“… silence … me.”
Le Coq wasn’t saying that he knew that the silence of death was descending upon him. No, he was trying to tell Sherlock something! High in the air, he had just witnessed a robbery. He was the only one who could see it. The thieves had known long before they committed their crime that that would be the case. As part of an ingenious and complicated plan, Monsieur Mercure had been instantly and expertly removed.
In a horrific moment of realization, the trapeze star had been trying to tell Sherlock Holmes that these fiends had silenced him.
HOW IT WAS DONE
Sigerson Bell knows. Under that red fez, below that balding pate with its yellowing strings of long greasy hair, inside that bulb-tipped skull, his always-thinking, always-questioning big brain has been following the mental and physical moves of the admirable young Sherlock Holmes. And enjoying it. Amidst his troubles, this boy is such a gift! The old man is blessed with the powers of deduction of an astute medical man and alchemist and is used to diagnosing patients at a glance. Thus, he observed Sherlock’s interest in the Mercure incident in the Daily Telegraph, put that together with the fact that the boy’s father worked at the Crystal Palace, that he was gone for precisely four hours and twenty-six minutes on the very afternoon of the accident – an appropriate time to get to Sydenham and back – and that a small shard of unusually colored purple wood was embedded in the decaying toe of his left Wellington shoe, obviously the remnants of Le Coq’s splintered trapeze bar. This brought him to the elementary conclusion that Sherlock Holmes had not only been at the Palace and witnessed the accident, but had been very close to it indeed.
The boy’s demeanor since then: his barely contained excitement, his questions about brain concussions and circus performers, his extended absences, even in the middle of the night (when Sherlock had slipped out to break into the Palace, Bell had crouched at the top of his spiral stairs in the darkness, listening to the boy’s movements down below), had convinced him that Master Holmes was pursuing the case. He knew of the lad’s interest in crime, something of his past, and had gleaned his connection to the solution of the Whitechapel murder during their many conversations. If the truth be told, the old man was absolutely thrilled about it all – it was like dining on filet mignon and Yorkshire pudding before being hanged. Adventure was afoot! Evil had taken place! And his young boarder, a youthful knight crusading for good, was in the middle of it all, right on the trail.
What he did not know was that the boy was also planning to save his life.
Though it is growing very late, the apothecary hasn’t gone to bed. Instead, he is just sitting down to perform an aria from The Magic Flute on his valuable Stradivarius violin, purchased at a bargain long ago from a nearby Jewish pawnbroker. He always plays it in an unusual position on his knee. But when he hears Sherlock Holmes returning, he sets it down quickly. He knows the sound of the violin makes the boy sad – it was the instrument his mother loved.
Sherlock is whistling a merry tune, his mind obviously deeply engaged in something. Bell can’t stand it anymore. He is desperate to be involved.
“I must ask you where you have been,” he says as he moves to a tall stool at the high examining table in the lab, where minutes earlier he had been mixing a green gooey alkaloid and the pulverized heart of a bat. The smell is rather off-putting.
Sherlock has just taken off his coat and placed it on a hook, ready to clean up this latest mess before he goes off to bed. He stops abruptly and ceases whistling. Bell is looking at him over the top of his glasses, which have slid down to the tip of his red nose, nestling at the knob that resides there in all its vein-filled glory The old man has never asked him anything like this.
“Uh …” replies Sherlock. Best to tell some version of the truth, he decides, the old man is no fool. “I was at the Crystal Palace … to see my father again. Did you need me? I apologize if …”
“Master Holmes,” sighs Bell with a smile, “I am not a devil from the Spanish Inquisition, nor do I wish to follow or control your every movement. You may do as you please so long as your chores are completed. And I believe they are.”
Sherlock smiles back, feeling relieved. But instead of looking away, the old man keeps smiling at him. It is rather unnerving. The boy attempts to go about his duties. He picks up a rag, wets it in a pail of water, and begins to wipe the counters and containers. But no matter where he goes, even when he is behind the old man, he has the sense that that smile, those watery red eyes, are still trained on him. Finally, the old man speaks.
“Why don’t you tell me about it? Perhaps I could be of some use?”
“About what?” asks Sherlock, fixing the most innocent look he can muster onto his face.
“Come, come now, Master Holmes.”
Sherlock then knows that Sigerson Bell knows. He should have guessed long ago. How could anyone keep something from this brilliant old man? But the boy doesn’t want to share what he’s learned about the Mercure incident: he wants to think about it on his own. All of the elements of a solution are at hand – the facts are spinning in his brain. He simply needs to fit all of these pieces together, something he has been trying to do since he left the Crystal Palace nearly an hour ago. He wants to see the crime as Mercure saw it. If he can just …
“Sometimes, you know,” adds the glowing old man, “two heads are better than one.”
Sherlock indeed needs another brain. And what a piece of tomato aspic sits under that red fez hat: a teeming blob of cranial jelly capable of helping him line up all his clues, and see the crime exactly as it occurred. He certainly doesn’t want to ask Malefactor for advice, and Irene, despite her intelligence, is out of the question.
But how can he bring someone he cares for into something like this? The last time he did, Irene was nearly crippled for life … and his mother was killed.
He looks at the kindly old man, the only adult friend in his life now. He can’t do this to him.
“I shall be in no danger,” states Sigerson Bell. It is a startling thing to say, as if he were a spiritualist reading Sherlock’s thoughts as clearly as the headlines in the Daily Telegraph.
“I … I have hurt people in the past,” sputters the boy. He hasn’t shared his feelings like this since before his mother died.
“I am an old man, Master Holmes. I love adventure and intrigue. Were I to even die helping you do something like this, I would expire with a smile upon my face. I would never regret it.”
It reminds Sherlock of what his mother said not long before she was killed.
“But …”
“I shall likely kick the proverbial bucket soon anyway my boy. Now, tell me about this. I will help.”
Sherlock hesitates. He doesn’t want the old man in any danger, whether he is on his last legs or not. His plan is to save him, not kill him. And deep inside, he is suspicious of anyone’s interest in his endeavors, even Bell. Why is the apothecary so intrigued?
“I live in a locked building in the center of London, far from any of this,” continues Bell, stating his case as clearly as a Lincoln Inn’s Field magistrate. “None of the devils involved in this would have any reason to do anything to me.”
Sherlock’s need to solve the crime is about to get the better of him. With a little help, the solution to the infamous Mercure incident could be at hand.