Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Holmes took a half step closer until he gained James’s full attention again. “You see why I owe it to Ned Hooper to fulfill my promise of taking up the case of his sister’s death.”

“There is no ‘case’,” James said again. “There was only the tragedy of her suicide more than seven years ago. The ‘case’, as you so melodramatically call it, is closed.”

“Do you remember the cause of Mrs. Adams’s death?” asked Holmes.

Henry James knew that he should turn away at that point, go into his hotel, and never talk to this madman again. But he did not move.

“At the depths of her melancholy, when she was alone for a few moments one Sunday, Clover drank a potion that was part of her photographic developing chemical apparatus,” James said at last rather than continue suffering the silence. “It contained arsenic. Death was instantaneous.”

“Death from that type of arsenic, potassium cyanide, is relatively quick but rarely instantaneous,” Holmes said calmly, as if he were discussing railroad timetables. “She would have eventually asphyxiated but only after long moments of the most exquisite agony.”

James raised his free hand as if he could shield himself from such words and images.

“Who found her body?” persisted Holmes.

“Her husband . . . Henry . . . I am certain,” said James, coming very close to stammering. He suddenly felt very confused. Part of his consciousness wished that he had been alone to do what he had planned to do on the sidewalk along the Seine.

“Yes. The police report said it was Henry Adams who discovered her—‘on the floor and comatose before the fireplace’,” agreed Holmes. “This was at a certain time of the morning on Sunday, six December. Does that time of the day and week bear any significance for you, Mr. James?”

“No. None at all. Other than . . . do you mean because it was the time each Sunday that Clover had for years set aside to write to her father, especially during his illness?”

Holmes did not answer. Instead, he took another half step closer and whispered, “Henry Adams had told friends that he never left his wife alone at that hour, on those Sundays, precisely because he feared that her melancholia would overpower her reason. And yet on that Sunday the sixth of December seven years ago, she was alone. At least for several moments.”

“I believe that Henry was on his way out to see his dentist about a tooth that was giving him . . . are you interrogating me , Mr. Holmes?”

“Not at all, Mr. James. I’m explaining why your presence during this investigation is of the utmost importance.”

“I will not betray a friend, Mr. Holmes.”

“Of course not,” said the detective. “But would it not be a case of betraying both your friend Henry Adams and your former friend Clover Adams if it were murder and if no one even bothered to look into it?”

“It . . . was . . . not . . . murder,” James said for what he vowed to be the last time. “Clover was one of the first—and I would venture to say the preeminent—female American photographers of her era. Her work was ethereal. Other worldly. But that very quality of other-worldliness added to her inherited tendency toward terrible melancholy. On this particular winter day, that tendency must have overwhelmed her and she drank some of the easily accessible chemicals from her photographic laboratory—a mixture which, she must have known, contained arsenic.”

“And who gave her those specific developing chemicals?” asked Holmes.

“I assumed she purchased them herself,” snapped James. “If you are again hinting of any shade of guilt accruing to my good and honest friend Henry Adams . . .”

Holmes held up a gloved hand. “Not at all. I happen to know that it was a stranger who provided those chemicals to Mrs. Adams. A brother of a female ‘friend’, a certain Miss Rebecca Lorne, whose acquaintance Mrs. Adams had made quite accidentally in Washington. That friend, Miss Lorne, was there waiting . . . according to police reports and newspaper accounts given to me by Ned Hooper two years ago . . . when Henry Adams returned from his dental errand. Miss Lorne told Adams that she had dropped in to see Mrs. Adams and asked if she was receiving. Mr. Adams said he would run upstairs to see if his wife felt up to seeing a visitor and then he found her body on the floor.”

“Again, you seem to be insinuating . . .” began James, showing the fiercest scowl he could manage. Usually even a much lower-wattage version of that scowl served to silence any presumptuous or personally trespassing interlocutors. Not so this night with Holmes.

“I am insinuating nothing,” said Holmes. “I am merely explaining why you and I will be catching the early express train to Marseilles at six quarter seven tomorrow morning and be boarding a steamship to New York by tomorrow night.”

“There is no power, means, force, blackmail, inducement, or other method of persuasion—in this lifetime or in any other possible variation of this life—that you could use to persuade me to travel with you tomorrow to Marseilles, much less to America, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Henry James.

The two men were alone in a first-class carriage compartment on the express train to Marseilles, which was some comfort to Henry James, and for the first three hours of the trip neither man spoke. James was pretending to read a novel. Holmes was behind The Times .

Suddenly, with neither warning nor prelude, Holmes lowered his paper and said, “You had a beard then as well.”

James looked up and stared. “I beg your pardon.” Eventually, he would get used to Sherlock Holmes’s sudden changes of topic or seemingly irrelevant announcements from the blue, but not this day. Not yet.

“Four years ago,” said Holmes. “When I was introduced to you at Mrs. T. P. O’Connor’s garden party. You wore a full beard then as well.”

James said nothing. He’d had that full beard since the Civil War.

“It is partially how I recognized you in the dark along the Seine,” said Holmes and returned to his paper.

Finally, seeing a way to irritate his irritating compartment-mate, James did speak. “I would think that the world’s most famous consulting detective might rely upon more points of physiognomy for recognition than a man’s beard.”

Holmes laughed. “Of course! I see the physiognomy of men, not their added facial-hair accouterments. I am, for instance, somewhat of an expert on ears.”

“You didn’t even remember we had been introduced,” said James, ignoring the absurd comment about ears.

“Not true, sir,” laughed Holmes. “I remember at the time that when I’d heard the American Mr. James was to be at the garden party, I’d hoped that it would be your brother, the psychologist, with whom I looked forward to discussing several things.”

“William hadn’t yet published his Principles of Psychology in eighteen eighty-eight,” groused James. “He was—to all intents and purposes—unknown to the world. How could you have known you wanted to talk to him? Your memory serves you poorly, Mr. Holmes.”

“Not a bit of it,” chuckled the detective. “Friends in America—friends who shared, in some way, my own peculiar vocation—had sent me copies of your older brother’s various papers on psychology, years before his full book appeared. But the primary reason I was distracted upon meeting you at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party, Mr. James, was that at that precise moment I was watching my suspect—the jewel thief—ply his trade. We caught him, as Watson would say, red-handed. Although I admit to having never learned where that silly phrase—‘red-handed’—came from.”