TWENTY-ONE

Bats and Microbombs

Lars Lindblad sat with his hands motionless on the keyboard, head half bowed, as the sound died. Then he straightened up, turned, and smiled as if he had been expecting us. ‘Good morning, Mr Holmes – Mr Wilson. So good of you to come.’

He rose from the piano and came towards us at a brisk but genial gait, smiling with a polite look of delight. He wore loafers, taupe trousers and an off-white sweater. ‘I am Lars Lindblad.’

‘And I . . . you know me?’ Holmes was momentarily at a loss.

‘Of course, Mr Holmes – what civilized man doesn’t know you?’ He reached out and shook Holmes’s hand, and then shook mine.

‘Most have trouble believing,’ said Holmes.

‘Oh, I believe implicitly,’ said Lindblad. He spoke in a perfectly cultured English accent with only the slightest hint of Swedish – a very mid-channel European accent. He turned up his palms in a gesture of openness. ‘But you see, Mr Holmes, I was a biology student at university, after giving up music. I had in mind to be a doctor. I have kept up with the biological sciences, for they are of great interest to me. Anyone who understands the direction of modern biological techniques must realize that the sort of resuscitation you experienced is not only possible, but inevitable. If it hadn’t been you, Mr Holmes, it would have been another, and will be another. The world is very fortunate that it was a man of your overwhelming talent who was brought back to us, so that you may live out, for at least a while longer, the natural course of your life. It may interest you to know that I have read Dr Coleman’s description of how he revived you.’

‘How is that possible?’ I asked abruptly, still upset at not seeing Marianne at the keyboard. ‘It has not been published yet.’

‘I have an acquaintance who was asked to peer review Dr Coleman’s paper. He was good enough to show it to me.’

‘I regret that it must be published,’ said Holmes. ‘The anonymity of my present life suits me.’

‘I wouldn’t worry much about that, Mr Holmes,’ said Lindblad. ‘Most of the world won’t believe it anyway – whatever is published, in however authoritative a journal. I have explained the matter, for example, in great detail to my partner in this little venture, Bart Gray, and he will not believe it. I explained to him why he had better believe it, for not believing it could well cost him his freedom. I told him that you were the one detective in the history of English crime who would surely undo him unless he took great care. But Bart only laughed and said that, while he knows well the possibility of regrowing organs, he is perfectly certain that you are an imposter becausehis brother said you are! – and so he went his mad way.’

‘Do you think him truly mad, Herr Lindblad?’ asked Holmes.

Lindblad laughed. His tanned face had a glow as he tilted his head downward. His curly short blond hair, silvered with grey, made him look both young and old. Suddenly he looked up at Holmes with penetrating blue eyes: ‘He is the maddest man I’ve ever met, Mr Holmes. Brilliant, of course. But quite mad. He is certifiable.’

Lindblad strolled to the Yamaha grand, briskly sat, and tossed off the opening passage of the Chopin B minor sonata, in a flourish . . . and then he suddenly stopped and turned to Holmes. ‘Would you call a man mad, Mr Holmes, who rigs a bomb in a piano bench so that whoever plays Debussy’s Clair de Lune will be blown to kingdom come – all because he despises a particular half-sister who has played that lovely piece since childhood?’

‘Mad sounds close enough,’ said Holmes.

‘Ah, yes. So I am very careful what I play on this piano. Since my Paris Conservatory days, French music has often been the only balm to satisfy certain of my moods, yet on this piano I refuse to play French music of any sort for fear I might happen upon a passage so similar to one in Clair de Lune that it blows me into eternity.’

‘I commiserate, Herr Lindblad,’ said Holmes. ‘Yet I cannot feel you are too harshly deprived. For my own part, I would gladly exchange Debussy for Beethoven, or Ravel for Mozart, on most days of the week.’

Lindblad laughed. ‘And quite right you are.’

‘I am willing to postulate that Bart Gray is mad,’ said Holmes, ‘but as to his being a genius, that is yet to be proved.’

‘Postulate madness, Holmes?’ said Lindblad. ‘You are too timid a theorizer! Would it be madness, do you think, if a brother stuffed his half-sister full of vitamin pills containing microbombs, then forced her to eat a quadruple dose of Lomotil tablets to ensure that she could not void her problems by defecating them; and would it be madness if he then locked her in a room in this castle and told her that she would remain there until he decided to push the button on his radio transmitter in order to prove whether or not microbombs placed in capsules were sufficient to blow a person to pieces? Would you call that a symptom of psychosis?’

‘My God!’ I cried.

‘Oh, yes, Mr Wilson,’ said Lindblad, turning to me so quickly that I got a waft of his cologne. ‘That is what he has done. The girl seemed to me so very lovely, so better fit for other uses . . .’ Lindblad shrugged again. ‘But madmen know best.’

‘Since you so disapprove,’ said I, ‘can you not do something about it?’

‘I wish I could,’ said Lindblad. ‘But in the first place, Bart mistrusts me and did not tell me in which of the many rooms in this colossal heap the girl is held prisoner. In the second place, that is not my department.’

He lifted his hands to the keyboard and began to draw forth into cool castle air the subtle strains of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata. He turned his head towards Holmes and said, ‘I have always admired you, Holmes, ever since as a child I read of your exploits. I admired your style and tenacity, and often I pretended that I was Professor Moriarty, and that you were after me. What a thrilling and rewarding life that would have been! I only regret that now, after my dream has been almost answered, it must end so quickly. I should like to have been pursued by you across countries and continents, to the far ends of the earth. Instead, it ends all too soon.’

‘I apologize for catching you so quickly,’ said Holmes.

‘Alas, you have not caught me; I have caught you,’ said Lindblad softly. ‘I fear we can never let you leave this castle, Mr Holmes – even to assure my future sport and amusement.’ He shrugged. ‘That you have let yourself be caught so easily is a bit disappointing, and tarnishes my childhood image of you. Another ideal of my youth has been seriously damaged, Mr Holmes! But here he comes, your Fate.’ He nodded towards the doorway behind us, and the sonorous sullen strains of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata swelled and subsided like an ebbing sea.

A very large man with a bony head and slumping shoulders walked towards us. He carried a shotgun in one hand and a bull-whip in the other. ‘All right, boys, give your mobiles to the Swede and let’s move it,’ said he, waggling the end of the shotgun towards the door.

‘Shotgun Abernetty, I presume?’ said Holmes, laying his mobile phone on the piano.

‘Presume what you damn please,’ said the man. ‘But if you don’t move fast I’ll flick a hunk of ham out of your hide – and it don’t look like you have much to spare.’ He cracked the whip, a loud POP. ‘The boss wants to see you.’

We left the room and walked down a long hallway, and the strains of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata followed us, growing softer and softer. Our uncouth host, who was about six and a half feet tall and correspondingly meaty, guided us through a maze of stairs and doorways. We passed through a kitchen where a dog was lying on a rug in the corner, sleeping. Our guide, from a distance of twelve feet, cracked the sleeping dog with the end of the whip, and blood appeared on its hip. The dog leapt up and began to whimper and cower; it had but one eye. ‘I flicked his other eye out,’ said the man. ‘I hate cowardly dogs.’ He led us at last into a room that appeared to be a laboratory, or workshop, or menagerie, hard to tell which. Along one wall were large cages of dragonflies, houseflies and bats. On a long bench computer screens glowed. At the operating table in the middle of the room two olive-skinned men dressed in white surgery gowns were bending over a bat, cutting away at its head with a scalpel. In another corner of the large room a man bent over a desk with a watchmaker’s magnifying glass plugged into one eye; in his right hand he held a small implement. As he glanced up at us I saw that he was pale-skinned, bulbous-eyed, skinny-headed, and I had no doubt that this was Filbert Abernetty, most recent of a long line of English bomb makers.

‘Shotgun,’ said this individual, in a small but piercing voice, ‘please be so good as to take a pocketful of these transponders –’ he pointed at a pile of disks on his desk – ‘and place them at fifty-foot intervals all the way to the very top of Ben Braigh. We shall then turn loaded bats loose and see if they go for them. Any bats that the transponders don’t detonate, we will detonate remotely, in the usual manner.’

‘Dammit,’ grunted Shotgun Abernetty, ‘Ben Braigh is a long hike.’ He walked to the desk and took a big handful of the disks, which were the size of very large watch batteries. He funnelled them into the right pocket of his jeans.

‘And one more bit of work . . .’ said Filbert.

‘Work is my middle name, cousin,’ said Shotgun.

‘. . . when you have placed the transponders, take a bag of loaded bats to the top of the square tower and release them. If we start hearing explosions on Ben Braigh we will know we have perfected the system.’

‘What am I supposed to do with these two yokels?’ asked Shotgun, walking back towards us. He jabbed me with the end of the shotgun.

I resisted the impulse to lay him out on the floor with a roundhouse punch. I must have made a move in that direction, for I felt Holmes touch my shoulder.

‘That’s not my department,’ said Filbert, looking back to his work.

‘Where the hell is Bart at?’ hollered Shotgun.

One of the men at the operating table turned towards him. ‘Bart vill be coming quite soon, sir.’ The accent sounded Indian or Pakistani.

That very instant Bart appeared. He walked with a creeping reticence, a smile pasted on his handsome face, a lock of dark hair falling over his brow. His shoulders were slumped slightly forward, as if he didn’t want to be quite so tall as he was, or as if he didn’t mean to obtrude. But one had the feeling that at any instant he might bare his teeth and spring for the throat. He wore a tweed sport coat over a white, crew-neck sweater, and around his neck was the same necklace of flat blue stones that I had seen before.

‘A classic passive-aggressive personality, but so extreme as to be dangerous,’ Holmes murmured.

‘What did you say?’ asked Bart Gray.

‘I was observing your manner,’ replied Holmes.

‘And I am observing your manners, Mr Holmes. They do not strike me as very refined. They strike me as gauche in the extreme. You are trespassing on my property.’

‘We merely wished to ask you some questions,’ said Holmes.

‘Oh! Well! That explains why you have broken into my castle! Excellent! You are a perfect gentleman, after all, Mr Holmes. I understand it all now. Then what are the questions? I am curious.’

‘Where is your sister?’

‘I don’t have a sister.’

‘We thought you might know where Marianne Hideaway is,’ said Holmes.

‘Oh, her! She doesn’t matter, Mr Holmes. Let me have another question – but no, let’s remove to somewhere more comfortable. Come this way, please.’

We walked through another doorway, out of the lab, and along a corridor to a book-lined room that looked out on Ben Braigh to the north. Shotgun Abernetty followed behind. When we entered the room Abernetty said, ‘I am supposed to plant these transponders up the mountain. Can I get on with it?’

‘I don’t want you to do that now,’ said Bart.

‘Filbert told me . . .’

‘I don’t care what Filbert told you. I am the Thane of Cawdor here. This is my castle. You are my retainer. You can climb Ben Braigh with your transponders later. Right now I want you to find Alf and Dunwoody and bring them here.’

‘They’re out in the woods.’

‘Bring them in. I need some muscle here. And tell that beautiful wench of Lars’s to bring us some tea, quick-time.’

Shotgun Abernetty bowed his head very slightly and touched his forelock with two fingers in a half insolent salute. He left the room with thumping footsteps.

Bart waved his hand gently as if to reveal the room to our view. ‘This is my mother’s library,’ he said. ‘Some of my earliest memories are of Mother standing by that window, gazing at Ben Braigh and rehearsing her lines. How beautiful she was!’

‘How beautiful she still is,’ I said.

He looked at me curiously, and with a kind of wonder. ‘Yes. Even at her age she is beautiful. No one can fail to notice.’

‘I understand she is in Paris at the moment, with your stepfather,’ said Holmes.

Bart ignored the comment. ‘We had such wonderful times here, my mother and father and I, and also my brother, of course. And our servants. It was quite a wonderland. Every summer. But several years ago Mother wearied of the place – I can’t think why – and she closed it up. She can be rather abrupt when she wants to be. However, that is past. I intend to hire new servants and invite her back, and I know my brother will come too, for he always loved Castle Mornay – and my hope is that all will be pretty much as it was before at Castle Mornay, once this dreadful business is over.’

‘What “dreadful business?”’ asked Holmes.

‘Sit down, gentlemen. I will explain.’

He waved us into two rich leather chairs near the window. He took the third, crossing his legs and holding on to his top knee with both hands. ‘You see, Mr Holmes and Mr Wilson, I feel one ought to work for joy, not for money. So when one is forced to work for money first, and joy only secondarily, I always think it is dreadful. And that is what I have been forced to do. I find quite suddenly that I require substantial sums of money, and as a consequence I am selling some technological trivialities to a terrorist organization based in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, as you know, have lots of money. And I need lots of money.’

‘For money you would betray your countrymen?’ asked Holmes.

‘I really have no choice.’

Holmes frowned. ‘Paucis carior est fides quam pecuniam,’ said he.

‘You don’t impress me,’ said Bart. ‘I never studied Latin.’

‘Perhaps you should have,’ said Holmes. ‘Sallust is worth reading.’

‘But isn’t it illegal, what you are doing?’ I asked.

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Bart. ‘Perfectly illegal. That is why it is so profitable.’

I could see where the conversation was leading. Everyone who has ever watched a spy movie could see where it was leading. He would reveal all to us, for he imagined he had us in his power – and truth to tell, I could not help but wonder if perhaps he had. I knew Holmes had made a call to Lestrade to tell him where we were, and that was encouraging. And I hoped Holmes had brought along the Webley service revolver that Scotland Yard (by a special ruling) allowed him to carry. At all events, I thought I might as well find out where we stood with this man by questioning him further. I hoped that I was not intruding too much on Holmes’s line of questioning.

‘Then aren’t you afraid of getting caught?’ I said. ‘I mean, you are talking to us like this, as if selling minibombs to Al Qaeda were the most natural thing in the world.’

‘Microbombs, please. The word is microbombs. But my groom collected your mobile phones, did he not? So the conversation is not being recorded,’ said Bart. ‘So why would I worry? . . . Ah, our refreshments.’ He opened his hand, graciously, towards the person now entering.

A striking woman with dark hair brought in a silver tray laden with tea cups, a tea pot, and a plate of biscuits. I recognized her immediately as Katrinka Pushkin.

‘Just set it down here, if you will,’ said Bart.

‘I don’t mind serving tea,’ said Katrinka. ‘I serve my cause in many ways.’

Bart gazed at us and smiled. ‘You see how subservient these people can be when they want something? Charming people. Know their place. They are buying my complete system of surveillance and destruction, a system quite unlike anything available anywhere else in the world. Before they take delivery I insist that they serve me a little. Helps build character.’

‘Another day of serving you means nothing to me,’ said Katrinka. ‘Tomorrow all will be accomplished.’

‘You see,’ said Bart, beaming and for once looking almost genial. ‘My brilliance bends even so extraordinary a creature as Katrinka Pushkin to my will – if only momentarily. She madly desires my system, a system made up of surveillance and destruction modules – Surveillance And Destruction Individually Sequenced Modules, to be exact. The SADISM system, as I like to call it.’

‘Your whim is to be Macbeth, Mr Gray,’ said Katrinka. ‘Mine is to be Cleopatra. I do business with Scots only as she did with Romans, to serve my country with beauty and brain.’ She shot us each a regal look and left the room. She had a hauteur both charming and threatening.

‘Macbeth?’ said Holmes. ‘You might have picked a safer role – he ends badly.’

‘Oh, death doth come to us all,’ said Bart Gray. ‘I have always thought Macbeth is one of Bacon’s better plays, and the worthy thane one of Bacon’s better villains. All a mortal man can do is be sure one’s own death comes quickly – and before that moment be sure to live on his own terms. I have guaranteed myself both of those privileges.’ He touched the necklace about his neck. ‘Each one of these seeming stones is a microbomb. I need merely say the right word and they will all explode, killing me instantly – together with anyone in the vicinity. That is why I feel quite confident that no one will ever succeed in arresting me.’

‘But you’d better hope,’ I said, ‘that no one guesses the word and shouts it from a distance.’

‘It is a word I made up,’ laughed Bart Gray, ‘and the audio signature is sensitized to my voice only. I am not worried.’

‘Where is the Shakespeare letter?’ asked Holmes. ‘That is my prime question.’

Bart Gray reached into his inner sport coat pocket and drew out a brown manila envelope. ‘Right here.’

‘Is it a genuine letter?’ asked Holmes.

‘I have no idea. It may have been written by a man named William Shakespeare. It may have been written in 1592 at Casa Figlio in Florence, as the letter itself indicates. These are fine scholarly points upon which I have no opinion, and in which I have no interest. What I know for sure is that this letter proves nothing about the authorship of the so-called “Shakespeare” plays. That is why I have stolen it. The world is easily deceived, Mr Holmes, and must be protected from gross deception or misconception or misinterpretation.’

‘I was under the impression,’ said Holmes, ‘that your brother, Alexis, and your father, Lord Gray, have already sufficiently protected the world from that particular error. I was under the impression they had already explained the Shakespeare fraud to the world, most brilliantly. Is that not so?’

‘Yes, my father has explained in detail why Shakespeare could not have written the plays, and why it is evident that Francis Bacon did. And my brother has a book coming out shortly which will make the explanation even more compelling. It is a shame you cannot read it.’

‘Perhaps I will.’

‘No, alas, Mr Holmes – I have work to do and I must insist that you remain at Castle Mornay a while longer – a good while longer, in fact.’

‘That I cannot do,’ said Holmes, and he stood up.

I stood up also.

‘I am afraid you must stay, Mr Holmes, and I will tell you why,’ said Bart Gray. As he stood up he drew from his pocket a small rectangular object, and held it up to our view. ‘This appears to be a television control, but it is not. You see the little switch on which I have placed my thumb? If I push this switch, Marianne Hideaway will explode. I promise you, Mr Holmes, I will push it the instant you do not do exactly as I say.’

‘Where is she?’ asked Holmes.

‘You are too inquisitive, Mr Holmes. She is locked in a little room. As you soon will be also. For I am about to take you to a chamber in the Square Tower. Come along, gentlemen – be quick. Time presses. Oh, and Mr Holmes – our scanning device shows that you have a revolver in your right coat pocket. Would you be good enough to lay it on the table beside you, before we start the long climb to your temporary quarters? Ah, yes, that’s a good fellow. We’ll just leave it there, perhaps forever – a memento of a visit by an inept but memorable charlatan. It will make a good conversation piece.’