Just as Knowles was showing us to the front door, Holmes turned to him. “I pray you, Mr Knowles, give my entreaty further consideration. Here is my card. If you change your mind about the stone, wire me and I will come to collect it straight away.”
Knowles pocketed the card indifferently and closed the door.
As we ambled away from the house, my companion said, “A curious little conundrum, eh, Watson? What do you make of it all?”
“We appear to have two conflicting points of view,” I said, keeping an eye out for a cab. “On the one hand, Timothy Voysden is quite certain that Lawrence Knowles engineered his father’s death. On the other, Knowles maintains there was no foul play. One of them, it would seem, is not telling the truth.”
“Which, do you think?”
“My money is on Knowles. Voysden is many things, but a dissembler he is not. I know that from facing him across the card table. I have seldom met anyone less capable of keeping a poker face. One can tell, almost to the last card, what he is holding in his hand.”
“Whereas Knowles, you feel, is a smooth, proficient liar.”
“He must be.”
“What if Voysden, in this one instance when it really counts, has acquired the knack of the convincing bluff?”
“He sought your help, Holmes. Would a guilty man do that?”
“Incorrect, old fellow. You brought him. He did not come of his own volition. And once he was at Baker Street he was in a sticky predicament, obliged to go through with the whole rigmarole of being an importunate client. He was quick to turn the spotlight of attention onto Knowles, was he not? Could this not have been an effort to misdirect?”
Looking back, I recalled how reluctant Voysden had been to accompany me to our rooms and how ill at ease he had seemed when there.
“I still feel he is innocent,” I said. “I mean to say, his own father, Holmes! Patricide! The most unthinkable of crimes.”
“Well, I am inclined to heed your opinion, since you know Voysden’s character better than I do. However,” he added, “there is another possibility.”
“Namely?”
“Neither man is the culprit.”
“What? A third party is involved? But who? The valet? Oh, please do not tell me the butler did it, Holmes!”
“No, I am suggesting that there was no human agency involved. Rather, there was an inhuman agency.”
I assayed the import of his words. “You mean… the Yithian stone itself?”
“You did not get as close to it as I did, Watson. The thing positively radiates malign intent. What is it for? What purpose does it serve? Why did that unknown Yithian craftsman fashion such an object? I am beginning to wonder if it is not some kind of weapon, and ensconced within it is an apparatus that lures in the unwary and invites them to wield it. It exists to be used, to kill, and Sinclair Voysden himself fell under its spell, until in the end his consuming obsession with the stone proved his undoing. The stone caused him to secrete it in his pocket and lay in wait there, like a tiger in the undergrowth, until its chance came to pounce.”
“Hence you asked Knowles to be allowed to take it away.”
“It is a deadly dangerous device,” Holmes said in low, urgent tones. “I would not be surprised if it took another life ere long, unless I can gain possession of it and destroy it. To that end, you and I, I fear, may have to indulge in a spot of larceny.”
I sighed heavily. “You wish us to commit burglary and steal the stone.”
“A desperate measure, but these are desperate circumstances,” said Holmes. “I have already devised a stratagem. The house may be approached from the rear, through the back garden, which overlooks the cemetery. The wall is not too high to climb, nor are any of the locks I have seen around the house, including that on the cabinet, beyond my ability to pick. And time is of the essence. So, no later than tonight, I feel we should—”
He was interrupted by a hue and cry coming from up the road, behind us. We turned to see the valet from the Voysden house hastening down the front steps, calling out, “Police! Police!” We heard, too, the sound of a woman indoors, screaming.
As one, Holmes and I sprinted back to the mansion. Holmes bounded past the valet and barged in through the front door. I followed. The screaming had stopped, but by the door to the room wherein Voysden senior’s collection of artefacts was stored we encountered a housemaid, slumped in a chair, in a dead faint. Evidently she had swooned, and she was being attended to by a woman in a cook’s apron.
In the room itself, a violent scene was presented. Lawrence Knowles lay on the floor, hands clasped over a wound in his belly from which blood was pouring. Nearby, Timothy Voysden leaned against the glass-fronted cabinet, staring down at his hand with a kind of horror. In it he held the Yithian stone. The cabinet where the stone had been kept had been broken into. Glass shards littered the floor around Voysden’s feet.
My eye was drawn back to the stone. Blood besmirched one half of it, and even as we watched, the crimson liquid seemed to grow thin and disappear, as though evaporating at high speed. It looked for all the world as though the stone was drawing the blood into its interstices, as a sponge does water.
Then Knowles groaned, and I, recovering my wits, darted over to him and knelt by his side. I tore open his shirt to inspect his wound. He had quite clearly been stabbed with the Yithian stone. The gouge was approximately square and a couple of inches deep.
“This man needs to be taken to a hospital promptly,” I said, “or he will die.”
“He is going to die anyway,” said Voysden coldly. “And look. So am I.”
He opened his hand, still with the stone in it, to reveal a slit in his palm. Blood was leaking out.
“What a fool,” Voysden wailed. “What a fool I was. It called to me. The stone called to me. It summoned me from upstairs, and I came down, and it spoke. It spoke in my head. I heard its voice. It said I must take it from here. The stone was frightened. It was scared that someone – you, Mr Holmes – wished it harm, and it asked me to help. I could not resist. I was powerless to do aught but comply. And then he appeared.” He nodded at Knowles. “He had heard me break the glass of the cabinet and he rushed in to see what was happening, and we fought, we grappled over the stone, and I… I… I was grasping it tightly, so tightly, as I lunged at him, and now I have doomed myself. I shall perish exactly as my father did. Oh God. Oh God!”
Voysden collapsed, dropping the stone. It rolled away from him in a wide arc, fetching up against the skirting board. The blood that had bedecked it was entirely gone. Not a drop remained.
You may predict the upshot of the incident, Lovecraft. Both men did indeed die of their wounds, Knowles more swiftly than Voysden. The former languished in hospital for just a day and, in spite of surgery and the strenuous efforts of doctors, he exsanguinated. The latter lasted a little over three days. The lesion in his palm was no more severe than that which had taken his father’s life, but with the younger Voysden it seemed as though he simply gave up. He knew from his father’s example that there was no chance of recovery, and so he allowed himself to die.
The official cause of death in regard to Voysden was, of course, haemophilia. It would seem a logical inference, since doctors had delivered the same verdict in the case of his father. As for Knowles, it was stated, plausibly, that he succumbed to shock and blood loss.
With regard to the Yithian stone, Holmes disposed of it at the first opportunity. No sooner had Knowles and Voysden been driven away to receive proper medical attention, than my friend fetched an iron poker and brought it down on the artefact repeatedly, smashing it to smithereens. If there were machinery inside, or some such cunningly contrived apparatus, it was none that anyone might recognise. The stone, when shattered, simply broke up into dust and smaller chunks of stone. Whatever powered it and gave it the ability to compel a man to murder, it was intrinsic within the fabric of the stone itself – technology, perhaps, at a submicroscopic level, of a design as far removed from hum
an understanding as a steam engine is to an amoeba. I do not know, Lovecraft. Neither, I imagine, do you.
At any rate, I have told my weird and rather sorry tale. I would prefer that it remain between the two of us and that you do not share it with anyone. Sherlock Holmes’s public reputation rested on the application of rationality and logic, and I would not have others knowing the full, irrational, illogical underpinning of his exploits.
Strangely enough, writing this letter (and I beg your forgiveness for its undue length) has given me the idea of committing to paper a fuller account of Holmes’s investigations, in which I would treat openly the uncanny elements that I have elsewhere done my level best to disguise. I shall give thought to preparing a manuscript – possibly it might have to be two or even three – covering the breadth of my acquaintance with the great man, all thirty-odd years of it. This would be for my own satisfaction, naturally, and not for publication. What do you think?
Yours faithfully,
John Watson
PURE SWANK
First published in Associates of Sherlock Holmes,
ed. George Mann, 2016, Titan Books
In “Pure Swank” you will meet – or, if you have read Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”, reacquaint yourself with – Clarence Barker, whom Holmes refers to as “my hated rival upon the Surrey shore”. He is a Sherlock Holmes wannabe and markedly inferior to the great man himself. There exists between the two, however, a kind of semi-cordial mutual respect, and I thought it would be fun to re-tell the events of “The Retired Colourman” from Barker’s perspective, in much the way that Amadeus depicts Mozart’s life from the biased, jaundiced viewpoint of a lesser competitor, Salieri. I added a couple of twists so that the original story might be seen in a whole new light.
“Pure Swank” was commissioned by George Mann for an anthology comprising stories about minor characters from the canon. A second volume was published, to which I contributed another tale, “The Adventure of the Noble Burglar”, which appears later in this collection.
Relevant trivia: The noun “swank” means the act of boasting or showing off. It does not have quite the connotations you’ll find of the adjective “swanky”, which tends to denote, approvingly, something that’s posh or upmarket. When I was at boarding school in the late seventies and early eighties the word was still in usage, although it did carry quite an old-fashioned air about it. According to the Urban Dictionary site, “swank” is now used as a slang term meaning classy, cool and tasteful, e.g. “That’s a swank pair of trainers.” Just so’s you know.
Pure Swank
Some day the true story may be told.
How I laughed when I read those words in the latest edition of The Strand this morning, and it was a laugh that was scornful and knowing in equal measure. The esteemed Dr Watson, ever the diligent chronicler of the adventures of Mr Sherlock Holmes, has once again set down in print the full facts of a case solved by his remarkable colleague. Yet, in his slavish conviction that nothing Holmes does or says is incorrect, that his long-time friend is infallible, Watson cannot have dreamed that, far from telling the “true story”, he has told only half of it.
Hence I, Clarence Barker, have taken up my pen in order to convey my own account of the same events, one that is accurate in every part. I do not intend to copy Watson’s example and submit this manuscript for publication in a journal with a national readership. That would be a grave mistake. These words are for my eyes only. As I enter my fifty-sixth year, with my faculties dimming daily, this is perhaps a confession, perhaps also a settling of scores, but perhaps most of all an attempt to enshrine a reminiscence before it slips entirely from my memory. By this means I may, as it were, pin the episode in place like a mounted butterfly, so that I can later and at my leisure admire its beauty.
The just-published tale to which I am alluding is one that Dr Watson has entitled “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”. It recounts a crime that took place nearly three decades ago, back in 1899, and which caused a scandal and gave rise to many a prurient, melodramatic headline but has since faded into obscurity – at least until now, when Watson has decided to exhume it from his notebooks and dish it up for public consumption. I have already received some telephone calls today from friends and acquaintances wondering whether I am the Barker referred to in the story. Anyone who knows of my past as a consulting detective may be able to infer that I am indeed he whom Holmes is seen disparaging as his “hated rival upon the Surrey shore” but nonetheless collaborates with quite readily in order to resolve the mystery. The deduction is, for want of a better word, elementary.
I do not feel that I emerge too badly from my portrayal in “The Retired Colourman”. I am described as “tall, dark, heavily-moustachioed, military-looking”, none of which I can gainsay. Thirty years ago I did favour luxuriant facial hair, in the fashion of the day, and prior to that I did see service in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the late 1880s, which bestowed upon me the straight back and square shoulders of an infantryman. “Stern-looking” and “impassive” are other epithets Watson applies to me, neither of them uncomplimentary, and he notes my grey-tinted sunglasses, an item of apparel I still wear, not through vanity or to correct any defect in my visual acuity but to ameliorate a sensitivity to bright light which has afflicted me most of my adult life.
There is more to me, however. What Watson was oblivious to, although it is hinted at very heavily by his friend in the story, is that I was formerly a member of that band of young ragamuffins whom Holmes used to employ as spies and errand runners in London. “His methods are irregular, no doubt,” Holmes says to Inspector MacKinnon at the dénouement of the case, with reference to me. “The irregulars are useful sometimes, you know.” He could hardly have been more explicit, could he? And, for that matter, how else could he have commanded my loyalty and complicity so easily – “…as to Barker, he has done nothing save what I told him” – had we not already had an established relationship as employer and employee?
I remember well the sixpences and half-crowns with which he would reward us Irregulars for services rendered. They made all the difference to a poor, homeless, famished orphan such as myself. Sometimes they were the only thing that stood between me and the workhouse. I remember how I and Wiggins, the leader of our merry gang, would sprint from Baker Street to the nearest bakery with our gainfully-gotten bounty and stuff our bellies with Chelsea buns until we felt sick. Moments of bliss in an otherwise miserable existence.
As an Irregular I grew to love and admire Mr Holmes. He was abrupt with us, stern, sometimes even harsh, but you never once doubted that he was on the side of the angels and therefore, by extension, we were too. I came to regard him as the father I never knew.
It was he who, when I reached my majority, advised me to join the army. “They are looking for young men such as you, Barker,” he said. “Stalwart, well-built, with a natural intelligence and aptitude, capable of following an order. A spell taking Her Majesty’s shilling could be the making of you.”
In a way it was. I enjoyed the physicality and uncomplicatedness of military life, and I could cope with the deprivations easily. I had grown up accustomed to hardship and become inured to it. Camp beds and mess rations were luxury compared with the bare floorboards and meagre snatched meals of my youth. Further, I was given the opportunity to learn to read and write, which I seized with both hands. I gained an erudition and a vocabulary that belie my humble, deprived origins. No, I did well by the army, and I think the army did well by me.
I was stationed in India for a time – the Nicobar Islands. The heat was lethal, the natives only a little less so. There was the penal colony at Port Blair to keep an eye on. There were mosquitoes that ate you alive and stomach ailments that hollowed you from the inside out. Worst of all there were the Sentinelese, savage Andaman Islanders who arrived at regular intervals in canoe-borne raiding parties to give us merry hell.
What I recall most, though, is the hour upon h
our of guard duty, standing watch in the relentless, glaring tropical sun. It is to this that I ascribe the problems with my eyes. Those ferociously bright rays, reflecting off the ocean, seared and scarred my retinas. Only sunglasses brought relief.
I discharged myself from the Lancashires in 1892, whereupon I set about pursuing my true ambition, the vocation that I had had a hankering to follow ever since my stint as an Irregular under Holmes. I wished to be a consulting detective, like him. I wished to emulate his exploits and gain some of the wealth and celebrity he had accrued.
* * *
It came as a surprise when I returned to England to discover that Sherlock Holmes was dead. News of his demise had not reached us in our far-flung outpost of the Raj. He had perished the previous year in a life-and-death tussle with the arch-criminal Professor Moriarty in Switzerland.
I was shocked. I had harboured the hope that Holmes would at least mentor me in the early stages of my career, or even engage me as an apprentice.
Yet I saw it also as a sign. Holmes was gone. There was a vacuum left by his absence. Who better than I to fill it?
Using what scant savings I had accumulated from my army pay, I set up a practice south of the river in one of the cheaper corners of Dulwich. The first few months were dismal. I had barely a trickle of clients, and none of them were what one might call illustrious, and certainly none of them had deep pockets.
I persevered, however, and built up a reputation, and gradually more work came my way. I took it upon myself to join the Freemasons, and it was a productive move. Through the Brotherhood I broadened my social circle. Fellow members of my Lodge, the Camberwell, came to consult me on matters that bedevilled them, and I was recommended by them to members of other Lodges, and thus my renown spread through the tendrils of that not so secret society.
It was thanks to a Mark Master Mason of the Supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch, no less, that I was brought in to investigate the notorious Park Lane Mystery. This was, of course, the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair, who was found dead in his home on the aforementioned thoroughfare, shot in his second-floor sitting room. The door to the room was fastened on the inside. No gun was discovered anywhere on the premises. It was all perfectly baffling.
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 12