“And he can afford to keep servants,” I went on. “Only two, granted, but if he were truly without funds even that would be impossible.”
“They were a peculiar pair, Benoît and Aurélie, would you not agree? I am quite firmly of the view that Benoît loathes his master.”
“A definite look of glee came over his face when you laid de Villegrand flat.”
“You saw that too? And he does not trust his sister to be alone in a room with the vicomte.”
“Had I a sister, I would feel the same,” I said. “De Villegrand, then, is nothing more than the swaggering, vice-ridden dandy he appears to be?”
“Up to a point,” said Holmes. “He has depths still hidden to me. He is not, though, Baron Cauchemar. That much I can safely avow. Bear in mind this. Abednego Torrance, by his own admission, is an associate of de Villegrand’s, yet Cauchemar attacked Torrance.”
“Allies fall out,” I suggested. “No honour among thieves, and all that.”
“Furthermore, a viscount outranks a baron. De Villegrand is hardly the type to demote himself, even when taking an alias.”
“But the two of them have a connection. That is already established.”
Holmes nodded. “How close that connection is remains to be seen and its nature must be ascertained. There is something I haven’t told you, Watson.”
“There so often is,” I sighed. My friend liked to play his cards very close to his chest. It was one of his more exasperating attributes.
“I must confess that Torrance was no randomly chosen piece ofbait last night. During my investigations yesterday, while passing myself off as a nondescript, unremarkable coolie, I ascertained that he traffics not only in people. He is an habitual smuggler of all manner of goods. Opium is one. He has connections throughout Limehouse, in countless opium dens. Arms and weapons of all kinds are another of his fortes. He moves them around in bulk.” Holmes paused slyly, then added, “Explosives, too.”
“Explosives,” I said. “As in dynamite?”
“Quite so. My interest in Torrance, then, was twofold. Not only was I using him to lure Cauchemar into the open so that I could see him for myself, but I also hoped I might be able to derive some information from Torrance, something that might lead us to the bombers.”
“So this isn’t all about Cauchemar?”
“Not entirely. If Torrance is the one supplying the terrorists with their dynamite, then it would have been useful interrogating him. Even if he isn’t, he might well know who is. I was unlucky, though. Events spun out of control and Torrance slipped through our fingers. It is a mistake I shall not repeat.”
“Cauchemar, de Villegrand, Torrance, the bombing campaign – it’s all one and the same thing? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“They are all pieces of a single jigsaw,” said a grim Sherlock Holmes. “But, for the life of me, I cannot yet fit them together to my satisfaction. And time is running out. I do not feel that I have long left in which to assemble them correctly and solve the puzzle. That near-riot we saw just moments ago indicates that London is poised on a knife edge, and not only London but potentially the entire country. If matters come to a head before I can unravel the mystery, then I fear greatly for the future.”
His sombre words were belied by the glint in his eye. Holmes was never happier than when presented with a seemingly intractable problem. The greater the challenge to his deductive skills, the more he relished it.
In a sense I was glad, for in the absence of intellectual stimulation lay danger for my friend. Holmes, with nothing weighty to engage his restless mind, was wont to slip into enervation and torpor, and the needle and the seven-per-cent solution of cocaine were then seldom far from reach, with the concomitant deleterious effects on his health.
At the same time, however, I was filled with foreboding.
After all, if Sherlock Holmes himself was stymied and muttering ominously about the nation’s safety and security, then there was cause to be alarmed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM
A lull prevailed during the next two days. Holmes told me he wished to be left to his own devices until further notice. He had enquiries to develop, he said, strategies to formulate, checks to make, and in none of these endeavours was my assistance required.
I acceded to his request and busied myself treating patients in my surgery and doing my rounds. I even squeezed in another visit to see my wife. Waterloo had reopened for business, and the train services were running more or less as normal. The initial shock to the railway system was over, but its after-effects still reverberated.
Down in Ramsgate, I was keen to assure Mary that the situation in London was not as dire as the papers were making out and that the crisis would soon pass, as crises did.
She, I could tell, was not wholly convinced by my placations but she put on a brave face to match my own.
“I just know you and Mr Holmes are in the thick of it,” she said.
“Hardly!” I blustered. “The very idea.”
“I’m no fool, John.” She interlaced her fingers with mine. “I know that Holmes would never allow a cancer of this magnitude to fester unchecked, and I know that you would never allow him to perform surgery on it unsupported.”
Spoken like a true wife of a medic!
“That is one of the reasons why I love you,” she went on. “You have such courage and such a strong sense of moral imperative. And you are implicitly loyal to your friend. I recognised those qualities in you the moment I first laid eyes on you, during that beastly affair with my late father and those pearls that were sent to me in the post and the dreadful murder at Pondicherry Lodge. I was instantly attracted to you not just because you’re a fine figure of a man but because you are thoroughly decent and upstanding too. These things mean much to a woman, more than a firm jaw or a stout masculine chest. But...”
“But...?”
“I want you to take special care. Please. You and Mr Holmes are wont to get into such awful scrapes. The criminals you come up against are an appalling lot, so devoid of mercy. I could not bear it if, having lost so much already, I were to lose you as well.”
The tenderness of her smile and the soft glistening of her tears all but melted my heart. It was an almost insurmountable effort to get back on the train and return to London. I felt heavy with care, and my funk deepened when I reached Waterloo and observed once again the damage caused to the building’s fabric by the bomb.
Repairs were already under way, however, scaffolding in place, navvies assiduously stacking bricks and mixing mortar, and this sight lifted my spirits somewhat. Order, I saw, could be restored. Injuries could be patched up and healed. Normal life would resume eventually.
It was, as I say, a lull.
On the third day, it ended.
A storm broke.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE FOURTH BOMB
I mean a literal storm as well as a metaphorical one. Ink-black clouds moved in over the capital and sent down a drenching rain, attended by bolts of lightning that seared the retinas and thunderclaps that rattled windows, dislodged roof slates and left you temporarily deafened in their wake. And in the midst of this tempest of almost Biblical proportions, the terrorists detonated yet another bomb, and panic erupted everywhere.
The bomb was planted at the boathouse in St James’s Park. Had the weather been less inclement and the park as full of perambulating pedestrians as was usual, I dread to think what the death toll might have been. In the event, only one person perished, a groundskeeper, although several dozen ducks were found floating upside down in the lake, killed stone dead by shock.
What mattered about this explosion was not the relatively minimal loss of life it caused, but its location. The park lies almost equidistant between Buckingham Palace and Westminster. In other words, the bombers had struck very close to the two main seats of government in the land. The blast even cracked windowpanes at the royal seat. Her Majesty, by great good
fortune, was not harmed, nor any others in her household. All the same, there was no mistaking the bombers’ message: no one is safe from us, not even the mightiest among you.
Examination of Hansard for that day reveals the moment at which the detonation interrupted proceedings in the Commons. Discussion of an amendment to a somewhat dreary bill on the registration and inspection of domestic water boilers was abruptly cut short, the record stating that “A loud noise being heard in the immediate environs, the Speaker counselled that the Honourable Members should repair to a place of safety until further notice”. By the time the session reconvened it had been established that the “loud noise” had in fact been a bomb, whereupon a motion was tabled calling for an emergency debate and was carried unanimously.
What follows makes for sobering and disheartening reading. I am afraid that the men elected to the highest offices in the land spent the next hour and a half bellowing insults at one another across the Dispatch Box, none of them exhibiting anything approaching dignity or statesmanship. The tone of Hansard is invariably dry and factual, yet one can still, perusing these exchanges, detect the note of braying desperation in the parliamentarians’ voices. Had the stenographer been entitled to include exclamation marks in his transcription, I suspect they would have been littered liberally throughout.
Rarely have I seen a more conspicuous example of leaders failing to lead. The phrase “headless chickens” springs to mind. Accusations of incompetence and inertia were hurled willy-nilly back and forth across the chamber, and the level of vituperation and sanctimony from all parties was breathtaking. The upshot was that nothing was achieved beyond the airing of political grudges and some quite uncouth name-calling.
And if those who were supposed to be among the wisest in our country were acting like louts and yahoos, how could the general public be expected to behave any better?
That night will be remembered as one of the most shameful in British history. In all the major cities of England, Scotland and Wales, but particularly in London, mobs went on the rampage. The pelting rain and crashing thunder did not deter them. If anything it served to excite them to greater violence, as though Mother Nature was giving their activities her blessing by wreaking climatic havoc of her own.
Mostly it was the Irish who were on the receiving end of the mobs’ wrath. Businesses run by Irishmen, or simply bearing an Irish-sounding name, were attacked and ransacked. A butcher’s just round the corner from my house in Paddington was one such.
Mary had been buying our meat from Mr O’Flannery ever since we moved to the area, and by her account he had never been anything but courteous, obliging and honest. He was, for that matter, a Londoner born and bred, though his parents hailed from Dublin. This mattered naught to the frightened, enraged men and women who took to the streets armed with crowbars, pokers, rolling pins and other implements. All Irishmen were Fenians as far as they were concerned, and all Fenians terrorist murderers, and so O’Flannery’s shop was broken into, the windows smashed, the fixtures and fittings reduced to kindling, and the produce looted. Not content with that, someone then set fire to the premises, and O’Flannery and his family, cowering in their flat above, managed to escape being burned alive by leaping from a second-storey window onto a mattress they threw into the back yard. O’Flannery’s wife fractured her ankle but, thankfully, all of them survived.
Countless similar stories unfolded across the capital, and across the country, and it was not only those who were purportedly or genuinely Irish who suffered. In some places Jews were singled out as the likely culprits, and Blacks, and Chinamen; in fact anyone who was deemed not sufficiently “British” for some reason or other. The bombers, it seemed, could be just about anybody – a neighbour, that fellow across the road who seldom left the house, that suspicious-looking chap with the shifty eyes and the hint of a foreign accent, he had radical-leftish sympathies, and wasn’t he a vegetarian too? A queer sort. Just the type to be hoarding dynamite in his basement and plotting the overthrow of the government.
The irony is blindingly obvious. The bombers might have some specific political aim, some point to make, but it was clear that their principal agenda was to sow discord and set Briton at odds with Briton. In which case, the mobs were helping them achieve their goal admirably. People were playing right into their hands.
A proper, better response would have been not to react at all, to remain calm and indifferent, to go about one’s affairs as though nothing untoward was happening. That, I would submit, is the one way ordinary folk can resist the tactics of extremist seditionaries.
As it was, a herd mentality prevailed, and the bombers were handed a victory. The whole nation was in uproar. Fear meant that few were thinking clearly or rationally. We had taken it for granted that ours was a civilised society built on rock-solid underpinnings, but that had now been cast into question, the foundations seeming more fragile than we had thought. All at once Britain appeared imperilled, and that in itself was the greatest peril facing us, for the perception of danger was spawning the actuality of it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DEATH OF AN ABBESS
The next morning, in the aftermath of that night of countrywide mass hysteria, Holmes and I found ourselves back in Moorgate, in an alley which ran behind a row of tenement buildings. The storm had passed, the rain had ceased, and a pewter-grey sky hung above the city, the sun valiantly attempting to peek through the overcast.
With us was Inspector Lestrade and one of his sergeants, a certain Bryant. At our feet lay a corpse.
The body was that of a flaxen-haired woman known to both Holmes and myself.
The Abbess.
In life, she had been lusty and lascivious. Dead, she was sad and pitiable, as the dead so often are. Rainwater had pooled in the sockets of her eyes, which were now dulled and fish-like. Her rouged lips were fixed in an everlasting cry of dismay. Her sodden dress clung to her ample frame in a clammy embrace. I had not warmed to the woman, but in no way had she deserved this cruel fate, dying alone in the mud of a filthy alley. Few do.
Holmes crouched beside her remains, inspecting them minutely. He looked tired and drawn, even more gaunt than usual. I recognised the symptoms. He was in one of his manic phases, so utterly consumed by an investigation that he neglected the basic necessities of eating and rest. I doubted he had slept more than a couple of hours since we last parted. He was subsisting on raw nervous energy alone.
“Death would appear to have come from a crushing blow to the upper thoracic,” said Holmes, feeling the body carefully. “Would you not concur, doctor?”
I knelt and examined her too. There was a deep concavity in the front of her chest, centred around the manubrium. Broken ribs gave to the touch with a palpable crackle.
“The absence of visible blood suggests a penetrating wound to the heart rather than, say, the lungs,” I said. “Fatal traumatic cardiac arrest would have resulted. In other words, she would have died more or less instantly.” I offered this as though it were some consolation.
“No other bruising or breakage,” said Holmes. “No evidence of defensive wounds, either.”
“Meaning she didn’t see the attack coming?” said Lestrade.
“Or wasn’t expecting it, which is not quite the same thing. I would be able to tell you more, but that wretched storm has obliterated every last scrap of evidence. I can find no footprints, no physical traces, nothing. All washed away by the rain.”
“I’ve been into the knocking shop and interviewed the dollymops,” said Sergeant Bryant, nodding to the rear of the nearest house. At various of the windows, distraught female faces could be seen peering out at us from behind curtains and blinds. “They report that the Abbess stepped outside around midnight.”
“In the storm?” I said.
“Apparently she had a rendezvous with someone. None of the girls know whom. Some prearranged clandestine meeting.”
“When did they first become aware that she had not returned?” Holmes asked.
“Not until first light. It was, by all accounts, a busy night. Plenty of comings and goings.”
“What?” I said. “With everything else that was happening?”
“You would be surprised, Dr Watson,” said Lestrade. “Trade at a place like the Abbess’s isn’t affected by social unrest or the vagaries of the weather. Clients will visit come hell or high water. Their urges know no bounds.”
“Needless to say, none of the girls saw or heard a thing,” said Sergeant Bryant. “What with the storm in full spate, it’s hardly surprising. It was only at daybreak that one of them ventured outside and found her.”
“If you ask me,” said Lestrade, “this is the handiwork of Baron Cauchemar.”
“I seldom do ask you, Inspector,” said Holmes. “However, on this occasion I’m moved to enquire how you arrive at that conclusion.”
“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? Cauchemar takes a dim view of anyone who breaks the law of the land. The Abbess is just the latest in a line of his victims. He sneaked up on her and slew her without mercy, in cold blood.”
“‘Sneaking up’ is hardly Cauchemar’s thing. But, more to the point, he hasn’t killed before.”
“There’s always a first time. It could be that he never meant to kill the Abbess. She was more physically delicate than he thought, or else he hit her harder than intended. That, or this is something he has been working up to over the past few weeks. Not content with dishing out beatings any more, he has taken it to the next level. It is often the way, in my experience. Killers don’t become killers just overnight. They evolve into the role. An apprenticeship in petty violence, graduating to murder, that’s how it goes.”
“We’re slightly outside the baron’s East End stamping ground, though.”
“He has been too successful for his own good. The pickings have got thinner there of late. He is expanding his territory.”
“And this is a being whose existence, three days ago, you cavilled at,” said Holmes, rising from his crouch. “Indeed, were happy to dismiss as sheer conjecture.”
Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares Page 9