The Murder of Mary Russell (31 page)

S
herlock Holmes stepped away from wife, friend, and brother, heading east towards the underbelly of London. His knowledge of London was intimate, the foundations of soil and paving stone, accent and air quality laid down when Victoria was on the throne. His passage through its streets and alleys had once been as smooth as a tongue through teeth, but the past twenty years had seen a century's worth of change: what the Great War had not demolished, the massive growth of the city threatened to topple.

The past three days threatened the same to him.

Watson had once accused him of coldness, claiming that Holmes regarded any strong emotion as a distraction, akin to grit in a sensitive instrument. It was true, to an extent: he was uncomfortable around anger, terror, love, hatred—distractions and grit, one and all.

And yet, Watson's remark had been written before the doctor knew him well. True, rage could derail the mental processes, but Holmes had also found it a boundless source of energy, just as hate made for a powerful means of focussing the mind. And love? Love was the thing that kept a person going past exhaustion, beyond reason, after hope was at its end.

Grit, yes—but then, grit was what one used to hone steel.

Still, for three days he'd been sprinting flat-out with the hounds of hell behind him, and extricating himself from that state took a deliberate effort. With his immediate concerns laid to rest—Russell alive, Mrs Hudson safe—his next actions would require every bit of cold purpose he could summon, a mental shift best supported by physical effort. The mind was, after all, a machine, and even the one belonging to Sherlock Holmes had moving parts.

So, he would move. He would walk to Whitechapel instead of storming across Town on wheels. He would take his time, each crack of his boot-heels like a hammer on sheet-metal, rendering it smooth and hard. Each mile would pound composure into his nerves; each minute would harden his purpose.

Pall Mall; Charing Cross; Old Scotland Yard; the Embankment. He'd been seventeen the year he and Mycroft watched the bedevilled and ill-named Cleopatra's Needle rise between its supports—and fifty-six when a German bomb nearly flattened it. A curve came; a bridge. Here was the spot where John Openshaw was thrown into the Thames, back in 1887. That street marked the western boundary of the Great Fire. Up this road, Irene Adler's husband had lodgings. Over the long-buried River Fleet, and on.

Near the Billingsgate market (a stone's throw from Neville St Clair's favourite opium den) the incongruous odour of bacon teased the fishy air. Across the river lay the boatyard where the Aurora…but Holmes' steps slowed. Bacon? He was not hungry, nor thirsty, but he was willing to eat and drink for the sheer normality of the act—just as he would walk despite his hurry and, once at his destination, he would talk instead of launching straight into bloodshed.

The chop-house served porters and fishmongers from Billingsgate, substantial men with substantial appetites. Holmes ate, paid, and left, then continued along the river to the Sugar Quay. There he circled the Tower—armoury, treasury, prison, symbol, nine hundred years of London's darkest history. At the beginning of the Ratcliffe Highway, along which two families had been slaughtered half a century before his birth, he spotted a newsagent.

Since his conversation with Billy amongst the hives, the time after Reichenbach had been on his mind. Not that Billy—or Mrs Hudson—had voiced any complaint about his long and unexplained absence, ever. Nonetheless, he'd been aware of their unspoken reproach, that he'd left them to wonder. Yes, he'd had his reasons to disappear, but to do so a second time would be unforgiveable.

Worse, he would not have Russell living with a wound forever raw.

He knew his concern was unjustified. Nonetheless, he stepped into the newsagent's to purchase a piece of stationery and envelope, to be handed a decorative card dating to the late Queen's reign. He quirked an eyebrow at its profusion of flowers, imagining his brother's reaction, and asked to borrow a pencil.

To the bearer: delivery of this card to Mycroft Holmes at the Diogenes Club, Pall Mall, London, will bring a reward of five pounds sterling.

__

Mycroft: I've gone to see The Bishop. If I fail to return

Here, his pencil faltered.
If I fail to return
—then what? Then I have failed.

Neither he nor Mycroft was in the habit of superfluity—far less, Russell. So he finished the sentence:

If I fail to return, I am sorry, to you all.

SH

He walked back to the desk. “Have you glue?” The man reached down and pulled out a pot, watching expressionless while Holmes wrestled it open and applied the brush. He pressed down the flap, then held the sealed envelope out to the newsagent. “Would you care to earn two pounds?”

The man eyed the card.

“I shall return by midday and retrieve this from you. If it is unopened, I will pay you two pounds for it. If one o'clock comes and I have not appeared, there is still money to be had. Simply open it and do what the card says.”

The man turned to prop the envelope on the shelf behind his head. Holmes nodded and left.

Would that all life's transactions could be so seamless.

If London's buildings and roads had changed since the days of his youth, even more so had the architecture of crime. Walking through London forty years ago, he could have named every dip, broadsman, and palmer who went by—along with the mobsman who ran him and the beak who'd last sent him down.

It looked like a cleaner city now. The Ripper killings, that bloody spasm that took place seven years after he'd moved into Baker Street, would be difficult today under London's electric glare—though by no means impossible. And the average citizen was less likely to climb off an omnibus with empty pockets or wake up in an alley with a bloodied head—but it still happened. The dirt remained; it had just got pushed into the corners.

This street was one of those corners.

Professor Moriarty was by no means London's first organising criminal, nor its last. He had been the most efficient, having never looked out from behind bars—or even come to the attention of Scotland Yard until one consulting detective had pointed him out. This claim could not be made by the man Holmes was going to see—nor by the man's father, who had first come up against the hard knuckles of the law when policing was done by Bow Street runners.

He'd had brains, the older Bishop had. He might have given Moriarty a run for his money if he'd been born into a different class or time, but by the time Moriarty was building his organisation, the senior Bishop was dead and his son was taking over. The son, whose hold on what the father had compiled was based more on brutality than on finesse.

The Bishop's son assumed command in the summer of 1880, shortly after an absurdly young Sherlock Holmes managed to scrape together full payment of the Hudsons' debt. This younger Bishop was an old man now, in his eighties, and with no fresh blood in the wings, the enterprise had become so outdated as to be Dickensian. In this modern era of permissive morals and ever-expanding technology, it had also shrunk considerably—but only in numbers. The organisation's age and decrease in scope had, if anything, intensified its filth and viciousness. This was a dilemma for Scotland Yard: it might be an advantage to have all the snakes gathered in one basket, but was it right to leave that source of venom crawling about?

The Yard chose to keep a watching brief on The Bishop, with the occasional hard slap when he showed signs of reaching out. Holmes had gone along with their decision—until now.

If The Bishop had made a move against him, Sherlock Holmes would have no choice but to stamp his heel on the adder's head.

The Bishop retained his offices in Whitechapel, instead of moving into the shiny business blocks favoured by London's new breed of crook. Holmes had not set eyes on the man in six years, had not spoken with him in ten, but he did not imagine the methods of obtaining an audience had changed much.

Calm without and within, Sherlock Holmes took a seat on the ornate little bench across the street from the incongruous marble façade, and got out his pipe. The interlude was both a means of presenting his calling-card—one did not walk hastily up to a house filled with armed men—and a final summons of composure. Had he arrived here before seeing the photograph of Russell's knife, at three o'clock this morning, he'd have gone for the man's throat, without hesitation.

Long ago, Sherlock Holmes had come before The Bishop with a promise: that any venture in certain directions—Mary Russell, Mrs Hudson—would bring reprisals both swift and deadly. A treaty had been agreed. Holmes was here to see if it had been breached, and if so, why.

Ten minutes later, soul composed and tobacco burned, he knocked the pipe's dottle to the ground and spoke to the man attempting to loom over him. “I see your boss still hires his Demanders for brawn rather than brain.” Standing as the fellow was, one sharp jab from an old lady's parasol would have done him in.

Holmes strolled across the marvellously untrafficked street (not one car had passed since he arrived) and up the steps to The Bishop's palace. He stood aside to let the big man open the door like a servant, then continued across the ornate tiles towards the throne room.

There was in fact a throne, a massive gilt and red-velvet construction that the father had installed as a jest and the son had taken seriously. A rumour had made the rounds, back in the 'nineties, that an underling who dared to explain the joke was later found in the river. True or not, the story held all the key elements of this Bishop's rule: a lack of humour, a ruthless hand, and a devotion to gaudy things.

The throne was still there. The man who filled it was even more grossly enormous than he had been six years ago, if that was possible. Certainly, his number of chins had increased. How was it the man's heart continued to push blood through all that mass? Holmes wondered.

Being prepared for the setup, his arm had reached out to snag the guard's wrought-iron chair from the foyer, dragging it through the door and across the tiles with a long and satisfying screech. He stopped before the throne, where a century of supplicants and penitents had stood (including, he suspected, one Clarissa Hudson) and took out his handkerchief. When the seat was dusted, he folded the linen back into his pocket and sat, to all appearances oblivious of the others in the room.

He was gratified to see uneasiness on the old criminal's face, under his habitual look of jovial menace. “Why, Mr Sherlock 'Olmes, wha' a pleasant s'prise. Certainly kept your figger, 'aven't you? I s'pose you've come to arsk a favour?”

His acolytes chuckled. Holmes said merely: “Samuel Hudson.”

The Bishop reclined back into his throne, sausage-like fingers laced across his bulging stomach. “ 'Udson. 'Udson. Now, there's a naim from the past. I do recall a luscious young—”

“No.” The monosyllable snapped through the room like a whip-crack, giving The Bishop pause, although the presence of lackeys made it impossible for him to back down entirely.

“I also 'member 'er old man, with less affection. 'E trimmed the Gov'ner, Jimmy 'Udson did—trimmed 'im right close. An' when we welcomed him back, 'e turned aroun' an' 'e did it again.”

“Both times, your father was repaid his loan, with interest,” Holmes pointed out in a bored voice. “And if you are now going to lay your arrest as a lad at James Hudson's feet, we both know that was someone's poor choice of a lady's maid to let your gang in. Have we finished this pleasant stroll down memory's lanes? Because I have more interesting things to occupy me than a conversation with you. Now, about James Hudson's grandson.”

One pudgy finger described circles on the worn-through gilt at the end of the throne's arm. The man then tipped his head to speak over his shoulder. “Hook it, lads. This gennlemun and me, we needs to talk.”