TWENTY-THREE

Flight

The explosion was tremendous.

I saw Bart’s head disappear.

His corpse toppled.

Simultaneously, the wall fell slowly inward, tumbling in slow motion – and I leapt backwards to avoid being crushed.

Bricks were scattered everywhere. Oddly enough, the light bulb still burned.

Dunwoody and Alf were crumpled on the ground, stark dead. Shotgun Abernetty, who had been standing farther back and leaning on a pillar, had been luckier. The pillar apparently had deflected part of the blast. He appeared to be only dazed. He lay draped over the empty pallet of bricks. He was groaning.

‘I dared not do it sooner,’ said Holmes.

‘Why ever not?’ I asked.

‘I wanted the wall high enough to protect us from the combined blast of the briar pipe and blue necklace, for I assumed that when the pipe went off the necklace would go off also. I hope you did not mind the delay, Wilson.’

‘I confess, Holmes, I thought you were carrying your famed sang froid a bit far, under the circumstances. But now all is quite clear to me – except, how did you know what words to say to set off the bomb in the pipe?’

‘I felt I could count on Bart Gray to go for the commonplace in trying to kill me,’ said Holmes. ‘And those words are the ones most commonly associated with me, in the popular mind – though I have seldom, if ever, actually said them.’

‘But what if you had been wrong!’

Holmes drew the Krueger fountain pen from his shirt pocket. ‘I would have used this.’

I laughed in relief. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Apart from a bruised arm, quite all right.’

As I stepped over the fallen wall I spotted some torn scraps of paper. ‘Look here, Holmes! Maybe we can salvage something of the letter.’

‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘The letter is a fake.’

‘Fake!’

‘Explain later . . . hurry! Must find Marianne. Let’s hope Bart didn’t push the switch on her before he blew up.’

Even as Holmes spoke I was on the run, taking the stone stairs two at a time.

‘I must tie up the American Abernetty,’ called Holmes.

I pushed open the door, entered the lab, and glimpsed the two Indian technicians running out the far side of the room. I then noticed Filbert Abernetty skulking in a corner, peering up over the edge of a counter top. I pounced upon him, grabbed him by the shirt, and simultaneously grabbed a huge canvas bag which was lying nearby. The bag had a zipper across the top. I put the weaselly fellow in a strangle hold, unzipped the bag, and began to stuff him into it. It looked to me like he would just fit.

‘No, no,’ he cried. ‘That’s a bat bag!’

‘And now it will contain a rodent of another sort!’ I cried, incensed that this disgusting little creature had caused so much suffering around the world – he and his family. I zipped him into the bag. For good measure I wired it closed with some of the very wire with which he made bombs. I left him struggling and groaning in his bag on the bomb factory floor.

I ran through the library into the great hall, and there Holmes caught up with me. I said, ‘We’ll need to break down every door in the castle to find her. I’ll take the north side, you the south.’

‘Just wait,’ he said, and he began to circle the room. He tilted his head this way and that. He circled the room twice. It became apparent to me that he was sniffing.

‘What do you smell?’ I asked. I feared it was gas, something dangerous.

‘This way,’ he cried, and darted through a doorway.

I followed Holmes through a maze of rooms; all the while he was sniffing. At one point he knelt by a chair and sniffed the cushion.

‘My God, Holmes! This is no time for fooling about,’ I cried. ‘Let’s just search every room, methodically.’

‘This way!’ he cried, and he darted out another doorway, hurried down a twisting corridor, and finally came to a small door that led to a circular stone staircase – obviously this was the staircase leading to the top of the round tower.

He went ahead of me, sniffing the air. Up and up we circled, round and round, endlessly. ‘I’m on the scent – she’s up here somewhere!’ he cried. And at last we came to the top. By then I was feeling not only exhausted but frantic, for I was not at all sure what horror we might find.

Holmes lifted up the wooden bar, pushed open the door – and a moment later Marianne Hideaway was in my arms, clinging to me, a tear running down her cheek as she kissed me. Then she began to laugh.

‘It was quite terrible,’ she said. ‘I’ll be very glad when I can purge all these terrible pills from my body.’

‘That will be soon,’ I said.

‘I am going down to get Shotgun Abernetty,’ said Holmes. He fled down the stairs.

I hurried to the window and from my hawk-like position I discerned that the landscape below me was filled with tiny motion: afar off, beyond the winking water of the loch, two figures flickered in and out of view as they ran beneath the trees that lined the private road towards Kilfinnoch. They were the Indian technicians. Close beneath me, two figures hurried towards the pier, each carrying a duffel bag; they flung the bags into the cockpit of the red biplane. The man with silver-blond hair, Lars Lindblad, gave a shout and waved towards the castle, as if telling the girl they had forgotten something. Katrinka Pushkin sprinted back towards the castle, and Lindblad followed her on the run.

‘We had better hurry down and help Holmes,’ I said to Marianne, and I turned from the window.

She nodded.

Her blonde hair swished and bounced as she passed through the doorway and on to the staircase. Round and dizzyingly round we went, and we tried not to trip as we turned and turned on the too-tiny steps of the tower. We found Holmes in the library – he was just leaning forward, frozen in afternoon light, as he reached for his Webley revolver, which lay on the walnut table where he’d left it.

‘My heavens!’ said Marianne, gazing at the revolver. ‘Are you allowed to carry such a thing, Mr Holmes?’

‘It was Holmes’s weapon in 1914,’ I explained, ‘so when he was resuscitated in 2004, a legal paradox arose: there was doubt whether he could be said to have ever been dead, and under the old laws he had legal right—’

‘Later, Wilson,’ cried Holmes. ‘Explanations later!’

‘Right,’ said I.

‘Filbert Abernetty is in a bat bag,’ said Holmes.

‘I put him there,’ I said.

‘While I attend to Shotgun Abernetty, see if you and Marianne can drag Filbert outside into the courtyard,’ said Holmes. ‘Help is on the way.’ Holmes then opened the door to the vaults below and – with his Webley at the ready – darted down into the gloom.

Marianne and I dragged the bag containing Filbert Abernetty along the hallway and outside into the sunshine. As we dragged it the last few yards I heard a tiny clatter-bang sound far above my head, like rocks being dumped in a distant dustbin. A few seconds later the sound grew huge, into a whuffing clatter-bang, and when I looked up I saw a helicopter battering wind and light over the lake, descending, coming now straight towards us. Amidst furious dust it sank to the courtyard. The last time I’d seen a PUMA was when one had lifted me out of a ravine and carried me to a field hospital in Afghanistan. Several troops with rifles jumped out and ran towards the castle. Three others leapt down and helped us get Filbert Abernetty out of his bag and into the copter.

Shotgun Abernetty loomed in the doorway of the castle. Holmes was right behind him, with a revolver pressed against his back. Holmes marched the big man to the door of the PUMA, and a soldier jerked Shotgun’s arms behind his back and clapped cuffs on him, and hustled him into the copter.

Marianne pointed at the jazzy red biplane, which had been untethered from the pier and was floating free. Two heads were in its cockpit, Lindblad behind and the girl in front. The biplane’s motor twitched, twitched . . . then caught, and the propeller became a blur.

‘We mustn’t let them escape!’ shouted Holmes, climbing into the copter.

Marianne and I clambered aboard, the helicopter lifted, and in a few instants we were above the level of the castle roof.

Marianne pointed. ‘It’s Grandpa!’

Grandpa Gray limped across the roof of the castle between the two towers, dragging a rifle. He struggled to lift the rifle. Finally he managed to rest it on one of the crenellations. Standing with his back to the drop-off, he drew a bead on us.

‘It’s a .600 nitro express!’ I hollered.

The pilot nodded – and very suddenly we went UP.

Grandpa Gray fired both barrels. Had we stayed at our original altitude he might have taken down a PUMA with an elephant gun. The roar was tremendous. I saw his legs and his shoes turn upside down as the recoil blew him backwards over the wall.

‘My God!’ cried Marianne.

Holmes pointed at the red biplane. It was now skimming across the surface of the lake . . . lifting . . . was airborne.

Our helicopter tilted, slid down a hill of air, whirled away in pursuit. In a few moments we caught the little plane, which looked quite jaunty. Lars Lindblad and Katrinka Pushkin wore goggles, and their white scarfs snapped and danced in the slipstream. Lars tossed back his head and laughed as he pointed towards us. Katrinka was smiling – the first time I’d seen her not cool and aloof. Lars flung the biplane into a turn that brought him nearer to us, just ahead of and beneath us. He struggled with something in his cramped cockpit. Finally he pulled the rim of a bag into view. He unzipped the bag, it yawned open – a cloud of bats streamed out . . .

The bats whirled upward in our direction as we approached them from the rear.

Holmes had always been quick – boxing champion at Cambridge and all that – but never have I seen a man of his age move quicker than he did as those bats rose to meet us. In a single lightning motion he grabbed Shotgun Abernetty by the collar and spun him – toppled him – out the open helicopter door.

Abernetty howled like a banshee.

Instantly the bomb-loaded bats veered and went for the transponders in Abernetty’s pockets.

As the big man tumbled – handcuffed – through their midst, I saw him explode three times. One explosion blew his left leg off. The leg flew in one direction, the rest of his body in another. His tumbling form accelerated out the bottom of the bat cloud and soon he was out of the reach of the little beasts, who seemed confused as they tried to fly down to reach his vanishing body.

Somebody closed the helicopter door.

‘Stay with that plane!’ shouted Holmes, pointing to the bright red biplane.

‘I’ve called in a pursuit plane,’ said the pilot.

‘He’s accelerating,’ said the co-pilot.

Our copter tilted forward. ‘I’ve never lost a battle or a biplane,’ quipped the pilot.

We droned on, our two aircraft locked together at a fixed distance. The hills and lochs of Scotland scrolled beneath us. By and by Lars Lindblad lifted up the bat bag and the wind snatched it away. He touched Katrina’s shoulder. She nodded, and she began unwrapping her scarf. His scarf and hers flew away behind like frightened gulls. A clear plastic canopy slid forward and covered their two heads.

Until that moment the canopy had not been visible. What mechanism brought it into view I do not know. Lars Lindblad took off his goggles; Katrinka Pushkin took off hers.

What happened next was difficult to comprehend. The top wing of the biplane appeared to break off. It blew away. The two pontoons below the plane dropped and tumbled towards the glittering water. Simultaneously the propeller fell off and whirled away to the west, still spinning as it vanished.

‘Blimey – he’s breaking up!’ cried a soldier.

The red biplane had vanished and we were staring at a sleek and unexpected craft, still red but utterly changed. It accelerated.

‘It’s a jet!’ cried a crewman.

The red plane shrank away ahead of us, banked, and headed east in the general direction of Sweden.

Our pilot brought the PUMA round in a great circle, and as we rattled through the blue Scottish sky I tried to get my bearings. By and by I recognized Loch Mornay. A few minutes later we were fluttering down into a field behind the Black Bonnet Inn.

Three cars of the local constabulary were parked on the road, growing larger as we descended. Holmes, Marianne and I climbed down and crouched as we hurried across the hard-blowing grass and out from under the blades of the windy PUMA. Several troops hustled the feeble Filbert Abernetty out of the copter and walked him over to the constables, who took him into custody and put him, handcuffed, into one of the vehicles.

The PUMA clattered upward into the suddenly cloud-cluttered sky. And faded away.

Doors slammed. The police cars glided away up on to the road, taking the freakish little bomb maker to his rendezvous with justice.

We three stood in a green field on a little knoll behind the inn, in the cold afternoon sunlight. ‘Well, Holmes,’ said I, ‘at last you have ended the “dreadful Abernetty business”. My congratulations!’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘And it took me only a hundred and twenty years to do it.’

‘Come now, Holmes!’

‘But, alas, I’ve let Lars Lindblad fly out of my fingers.’

‘He didn’t fly out of your fingers,’ I said. ‘You never had him in your grasp, nor any real chance at him. He’s probably landing in Malmö by now. Or Minsk.’

‘He is the pre-eminent criminal of the last half century,’ Holmes said, ‘and I have missed him! I am not happy with myself!’

‘I can’t believe he is as dangerous as Moriarty was,’ I said, trying to remind him of his past great victory.

‘Hard telling,’ he mused. ‘Lindblad has successfully committed sensational crime after sensational crime for forty years. No law enforcement officer in the world has been able to lay a hand on him! Can you imagine what it would mean for my reputation if I—’

‘Are you so vain, Holmes!’

‘I fear I am.’

‘You mustn’t get so excited, Mr Holmes,’ said Marianne, touching his arm.

‘Holmes was undoubtedly the sort of child,’ I said to her, ‘who, if ever he took a second at school, would spend the rest of the month sulking.’

‘I was,’ he admitted.

We walked down the slanting green pasture, all streaked red and shadowed with the dying light of the sun. We stepped on to the road, which was hard underfoot, and walked across to the Black Bonnet Inn. Marianne booked a room. We all took baths and changed clothes, and then we met in the old timbered dining room for an excellent supper of salmon. Afterwards, in the Bonnie Prince Charlie Room, we sat awhile by the fire, and sipped sherry, and talked.

‘One thing puzzles me,’ I said. ‘How did you know where Marianne was hidden?’

‘I smelled her.’

‘None of your pawky humour, Holmes!’

‘That was my method, Wilson, and none other. You may recall that after I was resuscitated I complained of an overwhelming sense of smell.’

‘I do recall.’

‘At first it was a surprise, later an annoyance, and later still I thought it might be an asset – particularly to a detective. I decided that rather than ignore my increased olfactory power, my hyperosmia, I should cultivate it. I had been like a man blessed with massive muscles who had not exercised them. I began walking the streets of London and noting every distinct smell that wafted up my nostril, and I linked each smell to its source, and I described each scent according to a system of my own devising. The normal olfactory human sense is so crude that no sophisticated method of describing scents has ever been devised or, indeed, has ever been necessary. I soon was able to distinguish scores of scents in every breath I took. I recorded them all in a little green notebook.’

‘So that’s what the cryptic writings in your book were all about!’ I said. ‘I thought they were something much more sinister.’

‘Why should you think anything sinister of me, pray!’ He looked astounded.

‘Well, when I see you at midnight crawling on your hands and knees in Regent’s Park, and your nose to the ground as if you had become a hound, I may be forgiven for imagining dark powers were at work.’

He laughed. ‘The explanation is quite simple. Earlier that day I had splashed perfume on the ground at intervals. I waited a few hours and then set myself the task of following the trail – a very crude test, admittedly, and one that any dog would view as beneath contempt . . . but for me, a humble homo sapien, it was a beginning.’

‘But tell me, Holmes,’ I said, ‘how do you explain the strychnine and other chemicals? You seemed to be obsessed with some sort of experiment that seemed to be going terribly wrong.’

‘My dear fellow,’ said he, ‘I merely was trying, by chemical means, to make myself more sensitive to smell.’

‘More!’ cried Marianne.

‘’Tis true,’ Holmes agreed. ‘I tried to increase my sense of smell even further by applying various chemical combinations to my olfactory mucosa. The one thing that worked was an application of strychnine. Alas, I noticed signs of strychnine poisoning, and I had to desist. But for one day I was in a hallucinatory world of smells so overwhelming that, like a dog, I almost abandoned eyesight and went by smell alone. I seemed to have no choice! On that day, while following Mrs Cleary’s dogs, I found I could stoop behind the dogs where they had sniffed, and smell the very thing they had smelled. Never before had I been able to do that!’

‘At the time,’ I said, ‘I confess I feared you were degenerating into an animal. But now I thank heaven you were so diligent, and were able to detect Marianne’s body scent even through the walls of a castle.’

‘I did not follow the thread of her body scent at all,’ said Holmes. ‘Her perfume and face cream were far easier to track. I had smelled them on you, my dear Wilson – as you may recall.’

Marianne laughed, brushed a strand of blonde hair from her cheek.

‘It was not a difficult task to remember Chanel Number Nineteen, Coco Chanel’s own favourite, and Lancômbe Rénergie, and to follow the wafting wave they made. The passage reeked of them.’

‘Reeked!’ cried Marianne, laughing again.

‘Only relatively speaking,’ said Holmes, raising a hand.

‘You are forgiven, Mr Holmes,’ she said. ‘And thank you for having brought this frightening tale to a safe conclusion.’

‘I confess,’ said Holmes, ‘that I do not relish telling Sir Hugh that I failed to save the letter, and telling him, perhaps even worse, that the letter was a fake.’

‘A fake!’ gasped Marianne, and she looked horrified. ‘He was so certain that it was genuine . . .’

‘Despite all his careful research,’ said Holmes, ‘he overlooked several things that showed the letter was a forgery. But I must put this to him very gently.’

‘Why not practise your tactful explanation on Marianne and me?’ I said. ‘I am curious to know your reasoning.’

‘Excellent idea,’ said Holmes. ‘Cheers.’ He sipped sherry. ‘Let me begin by mentioning those aspects of the letter which seemed to suggest it was authentic. Mind you, all the evidence I have is what I remember as Bart Gray read the letter while he was walling us up – but I must tell you, the words emblazoned themselves on my mind, and I wrote them down before dinner, to be certain the memory will not fade. Even at this moment I see those few words in my memory as clearly as if I were looking at a photograph of them. Of course, we do not have the orthography to judge by, which would have been important. But what we have, we have. And here it is . . .’

Holmes closed his eyes, leant back in his chair, put his finger tips together as if praying, then began to recite, very deliberately:

‘Florence, Casa Figlia, March 1592.

‘My Sweete Emilia,

‘You do infect me more than plague would do, and would that I had never run so far from it that I am far from you; for though I be here, still I am home at heart, so I have gained little. This eve I crossed the Old Bridge and into the Piazza della Signoria where I did pause in the shadow of the statue of Cosimo on his grand steed, for at that instant I heard virginals playing. The music made me think of you, and made me remember how you play upon the stops of my twice-strung heart as prettily as on the ivory.’

‘Bravo, Holmes! I think you have it exactly!’ I cried.

Holmes smiled, for he always enjoyed praise. ‘There was another sentence or two,’ he said, ‘that I remember less well, but they went something like this: In Rome I had many strange adventures. The innkeeper at the inn where I stayed was attacked every year by a disorder that sent him mad, and when it came upon him he began to babble without stop. The disorder struck just as I arrived, and for a month I suffered his furious moods. They told me that his delusions took different forms. One year he thought he was an oil jar, and screamed when anyone came near him with fire. Another year he thought he was a frog and went hopping about. This present year he began to imagine he was a bat, and whenever I returned from my walks in the city he would squeak high-pitched squeaks and flap his arms as if he wanted to fly.’

‘Yes, I remember that, vaguely,’ I said.

‘Those are not the exact words,’ said Holmes, ‘but close.’

‘Then what is right with the letter,’ asked Marianne, ‘and what is wrong with it?’

‘Many points are convincing,’ said Holmes. ‘First, there was a plague raging in London in 1592 and 93, and as a result the theatres were ordered closed, and perhaps that was a perfect time for Will Shakespeare, at age twenty-eight, to make the Grand Tour of Europe. His references in the letter to the plague ring true, and are artfully woven into a statement of love. Second, the letter is addressed to Emilia, and this fits with the contention of one Shakespeare scholar, A. L. Rowse, that the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets was Emilia Bassano, a young woman who came from a family of court musicians. Third, the allusion to the playing of the virginals therefore rings true. Fourth, the letter speaks of coming across the Old Bridge – Florence’s famous Ponte Vechhio – to the Piazza della Signoria, and of stopping in the shadow of a statue. All this is an accurate depiction of the geography of Florence. Fifth, some may feel the style of the letter rings true to what a young poet would write, for it has almost the rhythm of a poem, and is a bit fantastical and hyperbolical, as Shakespeare so often is. These five things suggest the letter may have been genuine.’

‘Yet you say it was not.’

‘Couldn’t have been,’ said Holmes. ‘The letter was dated 1592, and also the writer states that he stood in the shadow of the statue of Cosimo on his grand steed. But those two elements are contradictory. The famous equestrian statue of Cosimo by Giambologna was not put up in the Piazza della Signoria until 1594. I am certain of this date because of something that happened at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park in 1894, on the three hundredth anniversary of the erection of the statue. I encountered a man railing against the fact that Giambologna had paid an everlasting “tribute to tyranny” by raising the equestrian statue of Cosimo. Scarcely had he said those words than he was shot dead by an anarchist. He fell lifeless off his box and on to the grass almost at my feet. It was an occasion not easily forgotten. Which is why I remember the date so clearly.’

‘That sounds pretty conclusive,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ murmured Marianne.

‘Still, one would like to have seen the letter,’ said Holmes. ‘Perhaps the date was poorly written. One would like to have examined the actual script. But there were other things that indicated it was a fake. For instance, that passage about the mad innkeeper in Florence was a false note. Even as Bart Gray read it to us, I knew I had heard it before. It was only a few moments ago, however, as I sat in my bath, that I remembered where I had seen it. The tale is taken almost whole from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. Cellini died twenty-one years before this letter was purportedly written. In his autobiography Cellini tells of being kept prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, and he speaks of the castellan’s yearly delusions, how one year this jailer imagined himself to be a jug of oil, another year a frog, another year a bat. Obviously someone lifted the tale from Cellini and modified it just slightly to fit the Shakespeare letter.’

It was late when we left the Bonnie Prince Charlie room and made our way to our rooms. That night I dreamed that a stranger had come to the inn asking for Marianne Hideaway, and he had left her his card at the front desk. But when I looked at the card, it was blank. This led me to believe that the caller was none other than William Shakespeare. I ran to the door to catch up with him and ask for his autograph – but I saw only a lark leaping up out of the grass and taking flight.

The following morning we had planned to leave for London first thing, but I remembered something important to be done at Castle Mornay. After breakfast we drove around the loch by the main road, and turned on to the drive that led to the castle grounds. Vehicles from the local constabulary were parked everywhere. The bodies of the dead in the vault had been removed, and Grandpa Gray’s body had been removed from the base of the wall where he had fallen. The constables were taking pictures of the crime scene. I first went to the laboratory and saw to it that the bats were all released, and all the dragonflies. I then went looking for the little one-eyed dog. I found him hiding under the desk in the library, hungry and frightened. I finally convinced him I was a friend – thanks, in part, to the persuasive powers of the steak bone in my hand. The little dog followed me, timidly, out to my car, and he snuggled next to me all the way to London. Marianne cajoled him to come sit on her lap, to no avail. Even Holmes tried to make friends with him. No sale. The little dog would snuggle only next to me as I drove, and he would let no one else come between us.