by Andrew Lane
‘The biscuits?’
Yes. There were ten biscuits on that plate when I brought it in. There are seven now, but I haven’t seen you or your friend eat any. There is also a bulge inside your jacket that wasn’t there when you came in. Obviously you’re stocking up food for the future.’
Looking sheepish, Matty reached inside his jacket.
Weston waved a hand at him. ‘Don’t worry about it – they’re only biscuits.’
Sherlock wanted to get back to the question of why Weston was doing all of this. ‘You strike me as someone who is investigating crimes,’ he said, ‘but you’re obviously very reluctant to leave your house and actually do any investigating. When you do leave you are big enough that people will notice you, even without the way you dress. So – what’s going on?’
Weston took a sip of beer from the bottle. ‘I used to be in the police,’ he sighed. ‘That was a few years back, mind. I was a detective inspector in South London before I moved here to Oxford. Lots of crimes there, many of them involving sailors who’d disembarked on shore leave, got drunk, lost their money and decided to get it back again with menaces. I became very interested in the traces that criminals leave behind – the evidence. Not a very popular position, I have to admit. The other inspectors I worked with were much more obvious in their approach – arrest the nearest person to the scene of the crime and then beat a confession out of them. I persevered in my approach, however, and became actually quite good at finding small bits of things that had been left behind and then using them to track down the real criminals.’ He shrugged. ‘Let’s take a real case that I was involved with. A witness saw a man rushing away from a house where a woman was found dead. The person running away had their face wrapped up in a scarf so they couldn’t be recognized, but the witness noticed that the man had very pale hands. The usual approach would be to look at all the people who knew the victim and check whether any of them had very pale hands. I, on the other hand, went looking for a local baker. Their hands are pale because of the flour – it gets ingrained in their skin. It turned out that the victim owed the baker money, so I arrested him. He confessed while in custody, without the need to beat him up. I have to say that I was encouraged in my rather radical approach by a young man studying here at Oxford. His thoughts ran in similar channels to mine, and we used to talk a lot about the future of policing, where evidence would be everything in a case.’
‘Mycroft Holmes,’ Sherlock breathed. Matty stared at him, amazed.
Weston nodded. Although Sherlock couldn’t see his face, he radiated an aura of satisfaction. ‘When you said that your name was Sherlock Holmes, I thought that this was no accident. You are Mycroft’s brother, aren’t you?’
Sherlock could only nod his head. He was transfixed by two thoughts – the first that he remembered his brother talking of a policeman whom he knew here in Oxford, and the second that Mycroft had deliberately sent him here, hoping that the two of them would meet. He wasn’t sure whether to be flattered, intrigued or furious. There were times when Mycroft’s blatant and subtle interference in his life were very troubling. It was as if his brother didn’t trust Sherlock to act on his own, and always sought to guide him through various means.
‘Yes, I’m Mycroft’s brother. You met him here, didn’t you?’
‘I did. We used to drink in the same tavern, and we got talking one night. I had married by that stage and transferred here to Oxford.’
‘And then you had your accident,’ Sherlock said.
There was silence for a while as Weston stared off into the shadows, remembering things that had happened in the past, things that had scarred him both mentally and physically. ‘Yes,’ he whispered eventually. ‘Except that it wasn’t an accident. It was a deliberate attempt on my life, by criminals here in Oxford who were worried that I was getting too close to catching them, and it almost succeeded. It caused me injuries that nearly cost me my life, and left me disfigured and in permanent pain, and also unable to work. The police threw me out like a used handkerchief. It also, more importantly, cost my wife the use of her legs, as she was with me at the time.’ His hooded face turned towards Sherlock and Matty. ‘Would you like to see the result?’ he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he reached up and pulled the leather mask from his face.
Matty gasped, and Sherlock had to hold his breath so that he didn’t do the same. Weston’s face was a jigsaw puzzle of flesh and vivid scar tissue. The scars ran across his nose, his cheeks, his chin and his forehead. They also extended down his neck into his shirt. The scars themselves were dark and twisted lines, many of them criss-crossed by the signs of stitches. The flesh between the scars was of different colours – white, pale pink and maroon. The colours presumably depended on how badly the flesh had been damaged and how well the blood supply had reconnected, Sherlock assumed. Weston’s scalp was partially bald and partially covered with hair. There was no rhyme or reason to which bits were which. One ear was intact while the other was half torn away.
He then slowly removed his gloves. His hands were in the same state – twisted and scarred. Most of the nails were missing. There were heavy scars around his left wrist, almost making it look as though the entire hand had come off and been replaced, although Sherlock knew that was an impossibility.
From the way the scars vanished into his sleeves and the neck of his shirt, it looked as if they continued over most of his body.
‘This is how I was left,’ he said evenly.
‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked.
‘You can see the evidence – you tell me.’
Sherlock let his gaze travel over Weston’s hands and face again, but this time looking analytically rather than emotionally. ‘The damage is extensive,’ he said eventually, ‘but curiously random. If you had been attacked by a knife or a sword then the lines of the scars would be straighter. There are also no scars on the palms of your hands, I notice, although again, if you had been attacked by one man or several men with weapons then I would have expected you to hold your hands up defensively, and there would be significant cuts. The way the cuts are arranged, however, it looks as if a number of sharp things hit you at the same time from several directions.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I am thinking that you might have been in a carriage that crashed, falling apart so that the wood and metal of its construction left scars all over your body. He hesitated. ‘No, I saw you a few days ago, in a carriage entering the grounds of this house, and you didn’t seem at all perturbed or anxious by being inside, which you would have been had you already been in an accident involving a carriage.’ Sherlock suddenly remembered plunging through the skylight at the Oxford mortuary – the way the glass and the wooden frame had come apart and clawed at him as he fell. He shivered. ‘No, I think it’s more likely that you were inside a building when it collapsed. That would explain everything I can see.’
Weston nodded slowly. ‘You are right. I was sent an anonymous message telling me that the people I was chasing were inside a particular house in a slum area. I made my way there and went inside.’ He hesitated, remembering. ‘They had rigged the place with sticks of explosive. They lit the fuses as soon as they saw me go inside. One minute later, the explosives went off, bringing the house down around me. The last thing I remember is dust, fragments of brick, fragments of wood and shards of glass all seeming to float around me as if I was underwater, but at the same time watching as they cut me, sliced into me and stuck in me. Time itself appeared to slow down and stop.’ He took another sip of the beer. ‘I was dragged out of the wreckage covered in blood, with sharp objects projecting out of me all over like I was a hedgehog. I was in hospital for months, with stitches all over my body. The pain was . . . incredible. Unforgettable. I’ve always been a big man, with a healthy constitution, but the doctors say the only reason I survived was sheer willpower. I was determined to live. Nothing – not even the scale of my injuries – was going to stop that.’
‘The criminals –’ Sherlock asked – ‘what was it
they had been doing?’ Partly he wanted to know, but partly he wanted to move Weston on from obsessing about the crash and its effects.
Weston frowned. ‘I was beginning to suspect,’ he said, ‘that there were a group of thieves here in Oxford who specialized in robbing rich families of the worldly goods they had built up over time – the paintings, jewellery, statues and so on. They were intelligent, well-read men who would study old manuscripts and books in the hopes of finding out which families had these treasures and would then break into the houses secretly and steal everything. It would, of course, take them a long time to dispose of their haul – obviously gold can be melted down, but half the value of an antique ring is in the history associated with it, and stolen paintings have to be bought by someone who knows their value and is prepared to hide them away – but these art thieves were in it for the long haul, not the quick profit.’
‘Did you ever catch them?’ Matty asked.
‘Oh no. The police let me go. I was no good to them like this. I can’t walk properly, and on rainy days the pain makes me twist up in agony. People are scared of me, so I can’t question them or interact with the public in any way, but neither can I sit straight at a desk for more than half an hour without cramps setting in, so a desk job is out of the question as well. They threw me out. I ended up here, in this house – a virtual recluse. So no – I never caught them. But I badly want to.’
‘And that explains the collection of poisonous creatures,’ Sherlock said, the words emerging from his mouth even as he thought them. ‘You’re still investigating, aren’t you?’
‘I am putting together the tools,’ Weston admitted, ‘although I am in no condition to use them. Other people will have to do that. And my knowledge is useful in other cases as well.’
‘You’re living here with your wife,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘You said she was caught in the same . . . accident . . . that you were, but she wasn’t on the case with you, was she?’
Weston shook his head. ‘No, but one of my colleagues sent a boy running to tell her what had happened. She came straight away to the wreckage of the house. The police were picking through it, still looking for me, but there were some areas they were scared to go because some of the upper floors were still hanging there, ready to fall at any moment. She was convinced I was in one of those areas, so she came in to get me. Not a thought for her own safety.’ He smiled, scarred lips twisting as he remembered. A long pause. ‘A section of the first-floor landing fell down while she was there. Just after she got to me, and shouted to the searchers that I was there, half a ton of brickwork fell on top of her. She’ll never walk again.’
‘And then the stories started,’ Sherlock said quietly.
‘Yes, the stories started. Not immediately, but as people gradually forgot about the accident, and as they moved away or moved into the area, they gradually forgot who I was and what had happened. I didn’t help, of course, by staying out of sight, in the shadows. There’s something about having a giant man covered in scars that makes people nervous. Stories started that I wasn’t real, that I’d been constructed out of spare body parts, like that book – Frankenstein.’
‘You didn’t help the rumours either by stealing body parts from the mortuary. That just made things worse.’
Weston sighed. ‘I know, but I needed the parts to build up my collection – so that I could continue to teach myself how to identify a person’s occupation from the small signs left on their bodies. I had no alternative.’
‘And you had to steal them.’
‘Yes. Oh, I could have approached Doctor Lukather, of course, and asked him to let me have the parts for free, but he would have said no. He’s a very honourable man, and I knew that.’
‘But you don’t need the body parts themselves,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘It’s the wax copies that you need. The real body parts could be returned to the mortuary and buried along with the rest of the bodies.’
Weston shook his head. ‘It takes a good few weeks to make the copies. I use a man named Oscar Meunier. He comes from Grenoble, but he is living in London at the moment and making a good living producing wax sculptures of the nobility. He also moonlights for me, making these copies. He finds the work fascinating, and he is a true artist. I need the copies, of course, because the real ones would decay. Even if I had them preserved they would undergo changes. The tissue would discolour, and they would be useless for my purposes. No, the copies have to be made, but it takes so long that the families have long since buried the rest of the bodies. Returning the parts that have been taken would be impossible, and distressing to boot. I make sure that my agents in London give them Christian burials in unmarked graves. It’s the best I can do – and at least the bodies have been used for something important, something that will benefit the world.’
‘Not if you stay in your house and keep all the information to yourself,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘You can’t solve cases sitting here, isolated. How are you going to see a real forearm, a real ear, and be able to tell the occupation of its owner, if you rarely leave and never see anybody else?’
There was a long silence as Weston digested Sherlock’s words.
‘I had hoped . . .’ he said haltingly, and then stopped. He raised the bottle of beer to his lips, then lowered it again. ‘What else can I do?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Detection is my life. It is what I do best. It is the only thing I can do. Am I supposed to sit around the house every day, having George cook and clean for me, and do nothing? Some people who have heard about me write to me with problems of their own – problems the police cannot or will not solve – and I give them the benefit of my experience. It’s the best I can do.’
‘You could pass on the stuff you know,’ Matty said quietly. ‘Take on a student. Sherlock ’ere, ’e’s brilliant at spotting stuff, but ’e’s been kind of learning on the job. You could teach ’im everythin’ you know.’
‘I suppose I could,’ Weston said slowly. ‘That at least would mean that the information and skills that I have amassed would be of use.’
Sherlock leaned back in his chair, thinking. It looked as if moving to Oxford was going to be a lot more interesting than he had originally thought. What with Charles Dodgson teaching him about logic and Ferny Weston teaching him about the analysis of evidence, his days were going to be pretty full.
‘Do I pay you?’ he asked. ‘Is there a fee for these lessons?’
‘Only one,’ Ferny said. ‘I need you to investigate something for me. A case involving a man who wrote to me recently with an interesting problem.’
Sherlock and Matty looked at each other. ‘What?’ they both said at once.
‘I will explain later. First I want to check on George, and I want you to meet my wife.’
He led the way out of the sitting room and up the stairs to the first floor. The doors were all still closed, and he knocked on the second one. ‘Marie, my dear? We have guests. Can we come in?’
A voice from inside the room said: ‘Yes, please do. I want to meet them.’
Ferny pushed the door open. ‘Sherlock Holmes and Matty Arnatt – this is my wife, Marie Weston.’
Sherlock walked in, followed by Matty. Ferny, in the doorway, said, ‘I need to go upstairs and check on George. I won’t be more than five minutes. You can talk while I’m gone.’
The room was dark, with a single candle on a table beside a bed. In the bed, sitting up with a pillow behind her, was a woman with long dark hair and an angelic but pale face. She smiled at the two boys. ‘Come in, please. It has been a long time since I saw anyone apart from Ferny and George.’
Sherlock moved to the side of the bed, while Matty stood at the end, shuffling from foot to foot.
‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ Sherlock said. He gazed at her face, aware that he had seen it before somewhere, but uncertain where that could have been. She gazed at him as he wondered, a slight smile on her lips.
‘You look as if you recognize me,’ she said eventually, ‘but I a
m sure that we have never met. I would remember a handsome boy like you.’
And then it came to him. ‘You had your photograph taken,’ he said. ‘It was in a garden, about five years ago. Your husband was there, and so was my brother Mycroft.’
She clapped her hands together. ‘I remember !’ she exclaimed. ‘It was a beautiful summer’s day, and a friend of your brother had asked us if we would pose for him. Mortimer Maberley was there as well – he was Ferny’s sergeant in the Oxford Police Force.’
‘There was someone else there too,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘A boy. He would be about my age now, I suppose.’
Marie Weston’s face clouded over. She looked down at the bedspread. When she looked up, she said, ‘That was a long time ago.’ She paused, suppressing some deep emotion, then continued: ‘Ferny tells me that you both broke in here. I presume, from the fact that he hasn’t thrown you out, that you have explained yourselves to him adequately.’
‘It was . . . something of a misunderstanding,’ Sherlock said.
‘We was lookin’ for the bloke who was takin’ all them bits of bodies,’ Matty said. ‘An’ we found ’im.’
‘Ah yes – Ferny’s hobby. It is about the only thing that keeps him going from day to day.’
‘He still seems to believe that he can be useful,’ Sherlock said, ‘that his knowledge can help other investigators in other cases.’
‘He is fooling himself,’ Marie said. ‘I cannot tell him, and I beg you not to either, but his collection of poisons and of wax body parts is just . . . an obsession. He is unable to do anything with them. He sits there and looks at them, and analyses them, and writes lots of notes, but there is no application of his knowledge. He cannot investigate cases any more. Yes, people might write to him with problems, or he might read something in the newspaper, but if he cannot leave the house except under cover, then how can he actually investigate?’
‘Your husband is very knowledgeable,’ Sherlock said diplomatically. ‘He must have been a very good police officer.’