Vanishing Girl (27 page)

Sherlock does so.

“Then drop down to the ground and roll away!”

Sherlock slides out of the grip and rolls when he hits the cobblestones.

“Jump to your feet, take a balanced position, and measure your distance. Then strike your opponent with an oriental martial arts kick to the temple.” At the time, Bell had performed the feat as quickly as a cat and smacked another skeleton’s skull.

Sherlock pivots, dips his hips, and drives the point of one of his heavy Wellington boots into the thug’s temple. The man drops like a stone. But the boy doesn’t wait to see if he rises.

“Then …
RUN
!!!” Bell had screamed in his high-pitched voice.

Sherlock is off to the races again. He rips down the little cobblestone street and takes the first turn. As he does, he glances over his shoulder and notices someone peering around the corner near the fallen man, as if motioning for him to get up and pursue. It looks like a tall boy in a black tailcoat, and there seem to be a couple of others near his side, one blond, the other dark.

But Sherlock doesn’t allow himself more than a passing glance – he is likely imagining those figures anyway. Within minutes, he somehow finds his way directly to the railway station. Perhaps it is his good sense of direction, now regained, or perhaps fear sends him where he needs to go.

There are many daily trains to London and he is on the next one. He huddles on the wooden bench. As the train pulls out, he thinks about what he’s learned.

There were two men and a girl here, and possibly a local man pulling strings. They used a middle-class neighborhood, not suited for hiding a prisoner. They were only in the house for part of a day, just for hours, or perhaps minutes because they didn’t even go upstairs to the bedrooms. She didn’t try to flee. On that very morning, an anonymous telegram was sent to Scotland Yard. The two men were conveniently gone when the Force arrived, though the police got here on the fly. Did someone intentionally draw Lestrade’s men to Portsmouth?

But all this reasoning doesn’t reveal anything about
who
they are or
where
they are now. And it doesn’t mean Captain Waller was involved. He seems to have a secret and bears a grudge against Rathbone – so he has a motive. But that doesn’t mean he had anything to do with the crimes.

Sherlock wishes that love note had actually said something. He pulls it out of his pocket to crumple it up and throw it across the half-empty carriage. As he does, he takes one last disdainful glance at it. At that instant the train bursts out from under the station roof into the sun. Its bright rays shine through his window and he catches a glimpse of something on the paper.

A watermark.

It is the barely detectable outline of two faces
.

T
wo men and a woman in Portsmouth … two men and a woman at Grimwood Hall!
They indeed used the port city as a diversion! Sherlock Holmes is wishing that the train went right through London and on to St. Neots. It wasn’t so long ago that the speed of these locomotives frightened him, but now, rocking back and forth on his seat in an anxious motion, he is trying to urge the train to move faster. But he is conscious of another problem. It may not matter how fast he gets to London … for how will he get from there to St. Neots? He doesn’t have enough money left for another fare.

Meanwhile, Sigerson Trismegistus Bell is standing on the platform at Waterloo Station, dressed in his bright green tweed frock coat and red fez, holding a big brown canvas bag. He is tapping his foot, waiting patiently, his question-mark shape and colorful attire evident from everywhere in the station (and likely for several miles in any direction). He is at exactly the spot where the third-class cars on the last morning train from Portsmouth will stop. He was here for the one before as well.

Finally, the right one arrives.

Sherlock spots the old man instantly and descends from his carriage with trepidation written on his face.

What does this mean? Is he going to make me come home? Or is it something worse?

“You know, my boy, I was much taken by that riveting tale you told me some time past about the mill in St. Neots that manufactures the only paper left in England with the mark of the two Fourdrinier brothers upon it … and your unlawfully breaking into the manor house nearby and what you saw there. I also recall that you disappeared for twenty-four hours at that time … without permission!”

He isn’t pleased
.

“You were in error then.”

“I was?”

“Yes, and I’m sure your trip to the southern coast has confirmed that.”

“I have been meaning to ask you, sir, how did you know I wanted to go to Portsmouth?”

“Oh! It was the deepest deduction of the most convoluted kind.”

“Could you explain?”

“You have the eccentric habit – indeed you are an eccentric boy, never seen the like of it in another human being – of talking aloud to yourself. Whilst I was cautioning you to be silent to allow for the full effect of the bat adrenaline dripping into Professor Hanlon’s medulla oblongata, you were mouthing a single word over and over to yourself.”

“A word?”

“
Portsmouth
.“

“Oh.”

“You now want to go to St. Neots. And I have made a decision. It was a difficult one.”

How does he know where I want to go? It doesn’t matter. He has had enough of me and my ways. Just when I most need him. What does he have in the bag? My things? Is he moving me out?

“Oh, the bag? That is your dinner and supper, and perhaps enough to break your fast on the morrow as well. Pickled eggs, home-brewed ale with a very light alcoholic content, an onion, some leeks, a kipper or two, a doorstep of bread, and some thinly sliced rabbit. Step this way.”

My dinner and supper?

Waterloo Station is one of the busiest in London and even at this late-morning hour the crowds are thick. Folks of every class, soldiers and sailors and railway employees bustle about. Black top hats and brown caps and colorful bonnets float along the tops of the masses. Locomotives emit shrill, ear-splitting whistles that startle the ladies and bounce off the steel-girder and glass roof. The smell of grease and steam and sulfur hangs in the air.

The old man ushers Sherlock away from the long lines of platforms toward the arched openings in the brick wall, which lead out into the booking offices and the cavernous main hall with its high ceiling.

“This,” says Bell, as he presses two gold-colored coins into Sherlock’s hand while they almost run toward the doors that lead out to the street, “is for you. Get across Waterloo Bridge and take a hansom cab, or dash on foot, or whatever
you choose, and be at King’s Cross Station as quickly as you can. The trains leave in St. Neots’ direction at thirteen past the hour, every other hour. You have enough for a cab, and a return fare, perhaps a little more. Your accommodations at St. Neots are another matter, up to your own discretion, though one has the sense that you may not spend much time upon a pillow tonight.”

“But how …” begins Sherlock as the cold air hits his face and the sounds of traffic burst into his ears.

“How did I again know where you were bound? It is the diagnostic doctor in me!” shouts Bell proudly. “In fact, it was my deduction that St. Neots was the scene of the crime from the start. I was rather disappointed in your analysis. You are too emotional! Why would they hold the girl in Portsmouth a second time – the city where the police had found her before! But there are
still
many holes in this St. Neots idea, my boy. It’s like Swiss cheese! Can’t say that I know what you will find up there. It may not be what you think. Now be off with you!”

“Can you come with me, sir?”

That guilty look passes across the old face again.

“Uh … nonsense … no, I have things I need to do.”

The boy is sure that Bell has no appointments for the rest of today, and none tomorrow.
What is he up to?

Sherlock wonders if it has been wise to tell the old man all about the case. No one, absolutely no one, can be trusted. Malefactor once said that, and the boy believes it – it is one of the few tenets of the young crime boss’s philosophy that he accepts completely. Sigerson Bell is being far too nice,
too helpful, and trying to lead him north. What, indeed, will be found at St. Neots?

Up on Waterloo Bridge, known to Londoners as the Bridge of Sighs due to the legions who leap from it to their deaths, he takes a few seconds to find the apothecary in the crowds moving on the footpaths south of the Thames below. The old man is easy to spot, even at a distance: scurrying like a big, bent-over squirrel, rushing home as if he cannot spare a moment.

Because Sherlock was at King’s Cross just a few weeks ago, it is easy to find the right platform for the train up to Cambridgeshire and St. Neots. He doesn’t have to devise plans to evade the ticket inspector, either. He sits possessively in his seat, watching northern London pass by, thinking about what he will do the minute he hits the ground in the north.

He also thinks about Paul Waller. Mr. Barnardo said the child had perhaps a week before he went blind, but it might be a day too, or he might be lost by now. Sherlock thinks of his own poor childhood … and of all that Mr. Doyle can do for him. There isn’t a second to waste.

But is St. Neots
really
where he should be going? What does he
really
know? He didn’t actually see anything in Grimwood Hall that confirmed a single thing. He saw two men and a woman, dark images, illusions, ghosts. Something, however, wasn’t right about what he saw, and he is
certain that the girl was
never
held in Portsmouth. Then there’s Captain Waller’s St. Neots stationery. Yes, everything points northward.

But amidst all these puzzles, one rises above the others. It concerns the conduct of the kidnap victim herself. He keeps thinking about her unusual ways at the family dinner table and of her leaving home alone just past dawn the next morning.
What role is Victoria Rathbone playing in this strange drama?

This time he takes the train all the way into the little brick station at St. Neots. There are only two tracks and platforms, one going north, the other south. A railway employee is nailing green, sharp-leafed holly on the walls. Up above the entrance, the big, white-faced iron clock says it is just past three o’clock. Sherlock is itching to get going, but he has to be smart. It is December 2
^nd
, three weeks before Christmas, and there are still a few hours before it gets dark. Remembering the beasts or whatever it was that lurked on the manor house’s grounds and the vantage point that Grimwood’s three residents have on their surroundings through their windows during daylight hours, he decides it is best to approach the mansion under cover of darkness.

But there is something vital he should do in the short time he has left. Within half an hour, he is in the field by the Great Ouse River north of town, the paper mill pushing smoke into the cold air not far away. Penny Hunt will be coming home soon. He crouches down in the tall grass.

The sun is getting low when he sees her.

Shouldn’t an employed woman, a mother, be happy, perhaps whistling a merry tune?
But it seems she is never that way. She trudges forward, her head down. When she is close, he spots another bruise on her cheekbone. He rises. She almost screams, but then her face relaxes a little, just a little, for she is not pleased to see him again.

“Master Bell … or Holmes, isn’t it?”

“The same, Mrs. Hunt.”

“I am at least glad to see that you are still alive.”

“I seem to have eluded the curse of Grimwood Hall.”

Penny doesn’t smile.

“Why are you back, boy? I shall call the constable.”

“Please don’t.” He motions toward the hill. “I did indeed go up there last time, Penny … and I need to go there again.”

“No, you do not.”

“Those are just stories, legends.”

“People who live there and go there … die. A woman was murdered and a man was eaten alive. There are beasts loose on the grounds. That is
NOT
a story.”