“No! I’ll fix it myself!”
“What? You are not a doctor, Warlock.”
“And you are not a boggart-fighting guy!” He turned to Grogsson and Lestrade and shouted, “We are not involving Watson in any further cases, is that clear?”
When neither of them answered, he again bellowed, “Is that clear?”
“Urgh. Fine,” Grogsson grunted.
“As you wish, I suppose,” said Lestrade.
“Good! Because Watson needs to stay safe. And as for you, John: get out of here, right now! Go on, march! And as a special favor to me, do try not to get killed on the way home, eh?”
Burning with shame and anger, I turned to go. Lestrade refused to meet my gaze, though I could not tell if he was sulking because he did not like to have his hand forced, or because he’d let his case go so very wrong.
My only consolation came from Torg, who gave me the smallest nod as I left. He was always one who could say more with his gaze than his words.
Because of you, James McCarthy will escape the noose. The life that would have ended now shall flourish. Perhaps, if fortune smiles, flourish alongside Alice Turner.
Or, to put it another way:
Yah. U did gud.
THE ENGINEER’S DUMB
YOU MUST KNOW THE KIND OF PERSON THIS STORY regards: one of those fellows whose knowledge of a particular subject is so vast, they might at first seem an intellectual giant. And yet… let the subject veer ever so slightly from the vein of their expertise and it quickly becomes clear that their focus on one area of knowledge has driven all other forms of learning from their brain. They know nothing of current events, of cultural mores, or of the splendid variety of the world around them. They cannot cook. They don’t know which clothes they ought to wear or how to take care of them. Indeed, they cannot even take care of themselves. They are smart/stupid.
Victor Hatherley was such a man. Absolutely brilliant. And absolutely dumb. His brain could unravel any complexity of hydraulic engineering, yet failed to detect a trap so simple most schoolchildren would not have fallen for it.
He came to my attention one morning, when I was having a bit of a lie-in. I should have risen. I should have begun the daily tread of medical monotony that had become my bane—checking temperatures and distributing pills and generally performing the tasks necessary that Mary might be able to say she was married to a doctor. Yet my covers were warm, and the day that faced me so devoid of the thrilling adventures I’d known with Holmes that I could hardly bring myself to arise and face it.
So instead, it came to me. As I lay there in my comfortable nest of pillows and procrastination, Chives the doorman bustled in and said one of the “old guards” had come in from the railroad with a patient. I groaned. This was one of the hazards of living so close to Paddington Station; every now and then, one got a railroad case. This much could be said for them: they were never boring. Oh no. In fact, they tended to be grisly in the extreme. Usually it meant that some poor fellow had gotten himself run over by a train, or had forgotten to take his face out of the way before two heavy passenger cars had rolled into each other and the giant iron couplers snapped shut. Often the victim of such an accident would be presented to me by the fellow who had caused said accident and then enlisted the help of several comrades to bring the unfortunate sufferer to my home in six or seven separate buckets and express the hope that there was “something I could do”.
With a heavy sigh, I instructed Chives to tell our guests I would be right down, then began pulling on the least blood-absorbent set of clothes I could find. Apparently, I was not fast enough for whatever “old guard” the railroad had sent, for I alighted at the foot of my stairs to find he had buggered off, leaving nothing more than my new patient’s card. This proclaimed him to be Victor Hatherley, a hydraulic engineer who either lived or worked—or, who knew, perhaps both—at 3rd floor, 16A Victoria Street. Stepping into my sitting room, I found the fellow in question propped up in one of my overstuffed chairs. He was more or less whole—which was rare for railway cases—but slumped in a stunned sort of stupor that gave me to know that whatever troubled him was no trivial concern. As soon as he saw me, his eyebrows lurched expectantly upwards and he asked, “Are you the doctor?”
“Yes. I am Dr. John Watson, at your s—”
“I think I need your help.” As he spoke, he brandished his right hand at me. It was swaddled in bandages. From the shape of it, I could tell that the man’s thumb must either be pressed very firmly down against the hand or—more likely, judging from the amount of blood on his dressings—gone. He broke into a high-pitched, hysterical sort of laughter that told of nervous delirium with a clarity that far surpassed the act of marching up to somebody and saying, “Hello. I have nervous delirium.”
“You need medical aid! Here, drink this!” I told him, lunging for my brandy bottle. I tipped out a tumbler full of the stuff and turned back to find his expression doubtful.
“Er… do you think I should? In this condition?”
I always hate it when people refuse medical aid. I slopped a spritz of soda into it and said, “Well, it’s mostly water, you know. For hydration.”
“Oh?” he said. “Well then…”
Dutifully, he took his medicine and began to drink it down.
“There’s a good fellow,” I told him. “Yes… yes… keep hydrating.”
He’d got about half the glass down
