Sherlock Holmes and The Shadows of St Petersburg Read online

  Sherlock Holmes

  and

  The Shadows of St Petersburg

  [Being another manuscript found in the dispatch box of

  Dr. John H. Watson

  In the vault of Cox & Co., Charing Cross, London]

  As Edited

  By

  Daniel D. Victor, Ph.D.

  First Edition published in 2018

  Copyright © 2018

  Daniel D Victor

  The right of Daniel D Victor 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 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. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this book. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and not of MX Publishing.

  MX Publishing

  335 Princess Park Manor, Royal Drive

  London, N11 3GX

  www.mxpublishing.co.uk

  Cover design by Brian Belanger

  Also by Daniel D. Victor

  The Seventh Bullet:

  The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  A Study in Synchronicity

  The Final Page of Baker Street

  (Book One in the series,

  Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati)

  Sherlock Holmes and the Baron of Brede Place

  (Book Two in the series,

  Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati)

  Seventeen Minutes to Baker Street

  (Book Three in the series,

  Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati)

  The Outrage at the Diogenes Club

  (Book Four in the series,

  Sherlock Holmes and the American Literati)

  Here’s another for Norma, Seth and Ethan.

  Acknowledgments

  For their consistent help and encouragement, I’d like to thank Norma Silverman, Judy Grabiner, Barry Smolin, Sandy Cohen, David Marcum, and Mark Holzband. A special thanks to Seth Victor for his tech-help and to Ethan Victor for sharing his writing time with me.

  A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof.

  Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth, and nothing easier than flattery.

  Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

  -Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Crime and Punishment

  Constance Garnett Translation

  A Note on the Text

  Footnotes followed by (JHW) were included by Dr Watson in the original manuscript. Footnotes followed by (DDV) were added by the editor.

  Prologue

  “The bullet wound suffered by Mr Arthur Black was not sufficient to kill him.” Thus spoke the Deputy Coroner for East Sussex on a January day in 1893. What exactly had ended the man’s life was yet to be acknowledged.

  At the time of the inquest, close to two years following the supposedly fatal encounter between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, the general public (myself included) still believed Holmes to be dead. And yet - as I have noted elsewhere - in spite of his disappearance, I never lost interest in the challenges of forensic medicine that my friend had kindled within me.

  As a result, I continued to follow public reports of crimes and their ensuing investigations during Holmes’ absence. Indeed, owing to my familiarity with the official police force, I would not infrequently be asked for my medical opinion on various criminal matters. When the Scotland Yarders said, “Dr Watson, your services are required,” I did my best to oblige. Even without the guidance of my trusted friend, I should like to think that I made more than a few worthwhile contributions to their cases.[1]

  As a consequence of my willingness to represent the Yard beyond the boundaries of London, it came as no surprise when in early 1893 I was invited to testify at a public inquest in Brighton. Though I am certain a local doctor could have done the work just as effectively, I assumed that police officials, desirous of keeping controversy to a minimum, hoped the appearance at the inquest of a colleague of the late Sherlock Holmes might add credibility to a singular murder investigation.

  One can always count on the public’s ghoulish fascination with murder, a fascination that grows with the number of victims and multiplies exponentially if the dead happen to be personages of distinction. In the Brighton business, there were three dead. But in this case, it was not the usual gawkers that concerned themselves with the morbid details; it was a group of influential intellectuals that displayed keen interest in an explanation for the multiple murders.

  As it happened, one of the deceased, the aforementioned Arthur Black, was a recognised mathematician. He also happened to be the brother-in-law of noted author and critic Edward Garnett, whose father Richard served as Keeper of the Printed Books at the British Museum. Though Edward’s wife Constance, the sister of the dead man, had not yet begun her celebrated translations of Russian literature, she had already completed studies in Greek and Latin at Cambridge. With so much of the intelligentsia displaying interest, the Yard concluded that the criminal investigation needed to be treated with particular care.

  * * *

  The facts in the case were these: On Tuesday, 17 January, 1893, Mr Black, a teacher of mathematics at the School of Science and Art in Brighton, failed to appear for his first class of the new term. After two days of receiving no response to written queries, the school secretary took it upon himself to visit the teacher’s home at 27 Goldstone Villas. When he received no answer to his persistent knocks, he notified the local constabulary.

  It was Detective Walter Parsons who responded to the secretary’s concern. Parsons, accompanied by Ernest Black, Arthur’s brother, gained entrance to the lower level of the teacher’s house by breaking a garden window. Later, in a detail deemed irrelevant by the authorities at the inquest, it was noted that at the time of their entry a door to the garden had been unbolted.

  Whatever the two men had overlooked in their haste to enter, they would not soon forget the horrors they encountered once they got inside. As described by the detective, first they came upon the lifeless body of Arthur’s infant son. Dressed in nightclothes, the baby lay in a pool of blood. There was a knife wound to the back of the neck, and the skull had been crushed.

  Next, they found the body of Black’s wife. She was lying on her back, a pool of brain matter and blood having formed beneath her head. Nearby, a trail of blood led to the staircase. It was upstairs in the couple’s bedroom that the two men discovered the dead body of the missing teacher. Dressed in his nightshirt and lying face downward on the bed, Arthur Black had bled heavily from the nose. The non-lethal bullet wound described at the start of this narrative was located in his right thigh.

  On the table next to Arthur’s body, Parsons noted a revolver, the kind the Americans call a “six-shooter”. Four of its six bullets had been fired. Also on the table were a blood-stained hammer, a knife, and a group of medicine bottles containing chloroform.

  Upon examining Black’s body, Edward Treves, the police surgeon, posited that a deranged Arth
ur Black, after murdering his wife and child, had killed himself by drinking the sweet-smelling liquid. Such a desperate act, Treves said, would explain the excessive bleeding from Black’s nose as well as the observation by a neighbour that earlier in the day of the killings Arthur had looked “wild”. Nothing accounted for the bullet wound in the man’s thigh.

  The authorities concluded that Black had been insane when he performed these murderous acts, but it seemed to me that testimony critical of his wife raised questions about her own possible involvement in the matter. Witnesses considered Jesse Black a drunk, a misfit, a liar - in short, a woman of ill repute. She had been delusional, they said, overheard by neighbours on at least one occasion screaming out that she was being strangled when, in fact, she was not.

  Adding to the confusion, one witness reported having heard no more than two shots fired - certainly not four - on the night of the murder and no multiple screams. Another witness testified to having seen Arthur Black in the street well after the police surgeon believed him to have died. And there still remained the curious matter of the door that had remained unbolted. I fancied how the inquest’s ignoring of that clue would have irked Sherlock Holmes.

  “Surely,” I argued with Detective Parsons, “the unbolted door suggests the possibility that someone else might have perpetrated these horrific acts. Such a villain could easily have made his escape through the garden door. With no key in his possession, he would have been unable to lock the door from the outside, and it would have remained unlocked in precisely the condition in which it was found.”

  Absent any credible proof of such possibilities, however, the police appeared more than satisfied with Mr Treves’ original premise - that mother and child had been murdered by Mr Black who went on to drink the chloroform and kill himself.

  In the end, possessing no reasonable alternatives to offer the jury, I could muster little conviction in my argument to them for prolonging the investigation: “Gentlemen,” I pleaded, “there is no need to rush to judgement. There may yet be other explanations to examine before a correct conclusion can be reached with any degree of certainty.”

  Oh, that the jury disregarded my plea did not surprise me. Yet I cannot rid myself of the notion that had Sherlock Holmes been involved, any undiscovered facts would most certainly have been brought to light. What is more, I believe that the Garnett family clearly agreed with my suspicions. Why else would Richard Garnett, writing in his biography of his grandmother Constance, lament the absence of my missing friend? With so much of the case sounding “like the language of Sherlock Holmes,” he observed, “one almost expects the great detective to take over and explain all.”[2]

  Alas, no such saviour was forthcoming; and in response to the decisive but unconvincing verdict - that “mother and child came to their death by the hand of Mr Black and that Mr Black destroyed himself whilst of unsound mind” - the family chose to sweep the entire matter under the proverbial carpet.

  * * *

  So marked my initial involvement with the Garnett family. A second meeting took place in early 1899. Some five years after Holmes had returned to Baker Street from his putative death, we found ourselves in pursuit of a master blackmailer. One of his victims was the American novelist Stephen Crane, then living in England.[3]

  Now it should be noted that one could not enter into Crane’s orbit without also bumping into various members of his literary circle. Writers like Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, HG Wells, Henry James, and - more to the point - Edward and Constance Garnett were frequent visitors to Crane’s home.

  The Garnetts happened to live close by the Cranes just southeast of London in Surrey. Indeed, the Cearne, the Garnetts’ newly built stone-and-oak house in Limpsfield Chart, stood only a few miles from Ravensbrook, the Cranes’ unassuming brick villa in Oxted, which Edward had suggested they rent.

  Holmes and I had occasion to stop at Ravensbrook during our investigation into the blackmail entanglement. Months later, once the Cranes had moved to their stately - albeit rundown - mansion called Brede Place (another home recommended to them by Edward), the Garnetts joined many other celebrated guests at the soirées the Cranes hosted there. In fact, Constance’s brother-in-law, architect Harry Cowlishaw, was said to have provided a number of recommendations for improving the once-grand manor house.

  Like Brede Place, the Cearne also attracted its share of serious writers. Over the years, literary figures like Galsworthy and Lawrence would join the crowd that had frequented Brede Place. My opportunity came in late 1899, when our investigation on behalf of Stephen Crane provided me the chance opportunity to meet the Garnetts.

  Not long thereafter, I was honoured to receive an invitation to one of the Garnetts’ social gatherings, an especially treasured invitation since it was tendered to me in my capacity as author rather than amateur sleuth. Apparently, I had established some sort of reputation for myself.

  In truth, in the years following the publication of A Study in Scarlet, I produced more than twenty sketches for The Strand concerning my adventures with Sherlock Holmes. Who would have thought that as a result of recording our various investigations, that I, John H. Watson in the spring of 1900, would find myself at the Cearne joining the literati for tea and biscuits? But there I was, discussing not only the most vexing of literary questions, but also the latest political developments facing Europe - especially the social unrest in Russia.

  I enjoyed my time with the Garnetts. Edward had made a name for himself in the field of literary analysis, and his efforts to popularise Crane’s work in particular are well known. Yet I was particularly charmed by Edward’s soft-spoken, bespectacled wife some ten years my junior.

  Constance Garnett’s studies at Cambridge spoke well of her intellectual prowess. In spite of her distinguished education, however, I should judge that in the late ’90s only the most discerning of readers would have recognised her name. Today, of course, her numerous English translations of Russian works demonstrate just how talented a linguist she is.

  Inspired by an assortment of Russian émigrés in England, Mrs Garnett first travelled to Russia not long after her brother’s alleged suicide. Eager to practice Russian and enchanted by the writings of Turgenev, she decided to translate them into English, an undertaking that garnered much approval from the literary world. Buoyed by her early success, she set her mind on translating additional authors like Tolstoy, Gontcharoff, and Ostrovsky as well.

  But not, alas, Fyodor Dostoevsky. In spite of her growing familiarity with the works of many important Russian writers, Mrs Garnett was initially steered away from his writings. Her publisher William Heinemann (who also produced many of Crane’s works) suspected that what he called a British “fear of morbidity” would dampen any public interest in Dostoevsky’s tenebrous novels. To put it more cynically, one may assume that Heinemann worried such translations would fail to generate substantial profits.

  Enter John Watson. In April of ’05 I had the good fortune to be invited by Mrs Garnett to a gathering of writers she convened at her flat in Hampstead. Though the get-together turned out to be the last time I have seen her, I believe it to have been a seminal event.

  In addressing a hostess known for her familiarity with Russian texts, it seemed only natural to relate to her the details of a crime Holmes investigated that mirrored the events in a Russian novel. I refer, of course, to the case involving a pair of horrific axe-killings in London’s East End in the fall of ’87.

  Though it is only now that I make the narrative public, no one familiar with Crime and Punishment-Dostoevsky’s fictional account of two cold-blooded murders committed in St Petersburg, Russia, some twenty years before the London killings - could fail to note the similarities.

  Indeed, I am pleased to report that Mrs Garnett sat spellbound for the duration of my account of the grim affair, and it is that same story which follows this prologue. Humility prohibits me from ad
vertising my own importance in the matter; and yet I must point out that it was not long after I had related the events to Mrs Garnett that she began producing her own English versions of Dostoevsky’s major writings, Crime and Punishment among them.

  To be sure, others had attempted translating the works of Dostoevsky before she undertook the role. By way of example, one may cite Marie von Thilo’s treatment of Buried Alive or Frederick Whishaw’s translation of The Idiot. But as those editions earned little popular acclaim, I consider it no exaggeration to state that, owing to the clarity and precision of her expressive prose, it is to Constance Garnett alone that we should pay homage for introducing Dostoevsky to the English-speaking world.

  I would like to believe that the gruesome tale I related that evening in 1905 helped stimulate Mrs Garnett’s productivity. Trusting that it did enables me to view its publication as a form of atonement, a kind of compensation, if you will, for my inability at the inquest in ’93 to fully explain what had happened to Arthur Black and his family.

  At the very least, such thinking allows me to regard Mrs Garnett’s success in translating the world of Russian thought into English as antidote to the guilt that has pursued me all these years. At long last, I may now finally be able to lay the matter to rest.

  John H. Watson, M.D.

  London, June 1927

  1 For exploration of my police work following Holmes’ retirement, see The Outrage at the Diogenes Club. (JHW)

  2 Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life (DDV)

  3 Details of the blackmail case may be found in my account titled Sherlock Holmes and the Baron of Brede Place (JHW)

  Chapter One

  In Quintum Novembris

  (On the Fifth of November)

  -John Milton