The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (43 page)

In that moment, Mr Abrahams's attitude towards him underwent a total conversion. He saw that Sherlock Holmes was the one man in the world who might even now save his client. Yet he still nagged at the difficulties.

‘If their man opens the envelope you have left and finds blank paper, will he not expect trouble?'

Holmes frowned a little.

‘The reverse, I think. If the man who sent this message opens the envelope, he may assume that my blank paper means his message has been received. He will be reassured. The other man will perhaps suppose it to be a signal or warning. There will be confusion for a while, rather than suspicion, which I confess suits my purpose admirably.'

Though better-disposed towards Holmes, the lines of anxiety in the lawyer's drawn face remained deeply incised.

‘At the best, Mr Holmes, I fear this may be a goose-chase that will take months to conclude. It may lead us all over Europe.'

Holmes affected genuine astonishment.

‘I should be sorry if that were so, Mr Abrahams. I had proposed to bring the entire investigation to its conclusion by the end of the week—or next week at the very latest. As for distance, I shall be surprised if our inquiry takes us more than five miles from where we are now sitting. However, there is no time to lose. It is imperative that I should immediately interview the commander of the Scotland Yard detective police, Superintendent Williamson. It must be done this morning.'

Mr Abrahams looked at him in dismay. ‘Impossible! You would be fortunate to see him a week from now. If you follow the political news …'

‘I do not,' said Holmes hastily.

‘If you did, you would see that he is appearing morning and afternoon just now before a parliamentary select committee on criminal law reform.'

‘Is he indeed?' Holmes walked across the room and took his cape from its cupboard. ‘That is where my elder brother Mycroft will prove of the greatest assistance to us. He is the government's interdepartmental adviser and was instrumental in setting up that very committee, to which he told me the other evening that he now acts as secretary. I do not generally take a great interest in such bodies but where criminal law is concerned I allow an exception. Mycroft Holmes, as you perhaps know, is also a founder of the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall. Almost all its members belong to that little circle of government in Whitehall. Brother Mycroft knows everyone who is anyone in that celebrated thoroughfare. Prime Ministers may come and go but he goes on for ever. By a happy chance, he was the seconder when Frederick Adolphus Williamson—who, by the way, is known as “Dolly” to his friends—was proposed for membership of the Diogenes.'

‘You astonish me,' said Mr Abrahams, smiling for the first time that morning.

Holmes finished the last button of his cape and looked up.

‘I had not intended to surprise you. However, I believe you will find that Lord Llandaff, as chairman of the select committee, will find it inconvenient to sit between eleven o'clock and lunch today. He does not yet know that, but I promise you it will be so after I have communicated with Mycroft. As for Mr Williamson, he will find himself a captive with time upon his hands in the Palace of Westminster. The company of a fellow member of the Diogenes Club will be some consolation to him. I daresay, he will quite welcome a little chat.'

IV

A few moments before noon, Sherlock Holmes followed the footsteps of a uniformed flunky down a corridor that was tiled in blue, yellow and brown diamonds. Officials in red livery with buckle-shoes hurried by, playing-card figures overtaken by time. The gothic doors, embellished by fretwork or gilding, were labelled as ‘Motions' or ‘Questions', ‘Court Postmaster' or ‘Table Office'. Fan vaulting spread high above him. In bright murals, King James threw the Great Seal in the Thames, and King William found it again.

The flunky opened a door and stood back, as Holmes entered a long room looking upon the river. Foundries, glass-houses, and printing-works on the Surrey shore poured their feathery smoke into a cold sky. An oak table ran the length of the room, set with upright chairs carved in Tudor style and padded with red leather. By a grey marble fireplace stood two men, one of whom was recognizable as the brother of Sherlock Holmes, despite differences of size and shape.

Mycroft Holmes was the elder by seven years, a big lethargic man, his heavy face lined by the same incisive lines as his younger brother's. His unwieldy frame supported a massive intelligence in the great brow and in penetrating steel-grey eyes. He extended a large flat hand, which those meeting him for the first time were apt to think of as the flipper of a seal. He turned to his companion, a stocky nervous figure, a dwarf beside Mycroft.

Frederick Adolphus Williamson was a broad-faced man with mutton-chop whiskers and a gentle manner. The son of a Hammersmith constable, he had risen by self-education and diligence to exercise an uneasy command over the Detective Police of Scotland Yard. The three men sat down at one end of the long table, still littered with papers from the joint select committee.

‘Archer & Co.,' said Mycroft to his brother, ‘Northumberland Street. We are ahead of you there, Sherlock. Would you not say so, Dolly?'

‘An international affair,' Williamson replied with a quick smile of apology, ‘Scotland Yard and the French police at the Sûreté.'

The keen profile of Sherlock Holmes showed the least suggestion of hostility.

‘You speak of forged newspapers and fraudulent investments?'

‘Just so,' said Williamson, sweetness itself.

‘I should guess, Sherlock,' mused Mycroft Holmes, ‘that, grateful as we are to you for noticing the matter on our behalf, we shall soon have the City of Paris Loan swindle well in hand.'

‘Guessing is a shocking habit!' Sherlock Holmes said sharply. ‘It is destructive to the logical faculty …'

Mycroft broke in with a mocking apology.

‘You see, Dolly? My brother could keep a red-hot coal in his mouth more easily than a clever remark. The City of Paris …'

‘I am not here about the City of Paris,' said Sherlock Holmes quietly. ‘My concern is with a Society for Insuring Against Losses on the Turf, and its creator, Major Hugh Montgomery.'

Mycroft and the superintendent looked at one another. It was plain that they had never heard of Major Montgomery.

‘Not the City of Paris Loan?' Mycroft inquired. ‘Perhaps, Sherlock, we must take you into our confidence a little.' He raised his eyebrows at Superintendent Williamson who looked down at his hands, then gave a quick nod.

‘The City of Paris Loan,' Mycroft went on slowly, ‘is advertised as a means to finance the rebuilding of ancient sewers in that city. It promises to eliminate death by cholera and similar contagions. It is said to be backed by guarantees from the French government, who will pay fifteen per cent a year to stockholders with return of capital in full after five years. English and French private investors have been solicited and are almost begging the promoters to take their money. As well as the company's brochures, these investors have received copies of the most enthusiastic pages from the French papers.
Figaro, Le Monde
, and the Paris financial press describe it as the investment of a lifetime. Small wonder that there has been such a race among English clients to invest while the loan-stock remains on sale.'

He glanced at the superintendent who sat, as Sherlock Holmes later described it to me, like a man hunched under the knell of doom.

‘May I tell my brother the rest?' asked Mycroft Holmes.

Williamson hesitated, then nodded but without looking up.

‘I think it may be necessary.' Mycroft Holmes turned to Sherlock again. ‘What I tell you must not be repeated outside this room. I must have your most solemn word that you will not disclose the matter to another soul until it has been brought into public view.'

Sherlock Holmes assented by a certain petulant quirk of the mouth at the thought that his brother should have stooped to demand his solemn word in such a manner. Then Mycroft Holmes continued.

‘The City of Paris Loan and the turf fraud of which you speak, but of which I had never heard until just now, are only the latest of their kind. A series of these crimes has occurred during the past three or four years, though they have been kept from the public and the press. Presently you will understand why. Sometimes the villains are Gardner & Co. in Edinburgh, then they are the Paris Discretionary, next we have Colletso and the Egyptian Loan, then comes George Washington Morton and the New York Discretionary Investment Society. They grow like summer flowers, are cut down, and appear again next day. There is no end to them.'

‘And the perpetrators?' Sherlock Holmes inquired sceptically. ‘Are they so fleet of foot?'

‘In every case so far, it seems they have been trapped, only for the arresting officers to find the premises empty and the criminals gone.'

‘It is often the case,' said Sherlock Holmes with a philosophical yawn. ‘Can it really be for no more than this that I am sworn to secrecy?'

Mycroft shook his head.

‘You are sworn to secrecy for this.'

He drew out an envelope containing a photographic print. Sherlock Holmes took it, fingered a magnifying-glass from his breast pocket and studied it. The print showed three fragments of half-burnt paper, photographed when they were almost too brittle to touch and in the moment before they would crumble to ash. There was little to be seen except the words ‘Gardner & …' on one fragment, ‘19 January' on another, and ‘wanted in connection …' on the third.

‘And this,' said Mycroft Holmes, as he handed his brother a second print.

Sherlock Holmes wasted little time on the second specimen. There was a crest of the City of Edinburgh Constabulary, a day and a month. The words ‘drawn on the Clydesdale Bank', appeared faintly and ‘to be detained for questioning' very plainly.

‘Dear me,' he said quietly to Mycroft, ‘this is rather as I had supposed. Will you tell me where these interesting scraps were found?'

‘They are all that remains of several sheets of paper, which the man—or men—who disposed of them thought had been entirely destroyed. The fragments were found on separate days, so we may never know how many more acts of this kind were not even suspected. Each of these fragments was picked out from the back of an office dog-grate, which stands clear of the wall a little. In both cases, someone had overpitched the grate by placing so much coal on the papers that it preserved them in part rather than destroying them completely. These scraps were found unburnt at the rear of the ash-cans. For that we must be grateful to someone whom I will merely call an honest servant.'

‘Indeed,' said Sherlock Holmes casually. ‘And am I to be told where this grate—or grates—may be located?'

Mycroft glanced at the superintendent but received no response. He turned to his brother again, watching the face of Sherlock Holmes with the calculation of a falcon.

‘In the offices of the Detective Police at Scotland Yard. One in the Sergeants' Office and one in the Inspectors' Room. The date of the discovery in both cases is that upon the messages. Their receipt was not entered in the office day-book and they must have been destroyed soon after their arrival by whoever opened them. Therefore, it seems a moral certainty that these most urgent messages from another police force, requesting the immediate detention of suspects or known criminals by the Metropolitan Police, were being systematically burnt upon the office fires by men of the Detective Division. The fact that one was found in the Sergeants' Office and the other in the Inspectors' Room indicates the extent of the conspiracy.'

While Mycroft Holmes made this careful explanation, Superintendent Williamson appeared to be suffering death by a thousand cuts.

‘A matter of some gravity,' said Sherlock Holmes, calmly indifferent to moral considerations. ‘If my advice is sought, I would first of all observe that a common mistake on these occasions is to search high and low for the traitors within. On the contrary, one should begin by deciding which men among them all may be shown to be honest beyond doubt.'

Williamson looked up at him.

‘You will be relieved to know, Mr Holmes, that we have proceeded on those very lines. Of twenty officers in the Detective Division, I believe without hesitation that a great majority are innocent. Inspector Tobias Gregson, for all his faults, is no traitor. I would stake my life on that. Sergeant Lestrade is most certainly innocent. Apart from his moral qualities, he was not in the division at the time of these felonies and so had no possible connection with any conspiracy.'

‘Indeed,' said Holmes airily, ‘I have met Sergeant Lestrade and may say from personal knowledge that what you believe of him seems to me true.'

The superintendent was startled but also gratified.

‘Tell me, Mr Williamson,' said Holmes presently, ‘would you lend Mr Lestrade to me for a few days? A week perhaps?'

‘Lend him to you?' Mycroft Holmes burst in like thunder. ‘In heaven's name why, Sherlock? To what end?'

‘The reason,' said his brother in the same off-hand manner, ‘is that I have only one pair of hands and cannot be in two places at once. The end? So that the conspiracy which threatens my client through the action of a gang of swindlers, and that other conspiracy which threatens to bring down Scotland Yard in ruins, and then the Paris swindle, may all be a thing of the past by this time next week.'

The suggestion roused the superintendent.

‘I do not see what purpose it would serve. Besides, it would be materially irregular, Mr Holmes! Entirely without precedent!'

But, on reflection, Mycroft Holmes now moved to the side of his brother.

‘Hardly more irregular or without precedent, Dolly, than to have Scotland Yard in ruins and to see anarchy upon our streets. If Lestrade's leave of absence for a week or so may avert that, I believe I can settle any questions that the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister may care to put to me.'