Eye of the Crow Read Online Free PDF Page A

picture of the victim is drawn for the reader. Her pretty eyes look just like his mother’s in the little painting back in their flat.
    The woman’s identity has still not been revealed. He reads on.
    It is an open-and-shut case. There is no doubt that the Arab did it. The police are certain. An old detective named Lestrade is in charge.
    We found him not far from the scene, blood on his hands, a butcher’s knife concealed under his coat. She wasn’t a wealthy woman, but well turned out. This villain must have thought she had money. There are signs that he took her coin purse, though we haven’t recovered it. He must have ditched it somewhere. Remnants were found at the scene. We will talk to him, talk to him smartly. The purse shall be found. And he will swing for this.
    Further down the page Sherlock reads that the Arab’s trial will take place in about three weeks. Punishment will swiftly follow. The clock has begun ticking on Mohammad Adalji’s life.
    When Big Ben strike 5:00, it sounds like a distant gong in another county to Sherlock. He gets up and walks mechanically toward the river. Before he’s gone far he notices that the crows are nearby again. Two of them are flying above him. But then they veer away. He decides to follow. He should go straight home, but something inside urges him to go with them.
    They are flying toward the oldest part of London, the city proper, the area inside the ancient London Wall, where spooky little streets wind around like snakes slithering into stone burrows. It is filled with banks these days, but it’s where the Romans once lived, where the Vikings and Saxon lords ruled, where witches told gruesome tales, and wretched medieval men and women were whipped and tortured in public.
    The crows fly, then roost, and then move on. Following them gives him an uneasy feeling … like he’s with the devil’s birds.
    Where are they going? Where do they stay at night? Usually they find tall trees.
    Before long the Tower of London with its famous prison is to his right down by the Thames. Soon after it slips from sight, the crows start flying lower.
    He is a long way east now, in a working-class area. There are rag-and-bone shops, candle makers, costermongersand their carts everywhere: an immigrant neighborhood even poorer than his own. This wide road isn’t so bad, but down the smaller streets he sees desperate people walking about, many in bare feet, others lying against soot-stained buildings. He sees Jews too, crowds of them, some selling clothes, yes, with long beards and piles of hats on their heads. Languages he can’t understand fill the air.
    There are no gas lamps down these back-ways. Soon the sunlight will grow dimmer; the famous London fog, beginning to settle in, will get thicker. People are rushing home, leaving the main road. He goes by a street named Goulston.
    He shouldn’t be here. Sinister-looking men pass, eyeing him.
    “Easy mark,” he thinks he hears a dusky one in a sailor’s cap murmur to another.
    He keeps his eye on the crows. But suddenly they vanish. They drop somewhere to his left, just a short distance ahead. He is beginning to feel lost. The side streets here seem darker, like wolf dens.
    He stops at a narrow one … Old Yard … his best guess as to where the birds have gone. There are two shops on either side of the entrance and their upper stories, grim-looking lodgings, are built right across and over the little street.
    He takes a deep breath and ventures down it, his heart pounding.
    It is like being in a tunnel. The sides of the two-storey buildings lean out over the road, cutting off the setting sun. Filthy children dressed in rags crawl out from nowhere, begging with pleading eyes and outstretched hands. Othershave lined up their pathetic shoes on the grim, dirty footpaths, hoping for a sale. They smell as if they’ve bathed in cesspools. Many cough horribly, and their skin looks green. These are the sorts of areas where four or five families