Associates of Sherlock Holmes

THE RIVER OF SILENCE Lyndsay Faye

Dearest Mum,

Thank you for the new muffler and fingerless gloves – you’re dead to rights in supposing a promotion calls for a fellow to look smart, and right to consider that I should have my hands free to boot! You worried over the colour, but it’s just the ticket. A nice, dignified navy will do very well with my brown ulster.

How strange and freeing it is to be out of blue livery and stalking the shadowed streets in neat tweeds! The lads from H Division hooted over my plainclothes at first, saying I looked a smug breed of pigeon, but there was no malice in it and they toasted me plentiful times calling out, “Three cheers for our own Inspector Hopkins!” down at the Bull’s Head last week. (I didn’t myself join in enough to mar the solemnity of my new station, I promise you.)

My musty cubby at the Yard is well-outfitted now, with maps and reference volumes, plentiful ink and paper, and a flask of brandy should any females be forced to consult me in a state of distress – you understand I’d never hope for such a thing, but we live in a dark city, and I mean to shed some light on it. My resolve has impossibly redoubled since the news came down I was to shed my uniform, and when I’ve already thought of nothing else since… well, you know best of anyone to what I refer.

Enough dark reflections. Probably you’ve read of this, but Sherlock Holmes himself has returned as if by miracle from the dead and is to practice independently again in London. What a weird and wonderful world! Before I’d any inkling of joining the Peelers, I admired his brilliant methods (“idolised” Dad used to tease, remember?) and now to make inspector during the very week of his triumphant return from the depths… what an absolute corker. I can’t but think it providential, Mum, truly.

On that note: dare I surmise that the gloves and muffler suggest you’re at peace with my occupation, and your disappointment over my not becoming a clergyman like Dad has faded?

Trusting I interpret your kindly gifts aright, as I’m now to become a professional at reading the subtlest clues, I remain,

Dearest Mum,

I’m sorry for thinking the muffler and gloves suggested you had come round to the notion of my being a policeman. Rest assured that I intend to prove you needn’t simply make the best of a bad business, and can instead feel as proud as you would if I were delivering sermons (a task at which I’ve many times told you I’d be dismal). Remember all the occasions when Sherlock Holmes’s exploits led to God’s justice being served?

Thank you for the dried sausages – they arrived quite safe, and I wrapped them against mice just as you said. Must beg pardon for brevity, as a strange teak box was just dredged from the Thames with something terrible in it. The other inspectors seem not to want to touch the business – dare I hope that I might have the chance to test my mettle, and so soon?

Too much has happened to set it all on paper – but I must put my thoughts in proper order, no matter if I’m grasping at snowflakes only to watch them dissolve. Here at Scotland Yard I feel as if I’m starting my career afresh, and in a sense I am, and a warm glow lodges at the base of my spine whenever I’m reminded of my new responsibilities. But Lord, it would be something fine to have one of my trusty H Division boys to natter with. Here the inspectors call out obscure jokes to one another I can’t begin to savvy, and their eyes slide off the newly promoted when we pass in the crowded corridors. I don’t blame them. They’re overworked, and soon so shall I be. Headquarters smells of wearied sighs tinged with whiskey, shirt collars too long worn over interrogations and the filling out of forms.

And I’ve no one to consult with over this confounded box.

But I mustn’t pity myself, for that isn’t quite true – Inspector Lestrade visited me in one of the evidence lockers as I went through the contents, and though I know him to have been ensuring that a raw detective wouldn’t botch the matter, I was thoroughly grateful.

“All right, Inspector… Hopkins, I think it is. What have you got yourself into on your first day that has everyone buzzing like an upturned hive?”

Sweeping off his bowler, Inspector Lestrade frowned at me. I think he frowns to impart his words with weight rather than signal displeasure, though, and he needs all the gravitas he can muster, since the little fellow can hardly weigh more than eleven stone. He has brown hair and eyes, both several shades darker than mine, and I tried not to seem to be looking down at him even though I couldn’t help it – hardly anyone can.

Clearing my throat nervously, I began to answer.

“But you’re already through writing it up, I see,” he said, interrupting me. “Just pass that over and I’ll check your form is correct.”

I obeyed. Lestrade stood in full view of the peculiar – not to say ghastly – contents of the box, both objects resting upon the table, but he’d every right to supervise my paperwork on my first go of it. The other sight seemed not to disturb him, as indeed it couldn’t by this time shake me either.

A grunt emerged as the senior inspector scanned my notes:

Item: one large carved box

– teak wood (foreign origin)

– decorated with stylised lotus flowers (suggests Chinese import)

Contents: one severed forearm with hand: human, female

– white flesh, decomposition not yet set in (recently amputated, not an outdoor worker)

– mild swelling and discolouration (indicating submersion in river water for not more than five hours)

– clean nail beds (respectable)

– actual nails thin and cracked (poor health or nutrition)

– no sign of ever having worn a ring (unmarried)

Lestrade raised his eyebrows, seemed about to speak, and frowned instead.

“Something wrong, sir?”

“On the contrary.”

“Have I done well, then?”

“Not bad for a greenhand,” He returned my report. “Don’t forget to sign and date everything. And I can tell you that although the brass latch is equipped with a lock, it wasn’t used – merely fastened. I opened it myself without a key.”

Hastily, I bent to record this fact.

Lestrade rubbed at one temple fretfully. The arm looked much more poignant adrift on the sea of the large table than it had cradled in the ornate box. “You came to us from H Division, I hear.”

“I did.”

“Well, we don’t want any repeats of that business.”

“No, sir.” If it sounded like a vow and not a mere reply, there was nothing to be done about it.

“What are your plans?”

Straightening, I rubbed my palms together. “Obviously, first we must ensure it’s not some wretchedly coarse jest, and I’ve already sent wires to all the major hospitals asking after autopsies performed during the last twenty-four hours. In a moment, I’ll circulate word for dockside police to look out for any similar objects, God forbid. Next I’ll canvass businesses that import Chinese goods, particularly small furnishings such as this box, down Stepney way. If that fails, I’ll scour both Yard files and the newspapers for missing persons, and enquire at local cemeteries to see whether she might have been the victim of a grave robbery. That ought to hold me for a day or two.”

Lestrade’s bright eyes narrowed in comprehension.

“How old were you when you joined the Force, Hopkins?”

“Twenty-five. I’m only thirty now, sir.”

“Eighteen ninety-nine, then. You read The Strand Magazine, don’t you?” He crossed his arms, tapping a finger against his sleeve.

“I, that is… yes,” I stammered.

“Can’t be helped, I suppose.”

“No, sir.”

“Inspired you, I shouldn’t wonder, or some such rubbish.”

“I confess so. This matter at hand… you mentioned H Division yourself, inspector, and not wanting another catastrophe. Bearing in mind the severed limb, I… I wonder whether Mr Holmes would be interested?”

A bona fide snort quashed my fondest hope. “Mr Holmes goes in for the grotesque, not the gruesome.”

“That doesn’t surprise me, considering the stories. They’re marvellous. I’ve read every one.” The words were spilling like water from an upturned jug, and I’d no notion how to staunch them. “Is he just as Dr Watson says he is? Impossibly tall, impossibly brilliant, all of it?”

“Impossibly irritating? Yes. Everything about Sherlock Holmes is impossible,” Lestrade huffed.

“You arrested Colonel Moran, you must have seen him again – so the roundsmen are gossiping. Is he much changed? I mean – not that you didn’t solve Adair’s murder yourself, inspector, I only –”

Lestrade made a motion as if shooing a fly. “It’s all true. He’s alive, he collared the colonel, he’s even more impossible than previously. And he’ll be back to his mad antics, I shouldn’t wonder, with me left to tidy up the shrapnel.”

“You must be so pleased he’s miraculously safe home.”

I blurted this knowing it was true, not only from the fact they’d worked extensively together, but also from the half-rueful, half-wistful smile hovering over Lestrade’s features. They twisted in surprise, but then he shrugged narrow shoulders.

“Of course I am. He’s good for the city, and it’s the city I serve. Well, I must be –”

“Dashed if I can think of anything on Earth I want more than the chance to work with him.”

“Take that back,” Lestrade advised with a sour grimace, returning his hat to his head.

“Why?”

“Because working with Mr Holmes means you failed.” A shadow from the open door fell across his face.

And then he was gone, and I alone again, wondering how a mere mortal could trace a box with a poor and (presumably) dead girl’s limb in it. I’ve every confidence of filling my hours meaningfully upon the morrow, and yet… it is difficult to be optimistic.

Everything is difficult, under the circumstances. Lilla’s letters are still in the drawer of my night-table. Every day I try to move them to my battered trunk of keepsakes, and every day I fail. I check the post with fingers crossed and heart equally as twisted, the same weird curling feeling inside as I sort through mail never finding her name as I’d used to, and always hoping against sense a new missive may appear.

Dearest Mum,

I can’t do as you ask and no amount of cajoling will budge me – it’s impossible for me to pen you details of an open investigation. For open it still is, and I’m nigh ready to start banging my pate against my desk. The trail grows colder every instant, and all I can do is tilt at windmill after windmill. When I solve the case, for I will solve it yet, you can scold me for bragging. Meanwhile, my nose must be to the grindstone and not hovering over correspondence, and I hope you’ll forgive me.

I’d not thought of the question before you asked, but under these glad circumstances, I’ll be dashed if there aren’t more Strand stories to come, now you mention it! How could Dr Watson resist? The mince pie you mailed arrived only the slightest bit crushed, and I’m leaving it in my desk to have with my tea.

And now I know what Inspector Lestrade meant by warning me against working with Mr Sherlock Holmes. Today was simultaneously the best day of my life since 1889, and the worst to boot. If someone asked after the whereabouts of the sky, I’d hardly know which way to point.

No warning was given for his appearance. I don’t suppose there ever is – do God’s angels send cards announcing their arrival, or do they simply appear, frightening shepherds (to say nothing of sheep) out of their wits? One moment I was writing up futile reports at my desk – no indication of desecrated graves, no missing persons providing leads, no similar Chinese boxes sold in Stepney discovered, etc. – and the next moment I heard Lestrade say, “Oh, what luck he’s right where he’s wanted. Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson, meet our newest detective, Inspector Stanley Hopkins.”

Whirling in my chair, I fished for words and caught none.

Sherlock Holmes is both identical to and nothing like the man in the magazine. Every physical characteristic is correct (frightfully tall, sinewy, pale, and so forth), but his bearing and movements defy description. The vast intellect in his grey eyes is hooded behind affected languor, like a sheathed sword, and dying must take its toll on a fellow, for plentiful cats’-whisker lines fanned from their edges I did not expect to find. And there I was, first week as a proper detective and my first case at that, already a failure, goggling at him as if he were the risen Christ. (Wouldn’t Mum and dear departed Dad pitch a fit if they ever read that comparison.)

Dr Watson (a sturdy, handsome gentleman with a soldierly bearing and moustache) thrust his hand out after I’d sufficiently embarrassed myself. The act galvanised me and I sprang to my feet.

“An honour, Dr Watson, an absolute honour.”

“Likewise,” he affirmed warmly.

“I’ve followed your biographies very closely indeed. You might even say I’ve made a study of them. And the internationally celebrated Mr Sherlock Holmes – I hardly know what to say. What does a chap say when Orpheus is standing in his office? I, that is – hang it – the world is thankful for your return. Welcome back to London, sir.”

Lestrade half-turned to cover a sneeze I suspected was not a sneeze at all. Dr Watson merely smiled and rocked onto his heels and back again, tilting his head to see what reply his friend would make. Mr Holmes examined my hand for an instant too long before gripping it.

“France is hardly Hades,” he demurred – but I know the look of a man who has seen prolonged hardship and danger, and it was the look he wore. Come to that, the doctor likewise appeared a touch left of centre, eyes continually darting at his friend as if to ensure he was really there. “Inspector Hopkins, I believe you’ve something unpleasant to show me.”

“Growing more unpleasant every hour. But Lestrade, I thought –”

“If we wait any longer, there will be nothing to find,” he interjected tersely. “Mr Holmes did more than his part during the dark times, and agreed to come down. Follow me, gentlemen.”

I knew this already, knew everything about his involvement with Saucy Jack that could be gleaned from the gutter press, though I also knew better than to trust so much as a word written by a yellow journalist. But the H Division lads had confirmed Mr Holmes was in the thick of it when I joined their ranks, would mutter ’twas its own special hell and not another word I’ll speak on the subject. Snatching up my paperwork, I hurried after the trio.

Mr Holmes visited the arm, which had been preserved as best we could in glycerin, but pronounced there was little to see, glancing at Dr Watson to determine whether his medical companion agreed. Then we strode in his long-legged wake towards the evidence lockers and I located the box, watching as the great detective circled the table like a panther. Suddenly he froze. Somehow his stillness appeared more electric than his motion.

“I’d hardly any hope of being able to assist when you wired me so unforgivably late, Inspector,” he admitted, glancing up at Lestrade. “Happily, I was guilty of rash pessimism. Your box, Hopkins, will be of immense help to us.”

This surprised Lestrade, and Dr Watson likewise blinked. Staggered as I was, my pleasure took precedence. “I’m glad you think so, sir. Here is my initial report.”

Mr Holmes took the paper with a bored air, but his eyes flicked back to the page almost instantly. A faint dusting of colour had appeared on his wan face. When through, he passed the page to Dr Watson and quirked a brow at Lestrade.

“Hopkins here reads The Strand,” Lestrade pronounced with an air of martyrdom.

“Good heavens! He certainly does,” Dr Watson exclaimed.

“And provided me with three clues I should have lost otherwise due to the arm’s inevitable decay.” Mr Holmes’s tenor remained clipped, but an icicle twinkle appeared in his eyes.

“Did I really?” I cried, overjoyed.

“It’s going to be utterly intolerable around here from now on,” Lestrade sighed. “I’m requesting a transfer to Wales.”

“Best pack a muffler,” Dr Watson suggested, biting his lower lip valiantly.

This elicited a soundless laugh from Sherlock Holmes. “Come, Lestrade, you needn’t despair. He’s missed absolutely everything to do with the box. So have you, but we can hardly be shocked over that occurrence.”

Lestrade ignored this jab. “By Jove, splendid! You’ve really found something?”

“What have I missed?” I protested. “The teak wood and lotus flowers strongly suggest foreign origin, likely Chinese. Lestrade informed me that the lock was not used, the hinges are quite normal, and… and I don’t see anything else.”

“Wrong again, I’m afraid. You do not observe anything else.” Mr Holmes flipped the box onto its side with long fingers. “What is this?” he asked, pointing.

“A chip in a lotus petal.” Mentally cuffing myself, I moved to examine it.

“Why should that have happened, I wonder?”

“The box must have been subjected to violence in the Thames. A boat or a piece of driftwood struck it.”

“That may well be true, but it is not remotely what I meant.”

“What did you mean?” I questioned, mesmerised.

“What do you conjecture?”

“I can think of no other answer.”

“If you give up so quickly on your first case, I shudder to think what will daunt you six months from now. Astrological impediments? The state of Parliament, perhaps?” When I flinched, he continued in the same ironical tone, “What do you know about teak wood?”

“Very little,” I admitted, my face heating.

“Teak has an average weight of forty-one pounds per square foot, rendering it extremely hard, and thus resistant to stress and age. It also contains a high level of silica, which often causes instruments used on it to lose their sharpness. A direct blow to this box while in the river could cause this chip, but not without cracking considerably more of the body. Thankfully, this is not tectona grandis, however. This is alnus glutinosa, which is remarkably helpful and ought to narrow our search considerably.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Dear me, I’ve considered writing a monograph regarding the fifty or so commonest woods in daily use hereabouts, and I see I’ve been sorely remiss in delaying the project. It is European alder, indigenous to our fair isle and, might I add, a fairly soft wood. Observe the scratches covering the surface – this vessel was knocked about by flotsam, but as you noted, Hopkins, the limb was not waterlogged enough to have been very long in the Thames, and teak could never have suffered such myriad injuries in so short a period. It is stained in the expected dark reddish manner, and there its resemblance to the Chinese product ends. This is a sham,” he concluded, pressing a small pocketknife into the wood. A faint but clear mark immediately resulted.

“Thank God. You think it a hoax made by some perverse anatomist?” Dr Watson ventured.

“You misunderstand me, my dear fellow. Deteriorated as the limb we just viewed was, the cut severing the arm was never made with any medical precision – you must have determined as much yourself.”

“Certainly. I would hazard our subject used either a small axe or a large hatchet.”

“I concur.” Mr Holmes had produced a notebook and pencil and made short work of recording something. “No, the arm is quite real. The conveyance is the sham, and we must be grateful for its abnormality.”

“Severed limbs are abnormal enough,” Lestrade muttered.

“Would that were true, but this serves our purposes better.” Sherlock Holmes’s eyes glinted with enthusiasm despite our sobering mission. “What sort of person would create a false Chinese box?”

I couldn’t answer. None of us could. But when Mr Holmes spun on his heel and glided through the door, we understood that we were about to find out.

As it happened, the sort of man who would create a false Chinese box was a skilled woodcarver who lacked access to the high-quality lumber of his homeland and yet wished to ply his trade, or so Mr Holmes deduced most convincingly as we four hastened from the slate monochrome of Scotland Yard into the colour and chaos of London’s busiest thoroughfares. I’d been sniffing about the wrong neighbourhood, though I was as close to the mark as was possible without having the faintest notion of what I sought, the sleuth claimed (this seemed to be meant as neither censure nor condolence). Apparently, I didn’t want the gritty straw-strewn byways of Stepney, with its deafening markets and echoing warehouses and mountains of imports.

“You wanted Limehouse, my good inspector,” Mr Holmes finished, clapping me on the shoulder as he stepped down last from the four-wheeler. “The single neighbourhood hereabouts where Chinese culture thrives in corporeal rather than merely imported form.”

Air thick as soup filled our nostrils, the tarry odour of the docks combined with roasting meats, simmering vegetables, and unfathomable spices. Beneath all skulked the reek of strangely foreign refuse – for whatever they were discarding, it wasn’t potato peelings and apple cores. Chinese with glossy queues teemed along the pavements, and intermingling with them loitered grizzled career seamen and leather-skinned stevedores making deliveries. Lestrade flipped up his coat collar against the chill breeze.

“Are we to communicate what we’re looking for through pantomime, or learn Mandarin?” he asked dourly.

Mr Holmes smirked, flipping open his notebook to reveal three Chinese characters. “I rather think the signature of the maker might be of greater immediate use.”

“Capital, my dear fellow!” Dr Watson approved, grinning.

“How the devil did you find that out?” I cried.

“It was a positive tour-de-force of inferential reasoning,” Mr Holmes drawled. “When I flipped the box on its side, I discovered the mark had been scratched very subtly into the base.”

Dr Watson had the decency to study a stray cur worrying at an oxtail as my face flamed, but Lestrade gave a low whistle.

“Oh, come, none of that.” Mortified as I felt, I was grateful that Sherlock Holmes sounded impatient rather than pitying. “Ut desint vires, tamen est laudana voluntas. You mistook the characters for more ill-use visited by the Thames – resolve to do better during your second case. Now. I’m acquainted with one or two nearby apothecaries in this warren, and I’d wager a fiver my friend Wi Cheun will do right by us. Do wait here, for the poor fellow suffers from a tremendous sensitivity to strange Englishmen.”

We watched his gleaming black hat bob away in the throng of men fully a foot shorter than he. Or I did, while Lestrade and Dr Watson complacently lit cigarettes under a mud-spattered gaslight, as if they had waited for Sherlock Holmes to consult Chinese apothecaries some dozens of times. Decades seemed to pass. I’ll be dashed if glaciers didn’t melt.

“I feel such a fool,” I confessed.

“That was nothing,” Lestrade scoffed.

“It wasn’t nothing. My father was a clergyman – I do have some Latin, enough for Ovid anyhow. I suppose it’s too much to hope he’ll forget about it?”

The men continued smoking. I forced my jaw not to clench in dismay.

“Never mind, Inspector,” Dr Watson offered along with a genuine smile. “If everyone were Sherlock Holmes –”

Lestrade mock-shuddered, and the doctor chuckled gamely.

“I say, if everyone were Sherlock Holmes –”

“Then my career would be ruined,” the man himself finished, fairly vibrating with energy as he materialised in our midst. “I’ve traced the box, and we’ve a brief trudge. I’ll tell you on the way that I dislike Wi Cheun’s account extremely for the hypothesis it suggests to my mind, and yet – well, we refuse to draw conclusions before the evidence is scrutinised. Quick march!”

We set off briskly towards the Limehouse basin and soon were crossing its dingy footbridge under the octagonal hydraulic tower, surrounded by the clatter, shouts, and bangs of the lifeboat manufactory. As we walked, Mr Holmes shared what he had learned.

Five years previous (according to Mr Holmes’s druggist acquaintance) the mark, which read “Wu Jinhai,” would have designated Wu Jinhai himself, an immigrant from the outskirts of Shanghai who had once made his living carving teak. Upon arriving in London, he discovered that he could procure a few shillings by foraging driftwood along the riverbank, creating landscapes and animal menageries and the like on the flotsam’s surface, and afterward staining the piece to a high sheen. In time, he earned enough not merely to buy wood and commence crafting boxes, for which there was a perennial demand, but to marry a beautiful young Chinese woman and set up both shop and household in Gold Street near to Shadwell Market.

“A single domestic canker blighted this idyllic scene,” Mr Holmes explained. “Wu Jinhai and his wife were childless, and no amount of visits to the local physicians could banish their infertility.”

So distraught were they over their lack of progeny that one day, when Mrs Wu was scattering wood chips and sawdust over the ice in the back alley and spied a pair of white children on the brink of starvation, she did not chase them away as most would have done with street arabs, especially those of another race – she invited them in for soup. The Wus did not lack for money, and she saw no harm in gaining a reputation for both status and generosity amongst all manner of neighbours.

“In Chinese society, benevolence is often a way to reach across social boundaries and forge acquaintances that would otherwise be impossible,” Mr Holmes continued. “In this case, however, there was a catch which manifested almost immediately.”

Mrs Wu by this time spoke good English and discovered over empty bowls of dumpling soup that the children were mudlarks – the most wretched of the destitute, scouring the riverbanks for scraps of rag or coin or metal, as her own husband had once been forced to scrounge for wood. Far worse, the girl suffered from a spinal deformity – possibly brought on by polio, Wi Cheun had theorised to Mr Holmes – and the boy, though a few years older, was simple, only speaking in monosyllables. The girl revealed that they were siblings escaped from the cruelties of a nearby orphanage, and neither knew who their parents had been nor where they had lived before the bleak institution.

“The Wus took them in,” reported the detective. The intersections we now crossed, though no less cramped nor refuse-strewn, were populated with as many Italians and Jews as Chinese, though queerly picturesque Oriental writing remained slashed across many ashen shop placards. “As employees at first – or so Mrs Wu presented them – but later, apparently they were indistinguishable from her children save for their skin. The sister, Liza, worked on accounts and answered supply orders after learning her sums and letters from a paid neighbour. Arlie, the brother, never learned eloquence, but showed an immense aptitude for carving once Wu Jinhai taught him technique.”

“What happened five years ago?” I inquired breathlessly, for our pace had been set by the man with the longest stride.

“Five years ago,” he reflected. “Yes, five years ago Mr and Mrs Wu passed away from an influenza outbreak, leaving Arlie and Liza alone to run the family business as best they were able. And that, gentlemen, is the part I do not like, though I decline to make inferences in advance of tangible data.”

A chill stroked my spine, and my companions’ faces froze, for we had all seen Mr Holmes’s mind. A doltish brother, a defenceless sister who might have been thought a burden, a frail white arm hacked away and consigned to the Thames. None of us wanted to contemplate such a thing, and I’ll be dashed if the world-famous problem-solver did either.

“You’re right, Mr Holmes. We know too little as yet to condemn anyone,” I declared.

The sleuth’s steely jaw twitched. “Are you being fawning or optimistic?”

“Neither. I’m being magnanimous, or attempting it. I was meant to become a clergyman like my father,” I said wryly.

“Disinclined to resemble the patriarch?”

“On the contrary, I admired him more than anyone I’ve ever known. Didn’t share any of his talents, more’s the pity. Always stammering my way through catechisms. Dreadful. He passed some eight years ago and Mum thought I’d finally see the light, but all I saw was the noose in the prison yard. When my cousin took the cloth, I gave him Dad’s Bible with heartiest blessings and a helping of good riddance.”

Dr Watson nodded sympathetically as Lestrade sniffed in mild amusement. A flicker of a smile ghosted across Mr Holmes’s lips and vanished.

Then we had arrived, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live: the crooked house in the middle of the row, runoff trickling down Gold Street, rivulets sparkling despite their leaden colour. The Wu residence’s steps had not been cleaned since the last snowfall melted, streaks of soot painting black waterfalls down them, and one of the windows was patched with four or five layers of rotting newsprint.

Mr Holmes and Dr Watson approached with the bearing of men who’ve looked into the abyss and lived to tell about it, Lestrade close at their heels. Trailing only slightly, though my nerves hummed and sparked, I watched as the independent detective whipped out his pocketknife again and bent to one knee at the top of the steps.

“We haven’t any warrant, Mr Holmes!” Lestrade hissed.

“You directed my notice to a trail old enough to be considered positively historical, and now you’re quibbling about warrants?” the detective snapped in return, fiddling with the lock and producing a sharp snick. “Supposing we find anything, claim you investigated because the door had been forced. It would even be true.”

Lestrade struck his palm against the rusted iron rail, but made no further protest. Indeed, we were all about to burst into the house when Mr Holmes flung his arms out, causing Lestrade to stumble and Dr Watson to catch his friend’s shoulder.

“Enter, and then don’t move a muscle,” Sherlock Holmes ordered. “I must read the floor.”

We crowded inside and my senior edged the front door closed. We were in a murky room, lit only by the undamaged windows, with a thin haze of wood particles tickling our throats. Stack after stack of carved boxes filled the chamber, only interrupted by a deal table with an unlit lamp resting upon it, and next to it a bowl of soup with dried broth staining its lip. Mr Holmes tiptoed along the walls, hands hovering in midair, reading the sawdust as we watched in silence.

“All right, come in.” Mr Holmes’s brows had swept towards his hawklike nose. “There’s been traffic within the past day or two, but –”

He cut himself off and stalked across the room, staring down at a row of boxes piled six and eight high. When we followed him, it was plain to see that a single column had recently vanished, for its rectangular outline was printed clearly in the dust on the floor.

“Dear God,” Dr Watson breathed.

The trio sprang into action, opening doors and cupboards, urgently seeking more evidence. My efforts to assist soon bore morbid fruit when I took the corridor leading to the back area and discovered a bloodied hatchet lying on the ground.

“Mr Holmes!” I shouted (though I ought to have called for Lestrade). “In the rear yard!”

Both men were there in seconds, gathering around my hunched form. Mr Holmes’s eyes darted hither and thither over the cornsilk-hued grass and the chipped flagstones but, seeing nothing he deemed important, he sank to his haunches next to me, peering at the dull blade with its encrustation of gore.

“What do you see?” he asked. Lestrade opened his mouth. “No, no, my dear fellow, let us test his mettle a bit further. Inspector Hopkins, tell me what you observe.”

A needle of panic shot through my breast, but I soon rallied. “The blood is not more than five days old, which fits our timeline – it rained on the twenty-eighth, which would have washed much of this away, and the arm was found on the first, quite fresh. Additionally, there is not a large amount of it. While it coats the edge of the hatchet, the ground beneath is spotted, not soaked.”

“Meaning?”

“The body was moved.”

“Or?”

This required thought, but I soon had it. “The body had been dead for long enough for the blood to begin to coagulate.”

“Top marks.” Mr Holmes stood. “This is manifestly the scene of the crime, and it would do to call in –”

“Holmes!” Dr Watson’s face appeared in the door, his pleasant features sombre and still. “You had better see the bedchamber.”

Not twenty seconds later, we were standing in the queerest room I’d ever encountered.

Two beds nestled against opposite corners, indifferently dressed in stale bedclothes. The single round table hosted dirtied teacups and several amber bottles, which the doctor shifted to study.

The rest of us gazed in astonishment at the walls, which were entirely covered with maps. Maps of the world, maps of Great Britain, maps of our dozens of colonies. Maps of America and its southern neighbours, maps of Arabia and Brazil and the Sahara, maps of Japan and the Bering Sea, maps showing entire constellations of islands I’d never heard of before. Stuck into these scores of maps were pins of every colour, some with notes – “tropical, parrots and pineapple trees!” – and some without, creating a dizzying spectacle of a smashed globe spread out flat and fixed to the plaster.

“Well, someone’s taken an interest in geography,” Lestrade muttered.

“This was recently a sickroom,” Dr Watson reported. “Here is a willow bark tonic, elderberry syrup, yarrow extract, ginger… whoever was being treated had a severe fever.”

“By George, Liza was taken ill,” I realised. “And only her brother left to care for her. But did he speed it along, or –”

“Hsst!” Mr Holmes lifted his palm.

I heard nothing, and from their faces neither did the others. But an instant later, dashed if Sherlock Holmes wasn’t out of the room and already halfway down a flight of steps. Quick as we ran, he had the advantage of us, and we reached the cellar (which housed a single combined workshop and lumber room) just as a guttural moan reached our ears.

“Stop! Slowly, now,” Mr Holmes said in a calm, clear voice, and we proceeded at a more measured pace. “Watson, I need you.”

Mr Holmes was half-kneeling with his forearm resting on his upraised thigh, looking for all the world as if he’d happened upon a friend in a quiet lane on a summer’s day. The lad cowering behind a stack of alder planks looked to be around eighteen years old, his face streaked with tears and sawdust, his sandy hair matted into a squirrel’s nest, his blue eyes round and anguished. His lip bled where he gnawed at it, and the boy was thin enough to be a wraith. Lestrade cursed as we stood aside for the doctor to pass.

“Your name is Arlie, I think,” Mr Holmes said with a voice like warm syrup. “I am Mr Sherlock Holmes, and this is my friend, Dr Watson.”

“She don’t need a doctor no more,” the boy replied, almost too thickly to be understood.

“I know she doesn’t, but do you think that you might?” Mr Holmes continued. Dr Watson sat unobtrusively on a crate to Arlie’s left. “We’d be grateful if you allowed my friend to take your pulse. He’s a very good sort and would never dream of harming you.”

Arlie was too far gone to protest when Dr Watson slipped his fingers around the lad’s wrist. Tears continued to stream from his eyes, his wasted body shaking.

“He’s dehydrated, in shock, and in considerable need of food, but otherwise healthy.” Pulling a brandy flask from his coat pocket, the doctor offered it. “Take a sip, if you please. That’s right! Good man – you’ll feel calmer in a moment. You say that your sister needed a doctor but doesn’t anymore?” he added, casting a tense glance at Mr Holmes.

Arlie nodded, choked on more tears, and swallowed them back. “All she wanted were to see more’n that back room. For a long spell we managed on our own, but a week ago my sister done showed signs o’ the sickness, and I’d nary a choice save hiring meself out for the medicines and tonics. It were too soon for her to be ill, too soon by far. She didn’t want to stay in London, in that room, not forever.”

“Do you mean to say your sister was too weak to leave the house?” Mr Holmes prompted softly.

“Aye.” The boy winced. “These ten years she has been, for all the poultices and teas the Wus tried. Me, I done brung all such maps as I could find, and she’d tell me what it were like there, in other lands. Dragons and beasties and tigers ten foot tall. She wanted to see ’em with ’er own eyes. Liza said as the Thames don’t look like much, but the Thames can take you anywhere in the world, anywhere, and one day we’d sail down it together and see something other than Limehouse. But then she stopped breathing. For hours.” Racking sobs did violence to the boy’s lungs. “I done sent her off to the islands and the deserts like she wanted. Down the Thames, she said. She always said as that were the way to get there. She knew the way. I were careful never to lock the boxes. When she lands, she’ll be worlds away from London.”

Horror had spread like a plague across our faces, Lestrade standing with a hand over his mouth and Dr Watson and I staring as if somehow the force of our sympathy could undo what had been done. Only Mr Holmes remained impassive, his skin marble-white and his eyes positively metallic.

“Did anyone notice you?” he asked in the same hypnotic tone. “Packing the boxes, or perhaps carrying them?”

“Not I. I went by night down to the river steps.”

“Hopkins, run and fetch us a constable,” Lestrade commanded with uncharacteristic gruffness.

“No, not on my life,” Mr Holmes growled fiercely.

“Can you be serious?” Dr Watson demanded of my senior inspector.

“Now who’s theorising in advance of facts?” Lestrade snapped, brushing an angry hand over his face. “Get this Arlie lad to his feet, come with me, and we’ll find a cab. Hopkins here is about to report that an abandoned building has been broken into. Aren’t you, Hopkins?” he added meaningfully.

“Yes, sir,” I answered with some passion.

“What of the bloodied hatchet?” Dr Watson wondered as he and Mr Holmes together helped the distraught youth to stand.

“The family had just killed a hare for supper when they suddenly vanished,” I supplied at once. “It’s a great mystery as to where they went. I daresay it’s possible they left a letter of intent somewhere, however, and I daresay I can bring it to the constable’s notice.”

“Right, that’s settled.” Lestrade shook his head in despair. “Lord have mercy. Doctor, can you find him a place?”

“I’ve a friend with a thriving practice for neurotics in the Kent countryside.” Dr Watson sighed. “It’ll be temporary, but I’ll wire him at once. Arlie, we’re taking you to our home in Baker Street where you’ll have a bath and a warm meal, all right?”

Arlie made no sound, but leaned on the doctor and nodded his tangled head.

“Good,” Lestrade approved. “Gentlemen, are we all in complete agreement?”

After a pause, Mr Holmes said, “Poe referred to the Thames as the River of Silence. Ever since reading that, I’ve thought of it so.”

“Very well,” said my fellow Yarder. “Let no more words be spoken on the subject, then. Ever. Inspector Hopkins, I regret to say that your first case remains unsolved.”

So my first case was a failure twice over, and I am glad of it.

It was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do, and the best thing to do.

Yet my heart has been tugged in so many directions today that it feels quite unravelled, loosened sinews and arteries now doing their utmost to weave themselves back together again inside my chest.

Dearest Mum,

My first case, once so bright in its promise of removing a villain from our streets, turns out to be the basest of hoaxes. A rogue medical student was guilty of chopping a body into seven parts and setting them adrift. Women of your constitution don’t shirk at such macabre news, yet I loathe telling you, for it means after all that there is nothing of importance to relate. I am nonetheless weary for this having turned out to be a prank, however, and so will write you properly tomorrow or the next day. The bubble and squeak turns out to travel very well indeed in wax paper, and will serve as my breakfast.

Six months after the business of the false Chinese box, three cases total logged working with the incomparable Sherlock Holmes (and the estimable Dr Watson), and today I received the shock of my life when he arrived at the Yard with fresh evidence for Inspector Bradstreet. Mr Holmes never vacillates once a course is set, sails ahead like a schooner with an aquiline prow. But he paused before my alcove as if he’d expected to find me there.

“A word when I’m through, if you please, Inspector Hopkins,” he decreed, whisking off without awaiting a reply.

I’d no notion of whether to feel excitement or anxiety and settled on a queasy combination by default. Meanwhile, I had need of a case file and thought a brief dash to the archives might settle me. It would have worked, too, had Sherlock Holmes not been seated in my chair when I returned, his fingers steepled and his stork’s legs crossed in front of him. Greeting him as cheerily as I could, I dropped the papers and leaned against my cubby’s dividing wall.

“Can I help, Mr Holmes?”

Inspecting me with hooded grey eyes, the detective considered. “That depends entirely upon your response to a query of mine. Three possible outcomes present themselves. Either you’ll give me a satisfactory answer, an unsatisfactory answer, or you’ll refuse to answer altogether, as I’ve no right to wonder what I’ve been wondering of late.”

“You may ask me anything, Mr Holmes.”

“In that case, I wonder that you didn’t try for another profession,” he observed idly.

“By George, I don’t… why… what do you mean by that, sir?” The effort not to appear slighted was excruciating.

“Dear me, no, put the thought from your head. You’ve a natural talent for police work.” Mr Holmes made a lazy figure eight of dismissal with his forefinger. “It’s the income, you see. Detection doesn’t pay the official Force well, not when they’re honest, which you are, and rewards are rare – maybe more so than you’d hoped. You could easily have been a City clerk with your acumen and risen accordingly, but instead you live week to week, probably because you are forced to support someone who is not in your immediate family but is nevertheless dear to you, following a tragedy which affected that person gravely.”

Someone who’s never spoken with Mr Holmes might think they’d anticipate his omniscience, maybe even expect he’s about to throw open the curtains of their lives and survey the mess in broad daylight. Well, I record it here for posterity: no one save Dr Watson himself fares any better than I did.

“Heavens, lad, sit down!” Mr Holmes tugged me towards my own chair, pivoting so his lean body rested against my desk. “Upon my word, I didn’t imagine you’d react so strongly. The brandy flask I once observed in your top left drawer –”

“No, thank you.” I chuckled weakly as Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street offered me both my own chair and my own brandy. “I’m surprised at myself. Forgive me.”

“Pray don’t ask such a thing. It’s hardly the first time I’ve staggered a stout fellow. Recently, at that.” He glanced away, an unreadable look briefly warping his perfect suavity. “I did you a disservice. Let us abandon the topic in favour of –”

“Not a bit of it!” I exclaimed, recovering. “Now you explain how you knew. I shall catalogue every detail.”

Mr Holmes did not smile, but his wintry eyes warmed. “There were a number of small indications, so many that I must take a moment to sort them. Yes, first I noted that the button on your left ulster sleeve is cheaper than that on the right, and mended in a slipshod fashion by a man unversed in the art of tailoring. Clearly, that man is you, and while you are impeccably neat in appearance, you neither bothered to match the expense of your lost button, which was made of polished horn like its brethren, nor to match the thread colour, using instead whatever you had to hand. That you are a bachelor would have been obvious from your hat brim, but your financial straits speak more clearly through your buttonhole.”

“I’ll have to be more meticulous in future. Why need there have been a tragedy?”

Mr Holmes jutted his bold chin at my torso as he lit a cigarette. “Your watch chain is an old family heirloom, but the type of locket hanging from it with the scalloped edge was in fashion some five years ago, before I met my untimely demise.”

“Thankfully very untimely indeed.”

“Your servant. The locket is a memento, and five years is approximately the amount of time it takes to lose a well-sewn button and for one’s hat colour to pass out of style. No offence intended.”

I shrugged. “None taken. So I have financial problems, and you say they point to a tragedy. Supposing I merely had onerous debts?”

“You’d have pawned the locket or the watch chain or simply the watch to ease your path.”

“What if they were all too dear to me?”

“After having gifted your beloved late father’s Bible to a cousin? Please. You aren’t a man driven by foolish sentiment, and your high expenses haunt you monthly, which is why you know better than to squander your keepsakes at a jerryshop. Economy is the only solution. Your mother posts you dinner, for heaven’s sake, or at least so the writing on your many savoury-smelling packages indicates. No, don’t ask, it’s too obvious and I’ve glimpsed the addresses – you write a male version of her penmanship.”

Despite my distress, I smiled ruefully. “The tragically afflicted – you said not a family member? It might be my sister.”

“If your sister were impoverished or afflicted, she would live with you and reattach your buttons, or live with your mother and eat her mince pies,” Mr Holmes said so smoothly that his tone might nearly have been called kind.

“Quite so.” I cleared my throat. “Mr Holmes, what is this about?”

Sherlock Holmes’s head swivelled to regard me fully, a bird of prey ruminating over a hapless mammal.

“You joined H Division at the age of twenty-five in the immediate wake of the Ripper murders,” he said with clinical detachment. “Why? Men spat at the uniformed constables in the streets, women refused to look at them. I was acquainted with canines that wouldn’t so much as bark in a bobby’s direction. You are intelligent, active, and approachable, and even if you’d no desire to be a clergyman, the world was still your oyster, and you chose to join an institution that had been hung out to dry. Pray refrain from telling me it was all thanks to The Strand, though the doctor has every right to be flattered some good has come out of his melodramas. There is another, darker reason, and if I am to rely upon your sober judgement, as I wish to do in future, I request you tell me what it is.”

Despite my reluctance to reveal the source of my heartache, there is nothing quite so persuasive as Sherlock Holmes urging a man to prove himself trustworthy. I straightened my shoulders, tugged down my waistcoat, and set to.

“I was engaged to be married in eighteen eighty-eight to a Miss Lilla Dunton. She was – is – a woman of finest character, and I’d known her if only peripherally since childhood. The suburbs in southeast London aren’t populous, Mr Holmes, and she attended my father’s congregation. I regret to say that her family life was not a happy one. Her father was born in West Africa to colonial parents and saw much hatred and degradation along the Gold Coast and as a young man in Freetown.

“Mr Dunton told Lilla tales, even as a little girl, which invested her with waking nightmares, and as her mother died in childbirth, there was no one at home to offset this morbidity save a doddering old nurse. When the Ripper crimes commenced, she was merely appalled, as we all were, but when they continued… she was reminded of brutal stories she never imagined would be brought to life here in England. Tribal massacres, soldiers ruthlessly quashing native unrest. By the time Mary Jane Kelly was left in shreds,” I finished hoarsely, “her mind was in a similar state.”

It’s obvious from Dr Watson’s writing that Mr Holmes can be affected by misfortune and grief – dashed if I hadn’t already seen it myself, when we encountered Arlie in Limehouse. On this occasion, his iron expression did not harden so much as it melted before snapping back into that perfect equilibrium he so famously maintains.

“My dear fellow. What steps did you take?” he asked softly.

“She lives at an asylum in the Sussex countryside – a humane and peaceable one, much lauded by both locals and professionals. The expense is… significant. My locket containing a miniature silhouette is all I have left of her, though I often dream she’ll write me one day. Despite our geographical proximity, during our engagement we used to exchange love letters absurdly often. I’d still give anything to see her handwriting in my post. Meanwhile, I promised myself I’d do everything possible to prevent such a monster from ever desecrating our streets again.”

“You may yet hear from her,” he observed as if making a remark about the weather.

My answering smile was one of thanks and not joy. “That’s past praying for, I fear, Mr Holmes. Highly improbable.”

“But not impossible.” The sleuth stood fully, gathering up the hat and gloves he had laid upon my desk. “Thank you for the candour of your reply. Inspector Hopkins, I intend to make a detective of you.”

“I… just a moment, you…” I trailed off, reduced again to a blithering neophyte, as appears to be my natural state when in the presence of Sherlock Holmes.

“One cannot help but agree that you would make an execrable clergyman, and so we must see what we can do about making you a crack investigator.” He winked, and for the first time I was granted a glimpse of the impish humour Dr Watson had so often recorded in early adventures.

“Do you really mean it?” I whispered in awe. “You’ll share your methods, allow me to ask questions, that sort of thing?”

“I’ll teach you the whole art of detection myself, only supposing you don’t mistake wheelbarrow tracks for bicycle tracks again as you did last –”

The unfortunate Mr Holmes was interrupted, for I was wringing his hand so hard he must have been in some pain.

“All right, all right,” he gasped, laughing. “I ask a single favour in return, mind.”

“Name it, please,” I urged, half delirious with happiness. “Anything you like. I am yours to command. I was before, anyhow.”

“The name of this bucolic hospital in Sussex. Tut, tut! This is not about your former fiancée, whose health I hope improves by the hour – I’ve been struck by a sudden inspiration, one the doctor will enjoy tremendously, and keeping Watson in good spirits has direct bearing upon the quality of my living arrangements.”

Deeply puzzled, I wrote down the address. “It has nothing to do with me, then?”

“I did not say that either,” Mr Holmes chided, declining to meet my questioning eyes as he tapped his cigarette out against his boot sole and then flicked it into my rubbish bin. He took the paper with a flourish. “Good day, Hopkins. Until you have need of me.”

Dunce that I am, it took me all evening to work it out. What an ass I’ve been, and what a worthy hero I’ve chosen to guide me on my chosen path. As mired in penury as Mr Holmes and Dr Watson were in A Study in Scarlet, now they are internationally celebrated and sought after – and wealthy to boot.

Of course his asking after the asylum had nothing to do with my poor, precious Lilla.

It had everything to do with Arlie, however.