Neville St. Clair did not help matters. “Honey! Hello! Um… good to see you!” he stammered in a most unconvincing tone.
Lilly St. Clair’s face hardened. “Neville, what is going on here?”
“Erm… could we, um, talk about it later? Perhaps after this nice gentleman puts me down?”
“Right now, Neville!”
“But really, darling, it’s not the sort of thing one discusses in polite company. Especially if any of these gentlemen are police. Are any of you police?”
“Yup,” said Torg.
“Perhaps I can be of service, Mrs. St. Clair,” I said. “Two years ago your husband was in this very neighborhood, researching his article on begging. Somehow or other, he discovered the smiff.”
“The what?” said Mr. and Mrs. St. Clair together.
Holmes laughed. “Oh, it’s a word I made up, meaning ‘a weird little area where magic leaks into our world and bends any nearby people into horrid shapes’.”
“Ah,” said Neville, guiltily. “That’s a good word for it.”
“Thank you,” said Holmes, beaming with pride.
I continued, “Somehow or other, your husband began experimenting with the smiff, bending himself into hideous shapes—”
But St. Clair cut me off. “I wasn’t experimenting! I was ambushed! There I was, walking down this glum little alley—horrified, because my article wasn’t going as I wanted. None of the beggars would talk to me; they didn’t trust me. So then I got some rags and tried it myself, thinking I could frame the article as a day-in-the-life-of story. But I must have done it poorly, for all the beggars and the locals knew I wasn’t really the genuine article. I got nothing. I was marching down that alley on the very point of giving up, not paying much attention to my surroundings. Suddenly, I stepped into… something… Oh, God! My head! It filled with a thousand voices, telling me secrets! Whispering! Screaming! My limbs were wracked with pain. I turned to run, but I fell down into the mud. Half running, half crawling, I made it back to the street. Only then did I see that my arm had twisted round behind my back and up over the opposite shoulder. And one of my legs was bent out sideways, which was why I fell when I tried to run. I cried out for someone to help me, but the first fellow whose attention I got just jerked back and said, ‘Jesus! Would you look at this one, Charlie?’”
“Who’s Charlie?” Holmes wondered.
“His friend. They were down having a drink at that pub over there, I think. Well, Charlie got a look at me and said, ‘Bloody hell! Best one ever!’ and threw me a shilling. I begged him to help me. He said he was trying to and threw down another shilling and a handful of coppers. By this time, my cries had attracted the attention of some of the other locals, who gathered round and agreed I was deeply unfortunate and the best beggar they’d ever seen. I kept asking for aid and they kept throwing pennies and half pennies. It went on like that for almost an hour. Finally, I realized I was to have no help at all. What should I do? I went back down in the alley to see if I could come to understand what had afflicted me so. I didn’t think to bring the coins with me, but one of the more caring locals gathered them all up and put them into my pockets for me before I left. Well, I went back to the smiff—as you call it—and started dragging myself all around it. Such a strange light! I could not say the color. I could hear voices in strange languages, but I could not understand them. Finally, in desperation, I pulled myself back through it in the other direction. The voices came into focus. The secrets made sense. And when I drew myself out the other side, I found my limbs were their right shape again. Not only that, I had made 26s 4d in my accidental career as a beggar.”
“I know doctors who don’t make that much in an hour,” I said, then recoiled as I realized, “Oh! In fact… I am one.”
“Now that would make a good article!” said Holmes.
“And so it did. Of course, I omitted certain details.”
“Of course,” Holmes conceded.
“But the article sent shockwaves through London. Why, I thought my career as a journalist was finally taking off!”
“Yet, it did not,” I pointed out—rather more rudely than I meant to. I gave a little cough of apology.
Neville St. Clair fixed me with a level stare. “No. It did not. My next article was highly anticipated, but not very well received. Made more of a ripple than a shockwave, I fear. The one after that: not even a ripple. All the sky-high offers from the city’s editors dried up at once. I had no idea what to do! All that was left to me was the glum realization that I could make far more as a beggar than a writer.”
“Which,” I said to Mrs. St. Clair, “he decided to do.”
“Well, I had to do something, didn’t I?”
“And thus, Hugh Boone was borne,” I declared. “For almost two years, Neville St. Clair took the train into the city every morning, arrived at his place of employment—the storage room he rented over The Bar of Gold. There, he would change into his begging rags, climb down the ladder he’d had attached, wander through the smiff and get himself bent into whatever shape he thought might be most lucrative. When he was done begging, it was back into the alley, through the smiff, up the ladder, into his street clothes and home in time for dinner. It might have gone on forever, if not for a strange happenstance: you, Mrs. St. Clair, and the package you needed to pick up at the Aberdeen Shipping Company.”
“So that was you I saw in the upstairs window,” Mrs. St. Clair cried.
“Of course it was,” said Neville. “By God, I was horrified! What could I
