The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part I

by David Marcum

  “The water’s gone quick on us, Mr. Holmes, and I can see it rising up the walls!” I said, suddenly frightened. “We don’t want to get caught in here come high tide!”

  “No, it is far too early for high tide,” said Mr. Holmes, seeing the same danger as me. “This is rain water. A deluge, in fact!”

  With a terrible shout of anger and terror, Seaver tipped back into the flood and was swept away down the tunnel and into darkness. The last I saw of him was the tiny point of light from his lamp that blinked out once water pushed through the glass.

  “Perilous occupation, toshing,” declared Mr. Holmes. “It will see the end of us next if we aren’t quick!”

  Mr. Holmes cast off from the monument of lost money and tried to keep the punt weighed with himself, me and Toby from getting turned over in the swell. We flew down the tunnel at a quick pace and I kept counting and recounting the layers of brick between the surface of the water and the top of the sewer. That number kept getting smaller.

  “The water’s rising fast, Mr. Holmes!” I cried over the gushing cascade. Pointing out the obvious to Sherlock Holmes is a waste of his time and yours, but I was scared silly.

  “We are too close to the river!” he said. “All the water flowing into the sewers uphill is converging here. The entire tunnel will be filled to the top in moments.”

  Mr. Holmes soon had to duck his head to keep from scraping it across the arched brick ceiling. I was sure the rising water would squash us to jam against the roof before spilling over the sides of the boat and dragging us to the bottom. We’d be drowned for certain.

  “This is what we are looking for!” Mr. Holmes announced, jamming his pole into the wall and turning us towards a dead-end route that was capped with a huge iron door, sealed shut with no means to be opened. “The river lies just beyond.”

  “I thought you said sewer water don’t flow into the Thames no more!”

  “It does, but away from the city and too many miles down river to save us now. We must rely on the emergency overflow outlets. They are designed to open when the sewer is over capacity to prevent flooding in the streets.”

  Mr. Holmes lay down at the bottom of the punt next to me and Toby. I gripped on tight to Toby’s long, tangled mane and whispered to him, “Don’t you worry, Mr. Holmes will see us through.” But I wasn’t so sure as the edges of the low boat floated high enough to touch the very top of the tunnel.

  Just when I was certain we were all done for, there was a loud clatter that echoed through what bits of the tunnel weren’t already under water. The next thing I knew, we were thrown forward and blown through the door as it flew open under all the pressure. I knew then what it was like to be fired out of a pistol. We were soaking wet in an instant, but not by sewer water sinking our little boat. It was rain, pouring down on us in sheets, and when I realized that I knew we were outside again.

  I dared look up and saw we were adrift in the Thames. It was almost as dark out as it had been by lantern light in the tunnel, so black were the skies. Flashes of lightning lit up the shore enough for me to judge we’d been pushed all the way out to the middle of the flow, the tiniest ship on the whole river. Mr. Holmes stood up and surveyed our situation.

  “We shan’t be punting through waters as deep as the Thames,” said Mr. Holmes, casting the useless pole down into our boat. “Make yourself useful, Wiggins, and help me flag down a passing vessel that might throw us a line.”

  I did as I was told, and it weren’t too long before we was rescued, the three of us, and brought to the docks by a passing pusher tug. None were spared a thorough drenching, and me and Mr. Holmes had to return a stinking wet dog to his owner in Lambeth. We didn’t tell him Toby might have ended the day smelling much worse had our venture into the London sewers gone badly.

  “How has our houseguest been?” Mr. Holmes asked Dr. Watson back at Baker Street, once he’d gotten out of his wet clothes and into his robe.

  “Ravenous,” reported Dr. Watson. “I think we may go hungry in the coming week. Mrs. Hudson’s pantry is down to crumbs.”

  Beth was sitting quietly by the window, humming softly to herself, trying to put the bad memories of the day aside with song.

  “And how did your investigation go?” Dr. Watson asked.

  “Well,” said Mr. Holmes. “Wet but well.”

  “Back early enough to see to your chemistry experiments then, Holmes?”

  Mr. Holmes took a long look at his work bench and then waved it away with his hand.

  “No, Watson. I have had enough stimulation for the day. Perhaps tomorrow. At any rate, there is the girl, Beth, to attend to. Although I have solved the questions related to her father’s death, she is too young to appreciate the case history, and there is no comfort for her to be had in the details. All that matters to her is that he is gone. “

  “We should see about returning the girl to her mother,” agreed Dr. Watson.

  “Alas, there is no mother, Watson. Albert Ewart was a widower. A strip of clear skin around one finger told me of a ring that was there during his coal mining days, protecting that lone spot from the dust. It seems to have vanished years ago. Hard times or not, no living wife would let her husband pawn his wedding band.”

  Beth came out of her humming stupor and spoke up. “Mum’s been dead so long, I can’t hardly remember her.”

  “Another lost soul in London,” said Mr. Holmes of the girl. “So many much too young for such a fate.”

  “I would say you already employ half of them, Holmes.”

  Dr. Watson was referring to me, standing out on a rug in the hall where I’d been told to stay, still dripping wet from the day, so I wouldn’t stain the floorboards.

  “Ah, if only that were so, Watson,” said Mr. Holmes, giving me a grin. “Not a criminal in the city could lift a finger without my knowing of it.”

  “A single sovereign is hardly an inheritance that will keep her forever,” said Dr. Watson. “Inquiries will have to be made at London orphanages to find one that can take her in,”

  I had to raise an objection to that suggestion straight off.

  “Some of the lads have been in and out of those places, and horrible they are. Like a prison for children whose only crime is being on their own.”

  “I am afraid it is the best we can offer her, Wiggins,” said Mr. Holmes, even though I could tell he agreed with me.

  “I understand,” I nodded. “It’s the best you can offer.”

  I, on the other hand, figured I could do better.

  “Do not be so downtrodden, boy,” said Dr. Watson. “She may yet be adopted.”

  But when Dr. Watson turned to address me, all he found were wet footprints across the floor to the window and back again.

  “I believe she already has been,” I heard Mr. Holmes say upstairs as I led Beth out the back door and away from Baker Street.

  The rest of the lads were waiting for me at our usual spot, in an empty lot out behind a tanner’s shop, just a few blocks away. The rain had let up and it looked like the weather had decided to behave itself again.

  “Meet our new recruit,” I said to them as I approached. “You can call him Ben.”

  “Ben,” I repeated to Beth, making sure she understood her new name, “these are The Baker Street Irregulars. You’re one of us now.”

  Not all of them were so quick to accept new faces. Mullin was the first to protest.

  “He’s not one of the boys. He don’t even look like a boy.”

  “He’s one of us because I says so,” I told him, “and he’s a boy if I says that, too. You want to argue with me, open wide so’s I can knock out a tooth or two while I’m knocking some sense into you.”

  Mullin backed down as soon as he saw me make a fist, but some of the others weren’t so easy to bend.

  “You been p
layin’ a little too thick at bein’ the boss of late, Wiggins,” another dared to say.

  “Yeah? Well how many of you have gone on an adventure with Mister Sherlock Holmes and helped him solve a big mystery? None, that’s right. Because there’s Dr. Watson and then there’s me.”

  And that seemed to settle it. I didn’t mention Toby in the list of Mr. Holmes’s partners, just in case they thought I might rank third behind a dog. Once the matter of expanding our ranks was decided, I felt Beth tugging on my sleeve.

  “What do I do?” she wanted to know, now that she’d given up a life of mudlarking to become an Irregular.

  “You do as the rest of us does,” I instructed. “You watch and you listen. We’re the eyes and ears of London, we lot. And whatever we know, whatever we learn, it’s Sherlock Holmes who’ll put it to good use.”

  She was young, the youngest we’d ever taken in, but she understood straight away. I couldn’t honestly say that meant she had a bright future ahead of her, but she had a future with us, and that was something.

  The Tale of the Forty Thieves

  by C.H. Dye

  In perusing the records of the many adventures I shared with my extraordinary friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I am reminded how often the problems came to us in waves. Holmes might go weeks without a case, and then have several appear hard on each other’s heels. So it was in the spring of 1887, when it seemed for a time that my friend might never get a chance to rest. I attempted to procure him a few days respite in the country after the months he spent in France, untangling the threads of the Netherland-Sumatra Company scandal, but as I have written elsewhere, that visit was interrupted by murder. We were not even a day back from Reigate when he was petitioned by Stephen Grice-Patterson to unravel the apparent haunting and thefts on the island of Uffa, in the Firth of Clyde. It was as well that I accompanied him to Scotland, for it took the both of us to lay the “ghost” after three night watches and a mad chase across the heather. By the time we set sail for Glasgow, all my medical instincts were aroused once more on my friend’s behalf, but he insisted on returning to London by the night train, rather than taking a hotel and embarking in the morning.

  We arrived at Euston Station at an hour when the dairymaids were still portioning out their wares to sleepy scullions, and the great metropolis had just begun to stir itself. We had just emerged into the light of the early morning sun and were casting about in search of a hansom when we were hailed by a familiar voice. Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard was waving to us from the door of a growler on the street. “Mr. Holmes!” he called again. “Doctor Watson! Cabbie, draw us alongside those two gentlemen.” We waited until the cab had parked beside us to give the Inspector our good mornings, and he returned them with alacrity. “You have no idea how glad I am to find you back in London.”

  I cannot say that I returned the sentiment with enthusiasm. A new case held little appeal. I have never quite lost the knack of sleeping under uncomfortable circumstances, thanks to my time in the Army, but I had spent most of the last fifteen hours travelling in an overcrowded railway compartment. I wanted nothing more than a bath and my breakfast. And I was concerned about Holmes, whose normal pallor was underlain with grey and whose eyes lacked their usual spark. He had forestalled a black mood by taking cocaine whilst we were awaiting our train in Glasgow, but had paid for the respite with restlessness. While I had dozed, he had fidgeted and read, restocking his pile of newspapers whenever opportunity presented. Still, he greeted the policeman with a nod and gladly accepted Gregson’s offer of a ride to Baker Street.

  No sooner were we on our way than the Scotland Yard detective asked Holmes, “Did you read about the Cartier bracelet while you were out of London?”

  “A chain of diamonds and sapphires, stolen from a courier in the Strand last Friday. The company has offered a reward for its return.”

  “Yes. The courier, Hammond, didn’t even realize he’d been robbed of his goods right away. He’d been jostled once or twice in the crowd, but he swears each time he checked his pocket and felt nothing amiss. But when he came to his destination, the bracelet was gone from the case. As neat a job as I’ve ever known.”

  “An ordinary crime,” I interjected, hoping to keep Holmes from taking interest.

  “Ordinary enough,” Gregson agreed. “Were it not that the Foreign Office has become involved. They won’t say why the recovery of the bracelet is so important, and I shan’t speculate, but every man in the Yard is looking. And now a possible clue to the matter has come up near Elephant and Castle in Southwark. Do you know the area?”

  “Tolerably.” Holmes said, his fingers tapping against the pocket where he kept his cigarette case. It was empty, I knew, and so was mine, victim of his long sleepless night. “It is the intersection of several roads and a railway line. Not the richest of London’s districts nor the poorest, although the Walter’s Almhouses are home to more families than they were built for. The Baptist Tabernacle is the landmark most think of, although the area derives its name from a coaching inn mentioned by Shakespeare. They are building an underground station there, I believe.”

  “They are indeed, and there are two rival gangs which have stepped up their efforts to keep or take control of the nearby streets. It’s made for a good many fights, a few robberies, and an increase in all sorts of other crime, particularly shoplifting and pickpocketing.” The inspector tapped his bandaged leg. “Two nights ago Lestrade was on Brook Drive investigating a robbery when he came across one of the fights. He managed to blow his whistle and summon the nearest constables, but he got his shinbone cracked by a heavy belt buckle.”

  “Were the miscreants apprehended?” I asked, for I did not like to think of our frequent visitor being injured.

  “Three were. Five escaped,” Gregson said. “It would have been six, but for three constables, Hopkins, Madison, and Gambit, who gave chase. They cornered the third man, Jack Porter, in a rathole off of Lamlash Street. But along the way there, Porter ran through a room full of women and children sitting down to their dinner, and the constable nearest his heels, a young fellow named Hopkins, noticed as he tried to follow that the woman nearest the fire took one look at his uniform and thrust a paper in her hand towards the flames. Then Porter overturned the table for a distraction, and went out the window. Hopkins lost his footing and fell amidst the beans, and it was left to Madison and Gambit to catch Porter and tuck him into a Black Maria. Hopkins, meanwhile, realized that he recognized the woman who was berating him for destroying her supper - a pickpocket well known to the force by the name of Nettie Hannigan. Do you know of her?”

  Holmes tapped his steepled fingers against his chin and nodded. “She is sometimes called ‘Red Nettie’, is she not? Not because of her hair, which is brown when she has not been using henna, but because of the strawberry mark which shows on part of her left ear and down her neck.”

  “That’s right. She was caught with the goods a time or two when she was younger, but she’s grown more canny since. Pretty enough, in her way, and does piecework, apparently, for a manufacturer of ladies accoutrements. Hopkins reports a sewing machine in the corner of the room, among other things.” Gregson reached into his pocket for a sheaf of handwritten papers.

  “Is there a connection between Miss Hannigan and the Cartier theft?”

  “Nettie was apprehended on suspicion of shoplifting three hours after the theft near Charing Cross, though the female searcher found nothing and she was released. But here, let me read you what Hopkins reported. ‘The force of wind from the table overturning blew the burning paper out of the center of the fire before it could be entirely consumed, and it fell under my eye. I saw the word ‘police’ and the word ‘reward’, in the portion already blackened, and a moment later one of the women poured the firebucket over me and the paper. I saw that three small pieces were unburnt and was able to recover them by putting my hands on them as I got back t
o my feet. The wet paper stuck to my hands, and I was able to preserve it within my handkerchief as I pretended to clean myself off and made my apologies to the women. Once back at the station, I investigated the scraps. All three bore typewritten letters. The smallest one had ‘ H U F R M ’. The second largest ‘ O W S L - full stop - X P Q ’, and the largest, ‘ C E L E T in the paradol chamber until it is safe to C O L ’. Now I ask you Mr. Holmes, what can that be other than an order to keep a bracelet in the paradol chamber until it is safe to collect the reward?”

  “The paradol chamber?”

  “Yes. ‘P A R A D O L’. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “Are you certain that was what was written? Could it be that the l was rather an x?”

  “It was typewritten. There was no mistaking one letter for another.”

  “Ah.” Holmes scowled, but I could see that he was intrigued by the puzzle. “I should like to speak to Constable Hopkins directly, if possible.”

  “He’s due to testify on another matter this morning,” Gregson said, “but I’ll let his sergeant know. The sooner the better. Hammond’s company plans to treble the amount of the reward tomorrow. They’re pressed by the Foreign Office too, and are far less concerned with bringing the thief to justice than they are in recovering the lost gems. But if we can find this mysterious chamber before morning, we might not have every treasure hunter in the city getting in our way.”

  Holmes shook his head. “I know London as well as any man alive, and I have never heard of a Paradol Chamber.”

  “And what does ‘paradol’ mean?” I wondered, foreseeing a long morning consulting our dictionaries and other reference works. “It sounds like the name of a patent medicine to me.”

  “Or a chemical compound,” Holmes said, thoughtfully. “The -ol suffix points to an organic substance or an extract of some kind. But I associate the word with music. I believe it may be a family name, if not here, then on the Continent.”