THE ART OF AERIAL OBSERVATION

Inspector Lestrade is taken aback by the sight of young Sherlock Holmes wearing a confident smile. That isn’t a good sign. The detective has been examining the area in and around the vault room and is standing outside its door, set in its unusual walls, which don’t quite reach the glass ceiling.

“Mr. Lestrade,” intones the upstart, as if he were the plainclothes policeman’s equal. The Inspector has learned to be suspicious of this lad. This is a boy who knows far too much about everything. But he decides to play along, at least until he discovers whether or not he has anything to gain.

“Master Sherlock Holmes, can I be of any service?”

“As a matter of fact you can. And I can be of greater assistance to you.”

A couple of the Bobbies snort and turn their faces away. Young Lestrade steps closer to his father, his face betraying his interest in this conversation. They form a little circle of three.

But Sherlock intends to speak up in a confident voice so that all within earshot can hear. He glances at the room behind the Lestrades, obviously the one that houses the vault. That’s curious, he thinks, the walls don’t quite reach the ceiling. For some reason that seems significant to him, but he can’t think why, so it passes through his mind and exits.

“I am in a position to make an exchange with you, sir,” declares the boy.

“Are you now?” replies Lestrade, tipping his brown billycock hat back and putting his other hand up to his bushy mustache, just in case he is inclined to laugh.

“You tell me one simple fact,” announces Sherlock, “which I am guessing you are in possession of, and I shall solve at least one of the two crimes you are investigating.”

“Two crimes? How kind of you. Didn’t know there were two. Which one?”

“The robbery. I know who did it … and I shall prove it. All you will have to do is hunt them down. I don’t expect a large reward for the information, perhaps fifty pounds?”

This time the Bobbies don’t hide their laughter.

But Lestrade would like to hear the boy’s theory. He has little intention of giving him what he wants.

“The police are not in the habit of awarding funds to citizens with theories about crimes, real or imagined. If you were indeed to have the information you assert, Scotland Yard might, at the most, find ten pounds for someone such as you.”

Sherlock doesn’t blink.

“Thirty,” he says.

“Twenty would be exorbitant.”

“Twenty it is, then.” Sherlock hides the excitement bursting inside him. Twenty pounds would both pay for his education this coming term, and keep Sigerson Bell in business for another year.

Lestrade wants to get on with this. “What ‘simple fact’ do you require first?”

“I assume that the guard who was on duty the day of the robbery is in there now?” Sherlock points at the vault room.

“He is.”

“Those who handle the Palace funds must check the vault regularly and, therefore, must know almost exactly when they were robbed.”

Lestrade clears his throat. “You keep leaping over one point, lad. Who says they were robbed?”

“Come, come now, Lestrade,” remarks Holmes airily.

His tone and attitude are almost enough to bring things to a halt. The detective feels like thrashing the boy and sending him on his way. But he knows what remarkable things Sherlock Holmes accomplished concerning the Whitechapel murder and cannot bring himself to miss seeing this little episode to its conclusion.

“Yes, they know when the money disappeared and have told us,” admits Lestrade, lowering his voice.

“And when was that, exactly?”

The distinguished policeman now has a decision to make. Should he tell this ragged half-Jew an intimate detail of police business? He is inclined not to.

“Father, I think you sh –” begins his son, sensing his reluctance.

“Silence,” says the father.

He again reflects on the Whitechapel murder, how the boy had investigated a vicious killing that didn’t have a single witness and pieced together the entire event, uncovering precise details, based on the fact that it was observed in the night by two crows. It really was remarkable. The Inspector also considers the acclaim he had gained from the boy’s heroics and how he hadn’t had to give him one scrap of credit. Could the boy be as ingenious this time? Unlikely. But what if this brilliant robbery was committed by major stars of the criminal world, and young Sherlock Holmes actually holds the key? The applause, which he could direct entirely to himself, would be deafening. Who would believe that such an invisible minor and a half-breed to boot, was responsible? Lestrade tells himself he is a good man, but one must sometimes resort to darker methods in the cause of what is right.

“Step this way,” he says quietly. He leads Sherlock to an area close to the wall, allowing only his son to follow.

“The incident occurred between one o’clock and two on the afternoon of the first day of July,” he murmurs.

A thrill goes through Sherlock. The Mercures’ show had begun at one. He can’t resist a smart response.

“That means the operation began at approximately 1:05.”

“How do you –” begins young Lestrade.

“He doesn’t!” snaps his father. “Now, what are you going to give me in exchange?” He looks around, “Tell me quietly.” He feels a bit ridiculous even asking the boy, but can’t resist.

“Bring the guard out and let me ask him a few questions. All shall be revealed.”

This is the only way Sherlock can crack the case – he has no other means to make the guard answer his questions. He needs police authority.

Lestrade regards him for a moment. He wonders what the boy is up to.

“We shall not ‘bring him out,’ as you put it…. We shall go in and see him.”

It is an irregular thing to do – bring the boy right into the vault room inside a sealed-off police investigation zone – but Lestrade cannot bring himself to have anyone else about when this boy questions the guard. Chances are he will fail and make the Inspector look foolish. But if this minor were to solve the crime out here in front of others, then that would be even worse. Everyone would know. It just wouldn’t be right. London cannot have the sense that its safety, the solution to any of it serious crimes, is in the hands and minds of children. Again, one must sometimes use questionable methods to achieve good ends.

“Come with me,” says Lestrade, nodding to both Sherlock and his son. He motions to a policeman standing at the vault room door, who opens it and lets them in.

The young guard is sitting on a thick wooden chair, the only piece of furniture in the room. A curtain is drawn in front of the wall to his left, obviously where the vault is built into it. There is a string looping across his chest and attached to a whistle, the top of which can be detected sticking up from his right breast pocket. No one would be able to enter this room without being seen and the alarm being given; the guard could not be attacked from behind; and a Bobbie is always stationed outside the door.

Sherlock looks up. The glass ceiling of the Palace is visible above this room. He notices where the tops of the walls end, a good twenty-five feet below the ceiling. For an instant he glances toward the performance area down the nave. He thought he might be able to see the summits of the Mercures’ towers, but can’t. The perches must be just below.

Lestrade makes sure the door is closed behind them before he speaks.

“This is Master Sherlock Holmes,” he says to the guard. “He has a few questions for you. Anything that is said at this time inside this room is strictly police business and cannot be revealed to anyone at any time in the future. Do you understand?”

“I do,” says the young man quietly. Sherlock observes him. A youth of about nineteen or twenty years of age, with sandy hair, the beginnings of a mustache, and bags under his eyes from recent sleeplessness – obviously upset about what has transpired. But his look isn’t one of guilt. That worries Sherlock, though he commences his interrogation anyway. His plan is to startle his interviewee and bring him quickly to heel.

“You keep the combination to this vault in your left breast pocket, do you not?” Holmes had seen the whistle in the right pocket.

The young guard is startled by this remarkable opening comment. “Did the police tell –” he begins.

Sherlock cuts him off.

“I have it on good authority that you were in conversation with disreputable individuals in this building on the very day before the robbery and that you told them where the combination is kept.”

“I –”

“Do not lie to me. Lying will put you into a deeper hole than you are in now.”

The guard hesitates.

“Yes. Yes, I told a couple of people.”

Lestrade had been leaning against the vault wall as if bored. He takes a step forward.

“Do you know that I can prove that those strangers were members of the Brixton Gang?”

The guard’s eyes bulge. Lestrade steps even closer. His son had been nearer to the action, standing close to Sherlock. His father gently brushes him aside, staring at the young guard.

“Now you must come clean,” stresses Sherlock, going for the jugular. “What happened on the day of robbery? Did you let someone in here? Otherwise, how could they enter without being seen?” He pauses dramatically. “Or, did they force their way in, assault you and get away, your shame afterwards preventing you from telling the authorities that it was your loose lips that caused this terrible theft of one hundred thousand pounds?”

Sherlock doesn’t know exactly what happened. But he is speaking aggressively, sure that this will shake the young man and cause him to reveal what he knows. And what he knows will unlock everything. The details of the daring robbery are about to be heard.

But the guard surprises him.

“No!” he asserts with confidence. “No one came in here. I will swear to it on a Bible. There was no robbery! I don’t know why money is missing from the vault. I was here the entire time. Nothing happened!”

“Are you quite finished?” asks Lestrade glaring at Holmes and stepping between the two.

“No … I –” stumbles Sherlock.

“I think you are,” shoots back the Inspector. “This young man,” he points at the guard, “has told us everything we have asked of him. And everything he has said turns out to be the gospel truth. We knew he bragged a bit too much about his job to others – he is hiding nothing from us. He comes from a respectable family with money invested in the Palace, a place from which he will one day profit. He certainly wishes it no harm. His home has been searched and so has his bank account. You are dead wrong about everything, Master Holmes. I suggest you leave and don’t come back. If I see you on these grounds, I shall have you forcibly removed … or perhaps horsewhipped!”

“There was robbery here,” sputters Sherlock. “It commenced at 1:05 on the first instant of July. It was committed by the Brixton Gang. And it is connected to the murder of Monsieur Mercure.”

“How?” demands Lestrade, holding back a smile.

“I … I don’t know that part yet.”

“I see.”

“But, if you allow me, I can make it so you can lay your hands on both the murderer and every member of the Brixton Gang.”

“The idea that this apparent robbery” spits the detective, “was committed unseen by the most notorious gang in London and that a flying trapeze accident nearly a fifth of a mile away is somehow connected is a fantasy: the fantasy of a child involved in something well beyond his powers to comprehend!”

Lestrade glowers at him.

“You are wasting my valuable time. If you do not leave this second, boy, I will lay the hands of the Force on you and have you thrown into The Boating Lake.”

Sherlock’s face is burning. He has made a terrible mistake. He has gotten ahead of himself, grown too excited, believed he had the facts when he didn’t, depended on another to reveal things about which he was not absolutely certain. There is no substitute for cold, dispassionate reasoning, and in the excitement that had followed his last interview with The Swallow, he had forgotten that.

“Twenty pounds!” mutters Lestrade, stalking away.

Sherlock’s head and leaves droops as a Bobbie escorts him down the nave, depositing him near the front entrance with explicit instructions to leave the premises, along with a promise of what will be done to him if he does not. The sun is setting, darkness is descending. The fireworks will begin soon.

The moment the policeman leaves him, the boy darts back from the entrance, disappears into the crowd, and reenters the Palace. He is not giving up. He will get the money. He must.

The Swallow and his two colleagues don’t know that Sherlock has just been thrown out by the police. They are still wary of him and what he might be able to do to them: The Swallow because of what the young detective has demonstrated he knows and the others, because they are all too aware that they may still be looked upon as suspects by the police. If they have indeed escaped the clutches of the law, they want it to be permanent. Sherlock can still make those three do his bidding. That is a card he can continue to play But what can he do with it? He may only have a few hours left: the apparatus must be taken down soon and the Mercures may be allowed to leave London in the very near future. All evidence, already gathered and yet to be found, may soon be gone.

He makes himself invisible as he moves through the crowd back to the central transept. From his spot behind a big white statue of Prince Albert near the amphitheater, he can see that the police are still hovering near the vault room.

His mind is searching desperately, going back over what he knows, examining where he made mistakes, what he has missed.

What has he observed today that he hasn’t thought through yet? Often commonplace things, little details assumed not to be important at first, are the most valuable of all. Any scientist will tell you that. Have there been any recurring facts, observations he’s made more than once?

Something occurs to him.

Several times today, he’s noticed the strange fact that the vault-room walls do not reach the ceiling; and when he was inside that room with the Lestrades, he had observed it again and looked up to see if he could spot the tops of the trapeze towers. But it seems like a frivolous detail, not related in any way to the crime … or is it?

Sigerson Bell is fond of telling him that one can trace every human thought to a clear motivation. People don’t just think things. One’s mind always has a reason for going (or even wandering) in the direction it does, even if it doesn’t seem that way on the surface. For some reason, Sherlock’s mind had twice considered those unusual walls.

“Our instincts,” the old man likes to say, “are often ahead of our brains. We know something, but don’t realize it. I try to tap into that instinct when I diagnose a disease. Sometimes, something in the back of your brain, or shall we say, your gut, tells you what the problem is.”

Why does Sherlock keep noticing the short walls of the vault room?

He slouches against the pedestal beneath the statue and sighs. As he does, he looks up at the perch from which he nearly fell in the small hours of the morning, remembering the terror of it all. For an instant, he can’t stop himself from reliving it.

He shoots out over the transept on the flying trapeze, feeling as though his life is about to end. He recalls looking down … and noticing a room with walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling.

That was the first time it had occurred to him. He concentrates on what he saw. What had it meant to him? Why, afterwards, did he keep noticing it? Suddenly … he realizes what it is.

He could almost see inside the vault room from the apex of his swing on the flying trapeze! No other vantage point in the Crystal Palace affords such a view. None! He thinks of Monsieur Mercure and how incredibly high he soared that day.

Sherlock stands up and darts through the crowd to the base of the tower. The Swallow is loitering there.

“Master ’olmes,” he says, “can we tear this down yet?”

“No,” says Sherlock excitedly, “not yet. Do you want to absolve yourself entirely of this crime?”

The expression on the other boy’s face grows serious.

“I do.”

“Then climb up that tower, get on the trapeze, and swing as high as you possibly can, as high as Mercure usually went.”

The Swallow looks at the boy as if he were a lunatic. No one is expecting a performance, and the boy is dressed in his street clothes.

“’e always went the ’ighest,” he finally says, as if delaying.

“I know. Do this for both of us, Johnny. And when you do, look toward the area where the police are gathered, toward the room they are standing in front of, where the vault is, and tell me what you see.”

The Swallow climbs the tower, ascending as quickly and silently as a mouse. He reaches the perch, grabs the swing, and sends himself flying out over the central transept.

Down below, several people notice. There are oohs and ahs and soon hundreds, then thousands, are looking up, pointing to the distant glass ceiling. The Swallow swings very high, then pumps his legs and goes higher and higher, approaching maximum speed, thrilling the crowd. They begin to applaud. Finally, he alights back on his perch, landing to a great roar.

At the bottom of the tower, The Swallow is met by Crystal Palace officials and two Bobbies, angrily asking him why he was up on the apparatus. Clever as always, he insists that it is a flying trapeze tradition to do this before the “tear-down.” While they are discussing whether or not to believe him, he slips away and finds Sherlock.

“Well?” the young detective asks, a look of anticipation on his face.

“I could see right into the room, Master ’olmes. I could see the far wall with the curtain drawn across it and I could see the guard sitting there in ’is chair, as plain as day.”

Sherlock smiles.

“It has been a pleasure to know you, Master Wilde,” he says. “You are a gentleman and a star. You may go and so may your two colleagues. Break a leg.”

The Swallow grins back. “Much obliged, sir. The pleasure ’as been mutual.”

Sherlock Holmes walks straight out into an open area where the police can see him clearly. Lestrade notices, his face turns red and he yells for a Bobbie to pursue the boy. Sherlock drifts into the crowd again, the policeman after him. Young Lestrade watches with a look of wonder and slight admiration.

The tall, thin boy steps down the big front staircase of the Palace under his own steam with that smile still on his face. The grounds glow, lit by their many gaslights, and up above, fireworks explode in loud concussions and marvelous colors in the black sky.

Only Sherlock Holmes knows what Mercure said just before he fell. And now he knows what it meant.

“… silence … me.”

Le Coq wasn’t saying that he knew that the silence of death was descending upon him. No, he was trying to tell Sherlock something! High in the air, he had just witnessed a robbery. He was the only one who could see it. The thieves had known long before they committed their crime that that would be the case. As part of an ingenious and complicated plan, Monsieur Mercure had been instantly and expertly removed.

In a horrific moment of realization, the trapeze star had been trying to tell Sherlock Holmes that these fiends had silenced him.