The Dragon Turn (16 page)

Back at the shop, Sherlock tells Bell everything that happened before he turns in. The old man shakes his head sadly at first, but then rubs his chin thoughtfully and retires upstairs. The boy tosses and turns in his little bed and can’t sleep. The next day is Sunday. That’s good — it isn’t a day on which Lestrade is likely to act. He rises late and gives a street urchin two pennies to take a note to the home of Snowfields’ headmaster, informing him that “due to circumstances beyond my control,” he cannot teach summer classes for the next few days. He doesn’t mention that he will be spending every minute of that time searching for a dragon.

He also sends an invitation to Irene Doyle: he needs to see her. She appears at teatime in mid afternoon. The day is hot and muggy, and she is wearing a blood-red dress with a parasol, her arms bare all the way from her elbows to her wrists, another outfit that would look perfect on a stage.
Dressed for Hemsworth
, thinks Sherlock. Bell has somehow gotten wind of Miss Doyle’s invitation and has commenced to make them a rather sumptuous tea, complete with his best Indian brew poured into his best flasks, and scones seasoned with calf brains, a surprisingly tasty item, the ingredients of which are not revealed to Miss Doyle. The bent-over
apothecary then returns up the spiral staircase to his room, though Sherlock spots him every now and then, peering at them through the opening in the floor.

“Thank you for having me,” says Irene, taking a stool at the laboratory table. “Let us put last night behind us.”

“Irene, I have a few things to tell you. First, you must know why I suspect Alistair Hemsworth.”

“Speak as you please, but it won’t change my mind.”

He tells her, in detail. She keeps eating as he does, nodding from time to time at the remarkable flavor in the scones, but seemingly unaffected by the information.

“What kind of evidence do they call that?”

“Convincing?”

“No … circumstantial, isn’t it? Evidence that doesn’t really —”

“I know what it means, Irene.”

A button comes bouncing down the staircase, one that Sherlock noticed was getting loose on Bell’s laboratory smock this morning, but when they both look up, all they see is wispy white hair and the top of a bald head darting away.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asks.

“I want you to stay away from him. It would set my mind at ease while I, while I —”

“Pursue the case?”

“Well, it’s what you are always pushing me to do.”

“Not this time. You have done your work. Hemsworth is free.”

“To do more mischief because of me; and I am free to be jailed or disgraced if I can’t stop him.”

“Sherlock, it
isn’t
him. And it
isn’t
some dragon. That is a lunatic idea. It is beneath you. You are allowing yourself to be obsessed, instead of using reason … as we always say we should do. Tell the police about Mrs. Nottingham. She is obviously not what she seemed … rather like your friend, Miss Leckie. Remember that women can be just as beastly as men. The Wizard’s wife had reason to murder him. She is in love with someone else. Suddenly, she vanishes? She probably knows about her husband’s secret studio. She may be the only other person who does. It fits. The way you found out about her was genius.” She winks at him and he blushes. “Find her. Then figure out how
she
did it. Forget about chasing dragons.”

“I can’t betray Miss Juliet. I can’t reveal her identity. She told me about Mrs. Nottingham in confidence.”

“Then I will. I don’t need to play the gentleman. We must do what is right. The police should know this. If it is her, and they can find her, you are off the hook too. Justice will be served, which is what matters in the end.”

“Don’t tell them. Give me a day or two. I don’t think it’s Mrs. Nottingham, anyway. How did she kill a grown man and leave behind just his spectacles, his blood, and pieces of his flesh?”

“You will always underestimate women, won’t you?” She pauses. “I can’t stand by and keep this information quiet. Neither should you. But I will give you a little time.”

“You sound like Lestrade.”

“Sherlock, he hates you. I … I like you, very much. I can see the day when you will be a great detective, and I
will be singing at the Royal Opera House. What a couple we could be!”

She’s right
. A glorious future flashes through his mind, their fame riveting London as they live their dreams.

But then the boy hears his father’s voice, reminding him to be practical at all times, to never be seduced by romantic notions.
No woman should marry a detective
. “I cannot allow you to have anything to do with Hemsworth. I cannot put you in danger again.”

Irene’s eyes narrow.
“Allow
me? Sherlock, I am not your slave, nor will I ever be. I will make my own decisions.”

“Here, here!” says a loud whisper upstairs.

Sherlock glares upward. “I am going to prove that Hemsworth murdered his rival, the Wizard of Nottingham, and that this cowardly act was one of the most brutal in the annals of London crime.”

“Good luck to you, then.”

“I have no choice.”

“You know, you may be wrong about that too. It might not be a bad thing if Lestrade revealed your part in all of this. Think about it. Even if it made you notorious, that might be good for you in the long run. I am beginning to believe that any publicity is good publicity.”

“Wrong!” cries a high-pitched voice upstairs. Now Irene glares upward.

“Good morning, Miss Doyle,” says Holmes and rises to his feet.

“Sherlock, honestly, a dragon? They only exist in storybooks.”

“Not necessarily,” exclaims the voice again.

Irene begins to make her way out of the laboratory. Holmes is not pleased with her and isn’t moving to see her out. “If I just have a day or two,” he mutters, “then so be it. Lestrade may not be giving me even that.”

“Well, Saint George, let me know when you slay your dragon.”

Laughter erupts upstairs.

Irene stops and sighs. She looks sympathetically at Sherlock. “Though I know this search will lead you nowhere, if I were you, and I wanted more information about Hemsworth, the
real
goods, I’d start with one Mr. Hilton Poke. He knows everyone’s secrets. I am sure His Highness has some, but as I think you will see, not enough to make him a murderer. Speak to Poke — it might help you consider better suspects.”

She clatters from the lab and into the outer room. The entrance opens and closes and as it does, the apothecary flies down the spiral staircase and rushes past the boy and out of doors. He is holding a piece of paper and an ink bottle. Moments pass, then he returns. He hands the paper to Sherlock.

“What is this?”

“A note to Mr. Poke from Irene Doyle, introducing you. He is a man who is impressed by, shall we say, position. You and I, boy, we have none. Mr. Andrew C. Doyle has much more. Poke will see you if you bear this note. You shall be turned away without it.”

Sherlock Holmes is well aware of Hilton Poke, the gossip columnist for
The News of the World
, who is said to know everything about every theatrical star in London, or at least everything that they don’t want the public to know. Much to his shame, Holmes reads the little man’s stories regularly.

The newspaper’s offices are on Fleet Street, a busy avenue in the very center of London where most publications are headquartered. Sherlock has no other leads, so he heads there early the next morning, out into a day that is already humid. He picks his way through the noisy crowds, past the four-storey buildings that line both sides of the curving street that runs uphill from Trafalgar Square to St. Paul’s Cathedral. He keeps his eye out for blue-coated members of the Force, who might be coming his way with orders to take him to Scotland Yard. But none approach. Halfway down Fleet, he spots the red canopy with the globe and the newspaper’s name. When he tells the lady at the front counter that he has important information for Hilton Poke, he is directed up a staircase and down a hot hallway. The columnist has one of the largest offices in the building, with a good view of Fleet Street. Its mahogany walls are plastered with photographs, drawings, and caricatures of the city’s current theatrical stars. Poke is sitting in his chair with his feet up on his desk, waving a peacock-feather fan in his face. Despite that, the sweat still pours down his forehead and soaks through his white shirt and dark brown suitcoat. His countenance is that of a weasel, his body the build of a beaver. His lispy voice, which he is forever attempting to lower, rises up and down like the waves on the English
Channel, and everything he says is spoken as though it were of the gravest importance. His darting eyes rarely meet others’, and they certainly don’t now, as he takes Irene Doyle’s note from the poorly dressed boy. He reads it.

“Hmmph! Her father was once a name in this town — I suppose he helped a few folks — but he is fast descending. I hear Miss Doyle wants to sing, silly girl. His Highness Hemsworth? Why should I speak with you about him?”

“Because I know things.”

Poke studies the boy.

“What do you know?”

Sherlock hesitates. “Venus, his assistant, does not …”

“It is old news to me that she is actually from Brixton. I am waiting for the best moment to reveal that tasty tidbit. Not yet, not a big enough bang available presently.”

Sherlock had not intended to reveal that morsel about Juliet. He had planned a more meager revelation — merely that Venus wears English-style dresses offstage. “But you can’t tell the public that,” says Sherlock. “That would ruin her, take her job from her!”

Poke gives him a withering look. “Anything else?”

Sherlock tries a few other scraps of information he has picked up over the last week, nothing to do with the crime, nothing about the inner chamber. But what he offers is obviously old news to the gossip columnist, or at least of insufficient sensation. Poke takes a few seconds to stare back blankly, as if he were a king and the boy a pauper, then looks away again. So … Holmes plays his ace.

“I have friends at Scotland Yard.”

“You?”

“I am close to Inspector Lestrade’s son.”

“Yes?”

“He has given me some inside information, and, using it, we have made some progress on the Nottingham murder. The public knows nothing of it. This is between you and me.”

Poke leans forward. “What information?”

“I can’t tell you.”

The fat little man swings his feet off the desk and stands up. “Then you can see yourself out.” He turns to examine his bookcase, as if he has much more important things to do. There are just four or five books on the entire shelf, all biographies of show-business stars, two by Hilton Poke himself.

Sherlock stays seated. “I believe we can get Hemsworth convicted of the crime.”

Poke glances around at the boy. “Go on.”

“If you are willing to tell me all you know about him, it will help us immensely.”

“My dear boy, I need one of two people to be found guilty of this murder. If you cross your heart and swear to die that you have a reasonable chance to bring either His Highness Hemsworth … or the deliciously intriguing Mrs. Nottingham before the magistrates, then I shall help you. I could care less who really did it. But either of those two in the dock would work well for my purposes. Either would be a sensation!”

Sherlock reluctantly crosses his heart and hopes to die, something he hasn’t done since he was a small child. “Tell me what you know, Mr. Poke, and I will do what I can. I am guessing the police have not spoken to you … they would
not understand the depths of your knowledge of the things that really matter.”

Poke commences to spill the beans. Most of it is useless gossip and childish rumors about Hemsworth’s private life — sensational stories about the time he was captured in the Far East and brutally tattooed while tied by all four limbs to the ground; tales of the three-headed creatures and talking baboons he found on his travels; the “fact” that when he finishes with the small animals in his acts he guillotines them for amusement; that Venus will soon bear his child; several stories of his taste for drinking blood, and the twice-verified rumor that he was bitten by a vampire. Poke is obviously trying too hard, working at coming up with any morsel he has been fed that might make Hemsworth look like a killer. Sherlock is disappointed. It is all nonsense. But one thing intrigues him. There is a recurring theme in the columnist’s information.

“Might I stop you there for a moment, sir?”

“Intriguing, isn’t it? Too much to take in at once?”

“You keep mentioning that there is evidence that he is a vampire. That, in itself, does not interest me. It is nonsense. Vampires are figments of the human imagination, arising from our inner fears, placed in stories to thrill and scare people who have no brains in their heads.”

“Look, boy, if —”

“But …”

“But what?”

“Tell me why your sources believe he is one. It keeps coming up in what you say.”

“Well … the most telling thing is that he hates the sunlight.”

“Hates it?”