The Wintle Blog

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.” ...