The Patient's Eyes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes by David Pirie

Author:David Pirie [Pirie, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 1933648430
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2007-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

THE REANIMATOR’S CODE

At least Cullingworth was required, along with the rest of us, to make a long statement to the police. I am sure Warner hoped he would find some charge to bring. But there was nothing. Cullingworth had taken care to have no dealings with the police directly so he had never lied to them. His hire of the body was a cruel liberty, but he had paid the seaman’s bereaved sister over the odds through a lawyer. At every turn his money helped him to escape punishment and to my great disgust at the end of the day he walked out of that police station with a reprimand, which I am sure the man took to be a compliment.

Later Bell and I walked on the front to clear our heads. ‘It is just the nerve of the man,’ I said. ‘To think I once liked and trusted him. Is it true you said he was remarkable?’

‘I referred only to the development of his egotism. If his medical skills had kept pace, he could have been a legend.’

I stopped. We had come to a low flight of steps that gave on to the beach.

The Doctor knew quite well that, after what happened in Edinburgh, I had always hated beaches. He turned away tactfully and we started to walk back to my house in silence. ‘Remember,’ he said very quietly after a moment. ‘There has been some progress, especially with regard to Chicago, though we still have a long way to go.’

‘I hardly call it progress,’ I said. But neither of us continued the discussion. Indeed, it is almost all we said of it during his stay.

There is an awful inevitability in the way one memory triggers another. As we walked back through the streets to my practice, I was powerless to stop them flooding back. Once again I saw in my mind the image of that small upstairs room. In itself that room might once have been ordinary enough but for me it has long seemed one of the most horrible in the world, my own gateway to hell. As I raced up the stairs and into it on that awful night in Edinburgh the first thing I saw was that a fire of newspapers was burning on the hearth in front of the grate. The flames sent flickering shadows dancing around the walls and added to the hellish effect of the place. The flames also picked out a glass jam jar, which lay beside the bed and contained something crimson.

A woman I had seen once before lay on the bed, which was sticky and wet with a clear yet viscous liquid that later I realised was chloroform. Her nightdress had been jaggedy slashed as if by a knife but, not seeing the smaller cuts, she appeared untouched. She was certainly breathing. It took a little while before I saw the second slash in her nightdress below her waist and the redness under it. Yet this was merely another deceit.

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