Sherlock wondered what sort of game called for so much silver already betted when no card had yet been played. From the nonchalant manner with which the men handled the ingots, the contests seemed more for amusement than for profit, though the profound silence in the room underscored the intensity and focus of their pastime.
And if there was opium use, it was nowhere in evidence, nor was there any residual smoke or odor.
Like the women at the entrance, the men made no eye contact with Sherlock or one another but kept on silently staring at their cards. Regardless, Sherlock could feel that his presence had appreciably heightened the tension in the room. He had to discern whom, of the twelve seated men, he should approach—and do so quickly.
Thankfully, exotic game notwithstanding, the men could have passed for accountants enjoying a weekly match, for they dressed in the British fashion. This meant that their rank was not hidden from him, as it would have been had they been garbed in their national dress.
He set his sights on a svelte man in his early thirties who sat at the third table, his back to the wall, eyes to the front door. Underneath the table, his shoes were more costly than those of the others, though to be fair, every shoe in the place was polished to perfection—quite a feat on such a muddy day. But while the other men’s demeanor was shuttered and wary, this man sat with his knees slightly splayed, his countenance open, almost affable.
Sherlock was certain that he had found the right man.
“Beggin’ pardon, sir,” he said, approaching him. “I ’ear you’re seekin’ a lad wot knows wot.”
The leader did not say a word but kept rearranging his cards. His fingernails were manicured and the skin smooth, but his dexterous hands looked as strong as vices. Arthritis had claimed the first knuckle of the right ring and little fingers. The veins and sinews on his wrists were so prominent as to seem corded. The skin of his face looked weathered, as if he had spent his youth toiling aboard ships. And his expensive shirt could not quite hide an ancient but prominent scar at the neckline, as if someone had tried and failed to separate his head from the rest of his body.
Sherlock cleared his throat. It sounded like thunder in the silent room.
He could feel the other men stiffen, twitchy to obey whatever command their leader might give. Even in the midst of his fear, Sherlock was grateful to have been proven so quickly correct.
“Charles, guv, ’im as was, ’e told me about you. Said you was a good man to ’ave a talk wiv.”
The leader’s eyes were still on his cards. He was twirling one of the silver ingots between the first three fingers of his left hand.
“Him as was?” the man repeated. “How do you know he is dead?” His voice had an upper-class cadence most likely learned at a public school.
“I was with ’im when ’e died, sir. I seen ’im take ’is last breath.”
“I see. And where was this?”
“Nicklas ’ouse, sir. I gots me a ’prent’ship. But that ain’t no life for me, sir, an’ Charlie knowed it.”
The man nodded thoughtfully. Placing the ingot upon the table, he said: “Let me see your arms, boy.”
Sherlock was thrown by the request but was not about to show it. He dutifully set about taking off Alvey’s jacket, but his slight hesitation must have been taken as a sign of disrespect because a fat man of around thirty, along with a slightly younger moon-faced man, put down their cards, rose and tore it from Sherlock’s shoulders in one swift move. Grabbing one arm each, they yanked at him more than strictly necessary as they rolled up the cuffs of his shirt to the biceps.
Sherlock was gratified that he had already torn the garment in several places: the last thing he needed was to be caught wearing a pristine shirt under Alvey’s shabby jacket.
The leader turned Sherlock’s arms over one at a time, wrists up, and inspected them thoughtfully. Then he touched a small series of punctures above Sherlock’s left elbow.
“What’s this, then?” he asked, appraising him.
Sherlock did not respond.
Clutching his wrist and squeezing hard, the man looked into Sherlock’s eyes—while Sherlock struggled to not be discomfited by the abyss he saw there.
“That will no longer be permitted,” he murmured, indicating the injection points on Sherlock’s arm. “Are we clear on that, boy?”
Sherlock mutely nodded and then swallowed hard, hoping both reactions would seem like genuine fear to the man inspecting him—for they certainly felt that way to him.
When he lowered his eyes, he noticed for the first time that the leader’s shoes were not spotless after all. A few dots the size of pencil tips, dark red and in a spray pattern, colored the side of his left shoe.
“Shòu-shòu,” murmured the fat man to his boss, who nodded.
“I will take your offer under advisement,” the leader said, releasing Sherlock’s wrist. “Return here on Monday, four p.m. What do we call you, boy?”
“Basil,” Sherlock declared before adding, “Thank you, sir…”
The leader grinned, exposing teeth the color of copper. “You may call me Juju,” he said.
Then he went back to his game, making it abundantly clear that Sherlock had been dismissed.
Trembling from cold, anxiety, and feverish elation, Sherlock lowered his shirt cuffs, slipped on Alvey’s jacket, and hastened outside again.
Monday afternoon, he thought, the exhilaration of discovery quickly sweeping away all fear.
* * *
Sherlock strolled around the corner as if he had all the time in the world. He was gratified to find Alvey and Joe where he’d left them. Ducasse looked bug-eyed with news of some kind, while McPeel bounced from one bare and dirty foot to the other, his new shoes still on his hands.
“We just ’eard—” Alvey Ducasse began, but Sherlock hushed him with an upraised finger.
“Might I keep your jacket and shoes for the moment, and you take mine in exchange?”
Ducasse nodded as he returned Sherlock’s short staff and vielle, while McPeel could not seem to keep still.
“We just ’eard—” Ducasse tried again, but was cut off by McPeel.
“There’s been another murder on Narra Street!” Joe declared, eyes shining. “Can we have a gander, guv?”
27
HUAN DROVE MYCROFT AND DOUGLAS TO NARROW STREET: the scene of the crime. Nothing like being transported to a murder in a costly carriage pulled by a handsome beast, with a coachman of exotic extraction. Especially if the proprietor, upon alighting, is attired in hat, shoes and shirt straight from Jermyn Street, and flanked by a Negro secretary who could have put any white man to shame.
The gaping, huddled throng parted like the Red Sea all the way to the nexus: the cleaved and bleeding body. With all eyes upon him, Mycroft crouched down beside the corpse, which was lying in a substantial puddle of blood, with more blood spattered up and to the right, across the torso. Similar to the seventh victim, the man was Caucasian, and approximately thirty years of age, and had been sectioned into four parts: the head and neck had been separated from the torso, which had been cleaved right down the middle, with one arm attached to each half. The left arm was peppered from wrist to biceps with needle marks, both scabbed over and new. His lower extremities, from the hips down, formed the final section and had the indications, as clear as a road map, of a rough life: legs misshapen by malnutrition and scarred by rat bites.
Mycroft checked the punctures on the man’s arm but saw nothing that he could not have inflicted upon himself. As for the cleaving, it had been well executed: the murderer had the skills and strength to make surgeon-like cuts. But though the victim’s nose had been sheared off—greatly disfiguring the face and making eventual identification that much more difficult—his genitals had been left intact.
“This is an odd one,” Mycroft muttered to Douglas. “Not like the others.”
Douglas, standing over him, nodded.
Mycroft had not seen the first seven murder victims, other than in
ghastly illustrations. Even so, it seemed obvious that all eight had utilized the same butcher: for these cuts, like those, were clean and straight, requiring deftness, a keen eye, and enormous strength.
It was also clear to Mycroft that one man alone could not have accomplished the task. Another two men would have been needed to hold down the victim when the first blow was struck. But why would the same team that so carefully followed ritual in the other murders forsake it for this one? He would have concluded that the butcher had been interrupted in his work, but for the shearing off of the nose. Genitals were always cut first, leaving the nose for last. His only explanation was that the “message” this time was for someone else entirely… though he could not guess who.
Just then, a carriage carrying several constables arrived to the scattered jeers of the crowd, who did not care for peelers in the neighborhood, however noble the cause.
Mycroft glanced at the faces of the onlookers, wondering if the perpetrators of this grotesquery might still be close by, watching for reactions. If they were, they did not give themselves away. But he did catch a glimpse of a tall, hawk-like youth pushing his way through the crowd, followed by two young scruffy urchins with self-important grins, all three of them unmindful of the onlookers’ protestations and with but one goal in mind: to take in the scene of the crime.
“Sherlock!” Mycroft gasped while his brother stared down at him.
* * *
Sherlock saw Douglas pushing through the crowd. With his long reach, he snagged McPeel and Ducasse by their respective collars and tugged them through the gathering mob, all the while excoriating them on not honoring commitments, or some equally dreary bromide.
A moment later, Sherlock felt Mycroft’s grip on his arm, dragging him away from the body. Mycroft’s lecture had to do with duties regarding education and the evils of deception.
In truth, Sherlock was hardly listening. It was necessary that he shut out all extraneous noise so that he might better recall each tiny detail of the past hour.
He was very nearly certain who’d killed this eighth victim—or, more accurately, who’d given the order to kill: he had just met him and his minions at The Water Monkey. The establishment fit both proximity and, given the needle marks on the victim’s arm, his circle of acquaintances.
Juju the ringleader had sprinkles of blood on the side of his left shoe. These and the drops on the dead man’s torso were like the flick of a painter’s brush, so much in the same pattern that they might as well have been two halves of a divided canvas.
Sherlock tried in his mind’s eye to place Juju at the scene of the crime. Someone must’ve held the man down: two men, most likely. But it was hard to believe that Juju would be one of them, and he did not have the hands of one who could deftly wield a knife. Sherlock imagined him on his feet, peering down at the prone victim from what he assumed was a safe distance—one that would allow him to witness the proceedings without staining his clothes. Was the poor drug fiend still alive at that juncture? Did Juju believe he was far enough away from the splattering blood that he had not been sullied?
If only he could have examined the incisions closer up! If Mycroft had but tarried a moment longer!
He thought back to the card players. Were there signs of bloodletting on any of them? No. But neither had they mud on their shoes or clothing—highly unlikely on a day like this. Which meant that the men had changed their clothing before they’d entered the room. The only one who had seen no need to do so had been Juju, who had doubtless ridden to and from the scene of the crime in his carriage, for it accounted for the fresh tracks in the mud outside The Water Monkey’s door.
From what Sherlock recalled, the impressions of the wheels that had gone to and fro were of the same size but of diverse indentation, which meant the weight of the carriage had altered. It had been heavier in going than upon its return, and substantially heavier in the front than in the back both times.
Had Juju transported the victim to the scene of his own murder? And why was the coachman’s position overly weighted?
Sherlock dearly wished he had paid more attention to the ruts at the time—though the two Chinese ladies standing at the door to The Water Monkey would not have been quite so passive, had they witnessed a strange lad closely inspecting wheel marks made by their master’s carriage.
As for the card game, Sherlock’s first assumption had been incorrect. The men’s nonchalance about the match itself; the matter-of-factness with which they held their cards; the ease with which they’d placed their bets—all had seemed to connote a friendly, habitual game, when it had been nothing of the kind.
He now believed it had been set up for show.
How else to explain the contrast between cards played—there were undrawn piles on every table—and the bets, which appeared as if the men had been playing for a while? While it was possible that they had begun another round, the ingots had been tossed about too evenly.
There was no one with a clear advantage.
They may not have succeeded in fooling anyone who paid careful attention. But if they were expecting a visit from the police—white to a man, ignorant of the rules of the game—the ruse would have been enough.
He wished he could reveal these deductions to Mycroft, or inquire as to the particulars of slicing into a living body as opposed to one that had recently been deceased, but his brother was already angry. The last thing Sherlock was keen to tell him was that he had been nosing about for employment in an opium den.
He was fairly certain that he recognized the dead man. For the victim very much resembled the thin-haired assailant who had desired to scramble Sherlock’s insides with a well-placed punch to the gut, the night that he and Douglas had rescued Charles.
Douglas might have also recognized him, but it was unlikely. It was dark, and Douglas was busy fighting three men at once. Besides, if Douglas had said as much to Mycroft, his brother would have surely brought it up by now.
Best not mention it, he thought. Not yet. For if he were to tie, even speculatively, this brutal murder to Charles’s demise, Mycroft would view the entire undertaking as much too perilous, and that would be that.
“I shall not endeavor to ask what you were thinking, because I gather you were not thinking at all!” Mycroft was saying as he continued to manhandle Sherlock away from the scene and into the nearest pub, a grubby affair called The Bunch of Grapes. Sherlock could only assume that, abetted by a lack of windows and feeble gaslight, his brother would once again, and with a great deal more intent, lay down the law. He had to get Mycroft on his side, tell him just enough to intrigue him but not so much as to make him panic. For if his brother should prevent him from pursuing the case, Sherlock did not know if he would be able to bear it.
They took a seat across from each other and Mycroft signaled the barkeeper for two beers, then leaned towards Sherlock with his arms folded, demanding a response to a question Sherlock had failed to hear.
“Well?” Mycroft insisted as the barkeeper laid down two overfilled tankards with a clatter, their foamy heads sloshing onto the tabletop. Sherlock, feeling suddenly too warm in the low-lying air, unbuttoned his jacket, to Mycroft’s continued horror.
“What is that you are wearing?” he demanded.
Sherlock took a sip of his ale and wiped his lips with the back of his hand, in keeping with the general atmosphere. Thus fortified, he reached for his vielle case, opened it, and set the instrument face down into the only feeble spot of light to be had.
It revealed the fifteen groups of symbols that had taken him the better part of the morning to collect.
“I have something to confess,” he declared.
28
IN THE DIM LIGHT OF THE PUB, SHERLOCK COULD SEE Mycroft mulling things over. This was not a long process. In the time it took for his brother to order another round, he had already categorized in that ledger brain of his each tidbit of information that Sherlock had provided.
“Truly, I am livid that you kept s
uch a potentially dangerous secret,” Mycroft began. “However, I must confess you did a nice bit of work. Though the notion that Baker necessarily indicated a train station was a stretch, as it could also indicate the whole of Baker Street.”
“Yes, it could,” Sherlock admitted. “But not with the word ‘Mansion’ also in play. But, had I not located the first clue in the station, as predicted, I would have gladly traipsed the entire length and breadth of the street in search of same.”
“I’ve no doubt,” Mycroft muttered, his tone suspended between censure and admiration. “And it is equally clear, from the sample of wax you found, that Charles made impressions of those symbols to then pass along to this ‘Gin.’ Though I despise the fact that you put Douglas’s charges in such a position, I do acknowledge the necessity of having someone at the final stop to gauge if your theory was correct. And that the redheaded lad was waiting there,” he concluded, “reinforces your other theory: he had no knowledge of Charles’s death.”
Sherlock nodded enthusiastically. “The boys did not know about one another, nor were they meant to,” he confirmed. “I am convinced of it!”
“And Gin is most likely short for ‘Ginger.’”
“It certainly appears so.”
“I do have a few reservations, however,” Mycroft said. “The first is ‘Baker.’ Why would a lad who has but one breath left in him to say one word, choose that one? What did Charles hope to achieve? It makes logical sense but no emotional sense, do you see?”
“But I was proven right in my speculations,” Sherlock argued.
“Yes, but if someone has just injected you with a substance that leads to your death, why not say that person’s name?”
“You are saying Baker is a name?”
“Or a nickname,” Mycroft amended. “Then, when ‘Gin’ ran off,” he continued, “why did McPeel not immediately go after him? I had him pegged for a runner. He could have left Ducasse at the station to stand guard.”
Mycroft and Sherlock Page 14
