"What's this?" I do believe my friend was taken aback by Clark’s assertion. "Indeed, a great observation, lad. Truly? But surely they were different men who wore similar clothes?"

"They were wearing similar clothes, all right, with similar stains and similar rips and similar buttons missing, as well! It was them, and you couldn’t forget them. I said if any one of those rapscallions shows up again, they’re all three ringers, I did. 'Cause of the way they looked up at your window palavering and motioning and such. But how could I know they’d show up a year later, Mister Holmes?”

Our captive screamed and writhed in anguish, pulling at his bonds. His burning nerves were summoning him to wakefulness.

"Off, now, for the nearest two constables! But take your time, lad, if you please," Holmes winked. "Twenty minutes?"

"Yes sir, Cap’n!" Clark grinned and softly closed the door behind him.

Holmes paused after locking it. He turned to me, his faced etched with deep doubt. "We are dealing with a very strange affair, it seems, Watson."

His face was dark with abstraction as he crossed the room and sat on the edge of his chair, staring at the figure groaning before the fire.

"This man has made it his business to finish me, and yet I have never met him. He is alone, though his disguises echo a company of men who were seeking me one year ago." Holmes produced Mister Pitney’s pistol and trained the barrel on him. "For once, we are our own clients, Watson."

Mister Pitney sat upright before the fire. "Let me loose, you cur, let me loose!" he shouted, blinking as he tested his sight.

"Do not move or you will taste a bit of your own lead," Holmes said, narrowing his eyes, "and I assure you that I shall not miss my mark as you did a moment ago. Yours, sir, was a wild mission. You have the motive of a madman and yet the method of a genius. Indeed, you seem to be many men and wear the clothes of several, unless you are a quick-change artist with a very bad tailor. I wonder at you, sir! Is there a word of defense or explanation you would offer now? I assure you that I am not the police and it is curiosity, not prosecution, which prompts me to ask."

"You!" The man spat and squinted at Sherlock Holmes as he writhed against the manacles on his wrists and ankles.

"That will do!" I said. "He is mad, Holmes."

"You don't know me, Mister Holmes," the man snarled. "But I know you. You are a fraud, who stands in judgment of things much larger than you, by God!"

"In your judgment, Mister Pitney?" I interjected. "It’s a fine pulpit you preach from!"

"He is not Pitney, Watson," Holmes whispered, holding out a hand.

"I’m not Pitney," said the man, his lower lip loose in disgust, without turning his wide green eyes from Holmes. "Pitney's deaf and daft!"

Holmes leaned forward, meeting the man's stare. "Whom do we have the honor of addressing, then?"

"King George IV."

I laughed at the lunatic's response, but a quick look from Holmes silenced me.

Our captive howled a joyless cackle then, and I could see he was not as mad as I had supposed. I was relieved to let Holmes conduct the extraordinary interview that followed.

* * *

"Surely, I have not wronged you, nor have I met you," Holmes said. "Therefore, you must know me from accounts you have read, in the broadsheets, I imagine. Perhaps you harbour a childish grudge against my successes, my man, having made embarrassing mistakes in your own life that make you doubly despise the spectacle of a confident intellect. This is a capital mistake, worse than any and possibly leading to all the others you may have made. For no intellect is infallible. Indeed, lad, mistakes are the chief stock in trade of the successful mind, and from this one, mine has already profited, as should yours! It is through humble and eager use of error and proper identification of it that we reach successful conclusions. A man must use mistakes as his tools, his friends even, for improving his accuracy and for getting on with the happy business of living. Come, lad! You are young! Tell me what is the matter. You are brilliant. Why do you feel such gloom?"

I thought Holmes’s pedagogic appeal would land on less than eager ears and was astonished when the man cried out and buried his injured face in his bound hands, sobbing profusely, his angular frame heaving beneath the thick layers of his clothing.

"Sutton did it, Mister Holmes!" he cried. "I didn’t want to. I didn’t the first time—but you let them... come back."

"A bad business," Holmes said softly. "To whom does your mother belong?"

"She is my mother, Mister Holmes. My mother was Phoebe... but you must listen to me! I know that you are brilliant and good. That is why..." The man’s innocent countenance became sinister and brutal in the blink of an eye. "That is why I... admire you so. You are so good and right and clever. I would never wish to... harm you." He stared icily into Holmes’s eyes, a canine curve at the corners of his mouth.

"Sutton, you’re sweating profusely," said Holmes. "Why don’t we let you take off some of your layers?"

I was utterly bewildered by this nonsensical colloquy.

"Get away," the man snarled, like a tiger.

"To whom does your mother belong!" demanded Holmes, again.

I could not fathom what Holmes was getting at with such a question.

"I know who his mother belongs to, you stupid blackheart," replied the man.

"Then why don’t you tell us who you are?"

"You don’t think I will? Oh, what did you do to my head?"

The pathetic man lifted his bound hands to his right temple, which Holmes had so effectively struck with his black jack, and he curled into a ball on the carpet.

"I’m sorry, Erasmus," said Holmes.

The man straightened up and glared at Holmes. "I’m not Erasmus!"

"My pardon, Jim."

To my astonishment, the man contorted into a radically different physiognomy, and seemed like an entirely different person as he replied to Holmes: "It's Mister Tierney to you, sir! And to Hell with you, where we are!"

"Jim Tierney, you helped do this business tonight, didn’t you?" Holmes said.

"As did I!" The wretch laughed, an entirely different person as he pulled at the corner of one of his several shirts, which he had done throughout the interrogation.

I decided he must be some sort of eccentric mendicant who had picked up cast-off garments and layered them in the random order he had found them against the unusually bitter weather. His uncanny transformation of character I could not explain, beyond the effects of some grievous mental affliction.

"I haven’t been round today at all, and don’t tell stupid lies, damn idiot!" he shouted, to no one present, with a voice much older and deeper and full of malice. He suddenly appeared decades older, and the artist that worked this transformation was hatred and cruelty. The man's face was carved with deep gnashes, snarls and sneers of that piety which the very righteous and the very wicked share, and his eyes glinted a craven and cold-blooded mirth. The very bones of the man’s torso seemed to have bowed with decades of gravity and his shoulders seemed to become broader before our eyes.

Holmes stared intently at the horrible visage, leaning forward in his chair. "Let me speak to your father," he said.

But the man fell sobbing on the floor like a supple child. "No! Not to Father—I’ll go back, then!"

He sobbed violently, and I was surprised to feel a surge of pity for the wretched soul despite his attempt on our lives. But then he transformed into the old man again, sitting upright: "Stop talking to the devil, and don’t tell stupid lies, damn idiot!" he snarled.

The father-son transformation was uncanny. That one man could become another and then switch back again in the space of a breath struck me as nothing less than supernatural. "Pitney" sat rigid and twisted before us, glaring the rage of bitter old age.

Holmes attempted to interrogate the man further, but he froze as though seized by a palsy and crumpled onto the floor before the fire, and would not utter another word.

Presently, two constables arrived and officially arrested our anonymous assailant, exchanging Holmes’s exotic handcuffs for the police variety, at which I fancy I glimpsed a quick smile flicker over the assassin’s transmogrifying face.

Holmes watched him keenly as the police escorted him out, and in hindsight, if not at the time, it was certainly odd of Holmes not to state anything more about him than that he was disturbed and that we wished to press charges against him for attempted murder.

The constables quite readily satisfied Holmes’s request as an ashen, young detective filling in for Inspector Lestrade made hasty notes, poked at the broken window pane, and left shortly thereafter without saying a single distinguishable word.

When they had been gone an hour, I noticed Holmes was agitated. His eyes darted in enigmatic directions as his mind raced down inward vistas.

"Watson, you saw the way he pinched the corner of one of his six or seven shirts as he spoke? And the worn patch on the shirt corners?"

"Yes."

He seemed to be studying the ceiling as his thoughts again became too rapid for discourse, his aquiline face and deep-shot gray eyes reflecting the distant battle of reason and imagination that stormed in the far reaches of his mind.

"Holmes—"

"Make a long arm, Watson. ‘S’ for Sutton!"

I obliged, taking the cloth-bound ‘S’ index from the shelf behind me and found "Sutton" among the entries in Holmes’s angular hand:

"SUTTON, JIM. Retired (?) cutthroat. Trapper, tanner, furrier of mink and white fox in east Europe. Mysterious exploits in India involving exportation of monkeys. Settled in country outside of Alton, North Downs of Hampshire. Does no banking.

"As reported by Irregulars—Sutton made contact with Edelston, who is surely the murderer of wife Phoebe and many others of the London lowlife and head of a dangerous Cheapside gang.

"As reported by Hampshire Star, sale of Blackdown House at Exmoor Hill in North Downs near Alton to James Sutton. 4/7/94."

I read aloud. "And another entry: 'Confirmed to be the same Jim Sutton residing at Blackdown House at Exmoor by Mercer.' And the date, four months ago, Holmes."

The lines on his brow smoothed away, his eyes slitted, and his fingers clenched. Holmes gazed out the broken window at the London silhouette. Over his clouded features a pale light seemed to break, and such a perfect image of exaltation I have hardly seen outside a painting of a saint’s beatification. "Come, Watson," he said. "We have not a moment to lose! Can you wear something warm? We should have been off to Blackdown House an hour ago!"

"To Blackdown House? Now, Holmes? I am at a loss for it! If you wish it, I will, but I cannot see —"

"Dear Watson, I assure you I will be more ready to explain what we are doing when we have chartered a brougham and are on our way to Epsom!"

I acquiesced to Holmes’s overturning urgency and a quarter of an hour had seen to the arrangements. Suddenly I found myself hurtling into what would become one of the most inexplicable and disturbing nights in my long and storied association with the famous detective.

continue to part 3 >>

The Haunting of Sherlock Holmes Copyright ©2010 Warren Fahy.  All Rights Reserved.
Illustrations by the great Sidney Paget for the original Strand Conan Doyle publications.