Kronberg Crimes 01 - The Devils Grin

the door frame, a small boy of ten years, pale-faced underneath the grime, his hands shaking. The whole child was a picture of great agitation.
    ‘What is it?’ I said, dropping the rag in the bucket.
    ‘Me mum,’ he croaked, ‘is very sick.’
    I nodded, snatched my doctor’s bag, and we were both out of the room in less than a minute.
    He lived just around the corner in a two-storey house, of which the mould had taken hostage many years ago. The privy was overflowing, as it had to accommodate for the thirty or so inhabitants, all in various stages of utmost poverty. Without a single window or door intact, the house and whoever lived inside were at the weather’s mercy all year round. Here in St Giles it was a house like all the others.
    We climbed the crooked stairs to the second floor. It was dark and I stumbled several times. The missing windowpanes had been replaced with mildewed cardboard or potato sacks filled with garbage. Milky white daylight fingered through the shadows and painted the decline in even harsher colours.
    We passed a narrow corridor and entered a room that smelled like fermenting excrements. I stopped in the door frame and squinted, waiting for my eyes to adapt to the poor light. The heaps on the floor were children. They lifted their heads and greeted me with weak smiles, showing wreckages of yellowed and blackened teeth. In the corner lay a straw mattress that seemed to have been clubbed to death.
    Even if I earned a thousand pounds each month, I wouldn’t be able to turn life in St Giles into something acceptable. Several thousand people lived here under the worst conditions. Women gave birth on filthy stairways or down in the streets. Their babies had a survival chance of thirty per cent at the most. Of these, only another thirty per cent made it into adulthood, just to die of violence, disease or undernourishment.
    Barry and I approached the static pile on the mattress.
    ‘Mum? She’s here,’ whispered the boy.
    The blanket moved and a pair of blue eyes peered up into mine, losing focus soon thereafter.
    ‘Sally, what happened?’ I asked.
    She mumbled something unintelligible.
    I touched her forehead — it was scorching hot — then pulled the blanket down to her waist and unbuttoned her dress to palpate her abdomen. Both, spleen and liver were enlarged and she groaned as I pressed my fingers into the soft flesh. I took a candle from my bag, lit it and moved the light closer to her. There were rose-coloured patches on her lower chest.
    ‘Barry, does she talk funny sometimes?’
    ‘Yes ma’am.’
    He had never called me ma’am before. Startled, I turned towards him. ‘Barry, your mum has typhoid fever. Do you know what that is?’
    He nodded, his eyes wide in horror.
    I looked around in the room. There was a hole in the wall, which must have been a functional fireplace once. The thought of the approaching winter and my imminent journey to the continent left an astringent taste of urgency in my mouth.
    They couldn’t even make a fire here to at least warm the winter up a little. The biting cold would penetrate the missing windows and doors and the rotten walls, to turn anyone who wasn’t up to it into a frozen corpse. And no matter how loud you begged, the winter wouldn’t retreat until five months later.
    I turned back to the boy. ‘Barry, I’m leaving London in a week. You will be her nurse; I will instruct you. We will move her into my quarters tomorrow and you’ll take care of her there. Do you think you can do that?’
    His eyes lit up and he nodded again, this time vigorously.
    The following day we carried Sally into my flat. A swarm of children helped to hold up the makeshift bunk on which she lay. I had set up a sleeping corner with clean blankets, several jugs of fresh water and a bed pan. There was nothing else we could do but give her a dry, clean and warm place. I left Barry with some money for wood, coal and food, and instructed him where to get clean water. He would sleep here with his mother until she either felt healthy enough or until my return at the end of December.
    I desperately hoped my rooms would not be invaded by all the other thirty inhabitants of Barry’s house.

Chapter Eleven

    I started my journey to the continent on September 30th. On the ship to Hamburg I read Watson’s A Study in Scarlet . Half of London seemed to know Sherlock Holmes and I had the feeling this educational gap needed to be filled.
    My reactions while reading the