The Sherlockian (19 page)

As they watched him recede into the distance, however, they saw a quickly moving black car come to a sudden stop in front of him. The man lowered his cell phone. He pulled open the car’s door and swung his wide frame inside the car in one continuous motion; it appeared surprisingly graceful for a man of his size. The car sped forward, growing larger in the taxi’s rear window. It was headed straight toward them.

Harold turned back to the driver. “Do you mind going a bit faster?” he said.

“Faster?” replied the driver. “Faster to where?”

“Wherever,” said Sarah. “Up that way. And faster.”

The driver shrugged again, and gave a knowing shake of his head.
Americans!

Behind them the black car weaved between lanes, aggressively making up the distance between it and the taxi. The side windows of the black car were darkened, so Harold couldn’t make out who else might be inside. His view into the car’s front window was obstructed by one intermediate car, and then another, until finally he managed to get a second’s clear view of the black car’s driver: a balding young man in a gray sweater, who sported an awful goatee.

Harold inhaled sharply.

“Holy shit,” was all he managed to say.

Sarah saw the Goateed Man at the same time as Harold did. She turned instantly toward the driver.

“Hi,” she began, “would you please make a right turn up at that light? Yes, right here.”

“Missus,” the driver replied, “what is going on?”

“Please turn
right here,
now!” barked Sarah.

The driver switched lanes and took the turn.

“I do not want to be part of any trouble,” he said as they headed south past Imperial College.

“Neither do we. So let’s try to avoid trouble as much as we can, all right, by making a sharp left up ahead.”

“I will drop you off at this corner here.”

“No!” interjected Harold. “We’re being followed.”

“Come on, now,” said the driver. “Time to get out.”

“Sir, I’m being completely serious. Look at the black car behind us. They’ve been following us since we got into your cab.”

The driver looked up into his rearview mirror. There were more than a few black cars.

“Why would someone follow you? What, you are a famous actor or something?”

“Actually,” said Harold as he thought the matter over, “that’s a good question. I’m not sure why
they’re
following
us
As far as I can tell, they’re the ones who have something we want.”

“So maybe I pull over here and you can go to figure out who is chasing who.”

“That’s not a bad plan,” said Harold.

Sarah looked at him strangely. “What?” she asked hesitantly, as if she were afraid of the answer.

“I have an idea,” said Harold. He reached into his wallet and removed a tight clump of bills. Without checking to see how much money he was handing over, he folded the clump and handed it to the driver. The cabbie looked pleased as he thumbed through the money.

“I need you to do one more favor for us,” Harold continued. “Speed up. A lot. Then pull a quick left up ahead, at”—he squinted to make out the street sign—”Fulham. Then stop abruptly, as soon as you can.”

The driver glanced down at his new wad of bills, then shrugged.
Whatever you say,
spoke his gesture.

As the cab accelerated, Harold could feel his back press into the cushioned seat. He looked down to find his hands, of their own accord, gripping the seat below.

The cabbie swung the wheel to the left, diving into a gap between the oncoming cars, and Harold’s body was thrown to the right, against Sarah. He could feel her limbs tensing as the cab pulled the turn. When the car straightened itself, he tried to scoot himself politely away from her but ended up pushing with a hand against her upper thigh. She seemed not to notice.

The driver swerved the car to the curb and slapped the brakes with gusto. Without seat belts, Harold and Sarah were jerked forward against the divider. The car came to a stop.

“Wait here for a second,” said Harold as he exited the car. He stood outside the open door for a moment, waiting for the black car to pull the same turn and appear in front of him.

He didn’t have to wait long. After a few seconds, the car came hurtling through the intersection. But, unlike the cab, it had no plans to stop. It accelerated further as it straightened out on Fulham Street.

Harold, twitchy with adrenaline, stepped out into the street immediately in front of the oncoming car. He could see the confusion on the Goateed Man’s face, at the wheel, when he realized what had happened. For a long moment, as the car raced toward Harold, he began to reconsider his plan. If the Goateed Man wanted to kill him, he now had the perfect opportunity. All he had to do was keep his foot on the gas and Harold would be slammed against the front of his car. He could chalk the death up to a simple traffic accident, and no one would ever know the truth. Harold was playing a classic poker move against the oncoming car—he was paying for information, taking a calculated risk not for the purpose of winning but in order to learn something about his opponent. If he lived, it would be because the Goateed Man did not want to kill him. And that was important information. If he died, however . . . Well, Harold figured, if the Goateed Man really wanted to kill him, then he would have been killed already. Like Alex.

Harold could make out the Goateed Man’s grimace as he pressed on the brakes and yanked the car to the left, onto the curb. The metal screech of the wheels pierced through the midday traffic noise. The car turned to its side, front sticking out into the first lane of the street as it slid across the pavement. It finally stopped a few feet in front of Harold.

He looked directly into the face of the Goateed Man in the driver’s seat. The man scowled. Harold smiled. The Goateed Man wasn’t trying to kill him—in fact, he was going out of his way not to. Harold walked calmly up to the black car and knocked delicately on the passenger-side window.

There was a long, silent pause. The inhabitants of the car seemed not to know what to do. They had signed up for a car chase, not a polite tête-à-tête, and the change of activities was throwing them off their normal role.

Finally the passenger-side window slid down, revealing the man in the leather jacket inside.

“Yes?” said the man, his face glacially serene.

“You don’t have the diary, do you?” said Harold, coming to this realization only after he’d spoken it out loud.

The man said nothing while he considered the situation. This pause worried Harold; perhaps this guy was smarter than he’d hoped.

“You don’t have it either, then,” said the man as his face broke out in a broad smile.

Shit.
Harold had given up as much information as he’d gotten. But maybe this trade was worth it. If neither of them had the diary . . .

“You didn’t kill Alex Cale,” said Harold. It was not a question.

“You sure about that?” said the man. He reached into his coat pocket and removed a gun. He pointed it straight at Harold’s face. It appeared impossibly large as Harold stared down its barrel.

Harold’s resolve wavered. How sure was he, really, that this man didn’t want to kill him? Harold couldn’t think anymore. Logic collapsed. Cool, Sherlockian reason was burned up in the heat of his terror.

“I don’t have it,” Harold pleaded. “The diary. I don’t even know where it is. Or who took it.”

Suddenly the black car seemed to shiver. It sighed, then tilted slightly downward, sloping to the pavement away from Harold.

Harold looked over the roof and saw Sarah on the other side of the black car. How did she get there? He saw her rise from a kneeling position by the back tire: She’d punctured it. And, evidently, the front one as well.

“Cab!” she yelled at Harold. “Now!”

Looking down, he could see that the man with the gun was ever so briefly distracted by the commotion. Harold took the opportunity to run as fast as he possibly could.

He yanked open the cab door and flung himself into the backseat. Sarah was half a second behind him.

“Please go now anywhere as fast as you can!” shouted Harold at the driver. There was a recognition in the man’s face that something serious had happened. He didn’t ask questions, but instead threw the cab back into Drive and kicked at the gas pedal.

Harold looked through the back window. No one had gotten out of the black car. And it didn’t give chase. The black car sat motionless, leaning to its left against the curb.

Sarah revealed a small retractable knife in her palm. She folded the blade back into its shell and slipped it into her purse. She looked into Harold’s eyes with an impossible cool.

“So,” said Sarah, “how’d your plan work out for you?”

C
HAPTER 21

Virgil and Dante on the Shores of Acheron

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

—Dante Alighieri,

The Divine Comedy

October 30, 1900

Bram Stoker stood before Aldgate Station, examining the printed image in his hand. It was a three-headed crow, rendered in black ink upon a sheet of clean white paper. The crow’s beaks, in the image, were outstretched and open slightly, as if each were about to devour its own succulent prey. The eyes were hollow dots where the white paper showed through. The wings looked like single brushstrokes, or single slices of a knife. The image was menacing. Warlike. Murderous.

Bram handed the paper back to Arthur, who had been waiting in silence while his friend finished his examinations.

“A frightful beast, that one,” said Bram in regard to the image. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Nor I,” said Arthur with a sigh. “I haven’t a clue as to where it comes from or what it’s meant to represent.”

“Nothing nice, I’d wager. So you discovered these papers in Sally Needling’s rooms? And the Yard had described the same image as having been tattooed onto Morgan Nemain’s leg?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “and I can tell what you’ll want to know next. Did Sally Needling have the image tattooed on
her
leg as well? The answer, I’m afraid, we don’t have. The useless muffs from the Yard didn’t note anything about a tattoo in their report on the Needling case. But she was a good girl. From a respectable family. Having found her body in a Whitechapel alley was enough trouble for the police. They might have elected to omit a mention of a tattoo, to save the girl’s parents—and themselves, for that matter—a whole lot of bother.”

“Indeed. I gather that your impression of the Yard worsens with every passing day.”

“My God, man, they’re imbeciles! In four days I’m halfway to solving two murders, possibly more, that they’d given up on as lost long ago. They are wretched detectives.”

At that, Bram was forced to smile.

“It’s a good thing, then,” he said, “that we’ve such a master sleuth at our disposal.”

Arthur grimaced. He found Bram to be so flippant sometimes about matters of the utmost seriousness. But he needed the man’s help to once again navigate the East End, and so he held his tongue.

“My hope,” said Arthur, “is to find the tattooist who inked this design upon the leg of Morgan Nemain, and most likely upon the leg of Sally Needling as well. This image meant something to these girls. They kept these papers imprinted with the image, and at least one of them had it permanently inked onto her skin. Perhaps they told the tattooist what it meant. What it symbolized.”

“Have you given any thought to the possibility that the murderer himself drew the tattoo onto Morgan Nemain’s skin, after she died?”

“Lord, Bram, but isn’t that a gruesome thought? I don’t know where you get these ideas. No, I don’t find that a likely scenario. In the first place, the Yard man said that the tattoo had not been drawn recently. Moreover, if Sally was in possession of a stack of the same drawing, it seems most probable that whatever involvement these girls had with the crow image, they had it voluntarily, and they had it long before Sally’s murder.”

“Well reasoned, Arthur. But how do you intend to find the tattooist? There must be a thousand seamen in London who know how to apply ink to a hot needle.”

Now it was Arthur’s turn to smile. He stepped back and gestured to their surroundings. The midday din of Aldgate descended on them. Carriages rattled and banged their way down High Street. A gang of young boys kicked dirt into the air as they jostled one another and chucked pebbles at the passing horses. Beggars shook their rusted tins, and pickpockets followed quietly behind any man with a decent topcoat. And the stench, that horrid dead-fish stench, drifted across it all in gusts from the docks to the south. Arthur inhaled deeply, sucking in the putrid air and puffing it back out again between his grinning cheeks.

“ ‘Now put yourself in that man’s place,’” said Arthur. “ ‘What would he do then?’ Or, in our case, she?”

Bram frowned. “That’s a quote from something, isn’t it?”

“Yes. From A Study in Scarlet.”

“That’s one of your own stories!”

“Indeed. And it’s good advice, don’t you think? Come.” Arthur led Bram east away from the station, along High Street. “Imagine you’re a young girl, fresh-faced and twenty-six years of age, from a northern heath. You come into the city occasionally, for shopping, the theater, and perhaps the occasional suffragist lecture. You and your girlfriends have decided to burn ink onto your bodies, in order to symbolize something or other. Where do you go?”

“To the Strand. She would ask about in the shops there, the places she’d been before, about who in the city could draw the tattoo.”

“Close, Bram, but I fear not quite right. On the contrary, Sally would have gone anywhere
besides
the Strand. She wouldn’t want to be recognized in those familiar shops, asking around for a tattooist. What if her parents discovered her trip? What would they think? It would be a disaster.”

“But they say that painting on the body is becoming more common in these late days. I haven’t seen a British sailor
without
a burnt mark on his forearms in years. And, not that I listen to such gossip, but they say that even the Duke of York has been tattooed, that it was done up while he was in Malta.”