Denis Smith - The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

Holmes had been feeling in Cosgrove’s pockets while I was examining the policeman and now he held up a small leather pouch, an expression of triumph on his face. ‘Here, I think, are your diamonds, Lestrade!’ He loosened the top of the pouch and carefully tipped it up, and out on to the palm of his hand tumbled a mass of sparkling gems.

At that moment there came the sound of horses’ hooves and a vehicle drawing to a halt outside the front of the house. A moment later a police sergeant entered, followed closely by three constables.

‘You’re a bit late, Sergeant,’ said Lestrade in a tone of bitter humour. ‘You’ve missed all the action. Here’s your man, anyhow,’ he continued, wincing with pain as he indicated Cosgrove’s motionless body on the floor. ‘It’s Albert Cosgrove. He may look peaceful now, chiefly because he’s unconscious, but I’m warning you, when he wakes up, he’ll be like a madman in the body of a bull.’

‘Inspector Lestrade needs immediate medical attention,’ I interrupted, as he rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘Is there a doctor’s surgery anywhere near here?’

The sergeant informed me that there was one very close, at the west end of Putney, and instructed one of his men to help me get Lestrade there.

‘What are we charging Cosgrove with, sir?’ asked the sergeant as we made our way out of the house.

‘You tell them, Mr Holmes,’ said Lestrade in a weary voice. He was now leaning heavily on my arm, and his face had turned an ashen grey.

‘You may take your pick,’ said Holmes. ‘Cosgrove has murdered that man on the floor over there, whose name is Andrew Philips, he almost certainly murdered Billy Padgett in Whitechapel last night, he committed a very serious assault on a woman earlier this morning after breaking into her house, and he has just made a murderous attack on Inspector Lestrade and shot him through the arm. Oh, and while you’re reporting all this, you might also mention to your superiors, to lighten the tone a little, that the Bellecourt diamonds, for which half of London has been searching for the last dozen years, are now safely in our hands!’

In the year 1890 I saw little of my friend, Sherlock Holmes. From time to time I was able to follow his progress in the columns of the daily press and he appeared from all accounts to be as busy as a man could wish to be, but I missed the close involvement with his cases that I had enjoyed before my marriage, and which a variety of circumstances, both on his side and on mine, now prevented. In one respect at least, however, I was fortunate: that on each of the few occasions I was able to renew our acquaintance, I gained a new story for my records which was the equal in interest of any which I had entered in my note-book in the days when we shared bachelor chambers in Baker Street. Holmes himself observed with amusement on more than one occasion that I was for him the stormy petrel of adventure, and if fate had indeed cast me in that role, I was not one to complain of the fact.

It was a gloriously sunny afternoon towards the end of June. I had had a busy day, but having no further calls upon my time I dismissed my cab in Portman Square and walked the short distance to my friend’s lodgings. He was not at home, but the landlady expected him back for tea, so I sat down to wait. I was not the only caller he had had that afternoon, I observed, for a card had been left upon the table, bearing the gilt inscription, ‘Star of Kandy Tea Company, 37A Crutched Friars; Mark Pringle, Proprietor.’ Across the reverse of the card was printed ‘The Company employs only one salesman: His name is Quality’ and beneath that, in pencil, ‘Vital to consult you. Will call back later’, to which the initials ‘M.P.’ were appended.

Holmes was not long in arriving and it was with evident pleasure that he greeted me. He seemed in high spirits and tossed across to me an old leather-bound volume he had just purchased at a shop in the Strand. It was a German book, a black-letter edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, its binding cracked and faded with age.

‘Printed at Mainz, some time in the sixteenth century,’ remarked my friend. ‘According to the bookseller, there is a curious error on page 348, where “honey” is for some unfathomable reason rendered as “rags”; but I know the man of old and there is no more barefaced rogue in the whole of London. He invents these freaks of printing himself, you see, to excuse his exorbitant prices, and in the hope of attracting the custom of those whose only interest is in such oddities and who are unlikely ever to actually read the books they buy from him. Unfortunately, he himself neither speaks nor reads any language but English and, like the crow in the fable, is evidently incapable of conceiving that anyone else can do what he cannot, so he was somewhat discomfited when I was able to point out to him that neither word occurs on the page in question. But it really is very good to see you, my dear fellow! Indeed, the arrival of a doctor in my consulting-rooms rather completes my cosmopolitan day, for my morning’s visitors, if you would believe it, were a Member of Parliament, a lighterman, a coal-heaver and a theologian!’

‘There is yet another,’ I remarked, indicating the card upon the table by the window.

‘Hum! Tea-merchant! Smoked a cigar while he was here. Has helped himself to a drink, too, I see! Why soda water, I wonder? Hum!’

‘No doubt a wealthy, comfortable, City type,’ I suggested with a chuckle, ‘who sells tea from the Orient, but has never been farther east than Ramsgate in his life and would not recognise a tea plant if one were growing in his own garden. It is not difficult to picture him sitting at that table an hour ago, a stout, florid-faced man, with a glass in one hand and a cigar in the other, the very picture of a well-fed, easy life. An impatient and possibly self-important fellow, too,’ I added, ‘if he could not wait for your return.’

‘There is such a type,’ replied Holmes, smiling, ‘but I very much fancy that Mr Pringle is not of it. If you were to dip your finger into this glass of soda water, Watson, you would taste upon your finger-end the unmistakable bitterness of quinine. What would that suggest to you, as a physician, bearing in mind that the man who has been dosing himself with it includes upon his visiting-card the name of Kandy, in Ceylon?’

‘Malaria!’

‘Precisely. Now, malaria is not contracted west of Ramsgate with any great frequency, as I’m sure you would agree, and nor are its unfortunate victims generally marked for their stoutness or their florid faces. Mr Pringle has evidently spent some time in Ceylon, where he has picked up this most tenacious of diseases, but whether it be his illness or some less tangible worry which disturbs him so today, we cannot tell.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You observed the used matches that he left us?’

‘I believe I saw one in the dish, with the remains of his cigar.’

‘Not one, Watson, but five; five matches for one cigar, mark you. Now, while there is some truth in the popular notion that the pleasure of a good cigar helps one to forget one’s troubles, it is also true that one must already be untroubled to some extent, in order to derive any pleasure from the cigar in the first place. Anyone who can let a cigar go out, not once, but four times, is very evidently not in the appropriate state of mind. He has also been pacing the floor and has dropped cigar-ash in several places, as you no doubt observed, which also indicates a mood of distraction.’

‘Perhaps he is simply careless,’ I suggested.

‘I think not, for you can see that where he noticed that he had dropped the ash – just by the corner of the hearth-rug – he has made some attempt to pick it up with his fingers. As to the impatience you ascribed to him, we cannot say; but it seems at least possible that he went out chiefly to get a little fresh air into his lungs, one of the unavoidable effects of quinine being, as you are aware, an unpleasant sensation of nausea.