Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine 11

by Jack Grochot

  She broke down, sobbing, but was reluctant to divulge the evidence. “Oh, Mr Holmes,” she whimpered, “I was paid handsomely to do what I did, but if I give you the information I am as good as dead. My mother is gravely ill and I desperately needed the money for her care. Now she is doomed.”

  “Perhaps we can protect you, and help your mother, Miss Cable, but we can talk about that on the way to the British embassy,” Holmes told her in a sympathetic tone.

  We marched out into the early morning sunshine, LeRoch a few paces behind but sober. “I am indebted to you brave souls for my rescue,” he said to Holmes and me as we reached the door.

  “It was no bother at all,” I responded, thinking later that it was a silly thing to say.

  We proceeded to a populated avenue and hailed a coach after a lengthy wait with little discourse. LeRoch sat with Holmes and me across from Dr Tombe and Miss Cable, who confessed finally that she was an actress using her stage name. Her real name was Norma Uffelman and she said she had been hired in London for five hundred pounds plus expenses to play the part of LeRoch’s femme fatale. But who had employed her remained undisclosed. LeRoch glared at her, not admiringly any more.

  When Holmes explained our presence to the embassy receptionist, she sent a page boy to fetch a security officer, who took us to a section on the ground floor that contained four unoccupied jail cells. We showed Miss Uffelman into one and Dr Tombe into another, far apart so they couldn’t connive. We left them there to stew awhile about their predicament. Holmes, LeRoch, and I then met with a Scotland Yard inspector, Roger Stuart, who was stationed at the embassy. Over breakfast we went through the elements of the case and developed a strategy for our next move.

  Holmes said he already had come up with an idea to entrap whoever was behind the kidnapping, but he was mum about the details. Inspector Stuart said he would go along with anything Holmes intended, so long as Scotland Yard remained involved.

  “We’ll spring the trap on him and then Scotland Yard can expose the scandal to the newsies,” Holmes chortled.

  Holmes’s plan depended almost entirely on the complicity of Miss Uffelman, who by the time we had returned to the cellblock was more receptive to Holmes’s offer to protect her and help her mother. “Did you mean what you said about shielding me from retaliation for cooperating with you?” she asked meekly through the iron bars.

  “Miss Uffelman,” Holmes said somberly, “this affair with you and Dr Tombe is but a sub-plot to a grand play that could jeopardise the stability of the British Empire. The government can reward you with leniency for aiding us in solving this crime as well as make certain that your safety is not compromised.

  “The Crown will go so far as to change your identity, re-locate you to, say, New York, and provide you with the opportunity to succeed on Broadway. And there in the city you would find competent medical services for your mother.

  “That, of course, would require you to name the malefactor who paid you and testify against him.”

  Miss Uffelman’s face brightened at the prospects. “Maybe I shall do as you ask,” said she. “But first get me out of here.”

  “Not until we get the whole story from you, Miss Uffelman, a story we can use in a courtroom,” Holmes said sternly.

  “All right, then, Mr Holmes, I’ll tell it to you from the beginning,” she said compliantly.

  She recalled how she had lived on a meager billet as an understudy at the Lyceum and Haymarket theatres, barely surviving on her own after spending large sums for her mother’s care. One recent evening, she said, after a performance, a rugged-looking man, Tom Wheatley, nicknamed Boozer, went backstage and wanted to know if she needed a better acting job. She instantly answered in the affirmative, even though he told her the position would not involve the stage and could be hazardous. Boozer took her to a cafe at the intersection of Glasshouse and Regent streets, where she was introduced to her soon-to-be benefactor, a retired army colonel, Sebastian Moran. He was deceitful, she alleged, because he told her he was working with the Home Office to snare a double-agent, a traitor who was engaged in an act of betrayal that would reach a climax in Peking.

  Colonel Moran probed to learn if she was capable of traveling to such a distant land, but she was reluctant because of her mother’s condition. He pledged to hire a nurse to look after her mother while Miss Uffelman was gone, and then revealed the details of her role, producing the five hundred pounds as an enticement. She accepted his offer with a twinge of dread.

  “Did he give you an address if you found it necessary to contact him?” Holmes asked.

  “He said he could be reached again at the cafe,” she answered.

  “Are you prepared to go to court and repeat your narrative, Miss Uffelman?” Holmes wanted to know.

  “I am, if you keep your word, Mr Holmes.”

  “My word is my bond, Miss Uffelman. This will go a long way in your favour,” he concluded.

  Dr Tombe, who had been taken to a room out of the cellblock so he couldn’t eavesdrop on the conversation between Holmes and Miss Uffelman, proved to be a wealth of information also. It was all pertinent evidence, which, he said, he would repeat under oath at a trial.

  “I am not a young man any more, Mr Holmes,” he said to preface his account, “and a stretch in the penitentiary would be tantamount to a death sentence.”

  At first, he provided tidbits that an aggressive prosecutor could build into devastating evidence. As he related it, Dr Tombe and Colonel Moran had been friends since they met at a conference at the University of London, my alma mater for my medical degree. Dr Tombe and Colonel Moran stayed in touch and occasionally the two would have lunch or dinner together, and it was at one of those times that Colonel Moran proposed the role Dr Tombe played in the drama. Dr Tombe admitted that he had induced the first two agents to lose their grip on reality by imposing a hypnotic trance, in the same manner that he had attempted with LeRoch.

  Dr Tombe’s recompense was one thousand pounds each time he achieved the desired results.

  “Your assistance will be duly noted at your sentencing,” Sherlock Holmes assured him.

  After we left the embassy, I asked Holmes why he hadn’t been in the least surprised that Colonel Moran was the mastermind of the plot.

  “I suspected my foe Moran nearly from the start,” he revealed, continuing: “When I was consulting my Index back at Baker Street, I entertained the thought that if I ruled out a hostile government, only an international arms smuggler could profit from a war between China and Japan. Such an individual would possess the wherewithal and connections to accomplish a sale of munitions, as well as arrange for the intercession of Britain to end miserably. Colonel Moran fit the bill. Therefore, I spent the night devising a plan, and early in the morning, at dawn, I sent Mercer, my general utility man, to the Cafe Royal, where Moran gathers his henchmen and concocts his conspiracies. At exactly eight o’clock, two Orientals approached their table at the back wall and began an animated discussion with Moran. When it was almost over, Moran reached behind him, and from a cloth case he withdrew a new American military bolt-action rifle, which he demonstrated. The two visitors smiled broadly and nodded their heads excitedly. There was some jibber-jabber and they parted on good terms. I was certain a deal had been struck.”

  “And why were you not shocked at the method to incapacitate the mediators?” I wanted to learn.

  “Simplicity itself, Watson. I merely remembered our dialogue just last year about the findings of the British Medical Association on the applications of hypnotherapy. I deduced that it surely could be employed for a Machiavellian outcome as well as for a healthy one,” Holmes said.

  Holmes and I returned to our hotel room while Inspector Stuart made arrangements with the China ambassador to file the appropriate documents to extradite the prisoners back to London.

  “We mu
st prove Moran had knowledge of the unlawful activity and coordinated it, too,” Holmes stated.

  “And how do you propose to do that?” I enquired.

  “I intend to permit the man’s genius and his ego to be his undoing—the colonel will tell us it is so in his own words,” came his answer.

  With that, Holmes withdrew a sheet of foolscap from the desk drawer and composed a cryptic message. He took time to be meticulous about the wording, re-wrote it twice, reviewed it, and finally was satisfied that it said exactly what he wanted. He showed it to me. It read:

  Colonel Moran -

  Plan gone awry. Subject rejected my advances. Please advise.

  Respond to Chang Su Son Hotel, Peking.

  It was signed “L Cable.”

  “We shall go to a telegraph office to send this wire to him in care of the Cafe Royal. And then, we wait,” Holmes said, and he laughed in the noiseless fashion that was peculiar to him.

  After our excursion to transmit the message, we got some rest and were visited by Inspector Stuart, who had been communicating with his superiors in London about the developments in the case. Inspector Stuart was amused by the wording of the telegram. “The reply to this wire might very well provide the corroboration we need for their testimony,” he remarked. Later, the inspector identified himself to the hotel manager and instructed him to give any messages for Miss Cable to her associate, Sherlock Holmes.

  A wire for her came the next afternoon. Holmes and I were passing through the lobby on our way back from lunch when a bellboy directed us to the main counter. The clerk handed Holmes a sealed envelope and asked that he see to it Miss Cable received it. We hurried to our room, and Holmes used his pocket knife to slit open the envelope. It contained a message from Colonel Moran. This is what it said:

  Laura -

  You are an actress. Give subject your best performance. Act! Failure unacceptable.

  Holmes wrung his hands and danced a jig. “This should do him in!” he beamed.

  Inspector Stuart set the wheels of justice in motion again, notifying his superiors that we had obtained the evidence necessary to take Colonel Moran into custody.

  They did.

  When we arrived on the train on our return trip to Hong Kong two days later, I bought a copy of The Times at the newsstand. The top right hand column displayed a full account of how Scotland Yard had disrupted a scheme to undermine the efforts of the British Home Office.

  Later in the year, Miss Uffelman and Dr Tombe were given light sentences, short periods of probation. Miss Uffelman then vanished, it seemed, from the face of the earth.

  Colonel Moran fared worse. After a trial that lasted a week, a jury found him guilty and he was ordered to serve one year of hard labour at Pentonville Prison, called The Dungeon by its inmates.

  Colonel Moran vowed revenge against Sherlock Holmes as they led the arrogant convict, in shackles, out of the courtroom.

  A month afterward, Holmes and I attended a concert of Franz Berwald compositions at Albert Hall. While waiting for the conductor to rap his baton, Holmes made a prophetic comment that one day came to haunt me: “Although a major instigator of evil is tucked away securely now at Pentonville, I doubt the duress he undergoes there will change his tune. I expect there will come a time when Colonel Sebastian Moran and I shall encounter each other once again.”

  THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair. With an apology for my intrusion, I was about to withdraw when Holmes pulled me abruptly into the room and closed the door behind me.

  “You could not possibly have come at a better time, my dear Watson,” he said cordially.

  “I was afraid that you were engaged.”

  “So I am. Very much so.”

  “Then I can wait in the next room.”

  “Not at all. This gentleman, Mr. Wilson, has been my partner and helper in many of my most successful cases, and I have no doubt that he will be of the utmost use to me in yours also.”

  The stout gentleman half rose from his chair and gave a bob of greeting, with a quick little questioning glance from his small fat-encircled eyes.

  “Try the settee,” said Holmes, relapsing into his armchair and putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. “I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own little adventures.”

  “Your cases have indeed been of the greatest interest to me,” I observed.

  “You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”

  “A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting.”

  “You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right. Now, Mr. Jabez Wilson here has been good enough to call upon me this morning, and to begin a narrative which promises to be one of the most singular which I have listened to for some time. You have heard me remark that the strangest and most unique things are very often connected not with the larger but with the smaller crimes, and occasionally, indeed, where there is room for doubt whether any positive crime has been committed. As far as I have heard it is impossible for me to say whether the present case is an instance of crime or not, but the course of events is certainly among the most singular that I have ever listened to. Perhaps, Mr. Wilson, you would have the great kindness to recommence your narrative. I ask you not merely because my friend Dr. Watson has not heard the opening part but also because the peculiar nature of the story makes me anxious to have every possible detail from your lips. As a rule, when I have heard some slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory. In the present instance I am forced to admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief, unique.”

  The portly client puffed out his chest with an appearance of some little pride and pulled a dirty and wrinkled newspaper from the inside pocket of his greatcoat. As he glanced down the advertisement column, with his head thrust forward and the paper flattened out upon his knee, I took a good look at the man and endeavored, after the fashion of my companion, to read the indications which might be presented by his dress or appearance.

  I did not gain very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd’s check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, and the expression of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features.

  Sherlock Holmes’s quick eye took in my occupation, and he shook his head with a smile as he noticed my questioning glances. “Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”

  Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper, but his
eyes upon my companion.

  “How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr. Holmes?” he asked. “How did you know, for example, that I did manual labour. It’s as true as gospel, for I began as a ship’s carpenter.”

  “Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.”

  “Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?”

  “I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that, especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an arc-and-compass breastpin.”

  “Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?”

  “What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it upon the desk?”

  “Well, but China?”

  “The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When, in addition, I see a Chinese coin hanging from your watch-chain, the matter becomes even more simple.”

  Mr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. “Well, I never!” said he. “I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it, after all.”

  “I begin to think, Watson,” said Holmes, “that I make a mistake in explaining. ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico,’ you know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid. Can you not find the advertisement, Mr. Wilson?”