The Holmes-Dracula File, Fred Saberhagen [pride and prejudice read .TXT] 📗

or six weeks. It may help us if we can learn this victim’s identity, and how and when he was taken as an experimental subject—are our opponents seizing people on the street at random for that purpose?”

   “The police, then, are to be notified?”

   “I recommend informing Inspector Lestrade, after swearing him to secrecy. He has the capacity to follow instructions to the letter—once he can be made to understand them—and also to keep a closed mouth when necessary. Yet we must not tell even Lestrade the full story. Not yet.”

   Holmes returned to his examination of the corpse. “These small red marks clustered on the chest—they have the appearance of flea—bites, have they not, Sir Jasper?”

   “Indeed they have,” replied the illustrious physician. “Though why they should be so curiously concentrated I cannot guess. The body elsewhere is remarkably free of any evidence of attack by vermin. I say remarkably, assuming this man to have been kept in poor and unhealthy conditions during the last days of his life.”

   “Quite. Well, unhealthy is surely not too strong a word.”

    I ought perhaps to interject a comment here, to avoid puzzling my future readers unnecessarily. It was not until 1905, some eight years after the events herein described, that the bite of fleas was generally understood by the medical community to be the ordinary means of transmission of plague to humans—although as early as 1894 it had been confirmed by repeated studies that epidemics of plague in rats coincided closely with those in man. John Scott’s work in Sumatra, had any of his results survived, might have greatly speeded the advance of science in this direction.

    In 1894, also, Alexandre Yersin in Hong Kong, and Kitasato in Japan, both succeeded independently in isolating the plague bacillus, Pasteurella pestis; and in the following year Yersin had prepared a serum to combat the disease. Recalling this as I stood in the dissecting-room, I mentioned the existence of a serum to Sir Jasper, but he only looked grave and shook his head. Of course, months of effort would have been necessary to provide London with enough of the serum to be of substantial help against an epidemic.

   The door opened, and a senior official of the hospital, his face very grave, looked in to make an announcement. “Gentlemen, more police are here with another body that has just been found. The marks appear similar.”

   Holmes at once directed that this cadaver also be brought into our room, where it was laid out upon the remaining table. I was scarcely surprised to hear that this corpse had been brought up during the continued dragging of the Thames near the murder site. When found, it had been sealed inside one of John Scott’s oilcloth bags, and wearing one of the peculiar shirts that had made up part of his expedition’s equipment. The body had been in the water too long—perhaps a month, I judged—for us to be able to determine whether there were any flea-bites on the chest.

   Working beside me in the intolerably close, foul air. Holmes suddenly swayed, so that I felt it necessary to put out an arm and steady him. He muttered to me in a low whisper: “But I feel sure that the fleas bit this man also, Watson. Again, the drinking of the blood. Do you see? The fleas will have it, or the other. And in this case which is deadlier?”

   I tightened my grip upon his arm. “Holmes, you are coming home with me. Immediately, for you must rest.”

   For once, I think, I was as forceful as he himself was wont to be. Still, when he acquiesced almost meekly, I was surprised. Holmes perhaps enjoyed my reaction, for there was a faint twinkle in his eyes when we had taken leave of the others and were out of the dissecting-room. “As yet, Watson, no directions have been given for the delivery of the ransom. Do you mark that? It means that we have yet a little time to spare. It may mean that things do not go smoothly for the blackmailers. I pray that it is so... but in any case, you are right, now is the time to rest.”

   Early next morning, Lestrade appeared at Baker Street. The inspector was somewhat mystified by the orders he had received from his superiors to cease work on all his current cases and place himself completely at Holmes’ disposal. He came in bemoaning the fact that he was thus being forced, without explanation, to drop his work on the Grafenstein killing. And this just when, as he put it, there had been “a shocking development, but one that promised to be helpful.”

   “And what might that be?” Holmes demanded sharply.

   “Why, another murder.”

   Lestrade went on to inform us that one Jem Matthews, formerly of “the fancy,” and since his retirement from the ring one of the most accomplished ruffians in London, had been brutally slain during the night just past, in the lodgings of a young woman named Sally Craddock. “You might have noticed her at Barley’s, gentlemen. She was the one who gave the alarm. And she had just been arrested and put into the van there when that scoundrel we were after leaped onto it somehow and drove off.”

   Lestrade went on to explain that an hour or so before dawn the girl had walked into the Commercial Street police station, of her own volition and evidently in a state of shock, to report Matthews’ killing. She had begun to give evidence, saying that the wanted man—whose name she insisted she did not know—had quarreled with Matthews, and had slain him somehow by brute strength when Matthews drew a knife. Then, in the midst of being questioned, Sally Craddock had fallen into a deep sleep of exhaustion, almost a coma; a police surgeon was in attendance upon her now.

   I was glad that Holmes and I had had the chance for a few