The Patient's Eyes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  I moved to examine these and the first object I saw was so odd that I could not begin to think what it was. The thing consisted of a strap attached to a large hollow shape like a cucumber. I was picking it up when the Doctor stopped me.

  ‘Careful,’ he said. He took it cautiously, applying pressure to the top of the shape. As he did so, a horrible-looking blade with a serrated edge sprang out and up.

  ‘But what is its use?’ I asked.

  He looked at me. ‘I will tell you if you want to know, but first I think I should explain something to you. The motives for murder are usually commonplace. The mechanisms, however, are confined only by human ingenuity and the limits of the imagination. There is nothing decent about the subject and this apparatus is about as indecent as you can imagine. Even when it was discovered, it was never written about.’

  ‘I would still like to know.’

  ‘Very well. It was the device of a fanatically jealous husband, who wanted his wife to die during the act of love in the most painful way he could devise.’ He put it down carefully.

  ‘Here? And did he use it?’ I could hardly believe anything so horrible, yet I will admit I was fascinated.

  ‘No to both, I am glad to say. The thing came from Belgium and he was arrested for another crime. But I fear it is not unique. Think of it, Doyle, and it has probably happened …’

  I continued, now, to examine the room’s collection of items and case histories. It was vast and I realised that the shelf of sensational literature downstairs was merely a minor offshoot of what was here. The books and pamphlets and illustrated material all related to crime, mostly murder.

  ‘You may like to try writing up some notes of the case we saw tonight. They will be destroyed, of course,’ he said, as he unpacked his bag, containing the various tools of his work. ‘It is a condition of all my Crown work that it remains completely confidential and will never be revealed, but it might aid your understanding.’

  I was greatly flattered and readily agreed. ‘How long have you been studying crime in this way?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, a few years ago something happened which made me unsure how to go on. And then, like a miracle, this work, my work, began.’

  It was clear he would say no more so I did not ask, but I could be sure he was referring to the death of his wife.

  I walked home at dawn, pondering this and so many other things. Fortunately the house was not yet astir and I slipped straight upstairs. There was no hope of sleep. I felt like a traveller who has entered a new and strange land. It was obvious I would never look at things in quite the same way again.

  DR BELL’S METHOD

  Here, then, was the start in earnest of my working relationship with the Doctor. Now that I was taken into his confidence, the reader might well assume our dealings with each other became easier and more relaxed, and that I settled down to be a disciple of the man and his method.

  The assumption is understandable but it could hardly be more wrong. The honest truth is my relations with the Doctor never precisely mirrored the smooth cordiality between the two detectives in my fiction. Even there, I occasionally allowed a touch of asperity to show itself and this was but the tiniest hint of the true state of affairs: namely that for many years I could not easily reconcile myself to my mentor.

  In part this might be seen as merely a matter of age and temperament. I had my pride, he had his and, though he could be magnificent company, I would not describe him as a particularly easy man to befriend. When I first encountered him I was having to come to terms with my own family problem and, not much later, with the urgent need to make a living. All this made our collaboration uneasy. But in my heart I know there is much more to it.

  Put bluntly, the Canning affair proved far less troubling to me than the two awful cases that followed. It may be asked how I can write in this way about a man who deliberately scared his wife till she was in abject terror and then killed her. But it is a plain fact. What came later was more violent, more disturbing and, as I will show, unexpected. The Canning murder was deeply unpleasant, but the man was in his way a traditionalist and the case could usefully stand as a model for some of my later fiction. If the Doctor and I had confronted only his kind, our relationship would have proved less volatile. But the Edinburgh case that followed Canning took us into uncharted territory, as did the matter of Miss Grace’s eyes. Here was material that could scarcely be considered fit for public consumption and would test our relationship to the limit. But before I come to Miss Grace, I must recount a much smaller incident, which vividly illustrates the clash of temperaments between myself and Bell, even though it did not involve any crime at all.

  It happened in his room on a dull afternoon in early February, some time after I met him. I was still at least a year away from graduation and spent many more months as a medical student. But, as I look back, a trick of memory makes me almost feel as if this incident marked my final afternoon at the university. In my mind it is as though I went home after it, packed my bags and left the town. No doubt this is partly because there is much I wish to forget in the spring and summer that followed. But it is also true that the events in his upstairs study that day do, after a fashion, sum up my early relationship with the Doctor.

  The incident occurred after I came in to tell him that I had prepared the lecture theatre. We had half an hour to spare and Bell, who was sitting by the fire, invited me to take the chair opposite while he read my notes on the Canning case.

  ‘I know there is cruelty in the world,’ I was saying as I sat down, ‘but for a man to frighten his wife till she is in such a turmoil of horror, and then take her life in the way she most feared. It just seems utterly barbarous.’

  ‘Agreed,’ he said without much interest as he languidly turned over my pages. Then, without looking up or saying anything further at all, he finished reading the composition I had struggled for hours to write and threw it on to his fire. I watched the pages burn with some amazement and not a little irritation. Of course, the Doctor had warned me that any written record would be destroyed. The Eugene Chantrelle case had occurred some time before I knew the Doctor but he constantly referred to it and it had left him with an obsession almost amounting to paranoia about keeping all his activities as an investigator confidential. Chantrelle, a Frenchman, had killed his wife in Edinburgh and was eventually brought to justice. The amount of official bungling during the investigation had been almost comical. Vital clues were destroyed. Others blindly missed, but Bell had solved it, on the assumption that his part would be kept confidential. In this instance it was particularly important, for there had been much hurt pride and any publicity could only make matters worse. The Doctor made sure his name was kept out of the trial and all seemed well. But unfortunately he had fatally underestimated his man.

  For Chantrelle had observed not only Bell’s role in his prosecution but also the Doctor’s craving for anonymity. Now the murderer saw a magnificent way of taking his revenge. On the day of his execution he appeared at the gallows, dressed in his best suit and smoking a cigar, and asked to have a last word. Whereupon he addressed some remarks to the official forensic pathologist, Henry Littlejohn, airily asking him to convey his compliments and congratulations to the absent Dr Bell for bringing him to justice.

  Chantrelle hanged, but this last shot proved devilishly effective, humiliating Littlejohn and compromising Bell’s dealings with the authorities in Edinburgh for months to come. There was jealousy and controversy from the police, complaints and questions from the university, even some ribald interest from the populace. When I met him, Bell was still struggling to repair the damage. Indeed, his secretiveness and that locked room were a direct result of the Chantrelle affair.

  I knew most of this as I sat in his room that afternoon but it still seemed to me that sometimes he took his secrecy too far. I was annoyed to see those notes burn for I had taken time and trouble over them, and his subsequent remark did nothing to improve my mood. ‘But what of the method, Doyl
e?’ he murmured after a few minutes’ contemplation of the fire. ‘Those notes revealed nothing of it. Yet it is where you should have concentrated all your attention.’

  I found myself inflamed by the sheer egotism of the man. It was as if he cared nothing at all for the woman who had been murdered. As if her brutal death was only of any significance for the light it shed on his blasted ‘method’.

  ‘But is it, finally, a new method?’ I asked with more composure than I felt. ‘You cite Canning as a demonstration and I grant you were far ahead of everyone else, but it did not really take much for someone of your experience. Very well, you guessed that coal gas might be a cause. That is reasonable. Carbon monoxide would have shown in her blood eventually anyway, making even that leap redundant. All you needed then was the trick of ventilation and by luck you came upon it. Far from a new method, I would argue the Canning case proves only that everyone’s box of tricks is the same. It is merely that some are quicker than others in their use of it.’

  His face visibly fell and I actually wondered if I had gone too far. ‘But I swear I did not guess,’ he said, never for a moment suspecting I was being deliberately provocative. ‘It is an appalling practice, which betrays the chain of reason and reduces it merely to a series of leaps in the dark. In the end, guessing can actually, I believe, destroy the proper mental faculties. For it encourages fatalism and laziness. I promise you there is all the difference in the world between applying logical observation of the kind I am trying to pioneer and guessing.’

  ‘Possibly,’ I said and to my discredit I was enjoying his discomfort. ‘But without seeing it systematically applied and subject to a properly observed series of tests and demonstrations, you must grant your method will forever remain unproven.’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted with much less resistance than I had anticipated, ‘just so. Anyone can follow the reasoning afterwards and talk of what would later be discovered. I only wish there were a way I could illustrate it better for you.’

  ‘Perhaps there is,’ I said. He stared at me gloomily, an eyebrow raised. ‘You have written in one of your essays that it is difficult for a man to keep any object in daily use without leaving his personality about it. That is an example of your method in its purest form, is it not?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he agreed.

  ‘Well, then.’ I took out my father’s watch as I spoke. ‘If you make something useful of this watch, you may convince me.’

  The watch, with its chain and gold facia, gleamed in the light of the fire. ‘Months can go by without a single case. I would rejoice in a challenge …’ he said and the watch was duly handed over.

  I still remember Bell’s expression as he studied it. His face was a perfect picture of disappointment. In fact, I could hardly keep from laughing. ‘But there are hardly any data,’ he said miserably. ‘This has recently been cleaned.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I oversaw its cleaning myself. So you see, Doctor, I rather feel this illustrates the limitations of your so-called method.’

  The Doctor could certainly be arrogant, but he was never a bad loser and I expected him now to return the watch to me with a shrug of defeat. But he did no such thing. He held on to it, and turned it round and round under the light, opening its back and studying the works. Then he took out a powerful concave lens to examine it and at last, still a little crestfallen, he handed it back to me.

  He sat in his chair, eyes half closed. ‘Yes,’ he mused. ‘Perhaps you are right. But my investigation was not entirely barren. The watch is about fifty years old. Its owner is a man of untidy habits – very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects but threw away his chances. He has lived some time in relative poverty with a few short intervals of prosperity. After that he took to drink and his mind went. That is all I can honestly tell you.’

  I jumped to my feet in anguish. I felt in that moment as if he had casually ripped my soul apart. Here was the awful downward spiral of my father’s life, a downward spiral that we lived through day after day, a secret torture to me and all my family, being recounted like some casual smoking-room anecdote.

  ‘This is unworthy of you, Dr Bell,’ I said. ‘I could not believe you would descend to it.’

  He looked at me in amazement. ‘I do not follow.’

  ‘This is the watch of my father. You have somehow got wind of our family history and now you pretend to deduce this knowledge in some fanciful way! To parade a painful family secret in such a fashion is not merely unkind, it … is pure malice.’

  The Doctor looked quite concerned. ‘My dear Doyle,’ he said with some feeling, ‘viewing the matter purely as an abstract problem, I had not considered your personal reaction. But I can assure you I am quite unaware of your family situation. You could have been an orphan for all I know.’

  His tone was so genuine that slowly some of my rage ebbed away. ‘Then in heaven’s name,’ I asked, ‘how?’

  He came to me, then, took the watch and looked at me with a directness I had rarely seen before. ‘The same as always,’ he said quietly. ‘Observe the small facts on which larger inferences depend. Careless? Well, the lower part of the watch is dented and cut and marked from the habit of keeping other hard objects such as coins or keys in the same pocket. To treat a fifty-guinea watch like that marks a careless man.’

  Now he opened the watch and continued in the same soft, mesmerising tone, determined to let me see the process he had followed: ‘Through the lens I can see many pawnbroker’s marks – hence the hard times. But clearly sometimes he had money to redeem his pledge. Finally – look at the scratches round the keyhole – mark where the key has slipped! What sober man’s keys could have scored those grooves? And then you will observe here how they become seriously disturbed and destructive, well beyond mere drunkenness.’

  We looked at each other. So he had indeed stumbled through his deductions upon our darkest family secret, a secret my mother, my sisters and I were at such pains to conceal. I was impressed, but in that moment my humiliation was so intense I could only nod.

  ‘So have I shown you something at last?’ His voice was still very gentle, as was his expression.

  ‘Yes, you have,’ I told him. But my heart felt it would break. And shortly afterwards I left him.

  THE PATIENT’S EYES

  I still have my father’s watch. Indeed, it is on the desk before me as I write this, having just returned from its annual clean. Looking down at it, even now all these years later, I still feel some of the pain and humiliation of that afternoon.

  I see also, of course, how much of it was chance. If the Doctor’s demonstration of his method, a demonstration I so recklessly invited, had only concerned a more neutral object then it could not possibly have had the same effect. But it had felt like torture to me to see the glittering Ibo, the plaything of my childhood, so brutally transformed into a forensic record of my father’s decline into drunken insanity. Little wonder that, while I accepted its creator’s brilliance, the method continued to arouse doubts in me, doubts which were only fuelled when later it failed us.

  Therefore the episode still stands in my mind as a reason I pushed him away after I left the town. Though by then he had witnessed my innermost anguish and grief in far more harrowing circumstances, and to a degree that hardly seems fair, especially since I was barely grown up.

  I told myself, I think, after I passed my medical exams and left Edinburgh, that I no longer needed him. We corresponded occasionally but there was in some respects little to say, in others far too much and, as is the way with such things, soon we were not in communication at all. The silence between us continued into 1882 when I returned from a short and unsuccessful trip to Africa and began my first proper medical job. And so it was that one late October afternoon I came to be sitting opposite a patient in a South Coast consulting room without the slightest notion of how soon I would need the Doctor’s help.

  My patient’s face was perfect, I thought as I looked across at her. Not the dull,
cherubic face of an angel, nor the bland, rosy face of a doll, but the deep, soulful face of a saint. The eyes, in particular, were so filled with pure emotion that I found it hard not to stare at them. Bell had, of course, drummed into me the notion that a doctor may observe more from seeing than conversing so, while she talked, I tried to study her hands and clothes, and her general demeanour. But still I found myself oddly fearful that, once I stared into her eyes, I would be unable to look away again.

  Miss Heather Grace was only the third patient who had sat across my desk since I accepted my first medical position, a very junior role in that South Coast practice. Perhaps one reason why she made such an impression was that, since Edinburgh, I had been avoiding the company of women. Also, I was still getting used to the idea of being a doctor as I sat opposite her, forcing myself to look at her directly.

  ‘It is like a blurring,’ she was saying. And, so distracted had I been, it was only now I fully understood that the problem she was describing was not some stomach malady or a fever, but a condition of her eyes.

  ‘How often do these symptoms occur?’ I asked, quickly starting to make notes, hoping this would give me a more professional air.

  ‘Oh, it goes away, but it always comes back, especially at this season. I admit I feel stupid about it. I did not wish to bother Dr Cullingworth, my usual doctor. But …’ here she hesitated, ‘I have been a little troubled by it.’

  There was something about the way she said the word ‘troubled’ that would have melted a harder heart than mine. Miss Grace had a happy enough demeanour, but I sensed some deeper problem was concerning her.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked. ‘Do you live with your family?’

  She looked up at me. ‘I live with my uncle and aunt. My parents died. But it was some years ago.’