Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon

by James Lovegrove

  “Well now, that is a turn-up for the books.”

  “You mean to say you hadn’t thought of it?”

  Was it possible? Could I, for once, have beaten the great Sherlock Holmes to the solution of a crime?

  I should have known better.

  “What? Oh no, Watson,” said he. “I wasn’t referring to your theory. It is wholly unsound. I was referring to the pair of gentlemen over there who are even now making their way towards us.”

  I turned my head to follow his gaze.

  Two rough-hewn bravoes were approaching our snug with a purposeful gait. Each was practically the spit of the other, right down to the collar-length hair, the earring in the left ear, the bulbous nose and the eyes that were rather too close-set.

  These could only be the notorious Dawson twins, and it seemed they had a bone to pick with Sherlock Holmes.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  THE IDEAL MURDER WEAPON

  “Art thah the southern toff what’s been goin’ around town askin’ too many questions?” said one of the twins. “Thah matches the description right enough. High forehead. Big, beaky snout.”

  Around us, the room had gone rather quiet. The other patrons were all of a sudden very interested in their beers and not so much in conversation. The domino players laid down their tiles with none of the banter that had hitherto accompanied their game, while the draughts players studied the board intently as though it held the secrets of the universe.

  “Mr Neville Dawson, I presume,” said Holmes in a somewhat sardonic tone. “Or is it Nigel?”

  “I’m Neville,” the same fellow said. He jerked a thumb at his brother. “He’s Nigel.”

  “The handsome one,” said Nigel Dawson with a leering grin.

  “And the younger one.”

  “Only by five minutes.”

  “Thah should’ve been quicker off the mark, then.”

  “And thah shouldn’t’ve pushed in front like thah always does.”

  This had the air of a rehearsed routine, humorous to them if to nobody else.

  “’Appen as the Lombard came ter us not an ’our ago,” said Neville Dawson, “with a story ter tell about a London gent who seemed ter think our business were his business.”

  “The Lombard?” said Holmes. “Ah yes, the slang term for a pawnbroker. You must be referring to Mr Dobbs.”

  “Stanley Dobbs, aye.”

  “I presume he volunteered this information to you in exchange for money?”

  “He said he had something we might want ter hear. We paid him a bob or two for it.”

  “He has somewhat mischaracterised our exchange, I must say,” said Holmes. “Until I met him, I did not have the slightest idea you two fine fellows even existed. But I suppose a pawnbroker isn’t above distorting the truth if he thinks he can turn a profit on it.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Nigel Dawson. At least, I thought it was Nigel. They were so hard to tell apart and spoke with such unanimity that I had lost track of which was which. “The fact remains, me and my brother weren’t too chuffed ter learn somebody were pokin’ his nose where it don’t belong. We don’t tek kindly ter that sort of thing. We don’t tek kindly ter it at all.”

  “We’ve come ter deliver a spot of friendly advice,” said Neville, if it was Neville. “In a spirit of northern charitableness, like. There’s nowt for the likes of you in Yardley Cross. You and your friend would do well ter leave town at the earliest opportunity.”

  Holmes rose from the table, drawing himself to his full height. He had a good three inches on the Dawsons, and he leaned over them, smiling a smile which, while superficially genial, conveyed a certain wolfish menace.

  “Do you not think we should take this discussion outside?” he said. “Where there are fewer eyewitnesses?”

  “Don’t see why not,” replied Neville, or Nigel, with a shrug.

  As the four of us trooped out into the street, I foresaw this interaction going one of two ways. Either there was to be a fight, or Holmes would use his wits to extricate himself and me from trouble. The Dawsons certainly seemed open to the former outcome. One might even say they were spoiling for it.

  We stood on the pavement in front of the pub, Holmes and I facing the twins. There were perhaps half a dozen pedestrians in sight, but none appeared too curious about our mismatched little quartet. They were concentrating more on negotiating a safe path through the slush.

  “Now,” said a Dawson twin, “thah have a choice. Thah can go, and there’ll be an end of it; or thah can stay and continue to be a nuisance, and then thah’ll learn the true meaning of trouble.”

  “If thah start walking that-a-way,” said the other, “thah could be in Wold Newton by sundown.”

  “You are labouring under a misapprehension,” said Holmes. “I can honestly say that I do not give two hoots about the pair of you. My companion, I would aver, feels much the same.”

  “And dost thah know what I reckon ter that? I reckon that’s a lie. I reckon thah were sent by a certain nob of our acquaintance what’s lookin’ ter mek things square after I lamped him one yesterday.”

  “You think that we are in the employ of Erasmus Allerthorpe? That we are some sort of enforcers?”

  “There’s about the sum of it, aye.”

  Holmes chortled. “Do we not strike you as a little too genteel to be professional bullyboys?”

  “A ruffian’s a ruffian, ’owever posh he talks.”

  “In that case, there seems only one way to settle the matter.”

  “I were rather hopin’ thah’d say summat like that.”

  One Dawson twin produced a clasp knife from his pocket, prising the blade out from the haft. His double did the same.

  I cursed myself mentally for having left my revolver in our room at the Sheep and Shearer. I hadn’t dreamed I might need it. Yardley Cross had seemed a rather peaceful little town.

  I lofted my fists and circled them in the air. Knives notwithstanding, the Dawson twins would not find me an easy mark.

  Holmes, for his part, reached behind him to the portico above the pub’s front door. Deftly he snapped off two of the foot-long icicles that hung from the eave and brandished them in his gloved hands like a pair of rapiers.

  “Before we go any further,” he said, “I should have you know, Messrs Dawson, that I am now holding two specimens of the ideal murder weapon.”

  “Oh aye?” said one Dawson, cocking an eyebrow.

  “Is that a fact?” said the other, cocking an eyebrow too.

  “Observe the icicles’ tips. I have seen blunter stilettos. Now imagine one such tip being thrust between your ribs, into the soft tissues of your body. I could impale you with a single thrust, like so.”

  He jabbed the icicle in his right hand forward. Both Dawsons flinched reflexively and took a step back.

  “So cold is an icicle,” he continued, “and so very, very sharp, that you might not feel it enter you. Not at first. The pain would hit within a few seconds, however, and it would be a fierce pain indeed, like none you have known before. You perhaps might attempt to pull the icicle out, but you would fail. Not only would it be stuck fast, but you would have difficulty maintaining a grip on its slippery surface. At best you might succeed only in snapping the end off.”

  The Dawson twins were eyeing the twin shafts of frozen water with somewhat greater circumspection now.

  “The marvel of it is,” Holmes said, “that as you collapsed to the ground, breathing your last, you would understand that your assailant – me – had just pulled off a remarkable feat. For soon the icicle would melt. The heat of your body would turn it to water, and within an hour’s time, possibly less, there would be nothing left of it but a wet stain on your clothing. I would, of course, perforate the two of you simultaneously. I am quite capable of the feat.”

  As if to prove it, he made a spearing motion with both icicles at once. Again the Dawsons flinched.

  “Do you know what all of this means?” he said.
/>   The Dawsons shook their heads in dumb unison.

  “It means, crucially, that there would be no way of proving I killed you. The police would be unable to fathom why each of you had this perfectly round hole in his body that did not match the hole in his brother’s body. They would be quite baffled. Even if they attempted to prosecute me, I could simply ask them to show how I slew you with two completely different stabbing implements, and what those stabbing implements were, and, indeed, what had become of them. The case, I submit, would not even reach court.”

  The Dawsons exchanged glances. All at once they were not looking anywhere near as smugly confident as they had been. The clasp knife each held was wavering.

  “So then.” Holmes looked from one brother to the other. “What are we to do? Are we to do battle, or are we to call it quits?”

  A moment passed, and then Neville Dawson folded his clasp knife shut and stowed it back in his pocket. Nigel Dawson followed suit.

  “There’s no need for anybody to die today,” Neville said. He looked cowed. “We were nobbut mekkin’ a point, that’s all.”

  “Aye,” Nigel chimed in. “That’s right. Nobbut mekkin’ a point.”

  “In which endeavour I would suggest we have all been successful,” said Holmes. “Farewell, gentlemen. This has been a most invigorating meeting. I am glad we have managed to bring it to an amicable conclusion.”

  The Dawson twins sidled off down the road, frowning. The swagger they had previously exhibited was all but gone. They were defeated but didn’t seem quite to know how they had been defeated.

  “Well,” I said, letting out a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding. “That was quick thinking on your part, Holmes. Who knew an icicle was so potentially lethal?”

  “Not me, for one,” came the merry reply.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You so rarely do. There is a prevalent myth, Watson, that an icicle is, as I just put it, the ideal murder weapon.”

  “The reasons you provided to justify that epithet were very convincing.”

  “And one hundred per cent bogus. The Dawsons might be able to bamboozle Erasmus Allerthorpe across the baize, but against an inveterate bluffer like me they didn’t stand a chance. All that nonsense about the wounds not matching and the police being unable to prosecute. When there are passers-by who would be quite willing to testify they saw me commit the deed?”

  “I did wonder about that, and I am surprised that it did not occur to either of the Dawsons. They may not be the brightest of individuals, but nevertheless it seems glaringly obvious.”

  “Oh, I was quite prepared for one or other of them to raise the point. I had some marvellous fabrication prepared just in case, something about an icicle being invisible to the naked eye beyond a certain distance. However, there is a larger, indeed crucial flaw in my strategy which neither Dawson was likely to have intuited, namely that killing someone with an icicle is quite impossible. Allow me to demonstrate.”

  Without further ado, he drove one of the icicles at my chest like a lance. The instant it struck, it shattered into a dozen pieces.

  “Ouch,” I said, rubbing the spot. “That hurt.”

  “But are you dead? No,” said Holmes. “Is there even a hole in your garments? I may have overstated the case somewhat when I compared the icicles’ tips favourably to those of stilettos. They can seem that way until you look at them up close, when their roundedness becomes apparent. The penetrative power I boasted of is sorely lacking. Not only that but an icicle is a fragile thing, as brittle as spun sugar. If I had aimed for your eye, I might well have maimed you for life; but still, not a fatal blow. The trouble with the Messrs Dawson is that neither is as smart as he believes. Plus, of course, as with all bullies, they are cowards at heart. All it took to outwit them was a little bravado and a little browbeating. Now then.” Tossing the other icicle aside, he consulted his watch. “It is gone three. We have an hour, at best, until we lose the light. I propose we have sandwiches made for us at the Sheep and Shearer, to take with us as iron rations, and thereafter we should commence our journey.”

  “Journey? Where to?”

  “Where else? Fellscar Keep.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A FROZEN PURGATORY

  With the thaw came a mist. It began to build just as the sun was setting. Swirls of vapour rose from the ground, thickening into a gauzy miasma of white. It was not long before one could scarcely see a hand in front of one’s face. The white of the mist merged with the white of the snow, creating a world of overall whiteness. Trees and drystone walls were mere grey shadows. The sun itself was no brighter than a cue ball on a snooker table.

  Holmes and I followed the road out of town that led to the junction with the fingerpost. There we took the Fellscar track. Before leaving Yardley Cross, I had fetched my revolver from the inn. Holmes had not had to suggest this. After our little contretemps with the Dawson twins, I was not going to be caught unarmed a second time.

  Our footsteps sounded muffled, as did our breathing. The mist deadened all noise like the dampers on a piano.

  “Holmes,” I said. My voice carried a weird, tight echo. “Before we were so rudely interrupted by the Dawsons, we were talking about Erasmus potentially being Goforth’s killer.”

  “Were we? So we were.”

  “You said my theory was unsound.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “Why? It seems to me that it holds water.”

  “Then a sieve would seem to you to hold water. It takes but a moment’s thought to spot the fundamental flaw in your idea. Assume Goforth were to threaten Erasmus with blackmail. ‘I will tell your father you have been stealing valuables from the castle in order to fund your gambling habit’, or words to that effect. Erasmus, if he had any sense, would simply call her bluff. ‘Go ahead. Tell him. I shall deny it. See who he believes. A mere scullery maid, or his own son and heir.’ Her word against his. There would be no contest.”

  “Even if Thaddeus and Erasmus do not see eye to eye?”

  “They are still kin, and what is that saying about blood being thicker than water? Simply by accusing Erasmus of theft, Goforth might put her job in jeopardy, and she would be canny enough to know that.”

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose so.”

  “A valiant effort, Watson, but you are on a hiding to nothing with this one. By no means should we disregard Erasmus and his gambling debts, but they are not germane in this particular context.”

  “Are they germane to the Black Thurrick?”

  “Now there,” said my friend, “you may be on to something.”

  The sun slipped from view, to be replaced by the moon, whose glow infused the mist with a fainter, more nebulous effulgence.

  Presently we entered the woods adjacent to the lake. When we emerged on the other side, the castle would have been in full view were it not for the mist. All we could see were the lights of its windows, shimmering like rows of candle flames suspended in mid-air.

  Holmes put finger to lips. From here on, there was to be no more conversation.

  Passing the end of the causeway, we followed the perimeter of the lake round. We finally came to a halt on the side furthest from Fellscar. Somewhere to our backs, I judged, lay the copse where we had discovered the layer of soil which Holmes had suggested was deposited there by the Black Thurrick. Immediately in front of us was the lake bank and, just visible beyond, a rind of ice marking the edge of the lake itself. At this distance the lights of the castle showed as an indistinct lambent haze, like some polar aurora.

  Now, in the lowest of voices, my companion said, “Nerve yourself and stay vigilant, Watson. You and I must tap our reserves of patience and endurance like never before. For tonight, unless I am sorely mistaken, we shall be meeting the Black Thurrick himself in person.”

  What can I say about that long, cold watch? Shall I mention how the frigid air seemed to seep through my muscles into my bones and made them ache? Shall I relate how the silence filled
my ears as though it had actual substance? Shall I talk about the continual, stealthy shifting of feet and wriggling of fingers that was required in order not to lose all sensation in my extremities?

  What about the way that time, as though made torpid by the cold, crawled by? Or the way the mist writhed and coiled around us, thinning and thickening in response to the vagaries of barely perceptible breezes, so that sometimes I could see Holmes beside me, clear as day, and at other times he was all but hidden from view?

  It was all these things and more, that vigil. It was, indeed, one of the most trying, enervating tests of resolve I have ever undergone, and that is taking into consideration the many hardships I endured during my time in the army, the many arduous medical challenges I have faced as a doctor, and of course the many similarly adverse situations in which I have found myself as part of my adventures with Sherlock Holmes.

  Holmes himself stood rigid throughout the ordeal, as motionless as a statue. But for the regular puffs of vapour from his nostrils as he exhaled, one might have thought him dead. His gaze was fixed unwaveringly upon the lake.

  Accordingly, I kept mine upon it too, as best I could. The longer I strained my eyes staring into the mist, however, the more I began to glimpse shapes in it – things that resembled faces, or monstrous figures, or huge gnarled hands reaching for me. Each was there for a fleeting instant, then gone again.

  It was a kind of madness. Time and again I told myself the shapes were illusions, yet still they manifested. It was as though the mist was not only alive somehow but malevolent.

  It came as some considerable relief when, around eight o’ clock, Holmes produced from his pocket the sandwiches that had been prepared for us by the innkeeper’s wife at the Sheep and Shearer. He unwrapped the wax paper around them, carefully so that it did not make a crinkling sound, and handed me one. The sandwich consisted of a thick slab of ox tongue between two no less thick slices of butter-lathered bread. My half-frozen fingers could scarcely hold it, and my jaws felt so immobile that I could chew only small morsels at a time. Still, the sustenance was warming and welcome, as were the nips of brandy I took from the hip flask that Holmes offered me.