Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

wall. It was only waist high, and she jumped over it lithely and vanished from sight. He vaulted the wall and dropped down beside her.

Sherlock got to his knees and peered over the top of the wall, looking down the slope. There were still people around the chapel.

‘Come on,’ Virginia urged. ‘We need to keep moving. We need to get to my pa.’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘but carefully. Stay out of sight.’

Together they scurried along in the wall’s shadow, keeping low so that the stones shielded them from anyone looking in their direction.

Sherlock peered ahead. In the distance, across an undulating stretch of ground, was a wooded area.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We need to get to cover before nightfall.’

Despite being rife with tension the walk towards the trees was quiet and even boring. Sherlock was exhausted after all that he’d suffered that day, and he found that just putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, was one of the most tedious things he’d ever had to do. Every now and then he would stumble over a stone, or put his foot in a pothole, and he would nearly fall over – much to Virginia’s amusement.

He kept alert for movement that might mean they had been spotted, but apart from the birds that circled in the sky and the occasional rabbit the only thing that Sherlock saw was a majestic stag standing on a rise in the ground. Its antlers spread like small trees stripped of their leaves. It stared impassively at them, head turned to one side. When it was certain they were not a threat it lowered its head to the ground and began to eat the heather.

The sky dimmed from blue to indigo and from indigo to black as they walked. Stars began to twinkle: first one or two, and then, within a few minutes, too many to count.

Remembering the stag, and how it had casually dismissed them from its mind to chomp at the vegetation, Sherlock realized that he was hungry. No, he was starving. Apart from the oatcakes at Amyus Crowe’s cottage, he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

Virginia was biting her lip. She looked hungry too.

What were his options? Try to chase a rabbit down the next time one broke from cover? Unlikely that he would succeed. Throw Matty’s knife – which was still in his pocket – and hope to hit a rabbit? He didn’t know much about throwing knives, although he’d seen it done at fairgrounds, but he suspected that the knives had to be carefully balanced so that they spun smoothly, end over end. Matty’s knife had a handle that was much bulkier than the blade. He wouldn’t be able to aim it properly.

He remembered the first ever lesson that Amyus Crowe had given him, back in Hampshire in the woods that surrounded Holmes Manor. Crowe had taught Sherlock which fungi were safe to eat and which were poisonous. If he could find some mushrooms, then they could eat. He glanced around. There wasn’t much chance of finding them in open moorland, but perhaps when they got into the trees he could find some growing on rotten logs in piles of leaf mould.

He looked up to see how far they were from the wood. The treeline was probably half a mile away.

‘Look,’ Virginia said. ‘We can sleep there for the night.’

Sherlock followed the direction in which she was pointing. At first he saw nothing, but then he spotted a small stone building in the shadow of the trees. For a second he thought it was someone’s house, but after a moment he noticed how small it was, the absence of glass, and the door-less entrance. It was a hut, built to shelter shepherds from storms.

‘Well spotted,’ he said.

‘Any chance of some food?’ Virginia asked. ‘I’m starved after all that walking.’

Sherlock thought for a moment. He supposed he could safely leave Virginia for a bit while he scouted for mushrooms.

He told her so. She looked sceptically at him. ‘Mushrooms? You tryin’ to poison me?’

‘Trust me – your dad is a good teacher.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘He may be a good teacher, but are you sure he knows what he’s talkin’ about?’

‘Only one way to find out.’

‘Look, why don’t I collect some wood and get a fire going while you get the mushrooms? It’ll save time.’

‘Are you sure you’ll be all right? There are people after us.’

She stared at him, an eyebrow raised. ‘I can look after myself.’

They checked inside the stone shelter. Just one room, and leaves had drifted into the corners, but it seemed secure enough. There was even a small wood-burning brazier, along with a couple of battered saucepans and some metal plates.

‘Are you goin’ to be long?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘As long as it takes. You want dinner, don’t you?’

She smiled. ‘I’ve never had a man actually go an’ gather dinner for me before, ’part from my dad. I kinda like it.’

He couldn’t help himself. ‘What about buy you dinner? Has anyone ever done that? Apart from Mr Crowe, I mean?’

She shook her head. ‘Nope.’

‘Or cook you dinner?’

‘Nope.’

He smiled. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

The trees closed in around him within moments: trunks as thick as his body that erupted from tangles of roots and reached up towards the sky, forming a lacy ceiling with their branches. The thin light of the moon filtered down from above as he walked. Twigs seemed to grope for his face. Trailing strands of moss – or perhaps fine spider webs – brushed his cheeks and forehead, and he kept having to push them away. An owl hooted, and he could dimly make out the occasional sound of something larger – badgers, ferrets, maybe the odd deer – pushing its way through the undergrowth.

Somewhere off in the distance, a twig snapped as if it had been stepped on. Leaves rustled. Was it the wind, or a person?

He tensed, fearing that Scobell’s men had tracked them down, but a moment’s thought convinced him otherwise. He could still hear the owls and the passing animals. If Scobell’s men were around, the wildlife would have been more cautious.

Remembering the Edinburgh tenement, and the faces of dead men that had been staring out at him from the darkened doorways, he began to feel a flutter of panic in his chest. Were there dead men stalking him through the forest? Were they even now clustering around the door of the shepherds’ shelter, ready to burst in and attack Virginia? His heart started to race. He began to turn around, ready to race back to save her, but he stopped and took a deep breath. This was stupid. He put a firm mental hand on the panic in his chest and pushed downward. Dead men did not walk. There were no such things as ghosts. They weren’t logical. They were just superstition. Amyus Crowe had taught Sherlock a lot over the past year, but whatever Sherlock had learned had been built on top of a basic scepticism that was part of his character. There had to be a reason for things happening. There had to be a cause. Things that were dead were dead – they didn’t keep moving. Death was the absence of life. Whatever he had seen back in the tenement, whatever he and Matty had seen in Edinburgh, it wasn’t dead men.

Feeling better, he kept on walking. If he was hearing anything in the woods apart from the breeze then it was scurrying animals. The rest was just his imagination drawing the wrong conclusions from small amounts of evidence. Speculation in the absence of correct information was, he decided, a fruitless occupation. If he was going to come to conclusions in future, he was going to make sure they were based on evidence.

He entered a small clearing. In the light of the moon that flooded down from above he could see a cluster of mushrooms pushing through the loam and the leaf mulch of the forest floor. He approached and knelt beside them. They were bright orange in colour, and their edges were wavy, like lettuce leaves. He recognized them as chanterelles. Pulling as many as he could from the ground, he stuffed his jacket pockets.

A few feet away he found some morels, their honeycomb-like interior structure and brown colour unmistakable. Across the other side of the clearing, a few feet into the trees, he found a fallen trunk on which was growing a mass of the distinctive white strands of Lion’s Mane mushroom.

Arms and pockets full, he set off back for the shelter. He had enough to keep the two of them going until the