The Seven-Per-Cent Solution Page 7

  CHAPTER VI

  Toby Surpasses Himself

  “HOLMES !”

  He laughed, tore off the false hair, and peeled away the equally false eyebrows and warts of the singer’s chin. Next he removed the dark-tinted spectacles, and in place of the minstrel’s dead eyes, I was treated to the sight of Holmes’s twinkling ones, alight with silent mirth.

  “Forgive me, my dear fellow. You know I can never resist a touch of the dramatic and the setting was so perfect that I succumbed to temptation.”

  It took some moments to reassure the terrified cabbie, whom the entire episode had reduced to near insensibility, but Holmes succeeded at last in calming him.

  “But why the disguise?” I pursued, as he bent down to pet the dog, who, now close enough to sniff him, was happily wagging its tail and licking the paint from his cheeks.

  He looked up at me sharply.

  “He has bolted, Watson.”

  “Bolted? Who has bolted?”

  “The Professor.” Holmes spoke with an exasperated air as he stood up. “That is his house behind you in the fog. I was keeping watch on the residence myself last night (usually I have paid Wiggins* to do it), and all was normal until midnight. It was raw and damp, and I went to the public house down the road for some brandy to warm my insides. While I was gone, two men came to see him. What they said I have no way of knowing, but I don’t doubt that they were spies in his pay, come to tell him of my nets closing upon him. When I returned they had gone, and all was as I had left it. Then, this morning at eleven, I received a wire from Wiggins. Sometime between the time I left and he assumed my place, the Professor departed. How or where we have yet to discover. I came here as you saw me lest his friends should lie in ambush.”

  I listened, trying to maintain an impassive expression and to ask the appropriate questions.

  “Two men, you say?”

  “Yes. One was tall and quite heavy—fourteen stone, at least—this damp ground is very effective for registering impressions. He wore large boots with a curved toe and square heel, worn towards the instep on each foot. Men that large and heavy often stand with their toes out, which accounts for this phenomenon. He was decisive, and, I should judge, the leader of the two.”

  “And the other?” I tried to keep from swallowing conspicuously.

  “Ah, the other,” Holmes sighed ruminatively and looked about at the stillness. “There are features of interest about him. He was somewhat shorter and not nearly so heavy as his companion; less than six feet, I would say, and he walked with a slight limp, not unlike yours, Watson, in his left leg. He lagged behind on one occasion and had to be called forward by the other when he approached the house. This is to be inferred from the fact that only his toe prints are visible as he went in that direction. He was running to catch up, the increased length of his stride tells me, and not being stealthy, for such a manoeuvre had not occurred to his companion. They came forward to the house, met with the Professor and took their leave. I could tell you more about them except this wretched fog has precluded my seeing the total picture of their activities. Fortunately, I took precautions so that I may lay my hands on them, should that be necessary. As you know, however, it is not my habit to go after the small fish while the big ones are at large. Mind the vanilla extract!” he yelled suddenly, and pulled me backwards from the two paces or so I had taken in the direction of the house. “You might have fallen in,” he gasped, holding on to me to regain his balance. Now I was certain he was completely mad, beyond help.

  “Vanilla extract !” I spoke as calmly as I could.

  “Don’t worry, my dear fellow, I have not lost my wits,” he chuckled, releasing the lapels of my ulster. “I said I had taken precautions which would enable me to trace any, or all of these men. Pay off the cab and I will explain.”

  Feeling very ill at ease, I stumbled back towards the cab, took my bag from its recesses, and settled with the driver. He seemed relieved to go, no doubt having judged the dangers of the fog slight compared to the hazards of life in Munro Road. The cab creaked slowly into oblivion and I returned to where my companion stood waiting. Taking me by the arm and holding Toby’s lead, Holmes guided us towards the house, which, though still invisible, I was now able to sense in the near-by vicinity.

  “Look down here and breathe deeply,” he instructed. I squatted down and inhaled as directed, and almost at once my nostrils were assailed by the saccharine odour of vanilla extract.

  “What in the world—?”

  “It’s better than creosote, if one can arrange it,” he responded, allowing Toby to smell it as well, “for it isn’t sticky, which might warn the wearer that something was adhering to the soles of his boot. Its other advantage is its uniqueness. It is powerful and long-lasting, and I very much doubt that Toby will be confused by anything remotely similar—unless, of course, the trail leads us through a kitchen. Go on, smell it, boy, smell it !” he encouraged the dog, which dutifully sniffed at the large puddle of the stuff next to the kerb.

  “I poured this here before I left last night,” Holmes went on, continuing to remove the trappings of his disguise. “They all trod in it—Moriarty, his two accomplices, and the wheel of the cab that took him away some hours ago.”

  I thanked my stars that I had put on a different pair of boots this morning, and rose to my feet.

  “And now?”

  “And now Toby will follow the wheel of the cab. At some point he will exhibit uncertainty and we will look for the trail to continue on foot. Are you ready?”

  “Are we not too late?”

  “I think not. The fog that delayed your arrival no doubt interfered with his escape, as well. Come on, boy !”

  He jerked Toby slightly away from the puddle of vanilla extract and we were off. The scent was evidently a powerful one. Disregarding the visual handicap imposed on us by the fog, the dog went at a sharp pace, barely allowing himself to be held in check while Holmes retrieved his own satchel, a red carpet bag, from the shrubbery on the opposite side of the road. For the most part we travelled in silence, doing our best to keep up with the animal, whose sharp tugs on the lead and enthusiastic yelps gave us to understand that not even the noxious fumes of sulphur in the air were affecting his powers.

  Holmes appeared calm and collected, very much in possession of his faculties, and I was forced to wonder if I had not made some incredible error. Perhaps Moriarty had duped Mycroft as well as myself, and was in fact the centre of terrible evil. I put the thought out of my mind as one I could not afford at this time, and limped along as best I could in the wake of Holmes and the dog. This kind of weather was especially painful to my wound, and as a rule I did not walk in such fog. At one point I took out my pipe, but Holmes held up a warning hand.

  “The dog has the fog to contend with already,” he advised. “Let us not add to his obstacles.”

  I nodded and we went on, winding through streets we could not see, and dodging traffic, for we were obliged to use the centre of the road as the cab had done before us.

  At one point we passed the Gloucester Road Station on our left, and I heard clearly train whistles hooting in the mists, like blind sows trying to find their litters. Still the dog pulled us on, with no apparent lapse of energy.

  “I may write a monograph on it,”† Holmes said, referring to the vanilla extract. “Its properties for this kind of work are ideal, as you can see. Our guide does not hestitate at all. Even through mud and water he knows his way.”

  I mumbled something or other in agreement and breathed again an inward sigh of relief that I had changed my footwear, else the sweet substance had led that exemplary canine to me before we had travelled two yards. The game would have been up before it had started.

  As it was, I was hard pressed to maintain the cur’s pace. I could not see where we were, and the sounds of the city blurred in my ears as they succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity. My leg had begun to throb in earnest and I was on the point of saying so when Holmes sto
pped short and plucked me by the coat.

  “What is it?” said I, gasping for breath.

  “Listen.”

  I obeyed, trying to hear above the reverberations of my own heart. There were horses, the creakings of harness and tackle, the cries of cabbies, and the whistles of trains again.

  “Victoria,” Holmes said quietly.

  It was indeed the great railway terminus, as we could now perceive.

  “Precisely what I foresaw,” Holmes murmured next to me. “You have your bag with you? That is fortunate.”

  Did I detect a sarcastic inflection in his tone?

  “Your wire said ‘a few days’,” I reminded him.

  He gave no sign of having heard, but plunged forward behind Toby, who was making a straight line for the cab stands. He sniffed in the ground next to where several of them stood idle, the horses’ mouths covered with feed-bags, and then he suddenly made as if to dash away from the station.

  “No, no,” Holmes told him gently but firmly. “We are through with the cab, Toby. Show us where its passenger went.”

  With this, he led the animal around to the other side of the cabs and there, after a moment of hesitation, the animal’s confusion was resolved. With a fresh yelp, he darted off towards the terminus itself.

  Inside the crowded station—the more crowded because of the delays occasioned by the inclement weather—Toby dived through knots of stranded and irritated passengers, sometimes spilling over a portmanteau that lay in his path, till he arrived at the platform of the Continental express. There he stopped dead before the empty tracks as Gloucester stopped at the edge of his cliff. The vanilla extract ended here. I looked at Holmes, who smiled and shot up his brows.

  “So,” said he, quietly.

  “What now?” I enquired.

  “Let us find out how long it has been since the Express has gone and how long it will be before it goes again.”

  “And the dog?”

  “Oh, we will take him with us. I do not think we have exhausted his usefulness quite yet.”

  “Of course Toby is not the only method by which I might have traced Professor Moriarty,” Holmes said, later, as our train emerged from the fog some twenty miles outside London on its way to Dover. “There were at least three choices, any one of which would have served my turn. Without vanilla extract,” he added, smiling.

  The clean air brought a lift to my spirits as well as to my congested lungs. South-east of London the day was yet cloudy and rainy, but at least one could see, and the fact that I had Holmes well and truly on his way made up for any discomforts.

  My companion fell into a kind of uneasy doze and awoke thirty minutes later with a start, peering at me strangely. He stood up suddenly, holding on to the overhead luggage racks for support.

  “Excuse me for a moment, my dear fellow,” he said in strained tones, and with another awkward glance he pulled down his red carpet bag. He had, in the interval before our train departed from Victoria, used the facilities there to remove the last vestiges of his disguise and replace them with his normal attire, carried in the bag. I knew, therefore, where he was about to go, what he was about to do, and why he was about to do it. I choked back any remonstrance, however. This, after all, was why I was taking him to Austria. Yes, taking him, though he knew it not.

  Toby raised his head from its sleeping posture as Holmes slid past us out of the compartment. I patted him and he lay still again.

  Holmes returned some ten minutes later and silently replaced the carpet bag on its rack. He sat down without a word or indeed a glance at me, and pretended to be utterly absorbed in a pocket edition of Montaigne’s essays. I fell to gazing out at the rolling countryside, lightly swathed in glistening damp, the cattle standing with their backs to the wind.

  The train pulled into its rendezvous with the boat at Dover. We three disembarked briefly and stretched our legs on the platform, Holmes having provided Toby with a reminder of the vanilla extract by allowing him to catch a whiff from a small bottle of the stuff in his bag. Once on the platform, under the guise of allowing the dog to go about his business (which indeed, he did with alacrity), we strode up and down in an effort to determine if the Professor had left the train he was on when it, too, had stopped here. I, of course, knew he had not, but, as Toby came to the same conclusion, there was no need for me to say so.

  “And, as the train we are taking makes only these stops that all the Continental expresses make, we are not missing any opportunities the Professor had to leave it,” Holmes reasoned, and we thereupon crossed the Channel.

  Using the same procedure in Calais—with the same results—we continued on our way to Paris, arriving in the middle of the night. The Gare du Nord was almost deserted at that hour and we had no difficulty in following the vanilla extract footsteps to the platform whence originated the Vienna express.

  Holmes frowned as he read the sign.

  “Why on earth Vienna?” he mused.

  “Perhaps he got off somewhere along the way. There appear to be plenty of stops to accommodate him. I hope Toby is infallible,” I added.

  Holmes smiled grimly.

  “If he is not, we are a great deal worse off than when he took a wrong turning and went in search of a creosote barrel,” he admitted. “But I place my faith in vanilla extract. I have conducted experiments—and, well, if it proves false, Watson, this is one case your readers will be amused instead of amazed to read.”

  I did not tell him it was a case it had never occurred to me to set down.

  “Vienna will replace Norbury in the lexicon of my failures,” he laughed, going off to see when the next express was scheduled to depart and also to ascertain that it always left from the same platform, which, as it developed, it did.

  “When the dog cannot detect the scent,” Holmes reasoned as we rattled across France in the pre-dawn hours, “he will stop. As he has not stopped, I think it is safe to assume that he has not lost it. As the odour is not a common one—certainly outof-doors—we may also infer that it is the same scent he is following and not a barrel of the substance which has crossed its path.”

  I nodded drowsily, trying to keep my eyes on the yellow-backed novel I had purchased in Paris, but sleep shortly overcame me.

  When I awoke it was almost noon. I was covered by Holmes’s hound’s tooth travelling cloak, with my legs propped up on the seat. My companion sat across from me as I had left him, staring out the window and smoking his pipe.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked, turning to me after a moment with a smile.

  Aside from the crick in my neck, I answered that I had, thanking him for the loan of his cloak. I then ventured to enquire about our progress.

  “We stopped twice,” he informed me. “Once at the Swiss border and once at Geneva, for the better part of an hour. If Toby is to be believed, Moriarty did not leave the train.”

  Toby, I had cause to know, was retaining his reputation for infallibility. I rose, went to the wash room and shaved, and then accompanied Holmes to the dining car. There was some little fuss made about the dog, as there had been at every border, but Holmes solved this dilemma by entrusting Toby to the care of a steward, giving him some change he had concerted in Paris, and asking the man to see if he could find some scraps for him from the cook’s leavings. Then we settled down to luncheon, though it disturbed me to see Holmes’s slight appetite was of the slightest. I again refrained from comment, however, and the day wore on. Berne succeeded Geneva and Zürich Berne. The ritual of the platform walk was repeated on the occasion of each stop, and, as it yielded only negative results, Holmes and I would return to our compartment with frowns of puzzlement on our faces. Holmes would reiterate his logic in the matter, which I would repeat, appeared sound enough to me.

  After Zürich came the German border, then Munich and Salzburg. And still there was no trace of the vanilla odour on any of the train platforms.

  I stared out of the window all afternoon and into the twilight, mesmerised by the sc
enery—so different from that at home—with its little fairy-tale cottages and quaintly dressed natives in their peaked caps, dirndls and lederhosen. The weather was sunny and gave promise of warmth. I wondered that the snow on the spectacular mountains above our route did not melt in such a climate, and said as much to Holmes.

  “Oh, but it does,” he replied, squinting out of the window at the white-clad peaks. “And then they have avalanches.”

  This was not a pleasant thought, but it was impossible not to dwell upon it once it had been articulated. Were not avalanches often precipitated by sound—and were we not making a fearful racket as we plunged through these delicate structures? How if your reckless thundering should produce the tremor that would bury us?

  “You are right, Watson. It is a humbling thought.”

  I looked at my companion who was in the act of shaking out a vesta. There was no need to ask him how he had divined my thoughts. I could easily follow the chain of reasoning involved.

  “Yes, look at it,” he followed my gaze upward. “How puny our actions seem when contrasted with those of Nature, do they not?” he went on with a melancholy air. “A dozen geniuses could be on this train—each one possessing some tremendous secret whose service to mankind would prove invaluable—and yet, with a flick of the Creator’s little finger those distant peaks would be pushed on top of us and where would mankind be then, eh, Watson? I ask you: where does it all lead?”

  He appeared to be in one of those depressions I had seen overpower him before. More surely than if he were being buried by the snow and ice he spoke of, he was hurtling downward inside his soul and there was nothing I could do to stop him.