The Wilhelm Conspiracy (A Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery) Read online

  “I am Sherlock Holmes, this is my friend and colleague Dr. John Watson, and joining us now is the man who summoned us from London, Detective Inspector George Lestrade of Scotland Yard.”

  Lestrade strode forwards, brushing chalk and grit from his battered bowler hat, prepared to assert himself as the ranking officer. He addressed the sergeant. “Were you instructed not to move the body?”

  “So were they,” Stubbs said, nodding towards the carriage.

  The black door opened and one man stepped out, followed by another and then a third, who clambered up to the driver’s seat and untied the reins. All three men wore ordinary black suits, black wool coats, and black bowler hats, rather than Stubbs’s blue Harbour Patrol uniform.

  “Nice and dry in there?” Stubbs asked, wiping rain from his eyes and forehead with his pocket kerchief.

  The taller of the two men gave a tight-lipped smile and looked at Holmes. “Mr. Holmes? Have you seen everything you need to see?”

  “I have. You are free to take the body to the Dover Castle garrison. I ask that the examination not begin until Dr. Watson and I can be present.”

  “How do you know that we are from the garrison?”

  “Your boots are all of the same pattern, made of reversed leather, and polished black,” Holmes replied. “Also, Sergeant Stubbs said you were Army men. Given the urgency of the matter, Secretary Lansdowne would use the local Army garrison—it is quartered at Dover Castle.”

  “Right you are, sir,” the taller man said, as his companion turned back to the interior of the carriage. The two dragged out a folded military stretcher of stout wood and dull-green canvas, the type I had seen so frequently in Afghanistan. The taller man continued, “I will pass your request along to the medical examiner.”

  With his companion, he placed the stretcher beside the body and used Holmes’s coat to slide the body onto the green canvas. With a quick jerk, he freed the coat and held it at arm’s length. “This is yours, sir?”

  It was an obvious deduction, since Holmes was the only one of us lacking a topcoat. “Please leave it on the sand—away from the tide.” As the man flung the coat away, Holmes went on, “I see you are carrying a revolver. Are you expecting someone to interfere with you?”

  “Possibly,” the taller man said.

  “When and where?”

  Giving no reply, the two manoeuvred the stretcher and the body into their carriage.

  “We are all in the service of Her Majesty’s government, are we not?” asked Holmes.

  Again, Holmes’s words were met with silence. Soon the two Army men were seated side by side between the open rear doors, dangling their legs over the edge so that their boots nearly touched the beach gravel. Their revolvers were now out of their holsters. The taller man said, “Sergeant Stubbs, please telephone the garrison from the hotel and report that we are on our way.”

  We watched the black carriage disappear with its passengers and cargo into the mist that lay like a small cloud at the edge of the seashore. Holmes picked up his coat and shook it out.

  “You can get that cleaned at Radnar House,” said Stubbs.

  Holmes glanced at the waves behind him and then upwards at the cliff, where we could see the jagged silhouette of roof peaks, looming over us in the diminishing late-afternoon light.

  “Are you ready?” Lestrade asked.

  Before Holmes could reply, I heard what sounded like a firecracker exploding somewhere on the cliff above us. At the same moment, Sergeant Stubbs clutched his shoulder, uttered a groan, tottered, and was about to fall when Holmes pulled Stubbs up and propelled him forwards. “Run for the cliff,” Holmes said. “Now!”

  But then came another sharp report, which I now know was a rifle shot. I turned and saw that Stubbs had been struck again. He staggered back and fell at the edge of the tide, his helmet striking the gravel. Beneath him, blood darkened the wet pebbles and the swirling foam.

  4. TOO MANY QUESTIONS

  Three hours later Holmes, Lestrade, and I sat in a private downstairs room of Radnar House with Lord Lansdowne, Secretary of State for War. Lansdowne had been one of the leaders of Her Majesty’s government whose lives we had saved from the Moriarty gang eleven months earlier. Although he was thin, high-browed, and dark haired like Holmes, Lansdowne’s features were more elongated and less angular. Beneath his high-domed forehead, his face bore a luxuriantly thick and wide walrus moustache of dark brown, framed by elongated mutton-chop sideburns. His manner, cordial though never haughty, at least in my presence, showed the effects of a lifetime of privilege.

  On the sideboard an afternoon tea of generous proportions lay as yet untouched. Before each of us was a glass of warm brandy. I sipped mine. Lestrade had already finished his. Holmes’s glass was on the table before him, ignored.

  I still could not fully understand what had happened on the beach. After Stubbs had been shot, we had dragged him to shelter beneath the overhang at the base of the cliff. Holmes had gone up the path to seek help at Radnar House as Lestrade and I waited. I was able to staunch the flow of blood from the sergeant’s torso by placing my folded scarf beneath his arm and pressing hard directly above and below the wound. Lestrade and I took off our coats and piled them around his head and over his legs to warm him. His muscles shook with nervous tremors, and from his shallow, fluttering breaths, I knew he was rapidly going into shock.

  After what seemed an eternity but could not have been more than twenty minutes, Holmes had returned, grim-faced, accompanied by two men in military uniforms. “These are Lord Lansdowne’s officers,” he said. “While I was climbing the trail, his carriage arrived, which likely caused whoever shot Sergeant Stubbs to flee.”

  With the aid of the two officers, we carried the wounded man up to Radnar House and entered at the rear, so as not to alarm the hotel guests. The two attendants and I made our way to the second floor with the inert sergeant. A hotel nurse waited in a room at the end of the corridor with her medical kit. She and I cleaned and dressed the sergeant’s wounds as quickly as possible. The injury to his shoulder was not serious, but the lesion in his side, due to the shallow angular entry and exit of the second bullet, required four stitches, and he had lost a substantial quantity of blood. Fortunately the bullet had not struck a vital organ, and soon I was able to leave my patient sleeping in his warm bed with the nurse watching over him. One of his fellow patrolmen, a tall, strapping fellow, stood guard in the hallway outside his room. The nurse inside had my orders to administer claret and send for me immediately if he awoke, for I knew Holmes would have questions for him concerning what might have prompted the attack.

  Now, in our private downstairs room, Holmes was leaning forwards in his upholstered armchair, recounting to Lord Lansdowne the “message” from the three men who had waited for Lestrade outside 221B Baker Street this morning. He concluded, “Their words implied that I could expect pain and futility if I interfered with them. I do not know what they meant. I presume you do.”

  I saw concern and possibly alarm in the wide brown eyes of the Secretary of War. His fingertips went to his eyebrows, as though he was trying to apply pressure directly into his brain. “I am at a loss,” he said finally.

  “Then, Mr. Secretary, let us review what information we possess. First, we know that the traitorous banker connected to the Guy Fawkes affair has been tortured, murdered, and left by his killers to be discovered in humiliating circumstances and publicized in the newspapers for his wife, children, and the rest of the world to see. I interpret this as a message from his employers to indicate the consequences of failure.”

  “And quite possibly their outrage, given that Mr. Kent failed to return the colossal sum of one million pounds.”

  “Within a day of the discovery of Mr. Kent’s body, another body washes up on Dover beach. You send for me, via the Commissioner, who orders Inspector Lestrade to bring the message to me. Within a few hours Lestrade is accosted and instructed to warn me not to interfere, by a man who calls him by name
and does not trouble to mask his German accent.”

  “You think a traitor in my organization intercepted my message.”

  “It was either your message that was intercepted or the message from the Commissioner to Inspector Lestrade. Someone in either your organization or the Metropolitan Police is a traitor. And a most efficient someone, since not much time elapsed between the two messages and the appearance of three men on my doorstep awaiting Inspector Lestrade’s arrival.”

  “I fear that conclusion is inescapable.”

  “There is one more fact to consider. Shortly after my arrival here, someone shot the Dover Harbour sergeant assigned to guard the body. We must ask ourselves why that attack occurred.”

  “I have no idea why anyone would want to shoot a Dover policeman.”

  “He was standing next to me when each of the shots was fired.”

  “So the shots may have been meant for you.”

  “And the rifleman might have been an inaccurate or unlucky marksman.”

  “Do you think the Germans wanted to kill you?”

  “They may have. But they have had ample opportunities to do that during the past ten months, so I think the possibility unlikely.”

  “What, then?”

  “The rifleman’s aim may have been accurate, and there may be another reason for his desire to kill Sergeant Stubbs.”

  “Do you know the reason?”

  “How could I, when you have not been completely candid with me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Secretary, I need you to tell me why we are here. Why did you summon me, and why did you travel to Dover this afternoon? I cannot imagine that this was due only to the discovery of a charred body on the beach.”

  Lord Lansdowne lowered his eyes, and then, as if his mind had finally been made up, gazed directly at Holmes. “Mr. Holmes, we need your help in a matter of the highest consequences, one which could affect the future of the British nation for generations to come.”

  5. KERREN HOUSE

  Holmes nodded calmly, as if such requests were for him an everyday occurrence. “Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Given your position, I expected no less.” He picked up his brandy glass for a moment and set it down, still untouched. “I also expect that your request involves the theft of a new and extremely powerful weapon, and that the weapon utilizes electric current.”

  Astonishment shone on Lord Lansdowne’s aristocratic features. “How can you possibly know that?”

  “The deduction is a simple one. First, the War Office concerns itself with military conflict and with weapons. You, as its head, would not interrupt your Sunday unless the matter was extraordinary and urgent. If military conflict were imminent, you would be closeted with generals and admirals rather than with me, a lone civilian. That leaves a weapon, which must be new and powerful since you would hardly be interested in an old one. If the weapon were safely held by the War Department, you would have no need of my services and I would still be in London. Therefore a new and powerful weapon has been stolen.” He gave one of his brief smiles before continuing, “Also, I must admit that when I signed the hotel register this afternoon, I saw on the preceding page the name of Mr. Nikola Tesla, the famed electricity scientist. He arrived Friday.”

  Lord Lansdowne gave a small smile. “You live up to your reputation, Mr. Holmes. However, I believe I can point out one thing that you do not yet know. Mr. Tesla is now waiting for us in Kerren House, a few hundred yards from here. I shall explain more as we walk.”

  The rain had stopped and a stiff north-west wind buffeted our backs as the four of us set out on the gravel pathway that led along the clifftop. A faint crescent moon had begun to emerge from behind the clouds over the eastern side of the Channel and, beyond them, the shores of France. The Secretary and Holmes walked behind Lestrade and me. Lestrade carried a lantern.

  “We are concerned with Kaiser Wilhelm,” I heard Lansdowne say to Holmes as we picked our way along the shadowy and irregular grey stones. “You will recall the ill-fated raid in the Transvaal conducted by our Commander Jameson last January, and the Kaiser’s inflammatory telegram congratulating the Transvaal president for defeating our forces so soundly.”

  “I recall public fury on the subject reported in the press,” Holmes said.

  “The Kaiser is also driving all of Germany to work at a feverish pace in order to bring their naval power to a strength greater than ours. And despite his recent conciliatory telegram, Germany’s forces do grow stronger with each passing day.”

  “I take it Mr. Tesla’s electrical weapon has naval applications?”

  “An understatement, Mr. Holmes.” Lansdowne stopped, faced Holmes directly, and lowered his voice, as though fearful of being overheard even out in the open air atop the windswept cliff. “Picture, if you will, a cannon positioned just over there, overlooking the ocean, and a German warship appearing on the horizon. Picture a bolt of lightning shot directly from that cannon, instantaneously hitting the German vessel. Knowing what happens to a man who is struck by lightning, you can imagine the effects this weapon would have on the men aboard that vessel.”

  “The current would be conducted through the metal deck and frame of the ship. The men aboard would be instantly electrocuted.”

  Lansdowne nodded. “Without its crew, the warship would be useless. It could easily be taken as a prize by our Navy, and then used against the enemy.”

  “Could the weapon be placed on one of our warships?”

  “Mr. Tesla believes it is possible to generate sufficient electric power to operate such a weapon from a warship. And since his electrical generators are now providing enough energy to light up the American city of Niagara Falls, New York, our government is inclined to take him seriously. However, as I have mentioned, he is very much focused on scientific matters and less inclined to consider practical realities. You will see this when we meet him.”

  No one spoke further as we resumed our walk. Farther down the pathway we could see the outlines of a dark brick home constructed in the Gothic style. Electric light gleamed from the front windows, partially illuminating another large black carriage, similar to the one we had seen on the beach, a powerful black horse, and three tall men in military garb, waiting on the circular gravel drive. “There, gentlemen, is Kerren House,” said Lansdowne. “And those are my men. We have a need for military protection, as you will soon understand.”

  As we reached the house, the men came to attention and saluted. One of them silently gestured towards the front doorway.

  The door opened before we could ring or knock. In the doorway stood a tall, fair-haired woman, dressed in a long-sleeved, close-fitting white satin frock and cloaked in a white shawl that appeared to be of fine cashmere. Her long hair was pinned in a large swirl just above the nape of her neck, a current fashion which I believe is French. She beckoned us into the entrance hall and then inclined her head towards Lord Lansdowne, plainly waiting for the proper introductions to be made.

  Lansdowne said, “Lady Radnar, may I introduce Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Inspector Lestrade. Gentlemen, this is Lady Radnar. Lord Radnar is the owner of Radnar House, and her brother, Lord Kerren, is the owner of Kerren House, the dwelling in which we now find ourselves.”

  “Thank you, Henry,” Lady Radnar said, referring to Lord Lansdowne by his given name and thereby indicating her own equal social position. “Gentlemen, I am Sophia Radnar.” She blinked several times. I could see her lower lip begin to tremble. Her tone became hesitant. “Lord Radnar is in America on business, and my brother is still in Bad Homburg. That skeletal foreigner Tesla is in the conservatory with Harriet, my stepdaughter, and her friend from London. I will take you to them, but first I have a request for Mr. Holmes.”

  “Of course,” said Lord Lansdowne.

  “How may I be of assistance?” asked Holmes.

  “Mr. Holmes, I—” She broke off and a shudder passed through her graceful frame. “If only my husband were here,” she continued after
a moment. “He is accustomed to encountering critical moments in transactions of great importance. I am sure he would know what to do. I, unfortunately, do not.”

  “Of what are you afraid, Lady Radnar?”

  She shut her eyes tightly. Then she shook her head as if trying to banish a bad dream. “You are right. I am afraid. Things are changing too quickly for me. I cannot understand all this new science, yet my husband and my brother both say our future—my future—depends on it. My brother has invested all his capital in his project, and my husband has overextended himself as well.”

  Holmes gave one of his quick, perfunctory smiles intended to evidence sympathy. “But what is it that you fear?”

  “I am afraid that the body found on the beach today was somehow connected with my brother’s work. I am fearful that a dreadful mistake was made. I have read that in the United States they use electricity to kill murderers, and that there are burns—”

  She broke off, looking downwards and pressing her lips tightly together, obviously trying to regain control of her speech.

  She took a deep breath and then continued. “My nerves are not what they might be, Mr. Holmes. I have spent the past three months at Bad Homburg attempting to restore them—and without complete success, it would appear. But I am not a fool. If my brother is working on a military project, then some kind of new weapon must be involved. If the weapon has gone wrong, there may have been an accident, and that accident may be what killed the poor person whose body appeared on our shore last night. Such an accident would create a scandal and the Prince, who cannot abide scandal, would disassociate himself from the project. My brother and my husband would be ruined.”

  “The Prince?”

  “Of Wales.” She shook her head again and began to usher us towards the rear of the entrance hall. “But I am keeping you too long. My stepdaughter and her friend are with that emaciated foreigner, as I said. They are in the conservatory, which my brother has converted into his laboratory. I only ask you, Mr. Holmes, to clear up this matter as quickly as you possibly can.”