Douglas Preston - White Fire

“I returned from London, secure in the knowledge that, not only was there no man-eating wolf, but Sir Percival himself was the murderer of three men. The only question remaining was how to catch him up. I couldn’t very well reveal the truth — that there was no wolf. No; I had to find a reason to manoeuvre Sir Percival into making me his next target, and to arrange it, so to speak, on home ground. Hence my dramatic announcement of having solved the case — and my nocturnal shortcut across the open countryside, between the bog and the forest edge, site of the previous killings. Unless I had made a mistake in my calculations, I felt certain Sir Percival would take the opportunity to make me his fourth victim.”

“But you undertook that walk only because Sir Percival’s carriage broke an axle,” I said. “How could you have anticipated such an eventuality?”

“I did not anticipate it, Watson. I precipitated it.”

“You mean—?” I stopped.

“Yes. I fear I committed an act of sabotage against Sir Percival’s brougham. Perhaps I should send down a cheque for its repair.”

A faint whistle echoed out across the morning sky. A moment later, the express came into view. Within minutes we were boarding. “I confess myself astonished,” I said as we entered our compartment. “You are like the artist that outdoes his best work. There remains only one particular I do not understand.”

“In that case, my dear Watson, pray unburden yourself.”

“It is one thing, Holmes, to make a killing look like the work of an animal; quite another to actually devour portions of a body. Why did Sir Percival continue to do so — and, in fact, to an increasing extent?”

“The answer is quite simple,” Holmes replied. “It would seem Sir Percival, in his growing madness, had begun acquiring a taste for his, ah, prey .”

The subject of the Hexham Wolf did not come up again until perhaps half a year later, when I came across a notice in The Times stating that the new owner of Aspern Hall and his fiancée were to be married in St. Paul’s the following month. It appeared that — in local opinion, at least — the atrocities of the father were more than compensated for by the son’s military success, and by the courage he had displayed in his hunt for the would-be wolf. As for myself, I would have wished to have spent more time, had the circumstances been more pleasant, in the company of one of the handsomest young ladies of my acquaintance: Miss Victoria Selkirk.

On the lone occasion Holmes himself later referred to the case, he merely expressed a passing regret that the excursion had not furnished him with an opportunity to further his study of Sciurus vulgaris —the Eurasian red squirrel.

Corrie finished the story and looked up to find Pendergast’s silvery eyes upon her. She realized she had been holding her breath, and exhaled. “Holy crap,” she said.

“One could say that.”

“This story…I can hardly get my head around it.” A thought struck her. “But how did you know it was key?”

“I didn’t. Not at first. But consider: Doyle was a medical man. Before starting his private practice, he had been the doctor on a whaling ship and ship’s surgeon on a voyage along the West African coast. Those are among the most difficult postings a medical man could experience. He had surely seen a great deal of unpleasantness, to put it mildly, on these voyages. A story that would send him fleeing from the dining table had to be far more repugnant than a mere man-eating grizzly.”

“But the lost story? What led you to that in particular?”

“Doyle was so unsettled by the story he heard from Wilde that he did what many authors do to exorcise their demons: he incorporated it into his fiction. Almost immediately after the meeting in the Langham Hotel he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles , which of course has a few parallels to Wilde’s actual story. But Hound , while a marvelous story in its own right, was a mere ghost of the truth. Not much exorcism to be had there. One can surmise that Wilde’s story continued to work on his mind for a long time. I began to wonder whether, in later years, Doyle finally felt compelled to write something closer to the bone, with much more of the truth in it, as a kind of catharsis. I made some inquiries. An English acquaintance of mine, an expert in Sherlockiana, confirmed to me a rumor of a missing Holmes story, which we surmised was titled ‘The Adventure of Aspern Hall.’ I put two and two together — and went to London.”

“But how did you know it was that story?”

“By all accounts the Aspern Hall story was soundly rejected. Never published. Consider that: a fresh Sherlock Holmes story, from the master himself, the first one in ages — and it is rejected? One might surmise it contained something unusually objectionable to Victorian taste.”

Corrie wrinkled her nose in chagrin. “You make it sound so simple.”

“Most detection is simple. If I teach you nothing else, I hope you’ll learn that.”

She colored. “And I was so dismissive of this lead for so long. What an idiot I am. I’m sorry about that, really.”

Pendergast waved a hand. “Let us focus on the matter before us. The famed Hound of the Baskervilles merely touched on the grizzly story. But this tale: this incorporates far more of what Doyle heard from Wilde, who had in turn heard it from this fellow you found, Swinton. A commendable discovery, that.”

“An accident.”

“An accident is only a puzzle piece that hasn’t yet found its place in the picture. A good detective collects all ‘accidents,’ no matter how insignificant.”

“But we need to figure out what connection the story has to the real killings,” said Corrie. “Okay: you have a bunch of cannibalistic murderers who are behaving somewhat like this guy Percival. They’re killing and eating miners up on the mountain, trying to disguise what they’re doing as grizzly killings.”

“No. If I may interrupt: the identification of the killings with a man-eating grizzly was originally made by chance, as you’ve probably learned for yourself. A grizzly bear passed by and masticated the remains of one of the early victims, and that clinched matters to the town’s satisfaction. Later random sightings of grizzlies seem to confirm the connection. It is all about how human beings construct a narrative out of random events, baseless assumptions, and simple-minded prejudices. In my opinion, the gang of killers you mention did not set out to disguise their work as the result of a man-eating grizzly.”

“All right, so the gang wasn’t trying to disguise their killings. But still, the story doesn’t explain why they’re killing. What’s the motivation? Sir Percival has a motivation: he kills his partner to cover up the fact that he cheated him and stuck him in an insane asylum. I can’t see how that has anything to do with what prompted the killers in the Colorado mountains.”

“It doesn’t.” Pendergast looked at Corrie a long time. “Not directly, at any rate. You’re not focusing on the salient points. One should ask, first: why did Sir Percival eat portions of his victims?”

Corrie thought back to the story. “At first, to make it look like a wolf. And then later, because he was going crazy and thought he was developing a taste for it.”

“Ah! And why was he going crazy?”

“Because he was suffering from mercury poisoning as a result of making felt.” Corrie hesitated. “But what does hat making have to do with silver mining? I can’t see it.”

“On the contrary, Corrie — you see everything. You must be bolder in drawing your inferences. ” Pendergast’s eyes gleamed as he quoted the line.