Eye of the Crow (13 page)

“Come, Master Holmes. We are ready for your disguise. You may keep your trousers. The Peelers only look from the waist up and mostly at the face.”

Sherlock is placed in the chair. Crew, dressed in his oversized, once-scarlet military tunic, opens the suitcase and picks out a dark shirt, a bulky black coat, and a blue kerchief. He searches around again and produces a navy blue cap like a sailor might wear. Malefactor nods again and Crew pulls off Sherlock’s coat, undoes his cloth necktie, and motions for him to remove his linen shirt. Irene turns away. The old clothes are tossed on the cart and the new ones thrown onto his lap. Sherlock puts them on, then ties the kerchief around his neck. He can barely stand it. The clothes are filthy.

“Sit down,” says the leader with a smile, enjoying the boy’s discomfort. He pushes Holmes onto the chair again. “You need some grooming.”

Grimsby steps forward, producing a pair of rusty scissors out of a deep pocket in his overcoat. With a grin, he takes his customer roughly by the head and begins to snip violently. Great hanks of black hair drop to the ground and in minutes there is a transformation. Sherlock’s usually perfect hair is now only a few inches long in most places and less than an inch in others – uneven, as though someone has cut it by tearing it. But the disguising effect is magnificent. Sherlock can sense it. He knows he must be whomever and whatever he needs to be.

“And last but not least,” says Malefactor.

Another gang member has a sack in his hand. This rake-thin little lad with ears like the handles on a teacup, a streaked face and bare feet, is the dirtiest of the Irregulars. He reaches into the sack, pulls out a piece of coal, throws the rest on Sherlock’s lap and then tips the boy’s head up. The urchin proceeds to draw deep, black lines around Sherlock’s eyes.

When the sooty Irregular steps back, Irene draws in her breath. A street waif sits in front of her.

Malefactor is pleased with his dusty creation. “Disguise is an invaluable tool in the game of crime. It shall stand you in good stead. My information is that your mother is a singing instructor. You must have some acting in your blood. Use it. Fit your movements, your whole person, to your costume.”

He turns and gazes at Irene as if he hopes she is impressed, then reluctantly steps back. The Irregulars begin fading into the night. The meeting has come to an end. The
boss vanishes too, though his disembodied voice registers in the night.

“You are looking for an unexpected villain.”

Sherlock doesn’t say much as he walks back to Montague Street with Irene and barely remembers to look out for anyone pursuing. Her fear is outweighed by her astonishment at what she has seen. It is as if she entered another world with Sherlock Holmes and is returning with someone else. She wants to talk about his disguise and Malefactor and his advice, about all of it. But the boy’s mind is far away.

An unexpected villain?

That could be anyone: a man, woman, or child – even Adalji. But the gang leader is absolutely right about the eyeball. Sherlock must get it back.

There is only one way to do it. The police are looking for him; they know all about his parents and where they live. If they catch him, they may hang him. But somehow … he has to go home. He can’t speak with his mother and father. He must get in and out like a thief.

HOME ROBBERY

W
hen he rises the next night he is ready to rob his own home. Irene has kept him fed all day, and steered the maid and the governess away from the back windows. In a few minutes, he expects to see her again. But when he comes out to the street, she is nowhere to be seen. She knows he has to do this alone.

He pulls his cap down over his forehead and heads south. His charcoaled eyes look out from under the brim. On the way, he practices walking differently. He is a street person now. Malefactor was right about his mother. Fascinated by the operatic stage, she loves to talk about the art of playing roles.

“You have to become a character when you are presenting a part. The audience has to believe that you are someone else.”

The police have to believe he is from the streets. He walks slower, with a shorter step, imagining someone who has nowhere to go.

It has been more than a week since he’s been to Trafalgar. He desperately wants to see it again: a leisurely
stroll along Oxford Street and down to the Square. But those days are over. If the Bobbies know anything about his habits, they’ll know the places he frequents. The Force often uses detectives disguised in everyday clothes. He makes for the river in a direct line and crosses at Waterloo instead of Blackfriars. Before long he is over the bridge and back in Southwark.

He sticks to the smaller streets, alert in the rookeries, ready to fight for his life in the dark Mint neighborhood. But it is an unusually cold, late spring night, the misty rain is uncomfortable in the fog, and fewer denizens are about. By the time he reaches the street next to his, his heart is pounding. He stays in the shadows, up against the buildings, in doorways. No one seems to be following.

But now, two people are coming toward him in the distance. Indistinguishable at first in the drizzle, he soon sees that they are boys, wearing just shirts and trousers, their dirty caps soaked right through. He spies them before they spot him and drops behind a broken-down wooden barrow that’s been left to rot to the side of the footpath. He wonders why these two are out of doors at this hour; they are looking around as if searching for something, peering into alleys.

“I’m tellin’ you, the Peelers is offerin’ a fiver for him,” says one, a lad named Crippen whom Sherlock despises. Crippen is a dustman’s son who likes to tease Holmes about his breed. The other is a doughy waterman’s boy, a follower. “Lor’, a fiver!” he cries, “I’d turn over me mam and bulldog for that, let alone Sherlock Holmes.”

They near. Sherlock feels a piece of cobblestone by his foot. He picks it up and heaves it to the other side of the road. They cross to investigate. He rises and slips around the corner, onto his street and out of their sight.

The dilapidated old hatter’s shop comes into view. He looks up and sees the floor above it – his parents’ little bedroom is there at the front.
His mother … his father.
A tear falls to his cheek. He wipes it in disgust and darts across to the alley at the back of the buildings. As far as he can tell, there’s no sign of anyone watching, police or civilians. Perhaps the Force doesn’t expect him to be this reckless.

He goes over the crumbling wall like a snake. The first foot he places on the rickety stairs is set down gently. He places another and starts to climb, at a measured but steady pace. He stays as low as he can. Will his parents’ door be locked? Has his arrest put so much anxiety into their lives that they now fear the outside world much more than before? He reaches for the latch. It opens.

Perhaps he can take a chance: wake them and talk with them, assure them that he’s well. They will know he’s escaped. The police will have been here and …

A thought rushes into his mind. What if a detective is
inside
waiting for him? What if they’ve stationed a Bobbie there? Once he’d made the landing, he’d considered himself home free.

He opens the door carefully and lowers himself to the floor.

All is silent.

He can smell the cold fire, his mother’s cooking, their clothing, and Wilber’s pipe.

If there is a Peeler in the flat, maybe Sherlock can smell him too. He sniffs like a bloodhound. He listens. He can hear people sleeping. It sounds like two, just two – Wilber’s snore in the bedroom and Rose’s gentle breathing – but he can’t be sure. In the dark flat he might as well be blind.

Sherlock wants to go to the little bedroom first, find his parents, likely sleeping in their clothes on this cold night, snuggle in between them on their little bed, forget all the evil in the world, speak with them in whispers, show them that …

“You need that eyeball
.” Malefactor had said.
“You must go and get it whatever the danger.”
The gang leader is right. This trip is about getting in and out of the house as quickly as possible, unseen by the police and even his parents. The less his mother and father know, the less danger for everyone.

He crawls across the floor on his belly, stopping every few yards. His bed is at the far side of this main room that functions as their kitchen, parlor, dining room … and his bedroom. It won’t take long. He prays that his mother hasn’t found the eye. Maybe she’s thrown it out with the slop pot. Or even worse, maybe the police have discovered it.

He feels a leg: the front leg of his bed near the wall. He is at the right end. The eyeball was left near where his head usually lies, which should be immediately above him. His fingers walk up the leg and feel for the worn pillow. They walk under the flat straw mattress.

There it is!

The eye is in his hand. He jerks it out quickly.

But someone stirs.

On his pillow.

He freezes and instantly knows who it is. He doesn’t need a bloodhound’s nose … it is her perfume … the faint scent of beer. Rose Holmes is lying in his bed.

He holds the eyeball close and slides under the frame. He hears her rise. Her bare feet come down in front of his face.

“Sherlock?” she asks. She sits for a long time listening to the stillness. Then she sighs.

“Stupid cow.”

This time he can’t stop the tear. It rolls out an eye, along his upper cheekbone and splashes to the floor.

“Stupid cow … he’s gone.”

She falls back into bed.

He lies there for what seems like an hour, hearing her sobbing, and then tossing and turning. Finally, she seems to settle and drift off. He counts to five hundred before sliding out. It is time to make for the door. But he can’t resist. He gets to his knees and looks at his mother. She is indeed asleep, thank God. Her eyes aren’t moving under her lids.

She has no dreams anymore.

He kneels in front of her for a long time, just looking at her. She is
so
near him. He could just reach out and kiss her on the cheek.

No. He can’t.

He swivels and moves across the floor on all fours like a rat. Then he notices something. In the darkness, he can just make out his father’s record book on their little table. Wilber uses it to keep track of his legions of Crystal Palace birds. His square pencil is lying beside it.

Sherlock takes the pencil in his hand … and carefully draws a crow on the table.

Seconds later he is out the door and down the steps. It takes no time at all to leave his neighborhood, rush through the winding streets, run over Waterloo Bridge, and move up through the city to Montague Street, back to his dog kennel.

The only thing that makes him pause on the way is a copy of the
Daily News,
which he retrieves from a dustbin. But the crime appears to have left the London papers. They have their victim, their murderer, and prosecution is certain. They are saving their ink for the hanging. And it will come soon.

There’s an unwelcome greeting at Montague Street, in the form of John Stuart Mill. He’s lying on his back in his little house with his legs in the air, snoring, smelling worse than the Thames. The Corgi has decided to sleep out tonight and Irene obviously hasn’t been able to convince him to do otherwise. Sherlock sighs and then snuggles in beside the fat little beast, finding that the only way to sleep is to take this foul canine into his arms. They barely fit inside their
cramped quarters and Sherlock’s long legs are twisted like the seaweed he’s seen wrapped around Ratfinch’s eels. One of his legs actually sticks out the door. J.S. Mill isn’t a polite bedfellow either. Rude noises come from him in the night. Sherlock is appalled. Isn’t it enough that he has to wear such filthy, inelegant garments? Now he has to sleep with this gas bag.

When Irene wakes him in the morning, he is still snuggling the dog, the eyeball in one pocket, his hand clamped firmly over it from the outside. J.S. Mill is fast asleep.

She takes Sherlock indoors. He desperately wants to wash, but knows he shouldn’t. He has to stay in disguise.