The West End Horror Read Free

forced to join the public and own themselves baffled. The case was never closed, but their interest was inevitably arrested by more current events. The mysterious death of the actress at the Savoy had the same tongues wagging for weeks, and Scotland Yard was hard put to explain the peculiar disappearance of its police surgeon–who vanished, taking two corpses along with him from the mortuary, and was never heard of again. In McCarthy’s case the police ignored, as well (or forgot, because they could not understand it), the bizarre clue the dead man had left behind.
    How the populace would have trembled had they deciphered it! Instead of being idly (or in the case of the police, professionally) interested in an affair which, however sensational, held no personal concern for them, they would have found themselves–all of them!–very real participants in a crime so monstrous that it threatened to blot the nineteenth century and alter the course of history.
    The winter of ‘94–‘95 had been a fearful one. Not in recent memory had London been pelted so with snow; not in recent memory had the wind howled in the streets and icicles formed on drainpipes and in the eaves as they did in January of 1895. The inclement weather continued unabated through February, keeping the street sweepers perpetually occupied and exhausted.
    Holmes and I stayed comfortably indoors at Baker Street. No cases appeared out of the snowdrifts, for which we were unashamedly grateful. I spent much of the time organising my own notes after first extracting a promise from Holmes to desist from chemical experiments. I pointed out that in fair weather it was possible to dispel the stench he created with his test tubes and retorts by opening the windows and going out for a walk, but that should he become carried away now by his hobby we would inevitably freeze to death.
    He grumbled a deal at this but saw the logic of it and settled down for a time to indoor target practise, one of his favourite recreations. For an hour at a time–as I sat at my desk and endeavoured to work–he reclined on the horsehair divan, his pistol propped between his knees, and squeezed off round after round at the wall above the deal table which contained his chemical apparatus.
    He had managed to spell Disraeli with bullet pocks when this diversion, too, was denied him. Mrs. Hudson knocked at our door and told him in no uncertain terms that he was menacing the neighbourhood. There had been complaints from the house next door, she said, by an elderly invalid who claimed that Holmes’s artillery was having a deleterious effect on her already unstable constitution. In addition, the reports had caused several large icicles to fall before they had melted sufficiently to be rendered harmless. One of these stalactites, it appeared, had nearly driven itself through the head of the dustman, who had threatened to bring an action against our landlady as a result.
    “Really, Mr. Holmes, you’d think a grown man like yourself would be able to occupy his time in a more sensible fashion!” she exclaimed, her bosom heaving with emotion. “Look at all them fine books you have, just sittin’ there, waiting to be read. And there–” she pointed to several bundles on the floor, tied with string–“some you haven’t even opened as yet.”
    “Very well, Mrs. Hudson. You have carried the day. I will immerse myself.” Holmes escorted her wearily to the door and returned with a disgruntled sigh. I was grateful that we no longer kept cocaine lying about, for in earlier times such frustrations and boredom would have provoked instant recourse to its dubious comforts.
    Instead, Holmes took the landlady’s advice and began cutting the strings on his parcels of books with a small penknife and inspecting their contents. He was a compulsive bibliophile, always buying volumes, having them sent ‘round to our rooms, and never finding time to read them. Now he squatted down in their midst and began