Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

by Andrew Lane

  ‘Then I suppose I’ll have to do it myself,’ Sherlock said. The words surprised him even as he heard himself saying them, but they sounded right.

  Matty was about to say something else, but up ahead Josh Harkness turned a corner out of the marketplace. He was still clutching the stolen letter in his hand. Sherlock gestured to Matty to keep quiet. Together they exited the fringes of the crowd and moved towards the corner. Sherlock sidled up to the edge of the brick wall and looked around it carefully, half expecting to come face to face with the blackmailer, but the man was up ahead, walking along an empty street. Sherlock hung back until Harkness was almost at the far end. If he and Matty started after him while he was still only halfway along, then if he turned, he would see them straight away. They would be the only two people on the street.

  Harkness got to the end of the street and turned left. As soon as he vanished from sight, Sherlock pulled Matty into the street and started running.

  It only took a few seconds for Sherlock and Matty to get to the end of the street. They did the same there as they had before, Matty hanging back while Sherlock peered around the corner. Harkness was perhaps twenty feet away, still striding along, ignoring everything around him. He was, Sherlock judged, very confident in himself.

  A smell began to prick at Sherlock’s nostrils: a sharp smell, like a combination of cleaning chemicals and something darker, like sewage. Sherlock felt his eyes watering as the vapour – whatever it was – began to irritate them.

  At the end of the street, rather than turning into another street or an alley, Harkness came to a door and opened it with a key. He stared right and left suspiciously, the stolen letter still held in his hand. Sherlock pulled back so that he couldn’t be seen, trying to suppress a sneeze that kept trying to explode out of his nose. By the time he felt confident enough to poke his head back out, the man had vanished.

  ‘What’s in there?’ he asked Matty.

  Matty poked his head around the corner as well, underneath Sherlock’s. He sniffed. ‘Tannery,’ he said firmly. ‘They get the cow hides coming in from the farms and the abattoirs, and they cure them to turn them into leather.’

  ‘“Cure” them?’ Sherlock asked. He’d heard the term before, but he wasn’t sure what it entailed.

  ‘Yeah.’ Matty glanced up scornfully. ‘You ought to get out more. “Curing” is what they do to turn skin into leather. It makes it harder, makes it last longer and stops it from rotting.’

  ‘And how do they do that?’

  ‘They scrape as much flesh as they can off the skins with sharp knives, and then they wash them with some kind of chemical stuff.’

  Sherlock sniffed again, feeling the bite of ammonia at the back of his nose and throat. ‘Yes, I can smell the chemicals.’

  Matty grimaced. ‘You can smell them all over Farnham. The chemicals they use to cure the hides are made from some pretty horrible raw materials.’

  Sherlock frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, put it this way – some bloke told me that the chemical was called “urea”.’

  Sherlock thought for a moment. Urea. It sounded innocuous. It sounded like . . . oh. Yes. It sounded like ‘urine’. He looked down at Matty, frowning. ‘Are you telling me that they tan leather using urine?’

  Matty nodded. ‘That and other stuff, but you probably don’t want to even think about that. Just take my advice – hold your nose whenever you pass by that place.’ He shook his head. ‘I heard a story about one of the blokes who worked in there. He was trying to mix the skins around in the big tank they have, using a long stick, but he overbalanced and fell in.’

  Sherlock felt his eyes widen. ‘Fell into the . . . ?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He drowned.’

  ‘Drowned in . . . ?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He shuddered. ‘When I die I want to die quietly, in my sleep. Not drowning in a bath of—’

  ‘We’ve got to get in there,’ Sherlock said decisively.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, we’ve got to get in there.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Josh Harkness went in there.’

  ‘Yes. I know. That was my point. Not only does that place smell worse than the wooden outhouse you rescued me from in that American railway station last year – which, by the way, smelled like someone had got stuck and died – but it’s also got inside it the most dangerous man within a hundred miles. There are times when I wonder about you, Sherlock.’

  Sherlock sighed. ‘Look, I wish it wasn’t necessary, but he’s got some information about my family. He’s blackmailing my aunt and uncle. They’re nice people. They’ve never done anybody any harm, and they’ve looked after me and fed me for over a year now. I owe it to them to do something.’ He gazed down the street, feeling a grim expression settle across his face. ‘I’ve decided that I don’t like blackmailers.’

  ‘All right.’ Matty looked around. ‘Going through that door would be a waste of time. Harkness probably locked it behind him, and even if he didn’t we don’t know where it opens out. Might be right into a room full of people. There’s a broken window round the corner. We could probably get in that way.’

  ‘How come you know there’s a broken window round the corner?’

  Matty looked at Sherlock with exasperation. ‘I know where all the broken windows in Farnham are – just in case I need them. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that people leave out on kitchen tables. Although in this case I decided never to use the window as soon as I found out what was in there and who owned it.’

  Sherlock frowned. ‘I wonder why Harkness doesn’t get it repaired.’

  Matty shrugged. ‘Maybe he knows that nobody in their right mind would ever burgle the place, knowing who he is, an’ all. Maybe it lets some fresh air inside. Lord knows, it needs a stiff breeze running through.’

  Sherlock nodded, and led the way around the corner, walking along the street and past the closed door through which Harkness had entered the building. He deliberately didn’t look sideways just in case the door was open a crack and Harkness was looking out, watching for people following him. The confidence with which he’d walked away from the market suggested that he didn’t expect to be followed or didn’t care if he was, but Sherlock couldn’t take the chance. Maybe the man was trickier than he looked.

  Sherlock’s skin crawled as he passed the door. He half expected it to spring open. He breathed a silent sigh of relief as he left it behind him and reached the next corner.

  Matty was right beside him. Together they turned into a deserted cobbled alley.

  The wall of the tannery formed one side of the alley. Sherlock could see the window that Matty had mentioned. It was about eight feet off the ground, and the glass was cobwebby. The lower right-hand pane was missing.

  The smell emanating from the hole in the window made Sherlock want to turn around and be sick. Instead, he deliberately clenched his stomach muscles and swallowed a couple of times. He couldn’t afford to let his body betray him. He had work to do.

  He glanced at the window: too high for him to pull himself up, and the plaster of the wall looked as if it would crumble under his feet if he tried to get purchase against it. He had to think of another way to get through.

  ‘I’ll boost you up on my shoulders,’ he said to Matty. ‘You open the window and get in, then you’ll have to pull me up.’

  ‘Not going to work,’ Matty said firmly. ‘Take it from an expert at getting into buildings. I can get up and in the window, no problem, but I can’t take your weight for long enough to pull you in after me.’ He grimaced. ‘We’ll have to do it the other way round. I’ll bend over – you climb on my back, get in the window and pull me up and in.’

  Sherlock’s gaze moved between the high window and Matty’s small form. He nodded reluctantly. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want to hurt you.’

  Matty shrugged. ‘Stuff happens,’ he said casually
. ‘But bruises and scratches heal. Frankly, if your boot in my face is the worst thing that happens to me today, I’ll be as happy as Larry.’

  ‘Who’s Larry?’ Sherlock asked.

  Matty stared at him. ‘It’s just an expression,’ he said. ‘People say it all the time.’

  ‘I’ve never heard it.’

  ‘As I said, you should get out more. Mix with people.’ He smiled. ‘Now come on – you’re wasting time.’ He bent over, bracing his hands against his thighs. ‘Get up there quickly. You’re just as thin as you were when we first met, but I think you’ve put on some muscle in the meantime, and muscle is heavy.’

  Before he could reconsider, Sherlock put his right knee on to Matty’s back and then brought his left foot up, boosting himself until he was standing upright. Matty grunted, but his back remained steady. Quickly Sherlock reached in through the hole in the window and felt around for the catch. He undid it, then, pulling his hand back, slid the window open. He jumped for the opening, feeling Matty move beneath his feet as he did so. Sherlock’s stomach caught against the window frame, and he wriggled inside. The wood scraped against his skin. Before he could fall to the floor, he caught himself and crouched, looking around.

  He was in a small room that was empty of people but filled with boxes. Up against one wall was a wooden chute like a child’s slide, set on its end. The floor was about five feet below the edge of the windowsill – obviously built up a couple of feet from where the ground was. That made things easier. He lowered himself to the floorboards, turned and leaned out of the window. Matty was looking upward expectantly. When he saw Sherlock he extended his hand. Sherlock reached down and pulled him up. His friend was surprisingly heavy, and Sherlock felt the muscles in his back protesting, but he managed to haul the boy in through the window without causing himself permanent damage.

  Together they moved past the boxes to where a door interrupted the wall. It was closed. Sherlock turned the knob and edged it open an inch.

  Through the gap he saw a large room that occupied the centre of the building. A raised walkway ran around the edge of the room, with several doors leading off and a gap on the right that presumably led to the door to the street, but most of it was at the same level as the ground outside. In the middle of the room were four wooden vats, like the bottom halves of enormous barrels. Inside each one was a liquid. In two of the barrels the liquid was discoloured and lumpy, like soup, with bubbles rising slowly to the surface, but in the other two it was clearer, more like water.

  The smell rising from the vats was so strong that Sherlock could swear he saw the air itself rippling above them.

  ‘I ain’t going to eat for a week now,’ Matty complained in a whisper.

  ‘Breathe through your nose,’ Sherlock suggested.

  ‘I am. What I need to do is breathe through my ears.’

  There was no sign of Josh Harkness, but there were two other men in the room. They were moving from vat to vat, using wooden poles as long as their bodies to swirl the contents around. Each time they did so, the smell got momentarily worse.

  ‘I know those blokes,’ Matty said. ‘They go round town collecting cash for Harkness. They’re bad news.’

  Sherlock looked at the various closed doors. One of them presumably sheltered Josh Harkness. He didn’t dare explore until he knew where the blackmailer was.

  As the thought crossed his mind a door across the other side of the room opened and Harkness emerged. He wasn’t holding the letter any more.

  ‘Keep stirring them leathers,’ he yelled at the men by the vats. ‘That last batch came out patchy and baggy. I ain’t paying you to stand around doing nothing.’

  ‘It ain’t got nothin’ to do wiv us stirrin’ or not stirrin’, boss,’ one of the men yelled back. ‘It’s got to do with the quality of them skins. The cows you’re usin’ are’s old as my gran. Their skins are just as baggy an’ just as blotchy. You want better leathers, you get better skins for us.’

  ‘Don’t give me none of your lip!’ Harkness shouted. ‘If you think you can do it better, then you set up your own tannery! Until then, you work with whatever you’re given!’

  The men shrugged, looked at each other and got back to stirring. Harkness glowered at them for a few moments, then stomped along the raised walkway to where some steps led down into the centre. He walked over to one of the vats and looked inside, having to stand on his toes to do so. The smell didn’t seem to bother him.

  ‘There’s not enough skins in here,’ he shouted. ‘Throw some more in.’

  The two men headed over to an area hidden from Sherlock’s view by the vats. Harkness stomped across to join them. For a moment the room seemed empty.

  Sherlock took his chance. He quickly and quietly raced out on to the wooden walkway and ran along it to the door from which Harkness had emerged moments before. Matty followed silently.

  He got to the door, quickly opened it and slipped inside, closing it behind him before the three men could re-emerge from behind the vats. Part of his mind, the emotional part, worried about how he was going to get out again, but the rest of it, the logical part, told him that if the men had disappeared once then the chances were that they would again. All he had to do was wait. For now, the important thing was to search the room for its secrets.

  He looked around. One wall had a set of poles leaning against it. They had hooks on the end – presumably for pulling hides out of the vats. The other walls were lined with shelves, and each shelf had several cardboard boxes on it. Written on the boxes were letters: A, B, C, and so on. He went to the first box, pulled it from the shelf and took the lid off.

  The box was filled with paper: newspaper clippings, letters, official-looking documents and the occasional daguerreotype photograph. He scanned a couple at random. The newspaper clippings were a strange mixture of reports on criminal activity – burglaries, stabbings and so on – and reports of a more social nature – births, marriages and deaths. The official documents were much the same – some court reports or witness statements, with a smattering of notarized statements on legal paper, and some certificates of birth or marriage. One or two appeared to have been torn directly from church registers. The letters ranged from handwritten declarations of love or hatred to typed proposals of business, along with a couple of invitations to duels. Some of the photographs were simple, innocent portraits, usually with a note of the person’s name on the back, while others were the kind of thing that made Sherlock suddenly turn them over in embarrassment. In total, the box was a complete cross section of human life.

  He thought for a moment. Although most of the stuff in the box – with the exception of some of the photographs – was completely innocent, it presumably meant something more serious if taken in context. The letter to the housemaid at Holmes Manor from her boyfriend – which Sherlock assumed was now in another box somewhere in the room – was just a simple declaration of love on the surface, until you knew who had written it – the Mayor’s son, a man out of the housemaid’s class. The same must be true of everything else. A birth could be a simple birth – or not, if the mother was not married. That would be scandalous. A marriage could be quite innocent – unless the groom had been married before and his wife was still alive. That would be bigamous. Even a death – especially a death – could be suspicious if there were relatives who would inherit money in the will. That might be murder.

  He looked around the room grimly. The contents of those boxes could destroy lives quickly if they were made public, but they would just destroy lives more slowly if they weren’t. Josh Harkness would bleed money from the people he was threatening until they were destitute, living on the streets.

  His eyes fixed on the box labelled H. Somewhere in there was the secret that Mrs Eglantine had discovered about the Holmes family. He could, if he wanted, quickly take a look. Find out what it was that she knew – a secret so powerful that his aunt and uncle would rather keep the poisonous viper that was Mrs Eglantine close to their bosom than
get rid of her and risk its exposure.

  Or he could destroy that box, along with all the rest of them, and free hundreds of people from misery.

  Put that way, was there even a choice to make?

  The only question was: how?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sherlock knew that he had to use the tools to hand to destroy the letters, the photographs and the other documents. There were too many boxes for him and Matty to remove from the tannery, and they’d be spotted quickly if they even tried. No, he had to destroy them on the premises.

  But how? He supposed he could set a fire. That would destroy Harkness’s treasure trove of blackmail material, sure enough, but it would also destroy the building, and probably spread to the ones on either side. There was a good chance that people might die, and Sherlock didn’t want that weighing on his conscience. For a moment he felt paralysed, brain whirling as it sorted through the various things that he’d seen in the short time he and Matty had been inside the tannery. Then it struck him: the vats! He could dump the boxes into the vats! If the alkaline chemicals didn’t bleach the ink off the pages or dissolve them into their constituent parts, then they would become sodden and disintegrate of their own accord. There was something poetic about using one part of Josh Harkness’s little empire to destroy another.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

  ‘Thank God,’ Matty responded. ‘I’m on the verge of passing out, thanks to the smell.’

  ‘No,’ Sherlock clarified, ‘I meant that it’s time to destroy all this stuff.’

  Matty just stared at him.

  ‘We can’t let Harkness get away with it,’ Sherlock said insistently. ‘He’s slowly destroying people’s lives.’

  ‘And he’ll destroy our lives a lot quicker than that if we do anything to cross him.’ Matty shook his head in despair. ‘The man’s an animal! He’s more dangerous than a rabid badger backed into a corner!’

  Sherlock shook his head stubbornly. ‘I don’t care. I can’t leave here and then walk around town knowing that every third or fourth person I see is paying him to keep their secrets quiet. People have a right to privacy.’