Shikari
by James Lincoln Warren
Art by Mark Allen Davis
Preface
In 1993, “Confessions of an Old Shikari,” a holograph manuscript purportedly written by the notorious criminal Colonel Sebastian Moran, was discovered in a trunk in a Pasadena, California, attic. After having been scrutinized by various Holmesian scholars, the manuscript was declared a fraud, since it blatantly contradicted accepted historical facts.
Although the official papers of Mr. George Standford, a minor functionary in the British intelligence service from 1880 to 1923, were declassified in 1965, they were not subsequently examined until 2009, when a British acquaintance of mine requested permission to consult them. While cataloguing their contents, she found a document filed among them by mistake, a memoir written by one of Standford’s colleagues with a similar name: Mr. George Stamford, former aide-de-camp to the chief of British Intelligence.
When this manuscript was called to my attention in 2010, I realized at once that the Stamford Memoir independently supported the authenticity of the Shikari Confessions. In arranging excerpts from both manuscripts, I have attempted to provide a coherent narrative.
1. Excerpt from the Stamford Memoir (written c. 1930)
“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.
“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan,1 I perceive.”
—A Study in Scarlet
I suppose you could call me his confidential secretary, although my duties ranged rather further afield than that. It’s a strange job, and how I got it stranger still.
It was in the late spring of eighty-one. I was called to the club to attend M., having been told only that it concerned a matter of the utmost discretion. You know, of course, to what I refer: It was S., but at the time, I was mightily puzzled. None of us could conceive that M. had any private life at all, so I was expecting some small but significant point regarding a matter of state—and so it proved, but of a nature I could not have anticipated.
I entered his chamber and found him standing, his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out of the tall window at Pall Mall.
“Stamford, I have a special assignment for you,” he said, without otherwise acknowledging my entrance, “of a frankly personal character. Strictly voluntary, of course.”
“I shall be happy to be of assistance, sir,” I replied. All of us held M. in such awe that we would never have contemplated not capitulating to his most trivial whim.
He turned and looked me directly in the eye. I have heard those eyes described as having a faraway, introspective look, but if tigers had grey eyes, they could not pierce a man’s soul more keenly.
“It is a delicate matter, involving my brother.” He paused, as if waiting for me to react. I was so surprised that I’m afraid I could do nothing but stare at him in amazement.
At length he continued. “You have some knowledge of his peculiar qualities, I expect.”
“I have only this moment become aware of his existence—” I said, hastily adding “—sir.”
The feline eyes narrowed. “I thought you had befriended him in the laboratory at Barts.”
Certain of our activities obliged me to make regular use of the laboratory facilities at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. I was entered into the rolls there as a dresser, a necessary subterfuge to explain my frequent presence. It was never my habit to enter into conversation with any of the actual staff. I racked my brain for anyone I had seen there with any frequency, and my memory settled on a tall, spare man—with piercing grey eyes.
“You can’t mean the cocaine addict,” I blurted, straightway feeling as contrite as an out-of-order fag at Harrow.
He sighed. “I’m afraid so. He has settled on a dangerous course, one which, if left unchecked, may bring the club under unwelcome scrutiny. I cannot suffer him to proceed unsupervised. At the same time, I cannot suffer him to know that he is being observed. He is in want of good lodgings; I have therefore arranged that he require someone with whom to share an apartment—someone I can trust to keep an eye on him.”
“But sir—I am married!”
M. graced me with one of his rare and wise smiles. “Not you, my dear boy. I have someone else entirely in mind. He is the perfect man for the job: a physician, a skilled spy, a man of unimpeachable loyalty and integrity, just returned from Afghanistan. He was wounded there and has come home for his convalescence. In his present situation, I have no other use for him, but it would be a crime—” the word being accompanied by another smile, this one slight and subtle “—not to make use of his considerable talents.”
“Then may I ask what my part in it is, sir?”
“I want you to introduce them. You can claim you were the doctor’s dresser some years ago at Barts.”
“I see, sir. Of course, sir. His name, sir?”
“My brother’s, or the doctor’s? My brother is Mr. S— H—, and the doctor’s is John H. Watson. You are to meet Watson at the Criterion Bar. I have already seen to the other arrangements.”
“The Criterion? Why not simply at Barts?”
M. frowned, a circumstance that never bodes well for the person who induced him to show it.
“Because S. will certainly investigate your story in order to ascertain its veracity. If you claim to have met Watson at the Criterion, you can be sure that S. will find out whether it be true or no. He is my brother, and we are not unalike in many ways, not least of which is that he constitutionally appreciates the value of verifying intelligence.” The tone of voice in which this was expressed might have been aimed at an errant child being told why he shouldn’t pull the tail of a pet cat.
“I understand, sir.” I stood there stiffly, waiting to be dismissed.
“The Criterion Bar, Stamford. Instanter, Stamford!”
“Yes, sir.”
And off I went.
2. Excerpt from the Shikari Confessions
(written c. 1904, exact date unknown)
Moran, Sebastian, Colonel. Unemployed. Formerly 1st Bangalore Pioneers. Born London, 1840. Son of Sir Augustus Moran, C.B., once British Minister to Persia. Educated Eton and Oxford. Served in Jawaki
Campaign, Afghan Campaign, Charasiab (despatches), Sherpur, and Cabul.2 Author of Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas (1881), Three Months in the Jungle (1884). Address: Conduit Street. Clubs: The Anglo-Indian, the Tankerville, the Bagatelle Card Club.
It was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow, without reading Nature’s plainest danger signals.
—“The Adventure of the Empty House”
I don’t mind being called a cold-blooded killer. The way I see it, the only way to kill anything—or anyone—is in cold blood. Going off in a passion is the surest method I know to scotch a good shot. And I have brought down every dangerous creature in the world, including Man.
I am a killer, and furthermore, I’m damned proud of it. The Empire was built by men like me, killers every one, the masters of the human race. It is the lion and not the gazelle that rules the jungle. Watson may call me a cold-blooded killer, or assassin, murderer, blackguard, criminal, rascal, rogue, traitor, whatever he likes, and I shall not blanch.
I do draw the line, however, at being called incompetent. And that is what Watson does when he puts it about that I cheated at cards. I do not cavil at playing foul when it is needful for victory, mind, but really.
His intention, I am certain, is to demonstrate that I have no honour. Well, I don’t give a damn about honour—honour is for fools—there never was a panther or crocodile worried about his honour—and Watson doesn’t give a damn about his own precious honour when he tells such outrageous lies, knowing he does so with complete impunity.
The only reason a man cheats at cards is because he is too incompetent to win by skill. I never have needed to cheat—I have always been the best at every endeavour I have engaged, crime included, and to win by cheating at cards is like shooting a caged animal, cowardly and pointless. Even Watson would never accuse me of being a poltroon.
He does, however, accuse me of killing Ronald Adair. I am also accused of attempting to assassinate his hero Shirley on two different occasions, once in Switzerland and again in London—replete with obvious insinuations of more incompetence, since I am supposed to have muffed it both times. I am supposed to have been the “chief of staff” to Professor Moriarty, whom Watson confuses with his brother the Colonel.3 These are also lies.
The professor was a clever chap, a valued colleague, and as cool and nasty a piece as you might wish for mischief, but never the man I would allow to lead me, who had after all led a regiment—why, the blighter couldn’t hunt, couldn’t shoot, and if he’d ever come face-to-face with a shrieking Ghazi, I rather doubt he could have stood his ground. The professor was more vulture than eagle. Not my idea of fun at all.
And then Watson goes so far as to reiterate the canard of my being only “the second most dangerous man in London,” words nicely calculated to belittle and insult. He claims they were written in Shirley’s own hand, but such a sneering dismissal of high faculty is not at all in the style of the antiseptic Shirley—the words are pure Watson.
Which is not to say I don’t appreciate the skill of the man. He lies so cleverly, just as he was taught back in the early ’70s, before M. sent him out to Afghanistan. To illustrate: I am also accused of having slain Mrs. Stewart in Lauder back in ’87, although “nothing can be proved”—and that much at least is true, because I didn’t do it, that particular murder being entirely on the professor. Which only goes to show that the skilled and experienced liar always adds a grain of truth to his falsehoods to give them the flavour of credence.
He makes a great case that Shirley and I were great enemies, and we were enemies, being on opposite sides of the fence, as it were, but Shirley was never my archnemesis, any more than was Lestrade or Gregson or anyone in the whole chuckleheaded crew. I think that because Watson was Shirley’s lieutenant, he decided there was a certain aesthetic symmetry in making me Moriarty’s lieutenant.
No, my great nemesis was John Hamish Watson, M.D., himself.
If you’re like the rest of the world, you probably think of Watson as being a somewhat dim and bluff fellow, every bit the hail-fellow-well-met sort of chap, which is exactly what he wants you to think. Men of carefully crafted character are always more than they seem, and I should know. You probably believe Watson’s claim that he served his time in Afghanistan physicking the troops, and that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when he got in the way of a jezail bullet. If you knew anything about the Great Game, you might well wonder otherwise.
Watson simply knows his Kipling:
A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
Watson was never wounded by a jezail. He was shot with an Adams Mark III.4 It was a hasty shot at a distance, uphill, from on horseback, and I undercompensated for elevation, striking him in the buttocks5 as he posted instead of through the heart, but it was a good shot nevertheless, because I hit him and knocked him off his horse.
Watson was a spy, you see, in Afghanistan on the express orders of the head of British Intelligence, the ubiquitous “M.”: Mr. Mycroft Holmes. And I was one of the men he was spying on. If you don’t see how that is possible, read on.
One of the problems consistently confronting the British government in Central Asia was that our agents were regularly disembowelled or dismembered by hostile natives almost as soon as they arrived. The Russians, of course, had the same problem. Every time some dashing young subaltern traded in his uniform for the costume of a Ghazi tribesman and traipsed off to do his duty for Queen and country, his head would wind up affixed to the top of a pike over the main gate of a Ghazi fort. The Russians addressed this problem by sending the most capable and ruthless officers in their army, giving as good as they got—but we, suffering from a glut of pious fair play, took another tack. It was postulated that if the natives had a self-interested reason for not decapitating visitors, then spies could operate with impunity.
And that is why, O my Best Beloved, British Intelligence decided to recruit medicos.
A doctor’s presence, you see, was of material benefit to the khans. A physician is worth more alive than he is dead. He could in some small measure alleviate many of the rampant diseases among the general populace, and should he show particular skill, he might even become a member of a warlord’s retinue and the khan’s confidant. People talk to their doctors, don’t you know.
And so it was with Watson. His particular patron was Ayoub Khan, the governor of Herat and son of the late Amir, Sher Ali Khan.
You may not recall all the intrigues that permeated the Second Afghan War, but suffice it to say that after Sher Ali’s death in ’79, we had contemplated installing young Ayoub on the throne. Watson advised against it, arguing instead that Ayoub’s cousin, Abdur Rahman Khan, was a more tractable candidate, and his advice carried the day. This development was particularly inimical to my own interest, Ayoub having paid me rather handsomely to promote his cause, and having furthermore promised me significant preferment in the opium trade should he prevail.
To make a long and complicated story short, I had to ensure that Ayub’s revolt against us prevailed for me to collect, and for that he needed a victory. I gave him one at Maiwand, by providing him detailed intelligence of Brigadier Burrows’6 advance from Candahar, thus giving Ayoub the advantage of choosing his terrain.
The one crack in Watson’s panoply of pious Christian decency is that he has always been something of a gallant. His gentlemanly demeanour and good figure have always abetted him in his relations with women, and Afghan women were just as susceptible to his charms as the most demure English lady. Now, doctors are not admitted to councils of war even in the courts of Oriental potentates, but one of the most favoured odalisques in Ayub’s seraglio, absent other male companionship but eunuchs and Ayoub himself, had taken a shine to him. Like many stupid men, Ayoub was indiscreet in his pillow talk, and spilled his sorrows to her between their carnal skirmishes. All women are inveterate gossips, and none more so than courtesans in a hareem, and as a consequence, Watson knew every particular of every event that occurred in the palace. When she told him of Ayoub’s intended advance upon Maiwand, he knew that without foreknowledge of it, Burrows would be ambushed and his force likely destroyed. To worsen matters, he could hardly have mistaken Ayoub’s description of me to the trollop. He subsequently stole a horse from the stables and made off post-haste to warn Burrows. I had no choice but to go after him.
It was upon this occasion, after tracking him for hours, that I unseated him with the Adams as he rode. The shot was made at a distance with a revolver, and I was pleased with it, but I did not have the luxury of tracking him on the ground and finishing him off as I would normally have done, because it was critical that I should return to the army. That meant a hard and fast ride, time being of the essence.
Watson should have been done for. I thought he was done for, a wounded British spy alone in the Afghan wild, but an infernal luck was with him. Wounded and unhorsed, he nevertheless managed to reach Burrows’ political officer, Colonel St. John, in the very nick, for by that time Ayoub had already marched.
As all the world knows, in Maiwand Ayoub prevailed. Battle is a strange thing. There was a native shepherdess, Malalai, who removed her veil and sang to the Ghazis, exhorting them to victory, but who was soon cut down. This incident gave the native boys something to fight for, insane as that sounds. I cannot understand why anyone with any brains at all would risk life and limb for a mere woman, especially a dead one, but there it is. Had she not inspired Ayoub’s soldiers, the battle would have gone very differently, but once the Pathans had fire in their bellies, it was all but over. It was only through the indolence of Ayoub’s field officers, Burrows being an utter incompetent, that he was not wiped from the face of the earth.
Notwithstanding, Watson survived his wound in the arse and voiced his suspicions regarding my conduct, which he could not prove, since his only evidence was the word of a native concubine. It came down to the unsubstantiated claim of a jejune spy, a man well known to be immersed in deceit and double-cross, against the word of a seasoned regimental colonel, whose fidelity and courage had been lauded in despatches, and that alone saved me. Nevertheless, Watson’s doubts were sufficient to arouse some mistrust of me, putting me under such intense surveillance that any further succour to Ayoub Khan would have resulted in a firing squad. I came to harbour the strongest feelings of umbrage toward Watson for the injuries he had done me: The sanctimonious little prig had denied me a lifetime of riches, and put paid to my army career.
There was nothing to be done but decamp. I subsequently withdrew from the theatre, resigning my commission on the pretext of having had my honour impugned, and returned to England after obliterating all spoor of my adventures, to prevent Watson from making his case. In the sequel, although Ayoub Khan belatedly pressed his advantage and forced Burrows back, without my further assistance he was lost, and at the siege of Candahar, Bobs7 gave him a proper thrashing, ending the war.
Watson, however, was not to be deterred. Having shown his hand, he was now useless as an agent in Afghanistan, and he followed me back to England, obsessed with the idea of exposing my treason and bringing me to justice. The effort reduced him to near poverty, and there was still no proof, so M. pulled short on his terrier’s leash, once again freeing me to my own devices. I suppose I should have killed him then, but he was soon thereafter installed in Baker Street, and the risk of retribution was too great. Very well—being cold-blooded, I could wait for my revenge, for years if need be.
And that was our history.
Until I got involved with that Honourable idiot, Ronald Adair. . . .
1 Watson states that he was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, July 24, 1880.
2 Campaigns of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880).Thus Watson and Moran served in Afghanistan at the same time.
3 In "The Final Problem," Watson mentions "the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother." In "The Adventure of the Empty House," he apparently conflates the colonel with the professor, as Holmes is reported to have said to him, "If I remember right, you had not heard the name of Professor James Moriarty." This confusion is explained if Moran's claim that Watson's account is a prevarication is true, and the use of the wrong name was due to negligence in constructing the "cover" story. (Cf. note 5 where a similar inconsistency is explained.)
4 The London Armoury Company (colloquially known as "Adams," after its founder, Robert Adams) Army Mark III double-action .450 caliber revolver was the official British officer's sidearm from 1872 to 1880.
5 Moran's claim of shootng Watson in such an undignified part of his anatomy may resolve the well-known discrepancies regarding its location as reported by Watson himself, who variously claimed it as having been in his shoulder, his leg, or "in one of my limbs." Such remarks may well have been extemporized equivocations intended to avoid indelicacy.
6 Brigadier General George Reynolds Scott Burrows (1827-1917)
7 Field Marshal (then Major-General) Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts (1832-1914).
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