‘Yes.’
‘Then I suppose I’d better help out, if only to keep you alive. My life would be a lot more boring if you weren’t around.’
‘Thank you,’ Sherlock said.
‘I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing,’ Matty responded. ‘I’m just saying, is all.’ He sighed. ‘All right – what’s the plan?’
‘We take all of these boxes and dump their contents in the vats outside.’
Matty shrugged. ‘Somehow I knew it would mean getting closer to those vats. You know those workers aren’t going to let us come back once, let alone twice?’
‘Then we’ll have to distract them.’
‘With what?’
‘I’m still working on that.’ He thought for a moment. ‘It’s got to be something that will attract them all to one side of the building.’
‘Fire?’ Matty suggested.
‘Too dangerous.’
‘What if I let myself be seen, and they chase after me?’
‘That leaves me having to shift twenty-six boxes by myself.’
‘Oh.’ Matty’s expression brightened. ‘What if we wait until it’s dark, then we come back, break in and destroy them for good in peace: undisturbed, like?’
Sherlock shook his head. ‘This place is so important that Harkness will have it guarded at night. We were only able to sneak in now because it’s daylight, and there’s a lot of activity in the tannery. At night, in the quiet, any guard will hear us or spot us straight away, so that rules out hiding here until the sun goes down. No, it’s got to be now.’ He thought for a moment, ‘I suppose,’ he said slowly, ‘we could pull up some floorboards. This room is built up above ground level. Maybe we could hide the boxes beneath the floorboards. Harkness wouldn’t know what had happened to them.’ He frowned, thinking through the obvious problems. ‘No, we couldn’t lever the floorboards up without leaving splinters and marks. Harkness would guess straight away what we’d done.’
‘Well, I’m stumped,’ Matty said. ‘Let’s just call it a day, shall we?’
‘Let’s not. There has to be a solution.’ He let his mind go blank, hoping that the various pieces of the puzzle that were whirling around his head would settle down into some meaningful pattern. Gradually they did. ‘Right – here’s what we’ll do. You’re going to sneak around the vats to the far side and make a hole in one of them.’
‘With what?’
‘Have you got a knife?’
Matty reached into a pocket and took one out. The blade was folded into the handle. ‘I got this.’
‘Use it to carve out a hole in the wooden slats that make up the side of the furthest vat, or put it between two of the slats and prise them apart. Do it without being seen.’
‘All right. Assuming I’m not seen, what happens then?’
‘The stuff inside the vat starts leaking out. When they spot it, they’ll call everyone over to help seal the hole and mop up the stuff on the floor.’
‘So they’re all distracted for a while. That’s when we take the boxes out and throw them in the nearest vat?’
‘That’s right. Except that we need to find a faster way of doing it. You remember when we came in, we saw a wooden chute leaning up against the wall?’
‘Yeah,’ Matty said dubiously.
‘That’s probably what they use to get the cow hides into the vats. I can’t imagine they hoist them up on their shoulders and throw them in one by one – that would be hard, and very messy. I think they just slide them down the chute. While they’re distracted, I’ll get the chute and run it down from here to the nearest vat. We can slide the boxes down.’
‘It’s a plan,’ Matty said. ‘Not sure it’s a good one, but I can’t think of anything better.’
‘Right – let’s go.’
Sherlock moved to the door and opened it a crack. The eye-watering, nose-grating sewer smell of the tannery intensified. Gazing out, he noticed that the room was still deserted, although he could hear voices. Whatever Josh Harkness was doing with his workers, it was taking time.
He turned his head to see Matty. ‘All right – go!’ he hissed.
Matty squeezed past him and through the door. Moving quietly, he made his way along the raised wooden flooring to a set of steps that led down into the central area of the room, past another of the wooden chutes. He slipped across the room, moving from vat to vat, using each as cover, until he vanished from Sherlock’s view.
The next few minutes were nerve-racking. Sherlock waited, hardly able to breathe, not knowing whether Matty was actually making a hole in the furthest vat. Maybe he was desperately trying to carve his way through wood that was too hard for his blade? Maybe he had been caught by Harkness or one of his men?
A movement off to one side attracted his attention. One of the men with the long hooked poles was coming around the side of a vat. He stopped and started to roll a cigarette one-handed. Sherlock’s gaze flicked across to where he’d seen Matty vanish, but the boy wasn’t visible. The worker didn’t look as if an intruder had just been discovered, so Sherlock had to assume that he was still safe.
Just as he was about to look away, he saw a head peeping out from behind one of the vats. It was Matty. From his position, Matty couldn’t see the man with the hooked pole, but if he moved forward a few feet he would be in the man’s line of sight. Sherlock desperately willed Matty to look his way, but his friend seemed to be nerving himself up to run back to the steps.
Sherlock was preparing himself to make some noise that would attract Matty’s attention when the boy looked up at him. Sherlock gestured to him to stay where he was. Matty shook his head. Sherlock nodded towards the place where the worker was standing and made a walking movement with his fingers. Matty nodded in understanding.
Sherlock stared over at the worker again. He had lit his cigarette and was strolling forward, hooked pole held over his shoulder like a rifle. Another few steps and, if he looked to his left, he would see Matty.
Sherlock didn’t know what to do. If he attracted the man’s attention away from Matty, then he would expose himself, but he couldn’t let Matty be discovered.
Someone shouted from the other side of the vats. It sounded as if it might have been the worker who had argued with Josh Harkness. ‘We got a leak!’ he shouted. ‘You know the drill! Marky – get some sheets to mop up the stuff. Nicholson – you and me need to caulk that hole with some hemp quick and then nail a patch across it!’
The man with the pole ran to help. Sherlock beckoned Matty, who raced across to the steps. Sherlock ran to join him.
‘You start hauling the boxes out,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the chute.’
Matty disappeared back into the storeroom and Sherlock quickly moved to where the wooden chute was leaning up against the railings. It was heavier than it looked, and it took all his strength to manhandle it back to the storeroom and then from the railing to the edge of the nearest vat.
By the time Sherlock was ready Matty had stacked four boxes. While he went back for more, Sherlock took the boxes one at a time and pushed them down the chute. The angle wasn’t steep enough to allow the boxes to slide by themselves, but Sherlock found that he could use the second box to push the first, and then the third box to push the other two. In less than a minute he had all four boxes on the chute, and he was straining against the last one, trying to get all four to move.
The first box was teetering over the vat now. Sherlock took a step back and then ran forward, hitting the last box in the same way he’d tackled players on the rugby field at Deepdene School. The box jerked forward, transmitting its force down the line to the first one, which tumbled into the vat.
Too soon for congratulations. As Matty kept delivering the boxes, Sherlock kept stacking them on to the chute and ramming them forward. Box after box tumbled into the vat. Sherlock could see them floating in the poisonous, noxious mixture before it filled them up and they sank. Hopefully into oblivion.
On the other side of the vats he could hear raised voices and the sound of hammering.
The work fell into a repetitive routine. Pick up box. Put box on chute. Push box as hard as possible. Pick up another box. His muscles ached with the strain.
