Death in the Air

piece of work, he was. Johnny told me he saw the old scoundrel kill a man, and that he taught all his charges how to do the same.”

Sherlock’s eyes widen. He is getting somewhere now.

“I believe The Eagle and The Robin were romantically involved,” he says. “And that Mercure took her for himself.”

“That’s the word, though The Eagle won’t keep her honest now that Le Coq’s gone, either. She isn’t a very loyal sort, if you know what I mean. And Jimmy is as meek as a lamb: couldn’t hurt a flea, won’t put up a fight. They say he faints at the sight of blood. If you are looking for a suspect, it isn’t him.”

Suddenly the other door opens and there before them stands The Great Farini.

Sherlock gets to his feet, both in awe and because he fears that the master will throw him out. Farini is stripped to his undershirt, his thick shoulders and well-developed arms bare. Under his perfectly slicked-back hair, a sharp intelligence shines in his face.

“Sam, I …” he begins talking to El Nino, then stops. “What have we here?” he asks, turning to Sherlock Holmes, not pleased to find an unannounced intruder.

“Would you believe a reporter from The Glowworm?” inquires El Nino with a grin.

“That depends on whether or not they begin employment at the age of thirteen,” booms Farini. He is growing angry. His accent sounds American too, but a little flatter, perhaps Canadian. At first Sherlock thought the great man was about to smile, but his expression had changed quickly. It terrifies the boy. Farini walks up to him and looms over his upturned face, fixing him with the most frightening pair of dark eyes he has ever looked into. They too, seem to have changed from good to evil in an instant. They stare right into the boy, as if Farini intends to mesmerize him.

“What is your name, boy? Your real name.”

“Sherlock Holmes.”

“Sherlock Homes?” muses The Great Farini. “That sounds like a stage name, a fictional one … as real as mine.”

There is a long silence. The boy can feel the tension in the room. He can’t think of anything to say.

“What shall we do with him?” asks Farini.

“Drop him head first from the roof of the Alhambra, no net?” offers El Nino. He doesn’t seem to be on Sherlock’s side anymore.

“Or …” smiles Farini, “compliment him on a wonderful acting job, on displaying exemplary brains, invention, and daring far above the ordinary. All things we admire.” The famous man’s eyes are twinkling and he extends a hand. “Well done, Master Holmes. Now, be off with you. I’m sure El Nino has provided you with whatever you need?”

He has a grip like Hercules, and Sherlock is glad when he is released and allowed to head for the door. As he does, Farini places a hand on El Nino’s shoulder and Sherlock can see that it is heavy and digs into the lad’s thick muscles.

“My son will tell me all about it … won’t you … El Nino?”

“Of course, Farini,” says the boy, and Sherlock can tell that he means it.

Back out on dim Leicester Square, Sherlock feels as if he has just escaped from a dream: either a wonderful fantasy, or a nightmare.

Whatever the case, he got exactly what he wanted. El Nino has shed more light on the murder. All three of the other Mercures had good reasons to dispatch Le Coq. But one has now risen above the others as the prime suspect. The Swallow, it seems, has an interesting past … he knows how to kill.

Sherlock thinks of the youngest Mercure with his back turned to him at the Crystal Palace yesterday, whistling a happy tune on the very morning after his master had been fatally and brutally sabotaged. He thinks of the lad’s hardened expression and his obvious access to all the apparatus.

What exactly was he doing? He had a sack with him, filled with something. Was he checking the equipment? Is that his job every day? It must be, especially since the other two weren’t even near the building while he cleaned up. Was he always the last person to look at the trapeze bars before the performers swung out high above the hard floors … their lives in his small but inventive hands?

Yes indeed, that lad knows how to kill.

All Sherlock needs to do now, is lay his hands on evidence of The Swallow’s guilt.

TERROR AT THE PALACE

Sherlock wakes in the middle of the night. Sigerson Bell is snoring in his bed upstairs. The boy sits up in the cot, silently pushes open the long doors of the wooden wardrobe he sleeps in, and steps out into the lab, his bare feet patting the stone floor. The cramped room is cluttered with glass tubes, poisons, and skeletons, all surrounded by those teetering stacks of books. He can barely see an arm’s length in front of his face, but he doesn’t want to light a candle. Here at the back, there’s a little water closet with a flush toilet that Bell invented (just as efficient as young Thomas Crapper’s) and near it, a creaking wooden staircase that spirals up into the two small rooms on the first floor. One is a parlor that has more of the detritus of an apothecary’s profession than furniture. The other is the old man’s messy bedroom where, snuggled under a feather blanket, he dreams of miraculous cures, as a red woolen nightcap warms his balding head.

In less than a week Bell will be thrown into the streets, and with him will go Sherlock’s home and his hopes of attending school for the autumn term. But the boy is sure he can win a reward for the solution to this flying- trapeze crime…. He already has a compelling suspect. No one else knows anything. He has to move now. He has to find out exactly what The Swallow did during the moments before Mercure fell, and find concrete evidence of his guilt. Sherlock must somehow get to the crime scene and back in the night, returning before Bell even rises.

As he takes a careful step, he thinks he hears a creak at the top of the stairs, as if the old man were stirring. The boy keeps still for a moment, but the noise doesn’t come again. He quickly boils a spot of tea, tears off a piece of slightly hardened bread kept in a wooden box next to a monkey’s brain floating in a jar of formaldehyde, slips into the front room past the display cases, and out onto little Denmark Street.

It is almost pitch-black at first, but once he is on a bigger street, the glow of the overhanging gas lamps provides a gloomy light in the hot and humid air. He crosses the now-silent market at Covent Garden, floats over Waterloo Bridge, and glides south-east, running as often as he walks, past a nearly deserted Elephant and Castle, out into the suburbs, and then the countryside. Just past Dulwich village he passes its renowned college, nestled just off the road, on the other side of a beautiful cricket grounds. Dim lights make the buildings shimmer. He stops for a moment admiring its ghostly, red gothic exteriors and its spires disappearing into the sky. It’s a famous public school for elementary children, offering opportunities he is denied. He wonders what it would be like to awake within its dormitories. Some day, he vows, he will go beyond even this sort of institution, to a great university, by hook or by crook.

He scurries down Dulwich Road, runs past the toll gate, and gazes toward the Crystal Palace way up on Sydenham Hill. A few lights are left on in the night and it looks like a monstrous glass aquarium on a mountain. The last stretch up the hill winds through the trees of Gipsy Wood. His imagination fills with the thieves and goblins who, children say, inhabit this forest and run after them with arms outstretched…. He sprints until he comes to the back of the mighty building.

He wishes it was evening, not early morning, and that he was an ordinary boy who could scamper across the two hundred acres of beautiful grounds and play in its lakes, and especially climb up onto the life-sized statues of dinosaurs frozen in eternal slithers at the edges of the pools. But he has a job to do. He creeps by the big reservoir at the north end and over to one of the imposing brick water towers book-ending the building. The boy stares up at