“I shall be with Mycroft today,” he said, crossing to the door, “We are required to give an account of ourselves to Mr Churchill and his advisers. I see that you and I have no immediate engagements of any other kind. However, it is possible that you may receive a call from Mr Chung Ling Soo. If so, be good enough to ask him to leave a card with his present address and assure him that I will communicate with him forthwith.”
Mr Chung Ling Soo! What madness or nonsense this might be I could not tell and Holmes did not say. It was evidently some case that he had picked up and neglected to mention. It hardly seemed worth bothering about by comparison with the threat from the Revolutionary Anarchists.
As Holmes went down the stairs, I stood up and replaced him at the window. There was a cab waiting outside and he was about to step into it. I now saw that he was in the company of two Army officers. I recognised from my own military service that their lapels and hat-bands proclaimed one to be a colonel and the other a brigadier. Whatever game Holmes and his associates were playing seemed too rich for my blood, as the saying goes.
I kept an appointment for lunch in the refectory of the London Hospital with my friend and colleague Alfred Jenkins, who had been a lieutenant with me in Afghanistan-and who had pursued his military career as surgeon major for several years after I was invalided out after Maiwand. When his time was up and he returned to civilian life, he had been offered a senior post as surgeon at the London Hospital.
As we were eating our steak and kidney pie, a colleague of Jenkins came up and sat down beside us.
“We’ve got him!” he said excitedly, “There was great competition and he’s as handsome as Adonis-a very beautiful corpse.” The acquisition, I discovered, was the body of Poloski Morountzeff, who had gone by the name of George Gardstein. His corpse was of great importance, because few people had met him or had any idea what he looked like. In order that he might now be identified it was necessary for his remains to be preserved intact for a further three months. The task of accomplishing this had been awarded to the London Hospital, who had arranged to keep him in a formaldehyde-fume preservation-chamber with glass windows. His eyes had been carefully opened, while a policeman photographed his face for a life-like poster which soon appeared on public display.
When I returned to our lodgings, I Holmes was already there. He was not very communicative beyond saying that Lestrade’s men had been watching the East End. They had picked up the trail of Piatkoff who, contrary to Holmes’s expectations, had evidently not changed his appearance as yet. Possibly, as I remarked humorously, he was not a reader of the Morning Post. Holmes stared back at me, unsmiling. He remarked that Piatkoff had been seen in Jubilee Street. He had been watched by Atherton, alias Volkoff, at the Anarchist Club, where other members present had at first seemed so in awe that no one spoke to him. Then he had conversed at random, not as if he had a rendezvous with anyone.
No carter’s van had called at any address in Jubilee Street to deliver rifles. For all their cleverness, Mycroft Holmes and the pursuers had lost the scent of that consignment. I stood up, stretched, and wished my friend good-night. I noticed, as I did so, a carte-de-visite on the sideboard. It showed a tiny head-and-shoulders photograph of an expressionless Englishman in a suit and hat, under the inscription: “Memorandum from Chung Ling Soo: Marvellous Chinese Conjuror.” Written underneath were the words, “Wood Green Empire until Saturday. Always a pleasure to see you in the stalls.” What on earth Holmes wanted with a stage conjuror I did not know and, at that moment, I did not care.
8
If Sherlock Holmes and his brother had an idea of what was going on, they seemed in no hurry to do anything about it. Then a few mornings later I went down to breakfast and once again sensed a smell of solder or hot metal in the sitting-room. It did not seem to emanate from the room itself. Sherlock Holmes had it on his clothes. But where had he been that night? Who had he been with and what had they been doing? He certainly looked, once again, as if his head had never touched the pillow.
I thought perhaps I should become my own detective but I did not suppose I should get very far. Even Scotland Yard had accomplished little. Thanks to an innocent couple who came forward because they wondered what had happened to their lodger, the CID had located Poloski Morountzeffs workroom. The chemicals found there, chosen for the manufacture of bombs, he had explained away to the credulous landlord as a formula for his patent fire-proof paint. There was a supply of rifle cartridges, though no rifles, and clips of ammunition for a Mauser pistol. Morountzeff had been well-behaved, an ideal lodger, who sometimes locked his rooms and travelled to the Continent.
During the next week, thanks to such “information received,” the City of London police arrested three men and two women. Fedoroff, Peters and Duboff were charged with the Houndsditch murders, Sara Milstein and Rosie Trassjonsky with conspiring to assist them. Unfortunately, it seemed that the informants against them were more attracted by the rewards offered than by any allegiance to the truth. When the evidence was examined, all the defendants were set free. Murder could not be proved against the three men, much less against the two women.
It was difficult to establish the identity of any of the suspects. The internal security system of the Anarchist movement discouraged the use of names. Where necessary it still preferred to allude to “The Frenchman” or “The German” or “The Russian.” For every man who knew the sobriquet of “Peter Piatkoff” there seemed to be a thousand who knew “Peter the Painter.” What was not known could be betrayed, even under police questioning.
A few names were known to the police, among them such men of violence as Fritz Svaars and Yoshka Sokoloff. They had not been caught, as Holmes remarked with a sigh, and it seemed likely that they were in Russia or France by now.
Such was the situation when I went to bed a few nights later and, somewhen after midnight, had that unusual sensation of waking from a dream within a dream. After what seemed like several minutes, but was probably more like ten or twenty seconds, of dreaming about dreaming I was fully awake. It was almost four o’clock in the morning and, so far as I knew, Sherlock Holmes was in bed and asleep. He had certainly retired before midnight. Now, however, I heard voices in the sitting-room below me.
I had missed whatever they were discussing but I was quite clear in my mind that one of the voices was Sherlock Holmes and another was his brother Mycroft. There were at least two more, probably four but I could not be sure. I did not recognise these other speakers, though one of them had a very distinctive tone of voice. His words were spoken rather slowly but emphatically and, at times, with something like a growl. The voice was rather slurred on occasion, as if the tongue might be a little too large for the mouth. When this visitor concluded a rather lengthy remark, another speaker whose voice was unfamiliar to me addressed him as “Winston.”
I began to wonder whether I was not, after all, still dreaming. What were the government’s most senior civil servant, Mycroft Holmes, the Home Secretary, and someone who knew the Home Secretary well enough to call him “Winston,” doing in our sitting-room at four o’clock in the morning? The discussion was less intense now. They dropped their voices and I could make out only a rumble of talk.
Instinct told me that it would not do to walk in on their debate. On the other hand, I must be dressed and ready in case my presence should be necessary. I was just fumbling with a collar stud and tie when a board outside creaked and Holmes, perhaps seeing light under the door, tapped gently as he entered.