Neil Gaiman: Shadows over Baker Street

“Do you think they will catch him, then?”

My friend shook his head. “I may be wrong,” he said, “but I would wager that he and his friend are even now only a mile or so away, in the Rookery of St. Giles, where the police will not go except by the dozen. They will hide up there until the hue and cry have died away. And then they will be about their business.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because,” said my friend, “if our positions were reversed, it is what I would do. You should burn the note, by the way.”

I frowned. “But surely it’s evidence,” I said.

“It’s seditionary nonsense,” said my friend.

And I should have burned it. Indeed, I told Lestrade I had burned it, when he returned, and he congratulated me on my good sense. Lestrade kept his job, and Prince Albert wrote a note to my friend congratulating him on his deductions while regretting that the perpetrator was still at large.

They have not yet caught Sherry Vernet, or whatever his name really is, nor was any trace found of his murderous accomplice, tentatively identified as a former military surgeon named John (or perhaps James) Watson. Curiously, it was revealed that he had also been in Afghanistan. I wonder if we ever met.

My shoulder, touched by the Queen, continues to improve; the flesh fills and it heals. Soon I shall be a dead shot once more.

One night when we were alone, several months ago, I asked my friend if he remembered the correspondence referred to in the letter from the man who signed himself Rache . My friend said that he remembered it well, and that “Sigerson” (for so the actor had called himself then, claiming to be an Icelander) had been inspired by an equation of my friend’s to suggest some wild theories furthering the relationship between mass, energy, and the hypothetical speed of light. “Nonsense, of course,” said my friend, without smiling. “But inspired and dangerous nonsense nonetheless.”

The palace eventually sent word that the Queen was pleased with my friend’s accomplishments in the case, and there the matter has rested.

I doubt my friend will leave it alone, though; it will not be over until one of them has killed the other.

I kept the note. I have said things in this retelling of events that are not to be said. If I were a sensible man I would burn all these pages, but then, as my friend taught me, even ashes can give up their secrets. Instead, I shall place these papers in a strongbox at my bank with instructions that the box may not be opened until long after anyone now living is dead. Although, in the light of the recent events in Russia, I fear that day may be closer than any of us would care to think.

S—— M—— Major (ret’d)

Baker Street

London, Albion, 1881

It was in India, on the high Malwa Plateau in July of 1882, that I chanced to make the acquaintance of an American woman whom I have never forgotten and undertake an adventure which I have long waited to recount. The monsoon was much delayed that hot and arid summer, and war raged between the British and the Russians in nearby Afghanistan—another move on the chessboard of the “Great Game.” No end was yet in sight to either problem when I, Magnus Larssen, shikari, was summoned to the village of Kanha to guide a party in search of tiger.

My gunbearer (who was then about fifteen) and I arrived some ten days before the shooters, and arranged to hire a cook, beaters, and mahouts and prepare a base of operations. On the first full day of our tenancy, I was sitting at my makeshift desk when “Rodney” came into my tent, ferment glistening in his brown eyes. “The villagers are very excited, sahib,” he said.

“Unhappy?” I felt myself frown.

“No, sahib. They are relieved. There is a man-eater.” He danced an impatient jig in the doorway.

I raised an eyebrow and stretched in my canvas chair. “Driven to it by the drought?”

“The last month only,” he answered. “Three dead so far, and some bullocks. It is a female, they think, and she is missing two toes from her right front foot.”

I sipped my tea as I thought about it, and at last I nodded. “Good. Perhaps we can do them a favor while we’re here.”

After some days of preparation, we took transportation into Jabalpur to meet the train from Bhopal. The party was to be seven: six wealthy British and European men and the woman, an American adventuress and singer traveling in the company of a certain Count Kolinzcki, an obese Lithuanian nobleman.

The others consisted of a middle-aged, muttonchopped English gentleman, Mr. Northrop Waterhouse, with adolescent sons James and Conrad; Graf Baltasar von Hammerstein, a very Prussian fellow of my long acquaintance, stout in every sense of the word; and Dr. Albert Montleroy, a fair-haired Englishman, young around the eyes.

As they disembarked from the train, however, it was the lady who caught my attention. Fair-haired, with a clean line of jaw and clear eyes, she was aged perhaps twenty-two, but her beauty was not the sort that required youth to recommend it. She wore a very practical walking dress in sage green, fashionably tailored, and her gloves and hat matched her boots very well. I noticed that she carried her own gun case as well as her reticule.

“Ah, Magnus!” Von Hammerstein charged down the iron steps from the rail coach and clasped my hand heavily, in the European style. “Allow me to present your charges.” Remembering himself, he turned to the American, and I saw that she was traveled enough to recognize his courtesy. “Fraulein, this gentleman is the noted author and hunter of heavy game, Mr. Magnus Larssen. Magnus, may I present the talented contralto, Miss Irene Adler.”

“So what is this I hear about a mankiller, shikari ?” The older Waterhouse boy, James, was talking. “On the train, we heard a rumor that a dozen men had been found mauled and disemboweled!”

“Lad,” his father warned, with a glance to the woman. She looked up from her scarcely touched sherry.

I think Miss Adler winked. “Pray, sir, do not limit the conversation on my behalf. I am here to hunt, just as the rest of you, and I have visited rougher surroundings than this.”

Montleroy nodded in the flicker of lantern light. The boys had collected the supper dishes, and we were each relaxing with a glass. “Yes, if we’re to have a go at this man-eater, let’s by all means hear the details. It’s safest and best.”

“Very well,” I allowed, after a moment. “There have been three victims so far, and a number of cattle. It seems that the tigress responsible is wounded and taking easy prey. All of the bodies have been mauled and eaten; that much is true. The details are rather horrible.”

Horrible indeed. The eyes had been eaten out of their heads, and the flesh off the faces. The bodies had been dismembered and gnawed. If it had not been for the fact that the only prints close to the bodies were those of the wounded tiger, I might have been tempted to think of some more sinister agency: perhaps agents of a Thuggee cult. I was not, however, about to reveal those facts in mixed company, Miss Adler’s high opinion of her own constitution notwithstanding.

Across the room, I saw the younger Waterhouse boy, Conrad, shudder. I shook my head. Too young.