Knife Edge

CHAPTER FIVE

After the events of the night before, breakfast was a subdued affair. All of the representatives, bar the missing American, sat quietly, wrapped in their own thoughts. Sir Shadrach Quintillan was at the head of the table, of course, and Mr Albano was absent again. Count Shuvalov was served by his own manservant, while the rest of them were served by the castle staff.

As for himself, Sherlock was intent on working out how the effects of the séance had been achieved. He could not bring himself to believe that any spirits had crossed over from the Other Side to visit them — in fact, he was pretty much convinced that there was no Other Side to begin with. What they had sat through was a set of conjuring tricks, he was sure.

Mycroft was convinced they were being fooled as well. He and Sherlock had chatted late into the night after the séance had concluded. Mycroft had summarized by saying: ‘I know that we’ve been tricked, but I am not entirely sure how. There are various possibilities, but to be sure we need to establish exactly what techniques were used. What we saw is, as far as I can determine, pretty standard for séances. Mr Albano did not deploy any events which I was not expecting.’

‘What about the other representatives?’ Sherlock had asked. ‘Do they know they were fooled?

Mycroft had shrugged. ‘Count Shuvalov is an intelligent man: I believe that he, like us, knows that confidence tricks are being stacked up, one upon another. Von Webenau, despite his formidable reputation as a statistician and logical thinker, appears to have fallen for the tricks hook, line and sinker. I suspect that he has an existing reason for wanting to believe — a dead wife that he mourns, perhaps, and wishes to contact again. Herr Holtzbrinck could go either way. I thought it interesting that he was the one chosen to receive a message from the Other Side — Mr Albano is obviously targeting him as the easiest one to sway over to a state of belief. He will presumably work his magic on me, and on Count Shuvalov, over the next few nights.’

‘Does it matter if one or more of them believe that it’s true?’

‘What do you mean?’ Mycroft asked.

‘Well, your job here is to evaluate Mr Albano’s spiritual powers on behalf of the British Government. If you decide that he can contact ghosts, then your job is to outbid any other government for his services. But if you decide that he is a fake then presumably the British Government doesn’t care if any other government buys his services. They will just be wasting their money.’

‘That is perfectly true,’ Mycroft said, nodding his large head, ‘and it shows that you are developing a good grasp of the way international diplomacy works. In fact, I would rather foreign governments wasted their money on fake psychics than on, for instance, armies or weapons. I would, however, add two codicils to what you have said: firstly, I have a personal dislike of confidence tricksters being rewarded for their efforts, even if those rewards do not come from Great Britain, and secondly it is not a healthy or stable situation for governments with large armies to be guided by fake messages from ghosts. I much prefer governments to make their decisions based on logic and fact. That makes them predictable.’

‘On the other hand,’ Sherlock pointed out, ‘knowing that a government is paying attention to a fake psychic does give you the opportunity to feed them with things you want them to believe. Fake fake messages, if you like. Presumably, if a fake psychic will take money from one government for his tricks, he will take money from anyone.’

‘The thought,’ Mycroft had rumbled, ‘is immoral and unethical, and had never occurred to me.’

‘What about Sir Shadrach?’ Sherlock asked, thinking about Niamh Quintillan. ‘Is he involved?’

‘Mr Albano certainly requires help in order to achieve some of the effects.’ Mycroft pursed his lips. ‘If that help isn’t coming from Quintillan and at least one servant then it must be coming from elsewhere.’ He glanced across at Sherlock. ‘I presume, by the way, that you have already established in your own mind the various ways in which the chalk messages, the moving plaque and the ectoplasmic materialization could have been achieved?’

‘Yes,’ Sherlock had said quickly, but now, as he sat at the breakfast table, he found himself stumped. The wooden plaque could, he supposed, have been pushed around pretty easily by Ambrose Albano’s fingers, but the chalk messages and the ectoplasm were puzzling him. How had they been done? He had checked under the table, and there had been nothing hidden there with which messages could have been written.

Niamh was sitting opposite him, and he glanced over at her. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. He hoped he would get the chance to talk to her later. She had, as far as he knew, seen the whole thing, but from a different perspective. The séance had, he assumed, been set up to convince the people sitting around the table. Standing in the doorway, she might have seen something that none of the rest of them had.

Or, he wondered as he looked at her, did she already know how it had all been done? If Quintillan was implicated in the tricks, was his daughter also in on it? Was she part of the conspiracy? He hoped not.

He was about to ask her if she would show him more of the castle and its grounds later when one of the foot-servants unexpectedly dropped a tureen of scrambled egg on the floor. The sudden crash startled everyone. The foot-servant ran for the door, sobbing hysterically, while the other servants quickly moved to clear up the mess.

Niamh Quintillan got out of her chair and ran after her — the only person, Sherlock noticed, concerned with how the girl was feeling.

Sherlock munched on a slice of toast while he waited for her to return. Eventually she came back into the room. Her father glanced up at her questioningly, and she nodded in reassurance.

‘What was all that about?’ Sherlock asked as she sat down.

‘Oh, she’s all right. Poor Máire, she’s just worried about something she saw out of her bedroom window last night.’

Sherlock raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t tell me — she saw the Dark Beast!’

‘Actually,’ Niamh said levelly, ‘that’s exactly what she did see.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘I’m not. She said she got to bed at about three o’clock in the morning, after mopping down all the stone floors. She took a quick look out of her window before getting into bed. It was misty outside — there’s often a mist that comes in off the sea, and she said she was just about to close the curtains when she saw something. She thought at first it was one of the guests, but she said it was too big, and too bulky. Then the wind blew the mist away for a moment, and she saw it clearly.’ Niamh’s face was serious. ‘She says that it was a big, black shape, bigger than a man. Then the mist got blown across it again, and it disappeared.’

‘What did she do?’ Sherlock asked.

‘What could she do? She made sure her window was locked, and then she went to bed, but she says she couldn’t sleep. She just lay there, looking up at the ceiling, shaking with fear, thinking about what she’d seen. She got up this morning, exhausted through lack of sleep, and came down to serve breakfast, but she kept remembering what she’d seen.’

‘Do you believe her?’

‘I believe that she believes she saw something.’ Niamh glanced towards the doorway. ‘She’s obviously panicked. But if you’re asking: did she actually see the Dark Beast, or something like a deer out in the mist, or did she just dream she’d seen something? — I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I told her to go down to the kitchen, get a glass of water and sit down for a few minutes until she felt better.’

‘What side of the castle does her window look out from?’ Sherlock asked.

‘Why?’ She smiled. ‘Do you want to go looking for tracks?’

‘If I do, do you want to come with me?’

She laughed. ‘All right. Her window looks inland. I’ll show you later where it is from the outside.’

‘It’s a… deal,’ Sherlock said, catching himself before he could say ‘date’. ‘But can we wait until nearer lunchtime? Your father has said that I can take a look at the books in his library, and I wanted to get straight down to doing that.’

After breakfast, Sherlock headed for the library while his brother took Count Shuvalov’s arm and engaged him in private conversation, presumably about great secrets of state. The library was empty when he pushed open the large oak door. Inside, bookcases lined the walls, running from floor to ceiling. Tall windows were covered with green baize curtains to keep the sunlight from fading the books. Ladders on wheels and runners could be pushed along the bookcases. Every spare inch of space was covered with leather-bound volumes in faded black, red and green. In the centre of the room were a couple of over-stuffed leather armchairs and side tables, along with one much larger table where bigger volumes could be opened or maps unrolled.

Sherlock spent a few minutes familiarizing himself with the arrangement of the books — local history, world history, geography, fiction and — perhaps not surprisingly — large sections devoted to the West Indies, and also to spiritualism and psychic phenomena.

Remembering what Niamh had said about the maid’s vision of the night before, Sherlock glanced out of one of the windows. The library overlooked the cliffs: there was about fifty feet of grass before an abrupt cut-off line where the cliff edge was. On a clear day Sherlock supposed that he would have seen the sea in the distance, but there was still a lot of mist around, and all that Sherlock could see was a formless grey void — much the same as he had imagined the Other Side to be during the séance the previous night. It looked pretty spooky, even by daylight, and he could see how someone staring into the coiling mist might think they saw shapes being formed. Even a tree, seen through the mist, could take on the form of a monster.

He walked across to the shelves devoted to spiritualist and psychic phenomena. There were two entire floor-to-ceiling sections, with books ranging from those recently published to those dating back hundreds of years. Sherlock scanned the titles quickly, looking not so much for a book that talked about psychic phenomena as if they were true, but one that listed all the tricks and techniques that could be used to fake the effects. He was soon disappointed. The authors of the many and various books on the shelves were all, as far as he could tell, complete and total believers.

It made sense, he supposed. If Sir Shadrach Quintillan was taking part in a confidence trick then he would hardly leave books lying around that would give everything away. If he had such books, and Sherlock suspected that he did, then they were likely to be hidden somewhere. Sherlock made a mental note to continue looking in the rest of the castle — even in Sir Shadrach’s own rooms, if he had to. He was, after all, working for the British Government!

Given that he was currently in a different country, he supposed that made him some kind of spy. He found the thought strangely exciting.

Perhaps he was looking for the wrong thing. Rather than search for books specifically on how to fake psychic phenomena, perhaps he ought to be looking more widely, for books on illusions and magical tricks. He walked all around the library, using the ladders to check the upper shelves, but there were none.

He gave up on looking for books on psychic trickery or magic — in the library, at least. On a whim, he crossed to the section covering local history, and looked for any books that might have listed any local legends or stories. There were a couple on the shelves; he pulled one out and took it to the nearest chair. Sitting, he flicked through the volume to see if anything was said about the Dark Beast. He half suspected that Niamh had made the whole thing up to fool him. She seemed to have that kind of challenging sense of humour.

Surprisingly, he found an entire chapter devoted to the supernatural creature. It had, he found, been seen in and around the local area for hundreds of years. Nobody had seen it clearly — it apparently mainly came out at night, or when the weather was particularly misty.

Tired of sitting and reading, he prowled around the edges of the library. He had heard about secret passages in old castles, sometimes hidden behind bookshelves that would swing out on hidden hinges, so he pulled experimentally on a couple of shelves but only succeeded in knocking a few books on to the carpet. He felt silly, and so he stopped. Remembering things that his American tutor Amyus Crowe had taught him, he turned his attention to looking for small signs, tracks and trails, things that were out of context. If there were hidden doors in the bookshelves, and if they opened into the library rather than in the opposite direction, then they might leave some traces of wear on the carpet. He got down on to his hands and knees, looking for any evidence that a bookshelf might have swung out and rubbed against the carpet, but there was nothing. Again, he just felt silly.

‘What are you doing?’

He glanced up, trying to look casual rather than surprised and embarrassed. Niamh was standing in the open doorway, gazing down at him with a puzzled smile on her face. ‘I dropped a coin,’ he said.

‘What did you need a coin for in a library? The books are free.’

‘I couldn’t decide what subject to research next,’ he said smoothly, ‘so I was going to toss a coin.’

‘Oh. All right.’ She put her head on one side and stared at him silently for a long moment, obviously not convinced. ‘I’m bored. Did you want to go outside and look for tracks now?’

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’d rather take a look around the inside of the castle first.’ Standing up, he shrugged casually. ‘You live here, so you’re used to it, but I’ve never been inside a castle before. I’m curious.’

As he suspected, appealing to Niamh’s sense of curiosity worked. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s start at the top and work our way downward. I’ll give you the guided tour.’

She led him out into the main hall and then, ignoring the ascending room, raced him up the stone stairway that ran around the edges of the hall, all the way to the top floor. Together they headed along one of the two corridors that led in opposite directions away from the hall.

The castle, Sherlock remembered, was in the shape of a rough square, with the tower of the keep located halfway along one of the sides. The sides themselves were formed by the castle walls, which on the inside had a central corridor and rooms off to either side. The castle’s ‘corners’ were formed by three small towers and one larger one. It took them almost fifteen minutes to walk all the way around the castle walls and back to the hall again. Most of the rooms were bedrooms, or storage rooms, or were empty. Nothing startling or intriguing.

‘Can we get out on to the top of the castle walls?’ Sherlock asked. ‘On to the battlements?’

Niamh smiled. ‘Of course,’ she said, and led him to a small doorway off to one side of the hall, from where a stone stairway spiralled upward. It ended in two heavy doors set opposite each other. Niamh pushed one of them open and gestured him through.

Sherlock found himself on a long, flat, stone roof, covered with wet moss and edged with battlements that had been worn down by centuries of wind and rain into shapes like rotten teeth. At the far end of the roof was another tower, with its own heavy door. The wind whistled across the roof, snatching the heat from his body and sending cold drops of rain splattering against his face. He could see, from this high vantage point, the Irish countryside extending into the distance: green and brown, undulating gently to form low, wide hills. Undergrowth surrounded the castle, copses of trees stood out as dark green clumps, and stone walls separated fields. The clouds were low, brushing the tops of the hills.

In the distance, rising from a clump of trees, he could see a stone tower, a folly of some kind. Apart from the castle it was the only other dominating feature of the landscape, and he made a mental note to visit it, if he could find it from ground level.

The door slammed shut behind him. He turned, to find himself alone on the roof. Seconds later he heard a metal bolt slam across the inside, locking the door.

‘I’ll meet you at the other end,’ Niamh called from the other side of the door. ‘I’ll keep the door open for a count of ten seconds. If you don’t get through in that time, you’re stuck out there!’

Before he could say anything in response, he heard her footsteps running down the stone stairs.

Right now she was preparing to run along the corridor between the keep and the next tower. He had to match her, or beat her, if he wanted to get out of the cold wind. A flash of annoyance made his face feel hot. She seemed to like challenging him, and playing games. Well, if that’s what she wanted…

He started running along the castle roof, but almost instantly his foot slipped on a patch of moss and he fell sideways, slamming his shoulder into one of the worn battlements. Sick pain flooded his body and withdrew, leaving him weak. He climbed back to his feet and set off again, knowing that Niamh was outracing him a floor below.

This time he knew to avoid the patches of moss as he ran, but as a result his progress was marked by strange little dance-steps as he had to move rapidly right or left, or had to jump across wider areas. The bare stone wasn’t that much safer, he found — the rain had left it slick and slippery, and the soles of his new shoes were too smooth to get much of a grip. A couple of times he found himself sliding towards the battlements, and had to use his arms to cushion his approach and bounce off. He thanked heaven that nobody could see him — he must have looked as though he were mad. Of course, he realized, Niamh could visualize exactly how he looked. That was why she had shut him out there and made him run. For fun. For her own amusement.

The door ahead of him opened. In the darkness inside he could just see Niamh’s grin, taunting him.

He forced himself to a final burst of speed, ignoring the irregular blotches of moss, trusting to his speed and his weight to get him past them. In his head he counted down the ten seconds that Niamh had promised him.

When he got to eight, and he could see her preparing to shut the door, he jumped and let his feet skid on the moss, catapulting him towards the door.

He thudded against it just as she was closing it, pushing it back open and falling into the tiny room at the top of the stairs.

‘What did that prove?’ he gasped, leaning against the stones and trying to catch his breath.

‘It proved you can run fast,’ she said.

‘Faster than you.’

‘I got here before you, remember.’

He straightened up. ‘But you weren’t running on wet moss and wet stone.’

She twisted her lips in a little moue of disappointment. ‘Well, if you put it that way. All right, you won — this time.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Do you want to explore any more of the castle?’

She was challenging him again, waiting for him to back down.

‘Bring it on,’ he said. ‘But I’ve seen enough of the roof now. Let’s try for some lower floors.’

She took him around the second, first and ground floors, but they were much the same as the third floor — rooms of a similar size which were either set out as bedrooms or storerooms. Only the ballroom which occupied the ground floor of the other tower was different: a large, empty space lined with curtains with a dais at one end for a small orchestra.

‘I don’t think we’ve ever used the ballroom for anything,’ Niamh said quietly as they stood there. ‘As you can imagine, my father isn’t one for dancing.’

As they turned to leave, Sherlock had the sudden impression that a curtain twitched at the far end of the room. For a moment a dark shape, the size of a very large man, was revealed, and then it vanished again. Sherlock turned back to stare at the curtain, wondering if someone else was in there with them — a servant, maybe — but it didn’t move again.

‘Seen something?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Was it the Dark Beast?’

He laughed. ‘I doubt it. If it was, maybe it’ll stay for luncheon. He turned away and followed Niamh.

‘What about dungeons?’ he asked as they stood back in the main hall where they had started.

‘We’ve got them,’ she answered. ‘We keep them downstairs.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Mainly they’re used by the servants, and for the cooking. Would you like to see?’

‘I’d be worried about you locking me in a cell. I think I’ll pass.’

She smiled. ‘Probably a good idea. Shall we go outside now?’

‘Yes please.’ He checked the watch which hung from a chain on his waistcoat. ‘What time is luncheon?’

‘At one o’clock.’

‘We’ve got about an hour, then. Less if we get dirty or wet and need to change when we get back.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Afraid of getting a little bit dirty or wet?’

‘Not at all. I’m just afraid of missing lunch.’ He caught himself, and smiled. ‘I’m beginning to sound like my brother. God forbid.’

‘Do you get on well with him?’

‘That’s simple to ask but not so simple to answer,’ he replied, uncomfortable with the question but wanting to answer it honestly. ‘We’ve been apart for a while — well, I’ve been away. Abroad. We’ve obviously both changed since I left, and I think we’re both trying to work out what our relationship is now. I don’t need to rely on him the way that I did, but he needs to realize that we’re closer to equals now.’ He paused, wanting to change the conversation but unsure how. ‘What about you? Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘Apparently I had an older brother,’ she said, ‘but he died when he was a baby, before I was born.’ Her expression turned serious. ‘Lots of children die as babies where I come from.’

‘A fair number die as babies where I come from,’ Sherlock said, thinking about cholera, and the various other diseases that ran rife through the poorer areas of the big cities. ‘Not that I’m trying to draw any equivalence between your background and mine. I know I was privileged.’

‘Hey, I grew up in a place of beautiful beaches and beautiful sunsets where you could just pick your meals off the trees, and I’m now living in a castle. Believe me, I feel like I’m privileged.’

‘Touché.’

She punched his arm. ‘Come on, let’s take a tour around the outside of the castle. We won’t go too far — we can save that for later.’

He followed her across to the door that led out of the great hall. The doors were half open, and she slipped between them. Sherlock followed into the central square that lay between the castle’s walls. In daylight, and facing outward rather than facing towards the doors, as he had been the day before, he could see that it was mainly paved, with scattered patches of grass. In the centre was a statue of an armoured man on horseback. His arm was upraised, and holding a sword.

Niamh led the way outside through the entrance arch and crossed the moat quickly, but Sherlock paused to look down, into the moat’s murky water. He couldn’t see more than a foot or so into it, because of the mud and vegetation in the depths, but there were things swimming in there — sinuous shapes that could be fish or could be eels, he wasn’t sure.

The bulk of the castle shielded them from the wind that had chilled Sherlock up on the roof. He stared out at the Irish landscape. The low clouds had disappeared inland, and he could see the same low hills that he had spotted from the battlements. He looked around, trying to place where the tower he’d spotted was located, but he worked out that it must be around the side of the castle.

Niamh set off in the opposite direction. ‘Let’s look at the sea,’ she said. ‘I never get tired of it. Back on my island the sea is blue and green, but here it’s always grey. It’s also always angry, always crashing itself on the shore rather than coming in as gentle waves.’

Sherlock thought about the different ways he had seen the ocean as he’d sailed to China and back. ‘It’s like people,’ he ventured. ‘Despite the fact that we all look basically the same — two arms and two legs and a head — there’s an infinite range of personalities. The sea should be just as simple — chemically, it’s not complicated — but the same stretch of sea can look completely different depending on the weather and the time of day.’

Niamh vanished around the edge of one of the towers, and Sherlock followed. He found her heading across the stretch of grass that he had seen from the library — the one that separated the castle from the cliffs. She strode right up to the edge of the cliff and stood there, hair blown back from her face by the wind. He joined her, and together they stared silently out into the majesty of the Atlantic Ocean. The waves seemed to form momentary mountain ranges, grey and bleak and topped with white. It was only the size of the gulls that rode the waves that gave away their true size.

Niamh turned her head and stared at him boldly. He returned her stare, not sure what message he was sending but aware that messages were being exchanged.

Niamh opened her mouth to speak, but Sherlock’s attention had been snagged by something that he saw sticking out from a bush just the other side of her.

It was a foot. A bare foot.

‘Stop a minute,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

Sherlock gestured at the foot. ‘I think,’ he said grimly, ‘we need to get someone from the castle.’

Niamh took one look at the foot sticking out from the shrubbery, nodded, and ran back towards the castle as fast as she could. Sherlock moved closer to the shrubbery and carefully pushed back the leaves.

A body was lying beneath the bush. It was one of the castle servants. She was on her back, staring upward at the sky, and her face was twisted into an expression of pure terror. Sherlock checked her wrist and her neck for a pulse, but there was nothing. Her skin was cold, and her eyes had a thin coating of dust and pollen on them. She was undoubtedly dead.

This wasn’t the first time that Sherlock had seen a dead body, but the sight still made him uneasy. He was amazed at how thin the line was between life and death, and how easy it was to cross. He thought he recognized the girl as well: she was the servant who had dropped the plates and run out of the dining room during breakfast. So quick then, and so still now.

Without touching the body, Sherlock made a visual examination. There was no sign of blood, no obvious trauma. She looked as if she had suddenly fallen down and died on the spot.

Something was nagging at the back of his mind, and he quietened his thoughts to let it come forward. It had something to do with what he had first seen. He stepped back, and let his eyes move over the body, from the top of the head to the soles of the feet, trying to work out exactly what it was that was bothering him.

The feet! That was it! She wasn’t wearing shoes!

He heard Niamh returning from the castle, accompanied by others. He turned as they arrived. Silman was there, as were several of the house servants. They saw the girl on the ground and gasped, blessing themselves.

Silman bent to check the girl’s pulse, as Sherlock had done. She straightened up, shaking her head. ‘The poor girl. She must have had some kind of seizure, God rest her soul. I could tell that there was something wrong this morning, at breakfast. Perhaps her heart was weak.’

‘Perhaps it was the sight of the Dark Beast that drove her mad and killed her,’ someone whispered. Silman turned to glare at them. ‘Fetch sheets. We’ll wrap her body up and take her back to the castle. Someone go for the priest. The doctor is already on his way on other business. He’ll need to examine her, and sign a certificate of death. If he finds traces of disease then he might well quarantine the castle, which would be awkward for the master.’ She turned to Sherlock and Niamh. ‘Mistress, young master — I’m sorry you had to see this. Thank you for alerting us. I will tell Sir Shadrach, and we will make all the necessary arrangements. There is nothing else you can do here — I suggest you go on with whatever it was you were doing when you found her.’

Niamh nodded. ‘Thank you, Silman,’ she said soberly. ‘Please let me know if there is anything that we can do.’ She paused. ‘Did she have family?’

‘Not in this area. I believe she had a mother and a brother down near Cork. I will write to them.’ She sighed. ‘Such a tragedy, when young people die for no reason.’

Niamh was obviously still shocked. ‘I was only talking to her this morning,’ she said. ‘How can the Lord just… take people away like that? Do you understand it?’

‘What I don’t understand,’ Sherlock said thoughtfully, ‘is why she was outside in bare feet. She was wearing shoes this morning. Where did they go?’

Silman suddenly made a wordless exclamation, and slapped her hands to her cheeks. ‘Forgive me, young master,’ she said, ‘but the shock of seeing poor Máire here made me almost forget that I was already in the process of looking for you when the mistress ran in to find me.’

‘What did you want me for?’

‘It’s your brother, sir.’

Sherlock felt his heart shift suddenly. He felt sick. ‘What’s happened to Mycroft?’ he asked, stepping forward.

Silman hesitated, apparently trying to frame her next sentence properly. ‘He’s been injured. It’s his head…’