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eBook Category: Mystery/Crime
eBook Description: A shocking Sherlock Holmes story, too scandalous for Watson to publish during his lifetime--and perhaps too controversial even now.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Marvin Kaye, 1998
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2002

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [37 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [31 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [22 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [91 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [24 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [57 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [95 KB] , hiebook (KML) [79 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [47 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [20 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [25 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [53 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [36 KB]
Words: 7020
Reading time: 20-28 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

The winter of early 1894 eased, for a brief spate of days, into a melancholy overture of the warmer weather to come. It was during this saturated lull that I found myself in a four-wheeler bearing east down Oxford Street towards Bloomsbury. The driver had been told to hurry, and the clatter of wheels over cobblestones sent corresponding jolts through the seats and the spine. I hoped to have all my teeth in my head when we arrived at our destination.

"Richard Addleton," said Sherlock Holmes, regarding with a frown the hastily scrawled note he held. It jounced in his hand, unreadable. "Low man on the totem pole, as it were, in the anthropology division of the British Museum."

"What does he say he wants?"

"He is faced with a dilemma of great weight which he hopes I may help him solve, and he fears to walk the streets, or would never have presumed to summon me. I feel something very dark and very old looming over us, Watson, though for the life of me I can't tell you why." He lapsed into silence, his grey eyes focused inward rather than on the drear grey day outside.

The carriage slowed to pass with some care a group of workmen. A damp clay smell rose from the pit they had dug, ancient London exhaling into the modern. The scent of deep earth hung heavily on the wet air. Below the wheels of the growler, I reflected, was all the history of our great teeming city, laid down layer by layer, the new over the old.

I had no idea, then, to what astonishing and disturbing degree Holmes's dire presentiments and my own musings would twine together. I set it down here in hopes of easing my own mind on the matters that would so soon confront us--that will haunt me, I fear, forever. Whether or not so soiled a tale can be published remains to be seen.

We arrived at the Addleton house, a sedate old home tucked in among boarding-houses just off Russell Square, to find a young constable outside the premises speaking with a distrait elderly manservant, and a sergeant just venturing inside, his night-stick in his hand.

"Murders, sir," the young constable reported after Holmes had introduced himself. "Or so this fellow says--"

"Dead, both dead!" The manservant wrung his hands. "I come in as I do every morning at ten--I live with my family, you see, on Goodge Street--and there they was! And their brother gone for over a week with nary a word. What'll I do now? Who'll give me my orders like?"

"This is the home of Mr. Richard Addleton, is it not?" Holmes prompted. His soothing tone, wielded so effectively to calm witnesses into providing a clearer account, worked its magic. The manservant turned to him.

"Mr. Richard indeed, sir, who works round the corner there, and his brother William the government clerk. Both dead. They'd had an awful row. But who could have done such a thing?"

"And this other brother you mentioned?" Holmes asked.

The servant's eyes went wide. "Oh, sir, it was never him. Raised them like his own sons, he did, him being so much older and all; they'd lived all their lives here in this house, parents died when the two youngest were schoolboys. Went up North on some business or other, Mr. James did--to Manchester, I think he said. They started in fighting right away. Mr. James was always the peacemaker, and it was terrible with him gone, just terrible. The housekeeper took her holiday early just to be away from it. And now this!"