The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes

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First world edition published 2010

in Great Britain and in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2010 by Barry Grant.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Grant, Barry.

The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes.

1. Retirees – England – Herefordshire – Fiction.

2. Roommates – Fiction. 3. Holmes, Sherlock (Fictitious

character) – Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title

823.9'2-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-115-6     (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6887-9     (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-236-9     (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

CONTENTS

I gratefully inscribe this volume to my grandfather, August
,

who read Shakespeare
,

ONE

Mr Cedric Coombes

I
n the year 2007 my wife left me for an American computer expert and flew away with him to Connecticut. At first I was depressed, for we had been married nearly thirty years. But I quickly got a grip on myself and determined to look as cheerful as I could. I decided this was my chance to indulge in adventures I had long contemplated but never undertaken. Straightaway I asked my editor to assign me to cover the war in Afghanistan, and although he was reluctant because of my age, he finally was persuaded. Within a month I had sold my London house, put my dog in the care of a neighbour, and was on an airplane to India. India had intrigued me ever since childhood, and I had decided to enjoy a month of travel in that fabled land before taking up my duties as a war correspondent. I visited Lucknow, Kanpur and other places where great battles had been fought by British troops in those faraway days when Britain ruled the waves and much of the world. As I stood by the Ganges at Varanasi, and by the desert at Jaipur, I had the strange feeling I'd been here before. Perhaps it was Kipling. I had read Kipling as a child, and he had made me feel almost as if I'd grown up in India.

I regretted that I was unable to enter Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass, the route by which our troops had entered in 1878, fighting their way – yard by bloody yard – at the outset of the second Afghan war. The stories of that campaign had always excited me and I was anxious to walk the ground. Everyone told me, however, that travelling through the Khyber was impossible. I took the usual air route to Afghanistan, landed in Kandahar and reported to 6th Division Headquarters in early September, full of high hopes and good cheer. I had no inkling what bad luck and bad dreams lay in store for me. I had vaguely anticipated the horrors of war, but my knowledge had all come from talk and from pale words on a page. To see maimed men hobbling and dead people rotting, to see hungry cats crawling out of corpses, to see citizens weeping with fear and troops collapsing of wounds, is to know a different truth than the one told in books. I was attached to the Royal Horse Artillery and for three days I interviewed soldiers and filed dispatches to my newspaper, and all went well. Then I fell ill from dysentery and was forced to return to Kandahar where I lay in a twilit world for several weeks until at last my miseries ceased. Next I was assigned to the Household Cavalry. Our squadron of light tanks floated and jounced merrily across the desert landscape, and somehow – amidst all the mayhem, dust and discomfort – I occasionally found some pleasant moments. But then as we passed through a valley I stood up too high and was hit in the shoulder by a sniper's bullet that shattered bone, grazed the subclavian artery, and knocked me down so forcefully that I thought, before I blacked out, that I was dead. The jolting ride to the field hospital soon reminded me, sharply, that I was still alive . . . unfortunately, as I then thought.

I lay for a long time in various hospitals. I knew that in the vast scheme of things my injury was only minor. In the bed next to mine lay a young soldier who never spoke a word, just stared. He had lost both legs. Across the hallway was a man who had suffered burns. He screamed unmercifully whenever he wasn't moaning. He had, I think, lost his mind. This entire war – concocted as it was by men who all their lives had never done anything but hide in the safety of their national borders – was such a disaster that I should have guessed in advance that my part in it would be a pointless debacle. My performance as a war correspondent had been dismal. I had sent very few dispatches to my newspaper, and not one of them had seemed worthy of the reality which surrounded me.

When I returned to England I took a few months to recuperate and get my bearings, then made my decision: I retired from the newspaper and resolved to spend my days amidst green hills and good books, and to indulge in life's less turbulent pleasures. My life had changed utterly. I no longer had a wife, a house or even a dog, for now my little hound preferred my neighbour. I had neither obligations nor regrets. In brief, I was free to do whatever I could afford. I considered emigrating to America and ‘holing up' in a cabin in the Wind River Range. I also imagined finding a small cottage in one of the old British Hill Stations of India – Simla, perhaps – and passing my days in a replica of the nineteen-thirties. Hills or mountains seemed to be the common denominator. One morning I awoke with a start, remembering a curious little place in Wales set in the hills just across the border from Herefordshire. It was a castle town with winding streets, bell tower, good pubs, and many antiquarian book shops. I had passed through there ten years earlier, and it had seemed to me a Kingdom of Books. The thought appealed. Hills for the heart, books for the brain. I packed my car, settled my lease, and left London.

On a blowy October evening, just as the sun was setting behind the hills, I arrived in Hay-On-Wye, slid into a shadowy parking spot behind the Old Black Lion Inn, and booked a room at that venerable hostelry. No reservation needed. I began to think that to plan life's journeys was to ruin them.
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow . . 
.

Days were sometimes dull with fog and rain, sometimes sharp with shadow and sun. I spent most mornings rambling steep hill paths, afternoons browsing bookshops, evenings eating fine food, and late nights travelling through Shakespeare, Tacitus and Newton in vain hope of becoming a half-educated man. One day I was standing in the Black Lion Bar when someone tapped me on the shoulder. Turning, I recognized Percy Ffoulkes, who had been a schoolmate of mine at Eton and later at Oxford. He was several years my junior and we had never been particular cronies, but seeing him appear so unexpectedly here in the wilds of Wales caused me to greet him with great enthusiasm, and he likewise seemed delighted at our surprise encounter. In a burst of good feeling I invited him to lunch. As we strolled up Bear Street he said, ‘What have you been up to, Wilson! You look like ten pounds lighter than you did at college.'

‘Illness does wonders for the waistline,' I said, and I briefly described the recent cataclysmic circumstances that had landed me in Wales.

‘Poor fellow,' he said. ‘But if a man your age is mad enough to allow himself to be shipped off to the Afghan War – well, you're lucky you were no more than wounded. What you up to now?'

‘I've decided to stay the winter in this little town, if I can,' I replied. ‘But I'll go broke if I remain at the Old Black Lion. I'm looking for a decent little cottage to rent at reasonable rates.'

‘How odd,' remarked Ffoulkes. ‘You are the second man today I've heard say that same thing.'

‘And who was the first?'

‘A fellow I literally bumped into at the Castle Bookshop. Later I encountered him again at the Poetry Book Store, and I asked him if he had had any luck finding lodgings. He said he had located a rental property right in town, but he needed someone to go halves with him, or else he could not afford it.'

‘I wish I knew him,' I said. ‘I wouldn't mind a roommate.'

Percy Ffoulkes looked at me with a sceptical smile as he set down his wine glass. ‘I'm not sure you'd want this chap as a constant companion.'

‘Something wrong with him?'

‘I can't say that. But he certainly has a few quirks.'

‘Such as?'

‘Evidently he buys books by the hundreds at several bookstores in town, but only agrees to buy them “on approval.” He loads them into a wheelbarrow and wheels them to his lodgings. About a week later he returns with most of the load, having kept only a few. The bookseller who told me this is one of several in town who have agreed to give him a refund on whatever he doesn't want to keep. The booksellers don't like it, but he buys enough books to make it worth their while.'

‘A wheelbarrow!'

‘A regular garden wheelbarrow. I saw it with my own eyes.'

‘Anything else odd about him?'

‘I don't know. Would you call it odd, Wilson, if a man habitually analyzed books and pretended to be able to tell tales of their previous owners? That's one of his habits. I saw him do it. He was buying seven books out of the barrow load, and he laid one on the table and said to the bookseller, “This volume has a curious history: it was owned by a parson from Suffolk who purchased it in 1890 and gave it to his secret mistress, next owned by an elderly piano teacher from Bath who used sugar in her tea, then owned by a corrupt bank official who smoked Havana cigars and was imprisoned in 1950. And it is now about to be owned by a dead man.”'

‘That certainly is odd,' I admitted.

‘He seemed amused at his joke about the dead man, if joke it was.'

‘Some people are like that,' I said. ‘They amuse themselves with harmless lies. Remember little Tony Stamford, at Eton?'

‘Oh, heavens! I haven't thought of him in years,' cried Ffoulkes. ‘The lies he used to tell!'

‘Whatever happened to Tony, I wonder?'

‘Twenty years ago I heard something about him taking up a post in Singapore. I forget who I heard it from. Ye gods, how old we have become, Wilson!'