CHAPTER 3
You Left Me Hanging
Ten days later, even though lowering clouds darkened London with the promise of a summer storm, my mood was light as I returned in a cab from Paddington Station towards Baker Street. My extended holiday in Bath had been restorative. Given Holmes’s disputatious and dismissive mood of late, it was a welcome break to spend time with James Montgomery, a fellow soldier whom I had known in India, and two other comrades, whose ready laughter and playful demeanours had lifted my spirits.
Despite Holmes’s ill-placed concern, I had won a fair amount of money at cards. And while the best locksmith in Bath could do nothing with the mysterious box, I was sure a London expert would soon have it open. And so I had allowed myself to enjoy the baths every day and partook of wonderful cuisine: roast beef, oysters, champagne.
A dense tropical heat blanketed Baker Street. My medical colleagues who still believed in the miasmic transfer of disease were likely to be frantic at this weather.
As my cab pulled up to 221, I glanced up at our windows. The curtains were closed against the morning light, which was muted through a canopy of summer storm clouds. But the windows, too, were closed. That was odd.
Just as I descended from the carriage, the sky broke open and a torrent of rain dumped down as though some mischievous god had upended an enormous bucket on Baker Street.
‘Mrs Hudson!’ I exclaimed, greeting our landlady as she glided into the vestibule. But instead of her usual warm response, she took my drenched hat and coat wordlessly, her face cloudier than the sky outside.
While I may ‘see but not observe’, as my friend so often remarked, it would be difficult for any man to miss her distinct aura of reproach.
‘Dreadful weather!’ I put on my best smile. ‘But it is supposed to break the heat. Good to be home. How are you, Mrs Hudson?’
‘Just go on up, Doctor. It has been a challenging two weeks.’
‘Ten days, Mrs Hudson!’
‘Well, it seems a month. Go see to him.’ She disappeared downstairs. This was hardly the welcome I had expected.
I passed the sitting-room on the first floor landing, but the door was shut. Upstairs in my room, I set down my luggage and took out the small silver box from my mother. It gleamed in the morning light from my window, its tantalizing mystery intact. I locked the beautiful object in my drawer thinking I would find the right locksmith tomorrow.
I was not ready for what I found downstairs.
The first thing my eyes were drawn to was the floor, awash in clutter – inches deep with scattered papers, stained napkins, dirty ashtrays, pipe dottles, plates of dried food and random oddities. A box of snake-skins sat next to a carafe of something that looked like dried blood. Flies swarmed around it.
Mrs Hudson had clearly withdrawn her usual services, no doubt in one of her rare fits of pique.
And the room was as hot as a tea kettle on full boil. Yet a fire burned in the grate! Why? A gust of wind just then shot down the chimney and a spray of sparks escaped and landed on a pile of papers. One ignited, and I ran to it, just in time to toss the smouldering paper into the fireplace before it set the room afire. I drew the fire screen across it.
A near disaster! But that gust down the flue meant a breeze, so I next rushed to the windows and opened two of them against the stifling heat. The violent summer storm continued to pour down rain. But why was the room closed up like this?
And where was Holmes?
I turned to look and that is when I discovered him: hanging silently in a corner of the room. His body dangled from a rope and was suspended four feet off the floor. He was encased from the knees up in a straitjacket! One foot was bare, the other slippered. The bare foot wriggled.
He was alive, at least.
CHAPTER 4
New Skills
I stared at him for a long moment.
He frowned in concentration and began moving silently under the canvas of the restraint. It was a rather elaborate contraption, tightly bound, with leather straps and buckles, fastened with padlocks. The toes of his bare foot wriggled in concert with his efforts.
He must have seen me come in. I cleared my throat.
Nothing.
‘Holmes.’
‘Yes?’
‘Why the fire?’
‘Is that the first question you have, Watson?’
‘Yes. Why the fire?’
‘I was cold.’
‘In this weather! Are you eating?’
‘Burning papers.’
A plate of sandwiches sat untouched next to his chair. His movements under the straitjacket now involved his legs, hanging in the air, jerking from side to side.
‘Who helped you into that?’ I asked.
‘Billy.’
The page. A predicament of Holmes’s own devising, then. A minute passed. It did not look like he was making headway. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead and into his eye. He shook it away. Smiled at me.
‘You won in Bath, then. A tidy sum,’ he said.
‘What? Oh, for heaven’s sake, Holmes.’
‘Tie pin. A handsome one from here. But it is not like you to purchase adornments.’
‘Stop this. No one likes to be scrutinized in this way.’
‘You are usually amused.’
‘Never mind! What the devil are you doing there?’
‘I am attempting to replicate The Great Borelli’s hanging escape trick. I have almost got it, I think.’
‘The Great Borelli?’
‘Travelling escape artist and magician. A wonder, at least in his own mind.’
Why Holmes felt the need to emulate some itinerant performer was a mystery. He flailed about a bit, and I could see that one arm had escaped its sleeve and was snaking underneath the canvas of the straitjacket. But the other remained pinioned.
A chair which had been placed underneath him had tipped over, and his legs now dangled limply in the air. I stood up, walked over and replaced it under his feet.
‘Don’t help me!’ he shouted. ‘I kicked it over for a
