The Final Tales Of Sherlock Holmes - Volume Three: The Case of the Shepherds Bushman

Title page

The Final Tales of Sherlock Holmes

(Volume Three)

By

Dr. John H. Watson, M. D.,

as edited by John A. Little

Publisher information

2016 digital version converted and published by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

First edition published in 2016

© Copyright 2016 John A. Little

The right of John A. Little 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. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of MX Publishing.

MX Publishing

335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive, London, N11 3GX

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Cover design by www.staunch.com

Foreword.

The story of how these late adventures of Holmes and Watson came to be discovered has already been related in Volumes One and Two of this collection. I repeat it now for those few who may have inadvertently missed these books.

The building known to all Holmes afficionados as 221B Baker Street had fallen into such disrepair by 1955 - thanks to the efforts of the German Luftwaffe, and many years after the detecting duo had passed on - that the local authorities deemed it unfit for habitation. It had to be knocked down. By my father, as it happens.

Eneder Little had built up a successful business as a builder in London, having been forced to emigrate from Ireland after the lunatic DeValera’s disastrous economic policies of the 1930s. His company (Motto: ‘No Job Too Big For Little’) was granted the contract to demolish nos 220A, 220B, 221A, 221B, 222A, 222B, 223A and 223B Baker Street and rebuild a terrace of spanking new luxury four-bedroomed town houses, complete with all modern conveniences.

Before the buildings were due to be levelled, he was examining the basement at 221B when he discovered a tall dust-covered office cabinet hidden in a corner behind a dilapidated kitchen dresser. Having no keys, my curious father grabbed his jemmy and cracked open the lock that controlled the four metal drawers. There was nothing but wrapping paper inside the top one, but the other three drawers revealed a series of packages of A4-sized spiral-back handwritten notebooks, each held together by two elastic bands in the shape of a cross. Never having read a book in his life apart from his annual accounts, he had no comprehension of his discovery. But he was a cautious man and decided to dump the lot into a cardboard box and take it home that night. And then promptly forgot all about them.

I became aware of this event when I was helping my mother and sister to clear out his effects the day after his funeral. He married late in life, and returned to live in Dublin towards the end of the 1970s with his wife and two small children.

I had climbed up a ladder into the attic and started handing down cartons of what was obviously rubbish - ancient account books from his building company, newspapers, magazines, old clothes, sporting equipment from his hockey and cricket-playing days - when I discovered a cardboard box, covered by some spare fibreglass insulation. Its bottom was lodged firmly between two beams and pulling it out almost caused my foot to slip off the beam and crash through the bathroom ceiling.

A rapid inventory produced sixteen packages, each of which contained a varying (one to nine) number of notebooks dated from 1925-1930. Later, when we were sitting down, exhausted after our day’s work and with our shared grief, I asked my mother about them and she told me what little she could recall of their origin at 221B Baker Street. I pulled off the elastic band and opened the first notebook of a package marked February 1925, the earliest period. Intriguingly, it showed a faded red stamp with the tiny word ‘Strand’ repeated around the edges, and ‘REJECT’ in large letters diagonally across the middle. It was in surprisingly good condition, for a manuscript that had lain in its cardboard coffin for over eighty years.

I had only to finish a single chapter to realise what I held in my hand. All my life I had been a great fan of Holmes and Watson, and had read their exploits avidly, once when I was a teenager, and again when I had been hospitalised for a week while some varicose veins were being stripped. After a quick check of all the packages, it became clear that we had in our possession one novella-length and fifteen shorter adventures of the Baker Street detectives in the last years of their lives, all of which had been rejected for publication by Strand Magazine for a variety of reasons. One of them pitted the pair against the evil witch of Clapham Junction. Others treated pornography, rape and necrophilia. These were dark subjects for their time, but it occurred to me that Conan Doyle’s later pre-occupation with all things supernatural - caused by the loss of his wife and son - may have been a factor in the rejection of the final detective stories, which, as everybody knows, should always have a rational solution, with no hint of smoke and mirrors, magic acts or spiritualism.

As I read on through that dark night, I understood why the first story had never been published within their lifetime. It concerned a series of quite appalling serial murders that, in the London of 1925, would most certainly have caused public mayhem and a possible breakdown of society, had it been fully reported in the press, or if Holmes and Watson had not finally solved the case. After a small amount of editing by me to smooth out Dr. Watson’s archaic style, this story has been published as a separate novella within ‘The Final Tales Of Sherlock Holmes - Volume One’, entitled ‘Sherlock Holmes And The Musical Murders’. The first five shorter stories followed in ‘The Final Tales Of Sherlock Holmes - Volume Two’. Volume Three, which I trust you are about to read, contains the second selection of the shorter works, also suitably edited.

John A. Little,

Portobello,

Dublin,

Ireland.

May 31st, 2016.

7. Sherlock Holmes And The Shepherds Bushman.

‘One club,’ opened Sherlock Holmes, sucking eagerly on his cherrywood.

‘One diamond,’ whispered Jasper Lestrade nervously.

‘One spade,’ I followed dutifully.

‘Two ‘earts’.

‘One no trumps.’ Holmes’ saturnine features were lit by a manic grin.

‘Three hearts. Ahem.’ Jasper was following Lily’s lead, as usual.

‘Eh, three no trumps?’ What was my partner telling me, in some obscure coded fashion?

‘Faur nah tramps.’

‘Seven no trumps.’

‘No bid.’

‘No bid.’ Good grief! A grand slam! Typical Holmes!

‘Dahble.’ Lily upped the anti aggressively.

‘Redouble,’ replied Holmes savagely.

‘No bid.’

‘No bid,’ I reiterated.

‘Nah bid.’

‘All thirteen tricks? Doubled and redoubled? That really is a bit reckless, Holmes. We are already three thousand, four hundred and seventy-five points down. And why do I always have to be the dummy anyway?’ I grunted disconsolately, as I placed my cards in four vertical rows upon the table.

‘There is no answer to a question of such profundity,’ replied the great detective, much to the amusement of Jasper Lestrade and Lily Hudson.

‘Very funny.’ I poured myself another stiff brandy and left the table for the fifth time that evening, grabbing my stick and limping over to the window, from where I could hide my annoyance by observing the passers-by on Baker Street. Now that I had reached the ripe age of seventy-four, my Maiwand wound had deteriorated to the extent that I needed a permanent aid to getting around, and I found myself envying the strollers their comfortable promenade through the hazy November fog. Winter in 1926 was proving to be one of the mildest on record.

Since they had returned from their honeymoon two months earlier, our weekly rubber of bridge with the Scotland Yard detective - son of our old nemesis, George - and his wife, our housekeeper, Lily Hudson, had become a welcome relief for Holmes, if not for me. He had been down in the dumps since the frustrating case of the Hammersmith Hounds, and the subsequent passing of Irene Adler. Time lay heavy upon his shoulders and the absence of a decent murder had led to his return to a daily seven-per-cent solution of cocaine. I had given up trying to control his filthy drug habit. At seventy-two, he was fully entitled to destroy his own body, if that was what he wished to do.

I continued to savour Hennessy’s excellent ‘drop that cheers’ with my sixth Arcadia pipe of the day as the threesome played the hand noisily behind me. Gazing out the window, I felt a momentary sense of loss at the memory of those wonderful hissing gas lamps, now fully replaced by modern, silent, electric orbs. The atmosphere on Baker Street seemed entirely different. The shadows did not flicker. Change, change, change. Everything changes. But why?

When Holmes had won his predictable Grand Slam, Jasper enquired, ‘How did you do that? How did you know which cards were spread between Lily and myself? And in Doctor Watson’s hand? Have you developed x-ray vision? Are you a magician?’

‘Neither,’ replied the great detective, gathering the cards, shuffling them, and passing them over to Lestrade. ‘Having had nothing better to do, and not liking to lose at anything, I spent some time studying the Vanderbilt bidding system of contract bridge, which was published earlier this year in an edition of the New York Times. Also I know the good doctor so well that I can read his mind, especially if he insists on holding his cards up in front of the mirror on the wall behind hi...’

‘Holmes!’ I cried. ‘Come here, quick!’

I had spotted a giant figure staggering across the road. He looked as though he was about to collapse on the street. Instead he stopped right in the middle of the traffic, gazed up at me with intense loathing and shook his fist accusingly, before staggering on, completely indifferent to honking horns and irate cab drivers. What had startled me was his dense head of wild hair and black contorted features. Not since that same Afghan war had I witnessed such malevolence in a human visage. Were it not for his upright gait, I might have taken him for a member of the animal kingdom. An ape or gorilla, perhaps. Escaped from some zoo.

Before my friend had time to move, the front doorbell shattered the evening calm with a peal that echoed shrilly through the house.

‘Ah’ll gehhit,’ said Lily.

‘No, you won’t!’ I insisted firmly. ‘It could be dangerous. Lestrade? Will you come with me downstairs? Just give me a second to fetch my Webley.’

In the end all four of us were standing inquisitively in the hall as Lestrade edged the front door back cautiously to reveal the same monstrous character, his wild yellow eyes glaring at each one of us in turn from within their paint-striped countenance, and his huge arms spreading across the wide jamb in supplication, like Our Saviour upon the Cross. Then he screamed the same word twice - ‘cooee’, ‘cooee’, his eyes disappeared up into his head, and he fell facedown onto the hall rug with a resounding wallop that rocked the building to its rafters.

I felt for a pulse, but could find none.

‘Dead,’ I stated flatly. ‘He has entered the dark valley in which all paths meet.’

‘Hardly surprising,’ mused Holmes, as he pointed to a slender stiletto, lodged in the giant’s left side. ‘This looks like a case for Scotland Yard, Lestrade. I think we can discount suicide. I wonder what he wanted at 221B?’

‘He seemed to be very angry at someone in this house,’ I suggested. ‘He shook his fist at me from the street.’

Jasper looked even more shocked than his new wife at the sight of the corpse. I wondered how many dead people he had seen in his career to date.

‘’e’s an Abo,’ said Lily matter-of-factly. ‘Oi read abaht ‘em in thah nusepaiper. Thay eat woims, an’ foxes, an’ ‘orrible fings loik thah.’

‘That is correct, Lily,’ said Holmes. ‘He is an aborigine. From within Australia, I would guess. Some people call them bushmen. They also happen to be a part of the oldest surviving human culture in the world, at about fifty thousand years. Well, Lestrade?’

I guessed that Holmes was seeking the detective’s permission to become involved in what promised to be a fascinating new case. As well as showing off his knowledge of the nonsensical ramblings of that Darwin lunatic, of course.

‘I will set the wheels of an investigation in motion,’ replied Lestrade. ‘Perhaps you could apply your experience to the matter, Mr. Holmes?’

‘Of course. Let us see what we can find.’

With that, Holmes knelt down abruptly and hauled the body unceremoniously onto its back, taking care not to touch the knife. ‘Most interesting. Quite an unusually fine wool. Cheviot, I do believe,’ he muttered, picking fluffs of a white substance from the surface of the coat. He felt the lining all around and searched the deep pockets, removing a comb, a wad of banknotes, a few coins, a faded photograph, a strange curved instrument and a pair of live worms that wriggled about on the floor before a hysterical Lily stamped on them. He felt the man’s fingers, checked under his nails and removed a red scarf from around his neck. Like some kind of dog, the poor chap wore a black collar with white letters stencilled into it. Holmes felt for the clasp to the rear and removed it.

‘Bullfrog Mulbagaroo,’ he read aloud. ‘Dja Dja Wurrung, Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia. He looks more like a Buffalo to me. But what the blazes ...?’

Holmes ripped open the man’s coat and shirt, to reveal a tattooed chest, illustrating a picture that appeared to me like a particularly talented child’s painting, full of strange symbols and signs. To my mind it resembled an infantile version of the work of Georges Seurat and the French neo-classical movement. Lots of dots. Doodling, really.

‘A dreamtime story,’ Holmes answered his own question. ‘It is a way the indigenous population of that distant country make sense of the world and its creation. They have no written language, so they communicate through art.’ He rubbed his finger along the skin