Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

‘And then he’ll make a mistake, and you can turn the tables on him.’

Crowe nodded slowly. ‘When the game is a hunt and you’re losing, change the rules.’

‘When the man you’re up against is cleverer and more ruthless than you,’ Sherlock amplified, ‘make sure that the game doesn’t depend on the winner being the cleverest or the most ruthless.’

Crowe smiled and opened his mouth to say something, but there was a sudden thump from the roof of the cottage. Crowe’s gaze snapped upward, his hand already on the pistol, then he looked through the window again. Sherlock followed his gaze. The narrow enclosed hillside that sloped away in front of the cottage was empty, deserted, but something in the air had changed. A smell. Something . . . burning.

‘Smoke!’ he said. ‘I smell smoke.’

Amyus Crowe moved swiftly across to the window. ‘Nothin’ out here.’

Sherlock looked towards the door out to the rest of the cottage. Was it his imagination, or was there a faint haze in the atmosphere out there?

‘It’s Scobell,’ he said. ‘He’s set fire to the cottage!’

‘But how?’ Rufus snapped. ‘Nobody’s come near! And how on earth did he find us?’

‘They didn’t have to come near,’ Sherlock replied. ‘He’s dropped something burning on to the thatched roof from the cliffs above the cottage! That’s dry straw – it’ll go up in seconds!’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘Come on!’ Matty yelled. ‘We need to get out!’

Sherlock moved to take Virginia’s hand, wanting to make sure she got to the door safely, but Crowe grabbed at his shoulder. ‘Scobell will be out there, son!’ he shouted. ‘He’ll have rifles. He’ll pick us off like rabbits!’

Sherlock had a mental flash of the decapitated rabbit back at Amyus Crowe’s Farnham cottage. He didn’t want to end up like that.

‘We don’t have a choice,’ Rufus Stone said. ‘If we stay here we’ll be burned alive.’

They could hear the fire catching hold in the straw thatch now – a crackling sound, like sticks being broken by some giant hand. Smoke was drifting in through the open door. Already it was hard to breathe, hard even to see.

‘I don’t think he wants to kill us in the fire,’ Sherlock suddenly said.

Crowe stared at him questioningly.

‘He wants to take his revenge on you. A fire isn’t good enough for him – especially if he can’t be sure from the remains if you were even here.’

‘So what’s he trying to do?’ Rufus Stone asked, struggling not to cough.

‘Flush us out into the open. He’ll have men waiting further down the hill. They’ll have guns, and they’ll take us prisoner when we run out.’

‘But that’s the only option we’ve got!’ Matty cried.

Crowe shook his head. ‘Not quite. There’s a path that leads up the rock face, away from the house, if we can get down the slope that far. It’s hard to spot, but I know where it is.’

Stone covered his mouth and coughed. ‘The trouble will be in getting there,’ he said. ‘Scobell’s men won’t let us get too far from the house before they take us.’

‘I think I’ve got an idea.’

Sherlock ran for the door to the outside. Crowe and Rufus were moments behind him, with Matty and Virginia just behind them. Sherlock threw the door open. The sudden blast of fresh air sucked the smoke out in a billowing plume that would immediately alert whoever was watching from the rocky crags above – as Sherlock was sure they would be doing.

All over the ground in front of the cottage were the rocks of various shapes and sizes they had passed on the way in. Twenty feet ahead of that was the point where the ground dropped sharply away for ten feet or so – the point where they had had to scramble up using hands and feet. Somewhere past there, hidden by the sudden drop in the ground, were Scobell’s men.

‘Help me!’ he shouted, and set to work dislodging one of the bigger stones.

Realizing what he was doing, Rufus and Crowe threw themselves against two more rocks – even larger ones. Matty and Virginia joined Sherlock, trying to get his one moving.

Sherlock set his shoulder against the boulder and heaved. His throat and his ankles throbbed where the rope had bruised the flesh, but he ignored the pain and kept pushing. The boulder shifted before his weight, rising up slightly and pivoting on a point on its front edge.

‘We’ve got it!’ he yelled.

Something whistled past his ear and buried itself in the ground by his side. He let go of the boulder in surprise, and it fell back into its crater with a thud that he could feel through the soles of his feet. He looked at the new object in surprise. For a moment he thought it was a stick, but there were feathers stuck to the back. He pulled it out of the ground. The front end was sharp, like an arrowhead.

He stared upward. Silhouetted on top of the V-shaped cliff into the bottom of which the cottage was set he could see men holding cross-shaped objects in their hands. They were aiming at Sherlock the way they might aim a rifle.

They were crossbows. Sherlock hadn’t seen one before, but he’d seen pictures. It was like a small bow, but on its side, and made of metal rather than wood. It could fire bolts – like small arrows – very fast, and with enough power to punch through metal armour.

‘Get out of the way!’ Matty yelled, pulling him back towards the cottage.

‘He’s not trying to shoot us – he’s trying to spook us into running!’ Sherlock shouted, pulling away from Matty and rugby-tackling the stone with all his weight. ‘They don’t want us dead, remember!’ The stone shifted again, pivoting forward, teetering on the point of rolling down the hill.

Which was exactly what Sherlock wanted.

More crossbow bolts hit the ground around him, but he ignored them. He gave the boulder one last push, using all his weight and all his strength. It rolled over on to the grass – and kept on rolling down the slope, gathering speed as it did so, bouncing slightly as it hit bumps in the ground. Amyus Crowe got his rock moving as well – a bigger one that rolled heavily rather than bounced, creating a furrow of grass and earth as it moved. But it did move – faster and faster.

Rufus Stone’s boulder started to move, but instead of following the other two down the widening slope it veered sideways, towards the rocky walls of the V-shaped canyon. For a moment Sherlock thought it was going to stop dead, but it hit the wall and rebounded, catching two smaller stones on the way and dislodging them from where they sat.

The boulders, rocks and stones vanished over the edge of the slope. Seconds passed with no response – and then he heard a flurry of shouts and screams from below. Sherlock imagined the boulders smashing into a line of Bryce Scobell’s men like a bowling ball hitting skittles, breaking legs and smashing people aside. He smiled grimly.

‘More!’ he shouted, and immediately got both hands beneath another rock and levered it out of the ground. It came out easily. He hoisted it up to his shoulder and threw it like a shot-putter. It hit the ground and bounced away downhill until it was out of sight. Matty and Virginia sent smaller stones the same way, while Amyus Crowe and Rufus managed to dislodge two more huge boulders.

Two more bolts struck the ground around them, splattering earth everywhere, but the shooters had realized that their distractions weren’t working. For a moment Sherlock worried that they might start shooting at the four of them, rather than around them, but that didn’t seem to be part of their orders. The shooting continued sporadically, but no longer felt dangerous.

The shouting and screaming from below was reaching banshee proportions now. Sherlock didn’t know how many men Scobell had down there, but it sounded like they were all either incapacitated or otherwise distracted. They would have been expecting a handful of desperate runners whom they could easily subdue, but instead they’d got an avalanche of rocks.