Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [49]
“She described being conscious of a peculiar odor for several minutes — an odor we now know to have been burning flesh. When she reached the sitting room, Mrs. Serracoult was fully ablaze.”
Holmes had been on the point of reaching for his pipe, but evidently thought better of it. “How much of the house was destroyed in the fire?” he asked.
“None, Mr. Holmes.”
“None?”
“Mrs. Serracoult was burned to a crisp, but the chair she sat upon was not even singed.”
“Impossible,” I protested. “Such things might occur in Dickens novels, but never in real life.”
“And yet it happened,” Holmes noted, “suggesting that it is simply a badly-observed phenomenon. I have said many times that life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind of man could invent, but we must stick to reason, or we are lost.”
“Unlike Mr. Holmes here, I don’t believe in coincidences,” interrupted the haggard policemen. “I can’t explain it, but when the neighbor of a man who died a horrible death suddenly bursts into flames … I don’t know, gentlemen — it beats anything I’ve ever seen, and Lord knows, I’m no chicken.”
Holmes hurried Lestrade from our rooms, and a few moments later, we were in a cab, on our way to the Tuttman Gallery.
I attempted to draw Holmes into conversation about our present investigation. When he would not be drawn, I sought to engage his power to throw his brain out of action and switch his thoughts to lighter things by changing the topic to Cremona violins, warships of the future and the obliquity of the ecliptic.
“It … hurts my pride, Doctor,” he said eventually. “It should have occurred to me that, as the owner of a third Redfern, she might be in as much danger as Molinet and Monckton. I’m a foolish old man. How long can it be before I must retire to that farm of my dreams?”
So accustomed was I to his invariable success that the very possibility of his failure had ceased to enter my head until that very moment. “But surely … there’s still a chance … a chance to save anyone else who’s become entangled in this sinister web. If any man can untangle it, that man is Sherlock Holmes.”
Holmes gave a weak chuckle — he was always accessible upon the side of flattery. A moment later, he was the cold and practical thinker once again. “And faithful old Dr. Watson, of course,” he added.
I knew at heart that he would not give up so easily. It was when he was at his wits’ end that his energy and versatility were most admirable. “May I ask what our present objective might be?”
“Firstly, to ascertain whether anyone at the Tuttman Gallery might have a reason to wish harm to these three persons; secondly, to discover the names of anyone else who might have purchased a painting by Redfern; lastly, to locate the artist himself. It may be at odds with my method of observation and deduction, but I have an intuition that he might be at the center of this pattern of events.”
And so it proved. Crabtree, the proprietor of the Tuttman Gallery, was a gentleman of amiable disposition, who was extremely distressed to hear of the deaths of three of his most frequent customers, and allowed us free reign to search his store, question his staff and examine his records. Given the outré nature of the deaths, I had no clear idea of what we might be looking for, but Holmes seemed satisfied that no-one at the Gallery was acting with malicious intent. It appeared from Crabtree’s register that he had sold only one other Redfern, to a Mr. Phillimore. Holmes advised me that he had been consulted by Inspector Stanley Hopkins after Phillimore returned to his house one morning to fetch his umbrella and was never again seen in this world.
“I dislike ever having to hazard a guess,” remarked Holmes, “but I think we have a fair idea of the reason for his