Vanishing Girl

concentrate.

“Your lens, please.”

Lestrade is surprised by Holmes’s tone. Suddenly it isn’t friendly anymore – he sounds strangely adult and business-like. The older boy’s father doesn’t carry a magnifying glass, but he himself has taken to the practice … ever since he realized that Sherlock Holmes had employed one in the great Whitechapel murder solution. But he is reluctant to admit that he bears one, let alone to hand it over.

“You shall find it concealed in the interior of your clothing, left side, coat pocket,” says Sherlock.

“I don’t …”

“You want to keep its existence from your father. You are right-handed, so placing it on the left side makes it easier for you to reach it, and you carry it high, in your coat, in order to seize it in an instant.”

“You astound me.” Lestrade didn’t intend to say that. It just came out.

“It was elementary. The lens makes a slight bulge when you walk.”

The second the other boy hands over the glass, Sherlock is moving away from him, gripping it tightly in a palm, that hawk’s nose pointed at the ground like a blood hound sniffing for a scent. The door at the rear is a wide one. It’s a perfectly placed entry point for the thieves. In fact, everything about this area suits the villains’ purpose – the wide, rear door, the secluded passageway – he paces off the ground – space to park exactly two carriages or carts so that both are unobservable from the street.

In addition to knowing that the Rathbones were away and left but two housemaids at home, it is becoming quickly evident to Sherlock that the scoundrels knew exactly where things were both inside and outside, almost as if they had a plan of the house and its contents. The boy is now aware that he is searching for someone well acquainted with the Rathbone residence. Perhaps friends? Or employees, past or present? Someone somehow connected to the family.

All his senses are tuned as he moves about. Nearby, two constables are chatting.

“Are you on duty tomorrow?”

“What, at the ball? Not so privileged, no.”

“Well I is; there’s a whole army of us. Their excellencies is having it despite their cleaning out – word is it’s been scheduled ever since they got her back. A celebration, it was to be. Not such a happy occasion now, is it? But I heard our Lady R. wouldn’t hear of canceling it, or of having it in … an empty little house.”

They both laugh.

“What, need glitter for superior folks to look at?” “They’ll bring in the glitter, mate, rent some props and grovelers.”

Sherlock is glancing at the ground. The fool policemen have been tramping about; but a Peeler’s boot is a unique piece of footwear, thank goodness. The boy also sees the slight prints of the carriage ruts: indeed there were two. Four-wheelers, narrow gauge, but not too narrow, front wheels smaller. Sherlock has been making it his business lately to learn all he can about prints, whether made by boots or carriage wheels: identifying them will be, he is sure, a central skill in his occupation. He thinks of what carriage type this might be. A phaeton of some sort? A High Flyer? Fast and nimble, one horse or two. A Tilbury? No, more than likely a Mail phaeton or a Demi-Mail, lots of space onboard, covered to hide the thieves’ treasures, but still, very speedy. Phaetons … named after the son of a Greek god who rode chariots across the skies. The horses’ hoofprints are evident as well: two for each carriage, for added speed, narrow prints like the feet of thoroughbreds.

Sherlock glances toward the end of the lane to see which direction the wheel prints go once they head out. But they fade as they run toward the street. Strapped for time and anxious to get to the heart of the investigation, he turns back to the footprints and the identity of the thieves themselves.

The crooks walked right here. Who were they? How many were there? Sherlock sees faint shoe prints near the door. They lead just a few steps away and then stop at the point where the carriages must have been. They don’t seem like the markings of police boots. The villains would have drawn the phaetons up close to the door and loaded them as quickly as possible. So quickly! These few prints must belong to the thieves. He drops to his knees. This will have to be done fast. He lowers his face close to the ground, the lens trained on them. Yes, these marks are different. And from what Sherlock can tell, they betray that there were just two …

“You there! What are you doin’?”

A big constable, dressed in a black coxcomb helmet and one of those long blue coats with the brass buttons, is yelling at Sherlock.

Lestrade reacts instantly.

“Hand it over!” he shouts, reaching down and wrenching the magnifying glass from Sherlock. He turns to the angry constable who is approaching on the hop. “Don’t know how he did that, officer. Must have plucked me. Pick- pocket, you know.”

“Remove him from the premises. Now!”

“Yes. Quite right. We were just leaving.”

Young Lestrade isn’t pleased and leaves Sherlock standing on the street. But it doesn’t matter: the boy has learned some important things. Two four-wheeled phaeton carriages were used in this robbery, drawn by a pair of horses each, with a single thief in each conveyance; by the size of their boots and the length of their strides, it is apparent that they were adult males and that one of them was game-legged – his gait was irregular. That is a start. But he has so much further to go.

He sits on a park bench in Belgrave Square, thinking, gently tapping his fingers together. What else is there to work with? It comes to him.

Something he heard back in the driveway gives him a daring idea.

That night, Sherlock is asleep in the wardrobe in the shop, curled up on his narrow feather bed and wearing Bell’s old deerstalker hat to keep his head warm, dreaming of his daring plan when … he hears a frightening sound. Someone is tinkering with the lock on the front door.

He is particularly exhausted tonight – it had been an exciting day, and then he had spent time with his studies before bed. He is adamant that he will keep them up. When he was doing his sums, he had thought for a moment of a certain schoolgirl who has had (it seems) all sorts of trouble with her ciphering lately and many long questions for him. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t approach. She appears to hold him in high regard. He had been pleased to be back at his school desk these last few weeks and yesterday had been a red-letter day. After arriving late in the morning from Belgravia, a forged note from Bell in hand, he had eagerly climbed the creaking flights of stairs in his cramped little National School on Snowfields Road south of London Bridge, ascended past the children’s room on the first floor, the girls’ on the second (where the student in question – Beatrice, the dark-haired, dark-eyed hatter’s daughter from his old neighborhood in Southwark – was standing outside her door in her blue bonnet, smiling at him), all the way up to the boys’ room at the top. Soon after he entered, the headmaster addressed the classes.

“I am perhaps grieved, perhaps pleased, to announce to you all that Mudlark, one of our two remaining thirteen-year-old boys, has taken up an apprentice position with a Lambeth bootmaker. That leaves Sherlock Holmes as our eldest boy.”

It is hard to believe. The near-homeless half-Jew has outlasted them all. A few years ago, no one would have guessed that such a thing was possible. Sherlock certainly wouldn’t have – he would have been appalled to even think it. But now he is the school’s pupil teacher and intends to stay a few more years, probably a record at the grimy little school. He is pleased to be the boy who earns the best grades, too. No one bullies him anymore, no one calls him Judas. The application of some violent Bellitsu on the last boy who tried (Mudlark himself) has taken care of that.

“Congratulations,” said a glowing Beatrice when she saw him descend the stairs at the end of the day. Sherlock had to admit that she wasn’t a bad sort, rather pretty actually, and much less complicated than Irene.