The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  Ffoulkes was leaning in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face. ‘So that’s what you do with your wheelbarrows full of books,’ he said. ‘You slice them up and burn them on the stove?’ Ffoulkes nodded towards the kitchen table where a book and a knife lay. The book had been torn apart.

  ‘Oh, a little hobby of mine,’ said Coombes. ‘It is possible to learn a great deal more from books than what is printed in them. I’m just carrying that notion to its logical conclusion. I’m trying to develop a process to determine scientifically who has owned, or handled, any book in the world.’

  ‘And what,’ said Ffoulkes, ‘could be the point in doing that – even if it could be done?’

  ‘Why, good Heavens!’ cried Coombes. ‘Had a test to prove who has handled a particular book or document been invented long ago, thousands of criminals now walking free would instead be paying the penalty for their crimes – criminals of every sort, from murderers to white-collar swindlers.’

  ‘Do you have a theory how such a test might be constructed?’ I asked.

  ‘Several,’ said he. ‘They depend on identifying actual or reconstitutable samples of DNA found in the oils that the fingers leave on the pages of the book, or in flecks of skin that inevitably rub off when one is turning pages.’

  ‘Sounds far-fetched,’ said Ffoulkes, lazily. ‘But good luck.’

  ‘Oh, no, Mr Ffoulkes! A hundred years ago it would have been far-fetched. Today it is almost inevitable.’

  ‘Really?’ Ffoulkes smiled.

  Coombes wiped his blackened hands on a towel and darted away into the sitting room with amazing speed, and then he vanished into a bedroom off the front hall. He returned with a book in his hands. ‘I imagine you have read this book? The Double Helix by James D. Watson. I knew a man named Watson once. No relation, I’m sure. There has been a biological revolution, gentlemen, that astonishes me. They are cloning animals. They have created rat hearts using cells of baby rats. They have created mature human embryos from adult skin cells. I am sure you know all this.’

  ‘Yes, yes, it is all very amazing,’ said Ffoulkes. ‘But on a more practical note, what sort of place is this holiday cottage you have found?’

  ‘Quite right, quite right,’ apologized Coombes. ‘I get too excited when my favourite topics are in the air. The cottage has two bedrooms, a sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, patio, and a nice view of the hills. That’s about all I can say. I think you will like it, Mr Wilson. The main thing is, will you like me? Perhaps I should enumerate my worst traits.’

  ‘I don’t think that is necessary,’ I said, laughing.

  But Coombes was determined to tell me his faults. ‘I’m moody,’ he said. ‘I’m alternately in a state of furious energy and then in a state of reverie and passivity, a dreamlike state. What we used to call “a brown study”.’

  ‘What do you do in your furious state?’ I asked.

  ‘Walk the floor, dart away to solve problems, talk too much. I have learnt my behaviour can be disconcerting to those who are used to regularity and steady habits.’

  ‘I do need peace. My nerves are easily jangled. Are you ever loud?’

  ‘I am loud only when I play the violin,’ said he. ‘And I haven’t played a violin since . . . well, I haven’t played one for a long time. But I intend to obtain one as soon as possible.’

  ‘Do you play well?’

  ‘Exquisitely, if I do say so myself,’ said Coombes. ‘Anyway, I used to play exquisitely. But I can assure you, Watson . . .’

  ‘Wilson.’

  ‘Sorry, yes. Wilson. I can assure you that if I find I no longer play the violin exquisitely, I will instantly give it up. A violin played less than perfectly is too painful to bear. I could not put myself through the agony – much less anyone else.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. Any other faults?’

  ‘Not that I can think of.’

  I had to laugh at his logical approach to this whole problem, as if setting up a balance sheet of pluses and minuses would really help anyone decide anything. But I had decided to go along with his fantasy.

  ‘So it is my turn to confess,’ I said. ‘Then, I must tell you, first of all, that I am opinionated. I try to restrain myself from voicing my opinions when they are not wanted, but I do not always succeed.’

  ‘I don’t mind wrong opinions. I find them amusing,’ said Coombes.

  ‘Also, I am by nature impatient.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Coombes.

  ‘Third, I stay up very late and rise very early, and though I will promise to be as quiet as a mouse, I cannot change the sleep habits of a lifetime.’

  ‘Sometimes I don’t go to bed at all,’ said Coombes.

  ‘Well, there we are,’ said Ffoulkes, smiling and rubbing his hands together like a broker who has just seen his clients conclude a deal.

  ‘If you are agreeable,’ said Coombes, ‘we can meet at the property tomorrow at nine, so you can decide whether it suits you. I’ll call the agent.’

  ‘Excellent,’ I said.

  Coombes gave me a sheet describing the cottage and how to find it. Then we shook hands and he said, ‘Everyone talks so much about Afghanistan these days. How did you like it there?’

  ‘I confess,’ said I, ‘that it was not . . . I say, but how did you know that I . . . ?’

  The doorbell rang again and Coombes hurried to answer it. An old woman wearing a backpack was on the front stoop. ‘Is this Oxford Cottage?’ she asked. ‘I have a reservation.’

  While Coombes showed the woman into the kitchen to await the arrival of the manager, Ffoulkes and I left and strolled back towards the centre of town.

  ‘By the way,’ I said, suddenly stopping and turning to Ffoulkes, ‘how in the world did he know I had been to Afghanistan?’

  ‘I don’t think either of us told him.’

  ‘No, I’m sure we didn’t. But it was curious, wasn’t it? And then all this folderol about cooking books to learn their owners – I don’t know what to make of him.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Ffoulkes. ‘But he seems harmless enough. And anyway, Wilson, you always liked puzzles when we were at school. Mr Cedric Coombes is a puzzle you can work out in your spare time, when you tire of buying first editions of Dickens and hiking the foggy hills.’

  We walked to the car park by the tourist information centre and said our goodbyes, and we vowed to meet up in London someday soon – one of those vows old friends make in the heat of sudden meeting, but seldom carry out. Percy Ffoulkes climbed into his Range Rover, waved, and through the window his face seemed suddenly young, as I had known it years ago in the flower of our youth. And then he was gone in a swirl of leaves.

  I walked towards the Boz Books shop, anxious to examine a first edition of Pickwick Papers that I had found there – and anxious, also, for morning to arrive so I could learn more about my curious new acquaintance.

  TWO

  The Logic of Poetical Leaps

  I met Coombes next day in Chancery Lane, as he had arranged, in front of a pretty stone cottage in a row of stone cottages that walled one side of the street. Cambrai Cottage featured a sitting room with a wood-beamed ceiling and a large stone fireplace. At the top of the stairs were two bedrooms, one looking on to the street, the other on to the patio behind the house. We were pleased by the premises and by the price which, when divided by two, was quite reasonable. We concluded our bargain on the spot. On that very morning I checked out of the Old Black Lion and moved my belongings into Cambrai Cottage. The following morning Coombes arrived with his wheelbarrow of books and a very ancient leather suitcase with three faded stickers on the side. Only one of the stickers could still be read: Hotel Beau-Rivage, Quai du Mont-Blanc, Geneve.

  Coombes was certainly an easy enough man to live with. He rose early but never made a sound. He waited until I was away hiking the hills before conducting his book experiments in the kitchen. These experiments involved heating pages of books, then putting them into a bath of c
hemicals. But he made it a point to clean up the mess before I arrived back for lunch. His books were numerous but never in the way. He kept them carefully stacked in and around the bookcase at one side of the sitting room, and he carried them off to his bedroom in piles of five or six. Often when I arrived back in the evening I found him sitting in front of a roaring fire and reading three books simultaneously, going from one to the other as he apparently compared them. He seemed like a man in mad pursuit of something or other, but of what remained a mystery to me. In the titles he collected I could see no pattern. He had biographies of the Beatles, Tony Blair, Bill Gates, Bertrand Russell and many others. He had histories of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Falklands War, the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus histories of England, France, the United States, China, and various other countries – but none of these histories covered any period earlier than the twentieth century. Most numerous were books on modern science and technology, including quantum theory, global warming, alternative energy sources, acupuncture, mental illness and computers. Many books on computers. Also books on the biological sciences, especially genetic engineering of all sorts, including recombinant DNA cloning and reproductive cloning. In one corner was a pile of books on hypnotism, hallucinatory drugs, spiritualism and meditation. In another corner I noticed books on Marilyn Monroe, the history of sport in the twentieth century, the history of aviation, and a textbook on organic chemistry.

  What was he aiming at? Surely he had to have some specific goal, I thought. No man buys and borrows books by the barrowful without a definite purpose. But what that purpose might be I could not make out. There was a certain reserve in our relationship that prevented me from asking him outright. We roomed together, often ate together, but we carefully respected each other’s privacy – perhaps as a way of keeping our own secrets. We were, after all, two men of more than sixty who were perhaps reluctant to press each other about our goals in life at a period when, as everyone knows, goals often tend to fizzle and life to become a mere habit. Maybe he was just pottering, piddling and fiddling away his time with unusual intensity.

  Yet somehow I doubted it.

  As he had warned me, he periodically fell from a frenzied state of mind into a mood of lassitude, and for several days on end he would lie on the couch and stare into space, scarcely seeming to be aware of me when I entered the room. On one such day I had walked in, apparently unnoticed, and was sitting by the fire engrossed in the sports pages of the Guardian when his voice startled me:

  ‘What do you think of the opinion piece on page thirty, the one titled “The Missing Illogical Leap”?’

  ‘I haven’t read it,’ said I, ‘but I will.’

  I turned to the article and read it briskly.

  ‘What is your opinion of it?’ asked Coombes, anxiously.

  ‘So far as I can tell,’ I said, ‘it is an argument that relies more on sophistry than good sense, and tries to prove a point that is almost true but not quite.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The writer appears to believe that computers can never compete with the human mind, and why? Because, he argues, they cannot make the illogical leaps of imagination necessary in order to solve life’s big mysteries. That sounds like philosophical twaddle. Surely life’s mysteries never required illogical leaps in order to be solved.’

  ‘Perhaps the article wasn’t written as clearly as it might be,’ said Coombes, frowning.

  ‘The writer sounds like someone of the old school who refuses to accept reality, which is that computers have overtaken human intelligence, and will continue to sprint ahead of our plodding brains. We all once believed that no computer could beat a Grand Master at chess – but computers now do this every day. We all used to think that abstruse problems could only be solved by a philosopher, but recently many mathematical problems that have defeated mathematical philosophers for centuries have been solved by computers.’

  ‘Small problems may have been solved,’ objected Coombes. ‘But for the greatest mysteries of life, computers are useless.’

  ‘I am willing to be convinced,’ I said, smiling. I had never seen Coombes so excited. He was almost frothing.

  ‘Computers are mere compilers and crunchers of facts. Yet facts alone, Watson . . .’

  ‘Wilson . . .’

  ‘. . . can never, however speedily compiled or crunched, solve anything of consequence.’

  ‘I wonder what you mean, Coombes, by of consequence. Perhaps we are not really in disagreement.’

  ‘I mean any of the great mysteries of life. The mystery of gravity, for instance. Or the mystery of why a man murders his wife. Many years ago I too believed such problems could be solved merely by observing closely and analyzing logically. I believed that a problem was like a great river one must cross. You stood on the shore and by stepping from one logical stepping stone to the next, you eventually reached the far side.’

  ‘But that is how it is done, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Not at all. In every mystery I ever solved – and I have solved a number of minor mysteries – I proceeded in a completely different manner. I lived a whole lifetime before realizing this. That is why I wrote the article.’

  ‘You wrote it!’ I cried, opening the paper again. ‘I guess I am not very observant. I was in such a hurry to read the piece that . . .’

  ‘Oh, most people are too much in a hurry to observe properly. It’s a human trait,’ laughed Coombes. ‘Anyway, long ago I imagined that I solved mysteries first by observing, then by analyzing facts I had accumulated by observing. But that is not how it is at all. I realize now that I always made an imaginative leap that landed me somewhere strange, and then I tried to prove by logic that my leap had landed me in the right spot. If not, I made another leap, till eventually I landed where logic could prove I was spot on.’

  ‘I’m afraid I must differ with you, Coombes,’ I said. ‘I think it has long been established that sharp observation and careful analysis provide more solutions than leaps of fancy. I leave fancy to the poets. It is science which has built our world. Men like Newton, and Henry Ford, and Bill Gates.’

  ‘But Newton was a poet.’

  ‘Come now, Coombes!’

  ‘But just think of how he worked! He saw surprising and hidden likenesses, just as poets do. For instance, he saw a round red apple and a round white moon, and he saw the apple falling from the sky while the moon did not fall but only circled. Those were his facts. Had he only analyzed those facts he would have learnt nothing. But he made an imaginative leap and guessed what he later proved – that the apple fell towards the earth for the same reason that the moon fell around the earth. Gravity was the link that neither he nor anyone could have proved until first he had guessed it. His guess was his imaginative leap.’

  ‘If you are referring only to cosmic questions, perhaps you are right. But Newton is an unusual case,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Coombes. ‘I have concluded that the plague of this new age is a mindless trust in artificial intelligence. Men ought to trust instead to their own brains and instincts. I don’t speak only of cosmic questions, the meaning of life or the origin of the universe. I speak of small things, daily life – the solving of a crime or the solving of a personal problem with a . . . a lover, I suppose you now would call it. A man with powers of observation, analysis and imagination should – to take a trivial example – be able to deduce a great deal about a person from some small object that the person owned – say his watch or his car keys. But feeding data about that object into a computer would lead to nothing at all.’

  ‘That is surely an interesting theory,’ I admitted. ‘But I’ll wager that you could not conclude anything significant about a person merely by examining an object the individual owns.’

  ‘You would lose your wager,’ said Coombes.

  ‘Then let me put you to the test,’ I said.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Coombes. ‘I have had a boring day and need some stimulation.’
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  ‘Here is a pocket knife owned by my brother Charles,’ I said, pulling it out of a drawer. ‘He was working in Europe – he is an archaeologist – and he stopped by to visit me on his way back to Chicago where he teaches at a university. He has travelled with this old knife since college days and he did not want to lose it by checking it through with his luggage, which airline regulations would force him to do. The airline has lost two of his bags in the last two years. So he asked me to send the knife to him when he arrived home. I was going to post it tomorrow.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Coombes. ‘If you will be good enough to give it to me, I shall try to demonstrate that my theory is practical.’

  I handed him my brother’s old Swiss Army knife and he eagerly carried it away to the front window where evening sunlight, falling through the panes, made a bright patch on the table. He laid the knife in the patch of sunlight, sat down at the table, and from somewhere he produced a large magnifying glass that looked like the sort of antique magnifier that Charles Darwin might have used while exploring the Galapagos, or that Linnaeus might have peered through while squatting over Galeopsis ladanum. The rim was tarnished brass and the handle was of wood so worn by handling that it shone. As I watched him peering into that magnifying glass – his hawk nose, his angular figure – I again had the feeling that I had seen this man somewhere before. But where I could not say.

  Coombes studied the knife with painful care, turning its smooth red form over and over in his hands as if fondling it. At last he drew out the tiny tweezers from their tiny slot and examined them with his glass. Then he laid them aside on a Kleenex and withdrew the white toothpick from its compartment and examined it with equal attention. He opened each of the blades and accessories and examined each with excruciating care – the big blade, the small blade, the screwdriver-and-bottle-opener blade, then the can-opener-and-tiny-screwdriver blade, and finally the saw blade. With a toothpick he teased out wads of fuzzy material caught in the cavity where those blades had resided, and examined it under the glass. Next he turned the knife over and examined the final two blades – the awl and the corkscrew.