Death at the Diogenes Club: a Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery (The Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mysteries Book 6), page 13
Sir Andrew sat up straighter, looking as though he were about to burst a blood vessel. But I could see Mr. Dimitrios’ point. Even here in London, the Jewish immigrant neighborhoods were often threatened by violence, their houses burned or their businesses defaced.
Holmes only tilted his head slightly in answer to my question, his face inscrutable.
“I will show you the list of the stolen munitions, as well as the reports on the weapons that were sabotaged,” Mr. Dimitrios said. “I have them with me here.”
He lifted a black leather attaché case up onto his lap, flipped back the clasps to open it—
And then stopped, staring at the three tubes wrapped in brown paper and attached by wires to what looked like a timing mechanism.
Holmes was the first to break the silence. “It would appear that, at some point this morning, you came into possession of a bomb.”
CHAPTER 20
Mr. Dimitrios made a quick, convulsive movement, as though to throw the attaché case off his lap and onto the floor, but the motion was checked by Holmes, who had somehow leapt from his chair and manifested at Mr. Dimitrios’ side while the rest of the room was still frozen in shock.
“Be still, Mr. Dimitrios, I pray you. Sudden movement may jar the mechanism and precipitate the bomb’s detonation.”
Mr. Dimitrios sagged back, his face slack with terror and so pale the skin looked almost gray.
I spun to face Edward Barton. “Down in the kitchen you’ll find Mrs. Hudson and the little girl you met here the other day. Go down and get them out of the house. Please.”
Mr. Barton jumped up, racing out of the room without a word. A second later, I heard his footfalls, clattering at breakneck pace down the stairs.
“You!” Mr. Dimitrios remained rigid, unmoving under the weight of the bomb. But his head swiveled to face Sir Andrew and Lord Armstrong. “It’s not enough that you seek to destroy my business, you must also threaten my life!”
Sir Andrew’s face turned a shade redder. “Are you daring to suggest—”
“Gentlemen!” When Holmes liked, his voice could crack like the snap of a whip. “Scarcely productive right now.”
He was studying the bomb apparatus and spoke without looking up. “In fact, I suggest that you all file, calmly and quietly, out of the room and into the street. Mr. Dimitrios, if you will just remain still a moment more.”
Holmes dropped to his knees and placed his long fingers around the edges of the attaché case, easing it slowly, inch by painstaking inch, off the Greek man’s lap.
I held my breath, but no explosion came.
Mr. Dimitrios let out a gusty exhale, his face quivering as though he were about to weep with relief. Then he struggled to his feet, almost knocking over Lord Armstrong in his headlong rush from the room.
Lord Armstrong and Sir Andrew followed more slowly, the elderly man hobbling and leaning heavily on a cane.
“Let me help.” Lord Lansdowne came to take hold of Lord Armstrong’s arm on the other side, helping to support his weight and hurrying them from the room.
I bit my lip, waiting to hear the sound of the front door opening and closing.
“You know,” I said in an undertone, “it might not be a terrible plan for us to leave along with them. The bomb can’t kill anyone in an empty house.”
“You may if you like.” Holmes’s gaze flicked briefly up from the arrangement of wires and timer to land on me. “I have long since abandoned all attempts to order you towards the safest course. But I encourage you to proceed outside without delay. You also, Mycroft.”
Throughout the hurried exit of the other men, Mycroft had sat unmoving on the couch.
“I, however”—Holmes returned his attention to the bomb in his hands—“take exception to someone trying to blow up my place of residence just when I have become accustomed to living here again. Also, I am not entirely sure that I can set the bomb down without jarring the mechanism and inducing an explosion. That spring and wire arrangement there”—he nodded towards a coil of coppery colored metal near the edge of the case’s interior—“was, I believe, intended to trigger the detonation the instant the case was opened. It is similar to the trip-hammer mechanism that fires a pistol. Although whether by sheer chance or due to some flaw in the design, this one here appears to have stuck. But I am afraid that any sudden movements will jar it into motion.”
My heart lurched into my throat. “So there’s a timing mechanism and a device to set off the explosion if the case were to be opened before time? Someone wished to make very sure that the bomb went off today.”
“Indeed.”
Mycroft remained unmoving on the sofa. Apparently he was ignoring Holmes’s admonition to leave. “It might be helpful to know how many minutes are left on the timing device, Sherlock.”
No one looking at Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes would ever suspect that the two of them were brothers. But inwardly, they were in fact quite alike, both in intellect and in their habit of even in the darkest moments of crisis sounding as though they were doing nothing more exciting than ordering a cup of tea.
I had known them both long enough to find it almost reassuring—when it didn’t make me want to strangle them.
I peered down at the timer. “It looks like … five minutes?”
Holmes nodded. “Five minutes and perhaps a second or two more.”
Don’t think about what happens at the end of those five minutes. “Tell me what to do to stop it from going off.”
The two paper wrapped sticks were dynamite; during the Jubilee affair, I had seen enough of it to last a lifetime.
Holmes looked as though he were about to argue. I cut in before he could speak.
“You can’t defuse it when you’re using both hands to hold it steady. Yes, you might be able to shift the case into one hand, but that’s risky, and you’d only have one hand left for trying to disconnect the timer.”
Mycroft cleared his throat. “I would offer my assistance, but I am afraid that Lucy’s fingers will be far more nimble than mine.”
As Mycroft’s hands matched the rest of him for sheer bulk of size, that was patently true.
“Very well.” Holmes refocused on the bomb. “Since it is clearly a waste of our remaining four minutes and thirty-nine seconds to argue with you, I would ask that you go to my work table and find the pair of wire cutters in the top drawer.”
My hands shook slightly as I did as he asked, rummaging quickly through the work table drawer, which was about as neat and orderly as the rest of the flat. Rubber tubing, a packet of some unidentified chemical substance, a newspaper clipping from three years ago, a mousetrap …
There. I picked up the wire cutters. “Why do you even have wire cutters here in the flat?”
“They were purchased for use during a case in which I spent several days as a workman, charged with fixing the electric lighting in a large seaside hotel.”
I came back to Holmes’s side. “Which wire should I cut?”
“I believe the furthest to the left.”
I resisted the urge to ask Holmes just how secure he was in that belief.
Holmes eyed me as I angled the blades of the cutters into position, trying not to touch any other component of the bomb. “I need hardly emphasize that delicacy of touch is of the essence here.”
My hands were still shaking more than I liked. “Really? How lucky you said that, or I might have decided to just hit the whole contraption with a meat mallet.”
I managed to get the blades of the snips around the wire Holmes had indicated. “This one?”
Holmes gave a short nod.
In the room’s silence, I could hear the faint tick tick of the timer, counting down the seconds. I squeezed, severing the wire and bracing myself.
But there was no explosion.
The ticking had stopped.
“Can you tell us who might have had access to your attaché case this morning, Mr. Dimitrios?” Holmes asked.
We were seated once again in the Baker Street sitting room: Mycroft, Holmes, myself, and Mr. Dimitrios. The rest of the men had already given us their statements and gone.
The attaché case lay open on the tufted ottoman in front of the sofa, sticks of dynamite still exposed.
Mr. Dimitrios was staring at it as though it were a poisoned viper.
“It must have been one of those svolotch—the swine from Armstrong’s company.” His face reddened. “As I said, they are not content with sabotaging my business, they—”
Holmes broke into the tirade, holding up one hand. He was leaning back in his armchair, the stem of his pipe clamped between his teeth, and seemed to have entirely recovered from the experience of nearly being blown up half an hour earlier.
“Since Lord Armstrong and Sir Andrew would both have perished in the explosion, had you not chanced to open the case when you did, I believe we may reasonably eliminate them as suspects. Unless, of course, we discover the two gentlemen to be possessed of violent and simultaneously suicidal urges.”
Mr. Dimitrios looked sullen, but apparently couldn’t find any counter-argument.
Directly after the bomb’s failure to go off, Mycroft had left the room to use the telephone. He hadn’t specified, but I imagined him alerting various higher-ups in the government and setting into motion a plan for keeping Lord Armstrong under constant protection.
Now, though, he sat in his former place by the sofa, his hands resting on his knees and his large, jowly face as unreadable as Holmes’s.
“One also doubts whether Lord Armstrong, as a man of nearly ninety, would have the physical stamina to shadow you without being seen, abstract your case, and plant a bomb in it. Which returns us to the question, Mr. Dimitrios, of who might have gained access to your attaché case.” Mycroft’s eyes narrowed as he studied the other man. “You took the train to London this morning, from the departure point of … Covington?”
“Birmingham, I think,” Holmes murmured.
“Birmingham, of course,” Mycroft agreed. “You had breakfast at the railway station house restaurant—poached egg on toast, some of which has unfortunately clung to your waistcoat. You then took a cab—”
“A growler,” Holmes put in. “The spatter of mud left on the cuffs of his trousers by the wheels is quite distinctive.”
“That might reasonably be considered splitting hairs, Sherlock. But yes, a carriage of the standard four-wheeled growler variety here, to Baker Street,” Mycroft finished. “Which leads me to believe that the likeliest points at which the bomb might have been introduced would have been either in the restaurant or on the train. Now, did you open the case at any point during your journey?”
Mr. Dimitrios’ scowled in concentration, then nodded. “On the train. I opened the case to consult some new business contracts that I had brought along to read.”
“And we can take it that all was as normal within the case at that point,” Holmes said. “Very good. These were the papers that you wished to consult?”
He lifted the sticks of dynamite and the disconnected timer aside, pulling out a sheaf of documents.
Mr. Dimitrios flinched and swallowed visibly, his eyes on the bomb. “Mr. Holmes, is that wise—”
Holmes gestured dismissively. “It is perfectly harmless. Now, will you kindly cast your eye over these papers and tell us whether anything is missing?”
Mr. Dimitrios leaned forward, grasped the furthest edges of the papers from Holmes’s hand, and quickly sat back, pressing himself into the sofa and looking as though he still expected the bomb to explode at any second.
Holmes set the dynamite back down, and Mr. Dimitrios gave an audible sigh of relief, turning his attention to the documents and shuffling quickly through them.
“They are all here. Everything I brought with me from Birmingham. None are missing,” he said.
“Thank you.” I couldn’t tell from Holmes’s expression whether it was the answer he had been anticipating or not. “Now, was the case out of your possession at any point in time?”
“No.” Mr. Dimitrios’ answer was instantaneous, but then he gave an irritable shrug of his shoulders. “At least, not that I noticed. I may have dozed off at some point on the journey, with the case at my feet. But when I awoke, nothing had been disturbed.”
I leaned forward, watching him. “You noticed no one following you? No familiar faces, either on the train or in the restaurant?”
“None.”
“Did you speak to anyone at all?”
Mr. Dimitrios’ brow furrowed. “There was a man. He sat next to me on the train. He kept talking to me of vegetables.”
“Vegetables?” For a moment, I thought I must have misheard.
Mr. Dimitrios grimaced. “Apparently he grows—what did he call them?—vegetable marrows as a hobby and wins prizes for the size. He went on and on, speaking of quality of soils and different fertilizers. I assure you, I now have more knowledge of the merits of sheep versus cow manure than I ever cared to possess.”
“Did he make any effort to pick up your case or see inside it?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he came from? Or his name?” I asked.
Mr. Dimitrios shrugged. “He got on the train with me in Birmingham. I did not ask him his name. I said as little to him as possible so that he would cease talking.”
“Can you describe him at all? Was he old? Young?”
“Neither old nor young. I think he had brown hair. Or perhaps blond.” Mr. Dimitrios shrugged again. “There was nothing to make me look at him in particular. He was an ordinary Englishman, nothing more.”
Holmes sat back in his chair. I saw him exchange a brief glance with Mycroft, and then he said, “Very good, Mr. Dimitrios. Thank you for your assistance. You will be staying in London for the next few days?”
“At the Clarendon, on Bond Street.”
“Then we shall know where to find you should any further questions arise,” Holmes said. He studied the attaché case again. “I presume you will not mind leaving this in my possession for the time being?”
Mr. Dimitrios followed Holmes’s gaze with a barely concealed shudder. “You are welcome to it.”
“Do you think this was another attempt on Lord Lansdowne’s life?” I asked, when Mr. Dimitrios had gone. “Whoever wanted to kill him failed in the attempt at the Diogenes. And now they’re trying again?”
Mycroft pursed his lips. “If that is the case, we are dealing with an individual possessed of a remarkably high tolerance for collateral damage. If the bomb had gone off, up to seven people besides Lord Lansdowne might have been killed.”
Nine, if you counted Becky and Mrs. Hudson downstairs.
Holmes stood up, crossed to his worktable, opened one of the lower drawers, and began flinging objects out one by one. A medical scalpel hit the ground, followed immediately afterwards by a small bronze bust of the composer Brahms.
“The assumption that Lansdowne was the target also presupposes that whoever planted the bomb knew of the meeting here this morning. And not only that, but was able to assemble the bomb, discover Mr. Dimitrios’ travel plans, intercept him, and find an opportune moment for introducing the bomb.”
“When was the time for this meeting set?” I asked.
“Eight o’clock last night,” Holmes said. His head was still half-buried in the drawer. “I would have told you, but you were already at the theater.” He tossed out a jeweler’s loupe before emerging with a fine horsehair brush and a metal tin.
“Are you going to test Mr. Dimitrios’ attaché case for fingerprints?”
Holmes flicked open the tin, revealing the gray powder inside. “It will probably be an exercise in futility, considering that Mr. Dimitrios has been handling the case all morning, thus in all likelihood wiping any other prints away. However, in the spirit of leaving no stone unturned …” He tipped a fraction of the powder onto one clasp of the attaché case.
“Do you think Mr. Dimitrios’ vegetable marrow enthusiast could have been the one to plant the bomb?” I asked. “He might have done it after Mr. Dimitrios fell asleep.”
Holmes flicked the tip of the brush lightly across the clasp, smoothing the powder. “It is possible. It is also possible that he was a perfectly ordinary bore, of the sort that seems to invariably sit down next to one when traveling by train. In either case, however, the odds of our finding the gentleman in question are small. We have not even a reasonable physical description to go on. Unless this man hunted down a railway station attendant, lectured him on proper fertilizing techniques, and then was good enough to leave a card bearing his name and address, I fear we must approach the problem from another direction.”
I could forgive Holmes the sarcasm; he had a point.
“What about the bomb itself? Could anything about the materials tell you where it was made, or who by?”
Mycroft was already shaking his head. “The Irish nationalist campaigns of the 1880s, along with the rise of readily available scientific journals, have had the unfortunate side effect of making the construction of such devices almost common knowledge. At one point, there was even a so-called dynamite school in the United States—in Brooklyn, I believe. We may perhaps track down suppliers of dynamite, with an eye to determining the origin of these sticks here. But considering that they might have been purchased by order from anywhere in England or even further abroad, it will likely be a tedious line of investigation, unlikely to bear any fruit.”
“There is one other possibility,” I said. “Mr. Dimitrios could have planted the bomb himself, deliberately jammed the mechanism meant to detonate it when the case was opened, and then made sure to open it before the timer ran out.”
Both Mycroft and Holmes looked at me, near-identical frowns furrowing their brows.
“Why would he have done that?” Mycroft asked at last.
“To win our trust, make us believe him an innocent victim in all of this.”
“Possible,” Mycroft said. “Although considering the risks involved in transporting sticks of dynamite—whether controlled by a timer or not—it seems a long way to go, especially as we were not even seriously considering him as a suspect.”
