Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Hendricks led the way along the path and through a gap in the hedge. On the other side was the edge of a stretch of woodland, still within the estate’s boundaries. He set off, trudging with easy steps, not looking to see if Sherlock was following.

Sherlock checked his watch again. Coming up to eleven o’clock, and all he was doing was walking in the countryside. He wasn’t going to make it!

The gardener came to a stop by a grassy bank. On the other side of the bank the ground dropped away to a natural depression, roughly circular in shape, that was bereft of trees. Around the edges of the bank Sherlock could see dark holes – rabbit burrows, he presumed.

He had a sudden flash of memory – the rabbit’s head in the burrow, back in Farnham. The thing that had started his journey off. It seemed so long ago now, but it had only been a few days.

‘This is where I laid the traps,’ Hendricks said. He wouldn’t look at Sherlock, but instead gazed into the distance. ‘Used a looped snare attached to a bent sapling. The rabbit puts its head through the snare and triggers it, and the sapling pulls the snare tight and lifts the little critter off the ground. I check the snares every couple of hours.’

Sherlock gazed at where the snare had been, but he wasn’t sure what it could tell him. On a whim, he moved across to the bank where the rabbit burrows were. He bent down to check the nearest one. There was no sign of a rabbit, but he did notice some plant stalks that were lying just inside the mouth of the burrow. For a moment he assumed that they were the remnants of a meal that the rabbits had brought back to the burrow, but then he realized that couldn’t be the explanation. He’d never seen rabbits move food from one place to another – they always ate wherever they could find grass growing. He bent and picked up one of the stalks. There were flowers at one end, like purple bells, and the other end had been cut. These plants had been deliberately put there, in the mouth of the burrow. But who would do that?

‘Do you recognize this?’ he asked, holding the stalk up where Hendricks would see it.

‘Foxglove,’ the gardener said, glancing at the stalk and frowning. ‘Be careful of that, sir. “Dead Man’s Bells” they call that. Just a nibble of one of them leaves can kill you. There’s some as say that just breathing in near the plant can kill you, but I don’t put much stock in that. Been walking these woods for years, I have, and never had a problem.’ He frowned ‘Not seen much foxglove neither. Quite rare round here.’

‘Why would rabbits be eating poisonous plants?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Surely animals avoid poisonous plants.’ He turned the stem in his hand. ‘More to the point, why would someone put a poisonous plant where a rabbit can’t help but find it?’

‘They do say,’ Hendricks said, ‘that rabbits are immune to foxglove.’ His face was contorted, as if he was thinking something through. ‘Don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is . . .’

‘If it is true,’ Sherlock said, his thoughts racing ahead of his voice, ‘then the poison in the foxglove might build up in the rabbit’s meat. That might poison anyone who ate the rabbit!’

He glanced up to meet Hendricks’s gaze. The gardener was staring at him, the frown still darkening his face. The thought occurred to Sherlock that if it was Hendricks who had left the foxglove plants by the burrow, hoping that the rabbits would eat them and the poison would build up in their meat, and if he had then given the rabbit to Aggie Macfarlane, knowing she would prepare it for Sir Benedict to eat, then the gardener had committed a particularly devious murder. He might want to stop Sherlock telling anyone about it. He tensed his muscles, preparing to spring up and run if Hendricks made any move towards him.

But no – if Hendricks was a murderer, then why tell Sherlock what he needed to know to solve the crime?

‘Someone deliberately left the foxglove here, for the rabbits to eat?’ the man asked. ‘So the chances were that if I caught a rabbit, its flesh would already be poisoned?’

Sherlock nodded. ‘How long would it take for the poison to build up?’

‘A week,’ Hendricks said. ‘Perhaps two. But . . . who would do something like this? Something this barbarous?’

Instead of answering, Sherlock glanced at the ground. The earth was hard – too hard to retain any impression of shoes or boots. He might know how the crime had been committed, but that information was useless without knowing who.

He wanted to check the time, but he stopped himself. Knowing how little time he had left wasn’t going to make him think any faster.

His gaze was skittering around the area of the burrows, looking for something, anything that might be important, when he suddenly realized that there was something unusual on the ground. It was brown and dry, and looked a bit like a long, straight worm. He stared at it for a few moments, wondering why a dead worm would be laid out as straight as that, before he realized.

It wasn’t a worm. It was the mark left where someone had spat a mouthful of tobacco and saliva.

He glanced at Hendricks. The gardener had followed Sherlock’s gaze and was staring at the tobacco stain.

‘Do you chew tobacco?’ Sherlock murmured.

‘Can’t say I ever picked the habit up,’ he replied. ‘I don’t chew tobacco and I don’t smoke it. But I know who does.’

Sherlock remembered the butler, back at the house, and his mouthful of tobacco, and also the way he had claimed that the garden and the woods weren’t his area of expertise. If that was true, why had he been out here, all this way from the house?

‘You need to go to the police,’ Sherlock said. ‘Tell them what you found.’

‘What you found,’ the gardener said grudgingly. ‘I should have seen all this, but I didn’t.’

Sherlock shook his head. ‘The police won’t listen to me – I’m a kid, and I’m not local. There’s more chance of them believing you. If you want Aggie Macfarlane to be released, you need to tell them everything.’

‘Aye. I will.’ A corner of his mouth turned up. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for Aggie. I’ll do whatever I can to get her out. But what about you?’

Now Sherlock did look at his watch.

Ten past one. He had less than an hour to make it back and convince Macfarlane that he could clear Aggie’s name.

‘I have to run,’ he said. ‘I need to be somewhere else in a hurry.’

And he did run. He ran all the way back to the house, to where Dunlow and Brough were waiting for him. Before he even got to the carriage he was shouting, ‘Quick! We need to get back!’

As he climbed into the carriage, which was already pulling away, Sherlock glanced back at the manor house. He thought he saw the butler staring at him from a downstairs window, but the carriage was jolting too much to be sure. As they drove away Sherlock couldn’t help thinking about Mrs Eglantine. Were all staff who ran households potential murderers?

He kept his watch in his hand as the carriage rattled through the streets, lanes and alleys of Edinburgh. His heart was pumping, and he could feel a pressure in his ears and temples. He wanted to jump out of the carriage and run, but that wasn’t logical. It wouldn’t have done any good. The carriage was already going faster than he could.

He hated waiting. He hated relying on other people. He wanted to be doing something.

He glanced out of the window for the thousandth time. Walls, windows, street signs and street lamps flashed past, blurring into an amorphous mass. He was sure Edinburgh was a wonderful place, but at the moment he hated it.

He realized that they were getting close when he started to see warehouses rather than ordinary houses go past. As they slowed to a halt he jumped out and sprinted towards the particular warehouse he recognized from earlier. Macfarlane’s base.

‘Kid,’ Dunlow shouted, ‘wait for us!’ Sherlock pelted full speed through the front door. Men standing guard