Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

Hotel.’

‘Possible,’ Sherlock conceded, ‘but these adverts are paid for by the word. There are a lot of words here – more than you need to tell people how good your hotel is, but enough to contain a hidden message.’

‘So Mr Crowe and Virginia are in Kirkaldy Town.’ Matty scowled. ‘That’s miles away. I thought they were supposed to be in Edinburgh.’

‘The mention of Kirkaldy is a red herring. That’s not where they are.’

‘Then where are they?’

Sherlock shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I have to decode the message.’

He looked at it again. If it had been a set of random letters or numbers then he would have tried a substitution cipher, the way that Amyus Crowe had taught him. Substitution ciphers were based around the principle of substituting one thing for another – replacing every letter a with a number 1, for instance, every letter b with a 2, and so on. Decoding them, if you didn’t know what the substitution strategy was, depended on knowing the relative frequency with which particular letters occurred in normal writing. E was the most common letter, followed by t, a, i, o and n. So all you had to do was look for the most commonly occurring letter or number, and replace that with e, then work your way down the list – although you did need quite a large sample of code to break in order to have a good chance of getting it right. Scanning the message, though, Sherlock realized that it wasn’t a substitution cipher. For one, it made a strange kind of sense. It read as an advertisement. Replacing the letters of a sentence or a paragraph with other letters would result in a completely scrambled set of meaningless words. So the code had to be something else. He took a pen out of his pocket and quickly scribbled down the initial letters of the words in the margin of the newspaper, but he only got a little way – f t i p t r a r . . . – before he realized that he was on the wrong track.

Perhaps it was the last letters, he thought. He scribbled another set of letters – d e l e o t d x . . . No, that didn’t look right either.

Perhaps he should start from the end, rather than the beginning. He tried both options again – first letters and last letters – but all he got for his trouble was f i t k n u l . . . and e n n y r s e . . . Unless Amyus Crowe was deliberately confusing the issue by writing in a foreign language, Sherlock was on the wrong track.

Maybe he should be looking at words rather than letters. He tried every first word of a sentence – find tell two mr locate – then every second word – the us days and us. With the proviso that the second one sounded a bit like bad poetry, it was no good.

He sighed and bit the inside of his lip, aware that Matty was intently watching what he was doing. He was running out of ideas. Maybe this thing was too complicated for him to decipher.

Something was nagging at the back of his brain. He tried to force himself to relax, to stop thinking so that the thought could work its way to the surface. He had tried first words of sentences, and second words. What if . . . what if he tried the first word of the first sentence, the second word of the second sentence, and so on?

He knew the advertisement so well by now that he could write down the words from memory.

Find us in Cramond Town.

‘Got it!’ he whispered.

‘What?’

‘They’re in a place called Cramond,’ he said.

Matty looked dubious. ‘I thought you said Cramond was the name of the people who owned the hotel.’

‘There is no hotel,’ Sherlock explained again. ‘It’s a code. Mr Crowe had to get the name of the place in there, but he made it look like something else – a person’s name – and he then distracted attention from it by referring to a real place – Kirkaldy.’

‘All right – where is this Cramond?’

Sherlock pulled out the map he had bought from the bookshop. On the reverse side of the Edinburgh map was a map of the surrounding area. In the top right-hand corner was an index relating to a grid of letters and numbers around the edge. He scanned down the index until he found Cramond – not without a little flash of pride – and then checked the grid reference on the map. ‘It’s on the coast,’ he said. ‘Just a few miles away. We can probably get someone to take us there in a cart.’ He folded up the map and the newspaper, putting them into his pockets. He felt a sense of relief and weariness wash over him. He’d done it! He’d located Amyus and Virginia Crowe!

Now came the hard part – finding out why they had left, and persuading them to return . . .

A movement over Matty’s shoulder made him glance past his friend. Two men were approaching. One held something in his hands: it looked like an empty sack. It took a moment for Sherlock to identify him as the smallpox-scarred American he had seen in Farnham, and then again at Newcastle Station. A chill ran down his spine, and he felt his heart suddenly speed up. His eyes flickered sideways, to Matty’s face. He was just about to tell Matty to run when he noticed that the boy was staring over Sherlock’s shoulder. His eyes were wide and scared.

More men must have been coming up behind Sherlock – probably including the man with the missing ear and the ponytail. Sherlock was about to push Matty left and dive right himself when the man behind Matty realized that they’d been spotted, rushed forward and threw the sack over the boy’s head. Sherlock reached out to tear the sack away, but the world went dark as something heavy dropped over his head and covered his face. Hands grabbed him and pushed him off his feet.

CHAPTER TEN

The sack smelled strongly of pipe tobacco, and Sherlock found himself choking on a combination of the heat, the lack of air and the pungent odour. A small amount of light filtered through the gaps in the material, but not enough for him to see out. The hessian weave rubbed roughly against his forehead, his ears and the back of his neck. He could feel the skin being rubbed away, leaving sore patches behind. He was going to have some serious scrapes when he got out.

If he got out.

His wrists and ankles had been quickly and expertly bound with rope, tight enough to cut off the blood supply. Arms were wrapped around his chest and around his legs. He was being hoicked around like a sack of barley, carried rapidly across the park before anybody spotted what was going on. The same thing must have been happening to Matty. He tried experimentally kicking out with his left foot, but the grip around his legs tightened before he could move more than an inch. It was like having leather belts strapped around him. Perhaps this was what it was like to be crushed to death by one of those big snakes they had in South America – anacondas, or pythons, or whatever they were.

He opened his mouth to yell for help, but a fist impacted beneath his ear. A red spike of agonizing pain flashed through his head like lightning, leaving a sick ache in its wake. He felt as if he was going to throw up, but he knew that if he did so with his head in the sack then he was going to have to live with the consequences, so he swallowed several times, forcing his stomach to calm down.

Tiny flecks of tobacco had got into his mouth while it was open. He could feel the strands between his lips and his teeth, and sticking to his tongue. The bitter taste made him gag again, and he desperately swallowed more saliva. He knew that people not only smoked tobacco but chewed it as well. How could they stand it?

His fingers prickled with pins and needles as the blood fought to get past the ropes that bound his wrists. The fingers themselves felt as large and as tight as sausages frying in a pan.

The men carrying him changed their grip. For a moment Sherlock wondered what they were doing, but then the grip around his chest and legs loosened and they swung him back, swung him forward again, fast, and let go. He flew helplessly through the air, not even sure which way was up and which was down, waiting what seemed like an eternity to hit – what? Grass? Pavement? The surface of a river or a canal?

Half expecting to suddenly find himself sinking in cold water, he bounced on a soft surface and rolled until he hit a wooden board at right angles. The inside of a cart lined with straw? It seemed likely. He heard something hit the straw beside him, and a second later a heavy object thudded into him with enough force to drive the air from