Death in the Air (10 page)

Despite the hour, it is as hot as a jungle in here too. He hears other birds: cockatoos and ordinary redbreasts and swallows, offering squawks and chirps in response to their talkative comrade.

There is a series of courts under this nave, each representing an epoch in the history of man. When Sherlock turns his head and looks along the hall, he sees twin pharaohs staring down at him with paired sphinxes below,
the feature of the Egyptian Court. They are imposing in the gloom and their gigantic size and bulging eyes almost make the boy cry out.

He calms himself and gets to his feet. He has to make his way southward toward the central transept. That’s where the crime scene is. He moves stealthily around statues, ferns, and displays, feeling as though he were traveling through history, passing the Greek Court, the Roman, and on into the Medieval. Each area is filled with the dark shapes of ancient figures.

Farther on, he encounters magnificent stuffed lions and tigers, mounted on towering stone plinths, frozen in all their ferocious glory. He thinks he hears a splash in the marine aquarium nearby and looks to his right to see the side of a massive tank: octopi, lobsters, and thousands of little sea horses live there.

He smells spices from the Far East and the lingering scents of biscuits and pâté from the Refreshment Department’s dining room, but since the birds settled, he’s heard very little. The indoor fountains, whirring wheels of inventions, and children’s automated toys, are quiet for the night.

Sherlock floats like a ghost past the northern transept, toward the center. It occurs to him that he is good at this sort of thing, good at stealth and deceit.

But suddenly he hears something that terrifies him, a sound much worse than a nattering bird.

There are footsteps coming.
Human ones
. At first they are so quiet and distant that he isn’t sure they are real, but then they echo in the cavernous glass palace and grow
louder. He ducks under a wagon displaying bushels of Canadian wheat. But he is still exposed to anyone who might walk past. There are empty hempen sacks lying on the wagon, so he jumps up, seizes a couple, and hastily tucks one end of each under the bushels, making a curtain down to the floor, hiding himself from passing eyes.

He lies as still as a corpse.

The footsteps become louder. There seems to be more than one man, and at least one of them is breathing in great gulps.

Sherlock peeks out between the sacks and sees a single figure walking steadily in the center of the hall, heading north, right toward him. Where are the others? Then the boy looks down. The man has two white bull terriers on chains. They are straining against his hold, breathing loudly through their mouths, anxious to move forward. Both have torn ears, as if they’ve suffered injuries in battle. Sherlock can see their fangs as they gasp for air, saliva dripping onto the planked wooden floor. The dogs will smell him, for sure.

They come closer, and
closer
.

And pass by.

Sherlock breathes a sigh of relief.

But then the dogs stop. Both sniff the air and turn around, pulling their master straight toward the Canadian wheat wagon. The boy tries to draw in every scent he gives off, to arrest the beating of his heart. He clenches his hands into fists, forgetting the wounds from the cactus, and utters a little yelp before he can stop himself.

“Oi!” shouts the short, thick-set guard, his voice bouncing off the distant glass ceiling. “You lot! We ain’t found naught these last twelvemonth and you get to suspectin’ thirty-nine minutes before quittin’? … You’re sniffin’ the dead buffalo again! Mangy ’ounds! This way!” And with that he jerks them away, nearly snapping their wide necks with a violent tug, as he continues his slow march to the north end of the building.

Sherlock feels as though he might be sick to his stomach. But he controls himself, unclenches his sore hands, and tries to think carefully about what he has just heard. This man, apparently the only guard on duty, has thirty-nine minutes before he leaves. Every literate boy in London knows that it is just over sixteen hundred feet from one end of the Palace to the other. The guard has about five or six hundred feet to his destination at the far reaches of the building where Sherlock broke in. He’ll likely pause there, perhaps take a short break, then make one more sweep of the premises. Sherlock considers the man’s pace: about ten minutes to get where he is going now and have his break, ten minutes back to the central transept, ten minutes to the far, south end, and then a final ten back again to the center where he will likely end his watch. That means the guard will reach the central transept for his first pass twenty minutes from now. Sherlock will have that time to walk to the transept, make his first search of the premises, and get hidden away.

The sun will soon be rising, and a pre-dawn light is slowly creeping into the Palace. Its marvelous innards are
becoming slightly clearer: lush green plants and white statues set among iron posts, pipes, and frames of red and blue. Sherlock must hurry.

He quietly gets to his feet, pats his hair into place, then checks the disappearing guard and starts moving as fast as he can toward his own destination. He tries not to make the gleaming wooden floor creak as he sneaks along, near the building’s front wall, out of the sightline of his potential pursuer.

Suddenly, he sees a shadowy figure through the glass wall. It is approaching the Palace from the outside, coming right at him, about twenty feet away. The boy ducks down. The figure moves up to the wall and crouches as if trying to peer inside. Sherlock drops even lower, lying flat on the planks behind a statue. The figure pauses and rustles something on the wall. The boy hears a
splat
, then sees the figure rise and fade into the distance. A stack of something has been deposited on the floor. Getting up and tentatively nearing it, he sees a mail slot above the spot and a collection of letters and newspapers. On top is Sigerson Bell’s favorite, the
Daily Telegraph
. Something on the front page stops the boy.

“
SCOTLAND YARD WONDERS ABOUT THE MERCURE WONDERS
,” says the headline. Sherlock can’t resist reading the first two sentences.

Sherlock remembers Lestrade catching him examining the trapeze bar.
They are already gaining on me
. He has to go, but can’t stop reading.

At least
, thinks Sherlock,
they are on the wrong track. They aren’t suspecting The Swallow, for now
. He glances up the long, cluttered hall in front of him and actually starts to run.

The main transept at the middle of the people’s glass cathedral rises a hundred feet higher than the other ceilings, which is why it is used for the great high-wire artistes and trapeze stars’ performances. That, and because up to twenty-five thousand people can stand in its hallway and in the big amphitheater adjoining its south side and look up to see everything that happens in the air along its entire length. Sherlock is rushing forward under the stunning
arched ceiling now, the yearning sun still below the horizon, but sending more light through the transparent roof by the minute. He spots the Mercures’ apparatus, still tied to the towers, anchored near the west end of the hall. He surveys it as he moves.
Where is The Swallow’s equipment bag?

In seconds Sherlock is standing beneath one of the Mercures’ steel-laddered towers. The police ropes have been removed, the suspicious trapeze bar taken away. But there is The Swallow’s satchel, partway up the tower, maybe twenty feet high, and tied down. Sherlock looks farther up and sees that the swings belonging to the three younger troupe members have been pulled up to the perch, more than a hundred and fifty feet above the floor. He feels dizzy and reaches out to grab the tower.

He had planned to climb boldly to the perch and examine it, and not just because he might find sawdust left behind, but because it is such a marvelous, unreachable place to hide something.

But now, staring up and feeling ill, his ambition wavers. His heart is pounding and his pin-cushioned hands ache. The short distance to The Swallow’s equipment seems daunting enough. But all the way up to the top? He has no idea if he can do it. If he tries, will he freeze partway up? But he can’t falter, not now, not when he’s so close. He is running out of time. He starts arguing with himself, making the point that he may have enough to investigate here on the floor and up there at twenty feet high, where that mysterious –
A sound comes down the central transept toward him
.

Footsteps again. This time they are moving at a hurried pace.
Why has the guard arrived so quickly?

Sherlock considers his situation for an instant. If he runs, his chances of being spotted will increase. And since it seems like the guard knows where he is, the dogs will sniff him out no matter where he goes … that is, if he stays on the ground.

He looks up the terrifying tower at the perch.

He has only one option.

He starts to climb.

UP IN THE AIR

I
t is a sort of paralyzing feeling: the one that invades your body when you are high in the air and petrified and you have no option but to go higher. It is like Sherlock has stepped up onto the tower and entered a nightmare. He’d had no idea whether or not he was afraid of heights, had never been at any extreme elevation. But now he knows.
He is
.

Both Sigerson Bell and his father have spoken to him about adrenaline. It is a liquid compound of some sort that some organ in your body secretes when you are terrified, when you want to run, when you are extremely excited. Adrenaline is pouring through his body at the rate beer flows out of the taps that fill the barrels in the many breweries on the Thames. He staggers up the cast-iron tower like a drunk, his legs rubbery, his heart slamming in his chest, feeling for each rung, slipping and falling … and still climbing. He is gasping and making noise, completely giving away his whereabouts.

In the midst of his terror, he starts thinking that something doesn’t make sense about this pursuit. And then it
dawns on him. Why aren’t the bull terriers barking? It is a curious fact – the dogs are not making noise in the night. He looks down and sees the man standing at the bottom of the tower where it is bolted to the floor, his head down, concentrating on putting his foot securely on the first rung.

His beasts aren’t with him!

The boy is being pursued by dogs that not only make no sound, but don’t exist.

And the man … isn’t a man.

When his assailant looks up, Sherlock can see the face of The Swallow glaring at him.

So, this is his position: he is being chased up a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot cast-iron ladder by a professional trapeze artiste, as at home in the sky as a bird, a lad younger than he, but as strong as a tiger … a physically skilled, violent boy, trained to kill at a young age, who appears to have just murdered someone, and who will undoubtedly stop at nothing to conceal that fact. The Swallow now knows that the police think it was foul play; he knows that Sherlock was snooping around yesterday and saw him examining and tying up the trapeze bars, and that he is responsible for maintaining the troupe’s safety. The young snoop is in The Swallow’s sights, way up the tower in a near-deserted building … a perfect place to kill.

Sherlock can’t believe this is happening. Why, oh why, did he decide to investigate this murder? It’s turning out to be as violent as the Whitechapel case. He should have let Sigerson Bell fend for himself, and found other ways to get money for school –
steal
, for God’s sake.

He looks down and then back up. He has no choice. He must keep going toward the glass ceiling. He scurries skyward like a squirrel.

But The Swallow shortens the distance between them in a flash. He climbs at twice Sherlock’s speed. The tall, thin boy thinks he should calculate how long it will take L’Hirondelle to catch him, but he doesn’t. It doesn’t matter now. He simply has to
move!
He can’t fight the young athlete here. Maybe, if he gets to the perch first, he can think of something, have some sort of advantage.
Maybe
.

He decides to not look down. Turning his face upward, he makes for the perch with all he has.

He nears it. But The Swallow seems to be picking up speed.

“Boy!” he shouts.

Then Sherlock hears dogs barking down the hall in the northern transept.
They
are coming too.