The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [162]
“And so you tried to implicate an innocent man.” I could see Holmes’s cool anger building.
Wells said, “So it is resolved. Tell me one thing. Tarquin. If not for your brother’s money, why?”
He showed surprise. “Do you not know, Bertie? The first aviator will be the most famous man in history. I wanted to be that man, to fly Ralph’s craft into the air, perhaps even to other worlds.”
“But,” Wells said, “Ralph claimed to have flown already all the way to the moon and back.”
Tarquin dismissed this with a gesture. “Nobody believed that. I could have been first. But my brother would never have allowed it.”
“And so,” said Wells bitterly, “you destroyed your brother – and his work – rather than allow him precedence.”
There was a touch of pride in Tarquin’s voice. “At least I can say I gave my destiny my best shot, Bertie Wells. Can you say the same?”
The formalities of Tarquin Brimicombe’s arrest and charging were concluded rapidly, and the three of us, without regret, took the train for London. The journey was rather strained; Wells, having enjoyed the hunt, now seemed embittered by the unravelling of the Brimicombe affair. He said, “It is a tragedy that the equipment is so smashed up, that Ralph’s note-taking was so poor, that his brother – murderer or not – is such a dullard. It will not prove possible to restore Ralph’s work, I fear.”
Holmes mused, “But the true tragedy here is that of a scientist who sacrificed his humanity – the love of his wife – for knowledge.”
Wells grew angry. “Really. And what of you, Mr Holmes, and your dry quest for fact, fact, fact? What have you sacrificed?”
“I do not judge,” Holmes said easily. “I merely observe.”
“At any rate,” said Wells, “it may be many years before humans truly fly to the moon – oh, I am reminded.” He dug into a coat pocket and pulled out a small, stoppered vial. It contained a quantity of grey-black dust, like charcoal. “I found it. Here is the ‘moon dust’ which Ralph gave me, the last element of his hoax.” He opened the bottle and shook a thimbleful of dust into the palms of Holmes and myself.
I poked at the grains. They were sharp-edged. The dust had a peculiar smell: “Like wood smoke,” I opined.
“Or wet ash,” Wells suggested. “Or gunpowder!”
Holmes frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose the soil of the moon, never having been exposed to air, would react with the oxygen in our atmosphere. The iron contained therein – it would be like a slow burning – ”
Wells collected the dust from us. He seemed angry and bitter. “Let us give up this foolishness. What a waste this all is. How many advances of the intellect have been betrayed by the weakness of the human heart? Oh, perhaps I might make a romance of this – but that is all that is left! Here! Have done with you!” And with an impetuous gesture he opened the carriage window and shook out the vial, scattering dust along the track. Holmes raised an elegant hand, as if to stop him, but he was too late. The dust was soon gone, and Wells discarded the bottle itself.
For the rest of the journey to Paddington, Holmes was strangely thoughtful, and said little.
The Adventure of the Touch of God
Peter Crowther
It was with a mixture of trepidation and eager anticipation that, on a cold and dank November evening, having just arrived back at our rooms in Baker Street from a day-long symposium on glandular deterioration, I greeted Sherlock Holmes’s announcement that we were to journey to Harrogate.
Despite being some 200 or more miles from the capital’s bustling familiarity and drudgery (two indistinguishable sides of the same tarnished coin), the trip clearly promised a return to matters of detection. For though Holmes complemented news of our impending departure with the promise of bracing Yorkshire air to clean clogged and jaded tubes