Barry Day - Sherlock Holmes and the Alice in Wonderland Murders

“Come, Watson, let us take another look at her room.”

Alicia’s room was that rare combination — feminine without being fussy. I tried to look at it with Holmes’s eyes. What did it tell me about its occupant?

Wherever he had taken her, Moriarty had not given her time to pack properly. In fact, my heart sank at the thought that he may not have given her time to pack at all. There were remarkably few personal possessions in the room and I felt sure that this was not because she had recently removed them. Alicia Creighton simply did not wish to leave her mark on a room that she regarded as little more than a glorified prison.

Holmes confirmed my thought process. He was standing by her open wardrobe and rifling through the clothes that were hanging there — an activity that made me feel slightly embarrassed.

“Look here, Watson, this is interesting.”

At one end of the cupboard, carefully separated from the rest were a few simple working dresses, neatly hung and pressed. “These are clearly the clothes she brought with her from her old life, while these …” and he indicated a number of much more expensive garments shoved higgledy-piggledy in one corner: “… these tell us what she felt about the finery her ‘guardian’ provided.”

“But even more interesting is this …” He had closed the wardrobe and moved over to the window where a dressmaker’s dummy stood dressed in the Alice costume Alicia had worn to the party. “Why did she not consign this to her pile of rejects, I wonder? Could it be because she has now begun to identify with the heroine of Moriarty’s fantasy and is determined to emulate the Alice who found her way successfully through the strange imaginary universe by refusing to believe in it?”

As he spoke I found myself scanning the room. There was the dressing table with the two ebony hair brushes. I could imagine her sitting there using them on that mane of dark hair. By the mirror was a single framed photograph of a beautiful dark haired woman, obviously Alicia’s mother. The face was a little drawn but the resemblance was uncanny. And then it struck me. What woman would willingly leave, even overnight, without her hair brushes and such an important personal memento?

The urgency in Holmes’s voice underlined my own concern.

“Think, Watson, think! The lady knew she was in danger and she also knew that we would surely come looking for her. However suddenly Moriarty decided to decamp, she must have had time to leave some sort of clue …”

And then I noticed the book.

It was a battered old copy of Alice In Wonderland which Alicia had probably picked up at some secondhand bookstall when this Alice business had begun and she knew she had to contrive her costume. It had every reason to belong there, yet there was something about it that puzzled me. Then I realised it was the way it was placed on the dressing table. The handles of Alicia’s hair brushes seemed to be angled so that they pointed to the book.

“I’ve got it, Holmes,” I cried triumphantly, “she’s left us a message in the book.” It was the work of a moment to snatch it up and shake it. I fully expected to see a slip of white paper flutter to the surface of the table. Instead — nothing!

Holmes, I noticed, was running his fingers over the surface of the dressing table and now he appeared to find something. As he held it up, I saw that it was a bent hairpin that caught the light.

“Allow me,” he said taking the book gently from my hand. Then, as an afterthought — “Remind me, Watson, never to take you for granted. On occasions you see straight to the heart of a problem while I am still busy defining its boundaries. Ah yes, here we have it, I believe …”

Now he was holding it up to the light and riffling through the pages.

“Most ingenious. Miss Creighton was too clever to commit her message to paper. Even slipped between the pages of a book, it might well be discovered. Instead she hit upon the idea of pricking out a tiny pin hole under certain words. I seem to remember seeing a pad and pencil on Moriarty’s desk. Watson, if you would be so good …?”

By the time I returned with the writing implements, I could tell from his expression that his intuition had proved correct.

“Take this down, Watson, if you please …” And he slowly began to dictate as he turned the pages. When he had finished, what I had written down was this …

THE KNAVE WAS STANDING … WITH A SOLDIER ON EACH SIDE TO GUARD HIM … THE JUDGE … WAS THE KING … THE KNAVE … TOOK QUITE AWAY!.. INTO THE COURT … “YOU CAN’T SWIM, CAN YOU?” HE ADDED, TURNING TO THE KNAVE.

“What do you make of it?” I asked when I had read it back.

“Some of it is obvious enough, I think,” Holmes replied. “The King’ is clearly Moriarty who will ‘judge’ the prisoner who is being guarded. The ‘soldiers’ would seem to be the men we were discussing earlier …”

“And the ‘Knave’ …” I interrupted, “the Knave must be Steel. Don’t you remember — at the party Steel was dressed as the Knave of hearts?”

“Quite right, Watson, so he was. And in Lewis Carroll’s story the Knave was put on trial for supposedly stealing the jam tarts. In Moriarty’s book I fear Steel’s crime will take on rather more significance.”

“But what does the rest of it mean, in Heaven’s name? The court and the swimming?”

“That is for Moriarty to know and for us to find out, I’m afraid. Miss Creighton has done wonders to leave us this much information and it is for us to fill in the blanks — and quickly, too. Certain things seem clear. Even before Tweedledum went to battle with Tweedledee, Moriarty was planning a new phase in his operation. The presence of his ‘soldiers’—mercenaries would, I feel, be a better word — suggests some form of urban terrorism. A few determined and unscrupulous men, acting apparently at random, can paralyse a densely populated city at will. There have already been several such examples on the Continent in recent months. Naturally, they made little impact on the xenophobic British press — simply those foreigners being foreign. But if they were not somehow connected, I should be very much surprised.”

“Then there is the vanity factor. We have disrupted Moriarty’s meticulous timetable. If I know my man, he will need to wrest back the advantage to prove that he is still in control. He will feel the need to do something highly visible and extremely destructive. It is up to us to determine precisely what in time to forestall it. And now I think we can leave any further tidying up to Lestrade and his men.” He patted his pocket. “There are one or two samples here I wish to analyse … Explosive in nature without a doubt. If I can identify their type, dozens of our countrymen may continue to sleep soundly in their beds.”

The next two days passed more slowly than any I can ever remember. Moriarty and his men seemed to vanish from the face of the earth. Lestrade and his men — even Holmes had to admit — did a remarkable job of quartering the city and following every lead and whiff of rumour. Lestrade himself would arrive at Baker Street with monotonous regularity, his ferret face looking increasingly drawn, to report on progress — or, rather, the lack of it. Even Wiggins and his Baker Street Irregulars had nothing to report — a situation which irked those young men particularly, since they saw themselves as amateur competitors to Scotland Yard and were never so happy as when they were able to find a lead the police had missed.

The employees at The Clarion seemed equally and genuinely mystified. The official story was that Moxton and his entourage had taken off for an unknown European destination for an undisclosed period of time. Meanwhile, the paper was to pursue its set policies. It was a well-oiled machine that could function perfectly well without its proprietor for a few days. What appears to be the problem, gentlemen?