My Dearest Holmes Page 5

  'And so, you know the Carstairs of Sussex?' Holmes was saying, and I could tell that his interest was genuine. 'Why, what an interesting coincidence, Mrs Kirkpatrick! I knew the younger son, Mr Edward Carstairs, at college--only slightly, I may add, but I did have occasion to visit the family home. I was anxious to consult a particular old volume for my researches, and Carstairs was kind enough to let me have use of the library there. It certainly contained many fascinating first editions; I have rarely seen such a collection. However, I did not become intimate with the family. There is almost a decade between the elder and younger brother, I believe.'

  'Yes, I believe so.' Miss Kirkpatrick spoke quickly, with downcast eyes, and even I could see that we were hot on the scent.

  'Did you know him?' persisted Holmes. 'Rumour has it that he was somewhat dissolute as a youth. Obviously he has now settled down, and is quite a model of respectability, I believe, and happily married. I must confess myself disappointed that I never met him; he was from home on my only visit.'

  'I...knew him slightly,' said Miss Kirkpatrick; and then noticing that her son and I were listening, took the opportunity to turn the conversation. 'But Maurice, why are you not entertaining Dr Watson? How very rude you must think us, Dr Watson. Allow Maurice to help you to some cake.'

  A sharp look passed between mother and son, and the latter responded with alacrity. 'Yes, Dr Watson, you really must try some of this, it's excellent,' said he, attacking the unfortunate cake with the knife in such a way as to leave no doubt that there was a vicious streak in his nature.

  The rest of the meal passed rather hysterically, with both mother and son conversing wildly, and sometimes simultaneously, on every topic under the sun. Holmes remained as demure as ever, with a bon mot for every occasion, but I became confused and eventually sank into silence.

  --VI--

  THAT WAS not a successful visit,' I murmured, as we walked hurriedly away an hour or so later.

  'My dear Watson, what can you mean? It was most successful. I now have all the information I need to complete my investigations.'

  I sighed in exasperation, and thrust my hands further into my pockets. 'If you measure a visit by the amount of personal information you manage to squeeze out of your hosts, regardless of the amount of distress you cause or the amount of suspicion you arouse, then yes, I suppose you could call it successful,' I snapped. 'But you will excuse me from applying that epithet to what must certainly rank among the most embarrassing social occasions of my life. I can never enter that house again. You realise Kirkpatrick was suspicious?'

  I amazed myself; I could not remember ever daring to risk Holmes' displeasure by such an outburst before. He quickened his stride in angry silence; I matched my pace with his, the adrenaline pulsing through my veins, my heart beating uncomfortably. After a while he slowed down, and began humming to himself under his breath. I stole a glance at his face and was surprised to see that his expression was perfectly mild, as though the subject had passed completely out of his mind. This defeated me; I knew that I would have to apologise, or he would simply exclude me from the rest of the investigation.

  'I'm sorry, Holmes,' I said at last. 'You must forgive me; I'm overwrought. Of course you are right to put the investigation before everything.'

  'You know my methods, Watson,' he said. 'I am never one to be squeamish about details; I do what is necessary. And I can assure you that I never had any intention of ingratiating myself with Mr Maurice Kirkpatrick in the first place. Any acquaintance of that sort would be detrimental to my career, to say the least.'

  He gave me a sharp look. I avoided his eyes.

  'As for Miss Kirkpatrick,' he continued, 'I have no wish to cause her pain, but the matter has to be cleared up as quickly as possible for her own sake; and I can assure you, that while you were gossiping with her son over tea, I picked my way through the subject of youthful connections with what I think I may claim to be a modicum of finesse, only arriving at the home territory of the Carstairs at the very end of our conversation.'

  'Yes, Holmes, I see that,' I said. I reflected miserably that the man really was as I had so often described him, a brain without a heart. I might as well cast aside any hopes, such as Miss D'Arcy had encouraged, once and for all.

  He stopped abruptly at the corner of Kensington Church Street and hailed a hansom; and we soon found ourselves travelling in silence back to Baker Street.

  It was already dark by the time we gained our rooms. Holmes made straight for his bookshelf and took down a copy of Burke's Peerage. He then filled his old clay pipe from the Persian slipper, and sat down in silence to study the book. After some minutes spent fruitlessly pacing from fireplace to window, I seated myself opposite him and lit my own pipe. My imitative gesture seemed to please him, for he looked up at me with a grunt of satisfaction, and tapped at the open page with his forefinger.

  'Now we have him, Watson. Lord Robert Carstairs, of Camden Hall, Sussex. And here is the address of his London residence, in Cavendish Square. Dear me, we are almost neighbours! Date of birth, the 27th of May, 1844. So, now nearly forty-three years of age; about the same age as Miss Kirkpatrick, wouldn't you agree?'

  'Wonderful, Holmes. But are you sure that it is he? There could be a hundred and one reasons for Miss Kirkpatrick's reticence when his name was mentioned, and we are taking an enormous risk if we have nothing more to go on.'

  My foolish doubts restored Holmes' good humour completely, as I had known they would. He put Burke's Peerage to one side, leaned back in his chair, and blew a smoke-ring of satisfaction towards the ceiling.

  'My dear Watson,' said he, 'we have plenty to go on, I can assure you. You surely do not suspect me of acting on nothing more than a wild guess? Let me give you a little resume of the course of my conversation with Miss Kirkaptrick, plus one or two observations which you, my dear fellow, obviously failed to register in your highly nervous state.

  'We began, as you may have heard, with the topic of ancient Greece, and moved rapidly from the mainland to the islands, which we both agreed to be well worth a visit. Miss Kirkpatrick, it transpires, has been to--but I digress. It was a simple matter to lead the conversation from there to the haunts of one's childhood and youth, and the nostalgia inspired by them. Miss Kirkpatrick expressed a great love for the county of Sussex, where she had been born and brought up. She lived there, she said, until the age of twenty-two, when her father remarried; then she left the area and came to London--the implication being that she could not like her stepmother enough to live under the same roof with her. That is plausible enough, but knowing what we know, I think we can assume that there was more to it than that. If the encounter of which Maurice Kirkpatrick is the happy result happened, as it must have done, when Miss Kirkpatrick was twenty or thereabouts, the chances are that it happened in Sussex, and that her departure from the area took place soon after her son's birth.

  'If Miss Kirkpatrick's former lover now finds himself in a position to be blackmailed, he must be a public figure. The Kirkpatricks, as Miss D'Arcy rightly informed us, occupy a high social position, and their daughter would have ample opportunity to make the acquaintance of the most eligible young bachelors of the county. Two or three families sprang immediately to mind; I made my way through them until I hit upon the desired reaction.

  'I do have further confirmation, however. You may have possibly noticed that a copy of The Times lay upon the sideboard, and that it was folded open at the Court Circular. As we rose to leave, I took the opportunity to glance at it, and read that Lord Robert Carstairs is in London visiting friends at present, but that his wife Lady Sylvia Carstairs remains at home in Sussex.

  'Now, this indicates a hasty visit, does it not, arranged on some pretext no doubt, but for the real purpose of making contact with his son, in an attempt to forestall or counter the activities of his blackmailer. The fact that the newspaper in the Kirkpatrick household happened to be folded back at the very page upon which Lord Carstairs' activities were detailed
may be taken, under the circumstances, as an indication that gentleman's movements are an object of some interest.

  'So, my good Watson, I submit to you once again that Lord Robert Carstairs is the man.'

  'Wonderful, Holmes,' I repeated with more conviction. 'Yes, of course it is all very simple and reasonable.'

  Holmes gave me a sharp look. 'I often regret having to explain my deductive processes to you, Watson,' he remarked, rising from his chair, 'since your admiration is always so fleeting. Anyway--we have identified our man. Now let us see if we can do as much for his blackmailer.'

  'And how are we going to achieve that, Holmes?'

  'Why, by interviewing Lord Carstairs himself! I will send him a wire, telling him to expect us this evening; we do not want to have a wasted journey and find him from home. And even if his suspicious son has had the wit to forewarn him, I do not think he will refuse to see me, if only to ascertain how much I know. I shall take the opportunity to reassure him that the visit will be in the strictest confidence.

  'And now, my dear Watson, no more questions. As soon as I have sent this wire, I intend to indulge myself in a little violin practice. No better way to while away the intervening hours, or to clear the mind for the next stage of our little investigation.'

  Holmes was, as I have often mentioned, an amateur violinist of no mean standard, and it was usually a pleasure for me to listen to his performance. This evening, however, something in the haunting beauty of the Mendelssohn Lieder struck a responsive chord of such emotion within me that I was obliged to retire to my room. I do not know whether my damp eyes registered with Holmes; I caught a look from him as I rose to leave the room, and his own expression was peculiarly gentle, as sometimes happened when he was engrossed in music. His grey eyes rested upon me with a gaze that could have been either brooding or vacant. Then, with a slight shrug, he turned towards the window and continued his playing in an even more soulful vein.

  Upstairs in my room, I listened to the strains from below, and wondered for the hundredth time what was to become of me. Profoundly I wished Miss D'Arcy, Miss Kirkpatrick and my friend Maurice all to the devil; between them they had contrived to bring my unhappy situation into even sharper relief. Miss D'Arcy in particular, having drawn me out about my feelings for Sherlock Holmes, had left me, it seemed, at a point of no return. What was I to do? I was in love with the man. My double life, my nocturnal visits to the clubs and meeting places where I was accustomed to seek relief, had become odious and degrading to me. A clean break seemed to be the only answer, and yet I shrank from it.

  How long would it be before I betrayed myself to Holmes? Or--for in all probability he was well aware of the extent of my affection--before he himself confronted me with his cold, logical questions, his appearance of mild surprise, his 'Dear me, my dear Watson...', his careful impression of distaste for all the softer emotions, but in particular for those directed at himself? Try as I might, I could picture no happy solution to this downward spiral.

  Suddenly I became aware that the music had stopped. I listened, but there was no sound from the room below. Obviously, he had laid aside his violin to concentrate once more upon the case, unhindered by my presence, uninterrupted by my inane questions, my slowness and stupidity. How else did he see me but as a foil to himself? I was a whetstone to his mind, I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could scarcely be said to be made to me--many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead--but nonetheless, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. And yet when he wanted to move fast, when he wanted to dispense with the process of rhetorical question, suggestion from me, definitive answer from himself, he would completely ignore me, demand my silence, or contrive to remove my presence altogether.

  Such were the bitter thoughts which occurred to me as I sat forlornly upon my bed, trying to picture his movements, his frenetic pacing and smoking in the room below. Then, as I realised I could hear no footstep, no creaking of the boards as was usual when he paced the floor, I pictured him instead curled up in his chair, his feet drawn up and his head resting at an angle against the chair-back, enveloped in smoke from his pipe. The thought of him sitting silently below, and me above, appeared so bleak to me that I determined to go downstairs and join him, to sit with him in silence for company's sake. After all, why punish myself more than was necessary, by depriving myself of his presence? After a few more minutes' hesitation, I made my way downstairs and entered the sitting room.

  I found him lying back relaxed in his chair, the shirtsleeve of his left arm rolled back. He turned his head at my entrance, and greeted me with a slow, arrogant smile. Even before I saw the cocaine bottle and the syringe, I knew what he had been doing. A sinking sensation in my stomach caused me to halt by the door for a second; then without a word I walked across to my chair and sank into it, my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands. My reproachful attitude produced nothing beyond the humming of a few snatches of the Lieder he had just been playing, which soon gave way to complete silence.

  Here was another aspect of Holmes which caused me continual sorrow. His addiction to the drug and the alarming swings of mood which it engendered had long been a source of anxiety to me, and in vain I had cautioned, threatened and entreated him upon the subject.

  'Perhaps you are right, Watson,' he would answer mildly. 'I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendingly stimulating that its second action is a matter of small moment.'

  What could I do? I had not even an appropriate excuse, beyond the call of common friendship, for my concern over the matter. Why should he change his habits for my sake, if his concern for his own health was not sufficient to motivate him? How could I say to him what I longed to say: 'I love you; I cannot bear to see you harming yourself in this way'?

  It was impossible; the most that I could claim was that my influence prevented his using the drug to such an excess as he might otherwise have done, had he lived alone.

  Mercifully, we had not a long evening ahead of us. Dinner was brought up at seven-thirty; I ate steadily and miserably, Holmes hardly at all, as was usual when under the combined stimulation of the drug and an absorbing case. From eight-thirty to nine-thirty he sat in his chair, apparently immersed in a black-letter volume. At nine-thirty he rose abruptly, and came to stand by the chair in which I sat, also endeavouring to read.

  'Well, Watson, to work! The appointed hour for our visit draws near. Would you be kind enough to ring and order a cab? Lord Carstairs, I hope, is expecting us.'

  --VII--

  IT WAS NEARLY ten o'clock when we arrived at Lord Robert Carstairs' London residence. An immaculate butler opened the door to us, and regarded us with deep suspicion, while the footman went to present our cards.

  We were shown into a luxurious but dimly lit drawing room, where a comfortable fire was burning. A tall, elegant man with fair hair, just beginning to thin, a small moustache, and a slightly dandified style of dress and manner, rose from his armchair to greet us. His movements were slow and graceful, his voice quiet, with an edge of distrust to it despite his outward politeness and calm.

  'Mr Holmes, I presume?' said he, extending his hand to my companion. 'And Dr Watson,' turning to me. 'Well, it was very good of you, gentlemen, to give me advance warning of your visit; though I must confess myself still very much in the dark as to its purpose. I have heard of you of course, Mr Holmes,' he continued, as he gestured towards two empty chairs in which we seated ourselves, 'and I would be obliged if you would explain your business at once and in plain terms, and not leave me any longer in my present ignorance and anxiety as to its nature.'

  Sherlock Holmes seated himself and leaned forward, chin on folded hands, his keen gaze fixed upon Lord Carstairs' face.

  'To come straight to the point, then,' he said, 'you are being blackmailed, Lord Carstairs.'

  The noble lord could not disguise the expre
ssion of alarm that flashed across his countenance, though he did not appear to be taken completely by surprise. He waited some seconds before replying.

  'May I ask how you come to know this, Mr Holmes?'

  'You do not deny it, then.'

  Lord Carstairs shrugged. 'What would be the point of denying it? If you did not know it to be the case, you would not be here. Your knowledge of it worries me, however, for I have taken every step to keep the matter as quiet and discreet as possible, in order to protect the innocent. I ask you again, how do you know of this situation?'

  Holmes leaned back in his chair in evident satisfaction, and placed the tips of his fingers together. Not for an instant did his keen eyes leave Lord Carstairs' face.

  'You must respect the confidentiality between myself and my client, Lord Carstairs,' he said. 'I can assure you, however, that neither Miss Maria Kirkpatrick nor Mr Maurice Kirkpatrick are aware of my involvement in the matter. The object of my visit is to be of help to you; to trace the blackmailer, without involving the police, and to assist you in bringing the matter to a close without scandal or publicity, so that Miss Kirkpatrick may return to her home in safety and in peace of mind.'

  Lord Carstairs remained deep in thought for a while; then raised his eyes quickly, as one who has just found the answer to a question.

  'Then I think I can deduce the name of your client, Mr Holmes; and I am very sorry that the lady has become involved this far. I understood that Maria--Miss Kirkpatrick, wanted to keep the matter from her until all had been cleared up one way or the other. How much does she know?'