Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm (18 page)

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.