by Anna Elliott
Flynn rounded the corner and broke into a run—almost tripping on old bed springs and splintered packing crates and all the other assorted rubbish that collected in filthy back alleys like this one.
A couple of kids were playing kick the can at the entrance to the next street over, and they gave Flynn a dirty look as he tore past, scattering the cans for their game.
The street he came out on ran directly alongside the river. The air was filled with the familiar smell of mud and fish, and there weren’t as many crowds about here. The other people on the street with him were mostly coal porters on their way to work and sailors reeling back to ships after a night of drinking in one of the gin palaces or public houses.
Flynn slowed down, trying to decide whether he’d lost whoever had been following or not.
If there really had been anyone there?
No. Flynn could count on the fingers of just one hand the number of people or things he trusted in this world—but one of those things he believed in was his own gut instincts. He’d stayed alive in a lot of dangerous situations before by trusting his gut. The fact that he was sensing trouble now meant that there was something wrong.
Further up the road, an old lady selling gimcrack jewellery from a tray was competing with a missionary preacher for the attention of everybody passing by.
Neither was having much luck, as far as Flynn could tell. A coloured lantern show with pictures of famous murderers through the ages was drawing a much bigger crowd.
Hands in his pockets, Flynn approached the crowd who were pushing and shoving to pay their halfpennies and get a look through the slide-show peepholes at all the murderers. He wondered for a second or two how many of the pictured killers Mr. Holmes might have been responsible for putting behind bars.
But mostly he was trying to work things out in his own mind, because none of this made any sense.
For a start, it wasn’t as if he’d found out anything important.
He’d asked around among the sailors and labourers at Saint Katharine’s Docks, the London Docks, and the West-India Docks. He’d been prepared to spend all day and maybe even longer on this job, because if ever a task sounded like hunting for a needle in a haystack, this was it. London’s docklands had hundreds of warehouses and space to moor thousands of ships—any one of which could have brought Mr. Ronald Stiles in on it.
After the West-India Docks, he’d have moved on to the East-India Docks, the Victoria Docks, and then the Grand Surrey Docks and the Commercial Docks.
But as it had turned out, at the West-India Docks, he’d run across someone who claimed to know a man called Ronald Stiles.
Whether it was the same Ronald Stiles that Mr. Holmes was looking for, Flynn didn’t know. The fellow he’d talked to had been an old porter with a bent back and a mouthful of broken, yellowed teeth. Flynn would have bet more than the price of a hot meal that the man did a brisk side business in lumping—or helping himself to the shipping goods he was supposed to be helping unload. But he’d told Flynn he knew a sailor called Stiles, though he hadn’t seen him in a year or more, not since he took up with a girl—a fancy piece, the old porter had called her—who thought she was too good for the likes of a lowly tar. Ronald Stiles had gone off to look for other sorts of work, but when the old porter had known him, Ronald had been renting a room in a lodging house on Cable Street. The old porter hadn’t remembered the number, but he thought Ronald’s rooms might have been over a fish shop.
Not much of a lead, considering that Ronald Stiles could have easily moved to new lodgings in the past year. But it was all Flynn had, so he’d set off for Cable Street.
That was when he’d got the feeling he was being followed—soon after he’d left the West India Docks, although he didn’t know exactly when the feeling had started, so he didn’t know if whoever it was had somehow overheard him asking questions about Stiles.
It seemed like a solid bet that they must have. Flynn couldn’t think of anything else he’d done that would attract anyone’s notice—not lately, anyway.
Now here he was, at the end of Cable Street, trying to figure out a plan that would let him identify who’d want to bother following him to an east end fish shop that might or might not be a place where a common sailor had lived.
Well, the obvious answer to that one was that Ronald Stiles wasn’t just a common sailor.
He’d got himself mixed up in something dangerous or illegal or both.
Flynn could see a fish shop, now, halfway up on the other side of the road.
He thought, then took out a scrap of paper and a pencil from his pocket, pushing his way further into the crowd around the lantern show.
Then he ducked down out of sight behind the big painted box that held the coloured lanterns and slides, scribbled a quick note, and wrapped it around a sixpence he’d dug out of his pocket.
“Here—you.”
He poked the arm of a small boy who—while the owner’s back was turned—was standing on tip-toes trying to get a look into the lantern-show peep-holes without paying.
“Want to make a tanner?”
“What for?” The boy gave him a suspicious look.
“Just take this note to—” Flynn stopped. He’d been about to say, “Baker Street,” but they were actually closer to the house where Becky lived with Lucy and Jack. More likely the kid would go there than tramp halfway across London. Even then it was a long shot, since he could just as easily pocket the coin and toss the note in the gutter. But it was the best Flynn could do.
He gave the boy Becky’s address along with the note.
“They’ll give you another sixpence when you get there, but only if you hurry.”
The boy nodded and ran off, whether to spend his newfound riches or to actually deliver the message Flynn couldn’t say.
But he couldn’t go straight to Mr. Holmes or to Lucy and Jack himself, at least not yet—that might lose him the chance of finding out who else was trying to find Ronald Stiles.
Hands in his pockets, Flynn walked casually up the street a bit to a vendor’s cart, where a fat, red-faced man was selling household brushes of all sorts.
Flynn forked over the money for a horsehair clothes brush, then kept walking until he came to the brick building with the words Boules’ Fish Shop printed in gold letters over the door.
Again, no guarantees that this was the right fish shop, but it was a place to start.
He walked up—not to the fish shop, but to the house next door, and knocked.
An old woman with a sharp nose and grey hair answered his knock, took one look at the brush in Flynn’s hand, and started to slam the door in his face.
“Oh, please, don’t go back inside yet.” Flynn wished he were as good at pretending to cry as Becky, but he tried to let his lower lip tremble a bit. “My old dad’s watching me.” He jerked his head in the direction of the original brush seller down the street. “Business is slow, so he sent me to go door to door, like. He’s watching me, and if you go right back in, he’ll say I wasn’t trying hard enough and give me a beating. You don’t have to buy anything,” he added. “Just let me stand here a little longer?”
The grey-haired woman sniffed, but maybe she wasn’t as bad-tempered as she looked, because she said, “All right. But only for a minute, mind. I’ve got calves-foot jelly cooking on the stove, and I can’t go a-lettin’ it burn.”
It sounded proper nasty to Flynn, and from the smell filtering through to him from the open doorway, the stuff wouldn’t be any worse if it caught on fire.
But he gave her his most soppy-looking smile and said, “Oh, thank you ma’am! You’ve got true Christian spirit.” He pushed his cap to the back of his head, then asked, making his voice sound hopeful, “What about next door—the place over the fish shop? Do you think it’s any good my trying there?”
“I shouldn’t think so.” The woman sniffed disapproval. “I’d lay odds the man who lives there has never cleaned anything in his life. He’s a bad lot—comes in at all
hours, roaring drunk. Why, just last night he was a-bashing and clanging up there fit to wake the dead. Had to get my husband to shout out the window, tell him to stow it.”
The back of Flynn’s neck prickled. “Some kind of a row, d’ you think?”
“Who knows? He shut up soon after, that’s all I cared about.”
“What’s his name, do you know?” Flynn asked. “I’ve got a friend whose uncle lives around here,” he added by way of explanation.
“Harold? Ronald?” The woman shrugged. “Something of that sort. Don’t know his other name and don’t care to.” She craned her neck to look up at the windows above the fish shop. “Either he’s not awake yet or he’s gone out again. The windows is all dark, and I haven’t heard a peep out of him since last night.”
Flynn nodded. “Well, thanks very much, ma’am.” He touched the brim of his cap. “Think of me if you ever do want to buy any brushes.”
The woman went back inside, and Flynn turned to survey the street, trying to decide if he was still being followed, or if the uneasy feeling crawling all over his skin was just left over from before.
Carts and wagons rumbled past … A blond woman with a shopping basket … A dark-haired woman pushing a baby’s pram.
Flynn shook his head. Nothing out of the ordinary that he could see, but it never hurt to be careful.
There was a narrow side street branching off from the main road a few doors up. Flynn ambled slowly towards it, but no one followed or paid him any notice that he could tell. He stopped as soon as he rounded the corner and was hidden from view of the rest of Cable Street.
There were a couple of starving alley cats fighting over a scrap of rotten fish, but otherwise the street was empty for now. Flynn could hear loud, quarrelling voices coming from the house on the end, and a crying baby from one of the windows on his right, but nothing else.
He breathed out.
He’d got a promising lead on Ronald Stiles, now. He could go back to Mr. Holmes and make his report—
A crashing blow struck him on the back of his head, and the world vanished in a shower of exploding yellow sparks.
CHAPTER 3: LUCY
The front door rattled and shook with the force of a heavy blow. But not for nothing had our locks been chosen by Sherlock Holmes. The bolts held.
Prince whined beside me, his ears flattened back and his tail tucked down.
“It’s all right—” I started to murmur to him.
But I didn’t get the chance to finish.
Our intruder had moved on to lock picks, and was easily as skilled with them as I was, because after a bare handful of seconds, the door swung open, revealing the tall, broad-shouldered figure of a man wearing a dark mask and carrying a club in one hand.
His head turned, surveying the room, taking in the table in the centre, where a small patent-leather shoe was just barely visible from under the edge of the table cloth.
Slowly, the masked intruder approached the table—and Becky exploded out from behind the door, where she’d been braced in the corner, hidden from sight when it opened.
She aimed a hard kick at the back of our invader’s knee that made him stumble forwards. Then, while he was off-balance, she aimed a blow to his head, using the cricket bat she had clutched in one hand.
Our attacker fell to the ground, rolled over, and pulled off the mask.
“Well done,” Jack said. He nodded at the bat. “And thanks for not actually hitting me with that.”
Becky was grinning, her small freckled face triumphant. “I tricked you! You thought I was under the table!”
Jack sat up. “Nice touch with the shoe.” It was hard not to smile back at Becky, but he was trying to stay serious as he placed a hand on his younger sister’s shoulder. “That’s exactly what you do if someone ever tries to break in, but only if—”
“Only if I’ve already discovered that the house is surrounded and I can’t get out through a window or the back door and run away,” Becky recited obediently. “And only after I’ve tried to telephone for help.”
“Exactly.”
“I still tricked you!” Becky grinned again. “That means that I get to choose tonight’s desert, and I pick …” she furrowed her brow in thought. “Eclairs from the bakery on Oxford Street. You can pick them up on your way home from work.”
“Oh, I can, can I?” Jack rumpled his sister’s hair. “All right. A bargain’s a bargain. But you’d better go up and finish your arithmetic now, you and Flynn have a tutoring session this afternoon.”
Becky made a face. “Next time I’m going to wager that you have to do my lessons for me if I win. No—wait, never mind. I’ll do my lessons, but if I trick you next time, you have to buy me my own set of handcuffs!”
She started up the stairs to her room.
Jack dropped onto the sofa beside me.
“Does it ever strike you that our family is slightly unusual?” I asked him.
“Why, because we’re raising an eleven-year-old who dreams of owning her own set of handcuffs?” Jack was smiling, but sobered. “At least she’ll be prepared.”
I studied his face. Even at rest, there was a contained energy about Jack, and the kind of hard edge that most policemen acquired, the edge that comes from having seen and faced down the ugliest sides of life and human nature. But I thought now that there was an unusually grim undertone to his voice. “Do you mean prepared in the general sense, or prepared for something in particular?”
Jack opened his mouth to answer, but the telephone rang, cutting off whatever he’d been about to say.
He went to answer it, and when he came back, the grimness that etched his lean, chiselled face was even more pronounced.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. My pulse had already sped up.
“A police sergeant was killed this morning. Sergeant O’Hara, from the Holborn Station.”
“Holborn?” That had been Jack’s first posting in the metropolitan police service, the station where he’d been assigned as a constable when I first met him. “Did you know him?”
Jack nodded. “We went through training together. I hadn’t seen him in the last year or two, though.”
“And Scotland Yard has been called in to investigate … I’m assuming that he was murdered?”
I worked to keep my voice level.
Jack and all of the policeman who patrolled what Watson had famously described as the Great Cesspool of London had a dangerous job. I knew it and accepted it—and it didn’t do any good to dwell on the fact that Sergeant O’Hara could easily have been the one getting the same sort of telephone call about Jack’s having been killed in the line of duty.
“It looks that way,” Jack said. “I don’t know any details yet. But I have to go in.”
“Of course. Becky and I can walk over to Oxford Street and visit the bakery ourselves if you’re not back in time for supper. She’ll understand.”
Like anyone who lived with an officer of the law, Becky was perfectly accustomed to plans needing to be changed. Criminals unfortunately didn’t take holidays.
“Thanks.” Jack gave me a brief smile and went to the front rack in the hall to shrug into his blue uniform tunic. “I’ll try to send word if I’m going to be late,” he said over his shoulder.
“You don’t have to worry about being late. Just let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
“Thanks,” Jack said again.
He kissed me lightly on his way out the door, but it was an abstracted kiss—and then he was gone.
I dropped back down onto the couch, absently scratching Prince’s ears when the big dog bumped his nose against my palm.
The murder of a member of the police force always occasioned the most serious of responses from their fellow officers. And the fact that Jack had actually known Sergeant O’Hara, trained with him, could certainly explain the shadow at the back of Jack’s gaze.
And yet—
Becky’s head appeared at the top of the stairs.
; “What’s the matter with Jack?” she asked.
There was no point in trying to keep anything from Becky, since she inevitably made it her business to dig out the truth anyway.
“A police officer he used to know at Holborn Station was killed.”
“I know—I heard,” Becky said. “I meant other than that.”
I sighed. Becky was, in addition to her lessons in arithmetic, taking private training sessions in the art of observation from Sherlock Holmes. It would be too much to hope for that she wouldn’t have reached the same conclusion I had done.
“I don’t know,” I told her honestly.
We might be in the same profession of criminal investigation—Holmes and myself in the private sector, Jack in the official, public one. But there were still private matters concerning Scotland Yard that Jack couldn’t speak of, not even to me.
And Jack had been on his own for most of his life, since he was younger than Becky. Even now, he didn’t share troubles or worries easily.
“Why don’t we—” I started to say to Becky.
A knock at the door interrupted me, making my heart try to leap up into my throat.
But when I looked out through the peep-hole that had been another of Holmes’s installations, the figure standing on the front mat was a small, ragged boy, no more than six or seven years old.
“You owe me a tanner,” he said, as soon as I opened the door.
My eyebrows edged up. “I see. And why would that be?”
“Because I brought you this note, didn’t I, just like the other boy said.”
He thrust out a grubby, crumpled sheet of brown paper that looked like it had once been used to wrap up fish and chips.
“Boy?” Becky appeared beside me, ducking under my arm to stand in the doorway, as well. “What boy?”
“How do I know?” The child shrugged. “Now what about my tanner?”
“Here you are.” I added a half crown and another sixpence to the boy’s payment—all the spare change I had ready to hand—which earned me a look of deep suspicion and a muttered, Thanks, before the boy darted off.
