The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [107]
Holmes said soothingly, “Professor Hardcastle. Take your good time, sir. But please tell me exactly what did happen this morning. Speak freely before Dr Watson here. I explained in my note to you he would attend this case with me.”
“Of course. Of course.” He breathed deeply to steady his rattled nerves. “I wrote to you concerning the missing aerolite and how it reappeared in my son’s room. At the time I was alarmed, but after what happened this morning, I confess, I am terrified. For today, as I climbed the stairs to dress for our meeting, I was met by one of the maids who had been making up my son’s bed. ‘Excuse me, Professor,’ she said to me. ‘I found these on your son’s bedside table.’ ”
“The aerolite once more?”
“Yes .”
“And the sprigs of thyme?”
“Yes, arranged so the stone rested within like an egg inside a bird’s nest. The moment I saw the stone and the thyme I don’t believe I could have experienced a greater shock if I had been struck by lightning. Well, sirs … at that very instant I ran from the house dressed in nothing but trousers, waistcoat and carpet slippers. I’d been in my son’s bedroom not ten minutes before so I knew the devil had only just placed the stone on the table.”
“The devil?”
“Yes the devil, the demon … whatever damned title he must bear, because I tell you this, Mr Holmes, the man who left the aerolite and the thyme leaves in my son’s room has been dead these last five years.”
Sherlock Holmes smoked a small cigar as he spoke to a now less distraught Professor Hardcastle who sat in the armchair, the pince-nez upon his nose, his fingers tightly knitted, troubled thumbs pressing against each other. I sat upon a claret-coloured sofa, and, from time to time, made notes with pencil and paper.
For a moment, Holmes stood meditatively before the fireplace, which was vast enough to roast a whole side of mutton. Lost in thought, he smoked the cigar, blowing out jets of blue smoke, that were caught, even on this still summer’s day, by the updraft flowing up the flue, and carried the tobacco smoke away up the huge gullet of the chimney. “Now, professor. A few questions first before we discuss your suggestion that the aerolite and the thyme where left in your son’s bedroom by a deadman.”
“Ask what you will, Mr Holmes.”
“Exactly who was in the house at the time the aerolite made its second reappearance?”
“The domestic staff only. Mrs Hardcastle is calling on her mother in Chelsea. My son is at school.”
“Day school then, he does not board?”
“No.”
“Your son took the stone from your laboratory, plucked a few strands of thyme from the Heath, then left them so arranged bird’s nest fashion for a prank.”
“No.”
“Why so certain? Boys of that age thrive on mischief.”
“Edward is a perfectly healthy boy, capable of pranks and japes like the next.”
“But?”
“But he didn’t leave the stone.”
“When we first saw you, you were crying out, ‘It is thyme, it is thyme.’ ”
“Yes.”
“Then it was the appearance of that particular herb that troubled you so?”
“Yes.”
“And the appearance of the herb, alongside that piece of stone, has special significance for you?”
“Indeed.” Professor Hardcastle sighed, perhaps in the same manner a person who has seen the portents of doom and destruction manifesting in frightful sharp relief about him. From his pocket he brought out a stone as large and as dark as a damson plum and placed it on a copy of The Times newspaper that lay upon a table. “This is the aerolite referred to in my letter. It is of little monetary value. In my collection it bears the name ‘The Rye Stone’, simply because that’s where I found it all of three and twenty years ago. Then I was a boy of seventeen, yet already I had my life mapped out. I intended to make science