The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [64]
So it was that I felt great relief when Mrs Hudson announced that a man – a very insistent man who refused to give his name – was at the door to see Mr Holmes.
“Dark overcoat, hat pulled low across his forehead, and carrying a black walking stick?” Holmes asked without looking up from his chair.
“Why, yes!” exclaimed Mrs Hudson. “How ever did you know?”
Holmes made a deprecating gesture. “He has been standing across the street staring up at our windows for more than an hour. Of course I noticed when I went to light my pipe, and I marked him again when I stood to get a book just a moment ago.”
“What else do you know about him?” I asked, lowering my copy of the Morning Post.
“Merely that he is an army colonel recently retired from service in Africa. He is a man of no small means, although without formal title or estates.”
“His stance,” I mused, “would surely tell you that he a military man, and the wood of his walking stick might well indicate that he has seen service in Africa, as well might his clothes. But how could you deduce his rank when he’s not in uniform?”
“The same way I know his name is Colonel Oliver Pendleton-Smythe,” Holmes said.
I threw down the Morning Post with a snort of disgust. “Dash it all, you know the fellow!”
“Not true.” Holmes nodded toward the newspaper. “You should pay more attention to the matters before you.”
I glanced down at the Morning Post,which had fallen open to reveal a line drawing of a man in uniform. missing: colonel oliver pendleton-smythe, said the headline. I stared at the picture, then up at Holmes’s face.
“Will you see him, sir?” asked Mrs Hudson.
“Not tonight,” said Holmes. “Tell Colonel Pendleton-Smythe – and do use his full name, although he will doubtlessly bluster and deny it – that I will see him at nine o’clock sharp tomorrow morning. Not one second sooner and not one second later. If he asks, tell him I am concluding another important case and cannot be disturbed.” He returned his gaze to his book.
“Very good, sir,” she said, and shaking her head she closed the door.
The second the latch clicked, Holmes leaped to his feet. Gathering up his coat and hat, he motioned for me to do likewise. “Make haste, Watson,” he said. “We must follow the colonel back to his den!”
“Den?” I demanded. I threw on my own coat and accompanied him down the back stairs at breakneck pace. “What do you mean by ‘den’?”
“Please!” Holmes put up one hand for silence and eased open the door. Pendleton-Smythe was striding briskly up Baker Street, swinging his walking stick angrily, as though it were a machete. We both slipped out and Holmes closed the door behind us. Then together we crossed the street and proceeded surreptitiously after the colonel. He seemed to be heading toward the river.
“What is this affair about?” I asked as I hurried after Holmes.
“Mr Pendleton-Smythe, had you bothered to read that article in the Morning Post, disappeared two days ago. Foul play was suspected. In the fireplace of his London home police inspectors found several scraps of paper, but little could be made out except one phrase: ‘Amateur Mendicant Society.’ What do you make of it?”
“A mendicant is a beggar, I believe.”
“True!”
“But a whole society of amateur beggars? And for a retired army colonel to be involved in them! It boggles the mind.”
“I suspect,” said Holmes, “that modern views of beggary have colored your thoughts on this matter. Mendicants have been, at various times and in various cultures, both revered and despised. I suspect this is another name for the Secret Mendicant Society, a network of spies which is – or was, at any rate – quite real and much older than you realize. Its roots stretch back to the Roman Empire and as far abroad as Russia, India, and Egypt.”
“You think it still exists, then?” I asked.
“I thought it had died out a generation ago in Europe, but it seems to have surfaced once more. I have heard hints