The Redacted Sherlock Holmes Read online

  The Redacted Sherlock Holmes

  Orlando Pearson

  To my family

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Führer and His Deputies

  A Scandal in Nova Alba

  The Minister and the Moguls

  The Prince and the Munshi

  Further Works by Orlando Pearson

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Führer and His Deputies

  I have indicated several times in the past that there would be no further works about Sherlock Holmes. When I have done so, I have generally added the qualification that this was not for want of suitable material. After the Great War, however, relations between Holmes and me became much more distant as he retired to be an apiarist in Sussex. I had moved out of Baker Street after I remarried in 1907 and from then until well into the late nineteen-twenties I was busy raising my family with my second wife at our house in Queen’s Square. Accordingly, while I continued to publish old cases occasionally, I had no recent ones on which to report. As time passed, these old stories increasingly wore the air of coming from a by-gone age. Thus, after 1927, I published no further cases at all as I had no desire for the work of my friend to appear as up to date as the penny-farthing bicycle or the mangle.

  The narrative that follows recounts the only one of Holmes’s cases from the second German war just ended in which I had an involvement. As might be expected, both Holmes and I were physically frail by the mid-nineteen-forties. Nevertheless, this case illustrates how my friend’s extraordinary intellectual capacities were, with full justification, valued at the most senior levels across Europe long after his withdrawal from active detective work.

  In 1937 my wife died and, rather to my surprise, Holmes travelled up to London for her interment. At the wake we readily fell back into conversation.

  “Come to Sussex, dear boy!” he urged. “My beekeeper’s cottage could do with a bit more life. My housekeeper will remain in post with me, but she has saved enough to buy her own cottage in the village and will move there, which means that I have extra space. You will remember the housekeeper as Mrs Turner – the married name of Mrs Hudson’s elder daughter – who ran the Baker Street flats with her mother after Mr Hudson’s death. We can spend our time there defying the fading of the light. This time I will not even need to persuade a relative to buy your practice as your freedom from any smell of iodoform tells me that you have fully given up your work as a doctor in civil practice.”

  My children had by 1937 all long since left the family home and I found the idea of living in the country with Holmes far more appealing than living on my own in central London. It proved surprisingly easy to settle my affairs and within a month I had moved into Holmes’s cottage.

  There I planned to spend my final days and would have done so had the War not brought about a sudden change of plans. Our cliff-top village was an ideal location for a look-out and extended gun-battery to protect against the invasion feared in 1940. Our cottage was requisitioned and Holmes and I had to move out. With accommodation so short, I was concerned that we would not be able to find anywhere suitable to live, so I was pleased when, contrary to my fears, Holmes rapidly obtained the tenancy of a cottage near Fenny Stratford in Buckinghamshire. Thus it was that in July 1940 we found ourselves in the flat lands of the northern Home Counties, in a pleasant cottage with space for Holmes to continue his retirement activity of bee-keeping.

  Fenny Stratford was such a peaceful village even in the Emergency that I expected few visitors. I was therefore surprised when a constant stream of people came to see Holmes. One such visitor routinely arrived on a bicycle with a gas mask covering his face. I could only catch the name “Alan” in the muffled speech which emanated from behind the mask when I opened the door. He always carried a large tea mug in his hand and, before coming into the house, he would detach his bicycle chain, which he then carried into our cottage over his shoulders on a rag to protect his clothes from the oil. Other callers – more normal in looks and behaviour – were also often on the doorstep. I had guessed that Holmes would have some involvement with the war effort, however tangential, and so in the atmosphere of secrecy which prevailed during the Emergency, I was not surprised that Holmes always asked for exclusive use of our small living room when visitors called. I either retired upstairs, or to our small kitchen. But, through the thin walls of the cottage, the odd word was audible, particularly when discussions became animated. If Alan was there, the voices were noticeably hushed and nothing could be overheard, but when anyone else visited, voices were frequently raised quite loudly. Sometimes, I sensed, quite considerable anger was vented. The German province of Thuringia – the province of Bach’s birth – was mentioned with great animation, often in connection with bombs. I looked on the map and wondered why the focus of Bomber Command’s air campaign should be the relatively small industrial towns of Jena and Erfurt, rather than the much bigger and more important Ruhr basin.

  It was early May 1945 and the German war was all but at an end when a new visitor called on us. As usual, I vacated our living room, on this occasion retiring to the kitchen. I was just lighting a cigarette when Holmes put his head around the door and said “Watson, could I ask you to join us? Major Frank Foley has specifically asked that you be commissioned to make a record of this case.”

  My heart leapt at the suggestion and I joined Major Foley and Holmes in our sitting room.

  “Mr Holmes, you will remember that in May 1941, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Heβ unexpectedly landed in Scotland?”

  Age had not withered my colleague’s power of recall nor diminished the rigour of his spirit, so his response was a curt “Of course I remember it.”

  “I was the man who interrogated him. At the time there was general puzzlement that Heβ, a man so high up in Nazi circles, should have been so ignorant of German plans. He had flown to Britain and asked to speak to the Duke of Hamilton, but he did not claim political asylum, did not make any remotely credible attempt to present new peace proposals, and did not seem to have any worthwhile reason to have taken the great personal risk of flying here solo. He regularly claimed amnesia and then had patches where he remembered meeting people in the past. Since the announcement of the death of Hitler earlier this week, he has suddenly become lucid. He now talks at length about the Nazi inner circle and has made some startling claims about it which we are quite unable to disprove.”

  “Pray continue.”

  “At some point soon there will be a trial of the surviving Nazi leadership. One of Heβ’s defences against being put on trial would be insanity. Our psychiatrists are divided as to whether Heβ is insane, while our Soviet allies have made it clear that they will regard any failure to put him on trial as a major breach of our alliance. We therefore want Heβ to be questioned by a man whose word carries weight both here and in Moscow and we want the questioning to be reported by a man of unimpeachable integrity – hence my request that Dr Watson joins us. There should be no doubt that the questioning has been thoroughly carried out and Heβ’s responses accurately recorded.”

  Holmes shot a mischievous, side-long glance at me. “So, my dear Watson,” he chortled. “After all my complaints that you embellish and romanticise my investigations, you are still regarded as an accurate chronicler of them. To pile a Pelion of additional irony onto an Ossa of existing irony, your recording of my complaints about the accuracy of the way you portray me is almost the only element of your stories that can truly be described as accurate.” He turned to Foley. “And Heβ is still at Maindiff Hospital, in south Wales, I take it?”

  “Yes sir. That is where it is planned that you shou
ld interview him as that is the easiest place to ensure both your security and his.”

  “And how do you propose to get us there?”

  “Transport is at your disposal and will be here in half an hour.”

  Even though many years had passed since my soldiering days, I had remained organised and with few material needs, so in comfortably less than the time stated, I was ready to go, as was Holmes.

  I shall not detain my reader with the tedium imposed by the exigencies of war-time travel other than to say that every effort was made to ensure that our journey was as swift and as comfortable as possible. It was a great pleasure, though mildly disconcerting, as dusk approached, to see house and street lights visible, cutting through the twilight, now that black-out restrictions had at long last been lifted.

  It was late when we arrived at Maindiff. Quarters had been found for us in the Southern Lodge and we passed a quiet night. On the next morning, we had an appointment to see the psychiatrist Dr John Rawlings Rees, under whose care Heβ had been a patient.

  “Heβ is frequently paranoid and suffers from hypochondria, but it is not clear to me that he can be declared insane,” said Rees. “When he arrived, he talked about peace proposals and it was very logical that, as Hitler’s deputy, he should have had access to them. But they were nothing different from what we heard directly from German sources ourselves – a largely free, though pro-German, western Europe, a free hand in eastern Europe and British overseas possessions untouched. The Germans had made numerous peace overtures along these lines since the start of the War.”

  “And we understand he has made suicide attempts?”

  “Yes, in June 1941 and in February of this year.”

  “Did anything trigger these suicide attempts?”

  “Heβ had no access to wireless or newspapers in June 1941, but he did in February of this year. This indicates a general mental sickness rather than specific external events tipping him over into suicide.”

  “What is his diet?”

  “It is very ascetic. No meat, no alcohol. He is also a non-smoker.”

  “That would make him very similar to Hitler.”

  “You would have thought it might have been a way for Heβ to ingratiate himself with Hitler,” opined Rees, “but that does not seem to be the case. Heβ has told us how he brought his own food to the various quarters that Hitler occupied even though Hitler had a vegetarian cook at his disposal for his own use, so preparing vegetarian food for Heβ would not have posed a problem. This behaviour disconcerted Hitler so much that Heβ used to eat separately from him. He has been very hard to feed here and has had to be threatened with force-feeding. This attitude towards food may, of course, be part of his paranoia.”

  “And how does Heβ fill his days?”

  “He is well-treated. Those were the instructions from the most senior level. He spends most of the time in bed, though we have taken him out for drives into the Monmouthshire countryside, and he goes for walks around the grounds of this hospital – although, as you will understand, he is at all times under guard.”

  “And what does he do for mental stimulus?”

  “He can write letters to his family and he keeps a diary. He also has use of the library.”

  “What does he read?”

  Dr Reese paused, and his gaze flickered between Holmes and me before he answered.

  “Well, Mr Holmes,” he said eventually. “We encourage him to read the works of Dr Watson here. Heβ has an excellent command of English as that was the language of business in Egypt where he was brought up. Accordingly, he can read whatever he likes, but we find detective fiction is great comfort literature for someone in his volatile state and that is why we encourage him to read Dr Watson’s works. Something excessively exhilarating may make a sane person mad, but Dr Watson’s works are an excellent way of keeping an overwrought man sane as they are both stimulating and normally have a logical outcome.”

  There was a pause before Holmes gave a rather bitter laugh. “Almost the first thing I said to you, Watson, before we moved into Baker Street was that I get in the dumps at times, and may not open my mouth for days on end. I need to be left alone then, I told you, and I soon get right. You could hardly state a clearer description of the symptoms of someone who is on the edge and yet Herr Heβ is given your books about me to ward off hypochondria, paranoia and suicidal tendencies. I note that although everything else in this country is tightly rationed, irony is here in plentiful supply.”

  “And his amnesia?” I asked.

  “It fades in and out. Sometimes he claims to remember nothing even when we show him pictures of himself and his associates in his pomp. But he writes letters which show an understanding of both his past and of the present.”

  Our initial interview with Heβ was set for two o’clock that afternoon. We met him in a comfortable room with three old but imposing armchairs, arranged so that Holmes and I were facing Heβ. We took our places and Heβ was brought in by a medical orderly. He had deep-sunk, suspicious-looking eyes and was extremely gaunt. He wore a shirt without a tie and a lounge suit, but such was his thinness that the jacket extended down much further than would normally be the case.

  Heβ sat down and the orderly left us. Holmes adopted the practised, airy manner he took when he wanted to make an interrogated party feel at ease. “I am Mr Sherlock Holmes, and this is my colleague Dr Watson, who is to make a record of our discussions and before whom you can talk as freely as you would with me. We want to establish your state of mind as this great European conflagration comes to its close. So Herr Heβ—”

  “What are you doing here?” Heβ interjected. “Are you trying to poison me as well? Look at this food they give me!” He wrenched a rather fluff-flecked sandwich out of his pocket. “I am sure it is poisoned. Would you care to try it? Do you have any food I can swap with you?”

  “Herr Heβ, I am here to talk—”

  “Herr Heβ, Herr Heβ … It is not so long ago that you would have had to address me as Herr Deputy Führer and if I had not broken off my studies at the University of Munich to pursue my political ambitions, I would at least have the title of Herr Dr Heβ. It is only four years ago that I deputised for the Führer at the Mayday celebrations. Sic transit gloria mundi.” He fixed us with a wild-eyed stare. “After I flew to Scotland, the Führer stripped me of my titles and ordered that I be shot on sight if I return to Germany, so you may as well, I suppose, call me Herr Heβ.” He paused and turned his face to the window though I noted his eyes were straining to look at Holmes from side-on. “And you are the famous Sherlock Holmes?” he asked. And then “Are you sure the Führer is dead?”

  “His death was announced on Hamburg radio on 2 May,” Holmes confirmed calmly. “He is believed to have committed suicide, although the announcement talked of him dying on the front-line, fighting against Bolshevism. The Soviets have taken Berlin and the end of the War can only be days or hours away.”

  “Has his body yet been discovered and identified?”

  “The battle for Berlin has barely concluded. Recovery and identification of his body are hardly going to be the most pressing requirements,” said Holmes.

  “If he is dead, you will not find his body,” said Heβ, his deep-set eyes now staring out into the room. “Or if you do find a body that someone claims is his, it will be so damaged as not to be identifiable.” He suddenly turned to me. “We have much in common, good doctor!” he exclaimed. “We both act as amanuenses, writing down the words and moulding them for people who become much better-known than ourselves.”

  I had not expected to do much more than record what Holmes and Heβ said, so I was somewhat taken aback by this remark.

  “Yes,” continued Heβ to me. “When Hitler and I were prisoners together in the Landsberg prison after the Bierhallputsch, he dictated to me the work that became known as Mein Kampf or My Struggle. He wanted to call it Four and a Half Years (of Struggle) Against Falsehood, Stupidity and Cowardice. The brackets are particularly
fine, I think. I am sure that if your friend had had his way, your novel A Study in Scarlet would have been called A Monograph on the Apprehension of Drivers of Vehicles for Hire (with observations on the analysis of blood stains in dust). Note those brackets again.”

  Holmes opened his mouth to say something though whether to express his preference for Heβ’s suggestion or to deny what he was saying, I could not be sure. But before he could say anything, Heβ ploughed on.

  “Yet your friend gets all the fame, Dr Watson, just as Hitler gets all the plaudits – and all the royalties – for Mein Kampf.”

  Holmes and I had agreed a signal if we wanted a break in the interrogation – if we felt physically threatened by a man forty years younger than ourselves, or if Holmes wanted to consult with Major Foley about the progress of our discussions. Knowing Holmes and his well-justified confidence in his own methods, I had thought we were most unlikely to see the need for anything of the sort. As events unfolded, it was, in retrospect, a mistake to use phrases inspired by Holmes’s simulated ravings in “The Dying Detective” as a basis for our code, but Holmes suddenly turned to me and said “I think we need to consult with Mr Culverton Smith.”

  We retired to the corridor outside the interrogation room to consult. Because there were numerous security and hospital staff there, Holmes took me to one side so that we could talk alone. “As a doctor, do you have an opinion on whether there is any point in continuing this interrogation?” he asked.

  “Heβ certainly exhibits paranoia about his treatment, but he also has command of facts. He knows who we are and recalls some of the events of our collaboration. He has made a startling prediction about the body of Hitler, which we cannot at this stage disprove. He is clearly able to defend himself. If I may make so bold, Holmes, he seems to be asking you more questions than you are asking him. Perhaps we should ask him why he came to Britain.”