Dunlevy.”
“Why, of course!” she exclaimed. “The light must have dazzled my eyes. This way, if you please.”
We ascended a staircase draped in layers of cobweb and silt and crossed the hallway to an unmarked door. The landlady knocked.
“Come along, now, for there’s men to see you. Friends of yours, or so I’m told.” She favoured us with a sparingly toothed smile before descending out of sight beyond the staircase.
Without waiting for a response, Holmes gripped the knob and plunged inside and had seated himself in a nearby chair before our startled host, standing next to his open door, could venture to greet us.
“Though slowed by the thankless task of ascertaining your identity, Mr. Dunlevy, I have traced Johnny Blackstone back to his birthplace, his parents’ country farm, his primary school, his initial regiment, his transfer, his Egyptian service, and his disappearance. What I want to know is where he is. His regiment, his parents, and his dear sister are quite as eager to find him as I am. You are about to tell me every detail of your first encounter with Blackstone, omitting no microscopic facet no matter how trivial. I invite you, in fact, to glory in the trivial.” Holmes lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. “This agency runs on minutiae, Mr. Dunlevy, and you must furnish me with fuel.”
So began an interrogation which lasted the better part of four hours; however, it seemed to me (and, I have no doubt, to Stephen Dunlevy) to have gone on for days. Over and over again Holmes demanded he recount his story. Dunlevy somehow managed to retain his good humour, but I watched him grow increasingly angry at himself that his indiscretions that night had so far impaired his observation.
I was leaning against the door smoking, Dunlevy sunk in an armchair with his chin in his hand, and Holmes draped across another chair with his feet propped on the low mantelpiece, when my friend resumed a line of questioning I thought had been exhausted long before.
“From the time Blackstone met Martha Tabram to the time you left the Two Brewers, how much of their conversation were you able to catch?”
“Only what I have told you, Mr. Holmes. Everyone was shouting and no one taking heed of a word.”
“It is not good enough! Cast your mind back. You really must try, Mr. Dunlevy.”
Dunlevy screwed his eyes shut in concentration, rubbing a weary hand along the bridge of his nose. “Blackstone complimented her bonnet. He called it very becoming. He insisted on paying for drinks for her, and she knew they would be fast friends. They fell to tormenting one of the other fellows—an edgy private who’d had his eye on a girl for an hour and still hadn’t spoken to her.”
“And then?”
“He talked of the Egyptian campaign.”
“The words he used?”
“I cannot recall exactly. He used exotic language, vivid pictures…There was a tale about three cobras that seemed to amuse her very much. I could barely manage to—”
Holmes sat up in his chair with an expression of burning interest. “Three cobras, you say?”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
“You are sure of the number?”
“I would be prepared to swear it was three. Remarkable he should have encountered so many at once, but I confess I know nothing of Egyptian terrain.”
Holmes leapt to his feet and steepled his fingers before his lips, his countenance frozen but his entire posture vibrating with barely contained energy. “Mr. Dunlevy, the question I am about to pose is of paramount importance. Describe to me, as precisely as possible, Blackstone’s eyes.”
“They were blue, very pale in colour,” Dunlevy faltered, attempting to rearrange his features so that they did not imply my friend was out of his senses.
“Did he seem troubled at all by the light?”
“There was little enough light in the lairs we visited. One bright lamp in the White Swan, I believe. I remember he sat with his back to it, but they never lost their colour. Even in the darkest of the gin shops you could see his pale eyes shining out at you.”
Holmes let out an exclamation of unparalleled delight. Rushing forward, he began to wring Dunlevy’s hand. “I knew you could not have been thrown in our path merely to torment us!” He retrieved his hat and stick and made a theatrical bow. “Dr. Watson, our presence is required elsewhere. Good day to you, Mr. Dunlevy!”
I raced after my friend and caught him up at the corner.
“
“I am heartily glad of it.”
Holmes laughed. “I’ll own I was in a bit of a fit this morning, but surely you’ll overlook it if I tell you where we shall find word of Johnny Blackstone.”
“I confess that I cannot imagine any link between a man’s eyesight and his Egyptian exploits.”
“You, like Dunlevy, think the reference to three cobras a relic of foreign wars, then?”
“What else could it possibly mean?”
“As a medical man, the constriction of his pupils even during levels of very low illumination ought to suggest something to you.”
“On the contrary—cobra venom is a neurotoxin working on the muscles of the diaphragm and could have nothing to do with photosensitivity, or indeed any ocular symptom.”
“As usual, my dear fellow, you are both correct and misled.” He whistled stridently for a fortuitous hansom which had just rolled into view. “It will all be clear to you in a few minutes’ time, when I have introduced you to the Three Cobras, possibly the least savoury opium den in the whole of Limehouse.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A Narrow Escape
It was not a long journey down Commercial Road from Whitechapel to the tiny dockside realm of Limehouse, but the latter’s total dependence upon all things nautical made it a vastly different topography. Here the carmen were replaced by sailors, the market porters became dockside labourers, and the races as we approached the river grew ever more diverse. As the sun began to set over the lumbering Thames, I glimpsed from the window Welsh dockworkers, African stevedores, and Indian porters, all drifting in the general direction of hearth and home with a stop at the pub and two or three glasses of gin to sustain them on their way.
We turned abruptly onto a street, and all around us Chinese men and women, dressed immaculately in the British style, ducked in and out of shops marked only with the delicate slashes which served as writing in their native land. One young fellow, his pigtail tucked under a neat cloth cap and his fingerless gloves affording slight protection in the chill wind, pushed a child about in a tea leaf box which had been fitted with two front wheels, a back prop, and sanded handles.
Holmes rapped the ceiling of the cab with his stick, and the driver halted before a storefront identifying itself only by a crude picture of a steaming bowl. My friend leapt down with agile enthusiasm, tilting his head to our left toward the dampest, most soot-encrusted archway I’d ever laid eyes on. The businesses on either side, whose commerce I could not even hazard a guess at, boasted broken windowpanes patched with greasy brown paper.
“It’s just this way. Thank you, driver. And now, Watson, we would do best to keep our wits about us.”
Under the arch, we came upon a flight of mossy stone steps which led steeply down, under wooden slats and walls of grim brick, to a grotesque courtyard some three stories below the street at the level of the river. Seven houses sat in a semicircle, all constructed of rotting grey timber. My friend approached the sagging doorframe belonging to one of these and rapped three times.
When the door opened, a stoop-shouldered Chinese man with tufted silver brows and a peculiarly detached expression made a polite bow.
“I wonder, is this the establishment known as the Three Cobras?” Holmes ventured deferentially.
