Murder, My Dear Watson

by John Lellenberg

  My friend lifted the paper to the light and said in a low murmur, “Fine cream laid, watermark from Brewster and Sons, deckle edges— quite the dandy as far as writing is concerned, your friend—written in a plain hand by a man capable of much more decorative lettering, no smudges, no blots, no—I revise my earlier estimate. The man is a genius and not a dilettante.”

  “What does the note say?” I tried in vain to keep the impatience out of my voice; Holmes and his brother could discuss the missive for half an hour without actually reading it, but as a lesser mortal I wanted to know the contents.

  “ ‘I must consult your celebrated brother regarding the singular contents of an ancient British barrow.’ Signed, Wilfred Patchford, M.A.”

  “A barrow?” I glanced out of the window; a passing flower-seller having brought an image of Covent Garden to my mind. “What could possibly—” I broke off with a blush, realizing my mistake. As an archaeologist, Patchford no doubt meant “barrow” to signify an ancient collective burial site, not a container for fruits and vegetables.

  “Singular contents? Whatever can the man mean?”

  “There is but one way to find out,” Holmes replied. “Have the waiter invite Mr. Patchford to join us in the Strangers’ Room.”

  “IT APPEARED TO be—but of course I know nothing of such matters —but it did have the appearance of the Horus figure in the British Museum, the Elgin rooms, you know, but of course I am no Egyptologist, only that it did look so very like.” Patchford at last ran out of breath and slowed down like an exhausted horse.

  Reading between the lines of the man’s breathless, disjointed manner of speech, it appeared that his ancient British barrow had contained, not relics from the seventh century as he had hoped, but a small figure of a bird, made of some black stone, and belonging to no period of British history.

  “It is surely very valuable and quite old,” the antiquarian continued, “but it is not British in any way and it has no business turning up in Sir Cadogan’s burial place.” The little man sounded quite indignant, as if the black bird had flown into his tumulus just to annoy him.

  He was a woolly little man, with tufts of white hair shooting from his pink scalp as if he’d been electrified. Watery blue eyes peered through silver pince-nez and knobby fingers made invisible cats’ cradles in the air as he spoke. I pitied the students who had sat through his lectures if his colloquial speech was anything to go by; they must have had quite a job to stay awake.

  “It certainly does look Egyptian,” Mycroft Holmes said. He lifted the bird from the tea table where Patchford had placed it. “Basalt, I think,” he murmured as he stroked the smooth dull black sides of the little statue.

  “A funerary object, do you think?” I was surprised at Holmes; normally his knowledge extends to matters of criminology and no further. “I believe statues of this size were often placed inside pyramids as guardians over the mummies.”

  “But what was it doing in Sir Cadogan’s barrow?” The professor’s face wore an expression of petulant outrage.

  “Was the late Sir Cadogan a Crusader, by any chance?” I picked up the last cucumber sandwich. “He might have brought the statue back as a souvenir from the Holy Land.”

  “He might indeed,” Patchford said with an irritating smile, “if he hadn’t died four hundred years before the first Crusade.”

  “Professor Patchford,” Holmes asked, steepling his fingers, “do you have any opinion regarding how long the bird had been in the barrow? Could it have been put there, say, within the year, or had it lain in place a long time?”

  “An excellent question, sir.” The little man beamed. “I can see I was quite right to appeal to you, quite right. When I first opened the tumulus, I would have staked my oath that I was the first person to have done so. Often, you know,” he went on, his hands twisting in his lap, “we archaeologists come to the site after everyone else has already ransacked it—grave robbers, curiosity seekers, carrion beasts.”

  “But this time the site appeared undisturbed,” Holmes prompted.

  “It appeared,” the little man lowered his voice and giggled, “virgin. So undefiled was it that I had a momentary lapse in reason and thought I might release a ghost upon the world. That’s the local legend, you know, that barrows are occupied by wights, ghosts of those who died, and that opening them sets the ghost free.”

  “Surely you don’t believe—”

  “Oh, no, of course not, Mr. Holmes,” Patchford hastened to reply. His wizened hands smoothed his wild hair back behind his ears. “But I’ve seen some strange things in the fens and bogs where barrows lie. Swamp gas can only explain so much, sir, so much and no more.” His voice grew lower and more confidential. “I removed the stones, one by one, very carefully, from the tumulus and I peered inside with my lantern and what did I see but this very bird staring at me with his great black eyes and I—well, sir, I won’t deny it gave me quite a turn.”

  “I imagine it did indeed,” Mycroft replied. His plump hands continued to explore the bird; he ran his fingers over it as if hoping to read some meaning into its shape and heft.

  “It was directly in front,” Patchford said, “and so I suppose someone must have opened the tomb and placed it there, I mean, that is the only possible explanation, I realize that, but whoever did such a thing covered the tumulus back up with such care, such exactitude, such precision, that I can only assume it was someone as familiar with ancient British burial sites as I myself, and I can tell you, gentlemen, the number of such men in England is infinitesimal. I don’t like to boast, gentlemen, but there are accredited professors of archaeology at very prestigious universities who could not have done it. The laying of stone upon stone, sealing the tomb without resort to mortar, and making it appear untouched for centuries—it was a veritable work of art, Mr. Holmes, and it was done with one purpose in mind, of that I am certain.”

  “To conceal the black bird,” Holmes said, almost carelessly, as if confirming a commonplace.

  “Just so. But why should anyone conceal such a find, I ask myself?” Patchford settled back in his chair and smiled. “A find like that could make a career. It ought to be in the British Museum or the Ashmolean, not hiding in a barrow.”

  “If it were stolen,” I ventured, and won the little man’s smile as a reward for my perception, “that might explain—”

  “Exactly, Doctor. If it were stolen, an obscure tomb would be a very good hiding place indeed. It could have lain there another century without anyone disturbing it.”

  “It might have lain there a half century already,” Mycroft observed. “The theft might not be recent at all. Egyptian pyramids have been looted since Roman times and their booty scattered over the entire European continent.”

  “Enough of this fruitless speculation,” Holmes said in a tone that brooked no disagreement. “This first thing to do is find out whether the bird is in fact Egyptian, and if it is, how much it might be worth.”

  “I know just the man.” Mycroft clapped his pudgy hands. “He’s a member here, but one sees him rather seldom, since he spends so much time in the Orient. Amateur Egyptologist, quite knowledgeable. We’ve had several stimulating discussions in this very room after one of his adventures.”

  “Pray tell me his name,” Sherlock Holmes said, leaning forward with the light of curiosity aflame in his grey eyes, “and I shall send for him at once.”

  “Basil Blakeney,” Mycroft replied with an air of great satisfaction. “Knows more about Egypt than men with twice his age and education. Lives near Brighton. He could get up to London in very short order.”

  MRS. HUDSON ANNOUNCED our visitor, then stepped aside to allow him entry into our sitting room. He was a slender man, with fair hair and large inquisitive blue eyes. He looked rather young for such a renowned expert, and he looked like the last man on earth one would associate with the word “adventure.”

  “Ah, Mr. Blakeney,” Holmes said with a smile. “How good of you to come.”

  �
��I am only too glad to be of assistance, Mr. Holmes,” the dapper young man replied. He wore a well-cut suit of grey broadcloth and his boots were polished to a high gloss. “I decided to take the opportunity of an unexpected trip to London and spend the evening at the opera.”

  Blakeney set his hat on a side table, pulled a pair of white cotton sleeve protectors out of his carpetbag, fastened them to his sleeves, and said, “May I see the bird?”

  “Certainly,” Holmes replied, the ends of his mouth quirking into a near-smile. “I was about to offer you tea, but I admire your single-mindedness.”

  Holmes had already conducted several chemical tests upon the statue and declared it to be made of basalt, as were many Egyptian funerary statues. He’d scratched the bottom of the figure and found that it was not solid; something inside the bird was made of substances other than the dull black volcanic stone. But without damaging the object, he could do no more, and he dared not damage it without an expert assessment of its value.

  The fastidious scholar bent over the bird, which stood on Holmes’s old deal chemical table. He reached once more into his capacious carpetbag and pulled out a magnifying glass, a brush, and a small chisel. Holmes quirked a single eyebrow, but I could tell he was impressed.

  Holmes ordered tea while Mr. Blakeney’s slender fingers poked and prodded, shaved and examined the falcon. After a full ten minutes, he stood up straight, lifted the bird off the table into the air, and dropped it with some force onto the stony hearth.

  Pieces of black stone flew into the air. I jumped from my chair and shouted, “What have you done?”

  I appealed to Holmes. “My God, he’s destroyed it! What will Patch-ford say? Mr. Blakeney,” I cried, running toward the fireplace as if I could somehow reverse the motion of time, turn back the clock to before that appalling act of destruction, “you must be mad!”

  Even as I knelt on the hearth picking up pieces, I heard an odd sound behind me. It was Holmes—chuckling.

  “Testing your hypothesis, Mr. Blakeney?”

  “An untested hypothesis is useless speculation, Mr. Holmes.”

  “An admirable sentiment,” the detective replied with a small bow. “Shall we inspect the results of your little test?”

  I was already kneeling on the slate hearthstones, so I turned the broken figure over and gasped, rocking back on my heels.

  Inside the basalt covering, partially revealed, was a bird of such magnificence, golden, jewel-encrusted, ruby-eyed, that my eyes blinked at the dazzling display. “Oh, my God,” I murmured. “It’s—it’s wonderful.”

  “But it is not Egyptian, is it?”

  “No,” the extraordinary little man replied. He had joined Holmes and me at the fireplace. All three of us huddled over the small figure as if in worship of a pagan idol. “I saw at once that it was fake. I was about to say so, when I caught sight of a thin layer of wax beneath the surface of the basalt, about an inch below the surface. Someone had covered the inside object with wax to protect it, then coated it in a basalt-based plaster to conceal it. The only way to find out what was under the basalt was to break the bird open. And this is the result.”

  “But what is it?” I turned the figure in my hands, letting the sunlight play upon the sparkling jewels. “And to whom does it belong?”

  “Those are pertinent questions, Watson.” Holmes shook his head with rueful admiration. “What better way to hide a falcon than inside another falcon? Very clever. Anyone finding it would think, as we did, that it was Egyptian, and when it was discovered to be a fake, it would be dismissed as worthless. Only Mr. Blakeney’s daring has permitted us to see the true value of this bird.”

  Mrs. Hudson brought tea and set it, with a small frown of disapproval, on the old deal table. Holmes poured and offered a cup to our guest, who accepted it without sitting down. Instead he took a single sip, put the cup down, picked up his chisel, and went to work stripping away the remaining basalt from the jeweled bird.

  “Faience?” Holmes asked. He stood hovering over the bird like an anxious parent watching a doctor examine a sick child.

  “You know it isn’t,” the Egyptologist replied with some asperity. “But I see the value of eliminating all possibilities before settling upon a conclusion.”

  “So the gems are real,” Holmes murmured, his voice trailing off and his eyes gazing into the distance. “Is it at all Egyptian?”

  The fair-haired man shook his head decisively. “No, it is not. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was from the Orient, but of a later period. Persian, perhaps, or Ottoman.”

  “So my suggestion that it was a Crusader’s booty was not so far from the mark,” I said with a pardonable air of pride. “Perhaps one of Sir Cadogan’s descendants brought it back from the East and placed it in his ancestor’s tomb for safekeeping.”

  “In any case, I have done all that I can,” the gentleman said. He took one more sip of tea, unfastened his sleeve-protectors, repacked his carpetbag, and picked up his hat. “Tosca awaits. I suggest you contact Gutman at Oxford. Quite the best man for this kind of thing.”

  GUTMAN OF OXFORD—a man even larger and more rotund than Mycroft Holmes—proved to be a veritable fount of information, so much so that Holmes had a job persuading him to focus upon the essentials. At every turn, he mentioned monographs written in Italian, passages from French histories, obscure biographies of even more obscure Spanish counts, and privately published family histories. My head swam with references to Saracens, Barbarossa, Suleiman the Magnificent, and the Knights Templars.

  “But the origin, Professor Gutman,” I said at last, “was it in Turkey or Persia? I’ve lost track, I’m afraid.”

  “Malta.” His dark bushy eyebrows gathered in a frown, as if he disliked dealing with one so dim as to lose the thread of his discourse. “I distinctly said it was undoubtedly—and you should know, sir, that this conclusion will be disputed by those who wish to—well, let us just say that it will be disputed—but I stake my not inconsiderable reputation that this is the authentic article, the Rara Avis of song and story, the legendary Maltese Falcon!”

  His air of consequence was so enormous that a laugh bubbled up in my throat. “But what exactly does that mean, Professor?”

  “It means, for one thing, that this bird is worth a great deal of money,” Holmes said, his prosaic manner deliberately chosen to cut through the professor’s fustian.

  “Priceless, sir, priceless,” the professor replied in a soft, silky voice. His gaze had not left the glittering object since he’d entered our rooms. Dark eyes beneath heavy black brows, a full black beard, and fleshy, sensuous lips proclaimed him a man of appetites, and clearly his avariciousness was aroused by the sight of the jeweled avian. But perhaps I wronged him, for he next remarked, “It has been sought by scholars of the Orient for hundreds of years, thought to be lost, then discovered again, then obscured by the mists of time and the smoke of battle. It was once in England, so I should not be surprised to see it here in Baker Street, and yet, I am surprised. Surprised and gratified, shocked and amazed—I had almost begun to think it a chimera, a phantom, a figment of overheated imagination.”

  “Who made it?” I thought perhaps if my questions were simple to the point of childishness that the answers might become less abstruse.

  “The Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, later called the Knights of Rhodes, today known as the Knights of Malta,” Gutman replied. He folded his hands across his ample stomach and settled back in the leather chair with the air of one about to tell a long story. “Although why they merited the former name is unclear, since Suleiman chased them out of Rhodes in 1523; they settled in Crete and persuaded Emperor Charles V to give them Malta, Gazo, and Tripoli for their own. There was but one condition,” he went on, lowering his voice and slowing his speech for dramatic emphasis. “They were to pay the emperor a tribute every year—a tribute of one falcon.”

  “One falcon like this every year would have left them very poor indeed,” Holme
s remarked.

  The fat man threw his head back and laughed. “Yes, it would have. But this was a special tribute, for the first year only. Bear in mind that the Hospitallers had preyed upon the Saracens for years, looting and gathering spoils of war. They possessed gold and gems, diamonds and rubies, silks and ivories, riches beyond the dreams of avarice. The Holy Wars were to them simply a matter of enriching themselves.”

  “So they created this bird out of the cream of their booty,” Holmes said, “and sent it to the emperor.”

  “Sent it in a galley commanded by a French knight,” Gutman confirmed with a decisive nod. He had the slightest of German accents, overlaid with Oxonian diction.

  “Something tells me it never reached Spain,” I said. The bird seemed to wink at me, a trick of light, but disconcerting. It had two large rubies for eyes; when the sunlight hit them, they glowed like new-shed blood.

  “Something tells you correctly,” the professor agreed with a nod of his large head. “Barbarossa, also known as Khair-ed-Din, the Algerian pirate, captured the galley and the bird. There it stayed, in North Africa, for another hundred years until it was carried away by Sir Francis Verney, the famous English adventurer.”

  “Then it was in England,” I cried. “Did Verney have a house in the Cotswolds?” All we knew of the barrow’s location was that it lay in that most picturesque area of the countryside.

  “He did,” Gutman replied and I glowed with pride. “But legend has it that the bird left England and made its way to Sicily, then to Spain, and finally to Paris.”

  “And if that legend was false?” I could not contain myself; the gem-encrusted statue had sparked my imagination. “What if Verney kept the bird and spread a rumor that it was no longer in this country?”

  “Or perhaps,” Holmes countered, “the bird that left England was a copy and not the true Maltese Falcon. Verney might have concealed the real bird in that barrow.”

  “Then, Mr. Holmes,” Gutman said with an air of great portent, “you have set Arabic scholarship upon its ear and come into possession of the single most valuable artifact of the entire period.”