The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (13 page)

The Case of the Unseen Hand

I

In that series of events which I call ‘The Case of the Unseen Hand', everything appeared to turn against us from the outset. Yet, at its conclusion, Sherlock Holmes enjoyed a private success that was seldom matched in any of his other investigations.

Readers of ‘The Golden Pince-Nez', a narrative made public in
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
, may recall my reference to the earlier triumph of the great detective in tracking and arresting Huret, the so-called ‘Boulevard Assassin' of Paris, in 1894. Holmes was rewarded for his services with a handwritten letter from the President of France and by the Order of the Legion of Honour. The presidential letter was written in January 1895 by Félix Faure, who had just then succeeded to the leadership of his country at a most difficult moment, following the assassination of President Carnot and a few months of unhappy tenure by Casimir-Périer.

Holmes had a natural sympathy for Félix Faure, as a man who had risen from humble circumstances to the highest position in France. It was unfortunate for Monsieur Faure, however, that a month before he assumed office, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young probationary officer of the French General Staff, had been condemned by court martial to life imprisonment in the steaming and unbroken heat of Devil's Island for betraying his country's military secrets to Germany. In the aftermath of the trial there were rioting crowds in the streets of Paris, demanding the execution of Dreyfus. The President himself was attacked in public and spat upon for his leniency. The mob threatened death to any man courageous enough to doubt the guilt of ‘the traitor'. Dreyfus was first ‘degraded' on the parade ground of the École Militaire and then transported to that infamous penal colony off the French Guianan coast of South America. He was confined to a tiny stone hut, day and night, in the breathless heat of Cayenne Île du Diable. Though escape was impossible from such a place, his ankles were locked in double irons attached to a bar across the foot of his cot. His true punishment was not imprisonment for life but death by slow torture. A firing-squad would have been a more humane sentence.

The facts alleged against Alfred Dreyfus were that he had sold his country's secrets to Colonel Max von Schwartzkoppen, Military Attaché at the German Embassy in Paris. The court martial was held
in camera
but the details of the accusations were public knowledge. The paper, which his prosecutors insisted was in the hand of Dreyfus, conveyed to Colonel Schwartzkoppen specifications of the new and highly secret 120 mm gun, its performance and deployment; the reorganisation plan of the French Artillery, and the Field Artillery Firing Manual. Only an officer of the General Staff could have held such information.

Sherlock Holmes, like Émile Zola and a host of impartial men and women, never believed in the guilt of Captain Dreyfus. My friend's skill in graphology convinced him that the handwriting on the letter to Colonel Schwartzkoppen was not that of Alfred Dreyfus but, perhaps, a half-successful attempt at imitation. Like Monsieur Zola, Holmes also deplored the bigotry of the prosecution, the whole manner of the court martial and condemnation. Years later, our
Dreyfusards
were proved right. Colonel Hubert Henry of the Deuxième Bureau and Lemercier-Picard, who had both forged further ‘evidence' to deepen the guilt of Dreyfus after his condemnation, committed suicide.

In the years that followed our adventure, the innocence of Dreyfus and the guilt of a certain Major Count Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy were to be established. Restored to his command, as a gallant officer of the Great War, Captain Dreyfus was to join Sherlock Holmes as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. The manner in which justice was done at last forms the background to my account of our own case.

II

In January 1899, when the presidency of Félix Faure and the imprisonment of Captain Dreyfus had already lasted for four years, Holmes and I travelled to Paris on behalf of the British government. Our confidential mission, which had been warmly supported by our friend Lestrade at Scotland Yard, was to meet the great Bertillon. Alphonse Bertillon was a former professor of anthropology, now head of the Identification Bureau at the Préfecture de Police. The ‘Bertillon System' had enabled the French police to identify a man or woman uniquely by measuring certain bony structures of the body, notably those of the head. It was claimed in Paris that these measurements would render all criminal disguises and false identities futile. The objection at Scotland Yard was that such a system was far too complicated for general use. In England, Sherlock Holmes and Sir Francis Galton had been working upon the simpler method of identification by fingerprints, which Bertillon had also pioneered. They had been set upon the task by Mr Asquith, as Home Secretary in 1893. At first their opponents argued that no jury would be persuaded to convict a defendant upon such a whimsical theory. Twelve years later, however, the Stratton brothers were to be hanged for the Deptford Street murder on the evidence of a single thumbprint.

When we set off for Paris in January 1899, it was our mission to persuade Professor Bertillon to join his efforts with ours in championing this simpler method of criminal detection. One of Bertillon's original objections had been that a great many surfaces retain no visible fingerprint. Holmes had answered this when he devised in our Baker Street rooms a system for making these unseen or ‘latent' fingerprints visible, by the use of silver nitrate powder or iodine fumes. Bertillon then demanded of him how such evidence was to be displayed in court. In reply, Holmes had painstakingly adapted a small Kodak camera by adding an open box to the front, so that the lens always looked down on the fingerprint from a uniform distance and was therefore permanently in focus. By this means, any number of photographs of a fingerprint might be made for a criminal trial. He had brought his prototype of the camera to display to the great French criminologist. All the same, there was no sign as yet that such advances would persuade Professor Bertillon to change his mind.

On a chill but windless January day, we crossed from Folkestone to Boulogne by the
Lord Warden
steamer. Holmes stood at the ship's rail, his sharp profile framed by his ear-flapped travelling-cap. As soon as we cast off from Folkestone harbour pier, it seemed that his interest in his French adversary underwent a significant change. Fingerprints and skull measurements were discarded from our conversation. He unfolded a sheet of paper and handed it to me.

‘The affair of Captain Dreyfus, Watson. Read this. It is a private note from my disgraced friend Colonel Picquart, late of the Information Branch of the Deuxième Bureau. Even in this matter it seems that we cannot escape the shade of Bertillon. Picquart tells me that the professor is immoveable, convinced that the incriminating letter of 1894 is in the hand of Captain Dreyfus. For a man of Bertillon's capability to believe such a thing is quite beyond my comprehension. Unfortunately, however, his reputation as a criminal expert will count for far more in a courtroom than all Monsieur Zola's denunciations of injustice.'

He shook his head and gave a quiet sigh, staring across the Channel. The sea lay calm as wrinkled satin towards the sands of France, pale and chill on the horizon of that winter afternoon.

‘Then what will you do?' I asked, handing back to him the sheet of paper.

‘I shall pray, Watson. Not for a miracle—merely for an opportunity to demonstrate to Professor Bertillon the error of his methods in graphology and identification alike. There is a battle to be fought and won for Captain Dreyfus but it must be fought at the right time and in the right place.'

During the next few weeks our Baker Street quarters were exchanged for two bedrooms and a sitting-room at the Hôtel Lutétia in the Boulevard Raspail. It was an area of business and bustle, having more in common with the nearby railway terminus of the Gare Montparnasse than with the bohemian society of poets and artists which the name of that district more often suggests. The Hôtel Lutétia rose like the hull of an ocean liner above a quayside in this commercial avenue of tall houses with their grey mansard roofs, their elegant windows and balconies set in pale tide-washed stone. In front of many a grander building, a handsome
porte-cochère
entrance remained. Yet the days of Second Empire quiet had gone. As afternoon drew on, the winter sun threw up a dusty light from the constant traffic.

I was not present at the private discussions between Holmes and Professor Bertillon, which were concluded in a day or two. In truth, there was little to discuss so long as the two men remained immoveable. The silver nitrate, the iodine fumes, the special camera, were mere toys in Bertillon's view. To make matters worse, a further hostility arose in general conversation when the professor repeated his view that the incriminating message of 1894 to the German Military Attaché was written in the hand of Captain Dreyfus. The first day's meeting ended with ill temper on both sides. Next morning Bertillon returned to the debate over scientific detection, insisting that fingerprints might be disfigured or erased, or even prevented by the wearing of gloves. They were no substitute for the measurement of criminal heads, where counterfeiting was an impossibility. With that, he indicated that his exchange of views with his English visitor was at an end. Holmes returned from the Préfecture de Police in a filthy temper, his vanity bruised, and his appetite for battle with the French anthropologist all the keener. I could not help thinking—though I judged it best not to say so at the time—that the sooner we returned to Baker Street, the better.

I had begun to look forward to our return and was already picturing myself among the comforts of home, when I heard my companion in the lobby of the hotel, informing the manager that we should require our rooms for at least another fortnight.

‘But why?' I demanded, as soon as we were alone.

‘Because, Watson, an innocent man is condemned to suffer the nightmare of Devil's Island until he drops dead from exhaustion or the brutality of the regime. Bertillon, the one expert whose word might yet save him, refuses to say that word. As it happens, he also rejects, unexamined, the only infallible method of criminal identification upon which others have lavished years of toil. I do not greatly care for Alphonse Bertillon. I swear to you that these two issues may yet become a personal matter between us.'

‘For God's sake, Holmes! You cannot fight a duel with the head of a French police bureau!'

‘In my own way, Watson, that is just what I propose to do.'

After so much bluster, as I thought it, Holmes became inexplicably a pattern of idleness. So much for his threats against Professor Bertillon! Like a man who feels that the best of life is behind him, he began to describe our visit to Paris as a chance that ‘might not come again'. Yet I could not believe that it was some premonition of mortality that determined him to spend two or three weeks longer in the city. More probably it was his usual mode of life, in which he alternated between intense periods of obsessional activity—when he would sleep little and eat less—and weeks when he seemed to do little more than stare from his armchair at the sky beyond the window, without a thought in his head.

The indolence that came upon him now was not quite of the usual sort. He tasted something of bohemian café society at the Closerie des Lilas with its trees and its statue of Marshal Ney. He spent an entire day reading the icy tombstones of Montparnasse cemetery, as he was to do next day at Père Lachaise. For the most part, we walked the cold streets and parks as we had never done in any other city.

A frosty morning was our time for the tree-lined vista of the Avenue de la Grande Armée, the lakes and woods of the Bois de Boulogne extending before us in a chill mist. Down the wide thoroughfare, the closed carriages of fashionable society rattled on frozen cobbles. The shrubbery gardens of the adjacent mansions lay silent and crisp beyond the snowcaps of tall wrought-iron railings.

‘My dear Holmes,' I said that evening, ‘it is surely better that we should go our separate ways for a little. There is no purpose in our remaining longer in Paris. At least, there is no purpose for me. Let me return to London and attend to business there. You may stay here and follow when you think the time is right. There can be no use in both of us remaining.'

‘Oh, yes, Watson,' he said quietly, ‘there is the greatest use in the world. It will require us both, of that I am sure.'

‘May I know what the use is?'

‘The question cannot be pressed,' he said vaguely. ‘The purpose must mature in its own time.'

It matured at a snail's pace, as it seemed to me, for almost a week. During those days our morning rambles now took us through the red revolutionary
arrondissements
of the north-east. We crossed the little footbridges of the Canal Saint-Martin. Holmes studied the sidings and marshalling-yards of Aubervilliers with the rapt attention that other visitors might give to the
Mona Lisa
in the Louvre. A late sun of the winter morning rose like a red ball through the mist across the heroic distance of the Place de la République, where the statue of Marianne stands like a towering Amazon protecting the booths and shooting galleries. By evening we were in the wide lamplit spaces of the Place de la Concorde, the tall slate roofs of the Quai d'Orsay rising through a thin river mist on the far bank.

Five days passed in this manner, as if Holmes were mapping the city in his head, noting the alleys, culs-de-sac, escape routes, and short cuts. That evening, there were footsteps on the stairs. At the door of our rooms, there appeared briefly and dimly a visitor who brought an envelope of discreet and expensive design with the gold initials ‘RF' interwoven. Holmes read the contents but said nothing.

Next morning, he came from his room in a costume more bizarre than any of his disguises as a tramp or a Lascar seaman. He was wearing the black swallow-tailed coat and white tie of court dress. Before I could ask what the devil this meant, there was a discreet tap at the door and our visitor of the previous evening reappeared, now similarly attired in formal dress. I caught a murmured exchange and the newcomer twice used the form of ‘Monsieur le Président', when indicating that time pressed. Holmes accompanied him without a word. I turned to the window and saw them enter a closed carriage, its black coachwork immaculately polished but without a single crest or other emblem to indicate its origins. I could only suppose it was for this summons that Holmes had been waiting while we walked the streets of Paris.