The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(61)
The solemn, once-grand interior of the house now matched the broken-down exterior. She led me across a worn and dirty parquet floor, through a hall lit only by a single gas lamp and some stained-glass skylights several storeys overhead that drenched everything in deepest blue. The place had a disused, musty scent to it. Dust lay everywhere, except for the trails shuffled through by the passage of just a very few people. I could see only three different sets of footprints, one clearly the lady’s.
We passed through a stout oak door that swung silently shut behind us to leave us in a large vaulted study covered all over with shelves of books. On this side, the door was hidden, backed with more bookshelves, and I might have been hard-pressed to locate the door if it had not just shut behind me. The only sunlight in the place came from small stained-glass windows two storeys up, near the ceiling. It was something of an establishment made for my kind, dark and gloomy. I found it easy to avoid any trickle of light that came down, for the entire room seemed to be bordered in shadows.
There were signs the room had been cleaned recently, but not very well; only the spots within easy reach. I could see cobwebs and dust higher up in the room that would require a ladder to clean. It had once been a very nice room, cosy and warm, but was now very quiet and sorrowful. This was a fallen household, once great, and now struggling to keep something of its grandeur. But fallen as it was, it was not the house of a groundskeeper. Not, at least, any groundskeeper I’d ever known. There were several photographs of the family on the walls, showing Victor himself in life, as well as Miss Apligian, and a narrow-faced austere man that must have been their father.
An elderly butler tended to the fireplace – a job usually administered by a servant somewhat lower on the household hierarchy. He looked back once, briefly, showing a stiff, round, elderly face, and then kept on working. Since he showed no sign of coming to take my hat and coat, I hung them myself on a deserted coat rack in the corner. The rack had a thin patina of dust, as well.
“Tea, I think, Merton,” Miss Apligian said. The butler got stiffly to his feet, then nodded with a facial expression that had nothing of cheer or animation, only a dreary heaviness that seemed to match the rest of the house. His footprints, when he left, were square-toed, of average size, precisely matching one set of tracks I’d seen in the dust. If Flora Apligian accounted for one, and the butler the other, that made Victor himself the likely match for the third set. The Apligians didn’t seem to get many visitors.
“I always thought you might come here someday, Dr Watson,” Miss Apligian said. “You and your celebrated friend. But I will candidly admit that I never thought it would be in Victor’s defence. Tell me truthfully, Doctor, are your friend’s powers exaggerated in all those stories of yours?”
“I’ve always found Holmes’s feats unbelievable enough without adding anything of my own, Miss Apligian,” I said gravely.
“Frankly, I do find them difficult to believe. We shall see. At any rate, I shall not try to deceive you. Indeed, why should I? I myself have done nothing wrong, and there is little you can do to add to the embarrassment that Victor has already brought upon this house, which is well-known to so many persons it would be hard to keep it secret at any rate. For I can tell you without exaggeration that Victor ran with a seedy crowd, and his untimely end does not surprise me. It saddens me, of course, but no… I can’t say ‘surprise’ would be the appropriate word. How public is his murder likely to be?”
“I can offer what discretion as I may,” I said, “but there is little I can do about the official police, which I must frankly warn you are likely to be here later today.”
“Of course,” she said. “Mr Sherlock Holmes is working on locating my brother’s murderer, then?”
“Yes.”
“Does he hope to find him? Or is this one of the cases that does not make it into The Strand?”
“We shall be the very souls of discretion, I assure you,” I said. “I have never used someone’s name when they have requested otherwise. Our success is still a question, to be sure, but I have seen Holmes untangle cases far more complex than this.”
Merton had returned with the tea, which he served. After this, he busied himself in a haphazard tidying of the other side of the room. Miss Apligian pretended not to notice, but her eyes flicked irresistibly over to watch the man occasionally. She took some time adding milk to her tea, which gave her something to do with her hands. “You’re probably wondering what the heir to the Apligian name is doing planting flowers and digging graves.”
“It is a curiosity.” I sipped carefully at the tea, taking the smallest sip possible.
“It was an embarrassment is what it was.” She sighed and met my gaze. “The truth is, Victor was… oh, I don’t know. Touched, my father always said. We were sure that something could be done medically. My father had doctors from all over London here when Victor was a boy, but there was nothing they could do. Even after Victor had become fully grown, he was always a bit slower than anyone else around him. Even worse, in my father’s eyes, Victor was never one for responsibility. Dealing with Victor has always been more like dealing with a young boy than a full grown man.”
“That must have been difficult for you,” I said.
“Yes, and rather more than that for Father. Victor was the only son, you see, but Father couldn’t very well leave his business to someone with the mind of a boy, could he?”