Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,35

in the laboratory, was “Dear me, sir! I see you have just been in Afghanistan. You were lucky to come back from Maiwand alive, despite your injury.”

We were total strangers! Two minutes earlier, before Stamford and I walked into that laboratory, Holmes had not even known of my existence. How the devil could he tell me of Afghanistan, let alone that I had been at Maiwand? Even Stamford knew nothing of my part in that battle. I said as much to Holmes. He laughed but would not enlighten me just then. Stamford later remarked that Holmes was forever teasing his acquaintances with these curious displays of deductive power. It seemed he was seldom if ever wrong in his conclusions. I thought it was surely some trick that he had learnt. What else could it be? I was naturally determined to find out how that trick was done.

To return to our adventure, however. Holmes had found vacant rooms at 221b Baker Street, handy for the streets of central London and the Metropolitan Railway, as well as agreeably close to the open spaces of the Regent’s Park. The arrangement of the rooms was convenient for two tenants but, as he had discovered, too expensive for one. We went together to Evans’s Supper Rooms that evening and over our meal agreed to inspect the new premises next day.

He told me about himself as we ate. His first rooms—“consulting rooms,” as he grandly called them—had been in Lambeth Palace Road, just south of Westminster Bridge on the far side of the river. He had still been an apprentice then, but these lodgings were convenient for the chemical laboratory of St. Thomas’s Hospital. He was not a regular student but was allowed occasional access to this laboratory on the basis of grace-and-favour. This was by virtue of a legacy to the governors in a bequest made by one of his kinsmen. How or why he had transferred to Barts Hospital, he did not yet say.

For a couple of years, this young researcher would return every evening from St. Thomas’s to the terraces and tree-lined vistas of Lambeth Palace Road, a favourite abode of our young physicians. It was here that he scored his first forensic triumph in the case of Dr. William Smethurst, an avaricious and philandering medical man. Dr. Smethurst’s wealthy bride had died in suspicious circumstances. The autopsy revealed large quantities of arsenic, and Smethurst had been the only person to have access to her in her final days. He was tried, convicted, sentenced and waiting to be hanged in a few days’ time. Sherlock Holmes, the young consulting detective, was employed as a last resort. In a sensational conclusion to this first case, he was able to prove that William Smethurst, though a thoroughly repellent individual, was as innocent of murder as the babe new-born. The arsenic had come not from the body but from items of the apparatus used to carry out the post-mortem tests.*

From then on, he never looked back. Perhaps he lost his footing when St. Thomas’s Hospital grew anxious at the macabre nature of some of his experiments and drove him elsewhere. If so, this never impeded him. He confessed that shortly before our arrival at Barts on our first afternoon, he had been belabouring a cadaver with a truncheon to establish the extent to which bruising might be produced post-mortem!

So much for his past. Next morning, the two of us travelled to 221b Baker Street and viewed the first-floor rooms on offer. There were two comfortable bedrooms plus a large and airy sitting-room with use of an attic storeroom. We should be provided for by a quietly spoken but agreeable housekeeper of Scottish extraction, Mrs. Hudson.

Baker Street was less fashionable than the Strand, but I was pleased to find that I should be paying less than at my so-called “private hotel.” I was so taken with this new arrangement that I agreed to the terms at once and arranged for my things to be moved to these premises the same day. Sherlock Holmes followed on the next morning.

I took an early opportunity of asking my new friend what made him think that I had lately been in Afghanistan and—indeed—at Maiwand. On one of our first mornings, I suggested at breakfast that someone must have told him. He shook his head: “No, my dear fellow. Why should anyone have told me? for they could not have known we were destined to meet. To begin with, I merely deduced