The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part III

by David Marcum

  There were also photographs and family documents. “An odd place to store them, surely?” said Holmes.

  “Indeed,” concurred Hopkins.

  As Holmes pulled the drawer, we heard the round of something hard rolling within. Reaching to the lack, Holmes found a small glass bottle containing a reddish brown liquid. He removed the stopper and sniffed. He and I both knew the identity of the contents before he spoke them aloud for Hopkins’ benefit. “Laudanum.”

  “No,” protested Hopkins vehemently. “My brother would never use a drug such as this. You must be mistaken.”

  “I am not mistaken,” Holmes said with a wry, humourless smile. “I have some expertise in these matters.”

  “I cannot believe my brother would use such a drug,” said Hopkins. “He did not drink or smoke, and oft times castigated me for doing so. Why should he use it now?” He paused as thoughts raced through his mind. “Would the use of this terrible drug explain why he would change character and make such a terrible decision as to take on a race with an unknown crew?”

  Holmes handed the laudanum bottle to me, as if handing away a temptation. “I have seen all I need to see here.” He headed for the door. “Captain Hopkins, please come to Baker Street tonight at seven o’clock. I shall have your answers for you then.”

  With that, Holmes strode from the room. I bade Hopkins a good day and assured him Holmes would be as good as his word before following my friend from the room.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Holmes did not speak at all on the matter of Matthew Hopkins. I myself had developed a theory which ran thus: Matthew Hopkins had become aware that his intractable devotion to sail was destroying his family business. Overtaken by guilt, he had begun to use opiates such as laudanum as a relief, and under the influence of these drugs, he had begun to behave in an aberrant and unwise manner, such as wagering with a rival and taking aboard an unknown crew in the desperate hope he could be proven right. That behaviour had led ultimately to the ship being lost and the deaths of all those aboard. However, when I presented my theory to Holmes, he merely requested that I ask Mrs. Hudson to bring tea.

  Early in the evening, Holmes was visited by a pair of his Irregulars, who quickly delivered their information and were equally swiftly rewarded with a coin.

  “Dare I ask?” I enquired.

  Holmes looked to the clock. “Captain Hopkins will be here shortly,” said he. “I have no mood to tell the story twice.”

  As anticipated, Captain Hopkins arrived precisely upon the hour of seven. He was soon seated comfortably with a cup of tea in his hand and an impatient expression upon his face. “Well, Mister Holmes?” he asked. “Do you know what has happened to my brother?”

  “Not everything,” Holmes admitted. “But the material facts of the matter are quite clear.”

  Quite by chance, I had placed the laudanum upon the mantelpiece. I cursed my foolishness and promised myself that I should remove it from the house at the earliest instance. For that moment, it had Hopkins’ attention. “Had my brother taken to using laudanum?” he asked.

  “He had,” Holmes confirmed. “Though I think it was only in the last few months he had taken to its use.”

  Hopkins’ shoulders slumped. I imagined that he had come to a similar theory as I had reached. I knew only too well the despair which came with the thought of someone dear to us being taken by an opiate. “I can scarcely believe he would become a slave to the poppy,” sighed Hopkins. “I thought him stronger than that.”

  I fancied I saw Holmes flinch just for an instant at any hint that use of an opiate was a weakness. His calm mask was in place within a moment. “Then I will tell you that he was not in thrall to laudanum,” Holmes replied. “Do not ask me to explain that yet. I shall give all the details I have at my disposal, but I shall relay them in my own manner.”

  Lighting a taper on the fire, Holmes lit his pipe. “I sent the Irregulars to find information on the crew taken aboard the Charlotte Hill by your brother. What I discovered was that each man had made no plans to return. Several had given up their homes. The families of some were noted as having more money than would have been expected. When people live in poverty, even those trying to hide a little more money than usual are quite obvious.” He took a long draw on his pipe. “But we shall set that aside for the moment. In your brother’s home, I was most intrigued not by the laudanum or the family effects, but your brother’s clothes. It was clear that your brother had lost weight recently.”

  Hopkins nodded. “Mrs. Priddy said that he was hardly eating. I thought little of it. When I have a concern, I, too, go off my food, and we have both been deeply concerned by business matters.”

  Holmes looked at Hopkins, and those pale eyes were not unkind. “I fear your brother was not merely concerned, Captain Hopkins. I believe he knew he was dying.”

  “What?”

  “You mentioned that your smoke had irritated his chest. I think rather it will have been his throat. I noticed that his newest clothes were several sizes smaller but the collars of his shirts had been altered to offer less pressure on the throat. Your opinion, Doctor?”

  I was aware of Hopkins’ eyes alighting upon me. “Difficult to be sure without seeing the patient,” I said. “But a throat cancer would be my guess.”

  “Deduction, not guess,” Holmes corrected me. “And it is also the conclusion I drew. I believe that Matthew Hopkins was aware that he was dying, and also aware that his business was dying. To save the business and the brother he cared for but, as is often the way with brothers, was unable to show his affection in life, he chose to show his affection in death.” He turned to Hopkins. “If your ship is lost at sea, will your insurance company compensate you?”

  “Fully,” Hopkins confirmed. He paused, staring at Holmes. “What are you saying, Mr. Holmes?”

  “I am saying that your brother knew he was not long for this life. He wished to give you the best chance possible to help your company survive. With the insurance from his life and for the lost ship, you will be able to take your company forward. He crewed the ship with other men who did not have long left to live, and he took them on a voyage from which none of them expected to return.”

  “Are you saying he scuppered the ship?” Hopkins sounded aghast.

  “I do not know,” admitted Holmes. “He may have taken it to a remote cove and scuppered it, or he may have sailed it to a foreign port to sell in order to raise money to look after the crew and himself in their final days. It is largely irrelevant. He surrendered the comforts he could have gained by dying at home so that you could prosper. The family documents in his drawer were a clear indication of the value he placed on family.”

  “So he may be alive?”

  Holmes held his hands wide. “Even I cannot tell that, but even with the most extensive of searches, by the time we track his whereabouts, he will certainly be dead.”

  I cannot express the mixture of emotions I saw upon Jonathan Hopkins’ face. He did not know if his brother was alive or dead, but he did know his brother was gone, having executed a plan for the love of his only remaining family.

  “Be assured,” Holmes said quietly. “I have no intention of discussing this matter with the insurance companies. I have no real evidence to prove my theory, though I know I am correct. Nor do I have the wish to thwart the dying wish of a brave man.”

  “But the law?”

  “The law did not engage me, Captain. You did. That is an end of the matter.”

  “Thank you, Mister Holmes.”

  I sensed that Hopkins would want to say something more but that would make Holmes uncomfortable. “Let me show you out, Captain,” I said.

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  I ushered Hopkins towards the door but was halted by Holmes’s voice. “Watson.”

  “What is it?”

  He had
picked up his violin and was pointing the bow at the bottle resting on the mantelpiece. “Show that out as well.”

  “Yes, Holmes.”

  The Disembodied Assassin

  by Andrew Lane

  In my forty-eight years on this Earth I have buried both of my parents, my brother, and my dear wife, as well as numerous comrades in the British Army, and countless patients whom I was unable to save from their injuries. I have also mourned the death of my dearest friend, Sherlock Holmes, and his later reappearance alive and well did not in any way console me for the three years in which I considered him lost. I am no stranger to grief, and yet the death of Queen Victoria on the 22nd of January 1901 came as a considerable shock to me. Victoria had been on the throne since before I was born, and despite the fact that I knew intellectually she was elderly and infirm, there was something in me that assumed she would go on forever. She embodied everything that was great about the British Empire, and I believe there was a large element of the British public which thought that, without her clearheaded guidance, that Empire would begin to crumble. Certainly her successor, her eldest son Edward, was not the immediate focus of the same love, affection and trust that his mother had enjoyed, for reasons that readers of some of my earlier reports of my friend Sherlock Holmes’s investigations will be well aware.

  The only person who seemed untouched by Queen Victoria’s death was Sherlock Holmes. He had been granted audiences with Her Majesty on several occasions, thanks to the work he had done directly or indirectly for the Crown, and she had presented him with an assortment of medals which he had immediately and carelessly thrown into a desk drawer on his return from Buckingham Palace, On picking up the black-bordered edition of the Times which reported her death, he turned immediately to the Small Ads page.

  I stared blankly across the room at that same front page, as he held the newspaper up, wondering what would become of the country in this new century, with a new ruler. Somewhere downstairs, I could hear Mrs. Hudson weeping as she cooked our breakfast. I already knew that outside our rooms, in the street, men and women were wearing black armbands, and hansom cabs were draped in black ribbons, as if they had all lost a close relative.

  When Mrs. Hudson finally delivered our breakfast - red-eyed and unable to talk coherently - there was a telegram on a plate next to the kippers. Holmes immediately snatched it up, sliced it open, and scanned its contents.

  “Brother Mycroft requests my immediate presence,” he announced. “Would you like to come with me, Watson?”

  “I would,” I replied. “Do you believe this request has anything to do with the death of the Queen?”

  He frowned at me, as if he wasn’t sure what I was talking about. “I doubt it,” he said eventually. “Unless, of course, Her Majesty was murdered, but I consider the probability of that to be relatively small. After all, why murder a rheumatic woman with failing eyesight in her eighties? Surely one could trust natural processes to carry her off in fairly short order.”

  “Does the death of Her Majesty mean nothing to you?” I snapped, angry at his casual attitude.

  He shrugged. “Depending on which historians one believes, Victoria was perhaps the sixty-third monarch this island has seen. I have not mourned the loss of the previous ones, and see no reason to mourn this one. She was an interesting lady, but in the end the monarchy has little practical function in society, despite the beliefs of my brother. Which leads us back to the question - will you come with me, or not?”

  Despite my irritation, I agreed to travel with Holmes. Some of Holmes’s most interesting cases had come from his brother, and I was intrigued to see what Mycroft wanted this time.

  We secured a hansom cab quickly, but our progress was slow due to the number of people who had spontaneously come out onto the streets of London to show their respects. Oxford Street was almost impassable, and our driver had to go up and around Trafalgar Square, which was so full of mourners that there was scarcely room for a single newcomer.

  “A good field for the pickpockets,” was all that Holmes would observe as we drove past the crowds.

  Mycroft Holmes was, as usual, comfortably ensconced in the Diogenes Club. This time, however, he was not waiting for us in the Strangers Room. Instead, we were led through the hushed enclave to a different location - this one being a meeting room placed directly in the centre of a much larger hall. As such, it had no windows, and only one obvious door.

  I glanced at Holmes as we approached, and saw that he was smiling. He noticed my interest, and put his finger to his lips, lest I inadvertently break the Club’s rule of silence by asking him what had amused him so. When we were safely inside the room - which was empty apart from the two of us - and the door shut behind us, he turned to me.

  “I have only been in this room once before,” he said, “and that was thirty-three years ago. I found Mycroft standing in the doorway with a knife in his hand. There was blood on the knife, and a dead body on the floor. Nobody outside had seen anyone else enter or leave apart from Mycroft and the other man. I had to prove that my brother was innocent of the murder in order to save him from the scaffold.”

  “You were fourteen!” I exclaimed.

  “It was not the first murder I had solved,” he said. Looking around, he added: “I see they have not redecorated since then.”

  “But the murder?” I asked when it became clear that he was not going to elaborate on the matter. “If it wasn’t Mycroft who stabbed the man, then who was it? And how was it done?”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps another time,” he said. “The matter had some points of interest, but not many.” He paused. “We both ended up in Moscow as a result,” he observed, tantalising me even further.

  Before I could demand more details of this period of my friend’s life - a period he had refused to speak of until this throw-away remark - the door to the room opened and Mycroft Holmes entered.

  He was, if anything, even larger than the last time I had seen him. His girth filled the door from side to side. I was aware, from my own observations and from comments made by his brother, that Mycroft Holmes lived almost exclusively in his office in Whitehall, in his club in Whitehall and in his lodgings - which were also in Whitehall. It would be fair to say that he rarely, if ever, walked for more than a few hundred yards.

  “Ah, Sherlock,” he boomed. “I am grateful for your attendance.” He walked over to a large chair that I suspect had been brought into the room especially for him and settled himself in it. He waved to two other chairs on the other side of the table. “Please - be seated. Refreshments will be served shortly.”

  We sat, and Holmes gazed critically at his brother. “You are looking well,” he said. “I perceive a change of maid or of your gentleman’s gentleman.”

  “Lord Humberstone has been murdered,” Mycroft Holmes announced baldly.

  Sherlock nodded. “It was clear from the latest edition of The Times that something had occurred which they were unable to report,” he said. “The story on the front page had been rewritten to fit a space which had obviously been set for something else, and then changed at the last minute.”

  “We issued them with a notice of Prior Restraint,” Mycroft said. “Given the currently unsettled political and social situation, we felt it best that the report of the murder of a prominent dignitary be withheld from the public for a few days.”

  “Until you have established whether it is a crime of passion, an unfortunate result of a burglary gone wrong, or an assassination,” Sherlock Holmes said.

  “Until,” Mycroft corrected, “you establish whether it is a crime of passion, an unfortunate result of a burglary gone wrong, or an assassination.”

  Holmes shrugged. “You have police for that kind of thing,” he pointed out. “I have my disagreements with them, but they have become significantly more professional in their approach to evidence-gathering and analytical
thought since I first started as a consulting detective. Is there some reason why they cannot be bought in?”

  Mycroft Holmes made a “Harumph!” noise, and looked away. If there had been a window in the room then he would have gazed out of it, but as it was he merely ended up looking at a gas lamp.

  “Let me give you the bare bones of the matter,” he said eventually. “Lord Humberstone is a member of the Privy Council, and a special advisor on Royal Protocol. He has been writing a document which sets out the terms under which power will transfer from Queen Victoria, following her sad but not unexpected demise, to her son.”

  I remembered Holmes’s comment about there having been perhaps sixty-three monarchs before Victoria. “But surely this has happened many times before,” I said. “There must be precedents.”

  Mycroft fixed me with a gimlet eye, as if he had only just noticed my presence. It was a pose, of course - he noticed everything.

  “It has not happened during any of our lifetimes,” he pointed out, “and besides, there is a significant movement advocating that our country abandon a monarchy altogether and becomes a democratic republic under the leadership of an elected President, along the lines of the United States of America. Such talk leads us down a path that ends up in Socialism, if not out-and-out Anarchy, and must be stopped in its tracks.

  “America has not ended up succumbing to Socialism or Anarchy,” I pointed out.

  “Give them time,” he growled. Turning back to Sherlock Holmes, he continued: “Lord Humberstone was addressing these points, attempting to ensure a clean and clear transfer of power in a way that would bring the population behind its new King. His murder is at best inconvenient, and at worst tantamount to a declaration of rebellion.”

  “Give me the details,” my friend snapped.

  “Lord Humberstone was in his study, working. The door was locked and the curtains drawn. He had a personal bodyguard of three men, one of whom was in the room with him, one outside the door, and the third outside the window. Hearing a cry from inside the room, the man outside the door knocked and entered. He found the man who had been stationed inside the room bending over Lord Humberstone, who was slumped over his desk. Humberstone had a knife in his back that had penetrated through to his heart. The man who had been outside the door and the man outside the window quickly searched the room, but could see nobody else but the man who had been with Lord Humberstone all that time. He was quickly arrested for murder, and is currently in police custody.”