The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes Read Free Page B

Cambrai Cottage featured a sitting room with a wood-beamed ceiling and a large stone fireplace. At the top of the stairs were two bedrooms, one looking on to the street, the other on to the patio behind the house. We were pleased by the premises and by the price which, when divided by two, was quite reasonable. We concluded our bargain on the spot. On that very morning I checked out of the Old Black Lion and moved my belongings into Cambrai Cottage. The following morning Coombes arrived with his wheelbarrow of books and a very ancient leather suitcase with three faded stickers on the side. Only one of the stickers could still be read: Hotel Beau-Rivage, Quai du Mont-Blanc, Geneve .
    Coombes was certainly an easy enough man to live with. He rose early but never made a sound. He waited until I was away hiking the hills before conducting his book experiments in the kitchen. These experiments involved heating pages of books, then putting them into a bath of chemicals. But he made it a point to clean up the mess before I arrived back for lunch. His books were numerous but never in the way. He kept them carefully stacked in and around the bookcase at one side of the sitting room, and he carried them off to his bedroom in piles of five or six. Often when I arrived back in the evening I found him sitting in front of a roaring fire and reading three books simultaneously, going from one to the other as he apparently compared them. He seemed like a man in mad pursuit of something or other, but of what remained a mystery to me. In the titles he collected I could see no pattern. He had biographies of the Beatles, Tony Blair, Bill Gates, Bertrand Russell and many others. He had histories of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Falklands War, the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus histories of England, France, the United States, China, and various other countries – but none of these histories covered any period earlier than the twentieth century. Most numerous were books on modern science and technology, including quantum theory, global warming, alternative energy sources, acupuncture, mental illness and computers. Many books on computers. Also books on the biological sciences, especially genetic engineering of all sorts, including recombinant DNA cloning and reproductive cloning. In one corner was a pile of books on hypnotism, hallucinatory drugs, spiritualism and meditation. In another corner I noticed books on Marilyn Monroe, the history of sport in the twentieth century, the history of aviation, and a textbook on organic chemistry.
    What was he aiming at? Surely he had to have some specific goal, I thought. No man buys and borrows books by the barrowful without a definite purpose. But what that purpose might be I could not make out. There was a certain reserve in our relationship that prevented me from asking him outright. We roomed together, often ate together, but we carefully respected each other’s privacy – perhaps as a way of keeping our own secrets. We were, after all, two men of more than sixty who were perhaps reluctant to press each other about our goals in life at a period when, as everyone knows, goals often tend to fizzle and life to become a mere habit. Maybe he was just pottering, piddling and fiddling away his time with unusual intensity.
    Yet somehow I doubted it.
    As he had warned me, he periodically fell from a frenzied state of mind into a mood of lassitude, and for several days on end he would lie on the couch and stare into space, scarcely seeming to be aware of me when I entered the room. On one such day I had walked in, apparently unnoticed, and was sitting by the fire engrossed in the sports pages of the Guardian when his voice startled me:
    â€˜What do you think of the opinion piece on page thirty, the one titled “The Missing Illogical Leap”?’
    â€˜I haven’t read it,’ said I, ‘but I will.’
    I turned to the article and read it