The House at Baker Street

by Michelle Birkby

  Mary had fought. Once she knew what was happening, she’d fought like a tigress. She had left her mark before he bound her.

  There was a man standing there: of middling height, slightly plump, dark hair oiled down, rounded shoulders. His dove-grey coat was torn, and I could see the back of his hand bound with a bandage. This was the hand that held the gun, pointed at Mary.

  There was another gun on the desk, close by his hand, ready loaded, I imagined. These were not revolvers, but single-shot guns, very old-fashioned. I wondered why he used these? Perhaps this was all he had. He did not strike me as a man who liked to use guns. His preferred weapons were words, and if he could not use words, then knives. I moved closer, across the lawn.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called, and turned.

  I froze still.

  It was him: the man I had talked to outside the Whitechapel Lady’s home. Her solicitor – her murderer. His face was pinched and plump, and he still had pince-nez firmly clamped to his short, slightly bulbous nose. His eyes were small, but his face was very much what you would expect to find behind the desk of a legal firm. His hair – which I guessed was dyed that unnaturally dark colour – was parted in the middle and plastered down to his head. He was all very much as he was before, when I talked to him in the street and Mary was rude to him, the very pattern of a solicitor. He stopped for a moment, talking off his spectacles, laying them down, then pinching his nose. They must hurt him. He was obviously very tired. He turned, suddenly.

  ‘Holmes, I know that’s you!’

  He did not look like a man to be afraid of. He looked like a man to be overlooked, to have his skills used, but never to be befriended. He was a man to be ever so slightly mocked. Someone to be found always in the background, someone to be underestimated, someone to be ignored.

  Well, him and me both. I stepped into the light.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I am Mr Sherlock Holmes’ housekeeper. I am Mrs Hudson.’

  I stepped into the room, through the window, making sure to keep him between Mary and me. I wanted to make sure he could point the gun at only one of us. With Mary unconscious, he chose me. He kept the gun aimed in my direction, turning as I entered the room and peering at me, obviously bitterly disappointed.

  ‘Mrs Hudson?’ he repeated, confused.

  Once his back was to Mary, her eyes opened, she saw me, and winked – obviously the unconsciousness had been feigned. She sat upright and began to pull at her bonds. I wasn’t sure how successful she could be, but the longer I kept his attention, the more chance she had to get free.

  ‘We’ve met, I think,’ he said, squinting at me. Perhaps he really needed those pince-nez he had worn before. Perhaps he just wasn’t seeing anything clearly any more. His eyes were crazed, like a trapped rabid dog.

  ‘Outside the Whitechapel Lady’s home,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh.’ He waved his hand. I was of supreme unimportance. He’d forgotten me as soon as he saw me. I had not played any part in his calculations, either as Mr Holmes’ housekeeper or the woman he met in Whitechapel.

  ‘I have introduced myself,’ I said to him, very evenly. ‘It is only polite you do the same.’ He laughed, but there was no amusement in it. There was, however, a trace of mania. I had not expected him to be sane, but I had expected him to be under control. After all, this was a man who thrived on control. And yet . . . there was something about him. His control was slipping.

  ‘Kirkby, York, Skipton, Overblow, take your pick,’ he told me. If I had seen that look in his eyes when I had talked to him in Whitechapel, I would have known him to be more than a mere solicitor. And yet then he had been so utterly calm.

  ‘Those are aliases,’ I said. Behind him, I could see the rope around Mary’s wrist was loosening. She twisted and pulled at it, and the rope stretched. She had tiny hands, she wouldn’t need to pull it much further to slip out of it. ‘Your real name, if you please.’

  ‘I’m not sure I remember,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s been so long since I used it. When will he come? I’ve been waiting.’

  He saw my gaze slip past him, and he turned round to face Mary, but she was fast and she quickly slumped in her chair. He stared at her, suspicious.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked him. ‘What’s changed, you’ve changed?’

  He turned back to me, unsure, wavering.

  ‘I don’t . . . nothing!’ he insisted. ‘All is as I planned it.’

  ‘Not quite,’ I said dryly.

  ‘It will be,’ he declared. ‘This is just an extra step. He is still expected. I was promised.’

  ‘I see,’ I said calmly. So the plan was still to go after Mr Holmes, was it? This re-arranged plan of his, was that what was shaking him to the core? He was always mad, I’d wager, but he had his limits. Yet something, someone, had pushed him beyond those limits. Had someone given him a monomania fixated on Holmes, and pushed him over the edge at the same time? Or was it always destined to end like this for him?

  ‘Then we have time to talk,’ I said to him. ‘Tell me, the Yorkshire names – a deliberate clue? As with the cab ride bills?’

  He smiled, and I have never seen such a cruel smile.

  ‘Such clever clues. So subtle! He was right. I laid such a clever trail.’

  ‘Who was right?’ I asked.

  ‘Him,’ he insisted. ‘Just him.’ Either he did not know the name, or even in his madness, he would not reveal it.

  Mary had slipped one hand out of the rope now, and she was pulling at the bond round her other wrist. If he turned, he would see her hands were almost free. Given his current state of mind, there was a good chance he’d shoot her there and then. I had to keep his attention on me.

  ‘A trail I followed,’ I reminded him gently. Always be gentle with a madman, I had heard the phrase somewhere. I kept my voice soft and low.

  ‘You’re just a woman. You haven’t the mind to work it out,’ he said dismissively. Behind him, Mary shot him a glance of sheer hatred. I felt a flash of anger myself, but I controlled it. He had a loaded gun pointed right at me, his finger on the trigger, and a mind rapidly losing its grip on reality. Any of us could die in a second.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ I said soothingly. Mary yanked at her bonds, obviously angry. ‘Mr Holmes worked out the clues. He’s coming soon.’

  ‘I know. I was told . . . what was that?’ he shouted suddenly. Outside a fox had screamed, those terrible screams that sound like someone being murdered, in an extremity of pain. For a moment the gun swung towards the window. I stepped forward, but he swung it back to me. It was barely inches from me, and I felt a frisson of fear.

  ‘Just a fox,’ I reassured him. ‘You should be used to it by now.’

  He nodded. I realized he thought he would stay, that tomorrow morning, his life would go on as always. He had not planned for, or even expected, failure.

  ‘I suppose you’re tired of waiting,’ I went on, breathless now, afraid, but somehow intoxicated by how close to the edge I was. I could not have stopped now for all the tea in China. And besides, Mary had her other hand almost free. But she still had to work loose the ropes round her waist and feet. ‘That’s why you kidnapped Mary Watson, isn’t it? You thought it would pull Dr Watson, and therefore Mr Holmes, towards you.’

  ‘I still have Mary Watson,’ he said quietly. ‘And I have you. He’ll come.’

  No. No one would come. Even if Billy woke now, and even if Mr Holmes and John could come immediately, it was still such a long way from Baker Street to here. And there was no time to wait. This man in front of me, this man with a gun in his hand, had lost all control. I could see his hand shake and his eyes dart towards the garden and the way he jumped at every sigh. The man I had met outside the Whitechapel Lady’s home had been a restrained man, ordered, playing his part perfectly, but that had all gone. It had slipped away.

  He babbled and talked and whispered, half to himself, half to me, but sometimes, I felt to another pers
on in that room, someone else behind Mary and me, someone he was convinced was listening. His secrets, kept for years inside his mind, spilled out of him. The scandals and the truths and the names! All his silent years in the background had ended. He laid the pieces of his game in front of me, and I listened, and I watched his gun, and I knew no one else would come.

  It would end here and now, between the three of us in this room. The housekeeper, the wife and the solicitor. No great hero. No staunch companion, just us three.

  Very well then. Let us end it.

  He gibbered on and on, secrets spilling like wine from a broken bottle. He could barely keep up with his own words. He looked exhausted, drained to the dregs, but he would not stop. It was as if, after being silent for all those years, he had to tell everything on this final night. All those secrets, all there, in his head, bursting to be told – and tonight, he finally revealed them all.

  He walked up and down, up and down in front of me, desk to window and back again, watching me, all the time. If ever he started to turn towards Mary, I called him back to me. And then, every time he looked at me, he pointed the gun at me. He walked to the window and stared out of it, telling me some foul tale, the gun hanging loose in his hand, and then, in a moment, his arm would come up and the barrel would point at me again, and I knew I could be dead in seconds. As long as he didn’t look at Mary. As long as he kept talking to me. Mary was very tightly tied. It seemed to take an age for her to completely free herself, for him to talk on and on, but in truth, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes. Occasionally he’d mention a name, just the beginning of one, but the same name, over and over again. I didn’t catch it, but he mentioned promises and endings and glory, all from this name he kept whispering under his breath.

  But after a while I couldn’t bear to listen to any more. The love stories and betrayals and secret children and letters, so many letters, were driving me out of my mind. I had to stop him. If he was going to keep talking, I was going to get a few answers for myself.

  ‘How long have you been planning this?’ I asked, interrupting him.

  ‘Not long,’ he said, surprised. ‘I hadn’t even heard of Sherlock Holmes until a couple of years ago. But once I knew he existed – it was so marvellous. It has been wonderful. Such joy, matching wits with him, Holmes, the greatest mind of the age!’

  ‘Who? Who told you about Sherlock Holmes?’ I asked, but he just stared at me, puzzled. Somewhere in his mind was a blank spot, and every time I asked who had led him to this, it pushed him a little further over the edge. When that happened, his grip on the gun tightened, and he pointed it more firmly in my direction. Whatever was in that part of his mind, he did not like me digging into it. It made him want me dead. I wonder if others had asked? I wonder if perhaps the Whitechapel Lady had asked the very same question and it had pushed him over the edge? But I had no intention of playing the heroine for truth’s sake. It was time to take a different tack.

  ‘Where is he?’ he moaned, like a woman waiting for a recalcitrant lover.

  ‘He is in a cab now,’ I assured him. ‘He is just leaving Baker Street. Can we talk, until he comes?’

  Perhaps if I kept him talking, Mary would free herself, escape and manage to get help. Besides, I desperately wanted to find out who was really behind this. He nodded in agreement.

  ‘You must have been so bored,’ I said gently. ‘A clever man like you, playing all those complex mind games with such easy victims. It must have been such a thrill when you first realized you could control these women. It was all so easy, and you never failed. And no one even knew who you were? It must be deeply unsatisfactory, to be so clever and so devious and have no one know. No one knows exactly what you can do.’

  ‘You don’t know either,’ he said darkly, turning round towards Mary suddenly.

  ‘I know everything!’ I shouted, distracting him so he wouldn’t register that her hands and waist were loose. He turned back to me, puzzled and angry and wary. In that moment, I realized I really did know everything. I had all the pieces in my head, and I had thrown them all up in the air, and they had fallen neatly into place, to create the perfect picture.

  ‘I should imagine you started as a country solicitor,’ I said quickly. ‘And one day, someone, a rich someone, a lady, gave you a secret, and instead of keeping it safe, you blackmailed her. You did it so cleverly and so subtly, you weren’t caught, and so you did it again and again.’

  ‘I know you’re only killing time until Holmes comes,’ he said to me, and I saw the madness flooding his eyes as he spoke. And yet he watched me and did not turn to Mary. The gun was raised, and pointed at my head, and for a moment, he thought about killing me. But then he lowered it again.

  ‘Not till he gets here. That’s what’s supposed to happen,’ he said. ‘That’s how I planned it. I sent Laura Shirley to him. I even sent him Adam Ballant. How could Holmes ignore the death of his own brother’s man?’ I could not let him know I was afraid – but I could not let him know I was his adversary either. Mary pulled at the ropes around her feet. He had tied her so tight.

  ‘You made so much money you were able to move to London. You need never work again if you didn’t want to. You didn’t need to blackmail any more, but you liked the power. You stole secrets, not for money, but power. You snapped your fingers and they danced to your tune. Oh, Mr Holmes will be so impressed!’

  ‘He promised me he’d come. He swore he’d be here,’ he kept repeating.

  ‘He will, he’s so close, he’s almost here. Let me finish, please? When they didn’t have secrets, you made them up,’ I extemporized. ‘Such clever lies, so easily told, so easy to believe. Who’d suspect you? Quiet, unassuming, professional. You whispered in ears, spread tales, told the lies, forced others to spread the poison for you and still no one believed it could be you.’

  ‘I was promised a final battle. It must come.’ He was barely listening. This wasn’t good. A battle? Is that how he thought of this, one soldier against another? He kept glancing towards the garden and the door. He was waiting, for Mr Holmes or someone else. What would he do when he realized no one else was coming? He’d gone to the edge and he was too close to draw back now. I had to keep his attention a little while longer, try to force him to retain some semblance of control, or he would snap and start shooting. But for how long could I do that? And what then?

  Mary stood. She was free. I waited for her to run, but instead, she reached for the poker beside the fireplace. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mary.

  ‘Robert Sheldon is afraid of you.’ I had to keep him watching me. I had to make him talk to me and only me. Mary was moving achingly slowly, trying not to make a noise, to ease the poker into her hand without banging it against the fireplace.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Ordinary Man. The one you use to follow people. He’s frightened of you.’

  ‘So he should be!’ He was actually proud of that. Proud he’d made weak, soft Robert Sheldon afraid of him. ‘I sent him after you. I forced him to follow you, even if it meant following you in the dark and the rain, for hours and hours. I even made him afraid of you. He believed every word I said about you!’

  Mary had the poker in her grip. She crept towards him. If he turned, he’d shoot. Just a single sound, just a feeling and he’d turn and kill her.

  ‘And then the women started dying,’ I said softly. The mania slipped a little from his eyes then. Somehow, the thought of their deaths had calmed him.

  ‘I’m not supposed to say,’ he said quietly. ‘Not to you. I have to tell him. That’s what I was told. I was too good to waste my talents. He told me that over and over again, rammed it into my head until I could barely breathe.’

  The madness had always been there, latent inside him, but controlled, so very firmly controlled. But I was correct: someone else had been there, and made his control slip away with promises of the great final battle against the great thinker, Sherlock Holmes. Who could slip inside a madman’s brain like that an
d play it so well?

  ‘Well, practise on me,’ I said to him. The more he talked, the more chance there was he would let slip who was behind this. ‘You want to get it right when he gets here, don’t you? Tell me, so you know what to say when it matters.’

  ‘I must get it perfect,’ he said, nodding. ‘It’s very important. And you don’t matter . . . I only saw the first one,’ he continued, trying to explain. ‘The very first woman I led to death. One hot summer day by the sea, on those high cliffs at Beachy Head, surrounded by friends, I told her what I was going to tell her husband. Oh, it was horrible, what I was going to tell him. It would have destroyed them both, and a few others too. Do you know, she didn’t cry? Not even beg. She just stood up, walked to the edge of the cliff, and jumped to her death. Oh, it was wonderful! I’d done that, do you understand? I’d taken her life, I had utter control. Do you know how intoxicating that is?’ His eyes sparkled. I’d heard the phrase ‘drunk with power’ but now I was seeing it.

  That was when Mary struck. She raised the poker and slammed it down on his arm. He cried out, but he didn’t drop the gun. Instead he fired – the shot was wide, but it was enough. She cried once, and fell, hard against the bookcase. They were duelling pistols, they only had one shot each, but one could be enough. I leapt forward for the other gun, but he was so fast, much faster than me! He spun and charged into me, slamming me into the wall, leaving me breathless on the floor. He raised the other gun.

  ‘No!’ I cried, holding out my hand. I could barely breathe. I could see Mary had hit her head badly. Blood poured down her cheek, and there was blood on her dress too. She seemed to be unconscious, but breathing. I had to keep us both alive.

  ‘Tell me!’ I insisted. ‘You owe me. Tell me.’

  ‘Tell you?’ he said, hesitating.

  ‘How else can I tell the world, once you’ve killed Mr Holmes?’