“There was robbery here,” sputters Sherlock. “It commenced at 1:05 on the first instant of July. It was committed by the Brixton Gang. And it is connected to the murder of Monsieur Mercure.”
“How?” demands Lestrade, holding back a smile.
“I … I don’t know that part yet.”
“I see.”
“But, if you allow me, I can make it so you can lay your hands on both the murderer and every member of the Brixton Gang.”
“The idea that this apparent robbery” spits the detective, “was committed unseen by the most notorious gang in London and that a flying trapeze accident nearly a fifth of a mile away is somehow connected is a fantasy: the fantasy of a child involved in something well beyond his powers to comprehend!”
Lestrade glowers at him.
“You are wasting my valuable time. If you do not leave this second, boy, I will lay the hands of the Force on you and have you thrown into The Boating Lake.”
Sherlock’s face is burning. He has made a terrible mistake. He has gotten ahead of himself, grown too excited, believed he had the facts when he didn’t, depended on another to reveal things about which he was not absolutely certain. There is no substitute for cold, dispassionate reasoning, and in the excitement that had followed his last interview with The Swallow, he had forgotten that.
“Twenty pounds!” mutters Lestrade, stalking away.
Sherlock’s head and leaves droops as a Bobbie escorts him down the nave, depositing him near the front entrance with explicit instructions to leave the premises, along with a promise of what will be done to him if he does not. The sun is setting, darkness is descending. The fireworks will begin soon.
The moment the policeman leaves him, the boy darts back from the entrance, disappears into the crowd, and reenters the Palace. He is not giving up. He will get the money. He must.
The Swallow and his two colleagues don’t know that Sherlock has just been thrown out by the police. They are still wary of him and what he might be able to do to them: The Swallow because of what the young detective has demonstrated he knows and the others, because they are all too aware that they may still be looked upon as suspects by the police. If they have indeed escaped the clutches of the law, they want it to be permanent. Sherlock can still make those three do his bidding. That is a card he can continue to play But what can he do with it? He may only have a few hours left: the apparatus must be taken down soon and the Mercures may be allowed to leave London in the very near future. All evidence, already gathered and yet to be found, may soon be gone.
He makes himself invisible as he moves through the crowd back to the central transept. From his spot behind a big white statue of Prince Albert near the amphitheater, he can see that the police are still hovering near the vault room.
His mind is searching desperately, going back over what he knows, examining where he made mistakes, what he has missed.
What has he observed today that he hasn’t thought through yet? Often commonplace things, little details assumed not to be important at first, are the most valuable of all. Any scientist will tell you that. Have there been any recurring facts, observations he’s made more than once?
Something occurs to him.
Several times today, he’s noticed the strange fact that the vault-room walls do not reach the ceiling; and when he was inside that room with the Lestrades, he had observed it again and looked up to see if he could spot the tops of the trapeze towers. But it seems like a frivolous detail, not related in any way to the crime … or is it?
Sigerson Bell is fond of telling him that one can trace every human thought to a clear motivation. People don’t just think things. One’s mind always has a reason for going (or even wandering) in the direction it does, even if it doesn’t seem that way on the surface. For some reason, Sherlock’s mind had twice considered those unusual walls.
“Our instincts,” the old man likes to say, “are often ahead of our brains. We know something, but don’t realize it. I try to tap into that instinct when I diagnose a disease. Sometimes, something in the back of your brain, or shall we say, your gut, tells you what the problem is.”
Why does Sherlock keep noticing the short walls of the vault room?
He slouches against the pedestal beneath the statue and sighs. As he does, he looks up at the perch from which he nearly fell in the small hours of the morning, remembering the terror of it all. For an instant, he can’t stop himself from reliving it.
He shoots out over the transept on the flying trapeze, feeling as though his life is about to end. He recalls looking down … and noticing a room with walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling.
That was the first time it had occurred to him. He concentrates on what he saw. What had it meant to him? Why, afterwards, did he keep noticing it? Suddenly … he realizes what it is.
He could almost see inside the vault room from the apex of his swing on the flying trapeze! No other vantage point in the Crystal Palace affords such a view. None! He thinks of Monsieur Mercure and how incredibly high he soared that day.
Sherlock stands up and darts through the crowd to the base of the tower. The Swallow is loitering there.
“Master ’olmes,” he says, “can we tear this down yet?”
“No,” says Sherlock excitedly, “not yet. Do you want to absolve yourself entirely of this crime?”
The expression on the other boy’s face grows serious.
“I do.”
“Then climb up that tower, get on the trapeze, and swing as high as you possibly can, as high as Mercure usually went.”
The Swallow looks at the boy as if he were a lunatic. No one is expecting a performance, and the boy is dressed in his street clothes.
“’e always went the ’ighest,” he finally says, as if delaying.
“I know. Do this for both of us, Johnny. And when you do, look toward the area where the police are gathered, toward the room they are standing in front of, where the vault is, and tell me what you see.”
The Swallow climbs the tower, ascending as quickly and silently as a mouse. He reaches the perch, grabs the swing, and sends himself flying out over the central transept.
Down below, several people notice. There are oohs and ahs and soon hundreds, then thousands, are looking up, pointing to the distant glass ceiling. The Swallow swings very high, then pumps his legs and goes higher and higher, approaching maximum speed, thrilling the crowd. They begin to applaud. Finally, he alights back on his perch, landing to a great roar.
At the bottom of the tower, The Swallow is met by Crystal Palace officials and two Bobbies, angrily asking him why he was up on the apparatus. Clever as always, he insists that it is a flying trapeze tradition to do this before the “tear-down.” While they are discussing whether or not to believe him, he slips away and finds Sherlock.
“Well?” the young detective asks, a look of anticipation on his face.
“I could see right into the room, Master ’olmes. I could see the far wall with the curtain drawn across it and I could see the guard sitting there in ’is chair, as plain as day.”
Sherlock smiles.
“It has been a pleasure to know you, Master Wilde,” he says. “You are a gentleman and a star. You may go and so may your two colleagues. Break a leg.”
The Swallow grins back. “Much obliged, sir. The pleasure ’as been mutual.”
Sherlock Holmes walks straight out into an open area where the police can see him clearly. Lestrade notices, his face turns red and he yells for a Bobbie to pursue the boy. Sherlock drifts into the crowd again, the policeman after him. Young Lestrade watches with a look of wonder and slight admiration.
The tall, thin boy steps down the big front staircase of the Palace under his own steam with that smile still on his face. The grounds glow, lit by their many gaslights, and up above, fireworks explode in loud concussions and marvelous colors in the black sky.
Only Sherlock Holmes knows what Mercure said just before he fell. And now he knows wha
t it meant.
“… silence … me.”
Le Coq wasn’t saying that he knew that the silence of death was descending upon him. No, he was trying to tell Sherlock something! High in the air, he had just witnessed a robbery. He was the only one who could see it. The thieves had known long before they committed their crime that that would be the case. As part of an ingenious and complicated plan, Monsieur Mercure had been instantly and expertly removed.
In a horrific moment of realization, the trapeze star had been trying to tell Sherlock Holmes that these fiends had silenced him.
HOW IT WAS DONE
Sigerson Bell knows. Under that red fez, below that balding pate with its yellowing strings of long greasy hair, inside that bulb-tipped skull, his always-thinking, always-questioning big brain has been following the mental and physical moves of the admirable young Sherlock Holmes. And enjoying it. Amidst his troubles, this boy is such a gift! The old man is blessed with the powers of deduction of an astute medical man and alchemist and is used to diagnosing patients at a glance. Thus, he observed Sherlock’s interest in the Mercure incident in the Daily Telegraph, put that together with the fact that the boy’s father worked at the Crystal Palace, that he was gone for precisely four hours and twenty-six minutes on the very afternoon of the accident – an appropriate time to get to Sydenham and back – and that a small shard of unusually colored purple wood was embedded in the decaying toe of his left Wellington shoe, obviously the remnants of Le Coq’s splintered trapeze bar. This brought him to the elementary conclusion that Sherlock Holmes had not only been at the Palace and witnessed the accident, but had been very close to it indeed.
The boy’s demeanor since then: his barely contained excitement, his questions about brain concussions and circus performers, his extended absences, even in the middle of the night (when Sherlock had slipped out to break into the Palace, Bell had crouched at the top of his spiral stairs in the darkness, listening to the boy’s movements down below), had convinced him that Master Holmes was pursuing the case. He knew of the lad’s interest in crime, something of his past, and had gleaned his connection to the solution of the Whitechapel murder during their many conversations. If the truth be told, the old man was absolutely thrilled about it all – it was like dining on filet mignon and Yorkshire pudding before being hanged. Adventure was afoot! Evil had taken place! And his young boarder, a youthful knight crusading for good, was in the middle of it all, right on the trail.
What he did not know was that the boy was also planning to save his life.
Though it is growing very late, the apothecary hasn’t gone to bed. Instead, he is just sitting down to perform an aria from The Magic Flute on his valuable Stradivarius violin, purchased at a bargain long ago from a nearby Jewish pawnbroker. He always plays it in an unusual position on his knee. But when he hears Sherlock Holmes returning, he sets it down quickly. He knows the sound of the violin makes the boy sad – it was the instrument his mother loved.
Sherlock is whistling a merry tune, his mind obviously deeply engaged in something. Bell can’t stand it anymore. He is desperate to be involved.
“I must ask you where you have been,” he says as he moves to a tall stool at the high examining table in the lab, where minutes earlier he had been mixing a green gooey alkaloid and the pulverized heart of a bat. The smell is rather off-putting.
Sherlock has just taken off his coat and placed it on a hook, ready to clean up this latest mess before he goes off to bed. He stops abruptly and ceases whistling. Bell is looking at him over the top of his glasses, which have slid down to the tip of his red nose, nestling at the knob that resides there in all its vein-filled glory The old man has never asked him anything like this.
“Uh …” replies Sherlock. Best to tell some version of the truth, he decides, the old man is no fool. “I was at the Crystal Palace … to see my father again. Did you need me? I apologize if …”
“Master Holmes,” sighs Bell with a smile, “I am not a devil from the Spanish Inquisition, nor do I wish to follow or control your every movement. You may do as you please so long as your chores are completed. And I believe they are.”
Sherlock smiles back, feeling relieved. But instead of looking away, the old man keeps smiling at him. It is rather unnerving. The boy attempts to go about his duties. He picks up a rag, wets it in a pail of water, and begins to wipe the counters and containers. But no matter where he goes, even when he is behind the old man, he has the sense that that smile, those watery red eyes, are still trained on him. Finally, the old man speaks.
“Why don’t you tell me about it? Perhaps I could be of some use?”
“About what?” asks Sherlock, fixing the most innocent look he can muster onto his face.
“Come, come now, Master Holmes.”
Sherlock then knows that Sigerson Bell knows. He should have guessed long ago. How could anyone keep something from this brilliant old man? But the boy doesn’t want to share what he’s learned about the Mercure incident: he wants to think about it on his own. All of the elements of a solution are at hand – the facts are spinning in his brain. He simply needs to fit all of these pieces together, something he has been trying to do since he left the Crystal Palace nearly an hour ago. He wants to see the crime as Mercure saw it. If he can just …
“Sometimes, you know,” adds the glowing old man, “two heads are better than one.”
Sherlock indeed needs another brain. And what a piece of tomato aspic sits under that red fez hat: a teeming blob of cranial jelly capable of helping him line up all his clues, and see the crime exactly as it occurred. He certainly doesn’t want to ask Malefactor for advice, and Irene, despite her intelligence, is out of the question.
But how can he bring someone he cares for into something like this? The last time he did, Irene was nearly crippled for life … and his mother was killed.
He looks at the kindly old man, the only adult friend in his life now. He can’t do this to him.
“I shall be in no danger,” states Sigerson Bell. It is a startling thing to say, as if he were a spiritualist reading Sherlock’s thoughts as clearly as the headlines in the Daily Telegraph.
“I … I have hurt people in the past,” sputters the boy. He hasn’t shared his feelings like this since before his mother died.
“I am an old man, Master Holmes. I love adventure and intrigue. Were I to even die helping you do something like this, I would expire with a smile upon my face. I would never regret it.”
It reminds Sherlock of what his mother said not long before she was killed.
“But …”
“I shall likely kick the proverbial bucket soon anyway my boy. Now, tell me about this. I will help.”
Sherlock hesitates. He doesn’t want the old man in any danger, whether he is on his last legs or not. His plan is to save him, not kill him. And deep inside, he is suspicious of anyone’s interest in his endeavors, even Bell. Why is the apothecary so intrigued?
“I live in a locked building in the center of London, far from any of this,” continues Bell, stating his case as clearly as a Lincoln Inn’s Field magistrate. “None of the devils involved in this would have any reason to do anything to me.”
Sherlock’s need to solve the crime is about to get the better of him. With a little help, the solution to the infamous Mercure incident could be at hand.
“Tell me,” repeats Bell earnestly.
And so the boy does.
They sit together on the two high stools at the table in the laboratory as Sherlock tells him what he knows: a disjointed story with disconnected but tantalizing facts. When he is finished, the apothecary ponders it all with a look of abiding intrigue, elbows on the table, face cupped on either side with his hands. He and the boy sit silently for a few moments. Finally, the old man speaks.
“They used a sedative potion on the guard,” he says clearly.
“Who?”
“The Brixton Gang.”
That is a major missing piece – in fa
ct, it makes the whole crime possible. Instantly, Sherlock begins to see what Mercure saw. He is high above the Crystal Palace on performance day, dressed in his royal purple tights, Le Coq, the magnificent master of The Flying Mercures. He grips the purple trapeze bar and swoops out over the central transept, a monster crowd gathered below. The bar feels a little shaky for some reason, but he pays it little heed – it is show time. He is a catcher: the one who will catch and throw the smaller flyers. But his first maneuver – one that always thrills audiences – is to fly himself, as high as he possibly can, using his great experience and enormous strength to stun spectators with his speed and elevation. It will be especially sensational here in this magnificent Palace. One swing, two, three … he reaches his apex. From up here the view is remarkable. But what is that? Almost directly in front of him in that room with the walls that don’t quite reach the ceiling: a man is slumped on a chair and two others stand in front of a vault, their heads turned to look up for an instant toward the performance. Then the trapeze bar snaps at both ends and he is falling, dropping like a bird shot from the sky. He screams. Looking down, he sees a dark-haired boy dressed in a tattered black frock coat and waistcoat, wearing Wellington shoes. He is heading directly toward him.
The apothecary’s voice brings Sherlock back to the laboratory.
“What we have is a superficial view of this crime: a theory, with holes in it. We must now examine what happened in detail, from start to finish, and most importantly we must understand how it happened. Let us piece it together, out loud. Tell it to me again, adding the information I contributed about the sedative, and I will try to help you when you reach gaps.”
Death in the Air Page 11