Snake Bite

CHAPTER TEN

Sherlock and Mrs Mackenzie both looked at the doorway, startled, then glanced at each other. Mrs Mackenzie’s face was anxious and surprised. Sherlock knew that his own face must have looked the same.

He rushed for the door. Mrs Mackenzie was only moments behind him, her hands already up over her heart as if trying to stop it from bursting out of her chest.

Malcolm Mackenzie’s study was down the corridor and around a corner from the sitting room. As he hurtled around the corner Sherlock saw Cameron standing in the doorway. He seemed to be frozen in place. He was gripping the door frame so hard that Sherlock could see the bones of his knuckles shining white beneath the stretched skin. A smashed plate and a squashed cake lay on the floor by his feet.

Servants appeared at both ends of the corridors: Chinese and Western faces all sharing the same shocked expressions.

Sherlock got to his friend and skidded to a halt. He stared at Cameron’s face for a moment, then his gaze followed Cameron’s inside the room. The scene he saw there would remain with him for the rest of his life.

The study itself reminded him of his brother Mycroft’s office. Bookshelves covered the walls, lined with leather-clad volumes in various colours. An ornate frame supported a large globe of the world in one corner. A desk sat towards the back of the room: a big slab of some dark native wood set on thick legs. Off to one side was a comfortably stuffed armchair with a small side table next to it. A book was opened, upside down, on the table. It sat beside a half-drunk glass of some amber-coloured liquid: probably whisky and soda, judging by the slight smoky odour that Sherlock could detect in the air.

Behind the desk was a wooden chair, and behind the chair was a wide window that looked out on to the interior garden. The window was closed and the glass was intact — no breath of air disturbed the curtains that hung in front of it.

In the chair behind the desk sat Malcolm Mackenzie. His hands were both in front of him on the desk, as if clawing at the papers that were scattered over it. His face was contorted into a mask of absolute horror: eyes wide and mouth open. His hair appeared to be sticking up in shock.

He wasn’t moving. His eyes weren’t looking at Sherlock, or Cameron, or anything in the study. They were focused on an empty area of space off to one side of the door. Sherlock deliberately followed his gaze, trying to see what he was looking at, but nothing was there. Nothing at all.

Sherlock’s heart already felt like it had moved too high in his chest and was in danger of blocking his throat and stopping him from breathing, but the next thing that he saw threatened to stop it beating entirely.

Malcolm Mackenzie’s arms were extended so far to the desk that the sleeves of his shirt and jacket were pulled halfway up his forearms. On his right forearm was a mark that Sherlock thought for a moment was a tattoo, but as his eyes lingered on it he realized the horrible truth. It was a bite mark: two holes punched into the skin with a smear of blood across them.

‘Father?’ Cameron said again.

Sherlock pushed past him just as Mrs Mackenzie got to the door. She gasped, hand raised to her mouth. His paralysis broken, Cameron rushed to the desk. He and Sherlock got to Malcolm Mackenzie at the same time. Sherlock reached out to touch one of his hands while Cameron put out a hand towards his face. Mackenzie’s skin was cold, and he did not react to the contact.

Sherlock slipped his fingers beneath Mr Mackenzie’s wrist and raised it off the desk, checking for a pulse. There was nothing. No blood was flowing through his veins, and his arm was as unresponsive as the branch of a tree. When Sherlock let it go, his hand landed with a dull thud.

‘I’m afraid,’ Sherlock said, his voice cracking, ‘that he’s dead.’

Mrs Mackenzie let out a cry. A few moments later Sherlock heard a second thud as she passed out and fell to the floor.

‘Take her to somewhere comfortable to lie down,’ Sherlock snapped at the servants who had begun to appear in the doorway. He saw the face of the butler, Harris, behind the others. He was looking white and shocked. ‘Harris!’ he called. ‘Look after your mistress! Get the maids to take her to her room!’ When the butler didn’t move, Sherlock clicked his fingers loudly. ‘Quickly! And send someone for a doctor. Not a local healer, but a real doctor — a European. There must be one somewhere in Shanghai!’

‘There is,’ Cameron muttered. ‘Dr Forbes. He lives about five minutes away.’

Sherlock glared at the butler until the man suddenly seemed to get a grip on himself and started issuing orders to the staff. Sherlock patted Cameron on the shoulder, then crossed to the door and closed it. He knew that Malcolm Mackenzie was beyond any need for privacy now, but even so he felt that the man ought to be respected, and not gawped at. Besides, if the snake was still in the room he didn’t want to give it a chance to escape. He wanted it dead.

As the door closed he turned back to look at Cameron. His friend was staring at his father’s twisted face. ‘What happened, Sherlock? What happened to him?’

‘He was bitten by a snake, by the looks of it,’ Sherlock said. He moved closer and indicated the bite on Malcolm Mackenzie’s arm. ‘There’s obviously a lot of it about.’

‘But what are the chances of two snake bites happening in one day while we are around?’ Cameron asked dazedly.

‘A more interesting question,’ Sherlock mused, gazing closer at the bite, ‘is what are the chances of the same snake biting two different people in different places while we are around?’

Cameron frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

Sherlock indicated the bite. ‘Look — one of the fang marks is larger than the other.’ He took from his pocket the sketch he had made earlier, based on his memories of the bite on Wu Chung’s shoulder. He held the sketch beside the real bite. ‘They’re exactly the same size, exactly the same distance apart, but one of the marks looks like the fang that made it is broken.’

Cameron glanced around the room, his face twisted into a scowl. ‘It might still be here, mightn’t it?’

‘The window is closed. Was the door closed when you got here?’

‘It was.’

‘And someone would have spotted a snake leaving in the past few minutes, there were so many people around. It must still be here.’ Sherlock’s eyes quickly catalogued all the shadowy hiding places around the room — beneath the furniture, on top of the books, hidden in the curtains.

‘We’re going to have to search for it.’

Cameron pulled open a drawer of his father’s desk. From inside he removed a revolver. ‘My father taught me to use this,’ he said quietly.

Sherlock grabbed a walking stick that was propped up against the door frame, on the basis that it was better than nothing.

For the next ten minutes the boys made their way carefully around the room looking for the snake. Sherlock would use the walking stick to poke, prod and investigate any likely hiding place, while Cameron would stand back ready to shoot if anything lashed out. Sherlock had no idea how fast snakes might move. His only previous experience of reptiles was with the giant lizards that Duke Balthassar had kept as evil pets. They had been very slow and deliberate in their movements, but he suspected that snakes might be faster. Every time he came to somewhere dark and hidden — a gap between two books, or a cushion propped up on a chair with a space behind it — he was careful to stand well back when he used his stick to poke around. His heart was racing and he could feel sweat breaking out over his chest. The thought that, at any second, a venomous snake might come hurtling through the air towards his face made him feel more scared than he had been in a long time.

Every once in a while he would glance over at Mr Mackenzie. The man just sat there as if he might suddenly turn around and ask them what they were doing, but Sherlock’s heart ached when he remembered, each time, that Malcolm Mackenzie wasn’t going to do anything any more. Sherlock had liked him. More than that, he had respected him. And Cameron had obviously loved him.

Eventually they had to accept that there was no snake in the room. All the possible hiding places had been investigated. Sherlock had even swept his stick along the top of the curtains in case the snake had somehow climbed up there, but nothing came falling down. It had gone.

Cameron was shaking with suppressed fury, and his face was white. He obviously wanted to take his revenge on the snake, and was feeling cheated. ‘Where is it?’ he kept on asking. ‘Where is it?’

‘It’s gone to the same place it went in Wu Chung’s house,’ Sherlock said.

‘Are you sure it’s the same snake?’

‘Oh, I’m sure. I just don’t know whether we are following it around or it is following us around.’

Cameron glanced at him. ‘How can either of those things be? Snakes are stupid. They can’t think for themselves.’

‘Indeed,’ Sherlock murmured. ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ He glanced up guiltily, aware that he was ignoring the tragedy of Malcolm Mackenzie’s death and concentrating more on the interesting problem posed by the snake, but Cameron didn’t seem to notice.

The door suddenly opened and Harris appeared. He ushered in a smaller man with a pointed white beard and a ruff of white hair around his otherwise bald head. ‘Ah, young Cameron,’ he said, spotting Sherlock’s friend. ‘A tragedy. A real tragedy. Your father — good man. Always thought so.’ He cocked his head to one side and stared at Sherlock. ‘I don’t know you. Do I know you?’

‘Sherlock Holmes — I’m a friend of Cameron.’

‘Ah. Yes. Good.’ He seemed to notice Malcolm Mackenzie for the first time, and he crossed to the body, checking it over carefully. ‘You have, I presume, looked for the serpent? I would hate to find it lurking down a sleeve or something.’

‘It’s not in the room,’ Sherlock confirmed. In fact, he had examined Cameron’s father’s body quickly while his friend had been distracted. The snake hadn’t been hiding in his lap, in his clothes or anywhere else around the body.

‘How’s Mother?’ Cameron asked quietly as Dr Forbes took out a stethoscope and listened to Malcolm Mackenzie’s chest for any trace of a heartbeat.

‘Looked in on her briefly,’ the doctor muttered. ‘Strong woman. Needs a barbiturate to help her sleep. Obviously distraught.’ He glanced at Cameron. ‘What about you, young fellow. How’re you feeling?’

‘Shocked,’ Cameron admitted. ‘Confused. Scared.’

‘All quite normal reactions.’

Sherlock indicated the body. ‘I presume…?’

Forbes shook his head. ‘No trace of life, I’m afraid. Looking at the swelling and the redness around the wounds, I can tell it was a poisonous snake. Probably caused a heart attack straight away. Poor man.’

‘That’s not what happened to Wu Chung,’ Sherlock mused. When he saw Dr Forbes raise an eyebrow he added, ‘Another man was bitten earlier today — a local Chinese man. He died as well, but it took a lot longer.’

Forbes frowned. ‘Might have been a different type of snake. Different venom.’

‘On the contrary,’ Sherlock said, ‘we think not only was it the same type of snake, we think it was the same actual snake.’

‘Then the venom should have worked in exactly the same way.’

‘That’s a good point,’ Sherlock said. ‘If it was the same snake then something changed between then and now. I wonder what it was.’

Dr Forbes stepped back from the desk. ‘I’m afraid there is nothing I can do, young man,’ he said. ‘Your father has been dead for a while now. I will fill in the death certificate to say that he was bitten by a venomous snake. The local authorities will need to be alerted, and they may wish to make their own investigation… I can do that, if you wish.’ He grimaced. ‘So sorry. Tragic. Very tragic. Your father was a good man. I’ll have the servants move the body to a bedroom, where it can lie peacefully until the funeral arrangements can be made.’

Forbes left the room. Sherlock and Cameron were silent for a few moments.

‘I should be doing something,’ Cameron said. ‘I should be arranging the funeral, or comforting Mother, or organizing the servants. After all, I’m the man of the house now.’ His face seemed to crumple, and he looked smaller: a vulnerable child. ‘What’s going to happen to us? With Father gone the business is finished.’

‘Perhaps you could go back to America,’ Sherlock suggested lamely. ‘I’m sure your father has built up quite a bit of money from his business. Your mother might want to move back home, near her own family if she has any. And you’ve always wanted to see America.’

Cameron nodded slowly. ‘Maybe.’ He shook himself. ‘I’ll go and check on Mother, and I’ll make sure that the local authorities know what’s going on. I’ll send a message to the local Catholic priest as well. I’m sure he can advise on what we need to do about a funeral.’

He walked out, leaving Sherlock behind.

Moments later Harris and two male Chinese servants entered the room. The servants were carrying a stretcher — a length of canvas with a bamboo pole running along each side — and Harris had a folded sheet in his hand.

Harris nodded his head to Sherlock. ‘We were instructed to…’

‘… take Mr Mackenzie’s body to his bedroom,’ Sherlock completed when the butler hesitated. ‘That’s all right. Do you need a hand?’

Harris shook his head. ‘I believe we can manage, sir.’ He indicated the stretcher. ‘It’s been in a store cupboard for years. Nobody can remember why it was there. Good thing we had it.’

As Sherlock watched, Harris and the two servants gently lifted Malcolm Mackenzie’s body from the chair and laid it on the stretcher. Once it had been arranged, hands on chest, Harris carefully placed the sheet on top of the body, hiding it from view. Harris directed the two servants to take an end each. They picked up the stretcher with some effort, and Harris led the way out.

Sherlock watched them go, feeling strangely useless. Everyone seemed to be doing something, apart from him.

He glanced around the room, waiting to see if anything caught his eye. He was remembering Amyus Crowe’s dictum about looking for things that stood out, things that were unusual.

Eventually Sherlock wandered across to the window, more out of boredom than for any other reason. He wanted to check that it really was closed, that nothing could have got in or out. He ran his hands around the edges of the frame, and pressed against the glass experimentally, but there was no looseness, no give. The window was completely sealed.

He looked around the room, letting his eyes flick across things without really taking them in, hoping that something would spring out at him. And something did. He suddenly noticed a smeared mark on the floor by the door. For a second he thought it was dirt tracked into the room by him, or Cameron, or Dr Forbes, but the smear was to the left of the door frame, close to the wall. He walked over and knelt down, taking a closer look. Now that he was nearer, he could see that the smear was in the shape of a footprint. He could clearly see the impression of the toes, and the ball of the foot. He would have assumed that it was a child’s footprint except for some marks in the carpet in front of the toes. The marks looked like they had been left by claws — something sharp that had dug into the carpet and caught the fibres.

He rocked back on his heels, thinking. A child with claws? An animal of some kind that left footprints like a child? What exactly was he dealing with here?

He remembered the thing he had seen — or almost seen — in the garden and then following Cameron’s father through Shanghai. Had it been in Malcolm Mackenzie’s study? It seemed likely, but what was it, and what did it want?

He searched around, but there were no other marks that he could see anywhere across the carpet. Just here. There was no way of tracing the creature’s comings and goings.

He straightened up and was about to leave the room when it occurred to him that the papers on the desk were in a mess. The rest of the room was neat, and he didn’t want Cameron or Mrs Mackenzie to walk in at some later time, see the papers scattered everywhere and be reminded that they were the last thing that Malcolm Mackenzie had touched. If Sherlock just put them into a neat pile, at least that would be something. At least he would feel that he was contributing towards helping the family at their time of crisis.

He walked back to the desk and scooped up a handful of papers. They were upside down. He turned them over, on the basis that he might be able to put them into some kind of order while he tidied them. He certainly didn’t want to read them — they were probably something to do with Malcolm Mackenzie’s business arrangements — but they might be numbered or something.

He glanced at the top sheet, and his heart skipped a beat.

It was one of the sheets that he had seen in Mr Arrhenius’s cabin, on board the Gloria Scott — one of the diagrams that had looked like a spider’s web. Quickly he riffled through the remaining sheets. They were all similar — all diagrams that looked like various combinations of lines and circles crossing and recrossing each other. He spread them out on the table, fascinated by them. What on earth did they mean?

Sherlock’s keen gaze scanned across the diagrams, looking for common elements, trying to see how they were constructed. The sheets of paper themselves were large but the paper was thin — almost translucent. If he held one up to the window then it seemed to glow with the light shining through it.

Each sheet had a large number of small circles drawn on it in ink. The circles were about the size of a coin. Each circle had two straight lines coming out of it in different directions, and the lines criss-crossed their way across the paper, forming triangles, parallelograms, rectangles and other more exotic geometric shapes. Except… no: he suddenly saw that two of the circles only had one line coming out of them, and seeing that made him realize that the lines actually formed a path. If he put his forefinger on one of the two circles that only had one line coming out of it, then he could follow that line across the sheet to a second circle, then follow another line to a third circle, and so on until he finally ended up at the other circle that only had one line coming out of it — or, in this case, going into it. It was a journey, but what did it mean? What was it trying to tell him?

He glanced at all of the pages in turn. He held them up to the light in pairs, trying to see if any of them were the same, or even slightly similar, but they were all different. Although they all consisted of small circles and long lines, all the circles and lines were in different places.

These were definitely the diagrams that Mr Arrhenius had kept in his cabin — the ones the pirate had been looking for. Sherlock had been right when he’d told Cameron that they were what the Dutchman had delivered to Cameron’s father the night before. But why? Sherlock racked his brains. Were they some kind of coded message that was meant for Malcolm Mackenzie to see — something that only he could decode, and that would look like gibberish to anyone who came across them by accident? Was decoding them the work that Malcolm Mackenzie had talked about over breakfast, when he had got so irritable and angry? If so, it indicated that whatever message was hidden inside the diagrams was important. So important that, when he had decoded it, Mackenzie had headed straight for the Shanghai Prefect’s Residence to tell him.

And then he had died. By accident? Sherlock was beginning to think not.

‘What are you doing?’ It was Cameron, standing inside the door and staring at Sherlock.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Difficult to tell,’ Cameron said. ‘I feel like I’m just being moved around at the moment, although I’m not sure what’s doing the moving. What about you?’

‘I think I’ve found some kind of coded message,’ Sherlock explained. He gestured to Cameron to come over, and quickly explained his reasoning.

Cameron gazed at the diagrams, frowning. ‘They don’t mean anything to me,’ he said.

‘Your father never received anything like this before?’

‘Not that I saw.’

‘Hmm.’ Sherlock stared at the diagrams. ‘There must be some kind of key that we could use to decode them.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, there are different types of code that people use. With some codes you substitute something for the letters in the message — replace every letter “a” with a number “1”, maybe, every letter “b” with a number “2”, and so on — except that would be too simple, because it would be obvious that there were no numbers bigger than 26, so people would work out pretty quickly what you had done. You could replace every “a” with a “b”, every “b” with a “c” and so on, up to “z”, which you would replace with “a”. That one’s harder to work out.’ He tapped the top diagram on the pile. ‘But this is different. Here there’s no substitution. There’re no different sets of symbols, or letters, or pictures.’

‘It looks like it’s some kind of journey,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘You see how the sheets are nearly transparent? If you could lay them over a page from a book, then the small circles might end up over certain letters. If you started at the beginning circle and then moved along the lines, maybe the letters beneath each circle on the path would spell out a message. Maybe the person who created the diagrams used a book that he owned, and he told my father which book it was.’

‘That,’ Sherlock said, ‘is a very clever idea. Except for the fact that there aren’t many books large enough for these sheets to fit over, and there’s no guarantee that your father would have the same book unless they had arranged it all in advance.’ He thought for a moment. ‘What kinds of books could you guarantee people will own? A Bible, I suppose, and a dictionary. Maybe the Complete Works of Shakespeare. That’s about it.’

‘Bibles are big,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘At least, the ones they read from in church every Sunday. Those things are huge.’

Sherlock looked around the room. ‘I suppose we could go through all the shelves and make a pile of all the books big enough for one of these diagrams to cover the page, and then work through them all, page by page, one after the other…’ He felt his fingers contracting into a fist in frustration. ‘And that’s the real problem — even if we knew which book to use, we don’t know which pages to go to for each of these sheets. There’s nothing on them to tell us.’

‘Maybe there was a separate key that mentioned which book and which pages?’ Cameron said. ‘Maybe that key took a different route, and arrived a few days ago in the post.’

Something in Sherlock’s brain was telling him that Cameron had said something important. Several important things. Odd phrases kept repeating themselves: ‘It looks like it’s some kind of journey.’ ‘Maybe the letters beneath each circle on the path would spell out a message.’ ‘Maybe that key took a different route.’

Journey. Path. Route.

‘What else do most people have in their possession?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Maps! Every family, every home, has a map of the world! And there are certain maps that are generally regarded as being better than any others — Ordnance Survey maps in England, and Admiralty maps for the world. Where does your father keep his maps?’

‘Where did he keep his maps?’ Cameron corrected softly.

Sherlock winced. ‘Sorry, that was clumsy.’

Cameron shrugged. ‘It’s going to take time.’ He pointed to a shelf with no books on, but which contained a number of rolled papers. ‘They’re over there.’

‘Help me look.’

Quickly the two of them unrolled the papers, one after the other. They were all maps — some of China, some of the area local to Shanghai, but some of the entire world. Sherlock quickly focused on the most detailed and colourful map — one that also showed current directions and shallow areas of the ocean as well as land masses. The text at the top identified it as an Admiralty map.

‘Right, let’s get it on the desk.’

Sherlock spread the map out on the desk while Cameron retrieved some drawing pins from a drawer and pinned the corners down. Then Sherlock took the first sheet with the spider diagrams on and placed it over the map.

It was smaller.

‘Where does it fit?’ Cameron asked. ‘We could slide it all over the place.’

Sherlock moved the sheet until its top left corner corresponded with the top left corner of the map. ‘Let’s try the simplest option.’

He quickly located one of the circles which only had one line coming out of it. ‘Here, let’s start with this one.’

‘It’s right over a town in Asia,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘Ulan Bator.’

‘All right, let’s follow the line to the next circle.’

‘It’s still in Asia.’ Cameron didn’t sound too impressed. ‘It’s another town — Singapore.’

‘U-S,’ Sherlock murmured. ‘Difficult to tell if that’s the beginning of a message or just a random pair of letters.’

‘Scotland,’ Cameron said, tracing his finger along the line to the third circle.

‘U-S-S,’ Sherlock said. ‘I’m beginning to get an idea where this is going. Quick — write down what I say.’ He scooted his finger across the map from circle to circle, reading out the names of the cities, towns, rivers, country names and oceans that were revealed inside the circles. Sometimes they surrounded the initial letters, sometimes they were buried somewhere in the middle of the name.

‘Right,’ he said eventually. ‘What have we got?’ Cameron didn’t say anything. His face was grim, and his eyes were scared as he spoke: ‘USS Monocacy to be blown up on Yangtze River!’