The Adventure of the Red Leech

by Fraser Sherman

Dear Doyle,

My good fellow, have you no faith in me? You cannot doubt I appreciate your work as my literary agent; none of my stories about Holmes would have seen publication without your advice. Nevertheless, my decision to keep some of my most memorable accounts locked away was not made from caprice.

I am fully aware that the public would devour the stories. I believe I have mentioned that several would bring on a suit for libel were I to publish them. Others are simply beyond belief. Can you deny that in comparison to the giant rat of Sumatra, Frankenstein seems a plodding account of mundane research?

To prove my words are no exaggeration, read the tale that follows. The events surrounding the murder of Nigel Crosby are true, but how few readers would believe them! It’s why Holmes and Scotland Yard kept the truth from the press at the time. Read on, Doyle, and understand.

Yours,

John Watson

I

Nightmarish though it was, the case of the Red Leech entered our lives at a propitious time. Holmes had successfully resolved the Cinque Ports affair and exposed Alistair Dorrance as the man responsible for poisoning the three shipbuilders. For the first week afterward, Holmes, as usual, basked in the plaudits to his genius, but then his old ennui began to settle upon him.

Resting on his laurels for long, or indeed resting at all, has always been alien to the workings of Holmes’s mind. I knew that without a fresh problem to challenge his intellect, Holmes would soon resort to his cocaine solution as an alternative source of stimulation. The two cases he’d dealt with during that week were inadequate, Holmes having given his clients their answers without leaving Baker Street.

My friend grew even more restless that October night, after our return from the opera. We indulged in a late supper, then Holmes turned to playing strange, tuneless airs on his violin, a sign his boredom with everyday life had reached its peak. Finally, he broke off playing, stalked to the fireplace and scooped shag tobacco from the Persian slipper on the mantlepiece into his black clay pipe.  It was at that moment Mrs. Hudson knocked on our door with an apologetic smile. “Mr. Holmes, a gentleman just arrived downstairs and insists on seeing you. I know it’s late—”

“Not at all.” Holmes lit his pipe with a coal from the grate, his eyes lighting up as well. “Anyone who calls for me at such an hour as this undoubtedly has a problem worth hearing. Please send him in.”

The gentleman our landlady ushered in a moment later was the image of a City financier, early thirties, muttonchop whiskers on a strong-jawed face. He wore a dark suit of good tweed under a misbuttoned topcoat of similar quality. His dark eyes seemed haunted; he glanced quickly around the room as he entered, then back at the hall outside before Mrs. Hudson closed the door. Only then did he offer Holmes his hand. “Thank you, sir, for seeing me. My name is John Phillimore and I have nowhere else to turn.”

“Many of my clients say as much.” Holmes gestured to an empty chair, resuming his own seat. “Tell me the tragedy that brought you here and whom you fear pursues you.”

Phillimore flinched as if he’d been struck. “Dear God, you are a sorcerer! It’s one thing to read Dr. Watson’s stories—”

Holmes smiled. “No client would arrive at this hour except under tragic circumstances. No respectable banker would leave home with his topcoat misbuttoned and missing his hat unless he left urgently. Your glances show the urgency is because you feared either pursuit, or that your pursuers were waiting for you here.”

“And you know I’m a banker because—no, never mind.” Phillimore opened a cigarette case and lit one with a shaking hand. “I can see there’s no magic to your work, merely cleverness.”

“I suppose cleverness is one word for it.” Holmes said tartly, concealing his displeasure at having his craft dismissed so easily. “Whom do you fear?”

“The police.”

“You are suspected of a crime?” I asked.

“Murder. I can see it in their eyes, they believe I murdered my friend and colleague Nigel Crosby and my dear wife Miriam. The detective in charge told me to wait in the study until he had a chance to question me, but I had to see you, Mr. Holmes! I must tell you of the Red—”

At that moment I heard Mrs. Hudson again in the hall outside, but this time in conversation with Inspector Lestrade. A moment later the inspector entered, accompanied by two constables. “Mr. Phillimore, I directed you to stay put!”

“It appears, Phillimore, you did not leave quickly enough to escape the eyes of Scotland Yard,” Holmes said. “Good to see you, Lestrade!”

“I am not responsible for the bodies in the library,” Phillimore said, rising and addressing Lestrade. “Surely you must see it is impossible for me to have killed them!”

“Them?” Lestrade shook his head. “If you had stayed, you’d have heard the police surgeon say that your wife lives.” Phillimore froze motionless. “Dr. Griffiths says her prospects are not hopeless, but she is unconscious and has lost a great deal of blood.”

“Dear God,” Phillimore whispered, “is it possible? Yet surely the Red Leech will strike again! Instead of wasting time following me here—”

“The Red Leech?” Holmes said. I could almost feel his heart race with excitement as the words elevated this case out of the ordinary. “Something more than a common leech I take it?”

“There was no need to follow you, Mr. Phillimore,” Lestrade said, before the banker could answer. “As soon as we arrived at your house, you demanded I bring Holmes onto the case. Where else would you have gone but to 221B Baker Street?”

“Capital Lestrade!” Holmes gestured at the inspector with the stem of his pipe. “Associating with me so many years has honed your wits to razor sharpness.”

Lestrade scowled but continued speaking. “When we questioned you earlier you were understandably incoherent. Kindly repeat your story to Mr. Holmes and I’ll take notes.” Leaning against the fireplace, the inspector drew his notebook and pencil out.

Phillimore drew deeply on his cigarette, sat back down and began. “I have been working as a banker for nigh a decade, mostly managing estates and trusts. Three years back I assumed management of the generous trust the late Simon Quail set up for his daughter Miriam. A year and a half ago, I met Miss Quail when she came up from Essex to sign various papers. We married soon after.

“I feel safe in saying our time together was idyllic . . . until the last four months. Mrs. Agatha Rider, a widowed friend of Miriam’s parents, moved to a flat the next street over from our home. Knowing no-one in London, she attached herself to my wife. Although Mrs. Rider presents herself as a fortune teller and spiritualist, Miriam sometimes hinted that she engages in darker practices, perhaps even witchcraft.”

Lestrade’s face, upon hearing this, embodied skepticism. Holmes’s face, wreathed in smoke, gave nothing away.

“Miriam,” Phillimore went on, “soon found she had nothing in common with Mrs. Rider. However, she was too kind a soul not to offer companionship to a lonely widow. Then, over time she began to enjoy the occasional fortune-telling or seance.” Phillimore shook his head. “I thought it harmless enough, but had I known where it would lead . . .

“A month ago, after returning from a seance, Miriam changed toward me. Did I so much as tip my hat to a woman in the street, my wife took it as a sign of faithlessness. She even requested my colleague, Nigel Crosby—she knew his wife, Alice, socially—audit the trust’s accounts, to confirm I’d done nothing improper with the money.

“I had no objection, of course, but Miriam’s loss of confidence in me struck me to the quick. Finally, last week, I begged her on my knees to speak her suspicions plainly, and to cease her congress with Mrs. Rider.” He shook his head sadly. “Had she done so at once, perhaps tonight’s tragedy could have been averted.

“My beloved wife broke down in tears. She apologized for doubting me and said she only requested the audit because Mrs. Rider browbeat her into it. Miriam said she had been lured into participating in ‘worse than seances,’ regretted it, but could not break off the association ‘because of the Red Leach! If I anger her, she will turn it against me!’ Then she covered her mouth in terror and made me swear never to ask her meaning.”

The belief in bloodletting by leeches as a medical cure-all had been abandoned well before I became a doctor. I had no knowledge of leeches, nor of the different species’ colors. Yet for all the revulsion leeches inspire, how could any species of any color provoke such fear?

“For the past week we had all the happiness of our earlier days,” Phillimore said, casting the stub of his cigarette into the fire, then lighting a second. “Miriam even forgot that she’d asked for an audit, so we were both surprised when Crosby arrived tonight.”

Holmes frowned. “Surely, he should have invited her to the bank during business hours?”

“Oh, he’d arrived primarily to return a borrowed copy of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and ask for the loan of Last Days of Pompeii. But he said he’d completed the audit that day and wished to assure us immediately that the accounts were in perfect order. With that, the three of us went to the library. I, however, was briefly distracted by one of the servants. I arrived only moments behind Miriam and Crosby, yet I found the door locked from the inside. From behind it, I heard Miriam scream. My valet, Wilkins, joined me as I forced the locked door open—dear God, inspector I cannot speak of what I saw there!”

As Phillimore buried his head in his hands, Lestrade took a deep breath. He seemed almost as shaken as the banker. “I’ll need your account eventually, but I can tell Mr. Holmes what Wilkins told us. After Mr. Phillimore broke down the door, Wilkins saw Crosby and Mrs. Phillimore on the library floor, their bodies pale and unmoving. Wilkins called Scotland Yard on his master’s behalf, which led to my arrival on the scene with Dr. Griffiths. He quickly determined that Crosby’s body had been entirely drained of blood.”

“Drained?” My medical training asserted itself. “A curious choice of words for blood loss. Were there open wounds?”

“No wounds, doctor,” Lestrade said. “Griffiths found nothing on either body that would explain the loss of blood, nor were there any bloodstains on their clothes or the carpet.”

“Impossible.” I turned to Holmes, shaking my head. “Even the vampires of fiction such as Polidori’s Lord Ruthven leave marks on the corpses of their victims.”

“And that is why I demanded the inspector contact you,” Phillimore said, rising from the chair and pacing across the carpet. “Dr. Watson’s stories say you work by eliminating the impossible. As it is impossible these deaths were caused by any natural means, that leaves only one solution—black magic! Mrs. Rider doubtless—”

“Rubbish!” Lestrade said. “As Mr. Holmes likes to say, the material world provides more than enough mysteries for us—what need have detectives for ghosts?”

“Then tell me inspector, how was it done?” Phillimore pounded his fist upon the table. “How else could it have been done? And where is Miriam?”

“Charing Cross Hospital,” Lestrade said. “She’s been rushed there for a transfusion. True, I do not know yet how the crime was committed, but we live in an age of science. Nobody has been charged with witchcraft in a hundred years or more.”

“On the contrary,” Holmes said. “Susannah Sullock was accused of witchcraft in Devon in 1860. The same charge has been made against other individuals, both here and on the continent. But charges, of course, are not the same as the actual practice of magic.”

“Well, of course not,” Lestrade said. “Holmes, if you’re going to take Phillimore’s case, I’d be delighted to have your help. As the gentleman says, a natural solution seems impossible.”

“Then the game is afoot!” There was no trace of ennui in my friend now “But Phillimore, I cannot agree with you yet that the solution must be supernatural.”

“What if you find no other explanation?” the banker asked.

“I shall address that circumstance if it arises. I doubt that it will.”

On which note we donned our coats and left Baker Street.

II

Islington Road was a respectable London street. Lighted upstairs windows stood out in the night, showing where neighbors had pulled back the curtains to watch events at the Phillimore residence. In less respectable streets, they’d simply have lined up along the pavement next to the house.

As we alighted from the cab and entered through the front gate, Holmes said nothing but saw everything: The front garden, enveloped in the darkness between the arc lighting of the streetlamps and the gas jets either side of Phillimore’s front door. The furnishings inside, of good quality but as conventional as one might expect of a banker’s house. The drawn faces of the household staff and Lestrade’s constables, testifying that this mundane family home had become a charnel house.

“I would give anything if you could solve this, Holmes,” Lestrade said as we and Phillimore climbed the stairs to the first floor. “If this case goes unsolved, it will cause a worse panic than the Whitechapel murders in ’88. We must find a rational explanation!”

“And if the explanation is witchcraft?” Phillimore asked.

Lestrade shook his head. “Holmes is a man of science, sir. He will prove no phantasm murdered Crosby.”

“No, Lestrade, I am a man of logic,” Holmes said. “If a chain of reasoning leads where science dares not go . . . but that would be remarkable indeed. Ah, is this the library up ahead?” He indicated the open door at the end of the hall. The hall lighting showed the broken lock, the key lying on the floor inside, near a man’s body.

“We would normally have taken Crosby to the morgue already,” Lestrade said, “but knowing you were coming—” He caught Phillimore by the hand as the man started to follow us in. “Please. Let Holmes do the work you wanted him to do.”

The library was as unremarkable as the rest of the house, holding a dozen bookcases stuffed with leather- and cloth-bound volumes, mostly popular novels from what I saw of them. The late Nigel Crosby lay on the floor between the door and the nearest bookcase. In life, his thick black beard would have been unremarkable; against the fish-belly pallor of his dead face, it drew the eye like an eclipse of the moon. His body, slightly shriveled by the loss of blood, had yet to begin the process of rigor mortis.

I knelt and felt the corpse while Holmes whipped out his magnifying glass, studying the carpet between Crosby and the door. Knowing Griffiths, I doubted his examination had missed anything, but Holmes would appreciate my confirming that. As I studied the body in its sober business suit, Holmes crawled along the floor to the doorframe, moved after a second to the nearest bookcase, then the wall. His face had the excitement of a human bloodhound casting around for a scent.

After a few minutes I looked up from Crosby’s body to see Holmes rubbing a red powder resembling dried wax between his fingers. I saw traces of the same powder along the wainscotting around the room. As Holmes rose and began studying the windowsills. I got to my feet. “Other than a cut where Griffiths checked for blood, there’s no mark. This is truly impossible.”

“For murder by mortal means,” Phillimore whispered softly.

“Have you any idea why they locked the door?” Holmes moved to the fireplace, studying the ashes in the grate, then the chimney flue above.

Phillimore froze as he lit yet another cigarette. “Surely you’re not suggesting—”

“Certainly not, sir.” Holmes moved to the other bookshelves. “I see you have Dr. Watson’s A Study in Scarlet; while I found it an overly sensational account of the Enoch Drebber murder, I’m aware it’s quite popular.”

I hid a smile. Much as Holmes denied it, I have become convinced he delights in how my stories add luster to his reputation.

“I’m sure,” he went on, “that Mrs. Phillimore will explain the locked door when she’s fully recovered.”

“Have you any idea how Crosby was killed?” I asked Holmes. “I cannot think of any scientific method for removing all the blood from his body without a physical wound.”

“Is there no way the killer could have used a leech?” Lestrade said.

“Leeches leave marks,” I replied. I resumed studying the body; surely it must offer up a rational answer! “And no leech could drain this much blood.”

The inspector ran a hand through his hair. “Fifty or a hundred perhaps?”

“Then, Lestrade,” Holmes said, “we must explain how the murderer entered the house unseen with fifty leaches on his person, applied them to the doubtless horrified victims, then removed the blood-engorged annelids and escaped from a locked room. All in the scant few moments between the closing of the door and Mr. Phillimore forcing it open.”

“Then you cannot find any natural method by which it could be done?” Phillimore said intently.

“No,” Holmes said, “but—Watson, it might reassure Mr. Phillimore if you explained how many impossible crimes we have investigated where the solution proved perfectly mundane.”

I understood his meaning, that I was to occupy Phillimore’s attention for a few minutes. I entered the hall and crossed to the nearest window, staring out at the garden meaningfully. As I expected, Phillimore joined me. “Do you see something, doctor?”

“Nothing, but Holmes will see more; he always does. The murderer will have left a clue somewhere, rest assured. Have you read my Sign of Four? The account of the case in which I met my late wife.”

“I read and enjoyed it,” he said, glancing uneasily at Lestrade and Holmes as they continued their work in the library. “I do not see the connection.”

“If you remember, the murders were the work of a pygmy climbing down the chimney flue. Another murderer used a similar method to expose her victims to an aggressive, venomous spider. In a third case the killer burned a herb in the fireplace that drove his victims to madness.”

“I remember that one. The Devil’s Foot case.” He shook his head firmly as he spoke. “Surely no such explanation is possible here.”

“I share your doubts, but neither of us is Sherlock Holmes. And who knows what your wife will say if and when she revives.”

“Of course, I had forgotten.” He smiled hopefully. “Do you suppose the hospital will let me see her tonight?”

“Charing Cross is unlikely to tolerate a visit to a critically ill woman at this hour, even from her husband.” I clapped him on the back. “She won’t yet be conscious to know whether you’re there.” I knew from Mary’s passing how little that would comfort him, but it was the best I could offer.

“Watson!” Holmes said, striding toward us. “We are about to be most discourteous and rouse the widow Rider from her slumbers. Mr. Phillimore, it is possible we shall have unraveled this riddle by morning.” Phillimore started to speak, but Holmes held up his hand. “No, until we meet the widow I shall say no more.”

III

Lestrade had hired a hansom and tipped the driver to wait until the investigation was done. As Mrs. Rider lived on Darrow Street within five minutes’ walk, however, we dispensed with the cabdriver’s services. It was a chilly, damp night for a walk, but our pipes were lit, and we drew comfort from the warm smoke.

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it Holmes?” I said, gesturing at a nearby electric streetlamp. “When we were children, this entire street would have been darkness. Then came gas lighting, now electric. I suppose to our ancestors this scene would have seemed as impossible as I find tonight’s events.”

“A remarkable puzzle, isn’t it Watson?” Holmes said, nodding to a passing constable. “The library windows were locked. The soot in the flue shows no-one entered that way. There are no secret panels or compartments in the room.”

“And the library door was locked from inside.”

“Unlocked, Watson,” he said, opening the garden gate at 42 Darrow. “I will stake my reputation on it.”

“But Phillimore and his valet—”

“Lestrade showed me Wilkins’s statement. The man said the door was locked, but that’s because he arrived to see Phillimore pounding on it. I studied the damage to the lock, however, and it’s clear the door was merely closed. Otherwise, the metal would show a different pattern of stresses. Now let us rouse the widow’s landlady.”

I knew better than to doubt Holmes’s conclusion, but his words left me baffled. Had the killer held the door closed against Phillimore while the Red Leech did its work? Or was he suggesting the banker himself had committed this ghastly deed? There was no time to ask, for a disgruntled woman who identified herself as Mrs. Mitchell opened the front door with a scowl.

While I normally take no credit for my friend’s accomplishments, the added fame my writing has brought him is sometimes of value. When the landlady realized she was face to face with the great detective—“I’ve read all about you in the Strand, sir!”—she accepted without question the importance of waking Mrs. Rider. When repeated knocking on the door of 16C produced no response except from disgruntled neighbors, Mrs. Mitchell let us in.

The lights were on inside, but there was no sign of the tenant herself. Holmes moved swiftly through the flat from room to room but when he opened the one closed door, he froze. “Mrs. Mitchell, please call Scotland Yard. Have them send word to Inspector Lestrade there’s been another murder.”

The woman gasped, though she looked as excited as she did horrified. I joined Holmes in what had been Mrs. Rider’s sitting room. Clad in a dressing gown, the widow—or so we assumed the woman to be—had collapsed over a small table, her long gray hair covering an empty teacup, her pale hand lying on an open book. I quickly confirmed life had fled. “Her pallor and the shrinking of her flesh suggests the Red Leech has killed again.”

“I believe you’ve read Edward Abbott’s Flatland?” Holmes ran his fingers along the bottom of the door as he spoke. When he raised his hand from the floor, his fingertips were red.

Was it blood? I would have asked, had his question not puzzled me more. “I presume you’re not bringing it up out of a sudden desire to chat about fiction?”

“Isn’t it a remarkable premise? Life from the viewpoint of a two-dimensional creature, astonished when it learns the existence of a third dimension.” He trailed his fingers along the bottom of the wainscotting until he reached the fireplace. “Imagine how a creature existing in four or five dimensions of space would seem to us? As an angel or perhaps a demon?”

I saw his point, but I shook my head. “Holmes if you think a jury will believe these women and Crosby were attacked by a hypothetical creature of higher dimensions—”

“I agree the crown will need better evidence than that to make its case.” Holmes pulled several charred pieces of paper from the fireplace grate. “I presume that’s why these letters—love letters, I suspect—were burned, so that the sender could conceal his connection to Mrs. Rider. It fits, though, Watson. It fits!”

Before I could ask what “it” was and what it fit, Holmes came to the table, sniffed the teacup, and nodded. Then he slid the book from under Mrs. Rider’s dead hand.

“Some forbidden volume of black magic?” I said with forced jocularity.

“Exactly, Watson. Ludwig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm, the Leggett English translation. A guide to summoning horrors from outside the three dimensions we know.”

“And you recognize it? You, who once told me he used his brain only to retain knowledge relevant to his work?”

“As you know by now, Watson, almost anything can be relevant to my work.” He slid his hand down the right-hand page. “Now here’s an ominous and apropos phrase: ‘Never be reckless with those you summon. For the sake of your soul, never call up what you cannot put down.’”

“Are you saying Mrs. Rider summoned the Red Leech and that it—broke free of her control?”

“Such a remarkable coincidence, don’t you think, Watson? That she should be reading that exact passage when the Red Leech struck.” He set the book down on the table. “It would have been wiser for Phillimore to place a bookmark on that spot, then close the book. Though a jury might still question whether she’d given herself the strong sedative I smelled in that teacup.”

“Then you do suspect Phillimore of summoning some monster and attempting to murder his wife.” It seemed incredible, yet I thought of his reaction upon learning Miriam was alive. He’d asked no further questions about her, nor demanded to see her. If it had been my beloved Mary . . . “Why, Holmes? And how?”

“If he seduced Mrs. Rider into teaching him the dark arts, he may have seduced others for more conventional reasons. And as yet, we only have his word that the audit vindicated him.” Someone opened the front door. Holmes clicked his tongue. “Watson, if it’s the neighbors rather than police, please keep them out. Once you’ve done so, call Charing Cross. Warn the staff that under no circumstances should they let Phillimore enter his wife’s room, not even if he cries an ocean of crocodile tears.”

IV

“This is monstrous!” Staring around his study from Holmes to me to Lestrade, Phillimore attempted to look outraged. “The very idea that I would harm my beloved Miriam—and how? Did you not see, Mr. Holmes, that the murder was impossible? Inside a locked room, I—”

“That was your first mistake,” Holmes said, as one of Lestrade’s constables put the man in handcuffs. “You assumed an impossible crime would place you beyond suspicion. You reasoned that even if we did not believe Mrs. Rider guilty of summoning the Red Leech, we could not suspect you! But when a crime is impossible for everyone, everyone is equally suspect.”

“I have no motive!”

“None that we have confirmed yet,” Lestrade said as we started for the front door. He glanced at Holmes, though, as if hoping for conclusive evidence.

“Your second mistake,” Holmes went on, “was to pretend the door had been locked.” That statement made Phillimore flinch. “What reason did you have to lie if you weren’t guilty? I presume the wax running around the edge of the floor formed a summoning circle; when you closed the door, you sprang your dark trap.”

“But—but—” Phillimore stared at Holmes, incredulous. “Mrs. Rider had the book of black magic! Surely, she lost control—”

“Then why was there another wax ring around her study?” Holmes shook his head. “It won’t wash, Phillimore. You dismissed my deductions as mere cleverness; your crimes lack even that. I don’t doubt your wife told you about Mrs. Rider’s sinister practices. Far from being horrified, you wooed her, promising marriage once she helped make you a widower. Stripped of the uncanny elements, it’s a very old story.”

“An absurd story!” Phillimore sputtered. “Inspector, you can’t imagine an English jury will accept that I am some modern-day Faust.”

“Whether a jury believes you is not my concern,” Lestrade said. “Perhaps Mr. Holmes is right and there are more believers in the modern world than we think. And if the audit shows you’ve been mismanaging your wife’s fortune, I suspect the jury will overcome its skepticism.”

We emerged out into the chilly early-morning darkness. Even the windows of the other houses were now dark, the neighbors having given up their vigils; they’d doubtless regret that when they heard about the arrest. Phillimore’s face had turned surly, but as we approached the cab, he smiled. “You make an excellent point, inspector. Trusting to the skepticism of twelve Englishmen would indeed be folly.”

The empty handcuffs clattered to the ground by the cab wheel. I glanced this way and that in surprise, then saw the murderer standing behind us on his front stoop, opening the door. He gave a braying laugh. “Terribly sorry, gentlemen but it looks like rain, and I forgot my umbrella.”

He stepped back into the house, not even bothering to close the door behind him. As we rushed in pursuit, a terrible suspicion seized me that he could not be as lacking in cleverness as Holmes thought. Sure enough, once we passed through the doorway, it became clear Phillimore had one more card left to play.

From where we stood a dozen staircases radiated out at every possible angle. A dozen James Phillimores walked up the stairs and away from us, some of them walking vertically or even upside down. I drew out my Webley but Holmes caught my wrist before I could fire. “Think, Watson! Whether illusion or some genuine distortion of physical space, we can’t be sure where your bullet will land!”

“My goodness, Mr. Holmes, it seems you are more than merely clever.” Phillimore chortled merrily as he approached the dozen first-floor landings. Lestrade started up one of the stairs but fell, impossibly, on top of me. “I was careful enough to have Agatha prepare my escape, though the silly goose assumed we’d take it together. Rest assured, you will never find me, nor the money from the trust.” A long hallway stretched ahead of him; he took a step down it, then turned and bowed as Lestrade and I got to our feet. “And despite your interference, Mr. Holmes, my insipid ninny of a wife will not live through the night.

“Agnes failed to make it clear the Red Leech could become satiated; after draining both her and Crosby tonight, it was satisfied with just some of Miriam’s blood.” Phillimore walked away, vanishing almost immediately through some trick of perspective. “Happily, having fed upon Miriam once it could easily be sent to do so again. The summoning for that was so simple, the police never realized what I had done.” Happily! Holmes and I had faced murderous husbands before, but none who spoke with such cruel flippancy. “After all, I hope to marry again, and I would as soon not be a bigamist.”

“You won’t be,” I said, with no small degree of anger. “I called Charing Cross; your wife died an hour ago.”

A long and ominous silence followed before Phillimore spoke, his voice full of dread. “You’re lying, you must be!”

“Why would he?” Lestrade asked.

“Because the Red Leech must feed once it’s roused! If there is no life left in Miriam for it to—” His voice caught. The sound of running footsteps echoed from the distorted hallway, coming closer, yet he did not appear. “You must help me! If it reaches me before I—”

Sudden silence fell. The distorted reality around us returned to normal, making it a simple matter to reach the landing and stare down the first-floor hall. Phillimore had gone, but an impossibly distorted crimson form hovered above the carpet two yards from us. I had barely begun to comprehend its shape when it shut up like a telescope. Nothing remained.

For a long second, none of us spoke. Then Lestrade glanced at Holmes. “A trick?”

“I think not.” Holmes pulled out his pipe but made no move to fill it. For once in his life, I think he would have preferred his deductions had been wrong. “Justice has been served, I believe . . . though by an executioner who cares nothing for British law.”

And so, Doyle, this most remarkable case came to a close. If I published the facts of the affair, my readers would dismiss it as an unbelievable farrago. You, I think, know me better, and are at least somewhat open-minded in matters mystical.

Would a British jury have been open-minded enough to send Phillimore to the gallows? A competent barrister might well have gotten the man off. Phillimore, however, lacked the fortitude to take such a chance. Nor did he have the foresight to confirm his poor wife still lived before he summoned the Red Leech a final time. By so doing he violated Ludwig Prinn’s advice and paid with his life for calling up what he could never put down.