Eye of the Crow

There is a short burst of laughter. “You are a strange young man, Master Holmes.”

“I know.”

“You will have to explain.”

“Not until you do.”

They stand shoulder to shoulder on either side of the wall, looking at each other’s hands gripping the bars: dark ones and pale ones.

“I will tell anyone who will listen, Master Holmes.”

“I am listening,” responds Sherlock.

The brown hands tighten on the bars.

“I am a butcher’s apprentice. I came to England from Egypt with my parents when I was eight … for a better life. I am good with a knife.”

Sherlock gulps.

“But I use it just to slice and carve the meat. My boss is Muslim too, of course, and we work only with blessed, Halal cuts. He makes me work late into the night, and on the evening when the lady was killed, I had a delivery just after sunset. It was to a soup kitchen near where she was attacked. I push a heavy cart with big wooden wheels and it’s difficult to turn sharply sometimes. I tried a shorter route on my return and went down the wrong street. It’s easy to do in Whitechapel when night falls. I realized it halfway. So I turned around in that alley … the one where it happened. I had trouble with it, had to nose the cart back and forth several times. I remember I was in a rush. I built up a sweat, and then went as hard as I could go back home.

“Part of my job is cleaning up afterwards, after the butcher and the others are gone. He’s a taskmaster, he is. I’m often there past midnight. That night was no exception, and as I was cleaning everything up, I came to the knives. I always do them last. Well … one knife, the big one … it wasn’t there.”

Sherlock feels a shiver.

“I looked high and low, but it was nowhere to be seen. I wondered if I had mistakenly taken it with me on my delivery. So, I started retracing my steps in my head. There was only one place where I had done anything unusual: I’d turned around in tight quarters in that alley. It wasn’t far from the shop.

I ran out into the darkness. There are some strange folk out of doors at night in London, Master Holmes. I ran with all I had to the alley. It was pitch black like a tunnel. It gave me the frights. I inched my way down there, feeling around with my boots, hoping to find the knife. Then …”

Mohammad’s voice cracks. Next door the long, white fingers grip the bars.

“Then … I crouched down and felt around on the ground at about the spot where I figured I’d turned, where the knife was most apt to be. My hands were soon in a puddle … but it hadn’t rained that night, Master Holmes. And the liquid … I thought it was water at first … was thick.”

Mohammad pauses again.

“I felt her hair first … then her face … her open mouth…. I knew she was dead … I knew it was blood…. I stood up. And when I did, my shoe hit something. It clinked on the stones. I leaned over and felt for it. I knew what it was … it was my knife.”

Sherlock’s eyes widen.

“I know now it was stupid, but I picked it up. I figured, I just figured that if anyone found my butcher’s knife next to a dead woman … a knife belonging to an Arab … they’d hang me without asking one question. So I grabbed it and ran.”

“Bloody footsteps all the way to the butcher’s,” says Sherlock without emotion.

“Yes. I was too scared to think straight. I just locked all the doors and slept in the little room the boss keeps for me, the knife in a rag under my coat, not thinking that I’d made a path to my door. The constables on the scene the next morning followed the trail right to me … and the knife.”

Sherlock lets the story sink in. He is trying to fit it into what he knows.

“I didn’t do it,” repeats Mohammad, his voice cracking.

“I know.”

“But you think I will hang.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you must think it. How could anyone think anything else?” His despair is deepening. “There’ll be no barrister to defend me. They have me! They have all the evidence and it is all against me. I have less than three weeks to live.”

“I may have a clue,” says the boy, lowering his voice as a jailer walks by. He pauses. “Something that may explain what really happened.”

“In the name of Allah, tell me.”

“Back home under the mattress on my bed …” Sherlock speaks under his breath again and looks around his cell as if worried that the very walls are listening, “… I have an eyeball.”

“An eyeball?” asks Mohammad.

THE UNUSUAL GIRL

Sherlock won’t say anything more. He doesn’t think it wise. It is dawning on him that there is something suspicious about the fact that he’s been placed in this cell right next to Mohammad Adalji. When he mentioned the eye he spoke quietly and cautioned his new friend to lower his voice and say nothing more.

The police are listening. He is sure. He hopes he hasn’t said too much already. He examines his cell in more detail: there are tiny holes in the ceiling; little cracks in the wall; he is imprisoned near the door that leads right to the office.

The boy spends the day lying on his stone bed trying to understand his situation. It is difficult to concentrate. He is frightened. The Arab is indeed going to die. And here he is, helpless: associated with an open-and-shut murder case. What are they going to do to him? What can they do to someone held on suspicion of withholding evidence? They’ve imprisoned him, haven’t they? And they aren’t letting him go. But what if it’s even worse? What if they think he and Mohammad killed that woman together? He feels his stomach burn.

Oh, God. As the day wears on, his spirit sinks as low as the new London sewers. The Arab’s desperate prayers fill the cells.

Every time Sherlock thinks of his mother and father he looks to the door hoping to see them. He wants them here, to hug him and tell him it is all a dream. He thinks of how desperately upset they must be. But the jail begins to grow dark and they don’t appear. It doesn’t make sense. Why aren’t they coming?

“Jailer!” he finally shouts, rising to his feet.

The stern-looking turnkey moves slowly toward him.

“Why aren’t my mother and father …?”

“Perhaps they’re busy,” the man growls.

It’s obvious … his parents aren’t allowed to visit. He explodes.

“You can’t keep them from me! You can’t keep me here!”

The jailer walks away.

Sherlock falls onto the bed, shaking. Control yourself, he thinks. He must reason this through. Do they really believe we killed her together? He slows his breathing. They charged Mohammad with murder, not him. Why are they trying to break him down and why spy on him? Don’t they already have what they need to hang Adalji?

And then it dawns on him. He puts the facts together … how the police are treating him, their focus on the purse when they questioned him, all of it. Everything becomes clear.

He mumbles to himself as he lies on the bed, knees drawn to his chest.

“They think they know exactly what happened.”

He can see it now.

“I wasn’t really arrested for withholding evidence. I’m not being held in jail for that,