Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

‘I know you will,’ she replied.

Brough was a thin man in his thirties with a scattering of freckles across a bald head. His lips were twisted in a sneer, as if he could smell something unpleasant. He accompanied Sherlock back through the rooms he’d been carried through before. Whatever was in the pit was snuffling around behind the fence on the far side as they passed, but in the next room the two men were still fighting, trading blows slowly while standing close together, not moving anything apart from their arms. They looked exhausted, and their faces were swollen and covered with blood. The dog fight had ended, and the crowd who had been gathered around it were dispersing. Money was still changing hands.

They headed towards the door to the outside, emerging into a weak, watery sunlight that was filtering through rain-heavy clouds. Sherlock turned around to look at the building they had left. Based on the flagstones, the tapestries, the animal heads and the flaming torches, he was expecting an old manor house at the very least, perhaps even a castle, but he was amazed to see that it was just a large and anonymous wooden warehouse set among other warehouses. The area looked deserted. It was probably located somewhere near the docks where those men worked. From the outside the building looked like somewhere that sacks of grain would be stored, not the central base for a criminal gang. More disguise, he supposed. Anything could be made to look like anything else, if you took enough trouble over it.

Dunlow was already waiting outside. He was older than Brough, shorter and wider, but he gave the impression that his bulk was largely muscle rather than fat. The two men led Sherlock to a black carriage.

Half an hour later they drew up outside a building made of grey stone and with a long roof of black slate tiles. The windows were barred. A carving in the stone above the door read Edinburgh and Lothian Police.

‘This is where the boss’s sister is being kept,’ Dunlow said. His voice sounded like stones grinding together. He looked uncomfortable at being so close to a police station. ‘Let me go in and see if they’ll let you talk to her.’

‘Is that likely?’ Sherlock asked. ‘I mean, I’m not a relative or anything, and even if you claim I am, they’ll know as soon as I open my mouth that I’m not Scottish.’

‘There’s a fine trade goes on in these parts in letting citizens with spare change observe criminals in their cells,’ Dunham replied darkly. ‘The middle classes like to see the poor in police custody – it lets them sleep more securely in their beds. I’ll slip the sergeant a shilling and tell him that you’re the son of a visiting English lord. He’ll be happy to let you have ten minutes alone with her, no questions asked.’ He saw Sherlock’s shocked expression and snorted. ‘What, you think the police are any better than the criminals? The only difference is that they have uniforms and we don’t.’

He walked off into the police station and came out five minutes later.

‘There’s a constable on the desk who’ll take you to the cells,’ he said. ‘Be out in quarter of an hour, otherwise they’ll want another shilling.’

Dubiously, Sherlock entered the police station. It smelled musty, unpleasant. A uniformed constable was indeed waiting just inside the door. He had mutton chop whiskers and a bushy moustache. ‘This way,’ he said gruffly, without making eye contact. ‘Fifteen minutes to look at her and talk to her. No funny business, you hear?’

‘No funny business,’ Sherlock agreed, without knowing quite what he was agreeing to.

The cells were down a set of stone steps that had been worn into curves by generations of feet. They reminded Sherlock uncomfortably of the time he had visited Mycroft in a police station in London. He hoped that this visit would have as successful an outcome as that one.

The constable stopped in front of a door and unlocked it with a large key from a hoop on his belt. He pushed the door open and gestured Sherlock in. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he warned. ‘She spends most of her time crying, so I don’t think she’ll do anything stupid, like attack you, but you can’t tell with this sort. If she makes a move towards you, bang on the door. I’ll be just out here, waiting.’

Sherlock entered. The door closed behind him, and he heard the key turn in the lock. He was alone with a potential murderer.

The potential murderer was lying on a metal bed that seemed to be attached to the wall by hinges and chains. She looked up at him. She was about thirty-five years old, with hair like straw and blue eyes. There was something about the shape of her face that reminded Sherlock of her brother, although she was smaller and more delicate. Her face was dirty, and streaked with tears, and her clothes were crumpled, as if she had slept in them – which she probably had.

‘I don’t need a priest,’ she said. Her voice was weak, but firm. ‘I am not yet ready to make my peace with God.’

‘I’m not a priest,’ Sherlock said. ‘Your brother sent me.’

‘Gahan?’ She pushed herself upright. There was panic in her eyes. ‘He mustn’t get involved. He mustn’t.’ She glanced towards the door, as if the constable might be listening outside. ‘If the police think he has anything to do with this, they will chase him to the ends of the Earth and never rest until they catch him!’

‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured her. ‘He’s not involved. I asked him if I could come to see you. I want to find out what happened.’

‘What happened?’ She looked away, eyes filling up with tears. ‘Sir Benedict is dead, and the police think I did it, sir. That’s what happened.’

‘And did you?’

She looked back at him, shocked. ‘I couldn’t kill Sir Benedict! I’d worked for him for twenty years. Sir, he was like a father to me!’

Sherlock nodded. ‘All right – then why do the police think that you killed him?’

She put her head in her hands. ‘Because I am his cook. Or at least, I was his cook. I prepared all of his food. And he was poisoned, or at least that’s what they say. So if he was poisoned, then I must have done it. It stands to reason, doesn’t it?’

‘But other people must have touched his food, or carried it, or been able to access it, surely?’

She shook her head. ‘Sir Benedict was very . . . untrusting. He believed that his business rivals were out to destroy him. He was convinced that they would attack him, or poison his food if they could. There were guards all around the house to prevent anyone getting in or setting fire to the place, and he took one with him whenever he left the house. All the doors and windows were locked and barred, and the only person he trusted to cook and serve his food was me.’ She made a slight sighing sound. ‘It was like a prison sometimes, and yet I was happy there. I’d been working for him for a long time, and he knew that I would never do anything to hurt him. Besides, he put it in his will that if he died of natural causes then I was to inherit five hundred pounds. The same was true for the butler, the maids, the gardener and all the guards he employed as well.’ She sniffed. ‘He knew that nobody could pay any of us to hurt him, or to let them into the house.’ She sniffed. ‘Not that the money was the reason why I wouldn’t have done anything.’

‘So you prepared his food – by yourself – and you took it to him? Alone?’

‘That’s right,’ she confirmed. ‘And I collected all the raw ingredients myself. Bought all the herbs and vegetables and milk from the market, and picked the meat from the butchers’ slabs. And I baked all his bread myself too.’

‘So if the meat or the vegetables were poisoned, then anyone in the area buying them would have died as well – and nobody did.’

‘That’s exactly the case, sir, and that’s why I’m in here now, facing the gallows.’

Sherlock checked his watch. Time was ticking away. Bryce Scobell was only a few hours from meeting Gahan Macfarlane. ‘And are the marketplace and the butchers’ shops the only places you got the raw ingredients?’

‘Yes.’ She caught herself, hesitating. ‘Except for the occasional rabbit. The gardener catches them in traps. He’d bring them to me, still warm, and I’d gut and skin them. Sir Benedict loved a bit of rabbit in cream-and- mustard sauce – ordered it a couple of times a week, he did.’ She sniffed, on the verge of tears again. ‘That was what they reckoned killed him. They fed a dog with the remains of his dinner, and the dog died as well.’

‘Interesting. His last meal was rabbit in cream-and-mustard sauce?’

She nodded.

‘And you prepared it all yourself?’