Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

his body in a sudden whoosh!

Matty.

‘You all right?’ he called through the hessian sack, but before Matty could answer something struck Sherlock in the ribs. Waves of sickening pain radiating outwards across his chest. He gasped. Matty, sensibly, didn’t reply. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was unconscious.

Not a word had been spoken by the men who had taken them, but the message was clear: stay still; don’t struggle; be quiet. Any deviation from those rules would be punished.

Still, at least they were both still together. That counted for something. While he was alive and in possession of his senses and his mind, Sherlock was confident that he could find a way out of most situations.

His deduction that they had been thrown into a cart was borne out as they moved off. The way Sherlock was lying, his head was facing in the direction of travel. He quickly worked back over his memories of the past minute or so. He’d been facing Matty, in the park, with the gate towards Princes Street off to his left. When the sack was put over his head he had been snatched off his feet and carried with his head facing forward and to the right, away from the gate and Princes Street. He had been thrown into the cart head first, so that meant the cart was almost certainly heading away from Princes Street, away from the centre of Edinburgh.

As they travelled, Sherlock tried to keep a running tote of the various turns they made – which direction they turned, and roughly how long it had been since the last turn. The mental effort of counting and remembering gave him something to do other than panic, and if he ever had to retrace the journey then the information might be vital.

Eventually the cart stopped. Hands grabbed Sherlock and pulled him roughly upright. He was tossed over someone’s shoulder and carried away. He could hear the footsteps, so they weren’t on grass. Stone, or hard earth? The man who was carrying him stumbled a couple of times, so perhaps he was walking across cobbles and some were loose. That was more information that might come in useful.

Sherlock’s fingers felt as if they were burning with lack of blood now. His mind was filled with images of the flesh blackening and falling off. Desperately he tried to force his mind to think about something else. The footsteps! They had changed – the man who was carrying him was walking on wood now, and the light filtering in through the gaps in the sacking was darker, cooler. He was inside some kind of building.

The sound of the footsteps on the floorboards changed, becoming more hollow. At the same time, Sherlock felt that he was being tipped up, head higher than his feet. He was being carried up a set of stairs.

At the top of the stairs things levelled out again, and the footsteps crossed more floorboards. The sound was different from downstairs, however. The floorboards creaked more, as if they were unsafe.

The man carrying him suddenly let him drop. Sherlock had less than a second to prepare himself for the impact. His left shoulder hit the floor first, and he cried out. The pain made him bite his tongue. He tasted blood.

Another impact, beside him – Matty, getting the same treatment. He didn’t cry out, but Sherlock could hear him moaning.

Something sharp and metallic slid between his palms. Before he could react, it sliced upward and the ropes around his wrists fell away. A moment later the ties around his ankles went the same way.

He reached up and pulled the sack off his head.

Steely grey light dazzled his eyes, and he blinked several times. He was in a room about the size of his aunt and uncle’s dining room, but that was where the similarity ended. This room was bare floorboards and cracked plaster walls rather than carpets and curtains. The green stain of mould bloomed across the peeling remnants of wallpaper. Holes in the walls exposed the wooden lathes beneath. Some of the floorboards were missing, and rat droppings were spread across the remainder like tiny black stones. The ceiling was largely bare of plaster, and the rafters showed through like ribs. Rain had trickled in through the holes and left puddles on the floorboards, adding to the general feeling of neglect and decay.

As Sherlock struggled to his knees the newspaper slid from his pocket and dropped to the rotting floorboards. He could see the word Cramond written in the margin. Horrified, he looked up. Three men were in front of a broken window, two of them standing and the one in the centre sitting with his hands on a walking stick that was set in front of him, but the way the light flooded around them left them looking like charcoal stick figures sketched on paper. Sherlock screwed up his eyes, trying to make out their faces, but it was no good. The light was too strong.

Matty was curled up a few feet away. A sack, similar to the one that had been covering Sherlock, was still tied around his head and shoulders. For a moment Sherlock couldn’t see any movement, and his heart lurched sickeningly as he wondered if his friend was dead, but then he saw that Matty was breathing shallowly. He was alive, but probably unconscious.

Given what Sherlock suspected was going to happen in the room over the next few minutes, unconsciousness seemed like a good option.

He looked past Matty. A chair had been placed to one side of the three men. Rufus Stone was tied to the chair. He looked at Sherlock and smiled. The smile might have been more reassuring if there weren’t swollen lumps on his forehead and cheeks and if his fingers hadn’t been covered with blood. They looked like someone had been working on them with pliers.

‘Let me explain how this will work,’ a quiet, almost gentle voice said. Sherlock thought it was the man in the middle. His accent was similar to that of Amyus Crowe – he was obviously American. ‘I have no compunction about hurting children. I have done it before, and I will do it again. I do not enjoy it, but if it is necessary then I will cause you immense pain in order to get what I want.’

‘And what is that?’ Sherlock asked. ‘I don’t have any money, you know.’

The man didn’t laugh, but Sherlock could hear a trace of humour in his voice as he answered: ‘I have no use for your money, boy. I have more money than I know what to do with. No, I want information about your friend Amyus Crowe and his daughter, and that is something you do have.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ Sherlock said, trying to inject as much conviction into his voice as he could. He squinted, trying to make out some features on the man’s face or his clothes against the bright light behind him. All he could tell was that the cane the man was resting his hands on had a strangely large head on it.

‘Then you will die in agony. It is that simple. You are about to experience a great deal of pain, but the more true answers you give me, the longer you will live and the less pain you will be in. Now, I have a series of questions to ask you. They are very simple questions. You will answer them just as simply, with no attempt at lying or obscuring the truth.’

Sherlock’s gaze fell on the newspaper. He had to stop the man seeing it. ‘What happens if I don’t know the answers?’ he asked, brain racing as he tried to work out what to do. He jerked his eyes away from it. Just looking down might draw attention to it.

‘A good question,’ the man conceded, ‘and one that has exercised my mind on many occasions in the past. I have, as you can probably guess, conducted many, many interrogations like this. Fortunately I have a solution. You see, we have been watching you for some time. Several of the questions I am going to ask you, I know that you know the answers to. Several of the questions I am going to ask you, I already know the answers to. You, however, don’t know what I know. You can’t risk lying – that is, unless you enjoy pain. Your best option is to tell me the absolute truth. The chances of your fooling me are slight, because on some of the questions I will know, for absolute certain, if you are lying to me – even if you say, “I don’t know.” Now, are we clear about the rules?’

Sherlock thought for a moment. The way the quiet man had laid out the problem was elegant and simple. If Sherlock decided to lie, or to claim ignorance, then there was a statistical chance that he might be caught out. The things Sherlock didn’t know were how many questions the man was going to ask, and how many of those he already knew the answer to. If the answers were ten and one then Sherlock might still have a chance to keep Amyus Crowe’s hideaway secret. If the answers were ten and five, then his chances were much slimmer.

His logical mind clambered all around the problem, trying to find a way through it, but it was seamless. The man asking the questions had the upper hand. He’d thought it all through.

‘Do you understand the rules?’ the man said. His voice was just as gentle as before. ‘I will not ask again.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Sherlock said, edging his foot to one side as if shifting position to make himself more comfortable.