Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm (21 page)

He looked past Matty. A chair had been placed to one side of the three men. Rufus Stone was tied to the chair. He looked at Sherlock and smiled. The smile might have been more reassuring if there weren’t swollen lumps on his forehead and cheeks and if his fingers hadn’t been covered with blood. They looked like someone had been working on them with pliers.

‘Let me explain how this will work,’ a quiet, almost gentle voice said. Sherlock thought it was the man in the middle. His accent was similar to that of Amyus Crowe – he was obviously American. ‘I have no compunction about hurting children. I have done it before, and I will do it again. I do not enjoy it, but if it is necessary then I will cause you immense pain in order to get what I want.’

‘And what is that?’ Sherlock asked. ‘I don’t have any money, you know.’

The man didn’t laugh, but Sherlock could hear a trace of humour in his voice as he answered: ‘I have no use for your money, boy. I have more money than I know what to do with. No, I want information about your friend Amyus Crowe and his daughter, and that is something you
do
have.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ Sherlock said, trying to inject as much conviction into his voice as he could. He squinted, trying to make out some features on the man’s face or his clothes against the bright light behind him. All he could tell was that the cane the man was resting his hands on had a strangely large head on it.

‘Then you will die in agony. It is that simple. You are about to experience a great deal of pain, but the more true answers you give me, the longer you will live and the less pain you will be in. Now, I have a series of questions to ask you. They are very simple questions. You will answer them just as simply, with no attempt at lying or obscuring the truth.’

Sherlock’s gaze fell on the newspaper. He had to stop the man seeing it. ‘What happens if I don’t know the answers?’ he asked, brain racing as he tried to work out what to do. He jerked his eyes away from it. Just looking down might draw attention to it.

‘A good question,’ the man conceded, ‘and one that has exercised my mind on many occasions in the past. I have, as you can probably guess, conducted many, many interrogations like this. Fortunately I have a solution. You see, we have been watching you for some time. Several of the questions I am going to ask you, I know that you know the answers to. Several of the questions I am going to ask you,
I
already know the answers to. You, however, don’t know what I know. You can’t risk lying – that is, unless you enjoy pain. Your best option is to tell me the absolute truth. The chances of your fooling me are slight, because on some of the questions I will know, for absolute certain, if you are lying to me – even if you say, “I don’t know.” Now, are we clear about the rules?’

Sherlock thought for a moment. The way the quiet man had laid out the problem was elegant and simple. If Sherlock decided to lie, or to claim ignorance, then there was a statistical chance that he might be caught out. The things Sherlock didn’t know were how many questions the man was going to ask, and how many of those he already knew the answer to. If the answers were ten and one then Sherlock might still have a chance to keep Amyus Crowe’s hideaway secret. If the answers were ten and five, then his chances were much slimmer.

His logical mind clambered all around the problem, trying to find a way through it, but it was seamless. The man asking the questions had the upper hand. He’d thought it all through.

‘Do you understand the rules?’ the man said. His voice was just as gentle as before. ‘I will not ask again.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Sherlock said, edging his foot to one side as if shifting position to make himself more comfortable. He nudged the newspaper into one of the puddles of rainwater that had come through the holes in the ceiling.

The man turned his head slightly, so that he was looking at Rufus Stone, and something about the way the light illuminated his face puzzled Sherlock. ‘It goes without saying,’ he added, ‘that I will tolerate no interruptions from the sidelines. Are we clear?’

Stone nodded his bruised and bloody head, but Sherlock was too concerned with what was happening with the newspaper to pay attention to his friend. The water was beginning to soak into the pages, but a quick hand could pull it out of the puddle.

He risked a glance down. The ink had began to run, erasing the letters that he’d written in the margins of the page. Within a few minutes even the printed text would be indecipherable. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned his attention back to the quiet man’s face, trying to gauge whether the man had seen anything. Sherlock was suddenly struck by the fact that there was something
wrong
with his skin. There seemed to be marks on it, but he couldn’t see what they were.

‘Then let us begin.’

The man raised a hand from his walking stick. Sherlock saw with shock that the head of the cane was a golden skull, gleaming in the light from the window, but he only glimpsed it for a second before the men on either side moved forward. Stepping over Matty’s inert form they grabbed Sherlock by his arms and hauled him to his feet. The floorboards creaked and bent with the strain.

The men were both holding ropes with loops at the end, made with slip knots. One of the men – the earless one with the ponytail – threw his loop over Sherlock’s head and pulled it tight around his neck. He threw the other end of the rope over one of the bare rafters and pulled it tight. Rufus struggled against his bonds in protest, but the man nearest him casually cuffed him with the back of his hand. Rufus fell back, groaning.

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
clunk
ed 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.