Eye of the Crow (8 page)

“And I’m a Jew, a poor one.”

“A Jew?” There is hesitation in the accused man’s voice.

“Lower half Jewish, upper half English … respected part disowned.”

“That is not good.”

“Precisely.”

Sherlock can hear the Arab sigh.

“Why do they suspect you?” he asks.

“Because you spoke to me.”

Sherlock hears another sigh.

“I am sorry.”

“And because I’ve been to the murder site … twice.”

“You have?”

“I followed the crows.” Sherlock pushes his face up tightly against the bars, trying to see more of his jailmate.

“Crows?”

“They landed right in the alley,” muses the boy, seeing the scene again.

“They’re …” murmurs the other, “they’re
omens.
I saw some circling above the Old Bailey.”

Sherlock is still remembering that last frightening trip to Whitechapel. “I went back a second time … because I pieced something together.”

“What do you mean?” A tiny tone of hope returns to Mohammad’s voice.

Sherlock doesn’t answer at first. But if his listener could
have seen him, he would have noticed a pleased expression beginning to spread across his face.

“Say that again,” Sherlock demands.

“I merely asked a question.”

“No, before that, about the crows.”

“That I saw them.” It had seemed like an innocent remark.

“And you said where?”

“Above the Old Bailey.”

There is a long pause.

“Mr. Adalji, I don’t think you committed the murder. I believe you.” Sherlock’s voice is matter-of-fact.

There is a short burst of laughter. “You are a strange young man, Master Holmes.”

“I know.”

“You will have to explain.”

“Not until you do.”

They stand shoulder to shoulder on either side of the wall, looking at each other’s hands gripping the bars: dark ones and pale ones.

“I will tell anyone who will listen, Master Holmes.”

“I am listening,” responds Sherlock.

The brown hands tighten on the bars.

“I am a butcher’s apprentice. I came to England from Egypt with my parents when I was eight … for a better life. I am good with a knife.”

Sherlock gulps.

“But I use it just to slice and carve the meat. My boss is Muslim too, of course, and we work only with blessed,
Halal cuts. He makes me work late into the night, and on the evening when the lady was killed, I had a delivery just after sunset. It was to a soup kitchen near where she was attacked. I push a heavy cart with big wooden wheels and it’s difficult to turn sharply sometimes. I tried a shorter route on my return and went down the wrong street. It’s easy to do in Whitechapel when night falls. I realized it halfway. So I turned around in that alley … the one where it happened. I had trouble with it, had to nose the cart back and forth several times. I remember I was in a rush. I built up a sweat, and then went as hard as I could go back home.

“Part of my job is cleaning up afterwards, after the butcher and the others are gone. He’s a taskmaster, he is. I’m often there past midnight. That night was no exception, and as I was cleaning everything up, I came to the knives. I always do them last. Well … one knife, the big one
… it wasn’t there.”

Sherlock feels a shiver.

“I looked high and low, but it was nowhere to be seen. I wondered if I had mistakenly taken it with me on my delivery. So, I started retracing my steps in my head. There was only one place where I had done anything unusual: I’d turned around in tight quarters in that alley. It wasn’t far from the shop.

I ran out into the darkness. There are some strange folk out of doors at night in London, Master Holmes. I ran with all I had to the alley. It was pitch black like a tunnel. It gave me the frights. I inched my way down there, feeling around with my boots, hoping to find the knife. Then …”

Mohammad’s voice cracks. Next door the long, white fingers grip the bars.

“Then … I crouched down and felt around on the ground at about the spot where I figured I’d turned, where the knife was most apt to be. My hands were soon in a puddle … but it hadn’t rained that night, Master Holmes. And the liquid … I thought it was water at first … was thick.”

Mohammad pauses again.

“I felt her hair first … then her face … her open mouth…. I knew she was dead … I knew it was blood…. I stood up. And when I did, my shoe hit something. It clinked on the stones. I leaned over and felt for it. I knew what it was …
it was my knife.”

Sherlock’s eyes widen.

“I know now it was stupid, but I picked it up. I figured, I just figured that if anyone found my butcher’s knife next to a dead woman … a knife belonging to an Arab … they’d hang me without asking one question. So I grabbed it and ran.”

“Bloody footsteps all the way to the butcher’s,” says Sherlock without emotion.

“Yes. I was too scared to think straight. I just locked all the doors and slept in the little room the boss keeps for me, the knife in a rag under my coat, not thinking that I’d made a path to my door. The constables on the scene the next morning followed the trail right to me … and the knife.”

Sherlock lets the story sink in. He is trying to fit it into what he knows.

“I didn’t do it,” repeats Mohammad, his voice cracking.

“I know.”

“But you think I will hang.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you
must
think it. How could anyone think anything else?” His despair is deepening. “There’ll be no barrister to defend me. They have me! They have all the evidence and it is all against me. I have less than three weeks to live.”

“I may have a clue,” says the boy, lowering his voice as a jailer walks by. He pauses. “Something that may explain what really happened.”

“In the name of Allah, tell me.”

“Back home under the mattress on my bed …” Sherlock speaks under his breath again and looks around his cell as if worried that the very walls are listening, “… I have an eyeball.”

“An eyeball?” asks Mohammad.

THE UNUSUAL GIRL

S
herlock won’t say anything more. He doesn’t think it wise. It is dawning on him that there is something suspicious about the fact that he’s been placed in this cell right next to Mohammad Adalji. When he mentioned the eye he spoke quietly and cautioned his new friend to lower his voice and say nothing more.

The police are listening. He is sure. He hopes he hasn’t said too much already. He examines his cell in more detail: there are tiny holes in the ceiling; little cracks in the wall; he is imprisoned near the door that leads right to the office.

The boy spends the day lying on his stone bed trying to understand his situation. It is difficult to concentrate. He is frightened. The Arab is indeed going to die. And here
he
is, helpless: associated with an open-and-shut murder case. What are they going to do to him? What
can
they do to someone held on suspicion of withholding evidence? They’ve imprisoned him, haven’t they? And they aren’t letting him go. But what if it’s even worse?
What if they think he and Mohammad killed that woman together?
He feels his stomach burn.

Oh, God.
As the day wears on, his spirit sinks as low as the new London sewers. The Arab’s desperate prayers fill the cells.

Every time Sherlock thinks of his mother and father he looks to the door hoping to see them. He wants them here, to hug him and tell him it is all a dream. He thinks of how desperately upset they must be. But the jail begins to grow dark and they don’t appear. It doesn’t make sense. Why aren’t they coming?

“Jailer!” he finally shouts, rising to his feet.

The stern-looking turnkey moves slowly toward him.

“Why aren’t my mother and father …?”

“Perhaps they’re busy,” the man growls.

It’s obvious … his parents aren’t
allowed
to visit. He explodes.

“You can’t keep them from me! You can’t keep me here!”

The jailer walks away.

Sherlock falls onto the bed, shaking.
Control yourself,
he thinks. He must reason this through.
Do they really believe we killed her together?
He slows his breathing. They charged Mohammad with murder, not him. Why are they trying to break him down and why spy on him? Don’t they already have what they need to hang Adalji?

And then it dawns on him. He puts the facts together … how the police are treating him, their focus on the purse when they questioned him, all of it. Everything becomes clear.

He mumbles to himself as he lies on the bed, knees drawn to his chest.

“They think they know
exactly
what happened.”

He can see it now.

“I wasn’t
really
arrested for withholding evidence. I’m not being held in jail for that, or for murder. They think I’m guilty of something else.”

He knows their theory.

“We’re thieves and work together…. The Arab is bigger and good with a knife, he was simply meant to scare her with it … I was young, fast, and street-wise, meant to snatch the treasure and make off with it … the Jew’s job. But our robbery went badly. She struggled and the Arab killed her. I fled with the purse. I hid it somewhere in a hurry and I keep going back to the area to get it, but haven’t retrieved it yet.
That’s
what they think! That’s why they’re holding me in jail without visitors and why they placed us beside each other. They want to see if I’ll let something slip about the purse to Mohammad, or better still, confess…. Then they will have the Arab, the half-breed,
and
the money.”

Strangely, for an instant this discovery actually makes him feel a little better. Now he has two clues: the glass eye and an understanding of the authorities’ motives. He isn’t entirely helpless anymore. He has lit a small candle, however dim, at the entrance to the tunnel of this mystery.

But what consolation is that? Doesn’t this mean they think Sherlock an accessory to murder? Can’t they put him
to death
for it? He won’t have a barrister, either. They can
hang boys at thirteen!
He curls up into a ball on the bed, petrified. What hope does he have now? Nothing can ever give him hope again.
But he is wrong. The very next day, hope comes into the jail in the form of a girl.

She arrives about noon, accompanied by her father.

A turnkey and a constable strut up to Mohammad’s cell. They take him out. The constable holds a pistol cocked and pointed; the turnkey binds the prisoner’s hands behind his back and shoves him onto a chair. There, his feet are strapped to the wooden legs. They push him, chair and all, back into his cell.

“Mr. Andrew C. Doyle,” bellows the jailer, “and his daughter, Irene, with express permission of Scotland Yard.”

The large man with the big walrus mustache and well-cut tweed suit doesn’t interest Sherlock. The girl doesn’t either, at first. They pass him. The man’s eyes, brimming with kindness, never stray from Mohammad in the next cell, but the girl notices Sherlock through his barred window. She glances his way: just a glance. There are questions in her face.

The boy goes back to his bed and sits on it, listening.

“Good day, Mr. Adalji, I am as announced,” says the man in loud but friendly tones that are obviously meant to soothe.
Slight Scottish accent,
thinks the boy,
raised in the Edinburgh area, came to London in his teens, religious, a freethinker, and a respected philanthropist.
Sherlock sizes him up in an instant. The boy is especially glad of his skill of analysis now. As of today, it will be very important to know
others well and imagine what sort of threat they might be. He has made it a point to study traits such as accents, even how they fade after people settle in London. He can tell many things by the tone of the man’s voice, the fact that he is in a jail speaking with a foreigner accused of murder, and his clothes. He is a spiritual man (though perhaps a dissenter), holds certain political views, wants to help others, gives to the poor.

“This is my daughter, Irene.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” she says kindly.

The boy imagines her sitting on the stone bed next to her well-groomed father, looking sympathetically into the eyes of the poor accused murderer. She’d floated past in an instant, but Sherlock recalls her perfectly.

“I am with The Society of the Visiting Friends of London,” begins Mr. Doyle. “We comfort the unfortunate, the guilty, the falsely accused, whatever you are, sir. We go into the rookeries, the jails, and opium dens. I read about your case in
The Times
and was given special permission to see you. We are simply here to talk. We will not judge you. Everything said between us will stay between us.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“That is between you and God. We are your friends.”

The girl is tall for her age. Sherlock likes that. She has long blonde hair that curls at the top and runs down the back of her neck in thick, shining waves; and dark brown eyes, darker than his own gray ones. Her clothes are plain: a white blouse frilled a little near the neck where a red ribbon is tied, a beige woolen shawl, a dark cotton dress that hangs
down almost to the top of her black boots, no crinoline. She seems about his age. He likes that too. He wonders what questions she had when she looked at him. And he wonders why she and her father don’t judge Mohammad Adalji.