Some folk do get justice after all. And in Dr. Watson’s case, I was thoroughly glad of it.
“You must be wondering why I’m stopping by like this.” His moustache twitched with amusement.
“Himself did not send you, I take it. But perchance he hinted as much until you imagined you’d got the idea all by yourself.”
Dr. Watson laughed readily. “Actually, I came here to deliver this in person, so I might learn your response.”
He passed me a card: formal design, a warm eggshell colour edged with a blue border. When I saw what it was, I think I flushed.
I hope I didn’t. But I think I did.
“I’m a touch staggered, Doctor. But yes, of course I’ll come.”
His square, open face lit up. “Wonderful! It’s short notice, but Mary has had a change of circumstances, and since neither of us possess any family to vex, why delay what we both want?”
“Can’t think of a reason in the world. Same as I can’t think of a reason why you’d want a detective inspector at your wedding,” I added, smiling.
Dr. Watson’s blue eyes didn’t darken exactly. But a wisp of cloud did pass over clear skies. “I don’t want to make any implication whatsoever that I wouldn’t invite you no matter the circumstances. However, Mary and I are quite alone in the world as regards kin. Thankfully, we’ve some of the best kith we could possibly ask for, so it’s only natural that we should want them at our ceremony.”
Nodding, I took a sip of spirits. The Lestrade clan is neither sprawling nor dwindling. Aside from my parents and my nephew, there are aunts, cousins, Mad Uncle Charlie, etc. I could equally turn up at my Aunt Annette’s suite in Chelsea for hot crumpets with bitter marmalade, or at my cousin Roger’s dairy farm in Shropshire for teacakes with strawberries and cream. We’re not in danger of extinction… But there’s a hole in the fabric. And I’ve been trying to mend it for so long, to so little avail, at the expense of any activities that might be considered sociable, that I was almost cheap enough to envy Dr. Watson his friends. Right up until I reminded myself that he considered me one.
“You appear perplexed, Inspector. Have I caused any offence?”
“God, no. You surprised me, that’s all. Last I saw you, Mr. Holmes was shouting at me about removing that poor woman’s clothing before the autopsy. How he imagines we should have done an autopsy with her corset and stays intact is beyond me.”
Dr. Watson’s laugh, unlike Mr. Holmes’s, makes a chap join in before he knows what he’s about.
“I suppose it might appear odd to some that our nuptials will be populated with so many who have been introduced to us by means of work instead of leisure.” Dr. Watson shrugged pleasantly. “Apart from a few associates from my club and one or two friends from Mary’s days at boarding school, everyone there will have something to do with industry or endeavour. My new neighbour, Charles Anstruther, at my medical practice, Michael Stamford from my days at Bart’s…”
“Sherlock Holmes,” I found myself muttering.
“Here, now.” Dr. Watson set his elbows on his knees. “I’m well aware that you and Holmes don’t get on from time to time, but may I ask whether anything’s troubling you specifically?”
It was right there in front of me. The offer, fresh and generous and honest as anything, like a perfectly baked steak and kidney pie. The doctor wouldn’t have minded me grousing. Probably would have taken Mr. Holmes to task over it to boot. But I didn’t need Dr. Watson miffed at his own best man. So I kept mum.
“No, and I’m sorry I’m in a foul humour today. The truth is I’m meant to write down every unsolved case that’s ever passed through my docket.”
“My word.” Dr. Watson frowned. “While potentially practical, that sounds… unnecessarily demeaning.”
“Such is the life of the regulars. Mr. Holmes should thank his stars he has no one to hold him accountable for a thing.”
“I wouldn’t quite say that.” Dr. Watson coughed demurely. “But I don’t envy you, and I’ll leave you to it, so it can be over that much sooner.”
“Much obliged, Doctor. I’ll be at your wedding with a spring in my step.”
He was halfway to the door before I realised he was limping a little. He always does in the winter, though it isn’t nearly as noticeable as it used to be. So do I. Too many memories came crowding in, scattered and terrible, and before I knew what I was about, I blurted, “Have you ever lost a patient, Dr. Watson, one that… one that stayed with you?”
The doctor stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “We all have.”
“Does it get any better?”
He bit his bottom lip with a slight shake of his head. “Inspector, I cannot claim that it does. May I be of service to you in any way?”
“No,” I said quietly. “Apologies, Doctor. I don’t think anyone can. It’s been some ten years. But I’ll manage, never fear, and these reports are nearly finished. I’ll be right as rain tomorrow.”
After a cordial goodbye, Dr. Watson left. He isn’t one to force a confidence. And he understands, God knows he does, what it means to be haunted. There used to be screams in his ears and sand in his teeth – we all saw it plain as daylight. And I was glad enough to be invited to such a decent bloke’s wedding that I nearly picked up my chin and squared my shoulders to finish my ludicrous assignment in a better mood.
But then I thought of Mr. Holmes again. That smile of his that’s almost a snigger, his refusal to acknowledge anyone’s choices as valid if they aren’t the exact ones he would have made.
This camaraderie business is hogwash. I’d as soon swim naked across the Thames as go to Dr. Watson’s wedding if it means smiling at someone who insulted my late sister, however unwittingly. I only hope I can manage to catch an important enough case to beg off when the time comes.
Entry in the diary of Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade
Wednesday, 9 January 1889
PC Noll and PC Holloway were foolish enough to leave their galoshes where PC Zordan could get at them when the trio checked in from their rounds today, and the former two kept asking as they left the Yard why everything smelled of marmalade. Their boots will be sticky as anything, supposing they aren’t glued to their overshoes entirely. Nobody said a word, either, though they all howled when the poor chaps were clear of headquarters. I’d run PC Zordan down over such a prank under normal circumstances, but I can’t find it in me to care. Anyway, citrus preserves never hurt anyone.
I stopped by Miss Wilhemina Sparks’s residence for a chat with the proprietress. Paradise Road turns out to be a considerable exaggeration if not an outright lie. And Mrs. Bray is a dour old thing, skinny as a plucked hen, with her hair in such a tight bun it’s a wonder she can move her eyebrows. She can, though. She can lower them right quick at a fellow.
“I haven’t the slightest where Miss Willie’s gallivanted off to,” she sniffed. “And now I know that her sister’s no better than she should be, and that it never even occurred to Miss Willie to show her a Bible and show her the door, I don’t care either. She paid me through the end of her stay, and that’s all I care about. She had a carpet bag packed and claimed she’d been corresponding with a man, that she was off to be wed, and that she would reach Miss Millie by letter in a few days.”
“What sort of a man, Mrs. Bray?”
“How should I know what sort? I never snoop in my boarders’ business, and once they aren’t my boarders any more, well, all the better reason to keep my nose out of it.”
“Would it be too much trouble for me to ask—?”
“No, you may not search Miss Willie’s former room, and I don’t see what cause you might have to request such an extraordinary thing.”
“Miss Sparks’s sister, Miss Millie Sparks, thinks she may have met with some misadventure.”
“Miss Millie Sparks,” Mrs. Bray intoned with a truly religious zest for suffering, “doubtless encounters so much misadventure, as you put it, that she fancies it surrounds her at all times. And I’ve just fi
nished having the suite cleaned – young Mary has been at it all morning. Spick and span and ready for my next tenant, may God speed them on their journey. Is there anything else I can help you with, Inspector Lestrade?”
There wasn’t, and I didn’t have a warrant on me. In fact, there seemed little point in a search. So I left. Gnawing the end of my pencil, I wondered why a spinster who’d once been taken in by a charlatan would risk everything all over again on a man she clearly barely knew. I don’t pretend to understand the way passion works. But I do know how common sense works. And women tend to have no lack of the stuff. On that point more than any other, I think, Mr. Holmes and I land at opposite poles.
Entry in the diary of Inspector Geoffrey Lestrade
Thursday, 10 January 1889
Well, colour me staggered.
It’s not often I’ll admit I’ve been dead in the wrong, because it doesn’t often happen. That’s not hubris – I weigh options, I consider. I calculate probabilities. Mr. Holmes loves to say that I was born without an imagination. Well, imagination is all very well, but I’m a detective inspector, not some brilliant scarecrow who’s consulted over only the daftest crimes and solves them by practising alchemy and making the world spin backwards. Most of the time, the plain explanation is the right one. So most of the time, I’m correct.
Today, however, I had the stick by altogether the wrong end. It’s not a crime I’m talking about, but a person.
But to begin at the beginning. The crime scene presented the sort of miserable, wretched outcome we all hope never to encounter again, but crops up every year or so anyhow. I stood at the corner of Greencoat Row and Francis Street, watching as two PCs carted away the body of Mrs. Jane Gibbs, wife of Mr. Merripeth Gibbs, City banker. The wind was a scalpel against exposed skin, and soon the coroner would be wielding the same. But neither would trouble Mrs. Gibbs any longer. Tucking my neck into my muffler, I watched my breath smoke like a funeral pyre.
“Here now, take care!” I snapped as the nearer constable banged the stretcher against the door of the police wagon. “You’d not want your mum to be carted off to the dead house like a sack of potatoes.”
He flushed. But Mrs. Jane Gibbs deserved what respect the police could offer her. She’d already encountered us regularly, when her husband took it into his head to tenderise her flesh and then lock her out of their sedate grey townhouse. We had discovered her with bits of her face bloodied, coatless and shivering, before she’d time to scurry off to a discreet refuge, on multiple occasions. She always claimed that she’d been terribly silly and fallen in the park. Or on the stairs. And that the servants were all taking a half-day, and that she’d forgotten her key, and that her husband was working late.
Scribbling in my notebook, I ignored the bustle that sudden death always produces. Not just from us police. From the neighbours, and the street Arabs, and the press, and the servants, and probably the fleas on the kitchen cats. I’ve never understood tragedy as a spectator sport. I saw a hanging at Newgate once and didn’t sleep for a fortnight without waking up to visions of a hooded body spasming like a fish flopping on dry land.
“Everything secured?” I called to PC McGettigan. I’d already questioned the butler and housekeeper, who assured me that the entire staff lived in utter terror of the master of the house. And I knew the history of that sad, sorry place. And I’d found the cause of death. All I needed was the coroner’s opinion.
And to write up a viciously damning police report.
“Aye, sir!” McGettigan rubbed at his ruddy side whiskers. “Servants have all been seen to, the bedroom locked and marked fer a crime scene, and her brother wired. He’s a Leeds man, so he’ll arrive on the morrow.”
“Good. Let’s start to clear out then. And get those yellow journalists off the corner! I don’t care if you have to use your truncheon.”
Spitting with significance, McGettigan trudged off. I turned to the street. Several of the reporters kicked up a fuss at being ousted, but one twitch of the beefy Irishman’s hand in the direction of his club and they slunk off, muttering. So I glanced down Greencoat Row in the other direction to make certain there weren’t any other riffraff to send packing.
Only to discover that there was indeed an undesirable leaning against a wrought-iron rail and smoking a cigarette, and his name was Sherlock Holmes. And he was staring with eyes like steel-tipped arrows square at me.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I hissed to myself.
“Sir?” The constable had reappeared.
“Right.” I shoved my hands in my coat pockets. “The prisoner is secured?”
“Snug as a sardine, Inspector Lestrade.”
“Go on, then. Don’t take the good roads to Newgate. That blackguard ought to feel every bump and scrape on the way to the last home he’ll ever know. If anyone needs me, I’ll be at headquarters signing his death warrant.”
If the constable was put off by my enthusiasm, I suppose I’ll find out later. I put my head down and marched hell for leather away from that twisted townhouse and the world’s only (thank God) independent consulting detective.
Thinking he would expect me to make straight for the Yard, I hurried in the opposite direction. A left on Francis Street, a right on Thirleby Road, a right on Howlick Place. Once I made it as far as the wide fairway of Victoria Street, I could cut north along Whitehall to sneak in through the rear of the building. A lamplighter nodded while using his long staff to ignite the city’s beacons as the stars began winking to life. The streets in that part of London are quieter than some, and the pubs snug and cheery. I was tempted to warm my bones with a hot toddy, but then my fingers closed around the little bottle of cyanide labelled ELIMINATES ALL PERNICIOUS PESTS that I’d stored in my pocket for safekeeping.
An effective murder weapon if ever there was one – and a stupid one, to boot. Thank God. Just then I reached the end of Thirleby Road, the smell of frying onions and sizzling mutton seeping from draughty kitchen windows, and I turned the corner which would land me safe in the melee of Victoria Street. And nearly trod on the toes of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
“Good evening, Inspector Lestrade,” he said evenly. The cigarette he’d been smoking was spent, and he crushed the butt under his sole.
“I… how the devil?” I spluttered.
“Come now, you really can’t be as surprised as all that! You were clearly leaving the scene of a crime that mattered to you; therefore, you would have made straight for the Yard to put paid to the whole affair. When you spied me, you made the snap decision to take a circuitous route – I traversed the opposite semicircle by way of Horseferry Road with the intention of cutting you off, which as you can see was gratifyingly successful. For an instant I thought you might choose Great Peter Street, but they are tearing up the pavement between Chadwick Street and Monck Street, and when I considered how badly you’ve been limping of late—”
“You aren’t wanted!” I all but shouted.
Heartsick, exhausted and furious at once might have allowed me to keep my temper… but add the pain from my shattered ankle into the equation, and I was ready to rip the amateur’s head clean off his swan’s neck.
“Damn it, Mrs. Gibbs’s murder is already solved. I unravelled it within two minutes and proved it in twenty more.”
Mr. Holmes’s eyes creased with something I might have mistaken for kindness in another man. He removed the black leather glove from his right hand. “I am sure you’re correct, Inspector. I came here for another reason altogether. I owe you my sincerest regrets; I’ve waylaid you with no object in mind other than delivering such in person. I apologise for having so upset you the day before yesterday. It was most uncivil of me, and I beg your pardon.”
He thrust his hand out. I gawked at it.
“Apologise?” I repeated stupidly.
“Yes, an enterprise I infrequently practise but nevertheless am capable of enacting,” he huffed. “It’s confoundedly cold out here. Shake my hand and let us bury the hatchet, as our American co
usins put it. I always quite liked that phrase – it smacks of zest, and honour, and the rugged wilderness.”
Dumbly, I pumped his hand. I may as well have been shaking the hand of an orangutan who’d just shown me a card trick. I was that bowled over. When I made no move afterwards, just stood there knocked for six, Mr. Holmes clucked behind his teeth and took me by the arm.
And here’s where it all gets hazy. This was some five hours ago and I can’t for the life of me recall which pub we sheltered in. All I can say is that for some small stretch of time I was freezing and wretchedly morose. And then I was warm as could be in a shabby armchair with bald patches worn in the velvet arms, and a snifter of something sustaining was in my hand. A woman cackled in a gentle rasp. The dog toasting itself by the hearth raised a leg to scratch behind its curly-haired ear. Offin the thicker patches of cigar smoke, a man was singing “Oh Mother, Take the Wheel Away” very badly.
Oh Mother, take the wheel away, and put it out of sight
For I am heavy-hearted and I cannot spin tonight.
Come nearer, nearer yet; I have a story for your ear.
So come and sit beside me,
Come and listen, Mother dear.
You heard the village bells tonight – his wedding bells they were,
And Mabel is his happy wife, and I am lonely here…
“When was the last time you apologised, then?” My brandy glass empty, I set it on a worn deal table. Mr. Holmes made some obscure flicking gesture and before I could blink, my glass was topped up again.
“Dear me!” His pale eyes twinkled. “I imagine it must have been some three months ago. There was a marvellous murder case in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, and Watson and I were staying at the village inn, and it was of the utmost importance that I determine the effect of combustion on button boots. The proprietor could think of nowhere between his robustly spartan establishment and Nottingham where I could purchase such a commodity. Luckily, while I happened to be wearing a Balmoral boot during said investigation, the good doctor had recently purchased the increasingly popular button variety that closely matched the deceased’s footwear.”
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