Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm (20 page)

‘So Mr Crowe and Virginia are in Kirkaldy Town.’ Matty scowled. ‘That’s miles away. I thought they were supposed to be in Edinburgh.’

‘The mention of Kirkaldy is a red herring. That’s not where they are.’

‘Then where are they?’

Sherlock shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I have to decode the message.’

He looked at it again. If it had been a set of random letters or numbers then he would have tried a substitution cipher, the way that Amyus Crowe had taught him. Substitution ciphers were based around the principle of substituting one thing for another – replacing every letter
a
with a number 1, for instance, every letter
b
with a 2, and so on. Decoding them, if you didn’t know what the substitution strategy was, depended on knowing the relative frequency with which particular letters occurred in normal writing.
E
was the most common letter, followed by
t
,
a
,
i
,
o
and
n
. So all you had to do was look for the most commonly occurring letter or number, and replace that with
e
, then work your way down the list – although you did need quite a large sample of code to break in order to have a good chance of getting it right. Scanning the message, though, Sherlock realized that it wasn’t a substitution cipher. For one, it made a strange kind of sense. It read as an advertisement. Replacing the letters of a sentence or a paragraph with other letters would result in a completely scrambled set of meaningless words. So the code had to be something else. He took a pen out of his pocket and quickly scribbled down the initial letters of the words in the margin of the newspaper, but he only got a little way –
f t i p t r a r
. . . – before he realized that he was on the wrong track.

Perhaps it was the last letters, he thought. He scribbled another set of letters –
d e l e o t d x
. . . No, that didn’t look right either.

Perhaps he should start from the end, rather than the beginning. He tried both options again – first letters and last letters – but all he got for his trouble was
f i t k n u l
. . . and
e n n y r s e . . .
Unless Amyus Crowe was deliberately confusing the issue by writing in a foreign language, Sherlock was on the wrong track.

Maybe he should be looking at words rather than letters. He tried every first word of a sentence –
find tell two mr locate
– then every second word –
the us days and us
. With the proviso that the second one sounded a bit like bad poetry, it was no good.

He sighed and bit the inside of his lip, aware that Matty was intently watching what he was doing. He was running out of ideas. Maybe this thing was too complicated for him to decipher.

Something was nagging at the back of his brain. He tried to force himself to relax, to stop thinking so that the thought could work its way to the surface. He had tried first words of sentences, and second words. What if . . . what if he tried the first word of the first sentence, the second word of the second sentence, and so on?

He knew the advertisement so well by now that he could write down the words from memory.

Find us in Cramond Town
.

‘Got it!’ he whispered.

‘What?’

‘They’re in a place called Cramond,’ he said.

Matty looked dubious. ‘I thought you said Cramond was the name of the people who owned the hotel.’

‘There
is
no hotel,’ Sherlock explained again. ‘It’s a code. Mr Crowe had to get the name of the place in there, but he made it look like something else – a person’s name – and he then distracted attention from it by referring to a real place – Kirkaldy.’

‘All right – where
is
this Cramond?’

Sherlock pulled out the map he had bought from the bookshop. On the reverse side of the Edinburgh map was a map of the surrounding area. In the top right-hand corner was an index relating to a grid of letters and numbers around the edge. He scanned down the index until he found Cramond – not without a little flash of pride – and then checked the grid reference on the map. ‘It’s on the coast,’ he said. ‘Just a few miles away. We can probably get someone to take us there in a cart.’ He folded up the map and the newspaper, putting them into his pockets. He felt a sense of relief and weariness wash over him. He’d done it! He’d located Amyus and Virginia Crowe!

Now came the hard part – finding out why they had left, and persuading them to return . . .

A movement over Matty’s shoulder made him glance past his friend. Two men were approaching. One held something in his hands: it looked like an empty sack. It took a moment for Sherlock to identify him as the smallpox-scarred American he had seen in Farnham, and then again at Newcastle Station. A chill ran down his spine, and he felt his heart suddenly speed up. His eyes flickered sideways, to Matty’s face. He was just about to tell Matty to run when he noticed that the boy was staring over Sherlock’s shoulder. His eyes were wide and scared.

More men must have been coming up behind Sherlock – probably including the man with the missing ear and the ponytail. Sherlock was about to push Matty left and dive right himself when the man behind Matty realized that they’d been spotted, rushed forward and threw the sack over the boy’s head. Sherlock reached out to tear the sack away, but the world went dark as something heavy dropped over his head and covered his face. Hands grabbed him and pushed him off his feet.

CHAPTER TEN

The sack smelled strongly of pipe tobacco, and Sherlock found himself choking on a combination of the heat, the lack of air and the pungent odour. A small amount of light filtered through the gaps in the material, but not enough for him to see out. The hessian weave rubbed roughly against his forehead, his ears and the back of his neck. He could feel the skin being rubbed away, leaving sore patches behind. He was going to have some serious scrapes when he got out.

If
he got out.

His wrists and ankles had been quickly and expertly bound with rope, tight enough to cut off the blood supply. Arms were wrapped around his chest and around his legs. He was being hoicked around like a sack of barley, carried rapidly across the park before anybody spotted what was going on. The same thing must have been happening to Matty. He tried experimentally kicking out with his left foot, but the grip around his legs tightened before he could move more than an inch. It was like having leather belts strapped around him. Perhaps this was what it was like to be crushed to death by one of those big snakes they had in South America – anacondas, or pythons, or whatever they were.

He opened his mouth to yell for help, but a fist impacted beneath his ear. A red spike of agonizing pain flashed through his head like lightning, leaving a sick ache in its wake. He felt as if he was going to throw up, but he knew that if he did so with his head in the sack then he was going to have to live with the consequences, so he swallowed several times, forcing his stomach to calm down.

Tiny flecks of tobacco had got into his mouth while it was open. He could feel the strands between his lips and his teeth, and sticking to his tongue. The bitter taste made him gag again, and he desperately swallowed more saliva. He knew that people not only smoked tobacco but chewed it as well. How could they stand it?

His fingers prickled with pins and needles as the blood fought to get past the ropes that bound his wrists. The fingers themselves felt as large and as tight as sausages frying in a pan.

The men carrying him changed their grip. For a moment Sherlock wondered what they were doing, but then the grip around his chest and legs loosened and they swung him back, swung him forward again, fast, and let go. He flew helplessly through the air, not even sure which way was up and which was down, waiting what seemed like an eternity to hit – what? Grass? Pavement? The surface of a river or a canal?

Half expecting to suddenly find himself sinking in cold water, he bounced on a soft surface and rolled until he hit a wooden board at right angles. The inside of a cart lined with straw? It seemed likely. He heard something hit the straw beside him, and a second later a heavy object thudded into him with enough force to drive the air from his body in a sudden
whoosh
!

Matty.

‘You all right?’ he called through the hessian sack, but before Matty could answer something struck Sherlock in the ribs. Waves of sickening pain radiating outwards across his chest. He gasped. Matty, sensibly, didn’t reply. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was unconscious.

Not a word had been spoken by the men who had taken them, but the message was clear: stay still; don’t struggle; be quiet. Any deviation from those rules would be punished.

Still, at least they were both still together. That counted for something. While he was alive and in possession of his senses and his mind, Sherlock was confident that he could find a way out of most situations.

His deduction that they had been thrown into a cart was borne out as they moved off. The way Sherlock was lying, his head was facing in the direction of travel. He quickly worked back over his memories of the past minute or so. He’d been facing Matty, in the park, with the gate towards Princes Street off to his left. When the sack was put over his head he had been snatched off his feet and carried with his head facing forward and to the right,
away
from the gate and Princes Street. He had been thrown into the cart head first, so that meant the cart was almost certainly heading away from Princes Street, away from the centre of Edinburgh.

As they travelled, Sherlock tried to keep a running tote of the various turns they made – which direction they turned, and roughly how long it had been since the last turn. The mental effort of counting and remembering gave him something to do other than panic, and if he ever had to retrace the journey then the information might be vital.

Eventually the cart stopped. Hands grabbed Sherlock and pulled him roughly upright. He was tossed over someone’s shoulder and carried away. He could hear the footsteps, so they weren’t on grass. Stone, or hard earth? The man who was carrying him stumbled a couple of times, so perhaps he was walking across cobbles and some were loose. That was more information that might come in useful.

Sherlock’s fingers felt as if they were burning with lack of blood now. His mind was filled with images of the flesh blackening and falling off. Desperately he tried to force his mind to think about something else. The footsteps! They had changed – the man who was carrying him was walking on wood now, and the light filtering in through the gaps in the sacking was darker, cooler. He was inside some kind of building.

The sound of the footsteps on the floorboards changed, becoming more hollow. At the same time, Sherlock felt that he was being tipped up, head higher than his feet. He was being carried up a set of stairs.

At the top of the stairs things levelled out again, and the footsteps crossed more floorboards. The sound was different from downstairs, however. The floorboards creaked more, as if they were unsafe.

The man carrying him suddenly let him drop. Sherlock had less than a second to prepare himself for the impact. His left shoulder hit the floor first, and he cried out. The pain made him bite his tongue. He tasted blood.

Another impact, beside him – Matty, getting the same treatment. He didn’t cry out, but Sherlock could hear him moaning.

Something sharp and metallic slid between his palms. Before he could react, it sliced upward and the ropes around his wrists fell away. A moment later the ties around his ankles went the same way.

He reached up and pulled the sack off his head.

Steely grey light dazzled his eyes, and he blinked several times. He was in a room about the size of his aunt and uncle’s dining room, but that was where the similarity ended. This room was bare floorboards and cracked plaster walls rather than carpets and curtains. The green stain of mould bloomed across the peeling remnants of wallpaper. Holes in the walls exposed the wooden lathes beneath. Some of the floorboards were missing, and rat droppings were spread across the remainder like tiny black stones. The ceiling was largely bare of plaster, and the rafters showed through like ribs. Rain had trickled in through the holes and left puddles on the floorboards, adding to the general feeling of neglect and decay.

As Sherlock struggled to his knees the newspaper slid from his pocket and dropped to the rotting floorboards. He could see the word
Cramond
written in the margin. Horrified, he looked up. Three men were in front of a broken window, two of them standing and the one in the centre sitting with his hands on a walking stick that was set in front of him, but the way the light flooded around them left them looking like charcoal stick figures sketched on paper. Sherlock screwed up his eyes, trying to make out their faces, but it was no good. The light was too strong.

Matty was curled up a few feet away. A sack, similar to the one that had been covering Sherlock, was still tied around his head and shoulders. For a moment Sherlock couldn’t see any movement, and his heart lurched sickeningly as he wondered if his friend was dead, but then he saw that Matty was breathing shallowly. He was alive, but probably unconscious.

Given what Sherlock suspected was going to happen in the room over the next few minutes, unconsciousness seemed like a good option.