Thirty-Nine Steps from Baker Street

by J. R. Trtek

  “The one is nonexistent and the other may be finessed, Watson.”

  “In which order do those descriptions apply?” I gently taunted as we entered the alley that extended behind the building.

  “Thus do you abuse your supplier of marmalade,” Holmes sighed as we walked over cobblestones covered with refuse. Approaching a door at the rear of the warehouse, we passed a small window at pavement level that had been broken. Three boards with nails protruding lay a few feet away.

  “The place has already been violated,” Holmes noted with interest. “Perhaps this is the work of those boys, related to the incident they spoke of. Perhaps someone else is responsible. In any event, we will not be the first to trespass here, Watson.”

  Bending down, he examined the door carefully before reaching into a coat pocket to extract a set of fine tools with which he easily opened two locks, which sat one above the other.

  “I take it that the finessing has begun?”

  Holmes looked up with a smile. “Quite so, old fellow.” He rose to his full height and dropped the tools into his coat pocket. Slowly pushing open the door, he said, “Let us relive the illegalities of old.”

  “Shall I use my torch?” I asked.

  “In a moment,” Holmes replied as he entered the building and then stepped aside to allow me to follow. “Wait until I close the door then aim your light at the floor, if you will.”

  The latch clicked shut behind us, darkening the interior, and I immediately pointed my torch beam toward the floor of the warehouse. From the light reflected upward, we could discern that we stood in a windowless corridor leading into the bowels of the structure. Holmes took three steps forward and gestured for me to accompany him.

  I cast the light ahead of us, and we walked down the hall, past a series of doors, finding that the corridor gave way to a large open space. Its windows had been boarded over from within, and overhead there were the remains of great ducts that reached down from the ceiling to a point perhaps ten feet above the floor, which was dusty and bore innumerable marks and stains. The floor itself was largely barren, though littered here and there with nails, rotten wooden boards, and scraps of newspaper. To one side, I observed two well-used floggers and a valinch. 232

  We stood in the centre of the huge room and slowly spun round, taking in the ghostly panorama.

  “I cannot wonder that those boys thought this place haunted,” I said.

  “But they spoke of boils, Watson. That is a tangible effect, not a sensation conjured from imagination.” He pinched his nose repeatedly, as if sniffing the air. “It has a chemical aura, does it not? Tar of some sort?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Though I confess it smells somewhat like horseradish to me,” I added with raised brows.

  “Would that be significant?”

  “It brings to mind HS.”

  “You mean the sulphur mustard gas the Germans have recently begun employing?”233

  “Yes. I have read that it can possess the aroma of horseradish.”

  Holmes abruptly cocked his head. “That would explain the boils on the boy, would it not?”

  “Yes, if we allow three assumptions: mustard gas was produced or stored here, some was left behind, and one of the boys touched a remnant while exploring this place.”

  “It would not simply waft away?” my friend asked.

  “It is called mustard gas, but at room temperature it remains liquid—looks a bit like sherry, or so one army doctor who recently returned from the front told me. Indeed, it is quite viscous, does not dissolve in water, and can remain in place for weeks or months, I understand.”

  “We must return with Magillivray and his men to investigate this place more thoroughly, Watson. For now, let us see ourselves out.”

  “You do not wish to examine the building further?”

  “When this interior is surveyed, I prefer it to be accomplished quickly and completely by several men. I also wish to return to the outside, on the chance that those boys may have reappeared. If they were inquisitive enough to gain entry to this place and prowl about, they may be inclined to come back in order to observe our progress—or to see us run from ghosts. It would be most desirable, if possible, to speak to the lad who was injured here.”

  We left the warehouse and Holmes restored the door to its initial, locked condition. The two of us stood in the alley for a moment and then strolled toward the street. Halfway there, a small head poked around the corner.

  “Half a crown!” shouted Sherlock Holmes, stopping to pull a coin from his pocket. “Half a crown for each of you if you stay this time!”

  The head appeared to be yanked back around the building corner, and then the boy appeared again. Hands reached for him from behind the bricks, but he evaded them and stepped fully into the alley, toward us.

  “I’ll take one,” he said. “I’ll take the ones for the others, too, if you want.”

  “A half a crown per lad,” said Holmes, steadily walking toward the alley entrance.

  From around the corner, the other two boys appeared. “What do we have to do?” asked one of them.

  “Tell us more. Take us to your friend,” said the detective, pulling two additional coins from his pocket. “The one who encountered the ghost.”

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t a ghost,” admitted the first child, taking one of the crowns. “It didn’t scare you, did it? You two gents went inside.”

  “We did,” replied Holmes, handing coins to the other boys as we stepped beside them. “And now we would like to compare what we saw with what you observed.”

  “We saw nothing much,” said the third lad. “All of us went inside, but there wasn’t anything there, other than a couple hammers. And a little bit of tar. Billy touched it, but none of us did, and by the next day, the blisters were growing on his hand.”

  “Can you take us to Billy?” Holmes asked. “Is he at home?”

  “Oh yes. They put him to bed,” said the third boy. “Most likely to get him out of sight. The boils are so ugly and awful, with yellow pus and all.”

  “And they hurt,” another added.

  “Tell us more as we walk,” said Holmes. “My companion here is a doctor and is interested as well, are you not, Watson?”

  “Of course,” I said, falling into step with Holmes and the others.

  We listened to the boys tell their story as we followed them south and west, entering the heart of the Poplar district, where destruction from the Zeppelin raids of previous years was still in evidence. In the course of walking just over a half mile from the vacant warehouse, we passed through streets lined with shops associated with the marine trades—ropemakers, chandlers, ironmongers, and sailmakers, as well as an old seamen’s mission. Those with whom we shared the pavement included a large number of dockworkers—some with skin like black leather from the tar they scraped from the tanks of oil ships, others with faces as pale as ghosts from unloading potash. Many were lascars, sporting turbans or queues.234

  As we passed a group of children playing Dead Man, we came upon terraces of shabby lets. 235 Eventually, the lads escorted us inside one such building. On its second storey, we paused before a door.

  “Look,” said one of them. “You see, his mum doesn’t know the full story. Thinks he touched something in the fields round the gasworks. She doesn’t know he went inside that old building.”

  Holmes nodded.

  “We don’t want him to get into more trouble,” another boy said.

  The detective set a firm expression on his face and merely said, “Knock, please, or I will do so.”

  Reluctantly, one of our escorts struck the door with a fist and loudly identified himself by name. A woman’s voice from within responded with permission to enter.

  Opening the door, we saw a small, sparsely furnished room where a woman leaned against an iron bedstead while sitting on a horsehair mattress darning stockings. Her youthful but haggard face signalled alarm at the sight of us, and she stood up suddenly.


  “You’re not a brand new pair of tallymen, are you?” she asked suspiciously.236

  “Not at all,” replied Holmes. “My companion is a doctor, and we are here merely to see the boy Billy.”

  “They said he would be all right,” she said in a raspy voice. “There is not supposed to be nothing to fear.”

  “We have no reason to believe there is,” I interjected. Glancing at Holmes, I added, “We wish simply to check on the progress of his wounds.”

  “At no cost?” she enquired, with eyes narrowed.

  “At no cost,” I assured her.

  “All right, then,” she said with reluctance, setting her work upon a table fashioned from fruit crates.

  She studied Holmes and me and then glanced at the three boys. “There won’t be room for everyone at once. You saw him yesterday,” the woman told the boys. “You can wait. In here, gentlemen.”

  Holmes and I followed her across the small room. Passing before a window partially covered by newspaper, I glanced down through the pane at a small concrete backyard where two girls were drawing water from a standing tap. An old man emerged from a privy that stood near the tap, and I turned my attention back to Holmes and the woman.

  “The other doctor didn’t know what it was he touched round near the gasworks,” she said. “And those boys,” she added, nodding back toward the boys. “They keep saying it was ghosts. As if.”

  She opened a door, and we stepped into an even smaller room, in which another horsehair bed was pushed up against a bare wall. One small window sat high up on the opposing side, and light diffused in through another sheet of newspaper to reveal a small figure beneath bed covers, a hand hanging out from the edge of a cot.

  “His brother sleeps on the floor now when he’s around, instead of with Billy, him being injured. Billy?” she said sharply. “Billy, wake up.”

  The blankets stirred. The hand moved and then winced. A boy’s voice mumbled wordlessly, and the occupant of the cot pulled himself up into a sitting position with one arm, revealing a round, dirty face. The other hand, on which I could see yellow blisters, twisted slightly, back and forth at the wrist.

  “These men have come to give you another look,” the boy’s mother said quietly. “He has gotten better,” she told us. “In the beginning, I was so worried. Thought it was plague.”

  I knelt down beside the boy, who smiled sleepily at me.

  “May I look at your hand?” I asked.

  “Don’t touch it, please,” the lad said. “Not if you don’t have to.”

  Handling only his forearm, which was unaffected, I turn the entire limb round and observed more closely the blisters on his fore and middle finger, as well as two on the palm. Their nature was immediately obvious to me at such close range.

  “It is as we suspected,” I said to Holmes.

  “Sulphur mustard?”

  “Yes. Do you have any wounds elsewhere?” I asked the boy.

  He shook his head.

  “The exposure must have been minimal,” I said, again addressing Holmes. “If these are the only blisters, he is very fortunate.”

  I let go the boy’s arm, reached forward and gently pulled back both his eyelids in turn. “The eyes are normal. Have you had difficulty breathing?” I asked the boy.

  “No,” he replied. “Just the boils.”

  I nodded and then with a little effort rose to my feet.

  “Is he doing well?” the woman asked. “And what was that about mustard? Was it spoiled food he touched? The doctor what treated him said it was something chemical.”

  “The boy will heal in time,” I told her. “He seems to be progressing well. And the doctor was correct,” I added. “Your son was exposed to a substance akin to some with which our soldiers in France are sometimes attacked.”

  “You mean he was gassed?” she said, drawing back in fright.

  “The chemical was in liquid form, and he appears to have innocently touched it,” I told her.

  Stepping past me to speak with the lad, Sherlock Holmes asked, “Did you see any stain that was yellow or brown when you were in that warehouse?”

  “In what warehouse?” said the woman. “Did he go inside the gasworks?”

  Holmes ignored her comment. “It is of vital importance that you tell me the truth, Billy,” he said. “The entire truth.”

  “What warehouse?” repeated the woman, and Holmes raised a hand in her direction as he kept staring at the young boy, who anxiously looked back and forth between his mother and the detective.

  “Please,” said Holmes, his voice softening as a show of kindness flowed into his eyes. “It will be all right if you just tell the truth.”

  “Yes,” Billy stammered after a moment. “There were stains, but it was dark in there, and I didn’t see them until I had put my hand on them.”

  “And it was the next day that you felt your hand hurt?” asked Holmes.

  “That night, in truth,” answered the boy. “It began to hurt so badly.”

  “When did you go exploring in the warehouse?” asked Holmes. Billy’s mother continued to mutter under her breath, but my friend ignored her.

  “Thursday,” Billy said nervously. “Thursday, just before sunset, when it was still light about.”

  Holmes nodded. “After the warehouse had been abandoned. It was dark inside, wasn’t it, Billy?” he asked.

  “Yes. We’d been playing Ginger237 with the men in the building for days. They didn’t like it, of course, and that made it all the more fun. Then, that day, we tried it again, only no one answered. After a time, we realised there wasn’t anyone there anymore. So we decided to go inside.”

  The boy paused for a moment and then continued. “We had no matches for light. We had to walk slowly down that hallway—

  “You did not enter through a door, did you?” Holmes said.

  The boy looked at his mother, who remained in the doorway, and shrugged. “No. There was a little window down near the alley pavement that was boarded over. We had seen the men nailing planks over it.”

  Holmes eyes widened slightly, and he nodded but did not interrupt the lad.

  “Well, we pried the boards off,” Billy said slowly, looking warily at his mother. “We used one of them to break the window.”

  The mother gave a cry of disgust and turned away, leaving the room. The boy bit his lip and began to tremble.

  “Go on,” said Holmes dispassionately. “I know that it is difficult, but you see, this is for king and country.”

  The boy looked at him with a suddenly puzzled expression and then continued. In the absence of Billy’s mother, the other three lads slowly crept into the room, gathering round their wounded friend as he continued.

  “I was the one who volunteered to go in first,” Billy said. “Harry dared me to go inside.”

  One of the other boys bowed his head.

  “I crawled in through the broken window and dropped down into this hallway with a low ceiling,” Billy said. “I followed it by keeping my hand against the wall and found a huge room with big metal pipes and such. Then I came back for the others.”

  Holmes nodded.

  “It was dark, like I said,” Billy went on. “Windows was boarded over, but some light still got in. We wandered about the place, and I started feeling around on the floor, trying to find what was there, you know? It must have been then that I touched it—in a corner, I think. We never found anything much, though, and left the place…”

  The boy stopped, as if uncertain of what more to say.

  “Afterward, you told your family that you had touched something in a field near the gasworks,” completed Sherlock Holmes. “You did not wish to admit to entering the warehouse.”

  The boy nodded.

  “She’d have beaten him,” whispered one of the other boys. “Maybe his da would have, too.”

  “I know your hand gives you distress,” the detective said, “but it will heal eventually. And, in the bargain, you have done our country a great servic
e. Now,” Holmes added, leaning forward, “you said a moment ago that the four of you watched that window be boarded over. Did you observe more? Perhaps objects being carried from the warehouse?”

  “No,” replied Billy, and the other boys nodded.

  “We just saw them boarding up some of the windows,” said another of the lads. “Then the men left in a lorry.”

  “How many men were there?” asked Holmes. “What did they look like? Did the lorry have any identification?”

  “There was two of them,” said one of the boys. “Just a pair of men in work clothes.”

  “Yes, but they were clean work clothes, weren’t they?” said another. “And the two of them didn’t act anything like regular blokes. They didn’t behave quite right.”

  “As if they were acting the part of workmen?” asked Holmes.

  “Yes, that’s it,” said the first boy. “They knew how to use their tools, but it seemed like none of it was natural for them.”

  “There was nothing,” said Billy from his cot. “Nothing written on the lorry.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said another of the boys. “What writing there might have been on the side was painted over.”

  “Thank you, lads,” declared Holmes, who spent another few minutes questioning the young witnesses before leading me back into the first room, where Billy’s mother sat, furiously darning.

  “Your son has performed a great service for our country,” he told the woman, who continued her work.

  “He will recover fully,” I added.

  “I don’t know that he’ll recover from the beating I’m going to give him,” she said angrily. “Lying and breaking into a building! I was angry enough when I thought he’d trespassed onto the gasworks, but this…I’ve not raised him and his brother to be—”

  The door suddenly opened and a burly man with a florid, leathery face entered. He was of early middle age, with the bottom of one ear lobe missing. Tossing a canvas bag of tools onto the floor, he calmly considered Holmes, the boys, and me for a moment.

  “So what’s this, then?” he asked.

  “Bill lied to us, Len,” the woman said at once. “The boys all broke into some warehouse down the high road. That’s where he got the boils.”