by Anna Elliott
“He was blackmailing them, demanding payment to ensure his silence, and they killed him for it.”
“Looks like,” Jack agreed. He stopped, looking down at me for a moment. Then he said, in a different voice. “Look. I’ll give up on trying to talk you into staying out of this. But will you at least promise me that you’ll be careful? These are a nasty bunch we’re dealing with.”
“I know.” Already they had shot Holmes, and Jack, too. The bullet wound in Jack’s shoulder was only just barely healed.
Without fully realizing it, I had wrapped one hand around the bars of Jack’s prison cell. Now he folded his fingers around mine.
“You never asked whether I did it.” His voice was quiet.
I tilted my head back to look up at him, ready to make light of the question, turn it into some sort of joke. But as my eyes met Jack’s, even the attempt at humor seemed to die.
His hand covered mine, his palm warm and a little calloused. His eyes were dark, shadowed and frustrated and yet oddly wondering, all at the same time.
He was looking at me as though he were trying to decide whether I was real or only some sort of fantasy.
“No,” I agreed. “I didn’t have to ask.” I swallowed.
The thought ghosted through my mind that this would be the perfect moment to say something heartfelt.
I was an educated, independent, modern young woman—and I didn’t have to wait for Jack to be the one to first declare himself.
“Time’s up.”
Behind me, Will, the young constable, spoke in a gruff voice—and the moment broke. Jack let go of my hand and stepped back, and I blinked hard. “I’ll come back to see you as soon as I have anything to report,” I said.
Not for the first time in my life, I was grateful for the stage training that let me keep my voice steady.
Jack dropped back onto the edge of the bed, favoring me with a brief twist of a smile. “Yeah, well. I’ll be pretty busy here, as you can see. But I’ll see if I find a spare minute to see you when you come.”
27. CASE FOR THE PROSECUTION
“Now then.” Holmes leaned back in the hansom cab on the seat beside mine. “Tell me what you have learned.”
I scowled at the shiny wet hindquarters of the black horse that plodded before us.
The weather was chill and drizzly, with rain spattering down from a sullen sky and thick curls of mist wreathing the London streets.
Actually, it matched my mood far better than bright sunlight would have done—but the inclement weather was also grinding all traffic on the roads to a virtual standstill. I had the irritable feeling that I could have walked back to Baker Street by now.
“Not very much,” I said. “Jack has been kept ignorant of all details about the sergeant’s murder. But he did tell me that Inspector Mallows had been spending money more freely in these last few weeks before he died. Gambling and drinking—and showing off a very handsome new pocket watch.”
“Ah, greed.” Holmes spoke in a musing tone, his eyes half-lidded, with the look that meant he was concentrating intently. “You would be surprised how many—rich and poor, intelligent and simple alike—fall prey to its lures. Or how few people will stop to think that their newly-gotten wealth might have been too easy to come by, or too good to be true. Most people possess the happy certainty that they deserve every stroke of good fortune that might come their way. It is the guiding principle of many a confidence trickster in duping their marks—just as it seems to have lulled the unfortunate Mallows into a false sense of security.”
“You agree that he was blackmailing our unknown opponents?”
Holmes twitched his index and middle fingers in a gesture that meant obviously. His gaze remained fixed on the streaming gutters of the butcher’s shop we were passing.
“Did you learn anything more?”
“Just that Inspector Mallows was in the habit of frequenting a pub in Covent Garden called the White Hart.”
“I know the establishment.” Holmes’s eyes unfocused, his thoughts clearly following some complicated inner track. “An unsavory place—even for a pub in Covent Garden.”
As a general rule, Sherlock Holmes’s voice was as unchanging as his facial expressions. His speech was cool, academic, and slightly sardonic—whether he was discussing a particularly grisly murder or the likelihood of rain.
Now, though, I thought that his tone altered slightly as he went on, “Constable Kelly did not … that is, he did not express any sentiments … He did not make any declarations of—”
“He did not propose marriage to me through the bars of his prison cell, if that is what you are trying to ask.”
“Ah.” Holmes sat back—looking as though he were profoundly wishing that he could occupy himself only with lighting his pipe.
I stared out the window, wondering what on earth had ever possessed me to confide in Sherlock Holmes.
Actually, I had been hoping that my revealing my innermost thoughts and wishes to Holmes would lead to his being more comfortable with sharing his own.
I should have tried squeezing lemonade from a rock. I would probably have been blessed with greater success.
“It has occurred to me that I owe you something of an apology for the way I responded to your earlier request for advice. I have had little practice at fulfilling the duties of a parent—”
“I don’t want to be a duty of yours!” I interrupted. I blinked hard against the sudden stinging in my eyes. This was ridiculous. I never cried. Not when I was ten, and my entire class at school had someplace to go for the holidays, while I remained wandering the dormitory on my own. Not when I said goodbye to my mother in Italy, having only barely become acquainted with her. Not a few months ago, when Holmes was shot, and I was afraid that he was going to die.
Crying accomplished nothing. Yet here I sat, fighting tears for the second time in a single morning.
If I cried, Holmes would very likely leap straight out of the carriage.
“Quite so. I misspoke. I did not mean to imply that I felt it a duty to … What I wished to say was that—though I have little practice in these sorts of familial relations—I am sensible of the honor you had done me, by trusting me with your confidences.”
I blinked again, managing a small smile as I turned back to Holmes.
“I haven’t had much practice, either.”
I hadn’t had much practice in caring for anyone, family or otherwise. I had had school friends, growing up—but never anyone to whom I was deeply attached. The last close friend I had thought I had proved in the end to be a member of the same German spy ring we were tracking now.
Maybe that was why I was finding it so hard to admit how I felt about Jack.
“What did you find out?” I asked Holmes. “Were you able to learn the details of Mallows’s death?”
“I was.” Holmes’s already thin lips compressed. “The facts are few—and ugly enough. But they can be easily summarized. On the morning of the third—that is to say, yesterday morning—the body of Inspector Mallows was discovered in an alleyway three blocks away from the police station. The amount of blood pooled beneath his body made it clear that he had died where he fell, as opposed to having been attacked elsewhere and dragged to the alley.”
“Even the limited capacities of the investigating inspectors were able to determine that much.”
“The cause of death?” I asked.
I braced myself—but still felt my stomach clench when Holmes answered: “He was bludgeoned to death. With a truncheon belonging to Constable Kelly.”
“How did they know it was Jack’s?”
“His initials were stamped on the handle. Also, his fingerprints were discovered on the weapon.” Holmes’s breath hissed with annoyance. “All the efforts I have made to persuade the police force to adopt the technology of fingerprinting—and they employ it in a case like this.”
“But that makes it still more idiotic! No one could possibly believe that Jack—a police constable hi
mself—would bludgeon someone to death with his own weapon and then helpfully leave the truncheon behind to be found? Anyone with the intelligence God gave to geese ought to be able to see that it’s a completely ridiculous theory!”
“They are claiming that Constable Kelly must have killed Inspector Mallows in a fit of rage. Then, panicking, he ran away—never thinking about the incriminating evidence he had left behind.”
Holmes’s upper lip curled slightly back.
“But surely—”
Holmes did not let me finish. “Unfortunately for us and for Constable Kelly, it makes no difference whether or not the case against him is solid or has more holes than a leaking sieve.”
He fairly bit the words off. It was rare that I saw Sherlock Holmes lose his temper—but he was on the verge of it now.
“What matters is that they have evidence—however shoddy, however scanty—with which to shore up their case and give them an excuse to proceed.”
I felt as though I had been hit in the chest with a sandbag. “You mean that others in the police force besides Inspector Mallows are employed by our ring of spies?”
“We suspected it before, did we not? This would appear to confirm it. The commanding officer of the station—Superintendent Weddeburn—was plainly not happy with the case against Constable Kelly. But neither was he in any way planning to protest the constable’s innocence or prevent him from being tried for the crime.”
The heavy feeling on my chest intensified.
“Do you think Superintendent Weddeburn is in the Kaiser’s employ?”
Holmes made a noncommittal motion with one hand. “It is possible, of course—but I do not believe that he is. To me, he bore the look of a man who had received his marching orders from on high, and was dutifully—some might say fearfully—resigned to carrying them out.”
“You mean that some higher-up police official is putting pressure on him to see that Jack is arrested and tried?”
“That is what I mean, yes. Though I doubt that Constable Kelly will ever come to trial.”
I should have thought that I would have reached a saturation point for worry by now. But apparently not. At Holmes’s words, ice shot down the entire length of my spine.
“What do you mean?”
Holmes gave me a sideways glance as—with a lurch and a jolt—the cab finally began to pick up speed. Whatever obstruction had been causing the delay in the road up ahead must have cleared.
“You do not seriously imagine that our nameless opponents will allow Constable Kelly’s case to come to trial, do you? Their survival and the success of their aims depends on their maintaining anonymity. On attracting no notice to themselves. A trial for the murder of one of London’s own police force would undoubtedly attract the interest of both the public and the press—precisely what our enemies wish at all costs to avoid. Should Constable Kelly face his day in a court of law, other eyes than ours would be sure to spy the flaws in the case against him.”
Holmes stopped, his long, thin fingers drumming a restless tattoo against the cracked leather edge of the hansom cab’s seat.
“If I were to place myself in our enemies’ shoes, I should arrange for an unfortunate accident to occur. Perhaps an assault, or a prison yard brawl—some unpleasant outbreak of violence, apparently random, but having one crucial consequence: Constable Kelly’s death.”
“They’re going to kill him.” I tightened my hands so hard that I would not have been surprised to see the material of my gloves split down all the seams.
I knew Holmes was neither as calm nor as detached as he sounded. Yet it was taking every ounce of my own self-control not to grab him by the shoulders and demand what he was going to do to keep Jack alive.
“Sometime after his transfer to Holloway.”
“But that’s tomorrow!”
Holmes pursed his lips. “I doubt the attack will come in the first day or two of his residence there. That might look odd, when he would have had so little time to make enemies among the other prisoners. No, I imagine that the attack, when it comes, will happen after he has been at Holloway for at least three or four days. Long enough for them to trump up some fictitious account of his having fallen foul of one of the resident prison toughs.”
Three or four days. I stared out the rain-spattered window at an apple vendor in the street outside, and a group of children huddled around a chestnut seller’s fire.
“All right.” I spoke only when I was certain that I could match Holmes’s precise, even tones. “How are we going to get him out of prison before then?”
Holmes did not answer at once.
Until that moment—when I sat with the silence feeling like an actual physical weight in the carriage between us—I had not realized how much I was counting on Holmes to have some miraculous solution. How much I wanted him to proclaim this a knotty little problem, smoke his famous three pipes—and then offer up an answer that would save Jack’s life, prove his innocence, and net our German-sympathizing opponents all in one fell swoop.
Stupid.
If I had learned one thing in my life, it was that nothing in this world came freely or without fighting for it. And trying to outmaneuver our enemies was like whacking at a mosquito while blindfolded in the dark. Without knowing more about their organization, we had small chance of success.
“Without wishing to belabor a subject we have already discussed—has it occurred to you that there may be another reason for Constable Kelly’s failure to broach with you the subject of marriage or personal attachments? One that may not in fact imply any lack of interest on his part.”
“What?” At even the best of times, following Holmes’s style of elocution could be tantamount to deciphering the Modern Major General’s song in The Pirates of Penzance.
Now my thoughts were having trouble in making a jump from prison yards and assassinations to marriage proposals.
“Another reason? What do you mean?”
Holmes gave me an odd glance. “You and Constable Kelly come from vastly different worlds. You grew up in exclusive boarding schools, rubbing shoulders with the daughters of the wealthiest and most elite families in Europe and America. You have performed before royalty, you count the young Rockefeller heir as an admirer—and you have attracted the notice of the Prince Regent himself.”
I could not suppress a grimace. “Oh yes, I was terribly tempted to become the latest in the long parade of Prince Edward’s mistresses. That dissipated, indulgent lifestyle of his—and those rolls of fat around his middle—are so very alluring.”
“Be that as it may, Constable Kelly is still a young man from Cheapside without family—living in two-room lodgings on a pound a week. I believe it quite likely that he cannot even—”
He stopped, pursing his lips as though debating whether to say any more.
“Read.” I looked down at my own hands, rubbing at a spot of soot that had fallen onto the back of my glove. “I already know that.”
Holmes’s eyebrows went up. “He told you as much?”
“No.”
And I would have bitten out my own tongue before ever bringing the subject up myself.
“I deduced it on my own. He can read—at least a little. Just not well. It’s amazing that he can read at all, really, considering that there was no one to teach him anything while he was growing up. His mother abandoned him, and he grew up on the streets with no one.” I straightened. “But just because he can’t read well doesn’t mean that he’s dull-witted! He’s very intelligent and observant and—”
Holmes held up a hand to stop me. “I am not questioning the young man’s intellectual abilities—which are quite good, even remarkably so for any member of the police constabulary. I am simply pointing out that although you may not view it in this same light, from Constable Kelly’s perspective, a young man such as himself has very little to offer a girl in your position.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Was Holmes right? Possibly. But it was hardly the most impor
tant issue right now.
“Quite so.”
I looked up to find Holmes’s keen gray eyes fixed on my face. He nodded, as though he had correctly interpreted exactly what I was thinking—which, knowing him, he probably had.
Holmes rubbed his hands together briskly.
“As I have always said, it is a mistake to allow matters of the heart to cloud one’s judgment or obscure one’s ability to think clearly. I bring up the issue merely so that, once acknowledged, it can be set aside.”
I rubbed my forehead. I wondered whether other girls felt this way in conversing with their own parents: as though they were trying in vain to keep up with a racing steam engine that kept making violently sharp turns.
Holmes leaned forward. “Our focus now must be on saving Constable Kelly’s life. Which means apprehending the true perpetrator behind Inspector Mallows’s death.”
His face was still grim, but I thought there was a faint undercurrent of excitement in his tone. He couldn’t help it; he was simply built to relish a challenge.
“In short, Lucy, we have a great deal of work to do.”
28. MATTERS EGYPTOLOGICAL
“So, Mr. Holmes is going to the White Hart, to see if he can find anything out about Inspector Mallows?”
Becky took a few little skipping steps to keep up with me, and I tried to slow down my pace to match hers. Though it was difficult.
Three or four days, Holmes had said, that Jack would likely be safe at Holloway Prison.
But what if Holmes was wrong? Uncle John would probably call it rank blasphemy to think so. But even Sherlock Holmes was not entirely infallible.
“Yes. Holmes thought that he would have better luck in questioning the regulars of the White Hart than I would.”
I had not argued with him. I might chaff with irritation at the ways of the world—but the fact remained that a young lady could not sashay her way into a low-class public house, announce that she had a few questions, and ask the petty thieves, ladies of the evening, and procurers who frequented the place to please be honest about their answers.
