The Secret Diary of Dr Watson

by Anita Janda

  Holmes is nothing if not fair. He let me apologize profusely for what felt like hours before he put an end to the interchange with a few well-chosen words.

  “Miss Cathcart, we are wasting valuable time. Watson has apologized for his momentary lapse of attention; it is enough. You ask me for a list of my failures and I oblige you. We can do no more.” His voice was riveting in its softness, mesmerizing in its intensity. “You complain of a two hour delay on our part. I tell you, you are fortunate that your telegram did not arrive when I was from home or committed to some other, even more pressing investigation. It is past time for you to tell us why we are here. What happened yesterday to stimulate your powers of invention to the heights of that telegram? What lies concealed on that window ledge? And what does your maid have to do with it?”

  He might have elaborated on this general theme for some time had Miss Cathcart not abruptly turned away, admitting defeat with a graceful wave of her hand as she disposed herself on a nearby loveseat. I was glad to see it, not least because I had been on my feet all morning. I seized my opportunity and selected a substantial-looking armchair placed well back in the shadows. Holmes checked the corridor once more, propped his lean form against the door, and in his own inimitable fashion, indicated that the subject was officially open for discussion.

  “Very well, Mr Holmes, we will do this your way. I owe you that much for your performance this afternoon. When you have seen and heard the whole, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me what you make of it. I warn you, there is very little for you to go on.”

  This was apparently supposed to be my cue, but I make no apology for having missed it. The role of the participant/observer is a difficult one at the best of times and Holmes himself would not have called these the best of times.

  “Perhaps, Watson, you would be good enough to retrieve the evidence. The third window, I think.”

  Remembering the general import of the lecture on the right way to draw the curtains in the Yellow Salon, I managed the first part of the business without exciting undue comment and after a brief struggle with the sash, retrieved a small and rather sooty parcel, which very nearly came undone in my hands. I observed that the twine securing the brown wrapping paper had been cut and felt sure that this would prove to be of major significance. I deposited the whole on top of the trunk, this being the only horizontal surface in the room that was not festooned with family portraits, bits of needlework or chemical apparatus.

  As always, Holmes’s inspection was minute. The tarred twine, the knot in the tarred twine, the quality of the wrapping paper, the blurring of the Belfast postmark, the peculiarities of the handwriting, the smudgy thumb marks in one corner, the pigeon droppings in the other, all received his careful attention. I listened to his discourse with half an ear, secure in the knowledge that he would be only too glad to explain to me later just which aspects of the packaging or the clumsy uneducated script decorating it had enabled him to deduce the writer’s sex, occupation, probable height, and habit of smoking cigarillos. I had no patience for this exercise today, being fully occupied trying to place the slight but sickly odor of it, a scent that took me back to my military days in Afghanistan in the most extraordinary way. Not a spice, no, the odor was both more and less than that. More immediate and less pungent perhaps. Or more obtrusive and less foreign.

  So it was that Sherlock Holmes opened a half-pound honeydew tobacco box made of yellow cardboard to reveal two severed ears nestled in a quantity of salt without surprising anyone but himself.

  Chapter 2

  What to say? What to write? It is difficult to decide how to continue a task you had no great wish to begin.

  Mary smiles at me over her mending. Her little stratagem has worked: John is writing again. She was so wise to give me this journal, “Bound in real morocco leather, John!” (as though that could make a difference), so wise to refuse to hear a word about the day’s adventure with Holmes.

  “You have your diary now, John. Please to write it down! I am sure you have a great deal to say about your Miss Cartwright,”—Mary has no head for names—“but you must not say it at the expense of your readers. I married a Writer,” she concluded, with a kiss on my brow.

  I have been at this journal for over a week now and she has yet to read a word of it. Marriage is a complicated business.

  * * *

  “Perhaps, Mr Holmes, you would be kind enough to tell me what you make of my cardboard box?”

  No tremor in her voice, no hesitation over her words. Then as now I find myself fairly overwhelmed by Miss Cathcart. When she said, “I warn you, Mr Holmes, there is very little for you to go on,” something almost everyone said to Holmes eventually (or why should they have gone to the trouble and expense of consulting him in the first place?), she said it with such an air.

  “The box, Mr Holmes?”

  “I had not forgotten it,” he assured her. “Or its contents. You called on me because you knew of my monograph, ‘A Practical Typology of the Human Ear’?”

  “Certainly not. I called on you because I did not like to trust what I am persuaded is a delicate matter to the tactless incompetence of Scotland Yard. My conscience would not permit me to ignore the incident as I should have preferred to do.”

  The thought of a woman with sufficient aplomb to be able to ignore the receipt of such a parcel was alarming at best. There was an awkward silence. Perhaps I should say that there was a silence which felt exceedingly awkward to me, for I am bound to admit, neither Holmes nor Miss Cathcart appeared to notice it. At last I could stand it no longer. I hurled myself into the breach, saying the first thing that came into my head.

  “A medical student, do you think, Holmes? Some sort of prank? The Ripper has gotten an extraordinary amount of publicity with his threats to clip the lady’s ears and send them to the police.”

  It was the right thing to say.

  “I think not, Watson. You cannot have been listening to my description of the man who addressed this package: a probable seaman, left-handed and semi-literate or clever enough to pretend to be so. I see no sign of the dissecting room. No special surgical skill or knowledge of anatomy was required to make these incisions.”

  I winced at this off-hand reference to the Ripper’s dexterity in disembowelling his victims, and his client winced with me. I knew, of course, that Holmes disagreed with the official view of the Ripper’s surgical expertise (as I do myself), but I hoped he would not feel obliged to go into it here. No one was suggesting that this crime had been perpetrated by a physician, and that was good enough for me. It is as much as a medical man’s life is worth to be caught at dusk in Whitechapel now, carrying a black bag. I hear they nearly lynched poor Hartrey last week and Hartrey has been a fixture in the East End for years.

  Holmes was oblivious to our discomfort, intent on his analysis. “Any moderately sharp knife would do. A herring knife, for example. The specimens are relatively fresh and have not been treated with an embalming or preserving fluid. They are most assuredly not ‘a lady’s ears,’ Watson. The larger one is almost certainly a man’s, possibly belonging originally to another (or the same) seaman. The earring suggests the sea. They have not been sent to the police or to any official or quasi-official body. Finally, I do not suppose Miss Cathcart to be acquainted with very many medical students.” He turned to his client. “You are not, I think, in the habit of renting rooms to medical students? I thought not.”

  I didn’t think she was in the habit of receiving parcels from illiterate sailors, either, but I kept the observation to myself. If Holmes has told me once he’s told me a thousand times that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I did not need to hear it again. In my experience, the impossible, like beauty, is commonly in the eye of the beholder.

  “The Ripper himself, then, Holmes?”

  I spoke idly, but it was no idle matter to Miss Cathcart. She leaned forward in her seat, her hands clasped convulsively. T
his must have been her fear from the beginning. It only remained for Holmes to pronounce upon the foundation of that fear in reality. It did not take long.

  “Unlikely, Watson, and for much the same reasons as ruled out the possibility of a prank by a medical student. There is also the matter of the earrings. No Whitechapel drab,” he caught himself just in time, I think, from saying something worse, “can afford jewellery of any description. They sell themselves, as you know, for the price of a doss or a tumbler of gin. There are no earrings even of this paltry quality in Whitechapel.”

  He paused thoughtfully and then, removing each earring in turn, examined it with his glass. First the earring, then the lobe. The other earring, the other lobe. The sight appeared to afford him gratification.

  “Some dust, yes. Not conclusive, but suggestive certainly. And the ears themselves, not newly pierced. The wounds are thoroughly healed. Yes, well, it is of course impossible to be sure, but all of the available evidence supports the hypothesis that the earrings were worn by the victims in life and not supplied afterwards by their assailant for artistic reasons of his own. Greater wear on the post of the earring worn by the lady than that of her weatherbeaten counterpart, contrary to what one would expect had the idea of the ornament been original with him and copied by her. I surprise you, Watson? You are easily surprised. The criminal mind is as inventive as our own; I have often observed it. Indeed, when Scotland Yard handles a matter, it is frequently the case that the criminal mind is significantly more inventive than our own. Well, well, enough of that.”

  Holmes brought the full force of his attention to bear on his client. More precisely, as he would say himself, he brought the full force of his attention to bear on his client’s left ear. Absently, he patted his pockets. Absently, I stepped in front of the little table where he had laid his calipers. (The spectacle of Holmes bearing down on Miss Cathcart in order to measure a characteristic feature of her shell-like ears was one I knew instinctively I was prepared to forego.) “My calipers, Watson.”

  I passed them to him.

  At no point had he taken his eyes off her ear. It was another, superior demonstration of the right way to draw the curtains in the Yellow Salon. Miss Cathcart was flushed to the roots of her hair by the time he turned to me across the cardboard box and said in a low voice, “You might ask yourself, Watson, under what circumstances a man other than the Ripper might elect to ‘do a Whitechapel,’ that is, to treat a man and a woman in the advertised Whitechapel manner, at least to the extent that we see here. If a-whoring she will go…”

  Humming under his breath, Holmes pocketed his calipers, eliminated the larger ear from consideration and fell to a detailed analysis of the feminine specimen. “The conformation of the cartilage, Type E, yes. The most common type, Watson.” (I should have thought Type A would be the most common type.) “Overall shape, the common oval; nothing distinctive there. No evidence of the subject’s hair colour. Pinna neither unduly long nor unduly short. No tell-tale fatty deposits, no bumpy ridge, no pockmarks, no freckles. In short, all heritable characteristics in their least distinctive, most prevalent Anglo-Saxon form. The genetic patterning is not clear. The other specimen is Type B Prime: unusual without being remarkable.”

  My disappointment echoed his own and I found myself silently vowing to make it up to him in the published version, a spectacular piece of illogic I am very glad I shall never have to explain to him. To be sure, I had hoped that my inclusion in the day’s adventure, secured as it was by the client’s own telegram to Holmes’s biographer, might have signified more than this passion for secrecy that thwarts me at every turn. I had hoped it at home when I first discovered it to be a message for Holmes, and I had hoped it again in Baker Street when I found myself decked out as an Egyptian horse doctor, the worst kind of medicine monger. Then we went to Kensington. And what did we find waiting for us in Kensington? Two ears neatly severed from their owners’ faces, no sign of Scotland Yard, and Hermia Marie Cathcart. It is getting so that every times Holmes says to me, “Come, Watson, this sounds promising, there may be something in it or there may be nothing at all,” my heart quails within me. So often, there is nothing at all, at least for me.

  Still, in spite of that, there I was, awash in righteous indignation over the injustice of a world that could give Holmes an ordinary Type E ear after he had contributed not one but two scientific articles that I know of to The Journal of Scientific Anthropology on the neglected topic of the taxonomic classification of the human ear. France has her Bertillon and he has his measurements, but we have our Holmes and he has his ears, and who can say which will ultimately be of greater service to the science of detection? Holmes should have every advantage his biographer could give him, I vowed. He should have an ear that resembled Queen Victoria’s if he wanted one.

  Why he should have wanted an ear that resembled Queen Victoria’s is more than I can say. I must have been more impressed with our client than I knew. It was, of course, an unpardonable liberty for me to have stared at Miss Cathcart like that. More than an unpardonable liberty, however, it was a mistake.

  “You have not asked me why I sent for you, Doctor.”

  “I assumed you had sent for Holmes,” I babbled.

  “I sent for you because I wished to know what if anything can be medically established about the two victims.”

  “You mean…”

  “I mean,” she snapped, “are they alive or are they dead?”

  This could not be happening to me, I thought, as I turned the two ears over and pretended to examine the backs. In the stress of the moment, I could not imagine how one might determine from a severed ear when the heart last beat its bloody tattoo. The ear is such a minor appendage. A leg, yes, a leg or an arm will testify to the victim’s state by the degree of contraction in the musculature, although even then I had known exceptions. If death was due to exposure and the subject was in a state of muscular degeneration, even a leg might not… but an ear?

  Holmes had his back to me and was serenely unconcerned, deep in the contemplation of some family photographs in heavy silver frames. I know how interested Holmes is in things of that nature: not at all interested. If he has as much as a single photograph of his own family, I have not seen it. This was a fine time for him to discover an interest in photography.

  “Yes, Dr Watson?” she purred.

  It was impossible to determine from the set of Holmes’s shoulders what he would wish me to say. With great presence of mind, I resisted the impulse to announce that I should know more after I had examined the specimens in my laboratory. We had brought an entire trunkful of laboratory equipment with us when we arrived and it was everywhere I looked: on the mantelpiece, along the far wall, among the photographs Holmes found so absorbing, beside the vase, below the portrait, against the bookcase. Everywhere. I had only to decide whether it was likelier for two maimed people to languish in durance vile in England, for, say, three days, or two bodies to remain undiscovered for the same length of time. Which?

  Holmes abhors guesswork. “The answer she is looking for, Watson, is that at the time these trophies were taken, one of the victims was alive and one was dead. Is that not so, Miss Cathcart? Where is she? Come, come, I have no time for games. What is her name—Harriet, Helen, Heloise, Henrietta, Hilary, Hope, Hortense?”

  He reeled off half a dozen names. If pressed for a list of women’s names beginning with the letter “H,” I might have thought of three. And they wouldn’t have been in alphabetical order, either.

  “Your sister, of course. Half-sister, then. The Miss H. Cathcart that this parcel was meant for. Is she here? Upstairs, perhaps?”

  His stroll through the Cathcart family photographs had told him everything he needed to know. Afterwards, as we made our way back to Baker Street, he told me candidly that he was doing ear research at the time.

  “You know, Watson, that I am ever on the alert for data that will confirm or disprove one of my theories. A well-photographed family with Type E
ears offered a rare opportunity for me to study the systematic genetic suppression of the idiosyncratic, an aspect of the problem I had hitherto ignored. It is very odd, Watson. The ear must be one of the least well-documented features of the human face. Do you know, nine times out of ten I found the sitter staring straight into the camera? I was about to give it up in disgust when I came across a wedding photograph, circa 1880, where the husband had been so distracted by the charms of his young bride as to appear very nearly in profile. It was a textbook example of a Type B Prime ear, attached, as I had predicted, to a sailor. Once I stopped focusing on the family ears and looked instead at the family, it was perfectly obvious what had happened.”

  That Holmes was able to identify the victims from their wedding photograph is remarkable, yes, but that his mind could leap from there to the “Miss H. Cathcart” scrawled on the packet to the awful truth, as I know it did, that is uncanny. A man’s wife maimed at his hands, he dead and mutilated in his turn, and the evidence sent to the widow under her maiden name as a tactful way of informing her of her sudden return to the single state. It is incredible. Holmes must be the only man on earth who could find this particular scenario “perfectly obvious.”

  Her miserable brute of a husband was to be expunged from her memory. Life was to go on as though he had never been. She was to be Miss H. Cathcart again.

  I find myself shuddering as I write this. He had loved her. I had seen it in their wedding photograph, the one Holmes thought of as a beautiful example of a Type B Prime ear.

  “Lex talionis, Watson: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Or, in this case, an ear for an ear.” I know what lex talionis means. And to my mind, it doesn’t include slicing the ear off the man you’ve killed, in order to send it to his widow.

  We left Kensington on a tide of goodwill, Holmes well pleased with the results of his exertions (and his fee), Lestrade loud in his assurances that he would keep Holmes apprised of the progress of his investigation. I felt exhausted, drained in mind and body. Unlike Holmes, I had not been paid for my professional services. Our hansom slowed to a walk; the press of traffic was severe. We were still some distance from Oxford Street.