Vanishing Girl

“You are just a boy. How … how do you know all this?” asks Victoria. There is both suspicion and admiration in her voice.

Sherlock puffs out his chest. “I noticed a watermark on a sheet of paper. Then I gathered data and made some simple deductions.”

Holmes smiles at her puzzlement, but then his face turns darker.

“What if I were to stroll downstairs and alert them? Cut a deal?” he says. He has had enough of this girl, of Irene Doyle, Inspector Lestrade, Malefactor, and the Rathbones. Every last one of them is an utter disappointment.

“You wouldn’t!”

“After all, what have those three really done? They have hurt no one. Even you have not been physically injured, other than being deprived of Yorkshire pudding. They have simply relieved a man, who doesn’t deserve to own a farthing, of his ridiculously lavish, unshared fortune. He, who lives in style while nearby children die … and go blind.”

Victoria says nothing. She actually looks guilty.

“But Master Holmes, you cannot –”

“Be quiet!” orders Sherlock. “I have to think this over.” He leans against the sill, staring off into the distance toward St. Neots. He notices that the train has arrived at the station.

Sherlock Holmes, of course, has no intention of notifying the villains. In fact, he is desperate for the police to arrive and is worried that they will be too late. He is staring out the window, trying to will them across that marshy field to Grimwood Hall. He will stay in this room until they get here. All shall be revealed and he will be the one to reveal it, with The Times reporter looking on. Credit where credit is due!

He keeps searching for them. Minutes pass. Where are they? Then his heart leaps.

In the distance, they emerge out of the town and onto the frozen field like a small army, all of them on the run. Sherlock isn’t sure, but it seems to him that Lestrade is in the lead, a slightly smaller figure by his side. The Force is equipped with dogs: hounds or bull terriers, likely muzzled to keep them quiet, pulling their masters at double speed.

Sherlock has kept back from the window, but now he puts his face right up to it and searches the grounds and surrounding area outside. There are the many trees and the ragged hedge maze and the black granite wall with the fence on top. There is no sign of the sleeping beasts.

The Force keeps coming.

Sherlock notices some movement to his extreme left outside the window. He presses his head against the cold pane and sees two Demi-Mail phaeton carriages in the driveway and a man carrying boxes out to them. Then another man limps forward with a big bag over his shoulder.

What if the fiends spot the police? Will they get away down a back road?

The boy glances at the marshy field again, and as he does, he notices something in the foreground: a top hat peeking up over the mossy wall. It vanishes. But then it appears again. Two other heads poke up this time, too. The first looks up at the window and levels his walking stick at Sherlock.

“Master Holmes, have you decided?” asks Victoria anxiously. She is imagining her fortune vanishing.

As he turns to her, there is a loud BANG! The window shatters and something rockets through the room and is embedded in a wall.

Victoria screams; cold air rushes into the room. In the confusion, Sherlock remembers Malefactor using a thick walking stick last night and it strikes him now that it looked different from the one he usually employs. Holmes has seen thick steel canes just like it in London … they sometimes contain concealed weapons … gentlemen carry air guns inside them.

Malefactor has laid his cards on the table. There is no doubt; he is trying to kill Sherlock Holmes.

On the surface, the boy in the upper room appears calm, but he is shaking. “Lie down on the floor,” he says to Victoria in an even voice. She doesn’t have to be told twice – in an instant she is just a head and upper body on the pine boards with a circle of scarlet crinoline dress spread out around her.

Outside, everything has sped up. The top-hatted head and its accomplices have fled. The two male thieves in the driveway are frantic. Through the shattered window Sherlock hears them shouting.

“That sounded like a gun – close by!”

“Fetch Eliza!”

“ELIZA!! We have to go! Now!”

Sherlock looks to the driveway again. He sees one thief rushing into the manor, the other mounting a phaeton, whip in hand. A question enters the boy’s mind.

Was Malefactor shooting at me … or was he warning them?

Sherlock looks for the young crime boss again. Three figures are heading for the forest on the other side of the grounds. No one awaits them at the edge of the trees. Malefactor must have kept Irene away. He made sure she didn’t see him in action on Grimwood Hill.

The police are nearing and Lestrade is running like a racehorse, way out in front of his charges, pulling a revolver from his rumpled brown coat.

At that very moment, a knock sounds on the big front doors of the locked entrance to the Ratcliff Workhouse. An old man with stringy white hair, a goatee and spectacles, wearing a green tweed coat and a red fez is pounding on the doors. He is carrying something in a sack. A grimy concierge is eating thin turnip soup in his tiny office inside. The smelly mixture has been spilling on his yellowed beard and bits of it are hanging there as gets up. “I’m comin’! ‘old on to yer knickers!” He staggers out, turns to the entrance, and opens the door.

Sherlock sees Lestrade do something he never dreamed the ferret-faced man had in him: he leaps onto the granite wall in one jump, grips two bars of the iron fence on top, and swings himself up. Off to the side of the house, Eliza Shaw is hustling out the door, wearing “Victoria Rathbone” traveling clothes. The scar-faced villain motions for her to climb into the carriage. The other phaeton, manned by the game-legged thief, is about to pull out.

Lestrade sees them.

“Halt!” he cries, “Or I shall fire!”

The phaetons begin to move.

The Inspector fires his gun and surprises himself: the bullet goes exactly where he intends it to go, right between the first team of horses and their buggy. The phaeton draws to an immediate halt, and the second crashes into it from behind.

“This way!” shouts Lestrade, motioning for his wheezing men to run to the side of the house and intercept the villains. The dogs are un-muzzled and begin to bark and snarl. “Toby!” a constable cries. “Seize them!” Sherlock sees the younger Lestrade arrive, and look up proudly at his father. In the distance, the heaving figure of Hobbs from The Times is struggling toward them.

In Stepney, the workhouse door has been opened.

“I am here to see a child named Paul Waller,” says the bent-over old man to the foul-smelling concierge.

“Paul Dimly, you means.”

“No, Paul Waller. Now, take me to him.”

“And who might you be?”

“I am Sigerson Trismegistus Bell, here on an errand from God.”

Sherlock crouches by the window and motions for Victoria to remain silent. He doesn’t want Lestrade to know he is here, not yet. The plan he has been concocting has a much more dramatic climax.

Outside, the police have taken only a few minutes to bring the villains around to the front door. Sherlock can