Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘You are a gentleman,’ he said.

When a man says that he means he considers you his equal. I found this idea amusing, although I was careful to keep that from reaching my face. As a young man I walked through the aftermath of the massacre of Meerut, my skin stained with walnut juice and let not a single sight disturb the calm that carried me through crowds of rioting sepoys.

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘A gentleman and a soldier.’

‘And a man of comfortable means.’

I was about to object but saw his eyes slide across my loaden coat, which was lined with green silk. So instead of objecting, I muttered something non-committal, quintessentially English.

‘This is difficult,’ he said. ‘Very delicate.’

At that point, I was meant to ask why it was difficult. He waited and I waited some more.

‘Very difficult,’ he added, as we turned back towards the press of people. ‘I’ll be blunt. You’re a gentleman and this is a dreadful accident. It is my best opinion that this man will die. I am sure someone has already sent for the police.’

This I privately doubted, since the crowd were far too busy being shocked to do anything that useful.

‘I can ease things,’ he said. ‘Let the patient be moved to my surgery. I will undertake to treat him.’

‘But he will still die?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the fat little man. ‘Nothing I can do will stop that.’ He paused, with the manner of someone considering how far to risk his reputation. ‘I can, however, delay slightly in announcing his death. I will mention complications, the poorness of his constitution, perhaps even suggest a certain unsoundness in his mode of life.’

‘A more deserving man would have lived?’

‘Indeed.’ The little man nodded, delighted at my quickness of wit. ‘There will be costs,’ he said. ‘Minor outlays. I can see the poor wretch’s family on your behalf, maybe give his wife a few guineas towards a Christian burial and the keep of her children. My own fees will be modest.’

Raising my eyebrows, I waited.

The sum he named would have bought a town in Odessa.

‘All in,’ he added hastily. ‘As would include my fees, outlay for his widow, a burial… Such a tragic accident,’ he repeated, shaking his head. For one hideous moment I feared the man was about to begin his spiel all over again, for we were nearing the crowd and the last thing I wanted was to waste more time on fainting women and chicken’s blood sponges.

‘Let me examine the patient,’ I said.

‘You?’ he said, sounding altogether less certain.

Put me in the path of danger and I will swear in the ripest Hindi. The man in front of me said his single word in an accent that spoke of education and birth. At times of great stress we all revert to the accents of our childhood. It seemed he was a rogue from choice rather than necessity.

‘Did I not mention I was a surgeon?’ Opening my coat further, to reveal the gun beneath, I began to push my way through the crowd.

‘Look at me,’ I demanded of the groaning man, and he opened his eyes with a great deal of fluttering and a dying fall of sobs, all the more convincing for being slight.

‘Now focus on my finger.’

I moved this digit and watched his eyes trail after, delayed by a single second and inclined to roll back in his head. Mind you, good at acting or not, I could always use any man prepared to step in front of charging horses, catapult himself above a carriage and dislocate his own leg on landing.

Gripping that leg, I put my other hand to his knee and pulled, twisted and pushed almost simultaneously. The wretch gave a hideous shriek, more from shock I suspect than anything else and forgot to keep his eyes half focused.

‘See,’ I said, ‘good as new.’ To make my point, I worked his knee as one might work the leg of a horse. In the crowd someone began to clap.

‘Those ribs,’ I added. ‘How are they feeling?’

He cast his eyes behind me to the fat man who hovered anxiously at my shoulder. Whatever passed between them, the wretch now sprawled on the ground sighed, his face already resigned.

‘Better,’ he said.

‘Let me.’ His ribs were fine, the sponge actually a bladder sewn into the side of his shirt and worked by pressure. Our man with the narrow face and darting eyes was so busy worrying that I might identify the object beneath my fingers, that he entirely failed to notice when I lifted his wallet.

‘Nasty swelling,’ I said, pocketing that object as I wiped my fingers on the side of my own trousers. ‘Otherwise, just a graze.’ Helping the man to his feet, I held him steady as he found his balance. It was a nice touch.

‘Your name, sir?’

The man looked at me. ‘Sigerson,’ he admitted finally. ‘Professor Sigerson.’

‘Professor?’

‘An American university. In San Francisco. A thoroughly modern institution.’ He managed to imbue this description with a level of approval which would have been missing had the words come from my mouth.

‘And your friend?’

‘My brother,’ he corrected.

Had someone told me those two men were picked at random from a thousand such, rounded up off the streets of London I would have believed him. The idea that they shared the same blood was an altogether stranger proposition. One man was fat and small eyed, the other tall and beak nosed, with eyes that belonged to an Ottoman potentate.

‘Professor Sigerson,’ I said, offering my hand. ‘Pray let me call on you to confirm your recovery…’

Needless to say, the address given me was as fake as the name. The house in which this man really resided was behind the new railway station. A shiny brass plate by the gate announced it as the residence of Professor Sigerson, thinker & Dr Sigerson, general physician.

The screws holding this unlikely announcement were new, but a hundred tiny scratches at the four corners spoke of other walls and hurried exits. At least, so Hunter told me when he returned, following them being the task I gave him while I found a blacksmith to repair the broken rim of our wheel.

So, it was entirely my fault the two Sigersons had vanished by the time I presented myself at their door. Stripped bare, their rooms echoed to the sound of my search, even the carpets having been spirited away. A very agitated landlady, who had appeared out of breath, shortly after I had Hunter break down the door, kept demanding of me what kind of fiends stole everything.

‘Efficient ones,’ I told her, although I fear she did not entirely understand my joke. The constable who’d accompanied the landlady began to make notes and, as I listened, her list of items grew longer and ever more valuable.

‘I will never get them back,’ she wailed.

‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘you can have them this very afternoon with almost no effort…’

It never ceases to sadden me the things that amaze closed minds. The sun setting over the Hindu Kush, with wild dogs circling the last flames of a fire destined to die before dawn; waves deep enough to swallow St Paul’s in one watery gulp; the innocence of a Nepalese child goddess so beautiful grown Generals cry in her presence, such things are put on this earth to stun us. To be amazed by anything less seems an insult to intelligence.

As I suspected, my comment that her goods would be returned proved enough to silence the landlady. Although I then had to explain to the constable that my certainty the carpets could be found at the nearest pawnbroker was more to do with common sense, than any intimate, not to say inside, knowledge of the crime.

‘We must be off,’ I said.

The constable looked as if he might object but changed his mind at a glance from Hunter, who wore the badge of a Queen’s Messenger beneath his coat. There my day might have ended, with an interesting meeting and my giving Inspector Lestrade descriptions of the two rogues and an order that I be notified when they were found. And so it would have ended, if Hunter and I had not proved woefully incapable of paying the blacksmith for his work on the wheel.