Sherlock Holmes and The Sword of Osman (14 page)

‘The treachery of it all!' I exclaimed indignantly. ‘Shelmerdine must have known that revealing our arrival might have laid us open to assassination.'

‘As you say,' Holmes returned.

‘There's something else which mystifies me, Holmes. Why did Saliha Naciye engineer Mehmed's murder
before
we snared her? I can see why she might...'

‘It was essential to cover her tracks. Not even a Sultan's wife could gain access to the sword. She needed Mehmed's help. Until she saw the ghillie suit and hit upon the idea of becoming a spectre she had no way to carry out her plan other than through an alliance with him. He hedged his bets and pretended to be her accomplice. After that, Saliha Naciye needed only one other - the Daughter of Jerusalem. The Jewess's life too might have been in danger except for her enduring value as the principal negotiator with whichever band of conspirators would agree to terms in exchange for the sword. Once Saliha Naciye had hold of the sword Mehmed was not only unnecessary for her plans, he was a definite threat. He could blackmail her - even be a witness against her if the need arose to save himself. It's not impossible it was Chiarezza who pointed this out.'

‘Did Mehmed know the Sultan's wife was the spectre?'

‘I doubt it. She had no need to tell him. His fear was genuine.'

‘What aroused your suspicions about Shelmerdine?'

‘The photographs. First, the German submarine. A camera could have been placed almost anywhere along the length of the bridge. However, soon enough I realised it was taken from the exact vantage point as the picture in the newspaper of us getting into the pinnace. Then, if you recall, after we caught Saliha Naciye
in flagrante
, we took another look at the photograph Shelmerdine handed to us on our arrival, the close-up of the sword.'

‘What about it?'

‘The real sword had already been spirited away.'

He waved Mycroft's letter at me.

‘“Shanghaied” as my brother said. Our dragoman must have considered providing us with a snapshot of the unfinished fake but he couldn't risk it. He may have heard we inspected the sword in the oil painting. The snapshot he supplied had to be identical. He could only have taken that photograph if he had access to where they'd sequestered the real thing.'

After a pause he added, ‘And then there was the incident at the necropolis.'

‘Which incident is that?'

‘When Mehmed's widow incriminated our dragoman.'

Marsh as deep as Grimpen Mire on the Devon moors was threatening to engulf me.

‘I don't recall her doing anything of the sort,' I replied.

‘But you do recall her telling us about the conspiratorial gaggle which met at her house for several nights?'

‘Yes.'

‘She said they were led by a man anxious to hide his identity behind a hood?'

‘I remember that, but...'

‘And that the man with us in the cemetery was that same person?'

‘I'm certain she said nothing of the...' I spluttered.

‘...when she switched to French to cut out any chance her words would be deliberately misreported. She looked at Shelmerdine and said ‘Comme lui'.'

‘‘Comme lui'?' I parroted. ‘What of it? Shelmerdine was standing right by her. If she pointed up at him it was because he too wore a hood to hide his face.'

‘You wrote down her exact words, Watson. She said, “Those men, those men who were carrying him. I have seen some of them before. They were at my house. Always at night. I saw all their faces, except the man in charge. He wore a hood over his face. ‘Comme lui'.” But we were all wearing identical hoods. If it were simply the fact the leader of the plotters wore a hood like ours she would have used the plural and said “Comme
vous
”, referring to the three of us. She didn't. She was warning us. She recognised him as the man in authority she'd observed in her own home. She deliberately used the singular - comme
lui
- to warn us. Our dragoman realised this immediately. You recall him jumping in with “Perhaps Allah will grant you a son from your last night with your husband - that is,
if you escape with your head intact
”. He was letting her know he could have her killed if she didn't fall silent.'

‘If you're right, why did Shelmerdine risk accompanying us to the cemetery?'

‘The Chief Armourer had been poisoned. The conspirators had no idea who'd been instrumental in Mehmed's death. They had to find out if they were about to be identified.'

‘If Shelmerdine did publish the photo in the
Journal de Constantinople
,' I began, ‘why on earth...?'

‘We were a present danger. His conspiracy was well advanced. By betraying our arrival he hoped we'd decide the game wasn't worth the candle. Either we'd flee or Sir Edward would pull us out.'

Holmes looked at me.

‘Watson, your weakness is you make a habit of liking people. You cultivate friendship far too fast. What made me suspect Shelmerdine wasn't all he purported to be? I merely kept in mind he was
exactly
what Mycroft purported him to be.'

He paused, pondering.

‘Nevertheless our dragoman was never the
capo dei capi
of the plot. You can tell old Masters by the sweep of their brush. Behind Shelmerdine spun a being on a quite different intellectual plane, my equal, even my superior. We may never discover who lurked behind him but I tell you, Watson, if I didn't know for a definite fact that Professor Moriarty lies in a watery grave...

‘Any plot hatched by Saliha Naciye had to be simplicity itself, Lucrezia Borgian in its ruthlessness and crudity. But the other was a plan of exceptional cleverness. Photographing us from the moment of arrival, knowing we lacked any deep knowledge of naval etiquette, reaped its reward. The forgery, costly as it was, would delay discovery of the theft until the time was ripe.'

Holmes added his own postscript.

‘We achieved Sir Edward's goal. The Ottoman Empire will hold, at least for the while. We have kept Abd-ul-Hamid on his throne. I doubt if Saliha Naciye will make a second attempt to push him aside. If she tries again and fails she knows she'll be seen floating in a gunny-sack in the Bosphorus.'

Twilight was descending. It was time to change for dinner.

Holmes reflected as we set off, ‘Shelmerdine's death may have been a serious blow to the conspirators in the shadows behind him but our dragoman's demise was a relief to Mehmed's widow. Her life was never going to be safe while he lived.'

Absorbed in thought we walked the hundred yards or so to the sturdy mansion, the loveliest of English homes. The duck with a huge spatulate bill and dark green head which had been standing patiently at our feet waddled alongside.

As we walked, Holmes remarked almost wistfully, ‘I wish there were always a few sultans about. It'll be a far duller world without such unscrupulous tradesmen. It might be disputed how far any singular gift in an individual is due to his ancestry rather than his own early training but villainy in the blood takes the strangest forms. A study of Abd-ul-Hamid's family portraits - the line from forehead to upper lip, the arch and droop of the nose - is enough to convert a man to the doctrine of reincarnation. If you pricked Abd-ul-Hamid's head the soul of every sultan before him, back to Osman Ghazi, would come hissing out like gas from a container.'

Not for a second in Stamboul had we given thought to any wider consequences of our actions. Now a particular sentence in Mycroft's letter, that Holmes had ‘single-handedly made a great war in Europe inevitable, and within ten years', reverberated in my head. How was my comrade to react to an indictment of such magnitude - and from his own brother?

I walked at Holmes's side in apprehensive silence while he blew smoke rings into the air. On the front lawn some yards from the entrance to Chequers I decided to bring the matter up.

‘Holmes,' I began, hesitantly, ‘there's something Mycroft...'

‘You noted that, did you, Watson?'

‘...where Mycroft wrote, ‘the much-feared East Wind has begun to blow'.'

Holmes smacked his hand on the letter.

‘Not that wretched East Wind! Rather I refer you to where my brother says - and I quote - ‘we came up against each other for the first time, and you came out in front'!'

I turned to stare at him. Crow's feet were forming around the austere grey eyes in a true and impulsive expression of pure happiness. This was the first deeply heartfelt grin I'd ever seen light up Holmes's face.

He waved the letter. Joyfully he repeated, ‘Mycroft admits it - I came out in front!'

With an exultant gesture he said, ‘Next week we'll dress, dine and enjoy an evening out. What do you say, a bottle of Montrachet
tête-à-tête
and a fine repast - none of your Everyman cut-off-the-joint-and-two-veg served by flat-footed old waiters in greasy dress-coats! We'll start at that most restful temple of food, Simpson's-in-the-Strand, Grand Divan Tavern.
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
is on at Covent Garden. If we hurry our meal we might get there just in time for Sachs' full-bellied cobbling song.'

‘The
Meistersinger
on you, Holmes?' I asked.

My surgery, wound-pension and fewer and fewer royalties from my publishers all lumped together hardly stretched to getting my silk grosgrain opera hat and dress boots cleaned and the cost of a ticket for a Wagnerian comedy, let alone a splendid repast at Simpson's.

‘Better still, my dear friend...' He tapped a bulge in his pocket. ‘...on His Majesty King Edward's Government! Our Foreign Secretary was as good as his word. We have a considerable number of five jacks to share. Once more you'll dine on smoked Scottish salmon, followed by treacle sponge with Madagascan vanilla custard - the very dishes I believe you ordered at the start of the case of the Bulgarian Codex.'

The memory of Stamboul was fading, its kaleidoscope of colour and sights, the stench of rubbish piled up in the streets, the smell of rotting fish pervading the quayside, the manifold grotesqueries and intrigues. Even my primal terror in the face of the gastromancy.

‘And your dish?' I asked.

‘I too shall order as I ordered then,' he replied, ‘slices of roast beef delivered on a silver trolley. Perhaps, as then, another anonymous note will be delivered in a Bon Bon dish,' adding with an uncommon self-mockery, ‘written with a J pen on royal cream paper.'

The bit was clearly between his teeth.

‘If so, I shall quit my bees and you your chambers. We shall set off once more, like the scourging hounds of hell.'

***

The weeks went by. The intense colours of high summer in Stamboul were overtaken by the cooler palette of memory running from silver and horse-back browns to perse. The Michaelmas daisies in Regent's Park with their mass of misty purples came and went. Holmes had long since returned to the quietude of his bee-farm. My moustache had re-established itself.

Heavily bundled-up, I took a morning constitutional around the boating-lake in Regent's Park. A question kept repeating in my mind. Moments before Holmes set off from the Ottoman shore that last time he astounded me by identifying Shelmerdine as the principal abettor in the second plot. He swore me to secrecy. His exact words were, ‘Watson, it must remain our secret, yours and mine, do you understand?' As he flung himself aboard the tender and set off for
Dreadnought
he even added, ‘Shelmerdine remains of paramount value to England'. Within minutes I had broken my word. Within hours Shelmerdine was dead. Holmes's reticence was a familiar and often frustrating characteristic. Why, I now asked myself, hadn't he kept the startling revelation to himself until I rejoined him aboard the battleship?

Standing there in the damp air of Regent's Park the rose-tinted glasses through which I had long viewed my old friend were quickly becoming less rosy. He knew I would wait behind at the dockside until Shelmerdine brought Mycroft's spices and returned my camera. The fact Holmes did not bide his time could mean only one thing: he had determined, correctly, that my affectionate regard for all things Holmesian would tempt me into a serious indiscretion. He
meant
me to reveal all to the dragoman. To use one of my comrade's own phrases it was the only conclusion I could come to, ‘consistent with sanity'.

I felt as stunned as if I'd been struck from behind by a Penang lawyer wielded by a dacoit. It would have occurred to Holmes that the Palace would have us in its eye to the very moment we quit the Empire's shores. It was
Holmes
, purposefully, not I inadvertently, who set in motion the shot that dropped the dragoman on Galata Bridge.

As I walked past the Heronry a second dramatic thought struck me. What role had Holmes's brother Mycroft really played? The public disclosure of our identity through the flaming headlines in the Stambouli newspaper could not have been left to a dragoman's initiative. Shelmerdine may have published the photograph of our arrival but only on specific orders. Whose orders? Was Mycroft the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making that not one Englishman in fifty thousand would ever dream of it - to dismantle the Ottoman Empire with all speed and at any cost?

A casual rumour picked up - even invented - by the Diogenes Club concerning the Sword of Osman could have been transmitted back to the bazaars via provocateurs like Shelmerdine, to be acted upon by Saliha Naciye and the CUP or the rival Prince Sabahedrinne. Mycroft was aware the sword had been shanghaied before our arrival. He must have been in constant telegraphic communication with our dragoman. The meeting between Sir Edward Grey and Sherlock Holmes at the Foreign Secretary's initiative must have come as a bombshell for Holmes's brother. Mycroft's letter delivered by special messenger to our train at Victoria with its mumbo jumbo about a new Convention on spies positively begged us to wiggle our way out of the case before it commenced. Looking back it seemed astonishing we weren't assassinated the moment the
Journal de Constantinople
revealed our presence. The last undercover person fitted out by Gieves as an Army doctor intent, supposedly, on studying the use of vegetables in Ottoman medicine never made it back. We would have offered the simplest of targets for Shelmerdine's co-conspirators at the crowded waterside. The open graves at the cemetery could have been dug specially for us. Our throats could have been slit in an instant when we confronted the Chief Armourer's widow in the grove.