Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

by Andrew Lane

  ‘This is where the boss’s sister is being kept,’ Dunlow said. His voice sounded like stones grinding together. He looked uncomfortable at being so close to a police station. ‘Let me go in and see if they’ll let you talk to her.’

  ‘Is that likely?’ Sherlock asked. ‘I mean, I’m not a relative or anything, and even if you claim I am, they’ll know as soon as I open my mouth that I’m not Scottish.’

  ‘There’s a fine trade goes on in these parts in letting citizens with spare change observe criminals in their cells,’ Dunham replied darkly. ‘The middle classes like to see the poor in police custody – it lets them sleep more securely in their beds. I’ll slip the sergeant a shilling and tell him that you’re the son of a visiting English lord. He’ll be happy to let you have ten minutes alone with her, no questions asked.’ He saw Sherlock’s shocked expression and snorted. ‘What, you think the police are any better than the criminals? The only difference is that they have uniforms and we don’t.’

  He walked off into the police station and came out five minutes later.

  ‘There’s a constable on the desk who’ll take you to the cells,’ he said. ‘Be out in quarter of an hour, otherwise they’ll want another shilling.’

  Dubiously, Sherlock entered the police station. It smelled musty, unpleasant. A uniformed constable was indeed waiting just inside the door. He had mutton chop whiskers and a bushy moustache. ‘This way,’ he said gruffly, without making eye contact. ‘Fifteen minutes to look at her and talk to her. No funny business, you hear?’

  ‘No funny business,’ Sherlock agreed, without knowing quite what he was agreeing to.

  The cells were down a set of stone steps that had been worn into curves by generations of feet. They reminded Sherlock uncomfortably of the time he had visited Mycroft in a police station in London. He hoped that this visit would have as successful an outcome as that one.

  The constable stopped in front of a door and unlocked it with a large key from a hoop on his belt. He pushed the door open and gestured Sherlock in. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he warned. ‘She spends most of her time crying, so I don’t think she’ll do anything stupid, like attack you, but you can’t tell with this sort. If she makes a move towards you, bang on the door. I’ll be just out here, waiting.’

  Sherlock entered. The door closed behind him, and he heard the key turn in the lock. He was alone with a potential murderer.

  The potential murderer was lying on a metal bed that seemed to be attached to the wall by hinges and chains. She looked up at him. She was about thirty-five years old, with hair like straw and blue eyes. There was something about the shape of her face that reminded Sherlock of her brother, although she was smaller and more delicate. Her face was dirty, and streaked with tears, and her clothes were crumpled, as if she had slept in them – which she probably had.

  ‘I don’t need a priest,’ she said. Her voice was weak, but firm. ‘I am not yet ready to make my peace with God.’

  ‘I’m not a priest,’ Sherlock said. ‘Your brother sent me.’

  ‘Gahan?’ She pushed herself upright. There was panic in her eyes. ‘He mustn’t get involved. He mustn’t.’ She glanced towards the door, as if the constable might be listening outside. ‘If the police think he has anything to do with this, they will chase him to the ends of the Earth and never rest until they catch him!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured her. ‘He’s not involved. I asked him if I could come to see you. I want to find out what happened.’

  ‘What happened?’ She looked away, eyes filling up with tears. ‘Sir Benedict is dead, and the police think I did it, sir. That’s what happened.’

  ‘And did you?’

  She looked back at him, shocked. ‘I couldn’t kill Sir Benedict! I’d worked for him for twenty years. Sir, he was like a father to me!’

  Sherlock nodded. ‘All right – then why do the police think that you killed him?’

  She put her head in her hands. ‘Because I am his cook. Or at least, I was his cook. I prepared all of his food. And he was poisoned, or at least that’s what they say. So if he was poisoned, then I must have done it. It stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But other people must have touched his food, or carried it, or been able to access it, surely?’

  She shook her head. ‘Sir Benedict was very . . . untrusting. He believed that his business rivals were out to destroy him. He was convinced that they would attack him, or poison his food if they could. There were guards all around the house to prevent anyone getting in or setting fire to the place, and he took one with him whenever he left the house. All the doors and windows were locked and barred, and the only person he trusted to cook and serve his food was me.’ She made a slight sighing sound. ‘It was like a prison sometimes, and yet I was happy there. I’d been working for him for a long time, and he knew that I would never do anything to hurt him. Besides, he put it in his will that if he died of natural causes then I was to inherit five hundred pounds. The same was true for the butler, the maids, the gardener and all the guards he employed as well.’ She sniffed. ‘He knew that nobody could pay any of us to hurt him, or to let them into the house.’ She sniffed. ‘Not that the money was the reason why I wouldn’t have done anything.’

  ‘So you prepared his food – by yourself – and you took it to him? Alone?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she confirmed. ‘And I collected all the raw ingredients myself. Bought all the herbs and vegetables and milk from the market, and picked the meat from the butchers’ slabs. And I baked all his bread myself too.’

  ‘So if the meat or the vegetables were poisoned, then anyone in the area buying them would have died as well – and nobody did.’

  ‘That’s exactly the case, sir, and that’s why I’m in here now, facing the gallows.’

  Sherlock checked his watch. Time was ticking away. Bryce Scobell was only a few hours from meeting Gahan Macfarlane. ‘And are the marketplace and the butchers’ shops the only places you got the raw ingredients?’

  ‘Yes.’ She caught herself, hesitating. ‘Except for the occasional rabbit. The gardener catches them in traps. He’d bring them to me, still warm, and I’d gut and skin them. Sir Benedict loved a bit of rabbit in cream-and-mustard sauce – ordered it a couple of times a week, he did.’ She sniffed, on the verge of tears again. ‘That was what they reckoned killed him. They fed a dog with the remains of his dinner, and the dog died as well.’

  ‘Interesting. His last meal was rabbit in cream-and-mustard sauce?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And you prepared it all yourself?’

  ‘That’s right. I bought the cream in the market, along with the mustard seeds. The gardener provided the rabbit himself. It was still warm, so I knew it had only just been killed.’

  Sherlock racked his brains for something else to ask. Nothing sprang to mind. He looked at the woman as she sat there on the hard metal bench, her face tearful, grief-stricken, and yet hopeful. She was depending on him to prove her innocent, just as Amyus and Virginia Crowe, Matty Arnatt and Rufus Stone were depending on him. He couldn’t let them down, but he couldn’t see how Aggie Macfarlane could be anything else but guilty. If what she had told him was true, then Sherlock couldn’t see any way that the meal could have been poisoned. Yet if Aggie Macfarlane was guilty, wouldn’t she have given him a story that provided some chance that the food might have been poisoned by someone else? She was likely to be convicted and hanged because of her own honesty.

  ‘I need to see the house,’ he said lamely, ‘to look at the scene of . . . of the crime. If I find anything out, I’ll let you know.’

  He left her there, in the cell, staring after him with newly kindled hope in her eyes.

  He told Dunlow and Brough that he wanted to visit Sir Benedict Ventham’s manor house next. They raised their eyebrows, but they set off without a word.

  The journey took another twenty minutes. Sherlock checked his watch at least five times, counting the minutes and the secon
ds.

  They turned off the road and into a driveway that curved up to a large, forbidding house. Instead of stopping at the front, the carriage kept going, past the house and down a side road to the back.

  ‘Servants’ entrance,’ Dunlow explained.

  They got out of the carriage, and with Dunlow in the lead and Brough bringing up the rear they walked towards a door at the back of the house. It opened as they got to it. A tall, thin man with a pencil moustache stood there, looking at them. He was dressed in striped trousers and a black jacket. His left cheek appeared to be slightly swollen, and Sherlock wondered if he had been in the middle of eating something when they turned up.

  ‘What in heaven’s name are you two doing here?’ he hissed. ‘I’ve paid your employer his blood money this week. Get out of here!’

  ‘Macfarlane wants this kid here to see the place where Sir Benedict died.’

  ‘This is not a tourist attraction,’ the man said. ‘We do not conduct sightseeing tours.’

  ‘Are the police here?’

  The butler shook his head. ‘They said they already have everything they need.’

  ‘Then there’s no reason you can’t show us the room where your boss died, and the kitchen where the meal was prepared. Or do you want to explain to my boss that you don’t want to?’

  The butler hesitated. He looked at Sherlock. ‘Just the boy, then, and only for a few minutes. No more than that.’

  Dunlow looked at Sherlock.

  ‘That should be enough,’ Sherlock said.

  The butler led the way into the house, moving from the servants’ area, where the walls needed painting and the carpet was threadbare, to the main part of the house, where the paint was immaculate and the carpets were so thick and so comfortable it was like walking on clouds. He led Sherlock into the main hall. A grandfather clock was set against one wall. It ticked loudly, counting down the seconds. The butler turned to one side, into a dining room. Sherlock noticed that he was chewing something.

  ‘This was where Sir Benedict died,’ the butler said. He nodded to a chair at the head of the table. ‘Sitting there, he was.’

  The smell of tobacco drifted across to Sherlock as the butler spoke. That explained the swollen cheek – he was chewing tobacco.

  ‘Who brought the food in?’ Sherlock asked. He already had the cook’s answer, but he wanted to check that she had told him the truth.

  ‘Aggie Macfarlane.’ The butler’s lips wrinkled. ‘Very close to Sir Benedict, she was. Too close, if you ask me. She came in carrying the plate like everything was normal, but she knew that there was poison in it.’

  ‘You’re sure she poisoned the food?’ Sherlock asked.

  The butler scowled. ‘Who else could have done it?’ he asked.

  That was a fair question, and Sherlock was asking himself the same thing. ‘What about the plate?’ he asked. ‘Could the plate have been coated with poison?’

  The butler paused before answering, and Sherlock noticed that he was shifting the chewing tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘The cook had strict instructions always to wash the plate just before she dished up the meal,’ he said eventually. ‘Everybody was aware of that. There would be no point in poisoning the plate.’ He paused, thinking. ‘And I was told that the police fed a dog with some of the food – not from the plate, but from the oven dish she’d cooked it in. The dog died. That surely must mean that it was the food that was poisoned, not the plate.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sherlock said slowly, ‘but that means the food was poisoned before it was cooked. Why poison the food and then cook it? The poison might be destroyed by the heat of the oven. It makes more sense to put the poison on the food after you’ve served it up.’ He felt a little flutter of excitement in his chest. This was the first real evidence he had that Aggie Macfarlane might actually be innocent. It wasn’t enough to clear her name with the police, but it suggested to Sherlock that he was on the right track.

  The clock in the hall made a sudden noise as the cogs and gears inside shifted. Sherlock glanced at its face. He needed to be on the right track.

  ‘I need to go to the kitchen,’ he said.

  ‘Follow me.’

  As they walked back through to the servants’ area he checked his watch. Ten thirty in the morning. Two and a half hours left – and half an hour of that would be wasted in getting back to Macfarlane’s warehouse. He was running out of time.

  The kitchen was almost identical to the one at Holmes Manor – a large table in the centre stained with years of use, a big range with plenty of oven doors, a dresser stacked with plates and dishes, a rack hanging from the ceiling where the bodies of pheasants and rabbits dangled, a large, square sink . . . all the usual paraphernalia of the culinary arts. There were no dirty plates or food-encrusted saucepans – either Aggie had tidied up as she went along or she hadn’t been arrested straight away.

  He wasn’t going to learn anything here.

  ‘The rabbit that was poisoned,’ he said. ‘I need to see where it was caught.’

  ‘That,’ the butler sniffed, ‘is not my area of expertise. My domain is indoors, not out. I will fetch the gardener.’ He walked across to a door that led outside, to the garden, and opened it. He spat the tobacco out of his mouth in a brown stream that hit the ground to one side of the door and called, ‘Hendricks! Come here!’

  The butler turned back to Sherlock. ‘Hendricks will answer any more questions you might have. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a new position to seek.’

  He walked off, leaving Sherlock alone. Sherlock stood there, in the kitchen doorway, gazing out on the well-tended garden, aware of the dark odour of the tobacco rising up from where the butler had spat it out. He felt slightly sick at the smell. He couldn’t see the point in tobacco – either smoking it or chewing it. They were disgusting habits. He had no intention of doing either when he grew up.

  A figure appeared at the end of the path, through a gap in the hedge. He was in his forties, with short salt-and-pepper hair and beard, dressed in a dark green jacket and moleskin trousers. ‘Did someone call?’ His voice was a rich Scottish brogue, completely unlike the butler’s strangled accent.

  ‘Are you Mr Hendricks?’

  ‘Just Hendricks will do.’ He glanced at Sherlock’s clothes. ‘Sir,’ he added. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Sherlock debated whether to try to explain who he was and what he was doing, but after a moment’s thought he decided just to tell the man what he wanted and leave it at that. ‘The rabbit that you caught – the last one Aggie Macfarlane cooked for Sir Benedict – I need to see where you caught it.’

  Hendricks stared at Sherlock for a moment. ‘Fair enough,’ he said eventually. ‘Best come with me then.’

  Sherlock checked his watch. This was all taking too long! Time was running short, and the lives of his friends were on the line!

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Hendricks led the way along the path and through a gap in the hedge. On the other side was the edge of a stretch of woodland, still within the estate’s boundaries. He set off, trudging with easy steps, not looking to see if Sherlock was following.

  Sherlock checked his watch again. Coming up to eleven o’clock, and all he was doing was walking in the countryside. He wasn’t going to make it!

  The gardener came to a stop by a grassy bank. On the other side of the bank the ground dropped away to a natural depression, roughly circular in shape, that was bereft of trees. Around the edges of the bank Sherlock could see dark holes – rabbit burrows, he presumed.

  He had a sudden flash of memory – the rabbit’s head in the burrow, back in Farnham. The thing that had started his journey off. It seemed so long ago now, but it had only been a few days.

  ‘This is where I laid the traps,’ Hendricks said. He wouldn’t look at Sherlock, but instead gazed into the distance. ‘Used a looped snare attached to a bent sapling. The rabbit puts its head through the snare and triggers it, and the sapling pulls the snare tight
and lifts the little critter off the ground. I check the snares every couple of hours.’

  Sherlock gazed at where the snare had been, but he wasn’t sure what it could tell him. On a whim, he moved across to the bank where the rabbit burrows were. He bent down to check the nearest one. There was no sign of a rabbit, but he did notice some plant stalks that were lying just inside the mouth of the burrow. For a moment he assumed that they were the remnants of a meal that the rabbits had brought back to the burrow, but then he realized that couldn’t be the explanation. He’d never seen rabbits move food from one place to another – they always ate wherever they could find grass growing. He bent and picked up one of the stalks. There were flowers at one end, like purple bells, and the other end had been cut. These plants had been deliberately put there, in the mouth of the burrow. But who would do that?

  ‘Do you recognize this?’ he asked, holding the stalk up where Hendricks would see it.

  ‘Foxglove,’ the gardener said, glancing at the stalk and frowning. ‘Be careful of that, sir. “Dead Man’s Bells” they call that. Just a nibble of one of them leaves can kill you. There’s some as say that just breathing in near the plant can kill you, but I don’t put much stock in that. Been walking these woods for years, I have, and never had a problem.’ He frowned ‘Not seen much foxglove neither. Quite rare round here.’

  ‘Why would rabbits be eating poisonous plants?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Surely animals avoid poisonous plants.’ He turned the stem in his hand. ‘More to the point, why would someone put a poisonous plant where a rabbit can’t help but find it?’

  ‘They do say,’ Hendricks said, ‘that rabbits are immune to foxglove.’ His face was contorted, as if he was thinking something through. ‘Don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is . . .’

  ‘If it is true,’ Sherlock said, his thoughts racing ahead of his voice, ‘then the poison in the foxglove might build up in the rabbit’s meat. That might poison anyone who ate the rabbit!’