He has just two days and two houses. The murderer has to be in one of them. But at the very time when he needs to move faster, is he in an impossible situation? He thinks of what happened last night. Did he leave a trail behind … footprints? Has he aroused suspicion? Will someone be waiting for him the next time he goes to Mayfair, a runaway coach or a long-bladed knife poised to take his life? And what are the chances he will be as lucky in the last two houses as he’s been in the first? In them, almost as if invisible powers were guiding him, he had found what he’d been looking for without putting himself in peril. His mother believes in ghosts – she loves séances where people sit at tables and call on the spirits of the dead. Rose would say that a ghost had been leading him. But will a friendly phantom guide him again?
There is only one way to find out.
Fear almost consumes him as he readies himself that night. He has to force himself back to Mayfair. His whole body is shaking as he finds the street that runs almost all the way through the neighborhood near fashionable Park Lane. The last two houses on his list are on the same avenue, about a dozen residences apart and on either side. So far, he’d started at the top of his mother’s note and simply moved down. Tonight, he’s decided to play the odds in his deadly game of housebreaking roulette – he’s picked the fourth home.
A large residence at the corner of the street has a wooden drainage pipe running up its side. He decides to climb it, placing his feet on the iron rings that hold it to the wall. On this roof, Sherlock will be only five dwellings from his target. But just as he reaches his arm up the pipe and puts his left foot onto a ring, he glimpses something moving on the street. Someone is walking past. He or she seems to be taking forever. Flattened against the building, thankful to be dressed as a chimney sweep with his face blackened, he peeks out.
It’s Rose Holmes!
She is walking as if the weight of Westminster Abbey were on her shoulders and as if the flat street were steeper than old Ludgate Hill. Her face is cast down and she holds a piece of paper in one hand.
Sherlock rushes out to her. As he approaches she gasps. The look of fear on her face pains him.
“Mother, it’s me,” he says under his breath.
“Sherlock?”
He pulls her back from the gaslight into a shadow.
“What clothes are you …?” she asks, then stops. “Oh, yes,” she nods, putting it all together.
“I’m getting closer,” says Sherlock.
“Thank God.” She crosses herself in the manner of her high-church Anglican ancestors, something he has rarely seen her do.
“Mother, it’s past midnight!”
“Yes.” She seems resigned to something.
“But why are you still …”
“It was a very long day, son. There were five daughters in the last home where I taught. The lady is having a birthday celebration tomorrow for her two-year-old son. They all had to memorize songs. I finished just a few hours ago and then I sat outside looking at the sky.”
He hopes that explains her lethargy. There’s no beer on her breath, but her mind doesn’t seem fully engaged. Something is distracting her.
“What is this?” He motions to the piece of paper.
“Oh … nothing, really.”
She puts it into a pocket in her dress.
“Nothing?”
What is she hiding? She is never good at keeping secrets from him.
“I have a job tomorrow. This is the address,” she admits. “The offer came at the last minute – a message delivered by coach to the house. Word of good help spreads quickly around here.” She smiles weakly. “The gentleman wants me to tutor at his house tomorrow.” She swallows as if there is a lump in her throat. Then she shakes her head and her voice sounds stronger. “I must get home.”
“Be careful,” says her son, barely listening because his thoughts are fixed on her sadness.
“Sherlock, I know how to keep safe on the streets. You know that.”
She reaches up and gently brushes the back of her right hand across his cheek down to his chin, and smiles at him. Then she leaves without saying good-bye. She doesn’t need to – that caress always means farewell, every night as she sits on his bed before he goes to sleep.
He watches her walk away. He has a bad feeling. He should have insisted on looking at the paper.
Moments later he is on the roof of the house, moving silently along in the dark London sky. It is cool tonight and feels as if it’s going to rain again. He has counted the number of homes he has to walk over. But when he is still two away, he hears something that makes him drop to the roof tiles.
It is the baying of a hound.
It sounds close and it sounds big: a deep, evil bark that resounds in the throat of a giant dog and threatens anyone who nears with a grisly fate. It echoes in the night and drifts away.
He slowly rises to his feet and silently moves again, up and down on the steep surfaces.
On the roof of the last house before his target, he has to leap over a little passageway. It isn’t far across, perhaps four feet – chances are he’ll make it, but he’ll have to do it well and land quietly. He lies on his stomach and sticks his head out over the edge, looking straight down. The drop is frightening. If he misses he’ll be in pieces on the ground.
Sherlock closes his eyes and says a little prayer. To whom, he isn’t sure: to his mother’s God, his father’s, Mohammad’s? Whoever will listen, he thinks. Whoever will care. When he opens his eyes, still looking straight down, two other eyes are staring back up at him.
They are framed by a massive dark head and sharp teeth. The boy hears a growl.
He rams his head back from the opening. Just his luck – the hound is at the house he intends to enter!
He rolls over on his back and stares up at the black sky. What now? He thinks of the property below him, a little yard at the back, surrounded by a high, black iron fence with spears on top that runs up the passage and around to the front of the house. Huge walnut trees tower above the street, hanging out over the roofs. He looks around. Walnuts – there are still some on the roof from last autumn. He stands, gathers up a few, moves back from the edge of the passageway so he can’t be seen, and tosses them gently into the backyard. He hears the hound bound away. Seconds later, he flies through the air and alights as gently as possible on the suspect’s roof.
The next few moments are some of the longest in his life. He listens to the hound running for the walnuts, its heavy breathing, its whimpers as it retrieves its prizes, and its scamper back to its spot underneath the roof. He peers over the edge. The dog is looking up, but not at him. It thinks he is still on the other roof. Perfect. So far, it isn’t barking.
He waits until he can’t wait anymore. No noises come from within the house – they haven’t heard any sounds from the roof. The hound’s breathing begins to subside, it yawns and sits down, still facing the opposite rooftop.
Sherlock rises and walks up to the chimney as if he were treading on glass. He is getting better at this. Down he goes and emerges into another dark dining room, ground floor. The front door is where it should be. Everything is in place.
But this time, he won’t be so lucky. There won’t be any little hall tables with glass eyes in little boxes, no crutches or photographs, no obvious proof of the owner’s innocence sitting around in the outer rooms for him to observe.
Sherlock slips up the grand marble steps to the first floor. He walks down the hall … drawing room on the right, study to the left. The latter is a good place to search … but not the best. He can’t waste time. He has to find the man’s most private room, where he would be most apt to hide things – where he himself would be. Sherlock climbs another flight of stairs like a ghost … and enters the master’s bedroom.
The door is only slightly ajar so he has to push it open a little more. It moves smoothly. The room is crowded with furniture, dimly evident in the moonlight that has peeked between the clouds and slipped through the s
light opening in the drapes – writing desk, washstand, cabinet, chairs and other objects he can’t quite distinguish. Another doorway leads to a dressing room. And there, across the room in a big bed with carved posts … is the sound of someone sleeping.
His feet are glued to the floor, their muscles held so tense they won’t function. He takes a silent breath, a deep one, and makes himself move in a crouch. Where should he search? What should he search for? First he’ll try the desk. Maybe there is something there, something the villain might hide from his wife … a letter?
Then he makes a terrible decision. He decides to move quickly to the desk to get this over with. He takes a long stride and stumbles over something – a footstool. He lands on the floor … and rolls under the washstand.
“What?” says a slurred voice.
He can’t believe it. It’s a woman. There is movement in the bed. A body moving and then … another!
He is sure this is the master’s bedroom … but there are two people in the bed.
Sherlock lies under the washstand until his legs feel stiff. There are no more stirrings. Finally, he slides out. He doesn’t care about the desk anymore. He crawls over to the bed and raises his head until his eyes peek up over its foot.
Two people lie there asleep. But he can’t make out anything about them.
He stands up. Sherlock Holmes stands to his full height – and still can’t tell. So … he creeps around to the side of the bed and looks down. He is standing right over the two sleeping bodies. His heart is racing.
It’s the gentleman and his wife … wrapped in each other arms.
Quivering and anxious to leave, he wants this to be proof of the man’s innocence. It seems impossible that this loving husband can be the villain. He wants to go now. Get out of this bedroom and out of this house. But as he turns he notices that he is being watched! In the dim moonlight, a human eye is floating in a gleaming glass of water and staring into his face. He starts and his leg touches the little table near the bed where the glass sits. The whole thing tilts and the eyeball rolls, tinkling against the glass. In the bed, both bodies stir.
Sherlock turns and flees the bedroom, moving so fast that it’s difficult to keep his footsteps quiet. Outside the doorway, he lurches to his left, rushes down the hall, and soon finds the top of the stairs. He takes a much wider turn than he should.
His foot catches something, the leg of a piece of furniture.
He stumbles and falls, crashing to the floor, the fancy cabinet almost landing on top of him.
He springs to his feet and flies down the stairs like a swallow. Violins are playing in his head.
The way out!
He hears a man shout from the bedroom. The whole house awakening, servants hitting the floors upstairs. The master’s feet pound into the hallway and rush to the top of the steps.
The front door!
Swooping off the bottom steps, Sherlock makes for it. He drives the heavy bolt back and heaves.
It won’t open.
The gentleman is thudding down the staircase, shouting amid the sound of other voices, and of something wooden and steel being pulled from a wall.
A rifle!
Sherlock feels for another bolt on the door, there it is … and another. He drives them both back, yanks the door open, and whacks it closed behind him.
Then a sudden realization hits him like a punch.
The hound! He has forgotten about the hound.
He hears it instantly, bounding around from the passageway, so large when he sees it up close that its massive head seems as high as his shoulder, some sort of evil hybrid dog the size of which he could never have imagined, capable of seizing him by the throat and tearing it out in one rip.
Sherlock looks toward the wrought-iron fence. It is as high as his head and pointed at the tips like spears from the Dark Continent.
He has no choice. He heads for it.
The hound’s hot breath is at his back.
He reaches the fence and leaps as high as he can. One hand seizes the horizontal bar at the top, the other the sharp tip of a spearhead. He can feel it go into his flesh, touching the bone. Sending his scream and pain deep into himself, he jerks the wounded hand off the spear and onto the horizontal bar and pulls himself up.
But the hound can leap too. It sails through the air as he snaps his feet up to the top of the fence, pulled by the strength of his arms. One leg goes over the spears, out toward the street.
The hound catches the other.
Its teeth enter his calf, tearing into the flesh. But when the giant canine opens its mouth again to strengthen its grip, to crunch bone … the boy is gone. He whips his wounded leg over the fence and lands, almost on his face.
Sherlock runs, ignoring the pain in his hand and leg. He puts his head back, chest out, pumps the air with his arms, and dashes down the stately street out into the rest of London, and on and on until he is sure no one is following and he is deep in the city, in The Seven Dials, down another dark alleyway. He collapses in a heap against a wall and squirms into a dustman’s mound of stinking rubbish and refuse. Buried under it, his chest heaving so hard that the mound looks alive, Sherlock isn’t thinking about his wounds. His mind is back in that bedroom.
They were wrapped in each other’s arms.
And there’s something else.
He hadn’t been able to make out the color of the iris on the false eye when he first saw it submerged in the water, but he’d noticed something else when it rolled. It had no initials. Mr. Lear’s do. That eyeball must have come from a different manufacturer than the murderer’s.
The gentleman in that second-last house is not his villain.
Whether Sherlock falls asleep or blacks out he doesn’t know, but within minutes his consciousness is gone.
“One left,” he murmurs, just before he fades away.
DEATH
He wakes in the morning with a searing pain in his leg. There were special physicians who tended to his mother’s family – he wishes he could go to one now. His father has told him about infection and that possibility worries him. It can kill. He pulls up his trouser leg and looks at the ugly wound, caked with blood. A message courses through his brain. Survive. Before long, he thinks of something that might help.
It starts to rain. He sets off through the streets, east-bound, aware that a noose is tightening around his neck: the injury may be growing worse and Mayfair is surely going on alert.
But he has to go back there, tonight. All he can hope is that the gentleman in that last house didn’t see him clearly and can’t tell the police that a tall, thin boy with dark hair, dressed like a chimney sweep, was in his very bedroom.
At Fetter Lane he notices that someone has dropped a newspaper against a red pillar box on a dirty footpath. He snatches it up and reads as he walks.
Crime pages.
Here it is …
Mayfair last night … break-in reported … owner could not see the perpetrator in the darkness of his house.
Sherlock looks up to the sky for an instant, thankful. He reads on.
The police are concerned about goings-on in Mayfair … a door was reported to have been unlocked from the inside the night before …
So, that’s the way it will be – he will have to enter that last house with a Bobbie on every Mayfair corner. The solution to the crime is within his grasp, but will his pursuers let him solve it?
He is sure that some of the bottles and flasks he noticed in the chemical laboratory at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital contain disinfectant, the new way of killing infection that his father has often spoken of – Wilber read about microscopic bacteria in the writings of the great French scientist Louis Pasteur, and scoffed at the idea that bad smells infected people and that fly maggots should be used to eat dying flesh and save only parts of infected limbs. Science, Wilber knew, could do better.
Sherlock sneaks into St. Bart’s again, entering by the same arched back door. He knows where to find the lab and what he i
s looking for inside. But someone is there when he arrives, likely a medical student. He waits until the white-coated, thick-set, young man leaves. He slips in. It takes a long time to find what he needs, and his fear grows as the clock on the wall ticks. He searches label after label. Finally, he spots a small bottle containing a clear liquid identified as “Lister’s Carbolic Acid Solution,” drops it into a pocket, and makes off down the white corridors, passing the man in the white coat. He hobbles away as fast as he can, and when he gets to the streets, keeps moving. On an embankment down by the Thames he raises his bloodied pant leg and pours the potent elixir over the wound.
He cries out. He has to. The pain is unlike anything he has ever felt before, like someone is burning his flesh with a firebrand. His shriek goes out across the Thames and is swallowed up. The liquid bubbles on the injury, beginning to destroy the infection. He drops more onto his skewered hand.
Across the Thames … that’s where he wants to go before he returns to Mayfair … because he is faltering. It seems like suicide to attempt this last break-in, the odds are so highly stacked against him. Should he go home? Just briefly?
He needs to see Rose. What he hopes to gain, he isn’t sure. Perhaps she will convince him not to go. And that would be a godsend. Or maybe she will give him the courage to do it? He wonders if he wants that.
Perhaps he just wants to see her for the last time.
The sky clears as he heads south.
It is amazing how easy it has become for him to enter a house unseen. Malefactor would be impressed. Sitting alone in their flat, which seems even smaller and more pitiable now that he has been inside the mansions of Mayfair, Sherlock realizes that he won’t see his father tonight. It’s a Friday – the day when Wilber stays late to clean the doves’ cages. What a job for a man once destined to be a professor of natural philosophy at the University College of London.
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