Death in the Air (14 page)

A
whole new factor has entered the game. Sherlock needs to locate the Crystal Palace vault,
and
see the crime scene one more time before it is dismantled. He has a great deal to discover and put together, and it all must be done in the next few hours.

It is hard to believe that he is going back to Sydenham – he had just been there in the small hours of the morning. The two boys walk through the Trafalgar Square crowds and approach Charing Cross Railway Station. Its entrance is through a ground-floor arch in an imposing, brick-stone hotel that rises six storeys high. An ornate column with a replica of the medieval Charing Cross at its tip stands in the hotel’s forecourt, behind an iron fence. Only the wealthy ever use this building’s fashionable two hundred rooms and dining area.

Sherlock tries not to gawk as they move through the arch and merge with the flow of people entering the terminal on the other side. The station’s big clock is thirty minutes from striking seven, and many folks are still finding their way home. Though Sherlock appears calm as he walks
beside the strutting, loudly-dressed Swallow (who knows how to play his part as he receives stares of recognition), the young detective’s mind is racing. He would be ashamed to tell his companion, but he has never once been on a steam locomotive. He is trembling.

Trains move at unimaginable speeds. He had often stopped to watch them explode through Southwark, all power and sound and steam, thundering over the low brick bridges there, built through, and veritably on top of, poor neighborhoods.

The boys pass the W.H. Smith bookstalls that sell nearly every London paper as well as city maps. Gentlemen in top hats rush by, calling out to news vendors, tossing them coins with hardly a glance, and catching their papers.

“Gazette!”

“
Times!”

“
Tely!”

They hurry, preoccupied, to their trains, reaching into their waistcoats for pocketknives to cut open the sealed pages. Sherlock wishes he had a few coins in his clothes too.

The Swallow buys them two eight-pence, round-trip, third-class day tickets from a uniformed conductor and finds the platform for the South Eastern Railway line to the Crystal Palace six miles away.

First-class cars are elegant and even serve food, but the carriage the two boys enter, solely for the working class, is much plainer. To Sherlock, it is heavenly. He sits down in a wooden seat across from The Swallow and stares out the window. Within minutes the locomotive hisses and chugs
out of the terminal, over the Charing Cross Rail and Foot Bridge into Southwark. The boy can feel its power already. They move through Lambeth, along the edge of the river, then to the ancient London Bridge Station. They stop, receive more passengers, and quickly move on, picking up speed as they grunt through rough areas near his old haunts, over those low stone bridges he’s so often seen the trains upon. They enter industrial Bermondsey and pass the stinking tanneries on his right, smelling of the lime, rotten eggs, and dog excrement used inside. Then the train swings south, heading into the suburbs and the countryside.

Sherlock cannot believe the speed at which they are moving. It terrifies him. He has heard that locomotives can fly as fast as sixty miles in an hour! He believes it now: his shoulders are pinned back to the seat, his expression held tightly, anxious to look collected in front of The Swallow.

Sherlock has never moved more rapidly than he can run.

The boy looks out his window and straight down, trying to see the tracks, but they are a black stream. Buildings flash past, cows and sheep disappear in the fields the instant they appear. He has always dreamed of being on a train and of taking to the sky in a hot-air balloon, but he never really believed he would get to do such things. Sherlock Holmes wants big experiences. The speed of the train thrills him as much as it frightens him.

But soon he worries that it is out of control. There have been many shocking railway accidents, not the least of which happened two years ago almost to the day on this
very line, south of here in Kent, when ten people were killed and many maimed in the notorious Staplehurst crash. Charles Dickens was on that train and the terrifying way he described it in his magazine
All the Year Round
sent shivers down the boy’s spine.

As they race south, only minutes out of the London Bridge Station and yet approaching their destination, Sherlock feels the locomotive rock back and forth, barely hanging on. He has to shut his eyes. In his vivid imagination he sees the train flying off the tracks, careering into a field, smashing into a building, and exploding in great red and black flames: he hears the screams of the excursionists, blood splattering the insides of the cars, severed heads and limbs thudding against the windows.

The train slows.

Sherlock opens his eyes. The Swallow is grinning at him.

“Life movin’ too fast for you, Master ’olmes?”

The young detective looks out the window, embarrassed, and concentrating on slowing his breathing. The locomotive puffs gently through Forest Hill Station, whistling as it goes, then picks up just a little speed as it enters Upper Sydenham, and the Crystal Palace comes clearly into view. The sun is getting lower in the gray sky, peeking through the clouds. The glass monster glows on its hill right above them.

Sherlock has never seen it from this vantage point. Every time he’s been here, even when he came with his mother, he walked. He’s always approached the Palace from
behind. But tonight the train is taking him past the grounds, and he can see the front of the magnificent building overlooking its green kingdom. The wide Grand Centre Walk leads way up to its tiered terraces and main doors.

The train follows the curving track toward the Palace Station, crossing in front of Boating Lake, populated with little pleasure vessels piloted by gentlemen, with ladies seated in front of them. The Great Fountains are stretched across the width of the park, spurting their white spray high into the sky.

Sherlock disembarks and nearly falls down – his legs are rubbery. A line of elegant hotels runs north from the station, but the two boys take the tunnel onto the grounds and head toward the Palace. The Swallow simply has to show his face to get them inside.

The trapeze apparatus is only one element in the case now. Of almost equal importance is the vault. Sherlock wants to know where it is, and how the Brixton Gang might have robbed it without anyone even noticing, and then deduce what in the world, if anything, all that has to do with the murder of Monsieur Mercure. If that notorious group of thieves indeed played a part in any of this, then Sherlock Holmes will be involved in a much bigger case than he ever imagined. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense that all of the factors – The Swallow and the gang from his old neighborhood, the money missing from the vault, and the Mercure accident – are connected. But something inside him says they are. His heart rate increases as he enters the building.

What role did The Swallow have in all of this? Sherlock doesn’t trust this self-confident little devil anymore. He marches him up to the central transept. On his way he spots Inspector Lestrade and his son, attended by a half dozen Bobbies, standing at the far end of the nave. They are deep in conversation and look like they intend to stay for a while. Sherlock immediately decides that he must investigate what they are up to, especially why they are gathered in that particular spot, far from the trapeze installation. But first, he has a few more questions for Master Wilde. They lean against a wall near the tower they climbed in the early hours of the morning. Sherlock wants this conversation to take place with the whole scene in front of him.

“Did you ask your Brixton friends to come here the day before the accident?”

“No,” answers the young acrobat peevishly. “’Course not. I told you once, I ’ave naught to do with their like now.”

“Did you have the sense that they sought you out?”

“Don’t know.”

“Where did you meet?”

“Right ’ere, where we’re standin’. I was puttin’ up the equipment.”

“So, they saw that you were in charge of the trapeze swings?”

“Suppose they did, yeah.”

“Was there anyone else around?”

The boy points across the transept. “Just them two.”

The Eagle and The Robin are walking in their direction. They are glancing around, aware that others are noticing
them. They pick up their pace when they see The Swallow and the tall, thin boy.

“Stop talkin’ to strangers, Johnny, and get to work,” the young woman commands as they near. She turns on Sherlock. “Leave off!” she barks.

Despite her nasty attitude, the boy is struck by how beautiful she is up close. Not that she isn’t while in the air: her flaming hair flowing as she flies, her face glowing with strong, painted features, and her long muscular legs and slim arms shockingly on display in her almost see-through red costumes; she is always a scandalous and enticing vision, and her entrancing form mixes with the danger of her act and thrills the hearts of every man who has ever gazed up at her.

Sherlock steps back, feeling intimidated.

“I
’ave
to talk to ’im,” says The Swallow, looking her square in the face, obviously not afraid of her.

“Why?” asks The Eagle. He steps up close and stands over Sherlock and The Swallow, his size imposing. But Sherlock can see that what El Niño told him is true, just by looking into the man’s eyes. The Eagle seems unsure of the authority he is trying to display. Close observation can tell you a great deal about an individual; it can reach into a soul. Sherlock has been trying to rally himself. The other’s weakness makes him feel stronger.

“Because I know certain things about the Mercure murder that no one else knows,” he says, moving so close to The Eagle that their noses almost touch.

“It … it isn’t a murder,” answers The Eagle, visibly swallowing. “We saw him today. He’s still alive.”

“That’s correct,” says The Robin, “and …” she hesitates, “what do you know, anyway?”

Sherlock hadn’t been surprised to see cracks in The Eagle’s exterior, but The Robin looks to be faltering too, her question almost a plea, obviously taken aback by Sherlock’s claim. The boy wonders why this brash woman might be frightened. Does she have something to hide? Is she a better suspect than it seems?

“It isn’t murder
yet
, you mean,” asserts Sherlock. “But the chances are, it will be, and if not, then
attempted
murder, at least.”

The Eagle glances at The Robin as if looking for guidance.

“I need more time with your young accomplice,” says Sherlock, “so you two may go – for now. I understand you have work to do? Please do not leave the premises until I speak with you.”

Always best to leave suspects worrying
, he thinks. The Robin and The Eagle, who both seemed to start at the word
accomplice
, leave meekly.

“I had naught to do with this, you know,” repeats The Swallow, the instant they are out of earshot.

“Where is the vault?” answers Sherlock dryly, as if he hasn’t heard him.

“’ow should I know? That doesn’t concern me.”

“You know, because you always know where the money is kept at any venue you play It is in your nature. Am I not correct?”

The Swallow regards Sherlock as if testing his will and receives a stern stare in response.

“It’s over there.” He is pointing down the nave directly at the police officers. A thought enters the young detective’s mind. He is considering a line of investigation that Lestrade, standing directly outside the vault with his son and the constables, has likely never even considered.

“Do you know anyone who works there?”

“Where?”

“At the vault – has anything to do with guarding it?”

The Swallow allows a slight smile.

“I do,” he says.

It is the answer Sherlock was hoping for. In fact, he feels as though he has just called the winner at The Derby. The Swallow indeed knows something, and his smile is an indication that Sherlock is getting warmer. Despite the young star’s situation, he obviously admires a clever mind.

“Did the guard make the acquaintance of your friends from Brixton the day you met them here?”

“He did.”

Sherlock detects a twinkle in The Swallow’s eyes now, as if he were inviting his interviewer to ask the right questions. But the twinkle has its limits: the young acrobat also wants to defend himself.

“I will tell you again,” he says, “I did naught wrong. I don’t know what ’appened that day, I swear on me mother’s grave. I’ll truthfully answer any question you ask, but I don’t
want to get no one in trouble, send no one to jail, and I won’t volunteer information.”

The time has come to ask the right question. Sherlock has the right person in front of him, while the police are lost, as usual.

“Is the guard a young man? Would you say he admires you?”

“’e is, and ’e does, talks to me every time I come ’ere.”

“Did he ever tell you anything about his job, brag about it?”

“Yes.”

“Did he speak of it that day?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“’e said there’d be one hundred thousand pounds in the vault by two o’clock that day.”

Sherlock tries not to show his excitement.

“Anything else?”

“And that ’e keeps the combination for the lock in a notebook in his coat pocket. Said it was very complicated, as though ’e wanted to give us all a sense of ’is importance.”

“Us all?” asks Sherlock as soberly as possible. “Who else was party to this
particular
conversation?”

“Two others.”

“The members of the Brixton Gang?”

The Swallow is reluctant to answer, but he’s promised.

“Yes.”

Sherlock is finding it even more difficult to stay calm. He has to keep to his line of questioning.

“Did the guard tell you and your friends anything else of interest?”

“Not really.”

“Anything else at all? Trivial matters are sometimes things of immense importance.”

The Swallow thinks for a moment.