With her tight budget, and this trip being a mere two and a half hours (assuming the schedule was not interrupted by troop movement), I did not think she would indulge in a seventeen shilling First Class return. Nine shillings and fourpence would be quite enough of a drain on her purse.
Thus, I bought a ticket for First. I had taken care with my disguise that morning, and my last act before stepping onto the street had been the insertion of the scleral lenses over my eyes, to change their colour from clear grey to muddy brown. The lenses had the unfortunate side-effect of making one’s tear ducts water ferociously, and would have me in agony by the time we reached Victoria. Still, as a finishing touch, they were far more effective than spectacles. And since our lessons had yet to cover surveillance techniques, chances were good that Russell had never heard of such things.
I pulled the raccoon-skin collar of the alpaca overcoat around my chin, settled my fedora at a rakish angle, and swanned my way towards First Class. Even if Russell had been looking directly out her window at me, I did not believe she had the experience to see through that particular costume and the way I moved inside of it.
It was actually rather amusing: Sherlock Holmes forced to muster all his skills to outwit a child of fifteen years.
The train left on time, then alternated its normal speed with odd pauses in empty countryside, coming to London less than an hour late. I took care to lose a glove amongst my draperies, allowing the other passengers to leave the carriage. Once Russell’s head had gone past the windows, I put on the glove, tugged up the wretched collar, and stepped down to the platform.
She did not look back once.
Nor, in this city of soldiers, did she take any note of the young man in uniform who leant against the outer wall. He had one arm in a sling; the other held a cigarette.
I stopped beside him, watching intently as my apprentice crossed the busy forecourt towards the street. By now my eyes were burning like fury, but I could see well enough to be certain that no one dropped in behind her, no one broke into a trot to join her omnibus queue.
She should be safe until the afternoon.
“Billy wrote me that you’d been wounded,” I said to the young man. “Do you require that sling?”
“Er, Mr Holmes?” The young soldier took his eyes off her figure, just for a moment, not at all certain of this person who addressed him.
“Must you wear that sling?” I asked again, more urgently. Injured soldiers might be commonplace in London, but she would notice if the same injury was following her about.
“No, it’s not a home-to-Blighty, I’m just filling in at the agency until I can pass my medical boards. I can do without it.” His gaze had returned to the assigned object of his surveillance.
“Good. You see her?”
“Tall girl with yellow hair and a brown hat?”
“That’s right. I’ll catch you up in an hour.”
The soldier did not ask how, simply heeled out his cigarette and trotted to a parked motor-cycle. As he kicked it into life, a young woman stepped out of the crowd and slid on behind him. The two Irregulars eased into traffic in the wake of the bus.
I knew where Russell’s optometrist’s was; the ’bus she’d boarded confirmed that her first goal would be to have her spectacles repaired. And since one of her favourite booksellers was just two streets from the shop, she was liable to linger in the vicinity before making her way to her mother’s club, which she used when she had to be in Town overnight. That gave me sufficient time for a more deliberate change of persona than just stuffing the loathsome overcoat (the fur had been poorly cured, and stank) and the blinding lenses into the nearest dust-bin.
One of the bolt-holes I had retained across London’s great sprawl was concealed as a room in the Grosvenor Hotel, mere steps away. There I flung off the wretched alpaca-and-raccoon, then hurried to ease free the slivers of tinted glass. While a kettle came to the boil over the little room’s gas ring, I held a damp flannel to my swollen eyes, mentally composing a letter to Herr Müller with detailed suggestions as to improvements in the corneal lens. When the tears had abated, I brewed coffee and picked out some alternative garments, gluing onto myself the appropriate tufts of hair.
Had I been even ten years younger, a military uniform would have rendered me instantly invisible. But thus far, the armed forces were not interested in men past their fifth decade.
So I became a woman.
I rinsed the cup and hung the extreme overcoat in the wardrobe, then picked up my handbag and went in search of my apprentice.
10
I’d had some say in the training of these two Irregulars, and was pleased to find them sufficiently competent to evade the eye of an untutored adolescent. In fact, they were better than competent, they were good: having left Victoria together on a motor-bike, they were now apart and on foot. The soldier had no sling, no cigarette, different badges on his uniform, and was so straight-spined, one could not imagine him lounging against the wall of a train station. The girl was nowhere in sight.
I paused to buy a newspaper from the vendor near the café by whose door the lad was standing, and murmured his name.
A slight widening of the eyes betrayed the young man’s reaction to the dowdy school-teacher in the sagging skirt, sensible shoes, and worn gloves. That, and the brief delay before he responded reassured me that my costume might suffice.
“Mr—that is, sorry. She left the optometrist’s and is in the bookshop.”
“Your friend is with her?”
“She took over twelve minutes ago.”
“Good. Step inside to change your coat, then come back.”
Russell’s appointment with the solicitor was for tomorrow, June the first. I had to assume that her aunt knew not only the time and place of that appointment, but also where Russell would stay in Town, and even more or less where she would go today. I could not afford to let the child range free and unguarded.
The War had stolen away my usual source of Irregulars, including the man who employed these two—Billy Mudd, who had learnt his skills from me long ago. Still, reasonably skilled agents were available, and if more of them were women than men, at this point the streets (and the jobs) of London held a higher percentage of women as well. For my purposes today, women were just fine.
Prolonged surveillance is a task nearly as wearisome to describe as it is to conduct, so I shall not go into close detail. Suffice it to say we did not lose her, and my companions were replaced every two or three hours. As for my appearance, it is extraordinary how much a ladies’ handbag may contain in the way of concealment. I felt quite bereft when I transformed at last into a man.
I even managed a quick meal, my first of the day, while the agency’s two women—one young, one old—kept their eyes on the inexpensive little bistro where Russell was eking out her meagre allowance.
I joined the older one as she followed my apprentice down the ill-lit street. The wartime ban on street lamps and outdoor lights made it necessary to follow rather more closely than I might have wished, but Russell merely made for the ladies’ club. I heard her voice greeting the door-man; the door closed behind her.
“Give me five minutes,” I told the agent. “Then you can go home.”
The empty building across from The Vicissitude (what a name for a club!) was a block of flats in the process of renovation. My pick-locks made fast work of the padlock, and I arranged the chains to appear fastened, should the beat constable give them a glance. Débris-littered stairs led to windows that were not entirely boarded over. I even found a sort of chair in one of the rubbish heaps, its three surviving legs ensuring that, tired as I was, I would not doze off too deeply. I positioned it before the window, and was rewarded with a second piece of luck: The curtains in a room across from me went bright, betraying a gap between them. In that gap my apprentice appeared. She looked down at the motorcars and pedestrians for a moment, then tugged the curtains more completely together. The glow behind them remained on.
/> Six minutes later, I heard the door below me scrape open and shut; a minute after, the door behind me did the same.
“Do you want me to watch the back of the club?” my companion asked.
“She’s given no indication that she’s aware of us, and that alleyway has no windows overlooking the back door. I think we’ll be safe enough.”
“There are rooftops. Or I could take up a position amongst the club’s dust-bins. Either way, with the blackout, she won’t see me.”
Good woman: not only a willing volunteer, but she’d done her home-work. Still, I could see no reason to inflict a miserable night on her: Russell had neither the clothes nor the money—nor even, I would have thought, the inclination—to be planning an evening out. If I knew the child at all, she was over there wallowing in her new books.
“That won’t be necessary. Just have someone join me here before dawn. A flask of coffee would be appreciated.”
“Have a good evening,” she said, and left me alone with my thoughts, my pipe, and the curtains across the street.
I sat down to my balancing act shortly after nine o’clock. The glow across the way did not vary for two hours. At ten minutes past eleven, faint shadows moved behind the curtains; a tall, slim silhouette passed left to right, then back again. A few minutes later, the room went dark.
I stood, taking care that my three-legged chair did not crash over, and waited at the window for a time. No one emerged from the club door, and I suppressed the inevitable glimmer of doubt—that she had felt her tail, that I should have put someone at the back—to return to the chair.
I stopped. Some odd sound had penetrated the night. I walked to the adjoining window, where more of the glass was missing, and listened to the bells and bellows of a fire engine. It was not near, and it was moving farther away. However, the noise was repeated as another engine hurried across London. Then another.
Some series of catastrophes were afoot. And although I knew it was hubris to assume that distant city fires might be in any way my responsibility, nonetheless, I felt an interest greater than mere curiosity. I studied the dark façade of The Vicissitude, knowing that the sound was unlikely to disturb the sleeper within, yet hating to abandon my watch even briefly.
But I did. I pulled out my torch and trotted up the decrepit stairs to the rooftop, battering the flimsy door open with my shoulder in the interest of speed. Outside, I pocketed my torch, the rooftop being sufficiently lit by the near-round moon and the probing beams of London’s dozen or so acetylene searchlights. The fire brigade engines had been to the north, but a flicker to my right drew the eye: fires, several of them, over the East End—alarmingly near the docks and Tower Bridge. After a moment, I lifted my gaze. The night sky held nothing but the beams and the moon—but there! An almost imperceptible motion where there should be none, high up and three, perhaps four, miles distant: a zeppelin? None of the searchlights lit upon it, but a faint flash from below lent it a momentary trace of substance; seconds later the sound of a small explosion reached my ears.
Then the oval ghost was gone, turning for home, delivered of its load of incendiary destruction.
Grimly, I returned downstairs. Indeed, it was no business of mine. And as I’d opined to Watson, it would not be the last such attack.
The room opposite remained dark. If Russell had slipped away in my absence, I did not know how I would look my young associates in the face, come morning. I settled to my chair and my pipe, and spent the next hours teetering gently to and fro, to and fro.
Just before three o’clock in the morning, the downstairs door betrayed a slow open, then a slow close. I moved silently behind the inner door, one arm raised to prevent its wood from crashing into me, but from the corridor outside came a familiar voice.
“Mr Holmes, I thought you might like a couple hours’ sleep.”
It was the younger of the two women from the evening before, bearing an ancient and bulging Gladstone bag.
“Do you know what the zeppelin hit?” I demanded.
“Is that what it was? They’ve been warning us about the zeppelin menace for months now, I think we’d all but decided they were a myth. All I heard was, there’s been a series of fires and explosions in Shoreditch and Whitechapel.”
“No myth. I saw it.” My eyes went to the bag. She dropped it to the floor and drew out the paraphernalia of an angel of mercy: sandwiches, two flasks, some apples, and an old but thick travelling rug. She held out one flask and the rug.
“Tea?”
“What is your name?” I asked.
“Marilyn White.”
“Miss White, I thank you.”
There was sufficient light in the room for me to see the look of apprehension on her features give way to one of pleasure. I unwrapped a sandwich and poured some tea into the flask’s beaker while she settled on my inadequate perch before the half-boarded window. I then pointed out the window behind which my apprentice (I hoped) slept, told Miss White to wake me before dawn, and wrapped myself in the rug on the floor.
No need to mention that I had abandoned my post for nearly twenty minutes.
I slept. But when the wake-up call came, it was rather more urgent than a proffered flask of coffee.
11
“Mr Holmes—her light’s come on!”
I was on my feet and free of the rug in an instant. The glimpse of sky between the boards was not much brighter than it had been: not yet six.
“A lad came to the club’s door a few minutes ago, knocked on it and handed over a note. When her window went light, I thought I should tell you.”
“Good work.” I began to fling on garments. “When we get down to the street, you go right, I’ll go left—I spotted one of the Post Office’s telephone boxes there, I’ll ring for reinforcements.”
“Do you want me to ask in the club, after she leaves? They may have seen what the note said.”
“If your colleagues reach us, then yes, but I’d rather have more than one person on her than know what summoned her.”
When Russell came out, she turned in my direction. She went past the telephone kiosk, on the opposite side of the street. I finished my call and fell in behind her.
Rule One of surveillance is the same as that for beekeeping: Remain calm. Attitude is all, when it comes to disguise. If one does not emanate tension—rather, if one only emanates the diffuse tension of any ordinary city-dweller—even a suspicious eye will not snag upon one’s figure. I kept pace with my apprentice, a street’s width apart, my slumping shoulders not only serving to reduce my distinctive height, but telegraphing the message that here was but a tired night worker on his way to a hot meal and bed.
I had two distinct advantages. First, I was at home here: Apart from the odd newcomer, such as the telephone kiosk, I knew London in the way my tongue knew my teeth, automatically, easily, and without hesitation. And second, my quarry was not only an infrequent visitor to the city, she was all but untutored in the ways of surveillance.
I was grateful for my neglect of her skills, because it meant that she made the mistakes of an amateur. When she glanced back, it was to her own side of the street first, permitting me a split second to slow or speed my gait. She made for a major road, where the ‘buses plied—and where other pedestrians offered concealment, even at that hour. She took a direct route, which not only enabled my telephonically summoned Irregulars to locate me, but allowed me to jog-trot through an ill-marked alley, over a low wall and around a newsagent’s shed to rejoin the hunt in a different position. She waited for a bus, rather than summon a taxi and force me—us—into risking a giveaway leap to do the same.
That last might have had to do with finances rather than inexperience.
When her ’bus pulled to the kerb, I was down the street in a taxicab, strengthened by two Irregulars. A third hurried to join the queue behind Russell. None of them was Miss White—she had remained with me until the laden taxicab found us, then went back to question the Vicissitude staff.
; Our cab-driver was—a sight to which my eyes had not grown accustomed—a woman. This was no phlegmatic member of London’s usual cab-driving fraternity. Indeed, she was finding it hard to maintain a simulacrum of insouciance; she had the taxicab’s clutch poised to leap.
“Do not start until I tell you,” I reminded our modern Boadicea. “And when you do, drive at a normal speed.”
I was pleased that my apprentice had not chosen to travel via the Underground, although I was not certain why. Her route also seemed to be taking us towards the source of the previous night’s devastation—which might explain it, that she had been warned of a possible disruption to the trains. In any event, the smell came first, the reek of burning homes, followed soon after by the sight of filthy, exhausted rescue crews and fire brigade equipment, returning from a terrible night’s work. And, unusually enough, the farther east we went, the thicker the pedestrian traffic grew.
“Gawkers,” our driver commented in disapproval.
The young man at my side responded with a question as to the disaster, to which she readily gave answer, although before the end of the first sentence, I could see that she did not actually know what had happened here, but was merely repeating rumours.
She was right about the sight-seers, though. A few of those shoving along the pavements betrayed the eagerness of desperate family members; most were merely eager.
In no time, traffic was at a stand-still. Three black rooftops lay between us and Russell’s ’bus; heads began to crane to ascertain what lay ahead.
When Russell came down from the ’bus, our driver was alone in her taxicab, marooned and bereft of the day’s excitement.
My three Irregulars and I worked as a team, taking turns walking close behind her, then falling back to change hat, spectacles, or outer garment before moving up again. She had a goal, that much was clear. At first, I thought it might be the Liverpool Street station, but she kept to the north of it.