Eye of the Crow tbsh-1 Read online

  She tries to lift her head and force a smile. It looks terribly painful.

  “Don’t move,” he says.

  “I’m all right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For doing this to you.”

  “You? The murderer did this, not you. And we’re going to catch him.”

  The words on the chart above her bed read: “mild brain trauma, bruised right cheekbone, fractured left humerus, fractured left metacarpal, cracked 3rd right rib.” Sherlock swallows.

  Irene isn’t going to catch the villain. She isn’t going to have anything to do with him. Not now. Not ever.

  He stands above her, not listening as she speaks. She is planning what they should do next, what he might investigate while she recovers.

  “My father thinks it was an accident.”

  Staring down at Irene’s battered face, he feels tears welling in his eyes.

  He interrupts her.

  “I think I should go.”

  “Pardon me?” she asks, taken aback, trying to turn her head to see him better.

  “I should go. I’m sorry for this. This will never happen again. Ever.”

  “Sherlock? … What are you …?”

  But he is gone out the door. The tears are flowing now, rolling down his cheeks. He grinds at his face to wipe them away, rubbing his smelly coat sleeve into his skin until it turns red.

  He has brought Irene into a desperate world, one of murder and hatred and greed. It was wrong. Malefactor was right. It isn’t a place for her. It is for people like the killer, the Irregulars … and Sherlock Holmes.

  I hope I never see her again, he tells himself as he hurries down the stairs. He stops at the little door where he entered and straightens up, willing his sadness away and replacing it with anger. If he has to reject the only friend he’s ever had, the only one he will ever have … that is what he will do! Cold, hard reason will be his guide from this moment forward.

  Sherlock flings the door open.

  Ten strides later he is lying on the cobblestones in the big square in front of the Smithfield Market. Someone has seized him in a wrestler’s death grip, both rough fists under his chin, a face within an inch of his.

  Malefactor.

  He has grabbed Sherlock as if he wants to murder him.

  “I knew you’d come here, Jew-boy! I’m warning you. Leave her alone, and leave all this alone! You’ve done enough damage. You don’t know this world. You’ll kill more with your meddling. Whoever attacked Miss Doyle will know that you speak to us! Go back to the hole you crawled out of and stay there!”

  He lifts Sherlock and rushes him into an alley, out of the view of passersby There he throws him into a wooden rain barrel, bowling it over like a cricket wicket. Malefactor walks up and stands over the boy, taking off his hat and coat, and handing them and his walking stick to Crew.

  “I should have done this long ago,” he growls. “I shall teach you a lesson!” The Irregulars stand around them with grins on their faces, anxious for the beating to begin.

  “Kill ’im!” shouts Grimsby and it seems like it is going to happen.

  But Sherlock shocks them. He isn’t one tiny bit afraid now. Instead, his blood is boiling. Kill him? Not likely. Not anymore.

  Malefactor expects him to curl up into a ball, or if he actually fights back, to stand up and raise his fists.

  But Sherlock lashes out from the ground, swinging his long legs around like the blades in a field mower, spinning them powerfully, taking the older boy’s pins right out from under him. Malefactor lands in a heap, hard on the ground, a look of utter astonishment on his face. Then Sherlock is after him. He piles on and drives his fists into the criminal’s stomach, his face, his throat, between his legs. When fighting the devil, any way of fighting is just.

  But when the others pull him off, the strangest thing happens. Malefactor looks at him and laughs.

  “Why, Master Holmes, I do believe you have some spunk!” There is blood around his mouth.

  “If I had my way, you would get what you deserve!” Sherlock screams, unconcerned about who hears. “And everyone who ever hurt anybody in this world would get the same!” The Irregulars are struggling to hold him.

  “Ah, an idealist. Stamp out all evil worldwide? Utopia! A noble goal, Master Holmes.” His face turns angry. “For an idiot!”

  “I’ll catch the murderer! You’ll see!” spits Sherlock, still straining to get at him.

  “The Arab’s trial is in ten days, Holmes. Let him die. We live in an evil world. That is the way it is. I have made my peace with it. You should make yours. Justice is a fiction. Let this be!”

  “I know I can’t change the world … you fool! But I can change this!” rages Sherlock. “I will find the person who killed that woman and whoever hurt Irene. You can make a scurrilous wager on it, and win yourself some coins. That would make you happy. Money always does, doesn’t it, every pinch of it that you steal?”

  With that, he makes a sudden move and breaks free from the Irregulars. His strength, when summoned, surprises him. He takes two steps toward Malefactor, then stops … the crime boss’s tall hat is still in Crew’s hand. Sherlock kicks it from his grasp and sends it flying across the alley. Then he walks backwards toward the Smithfield Market eyeing his foe, not certain that the gang leader won’t attack him from behind.

  “This isn’t over!” shouts Malefactor as Holmes turns the corner and vanishes into the crowds. Sherlock has a strange feeling … that his opponent has a smile on his face.

  On his own on the street, his brain is on fire. He tries to calm himself, to think clearly and dispassionately, just as his father taught him. But it is difficult. He is absolutely enraged. He has lost his only friend. He has caused her immense pain. His hatred of the murderer is a seething cauldron inside him.

  He will live on the streets from this day on and do anything … anything… to solve this crime. He is going to enter Malefactor’s world. Whether it is a place he can survive in or not, he will go there. He will be like those people, do what they do. He will free himself and Mohammad Adalji.

  Sherlock will have to wait a few days to hear from his mother about Mayfair, but then he will go straight after his target. There will be no more caution. He won’t allow himself such weakness. He has just ten days.

  He slips into the shadows. He’ll have to steal to endure, sleep in alleys, and avoid the police. But it will all be worth it.

  His mother will find something, he is sure. Then he will flush out this fiend! He is certain now that he has the courage to do it.

  THE WILD SIDE

  Two days later, Sherlock goes looking for his mother.

  She teaches wherever she is hired in London, and Mayfair girls are her most frequent students this time of year. The “fashionable season” is about to begin: the upper class is moving from their country estates into city homes for the summer. If the villain lives in Mayfair, he will be there now.

  Sherlock can’t speak to Rose near their home, so he sets out to find her elsewhere.

  He imagines what route she might take from Mayfair to Southwark. He knows she often leaves for home about the time he flees Trafalgar, about five o’clock, and guesses she will walk through the Square hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

  As the yellow fog grows thicker that day, he cases the narrow streets she might take, keeping his cap tugged down low and hiding among the flowing crowds. Almost as if on schedule, not long after Big Ben chimes 5:00, he sees her. She emerges magically out of the fog, a light in the brown mass of pedestrians. She is moving down the other side of a street in Soho, keeping under the shop canopies, not far from Lear the glassblower’s place, looking warily at people as she walks. She appears grayer and tired.

  He crosses the street behind her and pursues. Keeping inconspicuous, he dodges through the crowd until he catches up. Passing by, he gently bumps her and murmurs into her ear.

  “It’s me.”

  Sherlo
ck moves on, knowing she will follow.

  He leads her through the back streets and then into the alleyway behind the Haymarket Theatre. It’s a perfect place. When it seems they are alone, she takes him into her arms and doesn’t want to let go. “You are in such danger,” she whispers. He doesn’t always respond to her affections, but can’t help himself this time. He hugs her too, and waits.

  When she pushes him gently back and looks into his eyes, there are tears streaked on her cheeks and her lip is trembling. But he has to be dispassionate, to the point – he has to ask her now, because there is no time to waste.

  “Do you have news from Mayfair?”

  She can’t speak: just shakes her head.

  His heart sinks. But then he upbraids himself. He knows what he has to do.

  “I think I can solve this, mother,” he says, hoping he can convince her.

  “I pray you can, Sherlock, but …”

  “I can, praying or not.”

  “But how? You are just …”

  “I need you to be brave,” he says with feeling, emphasizing the last word.

  It takes her a while to realize what he means. For a moment she seems to hesitate, but then nods.

  “I’ll make direct inquiries.”

  Sherlock’s voice quavers as he responds. “Never to the gentleman of the house, never to his wife, his family, his footman … or his coachman especially. Be very careful …”

  “Direct inquires. I will find people to ask. That’s what I’ll do,” she insists in a strong voice, summoning her courage once more, the kind she’d had in the days when she defied her parents.

  They leave the alleyway separately, Rose trying to keep that steely resolve, Sherlock working hard to prevent his feelings of guilt from overwhelming him.

  “I’ll find you in four days,” are his last words to her. He tells her nothing about the attack on Irene.

  There is little more Sherlock can do while he waits. He has his hands full just avoiding all his pursuers: the police, and the villain and whoever might work for him. Steering clear of the first isn’t his most difficult challenge. At least he knows what the Bobbies and most detectives look like, and where they tend to be. But eluding the other threat gives him constant terror. He expects an attack at any moment. He keeps changing his appearance, trading coats and hats with other street people, frequenting different parts of the city. Each night he sleeps in a new alleyway – the second night he walks far out of the city and makes his bed in long grass next to a stone fence in a pasture. And all the while he thinks of his parents and prays they are safe … especially his mother.

  Mohammad Adalji has similar prayers. In his cell on Bow Street he thinks of his mother and father, who both went back to Egypt last year. They don’t even know he is in jail. At night when he dreams, it is of hot Cairo skies and the happy games he played with his friends. But he sleeps lightly and awakens at the slightest sound … clutching at his neck whenever a door slams. He knows it is inevitable now … his death is fast approaching. There’s one week left.

  Sherlock needs to keep himself fed. He must have better food than he can get from stealing little crusts of bread from the pigeons at Trafalgar. But he has to do it without making a scene. He has to be sly and invisible, use his magical skills of observation.

  The best place to perform his wizardry is at the Smithfield. The city is full of markets but this one has two advantages. It is well placed, close to where he wants to be, but not too close, and it is big and always massed with people.

  At first he survives on rotting food plucked after hours from near-empty carts. All the while he cases the market with attention to detail and resists doing more. The meat that is sold inside the new, glass-covered, brick building that stretches for several blocks, doesn’t interest him. What can he do with cuts of cow cheeks and ox hearts, or skinned rabbits hanging from hooks? His target is the busy outdoor market where shoppers move shoulder-to-shoulder in pursuit of deals. Food stalls line both sides of artificial avenues, fed by hordes of loaded barrows: two-wheeled carts filled with vegetables, fruit, and eggs. It is as if the food is waiting for Sherlock, laid out but guarded by barrow boys.

  Holmes examines the customers who frequent the market, observes the habits of the vendors, and watches anyone who might be watching him, observing like a hovering crow.

  Within two days he has picked out a menu of potential victims and then whittled it down to a few. His attention is trained on the servants of wealthy families (from whom he can steal without feeling guilty). He can tell the relative fortunes of their employees by their clothing and the softness of their hands – by their bearing. He soon observes that many have habits. Buyers like to muse over the items for sale, choose them and set them down in their baskets while they pay. Many place the food in front of them; others rest the produce on the pavement, wedging it between their feet and the stall, keeping it safe.

  But one woman does it differently. Sherlock picks her out and watches closely. He can tell she is new to this. She moves up and down the avenues past the stalls many times before she chooses her food. She has a certain self-satisfied look that few lowly servants given the job of buying food at a market assume. This is a higher-paid employee, perhaps the cook herself, selecting provisions for a few days, while a lesser servant is ill, or has been dismissed.

  The boy watches everything she does. For two consecutive days she picks out her food and sets her baskets down on the cobblestones in front of the stalls – off to her side, neither foot near it. Then she fumbles in her big pockets for her coins and takes a long time to complete the transaction. Sherlock checks the position of the sun to calculate the time she appears both days.

  He sees many other opportunities the third day, but waits for her. He notices a tall Bobbie strolling through the crowds. The boy will have to do this perfectly.

  She arrives, right on time. One particular stall has become her favorite. She struggles through the crowd toward it, peeved about being jostled, her head tilted slightly back, looking down her nose at others. Sherlock moves stealthily toward the same stall, following a different route. He has to time it right. He has to get there just as she is putting her goods into her baskets. The Bobbie appears to have headed the other way, though every now and then he looks back.

  The woman moves up to the stall. There: half a dozen apples, five or six big potatoes, a few fistfuls of carrots, some watercress, and a plump turnip. Into her two baskets they go. There: she sets them down … looks up.

  Sherlock checks the Bobbie … facing the other way. He swoops. Rushing in, bent over and out of the vendor’s sightline, he snatches both brimming baskets.

  But another hand, just as low to the ground, reaches out too! Sherlock’s heart almost stops. There is no turning back. He either gets away or everything is lost. He shoots into the thick masses like an arrow, rising up as he flies. No one shouts. No one seems to follow. Everything and everyone is swallowed up in the throngs. Glancing back, he glimpses a lad eyeing him while moving like lightning from the stall, but not pursuing. Sherlock remembers now that the hand had been smallish: dirty too, and tipped with mangled fingernails.

  He knows the rascal … one of the smallest Irregulars, the one Malefactor had cracked in the face with his stick. The boy had let Sherlock go, but not because he had any feelings for him. In this world of deceit and sleight-of-hand, victory is given without complaint to the swiftest and the cleverest of the streets. Malefactor will likely never even hear of it. The boy won’t want to upset his general, and losing a prize to Sherlock Holmes would most certainly cause the gang leader to internally combust.

  Sherlock has enough to last him a week, but that isn’t what pleases him most. He knows he has done things very well indeed – he identified and pursued the same victim as an Irregular … and beat a trained thief to the prize.

  His brain never stops humming. Sometimes he wishes he could pull a lever and turn it off, but it just keeps spinning. Walking the streets that week, or ev
en trying to go to sleep at night, he finds himself calculating and imagining. He wonders, for example, about blood.

  It must be true that everyone’s blood is different. And if so, shouldn’t there be some way of identifying strains of blood in a chemical laboratory? Not just blood types, but individual blood. Might humanity not make that discovery some day? Couldn’t samples of blood, like those splattered on the glass eyeball hidden in J.S. Mill’s dog kennel be examined, so that detectives could know to whom it belongs? That blood might not all be Lillie’s … perhaps some belongs to the villain.

  Crouching within his black, oily feathers at the side of the building in the alley near Whitechapel Road, Sherlock sees, in more detail now, the struggle below. Malefactor said there were two screams: a woman’s and a man’s … and the man ran from the scene, clutching his face. Sherlock sees Lillie’s mouth contort, hears her scream, sees her rake her attacker’s cheek in a dying thrash, plunge a finger into his eye – gauge it from its socket!

  There are times when Sherlock despises his own mind, cursed as it is with an imagination as vivid as Mr. Dickens’.

  He is ever-vigilant for the dark coachman, but grows more careless about the police, becoming bolder and more curious about their plans as he travels the streets alone. He wonders how aggressively they are pursuing him now. Before long, he is actually following Peelers, eaves dropping when two or more gather in a group, listening to their conversations.

  The day before he is supposed to see his mother, he goes too far.

  He decides to return to Trafalgar. It is particularly crowded there and he thinks he can take a chance. He expertly trails a Bobbie through the mass of people across the Square toward another constable, and sits down within earshot. As he leans against the base of Nelson’s Column they stand in front of him watching the passersby He is listening intently when he sees both policemen stiffen.