“I must say, from what little I have heard about Mr Sherlock Holmes, he seems hardly the sort inclined towards spiritualism.”
“Consider me a seeker after knowledge, both esoteric and less so.”
“Very well. I must reiterate, however, that you and your colleague should prepare yourselves for disappointment. Will you both join hands with me? Thank you. It is crucial that we do not break this circle. Our shared energies will help pave the way for the spirits. You may wish to close your eyes as well.”
“I prefer to keep them open,” Holmes averred.
“So be it.”
In the parlour’s candlelit gloom, we waited. There followed an interval of some ten minutes during which nothing happened. Miss Efralstein finally roused herself from her trance and announced that, as she had predicted, nothing was coming through from the spirit world.
“Please try again,” Holmes said. “Ignore me. Concentrate instead on Dr Watson here. Perhaps you might ask the spirits about him. I am curious to learn if they have any messages they would wish you to pass on.”
With further professions of reluctance, Miss Efralstein resumed her trance. Her hand was dry and cool in mine. I found myself sinking into a kind of stupor. I had had a hard day at work, with many patients coming to me with pulmonary complaints. I began to feel drowsy.
Then the candle guttered and Miss Efralstein emitted a sharp hiss.
“Great Brown Owl, is that you?” said she. “Rap the table to confirm that you are gracing us with your presence.”
Immediately there came a series of thumps from the table. I felt the vibrations through my elbows.
“We hear you, loud and clear. Is all well with you in the great beyond?”
Further thumps resounded. The table practically lifted from the floor.
“We have annoyed you,” said Miss Efralstein. “I apologise. I realise it is an imposition, summoning you on a night when the curtain between worlds is so hard to penetrate. Nevertheless, I have here two gentlemen who wish to commune with the spirits. I crave your indulgence. May we, through your auspices, speak with the dead?”
There was one last thump, which I took to mean yes.
“Great Brown Owl is stepping aside,” Miss Efralstein said. “He is making way to allow someone else to come through. I am sensing… A close relative. Is it a brother?”
I started. In spite of everything Holmes had said, I could not but think that she was referring to my own brother, departed from this world not long since.
“A younger brother?” she added.
“No,” I said.
“Yes. That’s right. Older. An older brother. He seems full of regret, Doctor. There is much for which he feels he must atone.”
I was conscious of Holmes’s keen grey eyes fixed upon me. Yet my own attention was on Miss Efralstein to the exclusion of almost all else.
“Now, I am receiving an initial,” said she. “A faint impression. An… ‘N’, is it?”
“An ‘H’?” I offered.
“Yes. Yes, that is it! An ‘N’ and an ‘H’ look so similar, do they not? It stands for Henry, of course.”
“Harry,” I said. “He was always known as Harry.”
“Harry bids me tell you he is sorry for not being a better brother. He says he let you down.”
Emotion welled within me. A small sob formed in the back of my throat. I bit it back.
“He never meant to be a wastrel,” the medium continued. “He wishes he had looked after himself better and could have lived longer.”
“I wish that too.”
“He is safe and sound there in the hereafter, however. He is with your beloved father. He has found peace.”
Holmes interjected. “Ask him about the watch, Miss Efralstein.”
“The watch?”
“Ask him where it is.”
“The watch is lost,” said she, after a moment’s pause. “But it may yet be found. Look… Look in the familiar place. It has fallen, but is waiting to be rediscovered.”
“The familiar place? Can Harry be more specific?”
Miss Efralstein only shook her head, not so much in refusal as confusion.
“The spirits’ voices are fading,” she said. “I… I cannot hear them any more. We have lost the slender thread of linkage we had. Be assured that your brother is happy, Doctor. All earthly cares are behind him. He rests easy.”
* * *
“I trust you are satisfied,” Miss Efralstein said, as she ushered us to her front door.
She was speaking to me, but it was Holmes who replied.
“I am quite enlightened, madam,” he said, and passed her a sovereign. “For your trouble.”
The medium tucked the coin away in a pocket. Her eyes glittered behind her veil. “A good evening to you both. I imagine our paths will not cross again.”
“Who knows what the future has in store?” Holmes said. “Perhaps not even the spirits themselves.”
As our hansom trundled northwards, Holmes seemed in an amused, ruminative mood. I myself was thoroughly confused, in fact somewhat shaken. Was it possible that my late brother had genuinely reached out to me across the gulf between the land of the living and the land of the dead? If so, he had seemed to want a reconciliation between us, one I myself had longed for while he was still alive. His years of dissipation, during which he had worked only sporadically and spent most of his time in pubs, had contrived to drive a wedge between us. Where we had been close as children, we had become estranged as adults, and all my attempts to repair the rift had come to naught. I felt there was a chance now to change that. It was just a shame that it had taken death to bring Harry to his senses.
“You don’t of course believe for one moment that that was your late brother talking, do you, Watson?” my friend observed as we neared the river.
“I would have said not, but for the fact that Miss Efralstein knew so much about him.”
“But, as you yourself recount in The Sign of Four, I was able to deduce whole swaths of information about your brother by simple examination of your watch.”
“So? Miss Efralstein did not examine my watch. She had no clues whatsoever to go on.”
“Really? Think, Watson. Think. Cast your mind back. What happened right at the outset, after she established contact with the spirit world?”
“She stated she was in touch with Harry.”
“Not so. She said, in these exact words, ‘I am sensing a relative.’ She then tentatively proposed that it was your brother. You immediately reacted.”
“I did not.”
“You did. I saw your eyes widen. Not only that but your hand clenched mine – it stands to reason that the one holding Miss Efralstein’s did too. These involuntary gestures told Miss Efralstein that the fish was hooked. Up until that point she had merely been casting a line in the water. She then elaborated upon the point by telling you it was a younger brother. You corrected her, whereupon she made out that that was what she had claimed all along. ‘Yes. That’s right. Older. An older brother.’”
“Very well, but how did she know about Harry’s misfortunes in life?”
“A piece of informed conjecture,” said Holmes. “She began by suggesting your brother’s spirit had regrets. What a sweeping remark! Who among us does not have regrets? Again, through tiny physical signals, you inadvertently gave away that she was on to something, so she took the logical next step and declared that Harry felt he had let you down. She also said he wished he could have lived longer. There are few of us, alive or dead, who would not espouse that desire.”
“She called him a wastrel, which, alas, he was.”
“You are far from being an old man, Watson. By implication your brother, even if senior, would not have been in his dotage when he passed on. For him to have died at a relatively young age would suggest some kind of infirmity. Miss Efralstein chanced her arm by plumping for a dissolute lifestyle as the cause of his death. She might equally have said he had contracted some fatal disease, a
nd if you had then set her right, she would have pretended, as before, that she had not said anything different. You, Watson, were supplying her the answers without realising it. You were doing half the work for her.”
“What about his initial?” I protested. “She knew it was ‘H’. That could have been no mere lucky guess. The odds, if it were, are one in twenty-six.”
“Tut! She did not know his initial was ‘H’. Recall how she said first of all that it was ‘N’.”
“Yes. That is true. However, as she pointed out, the one letter is easily confused with the other.”
“Confused by whom? By your brother, the owner of the initial? Hardly. By her? But if your brother was speaking to her, whence the confusion? Moreover, ‘H’ does not sound like ‘N’. It may resemble it when written, but Miss Efralstein was listening, not looking.”
“Where did she get his name from? Answer me that.”
“Henry is by far the commonest male name beginning with ‘H’. Miss Efralstein aimed for the largest target, and scored a hit. You amended the name to ‘Harry’, and thereafter she called him that, as though all along she had known this and was on the same intimate terms with him as you. She followed it up with that lamentable nonsense about your watch. By that point I could hardly restrain my laughter. I am surprised you were not yourself chortling.”
“It was you who brought up the subject of the watch,” I said.
“And she latched on to it, assuming I was referring to an object that had been mislaid. Many people visit mediums wanting to know the whereabouts of lost personal treasures. All I had in mind was the watch I mentioned a moment ago, the one I analysed, the very one you have upon your person right now. She, however, assumed I meant some missing heirloom, and so she spun a cock-and-bull story about it being ‘in the familiar place’, implying it had fallen behind some cabinet or shelf.”
“My brother might consider that he had lost it.”
“Oh, Watson!” my companion ejaculated. “Come, come! You must concede by now that everything Miss Efralstein said in that parlour was the purest hogwash. A few clever stabs in the dark, some intuitive ‘reading’ of your good self, but essentially a tissue of supposition and insinuation. For each success of hers there was at least one failure, yet you have remembered only the former and are disregarding the latter. She was playing on your earnestness, and if the technique can work so well on a seasoned, intelligent fellow such as Dr John Watson, it can only be that much more effective on the less wary.”
I felt my cheeks redden. Holmes had meticulously debunked Miss Efralstein’s imposture. “I must seem such a fool to you.”
“Not a bit of it. You, like so many, are desperate to believe that the soul survives death and that there is a happy hereafter where we may reconvene with those who have passed on before us. Mediums like Miss Efralstein exploit that yearning, using it for their own ends. It is their meat and drink.”
“Do you not believe in an afterlife?”
Holmes pursed his lips. “Ask me again when I am considerably older, Watson, and death is breathing down my neck. For now, the present life is more than enough for me. There is much to be said for cherishing the mundane. It offers its own rewards. Speaking of which, you observed, did you not, some very singular features about Miss Efralstein’s house and about the lady herself?”
“Her house is as ordinary as can be,” I said. “She, on the other hand, is decidedly eccentric.”
“Broad strokes. I am talking about the fine details. Her necklace, for instance.”
“I did not even notice she was wearing one.”
“And that is where we differ, you and I. I not only noticed it, but noticed, too, an anomaly. It was a short silver chain from which hung a medallion with her initials engraved into it. There was something very unusual about that ‘E.E.’”
“Namely?”
“A number of the crossbars on the characters were fresher than the rest. Three in total. They had been added recently. Then there were the framed photographs on the sideboard in the hall.”
“Now those I do recall,” I said. “I counted six or seven of them.”
“Eight, to be precise. But do you recall anything about the content of the pictures?”
“They were of several people – children and young men.”
“How remiss of you not to discern that they were all of a single person. The same fellow, depicted at various stages in life from a baby to a grown man. Certain of his facial features were consistent from one picture to the next, in particular the mole on his left cheek. The first photograph, taken when he could not have been more than six months old, was a daguerreotype with the year marked in the corner: 1868.”
“So he is now twenty-one, whoever he is.”
“And ‘whoever’ is the issue here,” said Holmes. “He cannot be Miss Efralstein’s father, naturally.”
“Nor can he be her son,” I said. “Unless, of course, she is not the spinster her title proclaims her. Perhaps he is a favoured nephew, she an adoring aunt.”
“The last in the series was perhaps the most noteworthy.”
“In what way?”
“For the young man’s attire.”
“I cannot remember what he was wearing.”
“How fortunate, then, that I can.”
“Was it a uniform of some sort? I have a vague notion it might have been.”
Instead of replying, Holmes turned to peer out of the hansom’s side window at the fog rolling past.
Eventually he said, “Things are occluded at present, but I am beginning to glimpse solid shapes amidst the murk. Soon, Watson, I am sure, there will be clarity.”
* * *
Over the next couple of days I was too busy with patients to see Holmes. From dawn to dusk I scurried back and forth on house calls, returning home in the evening exhausted but glad to find my constant Mary waiting for me.
On the third day I found time to visit Baker Street, only to discover that Holmes was not in. Mrs Hudson informed me that he had been absent from the premises for much of the past seventy-two hours, running errands.
“If he eats any of the meals I’ve prepared, Dr Watson, it’s a miracle,” said the redoubtable landlady. “He is in one of those energetic moods of his, where work comes first and bodily sustenance a poor second. And oh, the racket he has been making when he is home!”
“Racket?”
“Every night, until about one in the morning, he has been crashing and banging around upstairs and emitting strange groans. I have heard him using voices, too. Loud, soft, a range of accents and intonations. All very peculiar. Just when I think I have become accustomed to my lodger’s idiosyncrasies, he manages to surprise me.”
“Whatever can he be up to?”
“You would have to ask him yourself.”
“I shall, at the first opportunity.”
Said opportunity was swift to arrive, for just as I was taking my leave, the front door opened and in strode Holmes. He had about him the look of a man very pleased with himself, which was confirmed when, over a glass of Madeira in his rooms, he told me he had made substantial progress with the case.
“Yesterday afternoon I took myself to Lloyd’s at the Royal Exchange,” said he.
“The insurers.”
“The same. It was highly illuminating. The ships of the Pole Star Line are underwritten by Lloyd’s, as most commercial fleets are, and I was shown a list not only of those currently plying their trade upon the ocean main or ensconced in port but those which have sunk. There were, in the latter category, a fair few. More than the average, indeed, according to the clerk who assisted me.”
“You yourself said that Sir Hubert liked to cut corners.”
“He was, it appears, prepared to do anything in order to minimise outlay and maximise profits. Hulls improperly caulked, worn rigging not replaced, threadbare sails going unrepaired, rotten timbers ignored. He would, too, prevail upon his captains to overload the holds, with the ships riding far below th
eir Plimsoll lines, dangerously so. I learned that accidents resulting in injury and even death are rife aboard a Pole Star merchantman, and the vessels themselves, since they carry cargoes heavier than they ought, are apt to founder in bad weather.”
“That surprises me. Sir Hubert was a shrewd operator. Wouldn’t cargoes that are so heavy they imperil the ships carrying them be bad for business?”
“Yes, but still it is a practice not unheard of in the trade. The reward outweighs the risk.”
“What a wretched man Sir Hubert Cole was, enriching himself at the expense of his crews’ safety.”
“I can hardly gainsay that opinion,” said Holmes. “Yet enrich himself he did, to no small degree. His Mayfair mansion is one of the largest and most impressive of its kind. It so happens I was there on the morning of that same day, and seldom have I stood outside a house quite so imposing. I could scarcely count the windows. One would have to be a veritable Croesus, as Sir Hubert was, to afford such a palace.”
“You went to his house? What for?”
“To make the acquaintance of Deakins.”
“Sir Hubert’s valet?”
“A rather disagreeable fellow, I must say, at least until I ventured him a few shillings, whereupon he became talkative and even amiable. I questioned him on a number of topics pertaining to his late master. Who knows a man better than his valet? The vast majority of the intelligence Deakins provided was irrelevant, but he did mention an incident that occurred the autumn before last, when Sir Hubert was accosted in the street as he was leaving the building to go to his office.”
“Accosted by whom?”
“By a woman. Deakins was present and saw it all. The lady stormed up to Sir Hubert and introduced herself as Mrs Fenella Leinster. She asked him if the name meant anything to him, in answer to which Sir Hubert said it did not. She said that that was hardly surprising, then began to upbraid him in a low, urgent voice. Deakins did not catch what she said, but the more she berated Sir Hubert, the huffier Sir Hubert became. At last he thrust Mrs Leinster aside and climbed into his waiting brougham. She pursued the coach down the street, hammering upon the bodywork with her fist and calling to the passenger, until she could keep pace no more. Deakins said he never saw her again, but the episode left an impression, and not only upon him. He dates Sir Hubert’s use of sulfonal as a sleeping aid to that day.”
The Manifestations of Sherlock Holmes Page 27