Sherlock Holmes - the Labyrinth of Death by James Lovegrove

Author:James Lovegrove
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Crime, General, Mystery & Detective, Fiction
ISBN: 9781785653377
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2017-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

DEPTHS OF DECEPTION

During the next few days Holmes’s career experienced one of its periodic lulls. After the roaring tempests of the previous week he found himself in the doldrums. No clients called. No telegram came from Scotland Yard requesting urgent consultation. This ebb and flow of cases – feast followed by famine – was typical, but the discrepancy between the one and the other was seldom so marked as then.

London simmered in the midsummer heat and Holmes quietly stewed in our rooms, falling into that lassitude of body and spirit that habitually plagued him when his brain was not occupied. He smoked incessantly and indulged in his cocaine habit, pipe alternating with syringe. He scarcely moved from his armchair and ate only the bare minimum to stave off starvation. The nearest he got to any form of activity was gazing out of the window with a wistful, almost forlorn air, as though willing some passer-by or cab to halt at the front door.

I, meanwhile, was on tenterhooks. I busied myself with my rounds, such as they were. I listened as attentively as I could to my patients’ litanies of woe and ministered to their needs with all the skill that was mine to summon. Yet my mind was always at least partly elsewhere, down in the bosky folds of Dorset, imagining what Hannah Woolfson was up to and wishing I could be there to look after her. She might have found an ally in Dr Pentecost, but he could never be as steadfast a champion as I would have been, nor as willing a one.

Each evening I came home hoping for a new missive from Hannah. I would enter an apartment so fogged with tobacco smoke that it seemed a London particular had taken up exclusive residence in our rooms. I would attempt to rouse Holmes from his torpor, fail, and console myself that if Hannah’s letter had come during my absence he would surely be more enlivened than he was. Then I would change into evening dress and venture forth alone in search of diversion, to a West End theatre or else to a gaming club where faro and hazard were played.

Such was the pattern of my existence for four days, broken on the fifth by the arrival of the much-anticipated letter. It came by first post, and I demanded that Holmes unseal the envelope even before he and I had embarked upon breakfast. With an insouciant smile, he obliged.

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