Death in the Air (11 page)

His hand reaches the perch. He can feel his pursuer’s steps shaking the tower just a foot or two beneath him! He seizes the thick wooden surface and tries to swing himself up onto it. His grip slips, he loses his footing and falls, out into the space high in the Crystal Palace, toward its hard wooden floor a hundred and fifty feet below! He clutches at the perch again … and somehow grasps it with one hand. He tries to raise himself but can’t – he doesn’t have the strength. He feels The Swallow’s hand grabbing for him, grazing his boot, and with a Herculean effort reaches up with his other hand, grips the platform and pulls himself up onto it. He has no idea how he found the power.

Standing up, looking out over the edge of the perch at the two tiny dogs and man far below, he almost faints. It is an incredible sight. He can’t imagine how the Mercures, how El Niño, does it. For an instant, a strange, almost exhilarating feeling creeps into the pit of his stomach and makes him feel like giving up. Why doesn’t he just fall into the air and float downward the way you would at the end of a wonderful dream?

The Swallow’s eyes appear over the edge of the platform. Sherlock pivots and kicks at him, aiming the point of his shoe right for his nose, but the boy, his face calm and collected, reacts like lightening and seizes the foot. Sherlock stumbles and as he does one of his arms windmills in the air and knocks a trapeze bar from its hook on the tower just behind him, above his head. At the same time, he jerks his foot back and starts to fall again. He is going over the edge of the platform … out into space for good.
Sherlock Holmes is dead
. It’s like he is falling down a waterfall, plummeting to his destiny.

But at the last split second he spots the trapeze bar above, loosed now, and also swinging out over the open space.

He snatches it with both hands.

In an instant, Sherlock is flying through the air … with the least of ease.

He swings out over the central transept, holding on for dear life, his black frock coat fluttering as he swoops, his injured hands screaming.

Sherlock can’t breathe. He sees almost everything in
the monster building, all the way down the north hallway to the end. He spots something curious – a small room at the western side of the transept, enclosed by a wall that doesn’t quite reach the ceiling. But he can’t see into it and it passes through his sight in a second and rushes past. He flails about in the air. He doesn’t know what to do. How do they move up here? Perhaps he can land way over on the other perch, on Monsieur Mercure’s boards on the other tower? He passes the bottom of the pendulum swing and is now climbing toward Mercure’s platform. He thinks of El Niño, kicking his legs as he flew to gain speed, so he tries that, but it has little effect. He tries again, amazed at the way it hurts his abdomen, and feels a slight push, upward toward the perch.

But when the platform is right beside him, he can’t get his long legs onto it, doesn’t have the vigor in his intestinal muscles to lift them high enough to set his feet onto the wooden surface. He misses and starts to go backward, on another gigantic swing in the direction he came from … toward The Swallow and the first perch. He is so terrified that he doesn’t care what happens. He just wants to get off. As he climbs the air near the first perch, he does something desperate. He lets go, hoping his momentum can simply shoot him up onto the platform, maybe even knock The Swallow down.

But it doesn’t.

He misses the perch altogether.

But something unexpected happens. He sticks one foot into a rung on the tower to brace himself, reaches out
over the edge of the platform, and catches Sherlock in a powerful grip as he flies by.

In an instant, the young acrobat has him up onto the solid rectangular surface and is sitting on him. But he doesn’t seem angry. Instead, he appears relieved.

“What the ’ell were you doing, lad?” he smiles. “That’s some sort of act! Got a job, ’ave you? You know, we ’ave an opening!”

He laughs.

Why is he laughing?
wonders Sherlock.
Why didn’t he silence me? Why didn’t he let me fall?

A SWALLOW’S LIFE

S
herlock won’t have to mingle with the early-arriving employees in order to get out of the building. He is under the safe wing of the young trapeze star. The Palace apparently has a room where performers can stay during engagements. The Swallow had been fast asleep when he heard someone near the apparatus. He explains to the guard, who can barely control his excited beasts, that this boy is his guest, and that though an accident had nearly occurred when they went up to the perch together for a spectacular view, everything is perfectly under control now.

The young star is lying for him.

It is evident that this boy did not make those cuts in Monsieur Mercure’s trapeze bar. If he had, he wouldn’t be doing this, and more to the point, he would have let Sherlock fall.
But if it wasn’t The Swallow, then who?

“Why were you up there?” the acrobat asks as they sit in the wooden seats in the nearby amphitheater.

Sherlock feels it is time to be just as honest with The Swallow as he was with El Niño. It will be to his advantage to have the boy on his side.

“I was here on the day of the accident. Mercure landed almost at my feet when he fell. I noticed two cuts in his bar.”

The young detective watches The Swallow’s reaction. He seems truly shocked.

“But why?” he asks. “Who would want to kill ’im?”

“You,” says Sherlock, rubbing his sore hands.

“Me? ’e’s a cad, but ’e’s me meal ticket. I ain’t a fool.”

“You used to run with a Lambeth gang. Your boss taught you all sorts of skullduggery. He showed you how to kill.”

The Swallow gazes at Sherlock for a moment. His dark eyes turn hard under his tousled black hair.

“You seem to know a lot about me, you do.”

“I have made it my business to.”

“Then what’s your business and who are you?” The young athlete stands up.

“I can’t tell you much about myself. But I can tell you a few things about this murder. And that’s what it is. First, I know you didn’t do it and I can prove it.”

The comment has the desired effect. The Swallow sits down again, relieved.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes and I need you to cooperate with me.”

“Much obliged to do so.”

Sherlock likes this boy, not only because he has just saved his life, but because he can obviously size up situations quickly.

“Tell me more about yourself, Johnny.”

Taken aback by Sherlock’s use of his real name, The Swallow pauses for a few seconds before talking:

“Not much I can say either, mate,” he winks. “Grew up in Brixton south o’ Lambeth in the Laursten Gardens neighborhood, a kind of down-and-out place with scads o’ empty houses. Me guvna were a bad ’un and run off on me mum. Nineteen of us, family and others, livin’ in one flat, children across the bottom o’ three straw beds, a bucket in the center o’ the room for the whole lot. I got in with bad sorts and went north some steps to Lambeth, closer to the action. Thought I was a big ’un, I did. Learned ’ow to nick, ’ow to pluck pockets, and yeah, ’ow to do in a man if I needed to.”

“How long has your mother been dead?”

How in the name of Leotard does he know that?
wonders The Swallow. He decides this lad must be some sort of magician, just like those wits, The Davenport Brothers, who pretend they read minds on stage.

“Trained in our business, Master ’olmes?”

“No, by a scientist. Observation, Master Wilde, that’s all it is. I noticed the ring on your left hand. It is obviously a woman’s. You were wearing it while you slept, so you must never take it off. Had to be your mother’s – you are too young to be walking out with a girl.”

“She’s dead more than a twelvemonth now, dear mum. I supports the little ’uns.”

Sherlock was getting a clearer picture of one Jonathan Wilde, born Brixton, late of the Lambeth streets, also known as The Swallow. Tough on the outside, but a marshmallow
inside, not really suited in the end to steal or kill; someone who might be persuaded to help find the real villain.

“I want you to keep your eyes open for me.”

“It ’ud be me pleasure. I don’t takes kindly to sliced trapeze bars.”

“If you remember anything else that you should have told me, let me know.”

“I shall.”

Sherlock is about to leave. The sun has risen. He has to get back to London on the double. But his mind is racing too – there are so many questions to ask this boy. Sherlock hadn’t, for example, been satisfied with the flippant answer The Swallow had given him yesterday about Mercure’s enemies. Perhaps he’ll do better now. This time, Sherlock will phrase the question carefully.

“In your opinion, is there anyone from outside the profession who might want to do away with Monsieur Mercure?”

“Not outside the business, no. But then, I don’t know many people other than show folks now.”

“Did he have any debts?”

“’im? ’e had a load of coins stacked as ’igh as they is in the Bank of England, ’e did. And ’e weren’t sharin’ it, believe me.”

“Noticed any suspicious people loitering about these past few days?”

“No …” begins The Swallow, stopping in mid-sentence. His eyes seem to register some recollection, then jump back into the present. “No,” he says, “definitely not, just the usual sort.”

Sherlock notices the pause and places it in his memory. This Swallow is an interesting young man, and he may prove to be even more so in the near future.

On his way home, Sherlock rushes through Trafalgar Square, then speeds north on a wide, busy street past palatial steps that lead to the huge doors of a towering church. As he turns his head to glance at it, someone violently seizes him and pulls him into the mews across the street on the far side of St. Martin’s ominous granite workhouse. Good and evil are often side by side in London.

“Master Holmes, I perceive.”

“Malefactor.”

The young leader is alone and smiling, his sunken eyes look sharp and mischievous. He clutches a newspaper in his hand, obviously amused at something. His slight Irish accent grows stronger when he’s angry or excited. “Have you seen this?” he asks, his tongue darting out of his mouth like a reptile’s. He is holding up
The Illustrated Police News
to display its headline: “
MURDER AT THE PALACE?
”

“I know of it,” answers the boy, trying to recover his equanimity without showing he ever lost it, fixing the disturbed collar on his frock coat.

“Care for a clue?” asks Malefactor pompously.

“I have several.”

Sherlock has actually been thinking precisely the opposite: that he has none. He is back at the beginning of
this investigation, miles from his reward. If The Swallow didn’t do it and neither did the meek Eagle, then his only suspect is The Robin and she isn’t a good one. El Niño had described her as disloyal, and she didn’t seem terribly impressed with her beau when Sherlock saw them talking, so it seems doubtful that she really cares for the younger man
or
the older – that she has the passion to kill Mercure, or would sacrifice anything for The Eagle. Her only loyalty is to the troupe’s name and the fame and money it brings her, whether its leader is alive or dead. She has no real motive.

“I am in possession of information about the chap known to the applauding masses as … The Swallow,” says Malefactor smugly, bowing deeply as if he were on the Alhambra stage.

There is a brief pause. Sherlock is reluctant to ask about it. But his rival will make him. The young master thief is greatly enjoying the attentions of Irene Doyle these days and having something important to tell Sherlock about this case, something the boy is anxious to know, just adds to his fun. He grins at Holmes, waiting for him to grovel, to beg to know what he knows.

What could this criminal, an expert among thieves and murderers, know about one of London’s greatest young trapeze stars?

“What is it?” the boy detective finally inquires brusquely.

“He was born and spent his early days in Brixton.”

Sherlock grins.