by Anna Elliott
“Particularly memorable, if he were carrying a painting in a three-foot by four-foot gilded frame,” Holmes said.
Lestrade gave Holmes a suspicious glance. “You don’t agree?”
Holmes shrugged. “And if the thief carried the painting here, from Hampton Court, a distance of nearly a mile and a half, that would also be an event likely to have been observed and remembered by passers-by in the park. Particularly if he were wearing his full Tudor costume rather than only his Tudor shoes.”
Lestrade’s jaw muscles tightened. “He obviously would have left his Tudor costume behind, so as to be less conspicuous. Or he might have taken a cab.”
“Indeed, he might have done. If so, your interviews with cab drivers are likely to prove fruitful.”
Lestrade said, “All right, Mr. Holmes. What is wrong with my theory?”
“Nothing at all, though it does require the assumption that the murderer of this man was an unusually considerate and respectful chap, judging from the condition of the shoes and the lower part of the bed spread here.”
“I see nothing wrong with either the shoes or the bed spread.”
“Quite so. Both are perfectly dry, other than the bloodstained area above the pillow. Therefore, since we know that there was snow on Tuesday at the time of the theft, the murderer must have been considerate enough to wipe his victim’s shoes and polish them before positioning the body on the bed. As we both observed, the shoes still appear quite new.”
“Are you patronising me, Mr. Holmes?”
“Far from it, Lestrade. However, you may wish to devote your resources to exploring another possibility.”
“Name it.”
“That this murder was done the night before the robbery. That the victim was lured here, killed, and left inside this room, so that his costume might be used by an accomplice who would impersonate him the next day. You might ask his landlady whether he had visitors in the days leading to the robbery, or if she could shed any light on his habitual activity after his daily shift as a warder.”
Lestrade looked thoughtful. “Yes, that would fit. Kill him for his uniform, eh? And it would set us haring off after the wrong man, wouldn’t it?” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Now we are getting somewhere.” He paused. “But the man who impersonated Olson. How did he get the painting out of Hampton Court? You yourself noted how conspicuous it would be, to go walking across the park with an object that large.”
Holmes nodded. “But if packing crates were available from the cleaning activity scheduled the day before, they might be used to conceal and transport the painting. And it would not require a very long walk from the palace to reach the Hampton Court river docks, would it?”
Lestrade’s beady eyes sparkled. “Ah! Motor launches! Always some of them around. Now we really are getting somewhere. We shall ask the Thames riverboat pilots. Someone must have seen something.”
“You might also ask Olson’s landlady if she recalls his purchasing new shoes,” Holmes said. “He may have been wearing them Monday night, so as to break them in before his shift began on Tuesday.”
Lestrade scribbled furiously in his notebook.
“Shall we walk across the park to the Palace?” I asked.
To my disappointment, Holmes said, “But now, Lestrade, Watson and I must be getting back to Baker Street. There is another case of ours that is somewhat pressing.”
CHAPTER 8: LUCY
“Lucy—wait!” Becky stopped and froze with her foot on the bottom step of the Hansom cab. “We need to go back upstairs to number 46!”
“What is it?”
Questioning Mr. Boules, the fishmonger who kept the shop downstairs, had elicited the information that the room was rented to a man by the name of Ronald Stiles. Although we had learned precious little else. The fishmonger was a large, flabby man with a perpetually flushed face and a suggestive network of broken veins under the skin. He’d assured us—slurring his words and breathing out profoundly alcoholic gusts of breath—that Ronald Stiles was, “a good shhhhhort,” who paid his rent on time and gave no trouble.
But he couldn’t give us any further details about Mr. Stiles’ life, and he certainly had no idea where his missing tenant might have gone.
He hadn’t seen anyone answering to Flynn’s description, either, although that didn’t necessarily signify. I doubted that that Mr. Boules ever contemplated the outside world much, unless it was through the glass bottom of his latest pint of beer.
Now Becky hopped down from the cab step. I waved the driver on.
“Have you remembered something?” I asked her.
We hadn’t questioned any of the other neighbours, since without knowing more about the case, I hadn’t wanted to draw undue attention to our reason for being in the neighbourhood. But we had made ourselves as conspicuous as possible, walking up one side of the street and down the other.
If Flynn was hidden anywhere nearby and watching, he would have seen us. But he hadn’t emerged from any of the leaning tenement doorways or entrances to dirty back alleys.
“I think so,” Becky said. Her eyes were screwed up with concentration. “The floor—over by the shelf with the razor and things on it. But it will be quicker if I show you, come on.”
She led the way, racing two steps at a time back up the stairs to Ronald Stiles’ rented lodgings, and then straight to the back corner of the room.
“I knew it!” she said. “Look—there, those marks on the floor.” Crouching, she pointed to some scuff marks on the wooden boards where something heavy had plainly been dragged away from the wall. “I think that cupboard—the one with the dishes on it—used to stand here,” she said. “It would just fit, see? And it must have been Ronald Stiles who moved it, because he took the trouble to unload all the dishes without breaking it first. Whoever came afterwards to search and then tore up the couch wouldn’t have bothered with that.”
“You’re right—that was very well spotted,” I told her. “So, the question is, why did Ronald Stiles feel the need to move the cupboard away from this particular patch of wall?”
I knelt down beside Becky and ran my hand experimentally across the faded and water-stained floral paper that covered the wall. “I don’t feel anything … wait a moment.”
One of the floorboards had moved, squeaking under the pressure of our combined weight.
I took out the knife I always carried in the top of my boot and used the blade to pry up the loose board. It came up easily, revealing a shallow hiding spot, about ten inches long and five inches deep.
Becky peered inside excitedly, then let out a breath of disappointment.
“It’s empty!”
“Well, it stands to reason that if Mr. Stiles took the trouble to uncover this hiding spot, he must have wanted to retrieve what was in here and bring it along with him. But it’s not completely empty—look.”
A small scrap of paper had caught on a nail at the side of the loose board. I detached it carefully, smoothing it out on the palm of my hand.
“What is it?” Becky peered down at the tattered scrap, then frowned, her shoulders drooping with discouragement. “Oh—it’s just the corner of a pawn shop claims ticket. The kind the pawnbroker gives people so that they can buy back the things they’ve sold him, if they get the money. That’s not much help, is it?”
“It might be.” I put the slip of paper into my pocket. “For now, though, I think we’d better get back to Baker Street.”
I hadn’t any concrete reason for feeling uneasy, but the back of my neck was prickling unpleasantly. At a minimum, whoever had slashed the cushions of the sofa might come back to see whether Ronald Stiles had returned home.
Becky nodded, stood up, and started for the door—just as it flew open to reveal a large man framed in the doorway, armed with a knife.
CHAPTER 9: LUCY
The man didn’t so much as glance at Becky—perhaps he didn’t even see her; she was partly behind him, over by the door, and his entire focu
s was on me and the still-open hole in the floorboards.
He was medium height, muscular, dressed in dirty blue trousers and a worn pea coat. Only a few wisps of hair clung to his otherwise bald head, but as though to make up for that, the lower half of his face was covered by a dirty blond beard whose bushiness I’d only seen rivalled by one of Holmes’s disguises.
Unfortunately, that didn’t make him any less of a threat, particularly in a closely confined space like this one, where speed and agility didn’t count as much as sheer brute strength.
He probably outweighed me by a solid seventy or eighty pounds.
“Who are you?” he growled. “And where’s old Ronny boy? Got himself a new fancy piece, has he?” His eyes narrowed as he looked me up and down. “His old lady’s not going to like that much, I can tell you.”
I shifted, wishing that I hadn’t set my own knife down a few feet away when I pried up the loose floorboard.
“Don’t move!” the stranger barked.
Even that small motion drew him a step nearer, brandishing the knife.
“Not unless you want me to carve up that pretty face of yours! Now, tell me: where is Ronald Stiles?”
I had learned that the next best thing to having an actual weapon in hand was to let your opponent to underestimate you. I held my hands up, trying to look frightened. “I don’t know where he is—I swear it!”
Actually, it wasn’t hard to inject a quaver of fear into my voice. My attention had been suddenly caught by Becky, who was still standing unnoticed several feet behind the stranger.
Completely by chance, she was in exactly the same position as she’d been for attacking Jack in his intruder’s guise.
I could see her eyes flick to the stranger’s broad back, calculating the distance between them.
My heart hammered as I gave a barely perceptible shake of my head, hoping to catch her gaze. If I was unlikely to win in a physical confrontation with the intruder, then Becky’s pitting herself against him would be like a kitten trying to attack a rampaging bull. Her best option was to try to slip out the door and hope that there was a policeman nearby—
I was so focused on Becky that I missed the first part of the stranger’s reply.
“—don’t believe you!” he was saying. He brandished the knife again. “Thought he could double-cross me, but he’ll be sorry when I catch him. Now where’s old Ronny hidden himself, eh?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. “I—”
Behind the stranger, Becky charged, running full-tilt and diving to strike the back of the big man’s leg with her joined fists.
My pulse skittered to a standstill. Although at least she’d had the sense to aim for a vulnerable point of attack.
The man stumbled forwards, but didn’t entirely lose his balance. Cursing, he recovered and rounded on Becky—which gave me the chance to snatch up the loose piece of floorboard and bring it down in a smashing blow on the back of his head.
He still didn’t go down. Instead, he spun back, flailing wildly with his knife. The blade caught the side of my arm, opening up a stinging cut.
I brought the board up again, smashing it into his face.
This time, he collapsed backwards, keeling over like a fallen tree and nearly crushing Becky, who jumped out of the way just in time.
She stared at me, her eyes huge.
“Lucy, you’re bleeding!”
“It’s all right.” I examined the damage to my arm. “It’s not much more than a deep scratch, really. I won’t even have to trouble Dr. Watson for stitches.”
Becky wasn’t to be so easily reassured, though. She looked from me to the stranger, who was lying unconscious on the floor.
“I’m sorry!” Becky said. “I know you wanted me to run, but I couldn’t leave you alone with him, I just couldn’t!”
I sighed and put my good arm around her, after wrapping the bleeding one in a fold of my cloak.
Becky always had been a law unto herself—and if I were honest, I hoped that she always would be. Difficult as that frequently made it to keep her safe.
“You did very well,” I told her. “Now, thanks to you, we have an excellent lead on finding out exactly what Ronald Stiles has got himself mixed up in.” I nodded at the unconscious man. His nose, I noticed with grim satisfaction, was bleeding freely and probably broken. “We can bring him back to Baker Street for questioning.”
CHAPTER 10: FLYNN
Flynn came awake slowly. His head hurt, but not as much as before. Not so much that he couldn’t think.
He still couldn’t remember why he’d got a pounding headache, though. Had he got into a fight? Fallen off a carriage when he’d tried to hitch a free ride?
Both those things had happened to him before, but he didn’t think that either of them was the answer now.
His eyes felt weighted, but he managed to pry them open—then felt his heart slam against his rib cage as he wondered in a panic whether he’d gone blind.
Blows to the head could do that, couldn’t they? He thought he remembered Mr. Holmes saying it could happen.
It took a second for his pulse to stop pounding and for his head to clear enough to realise that he could still see, it was just that it was pitch dark where he was. But there was a thin seam of daylight right over his head, like there was a crack in the surface above him.
So, where the dickens was he?
He tried to pull himself up and realised he couldn’t move. His hands were tied behind him and his legs were bound together, too.
And as the rest of his senses filtered back, he realised he’d got a rag or some other bit of cloth stuffed into his mouth to stop him making any noise.
No wonder his tongue felt dry as a cobblestone street on the hottest day of summer.
Not good. Not good at all.
Flynn strained against the ropes around his wrists, and got nowhere but to make his shoulders ache.
Right. He took a breath through his nose, trying to squash down another wave of panic. What would Mr. Holmes do?
Find out where he was, probably. Maybe he couldn’t see, but he could still feel. Flynn wriggled around a bit, moving as much as his bonds and the tight space would let him. He seemed to be in some kind of a trunk. A steamer trunk, maybe? He could feel hard wooden slats underneath a cardboard covering. And—
Flynn jolted, his heart starting to race. Because just beside him, his fingers had connected with the hard metal point of a nail that must have not been hammered in straight and had popped through the trunk’s lining.
A nail. A sharp nail.
It took him a solid ten minutes and he was sweating with effort by the time he managed it, but at last Flynn got himself into a position where he could rub the rope that tied his hands together against the point of the nail.
CHAPTER 11: WATSON
“And so we found a policeman to help us get him into a cab, and brought him here,” Lucy said, concluding her narrative.
Holmes and I had returned from Hampton Wick to find Lucy and Becky waiting in our sitting room, along with her scruffy blond-bearded prisoner, who had remained unconscious.
Holmes said, “An interesting development. Now, Becky, will you please join Mrs. Hudson in the kitchen. I will need to interrogate this man, and I believe he will talk more freely if he does not see you here.”
“But—” Her lips pursed, and she looked as though she were about to launch a mighty protest.
“I shall accompany you now,” Holmes said. “I shall use the telephone downstairs. Then, later, I will have a task for you.”
“I want to know anything he says about Flynn.”
“That I promise,” Holmes said.
While they were out, I took the opportunity to clean and bandage the cut on Lucy’s arm.
“That feels much better, Uncle John,” she added, with a smile at me. “Thank you.”
Upon Holmes’s return, he studied the bearded man, who lay sprawled in an armchair with his hands and ankles tightly bound. The m
an’s dissolute face still bore the evidence of his encounter with Lucy: his nose was swollen, blood smeared his upper lip and stained his beard, and he had the beginnings of what promised to be two very impressive black eyes.
“And now I believe it is time that we had a conversation with our friend here,” Holmes said. “Watson, if you would be so good as to pass me that vial from my chemistry table—yes, that one, beside the Bunsen burner.”
I passed him the small, stoppered glass vial he had requested. Holmes uncorked it, and instantly an eye-watering odour filled the air.
“A little preparation of my own invention,” Holmes said. “Fully as effective as smelling salts, though slightly less pleasant.”
He passed the vial underneath the unconscious man’s nostrils.
Whatever chemical derivative was contained in the vial, there was certainly no doubt as to its efficacy.
The bearded man snorted, coughed, choked, and came awake with a violent start that brought the back of his head into painful-sounding contact with the wooden frame of the back of the chair.
“Wh—what?” He glared blearily around the room.
Holmes wasted no time with preamble. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. Earlier today you visited Mr. Ronald Stiles’ place of residence. I wish to know why.”
The man gave another look around the room—this time, I thought, taking in the fact of Lucy’s presence, then returned to Holmes with a look of calculation. “What’s it worth to yer?”
Holmes returned his gaze with a calm look. “One should only attempt to bargain from a position of strength—which, in case it has escaped your notice, is a description that in no way fits your current circumstances, Mr.—?” he paused in question.
“Jones,” the man muttered.
“Jones.” Holmes’s eyebrows edged up in a way that suggested he shared my doubt that the name was genuine. But he appeared willing to let the matter pass. “Very well, then, Mr. Jones. Your reason for seeking out Ronald Stiles.” His voice grew clipped on the final words. “Now.”
