The Tarleton Murders

by Breck England

  At Westminster I leapt from the train and ran out into the knife-like wind off the river. Walking quickly, I made my way to the entrance of Whitehall, first looking round for any sign of pursuers. No one in the busy plaza was taking the slightest notice of me, so I addressed myself to the guard at the grand archway and asked to see Mr. Mycroft Holmes.

  Sometime later I faced a puzzled junior clerk who informed me that no such person was employed in the government.

  But I had received a wire from Mycroft Holmes at Whitehall only a few weeks before, I explained. No, unfortunately, I didn’t have the wire with me. The clerk shook his head, looked officially sympathetic, and disappeared back inside the halls of empire.

  Now I was well and truly baffled. Sister Carolina had utterly disappeared, so had Sherlock Holmes, and now his brother didn’t exist. No trace of any of them remained. Standing there on the street immobilized, for a moment I had the crazed thought that it had all been a fantasy of mine, that I was dreaming or gone mad.

  But what of the cabbie’s brutal treatment of the morning? Surely that was a message from someone. No, it was no fantasy. I was in grave trouble and now quite alone. I sent up a few Hail Marys and tried to think of what to do next.

  It occurred to me, or I had read somewhere, that to find a lost person one should go back to the last place the person was known to be. That would be the Cannon Street station, where Holmes took one cab and I another. Perhaps if I went back to that spot, looked for the cabbie who had taken up Holmes and the sister … but would I even know him if I saw him? Also, I was now rather shy of London cabbies.

  Nevertheless, I took the Metropolitan line again toward Cannon Street and found the kerb at the station where Holmes had left me. It was hopeless. There were dozens of hansom cabs in the queue, the drivers submerged in woolen scarves against the cold, none of them in the least distinguishable from the others.

  As I stood there forlorn, a boy approached me with a note, which said I was to follow him into the post office next the station.

  “Are you sure you have the right person?”

  “Yes, sir. You are Father Grosjean, sir?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Startled, and lacking the caution I should have shown, I went with him to the post office. What else was I going to do?

  The boy led me to a clerk with a wisp of a red beard who introduced himself briskly as “Bernard Shaw, an Edison man.” He took me into a private room hung with electrical wires and set me before a device the like of which I had never seen before. A horn protruded from it, and the clerk affixed a heavy instrument to my head so it covered my right ear.

  “What is this?’

  “It’s a telegraphic telephone, your reverence.”

  “A what?”

  “An electrical apparatus for speaking over long distances. Its purpose is to advance the illusion that communication can actually take place.”

  I had heard vaguely of such a thing but discounted it as fantasy, until I heard a roaring noise in my head and a voice spoke to me.

  “Father Grosjean?”

  I didn’t know what to do. The metallic voice repeated my name.

  “Speak into the horn,” Shaw whispered with an impatient smile.

  “This is Father Simon Grosjean,” I intoned slowly into the device, wondering if I were about to be electrocuted.

  “Is there anyone in the room with you?”

  I looked round expecting to see Shaw, but he had withdrawn and closed the door.

  “No, I am alone.”

  “This is Mycroft Holmes speaking. I am sorry I couldn’t acknowledge you earlier today, but the world situation is such that no one must have any connection with me for the present. I felt bad watching you from the window as you left, so I determined to make contact with you in the most private way possible.”

  “But how did you know to find me in Cannon Street?”

  “Please, Father Grosjean. I prefer not to discuss our methods.”

  “But I didn’t notice anyone tracing me.”

  “When I trace you that is what you may expect to notice.”

  I still couldn’t believe a machine was speaking to me and wondered if this were some elaborate ruse. Was I hearing someone in the next room talking through a pipe?

  “How am I to know certainly that this is Mycroft Holmes speaking?” I asked.

  The machine gave a rumbling gurgle, which I soon recognized as a laugh. “Very wise of you, Father. I would want to make certain myself. Ask me a question to which only you and I would know the answer.”

  I thought for a moment, then asked, “By what nickname were you known at Stonyhurst?”

  A space of silence, then “Big Mike.” A little wry resentment in the voice?

  “Thank you, thank you, Mr. Holmes. I do apologize. I was afraid I was losing my mind when they told me you didn’t exist.”

  “Well, I exist. What can I do for you, Father?”

  I explained my predicament and the fearful ride I had taken in the morning. “I just want to know what’s going on—where to find your brother, to know nothing untoward has befallen him.”

  “One never knows, Father. Something untoward is likely to befall Sherlock one day, given his taste for hazardous adventures.” I was surprised at his coolness. “But you might possibly find him at this address. Commit it to memory, but pray do not write it down.”

  I did so. “I am most grateful to you, Mr. Holmes.”

  “My pleasure, sir.” The roaring noise resumed after a loud click. I removed the apparatus and poked my head out the door where Shaw was waiting.

  “I’m finished with the machine,” I said. “It’s a remarkable contrivance, this telegraphic what-d’ye-call-it.”

  “Isn’t it? We’ve had it less than a month. We held our first communication with Norwich just a few days ago.”

  “Norwich! That’s more than a hundred miles from here! Who on earth could come up with a contraption like that? It’s utterly unreasonable.”

  “Perhaps all progress depends on unreasonable men,” said the perky Shaw. He shook my hand and I was in Cannon Street again.

  The address tucked in my memory was somewhere in the east of London. I knew the city feebly, but had no doubts about this location. It was in one of the city’s worst pockets of crime and filth, near the docks on the river where the scum of the whole world drifted in on the wake of the vast merchant fleet of Great Britain.

  Chapter 8

  Far beyond the east end of the Metropolitan line, I found myself in a worn cab slogging along behind a horse whose demise appeared imminent. I had been wary of taking a cab, but the bony driver looked so tired that I couldn’t muster up fear of him. When I told him where I was going, he sniffed hard, looked up to heaven, and said, “That’s no place I’d be caught without a clergyman.”

  My collar and cassock as our assurance, we entered the closest lanes I’d ever seen, squeezed between haggard, water-scoured warehouses of gray wood, peopled only by an occasional wretch lying drunken in a doorway. Although it was still afternoon, fog and the smoke from burning detritus darkened our path through the back burrows of the dockyards. Evil-looking boys darted in and out of the alleys, no doubt looking to waylay people like me.

  “Here it is, sir,” the man announced hoarsely. We had stopped under an ancient eave with slats swollen and eroded like a mouth full of rotting teeth. I stepped out and asked the cabbie to wait for me, but he said he would rather live long enough to have his dinner, turned round, and lurched away with surprising speed.

  Under the eaves was a slowly collapsing frame building that looked as if it had barely survived the Middle Ages. I knocked on the moldy boards that had once been a door and waited. No answer.

  I knocked again, louder, but again there was no answer. What if Holmes weren’t there? Worse yet, what if someone else were there, someone
I would prefer not to deal with? How would I ever get out of this labyrinth of ruins and back to Campden Hill?

  By this time I was perishing with cold, and a misery of a rainstorm had decided to squat over the city, so I decided to enter the warehouse of my own accord. No lock would have served the disintegrating door, so I pushed my way in and waved aside a dust-covered hanging that revealed steps leading underground. I descended, and as my eyes grew used to the dark, I detected what appeared to be a mass of squirming bodies.

  “Dowse … that … light!” came an agonized groan. I looked round. What light? Were they referring to the almost imperceptible grayish light from the open door above? I quickly replaced the hanging.

  “Excuse me,” I called in a weak voice. “I’m sorry to intrude, but I’m looking for a friend.” I was answered by a cascade of coughing and a giggle that sounded like a raven’s screech.

  “You have no friends here,” a tuberculous voice answered.

  A candle was abruptly lit and a man appeared, a well-kept, middle-aged figure with pale lips and eyes under his twisted black hair. Carrying the candle, he stumbled toward me as if sightless, then felt his way up the stairs to the door.

  “Ye’ll remember the market price, now, and pay according,” came the screeching voice from below. “Ye’ll remember like a good soul, won’t ye?”

  The man shouted something unintelligible. I pursued him out the door.

  “Excuse me, sir. Sir!” I touched his arm and he shook me away. Holding his hand over his eyes, he looked like a respectable churchwarden who had just come from Mass into the daylight. I didn’t dare speak Holmes’s name, so I merely said, “I’m looking for a friend who is missing. He is tall and thin, about twenty-five years old. Prominent nose …”

  The man cut me off. “What is it o’clock?” he stammered.

  “About four of the afternoon.”

  “It can’t be. It just can’t …” he moaned and drifted unsteadily away. Then he turned and said helplessly, “Um, no one like that. No one in there.” He pointed at the grim house and continued down the lane.

  I had reached another impasse and was soaking from the drizzle. I decided to wait for it to stop just inside the door of the house. I was under no illusions about the place, and my fear of it had diminished. Once or twice I had accompanied the sisters to minister in such places near the wharves of Charleston, where the hopeless smoke away their lives on the dismal harvest of opium from the East. Such people are to be pitied, not feared.

  The place was warm and the rain hypnotic. I have no idea how long I stood there watching, but as it got dark outside I became conscious of a low conversation going on down the stairs. Curious, I pulled the curtain aside and peered in. By the red glow of the pipes I could see three figures—a lascar, a blowzy Chinese, and a filthy rag of an old woman—the latter two lying in a stupor and mumbling quietly to each other on a collapsed bed that nearly filled the tiny cell. Their faces, drawn and drained by the poison, resembled each other so much that the woman looked Chinese and the Chinese man looked like an old fishwife. The lascar slept the sleep of a corpse—and perhaps he was one by now.

  I was about to turn away from this miserable sight and leave the place when I heard a faint “Tuck.”

  It’s not possible, I said to myself before realizing it was bally well possible. Anything was possible with Holmes.

  “Holmes?” I whispered. He must be hiding in the house somewhere.

  But the voice had come from the bed. Slowly the Chinese man slid upwards to his full height and shed about a hundred pounds in the process. I would never have believed it.

  “Holmes. You … you …”

  His voice was hushed and grave. “I instructed you to wait until you heard from me. Why have you disregarded my instruction? It was for your own safety, and that of another.”

  “I was afraid something had happened to you. An accident or … . It’s been four days! I’ve heard nothing!”

  “You were supposed to hear nothing. I wanted you out of this for the time being. Now you may well have brought them down upon us.”

  “Them? Who?”

  At that instant we heard a whistle from the courtyard and then muted voices at the door above our heads. Holmes put his finger to his lips and resumed his Chinese disguise, losing two feet of height and shrinking into an oily ball of fat in the light of a candle.

  He went to the door. I heard the voices, then a quick muffled shout. “Tuck!”

  I ran upstairs squarely into the stomach of a big hooded fellow who stank of sour gin. The man staggered back. Balancing on his rear foot, Holmes was circling another man, short but thick, who struck out at him with a roar and a fist like a tree trunk. My man turned on me with a brutal blow to my chin. I hadn’t remembered how shocking it was being punched in the face; but it raised my blood and my old school training, and I clouted the man with an upper thrust of my right and a thump to his temple with my left.

  I have always had powerful shoulders. I hit him so hard that he flew sideways off his feet against an outer wall. I could see a window in that wall, so I threw myself at him, wrestled him up, and heaved him like a beam of wood out the window. I hadn’t realized the house backed onto an inlet of the river: a dull splash was followed by a good deal of drunken roaring.

  I turned to find that Holmes had bloodied the other invader into unconsciousness.

  “Quickly,” Holmes said. “We must be off.”

  From below stairs came a cry. “The market price is dreffle high just now, and business is slack … so slack… .”

  “Have you any money?” Holmes whispered urgently.

  “I have a sovereign.”

  “Give it to her.” I tossed the coin down the stairwell and the old lady snatched it, shrieking at her good fortune. I was surprised at her sudden nimbleness.

  Moving like lightning, Holmes ripped the clothing off the man on the floor and swathed me in his foul scarf and filthy coat and hat. “Now!”

  We dashed out like rats caught in the light and ran through a warren of warehouses smelling of fish and tar until we arrived at the wobbly end of a pier. I thought I could hear voices behind us, but couldn’t be sure. We climbed down a ladder into a small boat tied to a piling, cast off, and began to row away from the dock.

  The sky was murky by now, the opaque gray of the afternoon gone, and we pulled our way quietly upriver staying in the longshore current. In the daylight we would have made a bizarre sight—a fat Chinese and a tramp in rags taking a little exercise on the Thames. But we were well concealed by the fog.

  I was more than baffled by what had just happened. “Holmes, what on earth—?” I began, but he shushed me with a low hiss. Of course, I thought, we might be invisible, but we could be heard easily across the water; so we rowed on in silence for what felt like hours, floating past curling lights on the water from a bridge or gas lanterns on the embankment. My hands froze, my shoulders cramped, my jaw ached from the fight, and I sent up a good number of Hail Marys that were earnestly meant. Happily, I was answered by an end to the miserable rain. I could even see a star or two through the clouds.

  At last we arrived at the abutments just below the entrance to St Katharine Docks, where we found a stone stairway.

  “I will leave you here,” Holmes said. “Go up the stairs, back to Cannon Street, and ask for a cabbie named Bratfish. He will return you safely to your family.”

  “You’re not tying up?”

  “No, I have more to do this night. But pack your belongings and be at Paddington Station at dawn. Wear mufti, particularly a heavy scarf round your face. Book yourself onto the 6:59 for Liverpool. We will meet you there.”

  “We? Sister Carolina also?”

  “Yes. Now this time, do as I ask.”

  “I won’t fail.”

  I watched Holmes disappear again into the fog.

  Chapter
9

  There was something French in the makeup of my family. It came from our paternal line—tough, extraordinarily tenacious people who came to England in the time of the Huguenots. Our family name, Grosjean, is French for “Big John,” undoubtedly a relic of a formidable ancestor of that type. My sister is a concentrated version of those traits, while my character is of my mother’s more phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon vein.

  Consequently, my sister met me in a tearing rage at the door that night. “Where have you been? We’ve been so frightened, afraid of every sound outside the door, afraid even of calling the police!”

  “Don’t exaggerate, my dear,” my brother-in-law said.

  “Look at him!” she shot back. “He looks like the Tsar’s armies marched over him in the mud. A fine figure of a priest! What has happened to you?”

  I didn’t know how much of my story to reveal, but my sister was not one to be lied to and in a way had a right to know why the shadow of danger had fallen over her household. So I told her a version of the truth, that I was assisting my old schoolmate Holmes on an inquiry concerning the Church. It was a question more political than religious, I assured her, but certain unsavory parties had an interest in it. I also promised to leave in the morning and all would be resolved.

  She hesitated, staring at me. “Your friend is a detective?”

  “I want to be a detective,” came a small, clear voice from behind us. It was Gibby, who had slipped out of bed.

  I smiled at him. “I thought you wanted to be a priest?”

  “I can be a detective and a priest,” he insisted.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I could detect sins and then get rid of them for people.”

  His parents and I could not suppress a laugh. “Gibby, that’s a very good reason to be a detective priest.” I went on, “I must leave in the morning, but may I tell you a bedtime story now?”