“Best not,” said Holmes. “It will complicate matters unduly. Just say that you are doing it in order to ensure Sir Henry’s mental health. Mortimer will see the sense in that.”
“What about Grier? He is waiting back at my cabin. He will want to know the outcome of your investigations. What shall I tell him?”
“Tell him that despite every effort I have been unable to draw any meaningful conclusion. Let him think that it was just an accident after all, as he already supposes.”
I did as bidden, and Grier seemed content. “That’s what I get for braving a storm,” he said. “Next time, I shall stay indoors, like any sane person.”
I saw him to his cabin and returned to mine, where I spent the night tossing and turning, much like the Aegean herself.
Chapter Thirty-One
PUERTO LIMÓN
By the morning, the squall had died out and the sea was serene again, with just a slight rolling swell. I got up feeling bruised and pummelled, as if I had just gone the full twelve rounds with the prize fighter Jem Mace, even though all I had done was lie in bed. I ate a hearty breakfast, then went to talk to Dr Mortimer.
At first he cavilled at my proposal, but I talked him round.
“Sir Henry could very well do himself a mischief if he keeps up this level of alcohol intake,” I said. “We have another six days at sea, if the rest of the crossing is smooth. It is surely possible that we can maintain the ruse for that long. We will be saving him from his own worst impulses.”
“But jaundice, Watson? Will he fall for it?”
“If we both insist on the diagnosis, there is no reason to think he won’t. Once we arrive at Puerto Limón, we can pronounce him cured. Whatever you may think of the rightness or wrongness of lying to him, a few days sequestered in his cabin, drying out, is just what the man needs. That way he will be clear-headed and fighting fit when we begin looking for Harry in Costa Rica.”
Mortimer and I met with Sir Henry in private and set about convincing him he was ill. It was easier than I had thought. He was suffering the obnoxious effects of a hangover, which helped. When he checked in the mirror, his skin was sallow, his eyes bleary. Outwardly he looked awful, and I had no doubt he felt just as awful inwardly.
“Jaundice,” he said. “My God. What must I do?”
“We have caught it in good time,” I said, “so it is eminently treatable. The simplest remedy is rest and plenty of fluids, by which, of course, I do not mean alcohol.”
“No. Quite right.”
“Water. Clear soups. Coffee. Tea. We must flush the excess bilirubin out of your bloodstream, in order to keep the icterus under control.” I was bandying about these medical terms both to impress and intimidate him. “Mortimer and I have agreed to keep you under close observation. We shall take it in turns.”
“It will be a terrible imposition upon both of you.”
“Think nothing of it. Your care is our concern.”
So it was that over the ensuing days I would sit with Sir Henry for six hours in the daytime and six at night, alternating with Mortimer. In between shifts I would eat, stretch my legs, and catch up on sleep.
The “patient” behaved impeccably. He consumed whatever foodstuff was put in front of him and did not touch a drop of alcohol. It was clearly a shock to him that he had contracted such a serious illness, and this had a sobering effect, in every sense.
The Aegean put in at New York, where as many passengers came on board as departed. Thereafter, her coal bunkers restocked, she began coasting southward. Soon the autumnal chill of the northern latitudes lay behind us and we were in tropical climes. The skies were immaculately blue, the sea dazzled, and warm breezes wafted.
In Jamaica we had to say a fond farewell to the coffee magnate and family. By then the swelling of his nose had gone down. It is worth noting that his wife walked past me as they were leaving and gave me a surreptitious nod, as if to say she condoned my conduct towards her husband. Discreetly I tipped my hat in return.
West across the Caribbean we steamed, towards the isthmus that connects the north and south portions of the American continent. We called in at Belize City, Puerto Castilla in Honduras, and Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua. At each, Holmes went ashore to consult the port authorities, enquiring whether a Mrs Pearl Merripit and son had disembarked there. The answer was always in the negative.
At last we arrived at Puerto Limón, on a morning so sparklingly bright and pristine, it could have been the first morning of Creation.
By then I was feeling cloistered and more than a little claustrophobic. You can spend only so long aboard a ship before you begin to yearn for the liberty to go just anywhere, to have an existence not restricted to a few hundred square feet of deck space and an even lesser area of interior accommodation. Spending long spells cooped up in Sir Henry’s cabin did not help matters. Nor, even, did travelling First Class, ungrateful as that may sound. A gilded cage is still a cage.
Puerto Limón sprawled inland, covering the flank of a shallow ridge of hills. The city consisted largely of low white buildings with curved red roof tiles. Here and there a church or a grand municipal-looking edifice rose above the rest. Palm trees lined the streets in between, their foliage like brilliant green bomb bursts.
The heat, even at nine in the morning, was tremendous. The five of us stood on the docks, fanning our faces and taking stock. Sir Henry looked a good deal better for the period of abstinence that had been imposed on him. The colour was back in his cheeks and his eyes had regained something of their old lustre. Of all of us trans atlantic manhunters, he was understandably the keenest to get going.
“Harry is out there,” he said, scanning the landscape. “Every moment we linger is a moment he gets further away.”
“But we cannot go off half-cocked,” said Holmes. “We must first establish whether Mrs Stapleton left the SS Görlitz here.”
Sure enough, she had. That was the good news. The bad news was that this had been four days ago. The larger, more powerful Görlitz had made better time on the crossing than the smaller, if nimbler, Aegean.
“Don’t worry,” Holmes said to a frustrated Sir Henry. “Her lead has lengthened, but we may still catch up. Let me ask around among the locals. Someone is bound to have seen her and Harry. Someone may even know her current whereabouts.”
Holmes had a good working knowledge of the major European languages, and although his Spanish was not the equal of his French or German, he was able to converse well enough in it. His first thought was that our quarry would have taken the train to San José, for one could more easily hide amid the teeming multitudes in the Costa Rican capital than anywhere else in the country. This, however, proved to be a false hope. None of the officials at Puerto Limón’s railway station could recall seeing a woman and a boy matching the description Holmes gave them.
Next, he scoured Puerto Limón itself, with the aim of establishing whether the pair had stayed there before moving on, and whether indeed they were still in the city. Here, again, he met with disappointment. There were only a handful of hotels and boarding houses to choose from, and none of them had lately played host to a beautiful Latin woman and a three-year-old boy who spoke only English.
Undeterred, Holmes cast his net wider. As evening set in, he trawled the city’s bars, buying drinks, making free with his money, trusting that his generosity would loosen tongues. Eventually a provincial by the name of Juan said that a friend of his, who ran a business transporting goods up and down the Rio Banano, had been hired by a woman sounding very much like the one Holmes was looking for.
“There was a boy with her, si,” said this fellow. “My friend, Ramón, he takes passengers sometimes into the interior. He took her and the niño on his boat, I am certain of it.”
Holmes rewarded Juan with a five-colón note for the information. “Gracias, señor. There is a second five-colón note for you if you can direct me towards another boat owner who would be able to take my friends and me upriver.”
&nb
sp; Juan eyed the money avidly, licking his lips. “I may know of such a person. In fact, it is my cousin. Gilberto is his name. Gilberto Suarez. He has a motor launch. It is not big but it is reliable. It is yours for the asking – at the right price, of course.”
Gilberto Suarez drove a hard bargain. A daily rate was negotiated by Holmes and Sir Henry for the hire of his motor launch and his services as pilot. The fee was doubtless extortionate by local standards, but reasonable by ours. Sir Henry could well afford it, and said to me later that if Suarez had asked a hundred times as much, he would still have paid up.
We purchased provisions for the journey, including tents, bedrolls and mosquito nets. In short order, we were boarding Suarez’s motor launch from a jetty at the mouth of the Rio Banano, where the river debouched into the sea a few miles south of Puerto Limón. With a white-hot sun riding high overhead, Suarez cast off and we headed upstream.
Chapter Thirty-Two
UP THE RIO BANANO
The motor launch was fifteen feet long, with a clinker-built hull and a shallow draught. Its engine was positioned centrally and was capped with a six-foot-tall chimney which sent out gobbets of noxious dark smoke. Gilberto Suarez sat just for’ard of this, manning the helm, while astern there was a covered area with bench seats. If we slotted our legs around one another’s carefully, the five of us were just about able to squeeze into this. However, it was preferable if one of us squatted at the bow instead. We organised a rota so that each man spent an hour up front, in the open, while the rest stayed in the shade. Any longer than that would have been to risk sunstroke.
The boat chugged bronchitically along, managing a speed slightly quicker than walking pace. This did not seem fast, least of all to Sir Henry, but Suarez insisted we were making good headway, especially given that the current was against us. He was a plump, jolly-looking man in late middle age who wore a broad-brimmed straw hat perched askew on his head and a red bandanna knotted around his neck and who was forever mopping his rugged brow with a handkerchief. Even though he had some idea about the nature of our mission and must have understood that sightseeing was the furthest thing from our minds, he insisted on referring to us as “turistas” and pointing out various items he thought would be of interest. Over there was a macaw, over there a capuchin monkey, and over there a caiman, the reptile lurking so low in the water that only its eyes and snout showed above the surface. His English was more than serviceable. Apparently he had ferried a number of British chargés d’affaires and ministers up and down the river in his time, as well as explorers and gold prospectors from our country and the United States, and this was how he had picked up the language. He claimed he knew the Banano and its tributaries intimately. There was not an inch of its waters that was unfamiliar to him. His wife – God rest her soul – always used to say that he loved the river more than her, and there was, he allowed, some truth in that.
Nightfall came with startling suddenness. We pulled in at a narrow, muddy beach and made camp. Grier built a fire and cooked sausages and beans over it while the rest of us pitched our tents. Dr Mortimer seemed in a rather disgruntled mood all evening, but when I asked what the matter was, he said simply that he was not the outdoors sort. He enjoyed his creature comforts, and here we were, on the banks of a wild river, at the edge of a forest filled with screaming animals and who knew what else – pygmy tribesmen with a taste for human flesh, quite possibly. He longed for a roof over his head and carpet beneath his feet.
I could sympathise up to a point. The forest was mysterious-looking and certainly not quiet. Within its dark, lush immensity, creatures ululated and gibbered, croaked and coughed. It was noisier than Piccadilly Circus on a busy weekday, and every time there was a lull and one thought that the raucous cacophony might have abated, it would resume with a vengeance, seemingly louder than before.
There were flying insects, too. The air was thick with them – ones that stung, ones that blundered into your face, ones that whirred past your ear on wings that sounded like someone riffling through the pages of an encyclopaedia. Their presence brought out swarms of bats, which swooped around us, emitting little piping chirrups that were just audible as they feasted upon the airborne banquet.
Never, not even in the mountainous desolation of the Hindu Kush, had I had such a sense of being in a realm not made for men. We were intruders in a savage Eden where we did not and never would belong. Nature fought and bickered around us, and the best we could do was stay out of its way.
Yet, at the same time, there was a majesty about it. A moon shone down on us that was bigger and brighter than the moon above Britain. The stars glittered in their myriads, so many of them that it was hard to pick out the major constellations amid the throng. A humid breeze blew along the river that made me think of some divine primordial breath, full of fecund inspiration. Much like Grier and his appreciation of the squall, I felt awed and humbled by our surroundings.
So great was this emotion that, after most of the others turned in, I stayed up smoking a pipe and soaking in the sights and sounds. I was not alone. Grier was in a similarly contemplative mood. We sat side by side and shared a companionable silence, while the night forest continued to put up its chorus of catcalls and the river rustled past.
“Your head injury seems to be healing nicely,” I said at last.
“All thanks to you, Doctor.”
“No dizziness? No heightened sensitivity to noise or bright lights?”
“You asked me that when we were on the Aegean, several times, and the answer is still no.”
“I felt I should check again nonetheless. The after-effects of a concussion can be pernicious. Those stitches should be ready to come out in a day or two.”
“Will it ‘smart’ again?”
“Hardly at all.”
“Oh dear.” Grier chuckled. “You know, seeing all those stars up there, I’m reminded of a joke I once heard. Two gold miners are out in the wilderness, camping. One is significantly cleverer than the other. Let’s call them Jeremiah and Cletus. No, actually they’re not gold miners, they’re Englishmen. Let’s call them Holmes and Watson. Holmes is the cleverer one, naturally.”
“Bah! It’s bad enough that Holmes flaunts his intellect and compares it favourably with mine all the time. Now you’re doing it too?”
“Do you want to hear the joke or not?”
“Very well. If I must.”
“Sometime in the middle of the night, Holmes says to Watson, ‘Look up at the sky, Watson, and tell me what you see.’ Watson replies, ‘I see thousands and thousands of stars.’ Holmes says, ‘What do you deduce from that?’”
“‘Deduce’,” I said. “You really are tailoring this joke to suit our characters, aren’t you?”
“It does seem to fit quite nicely,” said Grier. “Watson replies to Holmes, ‘Well, if there are so many stars, if even a few of them have planets, it’s quite likely that there are some planets like our Earth out there. And if there are planets like our Earth out there, there might also be life. It does make you wonder about mankind’s place in the universe.’ And Holmes says, ‘How fascinating, Watson. What I deduce from it is that somebody has stolen our tent.’”
I laughed, in spite of myself, and Grier laughed too.
“I shall have to tell Holmes that one,” I said.
“Will he find it funny?”
“He doesn’t have much of a sense of humour. The things that amuse him are often obscure and occasionally quite baffling to the rest of us. I suspect, however, that the absurdity of the joke – and the literalness of the punchline – will appeal to him.”
“Perhaps one day the joke will actually be about you and him,” said Grier. “As his stature continues to grow, and yours with it, people will tell the Holmes and Watson version. It will become the standard.”
“Who knows?” I said with a shrug. “Perhaps. But I would hope posterity remembers us, if it ever does, for something more than that.”
The next day we were up early a
nd on our way again. The launch seemed more sluggish than previously, but Suarez tinkered with the engine and soon had us back up to full speed, such as it was.
Not only forest lined the river. There were villages, some little more than a few houses clustered beside a landing, others so large they could almost be called towns. There were coffee plantations, rubber plantations, coca plantations, banana plantations, and small farmsteads. These occupied plots of land were hewn out from the forest, with the river close by to draw on for irrigation. People waved at us as we went by, and sometimes Suarez hailed them and the two parties would converse in Spanish while the boat chuntered past. The first time this happened I thought that they were merely exchanging snippets of news or gossip, but it transpired that Suarez was asking for information about Ramón and his steamboat. By this method he was able to chart the progress of our quarry.
“Ramón passed this way three days ago, señores,” he would report, or, “Ramón halted here and made a delivery but no passengers got off.”
After two full days of travel, I was beginning to think that we would never overtake Ramón’s steamboat. It and our launch would continue upriver in procession, separated by dozens of miles, an uncloseable gap. We were not gaining on Beryl Stapleton and Harry. They would remain forever ahead, unseen, tantalisingly unattainable.
And what if the information Holmes had gleaned from Suarez’s cousin Juan was incorrect? What if Mrs Stapleton and Harry weren’t on Ramón’s boat at all? Then this whole enterprise would have been a waste of time and we would be no nearer finding them.
On the third day, we had not gone more than a few hundred yards before we noticed that the bottom of the motor launch was awash with river water. The level was rising rapidly, and it was apparent that the hull planks had sprung a leak. While we passengers bailed out frantically, using whatever receptacles were to hand, Suarez steered towards a nearby sandbar. When we reached the shallows, he damped down the engine and we climbed out and dragged the launch up onto the sandbar. Suarez then set to recaulking the affected seam. Holmes looked on at close hand while he worked. The rest of us found a patch of shade to shelter in. When the job was done and the caulk had dried, we hauled the boat back into the river. The setback cost us a couple of hours all told.
Sherlock Holmes and the Beast of the Stapletons Page 21