“The pipe, Holmes!” I cried. “It is the only way!”
He disappeared. Seconds passed, masquerading as hours. I was fighting desperately not to fall but could not understand why. I leaned against the opposite wall and somehow remained standing.
At last Holmes reappeared, with something tied around his neck. He leaned head and shoulders out the window and barely managed, with his arm fully extended, to reach the water pipe. Using it as an anchor to pull himself out, he swung himself over to it and, when nearing the cistern, jumped to the water barrel and the hay and then fell to the ground. I do not recall, in my entranced state, that I was at all surprised to see Miss Monk hanging limply from his shoulders.
I fumbled at the knot binding her hands and so disentangled them. They had been tied with Holmes’s scarf. When I lifted Miss Monk and laid her gently upon the ground, her head lolled backward. Her neck was entirely unmarked.
“Is she alive?” Holmes gasped raggedly.
At first, I could not tell, so shallow was her breath, but at last I identified a sluggish pulse.
“There is life in her still. She has been drugged. Holmes? Holmes, for heaven’s sake, lie back and breathe deeply. You’ve been poisoned by the smoke.”
He collapsed against the wall. “Surprising,” he managed through shuddering breaths. “I would have thought myself entirely inured to the substance.”
I laughed and felt an itching sensation at the back of my neck. I reached behind my head to touch it and my fingers returned clotted with blood.
“Holmes, we must get away from this place. The building is still burning.”
“Then let us—” Holmes began, and then his eyes fixed upon a point behind me and above our heads.
“You aren’t meant to be here yet,” said a soft voice.
I turned around, intending to rise, but managed only to fall to the stones beside my comrades.
“I doused the basement with kerosene. Then I brought Mother downstairs with an excuse about a broken window,” Edward Bennett continued thoughtfully, for I knew him from the funeral that seemed an age ago and in another country. “How could you have known the girl was missing so quickly? It ought to have been burned to the ground when you arrived.”
“Tavistock led us here,” said Holmes after a struggle for air.
“Oh, I see. I didn’t know who had broken the window. He has been of the greatest use to me. He is clever enough in his own way. Not as clever as you, of course, Mr. Holmes.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“You were the only real threat to my work, you know,” Bennett remarked. His face and figure were strikingly, disarmingly neutral. He had blond hair and queerly pensive blue eyes. Even with him standing before us, I could scarcely describe him to myself, though that may well have been the effect of the explosion upon my senses. “I was with you on the Baron Ramsden case, if you recall. The missing patch of grass. Gregson didn’t see it as we did. Of course, you lied to him. You lied to everyone. You think yourself the final seat of judgment, don’t you? Astonishing arrogance. I can’t abide arrogance. Admit that you lied.”
“I cannot think what you mean,” Holmes exhaled coldly. “Then again, the world is rather hazy just now.”
“That is a pity. I do not think I can allow you to remain in it much longer.”
“Your mother—”
“Oh, you got her out as well, did you?” Bennett’s face changed entirely as his mouth curved downward in a witheringly cruel contortion. The features twisted into the personification of hatred. I saw the letter writer staring back at us, the man who had written the words
“I don’t,” Holmes coughed, retching slightly. “I never pretended to. I never understood any of it.”
“Come, now. You know far more than I ever intended you should.”
“I don’t know why you killed Martha Tabram.”
“Martha Tabram?” he repeated wonderingly. “Martha Tabram. I remember. The first girl. She had so much blood on her. She was crying out as she walked down the street. It reminded me of something.” He paused to consider. “They have all reminded me of something. I don’t know what it was. She was crying and I made her still. And the last girl, when you forced me off the streets—she was singing, and then all at once she was crying. I made her still too. Yes, I think that was part of it.
“Now, Mr. Holmes, I believe we should stop talking.”
It was becoming increasingly impossible to concentrate. My eyelids closed of their own accord. I forced them open again.
“You’re a fool,” Holmes murmured in a terrible, rasping voice. My friend still could not seem to breathe properly. “It will only be a moment before the police—”
“I am not a fool, and the police are a confused lot of imbeciles,” came the sharp reply. “I ought to know it. Running about like ants in their absurd circles. Take that message in the street I wrote, for example. I leave a note for them. And what do they do? They erase it.” He laughed pleasantly. “I thought they would. I couldn’t be sure until I had tried. I meant to write it in Dutfield’s Yard, next to the hall where all those Jews hold their meetings. That would have been something to see. But you arrived too soon that time as well.”
Bennett drew a knife from his coat. “I don’t like to finish it, Mr. Holmes, but I fear I must. I have to leave, you see. I do not believe I can stay in London any longer. But I promise not to hurt you. I never hurt any of them,” he whispered as he leaned down slowly toward us.
Two revolver shots went off. Bennett fell, his knife clattering beside him. It glinted in the light of the flames pouring out of the window above. I looked down at the gun in my hand and thought,
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE With the Respects of the Yard
I awoke in my own room to the sight of pale November light falling on the plane tree outside my window. I touched the bandage upon my head in confusion. I was extraordinarily hungry, and there was a violin playing somewhere.
When I tried to sit up, my left side flooded with a searing pain. I felt the area gently with my fingertips. No bandage had been applied, but there was a compress—a broken rib, then, or two perhaps. Using my elbow as a prop, I gradually managed to ease myself upward, until I was seated on the edge of my bed. No sooner had I accomplished this feat than I saw that it had been entirely unnecessary, for a bell had been placed within arm’s reach upon my side table.
The bell rested on a page from the
In a striking and dramatic turn of events, a courageous rescue has been effected by the dauntless private investigator Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose unflagging vigilance in connection with the Whitechapel murders once caused spurious doubts to be cast upon his activities in the district. A terrifying fire set in the basement of a building on Thrawl Street speedily led to the destruction of the entire house, a development which could well have caused many fatalities if Mr. Holmes and his partner and biographer Dr. John Watson had not been present at the scene. In a daring display of valour, Mr. Holmes carried two women from the inferno, one of whom had been trapped helpless upon an upper floor. Such evidence of gallantry is welcome indeed in times such as these, when the women of the district have been given so much cause for fear and discouragement. Both Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson sustained grave injuries at the scene, and though both the ladies to whom they proffered aid lived to see the hospital, the elder, a Mrs. Bennett, regretfully passed on as a result of internal wounds sustained during the blast. The conflagration, which was swiftly contained by that adept firefighting force we have all come to admire so universally, caused only one other casualty: that of ex–Scotland Yard officer Mr. Edward Bennett, who sustained
