Sherlock Holmes - The Thinking Engine E-Book

James Lovegrove

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

March 1895. Hilary Term at Oxford. In the newly built extension to the University Galleries, Professor Quantock has put the finishing touches to a wondrous computational device which, he claims, is capable of analytical thought to rival that of the cleverest men alive. Indeed, his so-called Thinking Engine seems equal to Sherlock Holmes himself in its deductive powers. To prove his point, Quantock programmes his machine to solve a murder in the Jericho area which has been baffling Oxford police. The Engine identifies a suspect who proves not to have a valid alibi for the night of the crime. The man is duly arrested and arraigned. Sherlock Holmes cannot ignore this challenge. He and Watson travel to Oxford, where a battle of wits ensues between the great detective and his mechanical counterpart as they compete to see which of them can be first to solve a series of crimes. As man and machine vie for supremacy, it becomes clear that the Thinking Engine has its own agenda. Holmes's and Watson's lives are on the line as a ghost from the past catches up with them...

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Chapter One: The Rubenstein Collection Mummy

Chapter Two: The Bumptious American

Chapter Three: An Insult and a Challenge

Chapter Four: The Head-in-the-Clouds Academic

Chapter Five: The Jericho Murders

Chapter Six: The Taint of Violent Death

Chapter Seven: A Master Craftsman at Work

Chapter Eight: The Thinking Engine Thinks

Chapter Nine: A Monstrous Turn of Events

Chapter Ten: The Three Letters

Chapter Eleven: A Signature in a Dead Tongue

Chapter Twelve: The Honourable Aubrey Bancroft

Chapter Thirteen: The Distance of Care

Chapter Fourteen: Just Another Jobbing Intellectual

Chapter Fifteen: The Greater Glory of Lord Knaresfield

Chapter Sixteen: Parson’s Pleasure

Chapter Seventeen: A Kind of Agent Provocateur

Chapter Eighteen: Pressure from the Press

Chapter Nineteen: The Mystery of the Missing Stroke

Chapter Twenty: An Impromptu Self-jettisoning

Chapter Twenty-One: A Kind of Mutiny

Chapter Twenty-Two: “Gas Par”

Chapter Twenty-Three: The False Armour of Rage

Chapter Twenty-Four: Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Voice Cabinet

Chapter Twenty-Six: A Chip off the Old Block

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Soul of a Napoleon

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Stranger in the Turf

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Proposition

Chapter Thirty: A Living Scarecrow

Chapter Thirty-One: Saving Sherlock Holmes

Chapter Thirty-Two: Moran the Ronin

Chapter Thirty-Three: A Brace of Errands

Chapter Thirty-Four: Midnight at the Museum

Chapter Thirty-Five: The Nuances of Language

Chapter Thirty-Six: Moriarty and the Turk

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Unholy Trinity

Chapter Thirty-Eight: A Great Brass-and-Steel Sham

Chapter Thirty-Nine: A Spider Again

Chapter Forty: Rods

Chapter Forty-One: The Tiger at Bay

Chapter Forty-Two: The Last Straw

Chapter Forty-Three: Shrewd People

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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Sherlock Holmes: The Thinking Engine Print edition ISBN: 9781783295036 Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783295043

Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan Books edition: August 2015 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

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FOREWORD

In the account known as “The Adventure of the Three Students” I wrote that in the spring of 1895 “a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns”.

I realise that, with those few words, I may have sounded entirely dismissive of the circumstances that brought us to that place, as though the matter were of minor consequence.

I also somewhat mendaciously described Holmes as “pursuing some laborious researches in early English charters” at this unnamed seat of learning. That was, I confess now, misdirection. He was doing anything but.

The truth is that, at the time, I felt obliged to skate over what was one of the most challenging and intriguing investigations my friend undertook, not to mention one of the most hazardous. The “Three Students” case was merely a light, diverting interlude in a much darker and stranger symphony whose nature I was not prepared to divulge when the story appeared in The Strand in 1904. Now, however, nearly a quarter of a century on from the story’s publication, I am ready to tackle the entirety of the affair in narrative form with as much frankness and honesty as I can muster. I am older, and the passage of years has given me perspective and distance.

Besides, I very much doubt I shall submit this account to my publishers and thus offer it for general consumption. It is likelier that it will add to the burgeoning number of manuscripts languishing in the tin dispatch box which I keep in the vaults at Cox & Co. Bank at Charing Cross.

The university town in question, then, was Oxford, and it is not without good reason that I was reticent about the month Holmes and I spent there during and after Hilary term of ’95. For what transpired in the City of Dreaming Spires (to borrow Matthew Arnold’s coinage from his poem “Thyrsis”) brought us face to face with one of the strangest and most singular manifestations of evil we have ever encountered, and the world is better off not knowing the full facts.

Not only that, but so strenuous and punishing were the events involved that my companion was driven to breaking point, and indeed very nearly was broken. The same goes for our friendship, which was tested to its limits. These are not events which it pleases me to recall.

Much has been written about Charles Babbage and his remarkable steam-powered mechanical computers and calculating machines. Somewhat less is known about Professor Malcolm Quantock and his Thinking Engine – a device that seemed to possess the soul and intellect of a man…

John H. Watson, MD (retd.), 1927

CHAPTER ONE

THE RUBENSTEIN COLLECTION MUMMY

“Watson, old chap,” said Sherlock Holmes, as the mummy of a four-thousand-year-old pharaoh came shuffling towards us in the Archaic Room at the British Museum, “I am prepared to concede, in this one instance, that a belief in the resurrection of the dead may not be wholly unfounded.”

The mummy lurched across the darkened chamber with its arms outstretched. Loose ends of cerecloth dangled from wrist and elbow, twitching as it moved. Its feet dragged over the floorboards with a horrid, dry swishing sound reminiscent of old twigs and parchment. Its face had the very barest of features, shallow indentations for the eyes and mouth lurking beneath the brittle-looking bandages, which lent it a rudimentary, skull-like cast.

“I only said ‘may’, however,” Holmes added. “That which appears to be perturbingly uncommon could, in the event, be quite commonplace.”

My friend’s sangfroid when presented with this all too tangible manifestation of the supernatural was impressive. I myself was in a state of some shock. I was rooted to the spot. A chill was going down my spine. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. I was experiencing all the clichés of terror, which at that moment felt freshly minted, in no way banal or tired, just all too appallingly true.

We found ourselves at the museum, at an hour when all right-minded folk should be tucked up in bed, owing to a visit by the Egyptologist Mr John Vansittart Smith, FRS, who had called on us in our rooms at 221B Baker Street the previous afternoon. At the request of this man, one of the pre-eminent practitioners in his field, Holmes had agreed to investigate a series of bizarre occurrences which had accompanied the Wallace Rubenstein Antiquities Collection on its year-long tour of Europe.

It had been alleged that the collection, which comprised several dozen priceless artefacts from around the globe, was in a very specific manner “haunted”. Night watchmen at several of the venues where it halted on its peregrinations had reported hearing strange sounds emanating from the chamber in which it was exhibited. Some had even come face to face with an ambulatory creature that matched the description of the mummy of Pharaoh Djedhor – a 30th Dynasty monarch who had reigned during the 4th century BC – and had fled in fright from this apparition. Djedhor’s preserved remains were the centrepiece of the collection, in no small part thanks to the large, ornately carved and painted sarcophagus that held them, a thing of considerable craftsmanship and beauty.

Although the watchmen’s accounts of meeting the mummy while on their rounds were dismissed as nonsense by museum curators and directors, and on more than one occasion had resulted in a summary sacking, nonetheless the collection had begun to garner a reputation. Attendances had gone through the roof. Everywhere it went – the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin – it drew crowds. People queued for hours to view it, lured by the glamour of otherworldly eeriness that now hung over it.

Several noted psychic mediums had declared that the Rubenstein Collection was the locus of genuine unearthly activity, and found evidence to back up their claims, ranging from cold spots in the exhibition area to traces of ectoplasm on the floor, although the former could be ascribed simply to draughts while the latter usually turned out to be spillages of a somewhat more innocuous substance such as resin or wax.

Those in possession of more rational, scientific brains were of the opinion that the living-mummy rumours were just so much hogwash. A two-thousand-year-old corpse, most of whose vital organs had been removed upon death and stowed separately in Canopic jars, could not spontaneously come to life. Any who had witnessed the phenomenon were either drunkards, liars, or afflicted with mental debility.

The aforementioned Egyptologist, John Vansittart Smith, though definitely of the rational persuasion, nonetheless had an open mind. He admitted to us that not many months earlier, in the principal Eastern chamber of the Louvre in Paris, he had come across a living being whose comportment and conversation had left him in no doubt that he was in the presence of someone who had enjoyed a lifespan far in excess of man’s usual allotted sum of years. This person, identifying himself as a priest of Osiris named Sosra who was born during the reign of Tuthmosis, had survived courtesy of an elixir of longevity he had concocted which vitiated disease and decay, thus all but conferring immortality on the user. Sosra, Smith said, had eventually perished in the arms of his beloved, a maiden called Atma who had been taken by plague and whose mummified remains he had pursued across the world over the course of many centuries with tragic doggedness. Ever since his unnerving encounter, the Egyptologist had been convinced that the ancient Egyptians could lay claim to scientific and medical knowledge that far exceeded our own.

“What if,” he said, “the stories about the Rubenstein Collection mummy are true? What if Pharaoh Djedhor languishes in some twilight state between life and death, kept that way by an infusion of herbs and chemicals introduced into his body during the embalming and mummification process? What if, from time to time, he rouses from this torpid state and staggers around briefly in a semblance of life? Mr Holmes, I implore you to look into this matter for me, so that I may know to my satisfaction whether my experience in France was a mere figment of my imagination or perhaps a hoax, or whether I really did spend an evening in the company of the oldest human being ever to have walked the Earth.”

“I am no expert in archaeology or ancient history,” replied my friend. “I can barely tell a Ming vase from a Qing vase. Surely it would be better if you yourself, Mr Smith, or one of your colleagues at the Royal Society or the Oriental Society, were to study the mummy and draw what conclusions you can from your analysis.”

“Alas, that is not possible. Mr Rubenstein has stipulated that no items in his collection are open to scrutiny, not even by professionals such as myself. It is a crime against the advancement of knowledge, if you ask me, but he will not be swayed. He is very jealous of his property, it would seem, and fears it might be marred by careless hands. The mummy may not even be exposed to the open air, lest it suffer the ravages of our polluted city atmosphere.”

“Intriguing. He allows the artefacts to go on tour, meaning they must be repeatedly packaged up, put in crates and transported from place to place, which entails no small risk of inadvertent damage; yet he is anxious that they should not be closely looked at, not even by those practised at handling such items.”

“He is an American,” said Smith, as though that explained much. “And very wealthy. A newspaper proprietor, I believe.”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “I have read about him. A former vaudevillian and theatre impresario who went into newspaper publishing and now has a string of dailies across the United States, the majority of them at the salacious and yellow end of the market. Yet himself a cultured man, it would appear, given his acquisition of some of the finest and most valuable of ancient treasures.”

“It is possible to have refined tastes and peddle dross,” I averred. “Often it is a mark of great intellect, the ability to create a product which appeals to the lowest common denominator.”

“True, Watson, and such a talent has proved highly lucrative for some. I feel, however, that Mr Rubenstein would still like it to be known that he has a cultured side, hence his allowing his collection to be shown to the public on the Continent and in Britain. The publicity coup arising from the brouhaha about an animate mummy is, if nothing else, advantageous to his goal. Mr Smith? I would very much like to take this case on your behalf. I am interested in seeing this so-called living mummy with my own eyes, and to that end, Watson and I shall tonight install ourselves in the British Museum and lie in wait. With luck, Pharaoh Djedhor will oblige us by rising from his uneasy slumbers and embarking on one of his posthumous perambulations.”

So it was that Holmes and I entered the museum shortly before closing time, just as the paying visitors were leaving. It was the very first day of the Rubenstein Collection’s fortnight-long stay in London, and a great tide of people poured out of the Archaic Room, chattering excitedly, while the two of us shouldered against the flow, grim of purpose. We had obtained special permission to be on the premises after dark from no less a personage than Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, the museum’s Principal Librarian and Director. Holmes had done Sir Edward a small service in the recent past, a matter concerning the theft of a gold Anglo-Saxon belt buckle. My friend was wont to dismiss the case as “a trivial diversion” but to my mind it involved some of his more ingenious examples of analytical reasoning, not least his deduction of the culprit’s lack of a left eye based on nothing more than the angle on which a crowbar was deployed during the break-in. Sir Edward, at any rate, felt he owed Holmes a favour, and was returning it by granting us licence – contrary to regulations though it was – to roam the museum out of hours. He had some inkling of our reason for being there but stated that he would prefer not to be told explicitly, since he had no wish to be seen to be giving official credence to, in his words, “this absurd farrago of half-truths and wishful thinking”.

We spent several long hours in the Archaic Room, hearing nothing but the whisper and sigh of the grand, venerable building around us and the clamour of pedestrians and road traffic on Great Russell Street outside the thick walls, all of which dwindled as the night wore on, leaving just the chilly, lonely rattle of the January wind. The only illumination came from moonlight slanting in through the high windows, which lent a phosphorescent silvery cast to the statues, pottery, swords, crowns, amphorae and other treasures that filled the room. The night watchmen had been instructed to give this particular corner of the museum a wide berth, an admonition which few of them minded heeding since at least half of them believed that Pharaoh Djedhor’s eternal rest was more unquiet than it ought to have been and the remainder had no desire to have their scepticism put to the test.

“It is a most singular errand we are engaged on,” Holmes murmured to me at one point during our vigil. “I would, of course, like to inspect the sarcophagus for myself, but I fear I cannot without disturbing its occupant and alerting him to our presence, which may have a deterrent effect. I would not care to inhibit friend Djedhor, should he elect to take the air this evening.”

“Holmes, you’re not telling me you think the mummy actually walks?”

“Do you suppose that it does not?”

Up until that moment I had been proceeding on the assumption that it was all hokum, a series of tall tales and misapprehensions which had grown with every stop on the collection’s tour, gathering size and momentum like a snowball rolling downhill. Now, in light of Holmes’s rhetorical question, I cast an uneasy eye towards the sarcophagus, which lay on a trestle some twenty feet from the glass-sided display cabinet behind which my friend and I had sequestered ourselves. It glimmered in the moon’s glow, the features of its painted face suffused with a radiance that made them seem weirdly, I might even say preternaturally, alive. Its black-rimmed eyes seemed to sparkle with deep, long-held knowledge, and I could not help thinking of the withered effigy within, confined to that fig-wood coffin over three hundred years before the birth of Christ, a once all-powerful ruler of one of history’s greatest and most enduring empires, worshipped as a god, considered a son of Ra, no less. Might he still be alive, fending off the approach of death via some arcane alchemical process lost to time? Might he, even now, be reaching for the underside of the sarcophagus’s lid with bony, impossibly old fingers, to push it open and once again walk the earth as he did in the dim and distant past?

I won’t deny that a chill descended upon me then and a knot of dread took up occupancy in my belly, so much so that when Holmes next addressed me, I started.

“Your service revolver is, I need not ask, to hand?”

“It… It is. Yes. In my pocket. But if we are about to confront the undead, what hope have we of stopping it with mere bullets? Are not such creatures impervious to harm by conventional means?”

“By repute they are,” said Holmes, “and it is a pity we have not taken the precaution of investing in ammunition made of silver. It is surely better, though, to face them with some manner of weapon at the ready than none at all.”

I could not fault his logic, but it did not comfort me. As the night wore on I became increasingly unsettled. The shadows in the room seemed to thicken, and I sensed the antiquities all around me as though they had an ineffable weight, as though their cumulative age was a force that made the atmosphere in the room heavy and oppressive. Time crawled, anchored by these many relics of long-gone civilisations in far-off yesteryears.

Shortly after the bells of St. George’s, Bloomsbury struck midnight, we heard it – Holmes first, with his sharper ears. The merest of scraping sounds reached us, followed by the merest of creaks.

Before our very eyes, the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Djedhor began to open and the mummy slowly, stiffly clambered out.

CHAPTER TWO

THE BUMPTIOUS AMERICAN

“Now, Watson!” Holmes hissed. “Quick! We must move!”

I, though, was unable to, for I was still overcome by that surge of terror which had left my entire body paralysed. I could no more have moved at that moment than could the squat limestone figurine of a Mesopotamian fertility goddess which sat on a pedestal nearby.

The mummy lumbered towards us with a dire, implacable gait, seemingly aware of the horror its menacing appearance must strike in all who saw it.

All, that is, save Sherlock Holmes, who was not intimidated. Rather, he was energised, and leapt forward with a fierce glee, clamping a hand upon my arm and dragging me along with him. His touch had a galvanic effect, and though I was far from thrilled at being pulled bodily into the path of the oncoming revenant, I took heart from Holmes’s intrepidity. If he was unafraid, should I not be also? My companion, after all, was far from being a fool. If he perceived no imminent danger in the situation, then no imminent danger there must be.

“Your pistol, old man,” he urged me. “Take it out. Aim it.”

I did as I was told, blindly compliant, cocking back the hammer with my thumb.

“You there!” Holmes said, speaking now to the mummy. “The jig is up. We have you at gunpoint. I would recommend you stand still and surrender, or face the consequences.”

I did not believe for one instant that his barked command would have any effect. How could they on a creature whose mother tongue had not been uttered aloud in several centuries and who doubtless knew not one word of English? A creature, moreover, whose very existence mocked death.

But then a most remarkable thing happened.

The mummy obeyed.

It halted in its tracks, and its extended arms rose from horizontal to vertical.

“P-please,” it stammered in an accent which sounded to my ears distinctly American. “Don’t shoot. I give up.”

Holmes gave vent to an arch laugh. “I knew it! The whole thing has been a charade, perpetrated by an associate of Rubenstein’s from his theatre days. You are, are you not, sir, a vaudeville performer?”

“I am that, among other things,” said the mummy, his tone somewhat crestfallen. “Kindly ask your companion to put away his pistol. I assure you I am no threat.”

“Perhaps I should be the judge of that. Watson, keep your gun trained on him. Let us firmly establish the facts of the situation before we lower our guard.”

“Watson?” said the mummy. “As in Dr John Watson? Then you, sir, must be Sherlock Holmes.”

“None other. From your distinctive drawl I take you to be a native of one of the mid-western states of America – Wisconsin would be my guess, judging by a certain particular broadness of the vowels which derives from the many Norwegian settler communities there.”

“That is true.”

“Yet I discern the faintest tinges of a Slavic heritage too, in your rather choppy intonation. I suspect your parents are of European origin, immigrants. From Budapest, perhaps?”

“Now you are being truly uncanny,” said the mummy, who was in no small way uncanny himself. “I was in fact born in that great city but we emigrated when I was very young.”

“I confess that it is a hobby of mine, tracing a man’s ancestry from his inherited speech patterns. It especially applies to your nation. Few Americans are just American. More often than not they betray the imprint of their forebears in their accents and vocabulary. I have composed a short monograph on the subject which is currently undergoing peer review by members of the Philological Society on its way to publication in their annual Transactions. Your origins, however, need not detain us, since it is your present activities with which we are concerned.”

“Before you go any further,” said the mummy, “may I at least remove some of these bandages? I have been bound up in them for nearly eighteen hours, and I find them constricting to say the least. Now that there is no further need to wear them, I may as well divest myself.”

“By all means.”

The impersonator of the dead Pharaoh Djedhor began carefully to unwind the cerecloths from around his head, to reveal a roughly triangular face with eyes set close together and eyebrows that canted towards each other at a very determined angle. His hair, wiry and dark, he combed with his fingers until it was somewhat neatened and given an approximate centre parting. Then he smiled sheepishly and stuck out a still cloth-wrapped hand. He could not have been more than twenty or twenty-one years of age, yet had the bearing of someone older and more worldly.

“It is an honour to meet you, Mr Holmes,” he said. “Your fame has reached the shores of my homeland, and I must say, if I had to be apprehended by anyone in the commission of this little imposture, I’m glad it was you. To have been unmasked by a lesser man would have been humiliating, whereas to have fallen foul of the great Sherlock Holmes – well, I guess then we can call it quits.”

I bristled at the sheer impertinence of the fellow. He evidently felt that he, a felon, was somehow the equal of my friend and that his capture in flagrante delicto was no more than the outcome of a contest, like a joust between two knights in which both were unhorsed. He could not, it seemed, have had a higher opinion of himself, his self-esteem excessive even by the standards of his own countrymen.

Holmes, for his part, was merely amused. “Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?” he enquired, grasping the mummy’s hand.

“I was born Erik Weisz,” came the reply, “but I prefer to go by the stage name of Harry Houdini. Of the Brothers Houdini? The toast of Coney Island?”

“I regret your fame has not stretched as far this way across the Atlantic as mine has the other way.”

The man who called himself Houdini looked disappointed, but not for long, his innate bumptiousness rapidly reasserting itself. “That state of affairs will unquestionably change. Soon the whole world will have heard of me, for with the assistance of my brother Theo I am developing a magic act which is wholly unique and which will one day be a marvel to all. Harry Houdini will become a household name to match yours, Mr Holmes. You mark my words.”

“With such a force of vigour and passion behind it, I have no doubt your prediction will come true, sir.”

“Holmes,” I said with some surprise, “you are behaving very amicably towards this man. Does the fact that he is a criminal mean nothing?”

My friend turned to me, head cocked. “A criminal, Watson? I am hard pressed to fathom what actual crime he has committed. Is donning the guise of a two-thousand-year-old Egyptian god-king against the law? I can’t say I’ve seen that in any of the statute books.”

“How about frightening museum watchmen after dark? Surely that is an offence? Trespass, too.”

“But this is all just flimflam. Chicanery. Showmanship. Am I not right, Mr Houdini? You have been employed by Wallace Rubenstein as a cunning means of drumming up custom. He is paying you to rise from Djedhor’s sarcophagus wreathed in cotton bandages and give your best impression of the walking dead, in order to generate interest in the exhibit and earn it a ‘spooky’ reputation. People’s credulousness and word of mouth has done the rest. Rubenstein, despite his news publishing empire, remains a theatrical at heart. You can take the man out of vaudeville but you can’t take vaudeville out of the man.”

“Sensationalism is Wallace Rubenstein’s middle name,” Houdini admitted. “In his newspapers and in all aspects of his life. I did have my concerns that pretending to be a mummy would not work. Would the public fall for it? Yet there is something profoundly fascinating about a person seemingly rising from the grave. It touches a deep-seated nerve – our dread of death and our hope of an afterlife beyond it. This little stunt has power. I am convinced the same power will bolster my magic act and make it a roaring success, once it is fully developed. Apparent death, apparent rebirth – who will not pay to see that?”

Houdini managed to look both wistful and avaricious at the same time.

“Watson,” said Holmes, “I believe it is safe for you to return your gun to your pocket.”

I acceded to the request with some slight reluctance. Houdini watched me do it with no small relief.

“Mr Houdini,” Holmes continued, “what impresses me most of all is the self-control you so clearly have in abundance.”

Houdini offered a low, gratified bow. “It is one of my foremost qualities.”

“To be entombed in that sarcophagus for so long a period – eighteen hours, did you say?”

“Since it was unloaded from the wagon just after six this morning and carried to this room. I am ostensibly part of the team of specialist removals men who are accompanying the collection on tour; that is my cover. Just before the sarcophagus is wheeled indoors, I sneak inside and ensconce myself. It is otherwise empty, by the way. Djedhor himself is waiting back at Rubenstein’s mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, his body stored in a dry, well-ventilated basement room. Then, with great care, I strip out of my civilian clothing, bind myself up in bandages, and wait for the witching hour.”

“Is it not claustrophobic?”

“I have ways of combating fear. The mind is a powerful tool, Mr Holmes, you know that as well as anyone. It can, provided it is subjected to the correct training and discipline, conquer all physical and emotional infirmities. I have studied the methods of Hindu fakirs and yogis, who are able to transcend the limitations of the flesh to a sometimes superhuman degree, and have applied them to my own work. I am now able to place myself in a kind of trance state, such that hours pass like minutes. I slow my breathing and lower my heart rate, even sometimes falling into a doze. Confined spaces with limited air supply hold no terror for me. I am as cosy in them as in my own bed.”

“Remarkable. Would your magic act, then, involve entering into a confined space?”

“And then absconding from it. Dash and I – that is, my brother Theo and I – are also hoping to involve handcuffs, and possibly a straitjacket. The act is still very much in its infancy, hence I am obliged to take paid engagements of every description, however irregular, such as this one. Tell me, Mr Holmes, am I to be arrested? Handed over to your London bobbies? Is that your plan?”

“I am undecided,” said Holmes. “No real misdemeanour has been perpetrated. No one has been hurt or materially disadvantaged.”

I felt moved to point out that certain museum employees on the Continent had needlessly and unfairly lost their jobs.

“That is a fact,” said my friend with a nod. “Perhaps then, Mr Houdini, we can come to some sort of arrangement. If you were to cable Mr Rubenstein and convince him to make suitable reparations to those people Watson has mentioned, the balance of justice will be righted and there will be no call to take matters further.”

“That is most reasonable of you, sir. I should warn you, Mr Rubenstein may not like it. He is not fond of parting with money. Yet he will, if the only alternative is a public embarrassment. And in return, your and Dr Watson’s complicity is assured?”

“I give you my word. I would advise, however, that in future you vary the timings of your excursions as Pharaoh Djedhor, for that is what first alerted me to the possibility that human rather than supernatural agency was involved here. Before I came to the museum this evening, while my friend Watson was tending to his patients at his practice, I made enquiries. I sent a number of telegrams and spoke at length with Sir Edward Maunde Thompson. I soon ascertained that Djedhor only ever made his presence known on the night after the Rubenstein Collection was installed in a new venue. Thereafter neither hide nor hair was seen of him until the collection proceeded to its next destination, whereupon he would immediately put in an appearance again. That was more than suggestive. It indicated a fixed pattern. It also indicated the involvement of a person of subtle courage and singular inner fortitude, just such a person as we have met tonight. I congratulate you, Mr Houdini, on your achievement, and salute you. Bravo.”

Again Houdini bowed, this time from the waist with both arms stretched out to the side, as though receiving rapturous applause from an audience.

He and Holmes talked for some time afterward, their conversation focusing on the picking of locks – an area of mutual expertise – and various makes of handcuffs, particularly the Hiatt Darby and the notorious Bean Giant. Then we went our separate ways, Holmes and I to Baker Street, Houdini back to the sarcophagus, wherein he would change into his ordinary clothes and re-emerge at opening time to join the museum’s first influx of visitors.

I myself had not taken to the arrogant, stocky little man at all. Holmes, on the other hand, was quite enamoured of him, and for the next few days sang his praises whenever possible.

“Harry Houdini is destined for a stellar career,” Holmes said more than once. “You’ll see, Watson.”

And of course he was right. Houdini the Handcuff King became one of the most famous performing artistes on the planet, entertaining and enthralling millions with his death-defying escapological tricks, until his tragic premature demise in October of last year.

It is not with Houdini, however, that this narrative is concerned. Rather, it is with the events that occurred a couple of months after that night at the British Museum, by which time the Rubenstein Collection was securely back across the Atlantic and settled again in its owner’s palatial summer home. Those events, not entirely unconnected with the mystery of the living mummy, were set in train on a cool spring morning in March, when Sherlock Holmes was perusing The Times over breakfast and abruptly let forth a shout that was half bemusement, half disgust.

CHAPTER THREE

AN INSULT AND A CHALLENGE

“Confound it all!” Holmes cried. “Have you read this, Watson?”

“I haven’t yet taken the opportunity to look at the paper,” I replied, setting down my teacup. “I have been attempting to finish this book, which so many of my patients have recommended to me, though for the life of me I can’t think why.”

“The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli,” said Holmes, eyeing the title embossed on the spine. “Improving stuff, I’m sure.”

“The only thing it could possibly be said to improve, given its sales figures and the number of editions it has gone through, is the state of Miss Corelli’s bank balance. I have never read such badly written tripe. This fellow Tempest, the protagonist – everyone keeps telling him that the aristocrat who is so interested in helping him dispose of his newfound inherited wealth, Prince Lucio Rimânez, is the Devil incarnate. Lucio! Might as well call himself Lucifer and have done with it. The situation is patently Faustian, yet Tempest remains oblivious. The fool doesn’t deserve the money. And as for the author’s chronic overuse of long dashes… Ugh. How rot like this ever gets published, let alone command such a wide readership, beggars belief.”

“Professional envy, eh, Watson?”

“Hardly. By any objective reckoning I do respectably well from my sideline as an author.”

“Not least because you have such sterling material to work with.”

Holmes spoke wryly, with a deadpan expression, but he was preening, I could tell. I have already said elsewhere that I had never known the man be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year 1895, and that his career as a consulting detective was at an acme of success, bringing him renown, acclaim and a handsome livelihood. With this, alas, came an air of ebullient satisfaction which occasionally bordered on conceitedness and was very hard to swallow, particularly at those times when my own temperament was of a more choleric disposition.

“If you dislike the book so much,” he went on, “why are you so keen to finish it?”

“Because I want to know how it all turns out and discover what, if anything, Tempest learns from his fall from grace.”

“Then Miss Corelli has done her job admirably, has she not? The purpose of a novel, after all, is to keep the reader spellbound and turning the pages all the way to the end, and I note you have been doing that with some avidity.”

“Perhaps,” I allowed. “Although I hate myself for it.”

“If it’s any consolation, I would be very surprised if the works of Marie Corelli and her ilk, that crowd of gushing romantics with their flock-wallpaper melodramatics, were still as popular a hundred years from now as they are today. Cultural tastes are fickle. Your chronicles of my exploits, by contrast, will in all likelihood continue to captivate future generations. That is a kind of immortality for both you and me – one, moreover, that does not require us to partake of a mystical Ancient Egyptian elixir like John Vansittart Smith’s mysterious Sosra.”

“Ah yes. Vansittart Smith. What do you make of his story of a seemingly centuries-old priest and his pursuit of the mortal remains of his lost love?”

“I am inclined to dismiss it as, at best, a misinterpretation of quite readily explicable events. Having looked him up in Who’s Who, I know that in addition to Egyptology Vansittart Smith has studied botany, zoology and chemistry, becoming the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none. I suspect he is as easy to impress as he is to distract. One night in Paris a Middle Eastern fraudster told him a tall tale, which he swallowed whole, with the gullibility of the lifelong dilettante.”

“That or he made the whole thing up himself.”

“There is that possibility. His field of study attracts those who have a tendency to romanticise the distant past. Is Egyptology not more exciting when there is a whiff of mystery and enigma hanging over it? Would that not make Vansittart Smith appear more mysterious and enigmatic by association? For a scientist, he is something of a fantasist, and his spine-tingling little narrative may well be a genuine anecdote sprinkled with a great deal of imaginative spice. At any rate, it and he need not detain us any further.”

I nodded in agreement, before returning to the topic from which we had allowed ourselves to become diverted.

“Do you really think, Holmes, that my writings will still be read a century or more hence?”

“I flatter myself that my name will be familiar to all long after I am gone from this world, thanks in no small part to you and your literary endeavours.”

“You are too kind.”

I set aside The Sorrows of Satan, having saved my page with a leather bookmark. In the event, I never did get round to finishing the novel, and I can’t say my life is in any way diminished for that.

“I have brought a small smile to your face,” said Holmes. “That is good to see. You have oftentimes been glum company of late. I understand why, of course. Your wife…”

My Mary had passed away the previous year while Holmes was still abroad, owing to complications arising during childbirth which had taken the lives of both mother and baby, and although I was over the worst part of my grieving, still I mourned her. The loss remained a gaping wound. It might take nothing more than the sight of a pretty young woman whose face reminded me of hers, or a whiff of a perfume similar to the rose-scented eau de toilette Mary had favoured, to renew the ache in my heart, as though only days had elapsed, not months, since she perished. Equally, I might find myself waking up of a morning in a dreadful funk and not knowing why, until I realised that it was because Mary was not there and I missed her.

Moving back into 221B with Holmes had been beneficial, in that it afforded me daily companionship and I was no longer rattling about at home on my own with sad mementoes of my time with Mary all around me. Holmes and the escapades he and I went on had proved a useful diversion from melancholy. Melancholy, nonetheless, crept up on me now and then like a venomous serpent and left me prone to sourness, as I was on that March morning.

“A small smile, yes, and with luck I shall be able to broaden it,” Holmes continued. “This article on page ten has just caught my eye and piqued me. It is in the way of an insult and a challenge. May I read it out to you?”

“By all means.”

Holmes cleared his throat and began.

“The headline runs, ‘The Thinking Engine – A Computational Breakthrough?’ The text beneath goes as follows. ‘This last Thursday, the 14th inst., saw the unveiling of a computational device whose inventor pronounces it the equal of any human brain, even the greatest.’”

“A remarkable claim.”

“‘Professor Malcolm Quantock of Balliol College, Oxford, has built a device of such surpassing sophistication that, in his words, “it makes Mr Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine seem a mewling infant by comparison”. So profound is its analytical and calculating power, according to its creator, that it will not just resolve mathematical equations and tabulate polynomial functions but also’ – brace yourself, Watson, here’s the nub of it – ‘solve crimes.’”

“What!” I ejaculated. “But that’s preposterous.”

“Is it?” said Holmes. “Well, we shall see. The article continues, ‘The professor has christened his machine “The Thinking Engine”, and it is presently installed in the new extension of Oxford’s University Galleries, the museum on Beaumont Street which was established originally in the seventeenth century to house Elias Ashmole’s and John Tradescant’s combined collection of engravings, geological samples, zoological specimens and other curiosities.

“‘The Thinking Engine is driven by a specially constructed five-horsepower petroleum-driven internal combustion motor which affords sufficient energy to operate an estimated one hundred thousand pinwheels and a similar number of sector gears. It is furthermore equipped with a printer to turn out answers in a typeset form on strips of paper.