Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets (6 page)

W
ENZEL
T
ERNAC WAS
a small, tidy fellow, fine-boned, delicate features, with wisps of ash-brown hair and the palest blue eyes Watson had ever seen. Those eyes peered at the two intruders in his kitchen over a pair of wire spectacles and a dried bit of cake. They were all seated at the table, gazing politely across at one another.

“I don’t know what more I can tell you, gentlemen. The deputy constable and the coroner from Dudley gave the place a thorough going over.”

A fly bumped past Holmes’s head and he waved a lazy hand at it. “Have the flies been particularly bothersome, Mr. Ternac? They are dreadful in London this summer, I can tell you.”

“Must be all the excrement running in the streets, I suppose.”

“Not to mention the sewage, eh?” Holmes said with a wink and a grin. “But I understand you still intend to move shop to London at the end of summer, despite the recent tragedy. I do hope the thought of our sewage hasn’t changed your mind. There are so many opportunities for a man of your abilities there.”

Ternac, uncertain if he was being baited, said, “I have not decided. I had much counted upon young Bowen’s assistance with it all.”

“And also his skill, I imagine. He learned a great deal in his time with Master Vandernedon. So I’m told.”

“He was well-trained,” Ternac acknowledged coolly, “but was far from a journeyman.”

“Yet you paid him a wage.”

“A small wage. Because of his mother. He would have had to work as a common labourer to provide for her welfare. I didn’t wish to see his talents go to waste.”

The persistent fly landed on the cake, and Ternac brushed it away. His hand was trembling slightly.

“You’ll need to put the saucers out again,” Holmes said.

“What?” Ternac blinked and blinked behind the little ovals of his spectacles.

“The saucers with the fly agaric in them. You’re out of powder, though. I found the empty packet in the rubbish heap behind your workshop.”

“Why—? What were you doing at my shop?”

“Admiring your spring pole lathe. We were all very impressed.”

“All?” The man whispered.

“Dr. Watson and myself, and the deputy constable.” The sound of Ternac swallowing was very loud. The fly landed upon the cake again. “Were you aware, Mr. Ternac, that flies don’t actually die from fly agaric? It merely intoxicates them. That is why you’re advised to pluck them out of the milk where they float in indolent bliss and toss them onto a fire. Otherwise they recover and fly off, no worse for it.”

“I cannot see why you feel the need to tell me all this about flies.”

“Oh, Mr. Ternac,” Holmes clucked in mock sympathy. “But you do. You
do
see. Jimmy Bowen, much like a fly, did not die from the amanita muscaria you gave him. He fell into a coma, that much is probably true, but you couldn’t risk his waking. Not after he figured it out, about the poison... That is why you were forced to put a cushion over his face and smother him.”

“That’s—that’s a lie. I had no reason to wish him dead.”

“I know. That’s what confused me at first. But once Joseph Henzley has had a chance to examine the broken glass from the witch’s bottle, I think we shall learn the truth—No, no don’t bother,” he cautioned as Ternac shot a glance at the door. “There are men coming here to arrest you. They will not feel kindly toward you if they are forced to chase you in this heat.”

Watson rose nevertheless, and moved to block any attempts to flee, but Wenzel Ternac, caught in the icy mien of Sherlock Holmes’ condemnation, could not seem to find his feet.

Holmes continued, “I’ve been told that the secret to creating the finest of small lenses is not as much in the grinding of the glass as in the formulation of the glass itself. And of that particular clear, fine glass the late Vandernedon was a master. That was the secret everyone believed he’d taken to his grave. Even Jimmy thought so, but you knew otherwise, didn’t you? You knew Vandernedon had shared his secret with the boy, even if Jimmy didn’t realise it himself. You knew it the first time he showed you the bottle he’d made for his mother. The very one she later filled with nails and pins and urine in order to protect her son from the girl you said had cursed him with witchcraft.”

Ternac drew in a deep shuddering breath. “He was going to stay for that dull ugly girl. I offered him a chance to better himself, I offered prestige, honour, the chance for greatness, and he wanted to stay here—with a dairymaid! What could I do?”

“Murder, apparently.”

“I’
D
’
VE THOUGHT GROUND
glass’d be the first choice of a glazier,” Cafferty said, over a much deserved pint at the Ram’s Head. It was his own ale from his own buttery, as he was also the proprietor.

“A glazier, of all people, would have known that doesn’t work, Mr. Cafferty.”

“What? Ground glass? It does! My cousin’s friend in Dudley heard of a woman that killed her husband with it.”

“She may well have killed him, sir, but not with ground glass. The mouth and tongue are sensitive instruments, able to detect a bit of grit or a tiny stone in a spoonful of beans. Enough ground glass to kill a person would be very obvious in the mouth; if it were ground fine enough that the victim didn’t notice, it would pass through the gut with only mild discomfort, and perhaps not even that. The human body is a remarkably efficient machine.”

“A machine doesn’t commit murder, Holmes,” Watson said.

He rolled a silver ring back and forth beneath his palm. They’d found it amongst the effects Jimmy had hidden under the floor boards beneath the bed in which he’d been murdered: earnest efforts at poetics, a lock of black hair and other indications of mutual affection. These items were in Watson’s pocket, to be given to Reverend Lilly with the ring, so that he might give it to Alice. He hoped it would be some measure of comfort to her. Noting the ring and easily deciphering Watson’s expression, Holmes smiled.“Nor does it love, you will tell me. But one day man will create a machine as intricate as the human body, and that machine will find us ridiculous and flawed and wicked, and that machine will justifiably end us.”

“An old philosophical discussion I am much too tired to have with you tonight.”

“All right, all right, old friend, I shall spare you my gloomy predictions. Have you set a guard on Rob Duggar as I suggested, Mr. Cafferty?”

“He’s in the stocks, Mr. Holmes. Where can he go?”

“He’s escaped before. As I’ve mentioned. More than once.”

“Yes, I’ll see to it.” But he went over to talk to the barman instead.

“He’ll not be there by morning.”

“Who? Duggar?”

“He has an accomplice in town. A young seamstress with a talent for lining coats.”

“Well, you’d best tell the deputy constable hadn’t you?”

“I don’t see why I should do
all
the work for him. But you and I should take extra precautions on our journey home. Loaded pistols, my friend, just in case.”

Watson shook his head wearily and rose to make his way to their room and a bed. He could scarcely believe they’d solved a murder, saved a girl from the gallows and sent the guilty party to it—and all before the sun had set.

I came by Julie Cohen when another author I’d approached contacted me to give his regrets, and threw her under the wheels of my fury; and it’s just as well he did. Aside from discovering that I’d walked home past her house every day for three years(!), I got an immensely fun Holmes story set in the late ’seventies (one of three stories with a New York-based Holmes investigating a crime on the West Coast, which is a weird coincidence), full of pop culture references. I can’t actually tell you why I
really
love ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Bandana’ without spoiling it, so I’ll just leave it there...

I
N MY MANY
years as the intimate companion of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, we inevitably were called upon to investigate confidential matters. Sometimes these involved international security; at other times the cases dealt with the hardly less delicate world of celebrity. Of course everyone is aware of the role that Holmes played in solving the Puzzle of the Grassy Knoll, and his key actions laying bare the full extent of the Watergate Scandal; but in my extensive notes, I also find records of the sensational case of the Abhorrent Disco, and the shocking affair of the Squealing Louse—both matters where the utmost discretion was required to avert an international scandal, or indeed warfare.

All my papers relating to these cases are safely locked away in my old dispatch box. The press has attempted persuasion, bribery and, more recently, burglary to access the box. Every attempt has failed—and I will take this opportunity to warn the parties involved that every similar attempt
will
fail, as I have security advice from no less a person than Mr. Mycroft Holmes, late of the CIA.

This week, however, I received a letter from Holmes himself, written from his retirement maple-tapping in the Okanagan woods. The envelope contained only two objects: a folded and creased page torn from a tabloid newspaper, and a note written in Holmes’s characteristic laconic scrawl. Both made my heart sink.

He has passed on to a better world at last. He is safe. You may write about the speckled bandana. SH

It was a Thursday in the summer of ’77, then, that I called upon Holmes in his quarters at 221B Bleecker Street in Manhattan, during a break from my medical duties. Despite the hot weather I found him in a fug of smoke, an empty packet of Winstons at his knee; he greeted me in his habitual offhand way, by tossing a plastic specimen bag at me.

“Watson,” said he, “what do you make of this?”

I held the bag up to the light. At first, it appeared to me to be empty, but upon inspection I saw that it contained no fewer than three hairs.

“Is it the forensic evidence from some crime scene? Traces left behind by a murderer, perhaps?”

“No no, nothing so exciting. I stepped out this afternoon, and I’ve had a caller in my absence. These hairs were left on the cushion of the very sofa where you sit now, Watson. Who is our prospective client? You know my methods; apply them.”

I peered more closely at the hairs in the bag. “It was a woman?” I hazarded. “They’re all over six inches long.”

“Watson, you are the one fixed point in a changing age,” remarked Holmes, laughing. “You, of course, keep your military crew cut, but for the rest of us, fashions have changed.”

“You think it was a man, then?”

“I know it was a man, for the simple reason that Mrs. Hudson informed me that his name was Kevin. But what sort of man, Watson? And what is his likely business with us?”

“How can we tell his business from his hair, Holmes?”

He merely raised his eyebrows, passed me a magnifying glass, and opened another packet of Winstons.

I applied myself to the task at hand. After a very few moments I put down the glass in satisfaction and said, “He’s a hairdresser.”

“Good, Watson, good! You noticed, of course, that the three hairs aren’t from the same head.”

“One is curly and red, one straight and black, and the third is black and kinky. He must have cut the hair of all of these people before he came to Bleecker Street.”

“A very sensible guess. However, it
is
a guess, and it is wrong. If our visitor is a hairdresser, why are the hairs all full-length? Why are there no smaller cut hairs left behind as well? One would expect there to be many more shorter-cut hairs adhering to a hairdresser’s clothes than long ones.”

“What is the explanation, then?”

“You are a medical man—examine the hairs more closely. Do you not notice a certain sheen to them? Open the bag; do you not detect an odour?”

“Hairspray?”

“No no, it is self-evident that this man is—but here, if I am not mistaken, is his tread upon the stair, and he can tell us the facts himself. Hello, Mr. Kevin Lowe. I apologise that I was absent when you came by earlier.”

The man who entered the room had hair slightly longer than average, even for the current style, but it was brown, with bushy sideburns. He wore a denim jacket and a yellow shirt, with a wide pointed collar open to an expanse of chest hair, and brown satin bell-bottom trousers. Although no more than of the average height, his platform boots gave him several extra inches, and he wore a diamond ring on his finger, and a small gold earring in the lobe of his left ear. His hands were fine and sensitive, as was his mouth, giving the impression of an artist or a fine craftsman. Holmes waved him to a chair, and offered him a cigarette, which he accepted and lit with an engraved Zippo from his pocket.

“Oh man, I’m glad that I caught you,” he said.“My flight back to Vegas takes off in three hours, and I was hoping you’d be on it with me.”

“This is my colleague, Dr. Watson, before whom you may be as frank as before myself. Pray tell, Mr. Lowe, what’s so urgent in the wax museum business that you need me to fly to Nevada immediately?”

Our client’s eyes widened. “I didn’t think I’d left my card behind.”

“You didn’t.”

“Well, Mr. Holmes, I’d heard you were good, or I wouldn’t have flown all the way across the country. But I didn’t know you were
that
good. Or have you visited Lowe’s House of Stars?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“You’d be a rare person if you had. Business isn’t exactly booming.” He sighed, letting out a long stream of smoke. “I’ve studied my craft all over the world, and I like to think of myself as an artist, but when it comes down to it, I’m not much competition for a plain old onearmed bandit. I’d sure like to know how you knew what my job was.”

“The hairs!” I cried. “Their smell and their unnatural sheen told you that they were not from any human head. But how did you deduce the wax museum, Holmes? Why not a wigmaker?”

“You accuse me of not keeping up with popular culture, my dear Watson. But when a man leaves behind hairs that clearly resemble not only those owned by recording artists Cher and Michael Jackson, but also the star of this year’s new smash Broadway hit,
Annie,
he would have to be a wig-maker to the stars indeed.”