The Classified Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula(69)
*
The rookery Holmes had in mind was along the Ratcliffe Highway in the East End of London. The stench of the city, always profound to my nose, rose to a prodigious reek that threatened to burn out my very skull, a testament to the poor drainage and worse sanitary conditions the squalor forced on its tenants. The babble of the city dwindled to a sibilant whisper as scruffy-clad street loiterers watched our four-wheeler pass. Men and women shouted off in the distance in a vehement strain that was sometimes violent, other times lewd, but always hidden or dimmed as we approached, the way chattering birds suddenly fall silent when sensing danger. A clamour rose up behind us after we had passed. As we rattled past the Tobacco Dock and the bronze sculpture of a boy and tiger outside of Jamrach’s Wild Beast Emporium, the buildings became even leaner, taller and closer together so that it almost seemed as if we were descending into subterranean trenches that held the seediest and most unfortunate of London’s tenants. The cabbie hadn’t been happy about our destination and Holmes had already promised him extra payment as a result. The entire place seemed nothing but dark alleys filled with the stench of standing water and dilapidated tenements equally filled with desperation and whispers.
Holmes directed our cabbie to pull up to a kerb where several young men loitered with the insouciance only available to the young. Behind the young men loomed a row of adjoined buildings so cramped and narrow that it might have been one huge, dilapidated monstrosity. All the windows closest to us were broken and open to the elements.
“Blimey,” one of the young men said as we stepped out into the street. Clearly, he recognized my austere friend’s countenance. He smoothed back a magnificently bushy black moustache, trying with that habitual gesture – with not much success – to hide his amazement and perhaps just a trace of awe. Finally, he mastered himself, and his face once again resumed the expression of unconcerned hostility that seemed to be its default. “Almost a shame to see you two ’ere,” he said. “I liked me a good story or two. Now we won’t never get to read another. No way is the Lady goin’ to let you two leave ’ere. Leastways not walkin’, she ain’t.”
He hefted a heavy stick and the three others also produced similar weapons and stepped forward. I hurriedly raised my own stick, certain that we were mere seconds from a pitched street brawl.
“Save the banter, Hodges,” Holmes said, unflappable to the last. “Tell Mrs Ricoletti that we’re here straightaway. She’ll be very interested to see me.”
“’Ow do you know my name?” the youth said, surprised.
“It’s my business to know your name,” said Holmes. “Just as I know Laramie, Stoutworth and De Santos behind you. I also know, with tolerable certainty, what jobs Mrs Ricoletti has had you do this past month just as plainly as I know the blackcurrant pudding you had for lunch this morning, which, I might add, has no actual currants in it. Now hurry up and tell Mrs Ricoletti that we are here.”
“Lord,” the youth whispered. “You’re ’avin’ me watched, you is!”
Holmes, unperturbed, waved the boy away. To my astonishment the previously hostile youth dropped his threatening stick and hurried through the door behind him. The door, a ramshackle slat of wood without latch or handle, banged shut behind him after he went through.
“Blackcurrant pudding?” I asked quietly.
“We passed a sign,” Holmes said, “not half a block back proclaiming the daily special as blackcurrant pudding for a mere farthing – surely not enough for real currants – and brown crumbs on both the moustache of our eager friend and the clothes of his comrades-in-arms. The deduction was a simple one.”
“It always seems so simple after you explain it,” I said.
“Perhaps I should stop,” he replied with a touch of asperity. “No one ever admires the magician quite so much after his tricks are revealed.”
“Hey!” the cabbie yelled behind us. “I didn’t bargain for staying long in a place like this!”
“Here,” I said, stepping over to hand a coin up. “Here’s a half-sovereign for your trouble. There’ll be another to rub against it after you take us out again. You’ll be in no danger. Not as long as you’re with Sherlock Holmes.”
“Sherlock Holmes, is it?” the man said. “Well, that’s different, then.”
“Your efforts at work again, Watson,” Holmes said with a grimace of satisfaction. “Your turn for romantic fiction does seem to have its uses.”
“Thank you, Holmes.”
The moustached youth burst through the doors, clearly in a rush. “Come on, then,” he yelled, waving his hands at us. “She wants to see you.”
“I rather thought she might,” Holmes said with a bland smile.
We were led up the short flight of dirty limestone steps into the tenement building. The dingy landing had two open doorways on the left and right that led into what had once been separate lodgings and now stood open, since the doors had been torn off their hinges, probably to be used as firewood for one of the meagre fires that flickered within. Several figures of indeterminate age and sex wrapped in grey rags slept on the floors, as well as in the lobby and on the stairwell landing. The area smelled of mould and unwashed bodies and a cold breeze informed me that more than one window was broken or missing inside.