Stone Cold (24 page)

Matty gasped. ‘So it’s true then?’

‘It depends what you mean,’ Sherlock said. ‘Let’s go down and take a look.’

‘What about Maberley?’ Matty asked. ‘Shouldn’t we open some more windows or something?’

‘He’s been okay every night so far,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘I think these people know what they’re doing. The chances are, if we wake him up then he’ll charge
out of the house with his fowling piece, and then all hell might break loose.’

‘Good point.’

The two of them headed downstairs and made their way towards the front door. Sherlock opened it a crack and looked outside. The front door faced away from the orchard, and there was nobody
between them and the low wall that separated the grounds of the house from the road.

Sherlock nudged Matty, and indicated the wall and the road. ‘Same distance as it was this afternoon,’ he pointed out in a whisper. ‘The house hasn’t moved.’

‘But if the house hasn’t moved then what did we see from the window just now?’ Matty asked.

‘Well,’ Sherlock said, ‘if the house isn’t moving, then it must be the orchard, mustn’t it? The house moving is physically impossible. The orchard moving is just .
. . improbable.’

They slipped out of the house and into the night. Sherlock led the way along the wall of the house, past the window to the sitting room. That had been closed from the outside as well. Someone
was obviously checking carefully before making any move. The brains behind this criminal activity was very clever, and very cautious.

A little way along the wall was a window into one of the inside rooms – the dining room, Sherlock thought. That window had been closed as well, but more importantly there was a device
sitting on the ground nearby. It was like a large milk churn, with a rubber hose leading from the top of it into one of the holes that Matty and Sherlock had observed earlier – the holes
drilled from the outside of the house to the inside. There must be some reservoir of liquid chloroform inside that container, Sherlock theorized, and the evaporated vapour was creeping into the
house. All of the other holes were presumably being used as well. He cursed himself for his stupidity in thinking that simply opening a few windows was going to stop something so fiendishly
clever.

When they got to the corner of the house, Sherlock stopped and peered around the edge. Matty knelt down and did the same.

The untidy lawn had been transformed. That afternoon there had been nothing there over knee height, but now it was filled with trees. They were the trees from the orchard, but they appeared
taller. It took a moment for Sherlock to see why, but when he did he smiled. It was, of course, the most logical solution.

The roots of the trees weren’t buried in the soil, as they had been in the orchard. That would, of course, have made it impossible for them to be moved unless they had been dug up one by
one, which would have taken too much time and left traces. It was apparent now that when the trees had been planted a couple of hundred years before, they had been planted in large wooden barrels
which had been sunk into the earth. Their roots had grown inside the barrels as the years went on. If the roots had ever got to the edge of the barrels then they would have been forced back on
themselves, which might explain why the trees were stunted. Now whoever was moving the trees had just pulled the barrels up out of the ground, taking the trees with them. Looking at the tops of the
barrels now, Sherlock could see loops of thick rope that had been attached to them. They must have been buried loosely in the soil as well. The people moving the trees would just have to dig around
until they found the rope loops, and then it would have been relatively easy to pull the barrels up.

Relatively
easy. It still would have taken a fair amount of time, and a fair number of people, which is why Maberley had to be drugged every time they did it.

The apple trees weren’t arranged in nice rows, the way they had been in the orchard. They were just set down higgledy-piggledy, wherever the movers could find a space.

Sherlock had been aware for some time of a rumbling noise, but now it was getting louder. He moved back a fraction, and pulled Matty back as well.

Around the distant next corner of the house came a cart. Not the normal kind of cart that you could see on any road on any day, but a big, heavy cart with wheels as wide as Sherlock’s
forearm. As he had suspected, the wheels were padded with big pillow-like objects that squashed under the weight of the cart and its contents as they moved. The cart was pulled by three enormous
shire horses, and the horses were being guided by a team of men dressed in black, with black masks over their faces. On the cart, of course, were two apple trees in barrels that must have been
removed from the ground only a few moments before.

From down near his waist, Sherlock heard Matty make a hissing noise. ‘It’s obvious, ain’t it?’ he whispered. ‘If the house ain’t movin’, then it must be
the orchard that moves!’

‘Oh, yes,
now
it’s obvious,’ Sherlock muttered. ‘It wasn’t so obvious earlier on, was it?’

Another man, tall but thinner than the others, walked behind the cart, checking where it was going. He communicated with the others through hand gestures. It looked as if he was the one in
charge.

As Sherlock and Matty watched, the cart slowed to a halt and the masked men scrambled up on top of it. Each one took hold of a rope loop, and together they lifted the first tree, moved it to the
edge of the cart and lowered it down to the ground.

‘The fairy rings!’ Matty whispered.

‘No fairies,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘Just thieves.’

‘But I still don’t understand – what are they stealin’? Not the trees – they always put them back again when they’ve finished.’ Matty hesitated, then
hit his forehead with his palm. ‘Of course – they think there’s somethin’
under
the trees!’

‘Let’s go and check,’ Sherlock said.

The men had finished dropping the trees off the cart now, and were leading the shire horses around in a wide half-circle so they could take them back to the orchard again and,
presumably, pick up another couple of trees. The thinner man who was supervising them took a last look around, glanced at the house, then followed them back.

Sherlock and Matty moved cautiously along the side of the house, keeping low so that their bodies would just be dark shapes against the blackness of the house itself. When they got to the end
they peered around the edge. They were looking towards the orchard now, and past more of the relocated trees. The empty cart was rumbling slowly down a gap that had been left between the trees.

Sherlock spotted a large bush over near the waist-high wall that bounded the house’s grounds. He glanced around to check that they weren’t being watched, then dragged Matty across
the open ground and dived behind the bush. They were looking diagonally across at the orchard now, and it was obvious what was happening.

The apple trees nearest the house had been removed and relocated to the lawn. The trees further into the orchard had been moved as well, some of them to the lawn and some of them put into the
holes left by trees that had already been moved. There was now a gap in the middle of the orchard where there had previously been apple trees, but now there were only dark holes, like pockmarks in
the earth. The thinner man and a couple of his companions were bent down at the edge of one of the holes, staring in. As Sherlock watched, one of them jumped in. His head ducked out of sight as he
crouched and began to hunt around inside. The thinner man, on the lip of the hole, looked as if he was whispering instructions.

‘They’re lookin’ for somethin’ that’s been buried,’ Matty observed. ‘The problem is, they don’t know
where
it’s been buried, just
that it’s under one of them apple trees.’

‘That’s right. They’re working their way across the orchard in a logical sequence, from the easiest trees to the most difficult to reach.’ Sherlock felt a warm glow of
satisfaction. He had been right in his deductions. ‘Do you remember the story that Ferny Weston told us, the one about the orchard having been planted around the same time as the English
Civil War? He said that there was a rumour that Prince Charles had been hidden here from Oliver Cromwell’s Roundhead forces, and that in return he had given the Maberley family a great
treasure when he was finally crowned king. I’d been wondering where exactly the Cavalier sympathizers and the Prince could have been hidden – there’s nowhere in the house they
could have been secreted. I think it’s obvious now that there are hiding places beneath the trees of the orchard. The holes must go deeper than the barrels, leaving space for refugees to curl
up and wait until the searchers had gone away, when the trees could be pulled up again and they could be rescued. They must have taken food down with them, and maybe even oil lamps so they could
read, and keep warm.’ He gestured to the searching men. ‘I think that
they
think that the treasure is hidden in one of the holes as well, and that would make perfect sense. We
know they searched Maberley’s house first off, because he said that there was a time when he woke up to find the house
tidier
than it had been. They didn’t find the treasure in
the house anywhere, so they started on the orchard. Very clever of them to work that out.’

‘An’ they’ve been workin’ all this time to find the treasure? That’s dedication for you.’

‘It’s probably something incredibly valuable – jewels and gold certainly, but the historical connections would make it much more important.’

Matty sounded grudgingly impressed. ‘All that time, night after night, an’ they keep on goin’.’

‘I don’t know why,’ Sherlock murmured. ‘It’s obvious where the treasure
actually
is.’

‘Is that right?’ a voice said loudly behind them. ‘In that case, you can save us all a lot of effort.’

Sherlock and Matty turned around. Behind them three masked men stood. Two of them held knives – wickedly curved and serrated. The other held a gun, which was pointed mid-way between the
two boys.

‘We should’ve woken Maberley up,’ Matty pointed out. ‘Or at least taken ’is gun.’

‘Don’t tell me that
now
,’ Sherlock muttered. ‘Tell me that half an hour ago.’

‘Hey, you’re supposed to be the intelligent one.’

‘No talking,’ the man with the gun said. ‘At least, not for a few minutes. Then you can talk all you want. In fact, you won’t be able to talk fast enough.’ He
gestured with the gun. ‘Go on – into the orchard.’

The group moved off, with Sherlock and Matty in the lead and their captors bringing up the rear. The two men with knives spread out to either side, in case Sherlock or Matty made a run for it.
They walked across the lawn, between the massive barrels that held the apple trees, and into the orchard itself.

In the centre of the orchard there were twelve holes where trees had been removed. In the light of the stars and the three-quarter moon, and the shielded lamps that he now saw the men were
using, the sides of the holes looked smooth, lined with tiny roots and soil. He glanced into one, and saw that the bottom was circular, but that there was a smaller square hole dug into the earth
in its centre. That hole was lined with wood – it looked like a crate had been dropped in and the top taken off. That, he guessed, was where the Cavalier refugees would have hidden from the
Roundhead searchers.

‘Who’s this?’ a voice said. Sherlock looked up, and saw the thinner masked man that he had seen directing the others earlier. The boss. The one in charge.

‘We found them over by the house, boss. They were watching you.’

‘Oh, really?’ The man walked over to look at Sherlock. ‘What is it that you want?’

Sherlock shrugged. ‘Just to know what’s going on. Mr Maberley told us his story – about the house moving. I wanted to see what the truth was.’

The man – in fact, by the tone of his voice he was closer to a boy – laughed. ‘Yes, he’s been telling that story for a while now. At first I thought someone might listen
to him, check what was going on, but they didn’t, so I stopped worrying. What’s your name?’

‘Does it matter?’ Sherlock stared at the boy’s eyes, which were clear and blue beneath the mask. ‘I don’t think you’re going to let us go, are you?’

‘No, I’m not. Maybe, like you, I just wanted to know.’

The man with the gun stepped forward. ‘He said he knows where the treasure is.’

The boyish leader moved to face Sherlock and stared into his eyes for a long moment. ‘He doesn’t,’ he said eventually, with complete confidence. ‘He thinks he does, but
it’s just a guess. He isn’t sure.’

‘But if he does, he could save us all a lot of time.’

The boy shook his head again. ‘He doesn’t. He’s just inflating the importance of some small deduction he has made, trying to keep himself and his friend alive.’

‘But—’

The boy made a chopping motion with his hand. ‘Enough. The subject is closed.’ He turned back to Sherlock, and pulled his mask abruptly off. He was about the same age as Sherlock,
and about the same height, although his brown hair was longer. He stared at Sherlock challengingly. ‘I thought you might want to see my face, before you die,’ he said. ‘A last
courtesy.’

‘Very kind.’ Sherlock smiled. ‘Or is it more that you’re tired of nobody knowing who you are, and you want at least one person to see your face, to know your name and to
tell you how clever you are before this is all over?’

The boy shrugged. ‘Fame has its benefits, and its problems. That being said, I’ve been unknown for a good while now. Maybe that should change.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Jude,’ the boy said.

‘Jude what?’

He smiled. ‘That’s all you’re getting for the moment. And you are . . . ?’

‘Sherlock Holmes. And this is Matthew Arnatt. I must admit, I’m impressed at how you manage to keep all these men in line – you being so young and inexperienced, and them being
so much bigger and stronger than you. I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to them to get rid of you and take over. That way they’d get a bigger share of the treasure, and they
wouldn’t have to take orders from a kid.’