by Janina Woods
The river was solid, open and very hard to escape on. I had hoped that the compacted snow would provide me with enough resistance to run, but it was too deep, and the icy patches made every step a potential pitfall. At least my pursuers had to fight the same odds. I only had to pray they would stick to their plan of not killing me just yet. I clutched my left arm to my body, the pain barely registering with the thrill of the chase in my veins, but I could feel blood soaking through the fabric of my shirt and was pretty sure the impact had torn the stitches Sherlock had so carefully applied.
I looked up to spot a path away from the river, so I could find a hiding place above. In that moment I missed a particularly smooth spot on the ice and felt my feet slip away underneath me. With my momentum, I could roll to the side to lessen the impact, but in my misfortune, I fell on my injured arm once again and cried out as I came to rest in another bank of snow. Within what felt like seconds, two men were upon me, pressing me to the ground. I tried to push them off, my cane like a barrier between our bodies, but they had the upper hand. The snow in my back gave way instead of providing me with leverage and my left arm was basically unusable, as every small movement made the pain flare up in the worst ways.
“You’re too clever for your own good, Holmes,” the woman said after she had caught up to us. I looked up at her between her lackeys’ shoulders. She was dressed in dark trousers and a snugly fitting jacket, just like the others. Her lack of breath did nothing to the smug satisfaction on her face. “We’ll have to lock you up for the remainder of this exercise. I really didn’t want to have to do this, but alas...”
I wanted to reply, but one of the men grabbed my arm and pressed down on the wound, so the only sound I made was a pained shout as the sensation flooded my system. Soon I breathed heavily and blinked away the tears that blurred my vision. My body screamed, but in my head there was just one thought: Thank all the gods that I had sent Hawkins away to safety.
The woman taunted me with a few choice insults, but I took the opportunity to observe her face instead of giving her the pleasure of the angry replies she so clearly coveted. She looked familiar. Too familiar.
Her build had not given away much previously, but after reading through Hawkins’ account of the events in Edinburgh, my memories had been pried open enough to match her features with the ones from my past, now that I could observe her face. The brown eyes boring into my skull were the same as of the woman we had freed from the warehouse in the aftermath of the events that had transpired. She had been locked in a room in the back of the office, crying, cowering. I had dismissed her from my mind completely, until now.
“I should’ve killed you all those years ago,” I growled and attempted to push forward.
“Is your memory as good as they say, or are you just trying to insult me?”
I struggled for a moment and used the movement to press my body into the men on top of me. With my right leg, I encountered a gun, hidden under one man’s jacket. Icy air flowed into my lungs as I took a deep, steadying breath. I had to wait until they pulled me upright. I couldn’t do anything on the ground, buried in snow.
“It had taken me years to rise to the top of Clarke’s gang, and in one night you destroyed all my hard work. Of course I only managed to escape because I didn’t register as a threat to you then. Well, how about now?”
Well, this could all be over sooner than I had hoped. With tears in my eyes and blood running down my arm, I managed to smile at the mastermind in front of me. She reacted accordingly.
“Get him out of my sight!”
This was it. I waited until the men had drawn me partially upright, before I twisted the handle of my cane and pulled out the narrow blade with considerable force, slicing through fabric and skin of the right man, who almost choked in surprise, stumbling backwards onto the ice. The other reacted faster than I had expected and jumped out of my reach immediately, but in his hasty retreat bumped into the woman and they both fell over.
In response I lunged forward to impale her on the sword. At the last moment she twisted out of my way, but I managed to hit her leg, leaving a gash on her upper thigh. Blood spurted from the wound, the warm red a sharp contrast against the white ice underneath. The woman howled in pain.
This was a chance I had to take. I raised my arm again, but then I saw metal glinting in the corner of my eye. The uninjured man had retreated a few steps and drawn a gun of his own, which was now trained at me. Instinctively, I backed away.
“No, don’t kill him!” The woman shouted, despite everything. “He can’t die yet!”
“But he’s getting away!”
“Then catch him!”
The man looked uneasily back and forth between us, before he cursed and jumped towards me. I took another step back and fell over the legs of the third in the trio. My attacker’s eyes shone with glee, but I had calculated my fall precisely. Quickly I dropped my sword and reached under the downed man’s jacket and drew his gun. A second later, I shot the man flying towards me unceremoniously. He fell at my feet.
Then I heard a scream. A group of people had come together on the jetty of the wharf above us, watching the gruesome spectacle like a theatre play.
“Are you going to kill me in front of an audience? Do you want me to scream your name while you do it?”
“As if that would matter now,” I spat.
“If I die, there will be many dirty secrets about your precious organisation in the papers.”
“You’re bluffing.”
She laughed, even though she was still clutching her leg to stop it from bleeding. “Are you willing to test your theory?”
I searched her eyes. She wanted to seem tough, but I could see the fear in them. I knew I should take her in, but my finger itched to draw a clear line. To end this there and then. But all of a sudden, a shot impacted in the ice between us. The woman flinched at the noise and I turned around. There was no one on the river with us. That meant... I looked back up, and there he was, clad in a black coat and a matching bowler hat: The cab driver. I had forgotten all about him.
“Sarah?” The man shouted.
“I told you no names, you imbecile!” She screamed, then looked back at me. “There you have it. Kill me and he’ll shoot you.”
“That’s a viable option,” I rebutted, though I didn’t particularly want to die at this point.
The woman called Sarah pulled a face. “Or we forget about bringing you in and you make your retreat now. We can always catch up to you later.”
We came to a temporary standstill as I mulled over my options. But then again, what possibilities did I really have? No, I valued my own life too much. For the second time in two days, I backed away slowly from the small woman.
“Alright. Then run,” she spurred me on.
“I’ll find you again. I’m on your trail.”
“You may find me, but you’ll never find us all.”
I had the urge to just do it. Just shoot and let it be over. But the very idea of exposing the Service through my actions almost made me feel physically sick. I couldn’t risk it. I looked up and saw the cab driver still pointing his weapon at me. He was just far away enough to miss me, especially if I moved while he was shooting, but I couldn’t judge his skill from this distance. So I gnashed my teeth and turned to run, gun clutched in my one good hand, my dear cane relinquished in the bloody snow, the two parts too far away from each other to retrieve.
When I spied a clear path up into the yard of a saw mill, I turned one last time. Sarah had risen to her feet, looking after me; the fake cab driver was nowhere to be seen from my vantage point. I stopped in my tracks and aimed the stolen gun at her. Before she could react, I fired. At this distance, and with my shaky hand, it would’ve taken a miracle for me to hit her, but there was a chance, and most importantly it carried a message.
It took me b
y surprise when she shrieked and fell, but I couldn’t judge if the bullet had actually hit her. Just then, a number of people streamed down on the ice and I turned to make myself scarce.
Chapter Fourteen
I managed to sneak into one of the unlocked offices of the saw mill, on the outskirts of the complex I had entered. The stale air told me that no one had visited these rooms in a while, so I was reasonably certain that I would be left alone while I patched myself up. Still I turned the key, which had been left in the lock on the inside and then slumped down in a wooden chair behind a small desk. The room lay in twilight, blends fastened in front of the windows, dark, cold and serene.
It took me longer than normal to catch my breath. I couldn’t get the woman’s face out of my head. Sarah. I had seen her only briefly, back then, in that warehouse. A bundle of nerves, crying, frightened. It had never occurred to me that she had been afraid of me, not of Clarke’s men. That she had been one of them. More important than anyone had realised. I had been blinded by my prejudice and now I paid the price.
If I had wounded her fatally, my career in the Service would be over. The very thing that would save my life would ruin the work of so many others. Why had I taken the shot on the river? Why?
Cautiously, I peeled off my coat and the suit jacket underneath. The wound on my arm was bleeding, but not as much as the pain made me believe. I rummaged through the cupboards and found a stash of old handkerchiefs, of which I bound two together and bandaged my arm over the shirt to stop the blood flow. There was no point in redressing the wound now. It would take too long. I had to get to Clarke before anyone could intercept me again.
Groaning, I slipped back into my garments and exited the office. Several minutes later, I joined the mass of people on their way north, up Belvedere Road, just another person trying to get to their destination through the icy cold.
When I had reached Blackfriars, I turned to cross the bridge towards Newgate. The guards didn’t exactly welcome me, but when I showed them my identification, I was led into the prison. The building looked unwelcoming and dark from the outside, but on the inside it was even worse. At least the parts maintained by the Secret Service were actually that: maintained. As I walked through the security gates and the hallways beyond, one thing was obvious, no matter where you looked: The place was extremely dirty. It was clear that the caretakers only did the bare minimum of what was required to be able to walk through the space and not sink your feet into filth with every step.
With my organised wardrobe - even after having been chased through London - I presented a marked difference to anyone on the premises, not only the prisoners, but also the guards and especially the overseer I had been led to. He was sitting in a small room at the bottom of the cell galleries and was dressed in an ill-fitting uniform, which was, for a lack of any better words, outrageously filthy. His grimy hair stood up on one side of his head, as if he hadn’t even deemed it necessary to fix it after waking up, and I refused the hand that he held out as a greeting, because there was no way I let that man touch even the leather of my gloves.
“You from the big guys?” he asked with a mouth full of foul teeth.
“Yes...” I replied slowly, taking a step back so as to not be enveloped in the foul stench he was emitting. I wagered he was in even worse shape than some of the inmates in the cells behind him. “I am here to see Jonathan Clarke.”
The man turned and made a show of looking at a few pieces of paper on the desk in a corner of the small room. They were the only thing that could be remotely called white in the vicinity.
“I wasn’t notified of any visit today. The prisoner isn’t ready.”
“I didn’t know I needed to see him until half an hour ago. I don’t care if he isn’t ready. Either you bring him to a room where I can speak to him, or I’ll go directly to his cell.”
The overseer bristled visibly and stood up straight for the first time since I had started talking to him. I hadn’t seen him around before, but I hadn’t had any reason to visit Newgate in over five years, either.
“You can’t just walk in here and demand things like that!”
“You will see that I can,” I replied icily. “Now go and fetch the man.”
“I’ll have to ask the director. I can’t just...”
I didn’t know if he was more upset about the broken rules or about my demands, which threatened to make him perform actual work. I suspected it was the latter.
“Go and see him, then. Tell him Mycroft Holmes wants to see Jonathan Clarke. And he wants to see him now.”
“Alright. But don’t move, and don’t touch anything,” he instructed me with a glare and slipped from the room.
I drew in an angry breath and let it escape through my nose in a gesture of disgust. Nothing in this room drew me touch it. There wasn’t even a place for me to sit and wait. Sure, there was the stool the overseer had slumped on before I entered the room, but I didn’t even want my coat to touch that surface. So I elected to stand and wait for the man to return in front of his small office, inside the bottom of the gallery.
The long hallway was light and airy for a prison, with four floors above me, crowned by a roof of metal and glass, through which the cautious winter sun filtered sparingly, illuminating some dust motes dancing in the air, but not much more. The cells were arranged on both sides of the building, several floors high, with a walkway made of metal and wood in front. A few stairs connected the galleries in the middle of the room, and were the only way to safely reach the next level. I had a feeling they were purposely narrow, as it wouldn’t allow a large group of people to storm up or down at the same time.
There was a curious quiet, even though I knew most cells to be occupied at all times. The only noises I heard were the occasional chair moving across the floor, or various items thrown about. Every now and then, someone shouted something unintelligible across the expanse, and someone else replied with even more garbled speech, but other than that it was actually rather peaceful.
As I stood and contemplated my next move, the smell in the prison so bad that I craved a cigarette just to inhale the aroma of the smoke, I heard quick steps approaching in the distance. They grew louder, until the form of the grimy overseer all but fell through the doorway opposite to my waiting place. He was out of breath and his face was red, where you could make out the colour underneath the dirt. It was obvious he wanted to say something, but he was so out of it, he didn’t push out more than fragments.
Not long after - the man still hadn’t said a sensible word - an infinitely better-dressed individual emerged from the corridor behind him. I immediately noticed that his uniform was clean and pressed. With attentive brown eyes, short, dark brown hair with a fringe that was just on the edge of being too long, and a height that rivalled my own, he stood at attention - and so did his impressive moustache.
“I am so sorry about this Mr. Holmes. You must excuse Wilford here... he hasn’t been with us for too long.”
“Then he should be keen to keep his position.”
“Yes, sir, of course, sir,” the director of proceedings for the Secret Service in Newgate stressed. “It’s just that we don’t get many unannounced visits.”
“That doesn’t excuse anything.”
“Of course not,” he stammered.
I had already made the man positively nervous. Thomas Evans had only received me in Newgate a few times, but those visits seemed to have made an impression, even though the last one had been years ago. Maybe that was because I had almost always brought a prominent member of the criminal persuasion with me to lock away. But for all the faults in his underlings, he was a good man, and I didn’t want to make him more anxious than necessary.
“It’s alright, Evans,” I said amiably. “I simply need to talk to Jonathan Clarke for a little while. Can you arrange that?”
“Yes, yes, of course.
Can I ask you to accompany me to my office, where you can wait, while we prepare the inmate and take him to an interrogation room?”
“That sounds acceptable.”
As I passed the dirty overseer in the corridor, I made an effort to step on the tip of his shoes, just barely missing his toes, as anyone could see that the flimsy leather was too big for his feet. He glared at me for a second, so I had to stop, even though I hadn’t planned to waste any more time on him.
“Wilford. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied, suddenly unsure, his earlier moment of courage forgotten.
“You should hope our paths never cross again. If they do, and you stand in my way one more time, as small as the obstruction may be, I will have your head.”
The man nodded and looked to his feet. I could hear the director shuffle nervously beside me. It was important to let people know who they were dealing with every now and then. The director had surely informed this Wilford character of my status, but the more he feared me, the easier it would be to work around him. I hadn’t planned to visit Newgate again after this episode, but you never know.
Wilford had been thoroughly shut up, so I turned away from him to be led to the director’s office, which was on the top gallery, along with the special cells. We walked up the narrow stairs in silence and I eyed the cells around us with interest. More than a few pairs of eyes followed us. I recognised a few murderers and other felons, but most faces were new to me, which wasn’t a surprise. The people imprisoned here were either waiting for their trial or already on their way to be executed. I had professionally known many men and women, who fell in that second category. Only the top floor housed people for longer. People that were too important, too well connected to be disposed of. They could be informants or bargaining chips. The Service knew their value, and Clarke was one of them.