The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [190]
“I am by no means sure that I understand.”
“No? Yet the matter is simple enough. A person living in a remote country house, a gentleman for whom monetary considerations have little weight, sends a trusted servant to obtain the immediate services of a London doctor, of any London doctor more or less, and you expect me to be surprised that you received a fee altogether out of the ordinary?”
“Well, Holmes,” I replied, “I will not disguise that my remuneration was perhaps excessive. But my patient evidently is a wealthy man and one prey to nervous fears. He trusts, too, to receive my continuing attentions from week to week. The situation does not strike me as being very much out of the ordinary.”
“No, Watson? But I tell you that it is out of the ordinary. The man you attended this afternoon is no ordinary man, you may take my word for that.”
“Well, if you say so, Holmes, if you say so,” I replied.
Yet I could not but think that for once my old friend had read too much into the circumstances, and I quickly sought for some other subject of conversation, being much relieved when Holmes too seemed disinclined to pursue a matter in which he might be thought to have me at a disadvantage. The remainder of the visit passed pleasantly enough, and I had the satisfaction of leaving Holmes looking a good deal more brisk and cheerful than he had done upon my arrival.
I went down to Hertfordshire again a week later and found my patient already much better for the treatment I had prescribed. I was hopeful enough, indeed, to feel that another two or three weeks of the same regimen, which included plenty of rest and a light diet, would see the illness through.
It was just as I stepped back from the bed after concluding my examination, however, that out of the corner of my eye I detected a sharp movement just outside the window. I was so surprised, since there was no balcony outside, that something of my alarm must have communicated itself to my patient who at once demanded, with the full querulousness of his indisposition, what it was that I had seen.
“I thought I saw a man out there, a glimpse of a face, dark brown and wrinkled,” I answered without premeditation, so disturbed was I by an aura of malignancy I had been aware of even from my brief sight of that visage.
But I quickly sought to counteract any anxiety I might have aroused in my already nervous patient.
“Yet it can hardly have been a man,” I said. “It was more likely a bird perching momentarily in the ivy.”
“No, no,” Mr Smith said, in sharp command. “A face, A burglar. I always knew this house was unsafe. After him doctor, after him. Lay him by the heels. Catch him. Catch him.”
I thought it best at least to make pretence of obeying the peremptory order. There would be little hope of calming my patient unless I made an excursion into the garden.
I hurried out of the room and down the stairs, calling to the manservant, who, I had gathered, was the sole other occupant of the house. But he evidently must have been in the kitchens or elsewhere out of hearing since I had no reply. I ran straight out of the front door and looked about me. At once, down at the far side of the garden, I detected a movement behind a still leaf-clad beech hedge. I set out at a run.
Holmes had been right, I thought, as swiftly and silently I crossed a large, damp-sodden lawn. My patient must be a man of mystery if he was being spied upon by daylight in this daring fashion. His cries of alarm over a burglary must, then, be false. No ordinary burglar, surely, would seek to enter a house by broad daylight.
My quarry had by now gone slinking along the far side of the beech hedge to a point where I lost sight of him behind a dense rhododendron shrubbery. But I was running on a course to cut him off, and I made no doubt that before long I would have the rogue by the collar.
Indeed, as soon as I had rounded the dense clump of rhododendrons, I saw a small wicket gate in the