Holmes wasted little time in reading the manuscript, skimming through it with such alacrity that I would never have believed, had I not known him, that he could be taking it all in. He consulted Hopkins’s notes as he went, adding his own marginalia to Hopkins’s notebook – not, at the Inspector’s insistence, to the manuscript itself, which would have evidentiary value if the forger came to trial.
While he did so, Hopkins observed to me, “This little business goes well beyond forgery. It’s conspiracy to murder, plain and simple. It’s the connection we need to make the case that the forger was responsible for Bastion’s and Probert’s deaths as well.”
Holmes murmured assent, and turned the page.
A little while later, he looked up and said, “The author takes some trouble to blame me for the killing of Mr Maines. I confess I must accept some part in provoking his death, insofar as his friends punished him for speaking to me. It is quite a fortuitous stick to beat me with, however, especially given that naturally nobody would testify to knowing who had really killed the man.”
He continued to read. After a few minutes, he remarked, “I do not believe I called the forger a literary genius. Does anybody else recall my making such a remark?”
Hopkins and I agreed that he had not. “But that’s a trivial point, surely,” I suggested, “compared with some of the things the manuscript has you do.”
“On the contrary,” Holmes said, “it is notable because it occurs during a conversation at which Inspector Hopkins was present. The author of the document, who may or may not also be the copyist, seems to consider his own talents of sufficient importance to risk a remark that might have alerted Hopkins to his imposture. I dare say it would have passed without comment, or been dismissed as a whimsical invention of yours, Watson; the discrepancy is, as you say, a trivial one. But it suggests a character flaw in the forger that I should not have altogether expected.”
An astonishingly short time later, he was finished. Turning the last page, he said, “It is apparent that this conspiracy, for such it surely is, has had us under surveillance for some time. Your notes would have been a windfall for them, Watson, but as you have observed they would hardly have been sufficient to reconstruct entire conversations with such a degree of precision. We have been eavesdropped upon repeatedly, I fear.”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t me,” said Mrs Hudson, “nor the pageboy. He knows I’d skin him alive if I caught him doing such a thing.”
“Fear not, Mrs Hudson,” Holmes reassured her, “the conversations between Watson and myself when we were alone in these rooms are recreated only approximately.”
“I’ve noticed that gentlemen aren’t often really alone,” Mrs Hudson observed. “I give you privacy in this house, Mr Holmes, as you’ve every right to expect. But when you’re out and about I dare say you’re generally surrounded by waiters and footmen and the like.”
“Indeed,” said Holmes. “I have little doubt that, if Watson and I were to inspect every instance when our words have been reproduced with a suspicious degree of faithfulness, we should recall some assistant or servant hovering just about within earshot. In the case of our conversations with Mycroft in the Stranger’s Room at the Diogenes, the attendant Jennings was often close at hand. We knew already that he was trying to better himself; I dare say the forgers found him not averse to a secondary source of income. Sir Hector Askew has footmen; at Boothby’s there were attendants; at the Athenaeum, the waiter. Even cabmen may have sharp ears.
“It may be that our correspondence also has been intercepted, since I doubt that your notes made reference to your cousin’s happy event, Watson. No? I thought as much. As for the conversations with Hopkins, here and at the Yard … Well, Hopkins?” he said, promptingly. “What is your view?”
Hopkins looked very grim. “I can account for some of it. The interview with Lucy Evans was written up in a report, for instance. I made notes for my own use of our conversation yesterday with Mr Mycroft Holmes, and after all the confusion following that terrible business with Probert, I couldn’t tell you with any certainty where those notes are now.”
Holmes said, “We may be confident that they are in the forger’s hands. As Watson observed, this manuscript represents a considerable commitment of time, especially since it must not only have been written in the sense of being composed, as Watson would have done had this been his handiwork, but also copied in the most meticulous penmanship by whoever did the work of mimicking his handwriting. The notes of that particular conversation, then, reached the author’s eyes at a late stage, and I imagine he must have been altogether quite alarmed that I had discovered the stylistic hallmarks whereby his work might be recognised.
“It was too late to alter the earlier pages, of course, nor could he omit the material in question, for fear of alerting you to its significance, Hopkins, but he does what he can to ameliorate the damage – suggesting, for instance, that Watson, too, spells connexion in the old-fashioned manner, though he has never done so that I have seen. You will notice that from that point onward the habits in question are rather carefully avoided, until he becomes overexcited, and I suppose hurried, on the final page. He even takes to using parentheses in place of dashes, though they had been notable by their absence to this point.
“But I believe I interrupted you, Hopkins.”
Hopkins sighed bitterly. “I was just going to say that, with those exceptions, there was only one man present at most of those conversations, other than the three of us.”
“Sergeant Douglass,” I said, not wishing to appear the only man present dull enough not to have reached this obvious conclusion.
“He has betrayed the Yard’s trust, and mine.” Hopkins’s face was stormy. “I’ll see him face the full force of the law for this.”
“He was, I assume, present at, and forewarned of, the arrest of Zimmerman?” Holmes asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Hopkins, bitterly. “He’s been part of all that from the start. He must have let these conspirators know that it was coming, and arranged for a false letter from Bastion to be found there.”
“And he would, of course, have had every opportunity to purloin your notes of yesterday.”
“So he would,” Hopkins agreed. “But worst of all, there’s poor Probert. If Douglass didn’t kill him himself, he must have enlisted someone else who did. He’s in this up to his neck. He’s off duty at present. May I use your telephone, please?”
Hopkins called through to the Yard and instructed Constable Fratelli to cease the search for Holmes, and instead to send men round to Sergeant Douglass’s home to bring him in, on Hopkins’s authority. Knowing now that Holmes was safe, Mrs Hudson took the opportunity to retire, pleading a very understandable exhaustion. I insisted that she should sleep late, assuring her that Holmes and I would make our own arrangements for breakfast.
Replacing the receiver, Hopkins said, “I’m ashamed that I let that swine take me in. I should have better judgement by now.”
Holmes said, “We should perhaps not be too harsh on the Sergeant, Inspector. We know that Probert was coerced into cooperation through feigned threats to his young relative, and Professor Rames spoke of similar inducements. Sergeant Douglass is a family man, is he not?”
“He is,” said Hopkins. He did not trouble himself to ask how Holmes had deduced this point, and I, too, felt that we had greater concerns for now. “But if someone was threatening his children, he could have come to me.”
“Doubtless he was warned that such a course of action would result in immediate harm to them,” Holmes replied. “We are all familiar with how these tactics work. We may be sure that this conspiracy goes far beyond Sergeant Douglass, however.”
Hopkins said, “Yes, I’ve been thinking about that too. As we’ve established, the manuscript takes great pains to ensure that I won’t suspect its untruth. Their plan would have had you out of the picture, Dr Watson, and made me unable to trust you, Mr Holmes, leaving me no grounds to suppose that this account was fictitious. But what of the other people who appear in its pages? It seems several of them have been gravely misrepresented. Wouldn’t they be able to testify to its falsehood – assuming, that is, that they’re not part of the conspiracy?”
“My thoughts in a nutshell,” said Holmes. “Professor Rames would not, of course, gainsay the absurd identification of my brother as the forger, for as we know he is in the conspirators’ pocket. However –”
“But wait a moment,” I said. “Of course I don’t believe that Mycroft is the counterfeiter, Holmes, but is the idea really so absurd? The manuscript goes to great lengths to make it seem plausible.”
Holmes sighed. “Really, Watson? Even if his indolence alone did not make it incredible, you have seen his hands. In his youth, I should have believed him capable of feigning another man’s writing. I have some skill in that area myself, though I should not be confident of exercising it with sufficient proficiency to deceive the likes of Dr Graymare. However, Mycroft is no longer a young man – nor a slender one. Fingers as plump as his would be incapable of the manual dexterity required for such delicate work. Again, I would hope that any defence counsel worth his salt would make much of such an objection.”
Hopkins frowned. “Unless it’s a question of missing limbs or the like, it’s very difficult to prove to a jury’s satisfaction that a man isn’t capable of something. Even if the defence shows him trying and failing, the prosecution can always argue that he’s feigning.”
“Very true,” Holmes agreed, “and the manuscript is careful to leave open the option that Mycroft is not himself the forger, but the forger’s paymaster. In truth, there is no compelling reason why those persons should be one and the same. A criminal organisation that consults with legal experts, military historians and literary scholars could quite reasonably employ separately a handwriting expert, a papermaker, a printer, a photographer and the like, as needed to fulfil the requirements of specific jobs.
“Be that as it may, we may place the manuscript’s dramatis personae into several categories. There are those like yourself, Hopkins, whose actions correspond with those of their real counterparts and who we may therefore assume were intended to be taken in. There are those who we already know to be involved in the conspiracy, whose silence on the manuscript’s divergences from reality might be relied upon. And there are those whose statements on the matter would have been either unavailable or untrustworthy – that is to say Watson, who was to have been removed from contention, and Mycroft and I, who would both have been implicated.
“And finally, there are three men whom we have not yet had cause to suspect, yet whose actions in this text differ markedly from those of their originals. Those are Dr Graymare, whose meeting with ourselves did not end as described, and who did not later meet clandestinely with Watson to call me a homicidal lunatic; Jerome Windward, who neither drank with Watson at the Criterion nor rescued him from attack; and Lord Loomborough, who far from being generous and accommodating attempted to warn us away from the case.”
“Lord Loomborough.” Hopkins looked shocked, yet also, I thought, rather delighted. “My word.”
Holmes said, “It is not, perhaps, greatly less plausible that a government minister might be part of such a criminal organisation than a senior civil servant such as Christopher Bastion or Mycroft.”
I said, “Holmes, we only met Windward for a minute or two, at Askew’s house. In fact, you barely met him at all. Are you sure he’s part of all this?”
Holmes said, “Since he could, if he wished, readily testify to the limits of our acquaintance, we must assume so. His chief role in the manuscript is as an early confidant for your counterpart’s misgivings about my unpredictable and erratic behaviour. If he were to swear before a court that you had expressed no such fears, the case against me should be much weakened.”
Hopkins said, “And it’s perfectly clear how he would have been useful to the conspiracy, isn’t it? He’s an aspiring author. It must be Jerome Windward who has been composing these forged documents, and Carson Graymare, the renowned handwriting expert, who’s been transcribing them. He may have told you that no-one could do so well enough to fool him, Dr Watson, but it wouldn’t have been himself he was fooling. He certainly took in that other graphologist.”
“Indeed,” said Holmes. “I did him a grave injustice by describing him as a charlatan. The theories he propounds may be nonsense, but his technical expertise in handwriting is unmatched by anybody else whom I have met.”
“Wait a moment,” I said, suddenly excited. “I still have the story young Windward gave me somewhere. Might that shed any light on the matter?”
But Holmes had stood suddenly, his eyes widening in alarm. “I fear that it will have to wait, Watson. While we have been sitting here reading, a man’s life has been in danger.”
“Who do you mean?” I asked.
“Professor Rames,” said Holmes. “His terror when we confronted him yesterday was obvious. The manuscript invents words for him, but it captures his state of mind very well. We may be sure that his role in the conspiracy has been consultative, providing the Shakespearean expertise the conspirators required, but having no involvement in the running of their organisation. Of those we suspect of complicity, Rames seems to be the least deeply involved, and thus the most likely to be persuaded to denounce this manuscript as a fiction. However, since the conspirators must know from their man Onions that their attempt on your life has been unsuccessful, and that we possess this manuscript, it is very likely that they have reached the same conclusion.”
“I say!” said Hopkins, getting to his feet at once. “You’re right, sir, of course.”
“I confess that the point should have occurred to me before,” said Holmes. He added ruefully, “I have had rather a trying night.”
“We’d better get there as soon as possible,” Hopkins said. “Constable Vincent has a carriage waiting. With your permission, I’ll have the Yard send some men to join us,” he added, reaching for the telephone once more.
While he dialled I said, “Loomborough must be the ringleader, I suppose. That fits with his reputation as a ruthless politician.”
“We may very soon be in a position to prove his culpability,” said Holmes. “That heavy tread upon the stair can be nobody other than brother Mycroft.”
OPENING OF THE ASSASSINS’ DAGGER BY JEROME E. WINDWARD (UNPUBLISHED)
Captain Gilmore Montrose’s display of memorabilia from his service in the Indian Subcontinent was much admired throughout ______shire, for both its intrinsic value and its historical and anthropological curiosity. It had been shown off to many a visiting professor, curator, and collector of Eastern curios, and it regularly occasioned excited comment from the hopeful young ladies who sojourned with their mothers or chaperones at his country house, Montrose Court—for while Captain Montrose was no longer young, he had never married—as well as many whose interest lay perhaps more in these latter beholders than in the antiquities themselves.
Pride of place, and the most envious glances of all, were given to an antique Persian dagger, whose blade glinted like diamond and whose hilt, set closely about with emeralds, sapphires and opals, scintillated like a tropical ocean. Legend had it that it had once been wielded by a cult of fearsome brigands, the legendary hashishim or assassins, though Captain Montrose would assure his more sensitive guests, with a gallant laugh, that despite this historical connexion it had not been used to deal a killing blow for a great many years.
But that was to change, one warm Spring Saturday when the larks were at wing and the honeysuckle blossomed in the hedgerows. Montrose Court was host to a weekend party, with its usual complement of around a dozen guests, and on this morning the Reverend Aleric Crichton—whose long habit it was to rise early for his Morning Prayers—was the first to go down to breakfast.
Mr Crichton’s route from his bedchamber to the breakfast-room took him past the turret-room which housed Captain Montrose’s collection, and which was habitually kept locked, but this morning stood wide open. This occasioned Mr Crichton little concern, as he assumed that Captain Montrose, too, had awoken early, and was paying his respects to his own Household Gods.
Knocking on the door, he stepped inside, calling a hearty greeting to his host, and then stopped dead—as unhappy a turn of phrase as of events—as the horror of the scene before him imposed itself upon his eyes.
For Captain Montrose lay face-down and unmoving upon the Persian carpet, next to an open glass case. Between his shoulder-blades, its silver gleaming with a crimson that was not that of rubies, projected the hilt of the Assassins’ Dagger.