Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

ain’t paying you to stand around doing nothing.’

‘It ain’t got nothin’ to do wiv us stirrin’ or not stirrin’, boss,’ one of the men yelled back. ‘It’s got to do with the quality of them skins. The cows you’re usin’ are’s old as my gran. Their skins are just as baggy an’ just as blotchy. You want better leathers, you get better skins for us.’

‘Don’t give me none of your lip!’ Harkness shouted. ‘If you think you can do it better, then you set up your own tannery! Until then, you work with whatever you’re given!’

The men shrugged, looked at each other and got back to stirring. Harkness glowered at them for a few moments, then stomped along the raised walkway to where some steps led down into the centre. He walked over to one of the vats and looked inside, having to stand on his toes to do so. The smell didn’t seem to bother him.

‘There’s not enough skins in here,’ he shouted. ‘Throw some more in.’

The two men headed over to an area hidden from Sherlock’s view by the vats. Harkness stomped across to join them. For a moment the room seemed empty.

Sherlock took his chance. He quickly and quietly raced out on to the wooden walkway and ran along it to the door from which Harkness had emerged moments before. Matty followed silently.

He got to the door, quickly opened it and slipped inside, closing it behind him before the three men could re- emerge from behind the vats. Part of his mind, the emotional part, worried about how he was going to get out again, but the rest of it, the logical part, told him that if the men had disappeared once then the chances were that they would again. All he had to do was wait. For now, the important thing was to search the room for its secrets.

He looked around. One wall had a set of poles leaning against it. They had hooks on the end – presumably for pulling hides out of the vats. The other walls were lined with shelves, and each shelf had several cardboard boxes on it. Written on the boxes were letters: A, B, C, and so on. He went to the first box, pulled it from the shelf and took the lid off.

The box was filled with paper: newspaper clippings, letters, official-looking documents and the occasional daguerreotype photograph. He scanned a couple at random. The newspaper clippings were a strange mixture of reports on criminal activity – burglaries, stabbings and so on – and reports of a more social nature – births, marriages and deaths. The official documents were much the same – some court reports or witness statements, with a smattering of notarized statements on legal paper, and some certificates of birth or marriage. One or two appeared to have been torn directly from church registers. The letters ranged from handwritten declarations of love or hatred to typed proposals of business, along with a couple of invitations to duels. Some of the photographs were simple, innocent portraits, usually with a note of the person’s name on the back, while others were the kind of thing that made Sherlock suddenly turn them over in embarrassment. In total, the box was a complete cross section of human life.

He thought for a moment. Although most of the stuff in the box – with the exception of some of the photographs – was completely innocent, it presumably meant something more serious if taken in context. The letter to the housemaid at Holmes Manor from her boyfriend – which Sherlock assumed was now in another box somewhere in the room – was just a simple declaration of love on the surface, until you knew who had written it – the Mayor’s son, a man out of the housemaid’s class. The same must be true of everything else. A birth could be a simple birth – or not, if the mother was not married. That would be scandalous. A marriage could be quite innocent – unless the groom had been married before and his wife was still alive. That would be bigamous. Even a death – especially a death – could be suspicious if there were relatives who would inherit money in the will. That might be murder.

He looked around the room grimly. The contents of those boxes could destroy lives quickly if they were made public, but they would just destroy lives more slowly if they weren’t. Josh Harkness would bleed money from the people he was threatening until they were destitute, living on the streets.

His eyes fixed on the box labelled H. Somewhere in there was the secret that Mrs Eglantine had discovered about the Holmes family. He could, if he wanted, quickly take a look. Find out what it was that she knew – a secret so powerful that his aunt and uncle would rather keep the poisonous viper that was Mrs Eglantine close to their bosom than get rid of her and risk its exposure.

Or he could destroy that box, along with all the rest of them, and free hundreds of people from misery.

Put that way, was there even a choice to make?

The only question was: how?

CHAPTER FOUR

Sherlock knew that he had to use the tools to hand to destroy the letters, the photographs and the other documents. There were too many boxes for him and Matty to remove from the tannery, and they’d be spotted quickly if they even tried. No, he had to destroy them on the premises.

But how? He supposed he could set a fire. That would destroy Harkness’s treasure trove of blackmail material, sure enough, but it would also destroy the building, and probably spread to the ones on either side. There was a good chance that people might die, and Sherlock didn’t want that weighing on his conscience. For a moment he felt paralysed, brain whirling as it sorted through the various things that he’d seen in the short time he and Matty had been inside the tannery. Then it struck him: the vats! He could dump the boxes into the vats! If the alkaline chemicals didn’t bleach the ink off the pages or dissolve them into their constituent parts, then they would become sodden and disintegrate of their own accord. There was something poetic about using one part of Josh Harkness’s little empire to destroy another.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

‘Thank God,’ Matty responded. ‘I’m on the verge of passing out, thanks to the smell.’

‘No,’ Sherlock clarified, ‘I meant that it’s time to destroy all this stuff.’

Matty just stared at him.

‘We can’t let Harkness get away with it,’ Sherlock said insistently. ‘He’s slowly destroying people’s lives.’

‘And he’ll destroy our lives a lot quicker than that if we do anything to cross him.’ Matty shook his head in despair. ‘The man’s an animal! He’s more dangerous than a rabid badger backed into a corner!’

Sherlock shook his head stubbornly. ‘I don’t care. I can’t leave here and then walk around town knowing that every third or fourth person I see is paying him to keep their secrets quiet. People have a right to privacy.’

‘Even if the secrets they’re keeping might get them put into jail if they were known about?’ Matty asked shrewdly.

‘Even so,’ Sherlock said. ‘If a crime has been committed, then there’s a process for that. It gets reported. The police investigate. Evidence gets collected. If there’s enough evidence then people get arrested. Josh Harkness isn’t punishing criminals because he thinks of himself as some unofficial part of the police force – he’s preying on people’s guilty consciences to make money.’

Matty grimaced. ‘It’s still evidence,’ he said. ‘And I think you’ve got a rosy view of the police. Like I told you earlier – the police around here are either taking money themselves or they’re doing their own little petty thefts on the side. Give a criminal a uniform and he’s still a criminal.’

Sherlock thought back to the time, some months before, when his brother Mycroft had been accused of murder. The police hadn’t seemed too interested in collecting evidence then, he had to admit, but even so, the principle was sound.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I admit the system isn’t ideal. I don’t even know what an ideal system would look like. Maybe the police need to be paid more. Maybe people need to be checked out and tested before they’re allowed to join the police. Maybe they need more training. Maybe they need consultants to help them out when they’re investigating difficult crimes. I don’t know. I just know that people like Josh Harkness aren’t the answer. He’s doing nothing to stop crimes – in fact, from his point of view, the more crimes the better.’

‘I ain’t going to convince you to give this up, am I?’

‘No.’

‘And you’re going to do it whether I help or not.’