The Soprano's Last Song Page 9

  No light could break through the gray cloak of fog that wrapped up the houses. All we could see was the murkiness blanketing the streets and the tiny shadows of rats running away, frightened by our movements. The few people that we passed moved to the other side of the street with the same feverish speed of the rodents.

  “It’s here!” Sherlock said suddenly, making us stop. I could not figure out how he knew. We were at an intersection that was completely identical to the previous one, and there was no beggar crouched on the sidewalk.

  “The smell,” Sherlock said. “The smell remains.” He crossed the street, put his hands on the moist, musty walls, and oriented himself.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing out a distant, yellowish glow. It was a window, the lighted window of a house swallowed by fog.

  Sherlock ran in that direction. I tried to hold him back. I thought that maybe we should have a weapon with us before we went into the unknown, but when he shook free from my grip, I just ran after him. Lupin lingered behind, ordered the coachman to wait for us, and then ran after us.

  The house was surrounded by a small garden invaded with weeds. It was short — a ground floor and an upper floor, topped by a roof with two chimneys. The lighted window that we could see from the street was on the top floor.

  Sherlock pushed through the garden gate and climbed up the two steps to the entrance. The front door was ajar.

  “Miss Betty?” he asked. “Ophelia?”

  Silence.

  Sherlock pushed the door open farther, making it creak in a terrible way. Inside, we found a true disaster.

  It was dark, but we could see that pots, pans, furniture, and books had been thrown to the floor. There was a hallway straight ahead that led to a kitchen, a small library on the left side of the entrance, and on the right was a flight of stairs. A little light shined down from above. The railing of the staircase was damaged, and many paintings were now lying on the steps, their frames torn apart.

  Sherlock put a finger to his lips. He made a gesture that indicated I should keep an eye on the hallway to the kitchen, and then he began to carefully climb the stairs.

  I stepped over the frame of a painting, making the old wooden floor moan beneath my feet. I watched Sherlock move slowly up the stairs, one step at a time, and I stared into the dark kitchen ahead of me, my heart pounding in my throat with every step.

  Suddenly, I heard the garden gate squeak, and I jumped. But I soon calmed myself, realizing it was Lupin who had joined us.

  Then I thought I heard a noise upstairs.

  “Sherlock!” I yelled. But he waved it off and continued up the stairs.

  I reached the kitchen doorway and looked around. The first thing I saw were plates and cups thrown on the ground, broken into a thousand pieces, cabinets that were emptied in a wild way, and then . . .

  My heart beat a violent blow in my chest.

  I felt my legs freeze. A curtain of darkness fell over my eyes. I sat down slowly, unable to hold myself up. I would have certainly fainted if the cold of the marble kitchen floor against my legs had not helped me snap out of my nightmarish trance.

  I took a deep breath and opened my eyes again. I was not wrong.

  There was a woman’s body lying beside the pantry door . . . white and still as snow.

  I put my hand on my mouth to keep from screaming.

  It was Ophelia Merridew.

  The floor creaked and made me turn suddenly. I saw that Sherlock was most of the way up the stairs, and above him, at the top of the staircase, was an imposing figure. The person was wrapped in a cloak and wore a big hat pulled down over his forehead and a red scarf that covered his face.

  “STOP!” Lupin shouted from the front door.

  I heard a loud noise. The wooden railing along the stairway came down with a tremendous crash.

  Sherlock Holmes had been pushed down the staircase by the devil of Bethnal Green. The force of his fall had taken down the railing, and he fell headfirst to the ground, landing in a pile of wood fragments and debris.

  The devil came down the staircase two steps at a time, moving quickly toward Lupin like a huge black thundercloud.

  I cried out in fear and ran toward Sherlock, who was curled up on the ground.

  Lupin and the stranger scuffled. The masked man picked up Lupin and threw him forcefully across the room. Lupin landed heavily by the door. The stranger rushed out to the street, disappearing into the fog.

  Sherlock was the first to get up, groaning.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He nodded. He pressed his hand on his shoulder as he staggered outside.

  Lupin followed him, limping. I found myself alone, just a few steps away from the corpse of poor Ophelia Merridew. I realized that the feeling of faintness I had experienced a few moments ago was still very real.

  “Drats!” I hissed between my teeth. Gathering all my strength, I ran outside, stepping over the rubble that littered the floor.

  When I arrived outside in the fog, I found Lupin and Sherlock both leaning against the iron gate. “What is happening now?” I asked, surprised by their calmness.

  I heard the crack of a whip and a horse trotting in the distance.

  “As it happens, we have given up our carriage to the devil,” Sherlock replied. “So we have no way to follow him. But perhaps the coachman has seen his face . . .” Sherlock was turning it over in his mind as he thought out loud.

  Sherlock stared silently at the dark trunks of the trees as if they were the bars of a cage. Lupin, however, was breathing hard. It looked like his temple and his right hand were wounded.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him.

  He slowly opened his fingers and showed me what he had swiped during the struggle with the Spaniard. It was a strip of red silk, a little bigger than a playing card.

  “And you?” he asked me.

  I shook my head doubtfully. Who knows? Maybe I was about to give up. Maybe I was going to confess that the whole investigation was too much for me. In truth, that is how I felt. But I did not say those words ever.

  Just then, we heard a groan coming from the house. “He . . . help . . .”

  So Ophelia is not . . . I thought. We all stared at one another in silence.

  “Let’s go!” I shouted at last.

  And with that, all three of us ran back into the house.

  Chapter 17

  A PIECE OF RED SILK

  “It’s really amazing,” Mr. Nelson commented as he leafed through the newspaper the next morning. “Half of Europe is in flames because of the war, and the newspapers continue to publish full-page stories on Ophelia Merridew!”

  I broke the shell of my hard-boiled egg. Hearing Mr. Nelson say her name made my heart beat faster. I could not reveal to him that I had been involved in that murky incident, so I pretended to be absorbed in reading the first page. Thankfully, Mr. Nelson did not ask questions.

  The Times reported that Ophelia Merridew had been found alive, but now she was struggling between life and death. She was being cared for in a secret place, because it was believed that she was still in danger.

  Police had determined that it was only by some miracle the attacker had not been able to finish his work — to kill Merridew. They reported that until they received direct testimony from the opera singer, they would not have a definite name for the attacker.

  There was no mention of the three of us, fortunately. Apparently, Scotland Yard was still convinced that Théophraste Lupin was guilty of murdering Alfred Santi. Nisbett continued to protest the accusation by insisting that there was some link between the murder of Santi and the attempted murder of Merridew — the latter of which, we all knew, had occurred when Théophraste Lupin was locked up in a jail cell.

  My friends and I were certain that there was a connection between the two incidents. The dratted d
evil of Bethnal Green! But, as Sherlock said, at this point he was like a fictional character, a faceless and nameless ghost.

  We figured it would be useless to try to talk to Nisbett or to go to the Scotland Yard. They would have simply thought of us as children who had too much imagination.

  At this point, Scotland Yard had investigated Mr. Lupin’s past, although not entirely accurately. They were convinced that he belonged to a dangerous gang of criminals. Therefore, they deemed that the attack on Merridew could have been one of Théophraste’s accomplices attempting to muddy the waters, freeing Mr. Lupin of any blame in the murder of Santi.

  A small sigh escaped my lips. The investigators, I thought, wouldn’t discover who the real murderer was even if he passed right under their noses!

  I finished my breakfast in a hurry and then stood up, ready to go out.

  “What are your plans for today, Miss?” Mr. Nelson asked me.

  “Oh, I don’t know exactly,” I said. “But I think I’ll go back to take care of . . . fabrics.”

  He opened his eyes wide. It was clear he didn’t want to spend another afternoon winding his way from one tailor shop to another on Savile Row.

  “Do you want to come with me?” I asked anyway.

  “Only if it involves something very dangerous, Miss. Something that absolutely requires my protection!” the butler joked.

  “Then you can stay here in comfort, my good Horatio Nelson,” I said as I got up from the table and smiled at him. “It will be an affair of refined matters . . . haute couture!”

  I crossed the dining room, laughing the entire way. I pushed through the Claridge’s revolving door and headed outside toward Sherlock’s house.

  The Holmes residence in London was simple, but had a great perk — a toolshed in the backyard.

  Sherlock had made the toolshed his own kingdom, and it was there where he greeted Lupin and me that morning between screwdrivers, hammers, and saws hanging on old rusty nails; a massive workbench; and an unknown number of drafts in the woodwork that the young Holmes would have to mend before winter.

  That morning, I discovered that the magnifying glass that would become Sherlock’s famous tool belonged to, in fact, his older brother, Mycroft.

  But it was that morning, Sherlock claimed, that he became the first one to use the lens.

  Sherlock put on a pair of white gloves (which also belonged to his brother). He then picked up the piece of red cloth that Lupin had snatched from the devil of Bethnal Green and bent over to study it with great care. Seeing Sherlock stooped in that way, with his eye grotesquely magnified by the lens, made me think of the famous hunchback of Notre-Dame, and I burst into laughter.

  “And what’s wrong now?” he asked me, lowering the lens for a moment in astonishment.

  “Forget it, Quasimodo,” I joked. “Tell us what you see.”

  That day I witnessed the great detective’s first investigation with a magnifying glass — with the very lens he would often be pictured with many years later.

  But since I want to be honest about how things really took place, well . . . I must say that in the beginning, Sherlock Holmes’s work with the lens was not very impressive.

  “It is silk!” Sherlock announced. And then he added, “Valuable silk!”

  Mocking him, Lupin made a shocked expression, and I had to try my hardest to hold in my laughter.

  Sherlock, who was intensely concentrated on his inspection work, took no notice of the teasing and kept sharing his observations with us. “It is certainly not a piece of a scarf. It looks like a piece of the lining of a coat. And here . . . here are the initials sewn on the fabric! Three characters: W & R!”

  At that, he put the lens down triumphantly.

  “Is that it?” Lupin asked. “W & R could be anything.”

  “Not anything,” Sherlock pointed out. “Indeed, it could be an abbreviation for thousands of names. But I can hardly believe the man is a Spaniard . . . considering that the letter W is extremely rare in the Spanish language.”

  “Good point,” Lupin agreed.

  “And that’s not all! Wait here a minute, please.”

  He gave us the cloth and the lens and ran out of the toolshed, heading toward his house.

  Sherlock returned shortly with a fancy coat belonging to Mycroft.

  He showed us how the silk was applied to the lining of Mycroft’s coat, convincing us even more that what we had in hand was, indeed, a piece of silk that Lupin had ripped off of the Spaniard’s coat.

  “As I have already told you,” Sherlock added, “my brother is determined to pursue a career in politics, and it is for this reason that Mother gave him my father’s good coat.”

  It was the first time that Sherlock mentioned his father, Siger, whose sad story I didn’t learn until later.

  “Now,” young Holmes continued, “please smell the lining of this coat and then smell the scrap that Lupin tore off of the Spaniard’s coat. Try to sharpen your senses. Smell, if you can, beyond the stench of the people who have worn these fabrics. Concentrate on the aroma of the silk, so to speak.”

  Intrigued, I tried to do as he said. The silk of the two liners did have, at their depths, a similar fragrance. “Aromatic!” I exclaimed. “Almost spicy.”

  “Excellent!” Sherlock approved, snapping his fingers in satisfaction. “The two fabrics have the same unmistakable smell of Indian silk, coming from the colonies of Her Majesty the Queen of England.”

  Lupin crossed his legs on his stool. “Then although he is likely a Spaniard, we know he bought his clothes here in England.”

  “Exactly. And we also know he spent more than a little on whatever this tiny scrap came from — likely a coat,” Sherlock added, holding up the piece of silk with a grin on his face.

  Lupin tugged nervously at his chin. Every little analysis or discovery, which for Sherlock and me may have seemed a simple move to solve a difficult puzzle, represented for Lupin, in reality, a step toward his father’s freedom.

  “And now that we have these letters, and we know that this silk is made in England?” I asked.

  “Should we go back to Savile Row?” Sherlock suggested.

  I shook my head. “Not quite Savile Row, but almost.”

  * * *

  As soon as Hortence left her house, I caught up with her along the street, leaving Lupin and Sherlock hidden behind a tree.

  “Miss Hortence! Miss Hortence, excuse me!”

  The seamstress stopped to see who was calling, but as soon as she recognized me, her expression turned rather sour.

  “Have you read about Ophelia?” I asked, moving toward her.

  Hortence said yes, adding that the accounts were terrible. She walked slowly but steadily, and held a couple of jackets wrapped in blue tissue paper under her arms.

  “What do you want from me this time, young lady?” she asked.

  “Instead of being happy that your friend has been found, you seem angry with me, Miss Hortence,” I pointed out.

  “I find it a strange coincidence . . . you come to my house with your butler, both of you weighed down by packages,” she replied, then she paused, as if to emphasize that she considered it entirely inappropriate to reveal the fact that I had someone in my service. “You ask me about Olive’s family, I tell you about Aunt Betty, and then, the next day . . . then my poor friend is found right in the old house of this aunt — more dead than alive!”

  “I do not see how you can think that I —” I started.

  “I do not think anything, young lady! But I don’t understand why you’re here now,” the seamstress concluded, nervously clutching her bundle of clothes.

  “Because you are the only person who can help me,” I admitted. And then I told her, trying to be as honest as possible, that I was doing a small investigation into the incident.

  I explained that
we had a valid suspect that we believed had attacked Ophelia in her aunt’s house, and that it could very well be the same person who had murdered Alfred Santi.

  “It just so happens that I have a friend, Miss. And right now she is lying in bed and fighting for her life. So I hope that I do not hurt your feelings, but I will tell nothing more,” the seamstress said.

  “All right, Miss Hortence,” I said, nodding. “I won’t ask you anything more about Ophelia. However, what I would ask of you is your expert opinion!”

  I was hoping that the initials on the cloth, W & R, would awaken some memory linked to Hortence’s childhood — and therefore to Ophelia’s.

  So, without hesitation, I waved the piece of red silk before her eyes. Hortence looked at it and then looked at me like I was crazy. “What is this? A joke?”

  “What can you say of it?” I asked, choosing to ignore her skepticism.

  “It is silk. Of the best quality,” she replied, examining the fragment.

  “It is signed with the initials W & R. Do they mean anything to you?” I asked.

  The woman paused to think. “No, I’m sorry. Not at all.”

  I bit my lip. “Could they be the initials of a tailor’s shop?” I persisted, determined not to leave empty-handed.

  “W & R?” Hortence repeated, pausing to think again, this time a little longer. “No. There is no tailor’s shop that has those initials. Not on Savile Row, at least.”

  “Maybe a tailor’s shop that has closed?” I kept at it, although I had less and less hope. “Or are there any shops that have changed ownership?”

  “I’ve been here for a lifetime,” Hortence said, “and I can assure you that I have mended a lot of clothes, old and new. I’ve never seen anything from your imaginary tailor, W & R! And now, with your permission, I have to finish my deliveries.”

  “Very well. I am staying at the Claridge’s,” I said. “If you think of something, or change your mind —”

  “I have nothing more to say to you, young lady. Good day!” Hortence said, walking briskly away. I walked back toward my two friends.