Vanishing Girl

was raised by a father who encouraged her to be independent.

Sherlock tucks himself behind the tree and observes, rubbing his hands together to keep warm.

He can see now that Victoria is carrying a big bag, a portmanteau, showing surprising strength in her pale arms. Her breath is evident in quick little cloudbursts in front of her face. She closes the door gently, as if she hopes it won’t make a sound, looks carefully around the front lawn, back up at the big, bulging bay windows on the front of the house, and then walks briskly along the front walk toward the gate. What is going on?

An idea rushes into Sherlock’s mind. He steps out from behind the tree and darts across the road. London’s street children often do little favors for the rich for coins.

“Hansom cab, me lady?” he shouts.

Victoria Rathbone stops dead in her tracks. One of her hands moves to her lips, as if to shush him. But she arrests it before it reaches her face, turns sharply toward the house, and begins to scurry back. Sherlock can’t believe how quickly she moves. In a flash, she returns up the walkway and into the mansion. There isn’t a second to even mention the little boy’s name.

Sherlock doesn’t have an inkling about what this means, but he knows it isn’t advisable to stand there trying to figure it out. He takes to his heels.

Did I frighten her? Was it simply that? Are there servants pursuing me again? He glances back as he flees. No one seems to be coming, but he keeps moving, just in case. Was she really leaving the house alone? Why did she run back?

It doesn’t make sense.

Holmes maintains a quick pace until he is all the way to Trafalgar Square. There, amidst the beginnings of a crowd of Sunday tourists in the cloudy, early-winter morning, he blends in, becomes anonymous. He huddles against the stone plinth of a statue and thinks. He eats some chunks of bread he has brought from the shop. The crowd grows. Out in the teeming colors of the masses in the square, he hears people arguing, vendors shouting, the pigeons cooing, vehicles rumbling on the streets, church bells tolling nearby. It is so loud that it almost hurts his ears. He thinks he sees an Irregular, that little one, peering at him from among the tourists. But when he looks carefully, he can’t be certain. He makes the scene go silent. It all fades, faces blur, and even smells recede. People move, speak, shout … without a sound. He concentrates. What isn’t right about Victoria Rathbone? How does it fit into what he knows about the robbery?

All he really has is her unusual behavior, her mother’s secret, and a vague profile of the culprits and how they pulled off their crime. It worries him that Malefactor might be well ahead in this game.

He tells himself that he should do something to clear his mind.

He decides to go to Stepney. He isn’t sure why.

Stepney lies east of even Whitechapel. There are many roads that lead to it, and all that come from central London are treacherous for a boy out on his own. The city is filled with pockets of poor, violent neighborhoods, and generally things get worse to the east or south.

Sherlock decides to steer clear of Whitechapel itself. He has had enough of his father’s old Jewish territory and those dark alleys where he came face-to-face with his first gruesome murder. Instead, he will walk nearer the Thames. He strolls toward St. Paul’s Cathedral and then swings south to the water, amazed, as always, at the number of churches in London. They are mostly dark and medieval, awe-inspiring temples to goodness standing amongst all this evil. He passes London Bridge and the ancient Tower of London, still thinking about Victoria and her mother. He veers slightly north to avoid the docks and the hard-living Londoners who lurk there, but soon is in places where he must be on his guard anyway; where anxious people in search of a living eye their marks, where crowds of children walk about in rags, begging from strangers. He darts through Shadwell, slows past a Friends Meeting House, feeling a little safer, but then moves into Stepney. Here he must be alert again.

Irene had said that the little boy was in the Ratcliff Workhouse, which Sherlock knows is near St. Dunstan’s Church. What sort of parents did the child have? A young girl who couldn’t keep him? Paupers who couldn’t either? Sherlock begins to chide himself for being here. This has nothing to do with the robbery, and he’s wasting his time. Malefactor is likely hard at work. Did he come here as a way to be close to the one person he dearly wants as a friend, but has pushed away for good? Perhaps he might see her.

He walks up Stepney High Street, feeling more secure where the road is busy, and sees St. Dunstan’s up ahead, lording it over both its expansive green grounds and the dirt-poor neighborhood.

It is like a castle from the Middle Ages in a modern, knightless world. Church services have just ended and the property is nearly deserted. He steps gently across the grass and sits on a bench near the grand stone stairs, pausing for a few moments, thinking about the case, his mother, whether or not he really wants to see Paul Dimly, and if he would be allowed into the workhouse anyway. The sun is straight above him in the cold noon hour. He stands and walks up the many steps to St. Dunstan’s entrance and tries the big wooden doors. They are locked. Looking north from this elevation, he sees the back of a rundown, two-storey building that looks like a patched-up stable, the words “Ragged School” near the roof. Didn’t Irene say that Thomas Barnardo ran such a school near here?

When he walks past the school a few moments later, he spies a young man stepping through the doors into the street. He wears a plain but respectable suit, round, wire-rimmed spectacles and the beginnings of a mustache. His appearance sticks out in these surroundings and there is something about him that strikes Sherlock as rather brave. A child nears, dressed in a filthy garment more like a potato sack than a dress and wearing a spit-polished pair of men’s black boots. The young man pats the little girl on the head. Her hair hangs in greasy strings and is likely crawling with lice. She clings to him, but he admonishes her, makes her stand up straight. Sherlock hears the word Jesus. Ah, this is his man.

Holmes approaches. He wouldn’t do this with just any gentleman of Barnardo’s middle-class stature. Most citizens of his ilk, encountering a desperate-looking boy in a threadbare suit, would shout at him or strike him or run. But he knows Thomas Barnardo is different.

“Excuse me, sir.”

“Yes, my good fellow. Are you in need? The lord …”

“I am a friend of Irene Doyle’s.”

There is a pause.

“You are?”

“And I would like to see Paul Dimly.”

“Ah, Dimly. That is not his Christian name, young man. Better to simply call him Paul, like the saint. A friend of Irene Doyle’s, you say. Would you like to help the child?”

“Uh … yes, yes I would.”

“And how will you do that?”

“I … uh … I don’t know, sir. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

Barnardo smiles.

“Come with me.”

The Ratcliff Workhouse isn’t a particularly large version of those mostly black, soot-encrusted, granite or wooden monsters that stain London every few dozen streets or so. It is built in a U- shape, on three floors, with Spartan accommodations, a large work area outside, and a cavernous dining hall in the basement. Paul Dimly lives alone in a very small room on an upper floor once used as a broom closet. He has no one to live with and would shun company anyway.

When Thomas Barnardo ushers Sherlock into the little room, they are startled to find it empty. After a moment of panic, the kindly man realizes what time it is, and that the little boy must have been taken down to dinner. The dining hall (though it is hardly fitting to call it that) is tall and long and cold and filled with crude, wooden tables set with tin plates and cups. At a thick counter at the front a burly male cook is ladling out a lumpy, dark stew. It seems to have a good deal of cabbage in it, for the stench of that vegetable fills the fetid air. Sherlock spots a small, scraggly Christmas tree, undecorated, on a wooden pedestal, just over the cook’s shoulder. He has forgotten that December has just arrived, and a dart of pain pierces his chest – his mother always celebrated Christmas and his father used to join in, too. This will be his first year without her, without his family.

Paul Dimly isn’t difficult to find. He is the smallest being in the room. Sherlock is alarmed at his size. He