Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm

looked into the hole left by the drawer for anything that might have been pushed inside, but apart from dust, spider webs and an old lace handkerchief he didn’t find anything.

Leaving the chest of drawers, with a final check to make sure it still looked as it had before he arrived, he turned to the wardrobe, but a noise from outside made him freeze. His heart thudded painfully. Had that been a creak of a floorboard? Was someone standing outside, listening for him in the same way he was listening for them? Had Mrs Eglantine finished her meeting with Cook and returned to her room for some reason?

The noise happened again: a scratching sound, difficult to place. Sherlock looked around wildly for somewhere to hide. Under the bed? In the wardrobe? He took a half-step, hesitant, fearing that a board would creak beneath his feet and give him away.

Before he could move again he heard the noise for a third time, and he recognized it with a rush of relief. It was the sound of ashes being scraped from one of the fireplace grates downstairs with a shovel, echoing through the chimneys. He relaxed, and let his hands unclench.

Now that his attention had been drawn to the fireplace, Sherlock moved across to it. He ran his hands through the cold coals in case anything had been hidden there, and even craned his neck to look up the chimney, but there was nothing to see.

He turned back to his search of the room, checking under the bed, but apart from an empty suitcase there was nothing there. The wardrobe was occupied by a number of dresses on hangers and two hats on a shelf – all of them black, of course. Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was just a housekeeper thing, or whether Mrs Eglantine spent her entire life wearing black. She was a ‘Mrs’, which meant that she was either married or widowed, but Sherlock could only imagine her walking up the aisle in church wearing a black wedding dress. He shivered and pushed the grotesque thought away.

He stood in the centre of the rug and looked around. He’d checked all the obvious places. The room was small enough and neat enough that he could see virtually every hiding place, and there was nothing unusual, nothing that he wouldn’t have expected to see in a housekeeper’s room.

If he was hiding something in his room, where would he put it?

On a sudden thought he stepped to one side and pulled the rug back. Nothing underneath but floorboards. He wasn’t expecting there to be – Mrs Eglantine was nothing if not clever, and hiding something beneath the only rug in the room was too simple and too obvious – but he had to check anyway, just in case.

Looking at the floorboards prompted him to test them with his foot, looking for any looseness. Maybe she’d levered up one of the boards and hidden something underneath. If she had, then she’d fastened it back too well for Sherlock to detect. He’d need a crowbar to lever them up, and that would leave traces.

The picture on the wall kept attracting his attention. For a minute or two he dismissed it, thinking that it was just the way it was hung at an angle that disturbed his ordered mind, but his thoughts kept circling back to it. It occurred to him that something might have been hidden behind the picture. Gently he eased it away from the wall and turned it so that he could see the back.

Only a pencilled price mark.

He sighed and put the picture back at exactly the same angle he had found it.

Hands on hips, he surveyed the room again. If there was a secret in the room, then it was particularly well kept.

If, in fact, the secret was in the room to start with.

On a whim he crossed over to the narrow window that looked out over the gardens to the back of the house. He couldn’t see anybody, so he was safe from observation. The window was open a crack. He pushed it further open and leaned out.

Something was hanging from a piece of twine that had been wrapped around a nail stuck in the wood of the window frame – a package that dangled a couple of feet below the level of the windowsill. It was small enough that it would have been almost invisible from the garden below, unless someone knew exactly what they were looking for.

Sherlock hauled it in and rested it on the windowsill. The twine was tarred to make it weather-resistant, and the package was wrapped in oilcloth. It left a reddish powdery residue on the windowsill. It looked to Sherlock as if the oilcloth had been rubbed with brick dust to make it even more difficult to see from outside. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to hide this package.

With a momentary hesitation, and a shiver of anticipation, he untied the twine and unwrapped the package.

Inside was a folded mass of paper. Sherlock wiped his hands on a handkerchief before unfolding it carefully, making a mental note of which layers were on the inside and which ones were on the outside. It was bad enough that he was in her room; he certainly didn’t want Mrs Eglantine knowing that he had found her hidden papers and was riffling through them.

The papers unfolded into two large sheets. The top one was a set of plans of Holmes Manor – architect’s drawings showing all the rooms on all the floors, all to scale. Many of the rooms had been crossed off in red ink. Most of them had scribbled notes written in them, or arrows pointing to particular features with question marks attached. One particularly thick wall between the dining room and the reception room had a note written beside it which said: ‘Check for secret compartments in the wall. Could be accessed from either side.’

The second sheet was slightly smaller than the first. It was a set of words and phrases written in the same handwriting as the notes on the architectural plans. They had boxes drawn around them, and the boxes were linked by lines and arrows in a kind of network. It looked as if Mrs Eglantine – assuming it was her – was trying to connect up a series of disparate elements, discoveries or thoughts into a coherent pattern – and failing. Sherlock scanned through some of the notes and found names of members of the Holmes family, as well as names that he didn’t recognize, alongside places that he thought he’d heard of and words that just seemed to be randomly chosen but presumably meant something to Mrs Eglantine. In the centre, like a spider sitting in the middle of its web, the words gold plates had been circled twice in an emphatic hand.

Gold plates? Was that what she was looking for?

Reluctantly Sherlock folded the papers up again, careful to make sure that he used the same fold marks in the same order as he had unwrapped the package. He wished he could keep them for further study, but that would be risky. He couldn’t even copy them – there was too much information there, and it would take too long. He knew more than he had earlier, but he wasn’t sure he was any the wiser.

He wrapped the papers up in the oilcloth, retied them with the twine and carefully lowered them out of the window, first checking that the garden was still empty.

Finally, he closed the window, remembering to leave it open a crack.

He took a last look around the room, partly for anything he might have missed and partly to see if he’d left any traces. To both questions, the answer was no.

After listening at the door for a few moments to check that the coast was clear, he left Mrs Eglantine’s room and slipped along the corridor. For a moment he considered going into his own room, but there was nothing for him to do there apart from rest for a while, and think, and he had other things to do. He headed downstairs.

The heavy oak door leading out into the drive and the gardens thumped closed as he entered the hall. Someone had just left the house. Through a narrow window Sherlock could see a black-clad figure walking to a waiting cart. It was Mrs Eglantine. She had put on a coat, which meant that she was probably going into town. She must have finished her conference with Cook, and a shiver went through Sherlock as he realized how close a call he’d had. If she’d kept her coat upstairs instead of in the kitchen, then she might have found him.

The cart clattered away and vanished through the gates to the road. Sherlock turned and headed back towards the kitchens.

‘Master Sherlock!’ Cook called as he entered. She was a large woman, her cheery face usually red from the heat of the ovens and her hands covered in flour, but today she looked pale and the skin around her eyes was creased as if she was trying to stop herself from crying. ‘I just got some bread in the oven. Come back in a while and you can ’ave a nice hot slice wiv butter fresh from the churn!’

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I was looking for Mrs Eglantine.’

Cook’s face seemed to age five years in as many seconds. ‘She’s gone to town. And good riddance too! ’Parently the quality of the vegetables I’ve been preparin’ for this household is not up to the standards she expects.’ She sniffed. ‘Anyone’d think she was the lady of the house, rather than Mrs ’Olmes, and this was some swanky ’otel rather than a country ’ouse.’