Andriacco Dan

Sherlock Holmes in the Peculiar Persecution of John Vincent Harden

Title Page

Sherlock Holmes in

THE PECULIAR PERSECUTION OF JOHN VINCENT HARDEN

by

Dan Andriacco

Dedication

In Memorium

Bill Russell, Norma Holt, Evelyn Weber

Introduction: In the Foosteps of a Giant

The only bad thing about the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories is that there aren’t enough of them. The original four novels and fifty-six short stories (leaving out Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s two plays and several other small writings about Holmes) comfortably fill a single large volume.

Since just this isn’t enough and nature abhors a vacuum, it’s no wonder that the remarkable Philip K. Jones has compiled a database of some 8,000 pastiches and parodies of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Seemingly any Sherlockian with writing genes eventually takes up the challenges to write a new Holmes story.

And having an incentive doesn’t hurt.

In 1988, Mysteries from the Yard Bookstore in Yellow Springs, Ohio, held a contest for the best original Sherlockian pastiche. The prize was a $100 gift certificate at the bookstore. I found that irresistible.

To write a Sherlock Holmes pastiche is to walk in the footsteps of a giant, which is daunting. But from having read the real thing many times, and a host of both good and bad pastiches, I had some strongly held notions about how to go about the task. You can find them in an essay on “Writing the Holmes Pastiche” in my book Baker Street Beat.

Suffice it to say that I wanted the story to feel as much like one from the pen of John H. Watson, M.D. as possible, both in terms of language and in shape of the story. An immense help in that regard was Ronald A. Knox’s seminal essay, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.” Monsignor Knox lists eleven elements of a canonical Sherlock Holmes story. A Study in Scarlet has all eleven elements, and most stories in the Canon have at least five. Those elements are:

1. A homely Baker Street scene to start, with invaluable personal touches and sometimes a demonstration by the detective or reference by either Holmes or Watson to an untold tale of Sherlock Holmes;

2. The client’s statement of the case;

3. Energetic personal investigation by Holmes and Watson, often including the famous floor-walk on hands and knees;

4. Refutation by Holmes of the Scotland Yard theory;

5. A few stray hints to the police, which they never adopt;

6. Holmes tells the true course of the case to Dr. Watson as he sees it, but is sometimes wrong;

7. Questioning of the victim’s relatives, dependents, and others, along with visits to the Records Office, and various investigations in disguise;

8. The criminal is caught or exposed;

9. The criminal confesses;

10. Holmes describes the clues and how he followed them;

11. The conclusion, often involving a quotation from some standard author.

This is the skeleton of a classic Sherlock Holmes story. I only needed a plot to give it flesh and blood.

Like many pastiche writers, I drew my inspiration from one of the many unwritten adventures of Sherlock Holmes referred to in the Canon. I deliberately chose one of the more obscure such references. (Who needs yet another “Giant Rat of Sumatra”?) In “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist,” we read of Holmes “immersed in a very abstruse and complicated problem concerning the peculiar persecution to which John Vincent Harden, the well known tobacco millionaire, had been subjected.”

That meager mention left me a lot of room to maneuver. I started by naming almost every character, except for the Canonical ones, after fellow members of the Tankerville Club, our Cincinnati scion of the Baker Street Irregulars. Three of those individuals are no longer with us – gone beyond the Reichenbach, as Sherlockians like to say – and it is to them that this story is dedicated.

For the title itself I couldn’t resist using the term “peculiar persecution.” Since I couldn’t fit that in with “Adventure,” I decided to leave adventure out of the title. All of the novels and many of the short stories (“A Scandal in Bohemia,” “His Last Bow,” “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” etc.) have adventure-less titles, so I thought I was on solid ground. As for the plot itself, I have no idea where it came from but I tried to write a good mystery that seemed Holmes-like.

I won the $100 gift certificate and used it to buy Sherlock Holmes books. “The Peculiar Persecution of John Vincent Harden” story was first printed, with the permission of the Conan Doyle estate, in The Sherlock Holmes Review in 1990, Volume 2, Numbers 3 and 4. Around the same time I also adapted it into a radio play, which has been performed by Sherlockian groups as readers’ theater.

When I met Steven Doyle for the first time, at the Gillette to Brett III conference in October 2011, he said, “You may not remember, but I published your pastiche.” How could I ever forget? It was my first published fiction!

When “The Peculiar Persecution of John Vincent Harden” was reprinted in Baker Street Beat, many reviewers singled it out as one of the highlights of the book. Ross K. Foad, in his “No Place Like Holmes” video review, called it “one of the best short Sherlock Holmes pastiches I’ve read.” It is in response to such comments that MX Publishing and I have decided to make this tale available as a stand-alone e-book.

The Peculiar Persecution of John Vincent Harden

In reviewing my notes of the many singular adventures shared with my friend Sherlock Holmes, I have often been struck by the remarkable number that concerned themselves with the doings of Americans.

Many such cases I have already presented to a long-suffering public. The Lauriston Gardens mystery and the tragedy of Birlstone, to name but two, were present-day crimes whose seeds were sown long ago in the fertile soil of the American continent.

Other incidents are doubtless too familiar to my readers to require further chronicling here. No one acquainted with the curious case of the bareback rider or with the horrifying immolation of the straw doll, which defeated the official police of three continents, could soon forget the chilling details.

There remain, however, some few examples of what might be called my friend’s “American connexions” which deserve a wider audience. (Let those responsible for the distasteful episode of the cajun cook be forewarned.) Surely any one of these hitherto uncelebrated problems would be of sufficient interest to engage the reader, else they would not have engaged Mr. Sherlock Holmes. None, however, was more fantastic than the peculiar persecution of John Vincent Harden.

It was mid-April of 1895. The fresh breezes of early spring blew through Baker Street, seeming to sweep away the crime and disease of the great city and make everything new again. After a frenzied round of professional calls in the morning and early afternoon, brought on by so sudden a change in the weather, I sat exhausted beside the unlit fireplace nodding over a medical journal. Sherlock Holmes, newly returned to our quarters in the guise of a simple fisherman, was absorbed in a microscopic examination of a peculiar red clay tracked in on his boots. We spoke but seldom, and such were the relations between us in those days that little talk was necessary.

Accustomed as we were to callers at all hours, the intrusion of our landlady into this comfortable scene was not entirely surprising.

“A gentleman to see you,” Mrs. Hudson told Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes took the card proffered on a silver tray. He held it up for me to read: “John Vincent Harden, Esq.”

“A gentleman, indeed,” said Holmes, fingering the nondescript white card as Mrs. Hudson withdrew. “A wealthy American, Watson. Proud, but not haughty, I should judge.”

“This is too much, Holmes!” I protested. “Surely even you could scarcely draw such profound inferences from a mere piece of pasteboard.”

“Once again you disappoint me, Watson. I assure you my little profile of Mr. John Vincent Harden is written here in black and white, if only you know how to read it: The paper. The engraving. The ink. The whole tone of this tiny document – powerful, but understated. It is much in the American style. And here is our visitor to prove out our modest inferences.”

Holmes unfolded his long, lean body and rose to meet the prospective client’s outstretched hand. John Vincent Harden was a short but powerfully built man wearing an expensive white linen suit, torn and stained from some recent altercation, and carrying a walking stick. He affected a large, graying mustache in the fashion of the American General Burnside. I put his age in the middle 50s, but when he gripped my hand it was with the strength of one decades younger.

“Mr. Holmes, I’ll come straight to the point,” said he, in the forthright manner of one who could do naught else. “I hear tell you’re the best.”

“Indeed? Friend Watson here has spread the news of my poor powers farther than I had suspected if I am so famous in – Tennessee, perhaps?”

“Kentucky, sir.”

“Indeed? I should have thought a trifle farther south. That explains, then, why you fought on the victorious Northern side in the American Civil War. Perhaps the late unpleasantness had something to do with your uncertain fortunes, for it is obvious that you were born into great wealth, lost it, but regained substantial means through your own labours.”

John Vincent Harden tightened his grip on the walking stick. “You’re good, all right. Damned good. Unless somebody told you about me.”

“I assure you I never heard your name until your card announced you five minutes ago, Mr. Harden. That card and you yourself told me all that I know of you. The ‘GAR’ emblem on the watch fob in your waistcoat pocket stands for ‘Grand Army of the Republic,’ does it not? Your military bearing would have ended any doubt I may have entertained. The gold watch which you consulted upon entering this room is old, but clearly valuable. An heirloom, then, of a wealthy family. Yet your hands are scarred, calloused. You have done manual labor, though not recently. And those efforts have paid off handsomely, for your dress – though tattered by whatever misadventure has brought you into these chambers – tells me you are wealthy once more.”

“I’m rich enough, all right, but let’s get down to cases. I’m here because I’m damned scared.”

The frank admission of fright, coming from this man of such obvious moral and physical strength, sent a chill through the warm sitting room. I believe that even Sherlock Holmes, the least fanciful of men, must have felt it. He leaned forward.

“Pray tell your story from the beginning, leaving out nothing. As you have seen, I am one who can make much of little things.”

“Well, sir, as for my early life, you seem to know a good deal already. I grew up on my family’s tobacco plantation, Whitecrest, thirty miles southwest of Lexington. We owned a hundred and twenty-five slaves. When the War Between the States broke out back in ’61, the Commonwealth of Kentucky was badly split. Both Jeff Davis and Abe Lincoln were born in our state, you understand. Officially, Kentucky stayed with Lincoln and the Union, and that’s where I saw my duty. I joined the army, fought at Gettysburg, rose to the rank of Colonel. But back at home, a lot of friends – even family – were joining the Rebs. Whitecrest was fair game for Rebel looters and marauders. When I returned from the war, there wasn’t much left of it. The house was a shambles. The slaves were gone. My mother was dead. My father didn’t recognize me. My brother – he was younger than I – had run off to join Morgan’s Raiders and never made it back.

“Mr. Holmes, that was thirty years ago, but not a day has gone by since that I haven’t remembered the vow I made to myself then: The Rebs couldn’t beat Grant and they weren’t going to beat me. I would start over. I would plant tobacco with my own two hands if I had to. And I would make my own fortune. There were hard years, sir. Many of them. The harder they got, the harder I got. Yes, I am a hard man, but a fair man. And a successful one, for I fulfilled that vow.”

Holmes stirred from his lounging position and lit his clay pipe. “And yet your life has not been without sadness.”

The tobacco millionaire stared at the floor, his clear blue eyes seeing far away as he replied in a dull voice: “I married a wonderful woman, sir. Norma brought grace and culture to Whitecrest. Even taught a hard man like me to appreciate your Mr. Shakespeare. She was carried away by consumption in ’81. Ophelia, our daughter, is the joy of my life – the reason I want to keep living.”

For all the forced gruffness with which he said these last words, our visitor’s voice was at the point of breaking and there was a wildness in his eyes. I handed him a glass of brandy and a cigar, medicines for melancholy, as Holmes pressed on. “It is only in England that you have become preoccupied with such thoughts, I perceive.”

“That’s true enough, sir,” John Vincent Harden conceded, setting down his walking stick to take a firm grip on the cigar in one hand and the brandy in the other. “All has gone well for me in my own element these recent years. I have reared Ophelia to a fine young woman of eighteen. She is to be married this fall to a young man of great promise. Her mother would be proud.”

“You approve of the match, then?”

“In every degree, sir. Stephen – Mr. Stephen Winter – comes from a fine old Lexington family. And yet I felt that before she entered the married state Ophelia ought to see the world in an extended stay abroad. We arrived in London nine weeks ago. For the first two months, we enjoyed the sites of your great city immensely. Then, six days go, I became the object of what I can only regard as a persecution, fanciful though the notion may seem. Ophelia and I returned to our hotel, the Langham, that afternoon after seeing Mr. Irving in Hamlet – my Norma’s favorite play – at the Adelphi Theatre.”

“Something was missing?” I conjectured.

John Vincent Harden almost chuckled. “I suppose you could say our room was missing, in a manner of speaking. It had been rented out to someone else! The room clerk, a man named Weber whom I’d never seen before, solemnly assured me that not three hours previously I had paid our bill and departed with my luggage and my daughter. Ophelia and I had to spend two days in a little cubbyhole before a proper room was available to us. Meanwhile, we had to replace all the clothing in our luggage. Damned nuisance. I almost quit England right then, but Ophelia wouldn’t have it.

“The clerk and the hotel manager acted as if I were a madman. I might have thought them right if Ophelia hadn’t assured me I had indeed been with her the entire day. Someone else checked us out of that hotel, Mr. Holmes. Someone who looked and sounded just like me.”

The American sat back and drank deeply from his brandy.

Holmes smoked in silence.

“But this is fantastic!” I cried. “It recalls nothing so much as Poe’s unearthly story of the two William Wilsons.”

“Tut-tut, Watson. Let us not be fanciful. Surely there are parallels enough in the commonplace books” – Holmes indicated their place on our shelves – “without turning to the supernatural for a solution to this mystery. The affair of the missing tobacco shop at Vienna in ’87 suggests itself immediately. There was also that dangerous little business at Montpellier two years ago in which I was of some assistance to M. Luttmer of the Sureté. And certainly you, Watson, remember the rather comic incident of diminutive love rivals of the Brandenburg Circus.”

“Certainly. But I fail to see – ”

“Precisely,” said Holmes. “You fail to see.”

“There’s more,” our visitor interrupted, speaking in the dull tones of a man almost defeated. “Three days ago I received at the Langham this wire from my man Lear, who is operating Whitecrest in my absence.”

He handed the wire to my companion, who quickly scanned its few words, then handed it on to me. It read:

BIG PROBLEM WITH SPRING PLANTING. URGENT YOU RETURN IMMEDIATELY. LEAR

“Well, sir, you may be assured I am not in the habit of taking instructions from my employees without so much as asking a few questions first,” the Kentuckian resumed. “I wired right back inquiring the exact nature of this ‘problem.’ Went straight to the Wigmore Street telegraph office to send it myself. Late that evening I received this reply.”

The second wire was even more succinct:

WHAT PROBLEM? E. LEAR

“Lear never sent that first wire, Mr. Holmes,” said John Vincent Harden. “It was a hoax.”

“Surely this is only some ill-conceived joke,” I observed.

“I might have thought so myself, Doctor, but for what occurred within this very hour to leave my clothing in the sorry state you see before you. I was just leaving the Langham to spend the late afternoon hours at the galleries. Scarcely had I stepped off the curb before I heard a terrible clatter. It was a four-wheeled cab bearing down on me with the speed of a runaway. But it was no runaway, gentlemen. The driver was urging the horses forward, not trying to reign them in. The man was bent on running me down. I was frozen with terror. When I finally did move, I tripped. It seemed I lay in that street for hours waiting to be crushed beneath the onrush of horses’ hooves. Only the quick action of a brave young Englishman saved me.”

John Vincent Harden pulled a large bandana from his back pocket and mopped his perspiring brow.

“And your daughter?” asked Sherlock Holmes.

“Ophelia is resting in her room. She knows nothing of this murderous incident – nor will she.”

“I see.” Holmes leaned back, pressing his lean fingertips together. “And the man driving the cab, what did he look like?”

The millionaire shook his head. “I was looking at those horses, sir, not at the driver.” His voice sunk to a near-whisper. “I was looking at death.”

“Whom do you suspect, then?”

“No one, for I know no one in England. Well, only that wild-eyed poet friend of my daughter, Paul Herbert. Rash young fellow. Runs with that Oscar Wilde crowd. Just this afternoon I told him flat-out I didn’t want Ophelia mixing with the likes of him. Stood his ground like a man, I’ll give him that. Thought he was going to hit me right there in the lobby of the Langham. Say, do you suppose – ”

“I suppose nothing,” said Sherlock Holmes. “I deduce.”

“You have a clew, then?”

“I am very close to having a solution.”

“What!” Our visitor fairly bolted out of his seat. “Without moving from your chair? Pardon my skepticism, sir, but that’s – that’s incredible!”

“It is commonplace. I noted a few moments ago one or two cases with which I am familiar that seem to point in the direction of a solution. The rest of your narrative only strengthened the parallels. I shall be making inquiries in the next few days to confirm my deductions, but I have every confidence that matters shall be thoroughly resolved by week’s end.”

“But what shall I do in the meanwhile?”

“Do nothing, Mr. Harden. I shall do the doing. The forces working against you are real, but it isn’t your life they want. You are in no real danger.”

Two mornings later, rushing towards the High Street in Marylebone on a pre-dawn summons from Stanley Hopkins of Scotland Yard, I finally induced Sherlock Holmes to explain at least some of his reasoning.

“It was obvious from the first,” he said, “that someone wanted our client to return to Kentucky – or at least to leave England. The incident of the hotel room was designed to so disgust him that he would quit the country in a huff, which he very nearly did. The bogus telegram was to lure him away, the apparent attempt on his life to frighten him away. Each time, you see, a somewhat different approach toward the same end. There’s the touch of genius in that, Watson. We’re up against a worthy opponent this time. Hardly a killer, however.”

“But surely, Holmes, you owe it to Mr. Harden to pursue – ”

“And pursue I did, Watson. I talked with Evelyn Weber, the clerk at the Langham, this afternoon. Didn’t I mention that?” Really, at times Holmes was exasperating. “This Weber is a stooped fellow with a thick mustache. Squints at you through his spectacles. ‘Mr. Harden checked out right enough,’ says he, ‘no matter how he tells the tale.’ I have also wired the Lexington, Kentucky, police with two vital questions. Ah, here we are. Let’s see what compels friend Hopkins to roust us out of our beds at this hour of the morning.”

Stanley Hopkins was in those days a promising young official detective in whose career Sherlock Holmes had taken a great interest. One of his greatest assets, I had always suspected, was that he knew when to call on Holmes for help.

“It’s a rum business, Mr. Holmes,” said he, leading us into the main room of William Russell’s cluttered bookshop. The body of a small man lay outstretched there on the floor, within feet of a wall of bookshelves. Beneath his extended hand, as if he had just pulled it off a shelf, lay an ancient bound edition of Hamlet. From his back protruded a silver-handled knife.

“Mr. Russell here” – Hopkins nodded toward an old man with long white hair and a beard like Father Christmas – “lives upstairs. He found this corpse lying here just like this when he came down this morning. I warned everybody not to touch anything until you arrived, sir. The peculiar thing is, Mr. Russell says he’s never seen the man before. We are inclined to believe Mr. Russell, he being a well-known and well respected businessman in this neighborhood. So what the devil is this mysterious Mr. Unknown Bloke doing getting himself murdered on Mr. Russell’s floor during the night?”

He seemed to take this unfortunate occurrence as almost a personal affront.

Eager as a bloodhound, Holmes dropped to the floor and began examining the dusty area around the body with his lens. His eyes shone and his pale cheeks gained colour. He was in his element: “A falling-out among thieves suggests itself immediately, of course. Two thieves came in; only one left. But this man’s dress – ”

Holmes uttered a strangled cry as his examination of the body brought him face to face with the dead man. “I am an old woman, Watson! I am Lestrade’s idiot nephew! I am not competent to farm bees on the Sussex Downs! Hopkins, we know this man. His name is John Vincent Harden.”

Seldom have I seen my notoriously moody friend as melancholy as in the following twelve hours. He smoked prodigiously, scraped out mournful sounds on his violin, and scarcely acknowledged my existence.

“If you won’t tell me your conclusions about this case,” I said bitterly, “at least tell Stanley Hopkins.”

“Soon enough,” he replied tersely. “A few more days can’t hurt now.”

In this, however, Holmes was in error, as became apparent that evening with the arrival in our quarters of Miss Ophelia Harden.

“The police have made an awful mistake, Mr. Holmes,” she said. “They have arrested Paul – my friend, Mr. Herbert.”

Miss Harden was a handsome, full-figured young lady fashionably dressed in pale colours to accent her blonde hair and blue eyes. Though small, such was the force of her character that few would have labeled her “dainty.”

“This is grief piled upon grief, as if Father’s death were not horror enough,” she wailed. “You must do something!”

Holmes regarded her through half-lidded eyes. “Tell me, Miss Harden, by what idiotic logic did the police decide to arrest young Herbert?”

“He and Father had strong words in public.” She lowered her eyes. “They were arguing about me, of course.”

“Of course. Your father mentioned the altercation during our meeting. He also made it quite clear that he did not approve of your poetic friend.”

“Father thought Mr. Herbert too young, too brash, too immature and thoroughly lacking in prospects. And he was right on every point! Oh, Mr. Holmes, Paul needs the steadying hand of someone like me, even though I am two years the younger.”

“And your fiancé?”

“Mr. Winter is perfect in every way, I suppose. He is handsome, tall, wealthy, charming – and, of course, boringly respectable. He may desire my affection and my company, but he doesn’t need them the way Paul does. I am fond of him, but not nearly so fond as Father is – was. I was quite undisturbed at writing him about my developing feelings for Paul.”

Holmes threw up his arms. “Surely even the Scotland Yarders don’t find a murder case against your Mr. Herbert in all of this?”

“Well, there is one other thing against Paul, Mr. Holmes. It’s that bookshop where they found Father’s body. Paul works there.”

Through the kind offices of Stanley Hopkins, we were permitted to interview Paul Herbert in his cell at the Bow Street police station the next morning.

“As God is my witness, Mr. Holmes – if there is a God, which I doubt – I wouldn’t have blunted my knife on that benighted man,” he proclaimed.

He was a flush-faced, red-haired youth about my own height, pacing the small cell with a nervous energy akin to that of Holmes in one of his bloodhound humours.

“It was your knife, then?” Holmes asked, seeming surprised.

“I don’t even own a knife,” the young poet snapped. “That was just a figure of speech.”

“We have yet to determine the ownership of the knife,” Stanley Hopkins told Holmes, somewhat stiffly. “But how much proof do we need? The victim was found dead in the accused’s place of employment just a few days after a frightful row between the two of them in the lobby of the Langham Hotel, observed by the hotel staff. He might as well have carved his initials in the man.”

Paul Herbert sniffed. “Being arrested for murder at least has a certain dignity. Now you’re saying I’m bloody stupid. That’s bloody insulting!”

“Watch your tongue, young man,” Hopkins chided. “Of course he didn’t plan to leave the body there, Mr. Holmes. The way we at the Yard have it figured, the accused here lured Mr. Harden to the bookshop in the late evening to kill him. Miss Harden confirms her father received some sort of message at the hotel that night. He rushed out, refusing to tell her where he was going. He never came back. Mr. Herbert killed him as planned. Things only began to go wrong when something stopped him from moving the body. It was probably the shop owner, Mr. Russell, coming down the stairs.”

“But Harden left his hotel in the evening and was killed then,” Holmes objected. “Russell didn’t find the body until this morning.”

“Merely a detail, Mr. Holmes.”

“Details are everything, Hopkins. How many times must I tell you that? Now, how did Herbert here get into the bookshop after hours?”

“When he isn’t writing poems, he sells books. As a long-time, trusted employee of William Russell – almost like a son, we understand – he has a key to the shop. Russell told us that. Didn’t want to, but we got it out of him.”

“Had a key,” Paul Herbert spat, his face more flushed than ever. “I told you I was set upon by a ruffian last night and knocked out. When I woke up, nothing seemed to be missing. I was puzzled as the devil. Then I was brought here on this absurd charge and the official hooligans searched me for the key to the shop. That’s when I discovered it was gone.”

“Very convenient,” Hopkins said heavily. “We’ll find it yet.”

“Doubtless,” said Holmes. “One further point, however: Have you arrived at a theory explaining why John Vincent Harden used his last ounce of strength to grasp a copy of Hamlet, a play he had seen a few afternoons previously? One might have thought he was attempting to indicate his killer, and yet there is no murdering poet in the work as I recall it.”

“There is, however, a young lady named Ophelia,” Hopkins rejoined smartly. “We reckon Mr. Harden’s last thoughts were of the poor deluded daughter he tried to protect from this swine. Really, Mr. Holmes, we of the official force seem to have done rather well without you this time. Is there any little point we may have missed?”

Holmes stroked his chin. “Let us see, Hopkins. You have missed the real killer, the real motive, and, oh yes, the real country.”

Stanley Hopkins stood open-mouthed. “Country, sir? I’m afraid I don’t – ”

“No, you don’t. The origin and the solution of this crime lie in America, Hopkins. If you fail to grasp that, you are hopeless.”

The truth of these words was quickly borne out. Waiting for us back at 221B when we returned from the police station was a telegram. “This tears it, Watson!” Holmes exclaimed, tossing me the wire. “We have our man.”

The wire read:

LEAR ON JOB. WINTER UNSEEN ONE WEEK. R.J. SENTER, POLICE CHIEF, LEXINGTON, KY., USA

“Our bird will fly as soon as possible now that Herbert is headed for the dock. He needed to stay in London only long enough to make suitably incriminating testimony against our young poet. Grab your service revolver, Watson, for we haven’t a moment to lose.” Holmes was already on his way back out the door. “I’ll tell Billy to have Hopkins meet us there with a pair of strong bracelets.”

“By all that is holy, meet us where?” I shouted after him.

“At the Langham, of course.”

“This is beyond me, Holmes!” I cried.

“No doubt.”

The Langham remains one of the grandest of London’s grand hotels. Holmes marched up to the magnificent front desk and hailed the clerk, a stooped figure of uncertain age hidden behind a thick, sandy mustache. The clerk peered at us through round spectacles, squinting. “Oh, hello, Mr. – Holmes, was it?”

He spoke in an indefinable Colonial accent, which I make no attempt to reproduce – some strange cross-breeding of South African and Australian, it seemed to me.

“Frightful goings-on since our little chat,” he said. “Mr. Harden showing up dead and all, naught but a couple days after that awful row with Mr. Herbert right here in the lobby.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “They were both mad as hatters, if you ask me.”

Holmes leaned forward. “Well, Weber, I’m quite sure you told the gentlemen from the Yard – Oh, excuse me.” In an uncharacteristically clumsy move, Holmes had managed to knock the clerk’s spectacles clean off his face.

“Terribly sorry,” Holmes said, holding the lenses out at eye level. “But do you know, I’ve found that clear glass like this can scarcely hope to improve the vision anyway.”

Like a frightened rabbit, Weber looked nervously from one to the other of us, then bolted. Holmes dived after, with me close behind. The crowd in the great lobby was sparse, giving the villain a nearly open field – but us one as well. Across the huge expanse we pursued him, only occasionally jostling a guest or two. We narrowed the gap but couldn’t quite close it. Our prey was within an arm’s length of a side entrance when the door unexpectedly swung open. Weber had up such a head of steam there was little he could do save collide with the newcomer.

“Here now – what’s the hurry?” that person asked, grabbing Weber by the scruff of the neck.

“Hold him, Hopkins!” Holmes cried, for it was indeed our young friend from Scotland Yard who stood holding the clerk.

Hopkins quickly clamped a set of handcuffs on his captive even as I leveled my revolver for good measure.

“Who is this man, Mr. Holmes?” Hopkins demanded.

“The persecutor and killer of John Vincent Harden – Mr. Stephen Winter.”

So identified, the man gave up all pretensions of being that which he was not. He shed the unnatural stoop of the hotel clerk, showing his true rather considerable height. He ripped off his mustache, revealing it to be as false as his spectacles. As he addressed us in his own Southern American voice, I realized that the unusual accent of the clerk Weber was but an unsuccessful attempt to sound English.

“All right, fellows,” said he, in the coolest possible tones. “I fought the good fight but I know when I’m licked. I’m guilty as sin and you’ve won the right to hang me fair and square. And come to that, I think maybe I’d rather be dead in England than poor in Kentucky anyway.” He straightened his tie. “Though as for blame, gentlemen, it’s really Colonel Harden’s fault as much as mine, don’t you see? I never in the world had it in mind to kill him, but he forced me to. When I checked him and Ophelia out of the hotel, he didn’t leave England. When I handed him that phony wire telling him to return to Whitecrest, he couldn’t just take it at face value and go. And when I tried to scare him away by half running over him with a rented four-wheeler, he went to see you instead, Mr. Holmes. The man was just too stubborn to live.”

“I had a fair idea of the game you were playing early on,” said Holmes, “but I never thought you’d turn over the death card.”

“That’s because you didn’t know how desperate I am. No one did.”

“But why did you want Harden out of England so badly?” Hopkins asked.

“Not Harden,” Holmes responded. “Miss Harden, Winter’s fiancé.”

“She wouldn’t have been my fiancé much longer if she’d stayed in England,” Winter said. “I could tell that from the way she wrote about this Herbert fellow in her letters. But I could also that tell her father opposed any possible match between the two. He wanted her to marry well. I felt certain that if I could pull them apart for a few months, the Colonel would prevail and Ophelia and I would be safely wed.”

“So it was an affair of the heart,” the police detective said.

Holmes tutted. “Still the romantic, Hopkins? Ah, well, you are young. An affair of the pocketbook, more likely.”

Stephen Winter nodded affably. “Alas, gentlemen, I wish I could claim a more noble motivation, but once again you have me. The family fortune I inherited was a respectable one, but I am afraid that my penchant for Kentucky horses has taken a devastating toll on my financial position. Even my home is heavily mortgaged, though no one knew it. Marriage to a wealthy woman seemed the only practical solution. Having conducted my affairs discreetly so as to avoid public scandal and maintain my reputation, I was considered a good catch. Ophelia was available and initially willing. Her father, as you know, approved. Then they came to England and disaster loomed. I spent most of my dwindling resources following them here to preserve my marriage hopes. It was one gamble I had to win, for I had risked all. Once here, I became Evelyn Weber, hotel clerk. In that guise, working at this hotel, I could keep track of the Hardens and be in a good position to carry out my schemes for encouraging their departure from England. I had little fear of being recognized by them, for people our sort don’t really notice people of the sort I was made out to be.

“If only Colonel Harden hadn’t been so stubborn it would have worked. Well, what can you expect of a Union man? I reluctantly concluded that nothing short of her father’s death would send Ophelia scurrying back to Whitecrest. Fortunately, Providence blessed me with a public argument between the Colonel and my rival, Paul Herbert. As Evelyn Weber, I would call police attention to the damning event before I mysteriously disappeared. Others saw it happen, too, so even Ophelia couldn’t deny it. If Colonel Harden were murdered, surely that young hothead would be the chief suspect. And if he were hanged, then all my troubles would be over for sure. I would be the reliable suitor rushing to comfort Ophelia in her hour of need, making us all the closer.

“But I had to be sure the case against Herbert was a tight one. So I followed him, learned as much as I could about him. When I saw him using a key of his own to close up the bookshop, I conceived a brilliant idea: Lure the Colonel into the shop with a note promising some dirt about young Herbert, distract his attention, stick a knife in his back and leave the body to be found in the morning. Who would believe Herbert’s cock and bull story of the key being stolen? Certainly not Scotland Yard. Of course, I took back from his body the note that brought Colonel Harden to the bookshop.

“You know, gentlemen, I rather liked Ophelia’s father after a fashion, despite his stubbornness and his Union sympathies. After all, he was on my side. I did so hate to kill him. Rather liked Ophelia, too, come to that.”

The killer smiled.

“The key facts were in our hands from the very first,” Sherlock Holmes explained at Baker Street the following evening after a hearty meal at Simpson’s. “I was convinced that the killer was whoever lay behind the peculiar persecution of John Vincent Harden. Two antagonists would be too much of a coincidence. Colonel Harden believed he knew no one in England except Paul Herbert, who had no conceivable reason for wanting the Hardens to leave the country – quite the contrary, in fact. The answer, then, as I suggested to Hopkins, lay in America. Who there might benefit from driving the Hardens out of the country? The presence of an English love rival to Miss Harden’s fiancé made Stephen Winter a suspect immediately. No such motivation was readily apparent for Lear, the major domo of Whitecrest Plantation, but he could not be ruled out since his name was connected with what turned out to be a seemingly spurious wire from America.

“One of these men, it seemed likely, was John Vincent Harden’s mysterious persecutor – either in person or through an agent in England. I sent a wire of my own to Kentucky to determine whether either was off the scene. By the time I received a reply that confirmed my earliest suspicions of Miss Harden’s beau, I was already fairly certain of the guise under which he was operating in this country.

“The first of the incidents plaguing Harden – the story of the apparent Doppelganger who checked the Hardens out of their rooms at the Langham – was mysterious only if the room clerk, a man Harden had never seen before, had told the truth. Assume that he lied and the mystery evaporated. It all hinged, then, on Evelyn Weber. Now consider the bogus telegram from Lear. It was presented to Harden at the hotel – presumably by a bellboy who could well have received it from the room clerk. Harden sent his follow-up wire from the Wigmore Street telegraph office, where Weber never knew of it. The response came back the following evening, when Weber was off duty. That’s the only reason Harden ever saw it. The murderous attack of the four-wheeler, I need hardly add, occurred just outside the hotel. Everything came back to the Langham and, by inference, to Weber. Clearly, he was also one of the hotel staff who overheard the heated dispute in the lobby between Messers Harden and Herbert – putting him in an excellent position to blame the former’s death on the latter. Weber could have been merely an agent for Winter, of course, but the plain glass spectacles were a transparent disguise.”

Holmes sat back in his chair.

“And so ends another successful case for my annals,” I commented.

“The case was indeed a great success,” Holmes said bitterly. “Only the client died. No, Watson, I have scarcely covered myself with glory in this one. If you should ever chance to chronicle this adventure, let it be as the folly of an over-celebrated sleuthhound, not as some sort of triumph.”

He picked up his violin and commenced to scratch out a melancholy series of notes that seemed to match his mood.

“Holmes!” I cried after enduring some minutes of this. “The Hamlet! What in the world was the significance of the book John Vincent Harden grabbed in his final moment? You asked Hopkins for his theory, but you never gave your own.”

“Didn’t I? Well, we can never know the truth for sure,” said Sherlock Holmes, looking up from his instrument. “But having met the charming Stephen Winter, perhaps the answer lies in Act I, Scene V, if I recall correctly – ‘meet it is I set it down/That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’ ”

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First edition published in 2012 by

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Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by

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© Copyright 2012 Dan Andriacco

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Andriacco Dan Sherlock Holmes in the Peculiar Persecution of John Vincent Harden