Stone Cold (20 page)

‘You could pass on the stuff you know,’ Matty said quietly. ‘Take on a student. Sherlock ’ere, ’e’s brilliant at spotting stuff, but ’e’s been
kind of learning on the job. You could teach ’im everythin’ you know.’

‘I suppose I could,’ Weston said slowly. ‘That at least would mean that the information and skills that I have amassed would be of use.’

Sherlock leaned back in his chair, thinking. It looked as if moving to Oxford was going to be a lot more interesting than he had originally thought. What with Charles Dodgson teaching him about
logic and Ferny Weston teaching him about the analysis of evidence, his days were going to be pretty full.

‘Do I pay you?’ he asked. ‘Is there a fee for these lessons?’

‘Only one,’ Ferny said. ‘I need you to investigate something for me. A case involving a man who wrote to me recently with an interesting problem.’

Sherlock and Matty looked at each other. ‘What?’ they both said at once.

‘I will explain later. First I want to check on George, and I want you to meet my wife.’

He led the way out of the sitting room and up the stairs to the first floor. The doors were all still closed, and he knocked on the second one. ‘Marie, my dear? We have guests. Can we come
in?’

A voice from inside the room said: ‘Yes, please do. I want to meet them.’

Ferny pushed the door open. ‘Sherlock Holmes and Matty Arnatt – this is my wife, Marie Weston.’

Sherlock walked in, followed by Matty. Ferny, in the doorway, said, ‘I need to go upstairs and check on George. I won’t be more than five minutes. You can talk while I’m
gone.’

The room was dark, with a single candle on a table beside a bed. In the bed, sitting up with a pillow behind her, was a woman with long dark hair and an angelic but pale face. She smiled at the
two boys. ‘Come in, please. It has been a long time since I saw anyone apart from Ferny and George.’

Sherlock moved to the side of the bed, while Matty stood at the end, shuffling from foot to foot.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ Sherlock said. He gazed at her face, aware that he had seen it before somewhere, but uncertain where that could have been. She gazed at him as he
wondered, a slight smile on her lips.

‘You look as if you recognize me,’ she said eventually, ‘but I am sure that we have never met. I would remember a handsome boy like you.’

And then it came to him. ‘You had your photograph taken,’ he said. ‘It was in a garden, about five years ago. Your husband was there, and so was my brother Mycroft.’

She clapped her hands together. ‘I
remember
!’ she exclaimed. ‘It was a beautiful summer’s day, and a friend of your brother had asked us if we would pose for him.
Mortimer Maberley was there as well – he was Ferny’s sergeant in the Oxford Police Force.’

‘There was someone else there too,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘A boy. He would be about my age now, I suppose.’

Marie Weston’s face clouded over. She looked down at the bedspread. When she looked up, she said, ‘That was a long time ago.’ She paused, suppressing some deep emotion, then
continued: ‘Ferny tells me that you both broke in here. I presume, from the fact that he hasn’t thrown you out, that you have explained yourselves to him adequately.’

‘It was . . . something of a misunderstanding,’ Sherlock said.

‘We was lookin’ for the bloke who was takin’ all them bits of bodies,’ Matty said. ‘An’ we found ’im.’

‘Ah yes – Ferny’s hobby. It is about the only thing that keeps him going from day to day.’

‘He still seems to believe that he can be useful,’ Sherlock said, ‘that his knowledge can help other investigators in other cases.’

‘He is fooling himself,’ Marie said. ‘I cannot tell him, and I beg you not to either, but his collection of poisons and of wax body parts is just . . . an obsession. He is
unable to do anything with them. He sits there and looks at them, and analyses them, and writes lots of notes, but there is no
application
of his knowledge. He cannot investigate cases any
more. Yes, people might write to him with problems, or he might read something in the newspaper, but if he cannot leave the house except under cover, then how can he actually
investigate
?’

‘Your husband is very knowledgeable,’ Sherlock said diplomatically. ‘He must have been a very good police officer.’

‘He was an
excellent
police officer,’ she said, ‘and that is why he and I are in the state we are in now. I would have preferred him to be a gardener or a baker, I
think.’ She shook her head violently. ‘But then he wouldn’t have been the man that I fell in love with and married. Life can be so very cruel sometimes. You can never plan what is
going to happen to you – or, rather, you can plan your life, but it will never go the way you planned. We should have had children by now, and Ferny should be a superintendent of police.
Instead . . .’ She gestured at the bed. ‘Instead this.’

‘Man makes plans and God laughs,’ Sherlock said. ‘My Uncle Sherrinford used to say that. It’s an old proverb apparently.’

‘And a very true one,’ Marie Weston said. ‘Your uncle was a wise man.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ Matty interjected. ‘I always wanted to be on a barge on the canals, an’ ’ere I am.’

Sherlock gazed at him sceptically. ‘That’s not really a plan,’ he pointed out.

While Matty glowered, Sherlock’s gaze was attracted by something on the wide table by Marie Weston’s left arm. It took him a moment to work out what it was. ‘That’s the
paper and string that the parcel was wrapped in, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘The one containing the . . .’ He hesitated, not wanting to say the words ‘body part’ out
loud in case it offended Mrs Weston. She was obviously of a delicate disposition.

‘It is part of Ferny’s work,’ she said. ‘For his collection. Every so often a parcel arrives in the post for him. He allows me to unwrap it, because I have so little else
to occupy my time in this house, but he does not allow me to open the box inside in case the contents disturb me. I know they are only wax copies, but even so – he worries about the
shock.’

‘She insists on unwrapping the parcels,’ Weston said, re-entering the room. ‘I think it reminds her of Christmas.’

Sherlock smiled automatically, as Weston went across the room to his wife, but his gaze was still fixed on the brown paper and string. There was something odd about them, something that snagged
his attention, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

‘George is resting,’ Weston said as he kissed his wife on the forehead. ‘The poison did not get into his system, thank the Lord. Given a good night’s rest, he should be
fine.’

‘Dear George,’ Mrs Weston murmured. ‘What would we do without him?’

Weston perched himself on the edge of the bed. ‘Now,’ he said, glancing from Sherlock to Matty and back again, ‘we have a discussion, you and I. Let us go downstairs and talk
like gentlemen.’

‘No, Ferny,’ his wife said, placing her hand over his, ‘please – stay here and talk. It is so rare that I get to hear a voice other than yours or George’s, and
these boys are delightful company.’

He nodded. ‘Very well.’

‘You mentioned a case,’ Sherlock prompted. ‘You said you wanted us to look into it for you.’

Weston nodded. ‘Indeed. It is connected with the work I was doing as a policeman, but I am unable to complete the investigation now. The police force themselves are not interested –
they have already decided that the man in question is hallucinating and that there is nothing to investigate. I, however, beg to differ. I think something very odd is going on, and I also think
that a man’s sanity, if not his life, is at stake. If I told anyone else this story then they would either think that I was making it up or they would blame supernatural elements –
ghosts or some such – but from what I can see of you two boys, you are level-headed and intelligent, and you will not leap to conclusions.’ He glanced from one to the other. ‘Do
you want me to go on?’

Sherlock looked at Matty, then back at Weston. He felt strangely excited. ‘Tell us everything,’ he said.

‘Where to begin?’ Weston said. ‘Well, let’s start with Mortimer Maberley himself.’

‘Dear Mortimer,’ his wife said. As Weston’s hand came down on to the bedspread she put her own hand on top of it. ‘What a lovely man he was. What a good friend. Sherlock
was saying just now that he had seen a photograph of the two of us with Mortimer, and with Sherlock’s brother.’

Ferny frowned. ‘That’s the one with –’ He stopped abruptly, then looked up at Sherlock and continued as if nothing had happened: ‘Mortimer and I were in the Oxford
Police Constabulary together. He was my sergeant. A very good officer, fair and even-handed. Older than me he was. His family was an old established family in the area, going back generations,
right to the Civil War and before. They had once been rich, but a lot of the money vanished during the Interregnum, between the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, when Oliver Cromwell and his
Roundheads controlled England with an iron fist. By the beginning of this century all the Maberleys had left was a large house twenty miles west of here and an adjoining orchard.’ He smiled
– a disquieting twist of his twisted lips. ‘I recall that Maberley’s father and grandfather had tried to make cider from the apples in the orchard, but the fruits were small and
stunted, and the brew was like vinegar. It never sold, and they never became the cider millionaires they expected. Maberley joined the police force because it was a regular job that would at least
provide some income to the family. Unfortunately his mother died of influenza when he was in his thirties, and his father of a heart attack a few years later, leaving him alone in the house. He
never married.’

‘Wasn’t there some family legend of a treasure?’ Marie Weston asked suddenly, straightening up in her bed. ‘I recall he came to dinner one night and mentioned it.’
She smiled. ‘He brought two bottles of cider with him as a gift.’ She giggled. ‘We ended up emptying our glasses into a flowerpot while he wasn’t looking.’

‘Yes,’ her husband said, his scarred forehead twisting in remembrance, ‘there
was
something about a trove of gold and jewels that had been given to them by Prince
Charles when he was on the run from the Roundheads back in 1651. Apparently, so the family legend went, they had hidden the Prince and his companions for several weeks when the Roundheads were
scouring the countryside for them. In his gratitude, when he finally gained the throne, Charles II as he became gave them riches, but by Maberley’s time nobody in the family knew what had
happened to the gold and the jewels. I was always inclined to believe that there was little truth and much exaggeration in the story, but Maberley believed it. At least, he
wanted
to believe
it, but no search of the house or the grounds ever turned anything up.’ He shook his head, banishing the memories. ‘Anyway, that is irrelevant. The point is that we worked together, and
I owed him my life.’

‘Because he pulled you from the collapsing building?’ Sherlock ventured. ‘The one that had been blown up with you inside?’

Weston nodded. ‘Yes, he did – at great risk to himself – and then he went back in for Marie. That action is the bravest deed I have ever known anyone undertake.’ He
paused momentarily, eyes misting with emotion, then continued: ‘He retired from the police shortly after I was invalided out, and retreated to his family home. He couldn’t afford to
take on any servants. He just potters along in that big house, all by himself, trying to do the cooking, the cleaning and the gardening. Once a week a boy from the village drops off a box of
vegetables and meat, which the local tradesmen supply on a tab that keeps on growing and is never going to be paid off, but they don’t care. They remember the Maberley family, and what they
did for the village in times past. We correspond, intermittently. And then, less than a year ago, I got the strangest letter from him. He seemed . . . anxious and unsettled, if his handwriting and
choice of words was anything to go by.’

Weston paused, almost seeming to be embarrassed by the story he was telling. Sherlock prompted him, asking, ‘What was in the letter?’

‘He wrote that he was under the impression that every night, while he was asleep, his house
moved
.’

Sherlock felt a chill run through him. A moving
house
? He suddenly remembered the words of Charles Dodgson, at their first meeting, talking about the Russian legend of Baba Yaga –
the witch whose hut had legs, and could walk around by itself. Was that a coincidence, or did Dodgson know something about Maberley’s problems and was trying to warn Sherlock in advance?

‘What did he mean, his house
moved
?’ Matty asked, leaning forward.

‘You recall that I said all his family had was the house and an orchard?’

Matty nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘The house was set by itself, in a small area of lawn,’ Weston continued. ‘On the south side of the lawn the orchard began, and ran for several acres. What Maberley told me was
that sometimes, if he woke up in the small hours of the morning, he found that his house was not on the edge of the orchard at all – it was in the
middle
of the orchard!’

‘In the
middle
of the orchard?’ Sherlock repeated, wanting to be absolutely sure what Weston was saying.

‘Indeed. He swore that if he looked out of his bedroom window then he could clearly see apple trees surrounding the house, rather than being all at the south end of the grounds. Somehow
his house had
slipped
several hundred yards, as though it was trying to get somewhere. Maberley said that the shock of the sight normally sent him into a faint, and when he woke up the house
was back where it was supposed to be, surrounded by lawn.’

‘It was a dream,’ Matty said firmly. ‘I get dreams like that – ones that keep coming back. I always dream that—’

‘And did this happen every night?’ Sherlock interrupted.

‘Not every night, no.’ He turned his head to gaze at Matty. ‘And he said that it couldn’t be a dream, because every night that it happened he wrote down exactly what he
saw, and in the morning the notes were still there, in his journal.’