Eye of the Crow Read Online Free

impel him toward the city like a strong wind. Just one more day maybe two, then he’ll go back for good. He follows his route toward Trafalgar Square, glancing back from time to time, afraid he’s being trailed. There are many would turn him in: a teacher, a local hawker, even the old hatter with his cloudy red eyes and scowling face.
    But over the river a treasure awaits him. Eyes alert as always, he spies a copy of the morning’s
Police News,
jammed under one of the outside seats on the top of an omnibus, clattering through the traffic toward him. The paper has been left up there and no one on the bus is paying the slightest attention to it. The driver is clutching the reins and the ladies inside are looking straight ahead into the noisy intersection. How can anyone abandon such spectacular information? He slips off the foot pavement right into the flow of horses and vehicles, puts a foot on the conductor’s platform at the rear, and executes a little jump to nab the paper. Not one of the whiskered faces under the tall black hats turns. Tucking itinto his coat, he vanishes back into the traffic and crosses to the north side before looking at his prize.
    He loves this stretch of Fleet Street where the big newspapers have their offices. He’s seen grim Mr. Gladstone twice, enemy of Disraeli and once a Chancellor of the Exchequer, his big sideburns puffed out, his walking stick in hand, a perfect top hat on his well-developed head. And last week he spotted The Great Farini, the man who walked over Niagara Falls on a high wire. His flying-trapeze protégé, the bullet-boy El Niño, was by his side.
    But today he doesn’t see anyone who matters, because the front page of the paper stops him in his tracks. “ MURDERER FOUND! ” it proclaims. There under the headline is a crude drawing of a young man named Mohammad Adalji, depicted with a big, hooked nose and nearly black skin. “It seems an Arab did the dirty deed,” reads the first line. Sherlock scans the story, “… lives not five blocks from the scene … found with a butcher knife … blood … to be bound over today at approximately 9:00 a.m…. the Old Bailey Courthouse.”
    Sherlock had heard the faint bong of Big Ben just as he snatched the paper. Nine o’clock. The Old Bailey: it’s only minutes away.
    He turns and runs.
    The crowd is still gathering when he arrives, spilling out into the road waiting for the murderer. Sherlock jostles his way up to the front, hearing men and women cursing the Arab and his horrible crime. Some clutch rotting vegetables and even broken bricks in their hands. Nearly adozen Bobbies, London’s respected policemen, stand nervously nearby, gripping their rock-hard, black truncheons in their hands.
    On the north side of the Old Bailey looms infamous Newgate Prison, where “the Jew,” Fagin, was held in one of Sherlock’s favorite novels, Mr. Dickens’
Oliver Twist.
The scaffold is always placed directly in front of the main doors of its dreary, windowless exterior. These streets are packed on hanging days – enormous audiences stretch as far as one can see, the best spots reserved at top price, Mr. Dickens often somewhere in the crowd.
    Soon, two thick dray horses pull a big coach up the street: the frightening
Black Maria
used to transport the worst villains. Its ominous appearance has the effect of throwing coal on fire and the mob’s mood instantly grows angrier.
    “That’s ’im!”
    “Get ’im!”
    “ MURDERER! ”
    As Adalji descends the dark wagon from the rear, manacled at his hands and feet, shoved roughly forward by the Old Bailey’s jailers, an onslaught of filthy projectiles is launched at him. One strikes him in the face and he lowers his head, another hits him in the groin and he grimaces and bends over. The jailers drag him toward the gate, stretching out his arms almost as if to expose him to the crowd. Sherlock sees his face. It shocks him. He wonders if Mohammad Adalji has even reached eighteen. His