Sherlock Holmes and the Missing Shakespeare (4 page)

Chapter Five:

A Candle in the Window

We arrived back at Baker Street with Holmes in a rare, frantic mood.

He raced up the stairs and into his study. He looked over the place carefully, knowing his housekeeper would have taken care not to disturb anything more than was necessary to establish what was missing. Despite his frantic mood, he looked like a bloodhound with his nose down, tracing the scent of his quarry. He scoured the place for any clue of who might have been there to relieve him of the precious manuscript.

“This was no ordinary heist I fear, Watson,” he remarked in the end. “Someone knew exactly what he was looking for and possibly even where it was to be found. He was in and out without leaving a single trace.”

“Not a trace?” I asked. “It’s quite impossible to have found no trace at all.”

“Indeed.” Holmes grimaced and plopped down into his chair. “There is no sign of the doors being forced, or the window. There are no footprints, nothing to suggest anyone’s presence in this room at all.”

“Then how did he do it?”

Holmes frowned and grumbled, “That, my dear Watson, is a mystery I would dearly like to solve at present.”

***

After having completed my rounds, I visited Holmes again the next morning only to find him balancing on the roof of the stables located behind his Baker Street residence.

“What, by Jove, are you doing up there, Holmes?” I exclaimed when I first spotted him there through the open window.

“Eureka!” he exclaimed in turn, before jumping for the window frame. He pulled himself up with a great effort and came into the house again. “Well, I have discovered the point of entry, Watson.”

“They came through this window via the stable roof?” asked I. The window was in an unlikely spot. Indeed, it took all of Holmes’s physical prowess to make the leap from the roof and pull himself into the house.

“Several roof tiles were out of place and there were markings on the window ledge. This window is often unlocked. The key word is ‘often.’”

I nodded. “Because sometimes it is locked, too.”

“Of course, Watson. After all, who better than we to know that crime is alive and well in London? Regardless, sometimes we are lazy, and I myself would never have guessed a thief to be so bold as to utilize this high window.”

“Did he get lucky?” asked I. “And come at the right time, when the window happened to be unlocked?”

Holmes cocked his head. There was sweat on his brow. I suspected he had been searching for clues all morning and afternoon. “Perhaps, perhaps not. A good thief would have ascertained when the window was left open, though it would have taken a long time of careful study to conclude which window would be left open, and at what time.”

I blinked. “How long?”

Holmes shrugged as he dusted himself off. “To thoroughly case this residence, to understand which windows might be left unlocked, and at what time, would require at least one week of careful study.” Holmes looked down at his big, now dirty hands with a displeased frown. He removed a clean handkerchief and begun rubbing his palms meticulously.

I gaped. “But that would be since the moment you were given the manuscript.”

“Indeed, my dear Watson.”

“The thief has been lying in wait this entire time?”

“It would appear so.” Holmes returned to the study and replaced the handkerchief with the meerschaum pipe, in which he began stuffing with tobacco. He lit it and sat down in his chair. “Of course, that would have required a veritable amount of determination to have spent a week looking over every part of this building to determine a way to enter unseen, to know where he could locate this document and how best to go about getting it without any circumvention,” he mused before taking a long pull on his pipe and blowing a big cloud of smoke toward the ceiling.

I took my usual seat and looked at him carefully. “Was there more than one person involved?”

“There was,” Holmes said. “A lookout surely. And I shall determine who played me this prank. Of all the criminal acts, the one I can least abide is the burglarizing of my own home.”

I could not help but grin at Holmes’s slightly conceited statement. “If there is anything I can do to help clarify this case, I will keep myself at your disposal.”

“That is very kind of you, my dear friend, but I fear we might not see each other for a short while.”

“Why would that be, Holmes?”

“As I shall have to travel in different circles and different places to get to the bottom of this.”

I spent the rest of the day in Holmes’s company, until such time as I knew the train from Newcastle would arrive. Then I sped to Paddington station to pick up my wife, leaving Holmes with only his cryptic description of what he would be undertaking.

With the ministering angel of domestic bliss back in residence, I returned to my normal schedule without ado. I went to look in on Holmes at Baker Street several times over the next few weeks, but I was told each time Holmes had not returned. It would be a month until I saw my friend again.

Chapter Six:

The Valet

“Hello, would you mind waiting a moment?” Holmes shouted at the tanned man who, in other circumstances, would not have been so conspicuous.

There were so many light-skinned servants in the city of London at the time that they practically went unnoticed for the most part. The trend of keeping on the exotic servants from the colonies had taken hold in the city as returning diplomats from India, the West Indies and merchants from the Americas brought their endeared house staff back to England with them.

He’d always thought it a product of their lingering taste for the exotic but would later realize the truth of the matter was that English servants of distinction had a tendency of being even more snobbish than the aristocrats they were used to serving. It struck him as being tremendously ironic.

Mr. Paul Kijumbe was just such one exotic servant brought to England by none other than Countess Mary Galham’s father after his safaris in Eastern Africa. He was a member of the coastal Swahili tribe from the village of Nyali near Mombasa. The ancestral intermarriages between the Swahili people and the Arabs who frequented Africa’s eastern coast had resulted in a population who bore striking resemblances to the quadroons and octoroons of the Southern regions of the American state of Louisiana.

As Kijumbe stood at the bar among his fellow valets and a few footmen from other distinguished London households, Holmes couldn’t help but overhear their conversation. Paul was quite boisterously describing some of the strange errands he ran for his current employer.

“As utterly bonkers as some of this stuff is, it sure does beat working for that stuffed shirt, Lord Sutton.”

A-ha!
Holmes thought.
I do believe I have you now!

He sat patiently in a corner of the public house sipping a single pint of Irish stout until I noticed the group begin to break up. They were mumbling about getting back below stairs ahead of the ringing of the evening gong. Quickly enough, Paul made his way to the door and out to the street. Holmes was close behind him.

“Hello, would you mind waiting a moment?” he called.

The man continued walking down the street, blatantly ignoring Holmes’s call for him to wait.

“Wait there! I have something I’d like to discuss with you! It’s related to a business venture and it would be worth your time, I swear!” he shouted again. Holmes believed the man’s name was Kijumbe and that he had a very good idea what happened to the Shakespeare manuscript which had been stolen from his flat.

The man turned into an alley which connected the street he was on to the next street over. The avenue was more crowded, and would allow the man to lose Holmes much faster. Holmes picked up his pace barreling into the entrance of the alley. In quick secession, several things happen all at once. Holmes had been about to take his next step when he suddenly found himself flat on his back; all the air had been struck from his lungs.

I should have expected that,
Holmes thought.

Before he could have another cognizant thought, the man he had been pursuing was straddling his chest, raining fists into Holmes’s ribs and face. Holmes planted his feet and thrust his hips upward; trying to buck the man off, but his assailant was an experienced fighter. He did not have his weight directly on Holmes’s chest. Instead, he was balanced on the balls of his feet to keep his weight forward and himself more stable. The position allowed him to react quickly when Holmes tried to throw him off, and that meant that Holmes was at a distinct disadvantage. The bucking motion, Homes had made, was intended to bring him to his feet; atop his assailant. However, since his assailant was able to rise and avoid all but a glancing blow from Holmes’s legs, the next punch he threw did double the damage. His fist slammed into Holmes’s face and the downward momentum of Holmes’s failed bucking move slammed his head into the cobblestones.

His vision blurred and he heard the man laughing. Holmes was not sure how, but he still maintained consciousness. He managed to land a kick to the inside of the assailant’s left knee, and the man buckled; his laughter became a grunt of pain. The man launched a haymaker at Holmes’s head, but Holmes managed to slide slightly out of the way. The fist connected with the cobblestones in a meaty crunch. Holmes knew that his assailant was more infuriated than ever.

This is not the time for honorable tactics
, thought the detective.

And thus, he brought his knee up into the man’s groin. The man’s grunt of pain turned into a high-pitched squeal. Holmes used the momentary distraction to slide out from underneath the man and shift in behind him, from where he delivered a punch to the back of the man’s head.

Holmes was now certain the man was Kijumbe; based on descriptions he had gathered. The man he believed was Kijumbe turned and flailed with a blind punch that Holmes deftly knocked aside. The problem with a blind punch, however, is that they are normally followed by a punch that is much more precise. This was no exception, and Holmes took Paul’s fist directly to the stomach. For the second time that day, Holmes had had the wind knocked out of him.

As he doubled up over his aching stomach, the man swung at his head again. Holmes turned, and felt the fist meant for his chin slide harmlessly down his cheek. The detective gathered himself and landed three swift punches to Paul’s face. Paul staggered upright and swayed uncertainly on his feet. He lurched toward Holmes, arms outstretched, and Holmes delivered a punishing uppercut to the man’s jaw. His feet, Holmes would swear till the last breath, left the ground and Paul landed flat on his back; with a whoosh and a crunch. He moved slightly and Holmes delivered an unforgiving heel kick to his jaw to finish him off.

***

A boy came rushing into my practice that evening, asking me to attend to a patient forthwith.

A man had collapsed in the street. As it was only two streets away from me, I was asked to attend to him. I immediately grabbed my bag and followed the boy toward the scene of the incident.

Arriving there, I found a small crowd of concerned citizens hovering over the fallen man, who lay on his side. I instantly crouched down beside the man and began examining him. I noticed no trauma or any mark that would explain his collapse, forcing me to conclude it had been illness or blood pressure to cause his collapse. I took his pulse and found he was alive, but not conscious.

At that moment, the boy pointed out the man who had sent him to seek me out. The man was a tall and thin, dressed in fine clothes, with large sideburns and a mustache. He had reddish hair, which was slightly longer than it should possibly have been to be entirely fashionable. But it was the eyes that betrayed him to me. I almost ejaculated his name in surprise, but a wink from those eyes stopped me doing so.

“Can you help him, Doctor Watson?” asked the disguised Sherlock Holmes.

“If someone can halt a Hackney carriage, we can get him to my practice and I shall help him further there.”

A cab was signaled and Holmes and I got the man into it. Moments later, we reached my practice and we placed the man on a table in one of my rooms.

“He will come round in half an hour, without your aid, Watson.”

“Did you do this to him, Holmes?”

Holmes nodded. “I needed to go through his pockets. I might be a dab hand at the art of picking pockets, though admittedly slightly rusty, but I cannot pick all his pockets at once. So instead, I injected him with a sedative, allowing me to bring him here, to the privacy of your humble practice in order to pilfer what he has on his person.”

“But what are you looking for, Holmes?” I asked as Holmes began rifling through the man’s clothes.

“His keys,” Holmes answered briefly.

I hoped to assist him by fishing a ring of keys out of his left trouser pocket, but Holmes ignored them and kept looking. It took him a good five minutes to open the man’s shirt and find there was a small key on a ring that had been locked into his nipple.

“Well, I would never have found that by picking his pockets,” he ejaculated cheerfully.

“That is a very odd thing to do.”

“Indeed it is.” Holmes carefully unlocked the ring, like one would an earring and slide the key from it. He then locked the ring again. “I knew he had the key on his person, but this was quite unexpected, even for me.”

“What does that key do?”

Holmes laughed. “Why, Watson, it opens a lock.”

“But what lock, Holmes?”

Holmes touched the side of his nose again. “All will be revealed to you in due time, Watson.” He drew some bank notes from a pocket of his jacket and lay them beside the man on the table. “This should cover your expenses, Doctor. This man should not have to pay for them and I will not be around when he comes to.”

“But where are you going, Holmes?”

Holmes pulled his figure straight, adjusted his jacket and pushed his hat at a jaunty angle. “That too will be revealed to you in time.” At that moment, he chose to adopt a posh accent, usually only used by the upper echelons of London society. Then he tapped his hat with his cane in greeting or goodbye and promptly marched out the door.

***

A week after this affair, I received a message from my friend, asking me to join him in Stratford-upon-Avon at the nearest opportunity I chanced to have. I thus told a colleague I would be taking a day off, informed my wife and, two days later, having made all the necessary preparations, I undertook the journey to the hometown of the Great Bard himself.

As per Holmes’s instruction, I took a room at the Pen and Sword Inn. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the accommodations there, but I was less pleased to find no trace of Holmes.

I took an excellent luncheon there and then remained in the common room where I read. I had brought some medical journals for the trip, knowing that I would have the chance to read them at least on the train, if not while waiting for Holmes, which I seemed to do entirely too much. I thus sat quite happily, though impatiently, in a corner, reading up on experimentations and studies in my profession, drinking tea, and later in the afternoon, ale. As the sun began setting over Stratford-upon-Avon, I ordered some food for dinner, hoping Holmes would show up soon. I had reached the last of the journals and I feared boredom would get the better of me if my friend would not grace me soon with his company.

It was only as I finished this last journal and began drinking the hot chocolate I had ordered that a familiar frame folded itself through the entrance.

The hat was gone, as were the posh clothes. He was once again in his usual attire and it was easy to see he was more at ease without the disguise he had adopted. He sat down at my table and hailed the waiter for an empty cup. The moment it arrived, Holmes poured himself some hot chocolate from my steaming jug.

“I am truly glad to be myself again. I can spend months pretending to be the scum of London, but trying to mix with the peers of the realm, the rich and the famous and all their varying offspring, is a job I would rather leave than take.”

“Is that what you have been doing, Holmes?”

He grumbled something and drank some of the beverage from his cup. “The underworld is my domain, but the underworld cannot tell me where this manuscript is. Nor could it tell me where the men came from who burgled my abode.”

“So you traversed the upper classes?”

“Indeed.”

“And did you find what you were looking for?”

Holmes grimaced then. “I believe I did. Though I have yet to test that belief.”

I left that statement unquestioned; knowing Holmes’s testing of his theories and knowledge would eventually involve yours truly. Instead, I queried him on the contents of the missing manuscript.

“Why, Watson, it is a missing play by William Shakespeare,” he exclaimed.

“I am, of course, aware of that, Holmes. But I was wondering as to the play itself. Perhaps you can relay the tale it tells to me.”

Holmes gave a vague smile. He poured the last of the hot chocolate into his own cup and ordered some more for my sake. Having taken another sip, he launched into the tale.

“Costarde is an old man already when he is sent from France to be the new ambassador to the court of the King of Spain. He has always been unlucky in love, constantly betrayed or simply unsuccessful in finding a suitable marriage partner. In Madrid’s Escordia Palace, he meets Maria. She is of a noble family; her father is chamberlain to the King of Spain, Don Ciprian.

“He falls hopelessly in love and begins courting her, but her father prevents him from continuing his pursuit of her. He sends her away to their country estate and arranges a match with Don Lorenzo. As the eldest daughter of an ancient family, she is expected to marry into another Hidalgo family, descendants of those knights who fought the Moors.

“She goes through a short courtship, as is customary of course, and then prepares to marry Don Lorenzo. But it is then that Costarde finds her and continues his courting of her in secret. She responds and they become secret lovers. Of course, Don Lorenzo finds out, as does her father, and Don Lorenzo challenges Costarde to a duel. Instead, Costarde retreats to Madrid, but Don Lorenzo pursues him there and it is quite obvious he will never let him off.