The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [138]
I had to admit that it did not, and he shook his head again in wonderment, but offered no further explanation.
“What will be your next move?” I asked, seeking some indication that might help me.
“I should have thought,” he said, “that that also would have been obvious to you. We must go to Addleton and view the locus in quo, indeed the scene of the crime.”
“But I thought you believed there was no crime here!” I exclaimed.
“I set out,” said Holmes, “to solve a medical mystery, but we have stumbled across crime on our path. There has been a crime, Watson. One with very far-reaching consequences.”
The next afternoon found us in Addleton, a stone-built village which consisted largely of one long street with an inn at either end, huddled deep beneath the great square bulk of Addleton Moor. Once we had settled our baggage at the Goat and Boots Holmes sought out the village’s only doctor. Doctor Leary was an affable Irishman in his forties, who welcomed us into his surgery.
“And what,” he asked, when we had introduced ourselves, “brings a famous consulting detective all the way from London to Addleton? We have no murders here, Mr Holmes, and apart from a bit of head-thumping among the quarrymen on pay nights we have no other kind of crime.”
“But you have a mystery,” said Holmes.
“A mystery? Ah, surely a man of reason and logic like yourself is not looking into the Curse of the Black Barrow?”
“Certainly not,” said Holmes. “I am, however, looking into events which have led the popular press to allege that the Curse is real, namely the death of Anthony Lewis, the deaths, sicknesses, stillbirths and deformed births that have occurred here, and the recent death in London of Sir Andrew Lewis. Would you deny that they create a curious pattern?”
“There certainly seems to be a connection though, like you, I reject the supernatural explanation,” said Dr Leary. He groped in his pocket for his pipe and lit it. When it was well alight he continued.
“I came here, you know, fresh from Medical School. I thought I’d found a nice pitch”, he said. “A pretty village, a bracing climate, clean water, nice people and nothing much to worry me or them except old age and quarry accidents. And so it was for the first few years, then they opened the Black Barrow, and if it wasn’t cursed then it certainly deserves to be so.”
“What did you make of the sickness that affected the excavators?” Holmes asked.
“Very little, I admit. It was not serious and it might have had a number of causes. They were sweating away up on the Moor in the summer sun, some of them young fellas who were more used to a pen than a pick. I thought it could be a touch of the sun and I treated it as such.”
“And young Lewis?” said my friend.
“That, of course, was different. At the time I made no connection with the archaeologists. He came to me first with burns on his hands. I thought he had picked up something too hot with both hands. He said that he had not, that he had red patches appear on his hands for no reason and then open up like burns. I treated him with salves and wondered if it was some foreign skin disease, for he told me he had been abroad as a child.”
The doctor puffed at his pipe, reflectively. “Then it got worse. He had fainting fits, headaches, nausea – soon he was too weak to leave his bed. His father sent the best of Harley Street to help me, but they were helpless. We could only watch him fade away.”
“And how did the sickness spread?” enquired Holmes.
“Very quickly,” said Leary. “Though it was never as fierce as in young Lewis. The next was the boot boy at the Goat. He died some weeks after the young man. It seems he had been in the habit of slipping into Lewis’s room in his spare time and listening to tales of soldiering and the silly lad must have caught his death from Lewis. Then there was old McSwiney. He was a retired peeler who spent all his time in the Goat. He was old enough to go at any time if he