Vanishing Girl (35 page)

“Inspector Lestrade!” she shouts. “Don’t –”

“Miss Rathbone, you were told to stay with the constables.”

Sherlock can tell that Lestrade is undeterred, still walking, coming this way.

“Sir!” he hears two policemen shout almost together. “She eluded us like a cat, and …”

“Never mind, we shall all visit this room together.”

“I implore you, Inspector Lestrade, don’t go –”

Sherlock stops listening. He turns to Victoria again.

“When Inspector Lestrade of the London Metropolitan Police gets here,” he says, “tell him everything I told you … and leave me out of it.”

And with that, he rushes down the hallway, past the
T
and into the next corridor, where he hides around the corner and peers out.

Inspector Lestrade, his son,
The Times
reporter, the two constables, and a protesting Eliza Shaw, emerge into the hallway and turn toward the door. As they approach, Eliza stops in her tracks.

Lestrade notices that the entrance to the room is open. He steps forward. He looks inside. His mouth opens in a gape as wide as the dome on St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Though Victoria Rathbone stands behind him … before him stands Victoria Rathbone.

Several hours later, long after Eliza Shaw has been removed from the premises in the grasp of five strong-armed Bobbies, after Miss Rathbone stamps her foot and calls Inspector Lestrade every synonym for idiot her little brain can summon, Sherlock enters the grounds. Though the sun is setting, it has turned mild. The snow is beginning to melt.

He looks out over the lawn from the far side of the fence near the arched doorway. It is becoming difficult to see in the growing darkness. The maze is full of shadows. It is time for the night creatures to awake. Fear pulses through every inch of Sherlock’s body.

At that very moment, Sigerson Bell is crouching beside Paul Waller. The little boy hasn’t been able to cry since he was a baby, but now he is weeping so hard that the tears coming out of his enormous blind, brown eyes seem capable of forming a pool on the floor beneath him. The workhouse employee who had found him just outside his room at breakfast time had been unable to get him to return, so he had left the child in the hallway. The little boy had struggled forward, feeling his way along the wall, seeing only darkness, not knowing where he wanted to go, but going nevertheless. Finally, he had collapsed, his little shoulders heaving.

“Paul?” asks the kind old apothecary.

The boy turns his face up toward him.

“I have here in my bag a solution of carrots and a secret chemical mixture involving liquid ammonia and sulfur, which I once perfected and then forgot, but which I have been working upon assiduously – we will teach you the meaning of that word – for the last few days…. Ever since a dear friend of mine told me of your predicament.”

“I cannot see, sir.”

“Precisely why I am in your presence, my young knight. You see, this mixture … it shall cure you.”

Sherlock Holmes climbs the first fence just outside the manor house, shaking in his Wellington shoes, looking for black shapes hidden in the night. Christmas is just weeks away – he wants to live. He drops down onto the grounds
and heads quickly into the maze. But within just a few steps, right in front of his path, he sees something that makes his blood run cold. It is the head of a massive beast, a face unlike any he has ever seen or imagined! And this time, he cannot escape. Thinking of little Paul and what the child has to endure, he decides that he, too, can look danger in the eye. Quivering, he walks directly toward the creature. Somehow, he must fight it. But as he nears … he sees that the horrific face is made by a few branches sticking out at unusual angles in the unkempt hedge. A deep sense of shame consumes him.

He moves again, more slowly. But he isn’t much farther through the grounds when he sees another ferocious face. He approaches again … but it’s just more twisted branches in a hedge. He stands still and thinks back to the thief’s strange conduct in the grand staircase room, roaring up the chimney of the massive fireplace.
Roaring!
Sherlock imagines what that must have sounded like outside, blowing in the wind and over the grounds … the resounding and echoing roar of some mythical beast.

The criminals had played on others’ fears. They had toyed with the likes of Sherlock Holmes, toyed with his deep concerns about himself, his constantly inner-directed worries. There are indeed no such things as black tigers or headless ghosts … unless they loom in the fears of a self-centered boy. That poor child in the workhouse was what should have mattered in all of this – and catching those fiends.

Sherlock turns back to the mansion … it is really just an ordinary manor house.

He is glad that he won’t receive the credit for solving this case. Things must be done for the right reasons. He doesn’t need Andrew Doyle’s help or anyone else’s. He must rely on himself to become what he needs to be.

And so, he makes a vow. He will
stop
seeking more criminal cases or the fame that goes with them. He will leave that for when he becomes a man.

He climbs the granite wall and heads down the hill toward St. Neots: to London and all its evils. But a question keeps repeating itself in his head.

“What if a crime … an enormous and irresistible crime … seeks out
me
?”

A smile spreads across his face. He picks up his pace.