by Lyndsay Faye
If Holmes indeed contemplated his future activities with pleasure, his face did not reflect as much on the train ride home—he alternately scowled and fidgeted, and it was not until Baker Street and the welcome refreshments he had mentioned that I was able to get another word out of him at all.
I heard nothing more of the Slaymaker case for two days, though in my worry I pressed Holmes multiple times upon the subject and he curtly informed me that the lady would come to no harm. In fact, Christmas had been and gone before Holmes one sleet-plagued afternoon approached me at my writing desk with an envelope in his slim hand. It was postmarked from Poole, addressed to my friend, and unopened.
“Go on,” he said, delivering it to my grasp. “I know the contents already, so you might as well do the honors.”
Thinking here at last was the key to the mystifying Lightless Maiden affair, I slit through the seal. I could hardly contain a gasp when a confusion of cheaply printed photographs spilled onto my desk.
A mass of pictures, the sort of penny postcards one finds so often at the seashore, lay scattered across a manuscript I had hesitantly titled “The Lone Cyclist.” They showed a ghostly figure bordered by tree line and by tidal break, in several similar poses, the very image of Miss Cooke as we had seen her on the night of the Winter Solstice. It was as if the ghost of Eva Rayment had indeed been captured—no doubt providing a ready profit in the tourist trade. My face swiveled up to Holmes in astonishment.
“Oh, come Watson, really,” he pleaded, leaning against my desk. “You wound me. This is altogether too much. I shall give you thirty seconds to think, and then I despair of you entirely.”
As it happened, I did not require thirty seconds. I required only ten.
“That brute Slaymaker was photographing her,” I cried, slamming my hand down upon the penny postcards. “She was a stranger to Bournemouth, and the legend inspired him to make use of her for profit! He costumed her, he wished the moon to be full when they experimented, he created flash effects to enhance the light, he enjoined her to be still—all the while, he must have had an accomplice hidden in the brush with a camera.”
“Certainly not on the night we visited, for I should have heard any other party in the bracken. But on the previous occasions—yes.”
“Oh, the cad, to use her for his own devices so! It’s positively deplorable, Holmes. Where did you get these?”
“From his kith and kin in the shell game industry, with whom he claims to brook no commerce. They do a brisk mail-order business as well as a promenade trade. Finding these was child’s play.”
“How did you know at first?” I asked eagerly, turning my chair to face him. “Here, at Baker Street. Why did you agree to visit Bournemouth?”
“I have never lost my heart to a woman, Watson,” Holmes answered with only a hint of irony, “but had I done so, and that woman lived practically in rags, buying ha’penny foolscap for letters to her parents and sending all her income home to tend to them, I should not postpone our nuptials pending the outcome of an imaginary scientific experiment. I should wed her, and thereby improve her lot in life. And despite my marked lack of sentiment, neither would I buy her an engagement ring made of brass, when I possessed such expensive taste in writing implements.”
A bitter silence fell. Staring down at the postcards, I shook my head.
“I already wrote to Miss Cooke, and enclosed one of these pictures as proof.” Holmes rose, clapping me on the shoulder as he made for his armchair.
“You did?” I repeated incredulously.
Holmes seated himself and made a long arm for his Stradivarius bow.
“I always rather regretted that Mary Sutherland business,” he confessed softly. “She was my client, after all, and I never told her that she had been courted by her own stepfather. I can’t think what I feared at the time—a scene, a scandal, an inconvenient hour? That she would prefer to disbelieve such a sordid charge than to trust me? That she would be hurt by it? Appalling cowardice, my dear fellow. I may have put the fear of God into Mr. Windibank, but I went no further, whether owing to pure negligence or apprehension over Miss Sutherland’s reaction I honestly can’t say. But whether she would have fainted or wept or railed or called me a liar doesn’t signify. What would any of those eventualities have mattered when set against her life, and dreams of bettering it? I hope, in vain perhaps, that I am a stouter fellow today. Miss Cooke and Miss Sutherland may be intellectual equals, but that does not mean they deserve to be duped.”
“It does not,” I agreed, smiling.
Holmes was balancing the end of the bow on one fingertip, making tiny adjustments but sparing an instant to glance at me. “I cannot fathom what you are thinking just now.”
“Truly?”
“I assure you.”
“It has been a very good year, my dear fellow. That is all. A most excellent, wonderful year.”
Holmes was just then distracted by a complex matter of coordination and dexterity. But he flashed a grin at me, and I knew that he had understood me entirely.
The Adventure of
the Thames Tunnel
September of the year 1900 will be forever associated in my mind with the Iron Hand, simultaneously the name of a vicious criminal network which had been terrorizing the St. Katharine Docks and of its anonymous leader, a ruthless dictator whose identity was so fiercely guarded that his orders were carried out solely by lieutenants bearing tattoos of sinister claws on their forearms. Had the band been a typical collection of crude miscreants, they should never have come to the attention of Sherlock Holmes, in the same sense that master sculptors are not hired to lay brick. But as their violence increased in audacity, so did the legends surrounding their commander, and Holmes began to note odd discrepancies which had eluded the attention of the regular force. Some two weeks, eight previously unsolved murders, and countless other offenses later, it will be recalled that the Iron Hand himself proved nothing but a myth created by the syndicate—although the popular press had no notion that it was Holmes who finally, and at tremendous personal risk, brought the gang to its knees.
On the night of this triumph (involving a complex trap devised by my friend which was far too convoluted for me to do it any justice in these memoirs), Holmes and I arrived back at Baker Street rain-drenched, muddied, bruised, exhausted, but fortunately unharmed. It had fallen to us to assist the Yard with rounding up the leaders of the Iron Hand in an effort perhaps exceeded only by my friend’s annihilation of Professor Moriarty’s network, and it was now close on three in the morning.
Holmes’s elegant movements were dulled with the fatigue born of too many sleepless nights as we trudged indoors. Meanwhile, only residual nerves caused by my having stopped my friend’s skull from being crushed with a brass-headed club enabled me to keep my eyes open. The sleuth poured a pair of neat scotches, promptly eliminated his, and all but melted into his armchair.
I began by sipping my drink, then saw the wisdom of his approach and finished it. “Holmes, you’re soaking the furniture.”
“I have earned every liberty I take with it,” he intoned happily. “Was there ever such a repulsive band of villains as the ones just packed off in a fleet of Black Marias?”
“I should hope not indeed.”
“God, but the energy I’ve spent over the last fortnight! Do you ever wonder, Watson, whether fires have primitive memories of sorts, and the embers of a coal engine after dragging a train up the Alps retain the echo of their exertions?”
Eyeing him shrewdly, I decided that this was nothing worse than his typical rambling when he was past the point of mere depletion, and I allowed it to pass. He looked as if he were considering rising and then turned his coat collar up and settled into it like a feline creating a makeshift nest. It was a testament to his profound enervation that he seemed to have no intention of so much as washing.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, at
least try to make it as far as your bed.”
“Impossible,” he murmured. “Quite entirely impossible.”
“My dear Holmes, you haven’t even removed your boots.”
He cracked a friendly eye at me, which drifted instantly shut after he had snugged an afghan around his shoulders, seeming content never to move again. “Good night, old fellow.”
Shaking my head fondly, I performed my own ablutions with rapidity, and I think fell asleep before my cheek so much as touched the pillow. After what seemed only an instant, I started awake again to find Holmes’s wiry fingers gripping my upper arm and candlelight glinting off his dark hair.
“What on earth is the time?” I rasped, not without a hint of asperity.
“Seven in the morning.” Holmes’s eyes shone hectically, and his exertions of late had imparted nigh-gaunt planes to his angular face.
“Are you all right?”
“Do you mean after last night’s scuffle with the weighted club and the twenty-stone thug wielding it? Perfectly. Thanks to your good self, my brains remain quite intact. I should have missed them.”
“We both should have, I imagine. Well, what’s wrong, then?”
“Watson, you can be the most dedicated pessimist. Supposing something wonderful has happened, and I’m here to share the glad news?”
Fighting a groan, I rolled onto my back, scrubbed a hand through my hair, and told myself sternly that the only course was military stoicism. “Impart to me this glad news.”
“The prospect of inaction is never a happy one for me, my dear Doctor, but especially not after so trying a matter as this Iron Hand affair. Swinging so far back and forth like a pendulum between vigor and sloth wreaks severest havoc on my mental processes. But we are in superb luck!”
“Are we indeed,” I managed with a notable lack of enthusiasm.
“Inspector Hopkins is downstairs and it’s certainly a murder—Hopkins’s hands are the first thing to give him away when he’s agitated, and he hasn’t stopped fiddling with his cuffs these five minutes. I shall give you a quarter of an hour to refresh yourself and dress and then we must discover what’s the matter with the poor fellow. In the meanwhile, I’ll ring for tea.”
With this announcement, he was off again like a hare. Dragging myself out of bed and shaving with the speed born of expertise at being rousted from slumber, I admonished myself that adequate sleep is never guaranteed to a man of medicine, and also that Stanley Hopkins so revered Sherlock Holmes that at least the problem could not be a trifling one.
I found the pair of them smoking, Holmes carefully coiffed with his slippers tucked into his armchair and Hopkins on the settee with his spine as straight as if he were still wearing the blue coat and polished buttons of the roundsman. Our friend Hopkins, despite his own ingenuity, has never lost his veneration of the great detective’s methods—even had he not been rubbing his thumb over his opposite cuff as Holmes reported, his bright, almost zealous expression would have betrayed his excitement. He is a well-built, forgettably handsome fellow with a small divot in his chin, and would be quite unremarkable in appearance save for a pair of truly soulful and perceptive brown eyes.
“My apologies for the earliness of the hour, gentlemen.” Hopkins’s lips tightened in sympathy. “I know well enough that you’ve both been clearing the streets of the Iron Hand, and everyone is bragging of last night’s triumph. You must be regularly done, but I know better than to delay over asking for help when the matter is as mystifying as this one.”
“No, no, you did quite right, Inspector.” Holmes contemplatively flexed his left hand, where a bruise was beginning to show from its having dented a ruffian’s jaw. “We are always happy to help, are we not, Watson?”
“Delighted.”
“Dear me! Have some tea, Doctor—Mrs. Hudson has just been and gone, and you’ll soon feel quite human again.”
I doubted this severely but followed his instructions, finding them sound. Pouring for Hopkins, I remarked, “Holmes says ten to one it’s a murder. Nothing too disturbing before breakfast, I hope?”
“No, Doctor, but the circumstances are enough to beat me. I’d have you both in a cab already, but the trains could hardly be stopped, and the tarp is insufficient considering the pedestrian traffic—we’ve been forced to move the body, but there are two constables guarding the scene.”
“Hopkins, if you want to make any more of a topsy-turvy mess of this tale, supposing you hang upside-down like a bat as you tell it?” suggested Holmes with an angelic smile.
“Quite right, sir.” Hopkins coughed abashedly. “Well, the first thing you’ll want to learn is that we’ve had no trouble identifying the dead man. The victim is one Mr. Forrester Hyde.”
“Good Lord!” Holmes exclaimed. “Not the expert cracksman I landed in Wandsworth Prison over six years ago?”
“The very same, though it was a month before my promotion to detective.”
“Watson, we’ve our own account, I trust?”
Already feeling energized, I got to my feet as Holmes waved in the direction of my journals and his commonplace book. “Yes, I can lay my hands on it soon enough. Eighteen-ninety-four. You say Hyde has met his end, Inspector?”
“And a terribly strange end it was, to be sure, Dr. Watson.”
“You’re certain it was a murder?”
“He had a fatal encounter with a bullet, and nothing indicates he could have done such a thing himself.” Inspector Hopkins smiled wryly.
Holmes’s eyes narrowed. “And he was shot at a railway station, I take it, since you had to consider the sensibilities of a crowded area in the early hours of the morning and mentioned the impossibility of stopping the trains. A well-frequented line with a high concentration of the weekday laboring force who are the true heroes of the city, then. Which?”
Hopkins chuckled appreciatively. “Wapping Station, the East London Railway.”
“Watson, before we hear the inspector out, might you just refresh our recollections as to Hyde’s history?”
“Yes, I have it here.” Running my finger down the relevant page of Holmes’s index, I seated myself. “Ah, I remember. Forrester Hyde was a hardy, dashing sort, very well liked by the audacious types he ran with, especially the ladies—there’s a woodcut here from the day he was captured. Strong jaw, arrogant chin, dapper waxed moustache. For a cracksman, he certainly preferred not to keep his head down. He claimed to come from a coffee plantation fortune and patronize all manner of arts, not to mention specific artists of the fair sex. He wrote for several columns and was at one time a well-known theatrical critic who lived like a gentleman of leisure.”
“He gave that impression,” Holmes corrected with his pipe dangling from his fingers, “but he was a vile scoundrel who wormed his way into feminine confidences and thence into their safes. Once he had their trust, he would be allowed inside their lodgings under the pretext of false appointments, et cetera, and steal what he could find—judiciously, I might add, and never within the same immediate circle of acquaintances. In reality, he came from a none too respectable clan in the Leathermarket Gardens area, evinced the strongest talent for acting and mimicry I’ve ever seen, and used hotels when he wanted to give the impression of lavish spending. For the rest of the year, he rented a cheap flat on Lamb Walk.”
“Just so! You caught him out over a detail in his clothing after being consulted by a ballerina of some renown, did you not?”
Holmes shrugged demurely. “One might own a few sets of expensive togs, even tie an array of cravat knots and keep one’s boots perfectly blacked, but if a chap lacks servants and a valet, I can discern it easily.”
“How so?” Hopkins inquired, as athirst as ever for tutelage.
“Well, this rogue obviously saw to his own entire toilette every morning. It doesn’t matter whether your waistcoat is expensive supposing it hasn’t been brushed proper
ly after washing, nor your shirtsleeves and trousers aired, for that matter. The roughness of the nap on all three items practically shrieked he was an impostor.”
“Excellent!” Hopkins exclaimed.
“Facile, surely. The ballerina, who shall remain nameless, already suspected him. Once I’d glimpsed him, I knew she was right. He’d have been caught long before then had he been greedier and the word spread—as it was, he needed only to keep up with the theatrical papers, submit his articles via mail, flatter the struggling with promise of good notices, and woo them in the language of flowers. The rest of the time he worked as a desultory construction engineer.”
“You followed him to his real home in Lamb Walk with Inspector Gregson and a warrant, but though you did find the ballerina’s sapphires hidden in the false bottom of a valise, you found nothing else,” I continued.
“By George, that was wretchedly vexing!” Rousing, Holmes slapped his knee. “I blamed him for several more larcenous acts, but could tie him to no particular stonecutter or pawn shop, and so admitted defeat on those counts after a lengthy search. He likely sold a piece at a time and lived off the proceeds, never hoarding enough to incriminate himself, faked forced window latches and the like in other dwellings—anything so as not to arouse alarm.”
“But the dancer’s property was more than enough for a conviction on robbery charges, and . . . well, it seems that Hyde could have been released anytime during the past year,” I finished.
“It was Wednesday, gentlemen, and he was dead two days later,” Hopkins supplied.
“Ah, here we come to the meat of the matter.” Holmes’s torso gave an almost imperceptible twist of excitement in his armchair. “What happened between Wednesday and this morning, Inspector?”