Sherlock Holmes and the Copycat Murders (Jerry eBooks) by Barry Day

Author:Barry Day [Day, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

“Well, Sherlock, now that we have indulged you in your own version of theatre, perhaps you will be good enough to indulge us by filling in some of the gaps in our understanding of recent events?”

It was Mycroft, his usual composure completely restored, booming from the depths of the chimney corner. Lestrade had gone off with the local police to ensure that his prisoner was placed safely under lock and key. Brotherton had been restored to his own home, where his housekeeper repeatedly insisted that his bedraggled condition was the clear consequence of going out without his warm gloves.

The landlord and his wife had evinced no apparent surprise that a second ‘Mr. Baskerville’ had replaced the first and appeared happy to answer to the name of ‘Holmes’. Presumably they put it down to the inscrutable ways of these barbaric southerners.

The dog, his graze cleansed and bandaged by my own fair hands—in the absence of an available local vet—was now snoring comfortably in front of the fire, its head resting proprietorially on my left foot.

“The general drift was always clear to me, of course,” the elder Holmes continued. I could, had I chosen to, taken issue with him on that assertion but I decided not to. His speciality, after all, was supposed to be omniscience. “I assume the ball of thread began to unravel when I alerted you to the doings of SAGS?”

“Even earlier than that, brother mine, but not by much.” He paused to light his favourite briar. Your warning simply brought a certain coherence to various rumblings I was hearing from what I might term the undergrowth of the underworld. The Irregulars . . .”—he was referring to the Baker Street Irregulars, his loyal troop of urchins who, by virtue of their appearance and youth, could flit undetected through places where an adult would draw attention—“had been bringing me an increasing number of reports of unusual comings and goings on the part of certain suspicious individuals, people who normally were unconnected but suddenly seemed to have acquired common interests. And in many of these transactions the names of McDoum and von Bork recurred with monotonous regularity. Your briefing merely provided the magnet that attracted the iron filings to a common centre.

“Unfortunately, my attention attracted their attention. The people with whom we are dealing are formidably organised, gentlemen, and—as we have seen—entirely ruthless. I flatter myself they saw my possible intervention as, at the very least, an impediment to their grand plan—with which you, Mycroft, had been good enough to make me somewhat familiar. Hence their decision to use the one man who might credibly discredit Sherlock Holmes . . .”

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“Thank you, old fellow. Modesty would have prevented me from completing the thought. Yes, if they could persuade the powers that be that someone they had reason to trust implicitly had either been suborned or turned rogue elephant, at the very least they could create a distraction for an administration that can hardly be said to be united on this or any other issue of the day.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.