Death in the Air

St. Giles and The Seven Dials meet Charing Cross Road and lead to seedy Soho. This little cobblestone artery is so narrow that its old, three-storey buildings block out the sun at street level, making it dark and frightening. There are gangs in the neighborhood and the old man must look out for himself.

He is remarkable to behold. Stooped, his body is arched like the top of a question mark; his white hair and goatee long and stringy, his violet eyes active, glasses on the tip of his always-perspiring nose, and a square red fez on his big head. His high-pitched voice is often hoarse from talking, usually to himself. “What is wrong with enjoying a chat with an intelligent person?” he likes to ask with a twinkle.

But his smelly shop, his livelihood, is in greater disarray than it appears. His advertisement still hasn’t drawn the partner he desperately requires. He knew his chances were slim when he first posted it. There’d be criminals looking to get inside his place or sons of working-class men with rough educations and dreams of medical careers, who would sneak with trepidation into his neck of London, take one glance at him and his laboratory, the human skeletons hanging about, the fresh organs in jars he’d purchased from unregulated gravediggers … and run.

The boy’s presence is some consolation. Almost the minute he came dripping into the shop, he began to fascinate the old man: skeletal, from the streets, but possessing a brain that sparkles and a reluctant tongue that, once employed, can say marvelous things. He is a boy full of mystery, with a great sadness in his soul, but resolution in his voice, who can stay right with the apothecary, no matter the weight of the subjects he broaches. Every time Bell speaks of his scientific discoveries, Sherlock Holmes listens as if he were a tracking hound.

“Eureka!” the alchemist had screamed at the top of his lungs a few weeks ago, dropping a test tube deep into the mess of a cadaver’s guts. “I have isolated a characteristic in the blood of this corpse! Do you know what this means?”

It had been a rhetorical question – Bell had forgotten that he was no longer alone in the shop.

“Yes, I do,” said a fascinated voice right behind him.

Bell had started so badly that he knocked the body off the table, depositing it and various organs on the floor: the pancreas went splat near his boot, the gall bladder wobbled away. The boy was not only in the room, but peering over the scientist’s shoulder.

“Some day we will be able to identify individuals by blood types,” said Sherlock.

Bell smiles again. He recalls how just a few days after that, he had held forth on his belief that he could diagnose diseases just by looking at patients, that he could tell almost anything about others by simply observing them. The lad had sat up like a Jack Russell terrier and taken a deep interest, almost as if he were being told something that he too deeply believed.

If the boy, thinks the apothecary, will continue to work for just room and board, and remains willing to be about the shop when I am out, and brave enough to keep the street Arabs from breaking in and stealing my chemicals, I shall keep him … for now.

It is nice to have someone to make his tea, fix his dinner, and talk. He has few friends. When he was younger that hadn’t mattered much.

That sad thought turns his mind toward his teetering financial situation, but he sends it flying with a wave of his hands. “Out with you!” he cries. Sigerson Bell never speaks of such evils, even to himself. He seems, to everyone, including Sherlock Holmes, a jovial man. If truth be told, good humor comes naturally to him. One might say that optimism, hand in hand with alchemy, is almost his religion.

The night Sherlock arrived, Bell removed some dusty clothes from a big wardrobe in his laboratory and fixed a cot for the lad in there. He even paid him once – two dirty shillings from the shop’s near-empty iron strongbox – and became, in the face of his rapidly oncoming demise, truly happier than he had been in months.

The boy who has brightened his life isn’t anywhere near the dwelling in Denmark Street yet. He has other things on his mind. Sherlock is walking five miles back into central London from the Crystal Palace and taking his time, thinking about what he has just observed there, amidst the screams and chaos. It seems incredible.

Monsieur Mercure will surely die. And the boy knows something that no one else knows. It was murder.

The smells of sweltering south London, industrial smoke and chemicals and wastes mixing with the refuse of the city’s thousands of horses and its coal and gas, begin to fill his nostrils. The numbers of people have increased as he’s made his way out of the country into the suburbs and now onto the busy foot pavements at the round “circus” roadway of Elephant and Castle. Red omnibuses appear on the circle, plastered with advertisements, brimming with Londoners. The streets are brown, the gentlemen’s clothing black, the thick air yellow, and everything is punctuated with the color of blood: red bricks, ladies’ bonnets, pillar boxes, and shop canopies. Soon the street vendors will be everywhere, their inventive cries cutting through the rumble of iron-wheeled carriages. The poor will grow in numbers too, the beggars will even beg from him. The injustices of London are about to surround him again.

“Icebox ice! At the right price!” shouts an anxious iceman, his thick cart dripping, the back of his thin, soiled coat soaked through with sweat. The city is as hot as Hades today, and growing hotter. Even the rats are keeping to the shade.

But Sherlock isn’t thinking about the heat.

As he stops at a rusty public pump and waits his turn to dip his necktie in the lukewarm river water, he is seeing the evidence again, just as surely as if he were back at the Palace: a trapeze bar broken at both ends, weakened by two evident cuts in the wood. They were expertly done, calculated to cause the bar to snap when the full weight of the star was applied to it in mid-air. But the police, he is wagering, will deem this an accident. The huge crowd that gathered, bloodthirsty as always at such dangerous performances, will have stepped all over the clue, marked it, splintered it more, destroying the telltale signs … signs that the police were not likely looking for to begin with. Why would anyone assume that a fall from a “flying” trapeze, as this new performing art is called, was murder?

That is what makes this case so tempting. No one else knows.

He has little interest in telling the police. If he takes this on, he will try to solve it himself, and then hand the Force his proof. This time, Inspector Lestrade and Scotland Yard wouldn’t be able to deny him his genius. The senior detective would have to admit that the boy had solved a dramatic crime, and know in his heart that the boy had unraveled two cases in just his thirteenth year. His usefulness would be obvious, and his career hopes, his impossible dream, enhanced.

But what does he really have to go on? Nothing. There isn’t anything to which he can apply his scientific method. He has a victim who, if he isn’t already dead, soon will be – unable to say another word about what happened in that terrifying moment high in the air. His most significant clue, the trapeze bar, will by now have been rendered useless, and his other – the man’s dying gasp – isn’t remotely helpful. Silence … me. It sounds like the statement of a shocked human being realizing that his life has come to a sudden halt: Silence! In a harrowing split second, Mercure was simply aware that he was entering the darkness that comes when you die.

Sherlock won’t tell Sigerson Bell anything, either. He won’t tell anyone … except maybe Malefactor. The boy crime lord and his little mob, with their extraordinary knowledge of the London underworld, may be useful.

But if Sherlock throws himself into this, takes this tantalizing chance and pursues another dangerous case with another violent perpetrator behind it, he will have to use every scrap of evidence and every bit of genius available to him. And the apothecary, with his marvelous, eccentric brain, is very much a genius. There are questions the boy can pose to the old man without betraying his object.

He likes living with the crazy apothecary. In fact, he considers it a stroke of good fortune that he found him. When he first saw the notice on Bell’s door, he had been looking for a place to live in central London because he couldn’t go home anymore. He had been to see his traumatized father after his mother’s death and their conversation hadn’t gone well. Wilber could barely speak. He was dragging himself to work at the Palace and, though he wouldn’t say as much, he seemed to find it difficult to forgive Sherlock for drawing his mother into a situation that had cost her life. It seemed like Wilber wanted to be left alone. And so did Sherlock. The boy was trying to remove emotions, affection, and tenderness from his personality. He had “much to do.” He hoped to build a Frankenstein … himself.

Sigerson Bell was perfect: he didn’t ask the lad questions about his past, had an inventive, encyclopedic