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 ...