Part 2 (1/2)

'If you must know,' I said, 'I have misgivings concerning this case.'

'I confess,' he replied, 'that the more I think about it, the less I like it. I suspect there are deep undercurrents here of which we have not been made aware.' He brightened up. 'Still, it is a capital mistake to theorize in the absence of the facts, and the case does hold certain interesting features.'

We took Trafalgar Square at a fast clip, and were heading up the newly built Charing Cross Road when Holmes said, 'How do you fancy a little run out tomorrow, old chap?'

His casual tone did not fool me.

'To the Library of Saint John the Beheaded?'

'I'll make a detective out of you yet,' he chuckled.

As we turned into Oxford Street we found ourselves behind a slow-moving bus - one of the dark green Atlas type -whose horses could not be raised from an idle canter. The press of traffic made it impossible for our own driver to overtake.

'These streets are becoming more crowded by the day,' Holmes remarked.

'There is only so much traffic the capital can take without grinding to a complete halt.'

It was twenty minutes later that we arrived at our lodgings in Baker Street.

Mrs Hudson, our landlady, had been alerted by telegram to our impending arrival. Despite a sprained ankle which had occurred during our absence, and which my loc.u.m had treated, she had a large dinner awaiting us. At last I was home and comfortable again.

I descended the next morning to find Holmes slumped in his armchair in the same position he had been in when I retired. He was still wearing his mouse-coloured dressing-gown.

'Have you slept, Holmes?'

'Sleep is for tortoises.' A huge pile of newspapers was spread around him and he was clipping out articles and pasting them into his files, 'I have a deal of catching up to do. Mrs Hudson had been saving these for me every day. This,' he said, waving a copy of the Globe, 'is the nervous system of the city, Watson! The agony columns, the small advertis.e.m.e.nts, the snippets of news concerning lost parakeets and accidents involving brewers' drays... I can predict half the crimes in London for the next six months by keeping abreast of these sorts of minutiae and trivia!'

Whilst I breakfasted on scrambled eggs, bacon and kedgeree, all washed down with cups of strong, sweet tea, Holmes busied himself amongst his cuttings. I took the opportunity to look around the room - made fresh to me by a few days' absence. It struck me suddenly how bohemian our abode must have looked to the casual visitor - of which we had more than our fair share, given Holmes's vocation. The general arrangement of chairs and tables was, it must be said, unremarkable. The three windows looked down onto Baker Street, and provided ample light. The furniture was comfortable.

A spirit case and gasogene in one comer were a welcome sign of refreshment, and a curtained recess in another provided privacy, should it be needed. No, it was the details that gave us away. The initials 'VR', which Holmes had patriotically inscribed in the wall adjoining his bedroom using a small-calibre revolver were, perhaps, the most obvious feature. Next to them his unanswered correspondence, affixed to the mantlepiece with a jack-knife, was a minor detail and the Persian slipper full of tobacco a mere frippery.

How did I put up with the man? More importantly, how did Mrs Hudson put up with him?

The answer to that was simple. Mrs Hudson's affection for Holmes was that same feeling that one would show for a precocious but wayward child. She had taken him under her wing, and Holmes, the great observer, never realized the extent to which she mothered him. The fact that the rent which - and I frankly admit this - he paid for both of us could have already bought the house many times over did not influence her in the slightest, I feel sure.

I glanced over at the side of the room which, by mutual agreement, was 'mine'. A few scattered volumes of short stories, a copy of Gray's Anatomy, a framed portrait of General Gordon and an unframed one of Henry Ward Beecher . . . these were my possessions. Not for the first time, I compared my life to that of my friend, and I found myself wanting.

'I have been researching the Library of St John the Beheaded whilst you lay asleep,' Holmes announced, apropos of nothing. 'I have been able to find no reference to it anywhere, save some guarded comments in an obscure theological journal published almost a century ago. It appears to derive from the Venetian Church of S. Giovanni Decollato, or S. Zan DegolA as the locals call it. According to the doc.u.mentation we were provided with by his Holiness-' he tapped a sheaf of vellum beside him which, I noticed, was already stained with marmalade ' it is located in Holborn, in the notorious area known as the St Giles Rookery, A nasty neighbourhood it is too; a veritable rabbit-warren of alleys, cellars, tunnels, slums and stairwells. The police dare not go near it, save in teams.' He frowned slightly. 'I tracked down Lady Fantersham there, you may recall, when she was kidnapping girls for the white slave trade.'

'An unexpected location for a library. I would have expected something isolated and heavily guarded. A manor house, perhaps, in some remote corner of England.'

'I suspect that the location is not accidental. Given the value that we know must attach itself to such a collection, what better place to hide it than amongst thieves and rogues?'

'Ah,' I cried. 'The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allen Poe! The best place to hide an incriminating letter is in a letter rack!'

'Poe is an American drunk and his fictional detective Dupin a fortunate blunderer,' Holmes snapped, and threw off his dressing gown to reveal impeccable morning attire.

'Surely,' I said, 'if we are descending into the lair of the criminal cla.s.ses, a disguise of some sort. .'

'No need: He reached .for his top hat. 'The one reference I have been able to find to the Library of St John the Beheaded implied that some form of immunity from harm was extended to its patrons.'

'Holmes, that was a hundred years ago!'

'Then we had better hope it is still accurate.'

Within a few minutes we were in a hansom heading for Holborn. Within sight of Newgate Prison, empty now but still a name to strike terror into the heart, we turned off into a series of narrow alleys, whose steep sides restricted the sky to a narrow, overcast strip and provided plentiful shadows for lurking muggers.

'Can't go no farther, Guv,' said the cabbie after a while.

I was not sure whether he was referring to the narrowness of the alleys or the danger of lingering. Holmes paid him off whilst I gazed around, convinced we were being watched.

'The St Giles Rookery' Holmes murmured as the two wheeler clattered away to wider and safer thoroughfares. 'A portmanteau term born of St Giles's Church and the rook, a burglar's jemmy. Keep your eyes peeled and your hand on your revolver.'

'How did you...'

'Your topcoat hangs heavy on the right-hand side. No doubt the crows will have noticed.'

'Crows?'

'The look-outs, Watson. Five of them. You had not noticed?' He gave an exclamation and moved off. I followed, wis.h.i.+ng I were somewhere else.

The alleys seemed to crowd in on us as we walked. The cobbles were more like sharp stones embedded in mud. Gla.s.sless windows and doorless doorways led to spa.r.s.ely furnished rooms and stairwells with broken treads. Undernourished dogs paced us from a distance. Sneering men in grimy, collarless s.h.i.+rts watched us from doorways. Hollow-eyed women glanced quickly up at us from sinks and tables, only to look away if we met their gaze. Children ran in gangs, playing with shards of wood and frayed string, staring at us with hard, old eyes. The stench was appalling - worse than the fetid odour of gangrene and trenchfoot which was my overriding memory of Afghanistan.

'The dregs of London make their abode here, Watson,' Holmes warned, sotto voce. 'I would be surprised if there's a man or woman with an honest occupation within a mile of this spot.' His voice was bitter. 'The criminal undercla.s.ses do not call themselves the Family for nothing. They live ten to a room and teach their children to become dips and mutchers in their wake, and who can blame them? Those politicians who decry anarchy and socialism as dangerous foreign nonsense should look to their own backyards first. There is no law here; it is nature, red in tooth and claw.'

'Dips and mutchers?' I asked.

'Pickpockets and thieves who rob drunks,' he said. 'Really, Watson, your education is remarkably lacking in some areas.'

A pair of grimy ragam.u.f.fins ran past us. I was about to reach out and ruffle the hair on one of them - a small, blonde girl - when Holmes stopped me.

'Tosh-fakers,' he explained.

'I'm sorry?' I pulled my hand back.

'Urchins whose dubious profession it is to search the sewer mouths of the Thames, casting amongst the excrement for valuable trifles which have been lost down privies and drains.'

'How can a child endure this way of life?' I exclaimed.

'They survive,' he said.

Holmes seemed to have memorized the route, for he led me unhesitatingly through turn after turn. Within moments we were moving through what seemed to be a crowd of scarecrows who eyed us with envy and hatred, but we carried a bubble of privacy with us that pushed the crowd away before us and closed it again in our wake. As Holmes had said, we were protected. I could not have retraced even a fraction of our path, for every street and every face bore the same marks of hards.h.i.+p and violence.

'Does anything strike you as strange?' Holmes muttered after a while.

'Nothing in particular,' I replied.

'Hmmm. I would be prepared to swear that this rookery is less crowded than the last time I pa.s.sed this way. Many of the male inhabitants appear to be absent.'

'Less crowded?' I couldn't see how any more people could be crammed into the area.