A Study in Darkness (38 page)

“Ah, but I shall save him the trouble of sending another bomber if I answer his invitation. Mrs. Hudson at least will thank me.”

“That note was more like a summons.”

Holmes shrugged. “What it lacked in spelling it made up for in textbook civility. It’s my brother they want. Mycroft is in London now, for all the good that will do the Blue Boys or the Yellowbacks. He’s ensconced in his club as securely as a pearl in its oyster. It would take an army to reach him. The Diogenes Club has hired a private guard, and they take their lack of sociability seriously.”

The Schoolmaster wrinkled his nose. “But walking into King Coal’s lair? That’s a boneheaded idea. He could take you captive and use you for bait.”

Holmes had thought of that. It was a calculated risk, but there was nothing more he could do from Baker Street. He needed access to the East End, and only the Blue King could grant him free passage. “Is that why you volunteered to come along? To dissuade me from seizing this opportunity to find a young woman lost in all this romantic scenery?” Holmes swept an arm around the docks, neatly stepping around a mass of gulls fighting over something dead.

The Schoolmaster snorted, unperturbed. “I came to watch your back. Better me than the doctor on this one, I think. I’m not so likely to be tripped up by a sense of honor.”

Holmes cleared his throat. “True.” When they knew where to look, he’d take Watson to rescue Evelina, to be brave and kind and to say the right words. But not today, just in case they went the way of the match girls. Come to think of it, he should have left the Schoolmaster behind. The entire Baskerville affair depended on the young man, but he did more than his share of work without complaint. It was easy to forget he wasn’t just another rebel soldier.

Holmes shoved down his misgivings, his guilt, and his grief, until they passed through his mind like strains of music from another room. There, but distant. They beckoned, they edged his way, but he did not let them close. At times like this, emotions were a drug to be carefully administered. Just enough gave strength. Too much rendered a person—most people—useless. And he had to ration just how much he cared if he wanted to keep a clear head.

“Where is this warehouse?” he asked. The Violet Queen had her headquarters in a bordello, the Gold King in a palatial suite of offices. The Blue King, in keeping with the neighborhood, had his in a dockyard.

“There,” said the Schoolmaster, shouting a little to be heard over the racket of the dockworkers. He pointed ahead to where the river curved, giving a view of the buildings ahead. “Between the two taller buildings.”

They carried on, getting closer. The Blue King’s headquarters looked nondescript at first glance, a coffee wholesaler to the right, a chop house to the left. It was a main floor and two above, each with a row of eight windows with no blinds or curtains. It looked utilitarian to the point of seediness. Holmes wanted to ask if the Schoolmaster was sure, but then took another, more careful, look. There were large men standing outside, spaced neatly apart, most holding a stout club with an air that said they never so much as bathed without it close by. He saw a baker carrying a tray of bread to the side door. There was a dog digging in a scrap heap. The mutt carried off a bone most of the locals would have used for their own meal.
When is poverty not poverty?
Holmes asked himself.
When the Blue King lives there. And now it is time to set this comedy in motion
.

“You stay here,” he said to the Schoolmaster. “If I don’t emerge in a half hour, I urge you to contact Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.”

“Am I to believe you haven’t already told him what you’re up to, just in case?” The Schoolmaster lifted his green-tinted glasses to give him raised eyebrows.

“If I am incapacitated, he will have to take up the search for my niece.”

“And you haven’t got every plod in London on the lookout for Miss Cooper already?”

Holmes returned the look impassively. “Of course they are.”

Lestrade had jumped to his aid at once, but Scotland Yard was already burdened with a series of murders—and the same interjurisdictional tension that plagued their work from time to time hampered Holmes’s case. If Evelina had passed within the borders of the square mile surrounding Westminster—just a few streets away from Whitechapel—she would be in the territory of the City, and it had its own police. Depending on the detectives involved, each force could sit on its own files like broody hens.

But that was off topic. “I don’t want the Blue Boys getting a good look at you.”

“Robbing me of my hour in the footlights?”

Holmes ignored the sally. “You’re more valuable than I am.”

“Dunno about that. I just know people who make things.”

“That’s like saying the queen has a large chair. Nuance is everything.” He turned and stopped, forcing the Schoolmaster to look him in the eye. People shoved by, unimpressed by two men blocking the path. “If they tortured you, what would they learn?”

The Schoolmaster’s lips pressed together, forming a grim line.

“I thought so,” said Holmes.
Fool. He’s as bad as Watson, trying to throw himself in harm’s way for the sake of the Great Detective
.

“Doesn’t seem right, letting you go in alone. That’s not what friends do.”

Holmes couldn’t stop the wrench of irritation that made him grip his sword cane until the wood creaked. “That’s why I’m here. So someone isn’t thinking sentimentally.”

The Schoolmaster flushed. “Then if you must do this by yourself, for God’s sake be careful.”

“Always.” Holmes touched the brim of his hat. “Wait here.”

This time the Schoolmaster stayed put, drifting toward
the window of a down-at-heel bookshop. Holmes went on, much relieved. He had his niece on his conscience; that was quite enough for now.

The sign over the warehouse door read Old Blue Gas and Rail, Mr. Robert Blount, Esq., Prop. Holmes was just reaching the short walkway to the door when two of the large men with clubs converged. He nodded politely. “I am here to see Mr. Blount.”

“Not at home,” said the larger of the two. He was bald, with a soft cap on his bullet head and the loose, practical clothes of the dockworkers—except his were new and clean.

Another man was approaching, this one smaller, with a pencil shoved behind one ear. “What’s all this?”

“Sherlock Holmes to see Mr. Blount,” Holmes said with perfect politeness, handing the man his card. “I received a letter with his kind invitation to call.”

“Holmes, eh? Like in the newspapers?” The man gave a gap-toothed grin.

And if I die, those wretched scribbles are all anyone will remember of me
. “Yes, the same.”

“Right-o, I’ll see what the boss says.” And the man darted off, his quick movements reminding Holmes of a bird. He came back no more than five minutes later. “He says come right in.”

The warehouse was divided into a warren of tiny rooms and twisting corridors, a few of them painted, most just bare wood and plaster. Barrels and boxes filled some, others had mysterious shapes draped in dust covers. Holmes’s escort, whose name was Benjamin, led him through at a quick pace. When they finally ran out of corridor and the space opened up to a large room, he ushered Holmes past with a flourish.

More large guards stood just within the door. Benjamin joined them, standing against the wall and all but saluting the figure who waited within. Holmes strolled past, carelessly passing the sword cane to the nearest muscle-bound hulk before he was searched for weapons.

Holmes had never seen King Coal in person, and he found himself momentarily stunned. There was something almost
mythical about the sight, as if he were regarding the personification of Gluttony in some absurd pageant. To say the man was enormously fat fell short. He was a mountain of suet draped for modesty and enthroned in a chair. The chair itself was on wheels, powered by a steam engine because no human alive could have pushed its weight. In fact, three scruffy boys strained to merely steer it into place.

Holmes, whose relationship with food was cordial but at times optional, was fascinated and appalled. His revulsion was not due so much to the man’s bulk, but to the contrast between his excess and the ruinous poverty around him. One might have fed half the district on what this one man must consume at a meal—more, since the starving welcomed even scraps. That, if nothing else, made King Coal less a monarch than a tyrant.

The room reeked of the Blue King’s body, as if they were breathing his effluvia. Sweat trickled in a steady stream down the rolls and folds of the man’s slug-pale flesh, the heat of the chair’s engine rendering him down to oil.

It took as much will to look away as if the man were a railway accident, but Holmes did it, forcing his gaze about the room. It was all but empty, a few maps pinned to the walls, a jumble of what looked like empty crates and spare parts filling one side. The floor was a slab without mat or carpet, the walls painted but scuffed. Gaslight flickered from plain brass brackets. It might have been a factory floor just waiting for the machines and workbenches.

A score of men, women, and a few children stood in a semicircle behind the man in the wheeled chair. Some held glasses and goblets of drink, others plates of food both sweet and savory. Obviously King Coal never suffered the slightest pang of hunger or thirst. In this neighborhood, that had prestige all its own.
His warehouse and his men match these dismal streets, but this is a throne room. It doesn’t look like much, but does that matter when you have what impresses these people the most?

“Welcome, Mr. Holmes. I’ve wanted to meet you for a very long time.” The man’s voice wheezed, high and thin like a punctured bellows.

Holmes gave a nod. “Mr. Blount.”

The fat man laughed, the jiggling of all that flesh shaking burning cinders loose from the chair’s engine. They hit the concrete floor and smoked until they died. “Call me King Coal. Everyone does.”

“Very well, Your Majesty,” Holmes said with a pinch—but no more than a pinch—of irony. He wasn’t there to mete out lessons in humility but to get the man’s cooperation.

King Coal raised a pudgy hand to stroke his lip. “I wasn’t sure you would come.”

Holmes narrowed his eyes, watching every twitch in the man’s puffy face. “I assume my refusal would do little good.”

“You think me impolite.”

“I do not hold up Mr. Jones as an example of courtesy.”

“No,” wheezed the man. “I take your point.”

“How may I serve you, Your Majesty?”

“You get right to the point, Mr. Holmes.”

“There is little benefit to doing anything else.”

“Then down to business.” Another cinder fell on the floor, smoking.

Holmes tensed, but made himself hide it.
First he makes his request, then I make mine
. “Go on.”

“There’s a hue and cry over some dead whores. A madman with a knife. The women are afraid to work. Bad for business.”

“The one they’re calling the Whitechapel Murderer?”

“The same. You must solve it.”

Confusion scrambled his thoughts for a moment.
Why does a steam baron care about a handful of women? There’s a loss of profit, yes, but enough to warrant calling me?
“I am always pleased to assist the police, if they permit it.”

“They will allow it,” the Blue King snapped.

Holmes wasn’t so sure. Lestrade was already complaining about Warren, one of the officers in charge. “I will do what I can.”

“Answers. An arrest. Peace and security. That’s what I want from you, Mr. Holmes. A little fear is good to keep the streets in line, but too much makes ’em restless.”

Understanding snapped into place.
Riots. That’s his weak point. He pushed the limits silencing the match girls. The whole of Whitechapel is already on edge, and this madman might just push them over
. And once roused, the East End would be a powder keg. Despite the best efforts of his streetkeepers, there were already reformers, radicals, and anarchists thick on the ground. The Whitechapel murderer was a match hovering over all that tinder.

How very entertaining
. “In return, Your Majesty, I have a boon to ask.”

“And what would that be?” The king’s eyes shifted like suspicious raisins in a blob of undercooked dough. He waved one of the attendants closer, plucking a sugarplum from her plate and popping it into his mouth.

“I am searching for two individuals who may be in this part of London. If you know where they may be found, I ask that you tell me. If you do not, I seek your permission to carry out a search.”

“Who is it you wish to find?”

“A young woman and a man. He is a sorcerer who may have taken up residence in your midst.”

“Sorcerer?” the Blue King scoffed. “We’ve precious few of that kind around here.”

“What of Symeon Magnus?” Holmes let the name roll out crisply, watching for a reaction. No one in the room shifted. They’d learned well how to hide what they knew.

“Him?” the Blue King’s manner changed, growing curt. “You’ll not go bothering him, Mr. Holmes.”

“He’s dangerous.”

“Not to me, Mr. Holmes,” the Blue King said in a warning tone. “I suggest you leave him be.”

It was plain that King Coal had an interest in the sorcerer—enough to put him under his protection. Did he realize who—and what—he was dealing with? Magnus’s presence made matters much more difficult—including the awkward question about what to do with a man who couldn’t be killed.
And whether he still has an unhealthy interest in Evelina
. It had taken Holmes some time, but he’d put together a disturbing
picture of what had gone on last April.
I wonder if he could survive a bath of acid?

King Coal shifted impatiently. “You said there were two people you wanted to find.”

“I am also looking for a young lady.”

“Ha! We have lots of them.” Suddenly restored to good humor, the Blue King pulled over a waif of no more than thirteen, holding her hand to his lips as if she were a countess. “Any color, size, or shape you like.”

Holmes hesitated, weighing the risks of alerting the Blue King to Evelina’s existence. “There is only one in particular that interests me. Her name is Evelina Cooper. I want her back, unharmed and untouched.”