Donald Thomas - Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil

When I returned to our lodgings, I Holmes was already there. He was not very communicative beyond saying that Lestrade’s men had been watching the East End. They had picked up the trail of Piatkoff who, contrary to Holmes’s expectations, had evidently not changed his appearance as yet. Possibly, as I remarked humorously, he was not a reader of the Morning Post. Holmes stared back at me, unsmiling. He remarked that Piatkoff had been seen in Jubilee Street. He had been watched by Atherton, alias Volkoff, at the Anarchist Club, where other members present had at first seemed so in awe that no one spoke to him. Then he had conversed at random, not as if he had a rendezvous with anyone.

No carter’s van had called at any address in Jubilee Street to deliver rifles. For all their cleverness, Mycroft Holmes and the pursuers had lost the scent of that consignment. I stood up, stretched, and wished my friend good-night. I noticed, as I did so, a carte-de-visite on the sideboard. It showed a tiny head-and-shoulders photograph of an expressionless Englishman in a suit and hat, under the inscription: “Memorandum from Chung Ling Soo: Marvellous Chinese Conjuror.” Written underneath were the words, “Wood Green Empire until Saturday. Always a pleasure to see you in the stalls.” What on earth Holmes wanted with a stage conjuror I did not know and, at that moment, I did not care.

If Sherlock Holmes and his brother had an idea of what was going on, they seemed in no hurry to do anything about it. Then a few mornings later I went down to breakfast and once again sensed a smell of solder or hot metal in the sitting-room. It did not seem to emanate from the room itself. Sherlock Holmes had it on his clothes. But where had he been that night? Who had he been with and what had they been doing? He certainly looked, once again, as if his head had never touched the pillow.

I thought perhaps I should become my own detective but I did not suppose I should get very far. Even Scotland Yard had accomplished little. Thanks to an innocent couple who came forward because they wondered what had happened to their lodger, the CID had located Poloski Morountzeffs workroom. The chemicals found there, chosen for the manufacture of bombs, he had explained away to the credulous landlord as a formula for his patent fire-proof paint. There was a supply of rifle cartridges, though no rifles, and clips of ammunition for a Mauser pistol. Morountzeff had been well-behaved, an ideal lodger, who sometimes locked his rooms and travelled to the Continent.

During the next week, thanks to such “information received,” the City of London police arrested three men and two women. Fedoroff, Peters and Duboff were charged with the Houndsditch murders, Sara Milstein and Rosie Trassjonsky with conspiring to assist them. Unfortunately, it seemed that the informants against them were more attracted by the rewards offered than by any allegiance to the truth. When the evidence was examined, all the defendants were set free. Murder could not be proved against the three men, much less against the two women.

It was difficult to establish the identity of any of the suspects. The internal security system of the Anarchist movement discouraged the use of names. Where necessary it still preferred to allude to “The Frenchman” or “The German” or “The Russian.” For every man who knew the sobriquet of “Peter Piatkoff” there seemed to be a thousand who knew “Peter the Painter.” What was not known could be betrayed, even under police questioning.

A few names were known to the police, among them such men of violence as Fritz Svaars and Yoshka Sokoloff. They had not been caught, as Holmes remarked with a sigh, and it seemed likely that they were in Russia or France by now.

Such was the situation when I went to bed a few nights later and, somewhen after midnight, had that unusual sensation of waking from a dream within a dream. After what seemed like several minutes, but was probably more like ten or twenty seconds, of dreaming about dreaming I was fully awake. It was almost four o’clock in the morning and, so far as I knew, Sherlock Holmes was in bed and asleep. He had certainly retired before midnight. Now, however, I heard voices in the sitting-room below me.

I had missed whatever they were discussing but I was quite clear in my mind that one of the voices was Sherlock Holmes and another was his brother Mycroft. There were at least two more, probably four but I could not be sure. I did not recognise these other speakers, though one of them had a very distinctive tone of voice. His words were spoken rather slowly but emphatically and, at times, with something like a growl. The voice was rather slurred on occasion, as if the tongue might be a little too large for the mouth. When this visitor concluded a rather lengthy remark, another speaker whose voice was unfamiliar to me addressed him as “Winston.”

I began to wonder whether I was not, after all, still dreaming. What were the government’s most senior civil servant, Mycroft Holmes, the Home Secretary, and someone who knew the Home Secretary well enough to call him “Winston,” doing in our sitting-room at four o’clock in the morning? The discussion was less intense now. They dropped their voices and I could make out only a rumble of talk.

Instinct told me that it would not do to walk in on their debate. On the other hand, I must be dressed and ready in case my presence should be necessary. I was just fumbling with a collar stud and tie when a board outside creaked and Holmes, perhaps seeing light under the door, tapped gently as he entered.

“I heard you moving about,” he said quietly, “I fear there is trouble boiling up near the Anarchist Hall in Jubilee Street, or rather about two hundred yards away. It seems as if we may have an insurrection on our hands. If Sergeant Atherton’s information from the underground is correct, the aim is to kill as many of our officers and officials as possible, and of as high a rank as possible. In other words, assassination under cover of a general outbreak. Rifles for the one, pistols for the other.”

I began to unscrew my trouser-press.

“What will you do?”

“Major Frederick Wodehouse of the War Office is here. So is the Home Secretary-Wodehouse picked up Mr Churchill from his house in Eccleston Square on the way. Nothing is to be said, at this stage, about either of them. It would not look well for the military to be involved.”

“And you will go with them?”

His profile, in the gaslight, looked leaner and tauter than ever I had seen it.

“This minute, old fellow. We also have a captain of the Scots Guards in attendance. Theirs is the nearest regiment, at the Tower of London. This is likely to be more than the police can deal with. We have no more room in the motor, so you must follow on as quickly as you can. Take a cab from the Metropolitan line for Stepney police station, just off Commercial Road. Ask for directions there. The desk sergeant will know where we are.”

With that he was gone. I heard footsteps and voices going down the stairs from our sitting-room to the front door. Then I took out my watch and looked at it. The hands were at just five minutes past four. Ten minutes later I was walking up Baker Street towards the rank at the underground railway. A single cabby was dozing on his perch. He was awake and alive in a second.

We did the journey to Commercial Road in less than half an hour, through a ghost-like city of empty streets and half-lit avenues. I told the cabby to wait and went up the steps, illuminated by the blue police lamp. Inside, it was as though I had stepped into the foyer of the Alhambra theatre five minutes before the curtain went up. This was plainly the headquarters of the operation, police officers pushing this way and that. I found my way to the sergeant’s desk and was answered in two words which would soon travel round the world.