Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud Part 4

The driver nodded his head slightly, indicating the road ahead. He didn't bother looking at Sherlock, although he did at least pull on the reins to slow the single horse down.

'Which way is Holmes Manor?' Sherlock called up.

The man tilted his head and indicated the road behind with a slight jerk.

'Can you take me to town?' he asked.

The man considered for a moment, then jerked his head towards the back of the cart. Taking this to be a 'yes', Sherlock climbed in. The cart sped up as he did so, almost causing him to fall off again. Instead, he tumbled forward into a ma.s.s of straw.

The driver didn't talk at all during the journey, and Sherlock found he himself had nothing to say. He spent his time thinking alternately about the dead man, the mysterious rider and the bizarre but engaging figure of Amyus Crowe. For a place that had appeared at first to be a h.e.l.lhole of boredom, Holmes Manor and its immediate locality were turning out to be anything but.

His thoughts drifted to the story that Matty had told him about the dead body that had been carried out of the house in Farnham, and the strange cloud that Matty said he had seen floating out of the window. Sherlock had dismissed the story at the time at least, the bit about the cloud but now he was having second thoughts. If Amyus Crowe was right about diseases being caused by 'minute creatures' which could be transferred from person to person then was that what he and Matty had seen a cloud of these minute, disease-causing creatures?

It didn't make sense. n.o.body had ever mentioned seeing these clouds of creatures before. Surely Sherlock and Matty couldn't have been the only people to come across them? Something else was going on.

It was only when the cart juddered to a halt that he realized they were in Farnham. The driver sat as still as a statue, waiting for Sherlock to clamber off, and then set off again without a backwards glance while Sherlock was still fumbling in his pockets in search of some loose change, expecting to have to pay the man something for his trouble.

Sherlock looked around. He recognized the street: it was the main one that ran through the centre of Farnham. Up ahead was a large, square red-brick building surrounded by arches that Matty had told him was a grain store. He glanced around; the market town was going about its normal business, with people walking along and across the street, stopping at shop windows or at stalls selling pastries, talking with each other or minding their own business. A greater contrast to the dark solitude of the woods it would be difficult to find.

It might have been his imagination, but small knots of people appeared to be forming on street corners and outside shops. Their heads seemed to be bowed together, as if they were talking in lowered voices, and they were glancing at every pa.s.ser-by with suspicion in their eyes. Were they talking about the possibility of plague in the village? Were they scanning every pa.s.sing face for signs of swollen buboes or the red flush of fever?

Sherlock quickly ticked off the list of places where Matty might be found. At this time the market stalls were still an hour or two from closing, so there was little chance that he was lurking around hoping for fruit or vegetables to be thrown away in his direction, and according to the railway timetable that Sherlock had carefully memorized, in case he couldn't stand it at Holmes Manor any more, there weren't any more trains until the evening. Matty might, he supposed, be lurking outside one of the local taverns, hoping for the odd penny thrown by one of the drunken customers.

In the end, Sherlock realized that he didn't have enough evidence to work out where where Matty might be. As Mycroft had said: 'Theorizing without evidence is a capital mistake, Sherlock.' Instead, he made his way through the streets until he came to the place that Matty had pointed out to him the house where the first man had died, and the cloud of death had crawled out of the window, up the wall and across the roof. Matty might be. As Mycroft had said: 'Theorizing without evidence is a capital mistake, Sherlock.' Instead, he made his way through the streets until he came to the place that Matty had pointed out to him the house where the first man had died, and the cloud of death had crawled out of the window, up the wall and across the roof.

The building seemed abandoned. Doors and windows were tightly shut, and someone appeared to have nailed a sign to the door. Sherlock a.s.sumed that it was a warning that someone had died from a fever within. He felt conflicting emotions within himself: part of him wanted to go inside and take a look around, see if there were any traces of the yellow powder in there, but another part, a more primitive part, was scared. Despite the brandy-soaked handkerchief that he still had balled up in his pocket, he didn't want to expose himself to possible contagion.

The door of the house opened a crack, and Sherlock moved back into the shadows of a doorway across the road. Who was in there? Was someone risking cleaning it up, or had someone moved in, or back in, regardless of the risk? For a few moments the door didn't open any further, and Sherlock felt, rather than saw, a figure in the darkness beyond, watching. He pushed himself further back into the shadows, heart pounding although he didn't know why.

Eventually the door opened further, just enough for a man to slip through. He was dressed in various shades of grey, and he glanced both ways along the street before slipping out. He carried a sack in one hand.

And the hand that held the neck of the sack was covered in a fine yellow powder.

Intrigued by the powder and by the man's att.i.tude, which indicated that he didn't want to be noticed leaving the house, Sherlock watched as he followed the road around to where it joined a larger street. The man turned left. Sherlock waited a few moments, then went after him. He didn't know what was going on, but he intended to find out.

There was something strangely familiar about the man. Sherlock had seen him somewhere before. He had a narrow, weasel-like face and prominent teeth that had been stained yellow with tobacco. And then Sherlock remembered the man had been at Farnham station when he and Matty had been there. He had been loading crates of ice on to a cart.

The man's path took him from one side of Farnham to the other. Sherlock stayed behind him all the way, ducking into doorways or behind other people if he thought the man was going to turn round. Eventually the stranger turned into a side road that Sherlock recognized. It was the one that he and Matty had been in earlier that day, where they had almost been run down by the carriage containing the strange pink-eyed man.

The man sidled along a high plastered wall, up to the wooden gates from which the carriage had emerged, and knocked a complicated rhythm that slipped out of Sherlock's mind even as he tried to memorize it. The gates creaked open and the man slipped inside. The gates closed again before Sherlock had a chance to see what was inside.

He looked around, frustrated. He really wanted to get a look over the walls to see what was inside, but he couldn't see how. It was all connected together somehow the two deaths, the moving clouds, the yellow powder but he couldn't see the threads that made up that connection. The answers that he wanted could be behind that wall, but they might as well have been in China.

The sun was low and red in the sky. It wouldn't be long before Sherlock needed to be back at Holmes Manor, getting cleaned up ready for dinner. He didn't have long. Desperately, he looked around. Behind him, where the wall turned the corner, much of the plaster had crumbled away, battered over the years by pa.s.sing carts and barrows and further eroded by rain. The rough brick exposed by the missing plaster might just be enough to give Sherlock a foothold, boosting him up on to the wall.

It was worth a try.

Without giving himself time to think, Sherlock slid along to the corner and looked around. n.o.body was watching. He reached as high as he could, letting his fingers find a niche between two bricks, then scrabbled with his right foot to find an equivalent purchase. When he thought he was ready, he boosted himself up. The muscles in his legs flared with the sudden activity, but he wasn't going to give up now. He threw his left hand up as high as it would go, and felt it catch the top of the wall. Holding on as tightly as he could, he brought his left foot up and then dragged it down the wall until it caught on something. He s.h.i.+fted his weight from his right foot to his left, hoping that the brickwork wouldn't crumble away. It held, and he simultaneously pulled with his left hand and pushed with his left foot. His body sc.r.a.ped up the wall, and then miraculously he found himself lying flat out on the top of the wall, teetering on the edge of falling inside the yard that was revealed beneath him.

CHAPTER FIVE.

From his position lying on top of the wall, Sherlock could see the entire yard spread out before him. There was n.o.body in sight. A single-storey windowless wooden building more of a barn than anything else dominated the ground, and the area around it had been left to dirt and weeds. Multiple wheel ruts linked the huge wooden doors at the front of the building to the gates in the wall. Some of them were barely more than scratches in the earth while others were deep and still filled with water from recent rain. Sherlock decided that carts or wagons were arriving at the barn lightly laden, making the shallow ruts, and leaving containing something heavy, causing them to sink deeper into the soft ground. But what was being stored or made in the barn, and was it somehow linked to the death of the man that Matty had seen, and to the yellow powder?

Sherlock swung a leg over the wall, preparing to lower himself to the ground, but a sudden scuffling made him pull back rapidly. Something dark and fast raced out of the shadows around the building on a blur of legs. Sherlock could see a large, heavily muscled head with tiny ears that were laid back along the skull and a small body covered with bristles. The dog didn't bark at him, but growled instead a deep, rasping sound like a saw biting into hard wood. Spittle dripped from its exposed teeth. It skidded to a halt just beneath the spot where Sherlock was lying and proceeded to watch him intently, shuffling from side to side on its stumpy little legs, tail held low.

He had to get into that barn. There was a puzzle here, and Sherlock hated unsolved puzzles. But the dog looked hungry and trained for aggression.

He looked back over the other side of the wall, where he had climbed up. Was there another way in? Improbable, and the dog would just follow him round, now it had his scent. Could he make friends with it? Not likely, certainly not without getting down from the wall, and the penalty for failure was too terrible to contemplate. He could find a loose brick or a large stone and drop it on top of the animal, but that seemed unnecessarily brutal. Could he drug it somehow? He supposed he could run back to Farnham Market and buy a chunk of meat with what little money he had, but then what?

He scanned the ground on both sides of the wall, looking for something that might help. In the corner where the wall met the ground, close to the gates, he spotted something like an abandoned fur hat. It was the dead badger that he'd seen earlier. Quickly he half-jumped and half-fell back down the wall and ran the few steps to where the badger's body lay curled up. He picked it up. The fur was dry and dusty, and the body weighed almost nothing, as if whatever vital spark had fled when it died had actually had a ma.s.s. He could smell something rancid and disgusting. With a muttered apology he bent slightly, extended his arm and pitched the badger over the wall. Its stiff limbs splayed out as it flew, pinwheeling around. It vanished behind the bricks, and Sherlock heard a thump as it hit the ground. Seconds later came the sound he'd been hoping for: the rush of paws on dry earth and snarling as the dog got its teeth into the dead body. Sherlock quickly scrambled up the wall again and glanced over. The dog was holding the badger down with its front paws and was wrestling its body back and forth with its strong jaws, tearing chunks out of it. As he dropped down on to the ground the dog stopped abruptly, glanced suspiciously over at him, and then kept on pulling at the dead creature. Either it had decided Sherlock was its friend for giving it such a great toy to play with, or it was just saving him for later. Sherlock fervently hoped the former explanation was correct.

Quickly, before the dog tore the badger into fragments too small to be of interest, he sprinted across the yard and up to the barn. There was a side door set in one of the walls, and he opened it a crack. Silence and darkness. He pushed the door further open and slipped inside, closing it behind him.

It took a few moments for Sherlock's eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they had he saw that the s.p.a.ce inside the barn was illuminated by skylights. Sunlight shone in through the dirty gla.s.s, making diagonal pillars of light that appeared to hold the roof up in an illusory scaffold. The place smelt of old, dry earth and sweat, but underneath those smells was another one something sweet and flowery. There were piles of boxes and crates in various places around the building, and across on the far side several men were loading them on to a cart. The man he had followed through Farnham was one of them. The canvas sack he'd been carrying had been thrown roughly to the ground nearby. A horse had been attached to the shafts of the cart, and was quietly eating hay from a nosebag that had been strapped to its head. A second cart was parked over to one side of the barn, its shafts pointing down and resting on the ground.

A pile of empty wooden crates lay in a rough stack nearby, and Sherlock moved silently over to hide behind them. He watched intently as the men stacked up the cart with what looked like the final load. They were cursing and jostling each other as they picked the boxes up and moved them one by one on to the cart. Judging by the dirt on their clothes and the sweat on their faces, they had been working like that for a while.

The man who Sherlock had followed through Farnham helped with the last box, then brushed his hands together and wiped them down his waistcoat as if he'd been working there all day. His hands left yellow stains behind as the dust whatever it was transferred to the coa.r.s.e material. One of the other men a big bruiser with a shaven head, tattoos that covered his arms down to the wrists like sleeves and a lit oil lamp hanging from a strap on his belt glanced scornfully at him.

'Enjoy your little excursion?' he asked with mock interest.

'Hey, I was workin' too,' the first man replied.

'What's the story with Wint's gaff?'

The new arrival shook his head. 'The Baron was right 'e were taking stuff from us on the sly and tryin' to sell it on. There was jackets and trousers all piled up beside 'is bed.'

'Anyone see you?'

'n.o.body. I was like a rat.'

'You got it all?'

The man nodded towards the canvas sack. 'I collected it all together and put it in there.'

'All right throw that on the cart as well.'

As the newcomer went over to pick up the sack, his burly co-worker called after him: 'Did you burn Wint's gaff?'

The newcomer shook his head. 'Didn't see the need.'

The burly man shrugged. 'You can explain that to the Baron when you see him.'

'Hey, Clem we're not gonna use the other one,' a man shouted, jerking his head towards the spare cart.

The burly man half-turned towards the gang of workers. 'Leave it,' he said. 'Chances were we weren't going to need it anyway, but the Baron don't like to take chances. A cautious man, is the Baron.' He turned back to the newcomer and pointed at the powdery yellow stains on the man's waistcoat. 'You got some of their stuff on you. Wint's gaff'll be contaminated too. The Baron'll want it burned, just like he does this place. Get rid of any evidence.'

The newcomer looked down at his waistcoat. 'What is is this stuff?' he asked. this stuff?' he asked.

His co-worker laughed with a sound that was a cross between a snort and a cough. 'Best not to know,' he said.

The newcomer looked at his hands. He glanced back at the burly man, and his face was suddenly pinched and white. 'Hey, Clem, does this mean what happened to Wint'll happen to me?'

Clem shook his head. 'Not if you wash it off properly, like the Baron told us.' He turned towards the other men, who were standing around talking now that the boxes had been loaded on to the cart. 'All right, you lot time to go. Martin and Joe you're with the cart. You know where to take it. Stouffer and Flynn you head off after the Baron.' He turned to the newcomer. 'Denny, you and me'll sort this place out. Burn it down. Place is so big that there's no knowing what we might have left behind.'

The newcomer Denny looked around at the barn. 'Do we have to?' he asked plaintively. 'Just think what we could do wiv this place once the Baron's finished wiv it. Set up a business, maybe, or turn it into the biggest tavern in the area. We could have girls singin', and dancin', an' everything. Seems a shame jus' burnin' it.'

Clem's face contracted into a thunderous scowl. 'You want to go and explain your little scheme to the Baron, you be my guest. Me, I'm gonna follow the instructions I was given.'

Denny seemed to shrink under the other man's heavy gaze. 'I was only askin',' he said.

One of the men over by the cart put his hand up to attract Clem's attention. 'When do we get paid?' he asked.

'When the gear's been delivered,' Clem growled. 'Everyone meet up tomorrow, at Molly's tavern. I'll get the cash from the Baron and divide it out then.'

'And how do we know you'll be there?' another man asked, half-sticking his hand up and then thinking better of it.

Clem stared the man down. 'Cos the Baron's buying our silence, remember yours and mine. If you don't get paid and decide to tell someone about what we've been doing the Baron'll come looking for me, and that's something I don't want. Everyone gets paid, fair and square, all right?'

The man nodded, mollified. 'All right.'

Sherlock drew himself further behind the stack of crates as the men dispersed, two of them getting on to the cart and two of them opening the ma.s.sive wooden doors to let it out, leaving Clem to supervise and Denny to stand around looking lost. The man driving the cart made a clicking noise and flicked the horse's rear end with a stick, and it started to walk off, still eating from the nosebag of hay.

Clem walked towards the large wooden doors, the oil lamp that was clipped to his belt banging against his thigh as he moved. Without turning his head, he jerked his thumb over towards where Sherlock was hiding. 'Lock that door,' he growled, 'then meet me round the front.'

Sherlock's heart skipped a beat as Denny started walking towards where he was hiding. If he came round the pile of crates he was sure to see Sherlock, and if that happened then Sherlock didn't give much for his own chances of survival. He s.h.i.+fted his position, tensing ready to run. Could he make it to the side door before Denny could catch him? He wasn't sure, but he was even less sure that there was any alternative.

Denny came level with the boxes, the dirty, sweaty smell of his clothes wafting around him, and Sherlock cast a quick glance towards Clem, trying to work out whether the burly man was close enough to help Denny catch him. Clem was almost at the main doors now. Sherlock quickly ducked round the side of the crates. As Denny pa.s.sed by, Sherlock slid back round. If Clem turned his head before he went out of the main doors then he would see Sherlock, as plain as anything, but he didn't. Sherlock watched, breath caught in his throat, as Clem vanished into the bright afternoon suns.h.i.+ne outside. Moments later one of the doors began to close, its rough wooden edge dragging in the dirt and its rusty hinges squealing.

Sherlock glanced over the top of the crates. Denny had just checked that the side door Sherlock had entered through was properly closed, and was about to throw the bolts that would make sure n.o.body could get in. As soon as he left, Sherlock would be able to throw the bolts again, open the door and make his escape.

Denny picked a padlock up off the floor and slipped it through a loop in the topmost bolt, and then again through a metal ring that had been attached to the doorframe. The padlock shut with a definitive click click. The key projected from the padlock, and Denny pulled it out and slipped it into his pocket. Then he turned, whistling, and headed across the barn.

Sherlock was aware of his heart pounding and his palms becoming clammy. He glanced over his shoulder briefly at the now padlocked door. It looked solid. He wasn't going to get out that way; at least, not in a hurry and not without making a lot of noise. He would just have to wait until Denny and Clem had left, hold on for another five minutes, then go out the same way that they had.

Denny got to the main doors just as Clem was pus.h.i.+ng the second one shut from the outside. The rectangle of light that showed through from the yard grew narrower and narrower. It shrank to a bar, and then a line, and then nothing. The doors closed with a thud thud.

Sherlock's heart shrank and darkened in the same way as the light had when he heard the unmistakable sound of a heavy wooden bar being slotted into place across the doors. There was no way out!

For a few moments he could just make out the two men talking, but he couldn't hear what they were saying. He straightened up, ready to move across to the main doors to see if he could make out any words, but a sudden sound stopped him in his tracks.

It was the sound of Clem's oil lamp being smashed against the doors.

Gla.s.s shattered, and liquid splattered across wood. Silence, for a moment, and then an ominous crackling as the flames from the wick of the lamp took hold of the oil-soaked wood.

Clem and Denny had set fire to the barn.

Panic threatened to overwhelm Sherlock. He wanted to run, but he didn't know where to go, so he ended up just twitching back and forth on the spot. A taste like sour metal flooded his mouth, and his heart was pounding so hard that he could feel the pulse in his throat and his temples. For a minute or so he couldn't think straight, couldn't connect two thoughts together in a sensible way, but gradually he quashed the panic by repeating to himself that there had to be a way out. All he had to do was to work out what it was. He could feel his racing heart gradually slowing down to normal and the twitching in his legs and arms receding.

The sudden smell of smoke began to fill the barn. Tiny flames were beginning to find their way like curious fingers through the joints between the boards of the doors.

Think, he told himself. Think harder than you've ever done in your life.

He looked carefully around the barn. Most of the boxes had been taken away by Clem and the rest of the men, and Sherlock still didn't know what had been inside. The crates he had hidden behind were still stacked over by the locked side door, but they were empty.

He ran across to the side of the barn and threw his shoulder against the wooden wall. The wood shook under the impact, but nothing bent or broke. He tried again. Nothing. If he was intending to break it down he was going to need an axe, or a hammer, or something. Not a shoulder.

Desperately looking around the barn for some kind of tool he could use to break the wall down, or prise the boards apart, his gaze suddenly snagged on the spare cart that had been left, abandoned, to one side. It looked functional, and the man, Clem, had indicated that it would have been used if they'd had enough boxes. Could Sherlock somehow use the cart to get out? Could he even move move it? it?

There was only one way to tell. Sherlock ran across and grabbed one of the shafts that a horse would have been strapped between to get the cart moving. It came up easily in his hands. He tugged experimentally on it, but the cart didn't move. He tugged again, harder, and the cart s.h.i.+fted fractionally, but the other shaft was still resting on the barn floor and Sherlock's efforts were just pus.h.i.+ng it further and further into the dirt and stopping the cart from moving.

Logic. Use logic. If he couldn't pull the cart, perhaps he could push it. Abandoning the shaft, Sherlock threw his weight against the front of the cart, where the driver would sit. It moved! The entire cart rolled a few inches backwards! He thanked whatever deity was watching over him for the mysterious Baron, whoever he was, who had so impressed his workers with his cautiousness that they had not only arranged for a spare cart but kept the axles greased as well. Then he took a few paces backwards and rushed at the cart, thrusting his shoulder hard against the wood. It was the same shoulder he had thrown against the barn wall, and he felt a spike of red-hot pain flash downward through his arm and up his neck, but the cart rolled a couple of feet backwards before coming to a halt.

Smoke drifted across Sherlock's face, making his eyes sting. He turned, and saw that flames were licking their way up the main doors and on to the lintel. Logically, the barn doors would be weakened by the fire and would be the ideal place to smash the cart through, if he could move it far enough and fast enough, but he would have to turn the cart around in order to aim it at the doors, and besides, the flames scared him. His only realistic chance was to try and smash the cart through the wall at the back of the barn.

Ignoring the sharp pain that radiated through his shoulder, Sherlock braced his hands against the front of the cart and pushed his feet into the soft dirt of the barn floor, knees bent. His body was almost horizontal, and he exerted every sc.r.a.p of energy he had more than he had ever used playing rugby football on the fields of Deepdene School for Boys, more than he had ever used fighting in the school boxing ring in the gymnastics hall. For a long moment his body seemed suspended between two immovable objects, and then the cart began to s.h.i.+ft. One of its wheels caught on something a stone, or a clump of dirt and the cart threatened to roll back to where it had started, but Sherlock dug his feet in and pushed until his muscles screamed. The cartwheel edged over the obstruction, whatever it had been, and then began to roll more and more smoothly backwards. Sherlock s.h.i.+fted his left foot, taking a big step, and then his right. The dirt gave his feet grip, and he threw all his energy into moving the cart, inch by inch. Like a locomotive, it began to pick up speed as it went. Within a few seconds it had gone from a lumbering crawl to a slow walk, then a fast walk, then a trot. Sherlock felt something ping ping in his shoulder as a tendon caught on bone like a violin string plucked by a finger. His arm threatened to flop nervelessly down, but with sheer force of will he kept it locked on to the front of the cart and after a few moments the pins-and-needles sensation subsided. The cart kept on moving. He dared not look up to see how close the far wall was in case s.h.i.+fting position reduced the strength he was bringing to bear and the cart slowed again. All he could do was count footsteps: one, two, three, four, five, six each one quicker than the one before. Surely he must be at the wall by now? Warmth blossomed on the back of his neck as the fire took hold of the doors. He could see his own shadow cast in front of him by the flames, outlined in red and flickering from side to side. in his shoulder as a tendon caught on bone like a violin string plucked by a finger. His arm threatened to flop nervelessly down, but with sheer force of will he kept it locked on to the front of the cart and after a few moments the pins-and-needles sensation subsided. The cart kept on moving. He dared not look up to see how close the far wall was in case s.h.i.+fting position reduced the strength he was bringing to bear and the cart slowed again. All he could do was count footsteps: one, two, three, four, five, six each one quicker than the one before. Surely he must be at the wall by now? Warmth blossomed on the back of his neck as the fire took hold of the doors. He could see his own shadow cast in front of him by the flames, outlined in red and flickering from side to side.

Suddenly the back end of the cart hit the far wall. The ma.s.s of the cart carried it on, the wooden slats splintering around it and the nails that held them together tearing out with painful squeals. Fresh air gusted in past Sherlock's head, blowing the smoke back but causing the fire to spread. The cart's rear wheels snagged on the wood, but Sherlock could see daylight s.h.i.+ning around the blocky edges of the cart's body. He scrambled up on to the driver's position, then across the flat bed of the cart, and out into the glorious fresh air and suns.h.i.+ne.

Naively, he had expected to see crowds of people and the local fire brigade with handpumps and buckets, but the yard was deserted. Even the dog had fled, presumably following the ruffians out of the main gates. Although the barn had been perilously close to an inferno on the inside, on the outside the flames were barely distinguishable against the bright sky, and only a thin trail of smoke led upward barely more than a kitchen fire would make. Eventually someone would notice and investigate, but not for a while.

The main gates were closed, and Sherlock a.s.sumed that Clem and his retreating ruffians would have chained and padlocked them. They had displayed similar caution in almost everything else they had done. Ignoring the gates, Sherlock looked around the walls for a suitable place to climb up and get over. The interior was bare brick, and he had no problems in scrambling up.

He paused on the wall and looked back at the barn. The fire was beginning to edge up into the roof s.p.a.ce now, and the rafters were burning. He needed to get out of there.

Half-climbing and half-falling to the ground, Sherlock limped away. He kept going until his lungs felt like they were going to burst and the muscles of his legs were begging him to stop. Slumping to a sitting position beside a low stone wall, he gave in to exhaustion and to the panic that he had been fighting off for what seemed like forever. He sucked in great lungfuls of air and let the shaking that had been building up in him sweep over his chest, his arms and his legs. After a while he felt strong enough to raise his hands up in front of his face. The skin was sc.r.a.ped and b.l.o.o.d.y, and there were splinters sticking out of his palms that he hadn't even felt. One by one he pulled them out, leaving his hands dotted with beads of blood.

All that effort, all that danger, and what exactly had he learned? That if the death of the man at the house in Farnham was an accident then it was an accident caused by some kind of criminal activity. The dead man had been stealing something from his confederates, and that something had got him killed. The criminals had packed the rest of that something into boxes and had taken them away by cart to some unspecified location, and then set fire to the barn to cover their activity. And this was all done to the instructions of a mysterious 'Baron'.

And then Sherlock remembered the first time he had stood outside the gates leading into that yard, when he and Matty had almost been run down by a carriage. The man in the carriage the man with white skin and pink eyes was he he the Baron? And if so, what exactly was he up to? the Baron? And if so, what exactly was he up to?

Sherlock suddenly registered how dark it was getting. The sun had almost set, and he had not only to get back to Holmes Manor but also somehow to clean himself up and change clothes all before Mrs Eglantine spotted that something had happened. He'd thought for a moment that his troubles were over for the day, but he realized with a sinking heart that they were only halfway through.

CHAPTER SIX.

Sherlock nearly missed breakfast next morning. The adventures of the previous day had left him tired and achy, and his head pounded in time with his heartbeat. He could feel a tightness in his chest and a scratchiness in his throat that was probably due to the smoke he had breathed in. He had missed dinner, but his aunt had made sure that a tray of cold meats and cheese had been left out for him. It had to have been his aunt Mrs Eglantine certainly wouldn't have bothered. He had spent the night restlessly balanced between sleep and wakefulness, slipping between dreams and memories until he could no longer tell which was which. He only slid into a deep, dreamless sleep as the sun was coming up, and as a result the gong that was struck by one of the maids to signal breakfast jerked him awake and gave him barely ten minutes to get ready for the day.