It has to be about six o’clock, he guesses. Rose should be here soon.
The sun glows into the flat, warming his face, bringing a slight smile to his lips.
He doesn’t bother to read his father’s books or drink from one of his mother’s two chipped teacups set on the shelf above the fireplace. He just stares out the little back window where he saw the crows gather, waiting for her. As the sun starts to set, everything begins to darken.
So does his mood.
Something isn’t right. Time passes. Why would she be so late two nights in a row?
The room grows darker. He lights a candle. Where is she? Fear begins to grow inside him, spreading out from his stomach like a fire.
Where is she?
He gets up and paces, walking as silently as he can, disguised as a chimney sweep in his own home. It has become completely black outside.
There is a rustling at the door. Finally!
What if it isn’t her? He doesn’t care anymore. He rushes to the door and flings it open.
Again, he sees a look of terror in his mother’s face. Reaching out with both arms, he pulls her indoors and wraps her in his arms. But something isn’t right. She feels weak in his embrace, though her heart is racing.
“Are you all right, mother?”
“I’m fine, Sherlock. They kept me late. I must sit down.”
She staggers across the room and falls onto the couch. The burning inside him, which had subsided momentarily, rises again.
“It was very strange,” she mumbles.
Her speech is slurred, but he doesn’t smell ale.
“What was strange, mother?”
“Tea? … Do you have some tea you might give me, young man?”
“What was strange!?” he shouts, taking her face into his hands. The pupils in her eyes aren’t right. Oh, God!
“The gentleman … the gentleman of the house …”
“Yes?”
“Gave me tea … made tea himself … and served it to me … a strange brew … it made me …”
Her voice fades. Something falls from her hand: the same piece of paper he saw her carrying last night. He sees the address on it this time. The very house he intends to enter tonight. The house where the villain surely lives!
Rose tries to rally herself. “I didn’t want to tell you that it was one of the four houses.”
“Mother, the men in the others are innocent!”
“I thought I might learn something…. I didn’t want you to go away…. The man gave me an awful smile when he showed me out … said Mayfair knows when outsiders ask inappropriate questions … that he’d noticed the other burgled houses belonged to his one-eyed friends … that he’d been speaking to all the servants …”
She collapses in his arms.
“MOTHER!”
As he holds her closely he can barely feel the beat of her heart. Lifting her in his arms, he is alarmed at how light she is … like a bird. When he sets her on her bed she is completely limp. Her eyes open briefly.
“You have much to do in life,” she says clearly.
Then her eyes close. Frantically he pulls the covers over her and takes her white hand in his. It has no life. He feels her wrist for a pulse.
There is none.
The beautiful, worry-wrinkled eyelids are still. The mouth is slightly open. Her lips are dry and her face flushed red. His father has taught him the properties of nearly every chemical mixture known to man, and their symptoms should they be ingested … especially the lethal ones.
Poison! Deadly nightshade!
“MOTHER!” he screams again and presses his forehead to hers. His chest heaves and his lungs fill and empty of air. He stays that way for a long while, holding her, waiting for her breathing to come back. But it won’t.
When he finally rises, his face looks like a devil’s mask. Hatred is carved into it. He seizes their table and throws it across the room with the strength of a demon. It crashes and splinters against the wall. The sound echoes in the little flat and out into the street.
He races to the window, smashes it through with his fist, and thrusts his head into the outside air.
“JUSTICE!!”
He howls it into the night, his head thrown back, his teeth like fangs, his eyes two glowing black coals. When he opens the door, he nearly rips it from its hinges. He swoops down the stairs.
Someone is coming up toward him.
If it isn’t his father, he will kill with his bare hands.
But he doesn’t. And it isn’t Wilber.
Irene is struggling up the steps.
“Sherlock!”
She has never seen a human being look like this before. It is as if his face, that dark, handsome young face, is lit from within. The eyes are all black – the gray irises gone.
He pauses for only a second. “Stay away from me!” he warns her.
He shoves her, wounded as she is, and nearly knocks her down the stairs. He doesn’t give her another thought. In minutes he is back across the Thames … and headed for Mayfair.
He has something to do on the way. Just below London Bridge on the north side, is Mohammad Adalji’s butcher shop. The old butcher likely doesn’t have a new boy yet. He’ll be cleaning the knives himself – just finishing up.
The Tower of London looms to his right but Sherlock doesn’t look at it tonight. His hands are clutched in fists, the knuckles white, and he is running, tears pouring down his face. Mohammad told him exactly how to find the shop.
The dim light is on when he arrives.
Sherlock tries the door. It’s unlocked. He opens it and deftly slips inside. The butcher has his back to him, cleaning and sharpening the knives. They lie on a thick wooden table, splattered with blood. The boy wipes his face dry.
He doesn’t bother hiding his presence. He knows what he wants – he has to have it – and he is certain he can outrun the old man.
There are at least a dozen blades to choose from. Every one of them will do the job. The sharpened knives are to the old man’s right, the dirty ones to the left. It will be harder to grab a sharp weapon, but Sherlock doesn’t care – that’s what he needs.
He eyes a big blade, long and serrated, sharp as a barber’s razor, not too long to be concealed in his clothing.
The butcher is gripping another knife in his hand. He holds it up to examine it and when he does, he sees a boy behind him, reflected in the gleaming blade. It makes him start. The lad looks like he’s climbed up from hell that very evening.
Sherlock lunges forward and seizes the knife. The man gasps and draws back, holding his big blade in front of him. He expects the worst: to be butchered with one of his own tools by this tall child from Hades.
The boy pivots and flees.
By the time the butcher has recovered his senses, by the time he has stepped to the street and screamed “Thief!” into the night, there is no sign of Sherlock Holmes.
He runs toward Mayfair, concentrating on a single thought. It is the hardest thing he’s ever had to do: he has to control his rage and his grief. He absolutely must to gain this vengeance. He needs to be ice cold, as villainous and as clever as a fox. He thinks of the things his mother has told him about performing.
“When an opera singer creates a character, she collects all the emotions she thinks that person might have … buries them deep inside her and then uses them.”
He buries his boiling anger, his white-hot rage. He wants it to power, not overwhelm him. He wants to use it! He can’t make mistakes, not if he wants his mother’s due. Tears come to his eyes again. He stops them, tucks his chin down onto his chest, holds his jaw tight, and glares into the darkness.
He flies across London in the night and lands at the Mayfair address.
The house is across the street from the one he’d been in the previous night. The Peelers are everywhere. He sees half a dozen before he even arrives. On the street where he will operate, there are two: one at each end of the avenue. His house is in the middle.
He darts over an iron fence, into a little backyard, and begins moving behind the houses, up and down like a snake over the separating walls.
Then he comes to the house he wants.
It has a long lane and a little mews and stable at the back. That’s unusual. Most stables are kept on smaller nearby streets, so the mansions are far from the smell. But because this house has its own little lane, a small additional stable has been built at the back, perhaps just for vehicles. A high wall runs from it along the backyard to the house. That will help him get onto the roof. Entering via the chimney is still the best idea – no one has figured out how he’s gotten into the other houses – he hasn’t been recognized. The chimney is still the way.
But just as he is about to scale the wall, he hears a noise behind him. His hand goes to his knife and he drops down behind the wall. Someone is inside the stable!
In seconds the two front doors swing open and a man emerges carrying a lantern. His frame is wide like a rugby player’s; and his thick head, like a bulbous canning jar on his shoulders, is shaved to the scalp. Something is familiar about him but from behind the wall, the boy can’t see him clearly. The man closes the doors and walks down the lane toward the street, glancing around, going right past the boy settling a black hat onto his head and a dark scarf around his neck.
Sherlock waits until the footsteps fade.
Now he can get on the roof. But something makes him want to look inside the stable. Those wide, rugby shoulders, that black hat and scarf … he’s seen them before.
He advances down the lane and pulls open the stable doors.
A dark coach … but it is brown. He closes the entrance.
Then he smells something. Paint. Someone has recently painted the coach. Sherlock looks down the street in the direction the thick-shouldered man has gone. Rushing to the street, the boy sees him pass under a streetlamp, revealing himself from head to boots … wearing a black-liveried coachman’s uniform with red stripes.
Sherlock reaches for the knife. But then he pauses. Even if he can kill this brute, it won’t eliminate the real villain. The coachman had been doing a job, following a meddling boy and girl, scaring them … for his living. Sherlock looks at the darkened house. The coachman isn’t the source of evil here. His real prey is inside.
Though standing on the wall allows him to start halfway up the house, there are no iron rungs or drainage pipes here. He’ll have to climb the outside of the building. It is an ornate home, filled with tall windows and deep frames and covered with green ivy. Up he goes like a spider, from wide windowframe to windowframe, up the ivy between them, silently and stealthily, until he reaches the roof Nothing will stop him now.
He is down the chimney in minutes. He doesn’t even look for an emergency way out. It doesn’t matter anymore. He wants two things: real evidence of the villain’s guilt … and the villain himself
He sweeps across the dining room and up the stairs to the first floor, then the second. Once he is there, it is obvious where the master sleeps. And that he sleeps alone.
The boy makes his way to the big double doors at the end of the hall.
His mind is racing – the coachman, the freshly painted carriage … the poison on his mother’s lips. There is no doubt now that this is the right place.
Evidence … then the villain. He feels for his knife.
The room smells of tobacco – a man’s lair.
Sherlock closes the door gently behind him. The almost paralyzing nervousness he felt in the other houses isn’t in him tonight. Vengeance is. His rage makes him strong and determined.
He crouches down and cases the room.
The man is snoring in the bed, lying on his back, the outline of his round gut rising and falling. Sherlock turns around. There is a cabinet, a washstand, a wardrobe … and a small writing desk.
This is the desk. It has to be. The one he has been searching for since he began entering the houses. All the evidence is coming together. He has to cinch it now. Malefactor said that when he found that one piece of evidence, that vital piece … everything would be solved.
Sherlock crawls across the carpet to the desk. It feels glossy, as if heavily stained. There are initials carved on the middle drawer. He runs his hands along the letters: J … T … R.
That’s the name – the last one left on his mother’s list. The desk belongs to the owner of this house and no one else … his own private depository.
Sherlock starts going through the drawers, finding banknotes and leaving them, papers that mean nothing, and photographs that he drops to the floor.
In the bed, the man stirs.
There has to be something, somewhere in this desk.
In the last drawer, the one on the left side, Sherlock finds a small box. It is heavy and made of iron. He tries to open it. It won’t budge. He holds it up in the moonlight and discovers a thick lock.
Sherlock remembers Malefactor’s lecture on picking them.
You need two sharp objects. He has one – a hatpin he found on the street a few days ago. He’d even bent its end, ready for action.
He pulls the knife from his clothing. Its tip is like a pin: the business end of a butcher’s blade that can slice through flesh as if it is butter.
Sherlock has heard Malefactor’s lock speech more than once. Fascinated by mathematics in all its forms, the young crime lord talks about the geometry of the interior, its tumblers, how they all need to fall into position for the lock to be sprung. You have to feel it: you have to click one and then the other and then the last.
Sherlock penetrates the lock with the tip of the knife, then slides the hatpin in too. He feels around inside. He begins pushing the tumblers back. Click. He can almost hear it. Click. There is the second one. Click…. The last.
Presto! He turns the blade. The lock opens.
He puts the knife and hatpin back into his coat, sets the heavy box on the floor, and lifts the lid.
There is only one object inside.
A purse.
It is embroidered with beads to form exotic birds, and splashed with red, which Sherlock at first thinks is part of the design. But it is raised and crusted on the surface.
Blood!
Some of the beadwork has been torn off.
Fingers trembling, he opens the purse.
Will there by anything in it?
There are a few coins, a small pot of rouge, a handkerchief
He is about to put it down, when he feels something else inside: a little pouch, like a secret pocket. It is difficult to open. He reaches in and finds a letter.
The killer took this purse in order to make the crime look like a robbery. He kept it here because the police had the Arab in custody and would never come to his Mayfair mansion. He would dispose of it, wisely, after the murder was long forgotten. But Sherlock is betting the villain didn’t search the purse thoroughly, had no reason to, and didn’t know this letter was hidden inside. If it contains anything incriminating, it will be Lillie’s vengeance from the grave.
Sherlock unfolds the sheet. But he can’t read it. It is too dark. He walks over to the window, an arm’s length from the head of the bed. The man is snoring, his eyelids moving rapidly.
Sherlock reads in the slashes of moonlight.
Lillie,
I implore you to read this carefully. If you do not desist from these evil plans of yours, I shall not be responsible for my actions. I have position and I will protect it, believe me. Blackmail is blackmail, whether perpetrated by a criminal or the belle of the ball. You cannot tell my wife of our affairs, I will not pay you for your silence, and you and I cannot continue together. That is simply our situation. We must go our separate ways. We were meant to enjoy one another, but never more than that. My world is not yours and never shall be.
Yes, I will meet you one more time. Tomorrow. There is a little lane off Old Yard Street in Whitechapel, west side, absolutely secluded. Be there at the stroke of two in the morning. I won’t meet you an
ywhere else. I know you will come, and I know you are familiar with those streets.
Tell no one of this. Those who interfere with me, do so at their peril.
J.T.R.
Sherlock crams the letter back into the purse. He shoves it all into his pocket.
He looks at the man in the bed. He hates him. It is absolute and pure hatred.
And it is time for this beast to die.
Rose Holmes might be nobody, Sherlock and Mohammad might be too, but this villain is going to pay, just as if they were all equals. There will be justice tonight. He will make things right with the violent plunge of his big butcher’s blade. He will carve up this man like the pig he has proven himself to be.
The boy reaches into his coat and pulls out the knife. It gleams in the moonlight. He steps up to the edge of the bed and raises it high over his victim. The man is lying on his back. The blade will go straight into the heart. Sherlock imagines the man’s gasp.
This is for all the injustice he has suffered; for all the hate everywhere in the world … and for Rose Sherrinford Holmes.
Justice!
His eyes are black stars. But something makes him pause.
Something deep inside him, borne of the scientific wisdom of his decent father and the love of his beautiful mother, murmurs that this will not be justice. It will be murder. And he, Sherlock Holmes, will be as bad as the man he kills. His mother will have died in vain. Irene will have been wounded for nothing.
Should he do what is right? He glares down at the man. Or wrong? He slowly lowers the blade, and hides it in his clothes.
He has the glass eye, the bracelet, the coachman, the freshly painted carriage, the blood-splattered coin purse, and even the letter. This man will swing. He will pay the price. Sherlock has him.
But he isn’t satisfied. He wants one more thing. One thing that will say to anyone, absolutely beyond any doubt, that this is the villain.
He thinks of the eyeball in the dirt in the dog kennel on Montague Street. He thinks of that day, not long ago, when Irene identified its color, its unique brown iris with the violet fleck knifing into it. Only one man has eyes like that.
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