Eye of the Crow (25 page)

After the man enters his house, Sherlock looks through one of the tall front windows. From there he can see much of the ground floor – a majestic dining room filled with gleaming furniture. He walks casually down the street and returns, then glances in the other front window and sees a wood-stained staircase leading upstairs.

He’s heard that there are never bedrooms on the ground floors of the rich. As dangerous as it is, he will have to enter one. That is where he will find the man himself. Moreover, if there is any evidence of guilt about, it won’t be in the areas of the house the rest of the family frequents. Sherlock isn’t sure how the rich live, but he has a feeling that unlike his poor mother and father, many wealthy husbands and wives sleep in separate bedrooms, in their own private worlds.

He has to go upstairs, find where the man sleeps or where his desk or study is, where he might keep something he wants to hide from others. If anything incriminating was in the villain’s possession when he left the murder scene, Sherlock is betting that it made sense for him to keep it, thinking at first that no one would ever dream of searching a Mayfair mansion, then within a day, knowing that an Arab would swing for the crime and he would never be a suspect. There would be a smarter time to destroy it, after the butcher-boy is dead and the case is closed.

Sherlock looks up at the house. There are five chimneys. He will get in through one of them. He heaves a sigh. It is nearly six o’clock. The whole family is home. The time has almost come.

Tonight!

CRIMINAL ACTS

S
herlock appears on the grand street that night like a shadow. He has taken off his shoes and blackened his ankles and the tops of his feet. He moves silently and stealthily, finds a house nearby that is easy to ascend – it has a little lane, and iron rungs on its side for laborers to use when repairing its roof – and in minutes has climbed to the top. He crosses three attached houses, up and down on the slanted surfaces above the top-floor servants’ quarters, with barely a sound. His feet pat gently on the tiles.

Soon he is on the one-eyed man’s roof

There are the chimneys. He chooses the largest one, which will take him straight down onto the ground floor of the house.

“In and out quickly,” he says to himself

It isn’t difficult to get on top of the brick column, but going down and coming back up will be hell. Just decades ago, most sweeps had been small children; but the climbing boys’ treatment had been brutal and exploitive. Now there are age restrictions. But even for the dirty, skeletal older boys and men who hold these jobs, climbing up and down
the barely foot-wide chimneys, like the one Sherlock peers down now, is a daunting task. He thrusts a hand inside. At least it isn’t hot, no recent fires. Being built like a starving man is, for once, going to be helpful.

He takes a deep breath and wedges himself in.

It is tight and claustrophobic, so much so that he thinks he’ll soon be squeezed to death or become stuck and then roasted in the morning. Somehow, he has to move downward. Twisting himself like a contortionist, he descends inch by inch, skinning his arms, his chest, and his legs. It seems to take forever. He can’t make a sound – he goes down through the interior of the house, all five storeys, past sleeping servants, owners, and children. His muscles begin to ache. He stops once and stares back up at the opening, wondering how he will ever go back up. Several times, he fears he’ll let go and fall, but finally, he lands safely.
He is actually inside the house.
His heart beats as though it will burst from his chest.

He is in the fireplace on the ground floor. In front of him stands the regal dining-room table, its mahogany surface covered with a white lace cloth, attended by five chairs, all carved in rich French style. Silently, he brushes the extra grime from his rags and the soles of his feet, removes the fire screen, steps over the grate, and avoids the coal scuttle. The steady tick of a big clock in the hall makes the only sound in the house. The long windows have dark drapes that hang to the floor, paintings cover the walls, ferns sit in vases, and his bare feet stand on a soft, ornate green carpet. Gingerly feeling a path around the table, he finds his way
into the hallway. Straight ahead is the morning room, to his left the big staircase, and to his right … the front door. Memorize it; the quickest way out in an emergency.

He turns to the stairs and places his feet carefully on the wide wooden steps, minimizing creaks. His legs are shaking, but he does it well and within seconds is on the first floor. He turns down the hallway. A drawing room full of furniture spreads out to the right.
Where is the master’s bedroom? Where is his study?

But he never makes it to either.

Edging down the hall, his breath coming in gasps, his sleeve brushes against a little round table. There is a jingling sound and something starts to fall. Frightened, he throws a hand out and catches it.

Sherlock stands stock still for a full minute, waiting to hear the sound of the house rousing, remembering the route down the stairs and out the front door.

But no one stirs.

What does he hold in his hand? It is a wooden container of some sort, the size of a snuffbox. Slowly, he opens it and slides his hand inside. It is a small ball … made of glass.

When Irene searched the directories at the library she had also checked for information about glass eyes. Though she hadn’t found much, she did learn the simple fact that they sometimes become cracked or nicked … and most people keep extras.

Has Lady Luck smiled on Sherlock tonight?

He kneels on the floor and pulls a match from his pocket, an essential tool of a thief. Malefactor had roughly
thrust a few into his hand as they departed that afternoon.

He lights it. He’ll only have a second and then the flame and its smoke will have to be extinguished.

There is the eyeball with its … pale blue iris.

It takes him an excruciating amount of time to get back up the chimney and onto the roof. It is a harder climb than he even imagined – several times he thinks he won’t make it. But he has to, so he does. Battered and bruised, blood on his rags, he actually smiles when he reaches the roof – he knows all he needs to know about this house and its owner. This gentleman is not his villain.

It is one of the other three.

He wants to keep moving quickly. Maybe that is careless, but he fears that the villain’s side may strike at any moment. The next morning, every dark-liveried coachman he sees in London terrifies him, compels him to speed up; his sense of being followed increases. There are three days left before Mohammad is condemned. He cases the next house in the afternoon and plans to enter that very night. But nerves begin to overwhelm him as he stands above the chimney. The fear inside him now seems greater than the rage. He is losing the smoldering energy needed to attempt these dangerous break-ins. The reality of it all is setting in.

But down the chimney he goes.

He need not have worried. Searching this house turns out to be easier than the first. When he arrives, the interior is so dark that he can’t locate his emergency exit. Trying not to panic, imagining how impossible it will be to find the evidence he needs when essentially blind, he goes down on all fours and finds his way through the ground floor to the front door. There: that’s his way out.

Once he is near it, he can see a little better: the moon shines brightly through a window in the stone-floored entrance hall. Just as he turns to move up the stairs and search the house, something catches his eye. Leaning against the wall beside the umbrella stand are two crutches. They are long and thick and obviously belong to a man: the owner of the house.

Sherlock hadn’t observed the gentleman outside his home that morning. During the short stretch the boy took to survey the house, the master hadn’t made a single appearance.

A pair of crutches? What could that mean? The man has either suffered a recent injury, or … Sherlock decides to look around. At first he doesn’t find what he is searching for, but after a few silent footfalls back into the dining room, he sees it: a photograph. It sits on the mantle over the fireplace. He takes it back to the entrance and examines it in the glow of the moon. There are five people in the picture: a woman, three children, and a gentleman … on crutches. Sherlock squints and looks down at the man’s feet. He has wooden legs.

It is elementary. This war veteran isn’t his villain, either.
He can’t have been the man who brutally murdered a healthy young woman strong enough to gouge out a man’s eye; he can’t have been the man who ran from the scene and leapt into that black coach with the red fittings.

Sherlock can go. But he doesn’t want to climb back up the chimney, doesn’t have the heart now. He is feeling overwrought and simply wants out.

And so he makes a careless decision. He retraces his steps to the door, unlocks it from the inside, and walks out the front steps onto the street.

He can’t bolt the door again from the outside. So he leaves it unlocked.

The next day, slithering through the narrow arteries of Soho, Sherlock hears something on wide Regent Street that almost makes him faint. It is the cry of a child, a young girl. He can hear her shouting above all other sounds in the din: “ARAB WILL SWING!”

She is repeating it at the top of her lungs. When he draws closer he can see her standing there in her soiled dress, about Irene’s age but much smaller, with straggly black hair and a dark complexion, deformed in size. She holds a clutch of the latest edition of the
Daily News.

Across Regent Street, a skinny boy is competing with her, yelling so loudly that Sherlock can hear his every word. “PENNY ILLUSTRATED!” he cries, surveying the crowds, anxious for a sale. “ADALJI’S TRIAL IN TWO DAYS!” He
holds his sheets high in the air. “DEATH SHALL SURELY FOLLOW!”

Sherlock can feel the blood drain from his face. Seeing this in black and white makes it horribly real. And the paper’s assurance of an immediate execution shoots another terror into his mind: if they hang Mohammad … what would they do to
him,
the accomplice? His pulse starts to race. They are
all
running out of time.