Free Sherlock Holmes 01: The Breath of God by Guy Adams Page B

and unable to drag myself back into the sharp, defined city I knew and loved.
    I raised my hands to my head, tapping at my forehead to test for a temperature. My skin was cool.
    I wasn’t surprised, this didn’t feel like an illness. Perhaps I had been poisoned? I thought back to being in Ruthvney’s study, trying to imagine when I might have come into contact with something, perhaps even the same chemical that had affected him so markedly. I could think of no way, I had touched nothing, tasted nothing... If it had still been in the air then surely all three of us would have been equally affected?
    “You just going to stand there?” asked a voice ahead of me. I looked up to meet the gaze of a news vendor, his ruddy skin a sure sign of years of over-drinking. It began with a wee dram to keep the chill off, I thought, then you got a real taste for it. “If you do,” he continued, “you’ll be trod underfoot for sure when the rush hour really starts. You think it’s busy now, you just wait until the offices close. Like ants they is, all running for cover.”
    “I won’t be here then,” I said, feeling foolish, “just getting my bearings.”
    “Oh yeah,” he replied, “bearings is it? I always keep mine close to hand.” With that he proved my earlier guess accurate by removing a hip flask from his pocket, unscrewing the cap and taking a big slug. “Bearings is easy to find if you always keep ’em in the same pocket.” He grinned at me and showed two large gaps in his front teeth. Diabetes, the medical man in me decided, probably caused by his diet, or lack of it... He held the hip flask out to me and, somewhat to my own surprise, I moved forward and took it. I drank a mouthful. Cheap rum, that burned rather than warmed. A man of the ocean I decided, revising my opinion, nobody but an ex-sailor would find comfort from this rough stuff. I handed the flask back and checked his wrists for tattoos as he took it from me. Sure enough, the fine curl of a rose stem peered out from beneath his cuff. Rum and tattoos, I thought, if he were any more obvious I would be able to smell the salt.
    “Better?” he asked, and despite the roar in my stomach that spoke of indigestion to come I found that the answer was yes and told him so. “I reckon it’ll cure almost anything,” he said with a knowing twinkle in his eye, “or make it so you don’t much care. Liquor’s like a politician that way. It don’t always fix things but it makes sure you don’t notice what’s broke.”
    “You might benefit from a square meal to soak some of it up every now and then,” I told him.
    “Yes, doctor,” he said and for a moment I studied his face, nonsensically believing it might be Holmes in disguise. Of course it wasn’t, Holmes was about better business than this.
    “Look after yourself,” I told him and walked off into the crowd.
    Unlike my friend I did not have a bottomless bank account so I took the underground train rather than a cab.
    The experience of descending beneath the streets into the tiled corridors of the underground stations is one that is both alarming and invigorating. There can be few that are not impressed with our capital’s subterranean travel system. As limited and restrictive as it may currently be, there is no doubt in my mind that it will one day expand, triumphing over its initial difficulties to become the preferred method for all. Its detractors point to thirty years of staggered development and the king’s ransom that’s been ploughed into it. When will they just give up? they wonder. But in my experience that’s something that the British in general and Londoners in particular have never been very good at. It’s just not in our nature to accept defeat – we bang our heads against a problem until it has the good grace to acquiesce.
    Soon they say the lines will be filled with the new electric carriages, strange beasts that whine endlessly as they carry themselves to and fro beneath the city.