The proprietor, or so I assumed him to be, nodded his head. “There are several berths if you wish to smoke, sirs,” he said in near-perfect English.
“What a stroke of luck,” Holmes smiled.
“I am Mr. Li. Please step this way.”
The outer door opened into a hallway, which after a flight of three steep steps became a narrow passage with beds built into the walls like berths on a ship, six pallets arranged in a rectangular formation on each side of the corridor. One old woman, with eyes set deep as wells and a long braid of lead-grey hair, looked to have just enough life in her to continue smoking the vile substance.
“Holmes, how on earth did you come to know of this pit?” I murmured.
“I make it my business to acquaint myself with a great many particulars,” he whispered.
Mr. Li waved us onward, for the corridor ballooned at its far end into a larger common room with a bed pushed against the wall and grass mats lining the floors. Gauzy hanging strips of tattered cloth, which had no doubt once contributed to an air of mysticism, now hung slick with smoke like the mud-soaked sails of a shipwrecked vessel. I could see other Englishmen in this chamber—two soldiers, lounging with elongated pipes dangling from their limp fingers, and a slack-jawed naval officer, whose hand traced lazy patterns in the thick air above him.
Mr. Li waved us over to a pair of grass pallets cloaked by the decrepit drapery. Holmes indicated we had time only for a four-penny smoke, and Mr. Li retreated to the stove, where a great mound of shredded opium simmered in a sieve set over a pot of shallow water.
“My dear Holmes, assure me that we have no intention of actually smoking this dross,” I mouthed as softly as I could.
“Never fear, Watson,” he returned equally quietly but with a mischievous grin. “You know my taste in self- poisoning to run quite in another direction.”
When Mr. Li had toasted two tiny portions of resinlike amber material and loaded it into pipes, he handed them to us and vanished. Holmes, to my dismay, placed the pipe between his teeth, but I soon saw he merely sought to free his hands and unfasten his watch chain. A gold sovereign dangled from the end of it, a relic of an earlier adventure,* and in a trice he had scooped the smouldering lump out of his pipe, dropped it to the floor, returned the stem to his mouth, and held a hand out for my own. This process he repeated with my pipe, and then he pulled out his pocket handkerchief and methodically restored the Queen’s golden visage to her former spotlessness. Finally, he picked up the cooled pieces with his handkerchief and deposited them in his pocket.
“I fancy that will do the trick. Care for another pipe, Doctor, or shall we call an end to this reconnaissance?”
“The latter, if you have seen all you need.”
“Then let us be on our way. Ah, here is the man I want. May I have a brief word with you?” Holmes asked Mr. Li, heavy-lidded and reserved.
Our host nodded, and we followed him to a side room off the entrance chamber where books and ledgers scribbled with cryptic characters covered the single small table.
“You see, sir,” Holmes began languidly, “our friend can hardly stop praising your business, and his words were more than justified. You do quite a commerce with soldiers, do you not, Mr. Li?”
“As you saw.”
Holmes placed a five-pound note on a yellowed ledger page. “In fact, while we settle up with you, I wished expressly to mention that our friend is being pursued by some very unsavoury characters—moneylenders, you understand—and is in hiding. I would like very much to help him if only I knew where he was. I wonder if, when he next drops in, you might find a moment to notify me? You would be rewarded, of course, for your time and trouble.”
“Your name, sir?”
“Basil. I was once a shipping captain, but I now own a small fleet,” Holmes said as he jotted down his address on a scrap of paper.
“And who is your friend?”
Holmes described Blackstone in detail, failing to mention any name.
Mr. Li scratched more notes upon his sheet, then straightened with a sigh. “Your friend does come here from time to time. Always alone. Always very popular once he arrives. Captain Basil, I make a great effort to help my customers. I make one request only, and that is truth. This business with your soldier friend—there is a possibility of violence?”
“That possibility exists,” Holmes assented, smiling briefly.
“I see.” He made another note. “In that case, Captain Basil, I must warn you that any violence occurring upon my property makes you liable to me.” He smiled at my friend in return. “I do not think you wish to be liable to me.”
I had not gone many paces up the dripping stairs to the street when Holmes remarked, “You dislike our new associate.”
“If you must know, I think the whole business proved him to be cunning and mercenary.”
“Oh, to the uninitiated, of course. However, I know that whole discussion of violence to have been entirely genuine. He is quite an eccentric character, Mr. Li. I have had dealings with him, though never in person, several times. He is a philanthropist, an opium purveyor, a Buddhist, and a tenacious enemy. The man was a renowned scholar in Peking. There was a little girl killed in this area not four years ago; Mr. Li found the culprit, a member of the Limehouse Forty Thieves gang, and I don’t like to tell you what became of him. He has done more in five years to relieve the area of gangs than Scotland Yard could do in twenty.”
“He is an ally, then? Why the absurd rigmarole with the pipes?”
“Business, my dear Watson, business! I’d never met the fellow in the flesh. There is a great deal of brotherly feeling amongst followers of that particular vice. If I am a client, I am on even footing with Blackstone. Otherwise, I am merely a swell or a plainclothesman. In any event, I wished a glimpse of the patrons.”
We reached the street just as the lamps were being lit, though I noted distressingly few in that locale.
“We had better trudge back to that portion of London populated by hansoms,” Holmes said. “I ought to have paid that fellow to wait. Your leg can manage it?”
“Certainly.”
“Then quick march, my dear fellow, spurred on by home, hearth, and the taste of future victory.”
The detective’s infallible sense of direction soon led into territory which, though unfamiliar, boasted English characters upon the sides of buildings. Holmes, deep in thought, strode forward with his aquiline profile straying neither to the left nor to the right, but I, as a man will do when he is in unknown terrain, looked about with curiosity at the deserted warehouses, which soon gave way to ramshackle tenements and the smells of a hundred suppers being prepared behind boarded windows.
I must have been so preoccupied with the scene that the first weary news vendor, hawking the last of his wares in a hoarse shout, failed to impress himself upon my consciousness. However, the second fellow, a taciturn youth with the face of a bulldog, held the front page up so determinedly that I glanced at the headline. With a cry of astonishment, I halted and fumbled through my pockets for a coin as Holmes broke from his reverie and returned to see what had startled me.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AT LARGE
While the police force in the district of Whitechapel has more than doubled since the discovery of Jack the Ripper’s grisly “double event,” it is regrettably still possible to fault the Metropolitan Police on one glaring miscarriage of public safety. As shocking as the citizenry will no doubt find it, the foremost suspect (and indeed, the only likely perpetrator identified thus far), the self-professed “consulting detective” Mr. Sherlock Holmes, is still at large and all too frequently to be found in the East-end. The reader ought not to feel guilty of a suspicious nature when he considers that Mr. Holmes attended the funerals of both the deceased, and is the subject of an active Scotland Yard investigation into his whereabouts on the night in question. These circumstantial matters appear black indeed when taken in conjunction with the discovery of a seemingly unrelated knife a few streets away from the depraved Eddowes murder. It is well known that Mr. Holmes was wounded in some manner on that night, and the discarded knife—clearly not the killer’s own, as it could not have inflicted her gruesome injuries—gives rise to the suspicion that Eddowes may well have concealed a weapon on her own person and was able to strike a blow to her assailant before finally succumbing to his evil designs. While no doubt the police are handling the inquiry around Mr. Holmes with due diligence, one cannot help but feel that the streets would be safer if his freedoms were more
