The Strange Return of Sherlock Holmes by Barry Grant

corner into the Rue Napoleon and kept running. When I reached the Quai D’Orsay I was exhausted. I hailed a taxi and it carried me to the Gare de Lyon. Undoubtedly the other conspirators had been watching the hotel, yet I had no evidence they had followed me. I hoped I had made my escape without detection.
    At the Gare de Lyon I was fortunate. A train for Geneva was leaving in half an hour. I bought a ticket and hurried aboard a compartment in the middle of the train, taking the seat farthest from the window. A middle-aged woman and her husband entered the compartment and sat in the two window seats, facing each other. The woman stood up, lowered her window, and leant on it with folded arms as she hung her head out and gazed down the platform with a proprietorial air. I held my watch in hand, waiting impatiently as the hands jerked towards the moment of departure. The woman sat down and tidied herself. At last the train began to roll. We were on our way . . .
    But now a man with a huge bald head floated into view, running hard down the platform. His handlebar moustache looked huge and his eyes glared and his cheeks were puffed out like balloons. It was the man Willie had knocked out in the baggage van at Canterbury. Here he was, again trying to board my train. His elbows were going like pistons, and every few strides he tried to grab the door handle. A slim dark man ran to the left of him, dropping behind as the train picked up speed. Once more the bald giant lunged for the door handle, missed, stumbled, and to save himself he grabbed the top of our open window with both his hands. He clung, he was dragged. The slim man shouted, ‘Ludwig, du Dummkopf!’ and vanished.
    The platform flickered, disappeared.
    Ludwig dangled in air, huge face pressed to our window pane.
    The woman by the window humped to her feet and fled gasping out of the compartment. Her husband followed her.
    I pulled off my boot and slammed Ludwig’s knuckles with its heel, pounded his fat knuckles until they began to seep blood. At last he howled and fell, and hit the gravel of the roadbed . . .
    Ye gods, Wilson!

SIX
    The World Interrupts
    â€˜ A cat!’ I cried, leaping to my feet. ‘Just a cat.’ But it had startled me, that scream! It sounded at first like a cry of the damned. A thrill of terror faded along my spine.
    I had been listening so intently to my companion’s narrative that only when the cat screamed did I become aware that Sergeant Bundle was knocking on our window. I opened the door.
    â€˜Good morning, gentlemen,’ said Bundle. ‘I stepped on the cat’s tail. Poor fellow was sleeping.’ Bundle’s face was piled with smiles as he hunkered into the room and sat down in the chair I offered. ‘Mr Coombes,’ said he, ‘you have put me on track!’
    â€˜Excellent!’ cried Coombes, leaping from his chair and grabbing a spoon from the coffee table. He leant against the mantle and said, ‘Pray give me the details.’ He put the spoon into his mouth as if it were a pipe, and he waited with a languorous look in his eyes. ‘Take your time and omit nothing,’ he added.
    Coombes’s whole performance was so dramatic, and so odd, that it struck me as affected and phoney. Yet it certainly had the intended effect of settling the sergeant down to take his details very seriously. ‘I have made an investigation into the question of what bicycles have been sold in the area in the past week. We have checked shops from here to Hereford and Brecon. A number of bicycles have been sold, but only two with tire treads that match the tracks in your photograph, Mr Coombes. One of those two was sold in Hereford to a young lad named Charles Montgomery. His father, also named Charles Montgomery, used a Visa card to pay for the bicycle. The bicycle is presently stored in their garage in Hereford. The other bicycle was sold in the same shop, on Widmarsh Street. I