The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  What else could I have said?

  The hour of dusk that autumn evening found us taking up our watch in Hertfordshire in that same thick rhododendron shrubbery where Holmes had hidden in the disguise of an old, wrinkled, brown-faced fellow at the beginning of this singular adventure. But where he had from deep within that leafy place of concealment looked out at the mellow brightness of afternoon, we now needed to step only a foot or two in among the bushes to be quite concealed and we looked out at a scene soon bathed in serene moonlight.

  All was quiet. No feet trod the path beyond the beech hedge. In the garden no bird hopped to and fro, no insect buzzed. Up at the house, which beneath the light of the full moon we had under perfect observation, two lighted windows only showed how things lay, one high up from behind the drawn curtains of the bedroom where I had visited my mysterious patient, another low down, coming from the partly sunken windows of the kitchen where doubtless the manservant was preparing the light evening repast I myself had recommended.

  Making myself as comfortable as I could and feeling with some pleasure the heavy weight of the revolver in my pocket, I set myself to endure a long vigil. By my side Holmes moved from time to time, less able than on other such occasions in the past to keep perfectly still, sore as were his limbs from the cudgel wielded, with mistaken honesty, by that European manservant now busy at the stove.

  Our watch, however, was to be much shorter than I had expected. Scarcely half an hour had passed when, with complete unexpectedness, the quiet of the night was broken by a sharp voice from behind us.

  "Stay where you are. One move and I would shoot."

  The voice I recognized in an instant from the strength of its foreign accent. It was that of Mr Smith's loyal servant. Taking care not to give him cause to let loose a blast from the gun I was certain he must be aiming at our backs, I spoke up as calmly as I could.

  "I am afraid that not for the first time your zeal has betrayed you," I said. "Perhaps you will recognize my voice, as I have recognized yours. I am Dr Watson, your master's medical attendant. I am here with my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, of whom perhaps you have heard."

  "It is the doctor?"

  Behind me, as I remained still as a statue, I heard the crunching of the dried leaves underfoot and a moment later the manservant's face was thrust into mine.

  "Yes," he said, "it is you. Good. I was keeping guard because of the many rogues there are about here, and I saw in the bushes a movement. I did not like. But it is you and your friend only. That is good."

  "You did well," Holmes said to him. "I am happy to think that the Count has another alert watcher over him besides ourselves."

  "The Count?" said the servant. "What Count is this?"

  "Why, man, your master. There is no need for pretence between the three of us. Dr Watson and I are well aware that the man up in the house there is no Mr Smith, but none other than the Count Palatine of Illyria."

  Holmes's voice had dropped as he pronounced the name, but his secrecy was greeted in an altogether astonishing manner. The formerly gruff manservant broke into rich and noisy laughter.

  "Mr Smith, my Mr Smith the Count Palatine of Illyria?" he choked out at last. "Why, though my master has travelled much, and though I began to serve him while he was in Austria, he has never so much as set foot in Illyria. Of that I can assure you, gentlemen, and as to being the Count Palatine ..."

  Again the manservant's laughter overcame him, ringing loudly into the night air.

  I do not know what Holmes would have done to silence the fellow, or what attitude he would have taken to this brazen assertion. For at that moment another voice made itself heard, a voice somewhat faint and quavering coming from up beside the house.

  "What is this? What is going on there? Josef, is that you?"

  It was my patient, certainly recovered from his nervous indisposition enough to venture out to see why there was such a hullabaloo in his grounds.

  "Sir, it is the doctor and, sir, a friend of his, a friend with a most curious belief."

  At the sound of his servant's reassuring voice my patient began to cross the lawn towards us. As he approached, Sherlock Holmes stepped from the shrubbery and went to meet him, his figure tall and commanding in the silvery moonlight. The two men came together in the full middle of the lawn.

  "Good evening," Holmes's voice rang clear. "Whom have I the honour of addressing?"

  As he spoke he thrust out a hand in greeting. My patient extended his own in reply. But then, with a movement as rapid as that of a striking snake, Holmes, instead of taking the offered hand and clasping it, seized its third finger, covered as always with its leather finger-stall, and jerked the protective sheath clean away.

  There in the bright moonlight I saw for the first time the finger that had hitherto always been concealed from me. It wore no heavy royal signet ring, as indeed was unlikely on a finger of the right hand. It was instead curiously withered, a sight that to anyone other than a medical man might have been considered a little repulsive.

  "You are not the Count Palatine of Illyria?" Holmes stammered then, more disconcerted than I had ever seen him in the whole of our long friendship.

  "The Count Palatine of Illyria?" Mr Smith replied. "I assure you, my dear sir, I am far from being such a person. Whatever put a notion like that into your head?"

  It was not until the last train of the day returning us to London was at the outskirts of the city that Holmes spoke to me.

  "How often have I told you, Watson," he said, "that one must take into account all the factors relevant to a particular situation before making an assessment? A good many dozen times, I should say. So it was all the more reprehensible of me deliberately to have imported a factor into the Hertfordshire business that was the product, not of the simple truth, but of my own over-willing imagination. My dear fellow, I must tell you that there were no reports of unrest in Illyria."

  "I knew it, Holmes. I had found out quite by chance."

  "And you said nothing?"

  "I trusted you, as I have trusted you always."

  "And as, until now, I hope I have been worthy of your trust. But inaction has always been the curse of me, my dear fellow. It was the lack of stimulus that drove me to deceit now. You were right about your patient from the start. He never was other than a man with a not unusual nervousness of disposition.You were right, Watson, and I was wrong."

  I heard the words. But I wished then, as I wish again now with all the fervour at my command, that they had never been uttered, that they had never needed to be uttered.

  The Repulsive Story of the Red Leech - David Langford

  "Our client, Watson, would seem somewhat overwrought," remarked Sherlock Holmes without lowering his copy of The Times.

  We were alone, but I had grown accustomed to the little puzzles which my friend was amused to propound. A glance at the window showed nothing but grey rain over Baker Street. I listened with care, and presently was pleased to say: "Aha! Someone is pacing outside the door. Not heavily, for I cannot discern the footsteps, but quite rapidly — as indicated by the regular sound from that floorboard with its very providential creak."

  Holmes cast aside his newspaper and smiled. "Capital! But let us not confuse providence with forethought. That board has been carefully sprung in imitation of the device which in the Orient is known as a nightingale floor. More than once I have found its warning useful."

  As I privately abandoned my notion of having the loose plank nailed down and silenced, there was a timid knock at the door.

  "Come in," cried Holmes, and in a moment we had our first sight of young Martin Trail. He was robust of build but pale of feature, and advanced with a certain hesitation.

  "You wish, I take it, to consult me," said Holmes pleasantly. "Indeed so, sir, if you are the celebrated Dr Watson."

  A flash of displeasure crossed Holmes's face as he effected the necessary introductions; and then, I thought, he smiled to himself at his own vanity.

  Tra
ill said to me: "I should, perhaps, address you in private." "My colleague is privy to all my affairs," I assured him, suppressing a smile of my own.

  "Very well. I dared to approach you, Dr Watson, since certain accounts which you have published show that you are not unacquainted with outré matters."

  "Meretricious and over-sensationalized accounts," murmured Holmes under his breath.

  I professed my readiness to listen to any tale, be it never so bizarre, and — not without what I fancied to be a flicker of evasiveness in his eyes — Martin Traill began.

  "If I were a storyteller I would call myself hag-ridden ...

  harried by spirits. The facts are less dramatic, but, to me, perhaps more disturbing. I should explain that I am the heir

  to the very substantial estate of my late father, Sir Maximilian Traill, whose will makes me master of the entire fortune upon attaining the age of twenty-five. That birthday is months past: yet here I am, still living like a remittance-man on a monthly allowance, because I cannot sign a simple piece of paper."

  "A legal document that confirms you in your inheritance?" I hazarded.

  "Exactly so."

  "Come, come," said Holmes, reaching for a quire of foolscap and a pencil, "we must see this phenomenon. Pray write your name here, and Watson and I will stand guard against ghosts."

  Traill smiled a little sadly. "You scoff. I wish to God that I could scoff too. This is not a document that my hand refuses to touch: see!" And, though the fingers trembled a little, he signed his name bold and clear: Martin Maximilian Traill. -

  "I perceive," said Holmes, "that you have no banking account."

  "No indeed; our man of business pays over my allowance in gold. But — good heavens — how can you know this?"

  "Yours is a strong schoolboy signature, not yet worn down by repeated use in the world, such as the signing of many cheques. After ten thousand prescriptions, Watson's scrawl is quite indecipherable in all that follows the W. But we digress."

  Traill nervously rubbed the back of his right hand as he went on. "The devil of it is that Selina ... that my elder sister talks to spirits."

  I fancied that I took his point a trifle more quickly than the severely rational Holmes. "Séances?" I said. "Mischief in dark rooms with floating tambourines, and the dead supposedly

  called back to this sphere to talk twaddle? It is a folly which several of my older female patients share."

  "Then I need not weary you with details. Suffice it to say that Selina suffers from a mild monomania about the ingratitude of her young brother — that is, myself. Unfortunately she has never married. When I assume formal control of our father's fortune, her stipulated income from the estate will cease. Naturally I shall reinstate and even increase the allowance ... but she is distrustful. And the spirits encourage her distrust."

  "Spirits!" snapped Holmes. "Professor Challenger's recent monograph has quite exploded the claims of spirit mediums. You mean to say that some astral voice has whispered to this foolish woman that her brother plans to leave her destitute?"

  "Not precisely, sir. On the occasion when I was present for sisters must be humoured — the device employed was a ouija board. You may know the procedure. All those present place a finger on the planchette, and its movements spell out messages. Nonsense as a rule, but I remember Selina's air of grim satisfaction as that sentence slowly emerged: beware an ungenerous brother. And then, the words that came horribly back to mind on my twenty-fifth birthday: fear not the hand that moves against its own kin shall suffer fire from heaven.

  "And my hand did suffer, Dr Watson. When I took up the pen to sign that paper in the solicitor's office, it burnt like fire as though in my very bones!"

  I found myself at a loss. "The pen was hot?"

  "No, no: it was a quill pen, a mere goose feather. Our family lawyer Mr Jarman is a trifle old-fashioned in such matters. I do not know what to think. I have made the attempt three times since, and my hand will not sign the document. Jarman is so infernally kind and sympathetic to my infirmity, but I can imagine what he thinks. Could some kind of mesmerism be in operation against me? What of the odic force? Some men of science even give credence to the spirit world — "

  "Pardon me," said Holmes, "but with my colleague's permission I would like to administer two simple medical tests. First, a trivial exercise in mental acuity. This lodging is 221b Baker Street, and it is the seventeenth of the month. How rapidly, Mr Traill, can you divide 221 by seventeen?"

  As I marvelled and Traill took up the pencil to calculate, Holmes darted to his cupboard of chemical apparatus, returning with a heavy stone pestle and mortar. In the latter he had placed a small mirror about three inches square. Looking at Traill's paper, he said: "Excellent. Quite correct. Now, a test of muscular reactions — kindly shatter this glass now."

  Traill performed the feat handily enough, with one sharp tap of the pestle, and stared in puzzlement. It resembled no medical procedure that I knew.

  Holmes resumed his seat, rubbing his hands in satisfaction. "As I thought. You are not in the slightest superstitious, Mr Traill; I guessed as much from the tone in which you spoke of spirits. A mathematical result of thirteen does not make you flinch, nor did you hesitate before breaking a mirror. You are masking your real concern. Why do you consult a doctor? Because you fear madness."

  With a sob, Trail buried his face in his hands. I stepped to the gasogene and spirit-case, and mixed him a stiff brandy-andsoda with Holmes's nodded approval. In another minute our client had composed himself, and said wryly: "I see that I have fallen among mind-readers."

  "My methods, alas, are more prosaic," said Holmes. "Inference is a surer tool than wizardry. I now infer that there is some special circumstance you have yet to reveal to us, for I recall no history of insanity in the family of Sir Maximilian Traill."

  "You are troubled and overwrought," I put in, "but speaking as a doctor I see no sign of madness."

  "Thank you, Dr Watson. I will begin again, and tell you of the red leech.

  "My lodgings are in Highgate and — since the allowance from my father's estate frees me from the need to seek employment — I have fallen into the habit of walking on Hampstead Heath each morning, in search of inspiration for the verses by which I hope one day to be known. (The Yellow Book was good enough to publish one of my triolets.) Some friends used to chaff me for being a fixed landmark at luncheon-time, when I generally enjoyed a meal of sandwiches and a bottle of Bass in the vicinity of the Highgate Ponds." Traill shuddered. "Never again! I remember the day quite vividly: it was a warm Tuesday, perhaps six months ago ..."

  "Prior to your twenty-fifth birthday?" asked Holmes sharply.

  "Why, yes. I sat on the grass in a reverie, idly watching someone's great black retriever splash in and out of the water. I was thinking of foolish things ... my sister's maggot of distrust, and the structure of the sestina, and The Pickwick Papers — you will remember Mr Pickwick's investigations of tittlebats and the origin of the Hampstead Ponds which lie across the heath. My thoughts were very far away from the heath. Perhaps I even dozed. Then I felt a hideous pain!"

  "On the back of your right hand?" said Holmes.

  "Ah, you have seen me rub it when troubled."

  "Already my methods are transparent to you," Holmes remarked with pretended chagrin.

  I leaned across to look. "There is a mark resembling a scald, or possibly an acid-burn."

  "It was the red leech, doctor. You will surely have heard of it. A repulsive, revolting creature. The thing must have crept on me from the long grass; it clung to my hand, its fangs — or whatever such vermin possess — fixed in me."

  "I know of no such leech," I protested.

  "Perhaps it is a matter which does not concern a general practitioner," said Trail with a hint of reproach. He plucked a folded piece of paper from his wallet, and handed it to me; it was a newspaper clipping. I read aloud: "Today a warning was issued to London dwellers. Specimens of Sanguisuga rufa, the highly po
isonous red leech of Formosa, have been observed in certain parkland areas of North London. The creature is believed to have escaped from the private collection of a naturalist and explorer. A representative of the Royal Zoological Society warned that the red leech should be strictly avoided if seen, for its bite injects toxins with long-lasting effects, which may include delusions, delirium or even insanity. The leech is characteristically some three to four inches in length, and is readily distinguished by its crimson hue."

  "Most instructive," said Holmes dreamily.

  Traill continued: "The horror was unspeakable. The leech clung to my hand, biting with a burning pain, rendering me too horrified to move. I was lucky that a doctor was passing by, who recognized the awful thing! He plucked it from my flesh with a gloved hand and threw it aside into the undergrowth.

  And then, straight away, on the grass of Hampstead Heath, this Dr James unpacked his surgical instruments from his black bag and cut the mouth-parts of the horrid beast out of my hand, while I averted my gaze and struggled not to cry out. `A narrow escape young fellow,' he said to me. 'If my eye had not been caught by the press report' — and here he handed me the scrap of paper which you hold — 'it might have gone badly for you. There is something in Providence after all.' I thanked Dr James profusely, and at my insistence he charged me a guinea. Although he had dressed the tiny wound carefully, it was painful and slow to heal.

  "And now you know why I fear madness. My mind seems unclouded, but my senses betray me — the leech-bitten hand burns like fire when I try to move against my sister's wishes, as though her infernal spirits were real after all."

  "Quite so," said Holmes, regarding him with intense satisfaction through half-closed eyes. "Your case, Mr Trail, presents some extraordinarily interesting and gratifying features. Would you recognize Dr James if you met him again?"

  "Certainly: his great black beard and tinted glasses were most distinctive."

  This seemed to cause Holmes some private merriment. "Excellent! Yet you now consult the estimable but unfamiliar Watson, rather than the provenly knowledgeable James."