Sherlock Holmes - The Stuff of Nightmares by Lovegrove James

Author:Lovegrove, James [Lovegrove, James]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781781165423
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2013-08-19T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE LAW IS AN ASSET

Cauchemar led us to an adjoining chamber, not as large but no less cluttered. If what we had been in was an armoury-cum-workshop, what we were now in was a hub, a centre of operations, a campaign headquarters. Maps of London were tacked to the walls, along with diagrams of the sewers and underground railway lines and rivers and all the other subterranean features of the city. Newspapers lay piled high on the floor, and clippings from them were pinned to display boards. The articles were exclusively devoted to crime and criminals, providing names and pictures of the city’s most notorious villains and the dates and locations of their misdeeds. There were bookcases on which sat Dr Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and other criminological case studies, alongside bound editions of the Proceedings Of The Old Bailey and The Illustrated Police News. Cauchemar took his vocation seriously, then, pursuing it with the thoroughness of a scholar.

Overhanging the centre of the room was an agglomeration of wires. Dozens of them were gathered in thick sheaves that ran down from the ceiling, drawing together like strands of a web. All of them fed into the back of a large brass teleprinter, which was chattering away diligently, producing coil upon coil of paper tape.

As Holmes’s gaze alighted on this, he let out a small cry of pleasure.

“Oh, this is very clever,” he said, gesturing at the teleprinter. “Bravo, Cauchemar, you cunning fellow. You have, if I’m not mistaken, spliced into London’s telegraphy network and secretly run a wire off each of the principal cables.”

“I have.” Cauchemar sounded both proud and bashful. “I am able to eavesdrop on every single message transmitted along the wires. It is an invaluable resource. Any telegram that gets sent, I automatically receive a copy of it, and no one is any the wiser. Sorting through them is another matter, though. Thousands of these communications zip back and forth each day, more than one man could hope to read and digest. To that end, I have made various adaptations to the teleprinter, guided in part by the tabular-computational principles of Babbage’s difference engine.”

“Elucidate.”

“I have installed a mechanism which is set to recognise the letter-patterns of certain words and phrases – I call them ‘key words’. Most messages pass through the system unremarked and are not printed. Only those containing pertinent or suggestive terms get singled out for me to study. I can even block them from passing on to their destination, if I wish, although I have done that rarely – in fact only once. The machine is like a prospector in the Klondike, sifting through the stream-bed gravel for nuggets of gold.”

“Heavens above,” I said. “No wonder you routinely turn up in your armour as crimes are being committed.”

“Criminals, even the less sophisticated representatives of that species, are known to organise their schemes and recruit accomplices via telegram,” said Holmes. “Scotland Yard also conveys many of its instructions the same way.”

“A valuable source of tip-offs,” said Cauchemar.

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