“Rest assured we will keep a close eye on him,” Holmes replied.
There being nothing else to be said, we made our goodbyes, and hurried through the rain-slicked streets outside to the main road, where we were extremely fortunate to catch a growler as it left the gates of one of the nearby boat yards.
* * *
As we settled ourselves in the cab, I raised the question uppermost in my mind since first we laid eyes on the toshers’ hoes. “I was surprised—”
“—that I made nothing of the fact that a hoe might be used as a weapon?” Holmes completed my question for me. “Especially given that the end of one of those heavy poles could very easily have produced the bruise on Red Rob’s back?” He shook his head in mock censure. “Have you so little faith in my abilities, Watson, that you believe I would fail to draw so obvious an inference? Of course, the hoe might well be employed to strike a blow against an unwary opponent. From behind and at a reasonable distance too, so that the relative strength of the two men need not necessarily be taken into account. James Mackay is a small man, but his hoe, used appropriately, would render Rob Rae’s greater strength and reach immaterial.”
“Then why did you fail to say so when we had Mackay in our hands? I have seen enough liars to know that he spoke barely a word of truth. Why have we agreed to explore a dangerous tunnel with a man who might well be a murderer?”
“I see that both James Mackay and Long Bill Rae made an impression on you, Watson. Mackay made a poor first impression, it is true, whereas Rae is an intelligent man where you did not expect to find one. You have consequently made the common mistake of equating ability in one area with that in another. But the example of Professor Moriarty should surely have demonstrated to you that such morality and intellect are not necessarily linked. We have no reason to believe Rae’s claims that no man of his would have harmed his nephew, any more than we have reason to believe that Mackay would.”
I had no answer to that. I lit a cheroot and considered whether I had been too quick to suspect Mackay and assume Long Bill’s innocence. By the time we reached Baker Street, where I had agreed to spend the night, I was still unsure.
* * *
Whatever my feelings, Mackay was as good as his word. We arrived at the top of the hill as dawn broke the following morning, dressed in old suits and stout rubber boots and gloves, and Mackay was already there. The river tide was out, and there were already many youngsters treading the mud.
“Glad to see that you came dressed for the job,” he said, indicating our galoshes, “though they suits are likely to be ruined.” He shook his head at our foolishness and handed each of us a dark lantern, shuttered so that the light shone only feebly before us. I saw that he had a similar lantern tied to his right breast. Noticing my gaze, he laughed. “You’ll have to carry your lamps in your hands, not having any ties. I need my hands free, though, and this way, the light shines down when I bend over, which is a handy trick in this game.”
With that, he reached up to grab the brickwork at the side of the tunnel entrance, and swung himself up and inside. Holmes followed and, after a moment’s pause, I did likewise and found myself in the stinking gloom of a London sewer.
The smell was almost a physical assault, a mix of spoiled meat and rotting vegetables, sulphurous gases, and general decay, so strong that I felt it scour the back of my throat as I passed inside. At Mackay’s grunted recommendation, we stood for several minutes a few yards from the broken grate, adjusting our eyes to the dim light. In truth, it was not as dark as I had thought it would be. So close to the entrance, light entered readily from the tunnel mouth but further in, I could make out shafts of brightness spearing down from the roof, illuminating the dank surfaces which would soon enclose us.
Directly inside the tunnel, the dirt exterior turned to wet brickwork, which curved above and below us. Heavy drops of water fell from the ceiling, landing in the shallow river that covered the floor with a metronomic beat; a counterpoint to the irregular groaning I could hear in the distance. Mackay, noticing me straining to locate the source of this sound, smiled wanly.
“That’s the tunnel shifting around,” he said, with gloomy delight. “It moves all the time, don’t it?” He kicked at a rat, which scurried away into the darkness. “Don’t pay it any heed, Doctor, not unless you hear a crack, right above your head. Then I suggest you run as fast as you can, for the roof’s about to fall. And move along the main tunnel, not into a side one, for there’s nothing any soul can do if you end up on the wrong side of a roof fall. But,” he concluded, spitting loudly at his feet, “we haven’t got all day, gentlemen, so you follow me now, and don’t stray from where I lead you.”
With that, he turned his back on us and, holding his lantern above his head, moved off into the tunnel. Holmes gave a tiny shrug and set off behind him, leaving me to bring up the rear, still gagging a little at the stench.
* * *
It took us longer to reach the first shaft of light than I had expected. It is one of the peculiarities of walking the sewers that distances and times quickly become confused, and it seemed to me that we walked for half an hour before reaching the first patch of illumination, though when I pulled out my watch and examined it, only ten minutes had passed. The light itself came from street gratings above our heads, through which the brightness of the London day made its way into the stygian depths we traversed. As we approached the first grating, Mackay dimmed his lantern and held a finger to his lips.
“Quiet as you can now. T’wouldn’t do for any of the good folks above our heads to hear us. We aren’t supposed to be here, or so a magistrate would say. Long Bill Rae’ll give you the tomfoolery that shoremen don’t make old bones, but as many end up inside a cell as inside a coffin nowadays.”
I thought Mackay overcautious, for the grating was a good eight feet above our heads and the constant sound of falling water surely masked any noise engendered by our passage. But Holmes silently indicated his agreement, so I did likewise, and we moved off again in silence.
We continued in this manner for some time, passing enough street gratings that they ceased to be a novelty. I remained unclear what Holmes hoped to find in this gloomy, stinking place, and though the rubber boots kept my trousers clean, I could not help but brush now and again against the dank walls, leaving my jacket and gloves besmirched with filth. Mackay had disappeared round a bend of the tunnel, and I was on the verge of suggesting that we should consider turning back, when Holmes held up a hand in warning.
“Listen,” he whispered to me, but try as I might I could hear nothing but the ever-present dripping of water and the scuttling of small, furred creatures. I said as much to Holmes.
“Exactly,” he said and, without warning, plunged quickly ahead. I followed at his heels, fumbling in my pocket for my revolver, though unclear as to the cause of Holmes’s sudden haste.
We had barely reached the bend when he stopped again. Mackay was crouched a few feet in front of us, caught in the act of rising.
Holmes stepped forward and held out a hand. “I would remind you, Mackay, of the terms of our arrangement,” he snapped. “You agreed to hand over anything you might find.”
If Mackay were concerned by the implicit accusation in Holmes’s words, he gave no sign of it. He straightened the front of his filthy coat and ran his hands through his lank, greasy hair. “T’were nothing to concern you,” he said, with dignity. “I was just checking on something, that’s all.” He took a step backwards, and kicked at a strange, lumpen shape at his feet. “I thought that mebbes this tosh ball here might be the sort of thing you wanted to see.”
The object over which he held his lantern was spherical, roughly one and a half feet in diameter, and composed of a mix of mud, twigs, rope and other assorted debris, all compacted together into a single agglomeration. I failed to see what was so fascinating that we should be obliged to crouch in filthy water to view it, but then Mackay bent down and scraped some of the muck away. He exposed a golden b
rown layer and rapped his knuckles on it. It rang with a dull metallic sound, and he half-smiled at our surprise.
It was difficult to make out much detail, but beneath the outer layer it appeared to be comprised of the rusted remains of any number of different pieces of metal. I identified several pennies and the handle of a spoon or fork, and what looked like one leg of a pair of spectacles. Holmes, less fastidious than I, scraped more of the dirt away and leaned in for a more minute examination, caring little for the damage he was doing to his clothes. He pressed against the ball with two hands but barely caused it to shift in its place.
“Fascinating,” I heard him mutter. “Presumably the individual items were washed down the sewer until they reached this indentation in the ground – see Watson, you can make out where there has been a minor collapse of the brick floor – and there came to rest, rusting together over time into the metal sphere we see now.”
“That’s right,” agreed Mackay. “Worth more’n most earn in six months, this one is, but reckoned by most to be too heavy to get out, even with four men.”
“You could not band together to do so? With other shoremen, I mean?” I asked. “Even if they would not help you, they would surely have helped Rob Rae?”
Mackay shook his head, causing his shadow to dance against the dark brick of the wall. “Rob wouldn’t have any of their help. Not if it meant giving them so much as a penny piece. He hated them, didn’t he?”
This was new information. “Even his uncle?” I said.
“Him most of all,” Mackay replied in a sneering tone that suggested I had asked the most foolish of questions. “Rob blamed him for neglecting his mother.”
“Did Long Bill know of this hatred?” Holmes interposed.
“Of course he did!” Mackay’s voice was scathing in its certainty.
It was impossible to make out faces with any clarity, so I could not see how Holmes reacted to this claim, but it was as though a sluice gate had opened in Mackay. Suddenly, his voice, though still barely rising above a whisper, was filled with emotion, untainted by the overconfidence and pride that had hitherto been its primary elements.
“Bill never married, that’s the problem right there. His old man led the toshers round here and his before that; and now he does, but there’s nobody to come next. Only Rob. And Rob wasn’t interested.
“Rob wanted out of this life, see? Me and him, we agreed when we were nippers that we’d do whatever it took to get away, to do something more than drudge in this stinking dark.
“But nobody leaves, not unless Long Bill says so. The prison yard or the graveyard, those are the only ways out, according to him. And Rob and him fought over it many a time.” He spat into the dark water at his feet. “Bill told him to stay away from me, told him he was a tosher, not a mudlark. And he was just a boy then, so he had to do as he was told – in public, anyway.”
“You kept in touch with one another?” Holmes asked softly.
“We did. Nights when Bill was drunk at Matty Gray’s, Rob and me would meet, and we’d plan how we’d escape. Money’s the key, see. Enough money and you can do what you want. Four hundred pound each, we reckoned, and we could walk away and never look back. And we’d’ve done it too…”
The creaking of the walls was the only sound in the sewer as Mackay fell silent. I thought he was finished, but just as I was about to suggest we move on, he spoke again.
“He could see things in his head, could Rob. Machines. He could look at a problem and see a way to fix it, as easy as another man might see the sun and know it was morning. Show him an obstacle and give him enough time, and he’d think up a way to shift it. Him and me, we were going to make our fortunes and get out, and never set foot underground again.”
He stopped again and, blinking as if only now recalling where he stood, looked between Holmes and myself.
“You were helping him in some enterprise?” I asked.
“I was,” he said. “I’ve always been the practical one. His ideas, my labour, see.”
“And what had he conceived relating to this tosh ball before us?” Holmes’s voice was insistent now, on the scent of something. “Come now, Mackay; it is no great deduction to link that object to your change in mood.”
Mackay smiled, for the first time with genuine pleasure, I think. “It was a sort of pulley system, to hoist the ball onto a low cart on runners, and thick, specially cut planks to act as a floor for the cart to run on. It doesn’t work quite yet, but it will. It will,” he repeated fiercely.
“I do not doubt it,” Holmes agreed. “Was it regarding this system that you argued on the mud that day?”
“It was,” the little man said cautiously, glancing up and down the sewer as though the shadowy side tunnels might hold inquisitive shoremen, eager to hear his confession. “Though it wasn’t much of a row. He’d rushed things, and one of the runner planks had broken in two. We had words and I stormed away – but we’d been pals long enough that it meant nothing the next day.” He kicked at something in the darkness. “Here’s the busted plank right here,” he said. “I’m sorry I lied, but if Long Bill and the rest knew for certain I’d been down here, far less argued with Rob, then I’d be a dead man by day’s end. These tunnels could have been built to hide bodies in,” he concluded with a shudder.
Holmes raised his lantern and stared at the tosh ball for a moment in thought. Then he turned and gestured to Mackay that we should resume our progress. “I do believe you,” he said, “but at the moment, we are working to a schedule, are we not? The tide will not wait for us, and we still have ground to cover.”
As Mackay slowly led us on, I wondered whether Long Bill had known that Rob was close to leaving. Could that be motive enough for murder? Could Long Bill have wanted whatever contraption his nephew and Mackay were building for himself?
* * *
An hour later, we were still trudging along wet passages. Deep in the sewer system, the brickwork was often loose underfoot, where decades of running water had eroded elderly cement and encouraged expansive growths of slippery mould and moss. I divested myself of my coat as the heat increased and stuffed it into the bag I had brought with me, but still I was too warm. Now and again one or other of us would stumble on an uneven brick and be forced to steady ourselves against the slime-encrusted walls. Our guide, however, showed no sign of similar problems. As sure-footed as a Swiss mountain goat he pressed steadily onwards, only stopping now and again to allow us to catch up.
My ears soon grew used to the ever-present dripping, relegating that sound to the back of my mind. It seemed to me that we had been walking for ever through a silent, dark emptiness. My lantern barely illuminated a distance of three feet before me, and that only poorly. I looked forward to the light of the irregularly spaced overhead gratings, but at the same time found them oddly disquieting, as each one we passed marked another distance we would need to retrace before escaping the surrounding blackness.
My relief was undeniable, therefore, when Holmes called a peremptory halt to our progress.
“Wait!”
We had reached another street grating. It appeared identical in every way to the dozens that had preceded it, but Holmes evidently thought otherwise. He held his lantern up high, ignoring Mackay’s snarled warning to douse the light.
Handing me the lantern, Holmes indicated the far wall. “Shine its light against this spot, please,” he said.
I did so, and watched as Holmes pressed his long fingers into the brickwork. I had paid them little attention until that point, save as sources of light, but I now saw that at each street grating, the otherwise uniform sewer tunnel opened up into a wide, square shaft, perhaps ten feet in length and six across, which extended like a chimney to the surface. Plainly, Holmes intended to scale this chimney.
At first, it seemed he would be unsuccessful. Try as he might, he was incapable of gaining sufficient leverage to hoist himself upwards. Only when he wrenched his gloves off was he able to force his fingers between the bri
cks. Now, he quickly moved up the wall until he grasped the underside of the grating with one hand and with the other pulled a long strand of something attached to the metal. He swung back and descended; as he passed back into the light of the lanterns I made out a satisfied smile on his face.
“Capital!” he exclaimed, tucking his find into his jacket pocket. “Now, Watson, if I might have your tie?”
“My tie?” I wondered if the fumes which filled the air in this underground hell had affected Holmes’s mind, or if my hearing had gone astray.
“Yes, your tie!” he repeated, and held out an impatient hand.
Slowly, I removed it, and handed it across to my friend. “Though what you want it for eludes me, Holmes!” I declared quizzically.
Rather than reply, Holmes placed my tie between his teeth, gripped onto the brickwork once more and, in an instant, shinnied back up to the grate, where he knotted it around a metal bar, before dropping back into the sewer.
“That was my regimental tie!” I protested.
Holmes was wholly uninterested, however. “Where are we situated at the moment exactly, Mr. Mackay?” he asked, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and cleaning his hands as best he could. “Clearly, it is not a busy street for nobody has passed by the grate in the entire time we have stood here.”
Mackay peered up at the grating above his head, as though he could read its location from the quality of the light streaming though the metal bars. “Hard to be sure,” he said after a moment. “We’ve come a long way in. But if I said Chelsea, I wouldn’t be too far off the mark. He poked at the crumbling wall with the tip of his hoe. “We needs to be heading back now, in any case. Tide’ll be coming in soon enough and it’s a pretty walk back.”
The thought of further hours tramping through the filthy sewer was not a pleasant one, I admit, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that every step I took would be one closer to fresh air. I fancied that Holmes too had drunk his fill of the tunnels, for he offered up no complaint as Mackay pushed past him and headed back the way we had come, but simply grunted his agreement and followed behind him without another word. I brought up the rear, weary but hopeful that whatever Holmes had taken from the grating, it would prove worth the effort taken to obtain it.
Sherlock Holmes Page 5