CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sherlock’s heart went cold, but before he could ask Rufus why Virginia’s name should have been tattooed on the quiet man’s forehead the musician raised an eyebrow, as if he’d just caught up with something that had been said a few moments before. ‘You know where Amyus Crowe is?’
‘He left a message for us in the newspaper,’ Matty replied. ‘It was coded, but we worked it out.’
Sherlock gazed at Matty and raised an eyebrow at the ‘we’, but Matty just smiled back innocently.
‘Well done.’ Rufus looked around. ‘We should get out of here before our friend comes back.’
They went down the stairs together and across the ground-floor room, detouring around the two thugs. They were still writhing in pain and groaning. Rufus stopped and stared at them for a moment. There was a glint in his eye that suggested he was thinking about paying back some of the pain they had caused him, but he turned away and kept moving. ‘We could question them,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he was still tempted by the thought, ‘but they look like hard nuts to crack.’
‘I dunno,’ Matty said, following his gaze. ‘They look like they’re pretty cracked already.’
Rufus led the way out into daylight. The sky was covered by a metallic sheen of cloud, casting a grim light on their surroundings. Sherlock looked around curiously. He had assumed that they’d been inside a house, but looking back at the building the three of them had emerged from, and the other buildings around, he could see that he’d been wrong. The buildings, which were grouped together, were six floors high and as long as half a street. The blocks were separated by narrow alleyways that were like straight paths between vertical cliff faces. The ground floors were lined with doors, one after another after another, and the upper floors with windows, more than half of which were missing their glass. The buildings looked soulless and empty, more like ants’ nests than places where people lived.
‘What are these places?’ Sherlock asked.
Unexpectedly it was Matty who replied. ‘Tenements,’ he said. ‘I remember ’em from the last time I was here. Find ’em all over the place, you do. They’re cheap places for poor people to live, but you end up with only two rooms to call your own, stacked up with other people’s rooms like birdhouses. Everyone’s rooms look the same – same front doors, same plaster, same window frames. The people who live there try an’ make ’em individual-like, with curtains an’ flower pots an’ stuff, but it’s like decoratin’ one beer crate in a pile of crates wiv a bit of ribbon. Just draws attention to how borin’ it is.’ He sniffed. ‘An’ they all end up smellin’ of rottin’ rubbish and boiled cabbage.’
‘The place looks deserted,’ Rufus observed. ‘A perfect temporary base of operations for our transatlantic captors. I wonder how they heard about it.’
‘I ’eard a rumour,’ Matty continued, ‘last time I was ’ere, that the local authorities was tryin’ to move people out of the tenements. ’Parently they wanted to sell the land off to build factories on, or posh mansions or somethin’. People I talked to told me that the authorities would start a rumour that some illness, like consumption or the plague, had broken out in a tenement. They’d move everybody out to the workhouse, then they’d knock the tenement down an’ build on the land. Make a lot of money that way, they could.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I ’eard that sometimes, if there weren’t any places left in the workhouse, they’d brick up the alleyways in an’ out of the tenements an’ leave the people inside to starve, but I don’t believe that.’
‘The trouble is,’ Rufus said thoughtfully, ‘that we don’t have any idea where we are, we have no way of getting out and there’s nobody to ask for help.’
Sherlock looked around. He had the map still in his pocket, but it was no use. ‘I think we were carried from the cart to the block from over there,’ he said, pointing to an alleyway between two of the blocks. ‘We didn’t turn any corners, and that’s the only straight route.’
‘Cart’ll be gone by now,’ Matty observed darkly. ‘That bloke who was askin’ the questions will’ve taken it.’
Rufus shook his head. ‘He had his own carriage. That’s how he brought me here. Just him and a driver. The driver stayed in the carriage.’
‘With the two men who kidnapped us from the park still in the tenement block,’ Sherlock finished, ‘the cart should still be here.’
The three of them looked at each other for a moment, then rapidly headed for the alleyway that Sherlock had pointed out. The alleyway opened out on to a dirt road that led away into the distance. On the other side of the road was a stretch of unkempt ground where a handful of bony, hollow-eyed horses were grazing on thistles and weeds. Sherlock couldn’t help but compare the scene with Amyus Crowe’s cottage back in Farnham: a beautiful, rustic location beside a field where Virginia’s well looked-after horse grazed contentedly. Here, everything seemed to be a dark inverse of that familiar place: rows of identical prison-like blocks next to a patch of wasteground where horses that might be Sandia’s forgotten siblings had been left to die.
Glancing into one of the tenement doorways, Sherlock caught sight of a movement. He squinted, trying to see what it was. A curtain fluttering in the wind? A pigeon or a seagull roosting?
Something white moved against the darkness inside the doorway. More quickly this time, Sherlock realized that it was a skull. The deep sockets of the eyes, the hairless surface of the head, the sharp edges of the cheekbones and the sinister grin of the teeth – another dead man was staring at him!
The figure moved back into the shadows before Sherlock could point it out to Matty or Rufus Stone. He scanned the row of doorways frantically.
Were these creatures connected with the Americans who had kidnapped the three of them, or was this some kind of hallucination born out of a breaking mind?
He gazed over at Matty, and saw that the boy was staring at the tenement doorways as well. Matty turned his head to look at Sherlock.
‘Did you see them?’ Sherlock asked desperately.
Matty nodded. ‘They’re dead men walking, aren’t they? They’re following us. They
‘I don’t believe that dead men can walk.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ve seen dead rabbits on butchers’ slabs, and dead fish in costermonger’s?’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘They never move. Not ever. When you’re dead, the vital spark has gone from you. Vanished. The only thing left is flesh, and that decays. Dead animals don’t come back to life, so dead people don’t come back to life.’
Matty looked unconvinced. ‘I ain’t got time to argue wiv you,’ he said.’
‘Come on!’ Rufus called. ‘We need to get out of here before they come back!’
On the side of the road a cart had been left, its horse tied to a stunted tree. The animal looked in considerably better condition than the ones in the ground across the road.
‘That,’ Rufus said, ‘is our ride home – if we knew which way home was.’
‘I memorized the route out,’ Sherlock said. ‘I can just reverse the times and the turns, and we can work out the way back to our hotel.’
‘But we’ll have to put a sack over your head,’ Matty murmured. He looked up at Sherlock and smiled. ‘So the conditions are the same as on the journey out. Otherwise you might get it wrong.’
Sherlock and Matty climbed into the back of the cart while Rufus clambered in the front. He flicked the reins experimentally and the horse started off as if someone had fired a gun. It didn’t seem to like being near the tenements.
Sherlock stood up behind Rufus’s shoulder, clutching on to a wooden bar, and tried to reverse the route that had brought them there. He assumed the cart was travelling at about the same speed, so all he had to do was remember the turns and the rough times in his head and then start the list at the bottom and work upward. Of course he had to change the turns around. A right-hand turn heading from the city centre to the tenements would be a left-hand turn heading back.
