Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (25 page)

“What’s interesting about the Honourable Albert Filey is that his brother, with whom he was on very poor terms, was a Poseidon. If anyone could have drowned him by main force, it would have been someone who was at home in the water as he was on land. No charges were pressed, no arrest was made, but the feeling persisted in a certain stratum of society that the other Filey—Cecil, I believe, was his name—might have been responsible. The two had had a falling out. Fraternal hatred spiralled out of control. Sibling spite soured into homicide. In the event, as if to give the hearsay validity, Cecil Filey took his own life not three weeks later. Drank arsenic. Intolerable remorse, it was assumed.”

“If I follow your line of reasoning,” I said, “it would appear that people are being implicated in murders they did not commit. That’s the common thread that’s emerging here. A Hercules, a Poseidon, an Icarus—in each instance someone is being made to look the obvious culprit, in order to deflect attention away from someone else.”

“That is indeed how it looks. The question remains, however, who is doing this and how are they accomplishing it? Watson, if you will kindly see your own way home, I would like to wander alone a while and ruminate. There may be a single solution to all three cases, and if I can alight upon it, I may yet save Charlie Gartside from becoming a third innocent victim of a dastardly scheme.”

I
N THE EVENT
, I did not see Holmes or even hear from him for a full twenty-four hours. I was visited at noon the next day at my practice by a Mercury messenger, who presented me with a note in my friend’s handwriting summoning me to an address in Shadwell. I gave the messenger a shilling, and he thanked me in speech so rapid and garbled that I couldn’t make out one word in three, before racing off at such speed he seemed to vanish.

The address turned out to be an engineer’s workshop. “My investigations have brought me inexorably to this place,” said Holmes as he met me outside, “the doorstep of a scoundrel as ingenious and villainous as any we have encountered in our adventures together. I fear I shall have need of your invulnerability, old friend, and perhaps also your service pistol, which I am glad to see you have brought along, judging by the bulge in your jacket pocket.”

“Your note implied I might need it.”

“I pray my instincts are wrong,” said Holmes, “yet I fear they are not. Let us go in.”

The engineering workshop looked much like any other of its ilk, a barnlike premises that housed machinery and tools— lathes, drills, bandsaws. Its sole occupant was also its sole proprietor, one Algernon Roxton, according to the hoarding above the entrance.

Roxton was a small, sallow-complexioned individual with thinning mousy hair and an unprepossessing face which seemed set in a permanent sneer. Some childhood disease—polio, I adjudged—had left him with a withered left leg, a defect he had remedied by fixing an elaborate metal brace to the limb which cunningly utilised pistons and springs to lend support and an almost full range of motion. He came towards us with scarcely a limp, the brace creaking ever so slightly as he walked.

“Gentlemen,” he said, his hands hidden behind his back, “how may I be of assistance?”

“You may assist us,” replied Holmes, “by confessing, Mr. Roxton, to at least three counts of premeditated, cold-blooded murder. It will go easier on you, and save us all a great deal of bother, if you do.”

To Roxton’s credit, he scarcely even batted an eyelid. Instead, he whipped his hands out from behind him. In one was a kind of claw-like gauntlet, which he slipped over the other. It hissed with power as he flexed the fingers.

Reaching for Holmes with this device, he attempted to grasp my friend’s neck.

I swiftly interposed myself between the two of them, raising an arm so that Roxton’s gauntlet clamped onto my wrist rather than around Holmes’s throat. The pressure Roxton brought to bear on me was immense, and inflicted considerable pain—but not, of course, any harm.

I grinned at the man, and he in return frowned in dismay.

“Dash it all,” he cried. “Your bones should be powder by now, your wrist as narrow as a pipe cleaner.”

“Luck of the draw,” I said, and punched him unconscious.

B
ENEATH THE WORKSHOP
, accessible via a trapdoor, lay another workshop, a secondary lair where Roxton stored contraptions he had developed which lent him the abilities of any physical Category you might care to name. There was a submersible kit, a kind of diving apparatus which allowed him to remain underwater for a significant span of time, breathing through a tube connected to a canister of compressed oxygen. There was a flying pack which used rocket propulsion to suspend him in the air and flit through the skies guided by rudimentary batlike wings. There was a mate to the gauntlet, which gave him a grip strength equivalent to that of the mightiest Hercules. There was even a prototype of what appeared to be a pair of steampowered, wheeled boots with which he would be able to propel himself along, somewhat like an ice skater, but as fast as a Mercury.

Roxton, when he came round, was reluctant to talk at first. Holmes, however, menaced him with my revolver, and soon enough his tongue loosened.

Not only had Roxton been crippled by polio when he was a small boy, he had also been born Typical. Throughout his formative years, his lack of Category had eaten at him. He was jealous of his schoolmates as they discovered their various abilities, especially those who were fleet of foot or who could lift great weights. He was taunted for his sickliness and his Typicality. The jibes sank in deep and fuelled a lifelong misanthropy.

Finding that he had an aptitude for engineering, Roxton turned it into a vocation. He was highly proficient at it, something of a genius. Yet still resentment of others simmered away inside. The establishment, although it paid him well for the work he did building bridges and steam engines and factory machinery, never respected him the way it had the likes of Brunel and Telford. He did not move in the right circles, alienated from society by his normality, his freakish ordinariness. He should have been lauded and laureled; instead, he was kept at arm’s length and treated with a grudging toleration at best.

So he decided to put his one skill —his “only God-given talent,” in his words—to use in a different field. He would make himself indispensable to the great and good by volunteering to do their dirty work for them, at a fee. He would become a freelance assassin, tailoring his methods of execution so as to direct suspicion away from whoever hired him and onto other parties, incriminating them by the very gifts he resented.

As Holmes pressed him further, Roxton admitted that he was behind Sir Hugh Lanchester’s death and that his paymaster was none other than Amos Pilkington, Sir Hugh’s erstwhile business associate. “Since I’m likely to be feeling the hangman’s noose,” he said, “I may as well tell all. Besides, I bet it was Pilkington who gave me up, wasn’t it? Drunkard like that. Just the sort to turn on you when the chips are down.”

“As a matter of fact, it was the Earl of Bracewell,” said Holmes.

“The posh devil.” Roxton snorted in disgust. “Got that girl pregnant. Couldn’t handle the potential disgrace to his family name.”

“I ingratiated myself with him at his club last night,” Holmes said. “Challenged him to a few frames of snooker. Beat him soundly, even though he kept trying to force the cue ball to swerve whenever I struck it. There’s only so much top spin that a feeble nudge from a Mover’s mind can counteract, however.

Before long, he lost his temper and started yelling at me, calling me all sorts of names. A very sore loser. He became so enraged, just as I wanted, that the moment I mentioned the actress you killed for him, he blurted out that she was a whore and better off dead and he was glad she had died before she could give birth to his illegitimate offspring—although that is a politer phrase than the actual one he used to describe the child. This was in full view of his fellow club members, and I must say the effect was electric. Consternation. Pandemonium. His Grace had, with a few rash, poorly chosen words, all but admitted culpability for a capital offence, and before an audience of his peers, what’s more, none of whom had a particular affection for him, given that he was a known cheat and cozener. After that, he turned on you pretty quickly, Mr. Roxton.”

“Why am I surprised? Anything to save his own skin.”

“And here we are,” Holmes concluded. “Watson and I will be escorting you to the nearest police station, where you will be free to confess your role in the three murders I have ascribed to you and any others I may have missed out. I shall be especially keen for you to absolve Charlie Gartside of blame for Sir Hugh’s death. Although the man has yet to be arrested, I reckon it’s only a matter of time before Scotland Yard put two and two together and bring him in. With luck, we can forestall that unfortunate occurrence.”

As we dragged the defeated, crestfallen Roxton out of his workshop, he said, “I understand that you, Mr. Holmes, are a Typical, like me. That’s what Dr. Watson writes in the stories he publishes about you.”

“And it’s the truth.”

“How do you bear it? How can you stand being a weakling compared with everyone else? Doesn’t it fill you with hatred?”

“If it ever did,” said Holmes, “I am long past caring. I may not be a Hercules, an Achilles, a Cassandra, even an Olfactory, but I have compensated in my own way. I have not been consumed with bitterness about what I am not, but rather been consumed with desire to be the best I can be, given my limitations. Mother Nature bestows her several gifts upon us. Some are glorious and enviable and come without effort. Others, like mine, need work but are no less potent once fully realised.”

“You make it sound so... so straightforward.”

“That’s because it is,” said Holmes. “I like to think I now inhabit a unique Category, my very own, a denomination in which the developed powers of ratiocination and analytical reasoning are the sole qualifying criteria.”

“And does it have a name, this special, one-man Category of yours?” said Roxton with mockery and just a touch of condescension.

“It does,” said my friend phlegmatically. “Because there is nothing difficult about it, other than the application of intellect and observation, which are available to all, I have dubbed it with an appropriately simple and universal title.”

“Which is?”

“Elementary, Roxton. Elementary.”

I met Glen through mutual friends at various London publishing events, and have had the good fortune to appear alongside him in two anthologies; Glen’s a thrilling new talent, and you’ll be seeing more from him. ‘Half There/All There’ a
beautiful
story set in the bohemian world of Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory,’ and perfectly grounded, not just in the mood of that crowd, but in the events of the time. It also imbues Holmes with a sort of fierce sadness and regret that took me by surprise, and which will follow you long after the story’s done.

T
HE WORLD KNOWS
Sherlock Holmes through these pages as a calculating machine, seeking justice with cold logic, but I know another side of him. A soft side, a less serious side. Playful. Actually funny, even, if you can believe it, and one of the best friends a man could ever have, if you could get past his weirdness.

I first met Sherlock Holmes at the closing party of the first Factory, that silver box filled with pills and people, covered in tin foil, mylar, and plexiglass. He walked in, this tall, rail-thin man, white skin and black hair slicked back, cut short, like a banker or lawyer or something. Not my type, but I couldn’t stop watching. He was the opposite of hip, but people noticed when he walked in and stood in the corner, smoking cigarette after cigarette, rolling each one himself. He watched everyone watching him, and, after an hour, came over to me, offering me a roll-up.

“It’s only tobacco. That’s all you smoke. You had enough of marihuana and opium In Country after you hurt your shoulder. You’re more involved with things that are a bit more imaginative, something that might spur you to get up and do something, aren’t you?”

His voice was low, with an accent that was hard to place, his flat vowels and clipped consonants emanating effortless cool. A strange way of talking, too. Educated. Erudite, rejecting the language of the street, but also avoiding the affected language of the Factory pretenders, claiming European authenticity as a tiny bit of recognition. Style was the thing, convincing others that you were brilliant. Andy had a shotgun approach to catch whatever outstanding people happened to fall into the orbit of his ragtag collection of sexual deviants and junkies.

I didn’t like him coming up and telling me things about myself.

“How’d you know I was In Country? And just what do you think I’ve got for you? I don’t have anything to do with grass, or mushrooms, or any of that hippy shit.”

I watched his thin face while he spoke, his jawbone etched out of granite there, though long and delicate, not like the ad men. I couldn’t stop looking at him, listening to his talk. “You’ve got a shoulder wound, that’s apparent from the hitch you had leaning against the wall, but you didn’t grimace, so it’s something you’re used to. New Yorkers don’t get much sun, but you’re brown, with malaria scars. The way you move and stand shows a streetwise city upbringing. You watch other people around you, keeping an eye out for customers and the police, yet you’ve rolled your eyes at two deals, grass and heroin. So: you were in Vietnam, bored with common drugs. You’re looking to sell something. I need something to occupy my mind and time. Something beyond even the delights manufactured in this Factory.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I took the cigarette he offered and lit it. It was a strong blend, thick, pungent smoke pouring out of the end, but nice. I looked up at him.

“It’s called Drum. It comes to me from the Netherlands—from someone who owes me a favour.”

He smiled at me, a crooked smile that turned my guts to water. I’d have a talk with him, and find out more about this observant, smoking man who’d just walked in to my life; for more than just a conversation, as it turned out.