Vanishing Girl

by Shane Peacock

  It is time to stop living in fantasies – he is a detective of facts and data. There is nothing wrong with my mind. The thief must simply have taken a while to bolt the door – that’s what gave me time. It surely must be locked from the outside.

  Sherlock Holmes gathers himself and turns to his task. It is time to find out who is in that room.

  He walks briskly down the hallway. He examines the entrance closely. No bolt. Then he looks down. Ah. There it is: on the outside of the door after all, in an unusual place near the floor. Someone is indeed being held here against her will.

  He unbolts the door … and enters.

  Everything in the room is clearly visible this time. And so is its only occupant. She is sitting on a settee next to the window, her head down, the same woman he just saw downstairs in bed and whom he glimpsed before in this very room.

  It’s Victoria Rathbone.

  There is a steely determination evident behind her frightened expression. He notices that her necklace is a thick chain with a small bell attached.

  “Who are you?” he asks.

  “Who are you?” she responds.

  “I asked first.”

  “You know very well … you rogue!” The R is perfectly rolled.

  “How can I be certain that you are her?”

  “What nonsense is this? Because it is evident, you fool!” Her snotty tone is not without a quaver, but her words are immaculately pronounced. “Are you in concert with those hooligans, or are you a friend?”

  “The latter … I believe.”

  “Then, whoever you are, remove me from this room. And send for my father. I shall wait in the dining hall until his arrival.”

  It’s her, thinks Sherlock, she wants to go home. Had he observed a brat like this in the Rathbone dining room he would not have thought that anything was amiss.

  He casts his mind back again to what he saw in the downstairs bedroom and it all begins to make sense. He decides to try one more question to be certain.

  “But perhaps you are just pretending to be her?”

  “No one can pretend to be me, you idiot!” She stamps her foot and her face goes red.

  Ah, yes. We have our girl.

  “My name is Sherlock Holmes and I have come to rescue you.” He smiles at his turn of phrase. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Well, it is not likewise. Take me away from here.” Her pout has grown across her lips, which are beginning to tremble. “This has been so horrible. You can’t imagine. I am allowed just four baths a week, I must wear this dress every six or seven days, peasant clothing at other times, and they feed me food barely fit for dogs.”

  “You look rather healthy to me.”

  “Do you call no Yorkshire pudding for three months, no oranges, no sweets, healthy? I have been forced to eat mutton and bread and milk and cheese and corn and peas and porridge for as long as I can remember. I have changed my mind. I demand that you take me to Belgravia this instant and let the cooks know I am home!” She sobs.

  “No.”

  Miss Rathbone looks shocked.

  “No?”

  “You were home just a few days ago, anyway,” he smiles.

  “I was?”

  “And secondly, we must await the police. They shall be along within an hour or two. Let us hope your captors don’t flee before the Force arrives … or that they don’t discover us … and murder us on the spot.”

  Victoria Rathbone gives a little shriek.

  Sherlock has put them in a dangerous situation. He can’t risk an escape attempt with her. It is broad daylight. And the fiends have placed that little cast-iron bell around her neck and secured it with a chain so that they will hear her if she tries to get away. It is sealed at the bottom and cannot be silenced.

  “If they discover us, they can’t release us, Miss Rathbone. We would be able to identify them. Your father would pursue them to the ends of the earth … and hang them in the London streets.”

  He walks to the window and peers out. “So, we must wait quietly and hope.” He can see St. Neots and the railway tracks running southward through a beautiful rolling countryside. He images the telegraph message shooting along the poles to London.

  At that very moment, an hour to the south, Inspector Lestrade is sitting on a special train from King’s Cross Station, his son by his side. But he can’t just sit there. He rises, shoves down a window, jams his head out, and screams up the tracks toward the conductor.

  “Get this iron horse moving, you imbecile!” he shouts.

  He has been in an ugly mood all morning, right from the moment the telegram was delivered by an out-of-breath messenger boy. It arrived almost the instant the senior detective entered his office. He is always there early. And lately, he’s been in harness even earlier. These last few days have been terribly trying. When the Rathbone home was robbed, the Metropolitan London Police and especially his detective division had been made to look like fools. Now, the girl has been taken again, and he and his men look even worse. There was no sign of her in Portsmouth and he has been completely perplexed. Then came this telegram from that half-breed boy, Sherlock Holmes, he who somehow solved the mysterious Whitechapel murder and, incredibly, handed over the Brixton Gang. Inspector Lestrade cannot, simply cannot, allow this child to outdo Scotland Yard again. But that is what the lad is doing. The senior detective knows for certain that the ransom-note stationery came from St. Neots. If Sherlock Holmes is there and says that the kidnappers are in a manor house nearby … he may very well be absolutely correct. The boy has been almost flawless in his investigations so far.

  “Get this piece of junk moving!” Lestrade screams again.

  Then he sees something that makes his day even worse. Hobbs, the bespectacled reporter from The Times, is rushing along the platform toward the train.

  “Do you know anything about what has transpired here?” Sherlock Holmes asks Victoria Rathbone quietly as he paces in the room, glances out the window, anxiously awaits any sign of the Force coming over the marsh.

  “I was kidnapped about four months ago, at the end of the season – such a horrible time to be inconvenienced – and I have been held here ever since.”

  “You have never left this room?”

  “They let me out for exercise and I go downstairs to a bedroom once a day where I am allowed to choose dresses to wear. They are such horrible rags!”

  “Are they are kept in a wardrobe – half silk dresses, half what you’d call peasant?”

  “How did you know –”

  “Why didn’t you escape through this window at night?”

  “You are a greater fool than I thought.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Do you not know about the black tiger?”

  “There is no such –”

  “Were I to somehow get out this window three floors above ground and climb down the ivy, the beast would hear me even if my bell didn’t make a sound. It would track me and kill me within seconds.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard it?”

  “Yes.”

  Sherlock looks out over the grounds again. Then he remembers something he should have been concerned about long before. To his shame, it has slipped his mind during all the excitement.

  Little Paul.

  In the Ratcliff Workhouse in Stepney it is breakfast time. Only one small woodstove heats the crude dining hall, and the children, who only eat after the adults are done, can see their breaths as they arrive. The gruel is cold within moments of being ladled into the wooden bowls. Little Paul isn’t there. They call out his name but he doesn’t appear. A man is dispatched to find him. The child is discovered sitting in a hallway. He couldn’t find his way downstairs because everything was a blur.

  “I cannot see, sir,” he tells the man.

  “Do you recall someone named Irene Doyle?” asks Sherlock, turning from the window to Victoria Rathbone.

  “I don’t spe
ak to any family with that name. It sounds foreign to me.”

  “She is your relative. Do you not remember speaking to a young lady in your house the day before you were kidnapped, who asked you about helping a little boy in a workhouse in the East End? He is going blind. You said you would make your father help him and have the child taken into the care of his physician, the only man in London who might cure him.”

  Miss Rathbone lets out a little laugh, which she then stifles.

  “My father never listens to me!” she exclaims, trying to keep her voice down. “He has spoken to me no more than three or four times since I turned ten. I was away in India at school for three years. I don’t think he laid his eyes upon me from the moment I returned until the day I was kidnapped. Yes, he gives me things to keep me happy, but I would never ask for something like that!” She snickers.

  “But you told Miss Doyle that –”

  “I don’t recall anyone named Doyle.”

  “But you –”

  “There are times when you must say certain things to keep up appearances. Perhaps I had some friends visiting?”

  Sherlock is stunned and angry. Maybe he should just leave this useless girl here, leave her to her fate, whatever it is. Or perhaps he should go downstairs and make a deal with the criminals, take a cut, and let them get away: Eliza Shaw, the two men and the captain.

  But then, he wouldn’t get the credit he deserves.

  “Maybe I should just lock the door and leave you here,” he says out loud.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care? You might rot up here. Maybe that would be a good thing.”

  “No I won’t, you impertinent boy. That villain, I’m not even sure which one he was – they put scarves over their faces when they speak to me – told me that I will be rescued.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When he was here, just now, he told me that they will leave food for me for a week. After that, the authorities will be notified and someone will come and get me.”

  “Do you honestly believe that?”

  “Why would he bother to tell me and why would he explain it all in such detail if it weren’t true?”

  “In detail?”

  “Yes, he seemed rather proud of himself. He said that they and a man who shall remain nameless have performed the perfect crime. They would prefer that I live. Within a week, they will be far away, unidentified, and set for life. Did my father actually pay a ransom?”

  Sherlock doesn’t answer, so she goes on.

  “They have engaged a London man, a boy really (in his words), who is well connected in the crime world and knows I am here. This boy has been helping them all along and is acquainted with a respectable young lady who is the key to my rescue. It is she who will carry a note to Scotland Yard … and because of who she is: they will believe her. I am to be saved on condition that the identity of the London boy remains unknown.”

  Sherlock reaches out for a chair.

  Irene and Malefactor.

  “Does this respectable young lady … do you think … she will know what is in the note?”

  “That appears to be the case.”

  Why would Irene do this? But he recalls what she said to him after she saved him as he fled the Belgravia mansion, when he refused, once again, to be her friend. “You will regret this, Sherlock Holmes!” He remembers the expression on her face. She wants to save little Paul. And that’s all she cares about. But does she want the child in her life? He thinks of how she responded when he suggested that the Doyles adopt the little boy. Sherlock had expected her to be happy; she seemed the opposite. He wonders now if she ever told her father who Paul “Dimly” really is. Does she simply want to save the boy … and leave it at that?

  Even the kindest heart in the world needs the undivided love of a parent. Moreover, Irene is not immune to the thrills that life offers. Malefactor has certainly been working on her, showing her his high-stakes world. Has he convinced her there is nothing they can do to catch the criminals and that Lord Rathbone deserves his fate? And that he can find Victoria and save Paul in the bargain? That might be enough for her. It would satisfy her father, too.

  But she is being played for a fool.

  Sherlock turns back to the rich girl. He is boiling. She will never help the workhouse boy. Paul will go blind and die. He thinks of the child’s enormous, cloudy eyes. He thinks of these criminals getting away with all the loot; he thinks of Lord Rathbone, hard and unforgiving, caring so little about his daughter that he doesn’t know her … a daughter barely worth knowing anyway; he thinks of Malefactor, gaining in strength; and finally, of Irene … lost.

  When Sherlock Holmes feels bitter about life, he not only grows furious, but starts to show off. His ego expands with his temper. He decides to exhibit his brilliance to this snobby, hard-hearted girl … and say things that hurt her. The entire story of the case of the vanishing girl is in his head now. And no one else’s.

  “Would you like to know exactly how all of this happened, Miss Rathbone? I doubt your brain capacity is such that you even have a clue.”

  Victoria looks at him as if she would like to have him sent to the Tower of London.

  “First, tell me your mother’s maiden name. I believe a former friend of mine once mentioned it to me in passing.”

  “It is Shaw, if you must know.”

  “Precisely. There is a relative of yours in this house.”

  “What?”

  “This was never a real kidnapping. These fiends could care less about you or extorting money from your father in that way. They wanted to rob him in a very particular manner. This was, from the beginning, a majestically conceived robbery. A man named Captain Waller, a Royal Navy officer, an old ‘friend’ of your greedy, ill-deserving mother, who advanced due to his charms and little else, was behind it all. He and two men he employed have been planning it for a long time, perhaps for more than a year. Your father was the perfect target and not just because Waller hated him. Why? Well, it is simplicity itself, isn’t it? Lord Rathbone has a ridiculous view of justice and how to deal with criminals, and just like many of his class, he doesn’t really love his children or spend any time with them. He simply loves himself, his position, and his money. Such were the perfect qualities in a victim.”

  Victoria gives a snort and turns her back on him. But she listens.

  “Waller made enquiries in the London underworld and was given the name of the boy you previously mentioned, a rogue with his finger on the pulse of things in the city, one who does thorough research about the rich. The lad found out all there was to know about Rathbone and how to deal with him. Waller was reminded that the lord had just one daughter, not particularly attractive, who was away in India, had been gone for some time. She was almost a stranger to the lord and lady. They concocted a way to snatch her soon after her return to England. But that was still months away.

  They developed the key to their plan well ahead of time: they found another you. The larcenous boy must have searched out girls in your mother’s family; distant relations, near you in age. Or perhaps it was the captain who recalled once meeting a particular girl relative who resembled you. However they did it, they located a third cousin named Eliza Shaw from Manchester way – her accent betrays as much. She was about your size, had similar bone structure, was nearly twenty but adolescent in appearance and able to pass for fourteen. She was a spitting image of you once they clothed her, adjusted the color of her hair, and trained her. They told her their scheme: they offered her the world. And she, of course, surrendered.

  Then they searched for, and found, the perfect hideaway: a dark manor house in St. Neots, a nice distance from London, but not too far. The house was said to be haunted … no one ever came near it. Man-eating beasts lived on its grounds, headless ghosts inhabited the hallways. They brought Miss Shaw here and continued her early training in how to talk like a spoiled, snobbish, upper-class girl. They copied your dresses, your walk, and your accent.


  Then their plan entered the truly clever part. They kidnapped you and brought you here and put you in this room. Every day, Eliza Shaw came up through a secret passageway from her bedroom downstairs and watched you through a hole in the wall.”

  He spins around theatrically. “Right here!” Victoria’s mouth hangs open as he points to a hole, about eyeball-size down near the floor on an inside wall.

  “She examined your face, your hair style, the way you walked, and the way you talked when you conversed with the other two men. They always wore scarves in your presence. She even smelled your clothes and copied your scent. When you were allowed outside, she came up to this room and observed you from here as you took your daytime exercise … while those nocturnal beasts slept.

  Meanwhile, they didn’t say a word to the world or the police. They sent no ransom note, nothing. That was by design. It seemed like a most curious crime. But they knew your father would not respond. He would give them all the time they needed, play into their hands. And then, when Miss Shaw was ready to become you for a week or two, they sent their ransom note. They gave him three days. Concern about you grew to fever pitch in London and among the police, and especially in the confused mind of one Inspector Lestrade. On the third day, your captors took Eliza to Portsmouth, where the captain lived and had arranged some time earlier to have a home rented in a respectable part of the town, far from any dangers that might interfere with their plans. Portsmouth, of course, lies to the south of London (in the opposite direction from where you really were) and is near the English Channel, so as to appear to be a place for a quick getaway by water. They deposited her there and immediately sent the police an anonymous telegram, a ‘public tip.’ Inspector Lestrade had asked for one, as they expected, so anxious had he become to solve this crime. The Force came like an army to Portsmouth and found you … a glorious day for them and their senior detective.”

  Victoria is trying not to turn around and gape at him.

  “But the entire crime was really about getting inside your father’s house, identifying every last one of his valuables, opening doors from the inside, and stealing him blind while he was away. Your mother’s room and its contents, dear to Captain Waller, were not to be touched. She was most certainly not the target.