A Study in Sherlock

The following afternoon, final confirmation as to the success of the plan was received from one of Wing’s allies in the police, a constable who provided Wing with information from time to time. Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson had called very early in the morning at the Bow Street gaol. They had spoken in private with Inspector Bradstreet; what precisely had transpired in Bradstreet’s office was not known to Wing’s informant, but the two had been taken by the inspector downstairs to the cells. There they remained for some time. Shortly after they returned to the street, to drive away in a carriage, a gentleman was escorted from the area of the cells whom the constable had not previously seen. That gentleman summoned a cab and was overheard to request delivery to the train station with all speed. The enterprising constable, thinking to learn something of what had transpired in the cells, took himself down the winding stair to the whitewashed corridor lined with doors. To his surprise, the beggar Hugh Boone was gone, his cell empty though the constable had not seen him brought up the stairs.

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes was overheard to mention breakfast to Dr. John Watson in a most jovial manner as they left the gaol,” said Chan to the guests gathered for one final cup of tea in his parlor. “I think he will be reflecting no further upon this matter.”

“That’s rather a shame,” said Wing, “as we might therefore be thought to be intruding if we were to express our appreciation for his help. No, Zhang, you needn’t glower, that was merely levity.”

“Indeed,” said Chan, anxious to get the issue disposed of once and for all. “In any case, I believe that will be an end to this matter of Hugh Boone, or Mr. Neville St. Clair, renting rooms at the Bar of Gold. All that remains is for the Lascar, in the most delicate but firmest of terms, to be made to understand that it was we who engineered these events. Once it is clear we are prepared to proceed with an equal measure of subtlety, but nothing approaching this level of restraint, should we be provoked again, I think we will be able to count on the Lascar’s cooperation. Yes, I believe a discretion previously unknown will suddenly begin to show itself in the behavior of our Lascar colleague. Would you all be prepared to accompany me right now to the Bar of Gold?”

“I am,” Lu responded instantly.

“I also,” Wing agreed, finishing his tea.

The three turned to Zhang, who, after a silent moment, shocked them all when he permitted his lips to twist into a smile. Answering smiles were received from the others. “I have no objection,” Zhang said, and so, still smiling, the four men of Limehouse made their way to the street.

S. J. Rozan, a lifelong New Yorker, first encountered and devoured the adventures of Sherlock Holmes at the age of twelve during the same convalescence as when she discovered Edgar Allan Poe. S.J. is the author of thirteen novels and three dozen short stories. She’s won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity Awards, and other honors, including the Japanese Maltese Falcon. However, none of these have been enough to entice Mr. Holmes to give her a call. She will keep trying.

For Dr. Watson’s perspective on the events narrated in this story, see “The Man with the Twisted Lip” by Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in the Strand (1892) and collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE PURLOINED PAGET

Phillip Margolin and Jerry Margolin

Everything about the moor made Ronald Adair uneasy. He had lived his whole life in Manhattan and he felt that there was something inherently wrong with places where you could actually see the horizon and the silence wasn’t annihilated by honking horns and pounding jackhammers. There were no Michelin-star restaurants in this wasteland, but there were bogs that could swallow a man in minutes. Ronald shivered as he imagined being sucked down into the ooze, struggling helplessly until the slime choked off his last terrified scream.

A year ago, Ronald had flown to Hollywood to talk to a studio head who wanted to buy the movie rights to Death’s Head, the video game that had made him a multimillionaire. He’d brought his girlfriend along and she had insisted that they visit the La Brea Tar Pits. The place had given him the willies. Sixteen-foot-high mammoths had disappeared into that darkness. At his last physical, Ronald had measured exactly five foot eleven inches tall. If he was sucked into one of those pits he wouldn’t stand a chance. He wondered if he would even recognize a tar pit or a bog should he wander out upon the moor. At least the manholes in Manhattan had covers you could see.

And then there was the Hound! Ronald knew The Hound of the Baskervilles was fiction but he was a fanatic Sherlockian—an investitured member of the Baker Street Irregulars with a complete set of Conan Doyle first editions in his library—so he also knew that Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale had been inspired by the legend of the seventeenth-century squire Richard Cabell, a monstrously evil man who had allegedly sold his soul to the devil. Cabell was buried on the moor and his ghost was said to lead a pack of baying phantom hounds across them on the anniversary of his death. Intellectually, Ronald knew there was no Hound prowling the “craggy cairns and tors” Conan Doyle had described in his story, but somewhere in the lizard part of his brain lurked the fear that an unearthly, slavering beast with glowing red eyes might roam a godforsaken place like this.

Ronald scanned the eerie countryside through the window of the jet black SUV that had been waiting for his private plane at Heathrow. The moor was shrouded in a thick, impenetrable mist that would cloak any ravenous fiend lurking near the dark pools of liquid peat. He pulled his gaze away and checked his cell phone. There were still no bars. They had disappeared as soon as the SUV passed through a small village which, the driver informed him, would be the last sign of civilization he would see before they arrived at Hilton Cubitt’s estate.

There were two other SUVs and a chauffeured limousine in the caravan that was headed toward Cubitt’s manor house. Ronald had seen the passengers in the other SUVs at Heathrow when they walked to the vehicles from their private jets. He had one thing in common with them: an outstanding Holmes collection. The limousine had joined the convoy as it left the airport and Ronald had no idea who was riding in it.

In the SUV directly behind Ronald was William Escott, a heavyset, dissipated Texas oilman who had inherited his wealth from his father. Ronald had disliked the collector the first time their paths had crossed at an auction. His low opinion of the man had never changed. Escott was a foul-mouthed slob who drank too much and talked too loudly. He had actually gotten into a fistfight during the Baker Street Irregulars’ annual meeting in New York in a dispute over the date of the action in “The Musgrave Ritual.” Escott did not limit his collecting to Holmes. He had an ownership interest in the Houston Astros and one of the best collections of baseball memorabilia outside of Cooperstown.

Robert Altamont was in the SUV that was following Escott. He was a chubby five-ten with a ruddy complexion, straw-colored hair, and bright blue eyes. The inventor had grown up on a farm in Oregon and had made his fortune after graduating from Boise State, but he dressed like a Boston WASP, affected a Haavaad accent and tried to create the impression that he’d been educated at places like Andover, Princeton, and MIT. The veil was easy to penetrate. Ronald had seen him use the wrong fork more than once at the BSI banquet and had caught numerous grammatical errors when Altamont tried to throw French phrases into a conversation.

Altamont had never confirmed the gossip about the source of his wealth but it was rumored that he had invented an electric car that really did what it was supposed to do and had sold the technology to a consortium of car manufacturers who now held the patent and the design in a vault in a secret location. The deal had supposedly made him a fortune.

Altamont was as avid a Sherlockian as Ronald. He had been turned on to Holmes by his older brother when he was ten years old and had started collecting on a small scale when he was still poor and in college. After he became rich Altamont not only built one of the world’s best Holmes collections but expanded his interests to Shakespeare First Folio, signed first editions of famous literary works, and French Impressionist paintings.

The caravan rounded a curve in the road and a pair of wrought-iron gates attached to weather-worn stone pillars suddenly appeared out of the fog. The gates and the house they protected looked familiar and Ronald had no trouble figuring out why. Hilton Cubitt had chosen this desolate stretch of the moor for his manor house because he wanted to model it after Baskerville Hall but the description in Doyle’s story did not provide enough detail, so he’d had the architect study the plans for Cromer Hall, which had inspired Doyle’s fictional architectural creation. Cubitt’s