Death in the Air Page 9

  Irene Doyle is standing at the counter, her eyes cast down, pretending to be not the least bit interested in his arrival. She isn’t dressed like a working-class girl today. She veritably shines in a red silk dress patterned with roses and matching bonnet and shawl. Her blonde hair seems to sparkle and a wonderful scent fills the room. But she looks almost ashamed to be here and Sherlock’s heart goes out to her.

  “Irene,” he says.

  She looks up at him hopefully.

  He checks himself and his emotions, stiffening his body almost to attention. She notices.

  “I’m not here to see you,” she says quickly in a hard voice.

  “I would be honored if you were.”

  “Malefactor told me you were living here.”

  “Something I never mentioned to him,” replies Sherlock, looking away.

  “He has means to find out.”

  “He is a rat who feeds off others.”

  Irene pauses before beginning again.

  “He has told me more about himself, you know. He has had a difficult time. His father was a simple dustman in Ireland, picking up rubbish off the Dublin streets. He worked day and night, and made a respectable sum of money, invested in the railroad and increased his wealth dramatically, and moved to northern England. But …”

  “I do not care what befell him,” Sherlock says, cutting her off. “You may have feelings for his sob story, but tragedies befall many of us. I have no interest in him. He is a rat.” He chews off the last word.

  Irene pauses again and closes her eyes, perhaps so she doesn’t have to look at him.

  “Very well. You have no interest in most people, it seems to me, other than those whom you can put in jail in order to make you feel better about yourself.”

  “I seek justice.”

  “So do others,” Irene counters. “But they don’t have to become wooden automatons to do it.”

  “What are you here for?”

  “To purchase something, but my interest has waned.”

  Sherlock wishes he could make her change her mind. He wonders how much she had planned to spend. But she lifts her nose into the air, turns sharply, and marches toward the door. Before she opens it, he sees her shoulders sag. She turns back to him.

  “Can’t we be friends, Sherlock?”

  He steels himself and answers her with a cold, unemotional face.

  The door opens and slams shut.

  Sherlock spends the last part of the afternoon pacing in the laboratory, at first trying to keep himself from thinking about Irene, building up a hard resistance to her like a callous over a wound; and then pondering The Swallow anew, wondering about a certain question he asked the boy and the long hesitation in the answer.

  The alchemist returns not long after the bells of St. Giles ring five. He has a box full of oysters from the Smithfield Market ready to smoke for their supper, and a pile of little cakes from a Drury Lane muffin-man for sweets after. Sherlock wonders where he found the money – it must be nearly all that he has left. When the old man sees the half-crown, he almost weeps.

  Sherlock loves smoked oysters, but he barely enjoys his supper. He gobbles it up, eating as if it were his last meal. He has made up his mind to talk to The Swallow again, and can hardly wait. This time his interview will have a much different tone.

  There’s a public house named The Faustian Bargain in Leicester Square that music-hall and circus people frequent. Johnny Wilde is sure to be in central London now and certain to be taking meals there. He has nowhere else to be today. The Mercures are out of work until they can hire a new member.

  His mouth full of his last two oysters, Sherlock tells Bell he is going out.

  “For some air, undoubtedly?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He accepts a cake from his old friend and eats it on the run, sprinting away into the bustling rush of people heading home from work.

  Sure enough, The Swallow is in the public house when Sherlock arrives. He is sitting alone in a booth at the back, a mug of tea and a plate of fish pie in front of him. When he sees the young detective he actually ducks his head for an instant, but then he raises it and waves him over. Sherlock makes his way through the dingy, wood-paneled room, tobacco smoke thick in the air, mixing with the strong smells of beer, coffee, and food. He spots a number of famous faces: sees midget acrobats, recognizes a freak known as the Animal Boy, and several comic singers.

  “Fancy seeing you ’ere, mate,” says The Swallow amiably, with what looks to Sherlock like a forced smile. He motions for Holmes to sit across from him in the booth.

  Sherlock sits heavily, keeping his eyes on his target.

  “I’m not here for any niceties. You lied to me.”

  Wilde places both hands on either side of his fish pie. One holds a big steel spoon … the other tightly grips a sharp knife. Sherlock sees the boy’s knuckles growing white around the handle. He feels adrenaline seeping into his system. The Swallow releases the spoon, picks up the knife and drives it … into the wooden table. It stands straight up.

  “Yes I did,” he says with a sigh.

  Sherlock is still recovering from a vision of that knife rising up from the table and being driven into his neck. He can’t speak for an instant. But The Swallow can.

  “Now you tell me what I lied about, mate … because it may be more than one thing.”

  Sherlock can’t help but smile. There is something in the concept of an honest liar that appeals to him.

  “I think you know what I am speaking about.”

  “The question about suspicious blokes loiterin’ near us at the Palace before the accident?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “How would you answer that question now, knowing that if you don’t answer truthfully, I will hand you over to Scotland Yard with the suggestion that you are the chief suspect in the slaying of Monsieur Mercure?”

  The Swallow grins.

  “Well, knowing what little I know of you, Master ’olmes, graspin’ your particular brain power that is more and more evident to me, guessin’ that you is in possession of some information about meself that don’t look too well for me … I would tell you the truth.”

  “And that truth is?”

  The Swallow looks out the grimy little window by the booth. Outside, a narrow alley snakes beside the public house, but it is barely visible through the grime. He rubs the back of his neck with his left hand and sighs.

  “There was indeed some folks … visitin’ me at the Palace the day before the accident.”

  “From Brixton?”

  The Swallow looks away again.

  “Yeah, from Brixton,” he mutters.

  “Of disreputable occupation?”

  “I can’t give you their names, Master ’olmes. You can turn me over to the Peelers if you like, but I ain’t givin’ names. There’s a sort of honor, you know, among thieves.”

  “I can imagine,” sneers Sherlock.

  “I’d wager you can, knowin’ the bit I know about you. You have a deadly look about you at times, you do.”

  He eyes Sherlock and it makes the boy uncomfortable, so he quickly moves the conversation forward.

  “Tell me this, just yes or no: were they members of the Brixton Gang?”

  The Swallow swallows. No one knows much about the members of that vicious, slippery, and magically efficient group, not even the police. For a moment it seems as if the young acrobat won’t answer. He picks up the knife and carves out a slice of his pie, slides it onto the utensil and eats it. Then he looks back at Sherlock, fish evident in his mouth.

  “Yes,” he says quietly.

  The young detective knows instinctively that an enormous piece of this puzzle has just been revealed. But exactly where it fits and what it all means is still a mystery.

  “I knew ’em in me youth. Two of the four. They was a bit older ’an me. They is in with some desperate ’uns now. Smaller thieves are useful, can get into places bi
gger ’uns can’t. I don’t condone what me old mates do, mind.”

  He is keeping his head down, as if he were ashamed, eating big chunks of the strong-smelling pie, his jaws grinding the food.

  “But you did, one day.”

  The Swallow looks up at Sherlock, a defiant expression on his face.

  “I did. But not now. You can believe me or not. That is up to you, Master ’olmes.”

  “You can prove it to me.”

  The Swallow goes back to eating.

  “’ow’s that?”

  “Come with me to the Palace today. I need you to get me in and help me walk about, everywhere, without interference. I am guessing that the trapeze apparatus will be removed soon.”

  “Tonight. I’m supposed to start tearing it down when the Palace closes this evenin’. The other two will be there. I’m takin’ the train.”

  “You shall be departing earlier than you planned and paying my fare.”

  “With pleasure,” snarls the boy with an unpleasant look.

  “Eat up,” says Sherlock Holmes.

  THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION

  A whole new factor has entered the game. Sherlock needs to locate the Crystal Palace vault, and see the crime scene one more time before it is dismantled. He has a great deal to discover and put together, and it all must be done in the next few hours.

  It is hard to believe that he is going back to Sydenham – he had just been there in the small hours of the morning. The two boys walk through the Trafalgar Square crowds and approach Charing Cross Railway Station. Its entrance is through a ground-floor arch in an imposing, brick-stone hotel that rises six storeys high. An ornate column with a replica of the medieval Charing Cross at its tip stands in the hotel’s forecourt, behind an iron fence. Only the wealthy ever use this building’s fashionable two hundred rooms and dining area.

  Sherlock tries not to gawk as they move through the arch and merge with the flow of people entering the terminal on the other side. The station’s big clock is thirty minutes from striking seven, and many folks are still finding their way home. Though Sherlock appears calm as he walks beside the strutting, loudly-dressed Swallow (who knows how to play his part as he receives stares of recognition), the young detective’s mind is racing. He would be ashamed to tell his companion, but he has never once been on a steam locomotive. He is trembling.

  Trains move at unimaginable speeds. He had often stopped to watch them explode through Southwark, all power and sound and steam, thundering over the low brick bridges there, built through, and veritably on top of, poor neighborhoods.

  The boys pass the W.H. Smith bookstalls that sell nearly every London paper as well as city maps. Gentlemen in top hats rush by, calling out to news vendors, tossing them coins with hardly a glance, and catching their papers.

  “Gazette!”

  “ Times!”

  “ Tely!”

  They hurry, preoccupied, to their trains, reaching into their waistcoats for pocketknives to cut open the sealed pages. Sherlock wishes he had a few coins in his clothes too.

  The Swallow buys them two eight-pence, round-trip, third-class day tickets from a uniformed conductor and finds the platform for the South Eastern Railway line to the Crystal Palace six miles away.

  First-class cars are elegant and even serve food, but the carriage the two boys enter, solely for the working class, is much plainer. To Sherlock, it is heavenly. He sits down in a wooden seat across from The Swallow and stares out the window. Within minutes the locomotive hisses and chugs out of the terminal, over the Charing Cross Rail and Foot Bridge into Southwark. The boy can feel its power already. They move through Lambeth, along the edge of the river, then to the ancient London Bridge Station. They stop, receive more passengers, and quickly move on, picking up speed as they grunt through rough areas near his old haunts, over those low stone bridges he’s so often seen the trains upon. They enter industrial Bermondsey and pass the stinking tanneries on his right, smelling of the lime, rotten eggs, and dog excrement used inside. Then the train swings south, heading into the suburbs and the countryside.

  Sherlock cannot believe the speed at which they are moving. It terrifies him. He has heard that locomotives can fly as fast as sixty miles in an hour! He believes it now: his shoulders are pinned back to the seat, his expression held tightly, anxious to look collected in front of The Swallow.

  Sherlock has never moved more rapidly than he can run.

  The boy looks out his window and straight down, trying to see the tracks, but they are a black stream. Buildings flash past, cows and sheep disappear in the fields the instant they appear. He has always dreamed of being on a train and of taking to the sky in a hot-air balloon, but he never really believed he would get to do such things. Sherlock Holmes wants big experiences. The speed of the train thrills him as much as it frightens him.

  But soon he worries that it is out of control. There have been many shocking railway accidents, not the least of which happened two years ago almost to the day on this very line, south of here in Kent, when ten people were killed and many maimed in the notorious Staplehurst crash. Charles Dickens was on that train and the terrifying way he described it in his magazine All the Year Round sent shivers down the boy’s spine.

  As they race south, only minutes out of the London Bridge Station and yet approaching their destination, Sherlock feels the locomotive rock back and forth, barely hanging on. He has to shut his eyes. In his vivid imagination he sees the train flying off the tracks, careering into a field, smashing into a building, and exploding in great red and black flames: he hears the screams of the excursionists, blood splattering the insides of the cars, severed heads and limbs thudding against the windows.

  The train slows.

  Sherlock opens his eyes. The Swallow is grinning at him.

  “Life movin’ too fast for you, Master ’olmes?”

  The young detective looks out the window, embarrassed, and concentrating on slowing his breathing. The locomotive puffs gently through Forest Hill Station, whistling as it goes, then picks up just a little speed as it enters Upper Sydenham, and the Crystal Palace comes clearly into view. The sun is getting lower in the gray sky, peeking through the clouds. The glass monster glows on its hill right above them.

  Sherlock has never seen it from this vantage point. Every time he’s been here, even when he came with his mother, he walked. He’s always approached the Palace from behind. But tonight the train is taking him past the grounds, and he can see the front of the magnificent building overlooking its green kingdom. The wide Grand Centre Walk leads way up to its tiered terraces and main doors.

  The train follows the curving track toward the Palace Station, crossing in front of Boating Lake, populated with little pleasure vessels piloted by gentlemen, with ladies seated in front of them. The Great Fountains are stretched across the width of the park, spurting their white spray high into the sky.

  Sherlock disembarks and nearly falls down – his legs are rubbery. A line of elegant hotels runs north from the station, but the two boys take the tunnel onto the grounds and head toward the Palace. The Swallow simply has to show his face to get them inside.

  The trapeze apparatus is only one element in the case now. Of almost equal importance is the vault. Sherlock wants to know where it is, and how the Brixton Gang might have robbed it without anyone even noticing, and then deduce what in the world, if anything, all that has to do with the murder of Monsieur Mercure. If that notorious group of thieves indeed played a part in any of this, then Sherlock Holmes will be involved in a much bigger case than he ever imagined. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense that all of the factors – The Swallow and the gang from his old neighborhood, the money missing from the vault, and the Mercure accident – are connected. But something inside him says they are. His heart rate increases as he enters the building.

  What role did The Swallow have in all of this? Sherlock doesn’t trust this self-confident little devil anymore. He marches him up to the central transep
t. On his way he spots Inspector Lestrade and his son, attended by a half dozen Bobbies, standing at the far end of the nave. They are deep in conversation and look like they intend to stay for a while. Sherlock immediately decides that he must investigate what they are up to, especially why they are gathered in that particular spot, far from the trapeze installation. But first, he has a few more questions for Master Wilde. They lean against a wall near the tower they climbed in the early hours of the morning. Sherlock wants this conversation to take place with the whole scene in front of him.

  “Did you ask your Brixton friends to come here the day before the accident?”

  “No,” answers the young acrobat peevishly. “’Course not. I told you once, I ’ave naught to do with their like now.”

  “Did you have the sense that they sought you out?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  “Right ’ere, where we’re standin’. I was puttin’ up the equipment.”

  “So, they saw that you were in charge of the trapeze swings?”

  “Suppose they did, yeah.”

  “Was there anyone else around?”

  The boy points across the transept. “Just them two.”

  The Eagle and The Robin are walking in their direction. They are glancing around, aware that others are noticing them. They pick up their pace when they see The Swallow and the tall, thin boy.

  “Stop talkin’ to strangers, Johnny, and get to work,” the young woman commands as they near. She turns on Sherlock. “Leave off!” she barks.

  Despite her nasty attitude, the boy is struck by how beautiful she is up close. Not that she isn’t while in the air: her flaming hair flowing as she flies, her face glowing with strong, painted features, and her long muscular legs and slim arms shockingly on display in her almost see-through red costumes; she is always a scandalous and enticing vision, and her entrancing form mixes with the danger of her act and thrills the hearts of every man who has ever gazed up at her.