This did not reassure me in the least. Holmes, however, was in excellent spirits. He glanced through the newspaper and then said,
“Here is something for your scrapbook, my dear fellow!”
It was a report of the incident on Friday night, the terrible night-time drama of Exchange Buildings and Houndsditch. Holmes waggled his fork at me with a little impatience.
“The third paragraph in the editorial, old fellow. This is precisely what I had hoped to avoid.”
A curious coincidence in the terrible events of Friday night was the presence among the police officers in Houndsditch of the well-known consulting detective, Mr Sherlock Holmes. Scotland Yard will say only that Mr Holmes chanced to be in company with Inspector Lestrade at the time and was in no way connected with the case. Most of our readers will surely hope that this is not the truth. Our nation and our society are under attack by the scourings of Europe ’s political gutters. We have tolerated too much for too long on our own soil. If Mr Sherlock Holmes were to purge England and the civilised world of such unprincipled villainy, the civilised world would rally to him and he would earn the sincere gratitude of all decent men and women. If Mr Holmes has not been invited to exterminate this menace, let that invitation be issued now.
I laid the paper down. Never had I read an editorial which adopted so strident a tone.
“A little strongly put,” said Holmes brightly, “but then I have not been invited to do anything except to have dinner this evening.”
“Where?”
“I was remiss in not mentioning it last night. By-the-by, I shall be a little late home. Lestrade, sensible fellow that he is, has decided to call upon the advice of brother Mycroft in this case. Our friend is in deeper water than is usual. Even the Political Branch at Scotland Yard has not been able to help him much. Mycroft, on the other hand, lives, moves and has his being in the world of politics and conspiracy. He keeps an eye upon it, on the government’s behalf.”
“An eye upon Russia?” I inquired sceptically. Holmes smiled.
“Mycroft is particularly fluent in the Russian language, and deeply read in Russian history and culture. His translations of the poetry of Alexander Blok are, I understand, highly regarded. I have also agreed to do what I can for Lestrade. In consequence, Brother Mycroft is giving us dinner in a private room of the Diogenes Club. Please, do not wait up.”
And that was all. After he had gone out, I was left to wonder what labyrinth we were invited to explore. By the time that evening came, I was ready for an early dinner. Then I took down a volume of Sir Walter Scott from the bookshelf-The Heart of Midlothian-and was presently far away in the North, the Edinburgh of a hundred years since and the drama of the Porteus riots. The narrative carried me along so easily that at the end of every chapter, I resolved to read just one more before the early night that I had promised myself.
It was, I think, gone eleven o’clock when I first heard the noise in the street outside-or rather on the outside wall of the room. Something like an empty tin-can hit the wall of the building with a clang and clattered back into the street.
“Mr Hoolmes! Mr Share-lock Hoolmes!”
A first blow of the knocker on the front door was followed by a second.
“Mr Hoolmes, it is I-You know who I am!-and I know you for a lackey and a lick-spittle! A craven flunkey of your monarch and his ministers! An oppressor of the people, one who must share the fate of his paymasters!”
It was so preposterous and unexpected that for a moment I sat and was not sure what to do. There was a pause and I thought the bawling lout had gone on his way. Perhaps he was disconcerted at getting no response. Perhaps he thought it was the wrong house, though the address of Sherlock Holmes was certainly no secret. The curtains were closed. I moved carefully towards them and, at the side, made a tiny gap which gave me a view of the street below by lamplight.
The man was still standing on the far side of the roadway, outside the unlit florist’s shop. He was not in the least the ragged trousered fellow I had expected. His smart black overcoat had what looked like an astrakhan collar and he carried a broad brimmed hat in his left hand. There was something in his right hand which looked like a stone. He was tall, neatly and quite expensively dressed. His hair was dark and trim, he had fine whiskers, his features were more aristocratic than not, indeed his nose was beaked almost to the point of disfigurement.
“You know me! You know me, Mr Hoolmes. When I tell you the name Piatkoff, you will know. You cannot answer? That you are a friend of tyrants, I have known. That you are such a coward, I did not think! A policeman’s lackey!”
I had been completely caught on the hop, as they say, dragged from the comfortable pages of Scott’s novel to face this ruffian. I tried to remember what Holmes had said about Piatkoff the previous night. At that moment, the fellow’s long right arm hurled the stone with the power of an out-fielder returning a cricket ball towards the wicket-keeper. There was an impact and a sound of glass falling on the floor below. I thought of Mrs Hudson but just then dared not take my eyes off this hooligan. He was lounging against the opposite wall now, not the least concerned for the disturbance he had caused. Lights had sprung up in two windows opposite and, at this quiet time of night, the din would surely attract a policeman on his beat.
I remembered that, among his souvenirs, Holmes had a police whistle which he had acquired during our pursuit of Dr Neill Cream, the Lambeth poisoner. I pulled out the drawer below the bookcase to rummage for it. By then, however, someone in the opposite house was shouting into the night to draw the attention of the Baker Street constable, who must therefore be in view.
I went back to the window, astonished to find that Piatkoff, or whatever his name might be, was still leaning against the florist’s wall as if he had not a care in the world. I had a terrible fear that perhaps he carried a revolver in his overcoat pocket and was waiting to shoot any policeman dead, as his compatriots had done on the previous Friday night. However, he was cleverer than that. With his Bohemian broad-brimmed hat on his head he waited a moment. He was evidently able to see something of which the policeman who strode towards him in helmet and gleaming waterproof was unaware.
The lighted interior of a red double-decker motor-bus was coming down from the Regent’s Park towards the Metropolitan underground railway, like a ship illuminated in the darkness. The man waited until it was almost level and the policeman was hardly twenty feet away. Then, in two or three steps, he came forward and sprang on to the moving platform at the rear of the bus, as deftly as if he had practised for this moment all his life. He and the constable stared at one another as the distance between them widened. I could not be sure but I believe he dropped off again as the bus stopped at the railway station, which was just in sight. The policeman had seen the last of him.
I thought of Holmes’s last instruction to me. “Do not wait up.” I was in no mood to do anything else. He came in a little before midnight, full of Mycroft’s ideas, though curious about the broken pane of glass in the downstairs window. I told him my story and he became more subdued, though caring nothing for his own safety.
“We had not counted on his arriving so soon,” he said at length, “though of course if they plan some spectacular violence he was bound to be close at hand. Our people have been watching him in Paris. Indeed Monsieur Hammard, the Chef du Service at the Sûreté, has a private line to the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard on such matters. Brother Mycroft assures me that Piatkoff was last seen in Paris not a week ago. For he really is a painter and had two pictures hanging in an exhibition which opened in a private gallery near the Quai d’Orléans.”