Death in the Air

the tops of the trapeze towers. But it seems like a frivolous detail, not related in any way to the crime … or is it?

Sigerson Bell is fond of telling him that one can trace every human thought to a clear motivation. People don’t just think things. One’s mind always has a reason for going (or even wandering) in the direction it does, even if it doesn’t seem that way on the surface. For some reason, Sherlock’s mind had twice considered those unusual walls.

“Our instincts,” the old man likes to say, “are often ahead of our brains. We know something, but don’t realize it. I try to tap into that instinct when I diagnose a disease. Sometimes, something in the back of your brain, or shall we say, your gut, tells you what the problem is.”

Why does Sherlock keep noticing the short walls of the vault room?

He slouches against the pedestal beneath the statue and sighs. As he does, he looks up at the perch from which he nearly fell in the small hours of the morning, remembering the terror of it all. For an instant, he can’t stop himself from reliving it.

He shoots out over the transept on the flying trapeze, feeling as though his life is about to end. He recalls looking down … and noticing a room with walls that didn’t quite reach the ceiling.

That was the first time it had occurred to him. He concentrates on what he saw. What had it meant to him? Why, afterwards, did he keep noticing it? Suddenly … he realizes what it is.

He could almost see inside the vault room from the apex of his swing on the flying trapeze! No other vantage point in the Crystal Palace affords such a view. None! He thinks of Monsieur Mercure and how incredibly high he soared that day.

Sherlock stands up and darts through the crowd to the base of the tower. The Swallow is loitering there.

“Master ’olmes,” he says, “can we tear this down yet?”

“No,” says Sherlock excitedly, “not yet. Do you want to absolve yourself entirely of this crime?”

The expression on the other boy’s face grows serious.

“I do.”

“Then climb up that tower, get on the trapeze, and swing as high as you possibly can, as high as Mercure usually went.”

The Swallow looks at the boy as if he were a lunatic. No one is expecting a performance, and the boy is dressed in his street clothes.

“’e always went the ’ighest,” he finally says, as if delaying.

“I know. Do this for both of us, Johnny. And when you do, look toward the area where the police are gathered, toward the room they are standing in front of, where the vault is, and tell me what you see.”

The Swallow climbs the tower, ascending as quickly and silently as a mouse. He reaches the perch, grabs the swing, and sends himself flying out over the central transept.

Down below, several people notice. There are oohs and ahs and soon hundreds, then thousands, are looking up, pointing to the distant glass ceiling. The Swallow swings very high, then pumps his legs and goes higher and higher, approaching maximum speed, thrilling the crowd. They begin to applaud. Finally, he alights back on his perch, landing to a great roar.

At the bottom of the tower, The Swallow is met by Crystal Palace officials and two Bobbies, angrily asking him why he was up on the apparatus. Clever as always, he insists that it is a flying trapeze tradition to do this before the “tear-down.” While they are discussing whether or not to believe him, he slips away and finds Sherlock.

“Well?” the young detective asks, a look of anticipation on his face.

“I could see right into the room, Master ’olmes. I could see the far wall with the curtain drawn across it and I could see the guard sitting there in ’is chair, as plain as day.”

Sherlock smiles.

“It has been a pleasure to know you, Master Wilde,” he says. “You are a gentleman and a star. You may go and so may your two colleagues. Break a leg.”

The Swallow grins back. “Much obliged, sir. The pleasure ’as been mutual.”

Sherlock Holmes walks straight out into an open area where the police can see him clearly. Lestrade notices, his face turns red and he yells for a Bobbie to pursue the boy. Sherlock drifts into the crowd again, the policeman after him. Young Lestrade watches with a look of wonder and slight admiration.

The tall, thin boy steps down the big front staircase of the Palace under his own steam with that smile still on his face. The grounds glow, lit by their many gaslights, and up above, fireworks explode in loud concussions and marvelous colors in the black sky.

Only Sherlock Holmes knows what Mercure said just before he fell. And now he knows what it meant.

“… silence … me.”

Le Coq wasn’t saying that he knew that the silence of death was descending upon him. No, he was trying to tell Sherlock something! High in the air, he had just witnessed a robbery. He was the only one who could see it. The thieves had known long before they committed their crime that that would be the case. As part of an ingenious and complicated plan, Monsieur Mercure had been instantly and expertly removed.

In a horrific moment of realization, the trapeze star had been trying to tell Sherlock Holmes that these fiends had silenced him.

HOW IT WAS DONE

Sigerson Bell knows. Under that red fez, below that balding pate with its yellowing strings of long greasy hair, inside that bulb-tipped skull, his always-thinking, always-questioning big brain has been following the mental and physical moves of the admirable young Sherlock Holmes. And enjoying it. Amidst his troubles, this boy is such a gift! The old man is blessed with the powers of deduction of an astute medical man and alchemist and is used to diagnosing patients at a glance. Thus, he observed Sherlock’s interest in the Mercure incident in the Daily Telegraph, put that together with the fact that the boy’s father worked at the Crystal Palace, that he was gone for precisely four hours and twenty-six minutes on the very afternoon of the accident – an appropriate time to get to Sydenham and back – and that a small shard of unusually colored purple wood was embedded in the decaying toe of his left Wellington shoe, obviously the remnants of Le Coq’s splintered trapeze bar. This brought him to the elementary conclusion that Sherlock Holmes had not only been at the Palace and witnessed the accident, but had been very close to it indeed.

The boy’s demeanor since then: his barely contained excitement, his questions about brain concussions and circus performers, his extended absences, even in the middle of the night (when Sherlock had slipped out to break into the Palace, Bell had crouched at the top of his spiral stairs in the darkness, listening to the boy’s movements down below), had convinced him that Master Holmes was pursuing the case. He knew of the lad’s interest in crime, something of his past, and had gleaned his connection to the solution of the Whitechapel murder during their many conversations. If the truth be told, the old man was absolutely thrilled about it all – it was like dining on filet mignon and Yorkshire pudding before being hanged. Adventure was afoot! Evil had taken place! And his young boarder, a youthful knight crusading for good, was in the middle of it all, right on the trail.

What he did not know was that the boy was also planning to save his life.

Though it is growing very late, the apothecary hasn’t gone to bed. Instead, he is just sitting down to perform an aria from The Magic Flute on his valuable Stradivarius violin, purchased at a bargain long ago from a nearby Jewish pawnbroker. He always plays it in an unusual position on his knee. But when he hears Sherlock Holmes returning, he sets it down quickly. He knows the sound of the violin makes the boy sad – it was the instrument his mother loved.