Young Sherlock: Night Break

by Andrew Lane

  ‘Are you here to kill me?’ he said simply.

  She shook her head in a kindly fashion. ‘Certainly not. You have interfered with our plans on several occasions, but we bear you no ill-will. What has happened has happened. There’s no point crying over spilt milk, as my mother used to say.’ She glanced at the lemonade and an expression of concern crossed her plump face. ‘Oh dear – is that why you hadn’t poured yourself any lemonade? Did you think it was poisoned? Here – let me pour some for you!’

  She leaned forward, picked up the jug and poured lemonade into Sherlock’s glass, and then into her own. Putting the jug down she took her own glass and sipped from it.

  ‘Just to show you that it isn’t poisoned,’ she said reassuringly.

  Sherlock reached out and took his own glass. It was cold against his fingers, and the ice cubes inside chinked together. He drank. The lemonade was tart and sweet at the same time.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Did you make it yourself?’

  ‘No – I have people for that sort of thing.’ She gazed at him, and he suddenly saw a glimpse of the steel behind the cosy façade. ‘Of course, if we had wanted to poison you, we would have coated the inside of your glass with the poison and let it dry before setting the table.’

  ‘I swapped the glasses around when I sat down,’ he said calmly.

  Mrs Loran laughed. ‘Very good! No – you didn’t swap them around. We were watching, of course. But I do admire your calmness under pressure, young man. I really do.’

  ‘Why am I here?’ Sherlock asked, putting his glass back on the table. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘It’s very simple. We need your help.’

  In the following silence, Sherlock looked around. The deck where they were sitting was still completely deserted apart from the two of them. Whatever power the Paradol Chamber had, it was enough to create this buffer zone on an otherwise crowded ship. Were there chains across the deck, further down where he couldn’t see them? Were there signs saying something like Closed Due to Vital Maintenance?

  ‘What is the Paradol Chamber?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘You know what it is. We are an organization of –’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted, ‘the chamber itself. What is it? Where is it?’

  ‘Ah.’ She nodded. ‘The Paradol Chamber is the room where the Council who run its activities meet. It is a room whose walls are made from sheets of pure amber, illuminated from outside. All those entering the room are masked in the Venetian style so that nobody knows who they are. In that chamber, history is not just made, but planned.’

  ‘Where is the Chamber? Where do you meet?’

  ‘The Chamber is wherever we want it to be. It can be disassembled, moved and reassembled to look exactly the same. We never meet twice in the same place.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘This thing that is going on with the canal in Egypt, the thing that Jonathan Phillimore uncovered – you don’t want it to happen, do you?’

  Mrs Loran was silent for a while. She gazed out at the white-topped waves surrounding the ship. She seemed to be trying to decide what to say, how much to give away. ‘It does not agree with our plans,’ she agreed eventually. ‘Creation of that canal across Egypt will cause a shift in political and economic power that will benefit the Paradol Chamber. It will reduce the influence of Great Britain, and it will give our agents a faster means of travel and of conveying messages. No, we don’t want the canal to be sabotaged. We want it to be built.’

  ‘And that is what these people are trying to do, isn’t it – to sabotage it?’ he pressed.

  She nodded. ‘Even we are not sure who is behind this rather clumsy plan. Our suspicion is that it is an ad hoc group of industrialists and politicians who see their own fortunes waning if the canal is completed. They believe that if they can prevent the canal being built now, then nobody for the next century or so will be able to finance it, or will be willing to take the risk. Things will settle back to the status quo that they are comfortable with.’

  ‘Is my brother one of them?’ This was the question that had been weighing down Sherlock’s mind.

  She shook her head. ‘No, but the men he works for – the men in charge of the Foreign Office, and the men who run the Government – some of them are involved. Your brother is merely following orders. I doubt that he wants to, but he has to if he wants to keep his post and his pension.’

  ‘I presume,’ Sherlock said carefully, ‘that you are telling me all this not just for fun, but because you want me to help you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Loran said. ‘We do. Ironic, isn’t it?’ she continued. She reached out and took another sip of her lemonade. ‘You have interfered with our plans before, but this time round our interests appear to coincide.’

  ‘Don’t you have your own agents in place?’ Sherlock asked.

  Mrs Loran shrugged. ‘We did, but they were discovered and disposed of by the agents of these clumsy saboteurs. It was unfortunate – because of circumstances we didn’t have our best people in the country, and so had to rely on recruiting locals. That was a mistake.’

  ‘Jonathan Phillimore – was he one of your men?’

  ‘Oh, please!’ She raised her eyes in scorn. ‘Lemon juice as an invisible ink? Do us the honour of giving us more credit than that, young man.’

  ‘And if I do help you – what do I get out of it?’

  She stared at him. ‘Surely you are not suggesting that we pay you?’

  ‘It’s not a bad idea,’ he admitted. ‘But no – I wouldn’t accept your money. It just occurred to me that you seem to be expecting me to offer my services for free.’

  ‘You and your friends are heading to Egypt to try and find Jonathan Phillimore and to try and stop the sabotage of the Suez Canal anyway,’ Mrs Loran pointed out. ‘You can do it with our resources and assistance, or you can do it by yourselves. Which do you think gives you the best chance of success?’

  Sherlock paused just long enough that Mrs Loran began to look uncomfortable. ‘I was hoping for more than just that,’ he said.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. A favour, perhaps. You will owe me something.’

  She laughed again. She had a girlish laugh, much younger than her face. ‘Sherlock, we are a criminal conspiracy that spans the globe! We lie, cheat, blackmail and kill! What makes you think that we would honour any promise that we make to you?’

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘the only way that an organization such as yours can keep control over such distances and timescales is if you do keep your promises. Bizarrely, your people and your contacts must trust you to deliver on what you say. It’s not as if you can draw up and sign legal agreements, is it? Your people trust you to pay them if they do a good job, and to rescue them if something goes wrong that isn’t their fault. Your whole enterprise is built on trust, isn’t it? Not trust as a moral, ethical thing, but trust as something you have demonstrated in everything you do.’

  She gazed at him for a long time, as if re-evaluating him. ‘I think you may even be cleverer than your brother,’ she said quietly. ‘Or at least, you have that potential.’ Her voice became more formal, like a schoolteacher. ‘Very well – we will owe you a favour, if you help us, that favour to be repaid at some time of your choosing, in a manner of your choosing, and said favour to be of a value roughly commensurate with the size of the favour that you are doing for us.’ Her voice returned to its normal warmth and friendliness. ‘After all, we won’t give you Luxembourg in return for helping us out. Not the whole of Luxembourg, anyway. Does that satisfy you?’

  He nodded. ‘It does. So – what can you tell me that will help?’

  ‘If you try to contact the Suez Canal Company and warn them that someone is trying to sabotage their work they will just fob you off. Your best option is to go directly to the man in charge – Monsieur Ferdinand de Lesseps. He is the main architect of the canal, and the man running all the works. If anyone will listen to you, it is him. He has a villa in Ishma
ili, but you may need to use subterfuge to get in.’ She looked out across the sea. ‘If that fails, then look for Jonathan Phillimore. If you find out where he is, then you will find the conspiracy.’

  Sherlock nodded. ‘How will I get in touch with you, if I need you?’

  ‘There will always be someone watching. There is a red handkerchief in your bag. Keep it in your pocket. If you need us, take it out and hold it up. We will be there.’ She picked up her glass of lemonade and drank it. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘we should conclude our meeting. I believe there is a croquet tournament scheduled, and I wouldn’t like to delay it for too long.’

  ‘I didn’t bring a red handkerchief with me,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I know. If you had, there would have been no need for us to put one in your luggage while you were sitting here.’ She stood up. ‘I don’t know whether we will meet again or not, but rest assured that we will be watching you with interest, whatever you choose to do in the future.’

  ‘And I will be watching you,’ he said. He raised his lemonade it salute. ‘Be assured of that.’

  She gazed at him fondly, like a grandmother trying to work out what present to give to her grandson. ‘Just because we owe you a favour, young man, it doesn’t mean that we won’t kill you if you get in our way.’

  ‘As I told Mr Kyte, just after he ran into the halberd I had left for him as a trap in Galway, and just before he breathed his last breath: only I choose when I die. Nobody else.’

  He turned his head to gaze out across the ocean, not willing to engage in a staring contest, or a battle of words. They had both said their piece. When he turned back, Mrs Loran had gone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sherlock didn’t see Mrs Loran again during the trip. He managed to get a copy of the passenger list from the Princess Helena’s purser, but of course she wasn’t listed – at least, not under the name ‘Loran’. On the assumption that she was travelling under a different name he spent some time gradually identifying every woman on the ship and ticking their names off on the passenger list. After three days he had to stop – he could account for every single woman on board, and Mrs Loran wasn’t any of them. He even went as far as sneaking into those areas of the ship where passengers weren’t supposed to go – the engine room, the storerooms and so on – on the assumption that she had a base of operations down there somewhere, but there was no sign of her.

  Putting the meeting, and Mrs Loran, behind him, Sherlock continued to work with Mr Reilly. This time the emphasis was on accuracy, and he was given a curved cutlass with a basket guard around the hilt to protect his fingers in case his opponent slid their blade along his to cut his hand.

  Reilly had drawn a target diagram in ink on a large sheet that he seemed to have taken from the Princess Helena’s laundry. The target was in the shape of a person. It was attached to a wall about ten feet away from where Sherlock had to stand. Inside the circle were several straight lines crossing from one side to another.

  ‘These are “cuts”,’ Reilly announced. ‘You will notice that each cut has a number written against it on the target. The intention is that, with the sword in your right hand, you cut the air as if you were trying to cut the sheet along that very line.’

  The target also had dotted lines drawn in ink on it, and they were also numbered. These, Reilly said, were ‘guards’. They worked in a similar way to the cuts, except that rather than attempt to slice these lines, Sherlock had to hold his sword so that it blocked the likely counter-attack of his opponent. There were markings on the diagram for the cuts telling him where to start and where to finish, and for the guards telling him where the point of his blade should be and where the hand should be.

  ‘The reason why we are doing this,’ Reilly explained, ‘is that I want these movements to become second nature to you. I don’t want you to have to think about them. In a sword fight, thinking means losing. You need to be able to react instinctively, without consideration. The way the human body works, if you exhaustively rehearse a movement, like a cut or a guard, then your muscles and your mind will remember it. You won’t have to think about it when the time comes to use it: if someone comes at you from a particular direction then your body will know how to respond. If you don’t exhaustively rehearse a movement then your mind will hesitate, when confronted with an attacking move, while it works out what it should do for best effect. That hesitation will cost you your life, if the fight is real. If it isn’t, it will merely cost you victory.

  In his sword-fighting tutorials, Mr Reilly now spent some time taking Sherlock through the actual anatomy of a sword: not just the blade, the hilt and the guard, but the different parts of the blade. In particular, he made Sherlock aware of the difference between the half of the blade closest to the hilt, which he called the ‘forte’, and the half closest to the point, which he called the ‘foible’.

  ‘The intention,’ Reilly announced, ‘is that when you engage your blade against your enemy’s blade, you should see to engage his foible with your forte. This is the strongest part of the blade, whereas the foible is the weakest. It will absorb the blows through your whole body. The same holds true for your enemy.

  They spent a good hour just on the process of withdrawing a sword from a scabbard. It wasn’t just a case of pulling it out, Sherlock found. There was a proper way of doing it that stopped the blade from catching and fouling the scabbard. Unsurprisingly, just lifting the blade from the scabbard immediately placed him in a guard: that of ‘prime’ or ‘number one’ guard, which left it, and him, in a proper position from which to defend or to launch an attack. Following that, Reilly also took him through the various positions to adopt when facing an enemy: ‘recover swords’, ‘slope swords’ and ‘return swords’, as well as ‘front prove distance’ and ‘right prove distance’.

  After that, Reilly made Sherlock combine the various cuts and guards, so that they weren’t just separate, distinct elements but were combined into a flowing motion, covering – it seemed to Sherlock – all of the possible combinations and permutations in strings, like ‘cut 1’, ‘guard 3’, ‘cut 2’, ‘guard 2’, ‘guard 5’, ‘cut 4’ . . . and so on, in seemingly endless combination.

  Sometimes he would look up to see Matty watching him from the side of the room, and sometimes the two of them were alone. Matty seemed to be happy to do his own thing while he was on board the ship, and stay out of Sherlock’s way. He certainly didn’t seem to be interested in learning to fight with swords, and Reilly didn’t seem interested in teaching him.

  Over the next two days they passed the islands of Ibiza, Palma and Mahon in relatively quick succession, then later on Sardinia and Sicily, before they docked at the much smaller island of Malta. The other islands were under the control of France, Spain and Italy, of course, whereas Malta, like their previous stop of Gibraltar, was defiantly part of the British Empire.

  As the Princess Helena slowed for its approach into the Valletta waterfront area Sherlock was struck by the clean lines of the windows, the bright stonework of the walls, and the coloured doors that ran all the way along the wharf – blue signifying that fish were stored there, green for vegetables, yellow for wheat, and red for wine, according to one of the ship’s crew with whom Sherlock had talked.

  When the Princess Helena docked, Sherlock watched the gangplank in case Mrs Loran disembarked, but he didn’t see her. He had to admit that she was a much better actress than he had expected, if she had managed to disguise herself in such a way that he couldn’t identify her. The other possibility was that she had disembarked secretly on to another ship that had come alongside them without anybody noticing, but that would have implicated everyone from the Captain down in covering up such a rendezvous, and surely some of the passengers would have noticed and said something? In the end it was abundantly clear that the Paradol Chamber had resources he could only guess at.

  Malta seemed to be filled with palaces, churches and other beautiful buildings dating back hundreds of years. Sherlock onl
y had time to visit one place during the little time they spent docked, so he chose the massive baroque Co-Cathedral of St John, and he barely had time to see half of it before he had to get back to the ship.

  From Malta the SS Princess Helena kept heading east, past Crete, then bent its path southward towards the port of Alexandria in Egypt – its final destination. The weather had grown progressively warmer during the latter stages of the voyage to the point where it was uncomfortable to be out on deck during the hours around noon, when the sun was directly overhead in a pure blue sky. Hats were definitely required for the men, and parasols for the women, to prevent sunburn or heatstroke, and virtually everyone had started to take naps during the afternoon.

  During the last leg of the voyage, from Malta to Alexandria, Mr Reilly and Sherlock actually sparred: blades clashing together in mock-fights. After so many days in which he had been practising movements and stances until they became second nature, Sherlock now discovered that whenever Mr Reilly lunged or cut at him, his body instinctively responded with the correct parry or guard. Previously, Sherlock had assumed that thought and logic could counter anything, and that fighting was merely the process of having a longer reach and a quicker response, and logically anticipating his opponent’s moves. This was a revelation! His body – and potentially any body – could be trained to respond without thought: a machine driven by pure instinct. Thought wasn’t enough.

  Mr Reilly also impressed upon Sherlock the fact that any attack – thrust or cut – should increase in force and velocity as it was conducted, not decrease. Sherlock realized with shock that when he was attacking, his tendency was to put the emphasis on the initial motion, not the follow-through. Mr Reilly quickly disabused him of this notion.

  From that point, their exercises became actual fights, with no quarter given or taken. Reilly was older than Sherlock, but he was more skilled. The whole thing balanced out, meaning that they were pretty evenly matched. Their fights could go on for ten, perhaps twenty minutes, with them moving forwards and backwards in the practice room, before one of them perceived a slight advantage and instinctively took it, swords clashing, sending impacts repeatedly up Sherlock’s arm. He found himself lost, not even knowing what time it was.