The Baker Street Boys - The Case of the Ranjipur Ruby (9 page)

“That is how it appears to be,” Dr Watson agreed.

“Skulkin’,” said Beaver dramatically.

Lestrade cleared his throat again. “That’s all very fanciful,” he said. “Like something from the pages of a penny dreadful. But we are dealing with reality here, not make-believe.”

“Quite right, Inspector,” said the captain. “I think we’ve heard enough of this nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense,” Ravi cried. “You must listen to them!”

“What we have here,” the inspector said impatiently, “is a failed robbery. A jewel robbery that went wrong, with tragic results. Nothing more.”

“Which reminds me,” the captain said to Ravi. “The key. I presume you took it from poor Ram Das’s body?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

“To keep it safe.”

“While you ran around the streets of London in the middle of the night? Really, Ravi, that was not very clever of you.”

“I thought the murderers might still be in the house. I ran to the Baker Street Boys’ hide-out. The Thugs would never find me there.”

“Well, you are not to go there again. Ever. Do you hear me?”

Ravi glowered at his tutor but said nothing. The captain went on.

“These boys are not suitable companions for you. You are not to see them again.”

“They are my friends. I’ll see them if I want to!”

“That’s enough! You are not to set foot outside this house without your uncle or me. And your so-called friends are not to come here again. Now go to your room and get changed out of those revolting rags. I’ll tell Annie to run you a bath – no doubt you need one. But first, hand over the key. I’ll take care of it now.”

He held out his hand. But Ravi did not move. Instead, he stood up very straight and looked
the captain in the eye.

“Captain Nicholson,” he said coldly, “you are forgetting who I am. Now that my father is dead, I am the Raja of Ranjipur – and, until I present it to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, the ruby belongs to me. So I will keep the key.”

The captain glared at Ravi as though he would like to box his ears. But with both Inspector Lestrade and Dr Watson watching, there was nothing he could do except back down. He lowered his head slightly in a curt little bow. Uncle Sanjay nodded and gave Ravi a rather oily smile.

“His Highness is totally correct,” he said. “He most certainly is the Raja.”

“As you say,” the captain agreed through gritted teeth.

“I do say,” said Uncle Sanjay. “Now, Ravi my boy, why don’t you run along and have your bath, and then you can put on some more suitable attire?”

When Dr Watson left them and headed back towards Number 221b, Wiggins and Beaver stood on the pavement outside the house and looked back up at the windows. They seemed very high,
and Wiggins wondered how anyone could have jumped down into the street without breaking a leg or at least an ankle. And in any case, they would have had to jump outwards as well as down: on either side of the steps to the front door was the basement kitchen area, fenced off from the pavement by black-painted iron railings topped with fierce spikes, like spears.

“I wouldn’t like to take my chances of missing them spikes,” Wiggins told Beaver.

“They could have been acrobats, like in the circus,” Beaver said. “If they was used to the flying trapeze…” He tailed off as Wiggins gave him a withering glance.

The policeman on duty outside the house plodded towards them.

“Now then, lads,” he said. “You can’t hang about here. Clear off.”

Wiggins was about to tell him that he was not hanging about but investigating a murder. But he thought better of it, and pulled Beaver away round the corner. The house had no basement here and no dangerous railings, but the only windows were very high up and he doubted if even
an acrobat would have dared to leap from them.

He thought about the problem all the way home, hardly speaking a word to Beaver. He was so engrossed in his thoughts that he did not notice the Italian organ-grinder’s monkey rattling his tin cup at him in the hope of another penny. And he did not hear the cheery greetings of their friends in the street. But by the time they got back to HQ, Wiggins had the beginnings of a plan.

“There’s something very peculiar about this murder,” Wiggins told the other Boys. “Nobody knows how the killers got into the house. And I don’t see how they could have got out of it, neither.”

He held the lapels of his coat and looked hard at his audience, waiting for someone to say something.

“P’raps they didn’t,” suggested Queenie.

“P’raps somebody helped them,” said Rosie.

“Exac’ly!” Wiggins replied. “Either way, it could have been what they calls an inside job.”

“Inside what?” asked Shiner.

“Inside the house of course, stupid,” said Sparrow.

“Sure and don’t we all know that?” said Gertie, sounding particularly Irish. “Wasn’t he in his bedroom when he was murdered, poor fella?”

“Who you callin’ stupid?” Shiner squared up to Sparrow, giving him a shove in the chest.

“Hold it! Hold it, both of you,” said Wiggins. “It don’t mean that at all. What it means is, the crime was done by somebody who was in the house, somebody who has what they calls ‘inside knowledge’.”

There was silence as the other Boys took this in.

“Unless there was somebody in the house what let ’em in,” Beaver suggested.

“And locked up again after they done it,” said Sparrow.

“What, with everybody rushin’ about all over the place?” asked Queenie.

“Exac’ly!” said Wiggins.

“So who done it?” asked Beaver. “You think p’raps it was that butler? He didn’t like the look of us, did he?”

“I didn’t like the look of
him
,” Wiggins
grinned. “Snooty old so-and-so. But that don’t make him a murderer.”

“Well, who is, then?”

“I dunno. All we know for sure is that somebody in that house is either the murderer or in league with the murderers. If I could question everybody, I reckon I’d soon find out who. But we ain’t allowed back in there, so I can’t.”

“What we gonna do, then?” Queenie asked.

“We’re gonna keep an eye on ’em from outside. Watch to see who goes in and who comes out, and where they go.”

“But won’t they spot us?”

“They’d spot you and me and Beaver, ’cos they know us. But they ain’t seen Sparrow, nor Shiner, nor Rosie, nor Gertie. So they don’t know them. Now, Shiner, I want you to take your box with your brushes and polish, and set yourself up opposite the front door. And Rosie, you take your tray of flowers and work the other side of the street.”

“What about Gertie and me?” asked Sparrow. “What’ll
we
do?”

“We got a few of Madame Dupont’s leaflets
left. You can be handing those out. I’ll go see if she’s got any more.”

“Right!”

“If you see anything interesting, come and report to me. But make sure there’s always at least one of you on sentry duty.”

Fired with fresh enthusiasm now they had something useful to do, the younger Boys collected their things and hurried off to their posts.

Madame Dupont was happy to give Wiggins more leaflets, especially when he said the Boys would not want to be paid for distributing them.

“I’m a bit busy just now, dearie,” she told him brightly, “but you remember where they are, don’t you? Help yourselves – there’s plenty there.”

Wiggins and Beaver walked through the exhibition to the far corner of the gallery and found the hidden door. It opened quite easily. Just inside the dark storeroom was a pile of neatly wrapped parcels containing the new leaflets. Behind them in the gloom they could just make out a clutter of odds and ends and the dim
shapes of old waxwork figures loosely covered with dust sheets. There was something spooky about these human shapes standing so still and silent, and the two Boys were glad to take a parcel of leaflets each and leave.

Walking back through the streets to his watchers, Wiggins was happy to be investigating again. He found a penny for the organ-grinder’s monkey, and stopped a little further on to pat two great shire horses standing patiently at the kerbside, attached to a heavy coal cart. The coalman, wearing a leather helmet with a long flap that stretched down behind him to his waist, was lifting the heavy sacks down from the cart onto his back, then bending forward to empty them through a circular hole in the pavement into the house cellar below.

As he swept the spilled coal dust into the hole before replacing the ornate cast-iron cover, the coalman gave Wiggins a friendly greeting. The Boys knew him well – he sometimes managed to “accidentally” spill a few lumps of coal into the gutter, which they could salvage and carry back to HQ. Today, however, Wiggins was too
busy to bother with collecting fuel. He had more important things to do, and he went on his way with a quick wave.

At first, the four Boys watching the outside of Lord Holdhurst’s house found their task quite exciting. But as the hours passed and nothing unusual happened, time began to drag. A posh grocer’s van, drawn by a high-stepping black horse with a glossy coat, brought baskets of food, which were carried down the steps to the kitchen door in the basement by a delivery man with a long white apron over his green uniform. The postman called twice, to push letters through the front door. And once, a telegraph boy pedalled up the street on his red bicycle, rang the doorbell and handed over a telegram in a buff envelope. But the Boys had no way of knowing if the message he brought was urgent or if it had anything to do with Ravi or the murder.

“I’m bored,” Shiner grumbled to Rosie as she walked past him with her little tray of posies. “I ain’t had a single customer all the time I’ve been ’ere.”

“No,” Rosie agreed. “I ain’t done much better.”

“If I’d been in the station, I’d have done half a dozen shines,” he went on. “
And
got paid for ’em.”

“Yeah, but that ain’t why we’re here, is it?”

“Waste of time, if you ask me. Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen.”

Rosie was inclined to agree with Shiner but said nothing. It was getting dark, and her empty stomach was starting to rumble. Shortly afterwards, however, the front door opened and the portly figure of Uncle Sanjay appeared. He trotted down the steps and set off along the street. Sparrow and Gertie signalled to each other and set off after him, keeping a little way behind but making sure they did not lose sight of him. He turned off the main street and entered a shop.

“Same as last time,” Sparrow told Gertie. “He’ll only be buyin’ his cigars again.”

“Better keep an eye on him all the same,” said Gertie.

They waited outside the shop until Uncle Sanjay came out, carrying a small paper bag. To their surprise, he did not head back towards the house
but hurried off in the opposite direction. They followed, cautiously, and saw him turn into a back street, where he stopped at one of the mean little houses, knocked at the door and went in.

“Now what would a bloke like him want in a house like that?” Gertie asked.

“Search me,” said Sparrow. “Let’s go and take a look.”

They strolled nonchalantly over to the house and then, glancing around to make sure nobody was watching them, crept up to the window and peeped inside. The gaslight had been lit in the room. Through the grimy glass and a tattered lace curtain, they could see Uncle Sanjay speaking to someone out of their sight. They saw him take a large packet of cigarettes from the paper bag and place it on the table in the middle of the room. Then he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a purse, and counted out a small pile of coins. As the Boys watched, two men stepped forward into view, to pick up the money.

“It’s them!” Sparrow gasped. “It’s the Thugs!”

A S
ECRET
P
ASSAGE

“What was they like, these two geezers?” Wiggins asked. “Was they English?”

“No,” said Sparrow. “Not ’less they been out in the sun.”

“Indians, I’d say,” said Gertie.

“They was wearin’ long shirts.”

“Outside their pants.”

“Baggy pants,” said Sparrow.

“Cotton. Grey cotton,” Gertie added. “And bits of cloth wrapped round their heads.”

“Turbans,” said Beaver.

“Sounds like our blokes,” said Queenie.

Wiggins nodded. Sparrow and Gertie had hurried back to HQ to report, after following Uncle Sanjay back to Lord Holdhurst’s house, where Shiner and Rosie were still on guard. They
were buzzing with excitement at what they had discovered.

“Anything else about ’em?” Wiggins asked.

“Well,” said Sparrow, “one of ’em had a dirty great scar on his face.”

“All the way from his eyebrow to his chin,” added Gertie.

“That settles it,” said Wiggins. “They’re the Thugs what tried to do Ravi in.”

“But what’s his Uncle Sanjay doin’, givin’ them money?” asked Queenie.

The Boys stared at each other, aghast, as they realized the awful truth. There could be only one explanation.

“He was paying their wages,” said Wiggins. “They’re working for him!”

“You mean he paid ’em to murder Ravi?” asked Beaver. “Why’d he do that? I mean, he’s his uncle.”

Wiggins took a deep breath and shook his head in exasperation. How could the others not see something that seemed so obvious to him? On the other hand, he thought more kindly, how had he himself not seen it before?