“I must agree with you, Watson,” said my friend Sherlock Holmes, breaking a half-hour’s silence. “General Gordon would not have shared such reservations. He would have been glad of anything that promoted present peace between the countries he loved, with the Future a secondary consideration.”
I sighed, and set aside my newspaper. “Holmes,” I replied, “I know perfectly well that I said nothing aloud, so how were you able to divine my inner thoughts and agree with them? No,” I added, holding up a hand as he prepared to speak, “I know your methods by now. Let me see whether I can reconstruct your reasoning.” Holmes smiled and gave a gracious wave of his pipe, granting permission.
We sat in our rooms at Baker Street on a warm Summer morning, the windows open to allow a breeze to pass. We had agreed between us to prefer the rich, if somewhat mixed, scent of the capital over the progressive closeness of a hot and stuffy room—in which, furthermore, Holmes had been trying out a new tobacco mixture of his own invention, that gave off a cloying rose-petal scent reminding me of Turkish Delight.
I had been reading The Times and had, I admit, fallen into something of a reverie, prompting Holmes into another display of the mind-reading trick he used as a form of entertainment, at times when he lacked any more consequential problem to stimulate his exceptional intellect.
“You read the paper earlier yourself, and so, I suppose, could see that I had reached the page with the piece about the expansion of our holdings in Hong Kong,” I said. The story reported that our diplomats had lately signed an agreement to lease new territories on the Chinese mainland that, it was promised, would secure an enclave for the precarious but precious colony throughout the coming century. It was not the most prominent item in the paper, being upstaged by the charges against a pair of soldiers accused of perjuring themselves in a recent court-martial, and the announcement of the sale through Boothby’s auction house of a supposed Shakespearean manuscript.
I continued, “I suppose, though I was not aware of it until you spoke, that I was gazing at the wall that holds the portrait of General Gordon, hanging opposite the one of Henry Ward
Beecher which you so kindly had framed for my birthday.”
“You have Mrs Hudson to thank for that,” Holmes informed me, “for she was tactful enough to suggest the gift to me. The picture has been sitting unframed atop your bookcase for some years, and evidently dusting it has become a trial to her patience.”
This explained Holmes’ unusual consideration—he not being a man prone to the giving of thoughtful presents—but I was still attempting to follow his earlier insight. “Gordon’s connexions with China are as well known to you as anyone,” I continued, “so of course you would have realised that I was wondering what he would have made of this new arrangement. Such leases were unknown in his day, though I gather that they are now in favour with the Chinese government. What I cannot fathom is how you guessed that I was considering the question of reversion.”
Though I am neither a diplomat nor a student of China, I have travelled in Asia and am familiar with the dangers facing the brave men and their wives, military and civilian both, who maintain our presence there. I assumed that to the negotiators a ninety-nine-year lease seemed as good as a perpetual one, but who knew what view the Chinese Emperor of the year 1997 would take when it expired? If he insisted on bringing the territories back under Chinese control, our grasp on Hong Kong would be as slippery as before.
Holmes smiled lazily. “Merely by following the movement of your eyes, Watson, and your own movements this morning. A little after breakfast you opened the letter from your cousin in Melbourne, Mrs Deaver, and informed me that she was celebrating the birth of a male child, on which I dutifully congratulated you. The letters you wrote afterwards included a reply. As you and your relatives rarely correspond, it was natural to suppose that you took the opportunity to express hopes for good fortune in the infant’s life to come.”
“I see,” I said. “And I suppose I looked again at the letter, after I read the newspaper article?”
“Not at once,” he said. “After setting the newspaper down on your knees, you glanced first at the calendar, and then to the writing-desk where you composed the letter. Then you looked over to the table by the door, where it sits now with the others, addressed but awaiting its stamp. You glanced down at the paper again, and your eyes then wandered to Gordon’s portrait, and remained there in contemplation before eventually returning to The Times.
“It was simple to deduce your train of thought. First you considered the passage of time: you and I shall not live to see the year 1997, and we have no descendants, though you and
some future Mrs Watson may yet be blessed. Your new young relative’s children or grandchildren, however, may very well see changes in their part of the world, arising from this shortsighted decision on the part of Her Majesty’s colonial agents. You recollected your letter, and assured yourself that it would soon be on its way, but then your misgivings renewed themselves. You looked for reassurance to ‘Chinese’ Gordon—the saviour of Nanking and one of your own heroes—and after a little thought you realised that such concerns would not have troubled his spirit. Whereupon, I expressed my agreement with you.”
“I see,” I replied again. “Well, I am dismayed afresh to find myself so transparent.”
“Ah, don’t be downcast, Watson. The clearest waters are not always the shallowest, as any sailor could tell you who has had the opportunity to compare the South China Sea with the murk of the Thames. Besides, I admit that the ability to predict you arises in part from the closeness with which we are acquainted. Were you a stranger, the technique would be somewhat less reliable.”
“I suppose that’s something,” I conceded. Though, in truth, the idea that Holmes knew me well enough to reconstruct my mental processes continued to unnerve me. I imagined him engineering a clockwork Watson in his mind, and setting the homunculus on its mechanical way, to think and act and speak as I would. The image of Holmes as a toymaker, moving me and Mrs Hudson around a doll’s-house Number 221B, made me shudder slightly.
“But, Watson,” said Holmes superciliously, again in response to no words of mine, “do not we all do the same in some degree? Is that not what you were doing when you imagined the responses of the late General Gordon to the developments of the present day?”
Coming on the heels of his previous ostentatious display, this irked me, and I was on the verge of an angry retort which might have spoiled the morning. I kept my temper and my silence, however, and held my tongue along with the newspaper, which I commenced reading once more.
A moment later I was reprieved by a knock at the door. Mrs Hudson hurried in, bringing an urgent missive that had arrived with a messenger.
“Brother Mycroft’s writing, I declare!” exclaimed Holmes, tearing it open as our redoubtable landlady bustled away, taking the letters I had written earlier. “I have been expecting something of the kind. I have heard this morning of a death that is likely to interest him.”
He perused the message swiftly, then handed it to me. As he had predicted, it was from his brother. Mycroft Holmes requested—“demanded” would not be an unduly strong word— our
presence at his club, with all dispatch. As he was a senior, though unacknowledged, official in the workings of Government, Mycroft’s summonses generally portended some crisis of state significance, and were not to be ignored even had we been so inclined. As it was, Holmes seized upon the distraction with relish, and we hailed a cab.
It was a journey of only a few minutes, down past Baker Street’s coffee-shops and newsagents, then through Mayfair and its grand garden squares, passing by the new Connaught Hotel, Pugin’s grandiose Gothic Church of the Immaculate Conception, and a particular house in Berkeley Square in whose supposedly haunted attic Holmes and I had once spent a trying night. From there our cab continued past Walsingham House and the Bath Hotel and into St James’, where the capital’s most prestigious gentlemen’s clubs are located.
A moment later we had alighted, and were passing into the hallway of one such, which Holmes had once described as the queerest in London. Glass panelling gave us a view of the reading room, in which the unsociable members of the Diogenes Club sat in their separate bays of books, newspapers and magazines, each with its single leather armchair, in absolute isolation from one another. With the glass between us, I was irresistibly reminded of fish skulking in their little caves in an aquarium.
Then Holmes knocked cheerfully on the window, eliciting a flurry of glares and shaken heads and the immediate attention of a plump attendant. Like all those at the Diogenes Club, he wore soft carpet slippers to muffle the sound of his footfalls. He ushered us with silent disapproval into the Stranger’s Room overlooking Pall Mall, the only room in the building where conversation was permitted. A moment later we were joined by the considerable presence of Mycroft Holmes, who gestured at the man to bring us tea.
“An ambitious fellow,” Sherlock Holmes observed as the servant hastened away. “His parents may have been in service, but I’ll wager his child will not be.”
“Ah, so you noticed that,” Mycroft replied. He settled his enormous body into a freshly polished leather armchair, looking rather like a hot-air balloon that I had once seen descending to the Earth, and gestured to us to sit as well. “The skin above the ears, of course, and the squint.”
“Together with the left middle finger,” Sherlock agreed lazily.
“Naturally. Well,” said Mycroft, “thank you both for coming here so promptly. You are both well, I trust?”
As I understood it, Mycroft Holmes was the linchpin around which the British establishment revolved, the weighty and immobile foundation upon which everything else was built. Like everyone but himself, I could comprehend only a small portion of his function, but I knew his mind to be an entrepot of reports and memos, records and instructions that drove the flow of information across our global Empire. If there was a correspondence to be discovered between the declining output of a sawmill in Manchester and the failure of a military sortie in Bengal, or between the price of cattle in Adelaide and the fall of a sparrow in Putney, Mycroft was the man to spot it, to tell you what its consequences might be and how they might be avoided. He was as indispensable to Great Britain’s interests across the face of the globe as his brother was to the thwarting of her criminals.
“Quite well, brother, thank you,” Sherlock Holmes replied. “I have been occupied with a number of pretty problems recently, but as it happens you find me free this morning. May I assume that Her Majesty’s Government is in need of my services once again?” Though I knew the brothers respected one another, neither was a man to waste his time in idle chit-chat.
“That is putting it rather more grandly than I should myself,” Mycroft told him, “but your surmise is correct. Thank you, Jennings, that will be all.” He waved away the allegedly ambitious attendant, who had returned with a tea-tray. “You have heard, perhaps, of the death of the Honourable Christopher Bastion?”
“I believe I have encountered some intelligence to that effect,” his brother admitted. “Perhaps, though, for Watson’s benefit, you could summarise the salient details?”
Mycroft nodded cordially. “Very well. Bastion was found by his manservant in his study at home this morning. He had taken prussic acid, and had been dead for some hours. He was the middle son of the late Viscount Agincourt, and his older brother is the current holder of the title. The family is ancient and distinguished, and notable for its long history of service to the nation. Christopher Bastion was until last week a senior civil servant at the Foreign Office, and had been one of its chief assets for many years, thanks to his political incisiveness and expert knowledge of affairs in many parts of the world. He was trusted with the most sensitive matters of policy, in both the diplomatic and the military spheres. He had, however, a long and unfortunate susceptibility to the company and charms of women, and this had recently led him sadly astray.
“A few weeks ago, Scotland Yard arrested a foreign spy, known by the alias ‘Zimmerman’, on whom they had had their eye. Thanks to the speed and efficiency of the operation, the man
had scant warning of his arrest, and was hurriedly burning papers when he was caught. Among those he had not yet destroyed, the police found a recent letter from none other than Christopher Bastion, implying in no uncertain terms that he would be willing to sell government secrets to Zimmerman’s masters for a high enough price. Hitherto Bastion’s probity had never been questioned, so I am sure you can imagine the shock and upset with which this news was received in Whitehall.”
“Had he a reason to want for money?” Holmes asked sharply. “Has the family fallen upon hard times?”
“Not the family,” said Mycroft, “but Bastion drew no allowance from the Agincourt estate, preferring to earn his own keep. His salary was not extravagant, and he was fond of the expensive things in life, including a young woman with whom he had recently formed a most unsuitable attachment. She had become a significant drain on his finances, as unsuitable young women are wont to be.”
“He admitted this?” asked Sherlock.
“Openly and without reservation, on being questioned. He was most insistent, however, that he had not written the letter to Zimmerman. In deference to his unblemished record, two experts in handwriting were consulted, independently of one another. Both confirmed the hand as his. Bastion was quite indignant when he learned that he was not believed, although he must have seen that we could not possibly take the risk of retaining his services. He was discreetly dismissed, and it seems the young lady, recognising that the wind had changed, left shortly thereafter. His valet attests that he has been in low spirits since then. It would seem that in view of his disgrace, his financial ruin and his romantic disappointment, Bastion had no interest in continuing his life.”
“It sounds an open-and-shut case,” I agreed, bracing myself for the pair of scathing contradictions that I invited in making such a statement in the presence of both Holmes brothers.
Mildly, Sherlock said, “Hardly, Watson. While prussic acid is best known as a method of suicide, its use as a weapon of assassination is not unknown. Furthermore, I count at least six possible motives for murder, the likeliest being romantic jealousy of Bastion, retribution for an unpaid debt and a wish to silence him for something he knew. Was he alone in the house?”
“Other than the servants, quite alone,” Mycroft confirmed. “As you will have gathered, he was unmarried, and he maintained a bachelor establishment near Piccadilly. His lady friend is
no longer in the picture. His suicide is not in doubt, however,” he declared, to my surprise and his brother’s evident annoyance. “Bastion left a note. His death concerns me and Her Majesty’s Government only insofar as it is lamentable to see a trusted ally so fallen. Our interest is in how far he was compromised beforehand. Specifically, in what secrets he might already have divulged to Zimmerman, or to others with whom Zimmerman placed him in contact.”
“One assumes that, had he done so, his monetary difficulties at least would have been alleviated,” Sherlock pointed out sharply. “And with them his romantic ones, if your description of his young friend’s character is accurate. Are you certain that she is not herself a spy, incidentally?”
“It seems peculiarly unlikely,” said Mycroft. “She is a dancer with pretensions to becoming an actress. She was christened Gillian McGuire, ...
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