Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(99)
The dog, snoring beside Trevor on the flagged floor, lifted an ear and thumped his tail, then went back to sleep.
“She’s a professional,” said my godfather. “Improvising when she saw an opportunity. They will have sent her in because they thought Stefan would be vulnerable to a pretty face. But she should have done a better job on her homework.”
“But why Stefan? Or whatever his name is?”
“Stefan”—he put emphasis on the name—“has a meeting at Balmoral next week. It’s important that he keep it.”
“Important enough that you disappeared for a year? Without telling anyone where you were?” I meant him to know I was still mad.
“The balance of power in Eastern Europe may depend on decisions Stefan makes. And on who supports him.”
He didn’t apologize for worrying us. He never did.
“Okay,” I said. “I get it. But why the post card? Why get me here?”
He shrugged. “I thought you might be bored. And I missed your birthday.” Sipping his tea, he added, “Just how did you discover me, by the way? I thought the disguise was pretty good.”
“You were the only one who never spoke to me.”
“Yes, well. I couldn’t very well, could I? The voice is the hardest thing to change. But I think we should talk about what you are really going to do in your gap year.”
I stared at him. Then I grinned. I couldn’t help it. But turnabout was fair play. Looking at my watch, I said, “Could we have this conversation tomorrow? I have a date.”
“A date?” He couldn’t have looked more shocked if I’d said I had two heads.
“Yes. A date. With the beekeeper. His name is Malcolm, as I’m sure you know. He’s on his summer break from university, and he’s quite hot.”
“Oh. Ahem, I see . . .” Never had I seen my godfather at such a loss for words. “Well, good job today, Sher—”
“Don’t,” I said, giving him my sweetest smile. “You know how I feel about the name.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY GRAVE
by Jonathan Maberry
It was in the spring of 1894 that I experienced an encounter so strange and enigmatic that only now, many years later, I am committing it to paper. Had I shared this matter to anyone but a few confidents among the police I would surely have been called, at best, a liar, or at worst a madman. Perhaps now the world is ready for it.
It had been three years to the day since this world lost its champion and I my best friend. Surely you have read the many accounts in the papers, and perhaps my own feeble attempt at prose wherein I described the titanic and fateful battle between Professor James Moriarty and Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
As had become my habit on a Sunday, I sat in the cemetery on an iron bench and contemplated the many adventures I was fortunate enough to share with Holmes. Some of those have been committed to paper and thus shared with the public, while others remain unwritten and untold—a few because they revolve so heavily around the person of Sherlock Holmes that I do not have the heart to write them out, and others because I know that Holmes did not want them told. Perhaps he might have agreed in time, but he did not feel that the world was ready to shine a torch into some of the darkest and strangest corners of our world.
I occasionally brought the notes to some of those unwritten papers with me when I came to sit on my bench near the empty grave. It is perhaps a foolish and overly sentimental thing, and a case can be made that grief has to some degree unfastened the hinges of my reason, but I took comfort in being there, reviewing case notes as Holmes and I had done in our chairs on opposite sides of an evening fire. I would read through the notes I had made in pocket diaries, or on any stray sheet of foolscap that came to hand while we were engaged in the hunt. Some of those pages were smeared with ash, others with rainwater, spilled wine—even blood. And so it took some effort to decode my hasty and obscured notes, and in doing so I was with my friend again, and we were on the case.
On a particular Sunday morning I was deeply immersed in a set of extensive notes on a matter Holmes and I had left unfinished. He often had more than one matter in hand, and would advance each a little at a time when one of his experiments yielded reliable results, or the reply to a telegraph arrived, or information came from his network of spies. Even I, his closest friend and confidant, had but an inkling of all of the many problems which occupied Sherlock Holmes. More than once he would tell me that he had solved a crime about which I had no idea he was even considering, and we would while away an evening with wine and pipes while he recounted the details. Many times he would lay out the facts but withhold the solution, then challenge me to properly assess them and deduce the likely outcome. I pride myself on saying that more than a few times I was indeed able to come to the right conclusion, and in such instances Holmes would favor me with a smug smile, and I knew that he took pride in my ability to make sense of it all. And that is fair enough, for was our friendship not in many ways an apprenticeship wherein he attempted to school me on the finer points of observation and investigation? If I was a slow apprentice, in my own defense I say that any student may appear a dullard when the teacher is so exceptional.
Most often, I admit, even when he laid out the facts for me, there was some element, often an apparently trifling detail, that I dismissed and yet which proved crucial. In one such case it was the way rose petals had settled on the surface of spilled wine; in another the paucity of blowflies was the key. At times like those, I felt like a feckless and inexperienced knight seated next to Lancelot at the table.