The Case of the Flying Man (6/7)
From the notebooks of John H. Watson:
We decided that we would work in two teams – Kent and Wells would canvass the local theatres, and Holmes and I would go to the various taverns and public houses which employed entertainers. After many unsuccessful enquiries, Holmes and I discovered a tavern in which Miss Carroll had sung as recently as two months prior. With the help of a few quid, Holmes persuaded the establishment’s owner to tell us the address of his former employee’s lodgings. Miss Carroll’s landlord proved to be quite talkative.
“You’re looking for Miss Carroll, are you? She is going places, that young lady, you mark my words! I’ve heard her practicing her songs during the daytime. She sings like a nightingale, she does. And her beauty would draw all eyes towards her, don’t matter none who else might be on stage at the time. She’ll be performing at Covent Garden before the decade is out. You just see if she don’t!”
Holmes could appear the personification of patience when it was necessary to elicit information. “You may well be correct, sir. But I have come today to see her on a matter of the utmost urgency. Is she within, or might you know where she is?”
“She’s not here now. She left…When was it? She was here but an hour ago when the missus and I was taking our tea. But she had gone by the time we had cleaned up the kitchen. I don’t rightly know where she is. She said something about a special job and her civic duty to help make London safe. But her getup weren’t half revealing. If I didn’t know it was a costume for a role, I’d have thrown her out on the street then and there. We run a respectable lodging, and we wouldn’t have ‘that’ kind of woman here!”
“You have been most helpful. Thank you.” Holmes and I took our leave.
“I say, Holmes, that doesn’t get us any closer to finding her than we were before. Should we just stay here to meet here when she returns?”
“If we stay here, Watson, she will be killed before she gets a chance to return; she is currently in the garb in which she is to die tonight. We must find her before Jack does. We haven’t the time to verify any hypotheses, so we must work on the most likely speculations. According to her landlord, she had mentioned something about a special job and her civic duty. Perhaps she is trying to lure Jack into the open so that the constabulary can arrest him. Our next stop should be to see Inspector Lestrade.”
The good inspector assured us that Scotland Yard would never endanger a member of the general public by requesting them to take on such a role. Having eliminated the possibility that Carroll had received her commission in that manner, Holmes concluded that it was likely that she had received it from a less legitimate source – most likely from Tempus himself.
“According to Wells, the identity of Jack was never discovered. Therefore, Tempus could not know who he is or where he might be this evening. And yet he would wish to make it probable that Jack encounter Miss Carroll. Were he to reason that Jack would likely revisit the sites of his previous crimes, he would request Miss Carroll to walk in those locales. We haven’t time to ensure that all of the locations are covered; we must deduce which one is the most likely one for Tempus to choose.”
With that, Holmes closed his eyes and became still for several minutes. The suddenness of his exclamation of, “George Yard, and not a moment to spare!” startled me. We were moving too swiftly for me to ask him how he had arrived at the conclusion that that was the proper location.
Despite the paucity of facts with which to work, his reasoning proved sound. Just as we arrived at the street in question, we could hear the sounds of a struggle and a muffled scream. The sight that lay before us as we turned the corner and the subsequent events I shall remember until my dying day. Had I not seen them with my own eyes, I would never have believed such events possible.
A young lady who bore a striking resemblance to the one sketched by Mr Kent was struggling vainly to fend off an attacker. The man stood behind her and had one arm wrapped around her throat as he unsheathed a knife with his free hand. I started to reach for my revolver and I heard Holmes inhale deeply and start to shout an order for the attacker to desist. What then transpired transfixed us both. We heard a sound such as a chimney makes when under gale-force winds, and then we saw Mr Kent descend rapidly from the sky. Before we could even begin to steel ourselves to witness his inevitable demise, however, he landed in a controlled fashion. He stared intensely at the knife, which the attacker dropped as though it were afire. His next movements were so rapid, that for the next second or two, he appeared as only a blur. When he had once again slowed down, I could see that he must have freed Miss Carroll from her attacker secured Jack by means of wrapping a nearby lamp post around his torso.
I am fully aware of how preposterous this narrative appears. It sounds more fantastical than anything Doyle or Wells has ever written. And yet I am recording the details as faithfully as is humanly possible, without elaboration or embellishments.
I looked to Holmes to see whether he was as dumbfounded as I. The only indication that his composure was strained was that his complexion had paled. I recalled his earlier words regarding Mr Kent’s peculiarities. Had he been alluding to *this* even then? What could it mean? How was it possible for a man to fly, or to move too fast for the eye to see, or to bend a lamp post with his bare hands? His actions were not humanly possible; that would have been evident to any witness. And all I have learned from my experiences in the war and in being a physician serve only to reinforce the impossibility of his actions. What could be the rational explanation for his feats? My questions would need to wait for another time.
Holmes addressed Mr Kent as he approached him. “I see you came to the same conclusions we did. Your arrival was most timely.”
Mr Kent nodded, but his attention was centered on Louise. She appeared uninjured, but distraught. Mr Kent started to comfort her with reassuring words. Only then did she seem to take in the enormity of the situation.
“Sir, thank you for coming to my aid. Had you not come when you did, I would have died! I don’t understand -- Lieutenant Tempess was supposed to have stopped Jack before the villain laid a hand on me. I don’t know what happened.”
Mr Wells jogged around the corner just then, having finally caught up to his fellow time traveller. “That, my dear, is easy to explain. Your ‘Lieutenant Tempess’ is not a member of the constabulary at all, but rather a villain who desired your demise at the hands of Jack.”
This revelation further distressed Miss Carroll. Mr Kent hesitantly put his arm around her shoulders in a brotherly gesture obviously designed to give her comfort and support. Mr Wells then impressed upon us that it was imperative that we tell no one what we had just witnessed. Holmes assured him that we had become privy to numerous secrets of a sensitive nature over the course of our investigations, and that their secrets were safe with us.
Mr Wells then turned to Louise, who likewise assured him that she would tell no one. “Who would believe me? I would have no one else to corroborate my story. I’d be institutionalised as a lunatic. I am not a fool. Rest assured that I shall never speak of the events of this evening.”
No one was very concerned about what Jack might say of this evening’s events. The entire city was already predisposed, by virtue of his heinous deeds and monstrous letters, to consider him insane. Were he to relate the actual events of the night, no one would give credence to his tale. The five of us agreed upon the story which Holmes, Miss Carroll, and myself would recount to the constabulary regarding the evening’s events, should the necessity arise.
We still needed to resolve the matters of what to do with Jack and the twisted lamp post. Mr Wells suddenly seemed struck by a thought. He pointed out that in the original timeline, Jack was never caught and in fact appeared to disappear from London altogether. Mr Wells believed that to be sufficient grounds to permit him to take Jack into the future, where he could be rehabilitated and where Mr Kent’s abilities were already known to all. Mr Kent, Holmes, and I agreed with his plan.
I could not but stare in astonishment as Mr Kent then fully straightened the lamp post with just his hands. Mr Wells firmly secured Jack with rope which the writer had brought with him. The time travellers thanked us for our assistance and took their leave, with Jack in tow. Neither Holmes nor I ever saw them again.
When we were back at our flat, I asked Holmes how it was that he had deduced George Yard to be the appropriate site. He responded that he knew he had neither enough information to come to a fully informed conclusion nor enough time to gather more facts. Therefore, he needed to deduce the most likely site based on what scarce information he did have. The most likely location occurred to him when he pondered what Mr Kent had relayed to us of his own family and of Tempus’ manner of thinking. He reasoned that Tempus would savour the irony of having Mrs Kent’s ancestor killed in the same location as a victim who shared a name with Mr Kent’s mother; Martha Tabram had been the name of the victim killed in George Yard.
I then went on to ask Holmes how he had known of Mr Kent’s extraordinary abilities. His response was notable for his rare admission of ignorance.
“I must confess, my dear Watson, that I had not been aware of the full scope of what Mr Kent could do. But I had become cognisant of his unusual nature during our first meeting with him. Do you recall him doing anything out of the ordinary while drinking his tea?”
“At one point he stared intensely at his cup for a second or two.”
“Well done. Did you notice anything else?”
“No. That was all.”
“Then you missed the twin facts that he lowered his spectacles before staring at the cup and that his tea began to steam while he was looking at it. I could see nothing unusual about his eyes which might indicate that he had had some sort of surgery to insert a heating device in or near them. Surely even in the future surgery would result in scarring. His ability to heat the tea with his eyes alone would therefore appear to be an ability native to him rather than the result of a medical procedure. Once I discarded the notion that he was an ordinary human, his lack of calluses took on an additional significance. I deduced from them that either his strength far surpassed that of all other men such that calluses never formed despite his manual labour or else his body had a vastly superior ability to heal. It became obvious to me that Mr Kent was indeed different from any other individual the world has seen.”
Although that was the last time Holmes and I ever spoke of the time travellers, their brief sojourn here made me aware that, as Shakespeare so aptly put it, there are stranger things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. I have since started to read speculative fiction and have found to my great surprise that I now enjoy the genre, and especially the works of H. G. Wells.
