Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

‘We could go to the police,’ Matty suggested. ‘Tell them that he’s gone missing.’

‘The trouble is that we don’t actually know what has happened to him, so there’s not much the police can do. It’s not like we saw him being abducted. They’ll say he just missed the train and he’ll turn up tomorrow. Worse than that: they’ll worry about two kids alone in Edinburgh. They’ll assign a guardian to us, or place us in some philanthropist’s home until Rufus arrives. That’s the last thing we want.’

Matty nodded. ‘I can see that. What about your brother, though? We could send him a telegram, tell him what’s happened.’

‘And within an hour he’ll send a telegram back telling us that we have to return to London until he knows what’s happened to Rufus. If he does that, then I won’t be able to disobey him – I’ve tried that before, and it never works out well. No, we need to be here. It’s best that we don’t tell anyone what’s happened.’

‘What do you think’s happening to Rufus?’ Matty asked quietly, not looking at Sherlock.

Sherlock sighed. He’d been trying not to think too hard about that. ‘I don’t know for sure. Maybe those two Americans have taken him, and they’re asking him what he knows. Given that he doesn’t know anything that they don’t already know, they’ll probably release him.’ Or kill him, Sherlock thought, but he didn’t put his fear into words. Although Matty was streetwise in a way that Sherlock would never be, he was younger than Sherlock, and there were some things he needed protecting from.

‘He knows about Edinburgh,’ Matty pointed out.

‘If they were on the train with us, then they know about Edinburgh as well. That secret is out of the bag, I suspect.’ He paused for a moment. ‘On the other hand, if it’s the Paradol Chamber, then I don’t know what they want with him.’

Sherlock found that the conversation had blunted the sharp edge of his appetite. Thinking of what might be happening to Rufus while they were relaxing in a warm bar and eating well made his stomach lurch.

‘I don’t want to worry you,’ Matty whispered after a while, ‘but have you seen the bloke over there?’ He nodded his head at the opposite wall. ‘In the booth, sitting by himself.’

Sherlock glanced over, trying not to be too obvious about it. He was worried that Matty might have spotted Mr Kyte, but when he saw the unfamiliar thin man sitting alone in the booth he breathed a sigh of relief. A moment more and he started to feel uneasy, however. The man didn’t show any signs of being interested in the two of them, but there was something odd about him, something Sherlock couldn’t quite work out. He was painfully thin, for a start, as if he’d been starved for weeks, and his skin was so white it was almost translucent. His eyes seemed invisible in the dark shadows of his eye sockets, and the bones of his cheeks and his chin pushed out against the tautness of his face so much that Sherlock thought the skin might suddenly split as he watched. There was something strange about the man’s clothes as well: they looked like they might have been his Sunday best, but they were coated in dirt, and there was a green tinge to his shoulders and sleeves. He was staring straight ahead, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything in particular. Nobody was sitting near him, and although he didn’t have a drink in front of him, the barman didn’t seem to want to go across and either take an order or throw him out. The man just sat there doing nothing.

The crowd in the tavern grew larger, and eventually the view of the strange pale-skinned man was blocked by people. Sherlock and Matty finished eating their pies and got ready to leave. As they stood up a gap opened in the crowd. Sherlock looked across. The man had gone.

‘You ever heard of the Resurrectionists?’ Matty asked as they left the tavern. He seemed edgy.

‘I don’t recognize the name,’ Sherlock said.

‘It was two blokes named Burke an’ Hare. Both called William. They was notorious up in this neck of the woods a few years back. I heard about them when me dad was up here, working. Lookin’ at that bloke back there reminded me of ’em. Edinburgh is one of the places doctors come to train, cos of the Edinburgh Medical College, but they’ve got a problem: how do they find out about the ’uman body if they can’t examine ’em, cut ’em up, like, when they’re dead – see where all the organs is, an’ where the blood goes?’

‘I thought medical schools were allowed to use the bodies of executed criminals,’ Sherlock said, frowning.

‘In theory, yeah,’ Matty responded, ‘but there’s always less bodies available than there’s student doctors wantin’ to take a look at ’em. An’ the number of things you can be hanged for has gone down a lot, which means there’s a lot less bodies available for use. Sixty years ago there was over two ’undred different crimes that led to an ’anging. Now there’s only five. So only about two bodies a year came up for use by the College. Which is where Burke an’ Hare came in.’

‘I have a feeling I know where this is going,’ Sherlock said quietly, feeling a shiver down his spine. ‘They dug up corpses and sold them, didn’t they?’

Matty stared at him. ‘Not quite,’ he said, ‘although a lot of that did go on. “Bodysnatching”, it was called. There was so much of it happening that friends and relatives of anyone who had just died used to keep watch over the grave to stop it being dug up. Some people – rich people – used to have cages built around graves of their relatives to stop anyone getting in. Before they realized what was going on, people used to visit the graves of their loved ones and find them disturbed, as if the bodies had come back to life an’ just crawled out of their own accord.’ He and Sherlock were pushing their way through the crowded streets towards their hotel. ‘Course, once people got to know about the bodysnatchers, they had to change how they went about things. They was quite inventive, the bodysnatchers. They used wooden spades, cos they made less noise than metal ones, an’ they used to dig down at an angle, so that any disturbance to the grave would be a way away, not directly over it. They’d uncover the end of the coffin, smash it open an’ drag the body out with a rope.’

‘All right, but you said this Burke and Hare weren’t bodysnatchers. What were they then?’

‘They was both Irish, for a start,’ Matty replied, ‘an’ they moved to Edinburgh to work as labourers on the Union Canal. Burke ended up stayin’ at a boarding ’ouse run by Hare’s missus. They got to be drinkin’ buddies, an’ they got talkin’ one night about ways of makin’ some money. One of ’em suggested that they could steal the body of someone who ’ad died locally of natural causes an’ ’ad no family, like, an’ sell it to someone at the College who could use it to demonstrate ’uman anatomy to students. It weren’t long before some old pensioner who owed Hare four quid died of natural causes. Burke an’ Hare made sure the coffin that was buried was filled with tree bark, ’an they flogged the body to a Dr Knox ’ere in the city for seven quid.’

‘Very enterprising,’ Sherlock said drily.

‘Problem was that people weren’t dyin’ of natural causes fast enough for ’em, so they decided to ’elp ’em along a bit. First one they actually killed was a local miller. They got ’im drunk on whisky an’ then suffocated ’im. Second one was another pensioner, a woman this time, named Abigail Simpson. After that . . .’ He shrugged.

‘Well, they was off an’ runnin’. Dr Knox would pay ’em a guaranteed sum for every dead body they delivered to ’im, no questions asked – ten quid if the body was in good nick, eight if there was anything wrong with it. They preferred women and kids, of course, cos they was easier to subdue an’ to suffocate.’

Sherlock found he was feeling sick. It was the casual nature of what Burke and Hare had done that offended him. The murders weren’t crimes of passion, or ‘spur of the moment’ incidents – they were a series of what were effectively business decisions. Business decisions that left people dead.

‘How many people did they end up killing?’ he asked quietly as they turned the corner and headed towards the hotel’s front door.

‘Best guess is seventeen,’ Matty answered, ‘over the course of a year.’

‘And didn’t anyone suspect? I mean, the doctor they were selling the bodies to must have realized that they weren’t executed criminals. Hanging must leave a distinct mark on the neck, and those corpses wouldn’t have had that mark.’

‘Dr Knox? Yeah, he knew, all right, although Burke later swore otherwise. He just didn’t want to disrupt the supply of bodies. He was getting a reputation as being the best anatomy teacher around, an’ students were flocking to his lectures, and payin’ for the privilege. He wasn’t going to give all that up.’ He snorted. ‘Story is that there was one bloke that Burke and Hare killed, name of Daft Jamie, who was well known around the town. When Dr Knox uncovered the body in the lecture theatre, ready to cut into it, some of the students recognized it. Knox said that it must be someone else, but he started the dissection on the face first, to make it unrecognizable quickly.’

‘What happened in the end?’ Sherlock asked, as he pushed open the front door. ‘I presume they were found out, otherwise you wouldn’t know all this.’

‘Burke and Hare killed a woman in their lodging house named Marjory Docherty, but until they could get rid of