Lyndsay Faye - Dust and Shadow

“And now this suicide!” Inspector Gregson proclaimed. “Under the circumstances, very black indeed.”

“How so?”

“Why, guilt! What does a man have to kill himself over if not guilt? Really, with all these developments, Mr. Holmes, if you remained, you might yet get a hint of what’s going on.”

“I have word of the gem in London.” Holmes shrugged one shoulder dismissively. “A stonecutter friend of mine has given me reason to return to the city, and I find the evidence meager enough here in Colwall to justify following this fresh lead.”

“Excuse me, sir,” interjected a voice from the side of the room. “Surely there is a great deal of evidence.”

Holmes swung his head to regard the young constable who had ventured this remark. “Do you think so?” he queried dryly. “I call solving a crime a near impossibility when one cannot even fix the date of occurrence within a twelvemonth.”

This retort elicited a chuckle from Gregson, who added, “Now, now, my boy, I brought you down so that you could watch a true professional in action. And Mr. Holmes here may have the odd tip as well. But you’d do better to listen, I think, and keep your opinions mum.”

The officer appeared unperturbed. “But what of the vandalized grass plot?”

“The grass plot?” Gregson laughed. “What can you see in that? As if gardening had anything to do with the matter!”

“I thought it rather queer myself, before I met the boys responsible,” Holmes said swiftly. “Yesterday a brief walk through your inn’s stable yard brought me into personal contact with young Fergus MacArthur and his several associates. They were busy rubbing the guests’ saddles with tallow while the groomsman lay snoring. If creativity alone ensured success in this world, that young gang would soon enough rule the Commonwealth.”

My friend rose gracefully and retrieved his hat from a small bench by the door. “I shan’t hesitate to forward you any news I may manage to unearth in London.”

“Ah, well. I have no doubt but that we’ll have solved the whole matter by the time we hear from you again, but despite that—my thanks.”

“Farewell, Inspector Gregson, and farewell to your staff. They are more promising than you realize.” Holmes gave a final nod and shut the door firmly behind us.

“Back to London,” I mused.

“Yes, Herefordshire has no further use for the two of us,” my friend replied. “However, I have every confidence of locating the ring through its mysterious buyer.” He patted his own breast pocket and the ghost of a smile appeared on his somber face.

We had not been long in London before Holmes telegraphed Lady Ramsden with the news that her mother’s ring had been found. Not only was the household’s joy at the ring’s return buried under their misfortune, but to my friend’s evident satisfaction, so was their curiosity at its initial disappearance. Gregson’s case thus remained regrettably inconclusive, but once the ring had safely arrived via Scotland Yard escort from London at Blackheath House, the good inspector’s spirits had risen enough to compliment the private detective on his “extraordinary luck.”

Stretched upon the settee two weeks later, I was engaged in a medical journal when I heard Holmes’s familiar step bounding up the stairs and into the sitting room. He held a letter to the lamp bemusedly, then with a motion of indifference tossed it onto a formidable stack of documents near the bookshelf.

“Holmes, I do believe you’ve Irregulars* who are shorter than that monstrous pile,” I observed.

“Mmm?” he queried distractedly. “Oh, I hardly think so. Little Graves has had an extraordinary bout of growth since you saw him last.”

I smiled. “What was it, then?”

“The letter?” Holmes stretched his sinewy arm to retrieve it, paused over it for a moment longer, and passed it to me. It was written in vivid red ink in an oddly erratic script, and it read:

Mr. Holmes,

You are a clever one. Arent you? No matter that you may be devillish clever you may be the very devil, but not so clever that Mr. Nobody doesn’t see you. Yes, I see you clear enough, and I may also

See you in Hell

Sooner than you think, Mr. Holmes.

I looked up in chagrin. “Holmes, this letter is an outright threat!”

“The tone is rather unfriendly,” he conceded, digging for tobacco in the depths of his Persian slipper.

“What do you intend to do?”

“Do? Nothing. Your correspondence is not, perhaps, quite as vivid as is my own. When I inspect the mail, desperate for a case worthy of my time and my talent, I all too often find instead the ramblings of the fanciful spinster or the lyricism of the bored newlywed. I’d a priceless example from Brighton last week which I must show you—”

“You have not the slightest interest in this bizarre missive?”

“To my deep discredit, I’ve known far too many criminals not to expect this sort of thing occasionally,” Holmes countered irritably. “It is written on cheap foolscap, posted in the East-end of London, no marks of fingers or other identifying features. What am I to do with it? Queer enough hand, though. I’ve hardly seen one like it.” He scrutinized the page.

“What steps can you take?” I asked once more.

“The best of all steps, my dear Watson—to throw it in the dustbin.” He tossed the paper in the general direction of his desk and forcefully steered the conversation to Richard Owen’s work in the realm of philosophical anatomy.

It was only the next afternoon, when I noticed Holmes’s commonplace book open on his desk, that I realized the letter had not been discarded but pasted carefully under “Miscellaneous Posts.” I meant to inquire of Holmes whether he had discovered any clue to the matter, but my fellow lodger’s abrupt arrival with an urgent appeal from Camberwell drove the matter from my mind entirely.

CHAPTER ONE Two Crimes

It has been argued by those who have so far flattered my attempts to chronicle the life and career of Mr. Sherlock Holmes as to approach them in a scholarly manner that I have often been remiss in the arena of precise chronology. While nodding to kindly meant excuses made for me in regards to hasty handwriting or careless literary agents, I must begin by confessing that my errors, however egregious, were entirely intentional. Holmes’s insistence, not to mention my own natural discretion, often prevented me from maintaining that exactitude so highly prized in a biographer; I have been forced to change the dates of marginal cases to disguise great ones, alter names and circumstances, all the while diligently preserving the core truth of the events, without which there would have been no object in writing anything at all. In this instance, however, any obfuscation would be absurd, as the facts are known not only to the people of London but to the world. I shall therefore set down the entire truth, as it happened to Holmes and to myself, omitting nothing that pertains to the most harrowing series of crimes my illustrious friend and I were ever called upon to solve.

The year of 1888 had already proven significant for Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for it was in that twelvemonth that he performed valuable services for one of the reigning houses of Europe and continued forestalling the activities of Professor James Moriarty, whose hold over London’s underworld grew ever more apparent to my friend. Several highly publicized investigations that year displayed Holmes’s remarkable skills to the public, including the appalling affair of the faulty oil lamp, and the matter of Mrs. Victoria Mendosa’s mysteriously vanishing thimble and its consequences. My friend’s talents, which had once languished in obscure specialism, in that year flamed into the most gratifying notoriety.