by Anthony Read
She eventually halted by a big door and disappeared through it, but when the girls tried to follow, they were stopped by a man in a dark blue uniform and peaked cap.
“You can’t go in there,” he told them firmly. “Not unless you’ve got a ticket.”
“You mean like a train ticket?” Gertie asked. “Why? Where’s it goin’ to?”
The man was not amused. “It’s not going anywhere,” he said. “That’s the Reading Room.”
Peeping past him through the glass panels in the door, Queenie could see an enormous, circular room. The walls, right up to the great dome of the roof, were lined with thousands and thousands of books, some of which had to be reached by iron staircases and galleries. Below, dozens of people sat at long desks, curved to fit the shape of the room, reading and writing busily. The woman took her place at one of them, nodding a silent greeting to those nearest to her.
“What they all doin’?” Queenie asked.
“Studying. Thinking. Writing,” the attendant told her. “They’re very clever people. Scholars and professors and suchlike.”
“Will you just look at all ’em books!” gasped Gertie. “I never knew there was so many books in all the world.”
The man gave her a superior smile. “We’ve got a copy of every book that’s ever been printed in this country,” he said proudly, stroking his heavy moustache. “But they’re not for the likes of you. Now hop it, both of you! And don’t touch anything on your way out. I’ll be watching.”
Wiggins and Beaver ran all the way to Soho and arrived, puffing and panting, outside Luba’s Russian Tea Room. There was no sign of Queenie, Shiner or Gertie either outside or inside the café, or in any of the streets and alleys near by.
“I’m worried, Beav,” Wiggins admitted. “I’ll never forgive myself if anything’s happened to ’em.”
“Don’t fret,” Beaver tried to reassure him. “There’s three of ’em. They’ll be OK if they stick together.”
“Yeah, I s’pose so. Well, there ain’t nothing we can do here now. Better go back to the Bazaar and wait for ’em to show up.”
After another quick look around the area, just to make sure, they made their way back to HQ in case the others had returned home and were waiting there for them. But the secret cellar was empty. So, with heavy hearts, they hurried round to the Baker Street Bazaar to report to Murray in his hideout.
They had only just closed the door behind them when there was another knock on it, again in the secret code, and Sparrow and Rosie tumbled breathlessly in.
“It’s gone,” Rosie gasped. “Somebody’s took the message!”
“And now Moriarty’s got it,” Sparrow added.
“Did you see him?” Wiggins asked. “Did you see Moriarty?”
“No,” Rosie admitted, “but we seen his carriage.”
“And you didn’t follow it?”
“No. He drove off at a good lick. We never had no chance of catchin’ it.”
“Forget this Moriarty fellow for the moment,” Murray cut in impatiently. “Did you see who actually took the message?”
“No,” said Rosie. “They was inside the tunnel, see.”
“But the only people what went through it all looked respectable,” Sparrow added. “None of ’em looked like spies.”
“Well, they wouldn’t, would they,” said Wiggins. “Not if they didn’t want nobody to know.”
“Quite so,” Murray agreed. “But tell me about them, all the same. Describe them to me, if you can remember.”
“Course we can remember,” Sparrow said scornfully. “We’re the Baker Street Boys, ain’t we? Mr Holmes learned us what to do.”
Between them, Sparrow and Rosie managed to recall and describe all the people they had seen passing through the tunnel in the park. Murray shook his head sadly.
“You’re quite right,” he said. “It could have been any of them. They all sound perfectly respectable.”
“That’s how they looked,” said Rosie. “There was even a copper.”
Murray sat up sharply. “A policeman? You didn’t mention him.”
“He’d be a park policemen,” said Wiggins. “The Royal parks has their own police force, you know.”
“I ’spect he was on his way to the police station,” said Sparrow. “It’s only just round the corner from where we was. He wasn’t on duty.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Murray.
“He didn’t have his armband on. When a copper goes on duty, he puts a striped band on his sleeve, don’t he? By his wrist.”
“That’s correct,” agreed Murray. “You’re a sharp lad to have spotted that. I’ll wager that’s our man. He must have collected the message, then handed it over to Moriarty or his coachman.”
“Well done, Sparrow,” said Wiggins.
“D’you reckon he weren’t a proper copper?” Beaver wanted to know.
“You mean somebody pretendin’ to be one?” asked Rosie. “Like in disguise?”
“Possibly,” Murray replied. “Or a proper copper gone bad. That’s why I didn’t want to go to the police – I don’t know who I can trust.”
They were still thinking about this when Queenie and Gertie returned and told them what they had seen in Luba’s Russian Tea Room, and how they had trailed the woman.
“She ended up in the British Museum,” Queenie said. “Cor! What a place that is. All them carvings and statues and gold and mummies and stuff.”
“What was she doing there?” Wiggins asked. “Meeting somebody? Leaving secret messages?”
“No, she went in a sort of library.”
“There were millions and millions of books,” Gertie added. “Sure and I never thought there was that many in the whole wide world!”
“Ah, yes,” said Murray. “That’ll be the Reading Room. A lot of revolutionaries go there to study and write their own books.
“Is that all she did?” Wiggins asked Queenie.
“No, before the museum, she went to the post office and sent a telegram,” Queenie replied. “I couldn’t see who it was to, but she looked like it was somethin’ urgent.”
“Excellent,” Murray told her. “We seem to have stirred up a real hornet’s nest.”
“No, no,” said Gertie, “there weren’t no hornets. I seen hornets and I don’t like ’em. They can sting you somethin’ rotten!”
“What’s a hornet?” asked Sparrow.
“It’s like a wasp, only bigger and nastier,” Wiggins said.
“If you get stung by hornets,” Beaver added seriously, “you can die.”
“Oh dear,” cried Rosie. “You don’t think…?”
“Hold it!” Wiggins held up his hand. “There ain’t no hornets. It’s just a saying. Right, Mr Murray?”
“Quite right, Wiggins. If you poke a stick into a hornet’s nest, they all come flying out looking for trouble. And that’s what our revolutionary friends from Luba’s are probably doing.”
“Yeah, but what are we gonna do now we’ve stirred ’em up?” asked Sparrow. “I don’t much fancy gettin’ stung, even if it is only a sayin’.”
“Well,” said Murray, “now that we’re all back together…”
“Hang on,” Queenie butted in. “We ain’t all together, are we? Where’s Shiner?”
THE HANGED HIGHWAYMAN
The black-bearded man from the café shoved Shiner into a room and slammed the door shut behind him. The boy heard a key being turned in the lock and then the sound of the man’s footsteps clumping across the bare boards of the landing and down the stairs. He hurled himself at the door and hammered on it with his fists, shouting at the top of his voice, “Lemme out! Lemme out!” But the footsteps carried on until another door closed at the foot of the stairs, and then there was silence.
The room seemed to be in the attic of a tall, old house. It was dingy, dusty and dim – the only light seeped in through a small skylight in the ceiling, with glass so grimy it was impossible to tell if the sky above was blue or grey. The onl
y furniture was a single iron bedstead, a rickety wooden chair and a cheap chest of drawers with three legs and a couple of books propping it up where the fourth leg should have been. A large tin trunk sat in one corner of the room, battered and dented from years of use and plastered with old shipping labels.
Shiner looked around desperately for a way of escape, but there was nothing. The skylight was too high for him to reach, even if he stood the chair on top of the trunk or the chest of drawers. And he knew that if he did manage to reach it, he probably wouldn’t be able to open it – and even if he got that far it would only lead out onto the steep roof. He worked his way carefully round the bare room, knocking on the walls in the hope that one of them might be hollow – he had heard that in some old buildings the attics and lofts joined up, in which case it might be possible to break through into the house next door. But these walls were all solid.
Angry at himself for allowing Blackbeard to catch him, he let out a scream of rage and kicked at the walls and door until his toes hurt. Then, as his temper cooled, he threw himself down on the bed, wondering fearfully what his captors would do with him. He had no doubts now that he was in the hands of a dangerous gang of revolutionaries. And he had no way of escape.
By the evening, Queenie was starting to get quite worried about her little brother. She knew he could usually take care of himself, but she also knew he often did things that got him into trouble. She wondered if that was why he had not come home for his supper. Even though he had eaten a pile of blini in the tea room, he must be hungry by now – the other Boys were ravenous, and Shiner always had the biggest appetite of them all. Queenie had been too busy to find anything to cook, but Murray had given her some money to buy pies for all of them as well as for himself, and they had taken theirs back to HQ to eat.
When they had finished and Shiner still hadn’t returned, Queenie decided she would have to go and look for him.
“I’ll come with you,” Beaver volunteered. “In case you need backup.”
“Me too,” said Rosie, jumping up.
“And me,” Gertie joined in. “I was with you when he went off after Blackbeard.”
“Right,” said Queenie. “We can start at the tea room. That’s where we last saw him. You comin’, Wiggins?”
Wiggins shook his head. “No, I got some thinking to do. ’Sides, somebody oughta stop here, case he comes back while you’re out.”
Sparrow had already left for his job at the theatre, so once the others had rushed out, Wiggins was alone. He settled down in his special chair to do some hard thinking. He had a nagging feeling at the back of his mind about the strange message, Spaniards Sat 3. It was still a puzzle that he couldn’t solve, but there was something vaguely familiar about it – he simply couldn’t remember what it was. After a while, however, an idea came to him, and he hurried off to see Murray at the Bazaar.
“I bin thinking about your brother,” he told him. “You said whoever murdered him did it ’cos they thought he was you.”
Murray nodded sadly. “Yes,” he said. “It should have been me. It was my fault he was killed.”
“No, it weren’t,” Wiggins said. “You can’t help looking like your twin. But the thing is, if the murderer mistook him for you, he must have seen him somewhere, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So, if we knew where your brother had been …”
“…we’d know where the murderer could have been, and that might give us a clue!”
“Exac’ly.”
“You’re a clever chap, Wiggins, but how do you think we’re going to find that out?”
“Well, in Madame Dupont’s tableau in the waxworks, your brother is at his desk, right?”
“Right.”
“And what’s on that desk?”
“Well, the gun, of course…”
“And what else?”
“Pens and … a book. His diary. By Jove, Wiggins – you could have something there! The diary should tell us what Alwyn had been doing and where he’d been.”
“Exac’ly! The waxworks is shut for the night now, so if I get the key from Sarge, I could nip in there and borrow the diary. We could read it and put it back in the morning, afore they open, and nobody would know.”
“Wiggins, my friend, you’re more than clever – you’re brilliant!”
“Ta very much,” said Wiggins with a broad grin.
Queenie, Beaver, Rosie and Gertie peered through the windows of Luba’s Russian Tea Room but could see nothing. The café was dark and deserted, with a closed sign hanging inside the door. They stepped back and looked at the upstairs windows, but there were no lights there either. For the next hour, the four Boys combed the streets of Soho, searching every alley and doorway, but they could find no sign of Shiner.
“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Beaver said, trying to comfort Queenie. “You know your little brother. Remember how he turned up in the Limehouse laundry, when we thought we’d lost him?”
“That’s right,” said Rosie, trying to sound cheerful. “He saved my bacon then, and no mistake.”
“Sure and I’ll never forget the way he climbed up that crane,” added Gertie. “I couldn’t have done it better myself. He’s a brave lad, so he is.”
“Yeah. Too brave sometimes,” Queenie replied. “Too brave for his own good. Always has been.”
“Come on,” said Beaver. “Let’s get back to HQ. Wiggins’ll know what to do. And you never know – Shiner might be there waiting for us.”
But of course Shiner was not waiting for them at HQ, and nor was Wiggins, who at that very moment was creeping into the Dungeon of Horrors to get the diary from Alwyn Murray’s desk.
Even though Wiggins was getting quite used to the Dungeon, it still felt spooky. Thinking he could hear a rustling sound behind him, he looked back over his shoulder, and in doing so he bumped into the highwayman’s skeleton, setting it swinging eerily in its gibbet. He hurriedly brushed past it, trying not to look at the grinning skull with its empty eye sockets under the black three-cornered hat. Grabbing the book from the desk, he retreated as fast as he could.
Shiner woke up with a start to the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Bored with sitting alone with nothing to do, he had lain down on the bed and fallen asleep, but now he quickly came to his senses and sat up. The room was dark, but he could see a sliver of light under the door and hear a key being turned in the lock. He thought fast – if he was quick enough when the door opened, he might be able to dive past Blackbeard and make his escape down the stairs. He hopped off the bed to be ready, but when the door did open there were two people standing there, Blackbeard and the chestnut-haired woman. Between them they completely blocked his way, and Shiner knew he stood no chance of getting past. The woman raised the paraffin lamp she was holding, to see better, and stared at Shiner.
“It is a child!” she exclaimed in a strong foreign accent. “A street urchin. What you do, Ivan, locking up innocent children?”
“He is no innocent,” Blackbeard spat. “He was following me.”
“Hah! He probably wanted to pick your pocket.”
“’Ere!” Shiner protested. “I ain’t no dip!”
“Dip?” the man asked, puzzled.
“Cor blimey, don’t you know nothin’? A dip’s a pickpocket. And I ain’t no thief, so you better watch what you’re sayin’.”
“Hmm,” the woman mused. “He is sharp, this one. You are right, Ivan – perhaps he is not so innocent.”
She looked steadily at Shiner. “If you are not dip, what are you?”
Shiner looked steadily back at her, determined to give nothing away. “I’m a shoeshine boy. I clean shoes.”
“Why you follow my friend? You want shine his shoes?”
“Well,” said Shiner, looking down at the man’s scruffy boots, “they could do with a good rub up…”
“Where your brushes? Your boot polish? No, you don’t want clean his shoes. So why you follow him? Someone send you to spy on him. O
n us. Who? Tell me.”
Shiner shook his head stubbornly. “No,” he said. “Can’t.”
“Can’t? Or won’t.”
Shiner shrugged but still stayed silent.
“Very well,” the woman snapped. “You stay here till you tell. Come, Ivan!”
And with that, she left the room. Blackbeard followed, slamming the door and locking it.
Shiner was left alone again, and the attic room seemed darker than ever.
Glad to be out of the Dungeon, Wiggins hurried back to Mrs Pettigrew’s shop and handed the diary to Murray, who opened the book and began to read.
“Is it real?” Wiggins asked.
“Yes,” said Murray, visibly upset. “This is my poor brother’s handwriting. I can hardly bear to look at it.”
He blinked back a tear. Wiggins felt uncomfortable, watching his distress.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s getting late. I’m going back to HQ, to see what the rest of the Boys’ve bin up to.”
“Good idea. I’ll need a little time on my own to read this carefully.”
Wiggins opened the door and squinted out to make sure the coast was clear. “Right,” he said. “I’ll be here first thing in the morning to put it back afore Madame comes to open up.” And he slipped quietly out into the night.
When the Boys started getting up the next morning and Shiner had still not come home, Queenie was worried sick.
“I’m goin’ back to that caff,” she announced. “To see if anybody knows where he might be.”
“Be careful,” Beaver warned. “It might be dangerous.”
“I don’t care. I gotta find him.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Wiggins. “But I gotta go back to the Bazaar first.”
“We’ll all go to the caff now,” said Gertie. “We’ll see you there.”
When Wiggins arrived back at Mrs Pettigrew’s shop, Murray was not looking happy. “I think I know where he was seen,” he told Wiggins.
“Where?”
