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

Author:David Marcum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sherlock holmes, mystery, crime, british crime, sherlock holmes fiction, sherlock holmes novel, sherlock holmes short fiction, undershaw
ISBN: 9781787052031
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2017
Published: 2017-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Manor House Ghost

by S. Subramanian

“I am glad to meet you, sir,” said [Mycroft Holmes], putting out a broad, fat hand like the flipper of a seal. “I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler. By the way, Sherlock, I expected to see you round last week to consult me over that Manor House case. I thought you might be a little out of your depth.”

“No, I solved it,” said my friend, smiling.

“It was Adams, of course.”

“Yes, it was Adams.”

– “The Greek Interpreter”, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Readers who have followed my accounts of the cases of Sherlock Holmes may recall that the conversation reported above was the first occasion I ever had of meeting my remarkable friend’s even more remarkable brother, Mycroft Holmes, the younger man’s senior by some seven years. The meeting took place at the Diogenes Club, located not far from the Carlton in Pall Mall, a club created for the exclusive membership of London’s most eccentric misanthropes, among whose numbers Mycroft Holmes counted himself. The elder Holmes was an official at Whitehall from where he orchestrated the government’s most delicate operations of diplomacy and international political relations, conducted, for the most part, in the secret world, and under cover of the murky shadows of intrigue and espionage. In the younger brother’s candid estimation, the older was the most astute exponent of the art of scientific deduction and inferential logic he had ever known, but one whose sedentary occupation, coupled with his natural predisposition to laziness and the private comforts of a life without physical exertion or social intercourse, often left him with little scope for the exercise of his remarkable mental faculties, save only when he could enthuse himself sufficiently to engage in the undemanding pursuit of armchair reasoning.

My first acquaintance with the Diogenes Club and Mycroft Holmes, described by Sherlock Holmes as “two curiosities”, of which the first was “the queerest club in London” and the second was “one of the queerest men”, happened on a lovely summer evening of the year ‘88, and was the starting point of that singular train of events which I have described elsewhere under the heading of “The Greek Interpreter”. The case, readers may recall, was a demanding one which tested my friend’s powers of deduction to the hilt. Somehow, in the course of the exertions called forth by the investigation, I succeeded in forgetting the teasing allusion to “the Manor House case” that had cropped up in the exchange between my friend and his brother. It did come back to me later, and I often taxed Holmes with the demand for a detailed account of the matter. Because of his commitment to his various clients and of mine to my various patients, we somehow did not get around to discussing the matter again at any length for some months, until, in early November of that year, Holmes brought it up again.

“Pshaw!” he said one morning, tossing aside the newspaper he had been reading.

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