Operation Red Book

It rained continuously at this time, and the streets of August Street were washed clean.

The sky in London was growing dark, and the store manager thoughtfully provided a glass oil lamp for the small table in the awning.

Ivy stirred the pasta in the porcelain plate. She only took a few bites of the fragrant pasta, and the rest had already cooled down.

Dorian looked at Ivy's movements from the side, the emotions in his eyes were dark and clear, and no one knew what he was thinking.

Ivy gently moved the hair that was blocking her eyes, and suddenly caught Dorian's sight out of the corner of her eyes.

She let her black hair fall on both sides of her face, and a sullen voice floated out from her hair that was like a curtain: "Why are you looking at me? Are you going to eat me now?"

Dorian sneered, and a ball of green fire floated out from his fingertips, heating the spaghetti with meat sauce in the porcelain plate again.

"You have to eat well before you die, otherwise it would be a shame to die hungry." Dorian joked.

Ivy thought about it carefully, and what he said seemed to make sense. She rolled up a ball of pasta, dipped it in the meat sauce, chewed it two or three times, and then swallowed it.

"I just don't want Grace to take my soul away. Can you help me talk to Raphael?" Ivy looked at Dorian without changing her expression.

"I don't know him and can't help you." Dorian just found it funny when he saw Ivy's disappointed look.

"I still don't understand why Grace doesn't admit that she is the Grim Reaper. She keeps saying that she loves children, but she and Morris do such things behind their backs."

"I hate people who say one thing and mean another, just like my mom... I don't want my soul to be taken away by someone I hate..."

Ivy shed a tear, which mixed into the pasta on the plate. The tear immediately disappeared and was picked up by Ivy with a fork and put into her mouth.

"It's so bitter." She said to herself.

"You mean what you say?"

Dorian muttered quietly, the remaining memories playing automatically in his mind.

First, a large stone flew by and hit the red-haired woman tied to the pillar squarely.

Then there were raindrops of stones of all sizes, which were like bullets, hitting the woman's body from all directions, leaving her covered in blood.

The next scene was a blazing fire, with red, black, silver and yellow colors interweaving to blur the scene before one's eyes.

Among them, red stands out particularly in the blurred picture.

Tiny cries and sharp laughter sounded from all around, squeezing Dorian's eardrums.

"It's okay... Don't be afraid... It's okay..."

The red-haired woman's faint voice entered his ears like a flying insect.

The noisy sounds around him became smaller, while the woman's faint voice gradually became larger, filling his entire ear canal.

"Hey! Come here, we found a clue." Holmes' rough shout brought Dorian back to reality.

Ivy finished the pasta on the plate and moved over with Dorian, who seemed to have just woken up from a dream.

Joshua turned over one of the pages to show the two of them. The entire page was written in two kinds of ink, one red and one black, and there were obviously more red notes than black ones.

The English letters and numbers above were intertwined and written chaotically on the blank page.

The numbers were all different sizes, and the uppercase and lowercase letters didn't line up to form any words.

Just a cursory glance at it is really dazzling. Ivy has been looking at the account books for several months, and the records on each page are well organized, never as messy and complicated as this account book.

"This...is there any clue?" Ivy asked.

"Isn't your job just to look at the account books? What have you learned in all these months?" Holmes sneered.

Ivy rolled her eyes at him, then reread the page of notes and stammered, "What's recorded in the account book is nothing more than the income and expenditure. Does the red pen refer to income and the black pen to expenditure?"

"Wrong, absolutely wrong! How can the income and expenditure be written with the same content? The total amount of income and expenditure should be at the end."

“Just a reminder. These two colors of pens represent two different industries.” Holmes said excitedly, raising one eyebrow.

"Stop playing around, Mr. Holmes, and tell me what's going on. The situation is really serious." Joshua said calmly.

"First look at the code name, capital letters plus numbers, the maximum number is 13 and the minimum is 5. It is reasonable to suspect that the number here refers to the age, and the capital letters refer to the initials of the name."

"Mr. Morris once said that Florence does not accept orphans under the age of 12. So where do the orphans over 12 in the orphanage go?"

"Look at these 13 numbers. Without exception, they are all black notes. There are occasionally some 11 and 12. In terms of age, these are all big children."

Joshua touched his nose, sighed, and continued, "Mr. Holmes knows some inside information. The black ink should record the child laborers who were sold to illegal mines and factories."

Ivy took a breath and fixed her eyes on the numbers behind her. She pointed with her finger: "Do these numbers refer to the income from selling children?"

"Yes, these are black notes and red notes." Joshua flipped through several pages and stopped at the page with the most red notes.

"The number of items recorded in the red notes is much greater than that in the black notes, and the amounts vary, there is no fixed number."

"The capital letters and numbers still refer to age. You can see that it ranges from 5 to 12 years old, and these..."

Joshua pointed to several pages with the code D8 written in red ink, and then pointed to an indeterminate amount of money at the back.

"These show that this, this child, he..."

Joshua suddenly choked up, leaving Ivy confused for a moment.

"His body was hollowed out, and Morris sold all his organs to different people." Holmes crossed his legs and smoked a cigarette, looking very bad.

He threw the unfinished cigarette on the ground, crushed it with his foot, and said coldly: "Florence? Orphanage? It's actually a black-hearted factory that collects orphans."

"Morris, that guy, sacrificed the souls of children to the devil, and then used their organs to trade for money."

"Older children were not spared either. They were sold directly to illegal mines and factories, where they were whipped and beaten with sticks along with cattle and horses."

Holmes became more and more excited as he spoke. He kicked over the chair in front of him, and the shop owner was so scared that he came out to ask what happened.

"Brother, do you have a phone in your shop? I urgently need to call Scotland Yard."

Holmes lit another cigarette and followed the shopkeeper into the store.

"Orphanages and human trafficking, prayer rooms and devil sacrifices, your world is really interesting, much more interesting than the eighteen levels of hell..."

Dorian said calmly, his eyes turning red without him noticing.

"I understand. This is the situation I fear the most. The evil ghost is covered with a layer of golden Buddha skin. He worships Buddha, but his heart is a ghost." Ivy said in a daze.

She slumped back in a wooden chair, her expression as solemn as Joshua's.