The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes by Donald Thomas

Author:Donald Thomas [Thomas, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9781605983523
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Voice from the Crypt:

The Case of the

Talking Corpse

I

Of all the problems submitted to Sherlock Holmes in the years of our friendship, there were few indeed where I was the means of introducing the case to his notice. There was certainly no other experience of mine to compare with a series of grotesque murders which afflicted Lambeth and the shabby areas of the Waterloo Road in the final decade of the last century.

Holmes was wont to argue that the eccentricity or singularity of a criminal is always a clue. Conversely, ‘The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.’ There was no lack of eccentricity or singularity in the present investigation. The apparent lunacy of the murderer led him to correspond cheerfully with Scotland Yard, offering to solve the mysteries for money, if the police themselves could not do so.

Our antagonist also appeared to possess a gang of assistants, all as mad as he—and women were among his accomplices. It even seemed we might be wrong in supposing the actual killer and tormentor of the fair sex to be a man! May not a woman have a grudge against the poor creatures of the street? With so much singularity, if Holmes was right in his hypothesis, such maniacs should have been easy enough to catch. Unfortunately, a long passage of time was to prove otherwise.

Let me begin at the beginning. One fateful Saturday evening, I had arrived at Waterloo Station after an informal reunion of several old friends. We had served together in the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers, during the Afghan campaign a dozen years before. Fowler, Osborne, Scott, and I had been subalterns in the draught that was sent up from the depot at Peshawur to the forward encampment of Khandahar. My own military career was short and inglorious. I was detached to the Berkshire regiment for the coming battle of Maiwand, where a Jezail bullet shattered the bone of my shoulder and grazed the subclavial artery. Nor was that the worst. At the base hospital of Peshawur, I was first a convalescent from my wound and then, more dangerously, a victim of enteric fever. How I came home an invalid and made my first acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes is described in my account of the Brixton Road murder, made public under the somewhat sensational title of A Study in Scarlet.

More than ten years later, in the mess at Aldershot, the four of us talked much of these things. As I returned from that convivial luncheon, it was as if the gullies and bare mountain ridges of Afghanistan rather than the tenements and warehouses of Nine Elms and the Waterloo Road rose before my eyes. The sound of the well-lit trains thundering into the great terminus under fiery pillars of steam might have been distant salvoes of our artillery covering the withdrawal to Jellalabad.

I walked out of the great railway terminus into a drizzling October evening, the gaslights of the busy street flickering and shining on the wet cobbles.

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