Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

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

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

The train was some distance beyond Guildford now, and he had lost the opportunity to dive back out and pick up some more newspapers. He made a mental note to do it at Waterloo when they arrived.

Finishing the newspaper, he made sure that he carefully tore out the report of the Edinburgh murder and folded it several times before putting it in his pocket. If nothing else, comparing the various reports would be an interesting exercise.

Matty was curled up on a seat, head against the window, fast asleep. Rufus Stone had his eyes closed as well, but judging by the way his hands were twitching he was mentally rehearsing the violin part of the music score.

Sherlock glanced out of the window again, but the countryside flashing past held little to interest him. He opened the bag that he had brought with him and pulled out a book. It was all about theatrical make-up – how to make it, and how to apply it to produce various effects.

He buried himself in the book, memorizing the details of how to make your own theatrical putty and make-up, and how to apply it so that nobody could tell unless they were within a few inches of you. The book also talked about changing posture – the way you stood – to make yourself look taller or shorter. He forgot about the train, and the journey, until they clattered over a particularly noisy set of points, and he looked up to find that Rufus Stone was staring at him.

‘Thinking of a career in the theatre?’ Stone asked, indicating the book. ‘I advise against it, the way I would advise against sticking your hand inside a dog’s mouth and pulling on its tongue. The pay is bad, the hours are long and unsociable and society does not value those who entertain it. I should know – I’ve spent more time than I care to think about in darkened theatres playing for small, unappreciative audiences.’

‘I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,’ Sherlock said honestly, ‘but I like the idea of being able to change my appearance so that nobody knows that it’s me.’

‘To be honest,’ Stone admitted, ‘there are times when I’ve been grateful for the ability to slip past an irate landlord or a former girlfriend without them realizing.’

‘You know about theatrical make-up?’ Sherlock asked, intrigued.

‘I’ve picked things up, over the years, working in theatres – or, more accurately, spending time in dressing rooms with young and beautiful actresses. Working for your brother, as well. There are some striking similarities between acting and spying.’ He smiled, but there was little humour in his expression. ‘Of course, dying on stage in front of an unappreciative audience is nowhere near as painful as dying in a back alley of a foreign city with a knife between your ribs.’

‘Can you teach me?’ Sherlock asked.

Stone shrugged. ‘I could give it a go. You’ll need a certain amount of raw artistic talent, and a lot of practice – not a million miles away from what you need to play the violin properly, in fact. Tell me what you already know, and I’ll see what I can add.’

They spent the rest of the journey with Stone giving Sherlock tips on the art of theatrical make-up. He brought the dry facts in Sherlock’s book to life with funny anecdotes of times when he’d seen false moustaches slide off actors’ faces or watched their make-up streak as they perspired until they looked like some bizarre striped animal. Sherlock found himself laughing, but also learning at the same time, and the rest of the journey seemed to flash past in moments.

Arrival at Waterloo was becoming a regular occurrence for Sherlock by now. The station, with its soaring iron arches and its glass panels, was a familiar sight, as were the crowds of people in all kinds of clothes, from black tailcoats to bright red-and-yellow checked jackets.

Rufus Stone led the way outside. ‘We need to get to King’s Cross,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It’s on the other side of London. Trains leave there for the north of the country.’

Sherlock looked back over his shoulder, wondering if he would see the two Americans, but if they had been on the train then they were hanging back, keeping out of sight. Perhaps they had stayed at Guildford to ask questions about a big American and a girl who would have been travelling a day or two before.

A cab was waiting directly outside the station, ignoring the traffic that was struggling to get past. Its driver kept shaking his head at the various people who tried to hail it or climb in. Sherlock assumed that it was waiting for someone important, and he was prepared to walk right past it, but Rufus Stone walked straight up and opened the door. Instead of waving him away or shouting at him, the driver jumped down and took his bag, then looked at Sherlock and Matty expectantly, obviously wanting to take their bags as well.

Sherlock had been encouraged by his brother Mycroft never to hail the first cab that he saw – just in case it was a trap or a trick of some kind – so Stone’s behaviour surprised him. The violinist was so confident, however, that Sherlock found himself leaving his bag on the pavement and following him inside. Matty did the same.

Everything became clear when Sherlock found that he was settling himself opposite the impressive bulk of Mycroft Holmes.

‘Ah, Sherlock,’ Mycroft said. ‘Welcome. Please make yourself comfortable. And young Mr Arnatt – perhaps you could squeeze yourself in beside me. I believe there is enough room, if you don’t mind pressing yourself up against the far side. Do be careful of my top hat.’

‘You sent a telegram to Mycroft,’ Sherlock said accusingly to Rufus Stone as they sat. From outside he could hear the driver throwing their bags on to the back of the carriage.

Stone’s face was impassive. ‘I had to,’ he said. ‘I work for your brother, and if he found out that I had let you go to Edinburgh without notifying him, there would be hell to pay.’

‘There would indeed,’ Mycroft confirmed. ‘I pride myself on knowing everything that goes on around me. If I discovered that my brother had slipped unnoticed through the city, I would be mortified.’

‘I’m still going to Edinburgh,’ Sherlock said levelly.

Mycroft nodded. ‘Of course you are.’ He reached up and rapped with his cane on the carriage roof. ‘King’s Cross!’ he called.

‘What?’

The carriage jerked and began to move away from the kerb.

‘Do you think that the disappearance of Amyus Crowe is of no interest to me?’ Mycroft shook his head. ‘He is, apart from being the closest thing I have to a personal friend, a man of exceptional abilities, for whom I have a great deal of professional respect. If he has disappeared suddenly, then there must be a reason, and I wish to know what that reason is. The presence of these two Americans is unsettling as well, given that we do not know whether they are friends or foes. Like you, Sherlock, I am puzzled, and that is a state of mind that I find particularly painful.’

‘What about you?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Will you be coming with us?’

‘I fear my days of travelling are past,’ Mycroft replied. ‘Our Russian expedition convinced me that I am better staying in London, where I am comfortable, and letting others actually seek out evidence and answers. But I shall be doing my part – while you are looking for Mr Crowe and his daughter, I shall be making enquiries about these two American visitors.’

Sherlock felt his heart sink. He wasn’t surprised at Mycroft’s decision, but he would have felt more confident with his brother at his side.

‘Oh,’ Mycroft continued, ‘I almost forgot. Congratulations on your deduction concerning exactly where Mr Crowe was headed. I cannot fault your logic, although I can fault Mr Crowe’s use of a rabbit’s head. There must have been something less offensive to hand and something less likely to have been stolen by a passing carnivore.’ He peered around the inside of the cab. ‘Do you think,’ he mused, taking the conversation off at a tangent, ‘I could have a carriage panelled, upholstered and carpeted to look like my office? Or like the Diogenes Club? That way I could travel in perfect comfort without the nausea that usually comes with a change of location.’

‘But who would bring your morning cup of tea or your afternoon sherry?’ Rufus Stone asked with a smile.

‘Those things can be arranged,’ Mycroft said. ‘The cab could stop outside certain establishments at pre-planned times, and waiters could pass trays through the window. I could have entire meals delivered for me to consume on the move. Think of the time saved!’

‘If you were allowed to eat and drink in here,’ Sherlock pointed out, ‘then you would grow so fat that you would never be able to get out again, which would undermine the entire point of having your own carriage in the first place. You would be like a snail in its shell.’

Mycroft nodded. ‘A fair point,’ he conceded.

‘If you’re not going to stop us going to Edinburgh,’ Matty piped up, ‘then why are you here, Mr Holmes?’

‘An excellent question, young man, and one that cuts right to the heart of the matter. I am here to see my younger brother, of course – something that hasn’t happened for a while now – and I am also here to warn the three of you to be careful. It has presumably occurred to you that anything which could cause Amyus Crowe to run rather than fight is likely to be bigger and more dangerous than you expect. I have always regarded Mr Crowe as a man entirely without fear. To find out that there is something that scares him is like finding out that the moon is entirely hollow at the back, like a dish, rather than a ball, like the Earth.’ He sighed. ‘I am also led to understand that Edinburgh is an unusually dark and violent city. The Scots themselves are a Celtic race, which means that they are prone to moods that range from maudlin depression to sudden anger. Do not think Scotland will be like Farnham, or London. Although you will not cross water – apart from the River Tyne, of course – and although the people you meet will speak English – of a sort – you should treat Scotland as you would a foreign country.’ He handed across an envelope. ‘I have taken the liberty of making your travel arrangements. Here are your tickets, and the address of a hotel into which you have been booked. Keep me informed as to what you discover. I regret to say that I have no agents of my own in Edinburgh, otherwise I would ask them to be on the lookout for Amyus Crowe and his daughter, and to keep the three of you from harm as well.’

‘Thank you,’ Sherlock said, taking the envelope. ‘Mycroft . . .’

‘Yes, Sherlock.’

He paused before going on. ‘I think you should know that Mrs Eglantine has left the employ of Uncle Sherrinford and Aunt Anna.’

Mycroft stared at Sherlock for a long moment. ‘Has she indeed?’ he murmured eventually. ‘Do I take it that this sudden reversal of fortune for that remarkably unpleasant woman has something to do with you?’

‘It has a lot to do with him,’ Matty said proudly. ‘And me!’

‘You must tell me the story when you get back.’ Mycroft kept staring at Sherlock. There was a strange look in his eyes, as if he was simultaneously seeing someone very familiar and someone who was a complete stranger. ‘You have my gift of being able to see a seed and extrapolate the flower,’ he said eventually, ‘but you also have something I lack – a regard for flowers, and a dislike of weeds. I admire you, Sherlock. I admire you greatly.’

Sherlock looked away, suddenly feeling a lump in his throat. He watched the buildings flow past the windows until he had his feelings under control.

‘I shall write to our mother,’ Mycroft announced suddenly. ‘I shall ask her to invite our aunt and uncle to stay with her for a few days. This family feud has long passed the point where it should have been forgotten. By the time our father returns from India I want it forgotten.’

‘Mother is . . . all right?’ Sherlock asked hesitantly.

Mycroft’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly. ‘She has good days and bad, but I think she is on the mend.’

‘And Emma?’

‘Our sister is . . . well, she is what she is,’ Mycroft said cryptically. ‘Let us leave it there.’

The carriage suddenly swerved sideways, towards the kerb, and stopped. Sherlock heard a scrabbling sound as the driver climbed down from his perch. Moments later the door opened.

‘King’s Cross,’ Mycroft announced. ‘If I remember my Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables, then I believe you will find a train leaving for Edinburgh within the hour.’

‘Thank you for meeting us,’ Stone said. ‘And for the tickets and the hotel arrangements.’

‘Look after my brother,’ Mycroft replied. He stared at Matty, and raised an eyebrow. ‘If it isn’t too much trouble, look after this one too. I find him curiously entertaining, and my brother obviously likes him.’

‘You’re a funny geezer,’ Matty said chirpily, ‘but thanks for the lift.’

Mycroft switched his glance back to Sherlock and stuck out a hand. ‘Send me a telegram whenever convenient,’ he said. ‘You can reach me care of the Diogenes Club. Let me know how your search is going. And take care. Take great care. I have a bad feeling in my bones, and I do not think it is the gout from which I worry that I am beginning to suffer.’

The three of them – Sherlock, Matty and Rufus Stone – climbed out of the carriage. The driver shut the door and climbed nimbly back to his seat. Sherlock heard the rap of Mycroft’s cane hitting the roof, and his muffled voice calling, ‘Admiralty Arch, my good man!’ And then the carriage was pulling away from the station.

‘We’re on our own,’ Matty said.

CHAPTER EIGHT

King’s Cross Station was just like Waterloo – a large space filled with people waiting on the concourse and pigeons roosting in the cast-iron girders that held up the glass roof – except that it was smaller. Smoke drifted through the air, and the sulphurous smell of burning coal hung over everything. The walls and girders were coated with a thin film of black dust.

Sherlock looked around, wondering if it was worth asking someone if they had seen a big man in a white suit and hat with a younger girl in tow at some stage in the past day or two. Asking the people who were catching trains wouldn’t do any good – the chance that they might have also been there at the same time as Amyus and Virginia Crowe was slim – but it might be worth talking to the ticket-office clerks or the station guards. Or, he thought, as his gaze scanned the walls of the arrivals and departures hall, he could talk to the beggars and pickpockets who moved like ghosts through the crowd, invisible and unnoticed apart from the occasional cries of ‘I told you – I haven’t got sixpence, and even if I did I wouldn’t give it to you!’ and ‘My wallet! Where’s my wallet?’ that marked their progress. The beggars and pickpockets would always be there, he suspected – day and night. This was their place of work and their home as well.

He stopped himself before he could walk across to the nearest beggar and offer him sixpence for some information. Amyus Crowe had tried to explain to him a while back about the problem of trying to confirm something you already knew. Sherlock was as certain as he could be that Crowe and Virginia were making for Edinburgh and had gone through King’s Cross on the way. Having a beggar tell him that yes, a big man in a white suit and hat had been there, with a girl, wouldn’t change his certainty – it would just be extra information. On the other hand, having a beggar say that no, he hadn’t seen a man or a girl fitting that description wouldn’t mean that they hadn’t been there. The beggar couldn’t be expected to remember every single person who had been through the station concourse. ‘The sensible man,’ Crowe had said, ‘don’t look to confirm what he already knows – he looks to deny it. Finding evidence that backs up your theories ain’t useful, but finding evidence that your theories are wrong is priceless. Never try to prove yourself right – always try to prove yourself wrong instead.’

The trouble was, in this case, if Sherlock’s theory was that Amyus Crowe and Virginia had travelled through King’s Cross, the only way to prove that theory wrong was to discover that they had travelled from a different London terminus – and that would mean a day wasted while they checked Paddington, Euston, Liverpool Street and the other major stations. They didn’t have time to do that.

‘You look pensive,’ Rufus Stone said, clapping him on the shoulder.

‘Just thinking through a problem,’ Sherlock replied. ‘I was wondering whether it was worth asking after Mr Crowe, but I think it would just be confusing.’

Stone nodded in agreement. ‘Even if he bought a ticket here, it wouldn’t have been for Edinburgh. He would have disguised his trail the same way he would have done leaving Farnham.’ He looked around. ‘We’ve got a while before the train, and my stomach is thinking my throat has been cut while it wasn’t looking. Let’s grab some food before we board the train – my treat.’

Stone was as good as his word. He found a chestnut seller on the fringes of the waiting crowd and bought three bags of hot nuts. He and Sherlock had to blow on them before they were cool enough to eat, but Matty seemed to have a throat lined with brick. He just swallowed them straight down, one after the other, smiling all the time.

After they had eaten their fill, Stone led Sherlock and Matty across the concourse towards the platforms. He showed their tickets to the guard, and they boarded the train. It was, in all respects that Sherlock could see, identical to the one that had taken them from Farnham to Waterloo.

‘It’s going to be a long journey,’ Stone said, settling down in a small compartment. ‘Make yourselves comfortable. Get some sleep, if you can. There’s two things a man should grab whenever he can – sleep and food. You never know when your next chance will come along.’ He glanced at Sherlock. ‘If I’d have thought, I’d have brought along a violin. We could have continued our lessons.’

‘In that case,’ Matty muttered, just loud enough to hear, ‘I would have taken a different train.’

Rufus glared at him. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘your musical tastes run just as far as a tin whistle and a rattle, and no further.’

‘Don’t knock tin whistles.’ Matty shook his head. ‘There’s plenty of good tunes come out of a tin whistle. That and a rattle is enough to dance to, and dancing’s what music’s all about.’ He glanced truculently at Stone. ‘Ain’t it?’

Stone just shook his head in mock sadness and kept quiet.

‘Actually,’ Sherlock said, ‘I wanted to talk a bit more about the theatre – about make-up and disguises, and things like that.’

Stone nodded. ‘I can happily do that. I love reminiscing about the times I’ve trodden the boards myself, carrying a spear in the back of someone else’s big scene, or played in the orchestra pit while the actors were on stage showing their craft.’ He raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘You seem to have a strong liking for the art and craft of acting. What’s brought this on, may I ask?’

Sherlock shrugged, uneasy at talking about his own hopes and likings. ‘I suppose I just find it interesting,’ he said. Stone kept looking at him expectantly, and to break the silence Sherlock added testily, ‘If you really have to know, it goes back to Moscow, and that cafe we were in. I was sitting there with seven or eight people with whom I’d spent the past three days, and I didn’t recognize them. Not one of them.’ He felt his cheeks burning with a sudden rush of emotion that seemed to be a curdled mixture of embarrassment and anger. He hadn’t realized until he’d said the words how much that incident had bothered him. ‘I’m meant to be a good observer,’ he continued. ‘Amyus Crowe always says that I’ve got a talent for picking up on small details, and yet they fooled me. They fooled me!’

‘They were better than you,’ Stone said calmly. ‘There’s no shame in that. I’m not the best violinist in the world. I never will be the best violinist in the world. But I’m good, and I’m getting better.’

‘I want to be the best,’ Sherlock said quietly. ‘I want to be the best violinist, and the best animal tracker, and the best at disguising myself. If I can’t be the best, then what’s the point of even trying?’

‘You’re going to find life very disappointing, my friend.’ Stone shook his head. ‘Very disappointing indeed.’

There was a tense silence in the carriage for a while, and then Rufus Stone, seemingly apologetic, broke it by telling Sherlock stories of his time working in the theatre, and of particular actors who could inhabit a part so well that they seemed to submerge their own personality in the performance. ‘The thing is,’ Stone said, ‘that if you don’t believe that you are an old man, or a woman, or a tramp, then how can you expect anyone else to believe you? Looking the part is just the surface; being the part is the true disguise.’

‘But how do I do that?’ Sherlock asked.

‘If you’re pretending to be sad, try and remember something in your life that made you cry. If you’re meant to be happy, remember something that made you laugh. If you’re meant to be a beggar, then remember being hungry and dirty and tired – if you can.’ He smiled slyly. ‘If you’re pretending to be in love, remember the face of someone you care for. That way your face and your body will naturally fall into the right shapes, without your having to exaggerate for effect. Oh, and always trade on people’s inattention.’

Sherlock frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that people usually see only what they expect to see. They don’t look in detail at every person on the street.’ He closed his eyes for a moment and ran a hand through his hair. ‘How do I put this? It’s like a theatrical backcloth. If you want the audience to believe that a play is set in China, you don’t spend weeks painting a detailed backcloth showing a Chinese palace or a village so realistic that people think they’re actually looking through a big window at the real thing – you sketch out some details, like a curved roof, or some bamboo, and let their minds fill in the rest. Minds are very good at deciding quickly what they’re seeing out of the corner of their eye, based on a couple of things that snag their attention, and then taking a picture from their memory and putting that picture in place of the thing itself. If you want to look like a beggar, then what you don’t want to do is to painstakingly recreate every detail of a beggar’s clothes and hair and face. That will make you stand out. Concentrate on a couple of key things, and then blend into the background. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

Stone gave some more examples, and they talked for a while, but the conversation trailed off into silence and Sherlock found himself gazing out of the compartment window. Towns came and went, fields flashed past, and gradually the landscape began to change from the neatness that Sherlock associated with the south of England to a more rugged, overgrown look. Even the cows began to look different – shaggy and brown, with horns that curved out in front of their heads, rather than black and white and short-haired. Once or twice they crossed bridges over large rivers, and Sherlock found himself remembering the wooden trestle bridge that he and Virginia and Matty had walked across when they were in America, escaping from Duke Balthassar.

Virginia. Even just thinking about her name sent a spasm through his heart. He couldn’t deny that he felt something strong about her that he didn’t feel for anyone else, but he couldn’t characterize it. He didn’t know what the feeling was, or what it meant, and its intensity scared him. He wasn’t used to the idea of someone else being part of his life. He had always been a loner, at school and at home. He hated feeling dependent on someone, but that was the way he was feeling now. He couldn’t imagine a life without Virginia in it, in some way.

The train stopped in Newcastle to take on fresh coal and water. The three of them took the opportunity to stretch their legs on the platform and buy some more food that they could eat from paper bags. This time it was apples wrapped in pastry and cooked until they were piping hot. Steam rose from them just like miniature versions of the steam rising from the train’s engine.

After a while Sherlock headed back to the compartment, even though the train wouldn’t be leaving for a few minutes. There was only so much walking up and down the platform that he could manage. The idea of exercise just for the sake of exercise had never appealed to him. He slumped in the upholstered seat, staring at the opposite wall. Train journeys, he decided, were excruciatingly boring. Sea journeys took longer, but there was more to look at, more to do. Ships had libraries, games rooms, restaurants and the whole entertaining routine of shipboard life. Trains had nothing.

Staring at the wall, counting off the minutes before they left Newcastle, he gradually became aware that he was being watched. It wasn’t anything supernatural that led to that conclusion, no prickling of the neck or shivers down the spine. It was something simpler, more prosaic: a pink and red patch at the edge of his vision that refused to move. A face. Two blue eyes aimed unblinkingly at Sherlock.

Without giving away the fact that he had noticed the watcher by moving his head suddenly, he tried to pick up whatever details he could, but the person’s body was partially hidden behind a pile of crates on a trolley.

When he’d squeezed about as much information out of the scene as he could without making it obvious that he had spotted the watcher, he decided to look properly. With no warning he quickly glanced to his right. Straight into the eyes of a man he thought he recognized.

Sherlock’s heart skipped a beat.

He was the image of Mr Kyte, a man who had been introduced to Sherlock as the actor–manager of a theatre company in Whitechapel but had turned out to be an agent of the Paradol Chamber, and part of a plot to assassinate a Russian prince who was a friend of Mycroft’s. He was a big, bear-like man with a chest the size and shape of a barrel, a mane of red hair that flowed down over his collar and a bushy red beard that hid his throat and fell halfway down his chest like a waterfall of rust. The last time Sherlock had seen Mr Kyte, the man had been engaged in a desperate struggle with Rufus Stone in a carriage in a Moscow street. He had escaped, leaving Rufus bleeding, furious and swearing vengeance.

The skin around Mr Kyte’s eyes and on his cheeks, Sherlock remembered, had been covered with hundreds of small scratches. They had looked strangely like shaving cuts, but in areas where hair did not normally grow. Despite the smeary window between them, Sherlock was close enough that he could see those cuts now. There was no doubt – it was Mr Kyte.

Kyte stared Sherlock in the eye for a long moment. He didn’t smile, or nod, or acknowledge in any way that he had been seen. After a few seconds he slowly drew back, into the shadow cast by a structure in the centre of the platform – a storage area of some kind. Sherlock’s heart was racing, and the air seemed to catch on an obstruction in his chest every time he tried to take a breath.

He had to tell Rufus Stone! He had to tell Mycroft! He didn’t know whether Mr Kyte’s presence indicated that the Paradol Chamber were involved in Amyus Crowe’s disappearance, whether they were following Sherlock because they blamed him for upsetting their plans or whether the whole thing was a complete coincidence, but the fact was that Mr Kyte was there, watching him, watching them, and that meant that things had changed. The situation was not the same as it had been just ten minutes earlier.

A blast from a steam whistle jerked Sherlock’s thoughts back on track. The train was about to go. He started to get up out of his seat, aware that neither Rufus Stone nor Matty had returned, but just then the door to the compartment slid back and Matty entered. He was holding a pork pie in one hand.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘Close enough. Where’s Rufus?’

Matty frowned. ‘I thought he’d be back here by now. He was a minute or so ahead of me.’ He tossed the pie in the air and caught it again. ‘Saw a pile of these on a market stall just outside the station. The bloke who was selling them got distracted by some woman walking past. Just gave me enough time to swipe one.’

‘But –’ Sherlock started, then stopped. This was no time for talking. He pushed past Matty and headed out of the compartment, into the corridor that ran the length of the carriage. There were doors at either end leading to the platform. He ran to the nearest one and looked out of the window.

All along the platform passengers were getting back on board, but there was no sign of Rufus Stone.

The train whistle blasted again. Within moments the platform was clear apart from the station guard, who was glancing back and forth along the length of the train, waiting to wave his flag.

Sherlock stared left and right. Rufus Stone wasn’t in sight. Sherlock wanted to jump off and search the station for his friend, but the train was moments from leaving. What if Rufus had got on another carriage and was walking through the train at that moment? If that was what had happened, and Sherlock got off, then he would be the one who was missing. Stranded on a station where the Paradol Chamber were watching him.

But what if the Paradol Chamber had caught Rufus Stone? There was certainly unfinished business between Stone and Mr Kyte.

The train jerked into life. The engine pulled away from the platform, dragging its carriages behind it. Within moments the station was receding behind them, and they were heading out of the city and into the countryside.

Sherlock made his way back to the compartment and stood outside, looking left and right along the corridor, hoping against hope that Rufus Stone would appear, casually sauntering along in that infuriating way of his. After five minutes he had to admit to himself that Stone wasn’t going to appear. He was still at Newcastle Station, probably the prisoner of the Paradol Chamber.

‘What’s the story?’ Matty asked as Sherlock re-entered the compartment. His lap was covered with pie-crust crumbs. ‘Where’s Mr Stone?’

‘I think he got left behind,’ Sherlock said grimly.

‘What happened? Did he meet some girl? Typical if he did. He’s got a roving eye, that one.’

Sherlock shook his head. ‘No, I think he met the Paradol Chamber.’

Matty’s face screwed up in disbelief. ‘What, the people that the French Baron bloke was working for?’

‘And the ones who framed Mycroft for murder and tried to kill his friend in Moscow.’

‘What were they doing at the station?’

‘They must have been following us,’ Sherlock replied. He felt powerless, unsure what to do. ‘There’s no way of knowing from here. We can only make guesses, and guesses are worse than having no information because they pull you the wrong way.’

‘So what are we going to do?’

Pausing only slightly to think, Sherlock said, ‘We’re going to keep on for Edinburgh. If a train guard comes along, we can tell him that our friend got left behind at Newcastle and we’re worried that he might have had an accident. He might be able to get a message sent from one of the stations we stop at along the way. When we get to Edinburgh we’ll head for the hotel Mycroft booked for us. If Rufus manages to get away from the Paradol Chamber or whoever has taken him, or if there’s an innocent explanation for his missing the train, then he knows that’s where we’ll be.’

He settled back in his seat, folding his arms and resting his chin on his chest. Matty just stared at him for a while, then turned and looked out of the window. Despite his friend’s presence, Sherlock had never felt so desperately alone.

‘We could just go home,’ Matty said after a while. His voice sounded very small.

The thought had already occurred to Sherlock, but he had rejected it. ‘We could,’ he replied, ‘but that doesn’t help Mr Crowe, or Virginia, or even Rufus. Besides, the Paradol Chamber know where we live. Our best bet is to hide out in Edinburgh until we can get this whole mess sorted. Go to ground.’

‘Like Mr Crowe and Virginia,’ Matty pointed out. ‘They ran away and hid as well.’

‘I know.’ Sherlock didn’t look over at Matty. ‘I know. But I wish I knew why. I can’t imagine what would frighten Mr Crowe enough to make him run rather than stand and fight his ground.’

At some point the train passed from England to Scotland, but if there was a sign to mark the moment then Sherlock missed it.

The stations slipped past more rapidly now and the names looked different to those on the platform signs in England. The landscape was rougher, wilder – craggy, dark hills in place of rolling fields. Even the sky seemed more overcast.

A ticket collector eventually appeared, and Sherlock explained about their friend not having made it back on to the train. The man tutted several times, and said he’d have a word with the stationmaster when they next stopped to see if a message was waiting, or whether one could be sent back to Newcastle. It was, Sherlock knew, too little too late. It was unlikely to produce a result.

Time seemed to slide slowly past. The ticket collector returned later to say that there was no news of Rufus Stone, and Sherlock felt his mood become blacker. Eventually, looking out of the window, he noticed that they were heading through more houses than he’d seen in one place for a while. Rather than being made out of brick, they were constructed from large blocks of grey stone. It gave them a serious, permanent look. The sun, which was balanced on the horizon, cast an orange light over them. The train began to slow down, wheezing to a halt just as it came alongside a platform that seemed to go on for miles. The signs on the platform read Edinburgh.

‘We’re here,’ Matty said simply.

They left the train, clutching their bags. They took Rufus’s too. Sherlock pulled Matty to one side and stopped. He wanted to watch the rest of the passengers leaving, just in case he recognized someone – like Mr Kyte or, hopefully, Rufus Stone.

The station was a teeming mass of people in different varieties of clothes, from top hat and tails to hairy tweed jackets and patched trousers. There were even – and Sherlock had to suppress a gasp at this – men wearing skirts.

Matty noticed Sherlock’s reaction. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘sorry – I probably should have mentioned that. Took me by surprise when I was here a few years back.’

‘Men with skirts? Well, maybe you thought I wouldn’t notice.’

‘They’re not skirts,’ Matty said firmly. ‘They’re kilts.’

‘Kilts.’ Sherlock sampled the unfamiliar word.

‘They’re a traditional piece of clothing worn by the Scottish clans.’ He sniffed. ‘A “clan” being a posh name for a family, as far as I can tell. Anyway, the clans used to be perpetually at war with each other until they all decided to get together and hate the English, and apparently the kilt makes it easier to fight. Or something. Anyway, they’re coloured in different ways depending on which family you come from.’

‘Presumably,’ Sherlock said, ‘so you can make sure that the man you’re fighting is from another clan and not your second cousin twice removed.’

‘Probably,’ Matty replied.

Sherlock filed the information away in his brain. Different coloured kilts for different families – that would bear some further investigation. You could look at a man in a street in London and not have any way of finding out his name short of asking him, but if you could look at a man in a street in Edinburgh and know straight away that his name was MacDonald, well, that was a useful thing to know.

‘Anything else I should know?’ he asked.

‘That purse-like thing that hangs down in front of the kilt is called a “sporran”, and it’s used to store things like money and such. Oh, and if a Scotsman’s wearing a kilt then there’s an odds-on chance that he’s got a small knife tucked into his sock. It’s called a “dirk”.’

‘Got it. Thanks.’ Sherlock continued to look around, and to listen. Many conversations were going on within earshot, but the words were accented, difficult to understand. Sherlock was used to local accents of course – people in Farnham talked differently from people in London, and the various Americans he’d met talked differently from anybody in England, but he hadn’t expected there to be an accent within a train ride of London that was so thick it was almost incomprehensible. He listened for a minute or so, analysing the passing conversations with Matty standing patiently by his side, until he had the basics sorted out. Once your ear was attuned to it, the accent seemed to fade into the background, letting the words come to the front.

‘Right,’ he said as the last passengers walked through the barrier and he stared along the empty platform, ‘I think I’ve acclimatized myself. Let’s go and find the hotel.’

They went outside and took the second cab they could find. The driver seemed to be in two minds whether he should risk taking two boys by themselves, but Sherlock showed him a handful of shillings from his pocket and the man nodded. As long as they could pay, he didn’t care what age they were.

Sherlock had already looked inside the envelope that Mycroft had given them, and he called out the hotel’s name to the driver.

The journey took about twenty minutes, passing terraces of tall buildings all made of the same grey stone blocks, and larger halls and mansions set back in acres of grass behind metal railings. Close up, Sherlock noticed that the grey stone contained hints of other colours – orange, yellow, blue, green – and that even the stone that was really grey often had ripples of darker hues running through.

The cab took them along the side of a park, and then jinked left and right into a wide thoroughfare lined with shops and hotels. It was the match of anything Sherlock had seen in London, New York or Moscow. Edinburgh, he could tell already, was an old and proud city.

The cab took a sudden right and drew to a stop. Sherlock and Matty got out just as the driver threw their bags down from where they had been stored behind him. He obviously felt that he shouldn’t dismount for kids. Sherlock resisted the temptation to throw the money at his feet. Instead he just held it up, slightly out of reach, so that the driver had to lean forward precariously to get it.

They had stopped before a tall terraced building with a sign saying ‘The Fraser Hotel’. The cab pulled away into a turn, back towards the main thoroughfare, and Sherlock noticed with part of his mind that the road sloped downward ahead of them. The rest of his mind was taken up with marvelling at the castle that had been revealed as the cab pulled away. It was enormous and dark, but the fact that it was built on a hill that was partly hidden by mist made the castle look as if it was a vast storm cloud hanging over the town.

‘What now?’ Matty asked.

Sherlock felt the absence of Rufus Stone weighing heavily on his mind. With Rufus gone he felt vulnerable, uncertain. Two kids, alone in Edinburgh. What could they do?

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

CHAPTER NINE

After dumping their bags Sherlock and Matty headed down the hotel’s staircase and out into the town. The sun had dropped beneath the horizon, and the darkness of the night was leavened by gas lamps and by flaming torches attached to brackets on the stone buildings. People were already thronging the streets, crossing from one tavern to another apparently in search of a better time than they were already having. Avoiding all of the activity as far as they could, the two of them found a relatively civilized tavern where they could sit in a corner and eat a gammon pie each, washed down with a watery beer which the barman seemed to have no problem serving them. However, when Sherlock asked for a pitcher of water the man just looked at him with a scowl on his face.

Every few minutes a different person tried to sit down beside them and engage them in conversation. Sometimes it was a woman with more make-up than was necessary and wearing clothes that looked as if they hadn’t been washed in a while, but more often it was an unshaven man in a stained suit or a grey collarless shirt and braces. Matty always said the same thing – ‘Our dad will be here in a minute, and he wouldn’t like it if he found you here’ – and they quickly left with a muttered apology or a curse. The first time it happened Sherlock just shrugged it off, but after the third time he stared at Matty with a question in his eyes. Matty avoided his gaze. ‘There’s some strange people around,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t matter what town you’re in, they always try and make friends with you if you’re a kid alone. You learn early on not to have anything to do with them.’

Sherlock didn’t ask any questions. It was obvious that Matty didn’t want to go into details, but once again he was glad to have his friend with him.

For a while they discussed what to do about Rufus Stone. It was clear that they had both secretly hoped that they would find him, or at least a message from him, at the hotel. The fact that there was nothing had rattled them more than they wanted to admit.

‘We could go to the police,’ Matty suggested. ‘Tell them that he’s gone missing.’

‘The trouble is that we don’t actually know what has happened to him, so there’s not much the police can do. It’s not like we saw him being abducted. They’ll say he just missed the train and he’ll turn up tomorrow. Worse than that: they’ll worry about two kids alone in Edinburgh. They’ll assign a guardian to us, or place us in some philanthropist’s home until Rufus arrives. That’s the last thing we want.’

Matty nodded. ‘I can see that. What about your brother, though? We could send him a telegram, tell him what’s happened.’

‘And within an hour he’ll send a telegram back telling us that we have to return to London until he knows what’s happened to Rufus. If he does that, then I won’t be able to disobey him – I’ve tried that before, and it never works out well. No, we need to be here. It’s best that we don’t tell anyone what’s happened.’

‘What do you think’s happening to Rufus?’ Matty asked quietly, not looking at Sherlock.

Sherlock sighed. He’d been trying not to think too hard about that. ‘I don’t know for sure. Maybe those two Americans have taken him, and they’re asking him what he knows. Given that he doesn’t know anything that they don’t already know, they’ll probably release him.’ Or kill him, Sherlock thought, but he didn’t put his fear into words. Although Matty was streetwise in a way that Sherlock would never be, he was younger than Sherlock, and there were some things he needed protecting from.

‘He knows about Edinburgh,’ Matty pointed out.

‘If they were on the train with us, then they know about Edinburgh as well. That secret is out of the bag, I suspect.’ He paused for a moment. ‘On the other hand, if it’s the Paradol Chamber, then I don’t know what they want with him.’

Sherlock found that the conversation had blunted the sharp edge of his appetite. Thinking of what might be happening to Rufus while they were relaxing in a warm bar and eating well made his stomach lurch.

‘I don’t want to worry you,’ Matty whispered after a while, ‘but have you seen the bloke over there?’ He nodded his head at the opposite wall. ‘In the booth, sitting by himself.’

Sherlock glanced over, trying not to be too obvious about it. He was worried that Matty might have spotted Mr Kyte, but when he saw the unfamiliar thin man sitting alone in the booth he breathed a sigh of relief. A moment more and he started to feel uneasy, however. The man didn’t show any signs of being interested in the two of them, but there was something odd about him, something Sherlock couldn’t quite work out. He was painfully thin, for a start, as if he’d been starved for weeks, and his skin was so white it was almost translucent. His eyes seemed invisible in the dark shadows of his eye sockets, and the bones of his cheeks and his chin pushed out against the tautness of his face so much that Sherlock thought the skin might suddenly split as he watched. There was something strange about the man’s clothes as well: they looked like they might have been his Sunday best, but they were coated in dirt, and there was a green tinge to his shoulders and sleeves. He was staring straight ahead, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything in particular. Nobody was sitting near him, and although he didn’t have a drink in front of him, the barman didn’t seem to want to go across and either take an order or throw him out. The man just sat there doing nothing.

The crowd in the tavern grew larger, and eventually the view of the strange pale-skinned man was blocked by people. Sherlock and Matty finished eating their pies and got ready to leave. As they stood up a gap opened in the crowd. Sherlock looked across. The man had gone.

‘You ever heard of the Resurrectionists?’ Matty asked as they left the tavern. He seemed edgy.

‘I don’t recognize the name,’ Sherlock said.

‘It was two blokes named Burke an’ Hare. Both called William. They was notorious up in this neck of the woods a few years back. I heard about them when me dad was up here, working. Lookin’ at that bloke back there reminded me of ’em. Edinburgh is one of the places doctors come to train, cos of the Edinburgh Medical College, but they’ve got a problem: how do they find out about the ’uman body if they can’t examine ’em, cut ’em up, like, when they’re dead – see where all the organs is, an’ where the blood goes?’

‘I thought medical schools were allowed to use the bodies of executed criminals,’ Sherlock said, frowning.

‘In theory, yeah,’ Matty responded, ‘but there’s always less bodies available than there’s student doctors wantin’ to take a look at ’em. An’ the number of things you can be hanged for has gone down a lot, which means there’s a lot less bodies available for use. Sixty years ago there was over two ’undred different crimes that led to an ’anging. Now there’s only five. So only about two bodies a year came up for use by the College. Which is where Burke an’ Hare came in.’

‘I have a feeling I know where this is going,’ Sherlock said quietly, feeling a shiver down his spine. ‘They dug up corpses and sold them, didn’t they?’

Matty stared at him. ‘Not quite,’ he said, ‘although a lot of that did go on. “Bodysnatching”, it was called. There was so much of it happening that friends and relatives of anyone who had just died used to keep watch over the grave to stop it being dug up. Some people – rich people – used to have cages built around graves of their relatives to stop anyone getting in. Before they realized what was going on, people used to visit the graves of their loved ones and find them disturbed, as if the bodies had come back to life an’ just crawled out of their own accord.’ He and Sherlock were pushing their way through the crowded streets towards their hotel. ‘Course, once people got to know about the bodysnatchers, they had to change how they went about things. They was quite inventive, the bodysnatchers. They used wooden spades, cos they made less noise than metal ones, an’ they used to dig down at an angle, so that any disturbance to the grave would be a way away, not directly over it. They’d uncover the end of the coffin, smash it open an’ drag the body out with a rope.’

‘All right, but you said this Burke and Hare weren’t bodysnatchers. What were they then?’

‘They was both Irish, for a start,’ Matty replied, ‘an’ they moved to Edinburgh to work as labourers on the Union Canal. Burke ended up stayin’ at a boarding ’ouse run by Hare’s missus. They got to be drinkin’ buddies, an’ they got talkin’ one night about ways of makin’ some money. One of ’em suggested that they could steal the body of someone who ’ad died locally of natural causes an’ ’ad no family, like, an’ sell it to someone at the College who could use it to demonstrate ’uman anatomy to students. It weren’t long before some old pensioner who owed Hare four quid died of natural causes. Burke an’ Hare made sure the coffin that was buried was filled with tree bark, ’an they flogged the body to a Dr Knox ’ere in the city for seven quid.’

‘Very enterprising,’ Sherlock said drily.

‘Problem was that people weren’t dyin’ of natural causes fast enough for ’em, so they decided to ’elp ’em along a bit. First one they actually killed was a local miller. They got ’im drunk on whisky an’ then suffocated ’im. Second one was another pensioner, a woman this time, named Abigail Simpson. After that . . .’ He shrugged.

‘Well, they was off an’ runnin’. Dr Knox would pay ’em a guaranteed sum for every dead body they delivered to ’im, no questions asked – ten quid if the body was in good nick, eight if there was anything wrong with it. They preferred women and kids, of course, cos they was easier to subdue an’ to suffocate.’

Sherlock found he was feeling sick. It was the casual nature of what Burke and Hare had done that offended him. The murders weren’t crimes of passion, or ‘spur of the moment’ incidents – they were a series of what were effectively business decisions. Business decisions that left people dead.

‘How many people did they end up killing?’ he asked quietly as they turned the corner and headed towards the hotel’s front door.

‘Best guess is seventeen,’ Matty answered, ‘over the course of a year.’

‘And didn’t anyone suspect? I mean, the doctor they were selling the bodies to must have realized that they weren’t executed criminals. Hanging must leave a distinct mark on the neck, and those corpses wouldn’t have had that mark.’

‘Dr Knox? Yeah, he knew, all right, although Burke later swore otherwise. He just didn’t want to disrupt the supply of bodies. He was getting a reputation as being the best anatomy teacher around, an’ students were flocking to his lectures, and payin’ for the privilege. He wasn’t going to give all that up.’ He snorted. ‘Story is that there was one bloke that Burke and Hare killed, name of Daft Jamie, who was well known around the town. When Dr Knox uncovered the body in the lecture theatre, ready to cut into it, some of the students recognized it. Knox said that it must be someone else, but he started the dissection on the face first, to make it unrecognizable quickly.’

‘What happened in the end?’ Sherlock asked, as he pushed open the front door. ‘I presume they were found out, otherwise you wouldn’t know all this.’

‘Burke and Hare killed a woman in their lodging house named Marjory Docherty, but until they could get rid of the body they hid it under a bed. There was lodgers there, an’ they got suspicious. When Burke was out of the way they checked his room, an’ they found her. So they called the peelers. Burke and Hare got the body out of the house before the peelers turned up, but they took it to Dr Knox’s place, where the peelers found it later. Hare turned Queen’s evidence and testified against Burke in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Burke was hanged, an’ his body was publicly dissected at the Edinburgh Medical College – perfectly legally, of course.’

‘And what happened to Hare?’

‘Vanished. Never heard of again.’

‘So he might still be here, in the city?’

Matty nodded as he opened his bedroom door. ‘Might well be, although it’s more likely that he went back to Ireland.’

The next morning there was still no word from Rufus Stone. Disconsolate, Sherlock and Matty ate a breakfast of oat porridge served by a silent maid. It was so thick that Sherlock could have cut it into slices with a knife, and it looked like pigswill, but it was surprisingly tasty, and filling as well.

‘What’s the plan?’ Matty asked.

‘I’m going to find a bookshop or a library,’ Sherlock replied. ‘I need a map of the city, and I need to find out more about the place. I feel lost here. I can’t find my bearings. Why don’t you go and check the places you used to know, see if there’s anyone who remembers you and can help us. We’re going to need all the help we can get.’ He paused for a second, thinking. ‘That park, up the street from the hotel – let’s meet just inside the front gates at midday.’

‘I ain’t got a watch,’ Matty pointed out.

‘Then ask someone.’

Having finished their porridge, they said their goodbyes and went out into the street.

Sherlock found a library a little way along the main thoroughfare. Inside, the dry smell of the books was comforting. It reminded him of Uncle Sherrinford’s library. He always felt at home with books. Moving to the section devoted to Scotland, he pulled an armful of volumes off the shelf and settled at a nearby table to read.

Within an hour he had a much better idea of the geography and the history of Edinburgh, and its place within the wider history of Scotland. The town was built on seven hills, he discovered, which he supposed would explain the fact that every direction seemed to be either uphill or down.

After a while the close black print started blurring as he tried to read it. He closed the book and shut his eyes for a moment. The problem was, he thought, that the kind of information he wanted wasn’t the kind that went in reference books. Where did people go in Edinburgh when they were on the run? How did they avoid detection when someone was looking for them? Who was in charge of the local criminal fraternity, and were they more likely to help a person on the run or the people chasing them?These were the kind of things that Matty was more likely to find out from his contacts, but unless it was written down and kept up to date then it was the kind of information that would just slip away. Sherlock decided that he needed to write down all the little snippets and facts that he or Matty unearthed along the way. Maybe if he kept them on file cards then he could access them the next time he needed them.

A sudden, disturbing thought struck him, and he shivered. What he was proposing wasn’t that different from what Josh Harkness had done – collect information on dubious and illegal activity and keep it. The only real distinction was that Sherlock wouldn’t be using it for profit.

He checked the watch that usually hung from a chain on his waistcoat. It was half past eleven. Time to start thinking about meeting Matty.

As he returned the books to their shelves he noticed that there were maps of Edinburgh for sale at the front desk for sixpence. He bought one and took it back to the table where he had been reading to open it. His gaze scanned quickly across the details: the shape of the city and in which directions the main roads ran. He located the main railway line coming in from London, and traced the route the cab had taken. It had gone along a road named Princes Street – clearly the main road through the city. That enabled him to work out where their hotel was, and where he was now.

Folding the map up and putting it in his pocket, he set off for the park. He felt more confident that he could navigate his way around now.

The sun was shining through the clouds, casting beams of light diagonally across the mottled blue and grey as if girders of light were holding up the entire sky. Glancing down side roads as he strolled along Princes Street he caught glimpses of the castle. It no longer looked like a solid grey cloud hanging above the city, but there was something about it that defied geometry and perspective. It looked as if it just shouldn’t be possible that the castle was up there while the town was down here.

As he passed one particular alley, something in the shadows made a scuffling noise. He stopped, intrigued, and looked sideways. He made no move to get any closer to the alley – that would have been stupid – but if anyone was following him then he wanted to know who it was.

For a moment he could only see a pool of shadow, like liquid darkness, where the sun could never penetrate, but after a few moments his eyes got used to the contrast and he could make out something that seemed to be floating in mid-air, like a pale balloon. It took a moment of concentration before his brain realized what he was looking at – the face of someone dressed entirely in black who was standing there, in the alley, staring out.

Sherlock took an involuntary step backwards. The face was bone-white, with eyes set so deep that the sockets were just black holes in the face. The cheekbones stuck out sharply, and the lips – if the figure had any lips – were pulled back from teeth that seemed to grin at Sherlock as if the figure was enjoying some private joke. For a long moment Sherlock was convinced that a rotting human body, something close to a skeleton, was standing there, in the alley, looking at him. Had it been ripped from the ground and left there, propped up against a piece of wood, as a warning? And who would do such a macabre thing?

The figure raised a hand to the side of its face and waved, then drew back into the darkness until Sherlock couldn’t see it any more. Only after it had gone, leaving him cold and shaking, did he remember the man in the tavern, the one who had been sitting alone. Had it been him?This figure had looked even more skeletal, even less alive, but that might have been a trick of the poor light.

What was going on? He thought back to what his aunt and uncle had told him. Was he going mad, like his father?

For a few seconds Sherlock wanted to go further into the alley, looking for the figure – looking for the truth about what he’d seen – but he pulled back. Logically, the most likely explanation was that this was a trap, and the figure was bait to lure him in. But was it random, or did someone know that his curiosity often outweighed his good sense? Rattled, Sherlock walked away from the mouth of the alley and he didn’t look back.

The park was only a few minutes further. When he got there, Matty was already waiting.

‘Are you all right?’ his friend asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sherlock replied sharply. ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’

‘All right – keep your hair on.’

‘Did you find anything out?’ Sherlock asked.

Matty shook his head. ‘Most of the blokes and kids I knew around here have moved on. That or they’ve died. I did find a couple of people who remembered me, but they don’t know anything about a big American who’s come through this way. What about you?’

‘I could find my way around the city now.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s something,’ Matty said critically. ‘If we was ever planning on moving here.’

‘Don’t underestimate the usefulness of geographical knowledge.’

Matty stared at him. ‘So what’s our next move?’ he asked eventually.

Sherlock pondered for a moment. He’d been debating this question himself. ‘I suppose we could go back and talk to the ticket collectors and the guards at the station here,’ he said slowly, ‘but they must see hundreds of passengers a day, and there’s no guarantee that they would remember Mr Crowe. Besides, if he continued to be as careful as he was back in Farnham, then he would have got off at an earlier station and maybe hired a cart to bring him and Virginia to Edinburgh.’

‘If he’s here at all,’ Matty pointed out. ‘After all, you’ve only got a dead rabbit’s head pointing you here. It’s not much to go on. I still reckon we might have gone off in completely the wrong direction.’

‘Despite Rufus vanishing?’ Sherlock asked.

Matty shrugged. ‘You’ve got a point. The clue was probably a good one, but now that it’s got us here, what do we do? Wait for another one to come along?’

‘Matty,’ Sherlock said slowly, ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – you may not be a genius, but you can bring out the genius in those around you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Amyus Crowe left a clue that would bring us to Edinburgh, if we understood it properly. Why did he do that? We’ve not asked ourselves that question yet.’

‘Because he wanted us to follow him,’ Matty replied.

‘Exactly. He wanted us to follow him. He wasn’t just saying “Goodbye – I’m off to Edinburgh!” He wanted us to know exactly where he was heading, and the only reason for that was because he wanted us to come after him. He wants our help. Now we’re here, he’s not going to leave us dangling. He’ll leave another clue around, one that will lead us right to where he is.’

‘Why couldn’t he do that from the start?’ Matty asked.

‘Because all he knew was that he and Virginia were heading to Edinburgh. Once he was here he would find somewhere to settle down in peace – somewhere he wouldn’t be detected. Not a hotel then. More likely a cottage somewhere outside the town that he could rent. Once he knew his address, he would find a way of letting us know.’

‘But he doesn’t know where we are,’ Matty pointed out.

‘So he would leave a message somewhere that we could see it no matter where in the town we ended up.’ He thought back to the newspaper that he had read on the train. In particular he remembered the page of classified advertisements that had so fascinated him: messages from one person to another, or one person to a group of people, either in plain language or in code. ‘He’ll place a classified advertisement in the local newspaper,’ he said with certainty. ‘He knows that’s one of the places I’ll look.’

‘But what if we missed it? What if he put the message in yesterday?’

Sherlock shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t know what day we were going to be here. If I know Amyus Crowe, he would pay for the advert to be in all week.’

Matty nodded. Either what Sherlock had said made perfect sense to him or he was willing to take it on trust. ‘Then let’s get a local newspaper. Let’s get all of them.’

‘How many are there?’ Sherlock asked, wondering if they were going to have to plough their way through ten or twelve newspapers, or whether Amyus Crowe would have put the advertisement in all of them.

‘Three,’ Matty said. He turned to go, then turned back. ‘You’ll have to read ’em,’ he pointed out, ‘cos I can’t read. And I ain’t got any money on me, so you’ll have to buy ’em as well.’

They found a newspaper vendor just outside the park and bought copies of all three Edinburgh newspapers for that day, then went back into the park and sat on a bench where Sherlock could read them. He couldn’t help but notice that the Edinburgh murder story – the one he’d seen in the copy of The Times on the train – was the front-page story on all three papers. The first one – the Edinburgh Herald – was representative of them all:

Edinburgh police this morning arrested a suspect in the murder by poison of the eccentric businessman Sir Benedict Ventham. Sources close to the police have told us that the suspect in question is a Miss Aggie Macfarlane, cook to the late Sir Benedict and – this newspaper has discovered – sister to the notorious criminal and leader of the Black Reavers Gang, Gahan Macfarlane. It is believed that she slipped poison into his food, for reasons that only she knows at the moment.

The Black Reavers? The name of the gang struck a chord in Sherlock’s mind. It made them sound dangerous, even sinister. He was about to move on to the classified section of the newspaper when he spotted the name again, this time in a report directly beneath the paragraphs on Sir Benedict Ventham’s poisoning:

FIRE DEVASTATES LOCAL GREENGROCERS

The premises of Messrs MacPherson and Cargill, greengrocers, of Princes Street were burned down last night in a fearsome conflagration of apocalyptic proportions. Bystanders fought the blaze for nearly three hours with buckets of water taken from the nearby river, with little success. No casualties are reported, as the blaze occurred during the hours of darkness. MacPherson and Cargill’s had been a local fixture for over fifty years. Our reporter was informed, by several members of the local populace, who wished to remain anonymous, that the greengrocers had recently become a target of the notorious Black Reavers – a local criminal gang of grim repute who demand money with menaces from local businesses . . .

He moved on to the classified section. It wasn’t as large as the one in The Times – barely half a page. Most of the advertisements seemed to be from households requiring a maid, a cook or a butler (‘references essential’), with a handful advertising lost property (‘Found in King’s Street, a lady’s brooch – emeralds set in gold. Prospective owners must apply in writing with full description of item before collection can be arranged’). Nothing struck him as being the kind of thing that Amyus Crowe would have written.

Just in case, he checked the letters pages as well. These mostly seemed to be complaints about factual inaccuracies in previous editions of the paper, or comments on the lack of manners of the lower classes, but one letter in particular caught his eye, and he read it out to Matty:

SIR,

I write with reference to the spate of sightings recently of men and women within the city limits who can only be described as ‘deceased and yet still moving’. Such events are an affront to God and speak to the perilous moral state of the population of this city. I draw to the attention of your readers the following biblical quotations:

Isaiah 26:19: ‘Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.’

Revelation 20:13: ‘And the sea gave up the dead that were in it; and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.’

I ask them to consider: does this not indicate that Armageddon is near, and that God will soon judge us all? Repent your sins, before it is too late!

Yours faithfully, Geo. Thribb Esq.

The letter made Sherlock think about the two skeletal figures that he’d seen – the one in the tavern the night before and the one in the street only half an hour ago. Was this what the letter was referring to? Was there a spate of people who looked like dead bodies walking the streets and, if so, what did it mean?

He pushed the thought aside. Interesting though these speculations were, they didn’t help with the immediate task – finding Amyus Crowe and Virginia, or Rufus Stone.

In the Edinburgh Star the classified adverts were skewed more towards notifications of upcoming dances (or ‘cèilidhean’, as they seemed to be known), lost pets and horses for sale. One in particular caught his attention: ‘Parakeet missing, can recite entirety of Hamlet and selected poems of Tennyson. Reward paid for return.’ A parrot that could recite the whole of Hamlet? Sherlock couldn’t believe it.

It was in the Edinburgh Tribune that he found what he was looking for. Nestled among the usual set of advertisements was one that immediately stood out.

‘That’s it,’ Sherlock said, pointing to the advertisement.

‘I can’t read,’ Matty explained patiently.

Sherlock read the advert out to Matty, who frowned. ‘Bit long-winded,’ he said, ‘and a bit creepy as well. Don’t strike me as the kind of place ordinary people stay.’

‘It’s not a real hotel,’ Sherlock said.

‘How do you know?’

Sherlock indicated the first three words. ‘The Sigerson Hotel. My father’s name is Siger – Siger Holmes. That makes me Siger’s son. The advert is aimed at me.’

Matty looked dubious. ‘Could be a coincidence. Maybe there is a Sigerson Hotel.’

‘Possible,’ Sherlock conceded, ‘but these adverts are paid for by the word. There are a lot of words here – more than you need to tell people how good your hotel is, but enough to contain a hidden message.’

‘So Mr Crowe and Virginia are in Kirkaldy Town.’ Matty scowled. ‘That’s miles away. I thought they were supposed to be in Edinburgh.’

‘The mention of Kirkaldy is a red herring. That’s not where they are.’

‘Then where are they?’

Sherlock shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I have to decode the message.’

He looked at it again. If it had been a set of random letters or numbers then he would have tried a substitution cipher, the way that Amyus Crowe had taught him. Substitution ciphers were based around the principle of substituting one thing for another – replacing every letter a with a number 1, for instance, every letter b with a 2, and so on. Decoding them, if you didn’t know what the substitution strategy was, depended on knowing the relative frequency with which particular letters occurred in normal writing. E was the most common letter, followed by t, a, i, o and n. So all you had to do was look for the most commonly occurring letter or number, and replace that with e, then work your way down the list – although you did need quite a large sample of code to break in order to have a good chance of getting it right. Scanning the message, though, Sherlock realized that it wasn’t a substitution cipher. For one, it made a strange kind of sense. It read as an advertisement. Replacing the letters of a sentence or a paragraph with other letters would result in a completely scrambled set of meaningless words. So the code had to be something else. He took a pen out of his pocket and quickly scribbled down the initial letters of the words in the margin of the newspaper, but he only got a little way – f t i p t r a r . . . – before he realized that he was on the wrong track.

Perhaps it was the last letters, he thought. He scribbled another set of letters – d e l e o t d x . . . No, that didn’t look right either.

Perhaps he should start from the end, rather than the beginning. He tried both options again – first letters and last letters – but all he got for his trouble was f i t k n u l . . . and e n n y r s e . . . Unless Amyus Crowe was deliberately confusing the issue by writing in a foreign language, Sherlock was on the wrong track.

Maybe he should be looking at words rather than letters. He tried every first word of a sentence – find tell two mr locate – then every second word – the us days and us. With the proviso that the second one sounded a bit like bad poetry, it was no good.

He sighed and bit the inside of his lip, aware that Matty was intently watching what he was doing. He was running out of ideas. Maybe this thing was too complicated for him to decipher.

Something was nagging at the back of his brain. He tried to force himself to relax, to stop thinking so that the thought could work its way to the surface. He had tried first words of sentences, and second words. What if . . . what if he tried the first word of the first sentence, the second word of the second sentence, and so on?

He knew the advertisement so well by now that he could write down the words from memory.

Find us in Cramond Town.

‘Got it!’ he whispered.

‘What?’

‘They’re in a place called Cramond,’ he said.

Matty looked dubious. ‘I thought you said Cramond was the name of the people who owned the hotel.’

‘There is no hotel,’ Sherlock explained again. ‘It’s a code. Mr Crowe had to get the name of the place in there, but he made it look like something else – a person’s name – and he then distracted attention from it by referring to a real place – Kirkaldy.’

‘All right – where is this Cramond?’

Sherlock pulled out the map he had bought from the bookshop. On the reverse side of the Edinburgh map was a map of the surrounding area. In the top right-hand corner was an index relating to a grid of letters and numbers around the edge. He scanned down the index until he found Cramond – not without a little flash of pride – and then checked the grid reference on the map. ‘It’s on the coast,’ he said. ‘Just a few miles away. We can probably get someone to take us there in a cart.’ He folded up the map and the newspaper, putting them into his pockets. He felt a sense of relief and weariness wash over him. He’d done it! He’d located Amyus and Virginia Crowe!

Now came the hard part – finding out why they had left, and persuading them to return . . .

A movement over Matty’s shoulder made him glance past his friend. Two men were approaching. One held something in his hands: it looked like an empty sack. It took a moment for Sherlock to identify him as the smallpox-scarred American he had seen in Farnham, and then again at Newcastle Station. A chill ran down his spine, and he felt his heart suddenly speed up. His eyes flickered sideways, to Matty’s face. He was just about to tell Matty to run when he noticed that the boy was staring over Sherlock’s shoulder. His eyes were wide and scared.

More men must have been coming up behind Sherlock – probably including the man with the missing ear and the ponytail. Sherlock was about to push Matty left and dive right himself when the man behind Matty realized that they’d been spotted, rushed forward and threw the sack over the boy’s head. Sherlock reached out to tear the sack away, but the world went dark as something heavy dropped over his head and covered his face. Hands grabbed him and pushed him off his feet.

CHAPTER TEN

The sack smelled strongly of pipe tobacco, and Sherlock found himself choking on a combination of the heat, the lack of air and the pungent odour. A small amount of light filtered through the gaps in the material, but not enough for him to see out. The hessian weave rubbed roughly against his forehead, his ears and the back of his neck. He could feel the skin being rubbed away, leaving sore patches behind. He was going to have some serious scrapes when he got out.

If he got out.

His wrists and ankles had been quickly and expertly bound with rope, tight enough to cut off the blood supply. Arms were wrapped around his chest and around his legs. He was being hoicked around like a sack of barley, carried rapidly across the park before anybody spotted what was going on. The same thing must have been happening to Matty. He tried experimentally kicking out with his left foot, but the grip around his legs tightened before he could move more than an inch. It was like having leather belts strapped around him. Perhaps this was what it was like to be crushed to death by one of those big snakes they had in South America – anacondas, or pythons, or whatever they were.

He opened his mouth to yell for help, but a fist impacted beneath his ear. A red spike of agonizing pain flashed through his head like lightning, leaving a sick ache in its wake. He felt as if he was going to throw up, but he knew that if he did so with his head in the sack then he was going to have to live with the consequences, so he swallowed several times, forcing his stomach to calm down.

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 prickled 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 – what? Grass? Pavement? The surface of a river or a canal?

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 snatched 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 – 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 grass. 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 – 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 – 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 reassuring 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 – 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 – 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 – 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 bloody 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 – the earless one with the ponytail – 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 – the one with the smallpox scars – 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 – the kind of voice that a vicar might use when asking for a cup of tea – ‘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 assumption 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 – 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 – 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 fortitude, 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 – 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 scrape 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 – 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 hit 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 scraped 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 cockroaches 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 nobody 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 – the window was closed and the only way out was the stairs that Sherlock had just climbed – 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 – bloodied, but smiling – 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 result, Sherlock supposed, of the beating he had received. ‘I feel like I’ve gone several rounds with a bare-knuckle pugilist – and believe me, I am more than familiar with that experience – 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 – which, by the way, I have every intention of doing – 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 – curl up into a ball and wait for everything to settle down. Failing that, be like a badger – 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 scrapes 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 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 – 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 – the one who asked you the questions – 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 – 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 – now a sodden mass. It didn’t matter – 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 – 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.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sherlock’s heart went cold, but before he could ask Rufus why Virginia’s name should have been tattooed on the quiet man’s forehead the musician raised an eyebrow, as if he’d just caught up with something that had been said a few moments before. ‘You know where Amyus Crowe is?’

‘He left a message for us in the newspaper,’ Matty replied. ‘It was coded, but we worked it out.’

Sherlock gazed at Matty and raised an eyebrow at the ‘we’, but Matty just smiled back innocently.

‘Well done.’ Rufus looked around. ‘We should get out of here before our friend comes back.’

They went down the stairs together and across the ground-floor room, detouring around the two thugs. They were still writhing in pain and groaning. Rufus stopped and stared at them for a moment. There was a glint in his eye that suggested he was thinking about paying back some of the pain they had caused him, but he turned away and kept moving. ‘We could question them,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he was still tempted by the thought, ‘but they look like hard nuts to crack.’

‘I dunno,’ Matty said, following his gaze. ‘They look like they’re pretty cracked already.’

Rufus led the way out into daylight. The sky was covered by a metallic sheen of cloud, casting a grim light on their surroundings. Sherlock looked around curiously. He had assumed that they’d been inside a house, but looking back at the building the three of them had emerged from, and the other buildings around, he could see that he’d been wrong. The buildings, which were grouped together, were six floors high and as long as half a street. The blocks were separated by narrow alleyways that were like straight paths between vertical cliff faces. The ground floors were lined with doors, one after another after another, and the upper floors with windows, more than half of which were missing their glass. The buildings looked soulless and empty, more like ants’ nests than places where people lived.

‘What are these places?’ Sherlock asked.

Unexpectedly it was Matty who replied. ‘Tenements,’ he said. ‘I remember ’em from the last time I was here. Find ’em all over the place, you do. They’re cheap places for poor people to live, but you end up with only two rooms to call your own, stacked up with other people’s rooms like birdhouses. Everyone’s rooms look the same – same front doors, same plaster, same window frames. The people who live there try an’ make ’em individual-like, with curtains an’ flower pots an’ stuff, but it’s like decoratin’ one beer crate in a pile of crates wiv a bit of ribbon. Just draws attention to how borin’ it is.’ He sniffed. ‘An’ they all end up smellin’ of rottin’ rubbish and boiled cabbage.’

‘The place looks deserted,’ Rufus observed. ‘A perfect temporary base of operations for our transatlantic captors. I wonder how they heard about it.’

‘I ’eard a rumour,’ Matty continued, ‘last time I was ’ere, that the local authorities was tryin’ to move people out of the tenements. ’Parently they wanted to sell the land off to build factories on, or posh mansions or somethin’. People I talked to told me that the authorities would start a rumour that some illness, like consumption or the plague, had broken out in a tenement. They’d move everybody out to the workhouse, then they’d knock the tenement down an’ build on the land. Make a lot of money that way, they could.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I ’eard that sometimes, if there weren’t any places left in the workhouse, they’d brick up the alleyways in an’ out of the tenements an’ leave the people inside to starve, but I don’t believe that.’

‘The trouble is,’ Rufus said thoughtfully, ‘that we don’t have any idea where we are, we have no way of getting out and there’s nobody to ask for help.’

Sherlock looked around. He had the map still in his pocket, but it was no use. ‘I think we were carried from the cart to the block from over there,’ he said, pointing to an alleyway between two of the blocks. ‘We didn’t turn any corners, and that’s the only straight route.’

‘Cart’ll be gone by now,’ Matty observed darkly. ‘That bloke who was askin’ the questions will’ve taken it.’

Rufus shook his head. ‘He had his own carriage. That’s how he brought me here. Just him and a driver. The driver stayed in the carriage.’

‘With the two men who kidnapped us from the park still in the tenement block,’ Sherlock finished, ‘the cart should still be here.’

The three of them looked at each other for a moment, then rapidly headed for the alleyway that Sherlock had pointed out. The alleyway opened out on to a dirt road that led away into the distance. On the other side of the road was a stretch of unkempt ground where a handful of bony, hollow-eyed horses were grazing on thistles and weeds. Sherlock couldn’t help but compare the scene with Amyus Crowe’s cottage back in Farnham: a beautiful, rustic location beside a field where Virginia’s well looked-after horse grazed contentedly. Here, everything seemed to be a dark inverse of that familiar place: rows of identical prison-like blocks next to a patch of wasteground where horses that might be Sandia’s forgotten siblings had been left to die.

Glancing into one of the tenement doorways, Sherlock caught sight of a movement. He squinted, trying to see what it was. A curtain fluttering in the wind? A pigeon or a seagull roosting?

Something white moved against the darkness inside the doorway. More quickly this time, Sherlock realized that it was a skull. The deep sockets of the eyes, the hairless surface of the head, the sharp edges of the cheekbones and the sinister grin of the teeth – another dead man was staring at him!

The figure moved back into the shadows before Sherlock could point it out to Matty or Rufus Stone. He scanned the row of doorways frantically. Was he going mad? Most of them were empty, but – yes, there! Another thin white figure stood half in shadow, watching him. It moved back into darkness as soon as it realized it had been seen.

Were these creatures connected with the Americans who had kidnapped the three of them, or was this some kind of hallucination born out of a breaking mind?

He gazed over at Matty, and saw that the boy was staring at the tenement doorways as well. Matty turned his head to look at Sherlock.

‘Did you see them?’ Sherlock asked desperately.

Matty nodded. ‘They’re dead men walking, aren’t they? They’re following us. They want us.’

‘I don’t believe that dead men can walk.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’ve seen dead rabbits on butchers’ slabs, and dead fish in costermonger’s?’

‘Yeah. So?’

‘They never move. Not ever. When you’re dead, the vital spark has gone from you. Vanished. The only thing left is flesh, and that decays. Dead animals don’t come back to life, so dead people don’t come back to life.’

Matty looked unconvinced. ‘I ain’t got time to argue wiv you,’ he said.’

‘Come on!’ Rufus called. ‘We need to get out of here before they come back!’

On the side of the road a cart had been left, its horse tied to a stunted tree. The animal looked in considerably better condition than the ones in the ground across the road.

‘That,’ Rufus said, ‘is our ride home – if we knew which way home was.’

‘I memorized the route out,’ Sherlock said. ‘I can just reverse the times and the turns, and we can work out the way back to our hotel.’

‘But we’ll have to put a sack over your head,’ Matty murmured. He looked up at Sherlock and smiled. ‘So the conditions are the same as on the journey out. Otherwise you might get it wrong.’

Sherlock and Matty climbed into the back of the cart while Rufus clambered in the front. He flicked the reins experimentally and the horse started off as if someone had fired a gun. It didn’t seem to like being near the tenements.

Sherlock stood up behind Rufus’s shoulder, clutching on to a wooden bar, and tried to reverse the route that had brought them there. He assumed the cart was travelling at about the same speed, so all he had to do was remember the turns and the rough times in his head and then start the list at the bottom and work upward. Of course he had to change the turns around. A right-hand turn heading from the city centre to the tenements would be a left-hand turn heading back.

His neck was throbbing, and his ankles had been scraped raw by the rope. Whenever he took a breath he could feel a catch in his throat, as if the cartilage had been pushed in. Worse than the physical damage, however, was the feeling of helplessness that had flooded over him when he was hanging there, in the tenement room. He’d been close to death before, but he’d always felt that there was something he could do, some way he could fight. Before he had remembered the knife in his pocket – Matty’s knife – he had been completely at the quiet man’s mercy. He had been moments from a painful and protracted death.

If he hadn’t kept Matty’s knife, if his friend hadn’t told him to hang on to it, then he wouldn’t have had any way out. He would be dead by now.

On such trivial things survival can rest. The thought made him feel uneasy. He looked at Rufus, who was also injured, and wondered if he felt the same.

It took half an hour, and two wrong turns, before they were back at the park near Princes Street.

‘Right,’ Rufus said. ‘Where now?’

Sherlock looked at Matty. ‘Do you want to tell him?’ he challenged. ‘After all, we worked it out.’

‘Nah.’ Matty smiled. ‘You go ahead.’

‘They’re hiding in a place called Cramond. I’ve looked on the map, and I know the way. It’ll probably take us an hour or so to get there.’

‘We’ll grab some food first,’ Stone said, ‘and clean ourselves up. I don’t know about you lads, but I’m starved.’

After they had done both, Matty purloined a scarf from somewhere, and Sherlock used it to cover the marks on his neck. Then, with Sherlock directing, Rufus steered the cart out of the city. It took a while to get past the houses and out into the countryside, and for the first half-hour or so Sherlock was aware of the dark shape of Edinburgh Castle looming over them, perched on its massive crag of rock. The low grey skies matched Sherlock’s mood. What had started as an adventure to find his friends now seemed like something much darker and more unpleasant. There were people out there who wanted to hurt Amyus Crowe, that much was sure. The question was, why? But whatever the reason, it looked as if Sherlock had unwittingly led them right to him. All he could do now was to get to Amyus Crowe before his enemies could work out where he was.

Sherlock looked back along the road as they moved. He was looking for carts or carriages or horses keeping their distance but not dropping too far back. He couldn’t see anything, but he felt that he had to do more to identify possible followers. Twice he got Rufus to pull off the road and hide the cart behind a barn for twenty minutes while he carefully watched every vehicle and rider that went past. He didn’t recognize anyone, and nobody looked confused at the fact that the people they were following had suddenly vanished.

At one point, while they were waiting, Sherlock leaned across to Rufus. ‘I thought you might have been taken by the Paradol Chamber, back on the train,’ he said.

‘Why would you think that? We haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since Moscow – apart from that attempt they made to have you diagnosed insane and locked away.’

Sherlock grimaced, remembering. ‘I thought I saw Mr Kyte at Newcastle Station. He was standing behind a pile of luggage, and he was staring straight at me.’ He paused, aware of a tightness in his chest. ‘I thought maybe the Paradol Chamber had decided to take some kind of revenge against us for messing up their plans. I think they still want to get even with me, and with you.’

‘Be that as it may,’ Rufus said, shrugging, ‘I didn’t see Mr Kyte on the station. If I had, I would have taken that great red beard of his and shoved as much of it as I could as far down his throat as I could reach. Take my advice, Sherlock – never trust a red-headed man, or a red-headed woman. They’re born for trouble.’

‘Virginia has red hair,’ Sherlock pointed out.

Rufus turned to fix Sherlock with a warning expression. ‘In that case, my friend, you have a problem.’

Uncomfortable at the way the conversation had turned back to him, Sherlock said quickly, ‘What do you think these people want with Mr Crowe?’

‘The same thing you seem to think the Paradol Chamber want with us – revenge.’

‘But what’s Mr Crowe done to them?’

‘Amyus Crowe is a complicated beast,’ Rufus replied. ‘On the one hand he’s civilized and fair-minded and very genteel. On the other . . .’ He paused. ‘Let’s put it this way – I think if we knew more about Mr Crowe’s past we might not like everything we found.’

‘He told us that he used to be a spy for the Union against the Confederacy during the War Against the States,’ Sherlock protested. ‘And after that he was responsible for tracking down Confederate criminals who had looted and pillaged civilian towns during the War.’

‘Yes,’ Rufus admitted, ‘he did tell us that. But he didn’t tell us the lengths he went to in order to recover those criminals, and he didn’t tell us how many of them he managed to bring back to face trial and how many happened to die in shootouts before he could take them captive. Remember, Sherlock, the man is a bounty hunter. He hunts men for money.’ He sighed. ‘Except that in this case it would appear that men are hunting him, and not for money. They want payback.’

‘You don’t like him, do you?’

Rufus smiled. ‘Ah, you picked up on that, did you? No, he’s not the kind of man I would choose to sit with over a tavern table, with beer in our glasses and tobacco in our pipes. I don’t think we would have much to talk about, but I think we would have a lot to argue about. I have a strong respect for the sanctity of human life, whereas I think Mr Crowe would have no problems in taking another man’s life for little provocation. What’s worse, he doesn’t like music.’

Sherlock was quiet for a while, digesting what Rufus Stone had said. He couldn’t find fault in his logic or his description of Amyus Crowe, but neither could he square the harsh words with the genial smile that he had seen on Mr Crowe’s face or the way he had taken Sherlock under his wing and looked after him. Were all people like this – complicated, not easily understood? If that was the case, what about Rufus Stone himself? Or Mycroft?

Or himself.

He thrust the thought aside. He would rather believe that what people displayed on the surface was what they really were.

‘How many of these Americans do you think are over here in England, hunting Mr Crowe?’ he said eventually.

‘Impossible to say,’ Rufus mused. ‘There were three in the tenement room. Add that to the driver of the leader’s carriage – assuming he was part of the gang, and not just someone hired for the day – and we get two left that we know of. Trouble is, there might be others we don’t know of.’

‘There were two carrying me,’ Sherlock said.

‘And two carrying me,’ Matty added.

‘So that’s at least four people still at large. Problem is, if the man in charge came over here with money, then he could just hire whatever support he needed of any nationality. There’s people in every major town and city in the British Isles that would murder their own grandmothers for an evening’s drinking and gambling.’ He sighed. ‘There’s no end of bad men out there, and a precious shortage of good men to fight them.’

‘That’s all right,’ Sherlock said. ‘One good man is worth ten bad ones.’

Matty snorted, and Rufus eyed him sceptically. ‘If only the world worked that way, things would be a lot better.’

‘When I grow up,’ Sherlock murmured, ‘I’m going to make them better.’

‘You know,’ Rufus said, smiling at him strangely, ‘I think you just might. You and your brother between you, but in radically different ways.’

‘But I’m not going to work for the Government like Mycroft does.’

‘Why not?’ Matty asked.

‘I don’t like taking orders,’ Sherlock said darkly. ‘Not from anyone. I know that sometimes I have to, but I don’t like it.’

When they got back on the road there was nobody in sight. It looked as if they had got away from the city without being spotted.

The landscape was a mixture of rough patches of scrubland and outcroppings of rock. The terrain undulated such that they were never on a level road for more than a few minutes, and their path detoured to get around some of the bigger rocky areas.

Cramond was on the coast: a collection of granite cottages with thatched roofs. Virulently green moss erupted from between the stone blocks of the cottages, looking like some kind of seaweed that had been deposited on shore by a storm and was not only clinging on to life but thriving. The air smelled of salt, and seagulls cried out like abandoned babies.

As the cart rounded the side of a hill Sherlock suddenly saw the sea laid out beneath them. The sun caught the tops of the waves and made them glitter in a hypnotic pattern, points of light dancing on a grey-green background. Closer to the shore, waves broke in parallel lines of white foam that appeared from nowhere, ran for a while and then vanished again.

‘Well, this is Cramond,’ Rufus said as they began the descent into the village. ‘Any idea where we go now?’

‘We could always ask if anyone’s seen a big American bloke with a white suit and a white hat,’ Matty piped up.

‘I think he would have dumped the distinctive clothes,’ Sherlock observed. ‘And we’ve both been with him when he’s gone into taverns and other places to ask questions, and done it in an English accent so good that he might have been brought up a few miles from London. No, he’s got the hunter’s skill of being able to blend with the background so well that you just don’t notice him until he wants you to. By now he’ll have picked up a Scottish accent so perfect that you would think he was born in Edinburgh.’

‘So I repeat the question,’ Rufus said. ‘Any idea where we go now?’

Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘We know that he wants to be found by us, because he left a coded message for us. So he’ll have left a trail that only we can follow, or he’ll assume that I can work it out. He won’t be staying in the centre of the village, because he would be too visible. Despite anything he does with his accent and his clothes, he can’t disguise his height. Virginia is with him as well. So he’ll find a place out by itself, and he’ll probably keep Virginia hidden away.’ He let his mind run loose on the various parameters of the problem. ‘He won’t rent a cottage on the main roads in and out of the village,’ he mused, ‘because there would be too much chance of passing people seeing him. He would choose somewhere high up, so that he would be able to see anyone coming well in advance, and so that he would have the advantage of height. Anyone who found him would have to approach slowly, uphill, while he could throw rocks and stuff downhill at them.’ He frowned. ‘He might choose a place on top of a hill, so that he and Virginia could escape in any direction if they were attacked, but that would mean attackers would be able to come at him from any direction while he could only watch in one direction at any time – or two if Virginia was helping him. No, it’s more likely that he would choose somewhere towards the top of a hill but in a cleft or a dip or something, so that anyone coming at him would be forced into approaching from the front.’

‘That narrows it down,’ Rufus said. ‘We can ask around for cottages that meet that description.’

‘There’s a better way,’ Matty said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Kids my age.’ Matty thumped his chest in emphasis. ‘In every town an’ every village there’s kids like me. They go everywhere an’ see everything. You can’t stop ’em. Just find one an’ slip ’im a tanner. He’ll know where Mr Crowe is hiding.’

‘Better than that,’ Sherlock added, ‘he’s probably paying them. Mr Crowe knows that urchins –’ he glanced at Matty apologetically – ‘go everywhere and know everything. He’ll be slipping them a tanner each himself to watch out for strangers. They’ll be watching out for us, as well.’

Enthused by this strategy, they headed towards the centre of the village. Whenever they passed either an individual kid with unkempt hair and dirty clothes or a group of them together, Matty slipped off the cart and went to talk to them. Each time he came back he shook his head and said that they weren’t talking, but Sherlock couldn’t help notice that whenever their cart was pulling away, the lone kid or one of the group would slip off. They all headed in more or less the same direction.

‘Should we follow one of them?’ Rufus asked after a while. The cart was parked on a stretch of dirt road near the centre of the village.

‘No,’ Sherlock and Matty said together.

‘They’re probably reporting back to another kid, an older one who acts as a central point for messages,’ Sherlock explained.

‘He’ll send a runner to Mr Crowe,’ Matty added. ‘If we get near that older kid, he’ll just up sticks and run for it, and then we’ll be back at square one.’

‘Given the scale of Mr Crowe’s intelligence network,’ Sherlock said, ‘we’re better off waiting here. Once the messages get to him, he’ll send someone to check us out.’

Sure enough, some time later a dirty, untidy child approached them. His feet were bare and almost black with dirt.

‘Afternoon!’ Rufus said, touching his forehead.

‘Got some questions for you,’ the boy said in a thick Scottish accent.

‘Go ahead.’

‘What’s the name of the lassie’s horse?’

‘The lassie?’ Sherlock asked.

‘The girl,’ Matty explained. ‘Virginia.’

‘Oh.’ Sherlock raised his voice. ‘It’s called Sandia.’

‘Aye. An’ what’s the name of your horse?’

Sherlock smiled. It had become a joke between him and Virginia. ‘He didn’t have a name for a long time, but eventually I called him Philadelphia.’

‘Aye,’ the lad confirmed. ‘An’ what’s your middle name?’

‘Scott,’ Sherlock said. ‘I’m Sherlock Scott Holmes.’

‘Come on then. I’ll take you where you want to go.’ As Rufus flicked the reins to get the horse’s attention, the kid added, ‘Best leave the cart. We’re headed uphill.’

He led the way off the road and upward, scrambling from rock to rock or clump of grass to clump of grass. Sherlock, Matty and Rufus followed as best they could. The way was steep, and Sherlock’s abused body found it hard to cope. After a few minutes his breath came in gasps and he could feel a rasp deep in his chest. His ankles started aching, where the rope had pulled on them, and after ten minutes spikes of pain were lancing up his calf muscles. But he kept on going. He had no choice. He could tell that Rufus was struggling too.

Their path led them past several cottages that were perched on the hillside, looking down on the town and on the sea. Every now and then Sherlock looked over his shoulder at the scenery. The sea was a slowly billowing sheet – grey now, seen from above, rather than the green that it had been when looked at on the way into the village – and he could see darker areas where, he guessed, the sand beneath the surface dropped suddenly away. The line where land met water was a stone quayside, and fishing boats were tied up along it, their masts dipping and bobbing as the waves rolled in. All in all it was an extraordinarily peaceful sight. Despite the pain in his legs and in his chest, Sherlock felt something inside him loosen its tight grip on his heart. Matty seemed to feel the same.

They passed a stone chapel and a graveyard – the highest point of the village proper. After that they were ascending through tall grass and thistles. The sound of seagulls crying accompanied them. Glancing backwards, to the sea, Sherlock realized that they had climbed so high that he was looking down on the seagulls.

After twenty minutes of hard hiking they came to an area where the hill rose up on either side of them and they were walking into a narrowing gorge where the ground sloped up slightly ahead but rocky cliff faces loomed on their left and right. Over his shoulder the boy said, ‘Difficult climb up ahead. Get ready.’

He was right. After a few hundred feet of gradually rising ground, with the cliff faces closing in on both sides, they came to a section where the ground ahead of them rose sharply for a stretch of perhaps ten feet. It wasn’t as steep as the cliff faces to either side, but it was still pretty steep. There was no choice but to scramble up using hands and feet. Once they got to the top, Sherlock looked back. He was surprised how high they were. Far in the distance he could see the dark line where grey sky met grey ocean.

The way ahead narrowed even more, and jinked around to the right so that the point of the gorge – if it even came to a point – was hidden. They kept trudging on, exhausted by the climb.

Sherlock looked back again after a few minutes. He could see the edge of the place where they had scrambled up, but nothing beyond that apart from the sky. The ground dropped away too steeply.

Finally, once they had moved beyond the jink in the gorge, a lone cottage came into sight. Built of the usual grey granite, weather-beaten by years of storms, it nestled into the hillside as if it had grown there. The cottage was set back into a V-shaped notch where the canyon came to an abrupt end, and the ground in front of it was littered with rocks of different sizes that had fallen from the cliffs over the years. On either side, steep faces of rock rose up to the point where the hillside began again. If this was where Amyus Crowe was hiding, Sherlock approved of his choice. The only approach to the cottage was uphill, and from the front. To either side and at the back there was a sheer face of rock. Anyone trying to climb down it would be risking their life.

The boy leading the way stopped within sight of the cottage windows. He stood there, with Sherlock, Rufus and Matty clustered behind him, until one of the windows opened and closed again. A signal that it was safe to approach. Sherlock suddenly had a picture flash into his mind of Amyus Crowe sitting in the cottage with a large gun in his hand, pointed out of the window. If someone had approached the cottage without stopping to be identified or being signalled to continue, Sherlock had no doubt that he would open fire.

The boy turned round and said, ‘The big man says it’s all right to go in.’

‘Thank you,’ Sherlock said. On an impulse he delved in his pocket and took out a half-shilling. ‘We appreciate the help,’ he added, holding the coin out.

The boy looked at it wistfully. ‘The big man pays us well enough,’ he said, keeping his hands by his sides. ‘He says that anyone who takes coins from two masters can’t be trusted by either one of them.’

Sherlock nodded and pulled his hand back. ‘Good advice,’ he said.

The boy walked off downhill, whistling.

‘What now?’ Matty asked.

‘Now we find out what all this is about,’ Sherlock said as he set off towards the cottage.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Those last few yards were perhaps the hardest that Sherlock had ever walked. He didn’t know what kind of reception he was going to get – whether Amyus Crowe was going to be pleased to see him or not, he didn’t know if Virginia was going to be there or whether she had been hidden somewhere else, and most of all he didn’t know whether Mr Crowe and Virginia were ever going to return to Farnham or whether this was just a temporary pause before they left the country. He didn’t have enough evidence on which to base a deduction, and that made him uncomfortable.

He reached the door, heart pounding. It was closed. He knocked.

‘Come on in,’ a familiar voice called.

Sherlock pushed the door open and led the way in. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adapt to the darkness inside – a deliberate ploy on Crowe’s part, he assumed. When he could see properly, he realized that Amyus Crowe was standing on the far side of the room. He was wearing a dark suit and holding a gun.

‘Well done,’ Crowe said. ‘You solved the riddles. Ah thought you would.’

‘It wasn’t hard,’ Sherlock said, shrugging.

‘Not for you, perhaps.’ Crowe switched his gaze to Sherlock’s companions. ‘Young Master Arnatt, welcome to mah temporary accommodation. And Mr Stone as well – make yourselves at home, all of you. Ah’ll stay within sight of the window if you don’t mind. Ah’m not expecting any more guests, but a man can never tell when visitors might arrive. Can I offer you a drink – some water, perhaps?’

‘After that walk,’ Rufus Stone said, ‘a drink would be most welcome. I don’t suppose you have any beer? Or cider, perhaps? A flagon of cider would go down very well just at the moment.’

Crowe smiled. ‘Ah might be able to find somethin’ of that kind around.’ He raised his voice. ‘Virginia, you can come out now. We have guests.’

A door behind Crowe opened and Virginia slipped into the room. Her hair seemed to glow like fire in the relative darkness. Her eyes were fixed on the floor, uncharacteristically shy, but she raised them after a few seconds and looked at Sherlock.

And then she was racing across the floor towards him, and her arms were around his neck, and she was kissing him. He’d dreamed about what kissing her would be like, but the reality was so much more than he had ever imagined. The weight of her body in his arms, the warmth of her lips locked against his, the smell of her hair . . . he felt overwhelmed. His mind was unsure what to do, but he suddenly realized that his body was already kissing her back without instructions.

She broke contact suddenly, not pushing him away but stepping back. He might have taken it as a rejection except for the fact that her hands were resting on his arms. She gazed at him from those bottomless violet eyes, and he saw that she was on the verge of tears.

‘You came looking for us,’ she whispered.

‘I had to,’ he said simply. The words came out of nowhere, unplanned. ‘I can’t live without you.’

‘Much as ah hate to break up this reunion,’ Amyus Crowe rumbled, ‘there’s a whole heap of talking that needs to be done, an’ I do believe that Mr Stone might expire here on the mat if he don’t get a drink inside him. Ginnie, be a darlin’ and get refreshments for our guests.’

Virginia’s hands squeezed Sherlock’s arms for a second, and then she let go. She backed away, still maintaining eye contact. He felt as if he could drown in those eyes. It was as if she was sending him a message, but he didn’t know what it was. Perhaps she didn’t either. Perhaps the important thing was that there was a message, not the content.

Virginia dropped her gaze, and Sherlock felt like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been released. He turned to look at the rest of the room, at the others, and the world seemed to have changed. Everything looked the same, but it was different. He couldn’t explain it.

Amyus Crowe was staring at him with a strange expression on his face. He raised a shaggy eyebrow. ‘A handshake will suffice for me, if that’s all right with you.’

Sherlock smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re all right,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re both all right. When we found your cottage was deserted, we were worried.’

Crowe nodded. ‘Couldn’t be helped. Ah got wind that someone was in the vicinity askin’ ’bout me and mah girl. Normally ah’d go in search of the people askin’ questions an’ ask them some of mah own, but when ah heard the descriptions of the fellows doin’ the askin’ ah decided that discretion was the better part of valour, an’ made a run for it.’

‘They’re as dangerous as that?’ Stone asked. ‘I have to say that young Sherlock here dealt very well with two of them – a black-haired fellow who appears to be deficient in the hearing department and a friend of his with a face like a potato.’

‘That’ll be Ned Fillon an’ Tom Payne.’ Crowe suddenly seemed to realize that he was still holding the gun and placed it on a table by his side. ‘They ain’t anything more than small fry. It’s the man they work for that scares the bejazus out of me.’

‘I think we met him,’ Sherlock said. ‘I couldn’t see his face, but I heard him speak. He talked really quietly.’

‘I saw him,’ Stone said, ‘and I really wish I hadn’t. He had tattoos all over. People’s names.’ He looked briefly at Virginia, but Crowe shook his head slightly, warning Rufus off. Only Rufus and Sherlock noticed.

‘Bryce Scobell,’ Crowe said heavily. ‘So he’s here.’ He sighed. ‘Ah was hopin’ that he might have just sent his men over to find me, but ah guess ah was too optimistic in that regard. He wants me so badly that he’s made the journey from America himself. You saw him in Farnham, ah suppose?’

‘I’m afraid he followed us here,’ Sherlock admitted. ‘To Edinburgh.’

Even in the dim light Sherlock could see that Crowe’s face seemed suddenly to grow paler and even more immobile than usual. To Sherlock the signs were clear. Crowe was in the grip of some strong emotion. His hand reached out to rest on the pistol on the table, and his gaze flickered towards the window, through which the approach to the cottage was visible. ‘Ah would have expected,’ the big American said, choosing the words carefully, like a man stepping on stones to cross a dangerous river, ‘that you’d cover your own tracks well enough that he couldn’t come after you. Does he know about this cottage?’

‘No.’

‘It’s only a matter of time.’ Crowe shook his head angrily. ‘Sherlock, how on earth could you be so careless as to let him follow you?’

‘He heard Matty and me talking about Edinburgh before we even set off,’ Sherlock said nervously. ‘He had some kind of listening tube in the cottage.’

‘Ah.’ Crowe nodded. ‘Clever.’

‘He kidnapped Rufus on the train,’Matty added, ‘and then he kidnapped me and Sherlock, but we escaped.’

‘Escaped?’ Crowe’s face twisted into a grimace. ‘Ah doubt it. He let you go.’

Matty was affronted. ‘Sherlock broke the legs of those two men – Fillon and Payne.’

Crowe shrugged. ‘If that enabled him to follow you here, Scobell would consider that a small price to pay.’

‘He was torturing me for information,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘It would have been easier just to keep on torturing me until I talked rather than trade two of his men for the information.’

Crowe didn’t look any less angry, but his hand moved away from the pistol. ‘Perhaps,’ he conceded. ‘Are you sure you weren’t followed here?’

‘Very sure,’ Sherlock said firmly.

‘What’s so bad about this Scobell bloke?’ Matty asked. ‘Apart from the fact that he likes hurting people. There’s blokes in this country who like hurting people. Can’t imagine this Scobell is much worse.’

Sherlock nodded in agreement. Matty’s words put him in mind of Josh Harkness, the blackmailer whom Mrs Eglantine had been working for. Harkness had been a nasty piece of work; could Bryce Scobell be that much worse?

‘There’s a load of different examples ah could give you,’ Crowe replied, ‘but ah’ll let one suffice.’ His eyes seemed not to be looking at Sherlock, or any of the others, but to be fixed on something that only he could see. ‘Scobell was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Confederate Army. He weren’t right in the head, even then. Ah don’t think there’s a word for what he was, what he is. Not evil, exactly, but he don’t have emotions like guilt, or regret, or shame like the rest of us. He don’t even feel things like anger or happiness. He just seems to sail through life with a complete indifference to anythin’ except his own survival. He’s convinced that he’s the most important thing in the world, and that everythin’ else exists to make his life easier an’ better.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Ah first heard about him when he was sent to deal with an uprisin’ among the native tribes. They’d taken advantage of the confusion surroundin’ the War Between the States an’ they were attackin’ families, settlers, anyone they could isolate an’ kill. Scobell was under the command of Colonel John Chivington at the time, and they were sent with a troop of militia to stop the Arapaho an’ the Cheyenne from mountin’ these attacks.’

Virginia came into the room with a tray containing five glasses and a plate of oatcakes. None of them had even seen her leave, so caught up were they in her father’s story. She gave the beer to Crowe and Rufus Stone, then passed glasses of water to Sherlock and Matty. Everyone helped themselves to the oatcakes.

‘This was about five, six years back,’ Crowe went on. ‘Chivington used to be a pastor in the Church, but his forbearance for his fellow man didn’t extend as far as the Indians. He hated them with a passion most men reserve for scorpions an’ rabid dogs. Scobell, his second-in-command, didn’t hate them, but he regarded them as a lower form of life that didn’t belong in his world. Between the two men there wasn’t a single friendly thought. Under Chivington and Scobell, the militia attacked not just the Cheyenne and the Arapaho but the Sioux, the Comanche and the Kiowa as well.

Crowe sipped at his beer. Nobody broke the heavy silence in the room.

‘The Indians were gettin’ the sharp end of the stick,’ he continued, ‘an’ they decided they wanted peace, so a meetin’ was arranged with the authorities. The Indians left the meetin’ thinkin’ they had a peace treaty, but nothin’ had actually been signed. Few days later, a chief named Black Kettle camped his people near Fort Lyon. They weren’t doin’ anybody any harm – they was just followin’ the buffalo along the Arkansas River. They lived off the buffalo, you see – used them for meat, for clothes, for oil, for everythin’.’

Crowe halted for a moment and looked out through the window. His hand moved towards the gun, but whatever he had seen must have been innocent – a bird, maybe, or an animal crossing the open ground – because he pulled his hand back and started speaking again.

‘They reported to Fort Lyon, just like they was supposed to, and then camped on Sand Creek about forty miles north. Their camp was in a dip in the ground, surrounded by low hills. Not long after they arrived, Chivington and Scobell rode into Fort Lyon and told the garrison commander that they was goin’ to attack Black Kettle’s tribe. The garrison commander told them Black Kettle had already surrendered, but Scobell persuaded him that this was an ideal opportunity to rid the world of more Indians. He seemed to be able to influence people like that. Next day Chivington led his troops, most of them drunk, I’ve heard, and surrounded the camp. On Scobell’s advice, Chivington took four artillery pieces with him.’

Virginia slipped into a seat next to Sherlock. Somehow her hand ended up in his. He squeezed it reassuringly, and she squeezed back.

‘Seeing the militia gatherin’ around him, Black Kettle flew a white flag of peace over his tent. Without givin’ any warnin’, an’ without consultin’ with Chivington, Scobell gave the order to attack.’

Crowe paused, and the momentary silence in the room was like something heavy and alive.

‘It was a fire storm of death an’ destruction descendin’ on them from the skies,’ he whispered. ‘Men, women, children – all of them massacred by the artillery fire an’ by rifle fire. They had no chance to defend themselves. An’ when the artillery had run out of shells an’ the rifles had run out of bullets, Scobell led his men into the camp an’ they killed every last one, by beatin’ them with the butts of their rifles, an’ with their knives. Every last one.’

‘Someone must have taken action,’ Sherlock said, shocked. ‘I mean, Chivington and Scobell broke the peace treaty.’

Crowe laughed harshly. ‘What peace treaty? There weren’t any signed bits of paper to refer to.’ When Sherlock opened his mouth to say something else, Crowe raised a hand to stop him. ‘Chivington was hauled up in front of a military tribunal a year or two later and forced to resign from the Army. Scobell went absent without leave, an’ has been on the run ever since.’

‘But . . . children?’ Virginia whispered. ‘Why? It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘When he was asked at the military tribunal why children had been killed, Chivington replied, “Because nits lead to lice.” Funny thing is, ah reckon ah can hear Bryce Scobell’s voice there, speakin’ through Chivington. Ah reckon Scobell had much more influence over his superior officer than people thought at the time.’

‘And I’m guessing,’ Rufus Stone said, ‘that you were sent to bring Scobell back to face justice.’

‘That, or mete out some justice of mah own choosin’,’ Crowe said evenly. ‘Ah was given that authority by President Andrew Johnson himself.’ He shook his head. ‘Ah nearly caught Scobell three times, in different places ’cross the States. Ah lost several good men in firefights along the way.’

‘What happened?’ Matty asked, breathless.

Crowe stared over at him. ‘Ah’ll give you an example of what Scobell is like,’ he said. ‘Cincinnati, three years ago: ah’d tracked Scobell down to a room in a boarding house. We surrounded it and burst in. He’d already left, but the woman who owned the place was sitting there, on the bed. She was holdin’ a stick of dynamite an’ a match. When she saw us, she struck the match and lit the dynamite.’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘We only just cleared out of the room in time. The explosion killed her, of course. Found out later that Scobell had kidnapped her daughter – said he’d kill her if she didn’t act as a livin’ booby trap for us. An’ she believed him.’

‘What happened to the daughter?’ Matty asked.

‘Oh, he let her go. He had no further use for her. Course, she was left without a mother, but Scobell didn’t care nothin’ about that.’

Sherlock stared at Amyus Crowe. There was something the big American wasn’t saying.

‘Why did he change tactics?’ Sherlock asked. ‘It started out with you chasing him, but it ended up with him chasing you. What happened?’

Crowe stared levelly at Sherlock. ‘There ain’t much gets past you, is there, son? You’re right. Something did happen. Ah said ah lost some men in firefights an’ traps an’ the like. Scobell lost somethin’ too. He lost . . .’ He paused, and looked up at Virginia. ‘Ah’ve never told you this, Ginnie. Ah reckon you’ll think the less of me for what ah’m about to say, but that can’t be helped. It’s the truth, so help me God.’

He took a breath, obviously having to force himself to continue. Sherlock found that he was holding his breath, waiting for what came next.

‘Bryce Scobell had a wife an’ child. Ah don’t believe he ever loved either of them. Ah don’t believe he’s capable of love. But ah think he came closer to real emotion with them than with anyone else. Maybe it was more like possessiveness – ah don’t know for sure. But the thing that happened was, we cornered Scobell an’ his bodyguards at a farmhouse in Phoenix. They started firin’ when they saw us, an’ we fired back. In the crossfire, two of mah people were killed, and so were Scobell’s wife an’ son. We’d had no idea they were there. Scobell escaped, like he always did, but he took an oath that day that he would make me pay for what ah’d done.’ He grimaced. ‘A month later a message arrived for me. It was from Scobell. He told me that he’d kill mah wife an’ mah child an’ he’d make me watch. He told me exactly what he’d do. It weren’t . . . the kind of thing that would occur to any normal, God-fearin’ person, but ah knew Scobell – ah knew that once he set his mind to a thing, then that thing would happen. With the permission of President Johnson ah took a leave of absence from mah duties an’ came here.’

‘And now he’s followed you,’ Sherlock said in the silence that followed Crowe’s admission.

‘As ah said, once he sets his mind to somethin’, that thing happens.’

‘You could have asked for help,’ Rufus Stone pointed out. ‘Mycroft Holmes would have provided guards for your cottage, I’m sure. If not, we could have recruited some people locally to help.’

‘For how long?’ Crowe asked. ‘Even if Mr Holmes provided us with round-the-clock bodyguards, he couldn’t keep them there forever. At some stage they would have been taken away an’ placed on more important duties.’ He shook his head. ‘Bryce Scobell is a patient man. Patient, and very, very clever. He would have waited until everyone had gotten bored an’ tired, an’ then he would have struck.’

‘But you’ve faced dangerous men before,’ Sherlock pointed out. He was confused. He didn’t understand why Amyus Crowe hadn’t stayed to fight. Crowe had always seemed to Sherlock to be a man who confronted difficulty rather than running away from it. Secretly he felt a bit disappointed. ‘I was there in the tunnels beneath Waterloo Station when you took on that man who wanted to kill me. You nearly broke his neck, and you didn’t seem the slightest bit frightened. What’s so different about Scobell?’

‘Ah have faced dangerous men before,’ Crowe agreed. ‘Ah’ve gone up against some of the toughest, hardest men in the world in mah time, but Bryce Scobell is a different bucket of catfish entirely.’ He sighed. ‘It’s difficult to describe, but there’s something . . . not human about him. Most people are wary of bein’ hurt, of bein’ damaged, an’ that gives you an advantage in a fight, but he ain’t. He just don’t care. Ah’m not sayin’ he don’t feel pain, cos he does, but he just shrugs it off. It don’t interest him. An’ he don’t remember the pain neither. If you punch a normal man in the face enough times he’ll stay back, not wantin’ to get hit again, but Scobell – hit him the first time an’ he’ll remember the fact that he was hit, but he don’t seem to learn from the pain. He don’t seek to avoid it next time. Knock him down an’ he just gets up again, an’ again, an’ again. He keeps comin’ back at you, like some kind of mechanical creation.’ He shook his head. ‘Ah’m not makin’ much sense, ah know, but facin’ Bryce Scobell is like facin’ some dark force of nature. He’s unstoppable. That would be bad enough if he was stupid, but he’s one of the cleverest men ah know. He thinks several moves ahead, like he’s playin’ chess, an’ he gathers people around him who are like him.’

‘I don’t understand about the names tattooed on his skin,’ Virginia said suddenly. She had been quiet up until that point. ‘Why would he do that? What does it mean?’

‘It’s a fixation with him,’ her father replied darkly. ‘Ah was told that when he joined the Confederate Army he only had three names, tattooed on his arm. Someone asked him what they were. He said they were the names of men he’d killed.’ He paused and shook his head sadly. ‘He was only eighteen. He’d had them indelibly inscribed on his skin, along with the dates. Said he wanted to make sure he never forgot them.’ He shrugged. ‘Course, in war you rarely know the names of the men you kill, so he’d leave a gap an’ do his best to find out who they were, where they were from, based on their regiment. After the end of the War Between the States he spent a considerable sum of money tryin’ to get the names of all the Union soldiers who died in particular places, at particular times. He even tried to find out the names of the Indians he killed. Had Black Kettle’s name tattooed right across the nape of his neck. He’s obsessed with the idea.’

‘What about the ones in red?’ Rufus Stone asked. ‘As if I didn’t know.’

Crowe eyed him darkly. Sherlock assumed he was tacitly warning Rufus not to mention Virginia’s name. ‘Those are the people he’s going to kill but hasn’t got around to yet,’ he said slowly. ‘Planning for the future, ah guess. He’s makin’ a statement that there are people out there whose days are numbered. When they’re gone, he has the name tattooed over in black.’ He peered out of the window again. ‘Ah’m told he’s got mah name in red on his forearm, right where he can see it every day.’

Rufus Stone was frowning. ‘For a supposedly intelligent man,’ he mused, ‘this Bryce Scobell seems to have missed a trick. I mean, he’s on the run from you, he’s on the run from the whole US Government, and he deliberately makes himself more and more recognizable. If I was him I’d dye my hair blond and keep out of sight, not tattoo more and more names on myself.’

‘It’s a compulsion,’ Crowe explained. ‘The man can’t help himself. An’ it’s amazing’ what a pair of gloves an’ some stage make-up on the face an’ neck can accomplish.’

‘So what’s the plan?’ Matty asked. ‘What do we do?’

‘We don’t do anythin’,’ Crowe replied. ‘Ginnie an’ I, we leave the country. Head somewhere else. Change our names. Change our descriptions, as much as we can. You three go back to Farnham an’ try to forget about us.’

The words hit Sherlock like blows. His gaze slipped across to Virginia. ‘I don’t think we can do that,’ he said quietly.

Rufus Stone frowned. ‘I don’t understand. Why did you leave the clues to bring us to Edinburgh if you don’t want our help?’

Crowe closed his eyes momentarily. ‘Because ah wanted to say goodbye properly,’ he said. ‘An’ because ah wanted to explain, face to face, why ah was runnin’ away. Ah wanted you to understand the scale of what ah’m up against. Scobell will keep comin’, an’ keep comin’, and keep comin’ until he succeeds. An’ even if ah try to turn the tables an’ hunt him down, he’s too clever. He’ll cover his tracks an’ hide until I stop lookin’; or worse: he’ll lure me into a trap.’

A silence followed as each of them tried to come to terms with what Crowe was saying.

‘There’s two problems with all that,’ Sherlock said eventually.

Crowe raised an eyebrow. ‘An’ what’re they then?’

‘The first,’ Sherlock continued, not put off by Crowe’s attitude, ‘is that this man, Bryce Scobell, will keep on coming after you. If he’s as clever and as dedicated as that, then he will find you wherever you go, no matter how long it takes him.’

‘You’re right,’ Rufus Stone said, nodding.

‘What’s the other problem?’ Matty asked.

‘It’s that you’re treating this like you would treat any hunt.’ Sherlock paused for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts into some kind of order. ‘I know, from what you’ve taught me, that you treat men as if they were animals. If you’re hunting them you try to predict their movements based on their habits, and you look for the signs of their presence – the signs they can’t help leaving, the way that animals leave tracks.’

‘Ah’ve always believed that mankind is just a different kind of animal,’ Crowe conceded, ‘an’ many’s a time ah’ve used that fact to mah advantage. What’s your point?’

‘My point is that Bryce Scobell isn’t an animal. He’s turned the tables. He’s treating you as the animal, and he’s tracking you, and that’s spooked you. Your usual way of dealing with a situation won’t work. The game has been reversed.’

‘You’re saying he’s cleverer than me?’ Crowe challenged, his eyes flashing beneath his bushy grey brows.

‘Yes,’ Sherlock said simply. ‘So if the game has been reversed, let’s change the game. If Scobell is a better hunter than you, let’s not make this a hunt. If he’s a better game player than you, let’s not make it a game. Don’t let him choose the fight. Change the rules.’

‘Easier said than done, young man,’ Crowe rumbled, but the expression on his face suggested that Sherlock had surprised him.

‘If he’s looking for you,’ Sherlock said, ‘then don’t hide. Don’t do what he expects. Stay in the open. He’ll wonder what you’re doing. He’ll assume it’s a trap and he’ll back away.’

‘And then what?’ Crowe challenged.

‘And then he’ll make a mistake, and you can turn the tables on him.’

Crowe nodded slowly. ‘When the game is a hunt and you’re losing, change the rules.’

‘When the man you’re up against is cleverer and more ruthless than you,’ Sherlock amplified, ‘make sure that the game doesn’t depend on the winner being the cleverest or the most ruthless.’

Crowe smiled and opened his mouth to say something, but there was a sudden thump from the roof of the cottage. Crowe’s gaze snapped upward, his hand already on the pistol, then he looked through the window again. Sherlock followed his gaze. The narrow enclosed hillside that sloped away in front of the cottage was empty, deserted, but something in the air had changed. A smell. Something . . . burning.

‘Smoke!’ he said. ‘I smell smoke.’

Amyus Crowe moved swiftly across to the window. ‘Nothin’ out here.’

Sherlock looked towards the door out to the rest of the cottage. Was it his imagination, or was there a faint haze in the atmosphere out there?

‘It’s Scobell,’ he said. ‘He’s set fire to the cottage!’

‘But how?’ Rufus snapped. ‘Nobody’s come near! And how on earth did he find us?’

‘They didn’t have to come near,’ Sherlock replied. ‘He’s dropped something burning on to the thatched roof from the cliffs above the cottage! That’s dry straw – it’ll go up in seconds!’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘Come on!’ Matty yelled. ‘We need to get out!’

Sherlock moved to take Virginia’s hand, wanting to make sure she got to the door safely, but Crowe grabbed at his shoulder. ‘Scobell will be out there, son!’ he shouted. ‘He’ll have rifles. He’ll pick us off like rabbits!’

Sherlock had a mental flash of the decapitated rabbit back at Amyus Crowe’s Farnham cottage. He didn’t want to end up like that.

‘We don’t have a choice,’ Rufus Stone said. ‘If we stay here we’ll be burned alive.’

They could hear the fire catching hold in the straw thatch now – a crackling sound, like sticks being broken by some giant hand. Smoke was drifting in through the open door. Already it was hard to breathe, hard even to see.

‘I don’t think he wants to kill us in the fire,’ Sherlock suddenly said.

Crowe stared at him questioningly.

‘He wants to take his revenge on you. A fire isn’t good enough for him – especially if he can’t be sure from the remains if you were even here.’

‘So what’s he trying to do?’ Rufus Stone asked, struggling not to cough.

‘Flush us out into the open. He’ll have men waiting further down the hill. They’ll have guns, and they’ll take us prisoner when we run out.’

‘But that’s the only option we’ve got!’ Matty cried.

Crowe shook his head. ‘Not quite. There’s a path that leads up the rock face, away from the house, if we can get down the slope that far. It’s hard to spot, but I know where it is.’

Stone covered his mouth and coughed. ‘The trouble will be in getting there,’ he said. ‘Scobell’s men won’t let us get too far from the house before they take us.’

‘I think I’ve got an idea.’

Sherlock ran for the door to the outside. Crowe and Rufus were moments behind him, with Matty and Virginia just behind them. Sherlock threw the door open. The sudden blast of fresh air sucked the smoke out in a billowing plume that would immediately alert whoever was watching from the rocky crags above – as Sherlock was sure they would be doing.

All over the ground in front of the cottage were the rocks of various shapes and sizes they had passed on the way in. Twenty feet ahead of that was the point where the ground dropped sharply away for ten feet or so – the point where they had had to scramble up using hands and feet. Somewhere past there, hidden by the sudden drop in the ground, were Scobell’s men.

‘Help me!’ he shouted, and set to work dislodging one of the bigger stones.

Realizing what he was doing, Rufus and Crowe threw themselves against two more rocks – even larger ones. Matty and Virginia joined Sherlock, trying to get his one moving.

Sherlock set his shoulder against the boulder and heaved. His throat and his ankles throbbed where the rope had bruised the flesh, but he ignored the pain and kept pushing. The boulder shifted before his weight, rising up slightly and pivoting on a point on its front edge.

‘We’ve got it!’ he yelled.

Something whistled past his ear and buried itself in the ground by his side. He let go of the boulder in surprise, and it fell back into its crater with a thud that he could feel through the soles of his feet. He looked at the new object in surprise. For a moment he thought it was a stick, but there were feathers stuck to the back. He pulled it out of the ground. The front end was sharp, like an arrowhead.

He stared upward. Silhouetted on top of the V-shaped cliff into the bottom of which the cottage was set he could see men holding cross-shaped objects in their hands. They were aiming at Sherlock the way they might aim a rifle.

They were crossbows. Sherlock hadn’t seen one before, but he’d seen pictures. It was like a small bow, but on its side, and made of metal rather than wood. It could fire bolts – like small arrows – very fast, and with enough power to punch through metal armour.

‘Get out of the way!’ Matty yelled, pulling him back towards the cottage.

‘He’s not trying to shoot us – he’s trying to spook us into running!’ Sherlock shouted, pulling away from Matty and rugby-tackling the stone with all his weight. ‘They don’t want us dead, remember!’ The stone shifted again, pivoting forward, teetering on the point of rolling down the hill.

Which was exactly what Sherlock wanted.

More crossbow bolts hit the ground around him, but he ignored them. He gave the boulder one last push, using all his weight and all his strength. It rolled over on to the grass – and kept on rolling down the slope, gathering speed as it did so, bouncing slightly as it hit bumps in the ground. Amyus Crowe got his rock moving as well – a bigger one that rolled heavily rather than bounced, creating a furrow of grass and earth as it moved. But it did move – faster and faster.

Rufus Stone’s boulder started to move, but instead of following the other two down the widening slope it veered sideways, towards the rocky walls of the V-shaped canyon. For a moment Sherlock thought it was going to stop dead, but it hit the wall and rebounded, catching two smaller stones on the way and dislodging them from where they sat.

The boulders, rocks and stones vanished over the edge of the slope. Seconds passed with no response – and then he heard a flurry of shouts and screams from below. Sherlock imagined the boulders smashing into a line of Bryce Scobell’s men like a bowling ball hitting skittles, breaking legs and smashing people aside. He smiled grimly.

‘More!’ he shouted, and immediately got both hands beneath another rock and levered it out of the ground. It came out easily. He hoisted it up to his shoulder and threw it like a shot-putter. It hit the ground and bounced away downhill until it was out of sight. Matty and Virginia sent smaller stones the same way, while Amyus Crowe and Rufus managed to dislodge two more huge boulders.

Two more bolts struck the ground around them, splattering earth everywhere, but the shooters had realized that their distractions weren’t working. For a moment Sherlock worried that they might start shooting at the four of them, rather than around them, but that didn’t seem to be part of their orders. The shooting continued sporadically, but no longer felt dangerous.

The shouting and screaming from below was reaching banshee proportions now. Sherlock didn’t know how many men Scobell had down there, but it sounded like they were all either incapacitated or otherwise distracted. They would have been expecting a handful of desperate runners whom they could easily subdue, but instead they’d got an avalanche of rocks.

‘Come on!’ he yelled.

With Crowe, Virginia, Matty and Rufus behind him, he piled down the slope after the rocks. The gradient seemed steeper than it had on the way up, and he could feel himself accelerating out of control. He nearly slipped in the wet grass. He tried to slow himself down, but Amyus Crowe careered into his back, pushing him onward.

As they scrambled down the ridge, he saw the remnants of Bryce Scobell’s ambush. There were five men located in a dip in the ground. Four of them were cut and bleeding. It was impossible to tell how badly hurt they were, but two of those four were trapped beneath the boulders that Crowe and Stone had sent hurtling down the slope. The fifth was trying to help his companions, but he didn’t seem to know which way to turn. Crossbows lay scattered around them.

Sherlock ran right through the ambush before they were even aware that he was there. He looked back over his shoulder to see Crowe and Rufus slow down, shepherding Matty and Virginia past them, before they speeded up again, taking up the rear. One of Scobell’s men blindly groped for a crossbow, but Crowe kicked it out of his reach as he passed.

They raced on, leaving the ambush behind them.

The occasional bolt still pocked the ground or pinged off the rocks, fired from the cliffs above, but the range was too great and the angle was wrong and Sherlock knew, just knew, that they weren’t a threat.

He felt exhilarated as he ran. He had rescued Amyus Crowe!

‘Ginnie! Sherlock! Here!’

Without stopping, he looked over his shoulder. Amyus Crowe was standing at the bottom of a barely discernible set of steps in the cliff face fifty yards behind him. Sherlock had completely missed it as he had run past, and so had Virginia, but Rufus Stone and Matty were already scrambling up it. This must be the hidden path that Crowe had mentioned! Sherlock skidded to a halt at the same time as Virginia, ready to turn and go back to where Crowe was standing, but just as he was about to move three of Scobell’s men came running down the rocky slope behind Crowe. There was blood on their clothes and their faces – they were the remnants of the ambush team – and they looked ready to kill, despite what orders they might have been given by Scobell. They wanted revenge for the rock attack.

Crowe saw the way Sherlock was looking past himand turned round. Sherlock saw the immediate tension in his shoulders. His head snapped back towards Sherlock and Virginia, and his eyes were wide with a mixture of fury and terror. He had obviously done the same mental calculation as Sherlock. The men were running downhill. If Sherlock and Virginia ran back to where Crowe was standing, they would be running uphill. There was no way they could get to Crowe before Scobell’s men did. Despite Sherlock’s admiration for and trust in his friend and mentor, he didn’t think that Crowe could take three furious men by himself. Especially if they were armed.

‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Look after Rufus and Matty! I’ll take care of Virginia!’

‘I can’t!’ Crowe yelled. His face was white with shock.

‘You have to!’ Sherlock yelled back. He turned to Virginia, who was looking back and forth between Sherlock and her father. ‘Trust me – we have to keep going down.’

She looked at Amyus Crowe. His face was despairing. Eventually, after a time that felt like hours but must have been less than a second, he nodded.

Virginia turned and ran towards Sherlock. Crowe scrambled up the hidden path, surprisingly fast for a man of his bulk.

Virginia grabbed Sherlock’s hand and ran with him, flying down the slope, pulling away from their pursuers.

Sherlock looked back, once, over his shoulder as they ran. Amyus Crowe, along with Rufus and Matty, was out of sight, hidden by the rocks. The pursuers had seen Crowe climbing. Two of them followed, while the other kept on going.

The slope began to level out ahead of them. To his left, Sherlock caught sight of the chapel that he’d seen on the way up. They would soon be back in the town. Could they evade their pursuers there, or were Scobell’s men already waiting?

Still clutching Sherlock’s hand, Virginia pulled him towards the chapel. ‘Maybe we could hide there,’ she panted.

They scurried behind a moss-covered gravestone that was leaning at a perilous angle. There was barely room for them both. Sherlock had to move close to Virginia so they could fit without being seen. He could feel her breath on his neck: warm and fast.

Boots clattered on the rocks, then disappeared.

‘What now?’ Sherlock asked after they had heard nothing for a few minutes.

‘I think we need to meet up with my father and Rufus and Matty. Somehow.’

Sherlock nodded. ‘All right.’

He turned his head. Her eyes were only an inch away from his.

He wanted to kiss her, but instead he just said, ‘Let’s go.’

The gorse and the heather were rough underfoot. The stems kept catching on Sherlock’s shoes as they trudged across the moorland. Virginia’s shoes were a lot more practical than his and he had to struggle to keep up.

They both looked around as they walked, checking the buildings behind them and the low wall they were slowly approaching in case anyone had seen them, but they were alone. The whole landscape seemed strangely deserted. Sherlock worried that a figure would spring up from somewhere, point at them and shout, but nothing happened.

The setting sun cast their shadows across the heather, purple on purple. The air was cold, and it smelled of flowers. Despite the lateness of the year a handful of bees buzzed slowly around, moving from bloom to bloom in search of pollen.

‘What are you thinking?’

He turned his head. Virginia was looking at him questioningly. She had noticed his preoccupation.

‘I was just thinking about bees,’ he explained.

‘Bees?’ She shook her head disbelievingly. ‘We’re separated from our friends, we’re on the run from a gang of murderers and you’re thinking about bees? I don’t get it.’

He shrugged, suddenly defensive. ‘I understand bees,’ he said. ‘They aren’t complicated. They do whatever they do for obvious reasons. They’re like little clockwork machines. They make sense.’

‘And you don’t understand people?’

He kept walking, not answering for a moment. ‘Why is any of this happening?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Because Bryce Scobell decided that he didn’t like the American Indians and decided to wipe them out instead of just moving somewhere there weren’t any Indians? Because your father was sent to catch him and became obsessed with finding him no matter how many people he lost along the way? Because Scobell became obsessed in turn with taking revenge on your father and followed him to England instead of hiding peacefully somewhere else in the world? I don’t understand any of it! If people just acted logically, then none of this would be happening now!’

‘Scobell is mad, according to my father,’ Virginia said quietly. ‘He doesn’t have any morals, any scruples. He does whatever he needs to in order to get what he wants.’

‘The madness aside,’ Sherlock said quietly, thinking about his own father, ‘that’s the only thing about this whole business I do understand. It’s a very logical attitude.’

‘It’s only logical if you’re the only person who acts that way,’ she pointed out quietly. ‘If everyone in the world acts that logically, then everyone fights everyone else, civilization falls apart, chaos ensues and only the strong survive.’

They walked on in silence for a while. Sherlock could feel Virginia staring at him, but he didn’t have anything to say.

A sudden movement and a burst of noise startled them both, but it was just a bird launching itself from cover and flying away.

By now they were nearly at the stone wall that they had seen earlier. Sherlock looked over his shoulder once more, expecting to see the same empty landscape he had seen every other time, but there were people moving down by the chapel. At that distance he couldn’t tell whether they were locals or Scobell’s men, but he wasn’t willing to take a chance. Before he could do anything, Virginia grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards the wall. It was only waist high, and she jumped over it lithely and vanished from sight. He vaulted the wall and dropped down beside her.

Sherlock got to his knees and peered over the top of the wall, looking down the slope. There were still people around the chapel.

‘Come on,’ Virginia urged. ‘We need to keep moving. We need to get to my pa.’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but carefully. Stay out of sight.’

Together they scurried along in the wall’s shadow, keeping low so that the stones shielded them from anyone looking in their direction.

Sherlock peered ahead. In the distance, across an undulating stretch of ground, was a wooded area.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We need to get to cover before nightfall.’

Despite being rife with tension the walk towards the trees was quiet and even boring. Sherlock was exhausted after all that he’d suffered that day, and he found that just putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, was one of the most tedious things he’d ever had to do. Every now and then he would stumble over a stone, or put his foot in a pothole, and he would nearly fall over – much to Virginia’s amusement.

He kept alert for movement that might mean they had been spotted, but apart from the birds that circled in the sky and the occasional rabbit the only thing that Sherlock saw was a majestic stag standing on a rise in the ground. Its antlers spread like small trees stripped of their leaves. It stared impassively at them, head turned to one side. When it was certain they were not a threat it lowered its head to the ground and began to eat the heather.

The sky dimmed from blue to indigo and from indigo to black as they walked. Stars began to twinkle: first one or two, and then, within a few minutes, too many to count.

Remembering the stag, and how it had casually dismissed them from its mind to chomp at the vegetation, Sherlock realized that he was hungry. No, he was starving. Apart from the oatcakes at Amyus Crowe’s cottage, he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

Virginia was biting her lip. She looked hungry too.

What were his options? Try to chase a rabbit down the next time one broke from cover? Unlikely that he would succeed. Throw Matty’s knife – which was still in his pocket – and hope to hit a rabbit? He didn’t know much about throwing knives, although he’d seen it done at fairgrounds, but he suspected that the knives had to be carefully balanced so that they spun smoothly, end over end. Matty’s knife had a handle that was much bulkier than the blade. He wouldn’t be able to aim it properly.

He remembered the first ever lesson that Amyus Crowe had given him, back in Hampshire in the woods that surrounded Holmes Manor. Crowe had taught Sherlock which fungi were safe to eat and which were poisonous. If he could find some mushrooms, then they could eat. He glanced around. There wasn’t much chance of finding them in open moorland, but perhaps when they got into the trees he could find some growing on rotten logs in piles of leaf mould.

He looked up to see how far they were from the wood. The treeline was probably half a mile away.

‘Look,’ Virginia said. ‘We can sleep there for the night.’

Sherlock followed the direction in which she was pointing. At first he saw nothing, but then he spotted a small stone building in the shadow of the trees. For a second he thought it was someone’s house, but after a moment he noticed how small it was, the absence of glass, and the door-less entrance. It was a hut, built to shelter shepherds from storms.

‘Well spotted,’ he said.

‘Any chance of some food?’ Virginia asked. ‘I’m starved after all that walking.’

Sherlock thought for a moment. He supposed he could safely leave Virginia for a bit while he scouted for mushrooms.

He told her so. She looked sceptically at him. ‘Mushrooms? You tryin’ to poison me?’

‘Trust me – your dad is a good teacher.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘He may be a good teacher, but are you sure he knows what he’s talkin’ about?’

‘Only one way to find out.’

‘Look, why don’t I collect some wood and get a fire going while you get the mushrooms? It’ll save time.’

‘Are you sure you’ll be all right? There are people after us.’

She stared at him, an eyebrow raised. ‘I can look after myself.’

They checked inside the stone shelter. Just one room, and leaves had drifted into the corners, but it seemed secure enough. There was even a small wood-burning brazier, along with a couple of battered saucepans and some metal plates.

‘Are you goin’ to be long?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘As long as it takes. You want dinner, don’t you?’

She smiled. ‘I’ve never had a man actually go an’ gather dinner for me before, ’part from my dad. I kinda like it.’

He couldn’t help himself. ‘What about buy you dinner? Has anyone ever done that? Apart from Mr Crowe, I mean?’

She shook her head. ‘Nope.’

‘Or cook you dinner?’

‘Nope.’

He smiled. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

The trees closed in around him within moments: trunks as thick as his body that erupted from tangles of roots and reached up towards the sky, forming a lacy ceiling with their branches. The thin light of the moon filtered down from above as he walked. Twigs seemed to grope for his face. Trailing strands of moss – or perhaps fine spider webs – brushed his cheeks and forehead, and he kept having to push them away. An owl hooted, and he could dimly make out the occasional sound of something larger – badgers, ferrets, maybe the odd deer – pushing its way through the undergrowth.

Somewhere off in the distance, a twig snapped as if it had been stepped on. Leaves rustled. Was it the wind, or a person?

He tensed, fearing that Scobell’s men had tracked them down, but a moment’s thought convinced him otherwise. He could still hear the owls and the passing animals. If Scobell’s men were around, the wildlife would have been more cautious.

Remembering the Edinburgh tenement, and the faces of dead men that had been staring out at him from the darkened doorways, he began to feel a flutter of panic in his chest. Were there dead men stalking him through the forest? Were they even now clustering around the door of the shepherds’ shelter, ready to burst in and attack Virginia? His heart started to race. He began to turn around, ready to race back to save her, but he stopped and took a deep breath. This was stupid. He put a firm mental hand on the panic in his chest and pushed downward. Dead men did not walk. There were no such things as ghosts. They weren’t logical. They were just superstition. Amyus Crowe had taught Sherlock a lot over the past year, but whatever Sherlock had learned had been built on top of a basic scepticism that was part of his character. There had to be a reason for things happening. There had to be a cause. Things that were dead were dead – they didn’t keep moving. Death was the absence of life. Whatever he had seen back in the tenement, whatever he and Matty had seen in Edinburgh, it wasn’t dead men.

Feeling better, he kept on walking. If he was hearing anything in the woods apart from the breeze then it was scurrying animals. The rest was just his imagination drawing the wrong conclusions from small amounts of evidence. Speculation in the absence of correct information was, he decided, a fruitless occupation. If he was going to come to conclusions in future, he was going to make sure they were based on evidence.

He entered a small clearing. In the light of the moon that flooded down from above he could see a cluster of mushrooms pushing through the loam and the leaf mulch of the forest floor. He approached and knelt beside them. They were bright orange in colour, and their edges were wavy, like lettuce leaves. He recognized them as chanterelles. Pulling as many as he could from the ground, he stuffed his jacket pockets.

A few feet away he found some morels, their honeycomb-like interior structure and brown colour unmistakable. Across the other side of the clearing, a few feet into the trees, he found a fallen trunk on which was growing a mass of the distinctive white strands of Lion’s Mane mushroom.

Arms and pockets full, he set off back for the shelter. He had enough to keep the two of them going until the morning. If he could find some water then he could boil them in the saucepans. That started him thinking – were there any herbs growing nearby that he could use to flavour the water?

His mind occupied with thoughts of how he was going to impress Virginia with his culinary skills, he walked up to the hut.

‘I’m back!’ he called softly, in case she was sleeping. ‘And I’ve got dinner!’

He stepped into the shelter, where Virginia had got a fire going in the stove. By its light, he saw that she was asleep, curled up on the ground. She had found some rushes or reeds from outside, and had piled them up underneath her head as a pillow. She had also piled more of them up for Sherlock, just a few feet away from her own head.

He wasn’t sure what to do. He supposed he could prepare food and then wake her up, but it had been a long hike uphill, and they had more walking ahead of them in the morning. Best that she slept now.

He dumped the mushrooms on the ground and sat beside Virginia. Something about the fresh air and the long walk through the woods had quelled his own appetite as well. They weren’t going to die of malnutrition if they missed one meal. He could cook the mushrooms when the sun came up.

He stared at her face. She seemed so relaxed, asleep. Her lips were curved in a slight smile, and her expression was calmer that he had ever seen it. Usually there was a watchful look on her face, especially when she was looking at him, but now it was as if he was looking at her with everything wiped away apart from the real Virginia. The girl that he so desperately wanted to know better.

He reached out a hand and brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes. She stirred slightly and made a noise, but she didn’t wake up.

He watched her for a while, mesmerized by her incredible beauty. It was difficult looking at her when they were together in daylight, because she would spot him staring at her and stare straight back, or ask him what he was looking at, but now he could admire her for as long as he liked.

Eventually he stretched out beside her, his head on the rushes that she had left for him. He felt himself drifting off to sleep. Despite the danger, despite the situation that they were in, he felt happy. He felt as if he had found the place where he belonged.

He fell asleep so gradually that he didn’t even realize when it happened, but he woke up suddenly. Sunlight was streaming through the doorway. He must have turned over during the night, because he was facing in the opposite direction, away from Virginia.

He turned back, and felt his heart freeze.

There was no sign of Virginia. Three white skeletal figures were standing in the centre of the room. They stared at him with wide, lidless eyes set deeply in shadowed sockets. In their hands they held curved blades, like the sickles that farmers use to slice through wheat when harvesting it.

He scrabbled desperately for the door, but thin arms grabbed him from behind. The fingers looked like twigs against the sleeves of his jacket, but they were as hard as bone, and they hurt as they dug into his flesh.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Sherlock struggled wildly, trying to break free, but the fingers of his attackers were immovable. One of them held a knife to his throat. It had a tarnished blade, as if it had been buried in the ground for years. The message was clear, and he stopped struggling.

The figures turned Sherlock over unceremoniously. He noticed with a shiver of fear that their clothes were ragged and mouldy, as though they too had been underground for a while. Buried.

They bent and grabbed his feet, hauling him unceremoniously into the air. They were strong, despite their appearance. He was carried from the shelter like a sack of corn. None of them said anything, but he suddenly realized that he could hear them breathing. One of them wheezed like an asthmatic, while the others sounded just like ordinary men would if they were carrying something heavy. Dead men didn’t need to breathe, Sherlock told himself. They didn’t smell as if they were dead. Sherlock knew the cloying, awful smell of rotting flesh: he’d found enough dead animals in the woods in his time. Looking at these things, they should have reeked to high heaven, but all he could smell was sweat. So they weren’t dead men. Just men who looked like they were dead. But why? And what had they done with Virginia?

He looked down at where their thin hands were clutching at his shoulders. White marks were rubbing off on the material of his jacket. Make-up? On their hands? He breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t really thought they were dead, but it was a relief to have his deductions confirmed. He supposed it made sense: if you wanted people to think that you were dead, then you needed to look the part. White hands and white faces indicated a lack of blood circulating. If people saw them only at a distance, as Sherlock had till now, it was convincing.

They were carrying him downhill, away from Cramond. He caught sight of the occasional upside-down face as he was jolted along. This close he could see beard stubble poking through the white make-up on their cheeks and necks. He could also see how bits of thin paper had been stuck to their skin to resemble dry, peeling flesh, how the clever use of shading made it look as if their bones were poking through their skin, and how one of them had markings painted on his cheeks that, at a distance, would look like the grinning teeth of a skull. It was all theatrics and pretend. Dressing-up games.

‘Tell me where we’re going!’ he demanded.

The ‘corpse’ holding his right arm looked down at him and grinned. His teeth were stained green, like moss, but even that was make-up. ‘You come with us,’ he grunted in a voice that sounded like it was bubbling up through mud. ‘You see Clan Chief of the Dead.’

‘You’re not dead,’ Sherlock said. ‘You’re just pretending.’

The ‘corpse’ kept on grinning. ‘You sure about that?’ he asked. ‘You bet your life on it?’