A Study in Darkness (6 page)

“My dear,” Holmes said, “would you please reassure the crowd outside that nothing is amiss?”

She suddenly became aware of the hubbub in the street. “What shall I tell them?”

“Whatever you like, but if you see a scruffy young lad
named Wiggins, would you ask him to call for, um, for our mutual friend?”

Evelina stared for a moment, but knew better than to ask for details. Gingerly, she picked her way across the blasted room. Shards of glass framed the view of the brown brick building across Baker Street, with its neat white sashes and bay windows. Mrs. Hudson’s lace curtains lay in shreds.

Carefully, she put her head out the hole in the shattered pane. There was a crowd gathered below, their upturned faces all wearing identical looks of bald curiosity. Someone in the street shouted a halloo, and Evelina waved. “Nothing to worry about. Just an accident with the kettle. No need to concern yourself.”

A boy of about twelve, wearing ill-fitting clothes and ragged shoes, slouched against the lamppost. “That musta been some cuppa!”

“Yes, it was a very large kettle,” Evelina replied. “Are you Wiggins?”

“Indeed I am, miss.”

Evelina cast a glance over her shoulder, but her uncle hadn’t moved. She knew he employed street urchins from time to time as a kind of messenger service that not even the steam barons could infiltrate. Wiggins had to be one of them. She turned back to the boy. “Mr. Holmes wishes to speak to your mutual friend.”

“Right you are.” The boy did an about-face and bolted down the street at a dead sprint. Apparently that mutual friend was well known.

She pulled her head back inside, her curiosity getting the better of her. “Who is your friend?”

“Someone equipped to take this charming specimen into custody,” her uncle said flatly.

The man swore.

Holmes gave him a freezing look. “Silence. There is a young lady present.”

The man shifted, his face sullen.

“Mrs. Hudson already went for the constables,” Evelina said.

“Won’t find any,” their prisoner put in. Perhaps he had
friends who were keeping the local plods occupied. Evelina hoped it wasn’t anything worse than that.

Holmes looked unimpressed. “Even so, we dare not waste time.” Impatiently, he waved her over and handed her the gun again. “Keep him still.”

With that Holmes crossed to his collection of chemical supplies and surveyed the racks of bottles intently, clasping his hands behind his back as if to deliver a lecture on the laws of aether. He stood for so long that Evelina grew bored and longed to let her gaze roam around the room rather than keeping her attention on the man on the floor. She’d caught glimpses of the soot-stained walls, the paintings hanging crooked. The explosion appeared to have emanated from a spot near the window.

“What blew up?” she asked.

“A brown paper package.” Holmes finally selected an amber glass bottle from the chemical supplies and then began rummaging in his desk. “It was badly placed and badly made, if the intent was to obliterate my rooms and everyone in them. Although this looks like a great deal of damage, an efficient bomb would have reduced 221B Baker Street to a smudge.” Eventually he took out a leather case and opened it, revealing a hypodermic needle. He took it out and began filling it from the vial of liquid.

Evelina’s stomach squirmed at the sight of the long, sharp instrument. “I hope that’s a sedative.”

Holmes gave a flicker of a smile, but otherwise ignored the question as he squirted a few drops out the needle. “This individual—Elias Jones by name, and his pocketbook concurs with that identification—entered the premises on the pretense of hiring my services. He brought with him a package wrapped in butcher’s paper and string, and proceeded to spin a tale about a mysterious Dresden figurine I would find inside the box, and how it held the clue to the grisly murder of an elderly aunt and her fourteen cats, and how he had been cheated of his inheritance.”

“Fourteen cats?” Evelina echoed in surprise.

“It was not clear whether they were among the victims.”

Her throat tightened as he turned, hypodermic in hand.
She tried to keep her voice light. “Perhaps the felines conspired to steal the old lady’s fortune?”

He gave her a dry look. “My would-be client’s laundry needed attention, and the box had a distinct chemical odor inconsistent with fine china. It was evident to me that he was attempting some sort of ruse. Accordingly, I refused his case and told him why. Then he became obstreperous and began demanding information. I summarily threw him out the door for his trouble, before he even had a chance to resist.”

“Or draw his gun,” Evelina observed, feeling more than a little queasy about what might have happened.

“Quite.” Holmes looked uncomfortable. “I apologize for tossing an armed man so close to where you were walking. That was unforgivably careless of me.”

“I’m sure you were quite occupied at the time.”

“I was annoyed,” Holmes replied. “Mr. Jones seems to be under the misapprehension that I know about Mycroft’s work simply because I am his brother. He could not be more wrong.”

“And the part about the rebels?”

“There is no telling why he assumes we are connected to the dissidents.”

That made Evelina’s breath catch.
Not exactly a denial, Uncle. What are you up to?
The rebellion against the Steam Council was growing, and had been more and more in the papers over the summer. Anyone identified as a rebel automatically faced the gallows.

“What about it, Mr. Jones?” Holmes asked in a terrifying voice, holding the needle just where the man could see it. “Did your masters give you the order to insinuate yourself into my confidence in the guise of a client, and then search my quarters for evidence of treachery?”

Evelina swallowed hard. Uncle Mycroft worked for the government, but the Steam Council had so many politicians in their power, it was hard to know where the elected officials ended and the steam barons began. Loyalties were nothing if not complicated.

It was far easier for her to concentrate on more immediate
problems. “If Mr. Jones knew his cover story was blown, why run back inside?”

“Indeed, why?” Holmes asked, leaning yet closer.

Jones grunted, flinching away from the needle.

The detective gave a thin smile. “Very well, keep your confessions for now and allow me to speculate. I spoiled your plan when I saw through your nonsense and tossed you to the street. There was no means of gaining information from the curb, so you had to get back inside if you wanted to earn your pay. At that point, direct questioning at gunpoint had to do. Not very subtle, but what does one expect from someone who is little more than hired muscle?”

“I still don’t understand the bomb,” said Evelina. “Why blow up the very person or place that can provide information?”

Holmes waited, giving Jones a chance to answer for himself, but the man remained mute, holding his hand to his bloody nose.

“That is rather less clear to me,” the detective mused. “He was carrying a small amount of a strong sedative, which suggests that he might have attempted to drug me. That would allow him to search my rooms at leisure, find a list of rebel names or whatever else he dreamed would be among my possessions, leave, and set off the incendiary device. Effective, since it delivers a supposed blow to the rebels and covers his deception in the same stroke.”

“But what if you had asked to see the figurine in the box?”

“The box might have been constructed to accommodate both a bomb and a prop for his masquerade.”

Jones made a noise that might have been agreement, but Evelina couldn’t tell. “Perhaps, though why risk setting a timer when there was no way to tell when his search would be over? It would have made more sense to set it once his search was done.”

She knew her uncle well enough to see under his insouciant mask. He didn’t know the answer to that question any more than she did.

“Accident?” Holmes mused. “Stupidity? You overreached yourself when you went up against me, Jones.”

Jones squeezed his eyes shut.

Perhaps he bit off more than he could swallow, but even fools kill people
. Evelina’s skin pebbled with horror at what might have happened, and she looked down, thinking how easy it would be to pull the trigger on Jones right then and there.

And then, with a look of vague distaste, Holmes pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tossed it to Jones to stanch the blood dribbling from his nose. As the man grabbed it from the air, Evelina noticed the smudges on his cuffs and understood the laundry comment her uncle had made earlier. “Gunpowder.”

“Precisely. Careless inattention to detail.”

Jones visibly cringed as he pressed the handkerchief to his face, but then he caught sight of Holmes advancing with the needle, obviously meaning to use it now. He made a low noise and tried to squirm backward. “Please, guv’nor, don’t kill me.”

Holmes was impassive. “You should have considered the consequences before you walked through my door with violence in mind.”

Evelina’s shoulders were in knots, the gun shaking in her hands. Elias Jones had tried to kill her uncle and had nearly blown her up in the bargain, but her insides still turned to ice. “Uncle?”

Wordlessly, Holmes caught Jones’s arm and began unbuttoning the filthy cuff and pushing up his sleeve. The man struggled furiously, making a choking sound of disgust and fear as Holmes jabbed the needle into his arm. Her uncle’s jaw twitched as he depressed the plunger, and Jones quieted at once, his eyes rolling back in their sockets. His silence disturbed Evelina almost more than his fear.

“Did you, uh …” she whispered, letting the gun droop.

“No.” Holmes narrowed his eyes. “Although that might be his preference by the end.”

Her mouth went dry.
What the devil is going on?

There was a scamper of young feet on the stairs, followed by a heavier tread. A moment later, Wiggins burst into the room, followed by a man. He was about thirty, tall and lean,
with curling, sandy hair and small wire-rimmed glasses tinted a pale green. As he surveyed the room, he wore the look of someone who was perpetually amused and slightly dangerous.

“Allow me to introduce the Schoolmaster,” Holmes said cordially, stepping away from Jones’s still form as if drugging a man senseless was an everyday event.

The Schoolmaster?
Evelina had never met a man with a code name before, but in her uncle’s line of work she supposed such things occurred—and she would fall on her own parasol before letting on she was anything but
au courant
in the detecting game.

Holmes gave a brisk nod to the boy and tossed him a shilling. “Well done, Wiggins.” The lad caught it and was out the door again in a flash.

Then Holmes turned to the Schoolmaster. “Look what my niece has caught for you.”

“Indeed.” The Schoolmaster grinned appreciatively at Evelina.

His easy smile brought heat to her cheeks and irritated her all at once. She wasn’t in the mood for flirtation. “May I put this gun down now?”

Her uncle laughed. “And deprive my friend here of the spectacle of my lovely niece holding one of the prime villains of London at bay?”

“I will point out that I subdued him with a broom,” Evelina replied coolly. “If he is a prime villain, then crime in London is in decline.”

The Schoolmaster took the opportunity to flip Jones over and pin his hands. Evelina stepped aside to give him room.

“Well, perhaps he is a step or two down from prime,” Holmes replied, turning to the Schoolmaster. “You’ll be interested in this one. I had to confirm the identification, for I have not seen the man in the flesh for over a decade. Elias Jones is an old hand at the nastiest sorts of thuggery and is currently in the employ of the Blue King. Now there is a match of master and man to make the blood run cold.”

Evelina recoiled from the man. The Blue King—better known as King Coal—was the eccentric steam baron who
ran the worst parts of East London, squeezing whatever he could from the impoverished residents. Anyone who worked for him had to be either pitied or reviled. Looking at Elias Jones, lying bloody and unconscious on the floor, she decided it was probably both.

The Schoolmaster withdrew a set of handcuffs the like of which she’d never seen before. He snapped a heavy cuff on Jones’s right wrist, and then a tendril of steel automatically snaked out to catch the left. The steel was so many-jointed that it was almost ropelike, but it snapped shut with a sharp click. No sooner had the sound faded than another rope sprang out to catch the man’s waist, then more slithered down his legs to hobble his ankles. Evelina was transfixed.

“How do those work?” she asked. The need to know was almost a hunger. She loved all things mechanical, and the design of the manacles was elegant, even fascinating, for all that they made her shiver.

The man gave her a teasing look, clearly planning to make her work for the information, and then turned back to Holmes. “Jones? I know this one’s reputation—a sly rat, if there ever was one. How long will he be unconscious?”

Holmes gave a slight shrug. “At least an hour.”

“Good.”

“He is really that fearsome then?” Evelina asked, still eyeing the manacles.

The Schoolmaster frowned, which she took as a worrying affirmative. “Why did the Blue King send him here?”

Holmes answered. “No doubt he wants what all men want from me—answers or silence.”

No
, thought Evelina,
it’s not that simple. They think you know something you shouldn’t
. Now that the crisis was past, her mind was churning out questions. She knew that her Uncle Mycroft had his carefully manicured fingers in a great many pies, both literal and figurative—and apparently at least one pie was volatile enough to interest a steam baron and to make Holmes hide that fact from Evelina.
A shadow government? Baskerville?

The Schoolmaster glanced down at his prisoner. “Shall we take him in, then?”

She wondered where “in” was since she very much doubted that they were referring to the police. If her uncle had wanted Scotland Yard, he would have sent Wiggins for Inspector Lestrade. And who was this Schoolmaster? The steam barons would want to ask him a great many questions about those restraints. Makers weren’t allowed to ply their trade without the Steam Council’s approval.