Goodman was in the breakfast room when I appeared early Saturday morning. I was dressed in clothing the housekeeper had chosen (and hastily altered during the night) from a wardrobe of items left behind by guests. None of them fit me well; none of them, I dared say, had been abandoned by accident.
My stand-in host was freshly shaved and wearing a suit of light grey wool with a public-school tie. His upper lip bore a pencil-trace of moustache; his nails were clean and clipped. The only vestiges of the woodsman were the emerald eyes and the unruly hair which, despite an application of oil, had a barely suppressed energy, as if any moment it would spring wildly upright.
“That’s a handsome suit,” I said.
“My cousin’s sister’s husband’s,” he replied, proudly looking down at the costume. He straightened the handkerchief in his breast pocket, brushed away an invisible crumb, and dropped his table napkin beside his plate. When he rose, it became clear that the gentleman in question was an inch taller in the leg and an inch narrower in the shoulder.
Clothes, however, make the man. Certainly, Goodman moved differently in this garb, his spine straighter, the boundaries of his body tighter, as if braced against the press of crowds and the pounding of pavements. The butler motored us to the train station, and when I stepped away from the ticket window and looked around for my companion, I nearly looked past him. On a weekday he would be almost invisible in a crowd of young businessmen, until one noticed the eyes beneath the light summer hat, and the faint idiosyncrasy of an owl feather in its ribbon. The Green Man had become the Grey Man, the colour of the city around him.
The newsagent was laying out the morning papers, and I paid for a copy of The Times. We took our seats and when I spread the fold open, Holmes’ message reached out like a touch of the hand. I wondered how far from me he was now. If he might be stretched out with his feet to the fire of one or another of his bolt-holes, waiting for me to find him.
“Do you have a plan?” my companion asked.
“Yes. There’s a message here for me, telling me to meet him at the funeral. However, there are one or two places to go first.”
I was feeling rather like Holmes who, when frustrated by lack of progress in a case, was apt to shout, “Data! I require data!” Before I could go much further, I needed information and I needed assistance: For both, I knew where to go.
At Waterloo, Goodman and I disembarked and made our way out of the steamy cacophony towards the exit. Long ago, in his days as an active consulting detective on Baker Street, Holmes had employed an ever-changing tribe of urchins he called his Irregulars. The core member of these troops was a quick, clever, nimble-fingered, unhandsome child with a gin-soaked mother and too many fathers, whose work for Holmes re-shaped his life away from outright crime towards an eventual adult profession of enquiry agent.
Billy had proved quite successful in his work. He would have been even more so—financially speaking—had he not chosen to remain in the district where he had grown up. He now kept an office in a part of the South Bank that did not actually frighten away monied clients, but he still lived two streets from the house where he had been born, and had built his own army of operatives out of cousins, neighbours, and childhood friends, a good number of whom had felony records.
If anyone, Billy could provide both manpower and information.
South of the Thames, the business of empire is less politics and finances than goods and services; consequently, the London sprawl that lies below the busy riverfront is less comprehensively served by modern transport. Half a mile to the north, we might have transferred to the Underground; here, we set off into the familiar by-ways.
Except they felt not entirely familiar. Surely I had not been away for that long? Each step I took, the sensation of wrongness grew, until in the end I murmured to Goodman, “Come,” and stepped into a rather rundown café. He followed me to a table that was sticky with spilt breakfasts, and I ordered coffee from the harried waitress.
The coffee that arrived thirty seconds later had already been doused with cream and sugar. Goodman raised an eyebrow at his cup, but I just leant forward, trying to avoid a puddle of egg yolk, and told him, “There’s something wrong here.”
“Indeed,” he agreed. Then he raised his eyes from the liquid, which was developing an interesting scum of coffee dust and flecks of half-spoilt milk solids, and saw that I was not referring to the drink. He changed his agreement to a query: “Indeed? What?”
Good question. I did not know London as thoroughly as Holmes did, but I had spent many days in the city, and had been in this area any number of times, including eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. “I don’t know what it is, precisely. But the district feels wrong.”
Another man might have looked askance, but this was a man who knew his forest so intimately, he could run among its trees in the dark. “Something you’ve seen? Smelt?”
“Sounds,” I replied slowly. “And things not seen. Two streets back, generally on a Saturday one hears the racket of a piano teacher at one end of the houses and a young man drowning her out with a gramophone at the other; both of them were silent. And not only is the district generally quiet, but people are missing.” I craned to look out of the steamy window, and then indicated the corner opposite. “Every time I’ve been on this street I’ve seen an elderly Italian man perched on a high stool. He’s the lookout for an all-hours gambling racket upstairs.”
“Constabulary tidying?” he suggested.
I pursed my lips. “A police operation would not affect children. Where are they? It’s a Saturday morning, they should be all over.”
I paid for the untouched coffee and we went back out onto the street. As we walked, my senses were heightened: a shop door closed here that I had never before seen shut; the gang of adolescent toughs that normally inhabited an alleyway there, missing; a shopkeeper who hired his upstairs rooms to a couple of the local ladies, watching through his window with a wary expression; the street itself, normally boisterous and carrying an edge of threat, gone still and indoors.
I liked this less and less, until I decided that to go farther into Southwark risked walking into a trap.
Three streets from Billy’s home was a greengrocer’s with a public call-box. I stepped into it, fed in my coin, and listened to the buzz of the ring.
A voice answered, a male on the uncomfortable brink of manhood, whose control slid an octave in the first two syllables of his reply.
“Is that young Randall?” I asked. “This is Mary Russell. Is your father—”
The voice cut in, so tense it warbled. “Pop said to tell you: Run.”
“But I need to see him,” I protested.
“He’s where you first met. Now, run!”
I dropped the telephone, grabbed Goodman’s hand, and ran.