by Mike Hogan
Holmes hailed a cab. “To Mears and Stainbank at 34, Whitechapel Road.”
The Bell Makers of Whitechapel
We clattered to a halt outside the entrance to the ancient and famous Mears and Stainbank Bell Foundry, the company that had cast church and other bells for centuries.
We passed through the glazed entrance doors into a neat office where a man sat behind a large desk reading the afternoon paper, and a boy slept on a chair by the window. Through an arched doorway, we could see a long, high-ceilinged workshop cluttered with huge bell-shaped forms and beams of heavy timber. A waft of searing air laden with sawdust, and tainted with a tang of hot metal and smoke blew through the doorway and made me cough and splutter into my handkerchief. The man closed the door and I breathed more easily. The office windows were open, but the temperature was Saharan.
“How can I help you, gentlemen?” the man said, holding out his hand. “I am the foundry manager, William Wariskitt.”
A long, deep, sonorous chime thundered through the room; my teeth vibrated in tune with it. The boy slept on.
“E,” said Holmes instantly. “A bell of considerable size, judging by the volume of sound.”
“Nineteen hundredweight,” said Mr Wariskitt, blinking at him.
“Ah, then it is sixth in a peal of eight, with the treble and tenor tuned to C and the tenor weighing, let me see, about thirty-eight hundredweight.” Holmes gave Churchill and I a triumphant look. We looked blankly back at him.
“Are you thinking of ordering a peal?” asked Mr Wariskitt.
“I am Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective, and these are my unmusical colleagues, Doctor Watson and Winston Churchill.”
We shook hands. Holmes nodded to Churchill; he laid the lump of silvery metal on the desk.
“My goodness, sir,” Mr Wariskitt said. “I last saw an ingot at the Great Exhibition in 1851, when I was a nipper. They had armed guards. May I?”
Holmes nodded. Mr Wariskitt picked the metal up and weighed it in his hand.
“Incredible.”
He called out to the boy. “Wake up, you sleepy hound. Get Tom out here quick as you like.”
The boy darted inside the factory.
“Well, gentlemen,” Mr Wariskitt said reflectively as he turned the lump of metal in the light streaming from a window. “In ‘84, the Americans used this material for the capstone of the monumental column to their late president, Mr Washington; out of a kind of homage, I suppose. It was a cone just under nine inches high, the largest piece cast at the time. I understand it took at least two goes to get it right.”
The boy returned, followed by an elderly man in a leather apron.
“Here you go, Tom,” said Mr Wariskitt, winking at us. “Close your eyes and hold out your hands.” He carefully placed the lump of metal on to the old man’s hands. “Have a gander.”
The old man opened his eyes and blinked down at the shiny material over his pince-nez. He grinned a huge, gap-toothed smile.
“Aluminium. Gawd bless me, it’s a bleeding great, huge lump of aluminium.”
He turned and went back through the office door holding the block of metal high. The foundry workers crowded around the old man as he paraded the metal through the workshop. I nodded to Churchill to follow him and keep an eye on our treasure.
“When the Yanks put a hundred-ounce cone of aluminium on top of their Washington Monument, the metal was a dollar an ounce, more than double that with casting cost.” said Mr Wariskitt. “It’s not a lot less now.”
He shouted through the door. “All right, Old Tom, give it here. And back to work the rest of you.”
Tom came through the door followed by Churchill and the boy. He put the aluminium reverently down on the manager’s desk.
“You are sure that it is aluminium?” asked Holmes.
Mr Wariskitt picked it up again. “It is cast aluminium - badly cast, or perhaps the metal was impure. It is not ornamental: it is a structural piece. What is it, gentlemen? Who would make anything structural out of aluminium? It is a precious metal, a laboratory metal, sirs; aluminium is not produced industrially. Or is it?”
“That,” said Holmes, lowering himself into a seat opposite the manager, “is what we wish to know. It is a police matter.”
Mr Wariskitt looked doubtful.
“There are Imperial connections,” said Holmes. “The Palace may be involved.”
I coughed. Apart from the Dundee cakes, I could see no connection between the emerald robbery and the Palace.
“Sorry about the dust,” said Mr Wariskitt. He turned again to the boy. “Get young Geoff in here, then make the tea.”
A keen-looking young man in a white apron responded immediately to the boy’s call. He pounced on the aluminium with an intense interest.
“Draft that, son,” said Mr Wariskitt. “It’s sheered. Have a go at the missing bit and we’ll see what we will see.”
The young man slipped out holding the lump of aluminium like his firstborn.
Mr Wariskitt sat back as the boy handed around mismatched cups of tea and plates of gritty biscuits. “Aluminium is new to us. We know bell metal and iron. We thoroughly understand copper and tin. Steel will not answer for bells, though it will be the metal of the next century; steamships may be steel constructed, but not bells; we have tried and failed.”
“Your company made Big Ben, sir, as I recollect,” I said.
“We did, Doctor. Or rather, we remade him. And then that interfering bugger Dennison (pardon my French) hit him with an outsize hammer - though told not to do so direct to his face - and cracked him.”
He sipped his tea. “Old Tom’s never been the same since Ben cracked. He worked for the company that made the first great bell that split. Then he came to us and remade him and he cracked again. He is still distressed by Ben’s tone.”
“Could you make a bell out of aluminium, sir?” asked Churchill.
“You could make one out of wood, but it would just go clop. A glass bell would work, or a China one; you’d not want to bang ‘em too hard. You could make a bell out of any metal, but would it last? Steel doesn’t. We’ve not tried aluminium - question of cost. Ah here’s Geoff.”
The young man unrolled a drawing across the manager’s table and weighted it with the chunk of aluminium.
“It’s clear that the piece is half a bracket,” he said. “You can see where something is supposed to slide through here. I would say you have a ship’s mast, or a flagpole. Given the cost of the metal, I believe we may ignore more mundane uses, except -”
He stopped and looked doubtfully at us.
“Go on, lad,” said Mr Wariskitt.
“Aluminium costs about the same as silver, sir, so I may be talking nonsense, but people do funny things. They say that Napoleon had a gold-plated necessary pot.” He laughed. “If this were steel, I’d say it was part of a ladder.”
“An aluminium ladder!” cried Mr Wariskitt, laughing with him.
The young man nodded. “I can think of only one company that might have access to enough aluminium to make a ladder, and the casting expertise to do the work. That is a company that deals mainly in wrought and puddle-iron structures: Eiffel et Cie of Paris.”
6. His People Are Known to Us
Epicurean Schemes
“Watson!”
“Where are you, Holmes?” I called as I struggled through the clouds of steam that enveloped the front of the Boat Train at Victoria. I stumbled in the mist like an alpinist through dense clouds until the friendly hand of young Churchill dragged me to the open door of our carriage just as the whistle blew and the train jolted into movement.
I handed Churchill a Penny Illustrated Paper, and settled in the seat opposite him with my Bicycling News and Tricycling Gazette.
“Let’s see,” sa
id Holmes. “Two hours to Folkestone, then an hour and a half on the boat to Boulogne. We will do our business and take the afternoon train to Paris and be back on English soil tomorrow evening, the day before the procession.”
“Even getting to Boulogne and Paris is costing a pretty penny,” I reminded him. “That’s not counting the hotel, and dinner. I hope the Government is picking up the bill.”
“Mrs Hudson made up some tongue sandwiches, Doctor,” said Churchill, taking a packet from the leather satchel that contained my pistol, the dynamite files and the Parnell correspondence. “Should you like one?”
“Sandwiches!” I took the packet and hurled it out of the open window into the London suburbs. “We are going to France, young man. If there is one thing - perhaps the only thing - that one can absolutely rely on with the French, it is their culinary genius. Holmes often feigns indifference to food, but we will see a different attitude displayed once we are in a restaurant across the Channel. In Boulogne, we will find excellent seafood; in Paris, we will dine in splendour at the Cafe Anglais! It is where the three emperors feasted. I have booked a table. I shall not look at our second quarter accounts until we touch English soil again.”
“Let us make our plans,” said Holmes waving away my Epicurean schemes. “We have a short time in France. We cannot spend a moment longer than is necessary away from the locus of our investigations, the procession route and the Abbey. The Thanksgiving Service is on Tuesday, the day after tomorrow. We have two days, no more. What are our aims?”
“To determine whether there is a danger to the Queen from dynamitards in France,” I said. “That must be uppermost in our thoughts.”
“Hear him,” said Churchill.
I was still worried that we were diluting our strength in pursuing the missing emeralds case. If the object of the conspirators was theft, and that has been achieved, we could scratch them from our list of assassins. We should, I thought, devote all our energies to uncovering the roots of the conspiracy against Her Majesty.
I ticked off the items on my fingers. “Our first task is to warn off this so-called General Morgan in Boulogne and General Trent-Hall and his associates in Paris, and to determine the whereabouts of the tins of explosives rumoured to have been shipped to the consignee, Mr Muller.”
“Agreed,” said Holmes. “Those are our targets for our most important and overriding case. I have wired our consul at Boulogne to meet us at the station with the latest news of General Morgan. We have a most comprehensive dossier on the villain from Mycroft; I am astonished at its completeness. We have exact intelligence of his movements and aliases. We even know that the Fenian Council in New York gave him five hundred dollars to bring on a dynamite plot in London. I have never been better briefed. It is strange that the authorities have not acted more precipitately. The evidence that Morgan is controlling a gang of dynamitards in France is perfectly damning.”
“The Donovan brothers are steeped in innocent blood,” I said.
“Yes,” said Holmes quietly. He glanced across at Churchill sitting sullenly in the corner of the carriage mourning his lost sandwiches. “I may have to recommend the strongest measures against them and Trent-Hall, if they will not come to heel.”
He leaned towards me. “Do not think for a moment that I would devote less than my most ardent attention to any threat to Her Majesty. You should know that I have determined to deal with these villains on their own terms, whatever the consequences.”
He patted his jacket pocket; it sagged with the weight of his revolver.
“I will cut off -”
“We, Holmes.”
“Indeed. We will cut off the head of the snake and leave the body without form or purpose.”
I wrung my good friend’s hand.
“And yet,” he said thoughtfully. “I have a feeling that the emerald theft and our primary task of guarding Her Majesty are not unconnected.”
“A premonition, Holmes?” I asked with a grin. “Intuition?”
He shook his head, an act that seemed to cause him pain.
I offered my brandy flask. “I say, old man -”
“No thank you. No, nothing so airy as a premonition, nothing so unmanly as intuition. On occasions, my brain absorbs data at a rate that runs ahead of even my powers of organisation and analysis. I strive to make sense of connections as ephemeral as dreams. The stakes are so very great. My head aches with the effort to calm a storm of inferences.
‘We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Watson, I am vex’d;
Bear with my weakness; my brain is troubled:
Be not disturb’d with my infirmity’.”
I nodded warily. I recalled my friend’s mental aberration at the Hotel Dulong in April, and the black, malevolent spirit that had tortured him for much of the following month.
“Officials from Eiffel et Cie have agreed to meet us,” I said softly, consulting my notebook. “We will have time tomorrow, before we catch our return train. They suggest that we talk with the foremost French expert on aluminium, Monsieur Paul Héroult. They invite us for an early lunch.”
“Very well,” said Holmes, seeming to shake off his malady. “If we can track the material it may lead us to the manufacturer of the ladder, assuming it is a ladder, and to the customer. Good, a busy trip and let us hope a valuable one.” He settled back in his seat.
“There are also the Parnell letters, Holmes. You promised Monsieur Bertillon, the author of the Bertillon system of identifying criminals, that you would consult on them. I have the copies with me, together with a bundle of original envelopes that Mr Parnell’s secretary delivered to us yesterday.”
“Give,” said Holmes. I took the package from Churchill’s satchel and passed it to him. He pulled out his magnifying glass and held the envelopes up to the sunlight streaming through our carriage windows. I watched his mental focus narrow until it encompassed only the words, phrases, daubs of ink and watermarks on the letters. He was totally absorbed for an hour or more of our journey.
“We will drop the copies off at the Sûreté,” he said at last, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. “They will forward them to Monsieur Bertillon. Believe me, Watson, you do not want to become entangled with the formidable author of the système anthropométrique bertillon.”
He laughed ruefully.
“He lectured at the Yard last year and I went out of curiosity. His system consists of postcards on which the measurements of an arrested criminal are noted: the usual height, weight and so on. He adds length of nose and foot, distance between eyes and ears, and dozens of other measurements, all in appallingly Continental detail. If a person of a certain height commits a crime, the police consult the cards and eliminate shorter or taller suspects. It is moderately useful, and simple enough. A child of ten with a blackboard could explain it in ten minutes. Bertillon is one of those slow-thinking, saturnine Frenchmen, the sort you would find as the mayor of a deeply conservative town in the Ardennes, or the Champagne; the lugubrious sort that savours every word and repeats himself with every second phrase. He speaks no English, and his interpreter was clearly ready to shoot himself, or Bertillon, by the end of the second hour. Him, we must avoid at all costs.”
He picked up his Times.
“Very well, Holmes, I’ll leave Bertillon to you. Cheer up, Churchill. Think of dinner at the Café Anglais. I had to pull strings to get a reservation. I had to, as the vulgar say, drop names.”
Holmes snapped his newspaper with a crack and turned the page with a complacent gesture. “I dare say that my name was sufficient.”
“I meant that I booked in the name of Lord Randolph Churchill, Holmes.”
He hid behind his paper and became very quiet. I am afraid that Churchill and I exchanged looks of quiet satisfaction.
&nb
sp; Our train shrieked, and clanked to a halt at Folkestone just at lunchtime.
I had been in two minds whether to suggest that we take luncheon there, or wait until we landed on the shores of France. I was peckish, and Churchill was pale with hunger, so I asked a porter for directions to the nearest restaurant. He told me that the ferry was leaving immediately, and that luncheon would be taken in Boulogne-sur-Mer.
The crossing was uneventful. I read my medical journals while Holmes and Churchill played two-handed Bezique. We disembarked at Boulogne and, after passing through Customs and fending off the attentions of the rapacious porters that are a blot on the escutcheon of that great port, we stopped at the gate of the station and looked for the British consul who had promised to meet us.
Holmes stiffened. “Oh dear,” he muttered in my ear. “I am afraid that we have caught a Tartar.”
A slight figure with a full beard and pointed moustache advanced towards us at the pace of a slow-marching marionette.
Holmes handed me his bag and darted forward to meet the man.
“Monsieur Bertillon!» he cried. «C’est une si agréable surprise de vous rencontrer ici.»
Churchill and I watched in fascination as Holmes very, very nearly kissed the man on both cheeks.
“Puis-je me permettre de vous présenter mon collègue et excellent ami, le docteur John Watson ainsi que notre élève, monsieur Winston Churchill ?» Taking the gentleman’s assent for granted, Holmes took Bertillon by the arm and propelled him towards Churchill and myself.
«Messieurs,” Holmes cried, throwing his arms in the air in an alarmingly Continental manner. “J’ai le grand honneur de vous faire rencontrer le fameux Alphonse Bertillon, fléau du grand banditisme, inventeur du système anthropométrique dit le bertillonage !»
Churchill bowed and held out his hand. “Enchanté de faire votre connaissance, cher monsieur,» he said.
Bertillon scrutinised the proffered hand with the enthusiasm of a suspicious tortoise peering at a mouldy lettuce leaf. He clasped Churchill’s hand with two fingers and muttered something slow and unintelligible. He turned to me, his dark eyes registering not a glimmer of interest.