by David Marcum
Mr. Holmes seemed to be asking these questions of himself, like he had some lingering doubt that all was not as it appeared. I took them as questions I should seek to answer myself.
“With your permission, of course,” I offered, “I could stay on and look into it further.”
Mr. Holmes said nothing, but the smile that crossed his face was not so much of amusement, but, I venture, pride. His attention was caught a moment later by the return of the county detective.
“Ah, Edmunds, there you are!” he said. “My return train leaves at a quarter past the hour, and I’ve done what I can here. If the Berkshire Constabulary wishes to pursue the matter in further detail, you know where you can find me. As it stands, I trust the investigation will be in capable hands.”
This last thing he also said to Edmunds, but he was looking at me when he said it.
“Wiggins,” added Mr. Holmes, “I’ll see you at Baker Street tomorrow, yes?”
“Tomorrow?” I protested. “That don’t give me much time!”
“My schedule is full, and Watson is no help of late. I need you and the Irregulars back on duty in London immediately. A day should be time enough to resolve this small matter.”
Small matter, he says! Well, I suppose solving a mystery seems something to knock off in an afternoon when you’ve done it hundreds of times. But being promoted to lead investigator was all new to me and I hardly knew where to begin. Luckily, I had the questions Mr. Holmes himself had proposed, so I figured looking for answers to one or two of them might get me started.
“Who else might have been feeding the animals with Mr. and Mrs. Ronder last night?” I asked Griggs as he was making arrangements to break camp. No decision had been made about where to take the show from there, but packing it all up again for the next leg of the journey seemed the right thing to do. Mrs. Ronder had been taken away by ambulance to a hospital in Bracknell, and no one knew if they would ever see her again, let alone speak to her.
“The Ronders always fed Sahara King alone. They thought it built trust. I think he ended up associating them with food until he saw them as food.”
“There was another man screaming,” I said, like I knew for certain. I didn’t.
“I heard a man screaming, but it had to be Ronder himself.”
“Not if he died as quick as it looks. Are you sure there was nobody else about?”
Griggs considered his answer long enough for me to know there was something to my question.
“At night, with Eugenia, perhaps. But not with her husband on hand.”
“Hanky-panky?” I asked.
“A love affair, to be sure,” Griggs nodded. “One look at his muscles next to Ronder’s physique and you can guess why, though her taste in men was not much improved.”
“The strongman?”
“A weak man, tempted by a young beauty, even if it meant disaster if they were discovered. We all knew it, whispered about it.”
“Could he have been the one to open the cage and let the lion loose at Ronder?”
“You mean a plot to murder him? I hardly think the lion could be counted on to carry through. Ronder and the cat had spent many hours together in the cage without incident.”
“But it killed both its trainers when the opportunity presented itself.”
“If Leonardo loosed it, he might just as easily fallen victim.”
“Unless he ran,” I suggested, recalling the woman’s cries of “Coward! Coward!”
Amazing what you can figure out just by talking to people. Here I was, five minutes into my investigation, and I was sorting it all out without having to look at a single muddy footprint or cigarette ash. I’m sure Mr. Holmes has his methods for a reason. People lie all the time, whereas physical evidence will tell only truth if you know how to listen. I surely couldn’t deduce a thing based off of somebody’s stubbed-out butt, but there are a lot of people who will open up to an innocent-faced boy when they might otherwise keep tight lipped.
Going directly to Leonardo’s van seemed the next logical step, but he was not there when Griggs and I arrived. His prop weights and spare leotards were strewn around, as though a hasty departure had been made. Sure enough, when we checked with the rest of the crew, we found he was not helping pack and ready the caravan. The trailers filled with the show’s freak acts was the last place we looked, as we figured it was the least likely place Leonardo would hide. His distaste for nature’s mistakes had been all too apparent.
“It’s Leonardo,” explained Griggs, when he was held to explain himself and our hunt. “He’s betrayed us and brought the entire show to ruin! Him and Eugenia, both.”
“Was it a lovers’ spat?” wondered the bearded lady, who seemed to have been following the inner-circus drama the closest.
“A lovers’ conspiracy, more like,” Griggs said. “They plotted to kill Mr. Ronder and run off together, leaving the lot of us in the lurch.”
They had all seen the state of Mrs. Ronder’s face following the attack, and there was, at least, sympathy for her. Her husband had been every bit as brutish with her as my brief encounter with the man suggested. That and worse. Following the whippings and the abuse, none could blame her for wanting to be rid of him.
“That plan’s all gone to rubbish, hasn’t it?” commented the living skeleton, sad for Eugenia’s fate, his own, and that of all the rest.
“But a lurch we’re still in,” said Griggs. “The Ronders are gone, the show is destitute, and Leonardo has also left - albeit alone, as he deserves.”
“We can catch him yet if we hurry. The gallows will have him for what he’s done, if you’re right,” said one of the Siamese twins.
“That I’d like to see,” added his brother. “It’s no circus, but it will be a spectacle nonetheless,”
“Which way do you think he fled?” Griggs wondered, looking towards all edges of the camp clearing.
At once, as though commanded, the dog-faced boy dropped to the ground and sniffed at the earth, like a hound finding a scent. I didn’t for a moment think it was anything more than part of his act, but when he rose and pointed in one direction, everyone took him at his word. At once, the entire sideshow of freaks toddled off in pursuit, like a disfigured and deformed lynch mob seeking vengeance. Despite their physical limitations, they made swift progress, and even the human torso, with no arms or legs, kept pace like the world’s fastest inchworm.
I was worried that my first murder solution, so quickly arrived at, would just as quickly turn into a kangaroo court and execution before I could even report my findings to Mr. Holmes or the police.
Whether by chance, scent, or intuition, the dog-faced boy proved correct in his directions. We found Leonardo within the hour, poised at the edge of a spent chalk-pit, the bottom of which had turned, over the years of rain and runoff, into a deep green soup. For a moment, I thought Leonardo meant to leap to his death, in despair for what he had done, or for the lover he had inadvertently stripped of her beauty. But then he turned, on hearing our approach, and I saw in his hand a terrible weapon and the answer to all my remaining questions. It was a club, with a heavy lead head, rounded and with five spaced spikes sticking out of the end. He meant to cast it into the chalk-pit, where the evidence of his crime would go undiscovered forever at the bottom of the filthy mire below. Surely whatever fell in there was likely to never be seen again. And if it were ever dredged up, no one would want to touch it.
I don’t claim to know what goes on in Mr. Holmes’s head when he makes his deductions, but in that moment I saw all the events play out in my mind as if I was right there watching them happen, like a play. Ronder’s murder hadn’t been left to the whim of a lion. He’d had his head caved in and his scalp clawed up by that dreadful club. Only once he was down was the cage door opened, so it would appear as though the cat were responsible. But things had g
one terribly wrong. The lion must have caught the scent of human blood in the air and decided he wanted some for hisself. The Ronder woman, having just opened his cage, was a close and tempting target. And then, rather than help, or put his weapon to good use to save his love from the beast, Leonardo ran. He only returned once his murder-claw was stashed away and braver help was on the way.
“Oh no,” declared Griggs, when he saw the same thing I did and likely guessed what it had been used for.
“You’ve seen it before?” I asked him.
“I helped him make it,” he said. “I often repair the cages, and I’m a handy welder. He told me it was for a juggling act he was working on. I should have guessed it was for something more sinister. Who ever heard of juggling with a single club?”
“Well then,” said Leonardo, striking a stance meant to intimidate the rejects of human creation with the sight of its perfection, “you’ve put it together. Don’t claim you liked Ronder any more than I! He was a filthy man, a cruel boss, and a worse husband to poor Eugenia. I tried to save her from him!”
“But you didn’t try to save her from your fanged accomplice,” shouted back one of the gathered lost souls who had tracked him down. I couldn’t tell which, there were so many.
“Who are you to judge me, you half-men and twisted wretches? Do you think we wanted to waste away our lives - our loves - doing tricks with animals and a load of freaks no better than animals? And that vile pig of a man lording over us forever!”
Leonardo waved his club at us all, pointing, threatening.
“You going to beat us all to death and pin it on a lion, are you?” said Griggs, boldly stepping forward. The rest of his compatriots followed his lead, and in that moment, Leonardo, perfect human specimen that he was, wavered in the face of life’s imperfections, and stepped back towards the edge.
“Away with you now! I’ll smash the first malformed skull in my sight!” Leonardo promised. But no more skulls were smashed that day, even as the sideshow ranks surged forward. Only a single murderous swing did Leonardo get to make, one that missed entirely, before he lost grip of his weapon and it fell far from his reach.
Leonardo the Strongman was, indeed, a strong man - but not so mighty as a dozen enraged freaks rendered destitute by his act of greed and lust. They pawed at and pummelled him until he teetered at the very lip of the pit. One final single-handed push from a pinhead who wanted in on the tussle she likely thought was only a bit of fun roughhousing, and Leonardo toppled over the edge. The circus folk released him at once, for fear of being pulled along with him, and Leonardo plummeted dozens of feet down the side of the chalky cliff that had been dug away, landing in the sickly green swamp at the bottom and vanishing under the surface in an instant, as if swallowed by the bog.
Betrayed by their fellow performer, yet vindicated by revenge, the freaks, the oddities, the outcasts, all gathered across the rim of the pit and looked down into the algae froth left behind by Leonardo’s flailing dive. He did not return to the surface.
“What have we done?” wondered the left-hand brother of the fused twins.
“What will we do?” asked his right-hand companion.
“We’ll go on,” said Griggs, staring into the deep. “Isn’t it what they say in show business? The show must go on.”
“This isn’t show business,” the dog-faced boy reminded him.
“The hell it isn’t,” said Griggs, turning to his troop of entertainers. He was a little fellow, only as tall as me at twice the age, but in that moment he was like a giant. “What do they call a circus other than The Greatest Show on Earth? Tell me that’s not show business!”
“We can’t go on like this. We’re down two lion tamers and a strongman,” said the bearded lady.
“True enough,” agreed Griggs. “We can’t book ourselves as Ronder’s Wild Beast Show without the Ronders. But we still have wild beasts aplenty, and the greatest collection of contorted contortionists and audacious oddities in all of England! We’ll regroup, rename ourselves, put some new acts together, and start small all over again. It will be like when we first began, only this time we’ll be our own bosses, answerable to no one!”
A cheer rose up in the assembled sideshow at the thought of being top-billed at last. But even after so rousing a speech, Griggs, the sad clown, remained humourless.
“That is,” he confided to me, off to the side, “if you can forget about all that’s happened here. I know you’re personal friends with Sherlock Holmes, but he’s not, after all, the real police, now is he?”
I looked back at the pit and wondered how many times Mr. Holmes might have discovered the truth of a crime, only to decide justice had been served, and that he needn’t illuminate the police. Perhaps that was the privilege of being a consulting detective rather than a Scotland Yard detective.
“The damage has been done,” I said. “An awful man is dead, likely another down a deep hole, a woman has suffered for her crimes, and I don’t see no one left who deserves to be punished any more than they already have been by nature and circumstances.”
I picked the fallen clawed club off the ground.
“Take it away,” winced Griggs, who didn’t even want to look at it. “Or throw it in the pit with its master. I wish I’d never touched the evil thing.”
“Bad news, lads,” I announced. “The circus isn’t coming to town after all.”
I found the better part of the Irregulars hanging out in one of the abandoned basements we often bedded in. Night had fallen by the time I made my way back to London, but everyone was still up late.
“Packed it in, did they?” asked Simpson.
“You could say so. It’s been delayed for a future booking at any rate.”
“Did you get to see it?” Ben wondered, riveted.
I considered whether I had or not. My preview had not panned out as I thought it might, and what I saw wasn’t a circus so much as a massacre.
“Not as such, no.”
“Then we didn’t miss nothing, really,” snorted Simpson, who had probably thought the least of my excursion. Ben, however, was still aglow with wonder.
“Were there elephants and tigers and bears?”
“No,” I said. “But there was a lion.”
Simpson remained keen to turn his nose up at it.
“Just one?” he said, laying the disdain on thick.
“One was enough,” I replied.
“What is it you have there, Wiggins?” Mr. Holmes asked me the next day when I came up to his rooms at 221b.
I had brought the clawed club back from Berkshire, thinking I should show it to Mr. Holmes as the solution to the crime that had, last he checked, only been a suspicious incident. In my time with it, I’d grown a certain fondness for the macabre thing, discovering that if I intertwined by fingers with the five claws, it gave me a good enough grip to use it as a rather dapper cane, like a proper gentleman.
Mr. Holmes had his nose in a heaping pile of papers and books, reading up on some old case vital to what he was working on now, no doubt. He’d barely acknowledged my reporting for duty, and the fact that I came carrying something seemed to only draw the interest of one corner of one eye.
I might very well have told him it was evidence, which would have been true, or a murder weapon, which would have been more accurate still. At any moment, I expected Mr. Holmes to deduce everything it had been involved in, all it had done, and the singularly wicked purpose for which it had been designed.
“It’s my walking stick,” I lied, and knew he would surely see through it.
If he did, he said nothing, remaining fixed on his work, and the multiple cases that were occupying his big brain that week. It’s possible he had already dismissed my “stick” as no more than a boy’s plaything. Perhaps even Sherlock Holmes can’t focus on a dozen different things at once.
“Wiggins, I’ll need you to assign at least twelve of the Irregulars to a dozen different crossroads spread across the east end. You’ll have your eye out for a hansom cab with a particular lady inside who will be making multiple stops. You’ll know her by her outrageous hat, which features no less than five peacock feathers. I need to know exactly where she goes, to whom she speaks, and the precise duration of each conversation down to the second. There’s a box with a dozen wound pocket watches already set to the correct time on the mantel. Distribute them accordingly.”
I went to gather the equipment for the job as instructed.
“Oh, and Wiggins...”
I froze in the middle of the room, but Mr. Holmes never looked up at me.
“How did that atrocious circus slaying develop?”
“The lion dunnit,” I said.
Mr. Holmes nodded ever so slightly as his eyes continued to dart across the newspaper clippings in front of him for relevant facts.
“Not unexpected,” he said. “Alas, it’s always disappointing when the most obvious solution proves to be the correct one.”
Never again did show Mr. Holmes the clawed club that had done in Mr. Ronder, and I can’t really say why not. Maybe I decided, since Mr. Holmes collected so many trophies and artifacts from his own cases, that I should start my own collection. At any rate, I still have it, though I can’t claim the collection has grown much since. Still, it does remind me of the one time I got to be the detective, in a case that slipped through Mr. Holmes’s fingers just because he was too busy solving every other crime in London to notice that one had been committed in Berkshire.
And there we have it. Like I said, one word after the other, and the story gets done. Only, now that it’s done, I see there weren’t so much of Mr. Holmes in it after all. I expect them fellows at The Strand won’t be quick to pay a wage unless there’s a lot more Sherlock Holmes to spread around. “Wiggins won’t sell magazines,” they’ll say. They’ll call me a street Arab and toss me out of their offices.