“I favour Barritso, as you well know,” said Holmes.
“Now,” said Professor Slocombe, as he swung the lens up to its highest mounting and passed the image along the borders of the Brentford Triangle, “what do you see?”
Holmes cradled his chin in his right hand and watched the moving picture with great interest. “Some trick of the light, surely?”
“But what do you see?”
Holmes plucked at a neat sideburn. “I see a faint curtain of light enclosing the parish boundaries.”
“And what do you take it to be?”
Holmes shook his head. “Some natural phenomenon perhaps? Something akin to the aurora borealis?”
“I think not.” The Professor closed the rooftop aperture and the room fell once more into darkness. Holmes heard the sound of a key turning in a lock, and a thin line of wan light spread into the room from a previously concealed doorway. “This is a somewhat private chamber,” the Professor whispered as he led the detective through the opening and into a gabled gallery set in the very eaves of the roof. What light there was entered through chinks between the slates. The old man struck flame to an enamelled oil-lamp, and the golden light threw a long and cluttered garret into perspective. It was lined on either side with tall, dark filing cabinets. Bundles of bound documents, some evidently of great age, were stacked upon and about these, or spilled out from half-opened drawers.
“As you can observe, I have been following the course of this particular investigation for a good many years.”
Holmes ran his finger lightly over the waxen paper of a crumbling document exposing a seal imprinted with the date 1703. “And all this has been amassed to the furtherance of one single goal?”
The Professor nodded. “It is the product of many lifetimes’ work and yet now, with all this behind me, I am still lost for a solution to the matter now closely pressing upon us.”
“But what is it, Professor? What have you found and what do you yet seek? Tell me how I might aid you, you have but to ask.”
“What I have here is evidence. But it is evidence of a most unique nature, for it is evidence of a crime which is yet to be committed; the greatest crime of them all. I have my case together and I can predict fairly accurately as to what will occur and when, but I have yet to come up with a solution as to a way that I might prevent it happening.”
“But what is it?”
“Armageddon. The apocalypse,” said Professor Slocombe. “The coming of the millennium. Did you think that I would have gone to all this trouble for anything less?”
Sherlock Holmes shook his head slowly. “I suppose not,” said he.
11
Norman’s automaton had finished breaking up the stones and resurfacing the shopkeeper’s backyard. Now he smacked the dust from his duro-flesh palms and returned to the kitchenette to brew up some tea for his living double. Norman watched his approach through the grimy rear window. He was doing very well now, he thought. There were no more signs of violent temperament now that his circuitry had been appropriately readjusted. He would give the creation a couple of days to redecorate the premises then, if all seemed sound, get him back on shop work. Although things had got off to a poor start, Norman was certain that the future looked promising, and that he would soon be able to dedicate all his time to his greatest project yet.
The scientific shopkeeper grinned lop-sidedly and struck up a bit more whistling. He sought about on his shelves for a chocolate bar which was still in date to munch upon. Through the open shop-doorway he spied another whistler. Jim Pooley was striding by at a jaunty pace en route to Bob the bookie. Here Jim would lay on one of the most extraordinary and ill-conceived Super-Yankee accumulators ever recorded in the annals of bookmaking history.
Norman gave up his futile search, made a mental observation that when the great day dawned and all his wares were computer-coded he would have no need to bother with such trifles as actually ordering new stock, and repaired to the kitchenette for a cuppa.
Jim Pooley pushed open Bob’s armoured-glass door and entered the betting shop. As is well known, to any follower of the sport of kings, the interior of such establishments vary by but the merest detail, be they based upon some busy thoroughfare in John O’Groats or down a back alley in Penge. The betting shop is always instantly recognizable to be the thing of beauty that it is: the grey, fag-scarred linoleum floor, and the ticker-tape welcome of slip stubs; the heavily-barred counter, twelve-inch black and white tellies; the rarely-scrubbed blackboards, displaying hieroglyphics that even the now legendary Champollion would find himself hard-pressed to decipher.
Jim squinted through the blue fog of Havana cigar smoke towards its source. Behind the portcullis, pulling upon his torpedo, sat Bob the bookie.
“In for another hiding?” the millionaire enquired.
Jim smiled and waggled his betting-slip. “Today is the day,” quoth he.
Bob stifled a yawn and rubbed a newly-purchased diamond ring upon the lapel of his smoking-jacket. The Koh-i-Noor glittered flawlessly in its setting as Jim slid his slip beneath the titanium security bars of the counter fortress. Bob held the crumpled thing at arm’s length and examined it with passing interest. “I have a new pocket calculator,” he told Pooley.
“Personalized for you by Cartiers of Paris, no doubt,” said Jim. “Wrought in platinum and fashioned into the likeness of a golden calf. Your initials in jade?”
“Something of the sort.”
“I have no wish to see it, but should it give you some small pleasure, I suppose I owe it to you. Times are, I see, as ever against you.”
“It is a hard life.”
“Oh, is it now? To tell you the truth, spending so much of my time, as I do, in the sensual pleasures of unashamed luxury, I rarely have time to notice.”
“It is electric,” Bob continued, “solar-powered in fact. It will work for a thousand years without maintenance.”
“Handy,” said Jim.
“But nevertheless useless.”
“Oh dear, and why might that be?”
“Well, for all the wondrous ingenuity of its creators, the lads have overlooked one small detail, and have denied it the facility to calculate any sum greater than nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds.”
“The fools,” said Jim.
“My sentiments entirely. Now should your selection,” he waved Pooley’s betting-slip sadly before him, “come up at the predicted odds, I feel that my calculator will find itself many zeros below the mark.”
“Don’t worry,” said Pooley sympathetically, “I have already worked it out in my head. I’ll have just the pound on it please, Bob.”
“As you wish, and shall you pay the tax?”
“Oh yes, I have no wish to upset the country’s economy. Such is not fair to the Government.”
“As you will then.” Bob pushed Pooley’s slip into the machine, and Jim passed him the exact amount in pennies and halfpennies. “I’ll be back around five to settle up,” said he.