The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [276]
For once, Sherlock Holmes seemed confused … but he regained his composure swiftly enough to withdraw the jotting-book an instant before the freckled urchin tried to snatch the banknote within. “Both of them, you say?” asked Holmes.
The newsboy nodded. “You heard me, boss. That guy wit’ the umbreller: after he wrecked the camera, I seen him walk into that buildin’ over there.” The newsboy nodded towards the offices of the Cosmopolitan. “The cameraman left, an’ I kept peddlin’ my papers, see? Then, mebbe half an hour later, the umbrella man comes out again. Only this time there’s two of him.”
Holmes and I exchanged glances. “Can it be that there are two James Phillimores?” I wondered aloud.
“There were, ‘coz I seen ‘em,” the newsboy replied. “Like they could o’ been twins … an’ that there’s pitcher o’ both o’ them.” The boy tapped his hand against the jotting-book, leaving ink-stained finger-prints upon the drawing of James Phillimore. “Same suit, same hat, same lip-spinach, the works. Only difference was, one twin had an umbreller and one twin didn’t.” As he spoke, the newsboy’s fingers gravitated towards the stray banknote, but Holmes kept this just out of reach.
“And did you see where he … where they went, lad?” Holmes enquired.
The newsboy’s eyes gleamed greedily. “What’s it worth t’yuh?” he asked.
“Five dollars,” said Holmes. “But I want the truth, mind!” He brandished the sketch of James Phillimore again. “Where did this man go?”
“There was two of him, I tol’ yuh … so y’ought to pay double,” said the newsboy.
Holmes sighed, and pressed two fivers into the newsboy’s eager hands. “Now, then!”
“I seen ‘em get into a cab,” the boy reported. “Just b’fore the door closed, I heard one o’ the twins – the one ‘thout an umbreller – tell the driver to take ‘em both to Madison Square.”
Thus it chanced that, five minutes later, Sherlock Holmes and I were in another cab hastening towards Madison Square: a place unknown to us, yet which the cab-driver assured us he knew intimately.
“ ‘Pon my word, Watson,” Holmes declared, as our cab went south on Broadway, “but this mystery gets stranger every moment. Thirty-one years ago, James Phillimore stepped through a doorway and ceased to exist. This morning he returned from the void: not a day older, and none the worse for his absence. And now it seems that he has become identical twins.”
“Do you suppose the newsboy told the truth, Holmes?” I pondered. “He might have lied to us, just to claim a reward.”
“I think not, Watson.” Once more Holmes produced his jotter, revealing the thumb-nail portrait of James Phillimore flanked either side by the two colossi of Moriarty and Moran. “A liar posing as an eyewitness would have claimed to recognize the first likeness he saw. Our newspaper johnny went right past the two largest and most obvious portraits in my impromptu rogues’ gallery – he did not recognize them, Watson – and he seized upon the smaller study that he did recognize: our quarry James Phillimore … who now appears to have borrowed a trick from the amoeba and split himself into identical twins.”
The southward traffic along Broadway was more congenial than its northbound counterpart had been, and soon we turned eastward and arrived at the crossroads of Madison Avenue and East Twenty-Seventh Street. Here awaited us a green quadrangle of parkland which, of a certainty, must be Madison Square. I paid the cabman, and I had no sooner alighted on the kerb than the hand of Sherlock Holmes was at my shoulder: “Watson! Look!”
I turned, and looked … and thought I must be seeing double.
At the far end of the park stood two identical men. Both were dressed in pin-striped suiting, of an outmoded cut. Both wore moustaches and dundreary whiskers.
Both of them were James Phillimore.
In swift movements of his lithe muscular limbs, Sherlock Holmes crossed the quad. In consequence of my Jezail wound, I was unable to keep pace with him. Thus