With the disappearance of Harry, there was only one other lead for the Great Detective to follow. Jenny was adamant that the boy would not have run away again.
‘He trusted us. He knew he was in danger. Someone’s taken him.’
‘There is no sign of a siege,’ Strax pointed out. ‘The carriage is undamaged. No evidence of the deployment of weaponry.’
‘The threat may have been enough,’ Vastra said. ‘Or his abductors may have employed more subtle means.’
Strax grunted. ‘Explain “subtle”.’
‘Don’t think you’d understand,’ Jenny told him, not unkindly.
Vastra meanwhile had settled herself into the carriage. ‘Let us examine,’ she said, ‘the scene of the original crime.’
The body had been discovered and removed from Ranskill Gardens. A lone police constable kept watch, presumably on the understanding that a stable door locked after the equine occupant has vacated the premises is at least more secure than one that is never locked at all.
Jenny engaged the constable in conversation while Madame Vastra examined the scene of the crime. Or, at least, the location where the body of Miss Felicity Gregson had ended up. Strax prowled the immediate neighbourhood, keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary and attempting – largely without success – to remain inconspicuous.
Making sure that she was not overlooked, Madame Vastra lifted the dark veil that concealed her reptilian features and examined the churned-up snow. There were splashes of red upon the white, several pebbles, and an incongruous carrot. She moved nothing, letting her fingers – or whatever for a lizard woman passed as fingers – brush gently against the blood. Her keen sense of smell told her at once that it was indeed human…
‘Who found her?’ Jenny asked the constable. She had already explained that the deceased was an acquaintance who had failed to keep an appointment with her mistress.
‘One of the residents. A pathologist himself as luck would have it, Miss. He was able to discern quite quickly that the lady was dead.’
‘And how did she die?’
The policeman shifted uncomfortably, stamping his feet in the snow and blowing on his cold hands. ‘I’m not sure that I should divulge that sort of detail.’
‘Oh, constable,’ Jenny soothed, ‘you can tell me.’
The constable glanced round, then lowered his voice. ‘Well so long as it goes no further. She was shot, in the back. Her killer must have been quite close, as the bullet went right through.’
‘Hence the blood on the front of her coat,’ Jenny said thoughtfully, recalling Harry’s description of events.
The policeman frowned. ‘How could you—’
But Jenny interrupted him before he could complete the thought. ‘Were there no witnesses? Did no one hear the shot?’
‘Fireworks display, down by the river. Perhaps you saw it, Miss? Made a right old racket, I can tell you. The inspector’s theory is that this distracted any attention the sound of a shot might have garnered.’
‘And no one saw anything?’ Jenny was keen to know if the police were aware of the two boys who had indeed discovered the body before the local pathologist.
The policeman shook his head. ‘Was one odd thing, though.’
‘Oh yes?’
Behind Jenny, Madame Vastra straightened up from her inspection of the snowy locale and listened keenly.
‘Lady in the house that backs onto the corner there.’ He paused to indicate the domicile in question. ‘She says she saw a man – a gentleman in fact – watching a couple of kids make a snowman.’
‘It does look as if there was a snowman here,’ Jenny agreed.
‘The body was found in the remains of it,’ the constable said. ‘But that’s not the odd thing.’
‘Then what is?’
‘Well, she swears she recognised the man, though he was muffled up against the cold and wearing a top hat. She says she is sure that it was Able Hecklington, the noted industrialist.’ The policeman gave a short laugh. ‘Though Lord knows why he’d be hanging about here watching kids make a snowman.’
Back at Paternoster Row, fortified by the remains of the hot soup that had previously restored young Harry, Madame Vastra, jenny and Strax discussed what they had learned.
‘It is obvious what happened,’ Vastra said.
This was indeed news to both Strax and Jenny, who were still befuddled by the enigmatic appearance of a dead body within the snowman.
‘And,’ Vastra went on, ‘we now know the identity of the murderer.’
Again, jenny and Strax exchanged confused looks.
‘But how can a dead body just appear inside a snowman?’ Jenny asked. ‘Harry and his friend Jim made it – they’d have noticed if they were building a snowman round a corpse.’
‘Osmic projection,’ Strax said knowingly. ‘Set the frequency modulator accurately enough and the body appears inside the snow.’
‘Not osmic projection,’ Vastra told him.
‘Then the woman was executed in a pit beneath the snowman. Careful use of a laser cutter would allow the ground to be removed and the cadaver inserted upright into the snowman.’
‘Not a laser cutter,’ Vastra said with the merest hint of waning patience.
‘In that case,’ Strax said, undeterred by his audience’s lack of enthusiasm, ‘the answer is obvious.’ He nodded to emphasize how clever he had been to deduce the solution to this singular puzzle. ‘Transmutation of matter.’
‘Cellular mutation,’ Strax told her. ‘The crystalline lattice of the snowman’s interior was transposed to a DNA-based organic matrix. The woman was created inside the snowman. She was,’ he explained, ‘made of snow.’
‘No,’ Vastra said. ‘She was not.’
‘However it was done,’ Strax said, ‘we should find every snowman in London – and obliterate them. just to be on the safe side.’
‘So how was it done? What did happen?’ Je1my asked.
Madame Vastra leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands in front of her on the table, for all the world like Sherlock Holmes. Only female. And green.
‘Miss Gregson was shot in the back.’
‘We know that from the police constable at Ranskill Gardens,’ Jenny agreed.
‘She was on her way to see me, when she realised she was in danger,’ Madame Vastra continued. She stared into the distance, as if seeing the events she described actually unfold…
Felicity Gregson was being followed. She caught a glimpse of her pursuer in the window of a haberdasher’s on Ghent Street, and ducked into an alley. The snow was getting heavy again, stinging her eyes as she stared out into the street There was no sign of the man in the top hat, but she knew he was there. She knew he was watching.
Despite the snow, a thin hint of fog curled like smoke round Felicity’s feet. She watched it for a moment, mouth open in surprise and alarm. Then she ran.
At the end of the alley, she turned into another street. Her destination was not far now, and she prayed the person (if person she be) that she was meeting would be there waiting. If anyone could help her…
A glance over her shoulder told her that the man in the top hat was still following. He seemed to solidify behind her out of the very air. Was it her imagination, or did the last few flakes of the ebbing snow fall through him as it danced and twisted down to the ground?
She doubled back on her route, took sudden side streets, did her best to get away from the man. By the time she reached Ranskill Gardens, she began to hope that she might have succeeded. The snow had become heavy again, and she crept quietly into the small enclosed area through a narrow back gate, her footsteps muffled by the fresh snowfall.
From behind came a sound which could have been a foot crunching on ice. Felicity gasped. She looked round quickly for somewhere to hide – anywhere. There was only one possibility.
Two boys were building a snowman. As Felicity watched, they pushed a carrot into its inchoate features. They laughed and scrabbled in the snow raising flurries of flakes.
Quickly, Felicity ran to take shelter behind the snowman, standing so close she could feel the cold of its back. She would rather the children did not see her – she would rather that no one saw her. If her pursuer entered the gardens by the same approach as she had herself, then he would see only the boys and the snowman. All she need do was wait until Madame Vastra arrived…
But it was not to be.
For the man in the top hat came into Ranskill Gardens by a different route. He stood in the shadows by the back wall, watching the boys play. Watching the woman he had pursued standing in plain sight, ignorant of his presence. All he needed was a distraction.
It came in the form of the fireworks display. The boys turned to watch, their attention on the light-show, their ears assailed by the crack and thunder of distant explosions. So much so that a single gunshot echoing round the gardens was lost in the cacophony.
The bullet from the man’s revolver struck Felicity in the centre of the back. It went right through her, penetrating and destroying her heart in an instant before traversing the soft body of the snowman and then embedding itself in the frozen ground nearby.
The force of the impact drove Felicity forwards with such violence that she was pressed into the snowman. Her body crashed through, almost to the other side. Blood wept from her gaping chest wound, through her coat, into the snow.
And in moments, as the two boys stood in awestruck horror, one with Felicity’s blood staining his index finger, the weight of her body collapsed the fragile façade of the snowman, and she fell lifeless to the ground.
‘So the murderer was the man Harry saw,’ Jenny said.
Vastra nodded. ‘That’s why he wants Harry – to be rid of any possible witnesses.’
‘Then we must defend the boy,’ Strax decided. ‘And the best form of defence is attack. I suggest a three-pronged assault on the villain’s stronghold with ground forces. Shall I break out the heavy weapons?’
‘We don’t even know who this man is, let alone where he’s taken Harry,’ Jenny chided.
‘Then we must begin surveillance on all possible suspects. Everyone who wears a dark coat and a top hat must be accounted for.’
‘In London?’ Jenny said. ‘How many men do you think that would be?’
‘There is only one that matters.’
‘But we don’t know which.’
‘I think we do, actually,’ Vastra told them. ‘Remember what the policeman said.’
‘Able Hecklington,’ Jenny recalled. ‘You think it was him?’
‘I think,’ Vastra said, ‘that it would be impolite not to ask.’
A short way across London, the subject of these deliberations, Mister Able Hecklington, stood on a gantry high above the floor of his largest foundry. He looked down at the furnace below. A vast metal cauldron, it swirled with smoke so thick that it seemed to obscure the fire that produced it. A roiling mass of fog spilled over the edges and out across the foundry floor.
Hanging above the cauldron was a metal frame in the shape of a man – a cage. But the figure inside was smaller than a man. Strapped to the metal frame, Harry could barely turn his head to see Hecklington standing watching with satisfaction. Beside the man stood a smaller figure – Jim. The boy’s face was pale, as if he only now began to understand what he had done. Or perhaps, what he had escaped by sacrificing his friend instead.
With the metallic clank of heavy chains, the cage containing Harry began slowly to descend. The smoke in the cauldron clawed at the air above, as if it was reaching out for the boy, beckoning for him to join it Hungry for his company.