The Empty Birdcage Page 16
Best of all, Huan’s presence raised no eyebrows. Or, if it did, all pretended to the contrary. For bargees, even if they’d never traveled further than from one local waterway to the next, considered themselves kin to the open sea, and were therefore quick to take a ‘Chinaman’ in stride.
Huan was affected not a whit by others’ approval or lack thereof. He scouted out his resting place, back to the fire, eyes closed and mouth slightly ajar, his egg-and-sherry untouched before him. Sherlock had teased him about ordering such a frilly concoction, but Huan would not be put off, although sleep arrived before he could indulge.
Sherlock nursed his beer, finished his cigarette, and listened for a moment to the chatter all around him. Mostly, the clientele was arguing about the state of the local aqueduct, a structure whose central span had begun to sag from the moment it was built—and had suffered much patching since.
“They put in th’incorrect stone!” one man brayed. “First frost cracked it in twain!”
“Nay, but it was good local stone!” argued another.
“Bath stone is what’s needed!” bellowed a third.
And on it went. Certain that no one was paying him the slightest attention, Sherlock carefully withdrew Lady Anne’s envelope from his breast pocket. Then he removed the note, placed it upon the table, and stared down at it.
It was small, three-by-five. He wondered if all were of equal size, for no mention of how small they were had made the papers. Sherlock looked for a brand mark but could find none. The paper had been cut from a larger sheet, perhaps to avoid the manufacturer’s name.
Unusual, he thought. For it was a common enough stock, milled and sold all over Great Britain. Who would go to the trouble?
The Fire Four Eleven! it proclaimed.
He rubbed the paper stock between his fingers, then smelled it. It was what it appeared to be: hemp. Rather thick and unpleasant to write upon, as it tended to sop up too much ink, this hemp had been treated with rosin soap to mitigate the bleeding. Hemp was also hardier than any linen-cotton mix and so better resisted the elements. He supposed that the killer had chosen it, for he could not predict for how much time his missive would have to remain, often out of doors, before it was found and read, remarked upon and copied.
As to the handwriting: the artists’ renditions had been quite faithful. Elise Wickham had been the killer’s latest victim, yet the writing on the note was perfectly calibrated and well spaced, the hand steady and robust… one might even say joyful. There was no variation that Sherlock could see between this and the artist’s rendering of the very first note, which he knew so well that he could see it before his eyes. The multiple deaths had not affected the killer’s sense of purpose, nor his resolve.
Sherlock paused.
One of the newspaper artists had rendered the mark over the “i” in the word “fire” as a tiny dash. He had been correct, for that was precisely what the killer had done.
Had the killer broken form on purpose? It was possible, though not likely, that only two of the notes contained dashes—the one in the artist’s rendition, and this one. But, more likely, they all did, and the other artists missed it; for a dot was the expected mark, and therefore a dot is what they saw. But there was no ink inside of the dash. It was a mere indentation on the page, as if the man had taken a miniscule blade and nicked the paper above the “i,” not deeply enough to perforate it but enough to leave an imprint.
Was the tiny incision his special signature? His brand, as it were? Or did he intend to communicate something specific?
As Sherlock was considering this, something caught his ear.
“Percy Butcher met his end while grooming a mare,” the voice opined. “And his dog, an old cur whose sole job it was to warn him of intruders, made no sound!”
Sherlock looked over. The speaker was a well-dressed man of middle years, with a smooth tenor voice and a know-it-all demeanor.
“Saw it with my own eyes!” he exulted.
Sherlock put away the note, swapped his glass of beer for Huan’s egg-and-sherry, and sauntered past the braggart’s table.
“He collapsed right there in the horse stall!” the brash storyteller was declaring to one and all.
As Sherlock passed by, he took a sip of Huan’s drink, almost choking on its sweet viscosity.
The braggart, his own egg-and-sherry in hand, looked up at Sherlock and nodded in recognition of a fellow imbiber.
Sherlock was not certain why men would bond over their drink of choice, but he was aware that many do. And so, he took advantage of the opening to declare, in the stranger’s own cadence: “I hear tell he wasn’t in the horse stall at all, but outside of it—”
“Then you heard wrong, lad,” the man countered. “In the stall he was, and in the stall he remained, and on his side. And the dog made no sound!” he repeated to the others.
“Which side?” Sherlock queried.
“Which side? Why, his… left! Left hand, left side! Resting on his elbow with his hand underneath his head, as if he were having a nap!” he added as the men at his table chortled.
Sherlock downed the awful concoction he had purloined from Huan and lifted up the empty glass to the man.
“Room for another?” he asked. “For I’ve a yen for a third myself.”
“Never say nay to a free drink, lad,” the man replied, laughing.
“And you never do, Daniel!” a brutish man nearby exclaimed, to the general mirth of the table. He had the large, square head of a bulldog, along with a bulldog’s jowls, and a tuft of thick black hair that fell over one eye.
Sherlock held up two fingers to the innkeeper, then turned his attention back to Daniel.
“I hear tell there was no note…” Sherlock lied.
“Why, of course there were a note!” the bulldog growled. “Are you daft? Man always leaves a note.”
“I saw it,” Daniel said, holding up his hands and putting an end to the incipient argument. “It’d been dropped right beside him in the muck!” He turned back to his brutish companion. “Dirtiest stalls as I ever laid eyes on…”
“Come to it by inheritance is what I heard,” a sallow-cheeked younger man in the corner interjected.
“An inheritance from whom?” Sherlock asked, and the sallow-cheeked man shrugged. Sherlock turned his attention back to Daniel. “So. How did you come to be at the stable that day?” he asked.
Daniel ran his thumbs down his lapels. “Constable’s a friend of mine,” he said proudly. “I happened to be in town. He knew where to find me—”
“Here, right here!” his thuggish companion announced to more laughter.
Daniel lowered his voice as if he were recounting a mystery. “There we was, half-dozen of us, all invited in to have a look. Eerie, I tell you. Percy Butcher lying there, dead before his time. Just because someone keeps a dirty stable, it don’t mean he deserves to die,” he added somberly, and other patrons nodded that this was so.
“The papers said that Butcher owned an old dog,” Sherlock said. “But that no one heard him bark.”
“Oh it was a fine watchdog, that one!” one man declared. “But it was half-blind. So if it didn’t smell ’em, it didn’t see ’em.”
A barmaid laid down their drinks. Sherlock pulled some coins from his pocket and put them on her tray, realizing it was probably too much only when she exclaimed: “Thank you, sir!” and added a curtsy.
His largesse did not go unnoticed by his newfound companions, nor was it well received. They pulled into themselves like sea urchins, eyeing him diffidently. But he had no time to assuage their suspicion that he was above them. After all, he was questioning his second witness; he would not squander the opportunity!
“How large was the note?” he asked, and Daniel shrugged.
“There’s an odd question, boy,” the bulldog said, staring up at Sherlock through chary eyes.
Tread lightly, a voice inside Sherlock warned, but he found that, like a runaway locomotive, he could not.
“And who has the note now?” he asked. “Your constable friend?”
“Aye…” Daniel said, this time looking at him quizzically. Even so, he seemed willing to engage until he caught the bulldog’s mistrustful gaze. “Why d’you ask?” he added, as if silently challenged to do so by his companion.
“Mere curiosity,” Sherlock said with a shrug before continuing on. “Did you perchance see any mark upon Percy Butcher? Anything you deemed unusual?”
This time, without prompting, Daniel rose to his feet.
“Say,” he declared, dragging out the word so that it was the length of four syllables. “You are the nosy sort, aren’t you, with all your moneyed ways! Who are you? Why all these questions?”
“He never did strike me as an egg-and-sherry man, Dan!” the bulldog declared. “Not from the first! Boy, if you need a lesson in minding your own business, I will be glad to oblige!” he added, flexing a bicep nearly as wide as Sherlock’s ribcage.
Without giving him time to respond, the bulldog came crashing over, his stool clattering behind him, and wrapped his burly arms about Sherlock’s chest, pinning him in place so that he could not move.
“Tell ’im what’s what, Dan!” the bulldog prompted.
Daniel did just that, his reddened face a few inches from Sherlock’s.
“Who are you!” he demanded a second time. “Why are you here? Why have I not seen you before? Out with it, lad, or you shall soon have half the teeth you come in with!”
Some of the others suggested to Daniel that he “leave the queer lad alone,” but it did no good. Daniel had shifted from jovial braggart to enraged drunkard in the blink of an eye.
With his body immobilized, Sherlock was preparing to mount a verbal defense, which seemed his best option under the circumstances. But when the bulldog growled to Daniel to get on with it, Daniel decided he could not wait it out. Holding Sherlock’s purchased egg-and-sherry in one hand, he balled the other into a fist, drew back his arm, and aimed his bare knuckles directly at the midpoint of Sherlock’s left cheekbone—when his drink suddenly flew through the air as if someone had shot it out of his hand. And the other fist, the one on its way to a reckoning with Sherlock’s cheek, was routed instead to the ulnar nerve of the man who held him fast.
He released Sherlock with a roar of pain, rubbing his elbow.
“I cannot let you hurt him,” a voice said, the soft lilt carrying a hint of apology.
Sherlock’s two aspiring assailants stared at Huan.
“You kicked the glass from my hand!” Daniel marveled. “With your foot!”
The novelty had washed away his harsh feelings. But his ruffian friend was in no such august mood.
“You are dead,” he announced with tears in his eyes.
“Jack, hush,” Daniel scolded, and this time the other patrons were in agreement. He turned back to Huan. “Then you used your open hand to divert my fist, yes?”
Huan nodded and smiled.
By that time, the other men at the long table were all on their feet, eyes wide with wonder, a few clapping Huan on the back.
“Might you show us how it’s done?” Daniel asked.
That was when Sherlock stepped to the fore.
“He shall indeed,” he declared, “if you’ll but answer another question or two…!”
25
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AFTER A BEATING AVERTED and a decent night’s sleep, Sherlock and Huan made their way to Percy Butcher’s stables. The stables themselves had no tales to tell: Butcher’s body had been buried for more than a month and the stalls had been cleaned until they shone, for the wags had it that Butcher’s relations planned to sell as quickly as possible. Sherlock made inquiries but found out that none lived nearby; that no one in town had ever met them; and that Butcher had never talked about them.
The order to clean and to sell had come by way of Butcher’s accountant, one Mr. Sand, whose shingle hung a few doors down from the stables. But the loyal Mr. Sand, citing a matter of confidentiality, would not say from whom he’d received his orders. When Sherlock insisted, his foot ensconced in the doorjamb, Mr. Sand threatened to fetch the constable.
“Mr. Sand,” Sherlock told him in what he hoped was a more conciliatory tone, “I am perfectly willing to have my foot severed in exchange for a smidgen of information. Where do Butcher’s relatives reside? If you will but tell me that, I shall go on my way and be an annoyance to them, rather than to you.”
“I would like to see you try,” the crisp little man spat out. “For Butcher had but one uncle, and he resides abroad!”
“Does he indeed, Mr. Sand?” Sherlock said, pressing on. “And does the name Via Esmeralda mean anything to you?”
Sand pushed with all of his might until Sherlock was forced to remove his foot lest it be crushed, and slammed the door in his face.
“What is Via Esmeralda?” Huan asked, for he had witnessed the little encounter.
“A mining company,” Sherlock replied. “I know nothing beyond that. But our Mr. Sand certainly seemed to.”
“‘Esmeralda’ is ‘emerald’ in Spanish,” Huan said.
“So, an emerald mine,” Sherlock replied.
He and Huan returned to the stables. With nothing to see on the inside, Sherlock concentrated upon the outside. But there were so many shoeprints and hoofprints and carriage wheel grooves pressed into the soft earth that any marks the killer may have made a month before would have been obliterated. Besides, the newspaper accounts of the Fire Four Eleven Murders all underscored a distinct lack of prints. Some of the more salacious rags even went so far as to intimate that the supernatural was involved.
Sherlock noticed Percy Butcher’s old dog lying half out of one stall, his eyes cloudy with cataracts, growling low if anyone dared to venture too close.
Some fifty feet from the stables’ doors, just beyond a proper little paved avenue that led to and from town (and where even newly laid prints would hardly be legible) was an anomalous bit of green, no doubt kept for the horses to graze upon when days were too cold to wander much farther afield. In the center of the green was a downy birch of decent size. Had someone chanced by and noticed him, the killer could have looked for all the world like a dendrophile inspecting the catkins, which were just beginning to bloom at the time of Butcher’s death. It was also enough in the public thoroughfare that a dog, blind or otherwise, would not have been alarmed by a foreign presence there.
While occasional passersby gawked at the stalls, commenting in somber tones upon the terrible tragedy, Sherlock inspected the square of grass from every possible angle. Percy Butcher, who’d been inside and brushing one of the horses, would have been well within the killer’s sightlines. And the rain imminent the morning of Butcher’s death would have obliterated any stray prints left upon the grass itself.
Having seen all they needed to see, Sherlock and Huan were climbing into the carriage again when an elderly gentleman strolled by. He carried a hand-whittled cane and sported a white beard that reached down to his breastbone.
“Strange bird,” he commented, glaring at Sherlock and shaking his head.
Sherlock assumed that the elderly man was referring to him, until he pointed to the tree with his cane.
“Up there in the birch! Strange bird. Born and raised in these parts and never did see its kind.” But when Sherlock and Huan dutifully looked up, he scowled. “Did you think it would loiter about, waiting for the likes of you? It flew away, didn’t it!”
“What sort of bird was it?” Sherlock asked.
“How should I know what sort of bird? I am not bird mad, like some!” the old man growled as he walked on.
“Here, old fellow! Might you describe it to me?” Sherlock called out as he jumped out of the sprung seat and hurried after him.
“Describe it? It was a crow, but not a crow! Strange beak. Feathers round its neck all… buffeted about, as i
f it had been in a windstorm.”
A crow-like bird? Lady Anne had not seen one, but she had heard one cry out.
“A rook, perhaps?” Sherlock attempted.
“Do I look the sort of man who has never laid eyes on a rook?” he spat.
“Is there anything else you recall?” Sherlock pleaded, and the old man turned, planted his feet, and raised his cane.
“I served in the Sikh War, young man, where I learned respect for my elders, along with a thing or two that I am still more than keen to demonstrate. Now you leave me be,” he bellowed, “or I shall give you a good thrashing that you will not soon forget!”
Sherlock would have been ready to insist, had Huan not stepped into his path.
“Master Sherlock,” he mumbled, eyeing the old man and his cane with some apprehension. “My head still smarts from yesterday’s adventure. Might we let it go?”
The night before, Huan had been as good as his word to the little throng gathered at The Cross Guns. He had demonstrated various capoeira moves, and his rapt audience had rewarded him with drink after drink… which Huan, not wishing to insult his newfound friends, had been too polite to refuse.
The great master of Caribbean fighting arts had in the end wrapped a heavy arm about Sherlock’s shoulders and, still smiling, allowed himself to be led, step by halting step, to his bed.
The old man went on his way. Before he climbed aboard the carriage again, Sherlock returned to the stables. He picked up a few sticks and threw them in the general direction of the old dog to see if he would notice or twist his head in their direction, but he did not.