table in the window. Sherlock felt oddly disconnected from reality. Less than an hour before he had been running for his life through dark tunnels, and now he was sitting in the sunshine waiting for a cake to arrive. Life could be strange, sometimes. Actually, he reflected, life could be strange a lot of the time.
‘So, what next?’ he asked once the tray of coffee and cakes had arrived.
‘Let’s take stock of what we know’ Crowe took a bite of his sponge cake. ‘There’s at least a double cutout between the person givin’ the orders and the people carryin’ them out.’
Sherlock frowned. ‘What do you mean, a “double cutout”?’
‘Ah mean that the man who killed himself in the Diogenes Club never met the woman in the veil. She hired the man with the beard, an’ he hired the man who was prepared to kill himself so that his family’s financial future could be assured.’
‘Maybe the woman was hired by someone else. Maybe there’s a triple cut-out.’
‘It’s possible,’ Crowe mused. ‘Whoever is organizin’ this is very cautious. They’re makin’ sure that nobody can trace back to them. The only reason we got this far is thanks to two unplanned events – the first bein’ that your printer recognized the man with the beard, an’ the second bein’ that the fellow with the beard was greedy and immoral enough to follow the woman who hired him to this museum he talked about. Never underestimate the value of an unplanned coincidence.’
‘But to what end?’ Sherlock asked. ‘What exactly are they trying to achieve?’
Crowe shrugged. ‘The immediate aim seems to be to discredit your brother, or otherwise get him out of the way. The long-term aim – not sure about that. We need more information.’
Sherlock sighed. He’d thought he was hungry, after all the running around, but the cakes just didn’t appeal to him. ‘What can we do?’ he asked.
‘As ah see it,’ Crowe said, ‘we have three options. First: we could tell the police what we know and return to Farnham, hopin’ that the Diogenes Club solicitor can get Mycroft out of prison and clear his name.’
‘What are the odds on that?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Slim. The police ain’t goin’ to be inclined to investigate a crime where they’ve got clear evidence against a man already in custody, an’ with the best will in the world our story ain’t exactly easy to believe. An’ our evidence has melted away.’
‘But we’ve got the laudanum spray!’
Crowe shrugged. ‘Could be medicine, like your brother said. An’ we can’t just produce it out of nowhere. We might have bought it at a pharmacist down the street.’
‘What’s the second option?’
‘We stay in London an’ talk to your brother’s employers in the Foreign Office – get them to take action an’ get him out.’
Sherlock winced. ‘Even to me, that doesn’t sound likely to succeed.’
‘Indeed. There’s a good chance that the Foreign Office will just leave your brother twistin’ in the wind. Last thing they want is embarrassment an’ publicity.’
‘Then we follow the third option,’ Sherlock said decisively.
Crowe smiled. ‘You don’t even know what it is yet.’
‘I can guess.’ Sherlock’s gaze met Crowe’s deceptively amiable stare. ‘We amass enough evidence by ourselves to clear Mycroft’s name. We go to this museum in Bow and try to find the woman in the veil.’
Crowe nodded. ‘That’s about the size of it. An’ frankly, I don’t hold out much of a hope for our chances. It’s a long shot, it really is.’
‘Why isn’t there someone we can go to?’ Sherlock exploded. ‘Why isn’t there someone who can investigate things that the police won’t or can’t investigate? Some kind of independent, consulting force of detectives who can set things straight, like the Pinkerton Agency in America that you told me about?’
‘It would require someone with a whole set of interestin’ qualities, that’s for sure,’ Crowe said with a strange expression on his face. ‘But it’s a career niche that’s currently unoccupied here in England.’ He seemed to pull himself back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. All right, I suggest we secure a hansom cab an’ ask the driver to take us to the museum in Bow.’
They caught a cab straight away, although Sherlock noticed that Crowe deliberately let two empty cabs go past without hailing them, choosing the third at the last second as it was about to swing past the spot where they were standing.
‘Why didn’t you go for the first cab?’ Sherlock asked as they climbed in.
‘Because we’re blunderin’ around the edges of a web spun by someone,’ Crowe answered, ‘an’ I wanted to make sure that the cab we got into was our choice, not someone else’s.’
‘What was wrong with the second cab, then?’
Crowe smiled. ‘The horse was lame. Ah doubt it would have made it all the way to Bow. An’ ah didn’t like the driver’s moustache.’
They settled themselves down in the seats, and the driver’s face appeared in the hatch above them. ‘Where to, gents?’
‘Do you know the Passmore Edwards Museum?’ Crowe asked.
The journey took half an hour or so, and Sherlock spent the time looking out at the slices of real life presented to him: washing lines full of clothes, strung between windows on opposite sides of the street; hard – faced men lounging around on street corners; street vendors with trays of sweets, fruits and flowers; knife grinders wheeling their barrows around and calling out to see if anyone wanted their knives sharpened on the pedal- operated whetstones they were pushing.
The museum was an orange-brown stone building with built-out corners and an ornately pillared porch. It was set back from the street, separated from the pavement by a strip of grass and a knee-high metal fence. A block of stone set into the wall next to the front door had been carved with the words Passmore Edwards Museum of Natural Curiosities.
‘Drive on past,’ Crowe called to the driver. ‘Drop us off on the corner of the street.’
The cabbie brought his horse to a halt where Crowe had indicated. Crowe paid, and the two of them got down from the cab.
‘Don’t look directly at the building,’ Crowe instructed. ‘Just stand here and talk for a few seconds. Let’s absorb any impressions we get.’
‘Call me stupid,’ Sherlock said, ‘but I get the impression it is a museum. It doesn’t look like it’s a front for anything.’
‘It might just have been a convenient meeting place,’ Crowe mused. ‘Something chosen almost at random, rather than the headquarters of a conspiracy. If so, we’re not going to discover anything here, and we’ve pretty much run out of evidence to follow.’
‘The least we can do is look around,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘We might see something, or hear something, or someone might remember seeing a woman in a veil.’
‘Good point, well made,’ Crowe said.
Crowe led the way towards the front door, to all intents and purposes a father taking his son out for the day.
They entered an empty lobby from which a stairway led up and then split left and right. It could have been the entrance hall of any reasonably large town house, if not for the huge glass case that filled the centre of the tiled floor. Inside the case was a reasonably accurate representation of a section of woodland, and populating it were various stuffed animals: a fox, several stoats, numerous mice, rats and voles, and one rather tatty otter which looked as if it belonged somewhere else entirely. The animals were posed in positions of startled alertness, as if they had been caught in the middle of investigating an unexpected and loud noise. Their glassy black eyes seemed to be staring in all directions.
A man in a blue uniform and a blue peaked cap approached them. ‘Would you like two tickets, sir?’ he said. ‘Just tuppence apiece, and you can stay as long as you want. Very quiet at the moment.’
‘Thank you,’ Crowe said, handing the man a couple of coins. ‘What can you recommend in the way of exhibits?’
The man considered for a moment. ‘The small mammal gallery, up and to your right, is often praised for its veracity. Alternatively, the amphibian gallery up and to your left has a number of unusual specimens which the kids seem to love.’
