Black Ice

CHAPTER TWELVE

After breakfast, Sherlock watched from the hotel lobby as the rest of the theatre party, minus Mycroft, left in horse-drawn cabs for the Maly Theatre. Once they had vanished around a corner, Mycroft said: ‘Come on then. Let us go.’

He hailed a cab – a proper cab, not one of the thin boards on which people sat astride – and gave a junction of two streets as the address. Leaning over to Sherlock, he said, ‘We can walk the last hundred yards or so. Uncomfortable, but necessary. I always make it a rule not to reveal my ultimate destination to people I do not know, if I can help it. Half the cab drivers in this city are in the pay of the Third Section.’

When they arrived, Mycroft handed the driver a coin and waited until he had driven away before he indicated to Sherlock that they were going to cross the road and walk back a little way.

The building that Mycroft stopped outside was three storeys high, and made of a reddish-brown stone. A main entrance was situated in the centre of the ground floor, three steps up from the pavement.

Mycroft and Sherlock entered through the doors. Stairs led up from the lobby. As if he’d been there a thousand times before, Mycroft walked straight across to the stairs and put his hand on the banister. He turned to Sherlock. ‘They say that in the Winter Palace, here in Moscow, the Tsar has a small room that ascends from one floor to another, moved by some kind of steam-driven screw mechanism. The time when all buildings have such rooms cannot come too quickly for me.’ Puffing, he started to climb the stairs. Sherlock followed, smiling.

The first-floor landing gave on to a long, dark corridor that ran the length of the building. Sherlock could smell vague odours of food: boiled ham, boiled cabbage, bread. Mycroft walked confidently down the corridor until he came to a particular door. Glancing in both directions, checking that nobody was watching, he pushed against it.

The door moved.

‘The wood around the lock is splintered,’ Mycroft said. ‘This is decidedly not good.’

He opened the door and entered the hallway, pulling Sherlock after him. With a movement that was surprisingly quick for such a large man, he moved sideways, to the wall, and pushed Sherlock in the other direction. Sherlock realized that Mycroft was trying to minimize the time they were silhouetted in the doorway, just in case there was somebody in the apartment with a gun. Good thinking.

They waited for a few moments, listening. There was no sound from inside. Eventually Mycroft moved forward, down the hall to a half-open door.

The room inside was a mess. It was, or had been, a living area, but the chairs were smashed and the tables knocked over. Paintings on the walls were disarranged. Shards of pottery and glass lay on the floor: the detritus of smashed decorative figurines, teacups and wine glasses. There was nobody there, living or dead.

Mycroft’s eyes scanned the room quickly. He turned and walked back into the hall to check the other rooms. Looking over his shoulder, Sherlock could see that one was a bedroom, the other a bathroom. They were empty of people as well, but they had been comprehensively wrecked in the same way as the main room.

‘Someone was searching for something,’ Mycroft murmured, standing in the entrance hall and looking around.

‘They didn’t find it,’ Sherlock said.

‘You are correct, but how did you come to that conclusion?’

‘Because if they had, there would have been areas where nothing was smashed or overturned – the areas that they would have got around to if they hadn’t found what they were looking for.’

‘Unless…?’ Mycroft prompted.

Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘Unless whatever it was they were looking for was actually in the last place they looked.’

‘Or, more likely…?’

‘Or they weren’t sure how many things they were looking for, so they had to search everywhere.’

Sherlock’s brother nodded. ‘Correct. What else can you deduce from the state of this place?’

‘Whoever searched it didn’t care if anybody knew they had searched, otherwise they would have made an effort to be tidier.’

‘You are again correct.’ Mycroft’s face was bleak. ‘I fear for Robert Wormersley’s life. Either he was here at the time, in which case he has been taken away by whoever smashed the door down and ransacked the apartment, or he was absent, in which case he would have turned tail and run as soon as he saw the damaged door. Either way, his fate is still uncertain.’

‘He wasn’t here at the time,’ Sherlock said with certainty.

‘And you deduce that how?’

Sherlock indicated the front door. ‘The door was locked, but not bolted. You can see the bolts still intact on the back of the door. If your friend was in the apartment and had locked the door then he would certainly have bolted it as well. The fact that it was locked but not bolted indicates that he had left, and locked the door behind him.’

‘Good work,’ Mycroft said approvingly.

Sherlock moved back into the main room and looked it over again. There was something about it that bothered him, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Something out of place. Or something in place where everything else was out of place. It nagged at him like something caught between his teeth.

‘I’m not seeing something,’ he said. ‘Or I’m seeing something but not understanding it.’

‘It will come to you,’ Mycroft said, ‘if you let it. Let your mind mull the problem over while you think about something else.’ He looked around. ‘I fear there is nothing else to see here. We should leave.’

Outside, in the street, Mycroft hailed a passing carriage. Sherlock tugged his sleeve. ‘I think I can remember the way back to the hotel. I was taking note of the streets as we came here. Is it all right if I walk back? I want to see some of the city.’

‘Very well,’ Mycroft said. He passed Sherlock a handful of money. ‘The principal currency in Russia is the rouble. The rouble is divided into exactly one hundred kopeks.’ He clapped Sherlock on the shoulder. ‘Now, you go and take a look around. I believe I will return to the hotel and think about our next move.’

As Mycroft’s carriage vanished round a corner, Sherlock began to walk. Moscow looked, sounded and, more importantly, smelt different from the places he was used to. The snow, for instance, muffled a lot of the noise, so that the clamour he’d been used to in London was largely absent. Moscow seemed like a quiet city. Although, he considered, it might also have been quiet through fear of the Tsar’s secret police and what they might do to people who said the wrong things.

The route was fixed firmly in his mind, and as Sherlock walked he found himself admiring the solid, impressive architecture of the city. As he got closer to their hotel he found himself turning into an open square so large that it almost seemed to bend with the curvature of the Earth. Ahead of him a cathedral rose up like some fantastic creation made out of strawberry ice cream and spun sugar. He had never seen anything like it in his life. It seemed to be a series of towers of different heights and apparently different diameters, each one randomly topped with a pointed spire or an onion-shaped dome which was painted or tiled in different colours: red, green, blue, yellow and white, all intermixed in various combinations of chequerboard patterns or swirls. Each spire or dome was topped with a large crucifix. As Sherlock walked slowly around the cathedral, staring all the time, he noticed that it kept changing its appearance. There was no obvious symmetry about it. Whichever angle he examined it from, it was a different shape. Like many things he’d seen in Russia since they had arrived, it looked like a collision between a complete accident and a deliberate creation.

On his right, just across a moat of partly frozen water, he could see the tall, red-brick walls of what he thought was the Kremlin – the palace and grounds where Tsar Alexander II lived, and from where he ruled over his immense domain. In between the cathedral and the Kremlin walls, and extending off to Sherlock’s right, was Red Square.

Several straight, wide thoroughfares led away from Red Square. Sherlock chose the one that he thought would lead to the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel and began to walk down it. A sign attached to a nearby wall told him that this was Neglinnaya Street. As well as being lined with shops on both sides it had a long row of stalls running down the middle. The shops seemed to be mainly selling fur coats, hats, boots or pastries of various sorts. Each shop had a brightly painted sign outside showing in pictorial form exactly what was on sale. The stalls were more plebeian, dealing as they did in all sorts of knick-knacks from knives to tobacco, from bags to old clothes, buttons and fragments of cloth. A few stalls were selling religious items: crosses, paintings on wooden plaques of saints and the like. Russia, it appeared to Sherlock, was a much more openly religious society than England.

Tea sellers wandered along the street between the shops and the stalls, pushing handcarts on which heated urns of tea were precariously balanced. They also sold snacks: strings hung around their necks from which rings of bread dangled like huge beads.

At each junction Sherlock noticed wooden booths occupied by men in grey uniforms and black helmets. They had swords strapped to their sides. The ones that weren’t actually asleep at their post just looked bored and cold.

Checking his watch, Sherlock decided that it was time he headed back. As he drew level with a side street, he stopped. Someone walking close behind him collided with him. He turned, already apologizing, but the man pushed past him with a muffled curse. At the same time he noticed an animated conversation happening at one of the wooden booths. A man in a heavy coat and a hat with fur earflaps was talking to the policeman in the booth, gesturing wildly with both hands. Sherlock was about to turn away when the man in the furs turned and pointed towards him. The policeman stared darkly at Sherlock.

A shiver ran through Sherlock’s body.

The man in furs appeared to be saying that something had been taken from him. He was gesturing to a pocket on his coat, sliding his hand in and out as if miming the fact that he had been pickpocketed. He pointed at Sherlock again. Sherlock glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone else was around, anyone that the man could have been pointing at, but there was nobody within ten yards.

Sherlock spread his arms wide in a gesture of innocence, gazing at the policeman and hoping the man would just wave him away, but instead the policeman gestured imperiously to him to approach the booth.

Sherlock switched his gaze to the man who had made the complaint. Just for a second, he smiled. It was the smile of a man who had pulled off a particularly cunning trick and was waiting to see the inevitable outcome. When he noticed that Sherlock was watching him the smile vanished from his face like a picture wiped from a blackboard.

Struck by a sudden and very unwelcome thought, Sherlock plunged his hand into his jacket pocket. His fingers closed on an object that hadn’t been there before: something square, something made of leather.

A wallet.

Suddenly it was all crystal clear to him. The whole thing was a set-up! The man who had barged into Sherlock’s back and walked off must have slipped the wallet into his pocket. The other man – the one talking to the policeman – hadn’t been robbed at all, but the moment he had seen the wallet slipped into Sherlock’s pocket he had gone across to the policeman and made his complaint, singling Sherlock out as the thief. And when Sherlock’s pockets were checked a wallet would be found in them, and the man who had made the complaint would undoubtedly recognize it as his, whether it was or not. He would be thrown into prison, and the evidence was completely against him.

This was a nightmare!

The policeman gestured again, more sternly this time. Sherlock’s heart started to race. He could feel sweat gathering damply at his armpits and down the centre of his back, sticking his shirt to his skin. Arrested in a foreign country for theft? He would be lucky if he ever saw daylight again, and that was even assuming that he got a fair trial. Given the clever way the whole thing had been set up, the chances were that every possible way out had been anticipated. They – whoever they were – might have paid off the judge, the jury, everyone. And that was assuming they even had judges and juries in Russia. He had no idea how the justice system worked. He had a feeling, based on things he had read in the newspapers back home, that Tsarist Russia worked on the basis of secret police and people vanishing off the streets and never being seen again.

He could run, but they must have anticipated that as well. He glanced around, trying to work out who in the surrounding throng of shoppers was part of this conspiracy.

To his left, a man in a black coat and fur hat turned his head away when Sherlock’s gaze passed across him. To his right, a teenage boy with a smallpox-scarred face glared sullenly at him, and a woman with her hands inside a fur muffler suddenly took an interest in the tobacconist’s stall she was standing by.

Three people at least. Three people who would stop him if he tried to run.

He desperately scanned his immediate vicinity again, hoping against hope that he would see a means of escape, but there wasn’t one. He wasn’t close enough to any of the stalls to snatch something up and use it as a weapon, and he was pretty sure that nobody near him would come to his aid if he yelled for help.

The policeman was striding across to where Sherlock stood. His sword was by his side but he was swinging a long stick in his right hand. The scowl on his face suggested that whatever Sherlock did he was intending to use the stick within the next few minutes.

A sudden gust of wind bought a smell of spiced tea to Sherlock’s nostrils. He turned his head. The tea seller was moving through the crowd a few steps away.

Without thinking, Sherlock took two steps and shoved the man in the small of the back.

The tea seller sprawled forward, pushing his cart away as he fell. The cart rolled on for a few feet and then hit a loose cobblestone. One wheel jolted upward and the cart tipped over. The silvery urn toppled over. The top flew off as it hit the cobbled street and a flood of brown tea spilt everywhere, immediately turning the snow to brown slush. People jumped out of the way of the steaming liquid. Some of them got splashed, and they cried out as it scalded their legs.

While the three watchers and the policeman were distracted, Sherlock slipped away through the crowd. As he moved he tried to make himself smaller, and to make sure that there was always a group of people between him and the people who wanted him, but there were five of them at least and he couldn’t block all of the possible sight lines as he moved.

A shout went up behind him. It was the policeman! He had seen Sherlock, and he pushed his way roughly through the crowd in pursuit. People stumbled and fell as he lashed out at them with his wooden stick.

Sherlock broke into a run, heading back the way he had come. If he could just lose them for a couple of minutes he could get back to the hotel and warn Mycroft.

A shrill whistle ripped through the air. Sherlock glanced back over his shoulder. The policeman was still in pursuit.

The cobbles shifted unevenly beneath Sherlock’s feet, and he nearly fell over. Catching himself, he looked ahead. There was a wooden booth on the corner ahead of him, and the policeman inside had already emerged and was looking in his direction. He must have heard the whistle.

Ahead was blocked, and so was behind. Sherlock swerved to the right, looking for a doorway or an alleyway through which he might escape. All he saw were shops and brightly painted signs. The colours began to blur as he ran. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest.

Suddenly an opportunity presented itself: a set of steps leading down to a basement area. Desperately praying that it wasn’t a dead end, that whatever door was down there wasn’t locked, Sherlock ran for the steps. He grabbed the railing at the top, swung round and flung himself down into the bricked basement area.

There was a door down there, but it was boarded shut, big planks nailed across it. No way out.

He turned to head back up the stairs, but a sudden whistle deafened him. The policeman was only a few feet away. Maybe he hadn’t seen where Sherlock had gone, but if Sherlock poked his head up above the level of the pavement then he would be noticed.

A second whistle, further away, and a third. Was the whole of Moscow chasing him?

Approaching footsteps. Just a few seconds and he would be seen.

He looked desperately back towards the blocked door, hoping that there might be a gap between the boards large enough for him to crawl through. Then he noticed an iron manhole cover set into the ground. He threw himself to his knees and tried to pull it up. The manhole cover was heavy and slick with ice, and his fingers were slippery with sweat. He managed to raise it by an inch or so, but it fell back with a loud, dull clang. Desperately he scrabbled at it again. This time, when he managed to prise it up, he slipped his fingers beneath it. If it fell again it might break them.

With his last reserves of strength he pulled the cover up and slid it to one side. A smell of dank earth and sewage rose up, making him choke. The meagre light from the clouded sky illuminated the first few rungs of an iron ladder.

He had no choice. Swinging his legs over the edge, he started to descend. When his face was level with the ground he grabbed the edge of the cover and pulled it back across. There was a handhold underneath, and he managed to pull it all the way across so that it settled into its previous position.

From above, he hoped, it would look as if the manhole cover had never been removed.

His intention had been to stay there in the darkness for as long as necessary, clinging to the iron ladder, but it was not to be. The rungs were mossy and wet, and his fingers had no strength left in them. Just as he heard a set of boots hit the manhole cover and stop, his fingers suddenly spasmed and let go of the rung. He fell into darkness, trying not to cry out.