The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(41)
More daunting than this was the terrible odour rolling off the man in nauseating waves. With my eyes closed, I might have mistaken him for a fishing trawler somehow crammed into the hotel hallway. His coat sleeves bulged with powerful arms and his chest and shoulders were like a hunched-over bear’s. He thrust a beefy arm out to shove me rudely out of the way, but I stood my ground, blocking his way in. Fortunately, we were in the thick of the night, when I was at my full strength, for the force in this stout man was quite remarkable. When I proved immobile, however, he stepped back, surprise and suspicion showing behind the thick glasses in equal measure.
“Who are you?” he said, then waved his hand. “No, it doesn’t matter. She thinks she can keep us from what’s ours, but she can’t! She knows she can’t!”
“She does not wish to see you,” I said coldly.
“But she will see me!” he sputtered. “She knows the futility of keeping me out, even if you don’t.”
Quiet, furtive steps came from the room behind me, and the soft scuffling sound of someone lifting a window. I could not believe that either of them had committed such a violent murder, and would offer them what protection I could. I would not let this violent, seething person past without some explanation.
“You’ll regret this meddling!” he snarled. “I’ll see that you regret it!” He spun his bulk around and stalked down the hallway without a further word.
I closed the cracked and abused door and went back into the room. As expected, the window was still partially open, the curtains dancing in the foul icy breeze. They were gone.
Staring with wonder, I reached out for the abandoned object they’d left precisely in the middle of the table. No wonder they were pursued from America. Placed in the precise centre of the table like a showpiece was a glittering tiara made of solid gold.
*
Following the escaped sisters proved to be impossible. While I could track them by scent down the fire escape and through the alley behind the hotel, despite the rain, the path onto the main thoroughfare, despite the late hour, had enough horse and foot traffic splashing through enormous puddles as to hopelessly confuse the trail.
When I returned to Baker Street, Holmes was not at home. I fair quivered with anticipation to tell him of my adventures and show him the circlet, but also with trepidation for the berating he was likely to give me for allowing a woman and girl to escape so easily and so ruin the entire evening’s work.
The gold diadem glinted and shone, even in the dim light of our study, as if it caught a light not known to the normal world. The front of the tiara stood tall and curved. Crawling across the surface were cramped bas-reliefs of the most hideous nature, the images overlapping each other with maddening constancy so that one creature could hardly be distinguished from the other. The overwhelming mélange of amorphous shapes, with barely discernible bulbous eyes, hinted at monstrous combinations of aquatic or subterranean creatures without any clarity or reason.
Though I’d carried it here with no hesitation, a sudden reluctance fell over me to touch it now, for fear that some of the creatures might twist and fall off with any jostling, and so come into being. I covered the thing with my coat and tried to forget about it. Whatever it was, Holmes would fathom its deeper meaning.
Only after the breaking of dawn did I finally hear my friend’s steps on the stairs. He entered the room wearing a scraggly beard, woollen cap, and worn pea jacket. He soon had this disguise off, however, and immediately fell to on the breakfast that Mrs Hudson had left. I brought the porcelain teapot with the scarlet ribbon around the handle from the sideboard, also left by our inestimable Mrs Hudson. I poured out some of the red liquid, still tolerably warm, so that I might try and shake off the lassitude of dawn.
“I found them, Holmes,” I said. “I have seen them tonight, and they have left behind a—”
“The Nowak sisters,” he said, “are hardly the centre of this case. Give me a moment to consider what I have seen, Watson, before you add fresh information. There are great depths to this case.”
“But…” I said, and stopped when he waved me away.
“Great… depths,” he said between mouthfuls. “Fiendish depths!” Though he’d fallen on the first dish with great vigour, he paused after lifting the lid off the second one, staring.
Holmes finally let the cover drop back on the food, then pushed away his half-full plate, and was now lighting a cigarette.
“What is the matter?” I said.
“Curried fish,” he said. “There’s no help for it; my appetite is quite gone just at the smell of it. I doubt I shall ever eat fish again without looking at it twice.”
“Whatever are you talking about?” I said.
“Gregson was quick enough,” he said, ignoring my question, “to track down the Nowaks’ ship, but with a bit more ingenuity, he might have also found the one that brought Konrad Pawlitz, as well.”
“Who is Konrad Pawlitz?”
“A businessman from Devonshire, come over some many years ago from Poland. My thought is that he may have been a distant relation to our Nowaks, but that is only one of many possibilities. The proximity to the harbour and a few other signs in the room at once suggested to me that she might have expected to meet someone coming in by boat. Checking for boats that arrived recently in nearby ports was the surest way to discover our victim’s identity. The list of passengers matching our murdered man’s description was small enough so that it was not difficult to narrow down that list to a single name. Pawlitz.”