The Baker Street Boys - The Case of the Stolen Sparklers (9 page)

“That’s what I thought,” said Wiggins. “Wish I could find out what it said. Might be just what we need to know.”

As it happened, Wiggins’s wish was about to come true. Queenie had heard the telegraph boy arrive and knew that Mr Harper had taken the telegram upstairs to Gerald’s room. When she heard Gerald come down to the drawing room, she picked up her bucket of coal and climbed the stairs as quickly as she could and knocked on the door of his room, just in case. She waited a few moments and, when there was no answer, went in.

Putting the bucket down by the fireplace, Queenie quickly looked around, hoping Gerald might have left the telegram on his dressing table or writing desk, so she could read it. To her disappointment she could not see it anywhere. She even dared to slide open the drawers – taking great care not to leave dirty fingermarks – and peep inside. But there was no sign of it. She sighed and went back to make up the fire before she left. Kneeling down by the fireplace, she spotted a screwed-up piece of paper which had been thrown onto the coals but must have fallen off before it had caught light. She opened it, smoothed out the crumpled paper and read the heading: GPO T
ELEGRAM
. The message written underneath was short: “Tomorrow ten o’clock BHY. Be there.” Queenie caught her breath. She didn’t know what the message meant, but the signature at the end was familiar. It was a single letter: “M”.

“M!” exclaimed Wiggins. “Moriarty! I might have knowed.”

“Blimey,” Beaver said. “What’s Moriarty got to do with it?”

“Everything, I ’spect,” Wiggins replied. “No wonder it’s such a mystery if he’s involved.”

He sucked his teeth thoughtfully, then read the telegram again, trying to make sense of it. Queenie had done well. Quickly folding it up and tucking it in her apron pocket, she had hurried downstairs to the kitchen and outside, pretending she needed to fill her bucket again from the coal cellar. She had passed the piece of paper up through the railings to Shiner, and whispered to him to run back to HQ and tell Wiggins she had rescued it from the fire in Gerald’s room. Wiggins had been pleased to receive another clue, but he was puzzled by it.

“ Tomorrow ten o’clock BHY. Be there. ”
Wiggins read the message aloud and scratched his head. “ BHY, ” he said. “Wonder what that is? Does it mean anything to you, Polly?”

Polly shook her head. “No. Never heard of no BHY. And who’s this Moriarty feller anyway?”

“Professor Moriarty’s the king of criminals. He’s Mr Holmes’s most dangerous enemy.”

“Have you come up against him before, then?”

“You could say we’ve crossed swords with him once or twice.” Wiggins looked around at the other Boys. They all nodded solemnly.

“P’raps this time we’ll manage to nail him good and proper,” said Beaver.

“We gotta find ’im first,” Shiner pointed out.

“D’you think this BHY’s a place?” asked Rosie. “
Be there
, it says. Be where? At BHY, wherever that is, right?”

“Right,” Wiggins agreed. “Good thinking, Rosie. If we could work out what the letters stood for …”

“… we could suss it out and be there afore him!” cried Beaver enthusiastically. “And if he’s takin’ the jewels, we could see who he’s givin’ them to and jump in and grab ’em and…”

“Whoa, whoa!” Wiggins cut him off. “Hang on, Beav! We ain’t sussed out nothing yet.”

“Oh. No. Nor we ain’t.”

“Never mind, Beav,” Gertie said cheerfully. “That’s what we can do when we
have
worked it out.”

“BHY,” Wiggins muttered. “BHY… It’s like trying to play ‘I spy with my little eye’.”

“Yeah – with a blindfold on,” said Shiner gloomily.

“I’m gonna have to think about this,” Wiggins went on. “You lot better go to bed and let me get on with it.”

He went to pick up his deerstalker hat and pipe from the shelf where they lived. To his horror, they were not there. This was terrible – how would he be able to think properly without them?

“Where’ve they gone?” he gulped. “Mr Holmes’s hat and pipe? I gotta have ’em!”

The other Boys were aghast, knowing how important they were when Wiggins had a problem to solve.

“Oh, those old things,” said Polly. “I cleared them away when I was tidying up.”

“You didn’t … you didn’t chuck ’em out, did you?” Wiggins asked fearfully.

“No, course not. I put ’em in that box of clothes over there.”

Wiggins sighed with relief, dashed across the room to the box and rummaged inside it until he found the missing items. Pulling the hat firmly on his head, he gave Polly a stern look.

“Don’t ever do that again!” he told her. “Why are you always trying to tidy everything up? You ain’t our mother.”

Polly’s lips trembled and she looked as though she might burst into tears.

“I- I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I don’t have anythin’ else to do while you’re out all day. And I was only tryin’ to make the place nice for you.”

“Course you was,” Beaver said soothingly. “You didn’t have to shout at her, Wiggins. She’s only doin’ her best.”

The other Boys all agreed, and Wiggins backed away sheepishly.

“Sorry,” he grunted. “I didn’t mean to, er… Sorry. Go on, now, all of you. Get to bed.”

Wiggins flung himself into his special chair and prepared for another night of thinking. But hard as he tried, he couldn’t find an answer to the problem. When morning came he told the others that the only thing they could do was watch out for Gerald leaving Mountjoy House and follow him when he did.

“We’ll just have to let him lead us to wherever he’s going,” he said.

The fog had thickened during the night. As the Boys took up their positions in the street outside Mountjoy House, it lay over London like a woolly blanket. But unlike a blanket, it did not keep them warm, and they shivered in the morning chill.

“We’ll warm up when we start movin’,” said Sparrow, trying to stay cheerful.

“Can’t be no colder than hangin’ about ’ere,” grumbled Shiner. “I hope ’e comes out soon.”

“And he’d better not go too fast when he does,” said Wiggins. “Don’t want to lose him in this blooming fog.”

“Yeah,” Beaver agreed. “Can’t see to the end of the street. We’ll have to stick close to him.”

“Right, but not too close. He mustn’t know we’re following.”

“And not all in one bunch,” added Gertie. “We’d better split up into two lots, three of us in each.”

“Yeah. He’d be sure to notice six of us all together if he looked round,” Rosie said.

“All right, let’s split up now,” Wiggins told them. “Beaver, Rosie, Shiner, you go on the other side of the street. Sparrow and Gertie stay with me.”

They had only just separated when the front door of Mountjoy House opened and Gerald came out. He pulled on a pair of gloves, wrapped his scarf more firmly around his neck and set off at a brisk pace. The two groups of Boys followed, trying to look casual.

Keeping Gerald in sight was quite easy at first, since there weren’t many people on the quiet streets. When he reached Baker Street, with its crowded pavements, it became much harder, but the Boys still managed. Then he stepped out into the road, hailed a hansom cab and climbed into it. Wiggins was quite close behind him, but not close enough to hear the address he gave to the driver. All the Boys could do was trot along behind the cab and hope they could keep up with it.

Fortunately the traffic was heavy, as usual. The streets were packed with cabs and carriages, vans and omnibuses, and the fog made them all go slower than normal, so the Boys were able to keep the cab in view. Their only fear was that with so many cabs all looking the same, it would be easy to mix them up and follow the wrong one. From behind, they could not see Gerald inside it. But luckily the cabbie, perched high up on his seat at the back, had a big red scarf wrapped round and round his neck and mouth and they kept their eyes fixed on that.

Wherever Gerald was going, it seemed a long way. The cab headed east towards the City, past the shops and new department stores of Oxford Street and on for nearly two miles. They were not far from Newgate Prison and St Paul’s Cathedral when the cab – and all the other vehicles around it – came to a complete standstill in a massive traffic jam.

Wiggins pulled out his battered pocket watch and consulted it.

“Wherever he’s going,” he told Sparrow and Gertie, “he ain’t gonna be there by ten o’clock, unless he gets a move on.”

“Looks like he knows that,” Sparrow answered.

Ahead of them, Gerald had leapt out of the cab, handed some money up to the driver and set off on foot, almost running in his hurry. Signalling to Beaver and the others to cross over, Wiggins followed. They came to a shiny new red-brick office building, tall, ornate and glowing; the sign over the main entrance proclaimed it to be the headquarters of a big insurance company. For a moment, Wiggins wondered if this might be where Gerald was going – perhaps he, like Lady Mountjoy, was hoping to claim insurance money for the jewels. But instead of entering, Gerald walked straight past and turned into a small street alongside it. The Boys followed, as closely as they dared, and soon found themselves plunged into a maze of alleyways, with ancient buildings leaning out crazily over their heads.

Gerald obviously knew the area well, and he scuttled round its many twists and turns so quickly that it became more and more difficult to track him. The fog was thicker still in the narrow lanes, and soon it swallowed him completely. Trying to guess which way he had gone in the gloom, the Boys took a wrong turning and found themselves facing a blank wall.

“Oh, no!” wailed Rosie. “We lost him.”

“Don’t panic,” said Beaver. “He’s gotta be round here somewhere.”

“He must’ve gone the other way at that last corner,” said Wiggins, heading back. “Come on. Quick.”

After two turnings they came out of the alleyways into a wider street, where the fog was not so dense. Even so, they could see no sign of Gerald.

“He can’t have gone far,” Wiggins said. “We only lost him for a few seconds.”

“Where are we?” asked Gertie.

“It says ‘Hatton Garden’ up there,” said Sparrow, pointing to a street sign on a nearby building.

“Don’t look much like no garden to me,” said Shiner. “It’s all houses and shops.”

“Yeah, but look at the shops,” Rosie said. “They’re all jewellers.”

The Boys looked around them. Sure enough, nearly all the shops on the street were selling rings and necklaces and watches.

“And look at them geezers!” Beaver exclaimed.

Among the people standing or strolling around were several men dressed in black. Some were wearing fur bonnets, but most of them wore wide-brimmed black hats from which their hair hung down in curled dark ringlets. Under their full-skirted coats they wore white shawls with long fringes. They had tight stockings to their knees instead of long trousers. To the Boys, who had never seen anything like it before, they looked strange and rather sinister.

“Wiggins,” Rosie whispered, “have you noticed that one over there? I reckon he’s watchin’ us.”

The man she was talking about was standing in a shady doorway, a little apart from the others. Wiggins glanced quickly in his direction, trying not to let the man see him looking.

“Yeah, you could be right. Rum looking cove, ain’t he? Wonder what his game is. Wonder what they’re all doing, come to that.”

His question was answered a moment later when two of the men approached each other. They greeted one another warmly and began talking earnestly in a foreign language. As the Boys watched, one of them drew a fold of paper from his inside pocket and opened it on his hand to show its contents. The other man nodded, reached out and picked up something small from it. He held it up to the light, then inspected it through a small magnifying glass which he screwed into his eye.

“It’s a diamond!” gasped Rosie. “They’re sellin’ diamonds!”

“Now we know what Gerald’s doing here,” said Wiggins. “We must be in the right place.”

“If only we could find him,” said Beaver.

“Fat chance,” Shiner groaned. “ ’E could be anywhere.”

“That’s enough of that,” Wiggins said sharply. “Keep looking. He could be in any of these shops – spread out and look in all the windows!”

On Wiggins’s order, the six Boys separated and began working their way along the street as fast as they could. But they couldn’t see Gerald in any of the shops. They met up again on a corner, all shaking their heads.

“D’you think there’s any more streets like this one?” Gertie asked.

Wiggins shrugged and scratched his head, looking around for some indication. Suddenly he stiffened with excitement and pointed at the street sign on the corner.

“Look!”

The others looked.

“ Greville Street,”
Beaver read. “What about it?”

“Go on. Read the next bit.”

“Er,
Leading to Bleeding Heart Yard
?”

“Coo, that sounds spooky.” Rosie shuddered.

“Never mind spooky – think about the words. Bleeding Heart Yard.”

“Gotcha!” Sparrow yelled. “BHY!”