Castle Rouge by Carole Nelson Douglas

that you will be just?”
    “I will be better than just. I will be logical.”
    “Logic.” The old man chuckled. “That is one remedy that has not yet been applied to the Whitechapel Horrors.”

    When Mrs. Hudson had delivered her offering and left, when the rabbi had given Holmes the particulars he required and left, my friend turned his attentions to me.
    “What, Dr. Watson, still waxing plump with prosperity and the married life in Paddington?”
    He surprised me by sitting at the round table and tucking into the kidney pie like a sailor.
    “Apparently you intend to put me on a fast immediately, Dr. Holmes.”
    He gave that sharp bark of laughter that seemed a social convention rather than real mirth, and pushed the platter toward my side of the table.
    “Dig in, Watson. It is chill and damp out despite the season.”
    I sat, if I did not import any kidney pie to my plate. “Then this is an expedition of sorts.”
    “Or a sortie.” Holmes grinned as he dashed some Tokay into the empty wine glasses.
    “You have made progress since you sent me the telegram. Was it something the rabbi said?”
    “I have made progress indeed, if crawling to the end of the most noxious sewer in England is to be considered an achievement.”
    “Surely not in that garb.”
    “No. I had to report to my betters just previously.”
    As always, Holmes gave a twist to the word “betters” that could only come from a man who considered himself on a higher plane entirely.
    I had to agree with his cheerful self-esteem. I had never known a man who could so accurately pierce to the core truth of a situation or a character. From the smallest motes of physical evidence he could extrapolate to the largest conclusions about the good and evil rubbing shoulders in the human soul. This facility made him remote to the myopic concerns of ordinary mortals, but it did indeed lay open the way certain of us live our lives and die our deaths. He was very like a master surgeon, cutting through the skin and gristle and muscle and bone of the carapace of ordinary life to what lay beneath: to the extraordinary and complex systems of motive and passion and seven deadly sins that race like rampaging corpuscles through every vein of our beings and often erupt in paroxysms of crime and evildoing.
    “Your betters,” I repeated after my reverie had faded. “Not the police surely.”
    “Especially not in this case!” he snorted, his restless gray eyes pouncing on the Persian slipper on the mantel. A cat spotting a mouse in its hole across the room could not have looked more intent.
    He leaped upon his prey in the next moment, and shortly after the familiar perfume of tobacco masked the chemical odors that filled the chambers like noxious potpourri.
    Scheherazade had her veils and her thousand-and-one tales to beguile. Holmes had his veils of smoke to add dazzle to his chronicles of crime.
    “The police have been thicker than usual,” he rumbled over the pipe. “The real crime is the vast numbers of footprints they have left all over the area.”
    “Then this is a case of paramount importance, if so many police are employed.”
    “Oh, indeed,” he said airily. “Of such paramount importance that they did not bother to call me in on it. No matter. Their ‘betters’ have beat them to it.”
    He had resumed his seat over the crumbles of pie crust on his plate and now placed his elbows on the table. “I confess that the police outflank me in only one respect.”
    “You confess?”
    He shrugged. “I am, as you know, able to slip into the foulest pits of London. Opium or thieves’ den, I can don a suitably low disguise and pass among them as their own.”
    “Nothing to envy,” I said with a shudder, for well I knew the diseases physical as well as spiritual that thrive in such ratholes of human commerce and depravity.
    “There is, however, one sinkhole of sin into which I am less easy about inserting myself.”
    “Really.”
    “No doubt you have