J.H.’s contention that N.S., with whom his relatives confirm he was at one time acquainted, has taken possession of his house and is now living in it is, they assure me, false. His conviction that N.S. cheated him out of a sum of money years ago is one which I would (speaking as a doctor and not as any authority on criminal matters) more readily assign to the realm of the possible, were it not for J.H.’s coexistent belief that N.S. achieved this through the operation of witchcraft, and that the same black arts underlie N.S.’s business practices wholesale. There is (as once again is common among obsessives) considerable elaboration as to the system by which these dark powers operate, the details of which hold a certain grotesque fascination but are irrelevant for diagnostic purposes.
If his infatuation had taken another object I might venture to suggest that J.H. should be protected from any chance sight or mention of that person, to test whether he is capable under such insulated circumstances of sustaining a normal life of no danger to others. Unfortunately, mention of N.S. is ubiquitous (in that his name routinely appears on a number of common household items), and it would be impossible to be confident of isolating J.H. from such stimuli outside the bounds of an institution such as this one.
I cannot therefore justify his release at this time, nor in the foreseeable future.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For a second time I was awoken by an insistent banging at the door, but a bleary glance at the clock admonished me that it was no longer night-time and that I should be abroad. Nor was the voice calling my name that of the club’s steward; it belonged to Sherlock Holmes.
‘Watson!’ he cried. ‘Lestrade has found the hansom cab!’
I dressed and joined him in the club’s breakfast room. Holmes was far too excited to partake of the kippers, though, or the excellent kedgeree, preferring a pot of coffee and a cigarette.
‘So it was a cab, then?’ I asked.
‘Indeed, my dear fellow. A brace of constables found it in a back-alley half a mile from the warehouse, without any sign of a horse. By now I would imagine the poor beast has been sold to a crooked dealer or a slaughterhouse. The vehicle has been impounded and is now at the Yard. As I predicted, the interior is positively smeared with paint and blood.’
‘Well, that was hardly one of your more astounding predictions,’ I told him with ill grace. ‘But I’m glad Lestrade’s found it. So our villain is a cabman, then?’ I was reminded of the first case on which Holmes and I had worked together, the murder of Mr Enoch Drebber of Utah, with its strange and bloody aftermath.
‘I would regard that as far from settled, Watson, though I gather the driver has been traced and constables sent to bring him in for questioning. The name he uses is Jonas Flatley, and unless that turns out to be a pseudonym he is not among the principals in our case. But this is one of the points you will need to verify.’
‘I?’ In my befuddled state I was unsure that I had heard him correctly.
‘I have a certain matter to attend to, Watson,’ he told me airily. ‘The morning is a fine, clear one, and if it holds I should be able to spare my attention for other business by around luncheon. Can you summon me an errand-boy? I have an urgent telegram to send to one Inspector Utterthwaite of the West Riding Constabulary.’
Grumpily, I did as he asked, then retired to my room to shave before joining Lestrade at the Yard. As I applied my Speight’s Accurate and Dependable Safety Razor – a present from my late wife Mary – to my chin, it occurred to me to wonder whether a skilled inventor might design a kind of razor that could remove most but not all of a man’s hair, leaving behind a remnant so short as to give the impression of stubble, and if so whether it would be possible to discern the difference. I stepped out again, thinking to put the point to Holmes, but he had already left. Since Baker Street was so close I determined to call around after I finished my ablutions and ask his view on the matter before continuing to Scotland Yard.
I blinked my way through the dazzling streets; I had slept well past sunrise and it was, as Holmes had predicted, an unusually bright day.
I had forgotten that Mrs Hudson was away. To my surprise I was greeted in the hall at Baker Street by a small, grubby and untidy child who I eventually recognised as one of Holmes’s Irregulars. Evidently, in our landlady’s absence, he had turned to others for his household arrangements. Loud crashing noises from the kitchen suggested that this child’s comrades might be attempting further feats of domestic service. I desperately hoped that Mrs Hudson was content at her sister’s, and would not return unexpectedly.
Ransacking my memory eventually yielded the urchin’s name. ‘Hullo, Daphne,’ I said to her. ‘Is Mr Holmes in?’
‘You’re not to disturb him,’ she told me solemnly. ‘He said as you might want to, and as you wasn’t to anyways, not on no account.’
‘But what on earth is he doing?’ I exclaimed. I felt that this really was the limit, that Holmes should not only bar me from my own rooms but detail a street child to give me the message.
‘He says you can look, only don’t go in and don’t talk to him,’ Daphne elaborated. ‘He’s got to constentrate, he says.’
‘Well, I… I never did,’ I retorted weakly.
I made my way up the stairs and found the sitting-room door ajar, with a cardboard sign tacked to it reading emphatically ‘DO NOT DISTURB’. Silently I pushed it open a little and peered in.
Holmes was sitting on the floor in front of a huge wooden box, a cube around six feet to a side. It had been constructed neatly and with great care, evincing a facility with carpentry that I would not have imagined my friend to possess. Though the planks were still variously splashed with paint, they had been stained over again with pitch where the timbers met. The whole construction loomed like some heathen shrine, an impression reinforced by the way Holmes faced it, his legs arranged in the lotus shape, his hands spread palms upward upon his knees. Arranged thus in such an attitude of prayer or meditation or who-knew-what, with his hawkish nose and high brow outlined by the light from the windows, he looked the very image of an Indian fakir of the kind that featured in Major Bradbury’s inexhaustible fund of stories, got up in Western garb.
‘What in heaven’s name are you doing, Holmes?’ I hissed at him, but he ignored me austerely. Despite my irritation and my curiosity, his prohibition against interrupting him, as relayed by Daphne and the sign, were so very definite that I did not dare interfere further. Shaking my head and hoping that I would not need to arrange a trip to an asylum at any point in the near future, I descended the stairs again and set out for Scotland Yard.
There I found Lestrade awaiting the cabman Flatley. The inspector seemed surprised and a little put out to see me rather than Holmes. ‘It’s always a pleasure, Dr Watson,’ he said, ‘but I’d thought Mr Holmes was taking a personal interest in this case.’
‘He’s still busy with that object from the studio. He has rebuilt it, but evidently he has… further investigations to make. I’m sure it will prove to be crucial one way or another to the solution of the mystery,’ I optimistically asserted.
‘Well, Mr Holmes’s methods are his own,’ Lestrade said grudgingly, ‘and I won’t deny they get results. If only he wasn’t so infernally secretive about them, and so dashed pleased with himself afterwards.’
Old and trusted colleague though Lestrade was, it felt disloyal to be discussing Holmes in this way, so I changed the subject. ‘What do we know of this Flatley fellow, then?’
Lestrade puffed out his lips and blew. ‘The cove lives in Whitechapel, I understand. He’s been a cabby for thirteen years and has never been in trouble with the law. If he’s suddenly decided to turn murderer now, he must have had pretty good reason.’
Flatley, when he was brought in, proved to be a fellow of about thirty, with a quick tongue but a rather surly look, especially when addressed by Lestrade or any other policeman. He was insistent that the police had no right to keep his cab from him, and was also demanding compensation for the loss of
his horse.
‘Now see here, my man,’ said Lestrade, ‘you’re lucky we’ve found your cab at all. If you go along with our enquiries and we’re satisfied with what you have to say, well, maybe you can have it back when you’re done with it. As for your horse, I doubt any of us will be seeing him again, except perhaps in a rissole.’
‘Her name’s Joanna,’ Flatley said truculently. ‘It was my auntie’s name.’
‘Well, sonny, it would’ve been a miracle if she hadn’t vanished seeing as how she was left unattended in Limehouse. Perhaps you can tell me how that came to happen.’
Flatley stared dubiously at me, and Lestrade said, ‘This gentleman is Dr Watson. He’s helping us out with our enquiries, see? Now you’d better start talking, my lad, and make no bones of it.’
I could see that my name meant as little to Flatley as his to me. He was a small, dark cockney with the muscular arms of his profession. Though of course I must have encountered many hundreds of London cabbies, and taken little note of their appearance, I did not think that I had ever seen him before.
Flatley said sullenly, ‘It was stolen, wasn’t it? Yesterday morning it was, Wednesday. I left Joey on her own with the hansom for a few minutes while I stepped into the Joker’s Arms on Bellinger Street to pick up a pot of ale – for later, you see, ’cause I wouldn’t never drink on duty and that’s God’s honest truth – and when I come out again she was gone. Nothing to do with me where the cab ended up after that. Did it get used to do crimes, then?’
I thought he was rather quick to jump to that conclusion, and I could see that Lestrade was also suspicious. He asked, ‘Did you see the man that took it?’
Flatley considered carefully. ‘I reckon maybe I did. There was this bloke leaning up against the wall of the Joker’s when I arrived. Big fellow he was, built like a docker, but he had glasses on and a little beard, like a gent. I reckon it was him.’
‘How old? How was he dressed?’ Lestrade asked.
‘A bit younger than me, I reckon. He had on ordinary working clothes, tweed jacket and trousers like you’d wear for any rough job.’
‘Hair colour?’ Lestrade demanded. ‘Eyes?’
Flatley looked nervous suddenly. ‘Well, I didn’t get close enough to see his eyes, ’specially with those specs on. Dark hair, though, like his beard.’
‘What sort of accent did he have?’
‘It was – Look, I don’t know, I didn’t talk to him, did I? I told you, he was just leaning up against the wall of the pub, waiting to waltz off with someone’s horse and hansom cab. What did he do with it, anyway? Why are you talking to me about this?’
Lestrade leaned back and folded his arms. ‘Ah, but you’ve told us a lot about him, Flatley. A lot more than you’d have noticed if you’d just walked past him in the street like that. You talked to him, didn’t you? So what was his accent like?’
‘Well, I s’pose I might have passed the time of day, like. He didn’t sound like he was from around here. Not foreign, though. Scottish, maybe? I didn’t ask.’
‘But you had a proper conversation with him, didn’t you?’ Lestrade insisted. ‘More than just passing the time of day. You had long enough to hear what he sounded like and take note of his hair and clothes. Long enough to get some ideas about what he might be planning to do with your cab, too. Isn’t that right, my man?’
Flatley sighed. ‘All right, peeler,’ he said. ‘All right. Cards on the table, then. Yes, I spoke to the bloke and yes, we talked about the cab. He might have mentioned that he had a use for it, like, and I might have said something like, “It’s more than I can afford to lend it to you, I could lose my licence that way.” And he might’ve said something like, “How about if I borrowed it while you was looking the other way, and brought it back here later? I’d only need it an hour, and there’s fifteen shillings in it for you.”’
‘Fifteen shillings?’ Lestrade whistled appreciatively. ‘You could buy a new nag for that.’
‘Not a decent one, I can’t. Not like my Joanna. Besides, I drank half of it last night when I realised the bloke wasn’t going to bring my cab back. What did he do with it, mister? I’ll kill him when I see him, running off with my Joey and treating her like that.’
‘We’ll have no threats of violence, my lad,’ Lestrade said. ‘Remember you’re in a police station. It would be no trouble at all to book you in and throw you in a cell. Especially since it looks like your cab was used in a murder.’
‘Coo!’ Flatley seemed excited to learn this. ‘That’ll be one to tell the lads. Who was it what got offed, then?’
‘Excuse me,’ I said, and left them to continue without me. It was perfectly apparent that Flatley was guilty of nothing more nefarious than a willingness to bend the rules to make some ready cash. It was also quite clear that Lestrade had always been capable of conducting this interview on his own. It was, after all, his profession, and the man was quite in his element.
I wondered whether Holmes had been expecting some more significant revelation to emerge, but for the life of me I could not think of what it might be. Flatley’s description of the ‘thief’ did not match anybody else in the case – not Rhyne nor Skinner, who were young but not burly; not Kellway nor Garforth, who were burly but not young; not Beech nor Kingsley, who were bearded but matched none of the other points; not Anderton nor Small, who were fat and not tall; and not Sir Newnham, who was far too elderly. Evidently whoever it was had employed an intermediary, as they had when they delivered Garforth’s purported message to Rhyne.
I wondered whether the reason for my presence was simpler still – Holmes was, he had insisted, frantically busy on whatever work he was still doing with Garforth’s peculiar indoor shed, so perhaps he simply wanted me out of his way for the morning. For the sake of my own feelings I hoped that this was not the case, but it would not have been entirely uncharacteristic of my friend at the times when he was most preoccupied with a mystery.
Determined that I should prove my worth regardless, I asked the desk sergeant whether I might inspect Flatley’s cab. It was the same man who had been on duty in the small hours, and he remembered me. He cheerfully assigned a constable to show me the way through to the stables.
In the yard, next to the burned-out wreck of the carriage found in Leytonstone, was an ordinary black hansom cab, considerably the worse for its sojourn in the slums of Limehouse. A window had been smashed, the paint was scratched, and not only the horse but all her harness and tack were missing. The interior presented an altogether more grisly picture.
We had all expected the paint – the same blue, green and white as I had already seen on Garforth’s studio floor, his steps and his trousers – but even I had not realised that there would be quite so much blood. Evidently the painter had still been bleeding profusely when he had been loaded into the hansom. Whether his assailant knew it or not, his victim had not been dead, though I had no hopes that he would have regained consciousness. Certainly there had been no blood at the warehouse, meaning that Garforth had been dead by the time he arrived there.
Further inspection quickly established that this was where Garforth’s body had been shaved for the second time. A myriad of small flecks of grey stubble adhered to all the paint stains, and were scattered liberally over the seats as well, particularly in one corner. The razor was nowhere in evidence, but the murderer could easily have cast it into a soil-heap, or the Thames, after abandoning the cab.
Having satisfied myself as to the condition of the visible surfaces, I lay down gingerly on the floor, doing my best to avoid the smeared paint and congealed blood, and peered beneath the seats, where I had already noticed something faintly glinting. I reached beneath the corner where the largest quantity of hair had been heaped, and with a cry of triumph retrieved – not the razor, but Garforth’s monocle.
The frame was of cheap metal, plated with silver, and attached to a smart black ribbon. I examined it carefully for any inscription. There was none, nor could I gather anything f
rom the occasional scratches to the lens and housing. Holmes might be able to deduce a man’s vices from the marks on his pocket-watch, but I was not Holmes. Emerging from the cab, I held the glass up to my right eye, and frowned.
My view of the stable-yard around me was completely undistorted. There was none of the bending and thickening of the image that characterised, for instance, the windows in Sir Newnham’s Experiment Rooms, or any ordinary pair of spectacles. The glass in this monocle had no optical properties at all. It would be useless as a corrective for anybody’s eyesight.
I remembered Holmes’s observation that the canvases in Garforth’s studio were not real paintings, nor even forgeries, but objects intended to give the impression of paintings. It seemed that Garforth’s monocle was likewise a mere facsimile of a monocle. It was the kind of accoutrement I might have expected to be worn on stage by an actor.
Did Garforth wear it purely as an affectation, I wondered? An artist might do such a thing, I supposed, if he wished to cultivate a particular impression. In any case, Holmes had thought the monocle would be significant, and that meant that this information was important to him. It was time for me to return and make my report.
I stopped by Lestrade’s desk, and he related cheerfully that he had let Flatley go for now, with a threat of misconduct proceedings hanging over his licence. ‘To keep him to heel,’ the inspector explained. ‘Unless we turn up something new, though, I think we’ll leave him be. He made a stupid mistake and he’s suffering for it. He’s proper cut up about that nag of his.’
I gave him an account of what I had discovered, and left the monocle in his keeping, with a suggestion to search for the razor in the area near where the cab had been found. I then returned again to Baker Street, determined this time that Holmes would pay attention to the important questions in hand.
Sherlock Holmes--The Vanishing Man Page 18