would ever want to.
‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine. What do we need to do?’
‘We need to search the body, and we need to search the room. All do the first thing, you do the second.’
‘All right.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Why did the police leave us alone in here with the… the body?’
Crowe glowered. ‘Trouble with the crime-fightin’ profession is that they like nice simple answers. They got two people in a locked room, one of them dead an’ the other one not. To them, the answer is simple, an’ ah must admit if I didn’t know your brother like I do then it would look just as simple to me. So as far as they’re concerned, they’ve got their man. The knife is more like a trophy to them – they can wave it around at the trial an’ scare the jury. The corpse – well, he’s dead, an’ he ain’t goin’ nowhere until the pathologist arrives to cart him away. An’ that should give us enough time to see what they might have picked up, if they’d bothered lookin’. Now, enough talkin’. Get to work!’
While Crowe busied himself at the table, Sherlock started in one corner of the room and methodically examined every inch. He didn’t know what he was looking for, so he looked for anything out of the ordinary. He checked the panelled walls and the pictures hanging from them, and he even pulled one of the chairs away from the table and moved it over to the wall so that he could climb on it and inspect the picture rails that ran along the top just underneath the ceiling. Then he threw himself to the ground and checked the carpet for things that might have dropped from someone’s hand or pocket and got caught between the fibres.
‘Anythin’?’ Crowe called after a while.
‘Not so far,’ he said dejectedly.
He kept moving around the room, letting his eyes rove everywhere. As he got to the corner of the table he noticed something on the floor beneath it: a small leather case, left in the shadow of the table leg as if someone wanted to put it quickly out of the way.
‘I’ve got something,’ he announced, pulling the case out and putting it on the table.
Crowe crossed from the body to see what had been found. He examined it critically.
‘Basic wooden construction, leather facing, brass hinges, brass lock and brass feet,’ he murmured. ‘Nothin’ special or out of the ordinary. No scuff marks on the feet an’ no wear on the handle, indicatin’ that it’s new. Ah, look at the handle there – can you see that thread tied around it? Probably where the price label was attached. This man, or someone else, pulled the price off but forgot about the thread. That was a mistake.’ He reached for the case and clicked the locks. ‘Unlocked, which is good for us.’ He opened it so that he and Sherlock could see inside.
The case was lined with a red material, probably silk or satin. The material was heavily padded so that anything in the case would have been pressed between the two sides when the case was closed.
‘Two depressions in the padding, see?’ Crowe pointed to two areas where the padding was pressed in, suggesting that the case had contained two objects, but Sherlock had already noticed them. ‘Too diffuse to tell us what the shapes were, although they appear to be different.’
‘The padding around one of the depressions is a different colour,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘It’s slightly darker.’
‘Could just be wear,’ Crowe muttered.
‘But the case is new – just bought.’
‘Good point.’ Crowe reached out to touch the surface of the material. ‘It’s slightly damp. That’s odd. Something wet was in here – maybe a bottle containing a liquid that partially leaked out.’
Sherlock looked around the room. ‘A bottle of what?’
‘Not sure yet. Let’s just file the information away for later.’ He closed the lid of the case and looked around the room. ‘What about those panels on the wall – any hidden doors? Any sign that there might be a window under there? Someone had to get in and out of this room without being seen.’
‘I thought of that, but there’s no sign of hinges or seams. I knocked on the walls, but none of them sound hollow.’
‘All right.’
‘Do you want to check?’
‘Why should ah?’ Crowe sounded surprised. ‘You’ve got a good set of eyes, an’ a good mind behind them. What about the carpet?’
‘Looks like it gets cleaned every day, and I can’t see anything that might have dropped on it today.’ ‘So,’ Crowe said grimly ‘there’s nothin’.’ ‘Except…’ Sherlock started. ‘Except what?’
‘Except there’s a damp patch on the carpet just here. And it’s cold.’
Crowe turned and stared at Sherlock. ‘A what?’ A damp patch. Maybe someone spilt a glass of water.’ Crowe raised his eyebrows. ‘Interestin’. We have a case that might have contained a bottle of somethin’, and we have a damp patch where that bottle might have spilt, but what we don’t have is the bottle itself, an’ whatever else was in there with the bottle. It’s an anomaly, and anomalies are what we need right now. Things that just don’t fit.’
Sherlock wasn’t sure. ‘So what does it mean?’ The big man shrugged. Ah don’t know yet, but ah’m filing it away for later consideration, an’ ah suggest you do the same. Now, keep lookin’. Just cos you found one thing, don’t mean there ain’t more things to find.’
Sherlock spent the next ten minutes searching the rest of the room, but when he got back to the corner where he had started, he stopped. Amyus Crowe appeared to have finished with the corpse as well: he was standing back and looking around the room.
‘Did you find anything?’ Sherlock asked. Crowe shrugged. ‘Some minor points of interest. This man wasn’t well, for a start. He’d lost a lot of weight recently, an’ he was under the care of a physician. I found this -’ he said, holding up a small glass bottle with what looked like a spring-loaded button on the top. ‘I think it’s a medicine of some kind, although I’ll need to get it checked out.’
‘May I look?’ Sherlock asked. Crowe handed the bottle across. It was about the size of Sherlock’s thumb. The sprung button on the top looked as if it might be used to pump something out of the bottle in a fine spray through a small nozzle on the side. Sherlock sniffed at the nozzle, and recoiled. There was something familiar about that bitter smell, but he couldn’t quite remember what.
‘His clothes make him look like a gentleman,’ Crowe continued, ‘but the tattoos on his arms suggest he was anything but.’
Sherlock slipped the glass vial into his pocket and crossed to stand beside Crowe. The man was thin, and tiny thread veins were noticeable in his cheeks. His head was thrown back, and he was staring at the ceiling with bulging and bloodshot eyes. His skin was white, but Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was naturally like that or if it was a result of his recent death.
The white front of his shirt was now completely maroon with drying blood. A tear had been made around the level of his heart: the point where the blade had penetrated, Sherlock thought grimly.
But who had wielded the blade?
He leaned closer. There was something about that tear that had caught his attention, but he wasn’t sure what it was.
‘Spotted something?’ Crowe asked.
Sherlock hesitated. ‘I was just trying to remember what the knife looked like – the one in Mycroft’s hand.’
‘Got to confess, I never got a clear look at it,’ Crowe admitted.
‘I did,’ Sherlock said. ‘It was thin, like a letter opener, but the tear in this shirt is quite big. Bigger than the knife that I remember seeing.’
‘Interestin’,’ Crowe mused. ‘I took a quick look at the wound as well. That’s quite a size. Suggested to me that the knife had a broad blade, but if you’re sayin’ the knife that was taken away had a narrow blade… well, that’s another anomaly that needs explainin’.’
‘Could the man have struggled?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Could that have caused the blade to tear a larger hole in his shirt and… and his skin?’
‘Possible.’ Crowe thought for a moment. ‘That’s the kind of thing we might need to conduct an experiment to verify.’
‘What?’ Sherlock exclaimed. ‘You mean stab someone else, and hope they struggle?’
Crowe laughed. ‘No, I mean we get a slaughtered pig from somewhere, dress it in a shirt, an’ then one of us
