The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(67)
“A nasty business,” Lestrade said. “Pistols going off in a public place in the middle of the day. I don’t blame you one bit for being shaken. I say, Doctor, you don’t look well. Are you sure you’re not hit?”
“Well,” I said. “I am rather shaken. I had some trouble locating a cab back to Baker Street, too, which was the only reason I came in here in the first place.”
“You can take mine,” he said.
“Thank you, Lestrade,” I said. “You have my gratitude.”
I secured my hat and gloves and collected my stick while Lestrade called the cab over and started issuing orders to more constables.
“Doctor,” Lestrade called out as I stepped out of the doorway towards the open door of the cab.
“Yes?” I stopped with the cab door in my hand, trying with all anxiety to hide the difficulty such placement held for me. The sun beat down on me through the fog with all the malice of an angry forge.
“Remember what I said about secrets, Doctor,” he said seriously. “They weigh around a man’s neck like quarry stones, if you let them.”
“Quite so, Lestrade,” I said, and stepped as unhurriedly as I could into the cab.
Chapter 14
SUSANA RICOLETTI
Alighting from the cab at Baker Street, I took one last look at the painful sun-shrouded haze above me, then entered gratefully into the cool interior. It was a lifted burden to mount the seventeen stairs up to our rooms, and an even greater one to find that Holmes had returned.
This fact was made readily apparent by the cloud of smoke that shrouded the ceiling of our room. The stench of Holmes’s tobacco was overpowering, and I could barely see into the room. It seemed that I had left one offence upon the senses simply to walk into another.
The cloud parted briefly, revealing the painting I’d purchased several months ago from a shop on North Hill Street, coincidentally enough, not far from the Apligian home. It depicted a woman staring forlornly out from a tunnel underneath one of the bridges at a sun bleeding saffron and ember streamers into the sky over the Thames. I’d purchased it simply for the sunrise, a sight I knew I would never see again. Even crawling around in the daylight, as I had today, I couldn’t bear to actually look at the sun and wouldn’t have seen anything through the burning haze. Now, however, it occurred to me how cut off from the rest of the world that lone figure in the painting was, and how very much like that figure Mary was. There was a hint of the forbidden in the yearning way the figure both kept to the shadows, and yet leaned toward the rising light.
Holmes sat by the window, smoking and thinking, silent as a Tibetan monk. I availed myself of some replenishment from the teapot with the scarlet ribbon that Mrs Hudson had left for me, drinking the first cup right down and taking the second with me to my chair. I noted with both astonishment and great pleasure that Mrs Hudson had finally decided to ignore Holmes’s wrath, and had clearly beaten the document disaster overtaking our rooms into tentative submission, stacking most of them in boxes to one side of Holmes’s chemical table. I sipped from my cup, pondering for the hundredth time what glib explanation Holmes could have given to that good woman to explain this grotesque new requirement of mine, and again could not hazard a guess, save that it could by no means be the complete truth. I finished the second cup and felt a great deal of my strength return. I’d poured a third before Holmes began to stir.
“Doctor,” he said, “clearly something curious has occurred. Tell me everything. Leave out no detail.”
I did, in great length, sharing everything that had occurred, including the depressing and faded grandeur of the Apligian home, to my assault from Randall Thorne and the French Canadian.
“I can still feel the man’s fingers on my throat,” I finished.
“A man who deals regularly with vampires without fear or harm, and carries silver bullets, is perhaps an even more impressive danger, I think,” Holmes said. “I should never have sent you alone had I realized that such persons were on our trail. Tell me, did he have only the single pistol?”
“I only saw one, though he could well have had another. Why?”
“We have a man marked by a vampire bite and then murdered by gunshot, and only a short time later, this American obligingly comes along, knowing a great deal about vampires, and shows one of us both a pistol and the willingness to fire it, no matter the circumstances. We also have a known vampire linked to the pearl found on the murdered man’s person, in addition to the bites. That much is all very clear, as are our likely culprits. It is only apprehending them that presents difficulty.”
“Clearly he shot Victor Apligian,” I said. “He must have. We have only to find the proof!”
“Tell me, Watson, did you notice anything unusual about the bullet in Victor Apligian?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.” “Neither did I, and certainly one of us would have noticed if it were silver, would we not?”
“Of course!”
“It wasn’t silver. I pulled several of the fragments from the wound, and found only the sort of material one generally fires from revolvers. Which is why I ask about a second revolver. Does Thorne always carry silver bullets, in which case why wasn’t Apligian shot with one? Does Thorne, perhaps, swap bullets in and out, according to circumstances? This would indicate that he planned to shoot Apligian with the far less costly lead bullets, which is reasonable enough. From your description of the encounter, it seems that Thorne very likely followed you in and sent his murderous partner around the back to get the best of you. A plan constructed on the fly, as it were. This Thorne seems to me a rather impulsive character. No, something is not entirely cut-and-dried with that theory. At least not with a single pistol.”