The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Dr Jekyll & Mr Holmes (9 page)

Dawn was a pale promise over the harbour when Hyde emerged from his final haunt and, after boarding the waiting hansom, turned his face westward once again. Holmes, who had been waiting with me inside the four-wheeler across the street, rapped softly upon the roof and we jolted off in his wake. We had held him in sight for several hundred yards when he turned a corner and disappeared behind an ancient brick edifice. By the time we rounded that same corner the street was deserted.

‘Look alive, cabby,’ Holmes hissed. ‘He may have swung into a side-turning.’

But he had not. We proceeded at a walk for the length of the thoroughfare, at the end of which we found ourselves looking up and down a cross-street and finding no sign of the hansom which we had been pursuing. At length Holmes sighed and directed the driver to take us back to Baker Street.

On the way there, Holmes sat with brows drawn and lips compressed, saying nothing. Deciding that this state of mind was doing him more ill than good, I endeavoured to say something reassuring. I had barely begun to speak when he uttered a sudden exclamation and struck his knee with the heel of his hand.

‘Fool!’ he cried. ‘Charlatan!’

I stared at him, wondering what I had done to arouse his ire upon this occasion. He ignored me, leant his head outside of his window, and barked a harsh order to the driver. Immediately a whip cracked, our pace quickened, and we sped round the kerb on two wheels, throwing both of us into my corner of the vehicle.

Holmes’s eyes (he had torn off the black patch) were agleam, staring intently at the street ahead. ‘What an imbecile I have been, Watson! I trust that the account which you have been threatening to write about the grisly business at Lauriston Gardens will present me as the imperfect being that I am.’

‘I am afraid that I do not follow you.’ I had to raise my voice to be heard over the pounding of the horse’s hooves upon the pavement, and to hold onto my hat as the wind of our passage plucked at the brim. Gas lamps sped past at a dizzying rate, their illumination flickering inside the cab.

‘It is simplicity itself,’ said he. ‘After he had his fun with us back at the Red Goose, Hyde had been at no pain to throw us off his trail until a few moments ago. He has not attempted to conceal from us his unsavoury appetites; if anything, he has been flaunting them in our faces. He knows that we know where he lives. Why, then, has he chosen to lose us in this manner? After we have eliminated all of the impossibilities, there is but one place left to which he can be heading, a place with which he does not wish us to know that he has any connexion.’

‘Dr. Jekyll’s!’

‘Precisely! The curious link which binds the disreputable young hedonist to the respected doctor is the one thing which he chooses not to dangle before us. He must know that we are aware of its existence, and yet it is something he would rather we forgot. But here we are, and there is the evidence which we seek. Stop here, cabby!’

We halted near a dreary block of buildings which fronted upon a narrow street within a stone’s throw of one of London’s busiest sectors, just in time to see a hansom rattling off from in front of it and a stunted, top-hatted, and cloaked figure ducking through a squat door into the building.

‘That, unless we have been mis-led, is the entrance to the dissecting-room of Dr. Henry Jekyll,’ Holmes remarked. ‘There sits our mystery, Watson. What brings him here at this hour? Money, or perhaps the urge to gloat over his night’s activities in the presence of his respectable benefactor?’ His lips were drawn tight beneath the grotesque makeup. ‘There is wickedness afoot here, Doctor, as obvious as that fog which is rolling in from the east. But there is nothing further to be gained here, at least not at the moment. Let us retrace our steps to Baker Street before that constable who is eyeing us too closely from the corner makes up his mind to arrest us for being suspicious persons.’

‘I fear that I am out of my depth,’ said I when we were back beneath our own roof, inadequately illuminated by the rising sun struggling to penetrate the encroaching fog outside the window. ‘Why should Hyde wish to keep secret his relationship with Dr. Jekyll, when he is so bold about his other interests?’

Holmes lit a cigarette and warmed his hands before the fire. ‘That is the pertinent question which faces us, and I do not think that I am exaggerating when I say that the answer will go a long way towards solving our little problem. The puzzle is nearly complete; we lack but one piece. Now that Hyde has declared his enmity, there is only one man in all of London who is in a position to supply us with what we need.’

‘I think I know whom you mean, but would not going to him necessitate breaking your word to Utterson?’

‘Not at all. The credit ruse worked once; there is no reason to suspect that it will not prove successful a second time. If it should not — well, my promise to Utterson was that as long as it is in my power to keep the gentleman in the dark he would remain so. The situation now is such that I can no longer avoid a course of action which from the start was obviously the only practical one.’ He straightened and threw his cigarette-end into the fire. ‘And now, Watson, I prescribe a thorough application of soap and water and then bed. It has been a long night for the both of us, and we must be fresh and alert this afternoon when we call upon a quarter of a million pounds sterling.’

U
TTERSON
C
HANGES
H
IS
M
IND

T
he contrast between the stately dwelling in which Henry Jekyll lived and practised and the decaying structure round the corner into which we had seen Hyde vanish early that morning was startling; set back from the street, the building was separated from it by a strip of grass as smooth and green as the surface of a billiard table, with conical bushes spaced about the grounds in a manner reflecting the skill of a gardener who had spent years perfecting his art. Ivy clung to the red brick walls and shaded the spacious, sparkling windows, completing the atmosphere of a pleasant country home nestled incongruously within the bosom of the foul city. It was difficult to believe that a single piece of architecture could present two such diverse faces to the world, and yet one had but to walk a few steps to become convinced of the duplicity.

The butler who answered Sherlock Holmes’s ring was of a type to match that part of the building before which we stood. Tall, elderly, with a great shock of snow-white hair and a thin face nearly as pale, he bore in his expression and carriage the proud yet humble air of one who is accustomed to serving, and who does so exceedingly well. He accepted between thumb and forefinger the card with which Holmes presented him, lifted it gingerly to within an inch of his watery blue eyes, and held it there far longer than it took to read the single name which was engraved upon it. Finally he lowered it and, after asking us in a surprisingly vibrant voice to step inside and wait, collected our hats, coats, and sticks, turned, and walked silently across the flag-paved room and through a pair of panelled doors. He slid them shut behind him with no more sound than one might make in drawing a breath.

The room in which we waited was less than cavernous, though what it lacked in breadth it more than made up for in the luxury of its appointments. Tasteful curtains muted the light filtering in through the windows. An excellent bust of Goethe done in flawless marble stood unobtrusively atop a pedestal in one corner, at the far end of a row of four solid-looking wooden and satin-upholstered chairs lined up with their rounded backs against the wall to our right. That wall and the one opposite sported the same number of oil paintings in matching gilt frames, which looked familiar; I stared at them for some time before I realised that they were executed in the same style as the one which we had seen hanging in Hyde’s rooms. A gift, perhaps, from his unlikely benefactor?

‘“Impressive” hardly suffices,’ said Holmes — echoing, as was sometimes his wont, the very word which had just that moment come into my mind, ‘the paintings number among Degas’s best, and those chairs are Louis XIV. Three of them are, at any rate; the fourth is a copy, though a very good one. I should say that the good doctor is a lover of life, torn between the awesome responsibilities of his profession and station and a definite preference for the forbidden. Louis XIV represents stability and respectability, Degas adventure and risk. A blackmailer could ask for no better combination in a victim.’

He seemed about to say more when the doors glided open again and the butler returned.

‘Dr. Jekyll will see you now.’

We were led through the doors and down a short, amply-windowed hallway to a plain door at the end, upon which he rapped softly. A muffled voice from within bade him enter. He did so, remained long enough to announce us, and, after stepping aside to allow us entrance, withdrew, drawing the door shut behind him.

We were in a study, three walls of which, save for the door, were lined from floor to ceiling with handsomely-bound volumes of every thickness — most of which, from the well-worn appearance of their spines, were there for use rather than for display. Most bore medical and scientific titles, some were legal in nature, but I noted a set of Goethe’s works in the original German reposing upon a shelf not far from the door, reaffirming his apparent interest in the great poet. The one wall which was not covered with books — that which faced the door — was dominated by a pair of French windows which opened out upon a small open-air foyer paved with flags and overgrown with rosebushes. But for the grey hulk of a stone building rising ghost-like from the fog a dozen yards beyond, we might have been visiting a country estate miles from London.

‘Sherlock Holmes,’ pondered the man who came forward to greet us from behind a huge French Empire desk which stood before the windows. ‘I don’t think that I know the name.’ They clasped hands.

‘But I have certainly heard of you, Dr. Jekyll,’ said my friend. ‘Allow me to introduce Dr. Watson, one of your own colleagues.’

I accepted the doctor’s firm handshake. He was a tall man, nearly as tall as Holmes himself, and remarkably well built for a man of fifty. He had a well-chiselled face and crisp blue eyes, in contrast to his manservant’s watery orbs of the same colour, and his wavy chestnut hair was silvered at the temples in a way which most men hope to emulate as old age approaches but few do. His face was broad but not coarse, clean-shaven, and distinctive for its high cheekbones, well-shaped nose, and wide, sculpted mouth. If anyone could look like a quarter of a million pounds sterling, Henry Jekyll succeeded down to the last twopence. I was surprised, however, to note that he was still in his dressing gown, it being close upon two o’clock in the afternoon; but as a scientist he may have been accustomed, as was Holmes, to working upon chemical experiments into the small hours of the morning and to rising late in the day, and so I thought no more about it. Indeed, there was a purplish tint beneath his eyes and a general wanness about his appearance that seemed to bear out that hypothesis.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?’ he asked Holmes.

‘I understand that you are familiar with a person who calls himself Edward Hyde,’ began Holmes. His manner had undergone an abrupt change from cordial to cold. There was in addition something official in his tone, not unlike that assumed by the blustering Scotland Yard detectives with whom he was accustomed to sparring.

‘May I ask why you wish to know this?’

For all Jekyll’s seeming forthrightness, his attitude seemed false, as though he had known in advance the question which my friend was going to ask. He was newly risen, however, and since there was no visible reason for it, I put the impression down to deadened senses and left it at that.

‘Hyde has expressed interest in a small parcel of property outside of London,’ my friend explained smoothly. ‘He left your name as a reference. We have been engaged by the seller to interview you concerning his ability to pay the sum discussed.’

‘I see.’ The doctor turned his back upon us to gaze out the window. ‘It is curious that a realtor would engage a third party to conduct such an interview when he could just as well do it himself.’

‘There is a substantial sum involved. Our client wishes to take no chances. When your roof leaks, you hire a carpenter to repair it.’

Jekyll made no rejoinder.

‘You are acquainted with the gentleman?’ Holmes repeated.

‘I am.’

‘May I ask in what capacity?’

‘We are friends.’

‘How long have you known each other?’

‘A year, I think. Perhaps longer.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance.’

‘May I enquire as to the name of the acquaintance?’

‘You may not.’

‘Very well.’ The detective nodded his acquiescence.

‘When was the last time you and Hyde saw each other?’

‘I think that I have answered enough questions.’ Jekyll turned from the window. His blue eyes were cold as ice. ‘You, sir, are a contemptible liar!’ he exploded. ‘Your client is not whom you say he is, and Hyde has no interests outside of London. I do not know what you hoped to gain through this charade, but I certainly do not intend to help you. Poole!’ He yanked at the bell-cord which hung over the desk.