The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories Part III

by David Marcum

  “One wonders whether this might signal the end of a permanent state of decease,” Holmes mused. “What might that mean in return for my craft? I could, for instance, be called upon to solve multiple murders of a single victim. Or, the police may no longer view it as a particularly serious offence, and I’ll be forced to seek an alternative profession. I understand the Liverpool Symphony has a vacancy for a lead violinist.” My friend has the oddest ideas of what constitutes humour. It can be rather trying at times.

  With a shrug, Lestrade queried whether there might even be a crime to investigate, and though it pained me to admit it, I could understand his position: with Crow having been pronounced dead so many months ago, why should Scotland Yard take any interest in his second death?

  “Perhaps because,” Holmes suggested, “during his period of resurrection, he impersonated a military officer. Unlike the good doctor, I am no betting man, but I should be prepared to wager a hefty sum that His Majesty’s Cavalry have no record of a Captain Courtney. It’s unfortunate, Doctor, that you were unable to conduct an examination before you were waylaid.”

  I so rarely have the opportunity to surprise one of so great an intellect that I took appreciable satisfaction in informing him about the small bruise I observed on the back of Crow’s left hand.

  “So he may have been injected with some poison?” Lestrade suggested, demonstrating the instinctive grasp for the obvious that had made him the envy of the Yard. “It must have happened just after those carollers arrived - everyone’s attention was distracted, the perfect moment. Which means that everyone present is under suspicion. Except for yourself, Doctor. And this Sir Boris Wyngarde, I suppose. You don’t invite someone ‘round to celebrate Christmas and then murder them. Do you?”

  “I imagine it would be rather difficult to use a syringe without thumbs,” Holmes noted, adding to my considerable surprise, “although from what you’ve told me, I have no doubt that he would be quite capable of murder. Didn’t you ever read pirate stories when you were a lad, Watson? You remember the standard punishment for piracy?”

  With mounting unease, I realised that I did indeed know: the penalty was to be strung up by the thumbs. Though he had always hinted at a colourful past, I saw at that moment that it may have been more colourful than any one of us could have imagined. “Holmes... do you suspect he and Crow may have been involved in something nefarious?”

  “In the absence of evidence, suspicions are entirely worthless, my dear Watson.”

  I have often been duped by Sherlock Holmes when he has assumed a role, in particular on a night shortly after my first marriage when he managed to convince me that he was alarmingly close to death. I am rarely so easily duped by anyone else, however, and had I been required to swear on the Bible that Sir Boris was genuinely surprised to be told of Captain Courtney’s true identity, I would have done so willingly.

  “Then... then... What about the expedition?” he blathered.

  “Not, by any chance, to the treasure-laden tomb of some previously unknown Egyptian Pharaoh? I’m afraid to say that the late Mr. Crow has tricked several wealthy men out of their fortunes with the same scheme.”

  His chins wobbled in protest. “No, no! I’ve seen the map!”

  “I imagine I could show you its twin,” Lestrade informed him. “We still have it in evidence. What a fellow this Crow was, eh? No better than a pirate, one might say. Please don’t tell me you gave him any money. Funds for the expedition, that sort of thing? You did? Oh dear! I suppose if you were to give me an address for Captain Courtney, there’s just a chance I might be able to recover some of it.”

  Sir Boris raised eight fingers to the sky in a gesture of despair. “I really don’t know. I always just saw him at the club. I was under no illusions that the address he provided when he applied for membership was certainly false.”

  “Well, that leaves us with nothing,” said the policeman, regretfully. “No clues, and no body.”

  Holmes was not one to be disheartened. “A funeral must have been carried out on the occasion of Crow’s first death, Lestrade. Perhaps an examination of his coffin would be enlightening.”

  I am certain that the Inspector would have joined me in considering grave-robbing an unsuitable past-time during the festive season, but Holmes was a man of progressive notions, and I doubted that anything I might say would deter him from this course of action. Thankfully, Kate’s interruption at that moment at least meant a temporary respite from such an unpleasant and - without the proper permissions - illegal activity.

  “John, dear,” she said, “I’ve been observing the constables interviewing the guests... and it seems to me that someone is missing.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mrs. Watson,” Sir Boris assured her. “Everyone I invited is still present.”

  Kate, Lord bless her persistence, would not be put off. “I’m certain I saw a woman... rather short, and dumpy... grey-haired... and wearing a faded red dress.” The more details my wife added to her description, the more I was able to picture the very woman. I, too, had seen her, conspicuous at the time by her lack of ostentation, but who was now noticeably absent from Sir Boris’ home.

  My own admission seemed to spark something in our host’s memory also. “Ah, yes!” he cried. “That would be Mrs. Warrender - but she wasn’t a guest; she just popped by to wish me the compliments of the season.”

  Lestrade enquired who this Mrs. Warrender, whom Sir Boris apparently didn’t like well enough to invite to his annual festivities, might be.

  “Please don’t misunderstand me, Inspector - she’s is a fine lady... just not exactly of the ‘first rank,’ if you understand what I’m getting at.” I sensed from the tightening of Kate’s grip upon my arm that she, for one, did not understand. “As you may know, I am exceptionally fond of the unconventional, but there are limits - I mean, a working woman, I ask you!”

  “And precisely what is that work?” I felt compelled to ask.

  “Oh, the importation of exotic animals. I believe she inherited the firm from her late husband. Her son, Ridley, provided me with a Burmese Jungle Fowl for my country estate, and I’m presently negotiating for a Bengal Tiger.” He placed a finger to his chin in a gesture of thoughtfulness. “I wonder if there’s time to cancel the order and get my money back?” It seemed that his forgetfulness regarding Mrs. Warrender extended to being able to say with any certainty just when she left the celebration. It was, he suspected, some time before the arrival of the carollers. Then again, it may very well have been afterwards. With regard to the lady’s address, he was only slightly more helpful, suggesting that she might be found in Lewisham, possibly somewhere near the brick-works. It did not seem like too great a task for our police force to locate an importer of strange beasts in Lewisham, but my hopes that the home of Mrs. Warrender might be our first port of call were soon dashed; Holmes was almost indecently keen to discover who might be buried in Erasmus Crow’s grave, since the man himself had been alive and well until just a few hours ago.

  It pains me to acknowledge that this was not the only impromptu exhumation in which I participated during my association with Sherlock Holmes; readers may recall the ghastly events that plagued the Canadian village of La Mort Rouge. On that occasion, we were without assistance from a member of the police force, but our position was now no less precarious, Lestrade having allowed himself to become infected by Holmes’s insatiable curiosity and thus, after identifying the cemetery in which Crow had supposedly been buried, rapidly procured a couple of shovels, but none of the appropriate legal documents.

  And so we set about our work, a cloud masking the moon, and the lateness of the hour preventing us from being seen. If anyone had observed our actions, Holmes at least would have been deemed entirely innocent, for he was reluctant to assist with the digging, preferring instead to examine the nearby grass through his lens.

 
“Holmes, if you wished, you could give us a hand,” I suggested, with, I hope, a certain chilliness in my tone. “The ground’s not all that hard, you know.”

  “And don’t you find that interesting, Watson?”

  Indeed I did not, since at that particular moment, I was wondering how I’d strayed so far from my notion of the ideal Christmas as to find myself several feet down in the earth in the process of uprooting a corpse.

  “You have no doubt failed to notice that the grass around this grave is scorched.”

  “That’s hardly surprising, Mr. Holmes,” Lestrade complained. “How could I have noticed that when I can hardly see my shovel in front of my face?”

  Holmes might have explained himself right away, but he was at that moment enjoying our discomfort and bewilderment rather too much. “Do you by any chance recall the words of In the Bleak Midwinter, Watson? ‘Earth stood hard as iron’...”

  I saw at last just what he was driving at. In December, the ground should certainly have been as hard as iron, but our digging had gone fairly easily - easier still for Holmes, who had not participated in any way.

  “It has, in point of fact, been softened with the aid of a small, controlled fire,” he explained to a still-befuddled Lestrade. “Someone has been here before us, gentlemen.”

  The Inspector was most displeased by this revelation, and threw down his shovel in anger. The noise of its impact - that of metal striking wood - informed us that we had at last discovered the coffin for which we had been digging. Holmes at least offered the use of his muscles in raising it from the pit and resting it upon the ground; from its weight, it was clear that someone or something lay inside.

  Lestrade’s foresight had not stretched to the acquisition of a crowbar, and a shovel proved too unwieldy, so in the end, it took the sheer brute force of three men to wrest the lid from the casket. There was, as I suspected, something exceptionally heavy inside. But the fact that I had seen Erasmus Crow earlier that night could not prepare me for the presence of his body in the coffin. He was, for the third time, quite dead. But the cause of his demise on this occasion was not an injection of some unknown potion; the blood surrounding the hole in his chest served as proof that he had been alive at the moment he was shot.

  The three of us would have some questions to answer concerning the circumstances under which we discovered the body, but Crow’s obviously violent demise meant that we had no difficulty in securing the use of the mortuary for his long-delayed autopsy.

  I had already dismissed the idea of identical twins - or even triplets - as the sort of far-fetched nonsense one might find in a yellow-backed novel, but I knew that Holmes would not discount it entirely until it had been proven impossible rather than simply improbable. Thankfully, I was able to provide this assurance almost immediately, for the dead man bore the same mark on his hand that I had observed at Sir Boris’ home.

  “Surely there can be no further doubt that this is, in fact, Erasmus Crow,” I remarked.

  “But how is it that the body’s quite fresh, when your friend Foxborough pronounced him dead three months ago? And you pronounced him dead earlier this evening, yes? By poisoning? And yet now he’s dead again, lying on a mortuary slab - and judging from the blood, his heart was still beating when he was shot.”

  I was forced to admit that it was a very troubling development.

  “If this is the third death for Mr. Crow, we can at least take comfort in the knowledge that there is unlikely to be a fourth,” Holmes observed.

  “I wish I shared your confidence, Mr. Holmes.”

  I could at least say with certainty that the coffin did not contain a body when it was first buried - unless, of course, the chemistry volumes were placed beneath him in order to give him something to read in the afterlife, in the manner of the pharaohs of Crow’s imagination.

  “Who do you imagine shot Crow and buried him in that grave - his own grave?” I asked. “Sir Boris Wyngarde, perhaps?”

  “If he had attempted to use a shovel, Watson, I venture to suggest he would still be digging.”

  “He might be able to fire a gun,” Lestrade suggested, “on a man who somehow keeps coming back from the dead. Any idea how he does that, Mr. Holmes?”

  Holmes, however, seemed distracted by a tinge of yellowish powder on the dead man’s lapels. Distractedly, he said: “Perhaps more than at any time of year, married gentlemen should be at home with their families. I have a few telegrams to send, gentlemen, and then I suggest we meet up again tomorrow, when we shall pay a visit to Mrs. Warrender.”

  To extricate oneself from home, hearth and spouse on Christmas morning proved every bit as difficult as might be imagined, but despite Kate’s protestations, I was determined to see this case through to its conclusion, whatever that might be. Hailing a cab was not without its challenges, but I soon joined Holmes at Baker Street, where Lestrade was already impatiently awaiting my arrival.

  Our journey to Lewisham was conducted for the most part in silence; none of us, it seemed, feeling the desire to wish one another a Merry Christmas, so powerful was the desire on my part and that of the Inspector to unravel this puzzle. Sherlock Holmes, who, I suspected, had already reasoned it out, held his peace solely because he was waiting for just the right dramatic moment.

  The Warrender residence served also as the family’s place of business, which perhaps explained why there were no indications of the festive season anywhere; wicker baskets containing squeaking, snorting and howling animals of various sizes and odours were stacked along the walls, and we were forced to walk single file in order to avoid the shredding of our coats by the claws that reached out at us as we made our way to the office of the head of the firm of Warrender and Son, Animal Importers.

  Mrs. Minnie Warrender did not make much of an impression on me when I had observed her at Sir Boris’ home the night before, but bathed in the greenish glow cast by sunlight shining through a row of tanks containing exotic schools of fish, her squat form and grim expression appeared positively malevolent. She sat behind a badly-splintered desk, her hands folded in front of her. I was reminded of the matron at my old school, a ghastly toad-like individual named Makins.

  “I must say, Mr. Holmes, it’s rare to have such distinguished guests in my offices,” she said, after the formal introductions were concluded.

  “And you must forgive me if say I find that hard to believe, Mrs. Warrender. You claim Sir Boris Wyngarde as one of your clients, for instance.” He spoke distractedly, as he studied the fish darting about before him.

  Lestrade’s features wrinkled in an expression of disgust. “Ugly looking brutes, the lot of them.”

  “You should know better than to judge by appearances, Lestrade. The blue-ringed octopus, for instance - I’ve always found it a fascinating creature. A most rewarding purchase for the discerning customer.”

  Mrs. Warrender’s gave no outward indication of unease, but I detected a degree of caution in her voice as she asked: “You are... familiar with the blue-ringed octopus, then?”

  “And also the porcupine-fish - both native to the Caribbean, and both possessing remarkable qualities. Perhaps you’d care to enlighten the Inspector?”

  Her smile was very far from ingratiating. “I’m afraid I have no notion of what you’re talking about, Mr. Holmes.”

  “Really? Then permit me to enlighten you, dear lady. Both produce a remarkable toxin which, when injected into the human system, result in a state which even the most tenacious and well-trained medical mind might mistake for death.”

  I knew then that Holmes had been expecting to find such creatures on the premises, and that their excretions might well explain how a man such as Erasmus Crow might be declared dead when he was, in point of fact, still alive, and how he might die again, under the name Enoch Courtney.

  Mr. Warrender continued to feign ignorance. “This is
all astonishing news, Mr. Holmes.”

  “I think not, madam. I rather suspect that when you inherited your late husband’s enterprise, you realized that you might acquire the animals necessary to start a more profitable, and entirely secret, business - selling a foolproof escape route to anyone anxious to evade the clutches of the police. How on Earth can anyone arrest a dead man? The toxin, in its pure form, is not without its side-effects, of course - it frequently results in damage to the brain, and is sometimes mistaken for a form of living death. You are perhaps familiar with the legend of the zombie? But a gifted chemist such as yourself must have found a way of altering the toxin to create a new and harmless formula, perhaps by combining it with an extract derived from the Black Fish of the Bering Sea, which I see in this tank. They are frozen every winter and revived during the spring thaw, are they not?”

  Before she had a chance to respond, a young man appeared in the doorway. He wore a leather apron and thick gloves, and spoke with a vaguely cockney accent, but there was something familiar about the tone. The height and build were right, too. And though he had covered his features as best he could the evening before, I recognised the eyes. Yes, this was the fellow, all right.

  “Is there a good reason why you’re intruding on these premises on Christmas morning?” He demanded. “We’ve a good deal to do before we close up for the festive season.”

  Holmes turned to greet him. “And this must be your son, Ridley Warrender.”

  “Your manner is very familiar considering we haven’t yet been introduced. What on earth is going on here?”

  I gave young Warrender a hard stare. “Be warned, I am armed, sir - and I owe you for that blow on the back of the head.” He attempted to laugh it off, but no-one else in that cramped room seemed to find it particularly amusing, in particular his mother.

  “My son and I are still uncertain what crime it is you are actually investigating, gentlemen,” she said.