It was by now perhaps five o’clock in the morning, and not at all a time when anyone who knew Mycroft Holmes would have expected to see him abroad. He was a creature of habit, addicted to his routines, and it took a grave crisis to rouse him from them. I supposed that a criminal conspiracy between police officers and a government minister, with the involvement of at least one foreign espionage agent, would probably suffice.
While Sherlock Holmes expended precious time, albeit in the most economical way possible, in outlining to his brother his conclusions so far, I looked for the story given me by young Jerome Windward, which I had not yet opened, let alone read. Our sitting-room had not been tidy even before it had been disarranged by the events of the night, and I had to search around for several minutes before alighting on the document wallet that he had passed me, days before, in Sir Hector Askew’s hallway.
Mycroft, meanwhile, had brought a document-case of his own. “These took me some little effort to obtain, especially in the middle of the night, but the archivists and librarians whose help my associates sought were amenable, in view of the urgency of the situation,” he said.
“We shall read them as we go,” said Sherlock. “Windward’s too, Watson – and bring the false manuscript also. We must waste no further time.”
“I shall stay here and make myself at home,” Mycroft declared, leaning back in his chair. “Would you place the telephone within my reach, please? Thank you, Inspector. I shall summon some men to guard my safety, and also to make me some more tea, so please don’t worry on my account. But do call me here, if I may be of assistance in some less kinetic capacity.”
A scant few minutes later, the Inspector, Holmes and I – Holmes still in his coal-stained, blood-speckled clothes – were in Hopkins’s police-carriage, driven by the redoubtable Vincent and hurtling towards Kensington. My Enfield revolver, which I had thought at the last moment to retrieve from the strewn mess of my room, sat snugly in my inner pocket.
I cut the string that tied shut Windward’s folder, and opened it up. Inside, as I had expected, was a thick sheaf of papers written out in longhand. Windward’s own handwriting, for I assumed that this was indeed such, bore little resemblance to mine, nor to any of the others that we had seen imitated in the counterfeit samples.
I had been remembering with perhaps too much excitement some other cases of Holmes’s in recent years, in which novels had provided clues to the resolution of mysteries. In one, a confidence trickster had drawn on a work of fantastical fiction for his more outlandish ideas, while in the course of another the draft of an unpublished novel had given a fictionalised account of a conspiracy involving its author. This time, though, if I had expected a secret confession or some other evidence of Windward’s collusion in criminality, I was disappointed.
The title page announced The Assassin’s Dagger, by Jerome E. Windward, and what followed appeared to be an overly sensational, though hardly original, novel of murder and sleuthing of the kind the reading public has seen in abundance in recent years.
Between the clatter of the horses’ hooves, the jolting of the carriage, and the rattle of the wheels across the paving-stones and cobbles, I read the opening pages. “Well,” I said, “I count an occasioned, a connexion, some superfluous capitals, a parenthetical remark with dashes, and something that looks moderately like a zeugma. Is this enough to mark Windward as our elusive author, Holmes?”
“Unless we are to entertain the possibility that this, too, was for some unfathomable reason forged,” Sherlock Holmes agreed. “But I hardly think that probable.” From Mycroft’s document-case, he drew a number of papers. “Your opinions, gentlemen?” he asked as he passed them around.
Each was handwritten, in three very different scripts. As I skimmed them, the same familiar formulations presented themselves, now almost unbidden, to my attention:
“To expenses occasioned during April of 1893 …”
“… reciprocating the Tender Regard that you have shown me during our connexion…”
“… he has, ‘in one fell swoop’, abandoned his principles, his country, his party, and any hope of convincing his members not to do the same to their foundering ship.”
“More of our fellow’s handiwork, I suppose,” I said. “But what are these, exactly?”
Holmes replied, “They are the evidence leading to the three separate scandals which propelled Lord Loomborough into his current position. Each of these communications brought down a colleague of his, whose shoes he deigned to fill shortly thereafter. Here are some letters from a woman of unsavoury reputation; here, receipts issued for some illicit income; and here, the submitted manuscript of an article castigating their party leader for his inadequacies.”
“And all, I suppose, written by Jerome Windward, and transcribed by Carson Graymare,” Hopkins said. “How old would you say Windward was, Dr Watson?”
I considered. “Not older than his mid-twenties, surely. How old are these documents?”
“The earliest dates back seven years,” said Holmes. “Either Mr Windward is maturer than he appears, or he was a precocious youth.”
“Loomborough himself is an author, though,” I remembered. “A memoirist, like myself. Why would he need Windward’s services?”
“You assume that he wrote his memoirs himself,” Holmes noted drily, over the noise of the carriage. “It is not unknown for rich men to employ amanuenses to scribe their autobiographies for them. The arrangement is less overt than your chronicling of my own adventures, Watson, but it is perhaps little different in other respects. It may even be how the two men met.”
He drew from the document-case a clothbound book. “We might find out, if we read this latest volume of Loomborough’s reminiscences. Mycroft thinks of everything. However, I hardly think it necessary. We have all the information that is germane, and what is more we may expect to arrive at Rames’s family house at any moment.”
With a final lurch, the carriage drew up outside the townhouse that Holmes and I had visited some twelve hours earlier, on the occasion of our recent interview with Professor Rames. We alighted hurriedly, and Holmes (with scant regard for the fact that it was Hopkins, not he, who was the official presence here) strode up the steps and rapped thunderously at the door with his cane. As I followed, I noted with concern that a window on the ground floor had been broken.
“I see it, Watson,” Holmes told me, before I could bring it to his attention. “I fear that we may be too late.”
It took a minute for the family butler to answer the door. His eyes narrowed when he saw Holmes. “Why, it’s you!” he said angrily. “I hoped we’d seen the last of you yesterday. Be off with you!”
“We are with the police,” said Hopkins, stepping forward smoothly and ignoring the man’s rudeness. “Inspector Stanley Hopkins of Scotland Yard. May we see Professor Jonathan Rames, please?”
“Ah, Inspector, I’m so sorry,” the butler said, reverting at once to a deferential professional character. “I’m afraid the Professor won’t be awake yet. We servants have only just risen.”
“It’s imperative that we see him on a matter of the utmost urgency,” said Hopkins, just as Holmes asked, “What, pray, has happened to that window?” Both were interrupted, however, by a bloodcurdling shriek from inside the house. Holmes pushed past the butler at once and ran into the hallway. Hopkins and I were close behind him, I pulling out my revolver, the butler protesting feebly behind us.
We quickly traced the scream, which continued unabated, to the drawing-room, which lay on the ground floor at the front of the house. Its source was a housemaid, clinging convulsively to a feather duster, standing stock-still and staring down at the rotund body of Professor Rames, the cause of her loudly vocal horror. The eminent Shakespearean scholar lay on the carpet at the centre of a scarlet stain, his bald head caved in by a killing blow. A blood-smeared lamp lay on the floor beside him, and a vase lay smashed nearby, its flowers scattered, its water mingling with the late scholar’s blood. Other signs of disarray littered the room.
“There, now, miss,” Hopkins told the girl at once, and took her by the shoulders. “It’s quite all right, I’m a policeman. You can leave everything to us. See that she’s looked after,” he added to the butler, as the poor woman’s frantic screams subsided to sobs, “but stay here yourself, if you please. We’ll need to ask you some questions.”
I knelt to examine the late scholar, but it was perfectly apparent that there was nothing to be done for him. “We’re too late,” I said. “He’s been dead an hour at least.” He wore a nightshirt and dressing-gown, and clutched in his hand an old-fashioned nightcap.
Hopkins had crossed to the shattered window, glass crunching beneath his feet. “Has anything been taken from this room?” he asked the butler. After a hasty survey of the debris, the man confirmed that some candlesticks and a rose-bowl, both silver, appeared to be missing.
“Well, it looks as if the Professor came down and surprised a burglar,” Hopkins said.
“Come now, Hopkins, you surely –” Holmes began impatiently, but the Inspector interrupted him, mildly enough.
“I said that that’s what it looks like, sir. I’m well aware of how surprising it would be if the appearance matched the facts. Where is the Professor’s room?” the Inspector asked the butler.
“We have him in the main guest bedroom, sir,” the man replied shakily. “It’s on the second floor, on the street side.”
“Easy enough to throw some gravel at his window and wake him, then,” Stanley Hopkins continued. “He’d see the fellow waiting there, and come down to let him in. It must have been someone who knew where he was sleeping, and whom he recognised. Presumably Onions, since this happened after Chops was detained at Baker Street.
“He brought Onions in here to speak to him, and a fight ensued, during which the thug stoved in the Professor’s head with the lamp. Then he grabbed the most expensive and portable items he could see and left, pausing only to smash the window from outside before making his escape. The whole thing was intended to look like a burglary, and as I say, so it does.”
At first Holmes had appeared irritated at having the role of explicator of the crime scene usurped from him, but as Hopkins continued with his recital he had begun nodding, and now smiled in almost paternal pride. “Just so, Hopkins, just so,” he said. “The guest bedroom is above this room. Had this scene played out in the way we are invited to imagine, the Professor must have been aware of the intruder before he came down. Either the window breaking would have awoken him, or, if he had been already awake, he would have heard the noise. Yet a man who heard a burglar in the night would surely rouse others before going to investigate, or at least bring with him some more formidable weapon than a nightcap. No, that explanation will not do at all, whereas the one you have outlined fits the facts quite comfortably.”
“Forgive me if I can’t take much satisfaction from that, Mr Holmes,” Hopkins said. “This is another member of the public who we’ve failed to protect. My word,” he said, suddenly, “you don’t suppose that Windward and Graymare are in equal danger? After all, they too could testify against Loomborough.”
“I suspect that for now their value to the conspiracy is too great to dispense with them,” Holmes replied. “I doubt that there is another forger of Graymare’s calibre in the country, for instance. To kill him would end the whole operation at once. I hope that they are not yet that desperate.”
“Even so,” said Hopkins. “I’d better have them brought in, to be on the safe side.”
He put a telephone call through to Mycroft, who was best placed to co-ordinate our efforts. Quickly Hopkins instructed that men should be sent to Dr Graymare’s home and others to Sir Hector Askew’s house, where we assumed his cousin would still be staying. Police constables would need to come and take statements from Rames’s servants. They should also arrange for the Professor’s body to be taken to the police morgue, like those of Zimmerman, Bastion and Probert before it.
Constable Vincent and the carriage would accompany us to Lord Loomborough’s, where we would be going without delay.