The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes

by Barry Grant

  ‘And what,’ he said, ‘do you think my duty may be, Mr Holmes?’ His voice was very hoarse.

  ‘That is your affair.’

  He nodded. He looked very balanced and graceful in body, standing up straight now, his head tilting. His black pants and turtleneck made him seem both elegant and dangerous. ‘I could kill you, Mr Holmes. Poof! Gone. With scarcely any effort.’

  ‘I have been dead once and it wasn’t so bad. Maybe it is even easier the second time.’

  ‘But I can’t,’ said Simon Bart. He laid the revolver on the table and walked away to the far end of the room and turned. ‘Is there no solution for my problem, Mr Holmes?’

  Holmes stared at the blank window. ‘I can’t think what it would be,’ he said, at last.

  ‘If you cannot see a solution, I suspect there is none.’ Simon Bart began to pace the floor. He sank into a chair as if a weak spell had come upon him. He sat like a rag doll, leaning far back, limp, as if someone had flung him there. He coughed, and his voice seemed to have become more hoarse. ‘C’est la vie. “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley.” I had hoped to spend Christmas with my mother.’

  Holmes looked at his watch. ‘You ought to be able to make Leeds by noon, if you get moving quickly. In that Jag of yours, maybe you’ll get there even sooner.’ He glanced towards the window. ‘It will be getting light soon. Watson and I are off to Wales.’

  ‘Holmes!’ I cried. ‘Think what you are doing!’

  ‘It is all right, Watson.’

  ‘I wonder,’ I said. ‘I wonder if it is all right!’

  Simon Bart got slowly to his feet. He looked intently at Holmes, as if waiting for a cue. He coughed, fell into a fit of coughing. He muffled his mouth with a handkerchief and looked at Holmes. His eyes above the handkerchief looked frightened. ‘Why?’

  ‘The first reason I shall keep to myself,’ said Holmes. ‘The second is that I suspect you agree by now that revenge is a poison cup, and mercy – even to the merciless – a better choice. How does it go, Mr Bart? “The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven . . .”’

  Holmes stopped, seemed puzzled to continue.

  Bart paced. He rubbed the back of his neck. Little beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He was nodding, waiting, as if the unfinished quotation disturbed him – as an unresolved chord disturbs a musician. He said, ‘“It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d; / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes . . .”’ Then he trailed off, still rubbing the back of his neck, still pacing. Suddenly he halted. He looked up, as if at the first balcony, and held out his right arm – ‘“Though justice be thy plea, consider this, / That in the course of justice none of us / Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy.”’

  Beyond the window the dawn was just breaking, making visible the twisted black limbs and barren branches of the trees, bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

  FIFTEEN

  New Lodgings in Baker Street

  A black car from Scotland Yard met us at the Baker Street tube station. Lestrade and Holmes sat in the back seat and I sat up front with the driver as we rode the short distance to Paddington mainline station where we would catch our train to Wales.

  ‘Colonel Davis is still in some danger,’ said Holmes. ‘I recommend you keep him in a safe house somewhere for the month of December.’

  ‘I will see to it,’ said Lestrade. ‘But he won’t like it.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Holmes.

  ‘He doesn’t like being cooped up,’ said Lestrade.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Holmes.

  I turned in my seat and looked at the two of them sitting side by side. I said, ‘You’ll have to admit, Lestrade, that Holmes is back on his old form.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I think he is,’ said Lestrade. ‘Yet I sometimes wonder about his motives, a little. He is taking rather longer to lay hands on the suspect than used to be his custom.’

  ‘This case requires more discretion than most,’ said Holmes. ‘I will deliver your man to you no later than January first of the New Year.’

  Lestrade laughed. ‘You always were a secretive sort – reluctant to reveal all that you knew till the final moment that suited you. That habit drove my grandfather almost to distraction, but always he pursued his own course, even knowing he would likely be one-upped at the end. And I am afraid, Holmes, that I, like my grandfather, must pursue my own course in this case. You say Colonel Davis may be in grave danger, and therefore we will put him on ice for a while in an obscure safe house. But my own informants tell me that the man responsible for The Old Vicarage murder is very likely a Hungarian fanatic named Franz Pistek who publishes pamphlets decrying the presence of American forces in nations all around the world. We have agents looking for him in Bratislava at this very hour, and they expect a break in the case soon.’

  ‘That’s a comfort,’ said Holmes. ‘With both of us working on the case, I am sure one of us will solve it.’

  At Paddington Station we parted from Lestrade and not long afterwards Holmes and I were in a comfortable train carriage, sipping vile tea from paper cups and trying to pretend it was drinkable, while watching English countryside slide away behind us as we rushed towards Wales. ‘Well, well, so you are not quite confident of Simon Bart after all,’ I said, stirring more sugar into my tea. ‘You have put Colonel Davis out of his reach.’

  ‘Trust everyone – but always cut the deck,’ said Holmes.

  ‘And yet I’m surprised you let Bart go, Holmes. Square with me, now.’

  ‘I let him go, my dear Watson, because Simon Bart is only a small fish, and if we allow him out of our net for a little while, it is no great loss to justice, and perhaps even a gain. For if Colonel Davis is inconvenienced by being required to live in cramped and secret quarters for a month, then I can only say that Colonel Davis has kept numerous innocent men living in cramped and secret quarters for years, while he supervised their torture – and I fear that this little inconvenience I have arranged is the only punishment he will ever suffer for his crimes. We need not be overly concerned with netting little fish like Bart, nor even bloodsucking fish like Davis. We ought to be concerned with harpooning the killer whales who have roiled the waters of the world and set up this huge pattern of death, destruction, hate and horror. But, alas, I fear harpooning them is impossible.’

  ‘Killer whales? What killer whales? And why would it be impossible for a man of your talent to impale them and gaol them?’ I said.

  ‘You know my history, Watson, and I suppose you are remembering the clash I had with the greatest criminal mind of an earlier day, Professor Moriarty. You are remembering how, in the end, I brought him down and destroyed his whole organization.’

  ‘Exactly so,’ I said. ‘Moriarty was the mad and almost omnipotent intelligence at the centre of a web of crime that entangled the whole of London. Though it took years of trying, you did finally manage to end his career by throwing him to his death in the Reichenbach Falls. His lieutenant, Sebastian Moran, the best shot in the Indian Army, then came after you in retaliation, and you collared the villain while he was trying to kill you with an air gun. If you could do it then, you can do it now. That is my point. I don’t believe for a minute that your age will impede you.’

  ‘Not my age,’ said Holmes. ‘The difficulty is not my age, but the age. We live in a different world. There are superficial similarities, of course, to that earlier battle against evil. In this case, too, there is a master criminal and his lieutenant at the centre of a web of crime, horror and terrorism that ravage our modern world. These two malevolent brains are directly responsible for the death of Calvin Hawes and many another innocent victim. But I have no way, no possibility, of bringing these men to justice. They are beyond the reach of justice. They are too powerful to touch.’

  His answers bothered me. I c
ouldn’t help remarking, ‘Then do we simply reel in our lines and nets, stash our harpoons, and let the killers go, is that it? It isn’t like you, Holmes!’

  ‘I’m afraid we must, Watson. They will die happy, rich, and applauded by their small circle of friends. There is nothing anyone can do about it.’

  ‘That isn’t the way a story should end,’ I said. ‘It sends chills through my heart to hear you say it. The two evil geniuses escape! My god.’

  ‘Not two evil geniuses,’ said Holmes. ‘One genius, one dolt. They lurk in Washington, DC, at the centre of a web of crime that covers the whole world. Moriarty and Moran ruined many a life in London. These two have ruined lives throughout the American Empire, which stretches all around the world. That man Pistek, who Lestrade so foolishly imagines has a hand in these killings, is right. The US has more than eight hundred military installations in at least thirty-nine countries of the world. No ruler, no person, is safe from the hand of the two who sit at the centre of the web and control those forces. Those two can, if they choose, reach out and grab almost anyone, and gaol them, torture them, kill them. Their reach is worldwide.’

  I felt my heart beating hard. ‘I had not realized your political opinions were so passionate – or, indeed, that you had political opinions at all.’

  ‘I have grown wiser with age,’ said Holmes. ‘Two lifetimes does that to you.’

  Holmes and I returned to our cottage in Wales and returned to our books and study. I bought the Pickwick Papers first edition that I had so long admired, and I bought many another rare and curious volume. Holmes bought everything, filling his wheelbarrow with a miscellany, a gallimaufry, a mélange of the strange, the commonplace and the erudite, an omnium-gatherum with which he educated himself about the events of the last ninety-four years.

  November turned to December. Snow fell on the barren hills and made the world a wonderland of white. I made black boot prints on the street as I returned down Chancery Lane to Cambrai Cottage. Holmes had the fire blazing. As I entered he looked up from his book and said to me, ‘Watson, all is pattern, repetition, variations on a theme. What you have done once in life, you do again – a prisoner of your own personality, and of life’s natural cycles.’

  ‘Come now, Holmes – surely you exaggerate a little.’

  ‘Not at all. I dare say, if a man lived long enough, everything in his life would repeat itself – in outline if not in fine detail. Have you not noticed, Watson, how often you are in a situation and you have the feeling you have been there before? Déjà vu. And my belief is that in most cases you really have been there before. And sometimes you can recall the earlier situation, and sometimes not.’

  ‘It is an interesting theory,’ I said. ‘But if we are really just repeating ourselves, what fun is it? What meaning could there be?’

  ‘Why should there not be fun and meaning in repetition? You read the same book twice sometimes, do you not, Watson, and actually get more out of it the second time through? You sometimes go to the same movie twice.’

  ‘True,’ said I. ‘Very true.’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said he. ‘Your life is a movie that keeps playing different but similar scenes over and over, and you enjoy it nonetheless.’

  ‘Yes, I see your point,’ I said. Suddenly his observation seemed not only clear but wise.

  Yet at that very instant his own enthusiasm seemed to collapse. His face fell and the light went out of his eyes. ‘Even so, one is likely to get bored,’ he mused. He launched himself out of his chair and stood by the window looking out at the snow like a disconsolate child with no playmates and nothing to do. He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, gazing out at the white little street.

  He looked lost.

  December leaked away and we heard nothing more of Simon Bart, and nothing from Lestrade or Scotland Yard. It was almost Christmas. I had no people to go to for the holidays, and neither did he, so we hung a wreath on Cambrai Cottage, and he gave me a book as a gift, and I gave him a book, and we unwrapped them and made a fuss – as if we didn’t already have enough books! – and then we went out to Christmas dinner together. Sergeant Bundle stopped by late in the afternoon with a Christmas cake. He was ruddy with bumptious good cheer, and he thanked Holmes for his work on The Old Vicarage case. He said Holmes’s work was excellent work, fine work, but some fish always get away, he said, putting his hand on Holmes’s shoulder – and I could see Holmes cringe. Bundle said he doubted now that the man would ever be caught, but not to worry, not to worry. ‘Merry Christmas, gentlemen!’ said he, and he was gone, bustling away. And somewhere bells were ringing.

  The following afternoon Holmes got a call from a private detective in Leeds, Alfonse Smedley, who informed him that Simon Bart was dead.

  ‘Holmes,’ I said, ‘you are a miracle of efficiency. I didn’t realize you had hired a man to watch him. You do cover the ground pretty thoroughly, don’t you!’

  ‘One tries, one tries,’ said Holmes, carelessly. ‘I knew pretty well that the aneurysm would do him in. And so it did. He fell dead right on the sidewalk outside his mother’s house, dropped dead as he stepped out to bring in groceries from his car. I instantly saw that his problem was still lurking, caused by the bayonet wound in the chest he had received in Afghanistan, then exacerbated by the fall from the stage. The fall must have reopened the split in the artery, and this suddenly brought on the hoarse voice and coughing that we noticed. Those are symptoms my old friend, Dr Watson, long ago told me were characteristic of some aneurysms. And of course the girl, Rebecca, mentioned that he was on beta blockers, a sign that he had probably guessed his own fate.’

  ‘Well, you were right again, Holmes,’ I said. ‘Doubly right. At least the poor tortured soul got to spend Christmas with his mother.’

  ‘A gift of Luck,’ he said modestly.

  ‘With a little help from you.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Holmes. ‘And I don’t think I’ll tell Lestrade the good news for a few days more – let Colonel Davis live a little longer in fear, cooped up in his safe house.’

  ‘Holmes!’ I cried, ‘I’m proud of you. I had always feared you were too much a man of principle.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Holmes. ‘Principle is good, but one can only stand so much of it. As Juvenal remarked, the wise person puts limits even to his honourable actions. Imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis.’

  ‘There is truth in that,’ said I.

  ‘But I’m bored, Watson. I languish. I need action. I need a dose of the world.’

  ‘Funny you should say so,’ I replied. ‘I was thinking just yesterday that it might be nice to move to London in the spring.’

  He leapt from his chair and grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table and tossed it in the air. ‘A capital idea, Watson! Just the thing.’

  ‘Last night,’ I said, ‘I was on the Web and I found some very nice lodgings in Baker Street, your old haunt. A nice area it is, close to Regent’s Park—’

  ‘Yes, Watson. Let us do it!’ he cried. ‘In Regent’s Park we can stroll and contemplate problems! Pacing through Regent’s Park with a problem on my mind was always a thing I loved. Shall we rent a place together?’

  ‘I think we should,’ said I. ‘We’ll be there in spring, almost like being reborn.’

  ‘I wonder –’ he mused, looking at me earnestly and full of hope – ‘do you suppose Lestrade might send a few small problems my way when we’re back in the city?’

  ‘I am absolutely certain he will, Holmes,’ I said, and I grabbed an apple from the bowl and tossed it, and caught it. ‘How could he not!’

  ‘Quite right!’ said Holmes. ‘It is perfectly logical. How could he not? After all, I have been tracking criminals for a hundred and thirty years.’

  Beyond our window, snow had begun to fall. I opened the cottage door and looked out. A distant bell began to toll. As our tiny street filled up with snow I imagined I saw Mr Pickwick’s coach and horses bursting round the corner in a muffled clatter. Sud
denly the world, so strange and full of wonder, seemed to promise startling days of companionship ahead, and the pleasant jolt of dangerous journeys.