The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (91 page)

At Paddington the concourse of the great railway station was bustling with weekend travelers crowding about the bookstall, the flower-sellers, and the cab ranks. Columns of smoke rose to the high curve of the glass roof from several green-liveried engines of the Great Western Railway waiting to depart. There was no train at the platform for Oxford and only a handful of passengers waiting by the leather trunks and wicker hampers, neatly piled for the luggage van.

It was hardly twenty minutes later when I recognized Gregson in his pale gray topcoat and bowler hat, keeping well back from his quarry. He scarcely needed to ‘tip us the wink.' From where we stood it was quite plain to see who his quarry was. I should have taken the young language teacher for an army subaltern on weekend leave, neatly turned out in a belted Norfolk jacket and twill trousers, a black leather bag at his side. Slightly built, clean-shaven and with short-cropped hair, he had an air of peremptoriness about him.

The young man's back was to us as Holmes looked Gregson in the eyes at a distance of several yards and inclined his head an inch or so. Our Scotland Yard friend in his gray topcoat walked past us as though we had been strangers and disappeared on the far side of the bookstall. We made our way to the further end of the platform, which would bring us close to the exit when the train reached Oxford.

It did not seem that Henschel was accustomed to spend the night in Oxford but would return to Sheerness by a train that would leave for London in the late afternoon or early evening. At our destination, however, we had already arranged for a hotel porter to take our travelling bags from us and carry them to the Mitre Inn.

There was no difficulty in finding a compartment to ourselves on the journey. A dreary hour of West London was followed by enchanting views of the Thames valley running among the winter woods of the hills with flooded water-meadows to either side. It was not yet midday when we saw from the railway line the spires and towers of the ancient city.

The station approach at Oxford was lined by luggage wagons and cabs, but Henschel crossed the road and began making his way toward the centre of the town on foot. We kept well back, walking separately, until he turned up the wide thoroughfare of Beaumont Street with its plain but handsome houses. The creeper-covered windows and archway of one of the colleges faced us from the far end. I was as sure as I could be that our man had no idea he was being followed. He did not once look back or make any manoeuvre to suggest that he was trying to throw off a shadow. Our only risk was that an accomplice lay further back, trailing us in turn. Yet there was no sign of such a man, and he would have been astute indeed if he had been able to shadow Sherlock Holmes unobserved!

I was conscious that every stretch of open street or pavement increased the danger of Henschel spotting us. I need not have worried. At the top of Beaumont Street he turned into the wide courtyard of the Ashmolean, the university museum, which was raised on a plinth with its Grecian portico, pillars, and statues, a sculptured goddess sitting high above a classical frieze. As the corner concealed us briefly, I drew level with Holmes and said, ‘For all we can tell, he may have come like any other tripper to see the collections. It seems more than likely.'

We separated again, two visitors dutifully and individually making our tour of the exhibits. The museum was admirably laid out for the purposes of tracking our suspect. Tall display cases running across the galleries make admirable cover for the hunter, yet one step beyond them gives a wide view ahead and behind. To begin with, from our concealment among the displays of classical sculpture on the ground floor, we watched Henschel go up the grand staircase leading to the galleries above.

Holmes waited until the young man had turned the corner to the second flight of steps and then walked slowly after him. I saw my friend pause and begin studying a dark van Eyck landscape on the half-landing. He had his back to the flight of stairs up which Henschel had gone to the floor above. Yet as Holmes stood there, I could see that in the palm of one hand he held a small round pocket mirror, reflecting the stairs behind him and the gallery above.

I followed cautiously up the staircase, well lit by its roof lights, to the wide and airy exhibition hall of the first floor. Before me lay a vista of Italian Renaissance art, to which we and our quarry were the only visitors just then, except for two ladies talking quietly together and a middle-aged gentleman on his own. There were display cases ranked in the center of the gallery and paintings along the walls to either side. I am no expert in such matters, but the small brass plates on each frame identified for me two Botticelli sketches of nymphs in woodland and a dimly lit papal portrait by Fra Lippo Lippi. How such things could be connected with espionage and naval codes defied explanation.

Holmes had disappeared from view. However, I became aware that Henschel was paying very little attention either to the paintings or to the Florentine ceramics and silverware that filled the glass display cases between them. He walked to the far end of the gallery and there helped himself to one of the small green canvas stools that filled a metal rack. These stools are commonly supplied in the great museums and art galleries for those amateurs who choose to spend a day sketching or copying some work by a master. The Ashmolean is next door to Mr. Ruskin's School of Drawing and Fine Art, which provides an ample supply of pupils. You will see such students busy every day in the galleries, as if they might be in the Louvre or the Uffizi.

Yet Henschel did not sit down to sketch any of the paintings. He held the folded green canvas of the stool in one hand and his black bag in the other as he walked through a side turning into a set of smaller exhibition rooms. This area was devoted to archaeological displays and, once more, the tall glass cases afforded ample cover. Each of them was layered with shelves on which were set out fragments of pots, amphorae or pithoi, small votive objects, here and there what appeared to be a rusted blade or implement.

Karl Henschel passed ‘Mesopotamia,' ‘Ancient Egypt,' ‘Anatolia,' ‘Ancient Cyprus,' and stopped at a display of cases along the far wall marked ‘Ancient Crete and the Aegean.' There he opened out his little stool of green canvas and sat down. From his leather bag he took a small copying board to which was clipped a pad of paper.

I believe he had not the least idea that anyone else was there and probably he did not care. Why should he? He got up and walked away, into another room. He must have opened his pocketknife, for I heard him sharpening a pencil into a basket that had evidently been provided. The polished boards of the wooden floors acted as an excellent soundboard and I knew I should hear him coming back the moment he moved. While the coast was clear, I strolled past the case where his stool was parked and paused like a casual visitor to see which display meant so much to him that he had come from Sheerness to make a sketch of it.

I would not have crossed the road to copy what I now saw before me. Imagine, if you will, a few dozen scraps of old clay tile. Most were the colour of slate, a few looked like dark terra cotta, rather the colour of burnt sealing wax. Some were roughly square and a smaller number were oblong but sandy-colored and tapering at one end. None of them was more than five inches square. There was also a small ornament that I noticed was labelled as a seal ring.

This entire collection was described on its plaque as ‘Linear B' tablets, most from the ruins of the Minoan palace at Knossos on the island of Crete. I remembered, from my schooldays, that this was the location of the labyrinth where Theseus slew the Minotaur in the famous legend. A small printed card informed the visitor that these clay tablets dated from a time before the Trojan War, probably about 1500
B
.
C
. They had been found during the past ten years by Sir Arthur Evans, in his excavations of the site.

There were marks upon these baked clay tablets. A few were single downward strokes, which looked like some method of counting. For the rest, imagine tiny representations of an axe head, a five-barred gate, a wigwam, a fish, a star, and so forth. Such was the writing of Linear B. A further display card attempted to describe the pronunciation of certain words. I learnt that ‘at-ku-ta-to' signified ten working oxen and ‘at-ku-do-nia' fifty of the same beasts. Then I heard a movement in the next room and walked quietly but quickly away, behind the screen of another case. I took a glance presently and saw that Henschel was now sitting before this curious display and making small neat sketches of the tablets.

For the next three hours, taking turns, we kept up our scrutiny. It was not difficult since we had Henschel bottled up in the set of smaller exhibition rooms. He could not come out except by returning through the displays of antiquities and then down the avenue of Renaissance paintings to the grand staircase. From where he sat, he could hardly be aware that we were, at varying levels, always within sight of that exit route.

Holmes even equipped himself with one of the canvas stools and chose the portrait of an amiable Venetian courtesan by Carpaccio, before which he became the model of concentration. He sat with his notebook and pencil as other visitors came and went. Presently, a thin elderly man with pince-nez, walking stick, a rather rusty frock coat, and a neat gray beard took a stool from the rack and sat before a Piranesi sketch of the Coliseum. He paid no attention to anyone but, after almost an hour of noting and sketching, he stood up, polished his pince-nez with a blue silk handkerchief, dabbed his watery eyes, and returned his canvas stool to the rack. Holmes sketched angles and features, lost to the world in Carpaccio's portrait, until the old man had shuffled past him on his way out.

At the instant that the tapping of the old scholar's walking stick reached the half-landing of the staircase, Holmes sprang up and approached the rack of stools in a dozen quiet strides. I followed him as he added his folded stool to the rest. His eyes scanned the metal frame rapidly and came to rest on the four metal tubes that were its corner posts.

‘As I thought!' he breathed sharply. His forefinger entered the nearest of these upright supports and screwed out a coiled piece of paper, no more than a single sheet of manuscript. As he unrolled it, I had just time to see:

57-09-83-62-15||19-80-05 …

His finger was to his lips as he returned it to its hiding place. Though his voice rose no higher than a whisper, its urgency was never in doubt.

‘After him, Watson! He is not agile enough to have got far!'

‘Henschel?' I gasped.

‘Leave him. It is best that he should not see us again.' He strode to the staircase and went down it, two at a time, closing on the hobbling frock-coated gentleman with his stick, who was just going out into the museum courtyard. Then my friend slackened his pace and sauntered a dozen yards behind him, like a casual visitor once more. We took up our vantage point behind one of the stone pedestals and watched the old man walking across Beaumont Street and turning down it the way we had come. Then, to my surprise, he suddenly drew a key from his pocket, slid it into the latch of a white-painted door beside him, and disappeared into one of the handsome plain-fronted houses.

Sherlock Holmes was triumphant.

‘And that, Watson, is how they do it! Now let us have no more of this until Monday morning. We have done all that is required of us for the time being.'

It seemed to me that we had done nothing of the kind. However, Holmes was in no mood to listen to argument. He insisted that we should not hurry back to London at once, or indeed the next day. Monday would be time enough. That evening we dined in the lamplit parlour of the Mitre with its low beams and memories of the coaching inn it had been until half a century before. Holmes pronounced the food and wine excellent. He talked of archaeology and the stupendous discoveries at Mycenae by the great German Heinrich Schliemann. How three gold-masked figures, warriors of the Trojan War, had been unearthed and how, when the masks were removed, their perfectly preserved faces had been recognizable for some minutes before they crumbled into dust.

‘“Today I have looked upon the face of Agamemnon,”' he recited with a chuckle. ‘No wonder Herr Schliemann sent that telegram to the King of Greece. Now, one pipe before my bed, my dear fellow. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.'

We retired to the sitting room that he had reserved for our use, while the groups of tall-hatted undergraduates began returning to their colleges before lockup and the life of the university passed by in the lamplit street below us. Great Tom began to toll his hundred strokes from Christ Church tower, at the end of which time the porters would shoot the iron bolts across to close the main gates and those who were not inside their colleges must face the justice of the dean or the proctors on Monday morning. Only now were we solitary enough to discuss the afternoon's events.

‘That old man was not our Admiralty spy,' I said incredulously. ‘He cannot be!'

Holmes laughed and lit his cherrywood pipe from the fire.

‘No, my dear fellow. The game is played in three moves, not in two. There is the spy who passes information. There is the old man who encodes it. Then there is Henschel who transmits it. Perhaps Henschel is also useful in formulating the language of the code.'

‘A language that no one has used for more than three thousand years?'

‘Precisely. In the present case, its rarity is what makes it unique. Almost nothing was known about Linear B until Sir Arthur Evans discovered the first tablets at Knossos. The meaning of the language is virtually unknown today. A string of meaningless ciphers. What better code could there be? It is not necessary to know its ancient meaning in order to give it a new one for purposes of espionage. It is the last thing in the world that anyone would think of!'

‘But the code is written in numbers.'

‘Quite right, Watson. On Monday morning I propose to put that difficulty to someone who can answer with rather more authority than either the Admiralty or Scotland Yard.'