by Andrew Lane
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.
