“With pleasure,” snarls the boy with an unpleasant look.
“Eat up,” says Sherlock Holmes.
THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION
A whole new factor has entered the game. Sherlock needs to locate the Crystal Palace vault,
It is hard to believe that he is going back to Sydenham – he had just been there in the small hours of the morning. The two boys walk through the Trafalgar Square crowds and approach Charing Cross Railway Station. Its entrance is through a ground-floor arch in an imposing, brick-stone hotel that rises six storeys high. An ornate column with a replica of the medieval Charing Cross at its tip stands in the hotel’s forecourt, behind an iron fence. Only the wealthy ever use this building’s fashionable two hundred rooms and dining area.
Sherlock tries not to gawk as they move through the arch and merge with the flow of people entering the terminal on the other side. The station’s big clock is thirty minutes from striking seven, and many folks are still finding their way home. Though Sherlock appears calm as he walks beside the strutting, loudly-dressed Swallow (who knows how to play his part as he receives stares of recognition), the young detective’s mind is racing. He would be ashamed to tell his companion, but he has never once been on a steam locomotive. He is trembling.
Trains move at unimaginable speeds. He had often stopped to watch them explode through Southwark, all power and sound and steam, thundering over the low brick bridges there, built through, and veritably on top of, poor neighborhoods.
The boys pass the W.H. Smith bookstalls that sell nearly every London paper as well as city maps. Gentlemen in top hats rush by, calling out to news vendors, tossing them coins with hardly a glance, and catching their papers.
“
“
They hurry, preoccupied, to their trains, reaching into their waistcoats for pocketknives to cut open the sealed pages. Sherlock wishes he had a few coins in his clothes too.
The Swallow buys them two eight-pence, round-trip, third-class day tickets from a uniformed conductor and finds the platform for the South Eastern Railway line to the Crystal Palace six miles away.
First-class cars are elegant and even serve food, but the carriage the two boys enter, solely for the working class, is much plainer. To Sherlock, it is heavenly. He sits down in a wooden seat across from The Swallow and stares out the window. Within minutes the locomotive hisses and chugs out of the terminal, over the Charing Cross Rail and Foot Bridge into Southwark. The boy can feel its power already. They move through Lambeth, along the edge of the river, then to the ancient London Bridge Station. They stop, receive more passengers, and quickly move on, picking up speed as they grunt through rough areas near his old haunts, over those low stone bridges he’s so often seen the trains upon. They enter industrial Bermondsey and pass the stinking tanneries on his right, smelling of the lime, rotten eggs, and dog excrement used inside. Then the train swings south, heading into the suburbs and the countryside.
Sherlock cannot believe the speed at which they are moving. It terrifies him. He has heard that locomotives can fly as fast as sixty miles in an hour! He believes it now: his shoulders are pinned back to the seat, his expression held tightly, anxious to look collected in front of The Swallow.
Sherlock has never moved more rapidly than he can run.
The boy looks out his window and straight down, trying to see the tracks, but they are a black stream. Buildings flash past, cows and sheep disappear in the fields the instant they appear. He has always dreamed of being on a train and of taking to the sky in a hot-air balloon, but he never really believed he would get to do such things. Sherlock Holmes wants big experiences. The speed of the train thrills him as much as it frightens him.
But soon he worries that it is out of control. There have been many shocking railway accidents, not the least of which happened two years ago almost to the day on this very line, south of here in Kent, when ten people were killed and many maimed in the notorious Staplehurst crash. Charles Dickens was on that train and the terrifying way he described it in his magazine
As they race south, only minutes out of the London Bridge Station and yet approaching their destination, Sherlock feels the locomotive rock back and forth, barely hanging on. He has to shut his eyes. In his vivid imagination he sees the train flying off the tracks, careering into a field, smashing into a building, and exploding in great red and black flames: he hears the screams of the excursionists, blood splattering the insides of the cars, severed heads and limbs thudding against the windows.
The train slows.
Sherlock opens his eyes. The Swallow is grinning at him.
“Life movin’ too fast for you, Master ’olmes?”
The young detective looks out the window, embarrassed, and concentrating on slowing his breathing. The locomotive puffs gently through Forest Hill Station, whistling as it goes, then picks up just a little speed as it enters Upper Sydenham, and the Crystal Palace comes clearly into view. The sun is getting lower in the gray sky, peeking through the clouds. The glass monster glows on its hill right above them.
Sherlock has never seen it from this vantage point. Every time he’s been here, even when he came with his mother, he walked. He’s always approached the Palace from behind. But tonight the train is taking him past the grounds, and he can see the front of the magnificent building overlooking its green kingdom. The wide Grand Centre Walk leads way up to its tiered terraces and main doors.
The train follows the curving track toward the Palace Station, crossing in front of Boating Lake, populated with little pleasure vessels piloted by gentlemen, with ladies seated in front of them. The Great Fountains are stretched across the width of the park, spurting their white spray high into the sky.
Sherlock disembarks and nearly falls down – his legs are rubbery. A line of elegant hotels runs north from the station, but the two boys take the tunnel onto the grounds and head toward the Palace. The Swallow simply has to show his face to get them inside.
The trapeze apparatus is only one element in the case now. Of almost equal importance is the vault. Sherlock wants to know where it is, and how the Brixton Gang might have robbed it without anyone even noticing, and then deduce what in the world, if anything, all that has to do with the murder of Monsieur Mercure. If that notorious group of thieves indeed played a part in any of this, then Sherlock Holmes will be involved in a much bigger case than he ever imagined. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense that all of the factors – The Swallow and the gang from his old neighborhood, the money missing from the vault, and the Mercure accident – are connected. But something inside him says they are. His heart rate increases as he enters the building.
What role did The Swallow have in all of this? Sherlock doesn’t trust this self-confident little devil anymore. He marches him up to the central transept. On his way he spots Inspector Lestrade and his son, attended by a half dozen Bobbies, standing at the far end of the nave. They are deep in conversation and look like they intend to stay for a while. Sherlock immediately decides that he must investigate what they are up to, especially why they are gathered in that particular spot, far from the trapeze installation. But first, he has a few more questions for Master Wilde. They lean against a wall near the tower they climbed in the early hours of the morning. Sherlock wants this conversation to take place with the whole scene in front of him.
“Did you ask your Brixton friends to come here the day before the accident?”
“No,” answers the young acrobat peevishly. “’Course not. I told you once, I ’ave naught to do with their like now.”
“Did you have the sense that they sought you out?”
“Don’t know.”
“Where did you meet?”
