Death in the Air

Sherlock is whistling a merry tune, his mind obviously deeply engaged in something. Bell can’t stand it anymore. He is desperate to be involved.

“I must ask you where you have been,” he says as he moves to a tall stool at the high examining table in the lab, where minutes earlier he had been mixing a green gooey alkaloid and the pulverized heart of a bat. The smell is rather off-putting.

Sherlock has just taken off his coat and placed it on a hook, ready to clean up this latest mess before he goes off to bed. He stops abruptly and ceases whistling. Bell is looking at him over the top of his glasses, which have slid down to the tip of his red nose, nestling at the knob that resides there in all its vein-filled glory The old man has never asked him anything like this.

“Uh …” replies Sherlock. Best to tell some version of the truth, he decides, the old man is no fool. “I was at the Crystal Palace … to see my father again. Did you need me? I apologize if …”

“Master Holmes,” sighs Bell with a smile, “I am not a devil from the Spanish Inquisition, nor do I wish to follow or control your every movement. You may do as you please so long as your chores are completed. And I believe they are.”

Sherlock smiles back, feeling relieved. But instead of looking away, the old man keeps smiling at him. It is rather unnerving. The boy attempts to go about his duties. He picks up a rag, wets it in a pail of water, and begins to wipe the counters and containers. But no matter where he goes, even when he is behind the old man, he has the sense that that smile, those watery red eyes, are still trained on him. Finally, the old man speaks.

“Why don’t you tell me about it? Perhaps I could be of some use?”

“About what?” asks Sherlock, fixing the most innocent look he can muster onto his face.

“Come, come now, Master Holmes.”

Sherlock then knows that Sigerson Bell knows. He should have guessed long ago. How could anyone keep something from this brilliant old man? But the boy doesn’t want to share what he’s learned about the Mercure incident: he wants to think about it on his own. All of the elements of a solution are at hand – the facts are spinning in his brain. He simply needs to fit all of these pieces together, something he has been trying to do since he left the Crystal Palace nearly an hour ago. He wants to see the crime as Mercure saw it. If he can just …

“Sometimes, you know,” adds the glowing old man, “two heads are better than one.”

Sherlock indeed needs another brain. And what a piece of tomato aspic sits under that red fez hat: a teeming blob of cranial jelly capable of helping him line up all his clues, and see the crime exactly as it occurred. He certainly doesn’t want to ask Malefactor for advice, and Irene, despite her intelligence, is out of the question.

But how can he bring someone he cares for into something like this? The last time he did, Irene was nearly crippled for life … and his mother was killed.

He looks at the kindly old man, the only adult friend in his life now. He can’t do this to him.

“I shall be in no danger,” states Sigerson Bell. It is a startling thing to say, as if he were a spiritualist reading Sherlock’s thoughts as clearly as the headlines in the Daily Telegraph.

“I … I have hurt people in the past,” sputters the boy. He hasn’t shared his feelings like this since before his mother died.

“I am an old man, Master Holmes. I love adventure and intrigue. Were I to even die helping you do something like this, I would expire with a smile upon my face. I would never regret it.”

It reminds Sherlock of what his mother said not long before she was killed.

“But …”

“I shall likely kick the proverbial bucket soon anyway my boy. Now, tell me about this. I will help.”

Sherlock hesitates. He doesn’t want the old man in any danger, whether he is on his last legs or not. His plan is to save him, not kill him. And deep inside, he is suspicious of anyone’s interest in his endeavors, even Bell. Why is the apothecary so intrigued?

“I live in a locked building in the center of London, far from any of this,” continues Bell, stating his case as clearly as a Lincoln Inn’s Field magistrate. “None of the devils involved in this would have any reason to do anything to me.”

Sherlock’s need to solve the crime is about to get the better of him. With a little help, the solution to the infamous Mercure incident could be at hand.

“Tell me,” repeats Bell earnestly.

And so the boy does.

They sit together on the two high stools at the table in the laboratory as Sherlock tells him what he knows: a disjointed story with disconnected but tantalizing facts. When he is finished, the apothecary ponders it all with a look of abiding intrigue, elbows on the table, face cupped on either side with his hands. He and the boy sit silently for a few moments. Finally, the old man speaks.

“They used a sedative potion on the guard,” he says clearly.

“Who?”

“The Brixton Gang.”

That is a major missing piece – in fact, it makes the whole crime possible. Instantly, Sherlock begins to see what Mercure saw. He is high above the Crystal Palace on performance day, dressed in his royal purple tights, Le Coq, the magnificent master of The Flying Mercures. He grips the purple trapeze bar and swoops out over the central transept, a monster crowd gathered below. The bar feels a little shaky for some reason, but he pays it little heed – it is show time. He is a catcher: the one who will catch and throw the smaller flyers. But his first maneuver – one that always thrills audiences – is to fly himself, as high as he possibly can, using his great experience and enormous strength to stun spectators with his speed and elevation. It will be especially sensational here in this magnificent Palace. One swing, two, three … he reaches his apex. From up here the view is remarkable. But what is that? Almost directly in front of him in that room with the walls that don’t quite reach the ceiling: a man is slumped on a chair and two others stand in front of a vault, their heads turned to look up for an instant toward the performance. Then the trapeze bar snaps at both ends and he is falling, dropping like a bird shot from the sky. He screams. Looking down, he sees a dark-haired boy dressed in a tattered black frock coat and waistcoat, wearing Wellington shoes. He is heading directly toward him.

The apothecary’s voice brings Sherlock back to the laboratory.

“What we have is a superficial view of this crime: a theory, with holes in it. We must now examine what happened in detail, from start to finish, and most importantly we must understand how it happened. Let us piece it together, out loud. Tell it to me again, adding the information I contributed about the sedative, and I will try to help you when you reach gaps.”

“The members of the Brixton Gang,” Sherlock begins, his eyes staring into the distance, his fingertips drumming against one another, “are so clever that their identities aren’t known to the police. They were casing the Crystal Palace in broad daylight, undetected, the day before the accident, already well aware of where the vault was and the different ways they might get at it. They were deciding on the best approach, in search of the key to another perfect crime. Then everything fell into their lap.”

“They meet their old friend, now known to the world as The Swallow,” nods Bell.

“They know he won’t give them away,” continues Sherlock. “So they start to converse, asking him innocent questions about the performances, learning that Le Coq flies by far the highest, that he nearly touches the glass ceiling … that he would be able to see into the vault room.”

“That seems like a problem for them, at first,” notes Bell.

“But then the guard, who worships The Swallow, who stops whenever he can to talk, comes along. He is introduced. The Brixton boys hide their immediate interest and slip into their quiet technique of drawing information out of others by asking innocuous questions. Soon the guard is bragging about the fact that there will be a great deal of money in the vault by tomorrow afternoon, at least a hundred thousand pounds. He also states that he keeps the combination to the lock in a notebook in his breast pocket. Before he leaves, he tells them something else: he loves the delicious lemon drink one can purchase in the Refreshment Department nearby.”

“A beverage into which one might slip a helpful potion,” adds Sigerson Bell, turning and writing a few chemical symbols on his little chalk board on the wall.

Sherlock looks at it. He understands almost everything now.