Sherlock Holmes and The Shakespeare Globe Murders (Jerry eBooks) by Barry Day

Author:Barry Day [Day, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2014-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

And so to London, my mind searching through the clues for the murderer’s identity. And now we had it: “Phippd Yes! Well, that settles things, surely. He must be our man?”

“Oh, Phipps is our man, certainly, but not the man. The second of the ‘three’. As we saw in the death of Fiske, he is most certainly involved, though I would guess against his will. No, Watson, he is the puppet but someone else is pulling his strings. It’s the puppet master I want and I mean to have him.”

“Phipps, Dame Ivy and the mysterious A N Other, eh?”

“That’s right ‘We three’. The clue was right there in the very first quotation we received from the ‘paperboy’ but I was too self-absorbed to see it. Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to edit that fact from the account of this adventure that I feel sure you will write? You remember the line—‘We three, to hear it and end it between them’? In my arrogance I assumed the writer was creating in his mind some sort of trinity between himself and the two of us, when what he meant—in his arrogance—was the three of them. He was laying down the gauntlet, challenging us to stop them. To do that, of course, we must first identify them.”

“At least we’ve got two of them,” I said encouragingly. “All we have to do now is find the murderer.”

“Good old Watson,” Holmes laughed as we descended from the cab that had brought us the short distance from Paddington and I turned to pay the cabbie. “It never fails to amaze me how well balanced we are. I invariably see the cup as almost empty, whereas you persist in seeing it as almost full! You are quite right, of course—we are making progress, if only by a process of elimination and we do have the ball of yam in our hands that will lead us through the maze to the lair of the Minotaur. What we grievously lack is time. Which is why we must take a shortcut”

As we were in our room and hanging up our coats, he continued . . .“There is one basic flaw in the argument you were propounding just now. In all likelihood we do not have a murderer because we do not have a murder . . .”

“What on earth do you mean, Holmes” I expostulated, “What about poor old Fiske?”

“Oh, Fiske was ‘murdered’ in every moral sense of the word, no doubt about that. The intention was clearly there. But in reality what killed Fiske was the abuse of his physical condition—encouraged by the ‘murderer’—and the absence of the substance that would have been the antidote. Fiske in essence killed himself—with someone else holding his hand. I can hear a defence lawyer using those very arguments on behalf of whoever we put in the dock.”

“Well, then, there was the attack on young Allan . . .”

“Was there? I wonder. You know my suspicions. In any case, that will never come to court.

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