Vanishing Girl

But all this reasoning doesn’t reveal anything about who they are or where they are now. And it doesn’t mean Captain Waller was involved. He seems to have a secret and bears a grudge against Rathbone – so he has a motive. But that doesn’t mean he had anything to do with the crimes.

Sherlock wishes that love note had actually said something. He pulls it out of his pocket to crumple it up and throw it across the half-empty carriage. As he does, he takes one last disdainful glance at it. At that instant the train bursts out from under the station roof into the sun. Its bright rays shine through his window and he catches a glimpse of something on the paper.

A watermark.

It is the barely detectable outline of two faces.

Two men and a woman in Portsmouth … two men and a woman at Grimwood Hall! They indeed used the port city as a diversion! Sherlock Holmes is wishing that the train went right through London and on to St. Neots. It wasn’t so long ago that the speed of these locomotives frightened him, but now, rocking back and forth on his seat in an anxious motion, he is trying to urge the train to move faster. But he is conscious of another problem. It may not matter how fast he gets to London … for how will he get from there to St. Neots? He doesn’t have enough money left for another fare.

Meanwhile, Sigerson Trismegistus Bell is standing on the platform at Waterloo Station, dressed in his bright green tweed frock coat and red fez, holding a big brown canvas bag. He is tapping his foot, waiting patiently, his question-mark shape and colorful attire evident from everywhere in the station (and likely for several miles in any direction). He is at exactly the spot where the third-class cars on the last morning train from Portsmouth will stop. He was here for the one before as well.

Finally, the right one arrives.

Sherlock spots the old man instantly and descends from his carriage with trepidation written on his face.

What does this mean? Is he going to make me come home? Or is it something worse?

“You know, my boy, I was much taken by that riveting tale you told me some time past about the mill in St. Neots that manufactures the only paper left in England with the mark of the two Fourdrinier brothers upon it … and your unlawfully breaking into the manor house nearby and what you saw there. I also recall that you disappeared for twenty-four hours at that time … without permission!”

He isn’t pleased.

“You were in error then.”

“I was?”

“Yes, and I’m sure your trip to the southern coast has confirmed that.”

“I have been meaning to ask you, sir, how did you know I wanted to go to Portsmouth?”

“Oh! It was the deepest deduction of the most convoluted kind.”

“Could you explain?”

“You have the eccentric habit – indeed you are an eccentric boy, never seen the like of it in another human being – of talking aloud to yourself. Whilst I was cautioning you to be silent to allow for the full effect of the bat adrenaline dripping into Professor Hanlon’s medulla oblongata, you were mouthing a single word over and over to yourself.”

“A word?”

“Portsmouth.“

“Oh.”

“You now want to go to St. Neots. And I have made a decision. It was a difficult one.”

How does he know where I want to go? It doesn’t matter. He has had enough of me and my ways. Just when I most need him. What does he have in the bag? My things? Is he moving me out?

“Oh, the bag? That is your dinner and supper, and perhaps enough to break your fast on the morrow as well. Pickled eggs, home-brewed ale with a very light alcoholic content, an onion, some leeks, a kipper or two, a doorstep of bread, and some thinly sliced rabbit. Step this way.”

My dinner and supper?

Waterloo Station is one of the busiest in London and even at this late-morning hour the crowds are thick. Folks of every class, soldiers and sailors and railway employees bustle about. Black top hats and brown caps and colorful bonnets float along the tops of the masses. Locomotives emit shrill, ear-splitting whistles that startle the ladies and bounce off the steel-girder and glass roof. The smell of grease and steam and sulfur hangs in the air.

The old man ushers Sherlock away from the long lines of platforms toward the arched openings in the brick wall, which lead out into the booking offices and the cavernous main hall with its high ceiling.

“This,” says Bell, as he presses two gold-colored coins into Sherlock’s hand while they almost run toward the doors that lead out to the street, “is for you. Get across Waterloo Bridge and take a hansom cab, or dash on foot, or whatever you choose, and be at King’s Cross Station as quickly as you can. The trains leave in St. Neots’ direction at thirteen past the hour, every other hour. You have enough for a cab, and a return fare, perhaps a little more. Your accommodations at St. Neots are another matter, up to your own discretion, though one has the sense that you may not spend much time upon a pillow tonight.”

“But how …” begins Sherlock as the cold air hits his face and the sounds of traffic burst into his ears.

“How did I again know where you were bound? It is the diagnostic doctor in me!” shouts Bell proudly. “In fact, it was my deduction that St. Neots was the scene of the crime from the start. I was rather disappointed in your analysis. You are too emotional! Why would they hold the girl in Portsmouth a second time – the city where the police had found her before! But there are still many holes in this St. Neots idea, my boy. It’s like Swiss cheese! Can’t say that I know what you will find up there. It may not be what you think. Now be off with you!”

“Can you come with me, sir?”

That guilty look passes across the old face again.

“Uh … nonsense … no, I have things I need to do.”

The boy is sure that Bell has no appointments for the rest of today, and none tomorrow. What is he up to?

Sherlock wonders if it has been wise to tell the old man all about the case. No one, absolutely no one, can be trusted. Malefactor once said that, and the boy believes it – it is one of the few tenets of the young crime boss’s philosophy that he accepts completely. Sigerson Bell is being far too nice, too helpful, and trying to lead him north. What, indeed, will be found at St. Neots?

Up on Waterloo Bridge, known to Londoners as the Bridge of Sighs due to the legions who leap from it to their deaths, he takes a few seconds to find the apothecary in the crowds moving on the footpaths south of the Thames below. The old man is easy to spot, even at a distance: scurrying like a big, bent-over squirrel, rushing home as if he cannot spare a moment.

Because Sherlock was at King’s Cross just a few weeks ago, it is easy to find the right platform for the train up to Cambridgeshire and St. Neots. He doesn’t have to devise plans to evade the ticket inspector, either. He sits possessively in his seat, watching northern London pass by, thinking about what he will do the minute he hits the ground in the north.

He also thinks about Paul Waller. Mr. Barnardo said the child had perhaps a week before he went blind, but it might be a day too, or he might be lost by now. Sherlock thinks of his own poor childhood … and of all that Mr. Doyle can do for him. There isn’t a second to waste.

But is St. Neots really where he should be going? What does he really know? He didn’t actually see anything in Grimwood Hall that confirmed a single thing. He saw two men and a woman, dark images, illusions, ghosts. Something, however, wasn’t right about what