The Wintle Blog

I did not expect to sleep, in the anticipation of that fatal dawn. But somehow, albeit I was fully clothed, and despite the cold and the stink of mothballs from a candlewick bedspread, I drifted away, and dreamed that a light was pulsing in my face, and then brightening, and then fading away – and woke to watch, through the uncurtained windows, clouds dancing across the moon. At six, Lestrade and Entwistle came into my room. “Shall I wake Holmes?” I asked. “We have at least another hour,” the metropolitan detective replied tetchily, shining a torch around my room, though for no reason I could deduce. Why had he come so early? Wearing a flat cap, battered sheepskin coat, old moleskin trousers and wellington boots, Lestrade looked more like a poacher than a policeman. At least the priest was in character, in his grey overcoat, buttoned to the neck. One of his hands grasped a bible; through the fingers of the other played the olive-wood beads of a rosary which was attached to an ivo...

Mycroft Holmes, now unveiled as a vice-regent of the dark powers, brushed a few damp ivy leaves from his astrakhan collar and leaned down over the Great Chess set. “My cockatrice takes your lion and leaves your king vulnerable.” He smiled at Holmes, delicately moving the pieces. “In fact, your king is fatally exposed, I think.” The fire murmured and settled. Holmes sighed and placed another log among the embers, pushing it down with the heel of his boot. “Perhaps I must surrender after all,” he said. “What did you say this imposter’s name was asked?” Lestrade. “Mephistopheles,” said Holmes. “Well, it’ll be hello ‘Metphistophelose’ and into my bracelets unless I get a few straight answers pretty quickly,” snapped the London bobby. Not for the first time, I admired his phlegmatism – the absence of any trace of romance in a mind which proceeded instead from one simple building block to the next, eschewing the grand, imaginative leaps which typified Holmes’s deductive procedure. It ...

Mycroft’s humming unnerved me. Rumbling through the scarf of fat that swathed his windpipe was a distorted but unmistakeable tune – and had there been a doubt, Lestrade dispelled it when the humming stopped and he picked up the broken melody to sing with a matching flatness: “You’ll always have your way if he likes you in a negligee, keep young and beautiful...” “Oh, do shut up, Lestrade,” I cried. “That wretched song is beginning to cause grief.” So we drove in a prickly silence for a while; down the steep hill into Gunnislake, through the village, and sharply down again to the single track of New Bridge. I reminded Mycroft of his promise to “elucidate” our mysteries as we travelled, but he pursed his lips, steered slowly up through the pine-canopied ‘S’-bends of the valley’s side, and said he needed to concentrate on the road. There would be revelations, but “later, later, all in good time”. “Not as if we’re short of an enigma or two,” muttered Lestrade, and squinting hard at ...

Was the hiss emitted by the lifting bottle-cap, or Lestrade’s plump lips? Difficult to tell, but without doubt there was a trace of parody in the Scotland Yard man’s tone when he remarked, putting the metal opener down and pouring his beer into a glass, “this, I think, is a triple White Shield problem.” The two of us were sitting on scuffed, dun-coloured leather armchairs in the seedy, dun-coloured parlour of Webb’s Hotel in Liskeard, which the unexpected sunlight of this October afternoon failed to penetrate through either of two tall, cobwebbed and mossy windows. Lestrade had just joined me, a sheaf of papers on his lap, all written over in his own distinctively thin and wavering hand (“a penmanship that looks,” Holmes had once remarked, “as if a bluebottle had lately escaped from a bottle of whisky into a bottle of blue-black Quink and then gone staggering across a notepad.”) There was a bluebottle, now, rubbing its forelegs together in one of the little rings of beer Lestrad...

It struck me as I sat beside his bed that I had never seen my fastidious friend in pyjamas before, despite more than two decades of cohabitation and almost numberless excursions out of London. True, now and then he would emerge from his study in dressing grown and slippers, violin, perhaps, in one hand, pipe in the other – but the dressing gown would always be braided and elegant, the slippers Persian, perhaps turquoise, delicately stitched in leather. And between the one and the other were never pyjama bottoms, but invariably a trouser of corduroy or cavalry twill, acutely pressed. But here was Mr Sherlock Holmes, in bed and asleep, in rather shabby flannel pyjamas, grey with a laurel stripe. An absurd jingle formed in my head and rang round and around while I quietly ate my cereal: “Not sure you’ll keep her keen with pyjamas striped in evergreen...” “Really, Watson, must you make the consumption of muesli sound like the mixing of concrete? Shut your mouth, man, shut your mouth.” ...

I gasped, and swallowed hard, thinking for a moment that beneath the towel she was completely unclothed, as indeed she might as well have been, for she was wearing only a bathing costume of some transparent material. “That is, might I venture, somewhat unsuitable attire for a cool Autumn evening in the Cornish countryside,” I remarked huskily. “And perhaps uncharacteristic of a young lady’s customary wardrobe.” “Dear, sweet Doctor Watson,” she laughed, “don’t be shy. Remember the song? ‘You’ll drive him half insane in a bathing suit of cellophane, keep young and beautiful, if you want to be loved’ – have I driven you half insane, doctor? It might appear so.” I had been tugging and tugging the curtains together, trying to close the gap between them. Now I turned to stare at her and covered the bare stretch of window with my back. My room, as I’ve recorded, was very small. The moist warmth of her freshly bathed body radiated over me, and her lemony, soapy scent was intoxicating. ...

Slowly, carefully, Lestrade poured beer into a tall glass. He stopped when there was about a quarter of an inch of pale liquid left in the bottle. “White Shield,” he explained, with a professorial smile, setting the bottle down. “That yeasty little residue would quite spoil the taste, besides turning a clear ale cloudy.” He swigged, and wiped his mouth with a corner of his cravat. “There’s some things they don’t teach you in medical school, doctor. True?” “Indeed.” For myself, a pot of China tea was all the refreshment I wanted. “I do hope Holmes is all right,” I said anxiously. “Perhaps we should take him something up?” “Let him stew. Like your tea.” The Inspector laughed, stretched out his legs, and addressed his beer with even more eagerness. “Here,” he said. “How about this?” and he dropped his pork pie hat onto the head of a stuffed goat that was standing by the window, staring out menacingly at the rain-misted river valley. Even subtracting the goat, the bar of the Danesco...

“I suppose there’s always a chance,” said Holmes softly, tracing patterns with his fingertips in the mist on the carriage window, “that this was some sort of sadomasochistic experiment, with a dash of exhibitionism for seasoning. We do find frequently that those two curious urges partner each other.” “A dash?” I exclaimed. “Call me prosaic, Holmes, but I can’t think how even the most athletic entrepreneur of sadomasochism could manage to remove all this clothes, strap his upper arms to the handlebars and thighs to the rear wheel of a Brompton bicycle, then suspend himself upside down on this makeshift crucifix, one hundred and twenty feet above the River Tamar, by means of a chain fastened to the Calstock viaduct.” For it was into Cornwall that our train was now heading, the Baker Street Irregulars having quickly established that Rusbridger had not, as we first suspected, been hung by his enemies from a London railway bridge. “No, no, you’re right, of course,” sighed Holmes. “We...

The fog that had engulfed Baker Street all afternoon began to lift towards dusk; I was grateful, for it had been insidiously sulphurous, and heavy and still, and despite a jolly tune on the radio I was gripped with melancholy, and irritated by the tock, tick, tock of Holmes’ fingernails on the keys of his laptop. “Doesn’t this weather depress you, too” I snapped, throwing the newspaper down on the hearthrug. “You know me, Watson,” said Holmes . “Mere meteorology has no impact at all on my psyche. I might, though, be saddened if the flat burned down.” And with his toecap he nudged away a newspaper page that had fallen near coals in the grate which were spurting gassy jets of flame. “Anyway,” Holmes continued, in an unsettlingly bright voice, “where’s it to be? Corfu, as usual? Or somewhere more adventurous? Wherever it is, do send me a postcard revealing whether Eros can still be induced to visit and excite the late middle-aged.” “Good God, Holmes,” I cried. “You surpass yoursel...

Poor Ray Mawby. The late Conservative M P for Totnes, exposed this week as a sometime spy for communist Czechoslovakia, was a lonely and hollow man, which wasn’t really his fault. Unfortunately, he’d been made into a symbol. Winston Churchill acclaimed Ray as the first of a “new breed” of Tory: blue collars sporting a blue rosettes. Men like Mawby, working class trade unionists (Ray was, I think, in the Transport and General Workers Union) were the party’s parliamentary future, Churchill declared. They were going to sweep aside the gentlemen of the shires, the old Etonians, the Oxbridge clubmen and lawyers. I’m not sure if he was the last as well as the first of this new generation, but I certainly never heard of another. And like everyone who gets cast as a symbol, Ray was trapped in the role, hollowed out by it, his own volition paralysed. Other M P’s, of whichever party, who conformed more closely to that rather tedious, Downton Abbey -esque script which British politics (as ...