The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online

crime. I knew who it was—or had narrowed the very small category containing the obvious culprit—within hours of taking the case. You see, the thefts had begun in various high English houses in Ireland. All the major English houses, in fact, save for Lord Wolseley’s and a few English aristocrats there who were out of favor with Lord and Lady Wolseley.”
    Henry James wanted to object again—on various obscure personal grounds as well as logical ones—but he could not yet find the words.
    “The chief thief’s name was Germond,” continued Holmes. “Robert Jacob Germond. A rather aging corporal who had served as the General’s—Lord Wolseley’s—batman and even valet on various campaigns and in both the Irish military camps and at Lord Wolseley’s estate on that green isle. One has to say that Corporal Germond did not look the role of a jewel thief—he had a long, rather basset-hound face with the accompanying luminous, sad, and sensitive eyes—but one look at the record of thefts within Lord Wolseley’s regimental garrisons in Ireland over the years, and then amongst the homes of Lord W.’s friends in Ireland, and then again in England during his and Lady Wolseley’s various visits home, and the identity of the mastermind—although I admit that it is far too grand to call him by that title—of this jewel-theft ring was immediately obvious to even the least deductive mind. At the very moment you and I were meeting at the garden party, Mr. James, I was covertly watching Corporal Germond go about his actual thieving. He was very smooth.”
    James felt himself blushing. He’d come to know several of Lord and Lady Wolseley’s primary servants over the years—most of them former military men under the General—but Germond had been assigned as his own personal servant during James’s only visit so far to Ireland and Lord Wolseley’s estate there. James had felt a strange . . . affinity . . . for the soft-spoken, sad-eyed personal valet.
     
    * * *
     
    James was not pleased that he and Holmes had to share a stateroom on the
Paris
, even though it was in first class and adequate to their needs. The booking had been so close to sailing time, Holmes had explained, that only a cancellation of this two-bed single stateroom had been available. “Unless,” he had added, “you would have preferred traveling in steerage . . . which, I know from personal experience, has its peculiar charms.”
    “I do not wish to be traveling on that ship . . . or any ship . . . at all,” had been James’s rejoinder.
    But save for the sleeping hours, the two saw little of each other. Holmes never went to breakfast, was rarely seen partaking of the rather good
petit déjeuner
in the morning dining area, was never glimpsed at lunch times, and only occasionally filled his assigned seat at the captain’s table where, every evening in his black tie and tails, James tried to converse with the French aristocrats, German businessmen, ship’s white-bearded captain (who seemed primarily interested in his food at any rate), and the single Englishwoman at the table—an almost-dotty dowager who insisted on calling him “Mr. Jane”.
    James spent as much of each day at sea as he could either browsing the ship’s modest library—none of his works were there, even in translation—or pacing the not-terribly-spacious deck, or listening to the occasional desultory piano recital or small concert arranged for the passengers’ amusement.
    But twice Henry James had accidentally caught Sherlock Holmes in powerfully personal and embarrassing moments.
    The first time he’d surprised Holmes—who showed no surprise or embarrassment either time—had been after breakfast when James was returning to the shared stateroom in order to change his clothes. Holmes was lying, still in his nightshirt, on his bed, some sort of strap wrapped around the upper bicep of his left arm, and was just in the process of removing the needle of a syringe from the