"Come in, gentlemen, come in," Holmes invited, his tone completely business-like. New energies had been mobilized from somewhere in his great reserves, and he might just have risen from a refreshing sleep.
One of the men who now ascended to our rooms was Sir Jasper Meek himself, the elderly and very eminent physician whose name had come up in our talk only minutes before. However striking this coincidence might have seemed ordinarily, at the time it was all but lost upon me, in the great wonder that I felt upon recognizing our second visitor. Although I am writing for posterity and not for immediate publication, I fear that prudence prohibits my naming him, or even describing his person in any detail. Nor shall I recount the first introductory remarks that passed among us.
Suffice it to say, that when we were all of us settled round a replenished fire, this younger of our visitors wasted not a moment in getting down to business. "Mr. Holmes, I need not tell you that only a matter of an importance impossible to exaggerate has brought us to your door, without notice and at this late hour."
"No, you need not tell me that," Holmes answered quietly. "Pray continue. You may speak as freely before Dr. Watson as before me."
"Very well. It is a crime of attempted blackmail with which we are concerned."
"I am not surprised."
"Not blackmail such as you must have dealt with in the past, Mr. Holmes. No affair of the heart. And this case is not confined to any single personage, however-eminent." The speaker gestured with a practiced flourish. "This great city about us, the heart of empire, is itself being held for ransom."
I actually sprang to my feet with an exclamation, but the effect upon Holmes was nothing like so strong. His gray eyes had taken on a hard, penetrating stare, but he merely nodded, as if receiving confirmation of an idea already held in private.
The two men on our settee exchanged glances. "You will understand, Mr. Holmes, and you, Dr. Watson," the speaker continued, "why no public announcement of the peril has yet been made, and why in fact none is contemplated. Even the official police have not been notified, though our full appreciation of the danger is now some hours old. The city is bursting with visitors from every corner of the Empire, nay, of the world, come to do Her Majesty honor. Any mass panic under these conditions would…" Here our exalted visitor had to pause, to try to master his emotions.
Sir Jasper Meek cleared his throat, and passed a hand over his high, pale forehead, so in contrast with the tanned parchment of his cheeks. "Gentlemen, the thing is this. There have already been several cases in the metropolis of London… of a most contagious and most terrible disease." Now he, too, hesitated.
"These cases you mention," Holmes snapped, "are of course meant as proof of the blackmailers' power to accomplish what they threaten, which is to loose an epidemic among us. And the disease is plague. Well, how much do the villains demand, and how and where is it to be delivered?"
Had Holmes presented a revolver and ordered our visitors to hand over their purses, their astonishment could scarcely have been greater. Both of them, faces frozen, stared at him in silence for the space of several breaths. Then the man I have not named pulled from a pocket a small piece of paper, which he handed over to Holmes. My friend took it eagerly. Looking over his shoulder, I read part of the note, which had been composed by pasting onto a sheet of white paper printed letters and words evidently clipped from one or more newspapers. The closing words of the message were:
UNLESS OUR DEMANDS ARE GRANTED, GOD SAVE THE QUEEN INDEED AND THE EMPIRE TOO. LET THERE BE NO TRICKERY OR A MILLION WILL DEE AS THIS MAN DIED.
The speaker continued, in a voice that came near breaking: "No instructions have as yet been given us for the delivery of the ransom. But what is demanded—in an earlier note, that we at first dismissed as the work of a mere crank—is nothing less than a million pounds."
I burst out again with some exclamation, at which, I think, no one bothered to look up. Our eminent visitor went on: "The note you hold, Mr. Holmes, was found pinned to the garment of the third and latest victim, an elderly man still unidentified. His body was dropped from a vehicle of some sort, earlier this evening, directly in front of the house of Sir Jasper in Harley Street. Sir Jasper had earlier received a message warning him to expect something of the sort."
"Have you that note, too? Excellent! Thank you." Holmes held the two papers for a moment to the light. Then he asked: "The victim was, I suppose, dressed in a peculiar kind of hospital shirt or gown, the sleeves held on by small cloth ties?"
If our visitors had been stunned by Holmes' earlier remark, this question cast them into a state approaching paralysis. At last they stammered out some confirmation; and from a small bag which he had been carrying, Sir Jasper now produced a garment which, when unrolled, looked like the twin of the shirt discovered on the pier.
"Gentlemen," he advised us, "I have treated this with carbolic, as was necessary to eliminate the danger of contagion. Otherwise it is just as I myself removed it from the latest plague victim's body."
Holmes accepted the garment and held it up, spread out.
"I see no bullet-holes," I remarked, no doubt rather thoughtlessly, in my excitement.
Sir Jasper gave me a peculiar glance. "We have said, Dr. Watson, that the man died of plague."
With a quick half-smile in my direction, Holmes bent to open a lower drawer of his desk. From the drawer he took out another roll of cloth, and spread it out upon his desk beside the first. The bewilderment in our visitors' faces could scarcely be said to increase, but their expressions seemed to acquire a frozen permanence as they beheld the two shirts side by side.
"Two things I must assure you of, gentlemen," Holmes' voice crackled now, and he smiled no more. "The first is that the threat you have received is in the most deadly earnest; and the second is that there is a good chance of its being carried out."
Chapter Thirteen
I can only describe the pressure that kept me from entering Sal's apartment by comparing it with the force that would prevent either breathing man or vampire from leaping in a single bound to the top of a hundred-story building; just so impossible was it for me to move a centimeter past the threshold without invitation.
"The coat!" Matthews rasped at me again, from across the squalid room. "Just tyke it off now, real easy-like." The knife in his hand prodded with precise calculation at the girl's soft throat, where one small bright drop of blood appeared.
My own right hand, extended at shoulder height, was hidden from his view behind the frame of the doorway in which I stood. It had gone to work with all its strength on the old masonry that mouldered there. Tired mortar crunched and cracked beneath my rage-driven talons, and a fist-sized stone was loosening.
To cover the sounds made by my busy fingers, and to try to gain time for them to complete their work, I endeavored to draw my enemy into an argument. As he obviously took me for some detective or other, I played the role: "Think what you are doing, Matthews. This is not a killing matter—not yet. Put down the knife, release the girl, and you shall never stand in the dock for any crime you may have committed so far. You have my solemn word on that."
Matthews had no intention of believing me, or even of listening. "Your coat, I said! Or, by God, I'll carve her!"