the way back to the hotel. I was taking note of the streets as we came here. Is it all right if I walk back? I want to see some of the city.’
‘Very well,’ Mycroft said. He passed Sherlock a handful of money. ‘The principal currency in Russia is the rouble. The rouble is divided into exactly one hundred kopeks.’ He clapped Sherlock on the shoulder. ‘Now, you go and take a look around. I believe I will return to the hotel and think about our next move.’
As Mycroft’s carriage vanished round a corner, Sherlock began to walk. Moscow looked, sounded and, more importantly, smelt different from the places he was used to. The snow, for instance, muffled a lot of the noise, so that the clamour he’d been used to in London was largely absent. Moscow seemed like a quiet city. Although, he considered, it might also have been quiet through fear of the Tsar’s secret police and what they might do to people who said the wrong things.
The route was fixed firmly in his mind, and as Sherlock walked he found himself admiring the solid, impressive architecture of the city. As he got closer to their hotel he found himself turning into an open square so large that it almost seemed to bend with the curvature of the Earth. Ahead of him a cathedral rose up like some fantastic creation made out of strawberry ice cream and spun sugar. He had never seen anything like it in his life. It seemed to be a series of towers of different heights and apparently different diameters, each one randomly topped with a pointed spire or an onion-shaped dome which was painted or tiled in different colours: red, green, blue, yellow and white, all intermixed in various combinations of chequerboard patterns or swirls. Each spire or dome was topped with a large crucifix. As Sherlock walked slowly around the cathedral, staring all the time, he noticed that it kept changing its appearance. There was no obvious symmetry about it. Whichever angle he examined it from, it was a different shape. Like many things he’d seen in Russia since they had arrived, it looked like a collision between a complete accident and a deliberate creation.
On his right, just across a moat of partly frozen water, he could see the tall, red-brick walls of what he thought was the Kremlin – the palace and grounds where Tsar Alexander II lived, and from where he ruled over his immense domain. In between the cathedral and the Kremlin walls, and extending off to Sherlock’s right, was Red Square.
Several straight, wide thoroughfares led away from Red Square. Sherlock chose the one that he thought would lead to the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel and began to walk down it. A sign attached to a nearby wall told him that this was Neglinnaya Street. As well as being lined with shops on both sides it had a long row of stalls running down the middle. The shops seemed to be mainly selling fur coats, hats, boots or pastries of various sorts. Each shop had a brightly painted sign outside showing in pictorial form exactly what was on sale. The stalls were more plebeian, dealing as they did in all sorts of knick-knacks from knives to tobacco, from bags to old clothes, buttons and fragments of cloth. A few stalls were selling religious items: crosses, paintings on wooden plaques of saints and the like. Russia, it appeared to Sherlock, was a much more openly religious society than England.
Tea sellers wandered along the street between the shops and the stalls, pushing handcarts on which heated urns of tea were precariously balanced. They also sold snacks: strings hung around their necks from which rings of bread dangled like huge beads.
At each junction Sherlock noticed wooden booths occupied by men in grey uniforms and black helmets. They had swords strapped to their sides. The ones that weren’t actually asleep at their post just looked bored and cold.
Checking his watch, Sherlock decided that it was time he headed back. As he drew level with a side street, he stopped. Someone walking close behind him collided with him. He turned, already apologizing, but the man pushed past him with a muffled curse. At the same time he noticed an animated conversation happening at one of the wooden booths. A man in a heavy coat and a hat with fur earflaps was talking to the policeman in the booth, gesturing wildly with both hands. Sherlock was about to turn away when the man in the furs turned and pointed towards him. The policeman stared darkly at Sherlock.
A shiver ran through Sherlock’s body.
The man in furs appeared to be saying that something had been taken from him. He was gesturing to a pocket on his coat, sliding his hand in and out as if miming the fact that he had been pickpocketed. He pointed at Sherlock again. Sherlock glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone else was around, anyone that the man could have been pointing at, but there was nobody within ten yards.
Sherlock spread his arms wide in a gesture of innocence, gazing at the policeman and hoping the man would just wave him away, but instead the policeman gestured imperiously to him to approach the booth.
Sherlock switched his gaze to the man who had made the complaint. Just for a second, he smiled. It was the smile of a man who had pulled off a particularly cunning trick and was waiting to see the inevitable outcome. When he noticed that Sherlock was watching him the smile vanished from his face like a picture wiped from a blackboard.
Struck by a sudden and very unwelcome thought, Sherlock plunged his hand into his jacket pocket. His fingers closed on an object that hadn’t been there before: something square, something made of leather.
A wallet.
Suddenly it was all crystal clear to him. The whole thing was a set-up! The man who had barged into Sherlock’s back and walked off must have slipped the wallet into his pocket. The other man – the one talking to the policeman – hadn’t been robbed at all, but the moment he had seen the wallet slipped into Sherlock’s pocket he had gone across to the policeman and made his complaint, singling Sherlock out as the thief. And when Sherlock’s pockets were checked a wallet would be found in them, and the man who had made the complaint would undoubtedly recognize it as his, whether it was or not. He would be thrown into prison, and the evidence was completely against him.
This was a nightmare!
The policeman gestured again, more sternly this time. Sherlock’s heart started to race. He could feel sweat gathering damply at his armpits and down the centre of his back, sticking his shirt to his skin. Arrested in a foreign country for theft? He would be lucky if he ever saw daylight again, and that was even assuming that he got a fair trial. Given the clever way the whole thing had been set up, the chances were that every possible way out had been anticipated. They – whoever they were – might have paid off the judge, the jury, everyone. And that was assuming they even had judges and juries in Russia. He had no idea how the justice system worked. He had a feeling, based on things he had read in the newspapers back home, that Tsarist Russia worked on the basis of secret police and people vanishing off the streets and never being seen again.
He could run, but they must have anticipated that as well. He glanced around, trying to work out who in the surrounding throng of shoppers was part of this conspiracy.
To his left, a man in a black coat and fur hat turned his head away when Sherlock’s gaze passed across him. To his right, a teenage boy with a smallpox-scarred face glared sullenly at him, and a woman with her hands inside a fur muffler suddenly took an interest in the tobacconist’s stall she was standing by.
Three people at least. Three people who would stop him if he tried to run.
He desperately scanned his immediate vicinity again, hoping against hope that he would see a means of escape, but there wasn’t one. He wasn’t close enough to any of the stalls to snatch something up and use it as a weapon, and he was pretty sure that nobody near him would come to his aid if he yelled for help.
The policeman was striding across to where Sherlock stood. His sword was by his side but he was swinging a long stick in his right hand. The scowl on his face suggested that whatever Sherlock did he was intending to use the stick within the next few minutes.
A sudden gust of wind bought a smell of spiced tea to Sherlock’s nostrils. He turned his head. The tea seller was moving through the crowd a few steps away.
Without thinking, Sherlock took two steps and shoved the man in the small of the back.
The tea seller sprawled forward, pushing his cart away as he fell. The cart rolled on for a few feet and then hit a loose cobblestone. One wheel jolted upward and the cart tipped over. The silvery urn toppled over. The top flew off as it hit the cobbled street and a flood of brown tea spilt everywhere, immediately turning the snow to brown slush. People jumped out of the way of the steaming liquid. Some of them got splashed, and they cried out as it scalded their legs.
While the three watchers and the policeman were distracted, Sherlock slipped away through the crowd. As he moved he tried to make himself smaller, and to make sure that there was always a group of people between him and the people who wanted him, but there were five of them at least and he couldn’t block all of the possible sight lines as he moved.
