Death in the Air Read online

  To Andrew, Mark, and Stephen,

  The Flying Peacocks,

  accomplished men and brothers in every way.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, thanks go to the great team at Tundra Books, especially to publisher Kathy Lowinger and editor Kathryn Cole; and to Jennifer Lum, who designs these wonderful Sherlock books, and Derek Mah who draws the beautiful covers. I’d also like to thank the circus history experts who, over the years, have taught me so much about that spectacular performing art, especially the late Dr. John Turner, of Formby, England, friend and saw-dust-ring aficionado extraordinaire. And finally, thanks to my troupe at home: my wife, journalist and editor, Sophie Kneisel, an irreplaceable ally; and Johanna, Hadley, and Sam, children of all ages, whom I hope stay that way.

  CONTENTS

  MAP OF LONDON

  PREFACE

  1 HOLMES RISING

  2 THE STRANGE MAN IN THE LABORATORY

  3 MALEFACTOR REVISITED

  4 THE FLYING BOY

  5 THE KINGS OF THE ALHAMBRA

  6 TERROR AT THE PALACE

  7 UP IN THE AIR

  8 A SWALLOW’S LIFE

  9 A CONFESSION

  10 THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION

  11 THE ART OF AERIAL OBSERVATION

  12 HOW IT WAS DONE

  13 I KNOW SOMEONE WHO KNOWS SOMEONE

  14 A DANGEROUS TRAIL

  15 SUSPECTING MALEFACTOR

  16 BELL’S SOLUTION

  17 THE ROTHERHITHE DEN

  18 IN WITH THE RATS

  19 THE SCIENCE OF DESPERATION

  20 WHERE CREDIT IS ALWAYS DUE

  21 AWAKENING

  PREFACE

  Sherlock Holmes was doing something he shouldn’t be doing. The police had asked spectators to stand back from the action in the amphitheater, but the boy couldn’t resist getting a better view. Devilment had been in him from the day he was born. He sneaked out from the tightly packed crowd, slipping past the Bobbies, treading quietly on the planked floor. Everyone was looking up. He moved into the open space, his eyes riveted on the human beings in flight.

  PART ONE

  THE MERCURE INCIDENT

  “So swift, silent and furtive were his movements like those of

  a trained bloodhound picking out a scent, that I could not

  but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had

  he turned his energy and sagacity against the law instead of

  exerting them in its defense. ”

  – Dr. Watson in The Sign of the Four

  HOLMES RISING

  What is it like to see a man die right before your eyes? Sherlock Holmes is about to find out. High above, framed by the curving glass sky of the Crystal Palace, a man is plummeting toward him, screaming. The man had started out as a much smaller figure, gracefully flying through the air, moving to the sounds of a brass band, no new-fangled safety net below. But suddenly he was falling, and now he is growing huge. His mouth is open, his eyes wide, and Sherlock feels as though he can look right into him. Monsieur Mercure, the trapeze star, is about to lose his life. A one-hundred-foot fall onto the hard, wood floor of the Palace will finish him in an ugly way. It will happen in the blink of an eye; his bones will crack, his body deform. The band has stopped playing. Only the scream cuts the silence. For an instant, Sherlock wonders if Mercure will land on top of him, but the unfortunate aerialist strikes the unforgiving surface with a sickening thud, a body length away. The shrieks of women and shouts of men punctuate the air as the performer crumples and rolls up to the tall, thin boy’s third-hand Wellington shoes.

  A crush of Palace patrons rushes to the spot. Sherlock does something strange. He doesn’t cry out or faint or even kneel to take the man’s battered head in his hands. He acts in the way he has been training himself to function for the last month. This is an opportunity, almost dropped upon him from the heavens, as if he were the hero in a sensation novel. He remains calm, observing everything in an instant. Then he reaches down, picks up the trapeze bar that has landed nearby, and examines it. There is something amiss about it and he sees it in a glance. As he does, he notices the man’s lips moving beneath his dashing red imperial mustache and goatee. Leaning over, the boy brings his ear up close: “Silence … me,” the man gasps and then lies still, splayed in a gruesome shape in his glittering purple costume and white silk tights. Sherlock sets the bar down and stands back.

  “Make way!” shouts an advancing blue-uniformed Bobbie, as he un-holsters his black truncheon, threatening to swing it. “Clear off!” He plows a line, pushing people back, trying to get to the accident victim.

  “Oh my Lord!” cries a woman in a green-striped silk dress, before she swoons at the sight of blood oozing from Mercure’s ears, and is nearly trampled. The flowers fall from her hair.

  “He’s dead!” shouts a man in a top hat. “Who is that boy?”

  Sherlock’s hands are shaking so badly that he puts them in his threadbare pockets. He sweeps the scene again, observing the twisted, fallen man as closely as possible, the other three circus stars staring down from their perches in horror, and the trapeze ropes dangling from the ceiling. But the crowd is quickly blocking his view. He backs away, retreating through the mass.

  He is bumped and jostled, and in seconds is at the rear of the horrified swarm. He turns and walks past excited stragglers racing to the scene, their footfalls echoing in the grand performance area under the cathedral ceiling in the central transept. Before long he is at the front doors, then down the big, white-stone steps and onto the giant, fountain-filled lawn on the Palace grounds. A hot sun is still high in the sky.

  He pulls those quivering, long, fingers out of his pockets, holds them against his temples, and closes his eyes. He sees the peculiar marks on the wooden trapeze bar again, and hears the man’s last words. But there’s something else: though Monsieur Mercure had gone as stone-cold unconscious as a corpse and the top of his skull looked broken in, this daring man, known to the world as Le Coq, was still breathing.

  Sherlock hadn’t been looking for such a scene. He had come to the Crystal Palace that day to see his father. But there had been a surprise. His friend, Irene Doyle, was there too, waiting to speak with him. It’s been a month and a half since Sherlock last saw her: on the night he shoved her aside as she climbed the rickety, wooden stairs to the Holmes’ little flat over the hatter’s shop in grimy Southwark south of the River Thames in London. It was the day his mother died. He had just held her in his arms and observed the poison on her lips. Moments later he had raced over London Bridge and into the East End where he’d stolen a butcher’s knife and flown to a Mayfair mansion to slay her killer, the man responsible for the unsolvable Whitechapel murder. Somehow, he’d held himself back from doing evil; instead, he had seized evidence of the man’s guilt and given it to the police. But they, and especially Inspector Lestrade, had taken all the credit for themselves.

  The last six weeks have seemed like years. Sherlock has grown much older. He stands up straight when he walks. There is little emotion on his face. His eyes are rarely cast down. He knows who he is and what he will be. His second case stands before him.

  It is the first of July 1867, and this London summer is boiling hot.

  In mid-May he had been a broken, weeping thirteen-year-old boy, lying in a rain-soaked alley inside a dark city rookery called The Seven Dials. When his mother had died he had momentarily convinced himself that he could go on. But then he had collapsed. For three days, he had been without food or drink, getting little sleep, immobile on hard cobblestones, smelling the overflowing sewers and the rotting offal around him.

  But on the fourth day he had risen.

  With her dying breath, Rose Holmes had told him that he had muc
h to do in life. He knew she was right. It had taken those three days to truly believe her.

  There was a reason to go on living and he started at that moment. He had the brains, the street connections, and the desire to help bring justice to the world around him. If he began immediately, worked every day without pause, he might, by the time he was an adult, be rebuilt into a crime-solving machine. He would be a new sort of London detective, the scourge of every villain: not just to the one who had taken Rose’s life and swung from a rope outside Newgate Prison last week, his neck snapped solely due to evidence Sherlock’s own daring had produced. The boy’s involvement in the Whitechapel murder had drawn his mother into the killer’s lair and the evil inside the villain’s heart had slain her. He would never forgive or forget.

  But several times over the last month he has broken down and descended into black depressions. He misses his mother terribly and wishes he had his father back. How can he, half-breed, poverty-stricken Sherlock Holmes, aspire to the heights he harbors in his mind? Involving himself in this trapeze incident would be a mistake, just as sticking his big nose into the Whitechapel case had been. Some day he will be capable of such endeavors, but it doesn’t make sense now – it is far too dangerous. He had better just tell the police what he knows, let them take the credit if they must.

  And yet … an opportunity is before him.

  He thinks of his mother again. He made her an unbreakable vow.

  THE STRANGE MAN IN THE LABORATORY

  Old Sigerson Bell isn’t really waiting for Sherlock. At least he’d never admit it. But he’s grown fond of the boy. He has given him the afternoon off and misses him terribly. He polishes his three statues of Hermes, fusses with his two gaslights, pulls his pocket watch out of his worn silk smoking jacket, and glances toward his door. It has been a month since the lad first rapped the knocker against his big, wooden entrance in the night, smelling even worse than the miasmatic London air. He was soaking wet from the pouring rain of a crashing thunderstorm and was dressed in the most tattered frock coat, waistcoat, and necktie Bell had ever seen – all arranged as neatly as the boy could manage. Had it not been so pitiable, it would have made one smile. Sherlock’s gray eyes were intense below his black hair, and his hawk-like nose almost seemed to sniff the aging apothecary and his dwelling, looking for answers. In his hands was a drenched piece of paper: the old man’s notice, which had fallen off the outside of the arched, shop door in the violent downpour.

  It had taken Bell some time to respond to the knock, and when he arrived he didn’t unbolt the door, but simply drew back its sliding peep-hole with a snap.

  “Speak!” he demanded.

  “It says on this notice that you are looking for an apprentice?”

  Only the old man’s big, bulb-tipped nose was visible through the opening. The lad’s eyes were almost even with his.

  “No, it does not.” The peep-hole slammed shut again.

  The boy kept pounding. Bell finally returned in a huff

  “If you don’t clear off, I’ll …”

  “I need this position, sir.”

  The old man examined the intruder this time, noticed his teeth chattering and saw him wipe the rain from his prominent brow. His words were enunciated clearly, like someone of breeding, and there was a remarkable earnestness in his voice. And yet, he was dressed in such rags.

  “If you observe closely, reading from top to bottom and left to right, as one does in the western hemisphere, you shall see that I require a ‘partner/investor’ foremost, then, in small print at the bottom of the page, an ‘apprentice,’ the position to which you refer. One is contingent upon acquiring the other. Good day.”

  “I shall work for free!” barked Sherlock.

  The peep-hole had stopped in mid-slam.

  Sigerson Trismegistus Bell smiles in recollection. He doesn’t really need an apprentice. He is too aged for that. The number of patients he sees is dwindling. He mostly gives advice now to the few who will have him. He’s always had what others consider crazy ideas about health anyway: that colds and influenza, typhoid and tuberculosis, do not come from bad air, but from things like microscopic bugs – germs and bacteria, carried in London’s putrid river water and in the human body. He has known that for many years, but others don’t believe him – even now, when men like the Frenchman Pasteur and the queen’s physician, John Snow, are writing about it.

  Along with his advice, Bell dispenses medicines to his patients: herbs, tonics, carbolic acid mixtures for infections, pinches of arsenic and other alloys of poisons and chemicals. But he’s more than a medical man. He’s a scientist, an alchemist: a wizard in search of magical solutions and gold. As he grows older, he seems to grow stranger.

  He lives in the middle of foggy, dun-colored central London, on Denmark Street near where the rookeries of St. Giles and The Seven Dials meet Charing Cross Road and lead to seedy Soho. This little cobblestone artery is so narrow that its old, three-storey buildings block out the sun at street level, making it dark and frightening. There are gangs in the neighborhood and the old man must look out for himself.

  He is remarkable to behold. Stooped, his body is arched like the top of a question mark; his white hair and goatee long and stringy, his violet eyes active, glasses on the tip of his always-perspiring nose, and a square red fez on his big head. His high-pitched voice is often hoarse from talking, usually to himself. “What is wrong with enjoying a chat with an intelligent person?” he likes to ask with a twinkle.

  But his smelly shop, his livelihood, is in greater disarray than it appears. His advertisement still hasn’t drawn the partner he desperately requires. He knew his chances were slim when he first posted it. There’d be criminals looking to get inside his place or sons of working-class men with rough educations and dreams of medical careers, who would sneak with trepidation into his neck of London, take one glance at him and his laboratory, the human skeletons hanging about, the fresh organs in jars he’d purchased from unregulated gravediggers … and run.

  The boy’s presence is some consolation. Almost the minute he came dripping into the shop, he began to fascinate the old man: skeletal, from the streets, but possessing a brain that sparkles and a reluctant tongue that, once employed, can say marvelous things. He is a boy full of mystery, with a great sadness in his soul, but resolution in his voice, who can stay right with the apothecary, no matter the weight of the subjects he broaches. Every time Bell speaks of his scientific discoveries, Sherlock Holmes listens as if he were a tracking hound.

  “Eureka!” the alchemist had screamed at the top of his lungs a few weeks ago, dropping a test tube deep into the mess of a cadaver’s guts. “I have isolated a characteristic in the blood of this corpse! Do you know what this means?”

  It had been a rhetorical question – Bell had forgotten that he was no longer alone in the shop.

  “Yes, I do,” said a fascinated voice right behind him.

  Bell had started so badly that he knocked the body off the table, depositing it and various organs on the floor: the pancreas went splat near his boot, the gall bladder wobbled away. The boy was not only in the room, but peering over the scientist’s shoulder.

  “Some day we will be able to identify individuals by blood types,” said Sherlock.

  Bell smiles again. He recalls how just a few days after that, he had held forth on his belief that he could diagnose diseases just by looking at patients, that he could tell almost anything about others by simply observing them. The lad had sat up like a Jack Russell terrier and taken a deep interest, almost as if he were being told something that he too deeply believed.

  If the boy, thinks the apothecary, will continue to work for just room and board, and remains willing to be about the shop when I am out, and brave enough to keep the street Arabs from breaking in and stealing my chemicals, I shall keep him … for now.

  It is nice to have someone to make his tea, fix his dinner, and talk. He has few friends. When he was younger that hadn’t mattered m
uch.

  That sad thought turns his mind toward his teetering financial situation, but he sends it flying with a wave of his hands. “Out with you!” he cries. Sigerson Bell never speaks of such evils, even to himself. He seems, to everyone, including Sherlock Holmes, a jovial man. If truth be told, good humor comes naturally to him. One might say that optimism, hand in hand with alchemy, is almost his religion.

  The night Sherlock arrived, Bell removed some dusty clothes from a big wardrobe in his laboratory and fixed a cot for the lad in there. He even paid him once – two dirty shillings from the shop’s near-empty iron strongbox – and became, in the face of his rapidly oncoming demise, truly happier than he had been in months.

  The boy who has brightened his life isn’t anywhere near the dwelling in Denmark Street yet. He has other things on his mind. Sherlock is walking five miles back into central London from the Crystal Palace and taking his time, thinking about what he has just observed there, amidst the screams and chaos. It seems incredible.

  Monsieur Mercure will surely die. And the boy knows something that no one else knows. It was murder.

  The smells of sweltering south London, industrial smoke and chemicals and wastes mixing with the refuse of the city’s thousands of horses and its coal and gas, begin to fill his nostrils. The numbers of people have increased as he’s made his way out of the country into the suburbs and now onto the busy foot pavements at the round “circus” roadway of Elephant and Castle. Red omnibuses appear on the circle, plastered with advertisements, brimming with Londoners. The streets are brown, the gentlemen’s clothing black, the thick air yellow, and everything is punctuated with the color of blood: red bricks, ladies’ bonnets, pillar boxes, and shop canopies. Soon the street vendors will be everywhere, their inventive cries cutting through the rumble of iron-wheeled carriages. The poor will grow in numbers too, the beggars will even beg from him. The injustices of London are about to surround him again.