Associates of Sherlock Holmes - George Mann Page 0,4
teak wood and lotus flowers strongly suggest foreign origin, likely Chinese. Lestrade informed me that the lock was not used, the hinges are quite normal, and… and I don’t see anything else.”
“Wrong again, I’m afraid. You do not observe anything else.” Mr Holmes flipped the box onto its side with long fingers. “What is this?” he asked, pointing.
“A chip in a lotus petal.” Mentally cuffing myself, I moved to examine it.
“Why should that have happened, I wonder?”
“The box must have been subjected to violence in the Thames. A boat or a piece of driftwood struck it.”
“That may well be true, but it is not remotely what I meant.”
“What did you mean?” I questioned, mesmerised.
“What do you conjecture?”
“I can think of no other answer.”
“If you give up so quickly on your first case, I shudder to think what will daunt you six months from now. Astrological impediments? The state of Parliament, perhaps?” When I flinched, he continued in the same ironical tone, “What do you know about teak wood?”
“Very little,” I admitted, my face heating.
“Teak has an average weight of forty-one pounds per square foot, rendering it extremely hard, and thus resistant to stress and age. It also contains a high level of silica, which often causes instruments used on it to lose their sharpness. A direct blow to this box while in the river could cause this chip, but not without cracking considerably more of the body. Thankfully, this is not tectona grandis, however. This is alnus glutinosa, which is remarkably helpful and ought to narrow our search considerably.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Dear me, I’ve considered writing a monograph regarding the fifty or so commonest woods in daily use hereabouts, and I see I’ve been sorely remiss in delaying the project. It is European alder, indigenous to our fair isle and, might I add, a fairly soft wood. Observe the scratches covering the surface – this vessel was knocked about by flotsam, but as you noted, Hopkins, the limb was not waterlogged enough to have been very long in the Thames, and teak could never have suffered such myriad injuries in so short a period. It is stained in the expected dark reddish manner, and there its resemblance to the Chinese product ends. This is a sham,” he concluded, pressing a small pocketknife into the wood. A faint but clear mark immediately resulted.
“Thank God. You think it a hoax made by some perverse anatomist?” Dr Watson ventured.
“You misunderstand me, my dear fellow. Deteriorated as the limb we just viewed was, the cut severing the arm was never made with any medical precision – you must have determined as much yourself.”
“Certainly. I would hazard our subject used either a small axe or a large hatchet.”
“I concur.” Mr Holmes had produced a notebook and pencil and made short work of recording something. “No, the arm is quite real. The conveyance is the sham, and we must be grateful for its abnormality.”
“Severed limbs are abnormal enough,” Lestrade muttered.
“Would that were true, but this serves our purposes better.” Sherlock Holmes’s eyes glinted with enthusiasm despite our sobering mission. “What sort of person would create a false Chinese box?”
I couldn’t answer. None of us could. But when Mr Holmes spun on his heel and glided through the door, we understood that we were about to find out.
As it happened, the sort of man who would create a false Chinese box was a skilled woodcarver who lacked access to the high-quality lumber of his homeland and yet wished to ply his trade, or so Mr Holmes deduced most convincingly as we four hastened from the slate monochrome of Scotland Yard into the colour and chaos of London’s busiest thoroughfares. I’d been sniffing about the wrong neighbourhood, though I was as close to the mark as was possible without having the faintest notion of what I sought, the sleuth claimed (this seemed to be meant as neither censure nor condolence). Apparently, I didn’t want the gritty straw-strewn byways of Stepney, with its deafening markets and echoing warehouses and mountains of imports.
“You wanted Limehouse, my good inspector,” Mr Holmes finished, clapping me on the shoulder as he stepped down last from the four-wheeler. “The single neighbourhood hereabouts where Chinese culture thrives in corporeal rather than merely imported form.”
Air thick as soup filled our nostrils, the tarry odour of the docks combined with roasting meats, simmering vegetables, and unfathomable spices. Beneath all skulked the reek of strangely foreign refuse – for whatever they were discarding, it wasn’t potato peelings and apple cores.