Death in the Air tbsh-2 Page 6

  “Sounds like a wise enough idea,” muses El Niño. “Murder, hmm?” The daring boy doesn’t sound convinced, but the whiff of an adventure obviously appeals to him. “What would you like to know?”

  “It’s about the Mercures.”

  El Niño raises his eyebrows and grows more interested.

  “He who suffered a fall at the Palace?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Not an accident, you feel?” The Bullet Boy eyes Sherlock closely.

  “I understand that they aren’t really a family?”

  “No, and neither are Farini and I, though he has adopted me. Adoption isn’t common, believe me. The Swallow was a lad much like me as a youth – name of Johnny Wilde. Farini found me in America; Johnny lived on the streets here. Mercure saw him steal something once and elude the Bobbies … like an acrobat – daring and agile. The next day he was in training … and being well fed. Mercure is a bad one though.”

  “He is?”

  “The word is, he doesn’t pay a fair percentage. Never educated Johnny and beats him as well: whacks him about with a cane when he doesn’t perform as he should. Heard he’s knocked him unconscious more than once.”

  There are two green-and-white sticks of striped candy sticking up in jar on El Niño’s dressing table. He has noticed the other boy glancing at them.

  “Like one?”

  Sherlock happily accepts.

  “Do you know anything else about The Swallow’s past?” he asks, feeling more confident.

  “He was originally from somewhere south of the city. Destitute when he was very small, he came north and got into a gang of street children. He was taken in by a Lambeth swell mobsman in a rookery over there, south of the river. Living with that old rascal prepared him for taking Mercure’s beatings. That Lambeth crook was a nasty piece of work, he was. Johnny told me he saw the old scoundrel kill a man, and that he taught all his charges how to do the same.”

  Sherlock’s eyes widen. He is getting somewhere now.

  “I believe The Eagle and The Robin were romantically involved,” he says. “And that Mercure took her for himself.”

  “That’s the word, though The Eagle won’t keep her honest now that Le Coq’s gone, either. She isn’t a very loyal sort, if you know what I mean. And Jimmy is as meek as a lamb: couldn’t hurt a flea, won’t put up a fight. They say he faints at the sight of blood. If you are looking for a suspect, it isn’t him.”

  Suddenly the other door opens and there before them stands The Great Farini.

  Sherlock gets to his feet, both in awe and because he fears that the master will throw him out. Farini is stripped to his undershirt, his thick shoulders and well-developed arms bare. Under his perfectly slicked-back hair, a sharp intelligence shines in his face.

  “Sam, I …” he begins talking to El Niño, then stops. “What have we here?” he asks, turning to Sherlock Holmes, not pleased to find an unannounced intruder.

  “Would you believe a reporter from The Glowworm?” inquires El Niño with a grin.

  “That depends on whether or not they begin employment at the age of thirteen,” booms Farini. He is growing angry. His accent sounds American too, but a little flatter, perhaps Canadian. At first Sherlock thought the great man was about to smile, but his expression had changed quickly. It terrifies the boy. Farini walks up to him and looms over his upturned face, fixing him with the most frightening pair of dark eyes he has ever looked into. They too, seem to have changed from good to evil in an instant. They stare right into the boy, as if Farini intends to mesmerize him.

  “What is your name, boy? Your real name.”

  “Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Sherlock Homes?” muses The Great Farini. “That sounds like a stage name, a fictional one … as real as mine.”

  There is a long silence. The boy can feel the tension in the room. He can’t think of anything to say.

  “What shall we do with him?” asks Farini.

  “Drop him head first from the roof of the Alhambra, no net?” offers El Niño. He doesn’t seem to be on Sherlock’s side anymore.

  “Or …” smiles Farini, “compliment him on a wonderful acting job, on displaying exemplary brains, invention, and daring far above the ordinary. All things we admire.” The famous man’s eyes are twinkling and he extends a hand. “Well done, Master Holmes. Now, be off with you. I’m sure El Niño has provided you with whatever you need?”

  He has a grip like Hercules, and Sherlock is glad when he is released and allowed to head for the door. As he does, Farini places a hand on El Niño’s shoulder and Sherlock can see that it is heavy and digs into the lad’s thick muscles.

  “My son will tell me all about it … won’t you … El Niño?”

  “Of course, Farini,” says the boy, and Sherlock can tell that he means it.

  Back out on dim Leicester Square, Sherlock feels as if he has just escaped from a dream: either a wonderful fantasy, or a nightmare.

  Whatever the case, he got exactly what he wanted. El Niño has shed more light on the murder. All three of the other Mercures had good reasons to dispatch Le Coq. But one has now risen above the others as the prime suspect. The Swallow, it seems, has an interesting past … he knows how to kill.

  Sherlock thinks of the youngest Mercure with his back turned to him at the Crystal Palace yesterday, whistling a happy tune on the very morning after his master had been fatally and brutally sabotaged. He thinks of the lad’s hardened expression and his obvious access to all the apparatus.

  What exactly was he doing? He had a sack with him, filled with something. Was he checking the equipment? Is that his job every day? It must be, especially since the other two weren’t even near the building while he cleaned up. Was he always the last person to look at the trapeze bars before the performers swung out high above the hard floors … their lives in his small but inventive hands?

  Yes indeed, that lad knows how to kill.

  All Sherlock needs to do now, is lay his hands on evidence of The Swallow’s guilt.

  TERROR AT THE PALACE

  Sherlock wakes in the middle of the night. Sigerson Bell is snoring in his bed upstairs. The boy sits up in the cot, silently pushes open the long doors of the wooden wardrobe he sleeps in, and steps out into the lab, his bare feet patting the stone floor. The cramped room is cluttered with glass tubes, poisons, and skeletons, all surrounded by those teetering stacks of books. He can barely see an arm’s length in front of his face, but he doesn’t want to light a candle. Here at the back, there’s a little water closet with a flush toilet that Bell invented (just as efficient as young Thomas Crapper’s) and near it, a creaking wooden staircase that spirals up into the two small rooms on the first floor. One is a parlor that has more of the detritus of an apothecary’s profession than furniture. The other is the old man’s messy bedroom where, snuggled under a feather blanket, he dreams of miraculous cures, as a red woolen nightcap warms his balding head.

  In less than a week Bell will be thrown into the streets, and with him will go Sherlock’s home and his hopes of attending school for the autumn term. But the boy is sure he can win a reward for the solution to this flying-trapeze crime…. He already has a compelling suspect. No one else knows anything. He has to move now. He has to find out exactly what The Swallow did during the moments before Mercure fell, and find concrete evidence of his guilt. Sherlock must somehow get to the crime scene and back in the night, returning before Bell even rises.

  As he takes a careful step, he thinks he hears a creak at the top of the stairs, as if the old man were stirring. The boy keeps still for a moment, but the noise doesn’t come again. He quickly boils a spot of tea, tears off a piece of slightly hardened bread kept in a wooden box next to a monkey’s brain floating in a jar of formaldehyde, slips into the front room past the display cases, and out onto little Denmark Street.

  It is almost pitch-black at first, but once he is on a bigger street, the glow of the overhanging gas lamps provides a gloomy light in the hot
and humid air. He crosses the now-silent market at Covent Garden, floats over Waterloo Bridge, and glides south-east, running as often as he walks, past a nearly deserted Elephant and Castle, out into the suburbs, and then the countryside. Just past Dulwich village he passes its renowned college, nestled just off the road, on the other side of a beautiful cricket grounds. Dim lights make the buildings shimmer. He stops for a moment admiring its ghostly, red gothic exteriors and its spires disappearing into the sky. It’s a famous public school for elementary children, offering opportunities he is denied. He wonders what it would be like to awake within its dormitories. Some day, he vows, he will go beyond even this sort of institution, to a great university, by hook or by crook.

  He scurries down Dulwich Road, runs past the toll gate, and gazes toward the Crystal Palace way up on Sydenham Hill. A few lights are left on in the night and it looks like a monstrous glass aquarium on a mountain. The last stretch up the hill winds through the trees of Gipsy Wood. His imagination fills with the thieves and goblins who, children say, inhabit this forest and run after them with arms outstretched…. He sprints until he comes to the back of the mighty building.

  He wishes it was evening, not early morning, and that he was an ordinary boy who could scamper across the two hundred acres of beautiful grounds and play in its lakes, and especially climb up onto the life-sized statues of dinosaurs frozen in eternal slithers at the edges of the pools. But he has a job to do. He creeps by the big reservoir at the north end and over to one of the imposing brick water towers book-ending the building. The boy stares up at the column. Each tower is nearly three hundred feet high and full of thousands of tons of water, supplying the steam boilers and many fountains that shoot spray impossibly high.

  His father once told him about a secret way into the Palace. Few employees know about it. In fact, Sherlock isn’t even sure it exists, but he has to try to find it. If he can’t, his daring plan will be lost.

  An engineer who helps maintain the boilers once let the secret slip during a late-night conversation with Wilber. The man had consumed too many spirits, fallen into a chat about scientific matters, and commenced to do a little bragging.

  “Around the back of the Palace, close to the north water tower, there’s a low glass panel,” he’d claimed, “which will tip inward if you give it a good jar at the bottom. If one of us engineers ever needed to get inside the building during an after-hours emergency, that’s how we’d do it. The panel is fastened with hinges at the top and a few small nails hold it in place at the bottom on the inside. It can be knocked loose but will stay in the frame.”

  Sherlock moves up close to the wall near the tower. Sure enough, he spots a dozen or so small panels there, almost at ground level. He looks around. A sound – a bark – pierces the night. Sherlock stiffens. Watch dogs…. But it’s distant, coming from somewhere near the village of Sydenham beyond the Gipsy Wood.

  He turns back to his task and tries all the panels closest to the tower, banging his foot against the iron frames…. The sixth one gives when he kicks it. It swings inward.

  He gets down on his belly and slides through the tight little rectangle … into the Crystal Palace. Its insides are barely lit – just a few small gas lamps glow in the gloom. He turns and closes the panel, anxious not to leave a trail. His plan of escape is to hide somewhere inside and mingle with the crowd of early employees who will enter through the front gates at six o’clock – many of them boys his age. Sherlock should have enough time to examine the crime scene without being disturbed, and then race home to Denmark Street.

  Yesterday, he had noticed that The Swallow had a sack with him, which he dipped into while he worked on the ropes. What was in there? A saw whose teeth marks might match the cuts in the bar when closely examined? A pocket-knife with tiny splinters of wood embedded in its steel? And what was way up on the perch? Wouldn’t that have been the perfect place to do the evil deed: a quick couple of slices in the bar while out of everyone’s view? Were there traces of sawdust on the platform? Remember, he tells himself, the police aren’t even investigating, and The Swallow knows that. He has no reason to remove such specks of evidence.

  His heart pounding, Sherlock turns too abruptly. He bumps into a large potted plant and knocks it over. Reaching out, he seizes it and feels a shooting pain course through his hands. The sound of the pot falling echoes in the enormous building.

  He stands still, holding what he now sees is a cactus from some exotic desert. The needles are deep in his flesh. The sound still reverberates.

  Are there guards inside? There must be. Are there canines trained to attack? Sherlock gingerly sets the cactus down, waits … listens … no footsteps, no barks, and no shouts.

  But then he hears something. It’s a nasty, high-pitched voice.

  “Stop right there!” it shouts.

  Sherlock drops down and flattens himself on the planked floor. He can’t see anyone, can’t hear feet approaching. Panicking, he wriggles back toward the panel, but he’s closed it from the inside and it won’t swing open the other way.

  “Stop right there!” cries the heinous voice. Then it starts repeating itself: “Stop right there! Stop right there! Stop right there!”

  A sense of relief melts over him. A parrot.

  Sherlock, who has been in the Palace several times with his father, remembers that here, in the northern end of the building, there are all sorts of exotic birds, parrots among them. Wilberforce Holmes, a deposed scientist with a love of ornithology, has often helped tend to these creatures.

  “Stop right there!” the parrot says again. “Cracker time, you bloody boob! Cracker time!”

  A foul-mouthed little thing, thinks Sherlock, grinning.

  Lying there, picking the cactus needles out of his hands, trying to ignore the pain, he looks way up past the three tiers of balconies and makes out the ghostly curving iron frames of the glass ceiling. Branches and shadows of evil-looking trees peer down at him – a jungle canopy. He is on the outskirts of the Palace’s tropical forest.

  Despite the hour, it is as hot as a jungle in here too. He hears other birds: cockatoos and ordinary redbreasts and swallows, offering squawks and chirps in response to their talkative comrade.

  There is a series of courts under this nave, each representing an epoch in the history of man. When Sherlock turns his head and looks along the hall, he sees twin pharaohs staring down at him with paired sphinxes below, the feature of the Egyptian Court. They are imposing in the gloom and their gigantic size and bulging eyes almost make the boy cry out.

  He calms himself and gets to his feet. He has to make his way southward toward the central transept. That’s where the crime scene is. He moves stealthily around statues, ferns, and displays, feeling as though he were traveling through history, passing the Greek Court, the Roman, and on into the Medieval. Each area is filled with the dark shapes of ancient figures.

  Farther on, he encounters magnificent stuffed lions and tigers, mounted on towering stone plinths, frozen in all their ferocious glory. He thinks he hears a splash in the marine aquarium nearby and looks to his right to see the side of a massive tank: octopi, lobsters, and thousands of little sea horses live there.

  He smells spices from the Far East and the lingering scents of biscuits and pâté from the Refreshment Department’s dining room, but since the birds settled, he’s heard very little. The indoor fountains, whirring wheels of inventions, and children’s automated toys, are quiet for the night.

  Sherlock floats like a ghost past the northern transept, toward the center. It occurs to him that he is good at this sort of thing, good at stealth and deceit.

  But suddenly he hears something that terrifies him, a sound much worse than a nattering bird.

  There are footsteps coming. Human ones. At first they are so quiet and distant that he isn’t sure they are real, but then they echo in the cavernous glass palace and grow louder. He ducks under a wagon displaying bushels of Canadian wheat. But he is still exposed to anyone wh
o might walk past. There are empty hempen sacks lying on the wagon, so he jumps up, seizes a couple, and hastily tucks one end of each under the bushels, making a curtain down to the floor, hiding himself from passing eyes.

  He lies as still as a corpse.

  The footsteps become louder. There seems to be more than one man, and at least one of them is breathing in great gulps.

  Sherlock peeks out between the sacks and sees a single figure walking steadily in the center of the hall, heading north, right toward him. Where are the others? Then the boy looks down. The man has two white bull terriers on chains. They are straining against his hold, breathing loudly through their mouths, anxious to move forward. Both have torn ears, as if they’ve suffered injuries in battle. Sherlock can see their fangs as they gasp for air, saliva dripping onto the planked wooden floor. The dogs will smell him, for sure.

  They come closer, and closer.

  And pass by.

  Sherlock breathes a sigh of relief.

  But then the dogs stop. Both sniff the air and turn around, pulling their master straight toward the Canadian wheat wagon. The boy tries to draw in every scent he gives off, to arrest the beating of his heart. He clenches his hands into fists, forgetting the wounds from the cactus, and utters a little yelp before he can stop himself.

  “Oi!” shouts the short, thick-set guard, his voice bouncing off the distant glass ceiling. “You lot! We ain’t found naught these last twelvemonth and you get to suspectin’ thirty-nine minutes before quittin’? … You’re sniffin’ the dead buffalo again! Mangy ’ounds! This way!” And with that he jerks them away, nearly snapping their wide necks with a violent tug, as he continues his slow march to the north end of the building.

  Sherlock feels as though he might be sick to his stomach. But he controls himself, unclenches his sore hands, and tries to think carefully about what he has just heard. This man, apparently the only guard on duty, has thirty-nine minutes before he leaves. Every literate boy in London knows that it is just over sixteen hundred feet from one end of the Palace to the other. The guard has about five or six hundred feet to his destination at the far reaches of the building where Sherlock broke in. He’ll likely pause there, perhaps take a short break, then make one more sweep of the premises. Sherlock considers the man’s pace: about ten minutes to get where he is going now and have his break, ten minutes back to the central transept, ten minutes to the far, south end, and then a final ten back again to the center where he will likely end his watch. That means the guard will reach the central transept for his first pass twenty minutes from now. Sherlock will have that time to walk to the transept, make his first search of the premises, and get hidden away.