by Anna Elliott
Or else someone else would call the police on them. Becky had dressed herself up in boys’ clothes that matched Flynn’s: boots, tattered trousers, oversize coat and a hat pulled down to shade her face and hide her braids.
Becky had learned a long time ago that boys had a lot more freedom to roam around the city, which wasn’t fair but it was just how the world worked. Even Lucy dressed up like a boy sometimes, just to be safe and so that none of the street toughs would give her trouble for being so pretty.
This wasn’t that kind of a neighborhood, though. St. John’s Wood was near Regent’s Park, the kind of a place where gentry lived: the houses weren’t called houses, they were Something-Something Villa or This-and-That Lodge.
In other words, she and Flynn stuck out like a couple of sore thumbs.
“If the police come by, we’ll just have to make a run for it,” Becky said. She stuck the picks into the lock again and started wiggling them around, hoping to feel something she could catch hold of.
Flynn tipped his head back, looking up at the plate over the door, which read, Bryony Lodge.
“Why’d Mr. ’Olmes want to go and rent this place?”
Becky shrugged. “Mr. Holmes is funny.”
That was actually one of her favorite things about Sherlock Holmes: he never thought about things the same way ordinary people did, which was exciting because it meant that you never knew what he might do or say next.
She glanced up at Flynn. “You don’t think he’s really dead, do you?”
Flynn shook his head. “Nah, not ’im. Got nine lives like a cat, Mr. ’Olmes does.”
Becky thought he spoke the words a little too forcefully, as if he was trying to convince himself as well as her. Flynn was worried, even if he wouldn’t say so.
The lockpick scraped uselessly inside the lock, and a drop of sweat trickled down the side of Becky’s cheek.
“Maybe we should have just come clean with your brother and Miss Lucy,” Flynn said. “They could have gotten us in here by now.”
Flynn was—possibly—right again, but Becky shook her head. “I don’t want to get Lucy’s hopes up in case I’m wrong.” She’d never seen Lucy as worried as she’d been last time she saw her. “Mr. Holmes is her father. She doesn’t want to think that he could really have drowned, but she’s afraid that he did.”
She blew out a breath and bent over the lockpicks again.
Maybe Mr. Holmes wasn’t easy to predict, but she should have known he’d change the locks on the windows and doors.
Irene Adler—the famous lady from one of Dr. Watson’s stories—had rented this place while she was in London. Becky had thought of it right away, as soon as Flynn had told her Mr. Holmes had been looking at a house that was most likely in St. John’s Wood.
She’d read that story so many times she practically had it memorized, right up to the way Mr. Holmes had described the place to Dr. Watson: a bijou villa, with a garden at the back, but built out in front right up to the road; two stories; Chubb lock to the door; large sitting-room on the right side, well furnished, with long windows almost to the floor, and those preposterous English window fasteners, which a child could open.
That had sounded promising, but now Mr. Holmes was the one renting the place.
At least, she thought he was the one renting the place.
Becky ran through the evidence in her head. Flynn had struck up an acquaintance with the boy who ran errands for the estate agent that Mr. Holmes had seen, and found out that the only property the estate agent had rented in the past two weeks had been in St. John’s Wood.
And while she’d been at 221B Baker Street early this morning, she had snuck into Mr. Holmes’s room and examined the soles of all the shoes in his wardrobe.
One pair—a pair of very elegant suede shoes that she couldn’t picture Mr. Holmes wearing unless he wanted to look like an aristocrat—had been speckled with crumbs of reddish-brown mud. Becky had compared it to the monograph Mr. Holmes had written about all of the different types of London soils, and found that the mud had probably come from St. John’s Wood.
There were three or four other places in London that had similar types of dirt, but this had to be the most likely. It just had to.
Getting in to check whether they were right was turning out to be much harder than she’d thought, though. The long windows Mr. Holmes had talked about were now covered with heavy wooden shutters and fastened with locks that you’d need bolt cutters to get through.
Maybe she should go back to Baker Street and try getting some bolt cutters? Although the second she set foot inside, Mrs. Hudson would probably lock her up and never let her out of her sight ever again. Or else Mrs. Hudson would cry, which would make Becky feel even more guilty about having gotten away from her.
Well, with any luck, she and Flynn could finish here and be back at Baker Street before Lucy and Jack came to collect her. And if they found something really useful, everyone—including Mrs. Hudson—would understand.
“Do you think your brother and Lucy are done with your father yet?” Flynn asked.
Jack and Lucy had told her what they were planning, and what they’d left out, Flynn had filled in.
Becky wiped sweat out of her eyes and shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
She focused on the lock. Part of her wanted to ask Flynn to tell her everything he could about her father, since Flynn had actually seen him just hours ago. But the bigger part of her didn’t even want to think about Benjamin Davies, much less talk about him.
Flynn seemed to hesitate for a second, then dug in the pocket of his coat. “’Ere. I wanted to give this to you.”
Becky glanced up to see him holding out a pocket watch. It wasn’t as nice as Mr. Holmes’s or Dr. Watson’s, but it still looked like it would sell for enough money to keep Flynn fed for weeks.
She frowned. “Why would you want to give it to me?”
“Because it’s the one I nicked off of yer old man,” Flynn said. “Dr. Watson and Miss Lucy never thought to ask me about it, so I hung onto it. But I reckon it oughta be yours.”
Mr. Holmes would probably say that Flynn’s logic left something to be desired. Becky jerked backwards, staring at the watch and starting to feel sick to her stomach. “I don’t want it!”
Flynn shook his head. “Don’t talk like that. You might need it—or the money you’d get for it. I know a bloke with a pawn shop down on Commercial Road who’d give you a couple of bob for it, easy.”
Becky frowned, about to say that she didn’t want the money from the watch any more than she wanted the watch itself.
But Flynn kept on going, leaning forward and shaking the shaggy blond hair out of his eyes. “You’ve got to have a plan. Just in case your father gets away and ’e does try to make you come and live with ’im.”
“Lucy and Jack won’t let that happen.”
“Yeah, but what if it does? You never know.” Flynn licked his chapped lips and then said, “I was thinking, you could always run away, if ’e did try to take you. You could come and stay with me. ’E’d never be able to find us.”
That was probably true, but Becky was still stuck on the first part of what Flynn had said. “You’d let me come and stay with you?”
She was so shocked she almost dropped the lockpicks again.
Jack and Lucy would have tried to find Flynn a proper home and a family, if he’d wanted. Or let him come and stay with them. But Flynn always refused straight-out. And he didn’t tell anyone where he lived, not ever.
Becky didn’t think even Mr. Holmes knew exactly where Flynn stayed when he wasn’t working on a case. It was probably somewhere in Whitechapel, because there was a pub near Mitre Square where Mr. Holmes could send messages. But apart from that, no one could find Flynn unless he wanted to be found.
He shrugged awkwardly. “Well, it’d just be for a bit, right? Just until we figure out how to get your old man locked up again?” Becky’s eyes stung and she had to swallow a giant lump in her t
hroat. Flynn would think she was a baby if she cried. She would think she was a baby.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll think about it.” She made herself take the watch and slide it into her coat pocket, too. You never knew what might happen, just as Flynn had said.
The deepest, most buried fear she had—the fear she’d been trying to ignore for days—tried to rear its head again.
“What was your father like?” she asked Flynn. “I mean, are you anything like him?”
“’Ow’d I know? I told you, ’e died before I was born.” Flynn gave her a look that said he thought she was crazy.
Becky stifled a sigh. “Never mind.”
She pressed again with the lockpicks … and inside the lock, something suddenly clicked.
She was so startled that for a second she just looked at it blankly.
“What’s wrong?” Flynn asked.
“I think … I think I just got it open.”
“Well, I got an idea. What if we don’t just stand ’ere staring like a couple o’ mugs and go inside?” Flynn said.
Becky’s heart hammered as she put her hand on the doorknob, but it turned easily. The door swung open, and Flynn ducked in.
Becky shook herself and followed. She had to stay focused, just like Mr. Holmes would say.
She shut the door behind them and locked it.
They were in a front entrance hallway with a marble floor, and gilt-trimmed mirrors hanging from the walls. It would probably be pretty when all the lights were on, but right now the curtains in the house were drawn and the windows shuttered. It made the place feel like something out of that story about the old woman who’d shut up her whole house and stopped all the clocks because she’d been abandoned on her wedding day.
“What are we looking for?” Flynn asked.
“I don’t know,” Becky whispered back. There wasn’t really any need to whisper since they were alone, but normal speaking voices just didn’t seem to belong here. “Any sign that Mr. Holmes has been here, I suppose.”
What she’d really been hoping was that Mr. Holmes would be here now—that he’d somehow escaped the river and was using this place as one of his bolt-holes, to hide and recover. But she didn’t even have to search the whole house to know that he wasn’t. Bryony Lodge had that empty, silent, abandoned feeling that places got when there was no one inside. She already knew there wasn’t another living soul here, Mr. Holmes or anyone else.
Flynn shrugged. His hands were thrust into his pockets, trying to look casual, but she could tell from the set of his shoulders that the place was making him nervous, too.
“Where do we start?”
Becky scanned the shadowy rooms she could see branching off from the front hallway. “What about in there?” She pointed to a room that looked like a parlor, with some chairs and sofas. It had to be the very same room where Holmes had pretended to be an injured clergyman and Dr. Watson had thrown in a smoke bomb to make Irene Adler think her house was on fire. Any other time, she would have been thrilled to think about actually seeing it in person.
She pointed towards the part of the room nearest to the windows. “You take that half, I’ll look over here,” she told Flynn.
For a while they searched in silence. Not that there was very much to search. Except for the furniture, the room was practically bare. No books, no pictures, no papers.
Becky dragged a chair over to the mantle, the legs screeching against the polished wood floor with a noise that sounded loud as a police whistle.
“What are you doing?” Flynn asked. “Trying to wake the dead?”
“In Dr. Watson’s story, Irene Adler hid the photograph of the King of Bohemia in a secret recess,” Becky told him. “There’s a sliding panel just above the right bell-pull near the mantle.”
At least, that was the way Dr. Watson had written it.
Becky maneuvered the chair closer to the mantle and hopped up, standing on tiptoe so that she could reach the bell-pull.
“Anything?” Flynn asked.
“I don’t know. There’s definitely something here.”
Her fingers traced the outline of what had to be a secret compartment, built into the wall. Her heart started to race a little as she pushed, sliding the panel open, then looked inside.
“No. Nothing here.”
The small compartment was empty, except for dust.
“Oh, well, never mind,” Flynn said. “Mr. Holmes probably wouldn’t use that hiding spot anyhow, not when anyone who’s read Dr. Watson’s stories would know about it.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
If Mr. Holmes had been here at all, that was—which, Becky had to admit, was looking less and less likely.
She studied the fireplace, hoping there might be ashes in the grate or some sign that someone had lighted a fire here recently. There were some coals in the coal-scuttle next to the hearth, but the fireplace itself was bare and empty, too.
Becky stayed on the chair for a second, though. The only thing on the mantle was one of those spill vases, the kind that held rolled up strips of paper to use when you were lighting a fire.
This one held five strips of rolled up newspaper. Becky frowned, staring up at them—
Outside, something rattled at the front door. As if someone else was trying to open the lock without a key.
59. A DISCOVERY
BECKY
Becky jumped, her heart trying to leap up into her throat. More than anything, she wanted to dive under one of the sofas or find somewhere else in the house to hide. But she made herself tiptoe back to the front door and look out through the peephole.
“What is it?”
Becky jumped again; she hadn’t realized that Flynn had followed her out into the hall, but he was standing right beside her.
“Is it the rozzers?”
Becky shook her head. “No.” Her heart was now trying to sink all the way down into her boots. “Worse than that. It’s my brother.”
“Well? What do you have to say for yourself?” Jack asked.
Jack didn’t get angry often, and he’d never, ever shouted at her, not once. But she could tell he was struggling to keep hold of his temper right now.
“I’m sorry!” They were back in the parlor, sitting on the sofa. Well, she and Jack were sitting; Flynn was hovering near the windows, looking as if he was ready to bolt through them at any second.
Becky bit her lip. “I just didn’t want to scare Lucy. She’s already got her father to be worried about.”
“And you didn’t think she’d be worried when we found you’d disappeared?”
Put like that, Becky had to admit that she hadn’t really thought things through. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
Jack raked a hand through his hair. “Now she’s on a train up to Shellingford with Dr. Watson, but I had to come and find you—which I wouldn’t have been able to do at all if you hadn’t left Mr. Holmes’s shoes and his study of London soils out, open on the floor.”
That was the trouble with her family—however clever you were at putting clues together, there was a solid chance that someone else would get it figured out just as fast.
“You knew we were here just from Mr. Holmes’s shoes and his monograph?”
“No. Lucy went through her father’s papers and found a newspaper clipping, advertising this place as available for leasing …” Jack stopped, raising an eyebrow at her. “You wouldn’t be trying to change the subject, would you?”
“No. And I’m really sorry, Jack.” Becky spoke quickly, before he could start talking again. “Really. But I think I found something. Look.”
She jumped up and went over to the fireplace, lifting the spill vase down from the mantle and carrying it back to the couch.
“These newspapers.” She took one of the rolled-up strips out and handed it over to Jack. “Look at the date on the top. 13 January. That’s yesterday.”
Jack had been frowning at her, but now he looked at the paper in his hand, his expressio
n shifting.
“Someone was here, in the house, just yesterday!” Becky said.
“Someone who didn’t want it to look like anyone was living here, but thought they might come back and be in need of a fire,” Jack said.
“Exactly.” Becky didn’t say anything more out loud, but the words beat in time to her own pulse. Please, please, please let it have been Mr. Holmes.
“All right.” Jack stood up. “Let’s see what else we can find.” He scanned the room, frowning, until his gaze stopped on the fireplace.
“I already checked the hidden compartment from Dr. Watson’s story,” Becky said. “There’s nothing there.”
“No, it’s not that.” Jack shook his head and stood up, crossing to kneel on the hearth. “Look here.” He pointed at a small spot where a crusty white substance had dried on the hearthstones. “Someone dripped water here, and it left the salt behind when it dried.”
He frowned for another second, then ducked, reaching up inside the fireplace, up into the chimney.
Something tumbled down onto the hearthstones—a wadded-up bundle of what looked like damp clothes: trousers and a shirt, wrapped around rough workman’s boots.
“Cor!” Flynn had come over to see what was happening, and now stared at the bundle, his eyes wide.
“Is that—” Becky’s heart was beating so hard she could hardly get the words out. “Do you think those are the clothes that Mr. Holmes was wearing when he went into the river?”
Jack was examining the clothes, shaking out each article. “I couldn’t prove it beyond all doubt, but it looks that way.”
There was something else wrapped up with the clothes, too. Jack shook the stained and dirty cotton shirt, and a waterproof oilskin packet fell onto the hearth.
“Cor!” Flynn breathed again as Jack slit the packet open. “What is it?”
“It looks like a map of Shellingford!” Becky said, trying to crane her neck to peer over Jack’s shoulder. The map was hand-drawn in blue ink, and a little moisture had seeped in through the oilskin, blurring a few of the outer lines. But most of the picture was clear.
