Mycroft and Sherlock: The Empty Birdcage E-Book

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Mycroft Holmes
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 429

Beschreibung

The new novel by NBA All-Star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, starring brothers Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes. It is 1873, and as the economies of Europe threaten to crumble, Mycroft Holmes finds himself in service to the Crown once again. A distant relative of Queen Victoria has been slain by the Fire Four Eleven killer, a serial murderer who leaves no mark upon his victims, only a mysterious calling card. Meanwhile, Sherlock has already taken it upon himself to solve the case, as his interest in the criminal mind grows into an obsession. Mycroft begrudgingly allows Sherlock to investigate, as Ai Lin—the woman he is still in love with—needs his aid. Her fiancé has been kidnapped, and the only man who might know his fate is a ruthless arms dealer with a reputation for killing those who cross him. Mycroft persuades his friend Cyrus Douglas to help find the young man, but Douglas himself is put in harm's way. As Sherlock travels the country on the hunt for the Fire Four Eleven murderer, both he and Mycroft will discover that the greed of others is at the root of the evil they are trying to unearth…

Leseprobe

C O N T E N T S

Cover

Also by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, and available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

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Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Anna Waterhouse

Also by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse,and available from Titan Books

Mycroft Holmes

Mycroft and Sherlock

TITAN BOOKS

Mycroft and Sherlock: The Empty Birdcage

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785659300

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659317

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: September 2019

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume anyresponsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse assert the moralright to be identified as the authors of this work.

Copyright © 2019 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

It has been both an honor and a privilege to have the opportunity to create an addition to the canon of an author like Arthur Conan Doyle. The positive response to my efforts has been a highlight in my life. I would like to thank my friends at Titan Books and my manager Deborah Morales for their constant assistance and encouragement. Most of all my co-author Anna Waterhouse has been superb. Thank you, one and all!

KAJ

For my mother Carmen who nurtured me.For Nadine and Isabel, who mentored me.For Donna, Sestina and Luisa, who walked the ancient paths with me.

AW

P R O L O G U E

Three Crosses in Gower, Swansea, WalesTuesday, 1 April 1873, 9 a.m.

HE COULD FEEL HIS HEART BEAT HARD AND STRONG against his chest. In terms of its physiological functioning, it was alive and well. But when it came to human emotions, that font of endless sonnets to love was irreparably damaged, he was sure of it. How else could he have so little regard for such an exquisite day? Or snuff out a life with nary a qualm?

He had pursued her for several days running, keeping well back so she would not notice him, observing until he was assured of her patterns: where she walked and, more importantly, where she lingered. He had plotted her death for so long, down to the smallest particular, that it felt as if he were merely following a well-trod path.

At long last, this was his moment. If anything went awry, he would be forced to end it, and it would be his corpse, not hers, that some passerby stumbled upon. But if he succeeded, there would be more. Many more.

She lived alone in a rundown shack in Three Crosses, an inland village that housed the workers of the local collieries. At eight each morning, when the fog was still wrapping itself about the limestone ridges and hillocks like ghostly ribbons, and other women of her age and station were cobbling together breakfast for their families, she would latch her front door behind her and leave, without looking back.

And why not? She was still early in her years: twenty-four or -five, he assumed. She no longer had a husband or a child to tend, having buried her only son a scant eleven months before she had buried her man. Just another miner delivered to his doorstep in a coarse brown sack that bore a perfunctory stamp: REMAINS, PROPERTY OF SOUTH WALES COAL.

Passing the cemetery where man and boy lay side by side, she would mouth a little prayer and remain a moment with head bowed and hands folded. Then she would all but fly to Three Crosses Bay, arriving in time to see the fog lift off the water like the twirling of petticoats.

He had heard the townspeople say of her: “Mae hi’n wallgof!”

“She is daft!”

Sick with grief, more like, he thought.

Regardless, her problems and sorrows were none of his affair. If anything, her agony encouraged him. A quick, all but painless death was the gift he could bestow upon her.

Though tall and slender like her father, she walked with the heavy gait of her mother’s peasant forebears. Still, it was gratifying to observe her from above, to watch as she removed her shoes, kneading her square naked feet in the moist seagrass like a cat. From there, she would amble closer to the rocky shoreline, always on the hunt for her precious objects, as he—her unseen, unknown nemesis—hunted her.

After loading up her treasures in the pockets of her sooty black skirt, she would drop to her knees upon the soft wet beach, her back to the cliff, her face towards the water. She would remove her black mourning bonnet, lay it beside her, and place a rock upon one of the ribbons, so that it would not fly away. That done, she would pull out her treasures one by one, blowing off the silt and dirt.

He was always careful not to make any noise as he watched, careful to shift slightly so that the light would not cast his shadow beside her but would remain behind her, where it belonged. The sun’s rays bent and warped his image until his elongated head appeared to be nestling against the nape of her neck.

It was lovely, that neck: not coarse and reddish like the rest of her skin but soft, and white as alabaster against her dark blouse. Her thick hair, twisted into a knot at the top of her head, was the color of burnt umber. As she studied one of her finds, a tendril worked itself loose, swinging to and fro, to and fro…

He glanced to the sky. The sun was already high upon the horizon. Soon, even this desolate spit of sand and rock would draw a sojourner or two. He dared not tarry.

He looked down at her again. She had pulled the rocks and sticks from her pocket. Soon she would begin to construct the most peculiar little bridges: arched pathways that commenced in one spot and ended in another, all of them leading nowhere, and close enough to the water that at night the creeping waves would wash them away, as if they had never been.

He had nothing against the girl. She would die, of course. As would others. In that, he fancied that he mimicked death itself: it was not personal. Sooner or later, it was everybody’s turn.

1

London, EnglandTuesday, 1 April 1873, 9 a.m.

MYCROFT HOLMES WAS WAGING A VALIANT BATTLE against the narcotic that was coursing through his veins. Though it came as friend, not foe, he despised it. It made his keen mental faculties seem suddenly unreliable; placing him if not at the mercy of his emotions, then at least in thrall to them.

In truth, he was also hallucinating, another hideous corollary to the drug. Though thankfully spared winged horses and the like, he seemed to be staring through a tunnel at a small puddle of water. Floating therein was a medical journal yellowed by a hundred years of time. He recognized it straight away; he saw himself reach for it, clutching it in his hand. He could see his fingers carefully separating one sopping page from the other, then pausing at an article he well recalled, about the physician William Hunter.

In 1775, Hunter had declared that ‘Anatomy is the basis of Surgery. It informs the head, guides the hand, and familiarizes the heart to a kind of Necessary Inhumanity.’

For years, that phrase—‘Necessary Inhumanity’—had clung to him as a useful concept, for it shut off the spigot of emotion so as to accomplish the greater good. He and his dear friend Cyrus Douglas had once debated it at length, in the back room of Regent Tobaccos, the two of them sunk into those padded red leather chairs by the fire, Armagnac at their elbows, while a winter storm moaned outside.

Douglas—who had never been fond of ends justifying means—had made clear his disapproval.

“There is no such thing,” he had declared. “Either a thing is humane, or it is not.”

“It all depends,” Mycroft had posited—rather cavalierly, it seemed to him now.

“Upon what?”

“Upon the mindset of the one who makes the rules. For example, I aspire to live by Mozi’s dictum: ‘It is the business of the benevolent man to seek to promote what is beneficial to the world and eliminate what is harmful. That which benefits, he will carry out; that which does not benefit, he will leave alone.’ Surely even you can find no fault with that!”

“It all depends,” Douglas had parried. “Will this ‘benevolent man’ be benevolent to me in particular? Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that he is as well intentioned as he believes himself to be: he could nevertheless think me less capable than he of forging my own path. What if to him I am a brute and a savage who needs his tutelage and protection? And even if I were precisely as he supposes, both brute and savage, does that give him the moral imperative to decide my fate?”

Mycroft could still taste the smoky flavor of the Armagnac as it warmed his mouth, could see Douglas smile and lean forward in his chair as he spoke, his umber skin glowing in the firelight, his expression open but challenging.

At the time, Mycroft had had no reply at the ready. He had even less at the moment, lying as he was on an unyielding marble slab.

He began to shiver. And, just as quickly as they came, the images of Douglas, the fireplace, and Regent Tobaccos crumbled into dust, and he was left with nothing but the cold.

Barely twenty-seven years of age, Mycroft had felt for a while as ancient as Methuselah. And though the procedure he was to undergo was so rare that he could not even glean its odds of success, his rapid deterioration had made it worth the risk. He would proceed on the shred of hope that his life would continue better, once and if he opened his eyes again.

Buck up, old man! he adjured himself. Count the blessings of the present circumstance!—for in fact, there were several.

Given the agony that physicians were forced to inflict upon patients in Hunter’s time, ‘Necessary Inhumanity’ had been an essential component to surgery. Whereas he himself would undergo little physical torment, for modern physicians used chloroform. Even the Queen had made use of it for two of her confinements. Besides, much progress had been made in the understanding of the heart’s functions and therefore humankind’s ability to repair it. And although his heart per se could not be operated upon, the goal was to aid the pericardium: the sac that lubricated it, that limited its erratic motion, that prevented excessive dilation, and insulated it from infection. Patching it up could restore his stamina and breath.

To say nothing of his reputation. His long attempt to mask his failing health had turned him into a curmudgeonly recluse, a final indignity: for ‘curmudgeonly recluse’ was surely a more fitting description of his younger brother, Sherlock, than he!

High time to reacquaint his small portion of the world with his more gregarious, good-natured self.

“Hands clean…?” he muttered aloud.

He heard Dr. Joseph Bell’s soft Scottish brogue as if from an adjoining room: “Aye, Mr. Holmes. We have scrubbed hands and arms to the elbow, as you requested.”

“With soap?”

“Aye,” Bell replied in a stentorian tone that Mycroft did not care for. “And done you one better: added five percent carbolic to the mix and so now are as clean as a clergyman’s knickers.”

He felt a needle pierce his skin. More morphine, he ventured; for, like a feral cat in a sack, he had been refusing to capitulate.

Why spar with the very operators who are attempting to better your life, he asked himself, however lengthy or brief it turns out to be…?

A damp kerchief was pressed down upon his nose and mouth. Chloroform, a tricky proposition. Too little, and one awakened screaming in the midst of the cut; too much, and the lungs collapsed, causing the patient to sleep forever in the arms of Morpheus. He fought a fleeting sense of panic before sinking deeper and deeper until the rational part of himself seemed to him a shadowy figure standing upon the platform of a train station, waving goodbye.

“I mention hands solely because Pasteur,” Mycroft mumbled, “is of the mind that washing eliminates s…”

The word he sought was ‘sepsis.’ But all he could manage was the longest ‘s’ sound in the world, like a tire going flat, before darkness overcame him.

2

Cambridge, EnglandThursday, 8 May 1873, 10 a.m.

MOST OF DOWNING COLLEGE, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF the East Lodge, was built of an oolitic limestone known as Ketton stone. On bright days it would glimmer in shades of yellow, from pale daffodil to butterscotch. Students and faculty alike would remark upon its beauty, taking especial pride in its sparkle, as if it were an earthly corner of the New Jerusalem.

Sherlock Holmes assumed that he was alone in finding it insufferable.

A cigarette dangled from his lips, its smoke forcing his eyes into a squint as he walked. His long fingers grazed the newspaper columns that he had carefully cut out, rolled into a bundle, bound with twine, and stuck into his jacket pocket. He’d reached for that little bundle a half-dozen times since leaving his rooms, for lately he had been feeling all nerves, and knowing it was there, close at hand, helped him to concentrate upon his case.

And what a case it was. Eight murders across Great Britain. Though geographically disparate, and though none of the victims had anything in common, they had surely been felled by the same killer, who had commenced his killing the first day of April and had continued with macabre but admirable regularity since then, at the rate of approximately one every four to six days, with one notable week’s hiatus.

The victims thus far included, in order of demise: a young widow; a small-town banker; two boys, aged seven and fourteen, killed separately; a chaplain of middle years; a retired barrister of eighty-four; the proprietor of a horse stable; and a ten-year-old girl. None had enemies to speak of. None had died with any mark of violence upon them. All, in fact, would have been decreed to have succumbed to ‘natural causes’—a catch-all phrase used by law and medicine when no clear reason made itself apparent—were it not for one thing.

The note.

At each murder site, a note had been left in the proximity of the body, almost always at the moment of death, though twice it had appeared upon the spot several days after the fact, as if to ensure that credit would be given where credit was due.

The message was always the same, four little words:

The Fire Four Eleven!

In terms of clues, those four little words were all but useless, in that they contained too many possibilities, which was to say none at all. Not to mention that newspapers carried a mere illustration of the note in question, so that one could discern neither paper stock, nor the finer details of the original handwriting. Nevertheless, Sherlock had gleaned a few facts, ones that he now mulled over as he walked along.

The artist’s rendering revealed that the killer’s handwriting had a looped ligature. Clearly, he had been steeped in classic copperplate, the proper penmanship of the proper English schoolboy, each letter meticulously formed, tops and bottoms obsessively uniform. But he had taken it one step further: even the spacing between the words was uniform, none exceeding the width of the letter ‘m.’

It was a ‘right fair hand,’ composed by a person who was proud of his skill. Sherlock further posited that the man had had no academic training to speak of, beyond the first few years of school. Someone so punctilious would never have abandoned his penmanship altogether. But, had he been allowed to continue his studies, neither would he have held onto it as a capstone of scholastic achievement.

If Sherlock could but have a look at the originals, if he could calibrate fluidity, combined with pressure exerted upon each letter, he could begin to gauge the author’s level of anxiety, his sense of righteous judgment, perhaps a specific reading of his age and nationality. But even without the originals, it was absurd to assume that a man so punctilious would choose his victims at random, as the newspaper accounts were conjecturing.

That the author was male was indisputable, for there were absolutely no deviations: the copperplate was roundhand from start to finish. Women by and large had a finer touch; their handwriting tended to be more individualistic and less static than a man’s, either due to a lack of proper schooling, or as a nod to socially approved ‘rebellion’; or simply the feminine inclination to be more choleric and melancholic than a man.

To say nothing of the fact that women did not ordinarily commit multiple murders, though nearly every country in Europe had been caught flatfooted by those who did: Hélène Jegado of France and Gesche Gottfried of Germany had both favored arsenic; Darya Saltykova of Russia had tortured and killed some hundred forty serfs, mostly women and children; and Englishwoman Mary Ann Cotton had poisoned as many as twenty-one people, including three of her four husbands and eleven of her thirteen children. Though all these women were competent and remorseless killers, they were also anomalies. It was men who seemed to fancy murder in multiples.

Sherlock’s conclusions at this juncture were few and hard-won. The killer was unique in that thus far he had struck only in the daylight hours, rather than under the more typical cloak of darkness. He was a right-handed Englishman with a primary school education and a great deal of free time, which one would need in order to travel and to visit multiple locations more than once. He also had an uncanny ability to justify what he had done.

This last, Sherlock deduced from the repetition of the message: as if each time, the killer were raising a flag of victory, emphasized by the exclamation point at the end. And, given that the penmanship was neither labored nor shaky, Sherlock assumed the killer to be between thirty and fifty-five years of age.

In other words, nothing to hang one’s hat upon. A male right-handed disciple of the roundhand script of between thirty and fifty-five might not be as common as dirt, but he was surely as common as clerks, of which England had a passel. And although few clerks had the economic wherewithal to travel so bountifully, this particular man had a well-honed gift for plotting and waiting, possibly fueled by a heightened sense of self-righteous revenge. He may’ve scrimped and saved for years to execute his plan: such a thing could not be discounted.

But against whom had he plotted so assiduously? For no seven-year-old had ever destroyed a man’s life or livelihood!

What Sherlock would not give to travel hither and yon, to examine the original notes, to spy out whatever useful tidbit the law had ignored or, worse yet, mangled, to follow the various and sundry trails like a hound on the scent.

But that was nigh on impossible. He had a month left of his degree, and no resources to speak of. Might he ask Mycroft for an advance? Money seemed to attach to his brother like leeches to tender skin. But how in the world would he justify it?

He could not.

Simply put, the Fire Four Eleven Murders, as the papers had been quick to label them, were giving him sleepless nights and even a bit of indigestion—and there was little he could do about it.

Sherlock strode across the college green, past his former friends, identical twins Eli and Asa Quince. They were sparring with short staffs upon the lawn, their sand-colored hair wet with the effort, their shoe-button eyes void of anything but each other. Exertion notwithstanding, their skin remained the color of bleached flour, as if nothing could coax blood through those staid Norman veins.

Their movements, as always, were fluid and assured, but something had altered. Eli was no longer a hair’s breadth quicker than his brother. In execution, as in everything else, they were now evenly matched.

Nothing quite so dull as a rivalry between equal opponents, thought Sherlock.

He said not a word as he passed but hunched forward, as if fighting a particularly vexing headwind. Every day of the previous term, he had beaten both boys handily at the short staff. And though he had filled many happy afternoons (and a journal and a half) gauging reaction times between Asa, whom he had labeled ‘the Addict’ and Eli, whom he’d dubbed ‘the Teetotaler,’ his long experiment had at last come to naught, for Asa had finally forsaken his substantial morphine addiction in favor of mens sana in corpore sano. Once this ‘healthy mind in a healthy body’ had been permitted to take root, all had been lost. Sherlock found he had nothing more to learn from either of them.

The twins, for their part, had likely sensed his disillusionment with their association, for they did not pursue him—the convenient consequence of befriending people with no discernible personality.

Sherlock continued on towards The Eagle, a watering hole that he favored. For his perennially gray England seemed to him to be growing more colorful with each passing year; pubs lining their floors with tiles and their walls with looking-glasses, so that the discord of human noise was free to ricochet unabated from table to table. Everywhere was the disconcerting image of oneself staring back from out some enameled mirror.

Conversely, at The Eagle he would find both quiet and blessed darkness, along with the disinterest of habitual drinkers towards a lanky nineteen-year-old mucking about with newspaper columns.

Sherlock turned down Trumpington Street past the Fitzwilliam Museum. As he waited on the corner for the traffic to pass by, a weathered mendicant sidled up to him, her face obscured by rags, her filthy hand outstretched. Sherlock dug into his pocket and pressed a coin into her hand, heedless of denomination and more to be done with her than from any sense of charity.

“Yer see, don’ ye?” the crone announced through broken teeth, her eye winking conspiratorially. “Yer sees wut uvvers cannot!”

She did not wait for reply but hobbled on, clutching the coin in her spider-like fist.

Sherlock was perturbed. Though not given to pondering the prognostications of some old beggar, it left him wanting. He didsee what others could not. He cast off the butt of his cigarette and felt about for his shag and papers. Pity that he could not yet bring himself to return to smoking a briar pipe—much more convenient. But it reminded him of failure, and of the worst kind. If he wished to succeed at his endeavors, he would have to guard against the sway of emotion, and to do so mercilessly, rather than simply assume that he was immune. As he rolled the tobacco between thumb and forefingers, he thought of his current predicament. He was very nearly done with the term. He could take books on his journeys, could he not? He would need little in the way of funds: a minimal amount for victuals, a pittance for train fare, naught but spare coins for shag. Even Mycroft could not begrudge him such a paltry sum, whatever it was! For a moment, he felt the burgeoning excitement of possibility. Then he remembered that his brother was not in London at the moment, that he had gone somewhere, for something or other.

Bother, where was it again?

Ah yes, Vienna. But why? For the life of him, Sherlock could recall no further detail of the journey, save one.

He would be residing at the Hotel Imperial. That name had stood out solely because it had sounded like rich fare for his parsimonious brother. Mycroft despised paying dearly for anything he could not thoroughly enjoy: “Hotels should deduct for the time one sleeps!” he would proclaim less than half in jest.

Sherlock knew perfectly well that the superior lodgings held, for his brother, an ulterior motive. But any stratagem of Mycroft’s doubtless had to do with the political or the economic field, or some other deadly dull pursuit. He was not in the least curious.

Still, the name of the hotel came in handy, for he could send a telegram to communicate but one message: “send money.”

He licked his well-packed rolling paper, lit his cigarette, and glanced about. Cambridge was not London, with telegraphs in every post office. But he did recall telegraph boys with their dispatch boxes exiting a building not so far from The Eagle.

He would plead his case to Mycroft on the chance, however slight, that he would see the merit in the thing.

After all, what did he have to lose? For all the darkened pubs in the world could not provide him the one thing he needed to solve this particular crime:

Proximity.

He turned to go, only to be confronted with the old mumblecrust again. He could see from her milky eyes and dimwitted smile that she remembered him not at all but thought him a brand-new mark.

“Yer see, don’ ye?” she began before he cut her off.

“Yes, yes, I see what others cannot,” he told her. “By the sheer luck of the draw, it so happens that you are correct. And I aim to get started this very moment. What do you think of that?” he added, pressing another coin into her ancient hand before hastening off.

“Áhd mór!” she called out behind him. “May good luck rise to ye, laddy!”

3

Vienna, AustriaThursday, 8 May 1873, 11 a.m.

MYCROFT DREW A BREATH, GRATEFUL THAT HE COULD do so without wincing. He savored the myriad scents of the balmy spring morning, the alpine swifts like two-toned arrows winging across the azure sky, the rock doves cooing and pecking at scraps of bread in the cracks of the cobblestones.

Odd that something so ordinary could bring such a catch to his throat.

More than five weeks had passed since his surgery. So as to ensure the strictest confidence, he had first resigned his post at the War Office, causing untold trauma to his former employer, Edward Cardwell. He had sent Huan, his bodyguard and driver, off to Trinidad for an extended visit with his family, for Huan was a good and faithful soul who would worry about him excessively, and blather unconscionably. And although the operation had not occurred in a hovel under cover of night, it may as well have, for all the skullduggery required so that three intelligent, inquisitive people—Queen Victoria, Douglas, and of course his brother Sherlock—would remain blissfully unaware of the goings-on. Sewing up the pericardium could not extend his life: the heart was still broken, after all, and would give out whenever it chose. But there was no denying that he could breathe more easily, and was no longer as pale as chalk.

“‘Designed by architect Karl von Hasenauer in a herringbone pattern and completed in record time by fifteen thousand workmen…’” Cyrus Douglas’s voice read aloud.

He and Douglas had spent the past week traveling throughout Germany: Mycroft to investigate the Teutonic banking system and Douglas its tobaccos. Now here they were in Austria, purportedly to explore the Fifth International World Exhibition, exquisitely laid out in Vienna’s six-hundred-acre park, the Prater—which made it larger than all of the previous World Exhibition areas combined. It boasted several hundred pavilions featuring exhibitors from thirty-one countries, each a dizzying paean to cultural and technical milestones. There were Japanese gardens and walkways, and outdoor cafés featuring the finest cuisines that the world had to offer.

So why did the whole endeavor feel so desultory?

Mycroft craned his neck to take in the Rotunda before them, the exhibition’s crowning glory, as Douglas continued to quote from the map that he held in his hands.

“‘The Rotunda is, at eighty-five meters high, the world’s largest domed structure, the dome three times the size of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in Rome.’”

“Does remind one of a greengrocer’s list,” Mycroft offered. “Onions, check; cabbage, check; world’s largest domed behemoth, check…”

“Come, it is not as halfhearted as all that,” Douglas protested.

“Mark my word, Douglas. If this folderol recoups even half of the nineteen million gulden Austria spent for its completion, the Emperor Franz Josef should consider himself lucky.”

“If you are enjoying this so little, perhaps we should go elsewhere…”

“No, no, we are here. We may as well make a day of it,” Mycroft said. “For, surely, there is no censuring Vienna’s desire to be transformed into a modern metropolis like Paris or London. At any other time, it might have succeeded, but not now. Not when a cloud of melancholy hangs over all this striving, majestic beauty… Smirk if you will,” he added, “but all of your good-natured optimism cannot escape it.”

“I have never smirked in my life,” Douglas protested.

“It is in the wind,” Mycroft prophesied. “People may not know that we are plunging headlong towards a crisis, but they feel it in their bones. This! This is what I wished for us to experience,” he added, gesticulating about him. “The visceral impact, the crest of the wave, as it were, of what is about to burst onto our British shores as well…”

“Ah. And I was under the impression that we were here to see electric lighting powered by a steam-driven dynamo,” Douglas muttered.

“This shallow turnout confirms my worst fears,” Mycroft replied. “An economic collapse is now imminent.”

“You have been predicting it for some time,” Douglas reminded him. “Perhaps it is your understanding of the word ‘imminent’ that is at fault.”

“Would you not call tomorrow morning ‘imminent’?” Mycroft asked.

“Tomorrow morning?” Douglas raised the collar of his coat against a sudden onslaught of wind and looked at Mycroft dismayed.

“I am merely stating facts. You need not gape as if I have caused the catastrophe.”

“What of Nickolus House?” Douglas asked apprehensively, referring to the boys’ school that he owned and ran.

“Well, as you will not allow me to bankroll it outright—”

“No, for that would severely tax our friendship—”

“I cannot fathom why—”

“Because you do not take kindly to enterprises that do not turn a profit, and Nickolus House does not and never shall turn a profit,” Douglas said.

“As I was saying, since you will not allow my bankrolling it,” Mycroft replied, “I did the next best thing: in the past six months I have made sound investments for us both. Raw wool, cotton, wheat, tea, meat, beer, and tobacco should continue to see us through the decade. No harm shall come to Nickolus House!”

“Thank heaven for that!” Douglas exclaimed.

“Thank me, you mean,” Mycroft corrected with a smile.

“As for poor, beleaguered Vienna,” Douglas added with a cursory look, “perhaps the lack of visitors has less to do with ‘imminent economic collapse’ and more with the terrible bout of cholera that they have endured. What you and I are sensing in the air might simply be the paranoia of contagion.”

They had just reached the Machine Hall, where a large knot of people was clustered. It is now or never, Mycroft thought. He halted, as if offended, forcing Douglas to do the same.

“Do you doubt me, Douglas?”

“What? No! I am saying that even if the Austrian economy is in crisis, you have wide-ranging influence. Could you not use it to warn their banks, at the least?”

“Banks? Banks are the problem! What do you think has caused this economic boom, this… this Gründerzeit? Bad speculation. Railroad bonds of undetermined value. Devil-may-care loans for real estate to fill up buildings that should never have been built in the first place!”

Douglas glanced about nervously, but Mycroft continued.

“And the banks’ funds to protect investments exist solely on paper! Tomorrow, the stock exchange will plummet, there will be a panicked sale on shares, and no one will come to anyone’s rescue!”

Predictably, the park’s attendees began to turn their way. Douglas lowered his voice until he was nearly whispering: “But surely their National Bank has reserves?”

“The reserves do not exist!” Mycroft insisted, as he went on gesticulating and expounding. “They will hand out note payables, as worthless as a pauper’s I.O.U. As for the Great Unwashed, they shall suffer a half-dozen years of the worst toil and drudgery imaginable!”

“Mycroft, calm yourself…” Douglas urged.

But it was too late. Two well-dressed Austrian gentlemen of middle years left the large group of visitors and walked towards them. The stouter of the two raised a monocle and peered at Douglas, his fist tightening around the ivory horsehead handle of his cane. His smaller friend, round, colored spectacles perched on the bridge of his upturned nose, stopped beside him.

Mycroft glanced at the cane.

“What do you suppose that is?” he whispered to Douglas as they drew ever closer.

“Pneumatic gun,” Douglas replied, “air tank in the handle and upper portion, ramrod in the barrel, muzzle velocity some thousand feet per second. They are all the thing in Belgium.”

“I struggle to recall a sillier weapon,” Mycroft muttered.

“Regardless. We cannot do battle,” Douglas warned. “Not here, not now.”

“Ist alles in Ordnung?” the stouter fellow asked Mycroft, never taking his monocled eye off Douglas, while the smaller used the thumb and index fingers of his free hand to massage a few errant blond mustaches.

“Ja, danke,” Mycroft quickly replied. “Mein Butler weiss nichts von der Geschichte. Ich versuche ihn aufzuklären.”

The two stared at Douglas as if to assess Mycroft’s declaration that he was simply schooling his man on some small point of history. Douglas for his part kept his focus on a patch of ground at the edge of his toes, playing to perfection the abashed servant who’d been put in his place by his younger, wiser employer.

Mycroft smiled and patted Douglas on the back, eliciting a look of disapproval from the smaller of the two.

“Das ist Zeitverschwendung. Neger können nicht lernen,” the little man declared.

With that, the two returned to the huddle of visitors, the smaller one casting a final warning glance over his shoulder to the tall Negro whom he had just declared incapable of learning.

“No further need to pat me; they are off,” Douglas muttered, eyeing the men warily as they went.

“What possessed you?” Douglas hissed as he and Mycroft quickly made their way towards an enormous fountain with a pagoda at its center. “It was as if… as if you intended to create a scene.”

“Really, Douglas, why would I…?”

“I cannot say. But I do know there was purpose behind it. You disappoint me, Mycroft.”

They stood beside the fountain, awkwardly watching the white swans gliding by.

“Your survival depends on my being circumspect. Forgive me,” Mycroft murmured at last.

Douglas did not respond directly. But as they began walking again he said, in a much lighter tone of voice: “Speaking of survival, you will never guess who asked about you.”

“When?” Mycroft asked.

“I believe the more usual response is ‘who.’ A fortnight ago.”

“Then I can guess. First, if we omit those dozen people we have in common whom I would in no way be surprised about, along with another dozen so distant that their contacting you would not have been brought up so casually, plus another handful who had no means of doing so two weeks ago, I am left with but three candidates.”

Douglas shook his head. “Mycroft, you must learn to recognize a turn of phrase when you hear one…”

“And, since you prefaced your statement with ‘speaking of survival,’ and two of those three acquaintances have nothing whatever to tie them to that word, that leaves but one mutual acquaintance whose survival we ensured. Albeit one who is neither intimate enough, nor in dire straits enough, for an urgent report the moment you and I saw each other again. And that would be Deshi Hai Lin,” Mycroft concluded, naming the Chinese businessman whose life they had saved some six months previously.

“Remarkable,” Douglas replied.

“Not at all. Process of elimination. You told Mr. Lin you had no notion where I was?”

“Yes, as indeed I had no notion.”

“And how long before he wrote back with an entreaty that, should you locate me, he would dearly love to make contact, or some such turn of phrase?”

“It was precisely that turn of phrase, and the following day. However, as it did not sound urgent, I only now recalled it.”

So I put my friend’s life in peril to attract a shark, and captured a minnow, Mycroft thought bitterly. One who brings news that I have been dreading for months…

As if on cue, they heard a voice behind them, calling out in a light Asian accent, its tone tremulous and slightly out of breath: “Mr. Holmes! I have found you at last!”

4

THE DIFFICULTY OF HAVING BUT ONE LARGE TELEGRAPH office in the whole of Cambridge was that the queues proved ever so long, the room in desperate need of air, and the petitioners sour and possessive of their seniority. As for the telegraph girls working the clanking machines, Sherlock allowed that they were skilled at their telegraphic literature, but he found them querulous. Not obliged to the public for their wages, they did not submit to ill treatment as a matter of course.

Sherlock swept a lock of unruly black hair from his eyes and was at long last approaching the counter when the blasted machine ceased its labors altogether, gears grinding to a halt like an errant locomotive. It took a half hour until the thing was in working order.

By the time Sherlock had dictated his telegram to Mycroft and was back on Bene’t Street, the afternoon crowd was staggering out of The Eagle in twos and threes, their discussions and quarrels all but spent, their last coarse jokes hanging in the air, and Sherlock well resenting the entire endeavor. Why should he be forced to beg for money from his brother, of all people? How very tedious.

He opened the door of the pub, to an interior neither charming nor intimate. Instead, it was large and plain, all brick and wood, its colors inoffensive, and not a looking glass in sight. Since it was just past the lunch hour, only a handful of stragglers was left: one man of middle years noisily slurping his fish soup, and two soused Irishmen struggling mightily to remain upon their feet and conclude their game of darts.

Passing the bar, Sherlock ordered a pint of bitter, then sat at the end of a long bench before a wooden table, as distant from the other three patrons as he could manage without drawing undue attention to himself.

With the barman’s eyes on him, Sherlock took the smallest sip of beer that he could, for he had precious few coins left, and he wished to remain unmolested for some time. Then he wiped his lips with the back of his hand and set to work.

He pulled the bundle of columns from his pocket, unbound them and laid them flat. He had collected fifteen columns in all: The Times, the Illustrated London News, and the Police Gazette, to be sure; but also the Courier, the Scotsman, the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Western Mail, and a handful that were local to the areas where the murders had occurred. He had omitted only those that had clearly copied the details from their betters, or those whose speculations were so unsound that nothing of what they said thereafter could be trusted.

Below the columns, he laid out a small, hand-colored map of Great Britain, courtesy of Gray’s, for he wished to follow the killings first in chronological and then in geographical order.

All the dead had lived in the quiet periphery of larger towns. Their domiciles were, if not in bona fide isolation, then in areas lightly populated; with few neighbors or family members who could chance upon a would-be killer in the act.

The first murder had been in Wales, near Swansea. Sherlock had already scoured newspapers to see if anything of import had taken place on or around that date but had come up short.

From Wales, the killer had traveled nearly two hundred miles to Manchester; then an additional hundred and fifty miles further north to Newcastle upon Tyne, then to Glasgow, then south again to Plymouth. After a week’s-long quiet spell in mid-April, he’d resumed his butchery: first Blackpool, then Avoncliff (another two hundred miles and change), only to turn around and head northeast another two hundred and thirty-eight miles, to Kingston upon Hull.

And at present was another lull, this one interminable, as the last killing had occurred on the 29th of April, and today was the 8th of May. Had it ceased for good? Logic said yes. But his instincts said the opposite. And although he did not wish for more deaths, he dearly hoped that he would be allowed to inspect at least one victim who had not already been interred, or cut to ribbons by some overly zealous small-town doctor.

Sherlock looked over the map again, tracing a finger from one murder to the other, as if on a pilgrimage. But, unlike ordinary pilgrims, the divinity he was pursuing was his own genius: a sort of prescience, combined with obsessive attention to detail, which seemed to reveal itself only if he focused with enough intensity and single-mindedness.

The killer could not have been on foot: the timing of the murders did not allow it, nor did the extreme distances. So, on horseback? By rail? Each of the locations had access to trains, though some travelers would have to rely on more infrequent timetables and longer walks. Local transports tended to carry the same passengers over and over. Had someone noticed a stranger in their midst? Was he a stranger in their midst?

The advantage of killing in unpopulated areas was certainly a lack of eyewitnesses. The disadvantage was that an unfamiliar figure on horseback or taking a stroll was sure to draw notice.

A few locales were coal towns, such as Swansea, but most were not. Sherlock sought a pattern. Perhaps the killer’s trajectory had drawn a letter, number or symbol upon the map, but he found nothing so obvious as that.

He scanned the victims’ Christian names, their surnames, their middle names (if given), searching for acronyms and other ‘coded’ messages, for he had found that he had a knack for those. Again, no pattern that he could see.

None of the bodies had been mishandled. None had been found with so much as an untoward blemish upon them.

Sherlock swallowed another small sip of bitter. His stomach grumbled low in return, but he ignored the complaint. Hunger was a daily affair, as were many of the body’s baser needs. Fasting sharpened his senses, and besides, he was not about to allow his gut to dictate terms of engagement. What else?

The victims had all died if not alone, then with no one in sight—with the exception of number eight, Abigail Sykes. The ten-year-old girl from Kingston upon Hull had succumbed in the kitchen, less than fifteen feet from where her mother stood at the stove, preparing supper for the two of them and Abigail’s father, a local clerk whom they expected home within the hour.

In the newspaper account, Mrs. Sykes recalled that Abigail had been standing at the kitchen table shelling a bowl of peas, that they had been singing ‘When the Corn is Waving, Annie Dear,’ for Mr. Sykes had recently purchased a broadside ballad from a traveling salesman and Abigail had been keen to memorize the ditty.

“She crumpled like a stone, she did!” Mrs. Sykes had announced in tears.

But in fact, she hadn’t—and not merely because stones do not crumple. Instead, she had stared at her mother with wide, terrorized eyes. Then she had turned in the direction of the window behind her and collapsed. Her back had hit the table’s edge so hard that the wood had cracked upon impact. From there, she had slid to the ground. Investigators had found tiny splinters protruding from the skin of her neck.

Sherlock stood up and turned so that his back was to the table. He squatted to the approximate height of a ten-year-old female. Then he turned again, and in slow motion hit the edge of the table. Could the weight of her little body have been enough to crack it?

Perhaps a cheap wooden table, given age and rot, might have split in the manner described. And was her hair pulled off her neck, or did it hang loose? If hanging loose, would splinters have been able to pierce the skin as her neck brushed against the edge? So much that he did not know!

“Confound it!” he blurted out.

The man with the fish soup did not flinch, but the sudden noise prompted the older Irishman to make a wild throw of his dart. He let out a curse, and then glared at Sherlock with malicious little eyes.

“Buggery!” he snarled. “Think yer the biggest toad in the puddle, do ye? I’ve gutted yer betters for less!”

He stumbled forward, wielding the dart in his hand like a dagger.

It was not often, in Sherlock’s brief life, that being young and reedy proved the advantage; for age, experience, and sturdiness surely had their merits. But not when those attributes were diluted by four drams of cheap rum and an equivalent number of beers.

Sherlock stepped gingerly out of the old souse’s way, and the man went hurtling past him and into the wall.

“There’s a rantallion!” his younger friend declared, staring at the scene with the dull, eager eyes of a born follower. “We’ll take him together, eh, Michael?”

“You do,” Sherlock muttered, “and I’ll take out that bum right knee with one kick.”

The younger man was instantly sidelined, but the older one became more enraged.

“Why, you plague-sore whoreson, I’ll teach you what’s what!” he cried with a wild toss of his dart, which sank into a crack in the wall not two inches from Sherlock’s right eye.

“An able wrist!” Sherlock called out to the older man. “But your last three fingers are rheumatic, as are all five of your left. And your left ear ails you. One good smack would set it ringing for a week.”

The old rummy, fresh dart in hand, cocked his head like a puzzled dog, thereby proving Sherlock’s hunch about his ailing ear.

“As for you,” Sherlock declared, turning to the younger man, “just you try to go home one more night with the makings of a brawl on you, and your missus will lock the front door for good.”

The younger man stared at Sherlock, amazed. “Boy’s a witch!” he announced in a hissing whisper.

“Not in the least. But we would all be better served if I returned to my pursuits and allowed you to return to yours.”

The rummy lurched another half step forward and was just taking aim in the general direction of Sherlock’s other eye when the barman called out: “Enough, you old muckspout.”

His inflection was equitable and slightly bored, as if he would serve the man a drink or smack him out the door; it was all the same to him. “Ye’ve had yer fun, now behave or be gone,” he added in his resonant baritone.

The old man’s mood was still bitter, but the younger man grabbed his friend’s wrist. “Leave it be, Michael,” he murmured, no doubt spooked by the combination of Sherlock’s prophesying and the barman’s bulging muscles.

The two went back to their game more jittery than when they’d begun, muttering their grievances but keeping it between themselves. Sherlock returned to his crime columns, no worse for wear, frequently checking his watch to see how long before he could head back to the telegraph office for Mycroft’s response.

5

MYCROFT SAT MUTE AND NUMB AT A LITTLE TURKISH café located outside the Ottoman–Turkish exhibition halls, dutifully sipping lukewarm coffee mixed with cardamom and sugar. Above his head, the swifts had vanished. The pretty May morning with its soft, hopeful sun had dissipated, leaving in its wake creeping clouds and a pettifogging chill that penetrated the bones.

Across the round wrought-iron table, Douglas appraised him with quiet concern, his own cup untouched.

Sometime before, Han businessman Deshi Hai Lin, impeccable in a traditional silk tángzhuāng the color of brick, had bowed before them, face creased with anxiety. “Mr. Douglas, Mr. Holmes,” he had said in greeting. “I am well aware that already I owe you my life, but I did not know where else to turn…”

His slight Mandarin accent had thickened a bit, most likely from nerves, and his voice quavered. Looming behind him were the two good-natured dullards who had once guarded his beautiful daughter Ai Lin.

The moment that Mycroft saw them, he knew that his hunch had been correct. “Are your son and daughter well?” he’d inquired as a courtesy.

Though he had steadied himself against the reply, he could not quell his profound sense of loss when Lin replied, “Thank you, yes. My dearest daughter Ai Lin is engaged to be married…”

“Mycroft? Rain appears imminent.”

Douglas was leaning across the table in a bid to gain his attention. Snapping back to reality, Mycroft met Douglas’s eye.