Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm Part 12

Tiny flecks of tobacco had got into his mouth while it was open. He could feel the strands between his lips and his teeth, and sticking to his tongue. The bitter taste made him gag again, and he desperately swallowed more saliva. He knew that people not only smoked tobacco but chewed it as well. How could they stand it?

His fingers p.r.i.c.kled with pins and needles as the blood fought to get past the ropes that bound his wrists. The fingers themselves felt as large and as tight as sausages frying in a pan.

The men carrying him changed their grip. For a moment Sherlock wondered what they were doing, but then the grip around his chest and legs loosened and they swung him back, swung him forward again, fast, and let go. He flew helplessly through the air, not even sure which way was up and which was down, waiting what seemed like an eternity to hit a what? Gra.s.s? Pavement? The surface of a river or a ca.n.a.l?

Half expecting to suddenly find himself sinking in cold water, he bounced on a soft surface and rolled until he hit a wooden board at right angles. The inside of a cart lined with straw? It seemed likely. He heard something hit the straw beside him, and a second later a heavy object thudded into him with enough force to drive the air from his body in a sudden whoosh!

Matty.

'You all right?' he called through the hessian sack, but before Matty could answer something struck Sherlock in the ribs. Waves of sickening pain radiating outwards across his chest. He gasped. Matty, sensibly, didn't reply. Maybe he couldn't. Maybe he was unconscious.

Not a word had been spoken by the men who had taken them, but the message was clear: stay still; don't struggle; be quiet. Any deviation from those rules would be punished.

Still, at least they were both still together. That counted for something. While he was alive and in possession of his senses and his mind, Sherlock was confident that he could find a way out of most situations.

His deduction that they had been thrown into a cart was borne out as they moved off. The way Sherlock was lying, his head was facing in the direction of travel. He quickly worked back over his memories of the past minute or so. He'd been facing Matty, in the park, with the gate towards Princes Street off to his left. When the sack was put over his head he had been s.n.a.t.c.hed off his feet and carried with his head facing forward and to the right, away from the gate and Princes Street. He had been thrown into the cart head first, so that meant the cart was almost certainly heading away from Princes Street, away from the centre of Edinburgh.

As they travelled, Sherlock tried to keep a running tote of the various turns they made a which direction they turned, and roughly how long it had been since the last turn. The mental effort of counting and remembering gave him something to do other than panic, and if he ever had to retrace the journey then the information might be vital.

Eventually the cart stopped. Hands grabbed Sherlock and pulled him roughly upright. He was tossed over someone's shoulder and carried away. He could hear the footsteps, so they weren't on gra.s.s. Stone, or hard earth? The man who was carrying him stumbled a couple of times, so perhaps he was walking across cobbles and some were loose. That was more information that might come in useful.

Sherlock's fingers felt as if they were burning with lack of blood now. His mind was filled with images of the flesh blackening and falling off. Desperately he tried to force his mind to think about something else. The footsteps! They had changed a the man who was carrying him was walking on wood now, and the light filtering in through the gaps in the sacking was darker, cooler. He was inside some kind of building.

The sound of the footsteps on the floorboards changed, becoming more hollow. At the same time, Sherlock felt that he was being tipped up, head higher than his feet. He was being carried up a set of stairs.

At the top of the stairs things levelled out again, and the footsteps crossed more floorboards. The sound was different from downstairs, however. The floorboards creaked more, as if they were unsafe.

The man carrying him suddenly let him drop. Sherlock had less than a second to prepare himself for the impact. His left shoulder hit the floor first, and he cried out. The pain made him bite his tongue. He tasted blood.

Another impact, beside him a Matty, getting the same treatment. He didn't cry out, but Sherlock could hear him moaning.

Something sharp and metallic slid between his palms. Before he could react, it sliced upward and the ropes around his wrists fell away. A moment later the ties around his ankles went the same way.

He reached up and pulled the sack off his head.

Steely grey light dazzled his eyes, and he blinked several times. He was in a room about the size of his aunt and uncle's dining room, but that was where the similarity ended. This room was bare floorboards and cracked plaster walls rather than carpets and curtains. The green stain of mould bloomed across the peeling remnants of wallpaper. Holes in the walls exposed the wooden lathes beneath. Some of the floorboards were missing, and rat droppings were spread across the remainder like tiny black stones. The ceiling was largely bare of plaster, and the rafters showed through like ribs. Rain had trickled in through the holes and left puddles on the floorboards, adding to the general feeling of neglect and decay.

As Sherlock struggled to his knees the newspaper slid from his pocket and dropped to the rotting floorboards. He could see the word Cramond written in the margin. Horrified, he looked up. Three men were in front of a broken window, two of them standing and the one in the centre sitting with his hands on a walking stick that was set in front of him, but the way the light flooded around them left them looking like charcoal stick figures sketched on paper. Sherlock screwed up his eyes, trying to make out their faces, but it was no good. The light was too strong.

Matty was curled up a few feet away. A sack, similar to the one that had been covering Sherlock, was still tied around his head and shoulders. For a moment Sherlock couldn't see any movement, and his heart lurched sickeningly as he wondered if his friend was dead, but then he saw that Matty was breathing shallowly. He was alive, but probably unconscious.

Given what Sherlock suspected was going to happen in the room over the next few minutes, unconsciousness seemed like a good option.

He looked past Matty. A chair had been placed to one side of the three men. Rufus Stone was tied to the chair. He looked at Sherlock and smiled. The smile might have been more rea.s.suring if there weren't swollen lumps on his forehead and cheeks and if his fingers hadn't been covered with blood. They looked like someone had been working on them with pliers.

'Let me explain how this will work,' a quiet, almost gentle voice said. Sherlock thought it was the man in the middle. His accent was similar to that of Amyus Crowe a he was obviously American. 'I have no compunction about hurting children. I have done it before, and I will do it again. I do not enjoy it, but if it is necessary then I will cause you immense pain in order to get what I want.'

'And what is that?' Sherlock asked. 'I don't have any money, you know.'

The man didn't laugh, but Sherlock could hear a trace of humour in his voice as he answered: 'I have no use for your money, boy. I have more money than I know what to do with. No, I want information about your friend Amyus Crowe and his daughter, and that is something you do have.'

'I don't know anything,' Sherlock said, trying to inject as much conviction into his voice as he could. He squinted, trying to make out some features on the man's face or his clothes against the bright light behind him. All he could tell was that the cane the man was resting his hands on had a strangely large head on it.

'Then you will die in agony. It is that simple. You are about to experience a great deal of pain, but the more true answers you give me, the longer you will live and the less pain you will be in. Now, I have a series of questions to ask you. They are very simple questions. You will answer them just as simply, with no attempt at lying or obscuring the truth.'

Sherlock's gaze fell on the newspaper. He had to stop the man seeing it. 'What happens if I don't know the answers?' he asked, brain racing as he tried to work out what to do. He jerked his eyes away from it. Just looking down might draw attention to it.

'A good question,' the man conceded, 'and one that has exercised my mind on many occasions in the past. I have, as you can probably guess, conducted many, many interrogations like this. Fortunately I have a solution. You see, we have been watching you for some time. Several of the questions I am going to ask you, I know that you know the answers to. Several of the questions I am going to ask you, I already know the answers to. You, however, don't know what I know. You can't risk lying a that is, unless you enjoy pain. Your best option is to tell me the absolute truth. The chances of your fooling me are slight, because on some of the questions I will know, for absolute certain, if you are lying to me a even if you say, "I don't know." Now, are we clear about the rules?'

Sherlock thought for a moment. The way the quiet man had laid out the problem was elegant and simple. If Sherlock decided to lie, or to claim ignorance, then there was a statistical chance that he might be caught out. The things Sherlock didn't know were how many questions the man was going to ask, and how many of those he already knew the answer to. If the answers were ten and one then Sherlock might still have a chance to keep Amyus Crowe's hideaway secret. If the answers were ten and five, then his chances were much slimmer.

His logical mind clambered all around the problem, trying to find a way through it, but it was seamless. The man asking the questions had the upper hand. He'd thought it all through.

'Do you understand the rules?' the man said. His voice was just as gentle as before. 'I will not ask again.'

'Yes, I do,' Sherlock said, edging his foot to one side as if shifting position to make himself more comfortable. He nudged the newspaper into one of the puddles of rainwater that had come through the holes in the ceiling.

The man turned his head slightly, so that he was looking at Rufus Stone, and something about the way the light illuminated his face puzzled Sherlock. 'It goes without saying,' he added, 'that I will tolerate no interruptions from the sidelines. Are we clear?'

Stone nodded his bruised and b.l.o.o.d.y head, but Sherlock was too concerned with what was happening with the newspaper to pay attention to his friend. The water was beginning to soak into the pages, but a quick hand could pull it out of the puddle.

He risked a glance down. The ink had began to run, erasing the letters that he'd written in the margins of the page. Within a few minutes even the printed text would be indecipherable. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned his attention back to the quiet man's face, trying to gauge whether the man had seen anything. Sherlock was suddenly struck by the fact that there was something wrong with his skin. There seemed to be marks on it, but he couldn't see what they were.

'Then let us begin.'

The man raised a hand from his walking stick. Sherlock saw with shock that the head of the cane was a golden skull, gleaming in the light from the window, but he only glimpsed it for a second before the men on either side moved forward. Stepping over Matty's inert form they grabbed Sherlock by his arms and hauled him to his feet. The floorboards creaked and bent with the strain.

The men were both holding ropes with loops at the end, made with slip knots. One of the men a the earless one with the ponytail a threw his loop over Sherlock's head and pulled it tight around his neck. He threw the other end of the rope over one of the bare rafters and pulled it tight. Rufus struggled against his bonds in protest, but the man nearest him casually cuffed him with the back of his hand. Rufus fell back, groaning.

Sherlock felt the rope tighten beneath his chin, choking him. Instinctively he rose up on tiptoe to try to lessen the strain, but the other man a the one with the smallpox scars a was slipping the loop on his own rope beneath Sherlock's feet and tightening it around his ankles.

'I suggest,' the quiet man said in a calm, reasonable voice a the kind of voice that a vicar might use when asking for a cup of tea a 'that you take a tight hold on the rope that is above your head. In a few seconds your life will depend on how tight a grip you can keep. Plus, of course, on how truthfully you answer my questions.'

Abruptly the man holding the rope that was around Sherlock's neck pulled on it. The noose tightened, yanking Sherlock off his feet. He grabbed for the rope above his head and hung on for dear life. The strands were rough beneath his fingers, but he could feel his palms becoming sweaty, and he knew that if his hands slipped then he would be left dangling by his neck, and he would suffocate.

His toes dangled in the air inches from the floorboards. The man pulled harder, and Sherlock rose into the air, still hanging on to the rope above his head with both hands. His vision was turning red, but he could just about make out the shape of the man who was holding the rope crossing the room and tying it to an exposed lathe.

'Now,' the quiet man said, 'let us begin.' He cleared his throat. 'What is the nature of the relationship between you and Amyus Crowe?'

'I . . . don't . . . know . . . anyone . . . with . . . that . . . name . . . !' Sherlock gasped between precious breaths of air.

'Now I know that to be a patent falsehood,' the quiet man said. He raised his hand an inch above his walking stick. As Sherlock looked down he could see the man who had slipped the rope around his feet crouch down, reach into the shadows behind him and pull out a stone the size of Sherlock's head. String had been tied and knotted around the stone, and one end of the string was attached to a fishing hook. The man hoisted the stone in one hand and stuck the fishing hook in the rope that hung loose from Sherlock's ankles. Then he let go of the stone.

The weight of the stone suddenly transferred itself to the rope and thus to Sherlock's feet, dragging him down, stretching his muscles and tendons and pulling the noose tighter around his neck. He clamped his hands even more tightly around the rope, trying desperately to keep himself from choking.

'On the a.s.sumption that you may be congenitally stupid and you may not have understood the rules,' the quiet man said, 'I will repeat the question. The penalty for lying should be obvious by now. As you will already have worked out, I do know the answer to this question: what is the nature of the relationship between you and Amyus Crowe?'

'Teacher!' Sherlock gasped.

'Good. Thank you.' A pause. 'Now, the second question a where is Amyus Crowe now?'

Sherlock's vision was narrowing down into a fuzzy tunnel. His blood was thundering in his ears, but the question still reverberated around his mind. He couldn't answer it a surely he couldn't answer it! But if he didn't . . .

He had no choice. He couldn't give Amyus and Virginia away.

'Don't . . . know . . .' he choked.

The quiet man sighed. 'Another falsehood. You would not have come all this way if you did not know where your teacher is. Are you stubborn, or just foolish?' He raised his hand again, just an inch off his knee.

Despairingly Sherlock tried to kick out with his feet to hit the crouching man in the head, but the weight of the stone that was pulling his ankles downward was too great. The man reached into the shadows again and pulled out another rock as large as the last. It was similarly tied up with string, with a fish hook dangling off the string.

The rope was already pulling Sherlock's chin up. His fingers were beginning to cramp. He wasn't sure how much longer he could hold his body up and stop the rope from cutting off his air supply.

The man by Sherlock's feet hooked the fish hook into the rope and let go. The heavy stone clunked against the one that was already hanging there. Sherlock felt as if he weighed twice as much as he had when the rope around his neck was first pulled tight. The muscles of his shoulders and arms were shaking with the strain of taking his weight. His heart was hammering within his chest, and his vision had narrowed to a coin-sized circle in the centre of a red-tinged darkness. The rope around his ankles was digging deep into the flesh, and the weight felt as though it were dislocating his legs. The man crouching by Sherlock's feet shifted position, and Sherlock distinctly heard the floorboards creak beneath his feet. Similarly, the man who had pulled Sherlock off his feet took a step to his right, and once again Sherlock could hear the floorboards creak beneath the man's weight. Even to his ears, blocked as they were by the desperate rushing of blood, that creak spoke of a possible sudden splintering in the near future. Those boards were old and rotten. That gave him an idea.

But he had to time it perfectly, otherwise it would not work.

'You seem to singularly misunderstand your situation here,' the quiet man said. His voice seemed to be coming from a long way away. 'The pain must already be immense, and I cannot see you surviving more than one or two more questions. I admire your fort.i.tude, I really do, but are your friends really worth the torment? At the end of the day, would they die for you?'

Sherlock had to force the words through his constricted throat one by one. 'Doesn't . . . matter . . . what . . . they . . . would . . . do.' He gasped for breath. 'Matters . . . what . . . I . . . do!'

'Ah, a man of principle. How rare a and how pointless.' The quiet man sighed. 'I will ask again, and this time I really do suggest that you give me an answer that I can use. Where is Amyus Crowe now?'

'I . . . don't . . . know!' Sherlock ground out.

The quiet man raised his hand again. Sherlock's head was canted at such an angle by the weight of the stones pulling on his feet and the noose pulling on his throat that he couldn't see downward, but he could hear the sc.r.a.pe of stone on wood as the man crouching at his feet pulled another rock out of the shadows. How many did he have there?

A pause, as the man attached the rock to the rope, and then he released it. The sudden jolting pain was so immense that it was as if Amyus Crowe himself was holding on to Sherlock's legs and pulling. Sherlock's arms were on the verge of being wrenched from their sockets as he held on to the rope above his head in a desperate attempt to stop his entire weight from coming down on the noose. Even so the rope around his neck was biting in so deeply that he could hardly breathe. The problem was that he had to make things worse if he wanted to escape.

With the last vestiges of his energy he clenched his right hand on the taut rope above his head and tensed the muscles of his arm as tight as he could. Then he let go with his left hand.

The entire weight of his body and the three rocks was suddenly taken by his right hand, and his neck. Before his fingers could slip from the rope, leaving his neck to bear the entire weight, he whipped his left hand down and delved into his trouser pocket. His fingers closed around the handle of Matty's knife a the one his friend had used to carve a hole in the vats, back in Josh Harkness's tannery, and that Sherlock himself had used to connect up the pinholes in Amyus Crowe's cottage wall to form the shape of an arrow. Pulling the knife out, he flicked it to open the blade. Sensing, rather than seeing, the men to either side of him move closer to stop whatever he was doing, he lunged upward, carving an arcing path with the knife.

The blade sliced through the taut rope above his head. Suddenly the noose was less tight and he was dropping free, air rushing into his lungs as pure and as cool as spring water. The rocks. .h.i.t the floorboards. A fraction of a second later, Sherlock's feet hit the rocks. The combined weight of the rocks and his plummeting body, along with the weight of the two men who were already standing there, was too much for the rotten wood. It splintered and broke, creating a hole that the three of them fell through, directly into the room below.

Sherlock twisted his body as he dropped, bringing his knees up so that he fell on top of the two men. Floorboards sc.r.a.ped his skin as he fell. The men hit the floor with a sound like an explosion. The floorboards collapsed under the sudden impact, dropping them into the dank earth beneath. Surprised by the sudden absence of darkness, rats and c.o.c.kroaches fled in all directions.

Scrambling clear, Sherlock desperately tugged at the noose around his neck. It loosened to the point where he could pull it over his head and throw it to one side.

He kept shifting his glance between the men and the hole which he had created above, but the men weren't doing anything apart from moaning and writhing in pain and n.o.body appeared looking down through the hole.

He pulled the rope from around his ankles. The flesh was swollen where it had bitten in, and he suspected that his neck looked the same way, but he didn't care. He was free!

He stood up, and immediately collapsed. His legs wouldn't take his weight. He knew he couldn't stay there, on the floor, so he tried again. And again. It was just a question of willpower, he told himself. His body would do what he told it to do, not the other way round.

On the fourth attempt his legs stayed more or less straight, apart from a tremor in the muscles. He took a deep breath and staggered across the room towards the stairs. It never even occurred to him to run out of the house. Matty and Rufus Stone were up there, and they were helpless, defenceless. He had to rescue them, no matter what the risk to his own life.

Climbing the stairs was possibly the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. His muscles screamed at the effort, and twice he nearly fainted. When he got to the top he entered the room where he had been tortured with the knife held out in front of him, ready for a fight, but the quiet man had gone. Vanished. It wasn't clear to Sherlock how he had got out a the window was closed and the only way out was the stairs that Sherlock had just climbed a but he had left. Only Rufus Stone and Matty remained. Matty was still curled up with the sack over his head. Sherlock looked over at Rufus a bloodied, but smiling a and Rufus nodded towards Matty. 'See to him first, lad,' he said. His voice sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of walnuts a a result, Sherlock supposed, of the beating he had received. 'I feel like I've gone several rounds with a bare-knuckle pugilist a and believe me, I am more than familiar with that experience a but I'll keep. The boy's not moved since he was thrown down there. He might need your help.' He shook his head admiringly. 'That was an amazing piece of improvisation, by the way. If I live to be a hundred years old a which, by the way, I have every intention of doing a I doubt that I'll ever see anything like that again.'

Sherlock went over and knelt beside Matty. Worried about what he might find, he reached out to pull the sack gently from the boy's head. Matty's blue-grey eyes stared up at him in amazement.

'You're all right,' Sherlock breathed.

'I'm always all right,' Matty replied.

'I thought . . . you weren't moving, so . . .'

Matty smiled. 'I've learned that in situations like this, best thing to do is be like a hedgehog a curl up into a ball and wait for everything to settle down. Failing that, be like a badger a attack everything wildly, biting and scratching as much as you can.'

Sherlock pulled Matty to his feet, and together they set about freeing Rufus Stone from his bonds. Sherlock was worried about the amount of blood on Rufus's hands, face and shirt, but the violinist shrugged it off. 'I've had worse sc.r.a.pes falling off roofs,' he said, 'although I won't be playing any pizzicato notes on the violin for a while. What happened to those two thugs? Are they likely to come back?'

Sherlock went gingerly over to the hole in the floor, aware that the rest of it might collapse at any moment, and gazed down into the room below. The men were still crumpled on the floor, in the hole that their bodies had made. They were groaning, but they didn't look like they would be moving at any stage in the near future. 'I can see them,' he replied, 'but I don't think we need to worry about them. Not just yet, anyway.'

'Fair enough. Ah, Sherlock, my admiration for you knows no bounds.'

'What happened?' Sherlock asked. 'We lost you at Newcastle.'

Rufus grimaced. 'They were on to us from Farnham,' he said. 'From what I overheard, they found Amyus Crowe's cottage empty and set someone to watch it in case he came back. It was that fellow with the ponytail and the chewed-off ear.'

Sherlock frowned. 'I didn't see him. We searched the house.'

'He was hiding outside somewhere. He'd made a hole in the side of the house and run a speaking tube from it, along the ground to his hidey-hole. He could hear everything you said.'

'A speaking tube?' Matty asked, puzzled.

'The kind of thing the captain of a ship uses to talk to the engine room a a ribbed and waxed canvas tube. If you speak into one end, then someone with their ear against the other end can hear you clearly over hundreds of yards.'

'Who'd've thought?' Matty muttered, but Sherlock was kicking himself. He'd seen a tube just like that leading away from Amyus Crowe's cottage, but he had thought nothing of it at the time. He vowed then and there never again to ignore something that was out of place or unusual.

'He overheard you two in the house,' Rufus continued, 'then he crept out after you and heard you talking about Edinburgh in the paddock.' He shook his head. 'Once he notified his compatriots, all they had to do was keep track of us on the journey up to King's Cross and then on to the train. They decided to take one of us at Newcastle so they could find out where exactly in Edinburgh Amyus Crowe was hiding a if indeed you'd got it right and he was in Edinburgh.' Ruefully he looked at his bloodied hands. 'They found out that I didn't know anything more than the fact that he was somewhere in the city, so they kept me quiet and took me along for the ride just in case they could use me against you somehow. We were on the same train as you, but the man in charge a the one who asked you the questions a had booked a whole compartment so they weren't disturbed, and they waited until the platform was empty before they got off. Once we all got to Edinburgh they set about finding a base to operate out of and give you two time to make contact with Mr Crowe a or him with you. Come this morning they decided to take you and find out if you knew anything more than me. Which apparently you didn't.'

'Actually,' Sherlock said, 'we do.' He glanced at the newspaper on the floor a now a sodden ma.s.s. It didn't matter a he had memorized the message. 'What we still don't know is why they are after Mr Crowe.' He shifted his gaze to Rufus's hands. 'Are you . . . are you going to be able to play the violin again?'

'Worried about your lessons? No refunds, lad.' Rufus held his hands up in front of his face and flexed his fingers experimentally. He grimaced at the pain, but kept doing it. 'The muscles and tendons are intact. The cuts and bruises will heal, in time. I won't be attempting any Paganini in a hurry, but the rest of the repertoire is mine to command.'

Sherlock looked around. 'What happened to the man who was asking the questions? The one with the walking stick with the gold skull on top?'

Rufus frowned. 'Didn't he go past you? I thought he went for the stairs.'

'I didn't see him.' Remembering the man's hand, caught in the light from the window, Sherlock added, 'What was wrong with his skin?'

'Ah, you noticed that?' At Sherlock's nod, Rufus went on: 'He had tattoos all over: face, neck, hands, arms a everywhere.'

'What kind of tattoos?' Sherlock asked.

'Names,' Stone said. 'People's names. Some were done in black ink, but a few were in red. One in particular, across his forehead, was in red ink and larger than the rest.' He looked up, meeting Sherlock's gaze. 'It was Virginia Crowe's name,' he said.