Sherlock Holmes: The Army of Doctor Moreau

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Find a cab? Naturally that was a far-from-simple task. Two gentlemen, dressed as vagrants and fresh—or quite the opposite—from the sewer will find it hard to befriend cab drivers. It was only by my holding up a pound note and agreeing a grotesquely inflated price upfront that I managed to secure us transport.

Once back at Baker Street, Holmes went straight to his room, leaving me to wash and struggle my way clear of my disguise. The damnable thing was cemented to my skin, and it was sore-faced and pink as a lobster that I finally settled down to sleep.

It may surprise some of my readers that I was even able to do such a thing but I can only say that, working with Holmes, you learned to take the terrifying in your stride. You also learned to take your sleep where you could find it; he was certainly not beyond waking you up before the dawn demanding you accompany him on one errand or another.

Thankfully that was not to be the case the next morning. I breakfasted alone, Holmes already having vanished, much to Mrs Hudson’s irritation. She never did like to see her food go to waste, a fate I assured her I would help it to avoid, having woken with the hunger of an ox.

Thus, working my way through two plates of bacon, eggs and kidneys, I resolved to spend the morning putting the peace and quiet to good use: I would dedicate my thoughts to the case. I know such an announcement is likely to create amusement amongst a number of my readers—I have received enough letters damning my faculties to know what the greater reading public thinks of my deductive abilities—but Holmes’ churlishness had put me in a competitive mood, and I was determined to prove my worth. In my defence, I will also point out that a perfectly serviceable candle may struggle to impress when placed next to a large gas lamp; in comparing my powers of deduction to those of Holmes, mine will always be found wanting.

Bearing all this in mind, I was nonetheless determined to make a dent in the case.

Once the breakfast plates were cleared, I asked Mrs Hudson for more coffee and set about making some notes, all the better to organise what we knew already. I shall spare the reader the inconvenience of ploughing through all of them verbatim, but shall nonetheless attempt to lay out the main points regarding the cadavers:

Body number-one—Male. Washed up and rapidly disposed of, not thought to be anything more than an accident. Information limited.

Body number-two—Male. Discovered by a gang of children. Manacled hands and feet. Signs of considerable abuse prior to death. Body had been beaten. (Interrogation, perhaps?) Investigating police surgeon believed he recognised both tiger-and snake-bites. (Indian connection?) The body was dead by the time it was dumped in the water. This can be deduced from the fact that there was no water in the lungs.

Body number-three—Male. In an even worse state than the previous cadavers—more of a collection of parts than an intact body. The tooth marks around a wound on what remained of the torso identified the attacking creature as a shark most often found in Australian waters. Given the state of the remains, it is impossible to tell whether it had been treated in a similar manner to the second.

Accepting those facts, we had Shinwell Johnson’s insistence that the bodies were not, as was speculated in the press, the result of gang violence. His logic for this was that you only committed such theatrical killings if you were sending a message, and if you were sending a message you signed your name to it. The thinking was sound enough and further endorsed by the snatch of conversation we had heard in the tunnels. “We know no gang could have done it,” Martin had announced, and Kane had agreed with him. Though whether that could be taken as actual fact rather than a sign they shared the same opinion as Johnson, it was impossible to say. Kane and his gang didn’t believe the murders were committed by gangs—that is all we could say for sure.

So, what could we say with regard to motive? The second body showed clear signs of having been interrogated, so the perpetrator was after information. Of what sort we could not say.

I was, by this point, realising there was a great deal we could not say! And what of Moreau? What evidence did we even have that he was involved?

Aside from the death of Prendick and the fact that these bodies showed signs of attack from exotic animals, there was absolutely none. Could it be that Mycroft had been withholding information? It seemed unlikely he was basing his fears on those two facts alone.

Prendick.

I underlined that name and then added two others: Montgomery and Moreau. I decided that procrastinating over paper was all very well, but we needed more information, and that was unlikely simply to fall into our hands.

I would find out all I could about the three men capable of reproducing these experiments.