find some point of intersection that should lead you approximately to the truth. And here on this tree is our intersection. I am grateful to you, extremely grateful for bringing me to it.’ He had taken out Greenwell’s notebook, and was studying the page with the strange symbol on it. ‘You have helped me understand something,’ he stated with some satisfaction as we walked back together to the police on the road.

  I suppose the Doctor’s excitement should have renewed my hopes but it did not. I spent an awful night, thinking of that dank wood and of Heather Grace. When morning finally came, the news was as bleak as ever. The officers, posted by Warner, had seen and heard nothing. A massive search had resumed at dawn with absolutely no result. And now the mist had come down again.

  Bell was nowhere in evidence and I heard this news when I reached the road, accompanied by one of Warner’s men. He had no inkling that I was close to the missing woman and assumed I had been called merely as a doctor in case they found her. ‘You will not be needed, Doctor,’ he told me with an air of confidential importance. ‘The word is we have no hope of finding her alive. Even if her abductor spared her, last night was bitterly cold.’

  The mist was so thick now that we could hardly see the trees from the road but I insisted on entering the wood all the same. I stood there alone in the mist and thought of his words, and wondered if she was lying anywhere near me. I did not search very much, if at all. But when I walked back to the road I was cold and numb. And the mist round the trees seemed more than ever like a tide flowing around a dank beach.

  THE HUNTER IN THE DARK

  Another day passed, during which the Doctor was consumed with his researches, and I barely saw him until he came in hastily with news that Warner had decided to subject Charles Blythe to a further interview.

  I was anxious to attend, but to my surprise the Doctor was even more so, weaving through the noon crowds on the pavement with fastidious urgency. Despite our haste, the interrogation had already begun when we reached the police station, a flat grey building so close to the railway station that I had walked past it when I first arrived at the town. Blythe sat opposite Warner and two other policemen, as Bell and I were shown in to sit behind them.

  Blythe certainly looked a changed man. All the arrogance and fight seemed to have left him. He was haggard and he trembled slightly. I was glad to observe Warner had changed tactics and was now questioning him very aggressively.

  ‘I keep telling you,’ Blythe said as they went back over events, apparently for the fourth time. ‘I have no idea what has happened. As I say, I have abandoned my attempt to block the inheritance.’

  ‘Perhaps, sir,’ suggested Warner, ‘because you know her money is already yours. It will be if she is dead.’

  There was no rage from Blythe at this suggestion, quite the opposite. His hands shook more. ‘You think I want her dead?’ he asked. ‘First poor Guy and now her. It is awful.’

  I was trying to decide if any of this was genuine, when the Doctor intervened. ‘Tell me, Mr Blythe,’ he said politely without a hint of the argument they had had in Blythe’s study, ‘does the name Majuba mean anything to you? Do you know someone who suffered there?’

  Blythe started. ‘Why, yes, I do,’ he answered, evidently surprised. ‘But it was supposed to be private. He is a poor devil. But he went back overseas.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Bell quickly, ‘I believe that poor devil is part of this. And you must tell me how they first met.’

  ‘Very well.’ Blythe seemed unsure of where this was leading. ‘He was stationed near our house. The Royal Marines. They were engaged in exercises all through the wood.’

  ‘Yes?’ Bell leant forward with what I could see was enormous interest. ‘What was his field?

  ‘He was a munitions officer.’

  The effect of these words on the Doctor was extraordinary. He was out of his seat in a trice. ‘My God! Then why the devil are we wasting time? We may already be too late. Come, Warner, at once.’

  Inspector Warner was baffled, ‘But I do not …’

  ‘There is no time for understanding! We must get back to the scene now. And I need the tools of the geologist. An axe and above all an auger.’ The Doctor all but ran out of the room and we scrambled to follow, leaving Charles Blythe, his mouth wide open with astonishment, staring after us.

  Warner was still at sea, but his respect for the Doctor outweighed any doubt
s he may have had. Within an hour we were back at the wood with a full complement of men. I had rarely ever seen the Doctor so energised, and he looked quite a spectacle as he moved into the mist and the trees, brandishing an axe as if he were about to commit murder himself. He made for the spot where I had first seen the cyclist, close to where poor Baynes had originally noticed the tracks and where Miss Grace’s bicycle had been found. Here he stood and surveyed the ground, though there was little enough to see. Meanwhile the police cabs, carrying spades and other items he had requested, moved along the road to be as close as possible to him.

  Warner went back to them while the Doctor stood, concentrating fiercely on the terrain. For a moment I thought nothing was going to happen and then quite suddenly he went into action. He tilted his axe upside down, moved to where the bicycle had been found and started to walk from this spot into the wood, banging the axe head hard against the ground as he went. His eyes were half closed and he had his head to one side as he listened intently to each blow.

  There was a loud clank from behind us on the road as the police started to unload spades. He looked up at me sharply. ‘Doyle, tell them to keep quiet at all costs. We may already have lost her.’

  His tone renewed all my worst fears and I ran back to the road where Warner was supervising the unloading. He saw my urgency and silenced his men at once.

  Warner and I moved into the trees a little way and watched the Doctor. He was still banging that axe head against the ground and listening intently as he weaved a trail back and forth, which took him slowly into the wood. The spectacle was an odd one. I could see that Warner for one could not make head or tail of it. ‘What is this now?’ he murmured to me. ‘I have followed him faithfully, but I hope he has not taken leave of his senses.’