The Baker Street Boys - The Case of the Disappearing Detective (2 page)

For a couple of minutes, they stayed on the man’s tail. Sometimes they lost sight of him for a moment, as swirls of fog came between them, but they could hear the sound of his stick, so they knew he was still there. Then, suddenly, the clacking of the stick stopped. They looked at each other, then cautiously edged forward. A slight breeze lifted the fog a little, so they could see the pavement ahead of them. There was no sign of their man.

“Oh, no,” Beaver groaned. “Where’s he gone?”

“I dunno,” Wiggins replied. “Unless… Look – see that little alleyway.” He pointed to a gap between two buildings, so narrow that if he were to stretch his arms out he could have touched both walls at once.

“You reckon?” Beaver asked.

“Gotta be. Ain’t nowhere else he could have gone. Careful, now. If he sees us following…”

They crept into the alleyway. It had plain brick walls on either side, with no openings of any sort. After a few feet, it turned to the right. Wiggins tiptoed to the corner and peeped cautiously round. There was no one there. And no way out, except for an iron door set into the end wall.

“He must have gone through there,” Beaver whispered.

“He can’t have. It’s barred and bolted from this side.”

And indeed it was. Two heavy bolts at the top and bottom were secured with padlocks. Across the middle of the door was a thick iron bar, fastened with an even bigger padlock.

“We was wrong,” Beaver said. “He couldn’t have come down here after all.” He reached out and tested the door. It was solid. So were the padlocks.

Wiggins looked around, examining the rest of the alleyway for any sign of a secret entrance or trapdoor. There was none. Then he spotted something on the ground. “He
was
here!” he exclaimed. “Look.”

He held up what he had found. It was an apple core.

Beaver looked puzzled. “What does that prove?” he asked.

“It’s fresh,” Wiggins told him. “It ain’t even started to turn brown. It’s the apple what our man was eating.”

“What’s that s’posed to be?” Queenie asked scornfully.

“It’s a apple core, stupid,” Shiner told her, equally scornful.

Shiner was Queenie’s younger brother, which gave him the right to be cheeky to her – or so he thought. Queenie, of course, thought differently.

“Stupid yourself,” she retorted. “Any more of your lip and you’ll get a thick ear.”

Shiner pulled a face and stuck his tongue out at her.

“Or bed with no supper,” she went on – a threat that could usually be relied on to shut Shiner up.

He scowled and went into a sulk.

“Now then, now then!” Wiggins intervened. He pointed to the apple core, sitting on a grubby handkerchief on the table. The rest of the Boys were gathered around it. “That,” he announced solemnly, “ain’t just an apple core. That is
evidence
. Mr Holmes his self says so.”

“Cor!” said Rosie, the little flower girl, gazing in awe at the withered, brown object.

“No, not a core – evidence!” chortled Sparrow, the youngest and smallest of the Boys, pleased with his own joke.

Sparrow’s ambition for when he grew up was to be a comedian at the music hall where he sometimes worked as a call boy, telling the performers when they were due on stage and generally helping out. For practice, he was always making jokes. Occasionally they were funny; sometimes they were so awful that the other Boys threw things at him. This time they just groaned.

The Boys were all gathered in their secret headquarters, which they called HQ for short. This was a cellar, beneath a derelict and decaying old building, reached through a narrow passage off a side street near Baker Street itself. Its entrance was so well hidden that no one would guess it was there. This was where they lived together, free from adult interference, looking after themselves with occasional help from understanding friends, like Dr Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s companion.

They had furnished their HQ with all sorts of bits and pieces they had found on streets and dumps – stuff that people had thrown out. An old kitchen table stood in the middle of the room. It had lost a leg, but they had propped up that corner with a thick piece of timber, so the top was nearly level. Some things they had made, out of pieces of wood and old fruit boxes. The best piece of furniture was a wonderful armchair, which Wiggins had made for himself out of parts of other chairs, old cushions and pieces of wood and string. No one else was allowed to use it. When he had a particularly knotty problem to solve, Wiggins would sit in it and think, just like his hero, Sherlock Holmes. And, like Sherlock Holmes, he would suck on a big, curly pipe to help him think – though of course he never put any tobacco in it. He had tried once, but it had made him cough so much when he lit it that he had thought his lungs would burst, and the others had said his face had turned a very interesting shade of green.

On the wall above the chair hung a picture of Mr Holmes, which Queenie had found in a magazine. She had carefully cut it out and put it in an old frame, as a present to Wiggins. For herself she had framed a picture of Queen Victoria, looking very regal, with a small crown on her head. The Queen was celebrating her Diamond Jubilee that year, marking sixty years on the throne, and there were pictures of her everywhere in London. Queenie could hardly imagine what it would be like to even
live
for sixty years, but she knew it was a very, very long time. Like almost everyone in the country, she was pleased and proud that their Queen was still reigning over them.

Queenie was the leading girl among the Boys. She was nearly as old as Wiggins, and could be just as bossy. The younger ones looked on her like a mother, which sometimes annoyed her. She would have liked to go out with Wiggins and Beaver, doing jobs for Mr Holmes and having adventures, but the others needed her to look after them.

It was Queenie who cooked the Boys’ food on the old, black stove that had been in the cellar when they first moved in. None of the others could cook like Queenie, though sometimes they tried. Beaver had once managed to burn the bottom right out of her best pan, and Wiggins’s attempt at scrambled eggs had been so rubbery that not even Shiner had been able to eat it. Queenie suspected that Wiggins had done it on purpose – she said she couldn’t see how
anybody
could make eggs tough. Queenie was an excellent cook. She could turn a few scrag-ends of meat and a bag of old vegetables – begged from a friendly butcher and greengrocer at the end of the day – into a delicious stew.

Queenie’s mother had taught her how to cook when Queenie was quite small, and when her mother had become ill, Queenie had taken over the cooking for the family. That was when she had started looking after other people, and it had become a habit. Her mother, who had been very fond of books, had also taught her to read. When her mother was very ill, Queenie would read to her as she lay in her bed. Queenie still loved reading, and did her best to teach the other Boys. None of them, not even Wiggins, were as good as she was, and some of them found it hard, but Queenie persevered with the lessons, telling them that being able to read would always prove useful.

After Queenie’s mother died, her father had started drinking heavily, and beating her. When he started beating her little brother, Albert, too, they had run away, though they had nowhere to go. Beaver had found them sheltering in a doorway, afraid to look for help in case they were separated, or sent back to their drunken father. They had been relieved and delighted to find a new home with the Baker Street Boys. Soon after, Albert had found a job – as a shoeshine boy at Paddington railway station – and with it a new name, “Shiner”, which suited him much better than “Albert”.

Shiner was now about eleven or twelve years old, a born rebel with a temper that often got him – and sometimes the other Boys – into trouble. He could be stubborn and selfish, but he had his good side, too: he was brave in the face of danger, and he could always be relied on to see any job through, no matter how hard it was.

Shiner was a quick lad with sharp ears, good at listening to his customers as he polished their boots and shoes, and picking up useful gossip. He had once overheard a respectable-looking businessman (who, incidentally, had been wearing an expensive pair of elastic-sided brown boots) telling another man about hiding stolen jewels in the station’s left-luggage office. Shiner had reported this to Wiggins. Wiggins had reported it to Mr Holmes. And Mr Holmes had been able to catch the thief, recover the jewels and hand both over to Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.

Shiner had basked in everyone’s praise at this triumph. But he had spoiled things by not wanting to share the reward with the other Boys. Queenie, however, had soon put a stop to that, and they had all enjoyed a blow-out feast that left them feeling full for days.

Now, Wiggins was explaining about finding the apple core, and how the big man had vanished without trace. “Like a puff of smoke,” he said.

“I seen that done at the theatre,” chipped in Sparrow. “They has this powder in a little tray, and when you put a spark to it, it goes up in a big flash.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Rosie asked.

“It makes a lot of smoke as well. And while the audience is still half blinded by the flash, the lady what’s got to disappear nips out and nobody sees her go ’cos of the smoke.”

“There weren’t no flash,” said Beaver solemnly. “We’d have seen it. Right, Wiggins?”

“What you on about?” Wiggins sounded exasperated. “Course there weren’t no flash. Nor no smoke, neither.”

“There was the fog…”

“Beaver!”

“Sorry.”

“This weren’t no conjuring trick. Mr Holmes said it was very interesting.”

“Was he cross with you for losing the man?” Rosie asked.

“No,” Wiggins replied. “I thought he would be, but when I told him what happened, and showed him that –” he pointed to the apple core “– he just said it was very interesting and that we done really well.”

“I can’t see how,” said Queenie. “What’s he want us to do now?”

“He says we’re to keep up the good work, and he gave me another bob. Look.” He held up another shiny shilling, then dropped it into the cracked china toby jug on a shelf near the stove, where they kept their meagre savings. The jug was shaped like the head of a man wearing a three-cornered hat and a black mask across his eyes. Wiggins said it was Dick Turpin, the famous highwayman. Queenie thought it was funny to have a robber looking after their money, but Wiggins always laughed and said there was nobody better.

“Well, we must be doin’ somethin’ right,” said Shiner, cheering up at the chink of the money in the jug and the thought of the food it might buy.

“We’ve gotta keep looking out for that man, and anybody else what goes in and out of that house,” Wiggins told them.

A sudden shout from the doorway made them all turn round.

“I seen him! I seen him, just now!”

Gertie, the last of the Baker Street Boys, had just pushed her way in through the sacking sheet that hung over the cellar entrance. Her green eyes were sparkling with excitement.

“Where? Where d’you see him?” Wiggins demanded.

“Out there, in the street. I was holdin’ this horse’s head—”

“You can’t hold horses’ heads!” Shiner interrupted. “That’s a lad’s job.”

“I ’spect they thought she
was
a lad,” said Rosie.

And indeed Gertie did look like a boy, with her ginger hair cropped short and ragged trousers reaching just below her knees, and she was well able to hold horses’ heads to stop them straying while their carriages were parked at the kerbside. She grinned, pleased by what Rosie had said, and continued. “I was holdin’ this horse’s head – a grey, it was, with a lovely long mane – when our man comes along and stands on the kerb right by me.”

The others gasped.

“Right by me,” Gertie repeated dramatically. “Then he hails a cab.”

“Where to? Did you hear where he was going?” asked Wiggins.

“Clear as a bell. ‘Driver,’ says he, ‘take me to Paddington railroad station, quick as you can!’”

“Paddington!” exclaimed Shiner.

“Railroad?” Beaver puzzled. “Why’d he say that?”

“Why were you talkin’ in that funny voice?” asked Queenie.

“’Cos that’s how he talked. You know what I reckon?” Gertie cried triumphantly. “I reckon he’s a Yankee!”

“An American, you say?” Sherlock Holmes nodded his head thoughtfully.

“That’s what Gertie thinks,” Wiggins replied. He was standing before the great detective in his rooms at 221b Baker Street, twisting his hat nervously in his hands.

Dr Watson sat near by, an encouraging smile on his friendly face, stroking his full moustache as he listened to what Wiggins had to say.

“And has Gertie ever heard an American speak before?” Mr Holmes asked.

“I dunno.”

“Could he, perhaps, have been an Irishman?”

“Oh no, sir,” Wiggins replied confidently. “She knows what an Irishman sounds like. There’s lots of Irishmen in London. ’Sides, her dad was an Irishman.”

“And there is the matter of terminology,” Dr Watson added.