CHAPTER TWO
The Anonymous Inmate
HOLMES AND I REPAIRED TO BAKER STREET, WHERE we cleaned ourselves up, donned fresh clothing, and ate a hearty repast provided by Mrs Hudson, before setting out again.
A hansom took us to Southwark and St George’s Fields, where lay the Bethlem Royal Hospital, popularly known as Bedlam. The institution’s central block loomed before us, fronted by a colonnaded, dome-capped portico. Three-storey-high wings stretched to either side for nearly a hundred yards. It was a huge and intimidating pile, its dark brick façade seemingly overhung by shadow for all that the day was sunny and bright and the sky a cloudless blue. As we climbed the front steps a faint, anguished scream emanated from a far window. This was answered by a torrent of oaths from somewhere also indoors but nearer by, then a shrill cry from somewhere else in a voice that sounded only tangentially human.
“The call of the wild,” said Holmes.
My reply was merely a mirthless grin.
We entered that place of madness, and Holmes presented his card at the reception desk and asked for McBride. Shortly the attendant arrived, a brawny redheaded Scotsman with a handshake like a bear trap and eyebrows as bristly as gorse. His white tunic was crisply starched and tightly buttoned.
“Welcome tae ye both, gentlemen. Gregson said you’d come. ’Tis an honour tae meet the mighty Sherlock Holmes. You too, Doctor. I’m an admirer of your stories. If you ask me you’re every bit as skilled a wordsmith as Scott or Stevenson.”
“How kind.”
“Now, if ye’d both care tae follow me…”
McBride led us towards the east wing, where he explained the male inmates were kept. The other wing was reserved for female inmates.
As we ascended a narrow, otherwise unoccupied stairwell, the attendant paused, turned to Holmes and said, “Would ye mind if…? Nay.” He shook his head. “I shouldnae ask.”
“Ask what?”
“It’s just that I’ve read so many times how ye can just look at a man and tell everything there is tae know about him. I was wondering, would ye mind doing it on me?”
There was a sharp intake of breath from Holmes. “You’ll forgive me, Mr McBride, but Watson and I are somewhat pressed for time…”
The Scotsman looked abashed. “Of course, of course. Rude of me.”
I nudged Holmes from behind.
“But,” my friend said, “I do not suppose there is any harm in me furnishing a basic summary of facts about you. You are from Edinburgh, obviously.”
“That I am.”
“The soft brogue is distinctive. But we can be more geographically precise than that. You were born and brought up in Cowgate, a slum area of that city.”
“I wouldnae say it was Auld Reekie’s loveliest spot. How did ye ken?”
“Your surname is Irish, and many of Irish descent in Edinburgh are inhabitants of Cowgate’s tenements. Statistically, the probability was high that you used to be amongst their number.”
“That is true an’ all.”
“Upon moving to London, you fell into a life of crime. Our mutual friend Inspector Gregson has already hinted that you have a shady past, for he told us that he met you ‘in a professional capacity’. When a policeman says that, more often than not it means he has felt the collar of the person to whom he is referring. I would go further and state that you were a cracksman.”
Beneath those wiry ginger eyebrows, McBride’s eyes were downcast. “Hardly my proudest boast, but when I first came down south I was on my uppers and had tae earn a living somehow. I’m a good soldier now, keeping the covenant. How did ye ken I used tae burgle houses?”
“One hand bears a scar, the particular shape of which indicates it can only have been caused by a jemmy slipping from your grasp and its tip gouging deep into the palm. Doubtless you served time for your misdemeanours.”
“Two hard years in Pentonville.”
“But to return to your upbringing, I would aver that your father was a drunkard and a brute, who used you ill as a boy.”
“Aye. Right beast he was, my da. How does it show?”
“Your left wrist hangs bent to one side when at rest, suggestive of a break inflicted during youth, the kind commonly known as a greenstick fracture. Were the injury the result of an accident, the break would most likely have occurred in line with your arm. The way your wrist is kinked tells me your hand was instead twisted radially, by force. The most probable cause of that is violence, and since you are a large man, well able to defend himself, the reasonable inference is that it occurred before adulthood. The likeliest suspect, then, would be a close relative, and in most instances such abuse is inflicted by the father. As for the man being a drunkard, you referred to yourself just now as a ‘good soldier’ who was ‘keeping the covenant’. Such phrases are common currency amongst those who have pledged themselves to the eleven doctrines of the Salvation Army, the so-called Articles of War. The obvious inference is that you are a member of that organisation.”
“I volunteer on my days off, giving out food tae the poor at my local mission.”
“Since one of the requirements of any Salvationist is that he be teetotal, I can draw the conclusion that you do not drink alcohol, and a credible reason why that might be is because your father did, in the worst possible way. By abstaining, you are explicitly rejecting the poor example he set.”
“The whisky was my da’s best friend, only love, an’ great ruin. I have vowed it will never be mine.”
“In short, Mr McBride, what I see is a man brought up with limited prospects, who fell from grace but has paid the penalty and risen again to become a productive citizen. You are an object lesson in turning one’s life around, and for that you are to be commended.”
McBride seemed both amazed and moved. His eyes were wide and sparkling, close to tears. “It really is uncanny,” said he, “an’ just as Dr Watson describes it in his tales.”
Holmes made an upward-ushering gesture. “Now, might we resume?”
The stairs emerged onto a corridor, which was a kind of gallery, with a row of barred doors leading off on either side. We proceeded along it past wretches in various states of psychic distress and physical disarray. One man was plucking invisible flies from the air and inspecting each imaginary insect with a connoisseur’s eye before popping it into his mouth. Another paced in circles, hammering his brow with the heel of his hand and reciting nonsensical rhyming verse. A third simply glared at us through the bars as we passed, scratching the intimate crevices of his body, while a fourth, who was chained by an iron collar to his bedpost, growled at us and gnashed his teeth, more a feral animal than a human being.
I tried to remain impassive at these sights, but inwardly I quailed. It was not the inmates’ sordor and mental enfeeblement that chilled me so much as the thought that, were I not careful, I might one day join their ranks. All too often in recent years I had felt my sanity to be on a precarious footing. Only a small amount of extra pressure would be needed to tip it over the edge.
“Here we are,” said McBride. “Our mystery man.” Removing a ring full of keys from his belt, he unlocked the door. “Right, you,” he said sternly to the inmate. “Visitors. Be on your best behaviour.” To us he remarked, “He’s not any trouble tae be honest, but keep out o’ his reach all the same, just tae be on the safe side. Ye ne’er can tell with these bampots. One moment meek as lambs, the next trying tae rip your throat out.”
We entered the cramped cell. The inmate was a man in his mid-to-late twenties. He was clad in a soiled smock and was on his knees in one corner, busy drawing upon the floor with a stub of charcoal. I saw straight away that he was missing one hand; his left arm ended just above the wrist. The injury looked old, the stump long healed.
But that was not all. The left half of his face was a ruin, the skin riven with so much scar tissue that it resembled melted candle wax. The eye on that side peered out through lids that were so distended one could only just glimpse its sclera, a little glistening lozenge
in a cave of puckered skin. The scarring extended all the way down his neck to his trapezius muscle. Like the amputation of his hand, the facial injuries looked to be old. Two or three years had passed, I estimated, since their infliction. There were, however, more recent wounds too. I spied numerous fresh cuts, scratches and scrapes, and even what I thought were bite marks.
As Gregson had said, the walls and floor of the cell were festooned with jagged hieroglyphs inscribed onto the brickwork at criss-crossing angles. The inmate was using the charcoal to add to them.
“Aye,” said McBride, seeing Holmes’s and my interest in the man’s activities. “He started doing that afore he started speaking. At first he used his own filth for ink, I regret tae say. Since he wouldn’t stop and us attendants became fed up scrubbing away the mess, I got permission for him tae have sticks of charcoal instead. He’s been happy with those ever since.”
I approached the nearest wall and peered at the madman’s work. The hieroglyphs were R’lyehian, three phrases repeated over and over:
R’luhlloig
Grah’n wgah’n
Sgn’wahl nyth
Roughly translated, this meant:
The hidden mind
The lost one controls
Shares space with the servant
The last of my decipherings, however, was not exact. The line could equally have been “The servant shares space”. The trouble with rendering R’lyehian into English is that it is terse and utilitarian. Grammar and syntax are pared down to the bare minimum, and therefore ambiguity of interpretation is rife.
I grimaced at Holmes, and he reciprocated by setting his lips in a thin, sombre line. R’lyehian was never welcome in any context. It invariably betokened bad things.
Holmes moved directly into the inmate’s line of sight. Bending down before him but receiving no sign of acknowledgement, he waved a hand to attract his attention. Slowly, almost indifferently, the inmate ceased writing and looked up.
“Sir,” said Holmes. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. And you are…?”
“I…” The inmate hesitated, seeming puzzled. “I am… I don’t belong here.” The words came out slurred, thick-sounding, and were couched in an accent which I thought was American.
“I am sure you feel you do not,” said Holmes. “Yet you would not be where you are without good reason. Your incarceration is for your own wellbeing, at least, if not also the wellbeing of others.”
“No,” the inmate insisted. “Here.” He jabbed a forefinger – his only forefinger – at his chest. “I don’t belong here.”
“The laddie’s been telling us that a lot,” said McBride. “Plenty of ’em say the same. Usually it’s the ones who think they’re Napoleon or Julius Caesar or whoever. ‘I’m the emperor of France. Where’s my palace gone?’”
“Or do you mean you belong in Boston, rather than London?” said Holmes to the inmate. “For Boston is where you are from originally, if I do not miss my guess.”
“Boston?” The inmate’s tone was wistful, almost dreamy. “Boston… No, not Boston.”
“Your intonation is distinctly Bostonian.”
The man shook his head, not so much in disagreement or defiance as in puzzlement.
Holmes motioned to the hieroglyphs. “R’luhlloig,” he said. “Grah’n wgah’n. Sgn’wahl nyth. Yes?”
Now the inmate looked truly confused. It was as though he had never before heard spoken out loud the very words he was writing.
“R’luhlloig?” Holmes enquired. “Grah’n? Nafl-kadishtu. Phleg.” In English: “The hidden mind? The lost one? I do not understand. Explain.”
McBride tapped my elbow. “What’s he saying?” he murmured. “What language is that?”
“It is… the Algonquin tongue,” I said, extemporising. “Evidently our anonymous New Englander has had contact with members of that Red Indian tribe.”
“Ye don’t say! And Mr Holmes is conversant in it? Well now, my admiration for the man increases. Is there nothing he cannae do?”
I had not expected McBride to accept my explanation quite as readily as he did, but then he was a fairly simple soul. Moreover, as a Salvationist he would have no truck with the occult and thus would be oblivious to it in its less familiar guises. Something overtly satanic he might be attuned to, but not the subtler, more insidious evils that were our beat. Gregson had chosen his “useful contact” in Bethlem well.
Holmes quizzed the Bostonian further in R’lyehian but it was fruitless. He was greeted with nothing but blank incomprehension.
He abandoned the effort, at which point the inmate spoke again. “I am… wrong,” he said, trying strenuously to frame his thoughts in speech. “I am not what I seem. I do not belong.”
“You are not what you seem?” said Holmes. “You seem mad. Are you saying you are sane?”
“No. Do not belong. Not here. Not here.”
The man repeated those two words while jabbing his forefinger at himself with increasing emphasis. Eventually he gave it up and collapsed back onto his haunches with a guttural sigh of exasperation.
“Very well,” said Holmes. “I understand that you feel you are not meant for the madhouse. Now…” He stretched out both hands. “I would like to inspect you, if I may.”
“I wouldnae do that if I were ye, Mr Holmes,” McBride cautioned. “Ye’ve no idea how unpredictable folk like him can be.”
“I shall take great care. I do not believe our friend is violent. He seems more confused and displaced than anything.”
With a surprisingly gentle touch Holmes took the inmate’s truncated arm and studied it, then ran fingertips over the disfigured side of his face. He examined the man’s surviving hand and finished by giving his head a thorough going-over: ears, hair, neck, teeth. The inmate submitted to his ministrations, weirdly serene. I had to wonder how long it had been since anyone had done anything but manhandle him. Bethlem was not known for the delicacy with which its denizens were treated.
“Watson, what do you make of this?”
Summoning me over with a flick of his fingers, Holmes drew to my notice a tiny round scab at the back of the inmate’s neck.
“It could be an insect bite of some sort,” I suggested. “I would not be surprised if the fellow has lice or fleas.”
“An insect bite?” said Holmes. “Perhaps.”
“You think not?”
“Were he riddled with vermin there would be other bites, not just this one.”
“A single mosquito bite, then.”
“I see none of the customary inflammation. Do you? Nor are mosquitoes common in London.”
“They might be in Purfleet, where he was found. It is fairly rural around there.”
“All the same, to me this looks very much like a puncture, such as might have been caused by a hypodermic needle.”
“That was my first thought,” I said, “but I dismissed the possibility. To insert a needle at the base of the skull, into the cervical vertebrae, is more than hazardous. There is no sound medical reason for injecting there, and every reason not to. What if the spinal cord were injured in the process? The consequences could be catastrophic: hypertonic spasticity, muscle atrophy, tetraplegia…”
“It is a queer location for an injection, I agree, but the mark of a needle is distinctive.”
Holmes’s expression added an unspoken suffix: And I should know.
As well he should, for beneath his sleeves countless such punctures adorned his arms. My friend’s dependency on cocaine was then, in the mid-1890s, at its height. Elsewhere I have portrayed his habit of resorting to the stimulant as the product of boredom, an almost whimsical indulgence to stave off ennui during the periods when clients were thin on the ground. In reality he availed himself regularly of a seven per cent solution of the drug – and sometimes a stronger dosage than that – simply in order to keep himself functioning beyond the normal limits of human endurance. Cocaine sped up his thought processes and combated tiredness, but the corollary was that it rava
ged his nervous system. He worked more effectively under its influence but cumulatively, over the years, use of the drug was taking its toll. I had badgered him long and hard to give it up, but it would not be until 1897 that my campaign was successful.
“Well…” Holmes rose to his feet. “I believe I have seen enough.”
“Ye ken who the fellow is?” said McBride.
“His actual identity? No. That would be a miracle. But I have gathered sufficient clues to lay a foundation for finding out.”
“I should be interested tae learn more.”
“And I have no interest in telling you,” Holmes said curtly. “You have already exacted one display of analytical reasoning from me, Mr McBride. Be content with that.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Stories and Real Life
“THERE WAS NO NEED TO BE QUITE SO BRUSQUE with the man,” I said to Holmes half an hour later at a hammam on Waterloo Road. My friend had insisted we take a Turkish bath in order to revive ourselves, and now we were perched in the hot-room, naked save for towels around our waists, our skin pinkened and perspiring freely. “You hurt McBride’s feelings, poor fellow. He was quite crestfallen as he escorted us out.”
My companion shrugged. “I have little patience with these people who expect me to perform for them. ‘What can you deduce about me from this fob watch, Mr Holmes?’ ‘Tell me everything you can about me from the condition of my walking stick, Mr Holmes.’ As though I am some trained bear, ever ready to rise up on my hind legs and dance about when they clap their hands.”
“It is harmless, surely.”
“It is trivial, and it is an imposition, and it wastes my talents, and I blame you for it, Watson. I blame you and your stories” – he buried the word stories in a contemptuous snort – “wherein you depict me as some sort of winking guru, dispensing gnomic pronouncements and shrewd insights with gay abandon.”
“I have been at pains to show you in a positive light in my fiction,” I retorted. “I never demean you. What you must not forget is that these stories you are so scornful of keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back.”
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