‘As you wish, Herr Gerber. You’re the one with the burning desire to talk, so what is it that you wish to say?’
‘I have wondered about this for many years, Lady Hardcastle. When you killed my brother, I wondered what I should say. You killed a part of me and I wanted to kill you, too. You do not have a twin, so you cannot know. But you took my life as surely as you took his. And then the Chinese rebels captured me. Took my freedom as you had taken half my life. I spent nine years in a Chinese gaol. Abandoned by my own government and left to rot. Nine years alone to contemplate just one thing: revenge.’
‘Oh, so you’re completely mad, then?’
‘Have a care, Lady Hardcastle. Remember who has the gun.’
‘Oh, I remember. I remember that your brother had a gun, too. I remember that he used it to kill my husband.’
‘It was our job to kill enemy spies.’
‘Roderick was no spy.’
‘No, that was the mistake of our masters in Berlin. They learned afterwards that you were the spy. But now I have the chance to put everything right. I can complete the job that Jakob and I were given, I can avenge my brother’s death and the theft of nine years of my own life. Two bullets, to give so much satisfaction.’
‘Two bullets? Whatever happened to the famous German efficiency?’
‘One each, Lady Hardcastle. Of course I have to kill you both. You left me alive to seek revenge for the murder of my brother, you do not think that I should be foolish enough to leave someone behind to avenge you.’
‘If you put it like that, it does make sense,’ she said, casually.
‘With you both dead, I shall retire to my family’s home in the Tyrollean mountains, and I do not intend to spend the rest of my days looking over my shoulder. It will be nice there. I dreamed for many years of seeing the sky.’ He seemed momentarily to drift off into a world of his own.
It is at this point that I should reveal a fresh deception of my own. The trap in The Adventure of the Empty House was just the starting point for Lady Hardcastle’s plan and I have glossed over my activities earlier in the day, entirely failing to reveal just exactly what I was up to. I thought it would help to convey Gerber’s sense of frustrated bewilderment at the immediately ensuing events if you, too, were in the dark and believed (with some irritation, I shouldn’t wonder) that she had simply reused Holmes’s plan in its published form.
As far as Gerber was aware, I was standing in the drawing room beside my mistress. And I have deceitfully written this narrative to make it appear so to you, too. But that is not precisely what happened. The first of my tasks that day had been to travel to the other side of London to visit the Royal Artillery barracks at Woolwich where Staff Sergeant Daffidd Evans was stationed with his wife, Gwenith. It had been my job to enlist the help of my sister in our risky undertaking.
And so it turned out that the woman standing in the middle of the drawing room with her arms raised, dressed in a maid’s uniform, was not me at all, but Gwenith, my dear twin sister. We thought it would add an extra dimension to the Sherlock Holmes trap and give us a safeguard against Gerber seeing through the clumsy ruse. I would also, we thought, add a pleasing symmetry to the whole twin-filled affair.
While Gwenith had been “me” in the drawing room, I had been in the kitchen, and as Gerber drifted off into his Tyrollean daydream, assuring Lady Hardcastle that he had no intention of spending his remaining days looking over his shoulder, I was tiptoeing up behind him in stockinged feet, hoping with all my heart that he had started as he meant to go on and didn’t plan to look over his shoulder now.
What a foolish and empty thing it is to hope. As I positioned myself to strike, something, some movement of mine, perhaps, some tiny sound I made, caused Gerber to turn his head. He spotted me.
Things weren’t going at all the way I’d imagined them, but I did notice that some good had come of it all. As he turned his head in surprise at my approach, his body turned as well, shifting his aim away from Gwenith and Lady Hardcastle. While the clockwork in his brain was still whirring, I struck out at his gun hand, knocking the pistol from his grasp and sending it skittering across the floor. I should have been growing used to it, but I can’t deny that I was beginning to get more than a little fed up with people pointing guns at me.
I shifted my weight slightly, readying myself for another blow but was forced instead to block a terrifyingly fast counterattack from the white-haired German.
‘I wasn’t entirely idle during my nine years in China,’ he said, aiming a shatteringly painful kick at my knee. ‘My captors encouraged me to keep active and learn some new skills.’ I managed to partially deflect a blow to my face but he still caught the side of my head and left my ears ringing.
He easily caught my next two strikes and was positioning himself for another attack when both our attentions were caught by an oddly quiet and polite cough from the drawing room.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt while you seem to be having so much fun,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But I thought I ought to point out that I now have this rather handsome pistol.’ She waggled the gun which was now aimed steadily at Gerber. ‘A Luger, isn’t it? It’s rather striking, don’t you think? Very modern looking.’
Rather unexpectedly, Gerber placidly raised his hands in surrender and allowed me to limp past him into the drawing room.
Gwenith helped me to the sofa where I gratefully sat down. It had been a while since I’d been bested in a fair fight and my knee was going to be reminding me of my near defeat for quite a while.
‘Right then, Herr Gerber,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Now that I have the gun, perhaps we can get things back on track. Would you be good enough to lie on your front with your hands behind your back, please?’
He meekly complied, the hint of a smirk on his scarred face.
‘And Gwenith, dear, if you would be a poppet and secure his wrists with the cord as I showed you, that would be grand.’
Gwenith took a length of cord from the bookcase and went over to the supine Gerber. There was a knock, and a voice called through the still-open front door.
‘I say, is there anyone at home?’ It was Sir David Alderman.
‘In here, Sir David,’ called Lady Hardcastle. ‘Thank goodness you’ve arrived. I find myself a little short-handed what with… Oh, I say, how dismaying.’
Sir David stood in the drawing room doorway with a revolver levelled at Lady Hardcastle.
‘Get up, Gerber, you idiot,’ he said. ‘I should have known you’d botch this.’
Gerber stood.
‘Give him his gun back, Lady Hardcastle, there’s a good girl.’
Lady Hardcastle handed the pistol back to Gerber who moved to stand beside Sir David, covering Gwenith with it as she moved to sit beside me on the sofa.