The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories - Part IX by David Marcum

Author:David Marcum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sherlock holmes, mystery, crime, british crime, sherlock holmes fiction, sherlock holmes novel
ISBN: 9781787052826
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2018
Published: 2018-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

The Adventure of the Old Boys’ Club

by Shane Simmons

“The Diogenes Club. Do you know it?”

Word had come to me, as it often did, from one mouth on the street to the next. Smithy the Beggar, who worked one corner of Baker Street, told Jammer the Cripple, who held out his cup on another. Jammer passed word to Mick the Ratcatcher, who told Henrietta the Chicken-Plucker. And so on down the line, through a dozen different points of disinterest and twice as many working-class cast-offs that the greater London machine never looked at twice, until it arrived in my ear, the intended target. Sherlock Holmes wanted to see me at 221b immediately. The entire relay, from the moment his landlady had first passed on the summons to a neighbour, took less than ten minutes. I was standing at attention, hat in hand, in his rooms in twelve.

“Wiggins,” he said, “you are precisely thirty seconds late.”

“Sorry, Mr. Holmes,” I relied. “Perry was deep in a bottle last night and he’s having a slow morning.”

“Inform Perry the Rugbeater that if he delays my communication network again, he’ll have to buy his whisky without the aid of my weekly stipend.”

The breakdown in the relay was forgotten a moment later. That’s when Mr. Holmes brought up the Diogenes Club.

“Know it?” I echoed. “Well, sir, I know of it. Can’t say I’m a member in good standing, or that I’ve ever crossed the threshold in my life.”

“My brother, Mycroft, practically lives there,” said Mr. Holmes. “He’s slept in the reading-room armchairs more often than his own bed.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“I hardly know it myself, I see so little of him. That is how we prefer to maintain our familial ties. Nevertheless, our paths cross at certain junctures, and such a one has arrived today.”

He finished writing a note at his desk and folded the sheet over on itself several times.

“Give him this message,” he said, handing me the unsealed letter. “It is a call for his attention, most urgently required, on a matter of pressing importance.”

I took it and stuffed it down my deepest pocket so as it wouldn’t get lost.

“When he refuses - and he shall - give him this message,” added Mr. Holmes, and gave me a second folded note.

I found another pocket to carry this vital backup plan.

“We’ll see if that doesn’t compel him to crawl out of his cocoon of books and brandy and let the sun touch his flesh for the first time in weeks!”

“Once I collect him, where will we find you?” I asked.

“Mycroft will know. He will calculate it in an instant. To actually spell out the destination for him might be perceived as an insult, and an insulted Mycroft will not serve our cause well at all. Off you go!”

As fast as my feet could carry me - and fast it was - I beat a path through the back alleys and side streets.

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