The Bookcase of Sherman Holmes: A Holmes and Garden Anthology Page 14

  The mist had cleared. The night was fine and clear. The walk back was exhilarating. Colin was on the hat shelf on the hallstand. And suddenly all was not well with Garden’s world anymore, as he found himself wearing an unusually heavy fur scarf with claws and the spiteful addition of teeth.

  As these needle-sharp weapons bit into his ear, he gave a yell and fell to the floor, Holmes returning from the kitchen to see what on earth was wrong with his guest.

  Shooing the cat out of the hall, Holmes helped Garden to his feet and chuckled, as Garden raised a handkerchief to his bloodied ear and cheek. ‘What a playful thing he is. He wanted to welcome us home,’ declared Holmes, almost overcome with mirth.

  ‘Is that what you call it?’ retorted Garden bitterly. ‘Look, if you don’t mind, I’d better be getting back. I promised I’d phone Mummy tonight, and I’d better not be late or she’ll skin me alive tomorrow in the office.’

  ‘Why don’t you just call round to see her?’ asked Holmes, with complete rationality, as Shirley Garden only lived a couple of streets away.

  ‘Because she said she might be out, so I’m going to ring her mobile.’ This seemed as good an excuse as any.

  ‘Why don’t you call her from here?’ asked Holmes, again with perfect common sense.

  ‘Because she said she might drop round to see me on her way home, and I’d better not be out,’ lied Garden, extemporising furiously, and hoping Holmes didn’t think about it long enough to see the gaping holes in his excuses.

  ‘Never mind, old chap,’ Holmes said wistfully, ‘But you could have asked her to call in here.’

  ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ improvised Garden meaninglessly, and made as quick an exit as he could without arousing any suspicion.

  Chapter Two

  It was that time of the month again, although a Friday this time, and Holmes had asked Garden if he would accompany him to the next Quaker Street Irregulars meeting. It seemed churlish to refuse, although Garden didn’t relish the thought after the verbal punch-up of the last meeting, but gave in gracefully.

  ‘If you grab what you need from upstairs at closing time, you can come straight over to my place, and we can go to The Sherlock early and grab a drink and something a bit more substantial than those sandwiches we had last time before things kick off. The catering’s on the wane, in my opinion. When the group started we used to get much better value for money – chicken drumsticks, bowls of coleslaw, cold sausages. Maybe we’ll have to discuss paying more.’

  Just hoping that things did not ‘kick off’ again, Garden did as he was asked, and got his wallet and a coat from his flat above the offices as Holmes locked up for the day.

  On the drive over, Holmes went into some detail about the members of the group, so that Garden didn’t feel quite so much at sea this time with all the strange faces.

  ‘Our chairman, Stephen Crompton – you know, the one who kept trying to call the meeting to order? – he’s a retired doctor, so his interest in the detecting duo is quite obvious. He fancies himself in the role of Watson, only with a bit more brains. He was one of the first people that I started to talk to in there. He’s a widower and lives alone, so it’s one of his only interests: that, and going into The Sherlock and engaging people in conversation about the books.

  ‘Elliot Jordan, the librarian, has read the books so many times that he can quote from all of them, and he’s also a bit of a film buff, always putting down all the ghastly films that were made in black and white which weren’t based on original Conan Doyle stories. He’s divorced, and I remember he said that if his wife could have cited Sherlock Holmes in their divorce as co-respondent, she would have done, because she said he spent more time with the detective than he did with her.’ At this, Holmes took a moment for a polite little laugh, as if anything could be more ridiculous.

  ‘Kevin Wood, the teacher, has, as his specialist interest, the last series-but-one on television, and has every episode on DVD. He doesn’t care for the films, especially the American ones. He is married, but his wife is somewhat the same about the Harry Potter books. In fact, they’re thinking of applying to appear on the BBC’s Mastermind, so they both live in their own little worlds.

  ‘Now, Bob Wiltshire, who’s a social worker, is a bit of a generalist, and is happy to read all these modern books that have been written, trying to recreate Conan Doyle’s original London, and setting his hero in all sort of other scenarios as well. He doesn’t mind what it is, provided it’s a story that has Holmes and Watson in it. He’s not over-critical.

  ‘On the contrary, Aaron Dibley, the one who’s a probation officer, is only for the original books. He doesn’t care for any visual portrayal or modern stories trying to emulate the creator. He’s quite rabid about his belief that Holmes’ world should be all in the reader’s head, and that no one could play him satisfactorily, not even Basil Rathbone. He likes to think that he can see the characters that he works with in Conan Doyle’s criminal underworld.

  ‘Now, who else is a member? Ah, yes, Christopher Cave the cabbie. He’s a bit of an oddball. He seems to prefer offbeat portrayals like the American interpretations. There’s the film, Young Sherlock, of which he is a fan, and one particular Hound of the Baskervilles that stars William Shatner which he’s wild about. Dartmoor, in this particular version, seems beset with great boulders, and looks like it’s actually set on the edge of a desert.

  ‘Personally, I’d say it was a sound stage, but he’s convinced it was filmed on the edge of a desert. The answer’s probably in the credits somewhere, but I can’t be bothered to look, and he simply doesn’t care. He thinks it’s the bee’s knees.

  ‘Oh yes, and there’s Rupert Mitchell, a new member. All I know about him is that he’s an undertaker from Farlington Market. A little dour in his manner.

  ‘Let’s see, we’ve covered Stephen Crompton, haven’t we?’ Garden answered that they had, and Holmes continued, ‘That leaves – ah, yes, Peter Lampard, a very useful man if your central heating is playing up or on the blink. He’s a registered gas engineer. He’s been raving about the newest television series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and is absolutely delighted that someone’s actually updated old Sherlock’s brilliant mind to encompass the twenty-first century. Gets frowned on a lot for that opinion, which is not universally shared, I can tell you, but nothing shakes his admiration for the writers.

  ‘Now, who haven’t I mentioned? Ludovic Connor I don’t know very well. All I know is that he’s a bank clerk, and that he’s really into the longer works like “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Sign of Four”, that’s he’s not long had his fortieth birthday bash, and that he’s single.

  ‘That leaves us with Dave Warwick, an electrician, who’s only recently read the books for the first time, and was instantly hooked. He came to us about three or four months ago; a refreshing breath of fresh air for us older codgers who’ve known the stories for decades. And he probably needs an escape from everyday life more than any of us. His wife’s just given birth to their fifth child. He wasn’t at the last meeting because she’d gone into labour, if you remember.’

  ‘You haven’t told me anything about that bloke that got up everyone’s nose at the last meeting with his scandalous short story – “A Study in Cerise”, wasn’t it called?’ interjected Garden.

  ‘How remiss of me, old boy, but I try not to think about him whenever possible. He’s really got a bee up his bum – if you’ll pardon the expression – about the relationship between Holmes and Watson. You witnessed that for yourself at the last meeting, but he brings it up at every gathering. We usually manage to shut him up, but that short story was just beyond the pale. I hope you don’t think that he’s representative of us as a group. He’s definitely out on a limb, as far as that’s concerned.’

  ‘He did rather stick out like a sore thumb. What’s his motive, do you think, in antagonising all the other members about the relationship?’ asked Garden.

  ‘I, personally, think he has delusions
of grandeur of getting into print and causing a bit of an uproar: as if we could help him with that – but he’s certainly going out of his way to make his mark. I’m definitely going to put in a proposal tonight about him being black-balled: I’ve made my decision. He adds no value to the meetings and just causes trouble.’

  ‘Won’t that cause a bit of trouble if he attends the meeting?’ Garden was curious to know how his partner would go about this.

  ‘Not at all. I shall propose in the written form – in fact I have the letter in my inside jacket pocket. I just wasn’t sure until just now whether I should hand it to our chairman or not, but I shall. The members can be polled before our next meeting and, if they’re in favour of ejecting him, out he goes, and we won’t have to see him again after tonight. At least we’ve got a bit of a cushion against the outside world for our little discussions, up there on the first floor.’

  At this point, which had been mostly an informative monologue on Holmes’ part, he drew up outside The Sherlock. They had travelled in the same car because Holmes said he had got hold of a copy of a film not much televised, that Garden had never seen before, and they planned to watch it together later after the meeting, and critique it. Garden was to stay in the guest bedroom, with promises that Colin would be banned from their presence while he was in the apartment.

  The pub seemed very crowded to Holmes, but then, as Garden pointed out to him, it was Friday night this time round, and he probably came in a bit later when he usually visited, when other folk had gone on to other venues. Finding a table just vacated by three giggling young women, Holmes grabbed a bar menu for them, and they set to choosing their meal.

  Deciding that Italian was not appropriate, and that good old-fashioned English fare was what was called for, they both selected chicken tikka masala and chips, and Garden placed their food order when he got the drinks, Holmes having purchased them last time they were here for a Sherlockian-themed evening.

  As they were finishing their food, a particularly unruly group of young men sited themselves near their table, and one of them jostled Holmes’ elbow as he lifted his pint glass to his lips, slopping bitter all over one of his trouserlegs. He shouted out in disapproval.

  ‘What yer gonna do abaht it, granddad?’ one of them jeered, and the others made threatening faces as they crowded round the table.

  ‘Nothing whatsoever,’ replied Holmes with dignity, and rose, adding, ‘We were just leaving.’ Nodding to Garden, he led the way to the door upstairs, the route to relative sanity.

  ‘Why are we going up now?’ asked Garden. ‘It’s twenty-five minutes before we’re supposed to meet.’

  ‘The last thing I need tonight is a pub punch-up. It may still be early, but they looked like they’d been there since lunchtime, and I’m not used to it being this crowded and rowdy. I normally drop in mid-week, when it’s relatively quiet.’ Garden noticed a slight flicker of fear in Holmes’ eyes, and wisely kept his mouth shut. If Holmes had been a local government officer before, he was hardly likely to be the sort of person who would welcome a ruck, with fists and feet and foul language.

  They climbed the narrow flight of stairs in silence. At the top, Holmes threw open the door almost as a gesture of defiance to those bullies downstairs, then stopped dead in his tracks and allowing Garden, who was miles away, mentally considering a new pair of stilettos, to cannon into his back.

  ‘What the heck?’ he exclaimed, but Holmes was as frozen in position as an ice-statue, for which it had seemed cold enough outside. ‘Holmes, what is it?’

  Holmes’ body slumped, and he stood aside so that Garden could see into the room. In the chair usually occupied by the chairman was the figure of Cyril Antony, obviously dead, but he was only identifiable because of his rotundity. A sheet of A4 was stuffed into the top of his waistcoat. They approached his body, both on tiptoes, as if they could in some way disturb his slumbers, and looked down on the earthly shell of this one-time troublemaker.

  There was a deerstalker on his head, but back-to-front, so that the back concealed his features from view. On his actual body, there were no signs of deadly assault. Reaching out one leather-gloved hand – quick thinking, mused Garden silently – Holmes moved up the deerstalker to reveal a restriction cutting into the victim’s neck, its ends sticking out on either side, a small coloured-cotton circle on one end.

  ‘By George! That’s a violin string, if I’m not mistaken,’ uttered Holmes in hushed tones. ‘The man’s been garrotted.’

  Garden looked warily around the room, but with the exception of a couple of full jugs and plates of food, there was nothing untoward about the place. ‘But we’re the first to arrive – apart from him, of course. What was his name again?’

  ‘Cyril Antony,’ replied Holmes automatically, then added, ‘And we can’t have been the first to arrive after him, unless he garrotted himself, which I think is doubtful, given all the difficulties that that would present.’

  Garden flushed, and bent his head to hide his embarrassment at this unconsidered remark. ‘I suppose we ought to raise the alarm: call the police – or at least get the landlord to do so.’

  ‘Not until we’ve had a good prowl around here first,’ replied Holmes, and Garden almost expected him to get out a magnifying glass. ‘And I’m going to start with this sheet of paper shoved, apparently carelessly, into his clothing.’

  ‘But, surely you shouldn’t disturb the crime scene,’ advised Garden, slightly too late.

  ‘I’m wearing gloves, and I can always shove it back later. I’m sure it wasn’t inserted in an easily identifiable origami-style way. Who’s to know, if we don’t tell ’em?’

  Realising the common sense of this remark, Garden looked over the shorter Holmes’ shoulder as the older man smoothed out the sheet of paper, to reveal the title page of ‘A Study in Cerise’, the short story that the victim had tried to read to them at the last meeting.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blowed!’ said Holmes with a strange harrumphing noise. ‘Somebody took even less kindly to his little venture into Holmesian literature than we did.’

  ‘Put it back, and let’s get downstairs and alert someone to call the police. It won’t look good if we don’t. They’ll think we’re somehow involved if we call them on my mobile,’ this last a possession he hadn’t mentioned when he had cited phoning his mother as an excuse to go home after the last meeting, and which Holmes had forgotten about, as he wasn’t yet used to such up-to-date technology.

  The older man may have bought state-of-the-art computers for their offices, but he still wasn’t comfortable with a smart-phone, and Garden reckoned he would have been happier with the really old-fashioned candlestick version of a landline. That was, somehow, more his style, as he managed to have about him a vaguely Edwardian atmosphere, completely in keeping with his apartment. Even his kitchen white goods were housed behind solid wood cupboard doors, away from prying twenty-first century eyes.

  The mention of the police didn’t infuriate Holmes as Garden thought it might do, and he supposed that it was his own way of dealing with the shock of sudden death, to keep his lip zipped about meeting DI Streeter again.

  After a quick look round the room where nothing seemed out of place, not even the dust on the window ledges, Holmes followed Garden back down to the ground floor, and Holmes sought out the landlord, Greg Wordsworth, and his wife, Tilly. ‘A literary-named landlord for a literary-themed pub,’ he quipped, while they waited at the bar hatch in the saloon bar, the pub still retaining both saloon and public bars, along with the snug, instead of the open-plan layout of many pubs nowadays.

  Wordsworth had said that Sherlock Holmes would turn in his grave if he threw the pub into one big open bar, and, at the time, Sherman Holmes actually wondered if he realised that their Sherlock was only a fictional character.

  The two of them were in the back, where they were enjoying a bite to eat after the initial Friday rush, and joined them on the other side of the bar in less than a minute, Holmes having a
ssured the barman that the matter was urgent.

  Holmes beckoned towards the big, bluff man to lean over so he could whisper in his ear. ‘What’s this, Holmes?’ the landlord asked in his ringing public school tones – God knew what he was doing running a place like this with the implied background of his accent – ‘a naughty joke not for the ladies’ ears, eh?’

  Holmes, caught off-guard, began to bluster, and it was Garden who took positive action, lifting the bar flap and propelling Holmes through it, and all four of them through the door into the back parlour. Wordsworth began to protest, but Garden cut him off with, ‘There’s a dead man upstairs, and you need to call the police as soon as possible and stop anyone else from going up there so that the crime scene is preserved.’ This did embarrass him a bit when he thought how Holmes had interfered with it, but he managed to swallow that, and stare the man in the eye with grim determination.

  Holmes kept his calm visibly at the thought of tangling with the police so soon after what he was now beginning to think of as ‘the ghastly incident’.

  Wordsworth visibly gulped and his ruddy face went pale. He was a tall man with a haystack of naturally blond hair, pale blue eyes, and a burgeoning belly, grown from his occupation as a pub landlord. His wife was an incongruous sight beside him, a tiny woman with the build of a sparrow, and unnaturally bright red hair, her face plastered with far too much make-up. How those two had ever got together was one of life’s mysteries.

  It was his wife who recovered her power of speech first. ‘Who the bloody hell is it, and what the hell are they doin’ upstairs, dead, in my pub? I want answers.’ She was certainly fiery.

  ‘I have no idea, madam, but I suggest you call the police’ – he nearly choked on the word – ‘without further ado, and we can discuss the whys and the wherefores later. You need to get someone on the door at the bottom of the stairs without delay, or the police might not be very impressed with your attitude to what is, evidently, a murder,’ stated Holmes.