“There was indeed some folks … visitin’ me at the Palace the day before the accident.”
“From Brixton?”
The Swallow looks away again.
“Yeah, from Brixton,” he mutters.
“Of disreputable occupation?”
“I can’t give you their names, Master ’olmes. You can turn me over to the Peelers if you like, but I ain’t givin’ names. There’s a sort of honor, you know, among thieves.”
“I can imagine,” sneers Sherlock.
“I’d wager you can, knowin’ the bit I know about you. You have a deadly look about you at times, you do.”
He eyes Sherlock and it makes the boy uncomfortable, so he quickly moves the conversation forward.
“Tell me this, just yes or no: were they members of the Brixton Gang?”
The Swallow swallows. No one knows much about the members of that vicious, slippery, and magically efficient group, not even the police. For a moment it seems as if the young acrobat won’t answer. He picks up the knife and carves out a slice of his pie, slides it onto the utensil and eats it. Then he looks back at Sherlock, fish evident in his mouth.
“Yes,” he says quietly.
The young detective knows instinctively that an enormous piece of this puzzle has just been revealed. But exactly where it fits and what it all means is still a mystery.
“I knew ’em in me youth. Two of the four. They was a bit older ’an me. They is in with some desperate ’uns now. Smaller thieves are useful, can get into places bigger ’uns can’t. I don’t condone what me old mates do, mind.”
He is keeping his head down, as if he were ashamed, eating big chunks of the strong-smelling pie, his jaws grinding the food.
“But you did, one day.”
The Swallow looks up at Sherlock, a defiant expression on his face.
“I did. But not now. You can believe me or not. That is up to you, Master ’olmes.”
“You can prove it to me.”
The Swallow goes back to eating.
“’ow’s that?”
“Come with me to the Palace today. I need you to get me in and help me walk about, everywhere, without interference. I am guessing that the trapeze apparatus will be removed soon.”
“Tonight. I’m supposed to start tearing it down when the Palace closes this evenin’. The other two will be there. I’m takin’ the train.”
“You shall be departing earlier than you planned and paying my fare.”
“With pleasure,” snarls the boy with an unpleasant look.
“Eat up,” says Sherlock Holmes.
THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION
A whole new factor has entered the game. Sherlock needs to locate the Crystal Palace vault, and see the crime scene one more time before it is dismantled. He has a great deal to discover and put together, and it all must be done in the next few hours.
It is hard to believe that he is going back to Sydenham – he had just been there in the small hours of the morning. The two boys walk through the Trafalgar Square crowds and approach Charing Cross Railway Station. Its entrance is through a ground-floor arch in an imposing, brick-stone hotel that rises six storeys high. An ornate column with a replica of the medieval Charing Cross at its tip stands in the hotel’s forecourt, behind an iron fence. Only the wealthy ever use this building’s fashionable two hundred rooms and dining area.
Sherlock tries not to gawk as they move through the arch and merge with the flow of people entering the terminal on the other side. The station’s big clock is thirty minutes from striking seven, and many folks are still finding their way home. Though Sherlock appears calm as he walks beside the strutting, loudly-dressed Swallow (who knows how to play his part as he receives stares of recognition), the young detective’s mind is racing. He would be ashamed to tell his companion, but he has never once been on a steam locomotive. He is trembling.
Trains move at unimaginable speeds. He had often stopped to watch them explode through Southwark, all power and sound and steam, thundering over the low brick bridges there, built through, and veritably on top of, poor neighborhoods.
The boys pass the W.H. Smith bookstalls that sell nearly every London paper as well as city maps. Gentlemen in top hats rush by, calling out to news vendors, tossing them coins with hardly a glance, and catching their papers.
“Gazette!”
“ Times!”
“ Tely!”
They hurry, preoccupied, to their trains, reaching into their waistcoats for pocketknives to cut open the sealed pages. Sherlock wishes he had a few coins in his clothes too.
The Swallow buys them two eight-pence, round-trip, third-class day tickets from a uniformed conductor and finds the platform for the South Eastern Railway line to the Crystal Palace six miles away.
First-class cars are elegant and even serve food, but the carriage the two boys enter, solely for the working class, is much plainer. To Sherlock, it is heavenly. He sits down in a wooden seat across from The Swallow and stares out the window. Within minutes the locomotive hisses and chugs out of the terminal, over the Charing Cross Rail and Foot Bridge into Southwark. The boy can feel its power already. They move through Lambeth, along the edge of the river, then to the ancient London Bridge Station. They stop, receive more passengers, and quickly move on, picking up speed as they grunt through rough areas near his old haunts, over those low stone bridges he’s so often seen the trains upon. They enter industrial Bermondsey and pass the stinking tanneries on his right, smelling of the lime, rotten eggs, and dog excrement used inside. Then the train swings south, heading into the suburbs and the countryside.
Sherlock cannot believe the speed at which they are moving. It terrifies him. He has heard that locomotives can fly as fast as sixty miles in an hour! He believes it now: his shoulders are pinned back to the seat, his expression held tightly, anxious to look collected in front of The Swallow.
Sherlock has never moved more rapidly than he can run.
The boy looks out his window and straight down, trying to see the tracks, but they are a black stream. Buildings flash past, cows and sheep disappear in the fields the instant they appear. He has always dreamed of being on a train and of taking to the sky in a hot-air balloon, but he never really believed he would get to do such things. Sherlock Holmes wants big experiences. The speed of the train thrills him as much as it frightens him.
But soon he worries that it is out of control. There have been many shocking railway accidents, not the least of which happened two years ago almost to the day on this very line, south of here in Kent, when ten people were killed and many maimed in the notorious Staplehurst crash. Charles Dickens was on that train and the terrifying way he described it in his magazine All the Year Round sent shivers down the boy’s spine.
As they race south, only minutes out of the London Bridge Station and yet approaching their destination, Sherlock feels the locomotive rock back and forth, barely hanging on. He has to shut his eyes. In his vivid imagination he sees the train flying off the tracks, careering into a field, smashing into a building, and exploding in great red and black flames: he hears the screams of the excursionists, blood splattering the insides of the cars, severed heads and limbs thudding against the windows.
The train slows.
Sherlock opens his eyes. The Swallow is grinning at him.
“Life movin’ too fast for you, Master ’olmes?”
The young detective looks out the window, embarrassed, and concentrating on slowing his breathing. The locomotive puffs gently through Forest Hill Station, whistling as it goes, then picks up just a little speed as it enters Upper Sydenham, and the Crystal Palace comes clearly into view. The sun is getting lower in the gray sky, peeking through the clouds. The glass monster glows on its hill right above them.