The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King [148]
Her voice had become increasingly hoarse, and the gun had drooped casually to one side as she talked. Holmes and I remained still, he with a look of polite boredom on his face that must have been infuriating, I trying to look young and stupid. The blood had stopped dripping onto the tiles, though my right hand was a bit numb. When Donleavy spoke again her voice cracked slightly with tiredness. I waited, invisible, for Holmes to make me an opening.
“Which brings us to the present. Sherlock, my dear man, what do you think I’ve come for?”
His response was uninterested, obedient, insulting.
“You wish to crow over me, like a cock on its dung-heap!”
“Patricia.” The gun rose in threat.
“Patricia, my dear.” His sardonic voice turned it into a sneer.
“To crow over you, I suppose, is one way of putting it. Nothing else?”
“To humiliate me, preferably in some public manner, so as to re-venge your father.”
“Excellent. Now, Miss Russell, do you see the envelope on the shelf to your right? The top one. Stand up and get it please—slowly now, re-member. All right, take it back to the table and place it in front of Sherlock. Sit down, hands on top of the table. Good.
“This document is your suicide note, Sherlock. Rather lengthy, but that cannot be helped. If you are curious, the machine it was typed on is downstairs, substituted for your own. Read it, by all means, and lay it in front of Miss Russell if you wish her to see it. You will not touch it, Miss Russell. One never knows how clever the fingerprint people have become, and it would not do to have your fingerprints on such a highly personal document as this. Please, dear Sherlock, you must read it. I am really quite pleased with the effect it produces, if I do say so my-self. Besides that, you must never sign any document until you’ve read it.” She laughed merrily, and the madness rang clearly from her.
It was, as she said, a suicide letter. It began by stating that he, Sher-lock Holmes, being in his right mind, could simply no longer see any point in staying alive, and it went on to elaborate the reasons. My re-jection of him and the ensuing depression it caused were so vehe-mently denied as to underline my absence as the chief cause of his decision, though I personally was carefully removed from blame. Then the letter launched into a long, rambling, detailed explanation of how the cases as recorded by Dr. Watson had been so entirely wrong. Seven-teen cases in all were presented with microscopic attention, pointing out in each one where the credit for its solution had in reality lain: usu-ally with the police, occasionally elsewhere, several times by Holmes accidentally stumbling on the answer, once with Watson. Page after page of it, we read and she sat. Finally came the murder of Moriarty, where it was revealed that the entire story was a deliberate fabrication against an inoffensive professor who had stolen the young woman Holmes desired, and whom Holmes had then hounded to his death by the creation of a totally imaginary crime syndicate. The document ended with an abject apology to the memory of a great man so badly wronged, and to the population in general who had been so misled.
It was an extremely effective piece of writing. The reader was left with the clear impression of a badly unbalanced, severely depressed, drug-ridden egotist who had destroyed careers and lives in order to build his reputation. The simple white sheets with their lines of print, were they ever to get before the public, would create a huge scandal, and very possibly turn the name of Sherlock Holmes into a laughing-stock and the object of scorn. I sat back, shaken.
“You have a definite flair for fiction-writing,” said Holmes, his voice cold with revulsion, “but surely you cannot believe I might sign the thing.”
“If you do not, I shall shoot Miss Russell, then I shall shoot you, and one of my employees