Hopeful that Holmes would be at Baker Street, I was impatient to tell him of my day thus far and so engaged a cab at the station.
On arriving home, I paid the driver and let myself in. A loud crashing of furniture from upstairs told me that my colleague was indeed home. Such a noise didn’t disturb me in the least. Regular readers will be aware of the fact that Holmes was a law unto himself, and a frequently destructive one. I once had to console Mrs Hudson for an entire evening after he had destroyed one of her sofas with a wrecking hammer, wishing to test “the tensile resistance of mahogany”. Naturally he paid for such cruelties towards the furnishings, but it didn’t stop our landlady suffering frequent bouts of nerves.
“What are you doing this time, Holmes?” I asked as I entered. “If Mrs Hudson’s at home you’d better prepare yourself for a firm admonishing.”
“That’s already in hand, Watson,” my friend replied in a somewhat pinched voice.
The voice was pinched because of the large, leather mitten that held him by the throat. The mitten belonging to Kane, the deformed gang leader we had thought ourselves fortunate enough to have left behind in the tunnels beneath Rotherhithe.
“What perfect timing, Watson,” said Holmes. “Might you be good enough to come to my assistance?”
Since when did he have to ask? I dropped the papers I was carrying and marched over to wrestle Kane—a big man he may have been but I had no doubt the two of us would be a match for him. But he knocked me backwards as soon as I was in reach of those thick arms, sending me tumbling over a footstool to sprawl on my back on the hearth-rug.
“If you could perhaps try a little harder than that?” Holmes managed to ask, desperately trying to pull the clamped mitten from his throat before it crushed the life out of him.
I grasped the poker and set at the man’s shoulders. I would like to say that, as a medical man, I was only too aware of the safe areas to hit Kane but it would be a lie. At that point I cared little for the gang leader’s longevity, I simply wished to see him fall and my friend removed from his potentially lethal grip. Kane roared and the noise was deafening. He dropped Holmes and turned to face me. I was pleased I had succeeded in one of my aims, though concerned that I would soon be in just as dire a situation as Holmes had been.
Holmes fell to the floor, rubbing at his throat.
“If you could return the favour?” I asked.
“Certainly,” he replied and made a dash for his bedroom.
Perplexed—and not a little irritated—I did my best to keep Kane at bay by swinging the poker forward and back in a large arc. He batted at it with those large hands of his and kept coming. I imagined that deformed face beneath the veil of netting he wore— that terrible, open wound of a mouth, gnashing and drooling as he backed me into the corner.
“Holmes!” I shouted. “My revolver’s in my undergarment drawer!”
“Of course it is,” he replied, having returned to the room, “but I have something altogether more effective.”
I saw he had the small pipe he had used before, the device he had refused to explain, in his petulant mood. He raised it to his lips and blew.
If it were—as I had originally suspected—some form of blowpipe, there was no sign of a dart. Nonetheless, Kane stopped dead in his tracks. With an animal howl he raised his hands to his head and then toppled backwards, crashing to the floor like a felled tree.
“What the devil is that?” I asked.
Holmes held it up with a chuckle. “I present the Perry Canine Remonstration Pod, purloined off the good professor during our meeting at the museum.”
“The what?” I was baffled at my friend’s explanation, baffled all the more when he reached forward and yanked the net-lined hat Kane had been wearing. Underneath was the head of a gigantic hound!
PART THREE
THE TERRIBLE FATHER
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“You knew?” I asked Holmes. “Even when we were in the sewers you knew that Kane was one of these monstrous hybrids?”
“I guessed as much from his mannerisms,” he agreed. “The way he moved, the way he sniffed the air, his preternaturally sensitive hearing … On the subject of which, should we ever again find ourselves faced with an opponent able to hear a pin drop at a thousand yards kindly don’t call me by name, I may as well have left the brute a business card.”
I hadn’t been aware of having done so but there was little point in arguing. I apologised and squatted down to give Kane a closer examination. The head was exactly like that of a dog, a bull mastiff, given its size and crumpled features. The hair was short and black with a dusting of white on its muzzle.
“What luck you had that whistle,” I said. “How long do you think it will last?”
“Oh, next to no time at all I imagine,” he said, dashing off to fetch a heavy pair of derbies he kept on top of the bookcase. “And it wasn’t luck,” he shouted, climbing his way past his collection of foreign dictionaries. “We were promised monstrous animal hybrids and one of the professors has a device for disabling dogs. I would have been stupid not to take it.”
“And if Kane had been half cat?” I asked as he dropped back down and began to fix the handcuffs around the creature’s wrists.
“Well,” he said, getting to his feet, “then I would have dangled some thread in front of it.”
I had loosened its collar, eager to judge the physiognomy beneath its heavy coat. At the base of its furry throat there was a heavy knot of scar tissue betraying where a large incision had been made. Was it simply a dog’s head attached to a human body? Surely not, for now I realised the point of its heavy leather mittens. Removing one I was presented with the large black hand of an ape. Everything about Kane was built for strength and aggression it seemed.
The creature began to move, the eyelids flickering and opening slowly. I stood up and took a couple of steps back. Curiosity was one thing, but I didn’t want its teeth at our throats over my unanswered questions. There would be time enough for further examination once it was secure in police custody.
“Shall I send Billy to fetch the police?” I asked, referring to Holmes’ page boy. “Surely the sooner the brute is locked up the better?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Holmes, dropping into his armchair and lighting his pipe, “I rather thought it might be to all our advantages were we to pool our resources.” He looked pointedly at the creature between us, now clearly conscious and eyeing us both cautiously. “Wouldn’t you say, Kane?”
The voice when it came had an animal growl that, now I knew its biological background, was not in the least surprising. What I had taken before as a gruff tone was nothing less than the sound of human speech being forced through a dog’s throat.
“What advantage would there be for me?” it asked.
“Oh come now!” said Holmes. “What interest do I have in your petty underground activities? I’m dealing with a far bigger picture than street crime, however well-organised, however brutal. I want your creator, I want the man who made you who you are. Give me him and you can go free for all I care.”
“Holmes!” I exclaimed. This was hardly the first time my colleague had taken the law into his own hands, but there was a world of difference between defending those who had committed dark acts for the best of reasons and protecting a violent street criminal simply because his information might be useful. No doubt the police may have had cause to strike such bargains in the course of their investigations—I am not naive as to the methods they sometimes have to employ in order to achieve the greater good—but I was distinctly uncomfortable at being complicit in such an arrangement.