delved into his trouser pocket. His fingers closed around the handle of Matty’s knife – the one his friend had used to carve a hole in the vats, back in Josh Harkness’s tannery, and that Sherlock himself had used to connect up the pinholes in Amyus Crowe’s cottage wall to form the shape of an arrow. Pulling the knife out, he flicked it to open the blade. Sensing, rather than seeing, the men to either side of him move closer to stop whatever he was doing, he lunged upward, carving an arcing path with the knife.
The blade sliced through the taut rope above his head. Suddenly the noose was less tight and he was dropping free, air rushing into his lungs as pure and as cool as spring water. The rocks hit the floorboards. A fraction of a second later, Sherlock’s feet hit the rocks. The combined weight of the rocks and his plummeting body, along with the weight of the two men who were already standing there, was too much for the rotten wood. It splintered and broke, creating a hole that the three of them fell through, directly into the room below.
Sherlock twisted his body as he dropped, bringing his knees up so that he fell on top of the two men. Floorboards scraped his skin as he fell. The men hit the floor with a sound like an explosion. The floorboards collapsed under the sudden impact, dropping them into the dank earth beneath. Surprised by the sudden absence of darkness, rats and cockroaches fled in all directions.
Scrambling clear, Sherlock desperately tugged at the noose around his neck. It loosened to the point where he could pull it over his head and throw it to one side.
He kept shifting his glance between the men and the hole which he had created above, but the men weren’t doing anything apart from moaning and writhing in pain and nobody appeared looking down through the hole.
He pulled the rope from around his ankles. The flesh was swollen where it had bitten in, and he suspected that his neck looked the same way, but he didn’t care. He was free!
He stood up, and immediately collapsed. His legs wouldn’t take his weight. He knew he couldn’t stay there, on the floor, so he tried again. And again. It was just a question of willpower, he told himself. His body would do what he told it to do, not the other way round.
On the fourth attempt his legs stayed more or less straight, apart from a tremor in the muscles. He took a deep breath and staggered across the room towards the stairs. It never even occurred to him to run out of the house. Matty and Rufus Stone were up there, and they were helpless, defenceless. He had to rescue them, no matter what the risk to his own life.
Climbing the stairs was possibly the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. His muscles screamed at the effort, and twice he nearly fainted. When he got to the top he entered the room where he had been tortured with the knife held out in front of him, ready for a fight, but the quiet man had gone. Vanished. It wasn’t clear to Sherlock how he had got out – the window was closed and the only way out was the stairs that Sherlock had just climbed – but he had left. Only Rufus Stone and Matty remained. Matty was still curled up with the sack over his head. Sherlock looked over at Rufus – bloodied, but smiling – and Rufus nodded towards Matty. ‘See to him first, lad,’ he said. His voice sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of walnuts – a result, Sherlock supposed, of the beating he had received. ‘I feel like I’ve gone several rounds with a bare-knuckle pugilist – and believe me, I am more than familiar with that experience – but I’ll keep. The boy’s not moved since he was thrown down there. He might need your help.’ He shook his head admiringly. ‘That was an amazing piece of improvisation, by the way. If I live to be a hundred years old – which, by the way, I have every intention of doing – I doubt that I’ll ever see anything like that again.’
Sherlock went over and knelt beside Matty. Worried about what he might find, he reached out to pull the sack gently from the boy’s head. Matty’s blue-grey eyes stared up at him in amazement.
‘You’re all right,’ Sherlock breathed.
‘I’m always all right,’ Matty replied.
‘I thought . . . you weren’t moving, so . . .’
Matty smiled. ‘I’ve learned that in situations like this, best thing to do is be like a hedgehog – curl up into a ball and wait for everything to settle down. Failing that, be like a badger – attack everything wildly, biting and scratching as much as you can.’
Sherlock pulled Matty to his feet, and together they set about freeing Rufus Stone from his bonds. Sherlock was worried about the amount of blood on Rufus’s hands, face and shirt, but the violinist shrugged it off. ‘I’ve had worse scrapes falling off roofs,’ he said, ‘although I won’t be playing any
Sherlock went gingerly over to the hole in the floor, aware that the rest of it might collapse at any moment, and gazed down into the room below. The men were still crumpled on the floor, in the hole that their bodies had made. They were groaning, but they didn’t look like they would be moving at any stage in the near future. ‘I can see them,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t think we need to worry about them. Not just yet, anyway.’
‘Fair enough. Ah, Sherlock, my admiration for you knows no bounds.’
‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked. ‘We lost you at Newcastle.’
Rufus grimaced. ‘They were on to us from Farnham,’ he said. ‘From what I overheard, they found Amyus Crowe’s cottage empty and set someone to watch it in case he came back. It was that fellow with the ponytail and the chewed-off ear.’
Sherlock frowned. ‘I didn’t see him. We searched the house.’
‘He was hiding outside somewhere. He’d made a hole in the side of the house and run a speaking tube from it, along the ground to his hidey-hole. He could hear everything you said.’
‘A speaking tube?’ Matty asked, puzzled.
‘The kind of thing the captain of a ship uses to talk to the engine room – a ribbed and waxed canvas tube. If you speak into one end, then someone with their ear against the other end can hear you clearly over hundreds of yards.’
‘Who’d’ve thought?’ Matty muttered, but Sherlock was kicking himself. He’d seen a tube just like that leading away from Amyus Crowe’s cottage, but he had thought nothing of it at the time. He vowed then and there never again to ignore something that was out of place or unusual.
‘He overheard you two in the house,’ Rufus continued, ‘then he crept out after you and heard you talking about Edinburgh in the paddock.’ He shook his head. ‘Once he notified his compatriots, all they had to do was keep track of us on the journey up to King’s Cross and then on to the train. They decided to take one of us at Newcastle so they could find out where exactly in Edinburgh Amyus Crowe was hiding – if indeed you’d got it right and he was in Edinburgh.’ Ruefully he looked at his bloodied hands. ‘They found out that I didn’t know anything more than the fact that he was somewhere in the city, so they kept me quiet and took me along for the ride just in case they could use me against you somehow. We were on the same train as you, but the man in charge – the one who asked you the questions – had booked a whole compartment so they weren’t disturbed, and they waited until the platform was empty before they got off. Once we all got to Edinburgh they set about finding a base to operate out of and give you two time to make contact with Mr Crowe – or him with you. Come this morning they decided to take you and find out if you knew anything more than me. Which apparently you didn’t.’
‘Actually,’ Sherlock said, ‘we do.’ He glanced at the newspaper on the floor – now a sodden mass. It didn’t matter – he had memorized the message. ‘What we still don’t know is why they are after Mr Crowe.’ He shifted his gaze to Rufus’s hands. ‘Are you . . . are you going to be able to play the violin again?’
‘Worried about your lessons? No refunds, lad.’ Rufus held his hands up in front of his face and flexed his fingers experimentally. He grimaced at the pain, but kept doing it. ‘The muscles and tendons are intact. The cuts and bruises will heal, in time. I won’t be attempting any Paganini in a hurry, but the rest of the repertoire is mine to command.’
Sherlock looked around. ‘What happened to the man who was asking the questions? The one with the walking stick with the gold skull on top?’
Rufus frowned. ‘Didn’t he go past you? I thought he went for the stairs.’
‘I didn’t see him.’ Remembering the man’s hand, caught in the light from the window, Sherlock added, ‘What was wrong with his skin?’
‘Ah, you noticed that?’ At Sherlock’s nod, Rufus went on: ‘He had tattoos all over: face, neck, hands, arms – everywhere.’
‘What kind of tattoos?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Names,’ Stone said. ‘People’s names. Some were done in black ink, but a few were in red. One in particular, across his forehead, was in red ink and larger than the rest.’ He looked up, meeting Sherlock’s gaze. ‘It was Virginia Crowe’s name,’ he said.
