Eye of the Crow

ornate green carpet. Gingerly feeling a path around the table, he finds his way into the hallway. Straight ahead is the morning room, to his left the big staircase, and to his right … the front door. Memorize it; the quickest way out in an emergency.

He turns to the stairs and places his feet carefully on the wide wooden steps, minimizing creaks. His legs are shaking, but he does it well and within seconds is on the first floor. He turns down the hallway. A drawing room full of furniture spreads out to the right. Where is the master’s bedroom? Where is his study?

But he never makes it to either.

Edging down the hall, his breath coming in gasps, his sleeve brushes against a little round table. There is a jingling sound and something starts to fall. Frightened, he throws a hand out and catches it.

Sherlock stands stock still for a full minute, waiting to hear the sound of the house rousing, remembering the route down the stairs and out the front door.

But no one stirs.

What does he hold in his hand? It is a wooden container of some sort, the size of a snuffbox. Slowly, he opens it and slides his hand inside. It is a small ball … made of glass.

When Irene searched the directories at the library she had also checked for information about glass eyes. Though she hadn’t found much, she did learn the simple fact that they sometimes become cracked or nicked … and most people keep extras.

Has Lady Luck smiled on Sherlock tonight?

He kneels on the floor and pulls a match from his pocket, an essential tool of a thief. Malefactor had roughly thrust a few into his hand as they departed that afternoon.

He lights it. He’ll only have a second and then the flame and its smoke will have to be extinguished.

There is the eyeball with its … pale blue iris.

It takes him an excruciating amount of time to get back up the chimney and onto the roof. It is a harder climb than he even imagined – several times he thinks he won’t make it. But he has to, so he does. Battered and bruised, blood on his rags, he actually smiles when he reaches the roof – he knows all he needs to know about this house and its owner. This gentleman is not his villain.

It is one of the other three.

He wants to keep moving quickly. Maybe that is careless, but he fears that the villain’s side may strike at any moment. The next morning, every dark-liveried coachman he sees in London terrifies him, compels him to speed up; his sense of being followed increases. There are three days left before Mohammad is condemned. He cases the next house in the afternoon and plans to enter that very night. But nerves begin to overwhelm him as he stands above the chimney. The fear inside him now seems greater than the rage. He is losing the smoldering energy needed to attempt these dangerous break-ins. The reality of it all is setting in.

But down the chimney he goes.

He need not have worried. Searching this house turns out to be easier than the first. When he arrives, the interior is so dark that he can’t locate his emergency exit. Trying not to panic, imagining how impossible it will be to find the evidence he needs when essentially blind, he goes down on all fours and finds his way through the ground floor to the front door. There: that’s his way out.

Once he is near it, he can see a little better: the moon shines brightly through a window in the stone-floored entrance hall. Just as he turns to move up the stairs and search the house, something catches his eye. Leaning against the wall beside the umbrella stand are two crutches. They are long and thick and obviously belong to a man: the owner of the house.

Sherlock hadn’t observed the gentleman outside his home that morning. During the short stretch the boy took to survey the house, the master hadn’t made a single appearance.

A pair of crutches? What could that mean? The man has either suffered a recent injury, or … Sherlock decides to look around. At first he doesn’t find what he is searching for, but after a few silent footfalls back into the dining room, he sees it: a photograph. It sits on the mantle over the fireplace. He takes it back to the entrance and examines it in the glow of the moon. There are five people in the picture: a woman, three children, and a gentleman … on crutches. Sherlock squints and looks down at the man’s feet. He has wooden legs.

It is elementary. This war veteran isn’t his villain, either. He can’t have been the man who brutally murdered a healthy young woman strong enough to gouge out a man’s eye; he can’t have been the man who ran from the scene and leapt into that black coach with the red fittings.

Sherlock can go. But he doesn’t want to climb back up the chimney, doesn’t have the heart now. He is feeling overwrought and simply wants out.

And so he makes a careless decision. He retraces his steps to the door, unlocks it from the inside, and walks out the front steps onto the street.

He can’t bolt the door again from the outside. So he leaves it unlocked.

The next day, slithering through the narrow arteries of Soho, Sherlock hears something on wide Regent Street that almost makes him faint. It is the cry of a child, a young girl. He can hear her shouting above all other sounds in the din: “ARAB WILL SWING!”

She is repeating it at the top of her lungs. When he draws closer he can see her standing there in her soiled dress, about Irene’s age but much smaller, with straggly black hair and a dark complexion, deformed in size. She holds a clutch of the latest edition of the Daily News.

Across Regent Street, a skinny boy is competing with her, yelling so loudly that Sherlock can hear his every word. “PENNY ILLUSTRATED!” he cries, surveying the crowds, anxious for a sale. “ADALJI’S TRIAL IN TWO DAYS!” He holds his sheets high in the air. “DEATH SHALL SURELY FOLLOW!”

Sherlock can feel the blood drain from his face. Seeing this in black and white makes it horribly real. And the paper’s assurance of an immediate execution shoots another terror into his mind: if they hang Mohammad … what would they do to him, the accomplice? His pulse starts to race. They are all running out of time.

He has just two days and two houses. The murderer has to be in one of them. But at the very time when he needs to move faster, is he in an impossible situation? He thinks of what happened last night. Did he leave a trail behind … footprints? Has he aroused suspicion? Will someone be waiting for him the next time he goes to Mayfair, a runaway coach or a long-bladed knife poised to take his life? And what are the chances he will be as lucky in the last two houses as he’s been in the first? In them, almost as if invisible powers were guiding him, he had found what he’d been looking for without putting himself in peril. His mother believes in ghosts – she loves seances where people sit at tables and call on the spirits of the dead. Rose would say that a ghost had been leading him. But will a friendly phantom guide him again?

There is only one way to find out.

Fear almost consumes him as he readies himself that night. He has to force himself back to Mayfair. His whole body is shaking as he finds the street that runs almost all the way through the neighborhood near fashionable Park Lane. The last two houses on his list are on the same avenue, about a dozen residences apart and on either side. So far, he’d started at the top of his mother’s note and simply moved down. Tonight, he’s decided to play the odds in his deadly game of housebreaking roulette – he’s picked the fourth home.

A large residence at the corner of the street has a wooden drainage pipe running up its side. He decides to climb it, placing his feet on the iron rings that hold it to the wall. On this roof, Sherlock will be only five dwellings from his target. But just as he reaches his arm up the pipe and puts his left foot onto a ring, he glimpses something moving on the street. Someone is walking past. He or she seems to be taking forever. Flattened against the building, thankful to be dressed as a chimney sweep with his face blackened, he peeks out.

It’s Rose Holmes!

She is walking as if the weight of Westminster Abbey were on her shoulders and as if the flat street were steeper than old Ludgate Hill. Her face is cast down and she holds a piece of paper in one hand.

Sherlock rushes out to her. As he approaches she gasps. The look of fear on her face pains him.

“Mother, it’s me,” he says under his breath.

“Sherlock?”