“He refused point blank,” Voysden said.
“It is a mark of how dire the situation was becoming that you even proposed the idea,” said Holmes.
“Indeed. I was desperate. I was watching the life literally ebbing out of the old man, and there seemed nothing I or anyone could do to prevent it. With less and less blood to pump, my father’s heart was failing, beating erratically. He had become as white as a ghost. Even his lips were pallid. Eventually, he slipped into a coma. When death arrived soon after, it was almost a relief.”
“What a terrible way to go,” I said.
“Awful,” Holmes concurred. “Mr Voysden, a couple of questions, if I may. First of all, how do you think the stone got into your father’s pocket?”
“I am quite sure that Knowles put it there.”
“Knowles being your father’s assistant.”
“Correct. He knew my father was in the habit of taking out his tobacco pouch immediately after dinner. By putting the stone in his pocket, he was exposing my father to the likelihood of being cut by it.”
“Knowles, I take it, knew of the stone’s alleged ability to cause unhealable wounds.”
“Knowles was with my father in Mesopotamia. He was there when my father met Ali Hassan and bought the stone. He couldn’t not have known. What’s more, Knowles has a key to the cabinet in which the stone is kept.”
“And you do not?”
“My father never entrusted me with one. Nor, for that matter,” Voysden added, “did I ever want one. Frankly, I have no interest in anthropology, xenoanthropology, or any of that stuff. Perhaps if my father had seen fit to inculcate in me, from an early age, a love for his own field of expertise, I might have developed a taste for it. But he did not, and I did not.” There was not so much bitterness in Voysden’s voice as ruefulness.
“But why would Knowles wish your father dead?” Holmes said.
“The two of them had a fractious relationship,” Voysden replied. “Knowles came into my father’s orbit nearly a decade ago, back when my father still pursued pure anthropology. He did not approve of my father’s diversification into wilder, weirder fields of study. It became a bone of contention between them.”
“Yet he stuck with him nevertheless.”
“How can I put this? Knowles hails from humble origins. His association with my father permitted him a lifestyle he might not otherwise have been able to lay claim to. He ate at our table, slept under our roof, travelled abroad extensively at another’s expense and in some comfort. Quite a step up for a draper’s son from Daventry.”
“But if he were responsible for your father’s death, might that not run counter to his own interests? Surely, in order to continue living in the manner to which he had grown accustomed, he would be better off if your father remained alive.”
“What can I say? You would have to ask him. All I know is that their disagreements had been growing ever more vehement. Indeed, they were becoming so bad, my father was even considering sacking Knowles.”
“Which would furnish Knowles with a motive for murder, no doubt about it,” I said. “Well, Holmes? What do you think? To me it all seems relatively straightforward.”
“To you, Watson, everything seems relatively straightforward.”
“A harsh accusation.”
“But fair. To give this matter its full due, I believe I should interview this Knowles fellow at the earliest opportunity. Mr Voysden, might we pay a visit to your house first thing tomorrow?”
Voysden took some convincing. He had yet to see for himself my friend’s skill in the art of detection and had only my word that Holmes could be of assistance. In the end, however, he relented and an appointment was made.
I ventured outdoors and managed to hail a hansom to take Voysden home. As I helped him into the cab, he said, “You really are a decent sort, Watson.” He was slurring his words, tired as well as inebriated, for the hour was now past midnight. “Your friend Holmes, though… I’m not sure how you put up with him.”
“He, too, is a decent sort, beneath the asperity.”
“Do you think he will be able to ascertain Knowles’s guilt?”
“I am sure of it.”
“Then that’s good. That’s very good. Till tomorrow!”
At nine o’clock sharp the next day, Holmes and I were pulling up outside an impressively large mansion in Highgate, adjacent to the cemetery. Never having visited your Providence, I have no idea if it has houses to compare with the best that London has to offer, but this particular edifice was among the capital’s finest – tall, many-windowed, with a pleasing symmetry to its architecture and a well-kempt front garden to soften what might otherwise have been a somewhat austere façade. The fortune that Sinclair Voysden had inherited must have been considerable. I experienced a pang of concern as I thought how Timothy Voysden was now heir to such wealth. I prayed that, with his tendency towards profligacy, he would not squander it at the card table and elsewhere. Perhaps the death of his father, if it were to have any benefit, would confer a sense of maturity and responsibility upon him.
A sombre-visaged valet with a black mourning band around his arm let us in. The house bore that atmosphere of hush, which is grief’s habitual attendant. The blinds were half drawn in every room, lending the interior a crepuscular gloom even though, outside, the sky was ablaze with spring sunshine.
Timothy Voysden greeted us with the sickly, hangdog look of one who had imbibed too much the night before, and no sooner had we been seated in the drawing room than he left us in order to go upstairs and lie down, citing a terrible headache, which I have no doubt he had.
Shortly after that, a man of similar age to Voysden entered our presence and introduced himself as Lawrence Knowles. A slightly nasal intonation betokened his modest Midlands upbringing, but as for the rest of him, he was smartly attired and well-coiffed, every inch the gentleman. He, like the valet, sported a black crepe armband, and he moved with a heaviness that seemed at odds with his nimble frame, stoop-shouldered as though care were a physical burden. This posture could, to my way of thinking, be mere imposture.
“I gather from Timothy that you wish to see me,” he said. “He tells me you have questions regarding Sinclair’s demise.”
“If it is not too much trouble,” said Holmes.
“Not at all. There isn’t much to say, beyond that it was a dreadful shock and that no one should have to die in such an abominable fashion. Timothy has no doubt informed you of the circumstances, not least the injury caused by the Yithian stone.”
“Yithian?” Holmes feigned unfamiliarity with the adjective.
Knowles essayed a surly smile. “Of or pertaining to the race of Yith, who are beings from a distant planet, technologically advanced and capable of roaming back and forth in time and space as psychic thought-forms. They have dwelled on Earth at various points in history and in various locations, most notably the lost city of Pnakotus in Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. The physical bodies they assume are tall, fleshy and conical, with long, tentacle-like appendages, four of them, each fulfilling a different function.”
You, of course, do not need Yithians elucidated to you, Lovecraft. Neither did Holmes and I. Still, we listened to Knowles’s summary as though hearing the information for the first time.
He himself appeared thoroughly contemptuous of the facts he was reeling off. “Or so Sinclair would have had you believe,” he concluded. “In my view, it’s utter tripe. I no more believe it than I do that the moon is made of green cheese. Yet Sinclair was forever espousing outlandish notions like this – fairy tales, really, a load of mumbo-jumbo about cosmic gods, loathsome horrors from beyond, unspeakable rituals, forbidden texts, lost languages like none that have ever been spoken by man – and it was getting him into trouble with his colleagues in the world of anthropology and causing his earlier, sounder fieldwork to become widely discredited. He reckoned the octahedral stone was the handiwork of Yithians. The symbols engraved upon it conveyed as much, to him. To me, they seemed
specimens of early Sumerian script, perhaps a crude forerunner of cuneiform. I said so, but Sinclair pooh-poohed the notion. ‘You are an idiot, Lawrence,’ he said. ‘Have you learned nothing during your time with me? Do these symbols look anything like logograms? Hardly! Rather, I would say they constitute a variant of the glyphs found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and as such belong to a language which is an offshoot of R’lyehian.’ R’lyehian, gentlemen, in the likely event that you have never heard the term before, is…”
There followed a brief explanation of that tongue which need not detain us here, since you and I are both cognisant of its nature and origins.
“Was Voysden senior in the habit of addressing you so discourteously?” said Holmes.
“Let me put it this way, Mr Holmes. He was not one to suffer fools gladly. Many a time I had been the victim of a tongue-lashing from him, the more so as he ventured further into occult matters. Whether it was his rejection by the scientific community or something inherent in the material that now preoccupied his mind, or a combination of the two, Sinclair had latterly grown irascible and disputatious. Indeed, it was getting worse and I could foresee a day, in the not too distant future, when his behaviour would become intolerable and I would be forced to leave his employ.”
“Leave before he ousted you?”
“Why would you say that, sir?” Knowles said stiffly. “For all our disagreements, I retained a huge respect for Sinclair. He had faith in my abilities when nobody else did. He had taken me under his wing, a young man with no qualifications other than a burning desire to learn, and assumed the responsibility for educating me and bringing me advancement. I owe him a great deal. In fact, I would go so far as to say I owe him everything. I hoped that this disequilibrium of his would be a passing phase and that the Sinclair Voysden of old would at some point return. I clung to that hope right up until the awful accident which stole his life.”
“You are certain it was an accident?”
“Has anyone suggested otherwise? Sinclair, you see, was becoming rather absentminded. Perhaps it was his age – he was approaching sixty. Perhaps his brain was distracted, for the reasons I cited a moment ago. Either way, his life had begun to be marked by forgetfulness and inattention. It might be something as trivial as mislaying his reading glasses or going out without closing the front door; or it might be something more serious such as ignoring a coal which had tumbled from the fireplace and begun to singe the hearthrug or turning on a gas lamp but neglecting to light it.”
“When did it start, this absentmindedness?”
“More or less when he returned from Mesopotamia,” Knowles replied. “It was accompanied by a growing obsession with the Yithian stone. Practically every day, sometimes twice a day, Sinclair would remove the stone from the cabinet and pore over it. He told me he was attempting to fathom its purpose. ‘The Yithians made this object for a reason,’ he said. ‘I am determined to establish what that reason is.’ Yet, for all his efforts, he got nowhere. The stone remained baffling to him, and consequently, being the kind of man he was, he drove himself all the harder to make sense of it. He became fixated by the thing to the exclusion of all else. On occasion I even overheard him muttering to it, as though in conversation.”
“Do you think it possible that, in a moment of negligence, he placed the Yithian stone in his pocket himself?”
“Instead of returning it to the cabinet?” Knowles pondered the question. “Yes, I suppose so. It would not have been unlike Sinclair – the slipshod, careless Sinclair we were seeing more and more of – to make such an error.”
“In other words, he might well have been the unwitting agent of his own demise.”
“He and the haemophilia he did not know he had.”
“Yet Timothy Voysden said to us last night that his father put the stone back in the cabinet.”
“Was Timothy there? He was not.”
“Were you?”
“No, but then I am not claiming knowledge of events I did not witness. Like you, I am hypothesising.”
“Mr Knowles,” Holmes said, “if it is not an impertinent question, what happens to you now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, your employer is dead and it was by his good graces that you were able to live here in this very splendid accommodation. Has the younger Mr Voysden asked you to leave?”
“He has not. In fact, this is somewhat embarrassing to admit, but…” Knowles hesitated, lowering his gaze. “It rather looks as if I am the one who will have to make the decision about Timothy’s future, not vice versa. You see, Mr Holmes, Sinclair’s will was read yesterday afternoon, and I, it transpires, am the sole beneficiary.”
“You and not the flesh-and-blood heir? Surprising.”
“Quite. Sinclair redrafted the will a couple of years ago, and the wording is specific. Timothy has been cut out. He receives not a penny. I, on the other hand, receive everything. According to a letter Sinclair wrote to accompany the redrafted will, I have been ‘more of a son than Timothy ever was’.”
“That must have created some awkwardness between the two of you.”
“There has never been much love lost between Timothy and me, but yesterday any pretence of cordiality between us was abandoned. He called me all manner of foul names, then stormed out of the solicitors’ office. I did not see him again until just a short while ago, when he came to my room to announce your presence. I imagine he spent yesterday evening, as is his wont, getting stinking drunk somewhere and indulging in his other habits of dissipation.”
I could vouch for that, but said nothing.
“That would not be out of keeping with the general tenor of his life, and it would account, too, for his indisposition this morning,” Knowles continued. “Of course, I have no intention of throwing him out onto the street. Timothy is welcome to remain resident in this household for the foreseeable future. He will, however, have to find himself gainful employment. I do not believe it is incumbent upon me to support him financially, the way his father did.”
“Understood,” said Holmes. “Now, if it isn’t an imposition, I would very much like to see the Yithian stone for myself.”
“I suppose there is no harm in that,” said Knowles, and shortly Holmes and I were being ushered into a large room at the rear of the building that housed Sinclair Voysden’s collection of exotica.
Lovecraft, it was a veritable treasure trove of the mysterious. Arrayed on shelves or stowed in drawers were a host of arcane artefacts: fragments of parchment, pieces of scrimshaw, totems, effigies, statuary, etchings, manikins. There were representations of cavorting beasts like nothing known to natural science or even from traditional legend. There were tomes large and small, thick and thin, bound in animal hide or else in a material which resembled – but I prayed was not – cured human skin. There were eerie tribal fetishes, many of which were clear representations of those two warring races of space-spawned entities the Old Ones and the Outer Gods, including several that depicted great Cthulhu himself, the basest and most fearsome of his kind. Everywhere one looked, there lay some chilling reminder of the powerful, inimical forces at work around us. You would have found the place fascinating, and I daresay hackle-raising too, just as I did.
Knowles led us to a tall, glass-fronted cabinet and pointed out the Yithian stone, which rested in its cotton-padded wooden box like a baby in its cradle. “After Sinclair’s mishap I reinstalled it there myself,” said he, “using fire tongs.”
“You were reluctant to touch the stone?” said Holmes. “Even though you regard any connotations of the paranormal as, to use your own word, mumbo-jumbo?”
“The sharpness of the stone’s edges is not in dispute,” came the somewhat strained reply. “I had just seen that for myself, all too compellingly.”
“May I take a closer look?”
Knowles produced a key and unlocked the cabinet.
Holmes leaned in and examined the stone from all angles. I noted that he was not once tempted to reach
out towards it; his hands remained clasped firmly behind his back. Nor did he allow his face to stray to within more than six inches of the stone. Knowles might have been sceptical about the stone’s capabilities, but Holmes was not.
I myself, from a distance of a couple of yards, eyed the thing warily. It resembled two pyramids fastened together at the base and its smooth surfaces had the dully-glinting appearance of silver ore, chased with veins of some opal-like substance, which shimmered in all the colours of the rainbow. For all its obvious beauty, I found it abhorrent. Even had I not known that it was the instrument of a man’s death, something about that stone repelled me. Its shape, its carvings, its seeming lack of useful function, all conspired to create a nauseating effect.
“I observe no bloodstains,” said Holmes, concluding his scrutiny and straightening up.
“There weren’t any,” said Knowles.
“Not even the least encrustation? Are you sure?”
“I do not recall seeing any blood adhering to it. But then at the time I was more concerned about Sinclair’s wellbeing than anything else.”
“His son claims there was blood on the stone after it cut him.”
“Perhaps there was and it ran off. There was certainly none when I brought the stone back to this room. Possibly the housemaid wiped it clean in the interim.”
“That is conceivable, I suppose,” Holmes said. “A request. I would like to take the stone away for further examination.”
“Out of the question.”
“Really? I should not need it for more than a day or so.”
“Mr Holmes, I do not know you personally. I have not met you before today. I am not going to entrust an item of some considerable value, in both historical and pecuniary terms, to the safekeeping of a complete stranger.”
Holmes looked set to insist, but relented. “Very well. It seems there is little more to be said or done here, then. Mr Knowles, I thank you for your time. Watson and I shall inconvenience you no longer. Kindly convey my regards to Mr Voysden junior and my hopes that his headache will soon abate.”
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 11