THE BAIT IS TAKEN
“My boy!” exclaims Sigerson Bell the instant Sherlock Holmes arrives at their door. The old man hasn’t even seen him yet; the lad isn’t through the outer room into the back of the shop where they live, eat, experiment, and tangle with each other in brutal fashion during Bell’s lessons in the arts of self-defense. “I have been awaiting your arrival for I have been considering having us embark upon an investigation of the workings of the digestive system of the mammal, by thrusting our hands up to the elbows into the —”
Then the apothecary sees his charge and stops. Sherlock appears to be upside down. That is because Bell is hanging from the ceiling again, despite the fact that it is nearing ten o’clock in the evening. It is a practice he suggests to his patients, to facilitate the flow of blood to the brain; he also believes it will help correct the extraordinary curvature of his spine, which is in the shape of a question mark. His long hair descends a couple of feet below his scalp like a little white waterfall, and he is completely naked except for a tiny, tight loincloth. But the sudden halt of his speech hasn’t been caused by the mere optical inversion of his apprentice — it is the look on the boy’s face.
He pulls his feet out from their harness and does a flip in the air, landing perfectly upright, not an inconsiderable performance for a man his age, which is somewhere between seventy and eight hundred and sixty-nine. Thankfully, he fetches a gold-colored smoking jacket and covers himself up.
“What has happened?”
It is an irritating talent: the old man’s ability to read Sherlock’s face as if it were a screaming headline in The News of the World. The boy thinks of himself as being so much more inscrutable than that. But he has learned to live with Bell’s great powers of observation and deduction, and also to keep very few secrets from him.
“It was the most extraordinary thing.” Sherlock seats himself on a stool at the laboratory table.
“I can see that. Were you not escorting Miss Doyle this evening? Is she trifling with your heart again? Sit down and I shall tender you some advice. I am a man of some experience in the mysterious ways of the fairer sex.”
“It is not that, sir. Miss Doyle was most cordial and we had a lovely evening until …”
“Until what?” Bell seizes another stool and pulls it up close to Sherlock, seating himself in a flash, his face inches from the boy’s, looking deeply into his eyes, irises snapping back and forth. His breath, fishy and full of the aroma of his favorite food — the foreign garlic onion — is enough to knock out a prizefighter. Sherlock pulls his stool back a few inches.
“Ah! The dragon man! Is it real?”
“It appeared to be.”
“I believe it! I believe there are dragons … somewhere! Mankind does not invent such stories out of thin air. If there are not dragons, there must be beasts much like them … perhaps the dinosaurs still roam on some far-off, undiscovered island!”
“It wasn’t that, sir. It was what happened afterward.”
“Afterward?”
Sherlock tells him. The old man listens, fascinated. When the boy is done, Bell rubs his chin. “Two celebrated men, a celebrated wife between them, and now … a sensational murder. A crime of passion! Irene Doyle has asked you to intervene.”
Sherlock, of course, hasn’t told him any such thing. This is irritating too … how Bell can take almost anything Holmes says and immediately deduce all sorts of other facts. Though the boy knows that he too, is often guilty of the very same maneuver, it still makes him want to scream.
“Yes, she has!”
“And shall you?”
“Uh …”
“Ah-ha! I knew it! You are back in harness!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Nonsense! Where are we to start?”
“We?”
“I mean … you.”
“The crime scene, of course.”
“But you don’t know where it is.”
“I have the means to find out.”
Though the younger Lestrade is not blessed with either Sigerson Bell’s or Sherlock Holmes’s talent for deduction and observation, he has no trouble picking out the boy far down the street in Whitehall, near Scotland Yard, early the following morning; that, despite the flow of horses and hansom cabs moving along the cobblestones, and the pedestrians strolling on the footpaths. Holmes, of course, doesn’t dare stand on the south side near the police buildings. He is at the gates of the Admiralty across the thoroughfare, doing his best to look respectable and purposeful in his secondhand suit. He has a morning paper clutched under his arm, having plucked it from a dustbin. The Hemsworth arrest is splattered across the front page, though there is little of real news in it for Sherlock, other than the curious fact that Mrs. Nottingham has not yet been located by the police. Aware of the spectacular nature of this case, Scotland Yard is being tight-lipped about everything, including the location of the crime scene.
It is a Saturday morning, but Sigerson Bell, unable to resist his young charge’s interest in the sensational Hemsworth case, in fact, anxious to hear more of it himself, has given the boy several hours off from his chores at the laboratory. Cleaning bottles and flasks and polishing the three statues of Hermes can wait until noon.
Lestrade knows there is no sense avoiding Holmes. Most days, he would be pleased to see the brilliant young half-Jew. The clues the lad has provided him over the past year or so have been most helpful not only to his career, but to his father’s opinion of him, and that is important, indeed. But the unfortunate coincidence of Holmes’s presence at The Egyptian Hall last night, in company with Miss Irene Doyle no less, has not been sitting well with young Lestrade all night. Now almost nineteen years old and a fully paid police employee, he is officially embarked on his career and lives for it. He never takes a Saturday off; and sometimes even comes to headquarters on Sundays, without saying a word to his father. Holmes, he knows, would be just as thoroughly pursuing a detective’s career of his own sort … if he weren’t younger and, most curiously, holding himself back.
The scrawny police detective in the loose, grown-up clothes always notices the lust for fighting evil in Sherlock’s eyes, and his effort to control it. That effort, as young Lestrade feared from a distance, does not appear to be present today when he sees him up close. He owes Sherlock Holmes, and that isn’t a good thing this late August morning.
“Master Holmes.”
“Master Lestrade.”
“I must apologize … I am in a most frightful hurry this forenoon.”
“Well, that is a coincidence, so am I.”
“You are?”
“I am. I must be at the scene of the Nottingham murder and back to my school at Snowfields within the hour. I am teaching summer classes.”
“I must.”
“Well, you see … there is only one problem with that.”
“I am all ears.”
“And nose, too.”
Sherlock doesn’t smile.
“Master Holmes, as I’m sure you are aware,” he glances down at the newspaper under Sherlock’s arm, “the location remains a secret … you know I can’t —”
“Nonsense.”
“I hadn’t finished.”
“No need to. You shall tell me what I need to know. You forget, I am in a position to blackmail you.”
“By telling my father that it has been you who has been supplying the clues for our cases lately?”
“Precisely.”
“I would deny it. And he would believe me.”
“I am in possession of many details of those crimes. Details only one with a —”
“All right!” snaps Lestrade.
“Where is it?”
“If you so much as move one —”
“Where is it?”
Lestrade looks back at Scotland Yard and then lowers his voice.
“The Cremorne Gardens.”
“Excuse me?”
It seems like a strange choice for a secret anything. The Cremorne is London’s loudest pleasure gardens, filled nightly with couples in pursuit of fun, gentlemen in pursuit of ladies (or so they call themselves), and ladies in pursuit of them (and their money). Balloon ascensions, high-wire walks, educated dogs and monkeys, minstrels, freak shows, fireworks, and dancing and more dancing take place within its fancy wrought-iron gates — twelve acres of undiluted amusement.
“Hemsworth has a secret studio in the Cremorne Gardens?”
“At The World’s End Hotel, below stairs. It seems he inhabits it at night.”
“Thank you.”
“Sherlock, you cannot go there. We have it sealed. Constable Spears won’t let you through.”
“When does he leave?”
Lestrade hesitates. “He ensures that the doors are locked when he goes home each night. I am sorry.”
“Never mind that. When does he leave?”
“Uh … there will be no one there after one o’clock in the morning, though an officer shall return at six. So, you can’t —”
Sherlock begins to walk away, but pauses and turns back.
“Who found the body?”
“There was no body, Master Genius. We told you that.”
“I stand corrected. Who found the Wizard’s blood, the little bits of him, and his spectacles?”
“The hotel keeper.”
“He just happened to wander downstairs that day?”
“I shan’t tell you more.”
“Lestrade, you know I shall discover this anyway. Withholding evidence will only slow things down.”
The young detective sighs. “There is a boy, a street urchin who lives in the area and sleeps in the Cremorne. He sees everything. He used to watch for Hemsworth at night, who would slink through the Gardens in a long black coat and safari hat, looking around, sneaking his way toward the hotel. It amused the boy, so he’d watch for him every time. The child has an over-active imagination. He said he knew the man was a magician or a wizard of some sort because he saw him do strange things: he’d always enter through a secret outside door at the back, which he’d open simply by speaking to it, and summon some sort of creature inside … that sort of fantastic stuff.”
“So, it was the boy. He got inside? He found the blood?”
“He noticed that Hemsworth was accompanied by another man a few nights ago, but only Hemsworth came out. Then the magician didn’t appear again for a day or two. The boy simply mentioned this to the hotel keeper. So, the keeper went downstairs. There was no answer at the inner door that led to the studio from the hotel … he went inside.”
“And the boy knows for sure that the other man never appeared again, didn’t leave through an unknown door? He positively identified this long-black-coated man as Hemsworth?”
“Holmes, what wishful fantasy are you driving at? The second man wore clothing identified as Nottingham’s. The cloaked man wore a black safari hat, known to be favored by Hemsworth. It was Hemsworth’s place. We know that. It was clear once we were inside. He took Nottingham in there and left without him, without his body, that is.”
“Did the keeper say it was Hem —”
“Don’t start making assumptions, like you are wont to do, trying to fit your theories to the crime. Criminal investigations are about facts, and facts alone. We are in possession of other evidence … which I shan’t share with you.” He pauses. “Sherlock, please, don’t go there. Leave this alone.”
Holmes departs Denmark Street about half past midnight that night, bearing one of Bell’s small blades — with a particularly sharp tip — to help pick the lock, or to protect himself, though he also has his horsewhip concealed up his sleeve. It has rained most of the day and the air is thick and humid. The yellow fog has returned. He will have a long walk tonight, but he knows the streets and how to keep clear of the criminals, the straggling drunks, and prostitutes. He moves stealthily through London, head on a swivel, first down the frightening, narrow streets near his neighborhood to a nearly-deserted Leicester Square, then along Piccadilly Street past The Egyptian Hall, spotting Buckingham Palace in the distance to his left. Then he is into upper-class Belgravia, turning off Knightsbridge Road before he reaches the unlikely area where Malefactor had his home. He checks for a pursuer more than once here and feels for his knife. Then he swings south, by leafy parks and racket courts, until he reaches King’s Road, and goes west into Chelsea. Soon he can smell the river and see the Battersea Bridge and the lights of the saw mills and chemical works on the other side of the Thames. Moments later, he approaches the Cremorne Gardens.
Its gaslights are dimmed and all is quiet, which is eerie for such a place. It is as if death has come to the Cremorne — everything has been stilled.
The Gardens is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and its main entrance is on King’s Road, a beautiful black gate with a gleaming star on top. Sherlock climbs the fence near the padlocked entrance and goes in. For a place that exists for entertainment, some of it the most crass in the empire, the Cremorne is beautiful. Elm trees hang over lush, emerald-green lawns and there are flowers everywhere. He heads into the misty jungle, under the few remaining lights, passes the big circus building, the Marionette Theatre, the American Bowling Saloon, and the central dancing platform. Then he creeps carefully through a more open area, along a tree-lined lane in the shape of a figure of eight, keeping his head down until he nears the south end of the park.
The hotel is looming there: The World’s End. It’s a fitting name. It looks spooky enough during the day, just two storeys high, but long and black, with turrets at each end, as if it were home to a colony of vampires. At night, with all its lights out, it seems even gloomier. He approaches. He hears crows cawing from its heights and rats scratching and squealing around its base.
His heart, much to his annoyance, begins to pound in his chest. At the back, the building is lined with a wall of trees. They tower over him now — weeping willows and copper beeches, looking like monsters ready to defend the hotel from a rear attack. Suddenly, a wind comes up and moans through the branches.
Sherlock sees a shape moving toward him in the darkness.