Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

keep him safe.”
    “Bless you, Mr Holmes,” the man effused.  “People consider me a hard man, heartless, caring only for the accumulation of gold and power, but I would give it all away if it meant seeing William again.  If I have seemed to be hard upon him in the past, it is only because I do not want to see him make the same mistakes I observed in others.”
    “You are your brother’s keeper?”
    “Yes, I suppose you could say that,” he admitted.  “If you find him, you will, I pray, convey…well, tell him why…if, when you find him…if he…”
    “You will have the opportunity to tell himself, I hope,” Holmes said, sparing further embarrassment to a man as unaccustomed to stammering as he was to baring his emotions. “Good night, Sir Reginald.”
    Holmes closed the door and hurriedly pulled a black bag from behind a chair.  From the bag he removed several small canisters familiar to any actor.  He had to seek information in low places, and the best person to do that was not Sherlock Holmes.  In a few minutes he transformed himself from a gentleman of the West End to a man who could move invisibly among the docks and tangled warrens of London’s dismal eastern half.
    At the door he hesitated.
    For once in his life he was more full of doubts than confidence.  He felt himself upon the border of an undiscovered country, and his misgivings had nothing to do with his three-year absence, for London is always London, always his home and ever the centre of the world.  His glimpses of the path ahead had been infuriatingly cryptic, serving more to obscure than illuminate.  But he had no choice but to push off into unknown seas, putting all his faith in logic and himself.
    He closed the door.
    Already abandoning the character along with the likeness of Sherlock Holmes, he loped down the stairs with a sailor’s gait and vanished into the brisk early morning air, the enfolding darkness.
    Back in his chamber, a lock clicked, a door swung open.

Chapter IV
    Holmes, The Meddler
     
     
    The atmosphere of the Neptune Tavern was heady with blue swirls of strong tobacco smoke and alcoholic exhalations.  It was choked with songs and conversations that melded into a polyglot babble, forcing listeners to linger close to each other, making it difficult, though not entirely impossible, for those who wished to overhear without being noticed.
    Clasping only his second pint of the evening, and it only done in by a few sips despite the length of time it had been nursed, Inspector Charles Kent lounged from place to place, apparently wrapped in an alcoholic haze, yet keen to every conversation that drifted his way.  No one looking at him would have recognised him as a Scotland Yard jack.
    With his two-day beard and his thready coat, he had more the appearance of a flying cove or a macer than anyone even remotely respectable.  Strictly speaking, however, he was not working for the Yard at the moment, having been summarily dismissed by his superiors from pursuing any line of investigation even remotely connected to the Vanishments.  A bunch of weepy simps, the lot of them, he thought as he took another slow slip and subtly shifted to another part of the tavern.
    “…and the Vanishments, aye, like what took the toff…”
    Interest peaked, Kent moved closer to the speakers, his intentions masked by the apparent randomness of his movements.  They were at a table in a shadowy reach of the tavern, near stairs that led to upper chambers of dubious intent.
    Three ancient tars were in low converse with a fourth man, a gaunt fellow dressed in sombre black.  He was not a man of the sea just as he was plainly not of the East End, and it was obvious the three clove to him more from the pints of ale he provided than any sense of commonality.  Though the fourth man smiled as he listened attentively to their ramblings, there was an inherent superficiality, as if the joviality went no deeper than his skin, and there was a haunted