by Anthony Read
Sparrow was beginning to lose hope as it got nearer and nearer to the time when Marvin and Mary were due on-stage, and still the mystic stayed put behind the closed door. Salvation finally came from the most unlikely source: Mr Trump. He knocked at the dressing-room door and told Marvin he wanted to speak to him before he went on.
“The patrons of this establishment are exceedingly appreciative of your performance,” Sparrow heard him say.
“Does that mean they like us?” Marvin asked.
“Indeed. To put it bluntly, they can’t get enough of you. Would you consider extending your engagement for a further sennight?”
“What’s that in English?”
“Will you stay on for another week.”
“Well, that depends,” Marvin replied, “on what you’re offering.”
“I have confidence that we can achieve a mutually satisfactory arrangement concerning remuneration.”
“OK, just cut the cackle and talk turkey. How much?”
The manager winced at the American’s bluntness, glanced at the other artistes moving up and down the corridor and beckoned to him.
“I would prefer not to discuss such confidential matters here,” he said. “Kindly accompany me to my bureau.”
“OK. I guess I’ve got a few minutes before we’re on. Mary –” he turned back briefly to the girl as he closed the door – “I’m just going upstairs with Mr Trump. Stay put and don’t talk to nobody, you hear?”
The two men had hardly turned the corner before Sparrow nipped quickly into the dressing room. Mary leapt to her feet from the sofa, excited but scared, as he rushed to open the window.
“Quick!” he told her. “Get outta your costume and into your ordinary clothes. Go on – I won’t look.”
As she changed, he stuck his head out of the window and gave a low whistle. Queenie immediately appeared outside in the alley.
“It’s on. Now!” Sparrow said, and threw her the velvet cloak.
Barely three minutes later, Marvin came back, passing Sparrow, who was pushing a big wickerwork basket – a skip – along the corridor. The American was so pleased with himself at being invited back for another week at the top of the bill that he even managed to give Sparrow a smile. But the smile vanished when he entered the dressing room and found Mary’s scarlet costume lying on the floor, and no sign of the girl herself. He let out an angry roar, then dashed out of the room and back along the corridor, catching Sparrow just before he reached the stage door.
“Hold it right there, kid!” he cried, grabbing hold of the skip. “What you got in that basket?”
“Dirty washing, Mr Marvin, sir,” Sparrow replied, his face the picture of innocence. “Ready for the Chinese laundry.”
“Hah!” Marvin snarled. “You don’t fool me that easy. Let’s take a look, shall we?”
With a mighty heave, he turned the skip on its side, spilling its contents out onto the floor.
“Mr Marvin, sir!” Sparrow protested. “What you do that for?”
Marvin pulled at the tangled heap of sheets and clothing, baffled to find nothing more.
“Where is she?” he yelled. “What have you done with Mary?”
“Mary?” Sparrow replied. “She’s in your dressing room, ain’t she?”
“No, she’s not, damn you! If you don’t tell me—”
Alerted by Marvin’s shouts, Mr Trump arrived. “If he don’t tell you what?” he asked, and glared at Sparrow. “Now what have you done?”
“Me, sir? I ain’t done nothin’, honest. Far as I know, Miss Mary’s still in her dressing room.”
“And you mean she ain’t, er, isn’t?”
“No.” Marvin shook his head and tore at his hair with his fingers. “She’s gone. Disappeared! Vamoosed!”
“But … but she can’t be! You’re on in two minutes!” Mr Trump had gone quite pale. He shouted for Bert and, when the stage doorkeper stuck his head through the swing doors, asked him if Mary had left the theatre.
“No, sir,” Bert told him. “She couldn’t have come past me. Mind you, come to think of it, I did see a young lady going past outside. Wearing a red velvet cloak, she was, with the hood over her head.”
“How long ago?” Mr Trump asked.
“Ooh, not more’n a couple of minutes. She went that way.” He pointed to the left. Marvin charged through the doors and peered down the street. In the distance he could see a small figure in a hooded cloak just about to turn a corner.
“I see her!” he cried, and set off in hot pursuit, running as though his life depended on it.
Mr Trump turned to Sparrow.
“If you’ve got anything to do with this…” he threatened.
“Me, sir? No, sir. Mr Marvin told me to keep away from Miss Mary, and I been busy anyway.”
Mr Trump glared at him suspiciously – but couldn’t see that he was firmly crossing his fingers behind his back. Then the manager struck his forehead with the palm of his hand as he remembered the show.
“Quick,” he ordered. “Run to Madame Violetta. Tell her she’s to do an extra turn. I’ll make the announcement.”
Madame Violetta had been soothing her throat with several large glasses of gin, so she rose to the challenge happily, if a little unsteadily. As the sound of her voice warbling and wandering through a sentimental ballad floated through the theatre, Sparrow quickly made his way back to Mary’s dressing room.
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “You can come out now.”
Mary emerged from beneath the sofa, where she had been hidden by the drapes, covered in dust.
“Is it OK?” she asked. “Has he gone?”
“He’s chasing Queenie all the way down Baker Street.”
“Oh, my. What if he catches her?”
“He won’t. She knows every twist and turn round here. And even if he did, well, he’d only find it wasn’t you, right?”
“Right. That’s terrific.”
“Yeah, ain’t it just?” Sparrow grinned triumphantly. “Now all we gotta do is get you out of here before he finds out and comes back.”
He moved quickly to open the window and help her climb out. Wiggins was waiting outside, holding an old coat of Queenie’s which he wrapped around Mary’s shoulders to keep her warm.
“This is Wiggins,” Sparrow told her. “He’s gonna take you back to HQ. You’ll be safe there.”
Moriarty’s carriage drew up behind the Imperial Music Hall just as Marvin returned looking distraught. Beaver, who had stayed on to keep an eye on the place in case Sparrow needed help, watched from the dark shadow of a doorway across the street as the carriage door opened and a bony white hand beckoned the American inside. This was too good an opportunity to miss. Holding his breath, Beaver crept across to the back of the carriage, out of sight of the driver, and tried to hear the conversation inside it.
At first the voices were low and muffled, and he could not make out what they were saying. Then one of them, which had to be the professor’s, rose in anger.
“You have let me down,” he rasped. “What use are you to me if you cannot control your own stepdaughter?”
“She can’t have got far,” Marvin replied. “She don’t know London or anybody here. I’ll find her.”
“You’d better. Before tomorrow night.”
“I will. I promise.”
“Leave no stone unturned. But whatever you do, keep the police out of it.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.”
“Just don’t forget it – and don’t forget tomorrow night is the big one. Now get out, and get on with it.”
Beaver barely had time to scuttle back to the shadows before the door slammed behind Marvin and the carriage drove off.
“I wouldn’t like to be in Marvin’s shoes tomorrow,” Beaver told the other Boys and Mary back at HQ, as he recounted what he had seen and heard. “The professor was furious with him.”
“So was Mr Trump,” Sparrow joined in. “He said if he don’t perform tomorro
w night, he might as well pack his bags and go back to America, ’cos he’ll make sure he never works in this country again.”
“Cor,” said Rosie. “Makes you feel quite sorry for him, don’t it?”
“No!” Mary cried. “Never feel sorry for that man. He’s wicked through and through.” She burst into tears. Queenie, safely back from her mission, put her arm round her and gave her a motherly hug.
“There, there. Don’t cry, love. It’s all right. You’re safe now.”
“You don’t know him like I do,” Mary sobbed. “I’ll never be safe as long as he’s out there.”
“Yeah, but you’re with us now,” Beaver tried to reassure her.
“That’s right,” Gertie joined in. “You’re with the Baker Street Boys. We’ll look after you. Right, everybody?”
“Right!” the others chorused.
Mary looked at their open faces and finally managed a small, slightly nervous smile.
“That’s more like it,” Wiggins told her. “Now, why don’t we have a nice cup of cocoa, and you can tell us all about it.”
“Cocoa?” she asked. “What’s that?”
“It’s like chocolate,” said Queenie. “Only to drink. You like chocolate, don’t you?”
“Oh, sure. But I’m not allowed.”
“Who says?”
“Marvin. Says it’ll make me fat and give me zits.”
“Zits? You mean like spots? Well you ain’t with Marvin no more, so you can have all the chocolate you like.”
“When we can get it,” Sparrow chimed in.
“Which ain’t very often,” Shiner added fiercely. “And when we do we have to share it.”
“Of course,” said Mary. “I wouldn’t want more than my share of anything.” And she smiled again, a little less nervously, as Queenie gave her a nod of approval.
While Queenie, with the help of Rosie and Sparrow, busied herself making cocoa with water from the big black kettle that was always singing quietly on the old stove, Wiggins sat Mary down and asked her to tell him all about Marvin.
“Like I told Sparrow,” she said, “he’s not my real father. My real daddy took off for the Yukon, to join the search for gold…”
“And never came back?” asked Beaver, whose own father had sailed away to the East and never returned.
“I never saw him again.” Mary bit her lip, but couldn’t stop a tear from rolling down her cheek. “We had word that there had been an accident in a mine that he was digging, and he’d been killed.
“Oh, that’s real sad,” said Gertie.
“Where’s the Yukon?” Shiner asked.
“It’s way over on the other side of Canada,” Mary said. “Right up in the frozen north. All ice and snow and mountains and stuff. They discovered gold there.”
“Did your Daddy find any?”
“I guess not. We had no money, so Ma had to look for a job. She was very beautiful, and she had a lovely voice, so Marvin took her on as his assistant. And when he promised to look after her and me, she agreed to marry him.”
“Did you like that?” Rosie asked.
Mary shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I always thought there was something creepy about him.”
“Well, there would be, wouldn’t there?” Beaver said. “With him being a mystic and a mind-reader and all.”
Mary gave a little laugh.
“Oh, that!” she said. “That’s all fake. Anybody could learn it in no time.”
“I knew it was!” Sparrow exclaimed. “I could see you wasn’t really hypnotized.”
“No, I just pretend. It’s part of the act. But he can hypnotize for real.”
“He can?” Rosie’s eyes were wide again.
“Sure. In the other part of the act he gets people up on-stage and puts them under the ’fluence, and gets them to do all kinds of crazy things.”
“What like?”
“Well, sometimes he gives them a glass of water, and tells them it’s whisky or wine – and they get drunk. For real.”
“On plain water?” Sparrow asked.
“Sure.”
“Hey, you could make a fortune outta that,” said Shiner with enthusiasm.
“Or he makes them believe they’re a duck, say, or a dog,” Mary continued, “and they run around the stage quacking or barking or whatever. And afterwards they don’t remember anything about it, so they don’t know they’ve been hypnotized.”
“P’raps that’s why you acted so funny yesterday!” Sparrow cried. “Was you hypnotized then?”
“I don’t know. That’s the trouble. He can make you do most anything and you just don’t know.”
“Anything?” Wiggins looked intrigued.
“Sure. Sometimes I wonder if that’s how he got Ma to marry him.”
The Boys fell silent as they thought about the enormity of this. That anyone could have such powers was scary. That the man who had them was their adversary was even more frightening.
“What happened to your ma?” Queenie asked quietly.
“She took sick and died, last year.”
“So you took her place in the act,” Wiggins said thoughtfully.
“I didn’t want to. I hate it. But he made me.”
“Of course,” Wiggins said, sounding more and more like Sherlock Holmes. “What else could you do? He’s the only family you’ve got…’
“No. No, he isn’t.”
“He isn’t?”
“No. My ma and pa were both English. Pa was an orphan, but Ma wasn’t. I guess I’ve got family here, maybe a grandma and grandpa and uncles and aunties too, if I could only find them.”
At this, the Boys perked up. This was something they could enjoy doing.
“Don’t worry,” Sparrow told Mary. “We’ll help you. Won’t we, Wiggins?”
“We certainly will,” Wiggins agreed. “But we gotta get Marvin out of the way first. No sense doing anything while he’s still about.”
“How we gonna do that, then?” Queenie demanded.
“I dunno just yet. But I’ll think of something, trust me. First of all, we gotta find out what he’s really doing with Moriarty.”
Mary looked blank. “Who’s Moriarty?” she asked.
“You know – the professor,” Beaver explained.
“Oh, him. Now he really does give me the creeps.”
“Yeah, us too,” Rosie said with a shudder at the thought.
“But what’s he doing with Marvin?” Wiggins repeated.
“He fixes for us to give private shows for rich folk in their houses,” Mary told him. “Makes out I’m a clairvoyant.”
“Clare who?” Rosie asked.
“Clairvoyant,” Gertie corrected. “That’s like a fortune teller.”
“How d’you know that?” Sparrow wanted to know.
“There was always one at the horse fairs my da’ and me used to go to. Called herself Madame Zara, she did. Said she could tell the future.”
“And could she?”
“Well, somebody set fire to her caravan once, for telling ’em wrong – she never saw that coming.”
The others laughed, but Wiggins remained serious.
“Is that what you do?” he asked Mary. “Tell fortunes?”
“Sometimes. But mostly we give séances.”
“Seein’ what?” Shiner asked.
“Seeing nothing,” Queenie explained. “A séance is like calling up spirits.”
“You mean ghosts?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Mary replied.
“Talking to dead people?” Gertie gasped. “Can you really do that?”
“They think so. The rich folk. They pay a deal of money to talk to their loved ones who’ve passed over.”
“There you are, then,” Beaver said. “That’s what they’re up to. Stinging rich people for cash.”
Wiggins, however, was not convinced.
“Nah, ain’t big enough, not for Moriarty,” he said dismissively, then he turned back to Mary. “
Do you think that’s why Marvin came all the way to London?”
“I don’t know. All I know is we had to leave New York in a hurry. I don’t know why, but he was real jittery. Still is.”
“Ha!” Wiggins exclaimed, raising one finger in the air. “The plot thickens!”
Mary looked puzzled.
“What’s that mean?” she wanted to know.
“Not a lot,” Queenie answered drily.
“It’s what Mr Holmes says when he’s getting to work on a case,” Wiggins explained.
“Pity he ain’t here to work on this case,” Shiner moaned. “Seems to me he’s never around when we need ’im.”
“Mr Holmes is a very busy man,” Wiggins reproached him. “It’s up to us to keep things going while he’s away on other cases.”
“So what we gonna do, then?” Beaver asked.
“You lot ain’t gonna do nothing,” Wiggins told him. “It’s the middle of the night, and you’re all going to get some shut-eye.”
He picked up his old deerstalker hat and curly pipe from the shelf, put the hat on his head and the empty pipe in his mouth, and settled himself down in his special chair.
“I shall sit up and do some hard thinking,” he said. “This is what Mr Holmes would call a three pipe problem. I’ve only got one pipe, but that’ll have to do.”
And he clamped his teeth around the stem of the pipe and set his face in an expression of deep thoughtfulness.
Learning the Code
Next morning, as the first glimmer of light began seeping into the cellar through the grating near the ceiling, Wiggins sat upright and laid down the empty pipe that he had been sucking for most of the night.
“Got it!” he said in a satisfied voice.
Easing himself stiffly out of his chair, he stretched his arms and legs, then ambled across to the stove and poked at the coals to bring the fire back to life. The others were still asleep, curled up in their blankets in various corners. But the noise Wiggins was making with the poker soon woke them, and they got up one by one, bleary-eyed and yawning.