Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter

Sorry I missed you, James. I will try to phone you later. I’m afraid I may not be able to stay here to keep an eye on Bart. I have seen several people going out to Bart’s lab in the barn, and I think one of them was Filbert Abernetty. So I’m not comfortable here, really. Bart has been acting strangely. I think I’d rather stay at my friend’s flat in Oxford for the next few days until Lotte and Hugh get back from Paris. So I plan to leave tomorrow early. I hope nothing prevents me. I packed my bag, intending to leave this evening, but my car wouldn’t start. I can’t understand this . . . I mean, it’s a new car! So, it’s a mystery . . . got to go!

I went into the sitting room and tried to call her, to see if she was already on the road to Oxford. No answer. I made coffee, then tried her number again. Still no answer. Not long afterwards Holmes appeared, looking cadaverous and calm in his bathrobe and slippers. I handed him the phone and he listened to her last message.

‘What do you think?’ I asked.

‘I think something very odd is occurring at Widcombe Manor,’ he replied. ‘I am speaking from mere intuition, Wilson, but I can tell you that whatever is happening there, I don’t like. Be a good fellow and call her again.’

I dialled her number. Still no answer.

We prepared a big breakfast. I cooked the baked beans on toast, the fried tomato, and the fried eggs; Holmes cooked the kipper. We ate this feast and complimented our own cookery, and when we had finished I dialled Marianne’s number again. ‘She was probably in the shower,’ I said.

But again she didn’t answer.

‘What do you think, Holmes?’

‘I think there is not a moment to lose.’

‘To Widcombe Manor?’

‘Immediately.’

‘Could she be in danger?’

‘Very great danger, I fear,’ said he.

We finished our meal.

‘I filled up with petrol yesterday,’ I said. ‘We’re ready to go.’

‘You had best pack a bag,’ he said. ‘Include some outdoor clothes, and boots. I’m not sure where this journey may take us.’

An hour later we were on our way out of London on the M40.

‘Filbert Abernetty,’ mused Holmes. ‘How strange to hear that name again. She saw him going into Bart’s barn?’

‘Evidently,’ I said. ‘Why would Bart be trying to hook her up with Filbert Abernetty, if he is so jealous? And Abernetty certainly does not sound like a man to her taste. I wonder whether he is any relation to the Abernettys from Bath that you knew in 1910.’

‘Not 1910, Wilson. It was 1889, or ’90 – ’90, I think. Yes, I’m quite sure it was 1890 . . . strange how one forgets.’ He sounded puzzled. ‘But I strongly suspect that the Abernetty family I once knew is somehow connected with the Filbert Abernetty that your good friend Marianne Hideaway so loathes and fears. If I am right, she may have very good reason to fear him.’

‘You certainly know how to frighten a man, Holmes.’

‘Sorry. But I thought you should know.’

‘I suppose I should,’ I said. ‘Then tell me the awful truth.’

‘My encounter with the family was brief, but memorable,’ he replied, turning himself in his seat to half face me as he told his tale. ‘In July of 1890 one of our minor aristocracy, a baron from the West Country, had business in London with a member of parliament. The Baron asked me never to reveal his name, so I won’t, although revealing it now, after he and several succeeding generations of his family are dead, could hardly matter. This man was under the strong impression that anarchists were threatening his life. Scotland Yard did not take the threat entirely seriously, and perhaps that was why Lestrade asked me to look into the matter. At the time I was impecunious, impetuous, and impatient for work, and so I agreed to take the case – which, in fact, offered some features not altogether without interest. The Baron and his wife said that they had, on the first Monday of every month for the preceding three months, received a package containing body parts. The April package contained two severed feet. The May package contained part of an arm and an ear. And the June package contained a pile of human flesh and bone. Each of these packages was addressed to the Baron, and each contained a card with this message: You too will soon be bits and pieces. The Baron, however, had discarded these packages and their grisly contents without notifying authorities, and only at the time of his London journey did he bring up the horrible tale of how he had received body parts by post – which explains, perhaps, why Scotland Yard had doubts as to the man’s veracity. By the time I was called in on the case, no real evidence existed any longer – if it ever had – so I was forced to await fresh facts, and to hope those facts did not come in the form of a dead baron.

‘My client arrived at Paddington Station in early evening and came by hansom directly to my digs in Baker Street. Dr Watson, who was present, afterwards agreed with my impression that the Baron showed signs of mental breakdown. At all events, he was staying at the newly built Savoy Hotel in the Strand and was having lunch there with his MP the next day. He wanted me to assure his safety by examining the dining room of the hotel before he arrived to eat. He disclosed that he had, some months earlier, given a speech on human rights in Belfast, and that this had caused certain political extremists – anarchists, he called them – to issue his death warrant. His story did not seem probable, but, as you may imagine, I resolved to make sure that the man stayed safe. The next day I booked a table at the Savoy that was very close to the table reserved for the Baron and his guest. I arrived a quarter hour before they were due to arrive, ordered my meal, and soon the waiter brought me a plate of bread and a dish of butter. The butter was nicely moulded in the shape of a seashell, and was garnished with two sprigs of parsley.

‘It was a terribly hot July day, and the dining room of the Savoy was full. And I must remind you, Wilson, that this was an era long before air conditioning – and also long before standards of dress had vanished so completely as they have today. The men were sweating in their white shirts and dark suits, and the women, in their corsets and flowing dresses, were likewise sweating, and occasionally dabbing their brows with handkerchiefs. Everyone was uncomfortable and suffering, but behaving precisely as if they were perfectly comfortable and having a fine time. It was an age, Wilson, when even simple actions like eating lunch on a hot day demanded a certain level of elegance, forbearance, style, and concern for one’s fellow diners – by which I mean, one didn’t drag down the general cheer by acting as if one were anything but cheerful. And I must say that people today might learn . . . but I digress. I don’t wish to sound like a curmudgeonly old man.’

‘Different ages, different customs, Holmes,’ said I.

‘As I awaited the arrival of the Baron, I began to worry about the small table-for-two that separated my table from his. On that table the bread had been set down, and the dish of butter likewise, and a crumpled napkin had been laid on one of the two chairs. But there was no sign of the diner. It struck me as odd that the napkin had been laid – against all etiquette and good sense – on the chair rather than on the table. I leant over and plucked the napkin from the chair and, as I had suspected, I found that it hid something. What it hid was a package about the size of a very large book. The package was wrapped in paper and tied with string, and it was addressed to Ignis Fatuus, Life’s End Cottage, Bexleyheath, Kent – as if about to be posted. I waved to the waiter and said, “Was the gentleman at this table in room 205?”

‘“No, 101, sir.”

‘“I believe he may have forgotten his package.”

‘The waiter said, “No, sir. He ordered his meal but was called away. He said he will return shortly.”

‘“But how long has he been gone?” I asked.

‘“Oh, not long, sir, not long – he will return shortly, I’m sure,” was his reply. And he hastened away to serve another table.

‘The waiter was busy, of course, and when one is busy it is easy to lose track of time. What worried me was that the missing diner had obviously been gone for a good half hour. This was clear from how far the parsley had sunk into his dish of butter – I had only to compare his parsley with the parsley in my dish of butter, and the parsley on the dish of butter where the two ladies nearby had already finished their meal, to make that rough calculation.

‘When a man comes down to lunch, hides a package under a napkin on a chair, tucks the chair under the table, leaves with a promise to come back shortly, and after half an hour still has not returned, it does not take great powers of deduction to conclude that something might be amiss – particularly when the package is addressed to swamp gas, and is set just next to the table of a man who has reason to fear he has been marked for death by anarchists. I saw my client just coming into the dining room with his MP. He looked nervously about, then spotted me and nodded and smiled slightly, and seemed reassured. Just as he sat down to his table, and was engaged in the usual gentlemanly banter with his guest, I quickly grabbed the package from the chair and strode out of the room. I went to the desk and asked if I might have the name of the gentleman in room 101, for I had a package to return to him. The clerk looked surprised and said, “He has just checked out, sir – but look, there he is just going out the front door. Perhaps you can catch him.”

‘He was a tall man, well dressed, and as he reached the top of the steps he put on his top hat. I followed him out of the Savoy and down the steps to the Embankment, and as I did so I lifted the package to my face to smell it, for I wondered if it might contain something that smell might detect – and that is when I heard it ticking. The gentleman in the top hat turned right. I kept my eye on him, ran down to the river and tossed the package into the Thames. I paused only briefly to watch it float away, half submerged, and then I hurried after the top hat. I feared I had lost him but soon I caught sight of him walking up Carting Lane towards the Strand. I followed him into Haxell’s Royal Exeter Hotel. There I heard him ask at the desk for the room number of Mr Abernetty. I heard the clerk’s reply, waited until the gentleman had ascended the stairs, and soon I was standing quietly outside the room of Mr Filbert Abernetty, listening. I heard two men in the room talking in not particularly low voices, agreeing with each other that “it shouldn’t be long now”. By and by a dull boom penetrated the hotel; I realized that the bomb had gone off despite being half under water. “There it goes,” said the voice of the top hat.

‘Another voice within the room, a voice thin as a child’s, replied, “Then if you will pay the other half, my dear Mr Devereaux, I will be on my way home.”

‘“Here it is. Very pleased to do business with you. I hope to see you again in September.”

‘A moment later Devereaux left the room, and I ambled down the hallway in front of him, as if looking for my room. As he passed me I glimpsed his face and recognized him. He was someone who had been pointed out to me by my brother at his London club. That obviated the need to follow him, as I knew I could find him at my own convenience. I was free to follow the man who was evidently the maker of the bomb. I loitered at the end of the dark hallway. Before long Filbert Abernetty emerged from his room and hurried away down the staircase and out into the Strand. He was a small man with very white skin and very dark hair. His eyes were large and protuberant. His mouth was small, his hands small, his voice high-pitched. He was, all in all, a strange creature. But I must say in his favour that he was exquisitely polite to all whom he encountered, the man at the news stand, the cab driver, the man at the ticket counter in Paddington Station. Also, he dressed well, and in the railway carriage he read Herodotus in the original Greek. I followed him to Bath, followed him through the streets to his clock shop, and I took a room at a nearby hotel.

‘The next day I visited his clock shop. I looked at a few watches, then I said that Mr Devereaux had suggested I might find what I wanted here. We had the usual cat-and-mouse conversation, sounding each other out. But the name of Devereaux carried weight, and in the end Abernetty showed me several mechanisms that could set off bombs of various power. “It is easy enough to create big destruction with a huge bomb,” he said. “I do not wish to sound immodest, but it was our family who supplied Guy Fawkes and Thomas Wintour with the fuse to set off the thirty-six barrels of gunpowder they had planted beneath Parliament in 1605. But since those crude days we Abernettys have specialized mostly in small bombs with big bangs – bombs that are portable, practical and devastating.”

‘When I got back to London I did research on his family and found he had not been exaggerating. His ancestor, Malcolm Abernetty, had been a member of the Clockmakers’ Company of London in the mid 1600s. In that early day he made clocks and watches, but also mechanisms to set off bombs. In the early 1800s the family moved to Bath, where they are to this day. In the nineteenth century they supplied bombs and bomb timers for anarchists. In the early twentieth century they made bombs for the Irish Republican Army. In recent years their major business has been selling sophisticated explosive devices to guerrilla groups in South America, Africa and the Middle East.’

I was beginning to see where Holmes’s logic was leading. ‘I am astonished that in Britain we have a family of bomb makers with a tradition going back four hundred years,’ I said. ‘So you suspect that the man who is Bart’s friend is a bomb maker from a long line of bomb makers?’

‘That is my fear, Wilson.’

When we turned on to the A44 I called Marianne’s mobile. No answer. When we turned on to country roads near Chipping Campden, I called again. Still no answer.

‘It’s probably just that her battery needs recharging,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Holmes, ‘no doubt that is the explanation.’