‘We’ll split up,’ Crowe said as the man moved off. ‘Ah’ll do amphibians, you do mammals. Meet back here in half an hour and if we haven’t discovered anything of interest then we can move on to another gallery.’
‘What counts as something of interest?’
‘Like ah said back at the Diogenes Club – anything that doesn’t fit. Anything that stands out.’
‘In a museum of stuffed animals?’
Crowe had the grace to smile. ‘It’s all to do with context. In the street, a dog walking past isn’t unusual. In a museum of stuffed animals, it is.’
‘All right,’ Sherlock said dubiously.
They climbed the first set of marble steps together, then separated where the stairs went left and right. Sherlock went right, Crowe left.
The stairs led to a balcony that ran around the upper space of the entrance hall. The balcony was edged with a waist-high balustrade of stone. Doors led off to what were presumably different halls of exhibits. A chandelier of cut-glass droplets and candles hung from the centre of the ceiling.
Sherlock headed through the first door. Beyond, he found himself in a long room which was broken up by a series of glass cabinets so that he couldn’t get a view all the way down. A skylight in the roof let in bright sunlight. He could hear voices somewhere in the room, but he couldn’t see anyone else.
He set off towards the far end, walking around the cases where he had to and briefly checking each of them out. As the attendant had said, this was the small mammal gallery. A ferret, poised perkily in an arrangement of dried grasses, was in a case next to a large, tan-coloured cat with tufted ears that was sitting on a flat stretch of desert sand. A badger, vividly striped in black and white, emerged tentatively from a burrow just a few feet away from a fox with absurdly large ears padding forever across a landscape of artificial ice and snow. Presumably it all made sense to someone.
Sherlock stopped beside the badger for a moment. The sight of the animal took him back to Farnham, and the dead badger he had used to distract Baron Maupertuis’s guard dog. At the time that had seemed about as bad as life could get. If only he’d known…
He passed cases of various rats and mice, cats and miniature dogs before he got to the end. Their emotionless eyes seemed to track him as he passed. The doorway at the end led out into a smaller hall with two doors leading off it. He chose one at random, and went through.
A figure loomed over him, arms upraised, vicious spikes emerging from its hands. He jerked backwards, nearly falling, before he realized that the figure was in a case and the spikes on the hands were actually claws. It wasn’t the bearded man from Waterloo Station. Straightening up, he brushed at his jacket self-consciously. It was a bear of some kind, with a tangled brown pelt and a muzzle that had been treated in some way to appear wet. It was bigger than Amyus Crowe, and that was saying something.
The room over which the bear stood guard contained a handful of larger cases. As well as the bear there was an elk with spreading, branch-like antlers, several wild boar with coarse bristles and tusks posed in a family group, and what seemed to be a cow so covered with long brown hair that Sherlock couldn’t even make out its eyes.
The door at the end led into yet another room. Sherlock was beginning to feel as if he was in a maze of some kind. As well as glass cases along the walls, it had cases in the centre. Each held a bird of some kind, and from what Sherlock could see they were all birds of prey.
The nearest case contained a lone eagle, set into a noble pose. Its wooden backdrop had been painted to represent a cloudless blue sky and distant mountains.
Sherlock moved further into the room. He heard something moving – the scrape of a shoe against the floor. Someone was obviously in the room with him, although he couldn’t hear any voices. Maybe it was a lone visitor.
He passed several cases containing owls of various types. They were sitting on branches – possibly real, possibly made of plaster of Paris; Sherlock couldn’t tell. Their claws encircled the branches: sharp killing weapons wrapped in scaled skin, designed to punch into the body of their prey and lift it up so the birds could fly away to their nests and feast.
As he went by, he thought he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He quickly turned to look. The birds were all staring at him. Hadn’t their heads been turned towards the door when he entered? Now they were facing into the centre of the room. Or was it something about owls that made it difficult to tell which way they were looking?
Something fluttered across the other side of the room. Was there a bird, a real bird, trapped in the room? A sparrow, or a pigeon, or something?
The next few cases contained an assortment of birds of prey. Sherlock spotted hawks, falcons, ospreys and several types of bird that he didn’t even recognize.
Even though they were dead and stuffed, there was something eerie about the birds, more so than the small mammals or the larger animals. Maybe feathers just looked more realistic than fur when what was underneath was stuffing rather than flesh and bone. Or maybe there was something about the shape of their skulls and the lack of body fat that meant the process of taxidermy left them looking as if they might at any moment just twist their heads and start preening, or stretch their wings to get the kinks out of their muscles. Even though their eyes were made of glass beads too, Sherlock thought he could detect a coldness in them, a dangerousness. The mice and the voles looked at passers-by as predators; the birds in this room looked at passers-by as prey.
He was imagining things again. It wasn’t helping. They’re just stuffed birds! he told himself. They aren’t real. They can’t move.
He heard another sudden movement in the far reaches of the room. Footsteps, perhaps. Cloth brushing against the wooden edge of a display case. It didn’t matter: he was bound to come across other visitors at some stage.
And then he was startled by a loud boom! For a moment he was shocked, wondering what it was, and then it occurred to him that the door at the far end of the room had slammed shut. Perhaps it had been caught in a draught.
Sherlock moved around a case that was blocking his way. Ahead of him, a larger case contained a vulture – its head bereft of feathers, its beak cruelly curved down at the end; its wings stretched out as if to bar his progress.
He looked up. There was another bird: a falcon, he thought. This one wasn’t behind glass, though. It was poised on top of the case as if it had just landed there.
A mournful whistle of three musical notes floated through the air.
As Sherlock watched, the falcon turned its head so that it could see him clearly and leaned forward as if it was about to launch itself off the case and dive towards his face.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A gleam of light caught Sherlock’s gaze. Something had been attached to the falcon’s legs: metal blades that stuck out like extra claws. As the falcon shifted on the cabinet Sherlock could see the varnished wood splintering as the metal bit into it.
Abruptly, the bird dropped towards Sherlock, propelled by a single flap of its outstretched wings. Its legs were held out stiffly beneath it, the metal claws spread wide. Sherlock jumped back, but his feet got tangled and he fell. It was as if he was toppling backwards in slow motion. He saw the falcon zooming over him, claws reaching for his eyes. It seemed as though he could see each individual feather covering its underside. Air blew across his face as the bird flapped its wings and soared past. Time stretched out, leaving him wondering if he had paused in mid- fall, suspended in mid-air, but the sudden impact as his shoulders hit the floor knocked the breath from his body in an explosive whoosh! and sent stars spinning through his head.
He rolled over, squeezing into the corner where the wooden base of a glass case met the floor, and scrabbled forward, expecting at any second to feel the bird’s claws bite into the flesh of his neck. The muscles in his back spasmed in pain. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a blur of brown feathers, and he jerked sideways, but when nothing moved he looked more closely and saw that it was a stuffed kestrel behind the glass. He was so close that he could see the stitches around its neck and the dust on its black glass eyes.
