The desert had a way of making a man feel observed. Sherlock Holmes noted this the moment he stepped from the frigate onto the scorched landing field of Arrakeen, his coat utterly wrong for the heat, his eyes utterly right for everything else.
"You will find the air thin and the politics thinner," said Thufir Hawat, the Mentat who had met him. "Duke Leto does not summon outworlders lightly."
"He summoned me because someone died in a room no one could enter," Holmes replied. "And because your own considerable talents, Master of Assassins, have reached an impasse. That troubles you more than the death itself."
Hawat's lips thinned. "You read that from a glance."
"From your boots. You have walked the same corridor a hundred times in two days. The dust pattern tells me so."
They descended into the Residency, where Duke Leto Atreides waited with the bearing of a man balancing a blade on his palm. Beside him stood the Lady Jessica, whose stillness Holmes catalogued at once as the discipline of a Bene Gesserit, and the boy Paul, whose pale eyes missed nothing — a kindred quality Holmes marked with private interest.
"The dead man is Lieutenant Veyne," Leto said. "Loyal twenty years. Found in his quarters, door sealed from within, the only window too small for a child. Poisoned. No vessel, no residue in his food. My physician calls it impossible."
"Physicians," Holmes said, "are forever mistaking the unfamiliar for the impossible. Show me the room."
Veyne's quarters were spare and soldierly. Holmes circled the body where it had been left under stasis, his long fingers hovering but never touching. He knelt at the dead man's hand.
"He died mid-word," Holmes murmured. "The right forefinger is stained — not blood. Spice, the melange your economy floats upon. But heavier than the ambient dust. He had been handling concentrated spice within the hour." He bent closer to the lips, sniffed, and recoiled with a flicker of grim satisfaction. "There. Beneath the cinnamon. A bitterness. The poison was inhaled, not eaten."
Paul leaned in. "The air recycler."
Holmes turned, genuinely pleased. "The boy sees. Yes. A sealed room is only sealed to bodies, not to breath. Every chamber in this fortress drinks from the same lungs." He crossed to the recycler vent and pried the grille loose. Within lay a small ceramic capsule, cracked and empty. "Triggered by heat. Spice-warmth from his own brazier, very likely. The murderer needed only to place this hours, even days, before. He was nowhere near when Veyne died. That is your impossibility, Hawat. Mundane as a milkmaid's churn."
The Mentat's eyes went distant, computing. "The capsule is Harkonnen design."
"Is it?" Holmes held it to the light. "It is meant to look so. Observe the seam — machined, but with a left-handed twist to the threading. Harkonnen industry standardizes right. This was made by someone who wished you to leap, as you have just leapt, toward your ancient enemy." He pocketed the capsule. "Someone among you."
A silence fell that had weight, like the heat.
"Why Veyne?" Leto asked quietly. "He commanded no fleet. He knew no great secret."
"That," said Holmes, "is the only interesting question in the room. Men are murdered for what they know or what they are. Tell me, Duke — what had Lieutenant Veyne done in his last week?"
Hawat answered. "Inventory. The spice harvest ledgers. Routine."
Holmes's eyes brightened to a cold gleam. "Routine. The most dangerous word in any language. I should like to see these ledgers."
They were brought to a study, and Holmes spread them beneath a glow-globe, tracing columns with a velocity that made even Hawat the Mentat watch with reluctant admiration. An hour passed. Jessica sent the boy to rest; the boy did not go.
"Here," Holmes said at last, tapping a line. "Three harvests logged from sector twelve. But the carryall fuel records — which Veyne would not have thought to cross — show only two flights. A phantom harvest. Spice declared, taxed to the Emperor at a loss, yet never lifted from the sand. Someone is skimming the desert and hiding it inside your honest accounts, Duke. Veyne found the seam, just as I found the seam in that capsule. Numbers do not lie, but liars use numbers."
"Then I want a name," Leto said.
"You shall have him within the hour. The thief had access to the ledgers, to the recycler maintenance roster, and to Harkonnen-pattern materials, however imperfect. He is left-handed. And he stood close enough to Veyne's brazier this morning to carry its scent." Holmes turned slowly. "Master Hawat — when we entered, you brushed dust from your left cuff with your left hand. A right-handed man does not do so. And your boots, which told me of your hundred passages, also told me you alone have walked freely past Veyne's door without question."
The room went taut as a bowstring. Hawat's hand did not move toward a weapon; that was the tell.
"You accuse the Duke's own Mentat," Hawat said.
"I accuse no one yet. I observe that you have not denied being left-handed, nor having stood by the brazier. A guilty man protests the small facts. An innocent one, or a clever one, lets them pass." Holmes stepped nearer. "But it was not you. You are too fine an instrument to leave a left-handed thread, too proud to copy a Harkonnen seal badly. No. The thief wished us to find a left-handed man of access who reeked of spice and brushed his cuff. He wished us to find you, Hawat, because the Duke would never believe it, and the very investigation would fracture this House from within. That fracture is the true crime. The skimmed spice is merely how the traitor funds his masters."
Leto's voice was low. "Who, then?"
Holmes drew the empty capsule and set it spinning on the table. "Your physician. The man who pronounced the death impossible. He examined the body first; he alone could have removed any inconvenient vessel and left only the convenient capsule for us to discover. He handled the spice — I saw the faint stain on his cuff when we met. And a doctor's hands are trained to either side. Summon Doctor Yueh, Duke, and watch what his face does when he sees this capsule he believed destroyed."
When the Suk doctor was brought, his composure held for precisely the span Holmes had predicted — until his eyes found the spinning ceramic. Then the diamond tattoo on his brow seemed to darken with the blood that drained beneath it, and his careful stillness cracked like the capsule itself.
"It was not for spice," Yueh whispered, before any question came. "You cannot understand what they hold over me—" and he said no more, but the saying was enough.
Later, on the high balcony, Paul stood beside the detective as the first moon rose over the dunes.
"You frightened my father's Mentat to flush the real prey," the boy said. "You knew it was Yueh before you accused Hawat."
"I suspected. Suspicion is a hypothesis; I do not love it as men love certainties." Holmes regarded him. "You will be a difficult man to deceive, young Atreides. You watch as I watch."
"I see what is," Paul said. "Sometimes I see what will be."
Holmes lit no pipe — the air was too precious here even for that small ritual — but his eyes found the dark horizon where something vast moved beneath the sand.
"Then we are nearly the same creature," he murmured, "save that I confine myself to the past. The future, I find, has too many footprints and not nearly enough mud."