MANY A SCOTLAND YARD OFFICIAL CROSSED THE threshold of 221B Baker Street during Sherlock Holmes’s tenure at that address. The majority came to consult him on some police matter or other and benefit from his expertise as a criminalist. A few wished to applaud him after he had aided them in foiling a felony or catching a culprit. Very rarely one might seek to upbraid him for involving himself in business that was not considered the rightful province of the amateur, or else to trumpet a perceived triumph of his own, the which, later, Holmes would invariably prove to be erroneous.

None, however, had any awareness of the investigations which comprised the bulk of Holmes’s life’s work, those forays into otherworldly mysteries where ghastly, ravening monsters and ancient, inimical gods were a prominent feature. None, that is, save Tobias Gregson. The unfortunate Inspector Gregson was drawn, against his will, into the murky supernatural waters in which my friend and I secretly swam; and indeed, many years after the events of the narrative I am about to relate, the man would perish in heroic yet tragic circumstances while assisting us in our endeavours, saving our lives at the expense of his own on an occasion when those same metaphorical waters threatened to drown us.

Of the rest, there was a single individual who may have developed some inkling about Holmes’s more esoteric pursuits, and that was Inspector Athelney Jones. Readers of my published works will recognise his name from The Sign of Four, a heavily amended account of a case involving a four-pointed version of the mystical sigil known as an Elder Sign. He also features in “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League”, although in that tale I mistakenly refer to him as Peter Jones, a slip of the pen for which I was often derided by him, and deservedly so. “It isn’t even as though Athelney and Peter sound similar,” he once said to me. “Could it be you have got me confused with the Sloane Square department store?”

The events behind The Sign of Four were too macabre and extraordinary for Inspector Jones to remain oblivious to their true origin, much though we tried to hide it from him. Perhaps, like many a Welshman, with both a devout Methodist upbringing and an innate Celtic superstitiousness coexisting within him, he was already highly attuned to the mystical side of life, and thus had less difficulty than most reconciling himself to the existence of powers and entities beyond normal human ken. Now, at any rate, whenever he stumbled upon something with a whiff of the weird or uncanny about it, Sherlock Holmes was always his first port of call.

So it was that on a brisk late-autumn afternoon in 1888, not long after the above-mentioned escapade, the man in question walked into our sitting room and heaved his burly, plethoric bulk into the basket-chair, which emitted several small protesting creaks as it accommodated his weight. Gratefully he accepted the offer of a cigarette and a snifter of brandy, and then, peering at us with eyes that glittered from within their puffy pouches like twin trinkets sunk deep in the velvet lining of a display box, he proceeded to inform us about certain recent nefarious goings-on at Highgate Cemetery.

Little did he, or we, realise, but the horrors in which he was to embroil us were the start of an enterprise that would occupy Holmes’s and my attention, off and on, over a span of some thirty years.

* * *

“Graves, Mr Holmes,” began Jones in that distinctive voice of his, which contrived to be both husky and mellifluous at once. “Graves,” he repeated. “Three of them.”

“What about these graves?” asked Holmes.

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the thing. Dug up they’ve been, sir, and the bodies that lay inside exhumed and absconded with.”

“Gone?”

Jones nodded. “Gone without a trace. Or no, perhaps not entirely without a trace.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Let me tell it to you in order,” Jones said, “and then we shall see what sense you can make of it all. Early this morning, a report reached us at the Yard concerning three graves at Highgate that had been interfered with.”

“A report from whom?”

“An undertaker, name of Dole, who was visiting the cemetery in preparation for a burial this weekend. Mr Dole spied the fresh excavations and knew straight away that there was something amiss, not least because he was recently responsible for laying to rest one of the graves’ occupants. He looked closer, found all three graves empty, and went to the nearest telegraph office to wire us.”

“Bodysnatchers?” I offered.

“Of course the notion crossed my mind, Doctor, even as a cab drove me to Highgate. ‘Jones-bach,’ I said to myself, ‘could we be dealing with some latter-day Burke and Hare types here?’ But then you, as a medical man, know as well as I do that bodysnatching just doesn’t happen any more, thanks to the Anatomy Act of 1832.”

“Yes, true. There simply isn’t a black market for dead bodies these days. By law, any unclaimed corpses go straight to the anatomists, with the result that they have all the cadavers they need, and more.”

“Quite so, Watson,” said Holmes, a measure of condescension in his tone. “Bodysnatching is highly unlikely to have been the motive for such a desecration, for the very reason you and the inspector have just stated. You really should have thought before you spoke. I can only assume you are so distracted by your forthcoming nuptials that your faculties are not as acute as they might otherwise be.”

“Ah yes,” said Jones, “the wedding isn’t so far off now, is it? And how fares the lovely Miss Morstan?”

“Full of plans,” I replied. “Every day, it seems, she has something she wishes to consult me about – the guest list, the wedding breakfast, the table decorations. I myself was hoping for a small, discreet ceremony, but Mary’s ambitions for the occasion just keep growing. I find myself saying yes to whatever she asks for, regardless of my own feelings or, for that matter, the welfare of my wallet.”

“And that is excellent practice for married life. Take it from someone who has been a husband for nearly a decade, Doctor: saying yes to your wife is the surest route to contentment. Besides, given your fiancée’s undeniable charms, how could you in all conscience say no?”

Jones appended his remark with a throaty chuckle, which I joined in with, albeit circumspectly.

“If we could perhaps return to the matter at hand…?” Holmes prompted.

“Yes. Of course. Quite,” said Jones. “Well, there I was at the cemetery, and bless me if there weren’t three graves, fully opened up. Each was in fairly close proximity to the others, and each contained a vacant coffin whose lid had been forcibly dislodged.”

“You said that Dole the undertaker had recently been involved in the funeral for one of the deceased.”

“I did.”

“How long ago did the interment take place?”

“A week, no more.”

“Which would indicate that the soil was newly turned, making the act of unearthing that much easier.”

“Which in turn,” I said, “makes the bodysnatcher theory that little bit more conceivable, don’t you think? A set of fresh corpses, readily accessible…”

“But what for, Watson?” said Holmes. “Why go to significant risk and effort to wrest three bodies out of the ground when, at least as far as illegitimate medical usage is concerned, there’s no chance of financial gain?”

“A prank, maybe?”

“A very unsavoury one.”

“Just for the sheer, perverted joy of desecration, then. How about that?”

“If so, it is suggestive of a very sick mind. More plausibly, we could be looking at grave robbing. The three deceased may have been buried with certain valuables on their persons, which others have sought to plunder. In that instance, though, why not simply grab the loot and have done with it? Why make off with the bodies as well?” Holmes turned back to Jones. “That said, Inspector, I am yet to be convinced this is anything more than a commonplace crime. No question, any right-minded individual would be repelled at the thought of disturbing the dead in their final rest, but I do not doubt the capability of Her Majesty’s constabulary to hunt down the perpetrators and bring them to justice.”

“Well now,” said the police official, his eyes twinkling all the more brightly, “in that respect I would agree with you, Mr Holmes. But here’s where it gets interesting.”

“By which I take you to mean unusual.”

“Exactly.”

Holmes leaned forward in his seat. “Do tell.”

“I ascertained from the cemetery’s records the home address of each of the deceased whose grave had been violated,” said Jones. “Then, back at the Yard, I sent constables to break the news to the relicts. It seemed better that they should learn what had happened to their dearly departed from someone in authority rather than read about it in the newspapers or hear of it by word of mouth – or, for that matter, witness the situation for themselves should they happen to visit the grave.”

“Such thoughtfulness is greatly to your credit,” I said.

Jones acknowledged the remark with a small bow. “One of the constables returned with a tale. He had gone to see a Mrs Thisbe Pickering, of Lanningbourne Common, whose husband Everard, an actuary with a Chancery Lane insurance brokerage, died less than a fortnight ago. Mrs Pickering was in a dire state when my man called, pale and trembling, and at first he thought that somebody must have got there before him and conveyed the dreadful news already. It turns out, however, that Mrs Pickering had seen her husband just last night.”

This was Jones’s coup, the bait with which he hoped to hook Holmes, and it worked. My friend was all at once a-quiver. Were he a cat, his ears would have been pricked, his tail twitching, his hindquarters swaying from side to side.

“Not in a dream, I take it,” he said. “Not as some imaginary phantasm conjured up by a grieving woman’s anguished brain.”

“From an upstairs window,” said Jones. “Lurking at the rear of the house. Her husband, standing there amid the shrubbery between her garden and the common behind the house, visible in the moonlight, gazing up at her. She caught only the briefest glimpse of him before collapsing in a swoon, but she would be willing to swear on the Bible that it had been he. So she said to my constable. Block, he’s called, and he’s as solid and dependable as his surname suggests, if also somewhat lacking in imagination.”

“In that respect, he is a fairly typical example of his species. Present company excepted.”

“Thank you, sir. I shall take that as a compliment. Constable Block, at any rate, was not persuaded by the widow Pickering’s claim. ‘If she saw her late husband, sir, I’m a Dutchman,’ were his words to me. ‘Yet for all that,’ he added, ‘she seemed quite certain about it. There was the light of utter conviction in her eyes as she related the incident. I can tell when a person is shamming, Inspector, and she was not. It may not have been true but neither was she making it up.’”

“Intriguing.”

“So I thought myself, Mr Holmes, and that is why I have come to you.” Jones held out his hands, palms upward, as though presenting a gift. “I know how fond you are of the outré and the inexplicable. You have rather a sweet tooth for it, I’ve observed. You enjoy confronting the irrational and rationalising it, and what could be more irrational than three missing corpses, one of which has, if Mrs Pickering’s account is to be believed, regained the power of locomotion and visited his erstwhile home?”

“It is certainly a singular conundrum,” Holmes replied in a careful manner, “and naturally I am curious to know more. What say you, Watson? A short trip up to Highgate? How does that strike you?”

* * *

Accordingly, Holmes, Jones and I made our way northward to that elaborate and rather wonderful necropolis known as Highgate Cemetery.

Anyone who has visited the place will know it to be full of winding alleys, imposing mausoleums and proud, ornate obelisks. It has avenues lined with vaults and lawns dotted with toweringly tall cedars, all set on a hillside with sweeping views across London. There is about it an atmosphere of gloomy, hushed grandeur. Those who have been laid to rest in its grounds seem to lie in a state of solemn splendour, as though death, for them, is a privilege. Here and there one finds headstones fashioned in shapes denoting the trades or hobbies that preoccupied the deceased in life – a hammer, a violin, a tennis racquet, a horse, an accordion – while, whichever way one turns, one is greeted by hosts of carved angels and cherubs, looking majestically downcast, their wings drooping in sorrow.

On Swain’s Lane, the narrow, walled thoroughfare that bisects the cemetery, our hansom deposited us at the gates to the graveyard’s eastern half. This is the more modest portion of its near-forty acres, where a plot may be secured for as little as £2 10s, and Jones led us along its pathways to the location of the first of the three ravaged graves. He had posted a constable here to stand guard, and the fellow saluted his superior officer as we arrived.

“Constable Gorham,” said Jones. “You know Mr Holmes, do you not?”

“By reputation only. An honour, sir.”

“And this is, of course, Dr Watson.”

Gorham touched forefinger to forehead. “Sir.”

“Anyone been by since I left you here?”

“A few random folk nosing around, curious. I’ve steered them off. Also that gravedigger chap. Coker?”

“Roker.”

“That’s him. Wanted to know when he could set to straightening things up again. I told him what you told me to say: not until Inspector Jones gives the word.”

“Good man.”

The grave itself was a pitiful sight indeed, a deep, ragged-edged cavity surrounded by heaps of scattered soil. At its head was a discreet wooden marker bearing the name of the person supposed to be interred beneath, one Marcus Knightley. This was a temporary token, there to serve as a placeholder until the ground had settled and a permanent memorial could be installed. The marker lay flat, clearly having been uprooted when the grave was disturbed.

Holmes fell to a squat and embarked on a close survey of the hole itself and the soil around it. Then he leapt down nimbly into the pit, landing in the open coffin, where he continued his examination, with much use of his lens on the coffin’s rim and lid. When he was done, he gestured to Jones and me, and we each took one of his extended hands and hauled him out.

“Next,” he said, and with Jones showing us the way we proceeded to the site of the second despoiled grave, leaving Constable Gorham at his post.

The second grave stood some thirty yards from the first, just within Gorham’s view, and there Holmes conducted a similar study. The marker identified the absent occupant as Miss Amelia Throckmorton. The third grave, a few dozen yards further on and also visible to Gorham from his vantage point, had belonged to Everard Pickering, and was in a similar condition to the previous two. Holmes scrutinised this one no less thoroughly.

At last, brushing dirt off his sleeves and trousers, he said, “There are certainly a number of singular elements worth noting here. For instance, I’m sure you will have spotted, Inspector, that all three of the deceased perished within the space of a week. So the dates on the grave markers attest.”

“I had not noticed that,” Athelney Jones admitted. “The three were all buried recently, that much we already knew, but the closeness of their death dates escaped me. Do you think it significant?”

“It may be. We have passed five other newly dug plots on our journey through the cemetery – none of them, of course, disturbed the way these three have been – and the dates on the markers of those display a considerably wider span of time. The oldest goes back nearly four months.”

“I believe it can take anything up to six months before a headstone may be laid,” I averred. “The ground is not stable enough until then.”

“The salient point, Watson, is that our trio of missing corpses met their ends a few days from one another. That may well be coincidence, but I am willing to bet there is something more to it. Then there is the matter of–– Oh ho, who’s this?”

Holmes’s attention had been caught by the rapid approach of a fellow in labourer’s clothing. The man strode towards us with the air of one who had a territorial right to be in the grounds of the cemetery, and the spade he carried slung over his shoulder seemed to justify this, affording as it did a clear indication of his profession.

“That,” said Jones, “is Jem Roker, the cemetery’s head gravedigger, as mentioned by Gorham. I should warn you,” he added, dropping his voice so that only Holmes and I could hear, “he is an irascible sort. Best not to antagonise him.” Turning, he hailed Roker. “Good day to you again, Mr Roker.”

“Good day indeed,” said the gravedigger. He was broad-backed and raw-cheeked, and his bearing was none too cordial. “Inspector Jones, you told me this morning that I and my men were to leave these three particular graves as they are, and we have done as you asked, all obliging like, out of respect for your rank and position. Now I’m telling you that they must be filled in and neatened, as soon as possible. We pride ourselves on keeping things all shipshape at Highgate. We’ve already received complaints from folk wanting to know how come there’s such a mess in this particular corner here and why there’s a uniformed policeman on duty. They don’t want to see dirty great holes yawning in the earth or bluebottles standing around.”

“It was, alas, unavoidable, Mr Roker,” said Jones. “I promise you, you and your men shan’t have to stay your hands for much longer. I needed the graves untouched so that my colleague here, Mr Sherlock Holmes, would have a chance to view them as is.”

“Ah yes,” said Roker, pivoting towards Holmes. “You. Didn’t I just see you clamber out of this very grave? I was looking on from up yonder, and I could swear I spied you ferreting around inside it.”

“Guilty as charged,” replied Holmes. “I was doing my best to determine what manner of foul play has occurred.”

“And jumping in and out of graves is how you go about that?”

“If you can think of a better method for gathering evidence in a case like this, I would be happy to hear it.”

“You don’t consider your actions might be disrespectful to the dead? Not to say downright ghoulish?”

“Given that the dead are not themselves present at this moment in any of the graves I have ventured into, I am not particularly concerned on that front.”

Roker’s eyes narrowed. “You have a pretty answer for everything, don’t you, sir?” He swatted irritably at a wasp that was buzzing about his face. “Well, let me tell you, I don’t take kindly to folk treating my cemetery as their personal gymnasium.” He flapped a hand at the wasp again. “Pesky jasper,” he growled. “Leave me be.” The insect seemed to get the message and flew away. Roker jabbed a forefinger at Holmes. “Tramping around inside graves like that – it’s not proper, not even with a copper’s say-so.”

“If an apology will placate you, Mr Roker,” said my friend in his suavest tones, “then by all means, I am sorry.”

“Yes, well…” The gravedigger harrumphed. “You just mind yourself. Who are you anyway? What’s your job?”

“Mr Holmes is a much-respected consulting detective,” said Jones.

“Consulting detective? Never heard of such a thing.”

“Perhaps because I am one of a kind,” said Holmes. “And in that capacity, I was wondering if you’d mind answering a few questions for me, Mr Roker.”

“Mind? Yes, I do mind, as a matter of fact. I have work to do. Proper work, unlike some.”

“I shan’t detain you long.”

“You shan’t detain me at all.” Roker spun on his heel and began to walk away at a brisk pace.

Holmes made after him. “Really, it will only take a minute or so,” said he. “As head gravedigger, you must be privy to all kinds of—”

He broke off because Roker had abruptly rounded on him. Unshouldering his spade, the gravedigger thrust it in Holmes’s direction, like a soldier attempting to impale his enemy with a bayoneted rifle. Had my friend not sprung smartly backward in the nick of time, the tip of the implement’s blade might well have penetrated his abdomen.

Roker thrust the spade again, but once more Holmes was too quick for him. This time, though, he not only evaded the blow but was able to catch the spade’s haft with both hands. With a sharp, powerful twist of his wrists, he yanked the tool free from Roker’s grasp.

The gravedigger, thus disarmed, appeared to weigh up his options. Should he fight or flee? He plumped for the latter, and all at once he was sprinting off at impressive speed, hobnail boots pounding the earth.

Tossing the spade aside, Holmes gave chase, as did Jones and I. I had no idea why Roker was so keen to avoid interrogation by Holmes. Perhaps it could be accounted for by his basic ill-temperedness: he resented my friend’s enquiries as an impertinence, a personal affront. It seemed more likely, however, that he had something to hide.

We pursued him along the mazy pathways of the cemetery, Constable Gorham joining the chase after a shouted summons from Jones. Holmes already had a head start over the rest of us, and he rapidly widened the gap, by dint of being fleeter of foot. Roker, alas, was swifter yet, for he soon vanished from sight. Holmes likewise disappeared ahead, and eventually Jones, Gorham and I stumbled to a halt. The heavily built Welshman was wheezing hard and in urgent need of a breather. The constable, similarly, was panting and red-faced, and as for me, it was either take a rest or else pass out from pain. Certain events in a cavern in the wilds of Afghanistan some eight years earlier had weakened my constitution and left me in a state of permanent physical debility. My shoulder was the principal source of enfeeblement and caused me no small discomfort whenever I overtaxed myself.

Once we three had recovered from our exertions, Jones suggested we split up. “Better chance of finding Roker that way,” said he. “Should anyone come across him, seize hold of him and don’t let go, and then yell and keep yelling until the rest of us arrive. I’ve no idea what the rascal thinks he’s up to, but we can have him up for assault on Mr Holmes, if nothing else.”

Alone, I picked my wary way through the necropolis. Now and then I heard oncoming footsteps and tensed up, only to encounter some innocent visitor wandering by, perhaps bearing a bunch of flowers to lay upon a grave.

I passed through the tunnel that ran under Swain’s Lane, connecting the two halves of the cemetery, and entered the older western portion. Here lay such noted landmarks as the colonnaded Circle of Lebanon, the imposing Egyptian Avenue, and the Terrace Catacombs with their tall, arched entrances. Here, too, was proof that death’s reputation as the great equaliser was unfounded, for only the wealthy could afford to be entombed thus, in such funereal high style.

I trod along sloping paths and up and down stone staircases, all the while keeping an eye out for Roker. I was nearing the cemetery chapel, and ready to give up the search altogether, when a hand seized my elbow from behind. I whirled round, fist clenched, all set to deliver a swingeing uppercut – until I realised that it was not the gravedigger waylaying me.

“Holmes!” I declared. “You should not sneak up on a fellow like that. I nearly hit you!”

“Apologies for startling you, Watson.” Holmes’s face bore a sheen of perspiration, and two livid dots coloured his gaunt white cheeks. “That was not my intention. I assumed you heard me coming.”

“Then you are stealthier than you think. I take it you have failed to apprehend our friend Roker.”

“He evaded me,” Holmes said ruefully. “He is faster than he looks, and, understandably, possesses an intimate knowledge of the cemetery’s layout, which he used to his advantage.”

At that moment, Athelney Jones lumbered into view, with Constable Gorham not far behind. “There you two gents are,” the inspector said. “No luck? Us neither. Seems Mr Roker has given us all the slip. He’s obviously mixed up in this business somehow, isn’t he? Why else would he be so aggressively uncooperative? My guess is he dug up the corpses himself.”

“But whatever for?” I said. “His own benefit?”

“Or another’s.”

“You mean someone paid him to exhume them?”

“That’s precisely what I mean, Doctor. After all, if you want that sort of work done, who better to employ than a gravedigger? A head gravedigger, no less.”

I nodded. “And he was agitated about filling in the graves because he wished to cover up any evidence of his own complicity. It wasn’t about professional pride at all, not really. Yes, that makes sense.”

“Well, he shan’t get away with it,” Jones stated through clenched teeth. “You mark my words. I am going straight to Scotland Yard and I will have half the force out looking for Mr Jem Roker. We’ll find out where he lives, and if he isn’t there, we’ll scour London until we’ve unearthed him. No pun intended. Come along, Gorham.”

With that, the two policemen departed, leaving Holmes and myself to our own devices.

My friend had a familiar sly expression on his face.

“What is it, Holmes?” I said. “I know that look. You think Jones isn’t quite on the money, don’t you? He’s missing something – some clue, some angle on the case that you yourself have identified.”

“Am I quite so easy to read?” came the reply. “Well, you’re not wrong. I don’t believe our Mr Roker is as guilty in this affair as the worthy inspector does. I believe someone has bribed the fellow for some purpose, that much is certain. But I am not so sure it was to dig up the three graves.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Gladly, on condition that you are willing to repair with me to a nearby pub first, where we can refresh ourselves after all this haring about.”

“More than happy to,” said I.

* * *

As we slaked our parched throats with pints of porter, Holmes shared with me his thoughts regarding Roker.

“You noted, of course, the watch poking out of his waistcoat pocket? Ah. Your blank look is all the answer I need. It was a thing of beauty, that watch. Enough of it protruded that I could identify it as a gold-plated half hunter with blued steel hands. The casing was well polished, likewise the part-glassed lid. It was of European manufacture, a Junghans if I don’t miss my guess. What a contrast a watch like that made to the worn, threadbare nature of its immediate setting, and indeed, to the general coarseness of its owner. You really did not observe it?”

“Holmes, after eight years together, you surely know by now that my eye for such details is far inferior to yours.”

“But it stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. Well, regardless, one must ask oneself how the likes of Jem Roker, on a gravedigger’s salary, could afford a timepiece of such quality.”

“A family heirloom?”

“This was no scuffed, much-handled object that has been passed down through the generations. It was quite clearly new and in nigh-immaculate condition.”

“So a gift.”

“It was certainly given to him,” said Holmes, “and not long ago, I would wager, since he has not yet gone to the trouble of purchasing a chain for it. No, all in all, I think the watch was more in the nature of a bribe.”

“A bribe to dig up the graves?”

“But that’s just it, Watson. Roker did not do the digging.”

“To turn a blind eye, then, while someone else did?”

“Perhaps I am not making myself clear. There was no digging involved whatsoever. No spadework, at least.” Holmes frowned at me. “A blank look again. Really, it is becoming a bad habit. I see I shall have to explain as straightforwardly as I can.”

“Since you have so far been rather obtuse, that would be welcome.”

“My survey of the gravesites yielded three signal facts,” my companion said. “Firstly, the soil was not dug out with a spade. If it had been, it would surely have been piled up more neatly, or at any rate in a series of heaps rather than scattered any-old-how. In addition, the inner walls of the graves showed none of the flat, scraping impressions one might expect if a spade had been used. Secondly, the coffin lids were not jemmied off, otherwise I would have found marks around their rims in the squared-off shape typical of a jemmy’s tip. Thirdly, graverobbers might have taken the trouble to replace the earth they had dug up, in order to make their crime less readily detectable.”

“As to the last,” I said, “perhaps the perpetrators were pushed for time. Dawn was coming and they feared exposure.”

“That is possible, I grant you, but is undermined by the fact that, as I have been at pains to establish, no spades were used, nor jemmies, nor any other kind of tool.”

“But all that leaves is bare hands.”

“Precisely, Watson! Precisely!” Holmes took a long draught of his beer. “The disinterment was done with bare hands. I saw with my own eyes, inside the grave pits: plainly visible fingermarks. They presented clear evidence of a scooping action.”

“I cannot imagine graverobbers, bodysnatchers, resurrection men, whatever you wish to call people of that ilk, choosing to use their hands.”

“I should add that the scooping action tapered in such a way as to indicate it came from below rather than above.”

I mulled this over for several seconds before realising what he was getting at.

“It can’t be,” I murmured.

“Oh, but it must be,” replied Holmes. “The only reasonable inference one can draw from the data is that no external agency was involved. In other words, the three bodies were not dug up. On the contrary, they dug themselves up.”

Now it was my turn to take a long draught of my drink. “This is no longer one of your common-or-garden, bread-and-butter cases, is it?” The pub was none too busy, but I had lowered my voice, as had Holmes his, for fear of being overheard. “This carries the whiff of the supernatural.”

“Indeed. Athelney Jones has brought us something both sinister and anomalous. He really has a knack for it, doesn’t he?”

I shook my head. “The dead coming back to life and hauling themselves out of their graves…”

“The coffin lids were pushed up from within,” said Holmes. “The looseness of the soil above would have allowed that. Then the corpses clawed their way out into the open air, casting dirt all around them and in the process practically emptying the gravesites. Their movements thereafter are hard to discern. I found numerous footmarks in the vicinity of the graves, going in various directions, but they could have belonged to anyone: Jones, Roker, the undertaker Dole, Constable Gorham, and who knows how many others besides.”

A thought struck me. “Could we be looking at cases of premature burial?”

“You know as well as I do how unlikely that is,” Holmes replied. “Premature burial is rare enough, but three such, in immediate propinquity to one another? And even if it were so, our untimely-interred trio, having struggled their way up out of the ground, would not simply have disappeared without trace. At the very least they might have languished beside the graves, exhausted from the effort of liberating themselves, or else they might, if recovered sufficiently, have gone to seek medical attention or the aid of a policeman, whereupon the plight from which they had just escaped would quickly have become common knowledge. I wonder, moreover, whether anyone has actually ever survived premature burial. Surely suffocation within the airless confines of the casket would soon turn the error made by coroner or doctor into awful reality. We must consider, too, the sheer strength required to lever up a screwed-down coffin lid, especially with a significant weight of earth on top.”

“In panicked desperation, a man is capable of supreme physical feats.”

“True. But a reanimated dead body, immune to pain or terror or fatigue, would have the stamina to conduct a patient, sustained effort at freeing itself, much more so than would a living person. You seem eager to dismiss the notion of ambulatory corpses, Watson, yet this would not be the first occasion you and I have encountered the phenomenon. Remember the crypt beneath St Paul’s Shadwell?”

“Only too well,” I said, with feeling. “I was rather hoping never to repeat the experience.”

“Far be it from me to dash your hopes, my friend,” said Holmes, “but I fear I have no choice. Now, sup up.”

“Why? Where are we going?”

“Lanningbourne Common, to pay a call on the widow Pickering, of course.” Holmes rose from our table. “She has alleged that her late husband put in an appearance at his former home, the selfsame night he emerged from his grave. The least we can do is confirm, or otherwise, the veracity of her claim.”

* * *

Lanningbourne Common perched atop one of north London’s many hills and was a modest acreage of semi-wild public land with only a handful of streets backing directly on to it. Finding the residence of the lady in question, therefore, was easier than anticipated. By dint of knocking on a few doors in the neighbourhood, Holmes was soon able to glean her address. Nonetheless, by the time we stood outside her house – one of a terrace of bow-fronted red-brick buildings – the afternoon was starting to wane, the shadows lengthening, a chill creeping into the air.

Thisbe Pickering proved to be a woman in late middle age with tightly pinned grey hair and a bony, compact frame. The paleness of her complexion was accentuated by the dress of sombre black bombazine she wore, yet there was more to it than that. She had the blanched look of one who has lately suffered not just bereavement but a terrific shock. Her voice, accordingly, was a thin, reedy thing, and her every gesture was timorous and restrained, as though she did not trust herself to speak or move with vigour lest the effort induce further reaction.

Holmes, who could exercise a powerful influence over the fairer sex when he wished to, charmed his way across her threshold. Inside the house there were signs of mourning etiquette all around, over and above Mrs Pickering’s widow’s weeds. Pictures had been turned to face the wall. Black crepe ribbons had been draped on doorknobs. Clocks had been stopped.

Presently we were ensconced in the parlour and Holmes had inveigled the woman into telling us about the sighting of her husband some twelve hours earlier.

“I chanced to get up in the middle of the night,” said she. “I have not been sleeping well this past fortnight, not since my Everard… Not since he, you know, succumbed. I was crossing the landing and happened to glance out of the window, and there he was, at the far end of the garden, plain as anything. I know it was him. I’m sure of it. A moonbeam caught his face, and it was a face I know as well as my own. After nearly three decades of marriage, how could I not? Even with the recent disfigurement – or indeed because of it – I am in no doubt that it was my husband’s face.”

“Disfigurement?” said Holmes.

“Yes, alas. Everard was always a handsome man, but the disease which killed him ravaged his features.”

“What did he die of, may I ask?” I said.

“Cancer, sir. A terrible cancer that stole his health, his looks, his vigour, everything, and eventually his life.”

“I am sorry to hear of it.”

“Evil illness,” said she. “Not six months ago, he was in fine fettle. Then the cancer took hold, and it spread fast. He became riddled with tumours, including some within the flesh of his face, which left it distended and frightful to behold. His end was protracted and gruelling. I would not wish such a death upon my worst enemy. Everard suffered the torments of hell in his last few weeks, and it was a blessing, truly a blessing, when finally it was all over. I did my best to console him throughout and ease his pain, but it never seemed enough.”

“Rest assured, my good woman, you have the condolences of us both,” said Holmes. “Now, if it’s not too much trouble, might you be willing to show us where in the garden, exactly, your husband happened to be standing?”

“Of course.” Mrs Pickering sniffed hard and dabbed a handkerchief around her eyes. “You said you are with the police, am I right?”

“Affiliated.”

“Well, at least you seem to be taking me seriously. That constable, the one who came this morning to inform me that Everard’s body had been taken from his grave – what was his name? Block. He all but laughed in my face when I told him I had seen Everard myself during the night.”

“I like to think I am more open-minded than the average bobby,” said Holmes, “and sharper of intellect, too. Where the police are a rusty handsaw, I am a scalpel.”

Mrs Pickering invited us to follow her. We exited the house via a set of French windows at the back and traversed a well-kempt lawn. Halfway across, the lady halted. “I shan’t go any further. I do not feel comfortable approaching the spot. You carry on. There, just beneath the cherry tree – that’s where Everard was. In life, he used to like to sit beneath its boughs, of an evening. It brought him peace.” So saying, the widow turned and, her shoulders sagging as though burdened with a great weight, went back indoors.

The garden and the common behind it were separated by bushes and rough undergrowth, so that the division between the two was not clearly demarcated. The cherry tree itself was a splendid thing, just coming into blossom, tiny flowers emerging from their buds all over it like little pale pink exclamations of joy.

Holmes fell to his usual practice of investigating a scene minutely. He studied the bark of the tree trunk. He prowled on all fours through the long grass at its base. He pored long and hard over broken stems and snapped branches and over every small declivity or impression in the ground that his eye fell upon. For a time he ventured out into the common, casting this way and that along its footpaths and greenswards.

“Well,” he said when he returned, “Constable Block – or should that be Blockhead? – passed up a prime opportunity to do some proper police work. Rather than scoffing at Mrs Pickering’s account of a nocturnal visitation, he should have troubled himself to follow it up, whereupon he would have found ample substantiating evidence.”

“In his defence, his task was merely to deliver bad tidings. He could not have suspected that there is more to those empty graves than meets the eye.”

“Negligence is never excusable, Watson. At any rate, Everard Pickering was definitely here last night. See there? And there? Footmarks made by a man wearing size eleven shoes. There are several pairs of shoes and boots lined up in the hallway of the house. We passed them on our way in. The masculine pairs are size elevens and can only be Pickering’s. Furthermore, the spacing between the footmarks suggests a man of around six feet in height. A topcoat hanging from the coat rack in the hallway would fit someone just that tall.”

“It’s a good thing that Pickering’s death is still so recent that his widow has not yet got round to throwing out his personal effects,” I said.

“For our purposes it is fortunate indeed.”

“All the same, might it not be possible that the footmarks belong to another man who just happens to have the same physical proportions as Pickering?”

“But with the same facial disfigurement?” said Holmes with a dismissive flap of the hand. “Now then, let us consider the tale the footmarks tell. We see that Pickering entered the garden from the common and stood beneath the cherry tree for some while. The depth of the indentations when he was stationary suggest as much. He then departed, back the way he came, out onto the common. However, he did not depart alone. There is a secondary trail, made by a man with much smaller feet, size eights. In several instances that trail crosses Pickering’s as it comes in from the common, partly obliterating his footmarks when it does so. Thus we know that the other man was a subsequent arrival. Both sets of footmarks, though, leave the spot in tandem, side by side. From this we may infer that the second man came to fetch Pickering and either led him away or accompanied him. The trail then goes cold, I regret to say. The footpaths on the common are too dry for clear prints. Would that it had rained lately!”

“Could the second individual have been another of the three reanimated corpses?”

“A fair assumption, I suppose,” said Holmes, “but there is a notable difference in character between the two sets of footmarks. Pickering’s exhibit a dragging, clumsy gait, such as one might expect of a walking dead man – such, indeed, as we ourselves have witnessed in the past. The other person’s, by contrast, are footmarks of the type any ordinary living human being might leave.”

“So the mystery deepens,” I said. “Who is this other? Might it be Roker?”

“The second set of footmarks betray that their owner is not only short but pigeon-toed. Roker is neither.”

“Clearly, though, whoever it is, he has some connection with Pickering, and perhaps also a connection with the other two missing corpses.”

“The former is indisputable,” said my friend, “and the latter plausible.”

I chuckled mirthlessly. “You know, Holmes, sometimes I wonder at us. Here we are, talking about reanimated corpses as though they are an everyday, mundane occurrence. The type of thing that the rest of the world relegates to the realms of fantasy or myth, you and I treat as routine.”

“In a sense it is, to us. It has been eight years since my ‘dream-quest’.” He was referring to the drug-induced mental journey he had undergone on Box Hill near Dorking, which had served as his initiation into a terrible secret: the existence of ancient godlike entities bent on subjugating and destroying mankind. “It has been slightly longer since your expedition to the lost subterranean city of Ta’aa, where you fell foul of the last remnants of a race of human-reptilian hybrids. Following those discrete revelatory episodes, you and I have had many grotesque and terrifying experiences together, and we now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that hideous dark forces swirl around mankind, lurking at the periphery of things, utterly inimical in nature, ever ready to sow havoc and harm. This has become our norm, we are accustomed to it, and hence it is no surprise if we should discuss such matters and related topics between ourselves with the same dispassion as you, I imagine, discuss case histories and the latest surgical techniques with your medical colleagues.”

“You might say we have taken the sane approach when dealing with insanity.”

“Well put,” said Holmes. “You really have a way with words, Watson.” He clapped his hands together. “Anyhow, it is getting dark, and we have accomplished as much as we can here. Let us pay our respects to the widow Pickering and be on our merry way.”

Indoors, Holmes thanked Mrs Pickering for her hospitality and said we would not impose upon her any longer.

“Mr Holmes,” the lady said, “tell me this. Did I truly see Everard? Or am I mad? Forgive my asking, but you must understand, he was not just my husband, he was my everything. We were not blessed with children and we lived only for each other. To think that he may not be dead, that we may be together again… It is inconceivable, yet I am filled with hope nonetheless.”

“And it is a hope,” my friend said stiffly, “that I am obliged to dash. Your husband has not returned from the grave. You were, I’m afraid, sorely mistaken in thinking you saw him.”

Mrs Pickering’s face fell. “But I was so sure. He seemed so real. And then when the constable said his grave was empty, I dared to believe the unbelievable.”

“I detect the smell of laudanum on your breath.”

“Well, indeed. Over the past few days I have been resorting to the drug in order to keep my nerves in check, as anyone might in my situation. What of it?”

“It is a concoction known to cause hallucinations in even the most well-ordered mind,” Holmes said. “Is that not so, Watson?”

I mumbled a few words of assent.

“All you saw last night, Mrs Pickering,” Holmes continued, “was a mirage brought on by a heady cocktail of laudanum and grief. You wished very much to have your late husband back, and at an ungodly hour, in a half-sleeping state, with a quantity of opium in your bloodstream, you glimpsed a shape in the garden which you took to be him. I put it to you that a shaft of moonlight happened to strike a clump of cherry blossom in a particular way; your imagination, aided by the laudanum, did the rest.”

Mrs Pickering looked wholly crestfallen now. A sob escaped her, and she turned away from us with a forceful gesture that indicated she wished us to depart.

We did as bidden, and while we were walking away from the house, I said to Holmes, “Could you not have been a tad more tactful? You left that poor woman crushed.”

“What would you have had me do instead? Tell her the truth?”

“Some version thereof.”

“Watson, whatever has become of Everard Pickering, it is safe to say he is no longer the man Thisbe Pickering was married to. There is to be no happy reunion for the pair, at least not in this world. If Pickering were as he used to be, if somehow he has been not just reanimated but restored to his full former glory, would he not have gone to her rather than merely loitering at the end of the garden? Would he not have rapped at the door and then swept her up in a loving embrace as soon as she answered his knock? Whereas he was drawn away from the scene by the owner of the second set of footmarks, much like a small child surrendering himself to the stewardship of a parent. That suggests his corpse is possessed of only the dimmest spark of sentience – enough to have got him to the house in the first place, but no further – and is incapable of independent thought. I could not in all conscience pretend to Mrs Pickering that she will ever have her husband back, and it seemed better to quench the flame of optimism rather than kindle it. Does that make me cold, my friend, or compassionate? Do tell.”

“A bit of both, if I’m honest,” said I.

Sherlock Holmes shrugged his shoulders. “So be it. I can live with that.”

* * *

The next morning, a telegram arrived from Inspector Jones. Mrs Hudson brought it up to our rooms as we were breakfasting, and Holmes paused from his neat evisceration of a boiled egg in order to read it.

“Ah,” said he, “now here is an interesting development, Watson. It transpires that the irascible Mr Roker has been found.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Jones has him in custody, I presume, and you may now question him at your leisure.”

“No, you misunderstand. When I said ‘found’, I meant ‘found dead’.”

“Oh. That rather puts a new complexion on things. Dead how?”

“The inspector, somewhat disobligingly, has declined to specify. He has, however, furnished us with Roker’s address, with an invitation to meet him there. Finish up those last few mouthfuls of kedgeree, why don’t you? The salubrious delights of Camden await us.”

Roker’s lodgings were situated above a butchers on a busy street of that northern borough of the capital and consisted of a cramped, sparsely furnished living room and an even smaller and barer bedroom, along with a bathroom down the hall shared with the various other tenants of the house. The gravedigger may have boasted of “keeping things all shipshape at Highgate”, but the same principle did not apply to his domestic arrangements. The windowpanes were cloudy with filth, cobwebs clung in every corner, and empty beer bottles, many bearing a patina of dust, cluttered every available surface. Unlaundered clothing lay around in foetid piles, and the floor was liberally festooned with tiny black droppings, denoting an infestation of mice or rats or both.

Roker himself, at least, would no longer have to worry about the squalor of his living conditions, if it had ever bothered him. He lay sprawled on his back, quite still, next to an overturned wooden chair. His face was purple and puffy, his tongue protruded from between his lips, and his eyelids were half closed, as though he were narrowing them against a bright light.

“I’m glad you have been able to attend too, Doctor,” said Athelney Jones. “You can confirm what I believe: that the cause of death here was asphyxiation.”

I knelt to examine the body. “The face appears congested and cyanotic,” I said. “There are numerous petechiae in the skin – tiny haemorrhages – resulting from high intravascular pressure.” I peered at the thin slivers of sclera revealed by the eyelids. “Likewise in the whites of the eyes. These are all signs of hypoxia. I don’t see any bruising to the throat, so I would say he was not strangled. Absent a coroner’s report, then yes, I would lay good money on this being a case of asphyxiation, Inspector, just as you say.”

“But if not by strangulation then by what other means?” said Jones. “That is the question. The house is not connected to the gas main, so some mishap with the jets cannot have been responsible. The fire in the hearth was not lit, so he did not die of smoke inhalation either. Burning charcoal is a possibility – it can remove the breathable air from a room in no time – but there is no indication of that to be found here. Besides, with so many chinks in the walls and gaps around the frames of the windows and doors, the place is hardly airtight, so the very idea of suffocation due to fumes may be safely discarded, I feel. Moreover, I was the one to discover the body – I and the constable who came with me – and neither of us smelled anything untoward when we entered.”

“The rooms are themselves none too fragrant,” Holmes pointed out. “That may have disguised the last lingering odour of toxic fumes, which have since entirely dispersed.”

“True, true. For what it’s worth, my constable ventured that Roker might have had a fit of some sort and swallowed his own tongue, suffocating that way. But as you can see, his tongue is more or less where it ought to be.”

Holmes knelt beside me, put his nose close to Roker’s inert face, and sniffed.

“I don’t detect the lingering scent of cyanide,” said he, “nor of any other poison.”

“It is baffling,” Jones said. “Dead as a doornail, but not a trace of evidence to suggest how it might have occurred.”

“Not quite, Inspector,” Holmes said slowly. “Have you marked this?”

He pointed a long, thin forefinger at Roker’s neck. There, in the skin above the left levator scapulae muscle, was a tiny raised bump, at the centre of which lay a barely perceptible puncture wound, little more than a pinprick.

“Goodness me,” declared the police official. “No, that escaped my attention. It looks rather like a bee sting, does it not?”

“And the venom in bee stings,” I interposed, “is known to trigger anaphylaxis, which in its acutest form can cause the throat to swell and the airway to become inhibited. Could that be our culprit, an innocent bee?”

“If a bee, where is its body?” said Holmes. “Bees famously perish when they sting someone. The stinger is wrenched from the abdomen, taking much of the innards with it. I see a fair few dead flies around us, and a number of living ones as well, but not a single dead bee. By the same token, where is the stinger? Should it not still be embedded in Roker’s flesh?”

“A wasp, then. Unlike a bee, a wasp does not disembowel itself when it stings and may sting multiple times with impunity.”

“A valid notion, but I refer you to our brief and rather intemperate audience with Roker yesterday at the cemetery. At one point a wasp assailed him and he swatted it away without apparent concern. A man who knew he was dangerously allergic to wasp stings would not have been so nonchalant.”

“What if he did not know? What if this, here, was the first time he discovered he had that allergy? The first and, as luck would have it, the last.”

“I find it hard to believe that a man who worked outdoors all day long, surrounded by vegetation and thus insects, would not have been stung by a wasp at least once. But while we should not discount the idea altogether, we should also consider the possibility that death was induced by means of a fatal injection. Could this puncture wound, Watson, to your expert eye, have been made by the needle of a syringe?”

“Why, yes, I suppose it could.”

“Then that is our wasp theory partway dismantled. Furthermore, would a wasp, having successfully envenomed and slain Roker, then have taken his watch?”

Holmes indicated Roker’s waistcoat pocket. The gold-plated Junghans half hunter which he had spotted during our meeting with the gravedigger – and I had failed to notice – was not present.

“I put it to you,” he continued, “that whoever donated the watch to Roker is the same person responsible for his demise. Once Roker was dead by his hand, the murderer decided to retrieve said rather expensive item of property.”

“An opportunistic thief might have done the same,” Athelney Jones offered.

“But would an opportunistic thief have availed himself of a syringe filled with some lethal substance in order to subdue his intended target? Customarily the cudgel, the knife or the sidearm is such a person’s weapon of choice. Nothing so subtle and sophisticated as poison.”

The inspector nodded. “That is a fair point.”

“Watson, would you do me the courtesy of opening Roker’s mouth?”

“Whatever for?”

“So that I may peer inside his throat, of course. Don’t tell me you are squeamish.”

I must admit I have never found it pleasurable touching dead bodies, nor is it something I have ever become accustomed to. I know of coroners, pathologists and embalmers who are able to switch off the natural revulsion most of us feel towards a cadaver and can handle one with detachment and even a certain respectful tenderness. I am not among that fraternity.

With a grimace that I did my best to mask, I pinched Roker’s upper and lower lips between forefinger and thumb of each hand and prised apart those two lumps of cold, pliable flesh. Then, moving his tongue to one side, I delved both sets of fingers into the buccal cavity and held his maxilla stationary with one hand while gently but firmly levering his jaw downward with the other. Both temporomandibular joints creaked as I worked.

At last his mouth gaped, and stayed that way after I let go, thanks to rigor mortis.

Holmes produced his lens and squinted through it down into Roker’s mouth. Presently he let out a soft “Hum!” and passed the magnifying glass to me.

“Take a look for yourself. What do you see?”

Deep in Roker’s gullet, just past his uvula and tonsils, I spied a swelling. It was purplish-black in colour, and it originated in the wall of his oesophagus, expanding all the way across so as to obstruct that passage entirely.

“There is the source of asphyxiation,” Holmes said.

“What is it?” asked Jones. “What can you see in there?”

“Watson? What does it look like to you?”

“A fleshy protrusion, roughly the size of a plum,” I said. “A growth of some sort. I would suggest a vocal cord polyp, but it is not the right colour, not even for a haemorrhagic one, and also it is far too large. Likewise, for much the same reasons, it is not an abscess.”

“A tumour?”

“Quite possibly. Some form of lesion for certain.”

“Would you be so good as to take a sample of it for me that I might examine back at Baker Street?”

He handed me a penknife and a small envelope.

While I set about the grisly business, Holmes said to Jones, “For the record, you and your constable found the body as we see it?”

“Just so. I checked for a pulse, but otherwise touched nothing. As soon as I realised Roker was dead, I knew I would be calling you in, and I know you’re pernickety about things at a potential crime scene being left as they are.”

“And at what time was this?”

“Just gone seven. We would have pinned down Roker’s whereabouts sooner, but his employment records at Highgate Cemetery are not up to date. Or rather, he moved around a great deal. He was not, I am given to understand, the ideal tenant.”

“The beer empties and the overall condition of his lodgings attest to that,” Holmes said.

“Nor was he always forthcoming with the rent,” Jones added. “He left a string of debts and disgruntled landlords behind him. But we followed the trail and caught up with him eventually.”

“Eventually, yes, but too late for Roker. Had you found him sooner – yesterday, say – he would be in a holding cell at the Yard now, and alive, rather than lying dead on this floor. I mean that as a statement of fact, not a criticism. Was the door unlocked when you arrived?”

“Yes. I knocked, there was no reply, so I tried the handle and it turned.”

“That accords with my thinking. Sometime last night Roker received a guest, a person with whom he was already acquainted. He invited him in. They shared a drink. You see the unfinished bottle of whisky on the table? I believe the guest brought it with him. It is a fine single malt, not Roker’s usual tipple – ale seems his preference – and not something he could normally afford. When Roker was in his cups, with his guard lowered, the guest whipped out a syringe and attacked. Whatever was in the syringe created the growth in Roker’s throat that stopped up his windpipe. Then the guest took his watch and his leave.”

“Fiendish,” said Jones, adding, “I don’t suppose you have some inkling as to the identity of this individual?”

“At this stage I cannot even conjecture,” Holmes said. “Watson, how are you getting on?”

“Just a moment.” It was fiddly work and Holmes’s penknife was not the best tool for the job, but I had managed to excise a small slice of the lesion. Balancing the bloody morsel on the tip of the blade, I carefully extricated it from Roker’s mouth and popped it into the envelope.

“Excellently done.” Holmes took the envelope from me and sealed it. “Inspector? Would you or one of your men do me the kindness of asking the other tenants in the building if they saw anyone enter or leave Roker’s rooms last night?”

“Of course.”

“I suspect the answer will be no. This strikes me as the kind of dwelling where nobody is any too curious about the comings and goings of others, and where minding one’s own business is prized. We may get lucky but I am not pinning my hopes on it. By contrast, this” – he held up the envelope with its little gory piece of cargo – “may prove very instructive.”

“I don’t suppose you’d care to give me some idea how.”

“Not now. Not yet.”

“You are ever the enigma, Mr Holmes,” said Jones, with a wearily resigned shake of the head.

“And you would not have me any other way.”

* * *

I had my practice to attend to for the rest of the day, but afterwards, around teatime, I repaired to Baker Street, where I found Holmes at his microscope. A handful of telegrams lay scattered on the acid-scarred chemistry bench at which he was working.

“A profitable day’s work?” I enquired.

“Very much so,” replied Holmes, glancing up from the microscope’s eyepiece. “Tell me, old friend, how fast do cancers grow?”

“That depends on several factors: the age of the sufferer, his overall state of health, the particular type of cancer. There are no hard and fast rules.”

“Let me rephrase. The lesion in Jem Roker’s throat was big enough to obstruct his throat completely. Could such a growth occur overnight?”

“I hardly think so.”

“Or, for that matter, instantaneously?”

“Definitely not.”

“I thought as much. I am of the opinion that the lesion was artificially induced and that it manifested so swiftly, it killed Roker on the spot.”

“That is impossible.”

“Surely, Watson, if we have learned anything over the past eight years, it is that nothing is impossible. I have been studying the sample of the lesion under the microscope.” Holmes tapped the scientific instrument with a certain affection. It was a handsome brass thing made by H Crouch of Barbican which I had bought second-hand and given to Holmes as a gift one Christmas. “What I have discerned is that it is riddled with cancerous cells. I have compared these with illustrations in my biology textbooks and there is no doubt in my mind as to their nature. I have also found, apart from the cancerous cells, a host of other particles which I have been able to identify as spores.”

“Spores?”

“Fungal spores, to be precise. Again, my biology textbooks have come in handy.”

“And you are telling me there is an association between those spores and the cancer?”

“A close one.”

“You believe them to be the agency by which the cancer has been generated.”

“I can draw no other conclusion,” Holmes said. “The spores attacked the cells of otherwise healthy tissue and turned them cancerous with an unnatural speed and aggression. Result: a lesion which would normally have taken weeks or even months to develop, occurring in a matter of seconds.”

“How ghastly,” I said. “So we can infer that the substance injected into Roker’s neck was a solution containing the fungal spores.”

“We most certainly can.”

“But what kind are they? What plant do they belong to?”

“There, I am stumped. The biological literature contains many that are similar but none identical.”

“May I have a look?”

“Be my guest.”

I put my eye to the microscope’s eyepiece, adjusted the focus, and saw a multiplicity of shapes ranged beneath the objective lens. The cancerous cells were easy to distinguish. They were distorted and corrupted versions of healthy cells. Dotted around in their midst were clusters of brownish-green spheres. Each of these was fringed with what resembled tiny hairs and each also sported a single, thicker extension of itself, somewhat reminiscent of a sucker on an octopus’s arm. They could only be the spores.

The more I peered at them, the less I liked the look of them. They exhibited a certain sponginess which I found, for some indefinable reason, repellent. They were just minuscule insentient organisms, invisible to the naked eye, and yet somehow I was glad that they were stuck between the slide and the cover slip, fastened in place, unable to escape, and moreover that they were dead and inactive.

All at once, the spores pulsed. A spasm passed through them, in uncanny unison, as though each was shuddering in a sudden cold breeze. The little hairs waved, and the sucker-like extensions extruded and retracted.

Startled, I withdrew my eye from the microscope.

Holmes gave a low chuckle. “Did the spores move?”

“You knew they were going to.”

“They have been doing it regularly, once or twice every minute.”

“You could have warned me.”

“And spoil the surprise?”

“Spoil your fun, more like. They are still alive.”

“It is hard to know what constitutes life in something so infinitesimal and basic,” said Holmes. “Is an amoeba alive? A bacterium? The spores are still functional, unquestionably, yet they lack any purpose, now that their deadly work is done. They have fulfilled their role, infecting the cells around them with cancer. All that remains is for them to sit in a kind of torpor, dormant, twitching occasionally in their sleep. Who knows how long they might stay in that state, without decaying. Indefinitely, perhaps.”

With a certain pardonable cautiousness, I returned my eye to the microscope. The next time the spores pulsed, I was prepared for it. That made it only slightly less disconcerting.

“We should destroy them,” I said, going from the chemistry bench to the sideboard and pouring myself a shot of whisky. It seemed ridiculous that my nerves were so unsettled by the spores and their little seizures, but there it was. To my mind, the things exuded a strange smugness, even a malevolence, as if they were aware they were being watched and wanted the observer to know how noxious they were and how much they should be feared.

“All in due course,” said Holmes. “But before that, I would like to study them a little further.” He waved a hand at the telegrams. “I have wired a description of them to several eminent mycologists. Their replies uniformly state that no such spores are known to exist. A couple of them have requested I send samples so that they can examine them for themselves.”

“I don’t think you should.”

“I don’t think I should either. I shall subject the spores to a battery of tests, with a view to garnering as much information as I can about them, and then I shall incinerate every last scrap of the lesion sample. In the meantime, you and I have a visit to make.”

“Where?”

“Not far,” said Holmes. “To a medical practice just off Harley Street. Virtually around the corner.”

* * *

As we made our way along Marylebone Road through the late-afternoon crowds, Holmes said, “I have not spent the entire day hunched over a microscope. Some of it I devoted to ascertaining who treated Everard Pickering in his final days. We know, after all, that Pickering died of cancer and that a cancerous growth caused the death of Jem Roker, and this surely cannot be coincidental. In both instances the cancers appear to have been of a rare, unnatural virulence, and this surely cannot be coincidental either. Given a clear connection like that, it seemed worth my while making enquiries in that direction. With the assistance of Inspector Jones, who sent a man on my behalf to speak to the widow Pickering, I learned that her husband was tended to by Ulrich Felder, a German-born cancer specialist. I don’t suppose you know of him?”

“The name is unfamiliar.”

“Perhaps not surprising. Herr Doktor Felder is, by all accounts, something of a black sheep in the medical flock. That is according to one Dr Ross Moore-Moffatt, whom I prevailed upon to grant me a brief audience earlier this afternoon.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of him,” I said. “He is pre-eminent in the field of oncology. Second to none.”

“Dr Moore-Moffatt was good enough to fill me in on the subject of cancer generally and, more specifically, Felder. He was of the view that the fellow is little better than a quack. He described him as a wealthy dilletante who has been making a name for himself lately in the profession, but not a good one. ‘Banging on about developing a treatment for cancer utilising naturally occurring substances,’ he said. Felder even claims to be working on a form of radical therapy that doesn’t simply retard the progression of the disease but might even provide a cure. ‘All sounds like so much flummery to me,’ was Moore-Moffatt’s opinion, ‘an attempt to drum up custom for himself among the desperate and the gullible. I mean, he has the qualifications – University of Heidelberg School of Medicine, if I remember rightly – but nobody in our line takes him seriously.’”

“He sounds like one of those unscrupulous types who offer spurious cancer cures using electricity, mesmerism and so forth,” I said. “The truth is, cancer can’t be cured except by surgery, and that brings with it a host of complications and is seldom wholly successful. In the vast majority of cases, the condition can only be managed and palliated. Almost invariably, barring rare instances of spontaneous remission, it is a death sentence, and anyone who says otherwise is deluded or a liar. What were these ‘naturally occurring substances’ of Felder’s? Did Moore-Moffatt say?”

“He did, if vaguely. ‘Lichens, mosses, something like that,’ he said.”

“‘Something like that’,” I echoed. “Such as, perhaps, fungi?”

“Exactly, Watson. You have hit on it. Might Felder’s radical therapy involve fungal spores? If so, it would tie him to Everard Pickering as well as to Jem Roker. Then there is another correlation.”

“Namely?”

“The half hunter temporarily owned by Jem Roker. Who did I say the manufacturer was?”

“Junghans.”

“A German watchmaker, from the Rottweil district.”

“And Dr Felder is German.”

“Indeed.”

At that point we had turned off Harley Street and were hastening down a narrow side-street which ran perpendicular to that prestigious thoroughfare upon which countless medical practices were situated. We arrived at a building where, among the several brass plaques on the portico bearing the names of the businesses within, there was one inscribed “Ulrich Felder, MD”. His surgery was on the second floor, and we climbed the stairs to find a young woman on the landing outside who was in the process of closing and locking the door behind her. She was dressed in bonnet, gloves and gabardine, with a gladstone bag hooked on her arm, and was evidently an employee of Felder’s, leaving work at the end of the day.

“Madam, if I may intrude,” began Holmes.

“Sir?” said she. “Can I help you?” Her face was appealing if unremarkable, with a certain rounded, slab-like quality. Her accent betokened the Midlands.

“You work for Dr Felder, I presume.”

“I am his receptionist. If you wish to book an appointment, might I ask that you come back tomorrow? I have already overstayed my hours, and I must not miss my train.”

“Naturally I would not wish to hold you up,” Holmes said. “It is a lengthy journey to Northampton.”

The receptionist gave him a searching look. “I am not surprised that you can tell I am from the Midlands, but I am surprised you know precisely where.”

“The Northamptonshire accent is unique, in so far as it contains a mixture of both northern and southern pronunciations. More to the point, it involves much pursing of the lips, particularly over the long vowels, which you have amply exhibited. Just as I can tell where you hail from, I also know that you are a wholly admirable young lady.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, it is plain to me that you have an invalid father at home who is waiting for you to come in so that you can cook supper for him and your mother.”

Now she was taken aback. “Have we met before, sir?”

“We have not,” said Holmes. “I have merely applied my powers of analytical observation. You are unmarried, judging by the fact that there is no wedding ring visible on your left hand through the fabric of your glove. Therefore it is more than likely that you live with your parents. You have taken a job some distance from home since jobs tend to be better paid in London. From this I infer that you are the sole breadwinner of the family because your father is incapable of work, owing to some infirmity, and your mother is obliged to spend her days tending to him. The extra income which a job in the capital earns you is necessary in order to purchase the medicines he requires for his condition. As for the supper part, a bulge in your gladstone bag is suggestive of the outline of a pie, doubtless purchased earlier in the day. Steak and ale, if my nose does not mislead me. The pie is large enough to feed at least three.” Holmes spread out his hands. “Each link in the chain of deductions reinforces the rest.”

“A pretty parlour trick,” said the receptionist. Her tone was disdainful, but her eyes suggested she was impressed all the same.

“I take it that Dr Felder has himself already gone home,” he said.

Now, briefly, the young woman looked evasive. “That’s right. As I say, if you come back tomorrow, I can make arrangements for you to see him. Although,” she added, “I cannot guarantee how soon that might be.”

“He is busy?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Ahhh,” said Holmes. The syllable was a low, satisfied purr. “From that, one might take you to mean the opposite. After all, if he were really so busy, would you be locking up the surgery alone? On the contrary, it is probable that a busy physician would be heading homeward at least at the same time as his receptionist, if not later.”

The girl was becoming flustered. “I really must be going. My train will not wait.”

“Just a moment more of your time,” said Holmes. “Your employer has been absent from his place of work lately, has he not?”

“He has been…” She searched for the appropriate word. “…indisposed.”

“Come, come, young lady,” Holmes chided. “You can do better than that. I realise you are trying your best to cover for him. You are a conscientious employee, just as you are a dutiful daughter. Dr Felder did not come in today at all, did he?”

She sighed. “To tell the truth, sir…”

“It would be greatly appreciated.”

“You are right, he did not come in today, nor yesterday, and I have no idea what has happened to him. All I know is that I arrived here yesterday morning to find a note on my desk from Dr Felder instructing me to cancel that day’s appointments and all appointments for the coming week. Since then I have been expecting him to reappear, or at any rate send a message explaining his absence. I would have left for home earlier but I’ve been hoping all day for some news. I’m beginning to worry about him. He is normally so reliable.”

“Hah! Incommunicado since yesterday morning,” said Holmes. “It fits.”

“You are not a prospective patient after all, are you?” said the receptionist. “I can be forgiven for thinking you were, because you are very thin and pale, and those traits are common among the people who come to see Dr Felder. You have a vitality, however, not usually found in a cancer sufferer. Might I ask what your purpose here is, you and your colleague’s?”

“We seek Herr Doktor Felder’s assistance on an urgent matter. It is related to a patient of his, Everett Pickering.”

“Everard Pickering,” she corrected him.

“Then he is a patient of Felder’s,” declared Holmes. “You have inadvertently just confirmed it.”

The receptionist realised she had been wrongfooted. “Gracious. That was clumsy of me.”

“As, likewise, are Marcus Knightley and Amelia Throckmorton,” Holmes said, hazarding the names of the occupants of the other two vacant graves. “They, too, were treated for cancer by Dr Felder. Am I right?”

“What if I deny it?”

“I think we are past that stage, my dear.”

Her shoulders slumped in a capitulatory fashion. “There is not much point me hiding anything further from you. You seem to know what you need to know already, and you see through my attempts to dissemble. Who are you gents anyway? I don’t believe you are the police.”

“Would the police have cause to be interested in Dr Felder?” Holmes enquired.

“They would not,” came the forthright reply. “He is a respectable man. There are some in his profession who consider him unorthodox. He has been relegated to the fringes and has been known to complain about it from time to time, calling it unjust and prejudiced. For all that, he is sincere in what he does. He honestly tries to make his patients well again, and within my hearing he has stated, more than once, that he is on the verge of a great breakthrough, perhaps even a cancer cure. I do not pretend to understand the science he is using or the methods involved in his treatments. I can assure you, however, that Dr Ulrich Felder would never do anything unethical or illegal. It is not his way.”

“I shall take your word on that. Two more things, before I let you go and you can catch your train. It would be of no small assistance if you were able to supply me with Dr Felder’s private address.”

The receptionist studied each of us in turn. Finally she said, “Perhaps it would be no bad thing if someone went to check on him. His note yesterday morning was strange. It had been written in haste, I could tell, and he is usually so precise and methodical about everything. He has been running himself ragged over the past few days, coming in each morning looking tireder and tireder, doubtless having lost sleep in his pursuit of that breakthrough I spoke of. Can I trust that you mean him no ill?”

“None whatsoever,” Holmes said. “Our primary concern is the late Mr Pickering.”

“Why?”

“That, I’m afraid, I am not at liberty to divulge. Suffice to say, I wish to ensure that he rests in peace.”

After some further deliberation, the receptionist gave us Felder’s address, which lay in Muswell Hill. “And the second thing?” said she.

“Dr Felder – is he by any chance of slight stature and pigeon-toed?”

She gave a bemused nod.

“Thank you,” said Holmes. “That will be all.”

The young woman hurried off downstairs.

As the front door thudded shut below, Holmes turned to me, his eyebrows arched, his grey eyes agleam. “That clinches it, Watson. All three of our mysteriously revived corpses were being treated by Dr Felder, for cancer obviously. He is at the heart of this affair, there can be no question. And now, to Muswell Hill!”

* * *

Night was falling as we drove northwards, and it was fully dark by the time we alighted outside Felder’s townhouse in the heart of the genteel northern suburb of Muswell Hill.

“Holmes,” I said as the cab rolled away, “it’s just occurred to me. Ought Inspector Jones not be here with us? If I’m not mistaken, we are at the dénouement of the case, and it was he who brought it to us in the first place. Does that not give him the right to be present at its resolution? More to the point, it would be good to have a policeman on hand, should an arrest need to be made.”

“You and I are perfectly capable of detaining someone under our own auspices,” Holmes answered. “As for inviting along the redoubtable Jones: if my suspicions are correct, then the inspector is best left out of it. I do not think he will benefit from witnessing the things we are about to witness, not if he values his reason. Think of Gregson, who has become, whether he likes it or not, our brother-in-arcana. To this day he is haunted by his experiences in that cavern beneath St Paul’s Shadwell, when he and Mycroft were almost sacrificed to Nyarlathotep. While he continues to function as a police officer, he has never been quite the same man since.”

“Jones strikes me as better equipped, psychologically, to cope with exposure to the preternatural.”

“But why put that to the test if we do not have to?”

Just then, there came from within the house the crash of breaking glass.

“Hark!” said Holmes. “What’s that?” He thrust open the gate, darted across the small front garden and hastened up the steps, I following close behind. He tried the bell pull, then the knocker. There was no response to either.

Through the door we heard further noises. There was a loud clattering, and a cry of alarm. There was also, just discernible, an eerie, inhuman groaning.

“A struggle, it sounds like,” I said. “Whatever is going on?”

Holmes tried the door, but it was locked. He cast around. “That window there. Watson, give me a leg-up.”

Squatting, I interlaced my fingers to create a stirrup for Holmes and hoisted him up until he was abreast of the window. He braced one knee on the ledge to relieve me of some of his weight. Then, taking out his penknife, he slipped the blade between the sashes and levered the catch aside. He shoved up the lower half of the window and wriggled through, after which he turned, leaned out, and hauled me in after him.

We found ourselves in a smartly appointed dining room. The commotion was coming from the hallway adjacent. There, we found a scene of chaos and horror.

A small, dapper-dressed man was cowering with a walking stick in both hands, which he was using to fend off a monstrosity. The creature was human, but barely. Dressed in a filthy, mud-stained suit, its face bore a sickly yellow pallor and was grossly misshapen. It lunged at the small man again and again, uttering a series of low groans that spoke of anguish and despair. Ropes were tied around its wrists and ankles, with loose ends flapping. A side table lay overturned on the tiled floor, the remnants of a shattered crystal vase beside it. A hatstand had been toppled.

Every time the creature went for the small man, he repelled it with a blow from the walking stick. The thing would cringe and moan, then resume the attack.

“Halt! Ich befehle dir anzuhalten!” the man barked at it, but the imprecation fell on deaf ears. The creature would not be commanded to stop; it was relentless in its assault.

“Dr Felder!” said Holmes sharply.

The small man shot a surprised look over his shoulder at us. “Who are you? How did you get in?” he said in heavily accented English. “You should not be here. Go away!” With that, he returned his attention to the marauding thing in front of him, delivering yet another blow with the stick.

“I rather think you need our help, Doctor,” Holmes said. “Unless you reckon you can corral that undead man by yourself, and frankly, you don’t appear to be having a great deal of success on that front.”

Felder sized up his predicament and realised he had little choice. “Very well. Help if you must.”

Holmes beckoned to me, and together we closed in on the rampaging creature. “You grab one arm, Watson. I’ll grab the other. Between us we can wrestle it to the ground.”

Easier said than done. The thing was possessed of a maddened, unholy strength and resisted us with all its might. Up close its body exuded a rank stench – the odour of decay and putrefaction, powerful enough to make one retch.

Nonetheless Holmes and I, by dint of much pulling and striving, were able to bring it down. We held the creature prone on the floor, pinning it beneath our combined bodyweight, and although it writhed strenuously in our clutches, it could not get up. It alternated between snarling savagely and letting out strings of garbled syllables that, though unintelligible, could still almost be taken for speech. The gusts of breath that accompanied these inarticulate ejaculations were foul-smelling in the extreme.

“Make yourself useful, man,” Holmes told Felder, who had just stood there gawking. “Fetch more rope.”

Felder scurried off, returning with a bundle of the requested item. Holmes secured the creature’s arms behind its back, then fastened its legs together tightly. Now all it could do was wriggle impotently like a landed fish. Bit by bit its guttural protests subsided to a sullen mewling.

“I suppose thanks are in order,” said Felder, a grudging note in his voice. “I had matters under control, of course.”

“That is not how it looked to me,” said Holmes.

The little German straightened out his lapels and the hem of his jacket. I noted that, when at rest, he stood with his feet turned inward towards each other. “I shall ask again. Who are you gentlemen?”

Holmes introduced us. “And you are the oncologist Dr Ulrich Felder.”

Felder gave a small bow. “At your service.”

“And this,” Holmes went on, waving a hand towards the bound creature at our feet, “is Everard Pickering – or should that be was Everard Pickering? As things stand, the fellow exists in a state of being and not-being, present tense and past tense. All courtesy of you, Doctor.”

“You seem inordinately well informed, Herr Holmes.”

“It is something I pride myself on.”

“Possibly I should be asking what has brought you to my home…”

“But I feel it is rather obvious.”

“Ja. Much though I hoped I had everything under control, it seems otherwise.”

“You have certainly been ruthless in your efforts to contain your little problem,” said Holmes. “Not least with your unusually callous treatment of one Jem Roker, gravedigger.”

The German’s head drooped. “Would that it had not been necessary, but Roker was proving a liability.”

“Where are they?” Holmes said, glancing around him. “The other two undead? Mr Knightley and Miss Throckmorton?” His gaze fell upon a door that was set beneath the stairs to the first floor. It stood slightly ajar, and through the narrow aperture another flight of stairs was visible, descending into darkness. “The cellar, I would hazard,” he continued. “That’s where you have been keeping all three of them. I see smears of mud on the door jamb. Grave dirt, I should imagine, that chanced to rub off their clothing as they passed through.”

“It is clear that nothing escapes you. The jig, as you British say, is up.” Dr Felder’s attitude was one of total resignation. He could have lied or prevaricated, but he seemed to have accepted that Sherlock Holmes had command of the situation and that anything other than full compliance was futile.

“Shall we return Mr Pickering whence he came?” Holmes suggested. “He can re-join his fellow ex-corpses down below, and this time, perhaps, we can make sure he is tied up more tightly so that he doesn’t break free again to menace you or anybody else.”

“That,” said Felder, “would be a very good idea.”

* * *

Holmes and I hauled Pickering to his feet and manhandled him down to the cellar, with Felder leading the way.

At the foot of the stairs Felder lit a pair of oil lamps. Their glow revealed not only the extent of the cellar – its dimensions were sizeable, matching the entire footprint of the house – but also, more unpleasantly, two further reanimated corpses positioned against one wall. Each was bound to a wooden chair, while broken pieces of a third chair were strewn across the bare brick floor. One could only assume Everard Pickering had strained at his bonds so intently that the chair’s joins had weakened and it had fallen apart beneath him. Thereupon he had stumbled up the stairs, only for Felder to confront him in the hallway.

Our arrival in the cellar set the two seated corpses mumbling and squirming. Marcus Knightley, who wore a frock coat and a cravat and sported a few wisps of white hair pasted across his sallow, peeling scalp, gnashed his teeth at us. Amelia Throckmorton, who in life must have been a respectable elderly spinster type, would have gnashed her teeth too, but all she had was bare gums; her dentures had not, it would appear, been buried with her, or else had fallen out since her interment. Like Pickering, each of this pair was a withered, emaciated shell with sunken, cloudy eyes. Also like Pickering, each was peppered with lumpen subcutaneous growths, which showed both on their exposed skin and as unsightly bulges beneath their clothing.

We lay the still squirming Pickering down next to them, on his side, and Holmes trussed him further with another length of rope so that he was unable to move whatsoever. Pickering wailed his discontent, which the other two undead echoed, a keening, wordless chorus. Horrifying and revolting though these creatures were, there was something pitiful about them too. I could not help but feel that they had not asked to be raised from the dead and were appalled to find themselves in this state.

The necrotic reek from the corpses permeated the air, mingling with another, more sharply pungent smell: that of chemicals. The cellar boasted a couple of workbenches that were laden with test tubes and condensers, retorts and tripods, scales and balances, flasks and droppers, along with rack upon rack of stoppered phials containing compounds, tinctures and reagents. The copious array of scientific paraphernalia gleamed in the lamplight, and I caught Holmes running an eye over it with, I fancied, a hint of jealousy in his gaze, for his own collection of such equipment, while substantial, was nowhere near as comprehensive.

In addition to all this apparatus, which was in immaculate condition, I spotted various cages of the sort designed to hold small animals. They were empty and stacked tidily on top of one another in a corner. There were also a number of journals and sheets of foolscap lying around. The handwriting and diagrams on the latter looked fastidiously neat, and I recalled Dr Felder’s receptionist referring to her employer as “precise and methodical”.

“So,” said Felder, brushing his palms together. “Here we are. What now, gentlemen? I take it you plan on turning me in to the authorities.”

“That is certainly our intent,” said Holmes. “But first, let me tell you everything I know, and you can then supply a few further details. I have the bricks. What I need from you is the mortar to bind it all together.”

“Very well. Seeing as it appears I have no alternative.” The corners of Felder’s mouth twitched drolly. “Perhaps you might like to tie me up, like these three, lest I attempt to escape.”

“That won’t be necessary. Unless you make it so.”

“I shall not.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Holmes. “Now then, if I am correct, this all started when you subjected three individuals to a form of cancer treatment, one of your own devising. The treatment somehow involves fungus, in a manner that I am not quite able to fathom.”

“That is the case,” said the oncologist. “My aim was to create a fungus-based preparation that can consume cancers. Many fungi are saprophytic, after all, meaning they feed on dead matter, whether it be plant or animal material. Others are parasitic. I thought that if I could breed a form of fungus that lives off cancerous tissue and inject a solution of it into human sufferers, this would provide the cure for cancer that the world has been crying out for.”

“And you believed you had succeeded.”

Felder nodded. “A certain rare form of fungus came my way which seemed to fulfil that very role. Initial experiments on tumours provided to me by anatomists offered very encouraging results. The fungus spores flourished in the medium of the cancerous tissue, devouring it eagerly until none was left. The next step was to try it out on living test subjects.”

“None other than these unfortunates,” said Holmes, indicating the trio of undead corpses.

“To call them unfortunates makes them sound as though they were reluctant participants. They were anything but. The three of them – Herr Pickering, Herr Knightley, Fräulein Throckmorton – were my patients already and were in the end stages of the disease.”

The three undead seemed to recognise their names as Felder uttered them. They were roused to a kind of mournful chattering, like agitated birds.

Oblivious, Felder carried on. “The prognosis for each was a matter of weeks. One by one, I offered them a proposal. I made it clear that this remedy of mine was untried and its possible side effects uncertain. They, even knowing that, gave enthusiastic consent.”

“I can understand why,” I said. “What was the worst that could happen? The treatment would kill them?”

“The risk, they felt, was worthwhile,” said Felder. “I did not guarantee them full remission. I made no promises at all. I simply told them there was an outside chance they might be cured.”

“But things didn’t go as you, or your patients, might have hoped. In fact, the outcome of injecting them with your fungal preparation was the reverse of what you anticipated.”

“That is self-evident, Watson,” said Holmes with asperity, the tone he customarily adopted towards me whenever I failed to meet his exacting standards.

Felder himself acknowledged my remark with a rueful shrug. “The fungus spores, it transpired, did not merely consume cancerous tissue. They facilitated its spread throughout the host body. Where initially there had been just one tumour, or a few, all at once there were dozens. I can only assume that individual spores attached themselves to clusters of loose cancerous cells and then were carried elsewhere through the bodily systems by natural processes. The cancerous cells propagated themselves in healthy organs, generating fresh tumours. It is even possible that the fungus and the cancer developed some form of symbiotic relationship. The fungus wanted to increase its sources of nutrition, and it is in the nature of cancer to proliferate, and so together, like farmer and crop, the two found a way to prosper, mutually beneficial to both. The world of microbiology really is quite fascinating, you know. Tiny organisms that you might think lack any form of intellect are able, collectively, to accomplish amazing feats. It is almost as if they can communicate among themselves in ways you or I could never understand.”

I recalled, with a shudder, the spores I had seen through Holmes’s microscope the previous day – how alive they had seemed, how knowing.

“At any rate,” Felder continued, “it was soon clear to me that I had failed dismally. One after another, in quick succession, the three patients passed away.”

“And all three were buried locally, at Highgate Cemetery,” said Holmes. “At which point, gravedigger Jem Roker entered the picture. But before we get to him, I feel, Dr Felder, that there is something you haven’t told us. A moment ago you said that the next step, after trying your fungus out on tumours, was living test subjects. Any scientist worth his salt would use animals for that purpose before human beings, and I see cages here – cages that would have once held rats or rabbits or small monkeys. What became of them? Why have you omitted mention of them? Could it be because you did resort to experimenting on animals first and the results were discouraging?”

“You are asking me whether I knew, in advance of giving the fungal preparation to people, that it might cause harm?”

“I am not asking, I am telling you. You tried it on animals, and it had dire consequences, and in spite of that you still went ahead and administered it to humans.”

Felder shook his head wonderingly and with a touch of exasperation. “There truly is nothing I can hide from you, Mr Holmes, or so it would appear. In my defence, I am trying not to make myself seem monstrous. I want you to understand that everything I did, I did with the best of intentions. The preparation was not fully ready, I admit, when I dispensed it to these three here. It could have been refined more, I don’t deny that. Perfected, even. What can I say? I was excited. I got ahead of myself.”

“What did it do to the animals?”

“Killed them. Killed them, then brought them back to life.” The matter-of-factness with which Felder said this gave me a chill. “Or at least to a semblance of life. In this respect my fungus resembles ophiocordyceps unilateralis, a tropical mould discovered by your own Alfred Russel Wallace back in 1859. That great naturalist found that ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects ants, taking over their bodies and altering their behaviour. It might even be said to control them, mastering them from within. The infected ants leave their colonies and go in search of a moist, warm place, the ideal medium for fungal growth, where they promptly die. Thereupon the fungus sprouts fruiting bodies from the ants’ corpses and continues its reproductive cycle. My fungus did something akin to that with mammals. Every time, the animal would perish within twenty-four hours or so of being injected with the spores. Or rather, it would appear to perish, whereas actually it entered a state of inactivity indistinguishable from death. A while afterwards, it would emerge from that state, giving an impression of being alive once more. The animal would mimic the common behavioural patterns of its species but was no longer, to all intents and purposes, a living creature. You might instead call it a fleshly vehicle for the fungus, a carriage transporting its occupant from place to place.”

“I presume you destroyed these abominations.”

“Natürlich. I killed them humanely with chloroform, then dissected them, after which I consigned the remains to the garden incinerator.”

“My God,” I breathed. “You gave the same fungal preparation to your patients as you did to animals, in the full knowledge of what it would do to them.”

“Might do to them, Dr Watson,” said Felder, wagging an admonitory finger. “Might. My thinking was that the fungus ran rampant in healthy animals, yet also consumed cancer tissue. If introduced into people with cancer, would it not focus its attention on the diseased parts to the exclusion of all else?”

“I doubt you warned your patients of the effect it had had on the animals. I’ll wager you kept that piece of information very much to yourself.”

“Why frighten them unnecessarily?”

“To summarise your narrative so far, Dr Felder,” said Holmes, “you injected three unsuspecting patients with a substance which you had reason to believe might be fatal to them but might also alleviate their cancer.”

“That is hardly responsible doctoring,” I interjected hotly, glaring at Felder. “You are a disgrace to your profession.”

The oncologist held my gaze evenly. He appeared impervious to guilt or shame.

“And when their respective cancers grew exponentially worse and all three died,” Holmes went on, “you were perhaps not surprised. Furthermore, you knew the three might well manifest the same result as your test animals – in other words, they might return to life. In anticipation of that eventuality, you enlisted the aid of Highgate Cemetery’s head gravedigger. You tasked him with reporting to you if the soil of the graves showed signs of disturbance. You offered him a decent sum of money, and Roker accepted and dutifully kept a weather eye on the graves, doubtless thinking your request peculiar but choosing not to question it too hard, not when it afforded him extra income. Then, not so long ago, he alerted you to the fact that the graves were indeed starting to look as though there was undue activity below ground. I imagine he found this more than a little disconcerting and could only be mollified with the offer of more money. When that would not suffice, you presented him with your watch, the rather splendid gold-plated Junghans half hunter that is currently nestling in your waistcoat pocket, back where it belongs. Probably Roker had taken a shine to it and remarked upon it admiringly at some point. You gave it to him, and thus was his full compliance once more assured. Do tell me if I am wrong on any count.”

“You are not, Mr Holmes. Not as yet.”

“Now that you had a good idea your patients were coming back to life and apt to dig their way out of the earth,” Holmes continued, “you began staking out their graves at night, leaving Roker to maintain his watch on them during the day. This I infer from your receptionist telling us that you looked as though you had not been sleeping well lately. Your plan was to intercept the undead corpses at their moment of emergence and bring them back here, where you might keep them out of sight and study them at your leisure. Dissection? Was that on the cards?”

“In due course. It will be necessary, so that I can learn more about where my treatment went astray and try to make improvements in future. For the time being, though, I have been content with merely observing them as they are and taking notes. I have been seeing how they respond to stimuli – speech, bright light, food, music and so on. It has been… most interesting. In certain instances they react quite normally. The response to pain, for example, is much as it is in any living thing. In other respects, however, they are senseless. It is as though vestiges of their old selves remain but buried deep. At this stage, I must point out that I have taken to calling them ‘fungal reanimates’. Since they are neither living creatures, nor dead ones, I feel that some new classification is required.”

“Why not?” said Holmes equably. He resumed his elucidation. “As chance would have it, all three of these fungal reanimates of yours sprang forth from the ground on the same night, the night before last, right before your eyes. I can only speculate how perturbing a sight that must have been; but also, to you, perhaps thrilling, in some perverse way. You managed to round up two of them, Mr Knightley and Miss Throckmorton, and guide them back here, but not the third. He, Mr Pickering, temporarily eluded you.”

“Fräulein Throckmorton was first to emerge,” said Felder. “By the time I returned from escorting her hither, Herr Knightley was just worming his way out of the ground, and Herr Pickering was starting to make his presence known. I thought I had time to deal with Knightley and get back for Pickering, and I was as quick as I could be, but too late. He was already gone.”

“Yes. Pickering became quite the wild rover. He wandered the darkened streets of north London, finding his way through some dim instinct back to his own house, where his widow spied him loitering dumbly in their back garden. Later that same night, you located him there, having correctly surmised where he might be. Soon enough you had him stowed in this cellar with the others. But now we return to Mr Jem Roker, who became, in your own parlance, a liability.”

“Ja. Roker.”

“Blackmail, was it? Threatening to expose you? Demanding yet more money?”

“All of the above,” said Felder. “Roker may not have understood exactly what I had done, but he was no fool. He came to me yesterday evening, to my own front door, and started accusing me of witchcraft and blasphemy and saying he would report me to the police and the newspapers. He was quite inebriated. I told him to go home. I would come to him there, I said, bringing with me something which would placate him once and for all. Those were my exact words: ‘placate you once and for all’.” The German chuckled as though at his own cleverness. “Roker, in his drunken greed, was most amenable to the idea. He already had my watch, and clearly believed I was going to bestow on him some item of even greater value.”

“Whereas what you actually brought along was a hypodermic syringe,” said Holmes, “containing a mixture of your fungal preparation and some cancerous cells drawn from the body of one of your three captives. Am I right?”

Felder’s top lip drew upward, exposing his upper set of teeth. This, I realised, was his smile, although it could easily have been mistaken for a sneer. “You are.”

“You also took an expensive bottle of whisky along with you, which you and Roker drank together. You knew he had a penchant for alcohol and would not be able to resist such an alluring offering. You knew, too, that he would imbibe more of the whisky than you, until his guard became lowered. And that was when you struck. In went the needle, into the unwary Roker’s neck. Your special concoction did its wicked work. The dose of spores and cancer cells was highly concentrated. A tumour swelled in Roker’s throat. He was dead within a matter of moments.”

“It worked better than even I had expected, and that is just as well, as I had no wish for him to suffer unduly.”

“He was a nuisance,” I growled, “and you murdered him.” I had taken a profound dislike to Dr Ulrich Felder. I don’t know which irked me more about him, his smugness or his utter lack of conscience. I had not made the provision of bringing my service revolver with me to his house, for Holmes had not suggested I might need it, and I invariably took my lead from him in such matters. I mention this simply because, had I had the gun with me at that moment, I might have been tempted to use it.

“So judgemental, Dr Watson,” said Felder. “Had I given in to Roker’s blackmail, it would not have ended there. He would have kept coming back for more, and yet more. He was that kind of man. He was putting my career in jeopardy, my research, everything I had worked for.”

“Still, you put him down with no more compunction than if he had been one of your laboratory animals.”

“Will you not at least acknowledge my brilliance? I disposed of Herr Roker in such a way that his death would appear to have been through natural causes. Nobody could have known otherwise. Nobody except, it seems, your friend here. Him I did not reckon with.”

“Many a criminal has failed to reckon with me,” said Holmes, “to his cost.”

“So I am learning, although I resent being called a criminal.”

“What are you, then?” I said.

“A man of science who is prepared to do whatever it takes for the advancement of knowledge and medicine.”

I snorted.

“However you choose to regard yourself, Doctor,” said Holmes to Felder, “you are inarguably a ruthless, coldblooded individual. Proof: having done away with Roker at his lodgings, you calmly collected your watch and made your exit.”

“What use was my watch to him any more?” said Felder. “The dead do not need to tell the time. Besides, it is mine. I paid good money for it.”

“And its presence on Roker’s person might have connected you to him.”

“That never occurred to me. The watch carries no personalised inscription, nothing to show whom it belongs to, but I suppose for an astute fellow such as yourself, Herr Holmes, it might be all you needed to forge a link between myself and Roker.”

“It absolutely was,” said Holmes. “And now I believe we are up to date. I am satisfied with my deductions, which you have confirmed in all aspects, Dr Felder. Unless, that is, you have anything to add?”

“I do not think so. This is the point at which you and your colleague forcibly restrain me and hand me over to the police, nicht wahr? You are both of you bigger and stronger than I, and I do not rate my chances against you. I suppose I must come quietly.”

“That would be by far the easiest thing for all concerned.”

“But I am afraid I cannot allow it. I will not be hanged for murder. I have too much to offer the world.”

That was when Felder sprang into action.

* * *

Two things happened pretty much simultaneously. First, Felder snatched up one of the lamps and hurled it at the workbench nearest him. The lamp shattered, oil splashed from its reservoir, and flame erupted all around. This, though, was merely a distraction, for in more or less the same instant the oncologist’s hand dived into his jacket pocket and drew out a syringe. Brandishing it over his head, thumb poised on the plunger, he threw himself at Sherlock Holmes.

I was too astonished by the suddenness of these actions to respond straight away. I saw the syringe flash downwards, on course to pierce Holmes’s chest. There was a murky green fluid inside its glass barrel which I could only think was the selfsame substance Felder had used to kill Jem Roker. Holmes was about to meet a similar grisly end to the gravedigger.

This appalling prospect galvanised me out of my frozen stupor, and I propelled myself forwards to intercede between Felder and Holmes.

Holmes’s reflexes, however, were superior to mine. Even as the little German brought the syringe down, my friend raised a forearm to block the thrust. Felder’s wrist collided with the edge of Holmes’s arm, and he yelped in thwarted frustration. He drew back his hand for a second attempt with the syringe, but this time Holmes was more than ready for him. With lightning swiftness he seized Felder’s wrist with both hands, twisting the German’s arm at the same time. The momentum of Felder’s swing, assisted by Holmes, carried the syringe in a downward arc, straight towards his own stomach. The needle penetrated his clothing and embedded itself in his flesh. His thumb inadvertently depressed the plunger part way.

For a few fleeting moments Felder stood staring down at the syringe protruding from his midriff. About half of the green fluid remained in the barrel. The rest was inside him, already coursing through his body.

His head came up, and his eyes were bulging, his features a mask of dread and horror.

“Nein,” he croaked. “This cannot be. Nein. Nein! Gott hilf mir!”

Holmes stepped back. “God cannot help you, Doctor. Nor, I suspect, will He have mercy on you in the hereafter.”

The fire started by the broken lamp was spreading fast. Already the entire surface of the workbench was alight, with trails of burning oil snaking across the floor in all directions. Chemicals in the rack on top of the workbench were contributing to the blaze. Phials exploded in the heat, spilling their volatile contents.

Felder, by the light of the flames, gasped and staggered. He was clutching his belly. The syringe had fallen out onto the floor. He reeled towards the other workbench and grabbed it for support.

“I can feel them,” he gasped in a tone that was half wonderment, half horror. “I can feel them inside me, growing, multiplying. They are in my stomach. Oh, now in my lungs.” His breathing grew rapid and stertorous. “This is what it is like. This is how it feels.”

He coughed wetly, and blood bubbled at his lips. Next moment, he bent double and a whole torrent of blood came gushing forth from his mouth. He collapsed, still vomiting crimson.

By this stage, flames from the first workbench were licking at the ceiling beams and acrid smoke had begun to fill the cellar. Felder, meanwhile, lay curled on the floor, his body wracked with convulsive spasms, blood now issuing from every facial orifice. He was scarcely recognisable as the dapper, prissy little man he had been. He was a shuddering, blood-soaked shambles.

“Come, Watson.” Holmes plucked at my sleeve. “We can’t stay.”

I nodded agreement. My eyes were starting to stream from the smoke, while the heat of the fire was ferocious. We stood no hope of extinguishing the flames, and retreat was the only sensible option.

“What about them?” I said, meaning Felder’s fungal reanimates.

The three undead corpses were recoiling from the fire, moaning, their eyes rolling. They heaved at their bonds with animal desperation.

“We cannot help them, any more than we can help the man responsible for making them what they are,” Holmes replied. “We don’t have time to untie them and shepherd them out of the building, not without risk to life and limb, and even if we did, what good would it do? What kind of future awaits them, save more of this terrible twilight state in which they exist now? This condition which is neither life nor death but the worst of both worlds?”

I tried to gainsay his argument, but could not. I looked to the trio of fungal reanimates, and their gazes met mine. They ceased their thrashing about, and I could see that they had reached a shared understanding. They were well aware they had nothing to look forward to, just as Holmes said. They accepted that the best thing for them was to be consumed by the holocaust and their torment brought to an end.

So I thought, at any rate. So I told myself then, and still tell myself to this day. The fungal reanimates were resigned to their doom and did not wish to be rescued. I have to believe that was the case.

Dr Ulrich Felder lay in an expanding pool of his blood, motionless apart from the occasional twitch of limb and head. There was no saving him either, but I had far fewer qualms about that.

Holmes shoved me towards the stairs, and as I began to ascend I spied him, out of the corner of my eye, grabbing one of Felder’s journals. He stuffed the book into his pocket as he followed me up to the ground floor.

Outdoors, in the street, we set up a hue and cry. “Fire! Fire!” Then, in the darkness, we made good our escape, even as neighbours emerged inquisitively from their homes and the crackle of the inferno in Felder’s basement grew ever louder.

* * *

There were several articles in the following day’s papers about a fatal house fire in Muswell Hill. The conflagration gutted much of the property but thankfully, through the brave efforts of the fire brigade, was extinguished before it could spread to the adjoining buildings. Four bodies were found in the basement, charred to the bone, and it was believed that one of them belonged to the man renting the townhouse, an oncologist from Heidelberg by the name of Felder. The other three were yet to be identified. The fire was presumed to have been caused by accident, perhaps somehow related to scientific equipment, of which certain badly damaged specimens were discovered in the basement, including the remnants of phials of chemicals. Generally, the whole incident was felt to be little more than tragic misadventure.

Inspector Athelney Jones came to call at Baker Street that same afternoon, to see what progress Holmes had made on the matter of the three corpses missing from Highgate Cemetery and Jem Roker’s death. With a shrewd look, he mentioned the Muswell Hill fire and mused aloud, with every appearance of airiness, whether that and the other events were in any way associated.

“I cannot lie to you, Inspector,” said Holmes, and promptly did just that. Or rather, he gave Jones a heavily edited account of our exploits. Dr Felder, he said, was a rogue medic experimenting illegally on the corpses of his own patients, in order to test certain outlandish theories he had about cancer. He bribed Jem Roker to dig them up for him. The two men had a falling out, and Felder killed Roker using a poison of his own devising. Holmes tracked him down to his home in Muswell Hill and, together with me, challenged him there. Felder retreated to the basement and set fire to it, and himself, and the corpses, rather than face justice.

“And that is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?” said Jones.

“Upon my honour as an Englishman,” answered Holmes.

“And you, Doctor, will corroborate everything Mr Holmes says?”

“To the letter.” I was not even half the thespian my friend was, but I did my best to bluff it out, and it seemed to do the trick.

“Very well,” Jones decided. “That all makes reasonable enough sense, and I will frame my report accordingly. I just wonder…” He lofted an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t by any chance be keeping something back, would you, gents? Something you think I’m not ready to hear? Something, shall we say, out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing, my good man,” said Holmes. “Not a thing.”

Jones hummed to himself. “I don’t suppose, even if there was, I’d ever manage to winkle it out of you. I know the two of you stand firm against evil in all its forms, be they manmade or otherwise, and that,” he said with dignity, “is sufficient for me.”

* * *

As a brief postscript to this section of my narrative, I must relate that Holmes spent several days studying the journal he took from Felder’s basement. He did this with a view to learning all he could about the doctor’s cancer treatment and the experiments he undertook.

“Damnably unrewarding,” was his conclusion. “I have been through the text over and over, and I am little the wiser. My German is good enough that I can make sense of it. There just isn’t much that is revelatory or illuminating. It is simply a day-by-day explication of procedures and findings, offering little more than Felder himself told us. I wish I had had the opportunity to gather up more of his notes. The only point I have found that is of any interest is that the fungus he used was donated to him by a certain benefactress, whom he neglects to name. He refers to her just once, and then only as an ‘Amerikanische Frau’.”

“An American woman,” I said.

“There are no other clues to her identity, just that single, infuriatingly vague mention. Who can she be? And why did she give him a fungus? And why that particular fungus, whose effects proved so strange and extraordinary? There is something going on here, Watson. I can feel it.” Holmes lifted both hands as though he were holding an invisible object in them, caressing it, examining its texture and contours. “My every instinct is telling me that a deeper mystery lies beneath all this. I cannot grasp it. I cannot even descry the outline of it. But it is there. I swear to God, it is there. And I shall get to the bottom of it, whatever it takes, whatever the cost.”

These were to prove prophetic words indeed.