The Return of Sherlock Holmes Page 4

  For the past fortnight Holmes had been sunk in a slough of despond, with frequent recourse to his 7 percent solution. Holmes was at his very worst when his brain was inactive, which produced in him a physiological lassitude ameliorated only by his fondness for cocaine. But now his eyes sparkled, and a vitality informed his movements, brought about not by drugs, I surmised, but by some intellectual puzzle presented to tax his intellect.

  “I say, Holmes, are you working on a case?”

  He turned his aquiline visage and favoured me with a sardonic glance. “From time to time, Watson, your powers of observation astound me.”

  “Out with it, man!” I demanded, ignoring his heavy-handed sarcasm.

  He seated himself in his armchair beside the fire and crossed his long legs. “This morning,” said he, “I was called upon by a young lady and presented with a pretty problem. You have heard, I take it, of Oswald Carmody?”

  “Of course. His volumes on the occult are famous, though I rather think there has been nothing new from his pen for a decade or more.”

  “Just so. And pray tell, what do you make of his work?”

  “Well… His books are first-rate examples of their kind—if you go in for that type of thing.”

  “ ‘That type of thing,’ ” Holmes repeated with scorn. “Trifling accounts of the supernatural: tales of ghosts and ghouls and things—to employ the cliché—that go bump in the night. In other words, poppycock.”

  “Quite,” I said; “but what has all this got to do with your lady visitor?”

  He stared into space, a long forefinger stroking the line of his jaw, before he replied. “Amelia Carmody claimed that her father’s stories are based on fact: that the many and various shades, spectres, and apparitions that appear in his lurid little accounts do in actuality exist. More to the point, she also made the claim, before she returned to Hampshire on the ten o’clock train, that the occult had a direct bearing on her father’s sudden disappearance three days ago.”

  “Oswald Carmody has disappeared?” I exclaimed.

  “Vanished clean off the face of the earth, according to his daughter,” he said, “and according to the report in yesterday’s Times.” He glanced up at the carriage clock on the mantelshelf. “There is a train leaving Waterloo at a little before one o’clock, Watson. Are you game?”

  “Need you ask, Holmes?” said I.

  “Then pack an overnight bag, and I will recount what Miss Carmody told me once we are ensconced in the carriage to Winchester.”

  “Oswald Carmody was in the habit of working well into the early hours,” said Holmes as the train raced through the snow-bound shires southwest of London. “He favoured a large room on the ground floor of the Jacobean manse that had been the family seat for almost three hundred years. His study was a book-lined room with a single door giving onto a passageway, and a pair of French windows overlooking a lawn to the rear of the house. He was in the habit of locking the study door while he was working, and the French windows were kept locked at all times. On evening of January 19, just over three days ago, he retired after dinner at nine, as was his wont, and locked the study door after him. This was the last that Amelia saw of him, for the old man did not show himself at breakfast the following morning. As eight o’clock came and went, and then nine o’clock—and no reply to his daughter’s increasingly desperate queries issued from within the room—she summoned the manservant, who succeeded in forcing the lock. To their consternation, they found the room empty: Oswald Carmody had vanished. The key was still in the lock on the inside of the door, and the French windows were likewise secured. Moreover, it had snowed the previous evening, but no footprints were to be seen leading from the French windows and away from the house. Amelia, as you might imagine, was beside herself with fear and consternation, emotions still on display when she sought my services this morning and recounted the fateful episode. She was distraught at the thought of what might have happened to her father—and fearful of the agency that had caused his disappearance. For she was convinced, Watson, that he had been spirited away by demonic forces. I agreed to take on the case, for, quite apart from finding it a pretty little puzzle, I am determined to prove to the poor girl that her father’s predicament, far from being the result of occult machinations, has a perfectly rational explanation.”

  “That’s all very well, Holmes, but if both doors were locked from the inside, and no footprints were to be observed leading away from the French windows…”

  My friend bestowed upon me a knowing glance. “I see,” he said; “you are playing the Devil’s advocate. But there are many explanations to account for the anomaly, Watson, as we shall find in due course. Now, I do believe that this is our station.”

  From the country halt just outside the city of Winchester, we hired a trap to take us the three miles to the village of Thurston Marriot, on the outskirts of which stood Carmody Grange. The going was treacherous, the narrow lanes being blocked in places by deep snowdrifts, and it was almost an hour before we turned into the driveway and the Grange came into sight.

  Surrounded as it was by the lowering shapes of ancient oak trees, with a caul of snow-filled cumulus overhead, the Grange presented a dour aspect that had nothing at all to do with my knowledge of its being the domicile of one of the country’s most revered writers on the occult.

  If the house itself was dank and drear, then its present incumbent—Miss Amelia Carmody—proved to be quite the opposite. She was a tiny creature with a pretty face and a vital, becoming manner, notwithstanding the situation in which she found herself.

  She greeted us at the door with a ready and grateful smile, and ushered us into a large if dowdy reception room. Holmes made the introductions, and Miss Carmody took my hand and murmured that she was delighted to make my acquaintance.

  She turned to regard my friend. “You cannot begin to imagine my gratitude at your agreeing to look into this matter, Mr. Holmes,” she went on. “The local police have been little more than useless: they insist that my father has wandered off of his own accord and will turn up in due course. But forgive me—you must be cold and tired. You will, of course, remain at the Grange as my guest for as long as the investigation takes. I will summon Jefferies to show you to your rooms.”

  The old man ushered us through the rambling house, along creaking passageways that M. R. James himself might have described in his tales of the uncanny. No sooner had I unpacked my overnight bag than Holmes came knocking upon my door.

  We proceeded downstairs and met Miss Carmody outside her father’s study. The passage was narrow and gloomy, and laid with cold flagstones, the door itself black and warped with age. Splintered wood showed where the manservant had succeeded in forcing an entry.

  Miss Carmody pushed open the timber door, and we stepped into the hallowed chamber.

  The instant we crossed the threshold, my friend was pacing hither and thither like a bloodhound on the scent. He strode the length of the room, taking in its accoutrements and furnishings, and then, as I had seen him do on countless occasions, he fell to his knees and began a minute examination of the floor of the chamber.

  With its gloomy mahogany panelling, its shelves of leather-bound volumes, its multitudinous examples of the taxidermist’s art, as well as the bountiful paraphernalia of the occultist—crystal balls, pentagrams drawn on musty charts upon the walls—the room was the very manifestation of the sanctum sanctorum of a man who had devoted his life to the study of the dark arts.

  Miss Carmody stood beside the desk, a hand resting lightly upon the leather inlay, as she watched with curiosity—and not a little amusement—the antics of Sherlock Holmes as he went about his business.

  The moment found him tapping at the walls between the bookcases with his long, agile fingers, his ear pressed to the uneven plasterwork. As he worked, he fired questions over his shoulder.

  “As I recall, you mentioned that you have
a brother. Is he resident at the Grange?”

  “Indeed, sir; George has no other option for he is, sadly, bed-ridden.”

  “His condition, if I might ask?”

  “He is consumptive and stricken with regular brain fever.”

  “Nevertheless, I will have to question him, if this can be arranged.”

  “I am sure he’ll be amenable to such a request, Mr. Holmes; he has few visitors, and will be eager to make your acquaintance.”

  “Beside your brother, yourself, and your father, who else is resident at the Grange?”

  “Only Jefferies, the manservant.”

  “No cook, kitchen staff, valets?”

  “Mrs. Hopkins from the village comes in and cooks and cleans for a couple of hours every afternoon.”

  “You mentioned that you are employed as a governess for a lawyer in Winchester,” said Holmes. “When precisely are your days of work?”

  “I work three days a week—Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays—teaching his twins French, German, and Latin.”

  “The rest of the time you are domiciled at the Grange? So you were present the day before your father’s disappearance, on Friday last?”

  She assented to this, and Holmes went on. “Did your father receive guests during the week leading up to the fateful day, pray tell?”

  “No… That is, yes—his brother Jasper dropped by on the Tuesday, although I was out at the time.”

  Holmes repeated the name. “On what business, might I ask?”

  “That I cannot state with any certainty, Mr. Holmes; though I do know that my father and Jasper share an interest in the occult.”

  “I will find Jasper in the village?”

  The young lady shook her head. “He has a small cottage in the grounds of the house; it was the groom’s, in the heyday of the estate, when my ancestors kept horses for hunting. Sadly, the stable yard is much overgrown these days.”

  “Might I ask why your uncle resides in the groom’s old cottage, when there are ample rooms to be had in the Grange?”

  “My father and Jasper did not, at one time, see eye to eye; indeed there was a falling-out over the provision of my father’s will. Happily, that has been resolved, and they are on equable terms once more. Nevertheless, Jasper still prefers the solitude of his own cottage.”

  His examination of the four walls complete, Holmes moved to the desk before the French windows and stared down at its disorganised burden: maps and charts sat in heaps, weighed down with an eclectic array of oddments—an ancient dirk, an old meerschaum pipe, and what I recognised as the scapula of a fully-grown man.

  Beside the desk stood a walnut bookcase bearing an array of two dozen volumes which on closer examination proved to be those from Oswald Carmody’s own pen, with such sensational titles as The Terror of Hadleigh Hall, Ghosts I Have Known, and The Devil’s Accomplice.

  Holmes looked up from the hugger-mugger of objects on the desk. “Are you close to your father, Miss Carmody?”

  “I hold him in deep affection, if that is what you mean. He is in many ways a reserved man, little given to a show of emotion. This I explain by the early death of his wife, taken when I was just an infant; indeed, I can hardly recall Mama.”

  “And your brother, George; is he close to your father?”

  She compressed her lips. “I am afraid not. They do not see eye to eye, and never have. George finds my father’s obsession with the occult nothing short of ridiculous; he is an arch rationalist, a man of science. He was studying physics at Oxford before he fell ill.”

  Holmes nodded to himself and opened the cover of a stout ledger which occupied pride of position on the desk. Looking over his shoulder, I made out a neat copperplate hand covering an expanse of feint-ruled lines.

  “My father’s journal,” Miss Carmody explained.

  My friend read a few lines, then, in a flurry of excitation, riffled back a few pages and resumed reading with increased absorption. A minute later he looked up at me, a gleam in his eye. “What do you make of this, Watson—most especially the passage here?”

  His finger indicated the final entry in Oswald Carmody’s journal, and I stepped forward and began reading.

  …approaching a critical juncture in our research. There can be little doubt that all the evidence, ably abetted by the observations of Jasper, leads to the manifest fact that we have come upon a significant clue as to the very location of the portal ultimum. There can be no doubting, also, that a passage might be effected. I shall inform Jasper without delay, and God willing I shall prove to the world…

  Holmes turned to the young woman. “Have you read this, Miss Carmody?”

  She shook her head. “I was never allowed into his study, and I wouldn’t dream of—”

  Holmes interrupted. “Would you kindly cast an eye upon this passage?”

  She did so, a hand to her mouth as her eyes raced across the lines. At last she looked up at my friend, her expression puzzled. “I…I cannot for the life of me fathom its meaning…” She took a breath and went on, “What can he mean, the ‘portal ultimum,’ and ‘a passage might be effected’?”

  Instead of replying, Holmes moved around the desk and stood before the French windows, staring out at the snow-clad grounds. He spent long minutes examining the frame, and then the lock mechanism at the foot of the door, and finally the huge iron key that hung on a hook beside the windows.

  He consulted his fob-watch, and said, “Now, Miss Carmody, I would like an audience with your brother, if I may, after which I think there might be time to pay a visit to your uncle before dinner.”

  The young woman ushered us from the study, up a grand staircase, and along a warped corridor into the west wing of the house. There she knocked on a door and, receiving a summons, opened it and introduced Holmes and myself to a sickly-looking youth who was sitting up in a four-poster bed. Saying that she had to supervise the cook in the preparation of dinner, she slipped from the bedchamber.

  “Please forgive our intrusion,” Holmes said as he drew up a chair. “Your sister had the wisdom to enlist our aid in the matter of locating your errant father, and there are one or two questions I am obliged to ask.”

  “Amelia mentioned that she was travelling up to London to petition the great Sherlock Holmes,” George said. “I am at your disposal.”

  As I took a seat, I observed the youth more closely: he was in his twenties, and thin to the point of emaciation; his blade-like face was deathly pale and covered in a sheen of perspiration. His hands, which lay upon the counterpane, were claw-like, with veins outstanding, and twitched from time to time with involuntary, galvanic spasms.

  “If I might begin by asking about the events of the morning of the twentieth,” Holmes said.

  “Amelia came to me,” George said, “beside herself with worry. She reported what she had found in pater’s study—or rather what she had not found—and I did my best to console her and vouchsafe the opinion that my father, deep in the throes of creation, had left his study and gone for a long walk.”

  “And the small matter of his study being locked from the inside?”

  “Simplicity itself, Mr. Holmes. The only explanation can be that my father had a spare key for the French windows, and used this to let himself out on that morning.”

  “Notwithstanding the fact that the snow behind the Grange was untrodden?”

  “It was snowing heavily that night,” said the youth; “I venture that he went abroad early, and that a fresh fall of snow covered his tracks.”

  A light gleamed in Holmes’s eyes, and it came to me that this explanation had occurred to him, too, and he was applauding the young man’s rationality.

  “And the fact that he has failed to return?” Holmes asked.

  “I fear my father might have succumbed to illness while abroad, or slipped and fell. Uncle Jasper said that he would su
mmon the local constabulary and have them conduct a search which, due to lack of manpower, was scant, according to Jasper himself.”

  “I take it you give little credence to your sister’s explanation that a supernatural agency might have been responsible for your father’s disappearance?”

  George gave a heartfelt sigh. “My sister is as credulous as my father, Mr. Holmes. We were brought up in an atmosphere steeped in the occult and the supernatural: whereas I repudiated such tomfoolery and sought a more mechanistic explanation for the workings of the universe, my sister was not so fortunate. She took my father’s preachings on the supernatural as gospel.”

  “Are you aware of his latest investigations, pray tell?”

  The young man laughed, but without mirth. “He has been obsessed with this for the past ten years,” said he. “He abandoned his other writings and bent all his efforts to investigating the portal, and the curse that is said to hang over the Grange.”

  This pricked my friend’s interest: he became even more alert. “The curse? But Amelia said nothing of this.”

  “My father thought it wise to protect her feminine sensibilities on the subject.”

  “I would like to know more about this so-called curse,” said Holmes, leaning forward in his chair.

  The young man waved a languid hand in eloquent disgust. “It is arrant nonsense, Mr. Holmes. My father claims to have uncovered some writings of a distant forebear dating from the 1600s, in which a curse is mentioned. I don’t know the details, but my father says that the owner of the Grange back in the 1690s discovered the entrance to the netherworld, and was taken by the creatures that dwelled within. One hundred years later, in the 1790s, Sir Pelham Carmody happened to vanish, again in peculiar circumstances. From these incidents arose the ridiculous story of the curse. The fact is that Pelham was a notorious rake and ne’er-do-well, with considerable debts, and it was in his interests to go to earth and so confound his creditors.”