Free The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Dr Jekyll & Mr Holmes by Loren Estleman Page A

laid a precautionary hand upon my arm. I contented myself, as did he, with making a substantial contribution to the shaken beggar’s cup as we passed by a moment later.
    Dawn was a pale promise over the harbour when Hyde emerged from his final haunt and, after boarding the waiting hansom, turned his face westward once again. Holmes, who had been waiting with me inside the four-wheeler across the street, rapped softly upon the roof and we jolted off in his wake. We had held him in sight for several hundred yards when he turned a corner and disappeared behind an ancient brick edifice. By the time we rounded that same corner the street was deserted.
    ‘Look alive, cabby,’ Holmes hissed. ‘He may have swung into a side-turning.’
    But he had not. We proceeded at a walk for the length of the thoroughfare, at the end of which we found ourselves looking up and down a cross-street and finding no sign of the hansom which we had been pursuing. At length Holmes sighed and directed the driver to take us back to Baker Street.
    On the way there, Holmes sat with brows drawn and lips compressed, saying nothing. Deciding that this state of mind was doing him more ill than good, I endeavoured to say something reassuring. I had barely begun to speak when he uttered a sudden exclamation and struck his knee with the heel of his hand.
    ‘Fool!’ he cried. ‘Charlatan!’
    I stared at him, wondering what I had done to arouse his ire upon this occasion. He ignored me, leant his head outside of his window, and barked a harsh order to the driver. Immediately a whip cracked, our pace quickened, and we sped round the kerb on two wheels, throwing both of us into my corner of the vehicle.
    Holmes’s eyes (he had torn off the black patch) were agleam, staring intently at the street ahead. ‘What an imbecile I have been, Watson! I trust that the account which you have been threatening to write about the grisly business at Lauriston Gardens will present me as the imperfect being that I am.’
    ‘I am afraid that I do not follow you.’ I had to raise my voice to be heard over the pounding of the horse’s hooves upon the pavement, and to hold onto my hat as the wind of our passage plucked at the brim. Gas lamps sped past at a dizzying rate, their illumination flickering inside the cab.
    ‘It is simplicity itself,’ said he. ‘After he had his fun with us back at the Red Goose, Hyde had been at no pain to throw us off his trail until a few moments ago. He has not attempted to conceal from us his unsavoury appetites; if anything, he has been flaunting them in our faces. He knows that we know where he lives. Why, then, has he chosen to lose us in this manner? After we have eliminated all of the impossibilities, there is but one place left to which he can be heading, a place with which he does not wish us to know that he has any connexion.’
    ‘Dr. Jekyll’s!’
    ‘Precisely! The curious link which binds the disreputable young hedonist to the respected doctor is the one thing which he chooses not to dangle before us. He must know that we are aware of its existence, and yet it is something he would rather we forgot. But here we are, and there is the evidence which we seek. Stop here, cabby!’
    We halted near a dreary block of buildings which fronted upon a narrow street within a stone’s throw of one of London’s busiest sectors, just in time to see a hansom rattling off from in front of it and a stunted, top-hatted, and cloaked figure ducking through a squat door into the building.
    ‘That, unless we have been mis-led, is the entrance to the dissecting-room of Dr. Henry Jekyll,’ Holmes remarked. ‘There sits our mystery, Watson. What brings him here at this hour? Money, or perhaps the urge to gloat over his night’s activities in the presence of his respectable benefactor?’ His lips were drawn tight beneath the grotesque makeup. ‘There is wickedness afoot here, Doctor, as obvious as that fog which is rolling in from the east. But