The Empty Birdcage Read online

Sherlock had barely got that out of his mouth when the man came at him in a blind rage, propelled him to the other side of the street, and pinned him to the wall by his throat.

  “Know the details of my life, eh? Track me down like a dog, eh? Give me one good reason I should not kill you where you stand!” he declared as foam began to form at the edges of his lips.

  Sherlock tried to speak but could draw no shred of air. Finally, he managed to point and whisper: “The tattoo!”

  “What of it!” the man cried. “You are dead, do you hear me? Dead!”

  “I… did nothing… to merit it!”

  The man’s face was so close that Sherlock could see the broken capillaries in his nostrils and cheeks. He squeezed Sherlock’s neck as if by instinct, tighter and tighter.

  “I did… nothing… to merit… death!” Sherlock croaked.

  As if breaking out from a trance, the man let him go.

  11

  SHERLOCK AND THE MAN SAT ON THE STEP OUTSIDE THE button shop, both of them struggling to remain composed: Sherlock, because he had been nearly choked into oblivion; the man, because his life had just been laid bare before him, or so Sherlock supposed.

  “My name is Sherlock Holmes,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Noah Oldacre,” the other replied reluctantly, taking it. “Might I steal a smoke? I have done without since morning—”

  “—say no more.”

  Sherlock removed his pouch and papers from out his pocket and passed them over.

  “You must be the very Dickens to have about,” Oldacre exclaimed as he rolled a cigarette. “What else do you know? And beware, lest you gull me!”

  “I have no reason to gull you,” Sherlock replied softly. “But will you then do me the courtesy of telling me what you know of the Fire Four Eleven Murders?”

  Oldacre shrugged, a gesture that in Sherlock’s view meant consent.

  “I know you were a cavalryman in the Charge of the Light Brigade,” he began. “I know you saw carnage of the sort that no human should ever be forced to see. I know you keep your regimental badge close to your heart to remind you of the comrades you lost. But I also know you cannot bear the sight of it.”

  Oldacre sighed deeply, yet with no sense of release. “That is a fact,” he said. “I saw men fall all around me. Horses too. We were led like lambs into a slaughter. ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre,’” he quoted. “‘It is magnificent, but it is not war.’”

  “A certain facility with French. And a stint in the cavalry,” Sherlock said. “As I suspected, you come from means. So, how do we reconcile your current circumstances with the formidable expense of a commission and a horse?”

  “You are the Nostradamus,” Oldacre said, as he exhaled smoke. “What is your conjecture?”

  “Family estrangement,” Sherlock said, and Oldacre nodded.

  “Both horse and commission were purchased by my father,” he affirmed. “And though my father did quite well in business, his roots as a small-time merchant caused him shame. When I fell in love with the woman who was to become my wife—who happened to be the daughter of a small-time merchant—I was disowned. I never laid eyes on my father again.”

  “My brother Mycroft,” Sherlock told him, “was secretary to Edward Cardwell, the Secretary of State for War. It was Cardwell, at my brother’s prompting, who ended the tradition of paying for commissions…”

  “Bully for him, bully for your brother. Give to him my felicitations when you see him, and tell him it should have ended twenty years ago,” Oldacre grumbled. “For it was Lord Cardigan, that incompetent swine, who ordered the Light Brigade to charge, and so caused needless deaths. I hear tell he paid forty thousand pounds for his morally bankrupt commission. May he pay it back in Hades.” Oldacre placed the cigarette between his lips and wrung his hands, staring at them suspiciously, as if they were a foreign thing. “But you guessed that I am a widower…” he reminded Sherlock, returning to the other conversation. “How?”

  “The meal you prepared for yourself for the train ride was put together inexpertly,” Sherlock told him, “and you consumed it with little pleasure, as if you are still unused to providing for yourself. And your black cravat is the newest item you own,” he continued. “That alone would tell me little, but for the fact that when she died you bought it as a sign of grief. You also removed your wedding ring. Not only can I see the faint circle it made upon your finger, but you’ve had a decade’s-long habit of twirling it, and the thumb and middle finger of your right hand still worry it, fidgeting with nothing.

  “When I saw the button shop,” Sherlock added, “I assumed ‘Wellham’ was your surname or else her maiden name; and if the latter, that she eventually inherited the shop. She passed, oh, four or five months ago, I’d say, again judging from the age of the cravat, as well as the fading of the circle on your ring finger.”

  “Five,” Oldacre admitted. “My Meredith was the only reason I awakened in the morning. I do so now by sheer force of habit. And because she would want me to.”

  “And then there is your tattoo,” Sherlock went on, not wishing to be sidetracked by Oldacre’s sentimentality. “‘PII 21:23–25.’ That is a reference to the second book of the Pentateuch, is it not? And to the three verses stipulating that punishment must above all be fair and equitable?”

  Oldacre nodded. “Not an eye for an insult, or a life for a theft, but an eye for an eye, a life for a life. A much misunderstood verse…”

  “Indubitably,” Sherlock agreed. “For it is in fact humane; it stipulates that a punishment should fit the crime.”

  “I can be rather hot-headed,” Oldacre admitted.

  An understatement, thought Sherlock, if there ever was one.

  “Meredith,” Oldacre explained, “can no longer remind me that violence begets violence—”

  “And so, you had it engraved upon your skin,” Sherlock finished for him, since he seemed once again reluctant to go on. “For it is fresh.”

  Oldacre nodded. “On my wrist to stay my hand, as she once did. ‘If any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe…’” he quoted. “But, as you have witnessed for yourself, it is not terribly effective. Had you not known what it meant…”

  He looked away.

  “But I did know,” Sherlock said by way of comfort. “Which was why I insisted that I did nothing to deserve death.”

  “Yes, but how did you know?” Oldacre asked.

  “I had noticed it on the train and, as I searched for you in the streets, I worked it out. Numbers like that, separated by a dash, are most usually scripture verses. The ‘PII’ gave me pause, until I realized it referred to the second book of the Pentateuch, and therefore Exodus. And so, you see that your reminder functioned as it was meant to.”

  Oldacre put out the cigarette, wrapped his arms about his knees, and then concluded with: “I do not know who the killer is. But I was acquainted with one of the victims. The second, Cantwell Squire. He had a secret. A very ugly secret. My fear is that someone who wished to destroy him and his ugly secret… is now killing others merely to point away from the truth.”

  “But from what I have been able to gather,” Sherlock said, “Cantwell Squire was a bachelor, a small-town banker. What sorts of enemies could he possibly—”

  “He was not a good man,” Oldacre repeated stubbornly. He stood and brushed off the seat of his trousers. “Now I’ve a business to open.”

  “Please, might you give me just a bit more—?” Sherlock began, rising along with him.

  “Ask, and I shall consider it a threat to my livelihood. But I will repeat what I said upon the train: cease your compulsion to meddle, for it will do no one any good.”

  If one disregards future victims, Sherlock thought.

  Oldacre walked up the remaining three steps to the front door, then shut it behind him.

  Sherlock sta
red at the closed door, knowing full well that, for the sake of his own health, he should turn and go. Yet, something goaded him on. He knocked upon the door politely, and was met with bulging, rage-filled eyes.

  “You do not know what is good for you!” Oldacre screamed, curling his fist into a ball.

  “Mr. Oldacre,” Sherlock said in his best compassionate tone. “I am no threat to your livelihood, sir, and neither are these deaths!”

  Oldacre stared at him.

  “And I can assure you that, whatever else, no one as meticulous as this killer is foolhardy enough to take more than a half-dozen lives to cover up for one! Whatever it is that you know, you have reached the wrong conclusion.”

  “Leave here, boy, this moment…” he warned.

  “Mr. Oldacre,” Sherlock begged. “Your wife is deceased. She can no longer be hurt, and I shall tell no one!”

  “You are a witch!”

  Sherlock denied it, not for the first time. “What I do is not black magic, it is logic!” he said. “A man like you, who has lost everything that is precious to him, has nothing else to lose… save the good name of the one whom he has lost. For that is what you are protecting. Your wife’s good name. On the mistaken notion that something about this case will sully it. Now, please. What do you know of Cantwell Squire?”

  “Squire…” Oldacre said, as if he could not place the name.

  He looked away, then at Sherlock again. Finally, he expelled all of his breath at once, as if he had been holding it for an eternity.

  “My Meredith had a younger sister. Maude. Squire was once engaged to her. One day, he broke the engagement and left her abandoned in… a delicate condition. Maude died giving birth, and the girl was adopted by a family in Wales.”

  “The first victim was Squire’s illegitimate daughter, then?” Sherlock said, making the connection.

  Oldacre nodded. “Rosalie was her name. Rosalie White. You know how a thing like that goes,” he said. “Now my wife’s family, the Wellhams, they had nothing apart from their business. After the scandal came to light, customers ceased to buy from them. As time went on, the whiff of impropriety lessened. But they never got back to what they were. Now it threatens to come spilling out again, sullying all that it touches.”

  “And what of Squire? Did he suffer any ill effects?” Sherlock asked.

  “Squire simply moved away as if nothing had happened. Still, though he never lifted a finger to help his daughter, I heard that he kept track of her over the years, for she was his sole relation. And Providence paid him back in kind. First, he lost a grandson that he never knew, and then, four days before his own demise, the girl. I pray he suffered every moment of it!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Oldacre,” Sherlock said. “I can vouchsafe that not a word of this will come out.”

  “You can, eh? And how do you go about doing a thing like that?”

  “Because, as I say, your sorrows have nothing to do with the case at hand.”

  Oldacre laughed mirthlessly. “Do you not know that people can be cruel for no reason at all? ‘The words of a gossip are choice morsels that go down into the inner parts.’ It does not have to make sense. People will chew on a juicy morsel until others’ lives are ruined.”

  With that, Oldacre turned, went back inside his shop, and shut the door behind him.

  12

  THREE DAYS LATER, MYCROFT AND DOUGLAS FOUND themselves back in England after a numbing journey that included train, horse, ferry, and quite a bit of shoe leather. For the first time in more than a week, they separated to their own abodes: Douglas to Nickolus House in the Devil’s Acre, Mycroft to his semi-detached villa at Greville Place, St. John’s Wood.

  Upon arrival home, Mycroft dismissed his cab and hauled his own suitcase through the gate and to the front door, simply to prove to his brain and his constitution that he could. That accomplished, he was more than ready to lie down upon his bed and fall into a solid night’s sleep.

  And so he would’ve done, had he not been felled by the aroma.

  He could smell it before his door was even unlocked, for it wafted through the keyhole directly into his nostrils, as if out of spite. By the time he stepped foot inside, he could make it out in the dim light, clinging to the rafters like a putrid cloud, this blend of tobaccos with not a one of them worth the plucking. Cheap shag. Sherlock’s preferred smoke.

  “Sherlock!” Mycroft bellowed as he dragged his suitcase along while waving away the poor housemaid whose sleep he had disturbed.

  “Leave it be, damnation!” he grunted as she tried to wrest the thing from out his hand, all the while apologizing that he should have let her know, if yer please, what hour he was due back, for she would have anticipated his arrival with a nice warm fire and so forth.

  “My brother!” Mycroft interrupted, staring daggers at the poor woman. “Where is he? What have you done with him?”

  “I have done nothing wiv ’im, sir!” the woman stuttered, offended and alarmed. “Master Sherlock is in his usual room…!”

  She pointed up the stairs. “Come the night afore last, sir, Mrs. McAllister thought for certain ’e had your leave, or she would have never…”

  Why, that ungrateful little cluck! Mycroft thought, taking the stairs two at a time while allowing his absurd heart to pound as much as it wished—for he was all but certain that it would pound much more avidly before the night was done.

  He tried the door handle, only to find that Sherlock had locked it from the inside.

  “Sherlock!” Mycroft bellowed again.

  He pounded against the door, all the while acknowledging that it would surely work against his needs; for the angrier he became, the more Sherlock was wont to remain calm and rational, eyebrow arched in surprise, tone steady and diction slow, as if addressing an imbecile.

  But Mycroft seemed incapable of controlling his fist; it could have belonged to someone else entirely, for the blows continued unabated.

  He heard footsteps on the other side. Then the lock turned and the door opened in one great, welcoming arc.

  “Brother! Home at last!” Sherlock announced, his sleepy face crinkled in a rare smile.

  “What, in the name of all that is holy,” Mycroft began, slamming his suitcase onto the floor, “are you doing here?”

  Sherlock’s face crumpled. His smile disappeared. “My, you appear to be perfectly unsteady upon your feet,” he declared. “Perhaps it is best if we chat in the morning.”

  “No, it is not ‘best if we chat in the morning’! What is the meaning of this? Why are you here?”

  “Come, sit down,” Sherlock said solicitously, motioning to the bedroom. “Catch your breath, for the love of heaven, for you are quite done in.”

  Mycroft could feel his face redden, could feel his fingers go numb as his circulation struggled to stay abreast of his rage. He walked into the bedroom, choking on the pall, moved aside Sherlock’s beloved vielle, and sat down hard in the Thonet rocker beside the bed.

  “You have two minutes to explain why you are not at Downing,” he said, keeping the rocker steady as Sherlock turned up the gaslight. “After which I grant you another ten to pack your belongings, as first thing in the morning you will board the early train to Cambridge if I have to drag you there myself!”

  “Well,” Sherlock said, “that does pose certain logistical dilemmas but never mind; we shall get to those forthwith, for if I have but two minutes, I must use my time judiciously.”

  Sherlock went to the ashtray where a cigarette burned, took a long puff, let the smoke out, and then slouched against the wall.

  “I cannot return to Cambridge,” he said evenly. “Certainly not before next term, and possibly never. It seems that the administration was made aware, through an anonymous source, that in the previous term someone by the name of Holmes used a chemistry laboratory to whip up various concoctions of a dubious nature and then utilized said concoctions to experiment upon the Quince twins, Eli and Asa. You remember them—”

  “Cer
tainly I remember them!” Mycroft all but shouted.

  “Yes, well, I would think you would—”

  “And put out that infernal cigarette!”

  “You have but to ask,” Sherlock replied, his tone wounded.

  He drew on it one final time then extinguished it.

  “And I would be ever so grateful if you did not interrupt,” he continued, “as you have already limited my time severely. Now as it turns out, experimenting in a chemical sense, however judiciously, upon one’s fellow students, appears to be an expellable offense. Something that in my opinion they should elucidate for incoming undergraduates, as it is not a thing one would simply assume. The point is, I was asked, perhaps more accurately ordered, to leave. At that juncture, I did the noble thing: the moment I arrived in London, I considered your hard-earned money—at least, I suppose it is hard-earned—and pawned my books and what few scraps I had at market value, and now I propose to eventually earn my keep by commencing to do what I do best!”

  “And what, I fear, might that be?”

  “Sleuthing, brother!” Sherlock replied with a grin. “It seems I am my own iteration of an Inspector Bucket after all. Strange how I fought it for so long, do you recall? That notion of being naught but a lowly detective? When all the while it was my ticket to, if not fame or even visibility, at least viability. I do believe that of all the options, it is the best possible one for me.

  “There! One minute forty, with twenty to spare!” he announced, checking his watch.

  Mycroft’s first instinct was to thrash Sherlock to within an inch of his life. But what would it serve? Best to try to have a logical discussion and see what, if anything, could be salvaged from this disaster.

  “Sherlock,” he began, after inhaling deeply whatever thread of oxygen was left in the room. “There are but three people who are aware of those experiments on the Quinces: you; I, who have said nothing to anyone; and a man currently in prison, for whom confession would only exacerbate his well-deserved but miserable existence.”

  “I do think of him periodically, you know,” Sherlock interjected. “Mostly, I wonder if he can smoke his beloved briar pipe behind bars, or if convicts can partake only of the basest shag, laid out in paper so coarse that it cuts the lips; or in clay pipes yellowed and cracking with the weight of age and overuse—”