Watson's Last Case Read online

  ‘How elementary,’ I remarked, somewhat coldly to judge from Dr Watson’s rather nettled reaction. Even the most Byzantine turn of events can have a very straightforward explanation.

  My manner became businesslike. ‘Dr Watson, I must brief you for this case now. As you can see I have collected a great deal of information on the political situation but still something is missing, and I must confess that I am perplexed.

  ‘Russia is one of our two most important allies against the Triple Alliance of Wilhelm II and I believe that she is in turmoil. I have been told that I am exaggerating by our man in Moscow, Buchanan, and he is a genuine expert in Russian affairs, but with all the respect due to him I think that I am right and he is wrong. Despite the fact that the nearest to Russia that I have been is my armchair in the Reading Room of this club.’

  Watson lifted the decanter. ‘May I have another drink?’

  ‘I would prefer that you did not, Dr Watson.’ The good doctor responded by returning the decanter to the Tantalus and merely topping up his glass from the soda syphon.

  ‘As you know there are a great many dissident intellectuals exiled from Russia living in all parts of Europe. My reports tell me that although they predict the downfall of the Tsar, even the most fanatical seem to believe that this will not take place in their lifetimes as they once so fervently hoped and believed.

  ‘The Russian aristocracy is even more complacent and believe that any uprisings by the peasants can be suppressed with ease and, if need be, severity.

  ‘However, I am uneasy. There is some logic in my unease but mainly it is intuition — a faculty that I have not cared to cultivate but it has its uses.

  ‘Firstly, Russia is at war with a sophisticated up-to-date mechanized state and after an initial run of success is now taking a beating. This has put increased pressure on her internal supply lines — supply lines which are antiquated and although internal are many times larger than the entire length of the rest of Europe. This has led to internal hardship, and I have found that people become more agitated over empty stomachs than fulsome rhetoric. Unless the food situation improves the Tsar is heading for disaster.’

  ‘But surely,’ interposed Dr Watson, ‘the Russian people realize that in war sacrifices have to be made and the Tsar can appeal to their patriotism.’

  ‘Normally I would agree with you, doctor,’ I replied, ‘but now there are further complications. Namely, the Empress, the Tsarevich, and the starets.’

  ‘Can you please explain that, Mycroft?’

  ‘The Empress Alexandra Fedorovna is in fact German and a first cousin to the Kaiser Wilhelm II, which makes her suspect in the eyes of every Russian from Grand Duke to serf. The starets is a supposed holy man who seems to be exercising uncertain influence over the Empress.’

  ‘What do you mean, Holmes?’ said Watson as though he was speaking to my brother.

  ‘While the Tsar is at the Front the Empress is in executive command of government, yet instead of taking advice from the council of nobles or the duma, she prefers to be guided by this peasant holy man who knows nothing of politics. And make no mistake about it, his influence is great. All who have opposed him have fallen, from nurses to the Empress’s own sister. It is generally believed that the Empress is undermining the war effort so that her cousin can defeat Russia. But what is the hold of this holy man over her? Surely not the liaison which is the gossip of St Petersburg despite the damning evidence to the contrary. In fact, so bitter is the anti-German feeling that St Petersburg has been renamed Petrograd.’

  ‘And the Tsarevich? Surely he is only a boy.’

  ‘Indeed he is, Dr Watson, but on his shoulders lie the hopes of the Tsar. He is the Tsar’s only son yet he is shrouded in mystery — and there I think is the centre of the problem.

  ‘The Tsarevich Alexis is rarely seen in public and when he is he often looks pale and drawn. You may remember the Daily Mail published a long article on him several years ago saying that he had been attacked by anarchists who had thrown a bomb at him resulting in his severe injury.’

  ‘That would account for him being pale and drawn in public,’ Dr Watson remarked. ‘He is no doubt worried about a repeat performance.’

  ‘That is a possibility, doctor, and it would account for why he is often carried around by a sailor. Rumours in St Petersburg and Moscow suggest that Alexis is a mental deficient whose mental disabilities are reflected by his physical ones.’

  ‘That again is possible. Royal houses throughout history have been littered with more than their share of lunatics,’ Dr Watson observed.

  ‘That is true, doctor, but my intuition and my deductions have made me follow a different course.’ I continued, ‘You may not remember our present King’s uncle, Leopold, the youngest of Queen Victoria’s sons.’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ replied Dr Watson. ‘A charming, high-spirited young man whose early death was a great shock to us all.’

  ‘Quite so. He died as a result of a fall in Cannes. He received a minor blow on the head and yet he suffered a brain haemorrhage.’

  ‘It is not unknown, Mycroft. Some people seem to have weaker arteries than others, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Once again this is true, doctor, but I believe that there is a killer stalking the royal families of Europe and its name is haemophilia.’

  ‘The disease which prevents blood clotting and so brings about death by bleeding.’

  ‘Exactly, Dr Watson. I knew that you would understand me.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mycroft. I understand the disease but not your reasoning.’

  ‘My agents in Prussia tell me that there is a mystery surrounding Princes Waldemar and Henry, and in Spain, Princes Alfonso and Gonzalo seem to be exhibiting characteristics very similar to the Tsarevich. For so many princes to be affected in such similar ways I feel that there must be more to it than royal madness.’

  I paused for a moment and unconsciously took my brother’s often observed pose of fingertips together, head back and legs crossed. Dr Watson had obviously seen the similarity and smiled.

  ‘The heredity of the Holmeses,’ he remarked.

  ‘Quite so, Dr Watson,’ I responded, ‘heredity holds the key — of that I am sure. The common denominator to all these princes is that their mothers are direct descendants of Queen Victoria.’

  Dr Watson spluttered on his soda. ‘But Queen Victoria did not suffer from haemophilia, Mycroft. If she had she would have died giving birth and as far as I know all her births were quite straightforward.’

  ‘What if the women were the carriers and the men the sufferers? That would explain it all.’

  ‘But why haemophilia, Mycroft? Why not some sort of mental illness?’ Dr Watson persisted.

  ‘Alexis is not allowed to ride or hunt. The Spanish princes are dressed in padded suits and even the trees in the royal parks have padding on them. There are just too many coincidences for it not to be haemophilia.’

  ‘It does not seem to be very sound reasoning to me, Mycroft,’ my companion observed.

  ‘I admit that it has elements of intuition in it,’ I conceded, ‘and it becomes more tenuous when we consider the role of the starets.’

  ‘How so?’ Watson asked taking out his pipe and putting it in his mouth but neglecting to light it. I offered him a Lucifer and pondered how appropriate it was to be holding an object so named while considering Gregory Efimovich the Dissolute, or Rasputin as it is rendered in the original Russian.

  ‘You remember I mentioned the London Daily Mail earlier. The incident that it referred to took place at the Polish hunting lodge at Spala in 1912. Bulletins were officially posted each day as to the health of the Tsarevich, each succeeding one anticipating his death with the next. Suddenly he recovered and it is believed, in particular by the Empress Alexandra, that this Efimovich effected the cure although he was thousands of miles away in Siberia at the time.’

  ‘How did he manage that?’

  ‘I can only believe that he sent word somehow. By tel
egraph presumably; it is not only my brother who wires people all the time. However, the fact remains that since then Efimovich has become indispensable to the Russian royal family despite the opposition to him from other sectors of society.’

  ‘But whether it is madness or haemophilia which affects the Tsarevich I know that Russia is in danger of collapse because of what is wrong with him. If Russia is in turmoil we lose an ally against Germany, and Russia is the last ally we can afford to lose. While Germany is fighting on two fronts we are safe, but if Russia withdraws we may well find that the Royal Navy is indeed all that stands between us and invasion.

  ‘Thus your mission is to go to Russia and find out exactly what is happening. Your personal contacts should secure you the entrée to the Royal Family and your professional qualifications should make it possible for you to act accordingly and warn the Tsar of the danger of his position.

  ‘However, I must advise you that I am in a minority of one and you might not find the Tsar receptive to my warnings. No matter — it must be done. I think if you talk to the Tsarevich’s tutor, M. Galliard, you might well be able to get to the bottom of this mystery.’

  With that I gave Dr Watson various of the files to read. First was my summary of how the Tsar was the most absolute monarch on earth and my observation of the more monolithic a power the more desperate is its opposition with a disinclination to compromise. Thus dissident opponents could be used against the Tsar by his enemies.

  The second file Dr Watson obviously found rather heavy going as it was full of figures concerning Russia’s economy. I précised it for him. ‘What the figures mean, doctor, is that Russia has been undergoing an industrial revolution but instead of the success of our own, it has created much distress. There is now a large population of many millions who owe allegiance to no-one except their wage packets. These factory workers are a new phenomenon to Russia and they create many disruptions which not even Cossack whips can keep in check. Materialism is a dangerous philosophy with more heads than Hydra.’

  The largest file contained the information concerning the Empress and the starets. Dr Watson read one of the letters, his face registering more and more shock as he continued.

  ‘My God, Holmes,’ he cried eventually almost bursting with fury, ‘she has condemned herself with her own words if this letter is genuine. I can’t believe it. She speaks to this Gregory in the most intimate terms. They must be lovers!’

  ‘As you say, doctor, if genuine the letter that you are holding condemns her. I believe it is genuine.’

  Once more Dr Watson almost exploded. I attempted to soothe him. ‘On the other hand, the Empress always writes in such a fulsome style; such a style alone is not proof of a liaison, Dr Watson, as you well know from your own work with my brother in the distasteful realm of blackmail. At least one gentleman in Bohemia and several ladies of distinction have cause to be grateful for your sympathy in affairs of the heart.’

  Despite colouring at my blandishments Dr Watson continued. ‘But this is a peasant with dissolute habits, a known libertine if his nickname and these other reports are to be believed. Why, he has even been examined by church leaders and found wanting and attempts have been made on his life. This is all so different from our clergy.’

  ‘Quite so, Dr Watson, and I am sure that I do not know the answer. However, I do know that the Empress genuinely believes him to have saved her son’s life when the powers of orthodox medicine failed and as a consequence of that, if nothing else, she trusts him with the very force of destiny itself.’

  Other files we worked through together for the sake of speed. On several occasions Dr Watson muttered that he knew several of the characters whose names appeared in the files. Sherlock was right: if anyone could persuade the Tsar of the danger that lurked in the bosom of his own palace it was Dr Watson. I busied myself with preparing letters of introduction for my emissary, although as it turned out he knew most of the people in question thus rendering my industry delightfully unnecessary. At twenty to eight we parted company. It was the last I was to see of him for nearly two years; in fact until he returned to the very room in which we were sitting to give me his report which I shall now use to reconstruct the events of Watson’s Last Case, starting from Watson’s point of view.

  The Report

  I

  The Spring equinox of 1916 saw me boarding HMS Torquay en route for Murmansk. I had two identities — Dr John Ross and Dr John H. Watson. The weather lived up to its reputation for unsettled, blustery conditions which made the Torquay more like a buckboard of the Australian Outback than one of His Majesty’s ships of the line.

  The voyage was notable for the weather and the company. The bitingly cold wind, the silent ice floes forever changing colour as they silently slipped past us, sometimes giving us a glancing blow to add to our plunging progress, the accretion of ice on our superstructure which although, like the floes, was beautiful to behold but had to be hacked off lest it made the ship top-heavy and capsize her. All this was new to me having been used to sunnier skies when on campaign.

  The company was no less strange to me as they were as disinclined as myself to reveal their identities or their reasons for being there. All that is except for one voluble American who claimed to be a newspaper reporter. No-one seemed to swallow that one, but his goatee beard gave him the appearance of ‘Uncle Sam’.

  The most unusual member of our party was an enormous Negro who was said to be an Ethiopian eunuch. He seemed to find all speculation concerning him rather amusing as he always seemed to have a smile not far from his lips or a twinkle in his eye. I never heard him speak, he only nodded or bowed. The American reporter seemed to amuse him most of all as he tried to communicate with the mute giant by hand signals of his own devising and pidgin phrases such as ‘Me, American. You, Ethiopian?’

  This pantomime served as a distraction but I nonetheless observed my fellow travellers and pondered their missions, wondering if the gravity of theirs matched my own. Only one of my fellow travellers broke the mutual reticence of the wardroom and only then to observe that my tobacco reminded him of someone he once knew. My ears pricked up at this thinking that he was obviously one of Sherlock Holmes’s clients. Alas no. It turned out that a hansom cabbie from his area had smoked a similar mixture and the aroma took him back to more leisured times, the power of smell proving to be a powerful if unregarded stimulus to memory.

  The one man who spoke to me at any great length was the ship’s surgeon. A powerful Scot named James Cambeuil who spoke in statements that suggested he was not used to being contradicted.

  ‘You’ll find the people poor and filthy and the nobles filthy rich,’ was just one of his observations.

  However, his theme was not an original one, it being shared by the rest of the population of Great Britain including myself, viz. the Tsar of all the Russias kept his people in cruel subjugation by force. It made my mission slightly distasteful to me that by helping the Tsar I would be sustaining a cruel tyranny, but the security of my own country was in jeopardy and that consideration overrode all others. On top of that what I had seen of the Tsar in Cowes in 1909 did not make me think of him as the ogre living off the blood of his people that popular imagination believed.

  After three weeks we arrived in Murmansk, and were taken to St Petersburg by troika. I have rarely been more pleasantly surprised by such an initially unpromising proposition. Although a seasoned traveller I almost baulked at the idea of over 1,000 miles in an open sledge drawn by some very suspect-looking horses. None of them seemed to appreciate the company of the others and least of all the encumbrance of a pile of wood, firs and humanity. It was my luck to be paired with the American reporter. He kept up a constant barrage of conversation throughout the whole trip despite the whiplashes of spray that the horses’ hooves threw up in our faces and the equally sharp strokes of the wind. The runners thundered on the ice, filling my ears and drowning the words of my companion.

  Despite all that I remember with awe t
he skill of the driver, the glow of the snow in the full moon and the amazing pyrotechnics of the Borealis.

  In several short days I was entering the capital of the Tsar of All the Russias, St Petersburg. Its beautifully proportioned classical buildings were more like France or Italy than Russia. The sun shone brilliantly, bringing a glow to the scene so that all looked well with Russia.

  This belief was strengthened by the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, who begged to differ with Mycroft’s intuitions. He stood with his back to the fire, reading my letters of introduction, the epitome of the career diplomatist, slightly stooped with greying hair that enhanced the air of distinction which accompanied his every movement.

  Through Sir George I entered the social life of the capital, being presented to Grand Dukes and Duchesses and even several Princes. All spoke English and French with equal facility so that I was soon made welcome. The entertainments were dazzling with enormous banquets, precious wines, extravagant stories, exotic dancers, sensational singers, and tamed animals. If there was about to be a revolution, these people certainly seemed unaware of its imminence.

  What of the people? I asked Sir George. ‘They love their Tsar and call him father of the nation. Couple that with the power exerted over them by the Orthodox church and they are a people at peace — at least in the countryside.’

  Before I could question him further the door to the reception room swung open and an expectant murmur passed through the guests. In strode a thin-faced, hollow-eyed man whose scrawny body was draped in a monk’s habit. The guests stood aside as he purposefully traversed the room. He had the fiery look of the fanatic. ‘Gregory Efimovich?’ I enquired of Sir George, but before he could respond the monk had turned on me. Obviously he had not been pleased by me. His eyes bulged and the veins in his neck stood out as he volleyed a shrill tirade of Russian at me, his arms wildly flailing as if to emphasize his words. The other guests looked shocked by this outburst although I noticed one of the princes, Prince Felix, smiling broadly at the cameo being played out before him. Presumably ‘holy’ men were allowed such excesses in the drawing rooms of Russia, but it was time to stop this outburst. I turned to Prince Felix and asked as calmly as possible, ‘Do you think that I could have a translation?’