Sherlock Holmes and the Four Corners of Hell by Séamus Duffy

Author:Séamus Duffy [Duffy, Séamus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719814990
Goodreads: 23398367
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 2015-04-30T10:15:41+00:00

The Adventure of the Edmonton Horror

Throughout my many years of acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes I can recall, from more than a hundred of his adventures (to which he referred, with characteristic self-effacement, as ‘my trifling achievements’), a small number of cases which stretched beyond the merely strange and seemed, perhaps, to have bordered on the supernatural: none more so than that which is recorded in my notes for the year 1897. It was a particular facet of Holmes’s character that whenever he was presented with a problem of this sort, he would scathingly dismiss, a priori, any suggestion of supernatural cause or influence and seek, instead, natural explanations. He also bore a remarkable capacity for gallows humour, or what the French call rire jaune: ‘no ghosts need apply,’ he had once told me with marked sarcasm. However, once my friend had become acquainted with the details of the affair which Inspector Wills of the Middlesex Constabulary called one day in late autumn to lay before us, even his agnosticism towards the supernatural was at first somewhat shaken. It was undoubtedly one of the strangest beginnings to any of the cases I had ever come across, the outlandish features of which resulted in the wildest speculation in the London press at the time.

At that point in my life, I had retired from regular practice and had gone back to my old quarters in Baker Street. October had been an unusually quiet month, and the brief hiatus in my friend’s consulting work allowed him to labour without interruption on the completion of a number of monographs upon which he was engaged; namely, the provincial accents and dialects of the English language, and a paper on the history of bee-keeping to be presented to the British Apiary Society. I recall that it was the first day of November and the onset of chills and fogs had arrived with perfect seasonality. Holmes was generally immune to the state of the weather, but on this occasion he was in one of his more cantankerous moods – the reason for which will soon become apparent. He could be as capricious as a woman and twice as cutting, and I should have said that I was a fair judge. We had just consumed a most excellent lunch and sat musing over the postprandial coffee. As I glanced over the newspapers, Holmes began to pore over the midday post which lay unopened whilst we had attacked the dish of devilled kidneys prepared by Mrs Hudson.

‘A rather mixed bag today,’ he muttered to me, as the maid finished clearing away the crockery. ‘I feel like the poacher’s wife in the fable; you know, the one who discovered the trout in the rabbit traps and the pheasant on the hook at the end of the fishing line. I believe this is your doing, Watson,’ he continued, looking up sharply as he indicated the object of his attention. ‘How often have I railed against your meretricious treatment of my métier? See

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