The Redacted Sherlock Holmes - Volume V

By Orlando Pearson

Five sensational Sherlock Holmes stories by Orlando Pearson followed by three meditations hinting at the most radical theory yet about the Great Baker Street Detective.
A Type of Infamy - Holmes investigates a mysterious disappearance in 1938;
The Fourth Student - shocking events in the worlds of athletics and medicine;
A Question of Time - Holmes, Churchill, and Realpolitik at Britain's finest hour;
The Sleeper's Cache - the sequel to the Bruce Partington Plans with Machiavellian manoeuvring by Mycroft;
The Other Woman - Holmes's second female nemesis and a musical discovery; and
Three Holmesian Meditations - an investigation into the true nature of the enigma that is Sherlock Holmes
Mr Pearson's previous works have been hailed by the Church Times as "Clever, thought-provoking, and terrific fun". This description applies just as aptly to this latest collection.
A must for traditionalists, lovers of crime fiction, and anyone who likes a thrilling read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MX Publishing
• Release date: Sep 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781787053359

Book preview

The Redacted Sherlock Holmes

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Volume V

Orlando Pearson

2018 digital version converted and published by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Copyright © 2018 Orlando Pearson

The right of Orlando Pearson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious or used fictitiously. Except for certain historical personages, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of MX Publishing.

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London, N11 3GX

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For My Family

A Type of Infamy

After the death of my second wife in 1937, I moved down to Sussex to share once more living quarters with Sherlock Holmes. My friend and I were by now both in our early eighties and the cliff-top village on the South Downs was sleepy in the extreme. I therefore expected no repeat of the adventures that had been such a feature of our lives in the 1880s and 1890s.

Holmes’s cottage was small but comfortably furnished. His housekeeper was Mrs Turner, the married name of the daughter of Mrs Hudson. She had bought her own cottage in the village and came to us early in the morning to make breakfast and tidy. Otherwise, Holmes and I led the solitary bachelor existence that Holmes had always craved, but from which I had been happy to escape at the time of my two marriages, first in 1888 and then in 1907.

As my reader may imagine, some of the routines which had formed such a part of our lives in Baker Street found their own forms, mutata mutandis, in Sussex.

Holmes would spend most of his days in his preferred activity of apiculture. When there was some lull in these activities, we would ramble through the Downs and cliff country where Holmes’s observations about nature were as acute as those he had made about London life nearly half a century earlier.

Of an evening, we would smoke a pipe together and talk of many things but, inevitably in the late 1930s, political developments were a frequent topic of conversation. During his long career as the world’s only consulting detective, Holmes had conducted investigations in which he had assisted a prime minister and two foreign secretaries. The insights that this had given him meant that our discussions ranged further than they had when we had first met in the closing years of the previous century, at which time his knowledge of politics had been almost non-existent. My reader will also be aware of our investigation of 1930 in Berlin into the fatal assault on Horst Wessel, leader of one of the city’s battalions of storm-troopers, and of the abortive commission to find discreditable material about Hitler in the winter of 1932/1933. Our involvement in these two cases informed our discussions as we watched with mounting horror the gathering of storm clouds over Europe.

The case that follows had as its inception a matter that was at first sight serious but mundane. Certainly, it gave no indication as it opened that it was a minor but significant cog in the great machine driving world events. One morning in early March 1938, just as breakfast had been cleared away, there was a knock at the door and a gaunt, mousy-haired young man stood before us.

You may call me Mr McGregor, he said in a voice with a tremor of nervousness. I have a most peculiar matter that I want to raise with you.

A case is always welcome, even in my retirement, said Holmes, lighting his pipe, although I would have thought that your work at the hot metal press would have precluded you from coming to consult during the working week.

Mr Holmes, said our pallid visitor, this is better than anything Dr Watson has written about you! How do you know that I work in the print trade?

My good Mr McGregor! I see before me a man who comes with bluish black edging to his gums and with fingertips stained from long contact with printer’s ink. He could have come from no other background. You are in contact with lead for the typeface and ink for the press every working day.

What you say is true, sir, said McGregor. "My work is at the Daily Mail and I spend all day at the foundry making letters and then testing their reproduction at the press. We form the letters in all manner of different fonts using an alloy with a high lead content, so the bodies of all of us who work there bear the signs of it."

And what brings you here to consult?

Most of my work is to create letters for the newspapers, as each metal font will only last for a few issues before its surface becomes worn down. As a side-line, we also make fonts to order. These are fonts a commercial company may order so that they have a particular shape that cannot be used by anyone else. We also receive occasional requests to reproduce a specific font for a document. It happens mostly when an old document with sentimental value is damaged or destroyed and the owner wants to create an exact replica.

You make yourself very plain.

I have a colleague called Jeremy Fisher who works at the same work-bench as I do. Last week, the proprietor, Viscount Rothermere, came to the shop floor in the company of another gentleman. It is a rare occurrence indeed for the proprietor to be seen on the shop floor. He went over to Fisher, and I heard him say he had an unusual commission, before the three started to speak in tones that were hushed so I could no longer overhear.

Pray continue.

I thought no more of it until the day before yesterday. There was a burglary at our work shop overnight. The burglars had made off with a number of items - mainly tools on work benches - but when I went to my own work bench I found they had used a chisel on Fisher’s secure locker and it stood open and empty.

Were any other lockers emptied?

No, Mr Holmes, or at least none that I could see.

So, are you saying that the burglars stole the valuable things they could lay their hands on quickly and broke open one locker only?

I did not go around the rest of the workshop, but what you say is what I saw.

Could it be that having broken open your colleague’s locker, they concluded that the other lockers were not worth breaking into?

That is possible.

And was a police investigation conducted?

The police were briefly on our premises.

Did they interview you?

They did not. Our supervisor said he would deal with the issue and I had no desire to have anything to do with the police.

So, this is a matter of minor larceny. Why have you come to see me?

Mr Holmes, the day before yesterday, Mr Fisher did not come into work. I had taken my work apron home the day before that and had forgotten to bring it in. I therefore decided to put on Fisher’s apron, which he had left hanging from the hook next to mine. In the pocket I found a photograph.

He handed it to my friend, who looked at it under a magnifying glass. I went and stood at Holmes’s shoulder to take a look for myself. I had expected to see a picture of a person. Instead there was a picture of some faded text from a greying document in a font I had not seen before. The text was in German and had the following words, which I print as Holmes and I saw them that morning:

Sohn. Mit der Ehr- und Tugendsamen Rosalia Buschini zu Gföll in U.Ö. gebürtig

It is a very short extract of an official document, said Holmes after he had examined the photograph minutely under the glass. It looks like an entry to an official register. I can read ‘...son. With the honourable and virtuous Rosalia Buschini born in Gföll in Lower Austria...’ That is the eastern part of what now constitutes the Republic of Austria. I would date it to the second half of the eighteenth century, although then Austria was a constituent part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and had a much larger territory.

From my experience with typefaces, Mr Holmes, you are right with the date. But for jobs like this, I don’t pay too much attention to the content or the language, so what sort of document it is hardly matters to me. This would be a clear enough photograph to make typefaces to reproduce the letters that are on this photograph, and there are enough different letters to make a good job of reproducing the ones that are missing.

So, what is your concern? Your colleague may have had a commission to reproduce this typeface. I understand from what you say that this is an unusual although not an unheard-of commission. What is there to examine?

Fisher wasn’t in yesterday either, sir.

Is that not a matter for your employer to concern himself with rather than you?

Mr Holmes, you seem not to know how the print shop of a newspaper works. We operate the so-called Spanish practices. I don’t know the true name of any of my colleagues and am never sure who will come in to work or when. We are paid in cash and there are often more pay envelopes than there are workers. But it does seem strange that Fisher’s locker alone should have been broken into, that Fisher is missing, and that he should have been working to make letters that have this strange foreign font.

Holmes was silent for a second and then asked, Can you describe the stranger?

He was very smart, sir. Silvery hair swept back. Couldn’t say much else.

Did you hear him speak?

No, sir.

And Fisher?

He’s in his mid-thirties and has a pale face. He has a tooth missing at the front.

So, Mr McGregor, said Holmes, Let me summarise to you what you are saying: Your colleague was given a commission to reproduce an eighteenth-century Austrian typeface. This commission was given to him by a stranger in the presence of Viscount Rothermere. There is reason to believe that the fonts that Fisher created have been stolen, as his locker was empty when it was broken open as part of this theft, although, conceivably, this minor break-in is unrelated to the commission. Fisher has not been seen for two days, although the working days of all of you at your newspaper are somewhat irregular.

That’s about my take on it, sir.

And did you hear nothing else of the conversation between Rothermere, Fisher and this stranger?

Nothing... except when they were leaving, Rothermere said that it was very appropriate to use a drunk frog for this commission.

I noted my colleague’s eyebrows shoot up at this extraordinary statement.

Was Fisher of French origin? he asked eventually.

Not as far as I am aware, sir.

And what do you know about his drinking habits?

McGregor smiled briefly before saying, Well, sir, Fisher’s not the only one where we work to enjoy a drink, even in working hours.

McGregor had nothing else to add and was soon on his way.

When our client had gone, Holmes sat in his chair smoking. I knew better than to disturb him and a whole hour passed before he said anything.

If matters are as I stated when McGregor was here, then it must be someone endowed with exceptional resources who wants this typeface. That must mean either a large organisation or a state. Moreover, if the break-in and the disappearance of Fisher have anything to do with the generation of the typeface, the need for obtaining it must have become more urgent still. But why the urgency to create a document from eighteenth-century Austria?

Could it be an attempt to change some land deposition?

"What you say might explain the request and possibly the urgency. Watson, this is unlikely to be a trivial matter. Fifty years ago I might have staged my own break-in at the offices of the Daily Mail, but that time is past. Instead let us to London and seek an interview with Viscount Rothermere. He clearly knows what this is about."

Even in 1938, my friend’s visiting card could still gain access to all the most prominent people in the country. As we waited in the reception for Viscount Rothermere to become free, we could see framed on the walls front pages of past editions of the newspaper covering major events. VICTORY AT LAST was how the newspaper had proclaimed the Armistice in 1918, while BACK TO WORK marked the end of the General Strike. HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS spelt out Rothermere’s support for Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and AIRSHIP CATASTROPHE announced the Hindenburg crash. We were brought before Viscount Rothermere - a man in his mid-seventies though still full of vigour.

How can I help you, Mr Holmes? asked the magnate as we eventually sat down.

I am investigating the disappearance of one your employees, Fisher. Has he been reported missing from work? said Holmes.

Rothermere stared at us for several seconds before speaking.

My dear Mr Holmes, he eventually expostulated, "you obviously have no understanding of the way business operates in Fleet Street. So-called Spanish Practices mean employee lists are not reliable, and I have no idea if we are missing any employees as I do not know who works either in the print shop or in type-setting. Our workforce is irregular, and we could not have it any other way if we want to have our newspaper published and distributed. We have none of the disciplines on the shop floor that are common to other businesses. In any case, the demanding nature of the work of our employees makes absenteeism a common feature of our workforce. I fear I am unable to pursue your enquiry as any attempt