Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm (14 page)

‘Very kind,’ Stone said, turning and grinning at the two of them. ‘Although I have to say, it sounds even better played by the light of a campfire in the middle of a forest at midnight. The trouble is that the older I get, the more I find I prefer the comfort of a warm, dry house.’ He gazed from one boy to the other. ‘Something has happened, hasn’t it? Tell me.’

Between them, with Sherlock sketching in the facts and Matty filling the gaps with vivid descriptions, they told Rufus Stone the story. His face grew grimmer and grimmer as they spoke. When Sherlock finished by telling him exactly what the two of them planned to do, he stood for a moment, thinking.

‘You really both intend going to Edinburgh?’ he asked finally.

‘Yes,’ Sherlock answered.

‘And there’s nothing I can say to change your minds?’

‘No,’ Matty replied.

He sighed. ‘Then it’s a good thing I keep a bag packed and ready by the door. It won’t be the first time I’ve had to leave a place at a moment’s notice.’

‘The difference is,’ Sherlock said quietly, ‘that we’ll all be coming back. With two extra people.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was the next day before the three of them could set out for Edinburgh.

After talking Rufus Stone into accompanying them as a responsible adult – a task that was surprisingly easy, Sherlock thought, all things considered – Matty had headed off to make arrangements for Albert to be looked after while Sherlock rode back to Holmes Manor to talk to his aunt and uncle. As he expected, they were still dazed and distracted from Mrs Eglantine’s fall from grace, and the personal freedom they had suddenly gained as a result. He presented the trip to them as a fait accompli and, as he expected, they went along with it. After all, they had previously agreed to him travelling to America and Russia. Compared to that, Edinburgh was just down the road. Or up it.

Uncle Sherrinford did nearly throw the whole plan into chaos when he asked to be introduced to Rufus Stone. ‘I cannot,’ he proclaimed, ‘in all conscience, let my nephew travel to the far end of the country with a man I have never even met. I know nothing about him.’

Remembering Rufus Stone’s bohemian taste in clothes, his earring and his gold tooth, Sherlock suppressed a grimace of concern. If Uncle Sherrinford ever met Rufus Stone in person he would probably forbid Sherlock from ever associating with him again in Farnham, let alone travelling with him to Scotland. Sherlock had developed a lot of respect for his aunt and uncle – a respect that bordered on familial love – but they weren’t exactly the most understanding of people. Grasping at straws, he said, ‘If it helps, Mycroft has known Mr Stone for several years, and is currently employing him to be my violin tutor.’

‘Ah,’ Sherrinford said, nodding his head. ‘In that case, I waive my requirement. Your brother is a perspicacious man, and I trust his judgement when it comes to character.’ He peered sideways at his wife. ‘You know, I recall that Mycroft said that there was something wrong with Mrs Eglantine the first time he met her. Perhaps I should have told him what she was doing to us. He might have been able to help.’

‘What’s done is done,’ Anna said, patting his hand. ‘The Good Lord does not place a burden on our shoulders that is too heavy to carry, and each burden makes us stronger.’

Sherlock dined with his aunt and uncle that night. The food wasn’t up to the usual standard – the shock waves from Mrs Eglantine’s disappearance seemed to have echoed down to the kitchen staff – and there was little conversation. Uncle Sherrinford and Aunt Anna seemed subdued by the magnitude of what had happened. Even Aunt Anna’s usual constant stream of opinion, gossip and commentary on the day’s events was absent. As soon as the meal was over, Sherlock excused himself and headed for bed. He’d had a busy day, and he needed to regain his strength for what lay ahead.

Sherlock, Matty and Rufus Stone met up at Farnham Station early the next morning. Each of them had a bag of clothes, toiletries and other travelling necessities.

‘This,’ Rufus Stone said with a grim face, ‘is a remarkably bad idea. My initial flush of enthusiasm has dissipated like a rain puddle soaking into the earth. Edinburgh is a big city, with a lot of people in it. What you intend doing is a bit like searching an ant’s nest for one particular ant. It won’t be easy.’

‘Nothing easy is worthwhile,’ Sherlock pointed out.

‘
Touché
.’ Stone smiled.

Rufus Stone paid for the tickets. He bought them from Farnham to London, on the basis that they could buy the next set of tickets, from London to Edinburgh, once they had arrived, and because it would be embarrassing and potentially dangerous to leave a trail behind them when Amyus Crowe hadn’t. Sherlock offered to use some of the money that Mycroft had sent him, but Stone shrugged. ‘Your brother pays me a regular salary for teaching you the violin,’ he pointed out. ‘One way or the other, it’s his money which is buying the tickets. It doesn’t really matter which one of us hands it over.’

There wasn’t a train for another hour, so Rufus suggested having a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich before they left. The boys agreed enthusiastically. The nearest tea shop was just across the road, but while the three of them were eating Sherlock stared through the shop window and noticed two men standing in front of the station and looking around. One of them had black hair pulled back into a ponytail; the other had smallpox scars across his cheeks and forehead.

‘Are those the two you think are looking for Amyus Crowe?’ Rufus asked, following the direction of Sherlock’s gaze.

Matty nodded.

They watched as the men approached the ticket office and asked the clerk a question. He shook his head. One of the men asked him something else, and slid some money across the counter. The clerk tore two tickets from a strip and passed them over.

‘They’ve bought tickets,’ Rufus pointed out. ‘That means they’ll probably be on the same train as us. Either they know about Edinburgh or they are moving the search to Guildford. Whatever the reason, we need to stay out of their way.’

Finishing their sandwiches and tea, they headed back across the road to the station. A few minutes later the train heaved itself alongside the platform: a behemoth of black iron shrouded in steam and hissing like some biblical demon. The three of them found a compartment to themselves. Sherlock kept an eye out for the two Americans, but he couldn’t see where on the train they got on – if they had got on at all.

Sherlock was used to train journeys by now. For a while he let himself become entranced by the scenery flashing past, but when that grew too boring he waited until they arrived at the next large station – which turned out to be Guildford – and quickly left the train to buy a newspaper from a seller on the platform. It was a London edition of
The Times
, presumably brought down as part of a large bundle on an early train.

The train was venting steam in a white cloud across the platform when he turned away from the newsvendor’s stall. As he moved back towards the long wooden wall of the train carriages, an errant breeze pushed the steam away and he spotted one of the Americans walking across the platform. It was the taller man, the one with the black hair shot through with grey and the gnarled scar tissue where his right ear should have been. He was coming from the direction of the ticket office. His companion – the man with the pockmarks across his cheeks – was standing by the carriage door, holding it open so that the train couldn’t leave before his friend was back on board. As the black-haired man approached his companion he shook his head. Whatever he’d been looking for – which Sherlock suspected was some news on Amyus Crowe’s movements – he was disappointed.

As they got back on to the train, and as Sherlock headed for his own carriage, he wondered whether the men knew about him and Matty and Rufus Stone. Rufus hadn’t spent much time with Mr Crowe, but Sherlock and Matty were regular companions of his. Most people in Farnham would have seen Sherlock and Mr Crowe together at one time or another, and people in small towns were inveterate gossips – something that Josh Harkness had traded on. It would only take a few pence changing hands, or the purchase of a pint of beer, for them to find out that Amyus Crowe spent time with people other than just his daughter. If they had descriptions of Sherlock and Matty, then they might recognize them on the train. The three of them would have to be careful.

Sherlock got back to his carriage just as the guard on the platform blew his whistle, warning passengers that the train was about to leave. He settled himself back into his seat. Matty was apparently asleep, and Rufus Stone was busy memorizing a musical score, the fingers of his left hand automatically making the shapes of the notes in the air as he read. Not wanting to interrupt them, Sherlock settled back into his seat with the newspaper.

The pages were filled with politics and reports of international events. Having heard his brother Mycroft speak disparagingly about newspaper journalists, and how little they really knew about the real reasons for things happening, he only skim-read the articles. Mycroft had once said that reading a newspaper piece about politics was like reading a book review written by a man who had never read the book, but had been told about it by a couple of people that he had bumped into in the street.

Sherlock did scan the pages for reports of the British Army’s presence in India, but there was nothing. He hadn’t heard from his father for a while now. He knew that things were busy out there, but he worried. He couldn’t help himself.

The front page was filled with personal advertisements and he was about to skip over them when his eye was caught by something unusual and he found himself drawn into reading them. They were small pieces, usually ten or twenty words – written by readers of the newspaper who paid for them to be printed – but Sherlock found that they opened little windows on to a world he would probably never know anything else about. ‘Dog missing, Chelsea area, answers to the name of Abendigo. Will pay handsomely for return, dead or alive.’ Sherlock supposed that he could understand someone loving a pet enough to pay money to get it back if it went missing, but what kind of person would name their dog after an obscure biblical character, and would want it back even if it was dead? It didn’t make any sense. And what about ‘Footman required urgently, good references essential. Must be able to play ocarina’? People needed good staff, obviously, but why would they need a footman with musical ability, and with such an unusual instrument to boot? Each personal advertisement was a slice of life, and he wanted to know more about the circumstances behind them. Some were obviously in code – apparently random collections of letters and numbers – and he tried to use the skills that his brother and Amyus Crowe had taught him to unlock their secrets. With some of them he was actually successful. Most were arrangements for furtive meetings, probably of people who loved each other but couldn’t, for whatever reason, meet in public, but others were stranger. One in particular made his blood run cold. After he had decoded it, the words said simply: ‘Joseph Lamner, you will die tomorrow. Set your affairs in order. Prepare to meet your Maker.’

Sherlock turned reluctantly away from the personal advertisements before he became too obsessed with them and skim-read the rest of the newspaper. Two pages contained little snippets of news from around the country, and Sherlock found his gaze snagged by one report in particular, which involved the city to which they were travelling.

Frustrated at the lack of detail, Sherlock wondered how he might find out more about this murder in Edinburgh. He didn’t think it had anything to do with Amyus Crowe’s disappearance – it would have been a coincidence too far if an article in a newspaper he’d happened to pick up at a passing station was directly related to the reason he was on the train in the first place – but he wanted to get a feeling for the place he was going to – a sense of what Edinburgh was like, and what kinds of things happened there. One of the things that Amyus Crowe had drummed into him on their regular walks through the woods and forests around Farnham was that the more you knew about your environment, the more you could control it. Most people, if they got lost in a forest, would be hungry and thirsty within an hour or two and would have no idea of the way out. Thanks to Mr Crowe, Sherlock now knew which plants to eat and which to avoid, knew how to follow animal tracks to find water, and also knew how to work out which way was north.

Thinking of survival in unfamiliar environments provoked a memory of New York, and his arrival in that city a year or so before. He’d been amazed then at the number of newspapers that had been on sale on street corners. Thinking about it now, he wondered how many different newspapers there were in London, and whether they all printed the same story. Presumably not – each must have its own style and its own bias. If he really wanted to know more about the background and the details of this murder in Edinburgh, then it might be a good idea if he bought as many different papers as he could, cut the relevant stories out and compared them against one another, looking for differences and for things that one report mentioned that the other ones ignored.