The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [141]
We took the inn’s pony-trap and, loading Mr Swain’s equipment, set out for the Moor. Although the top of Addleton Moor lies at about 1,100 feet above sea level, a decent track winds up from the village at one corner and, even with a slight covering of snow, we had no difficulty in reaching the top.
On the exposed top the snow lay thicker, a blanket of white that glittered in the morning sun. All around us hummocks in the snow revealed the presence of burial mounds, each casting a pale lilac shadow in the white. Holmes stood up in the trap and gazed around him.
“Ah! There it is!” he exclaimed, and pointed.
Ahead of us and to our left a dark mark broke the whiteness and, as we moved towards it, we could see that it was another tumulus, bare both of snow and vegetation, exposing raw earth.
“Have you ever photographed the Black Barrow before?” Holmes asked the photographer.
“No, sir. That would be a wasted plate. Nobody hereabouts would pay for a picture of that thing,” he replied with some vehemence.
We drew to a halt close to the Black Barrow and Mr Swain set up his camera under Holmes’s directions. I walked around the mound, finding it nothing more than a heap of compacted soil, unrelieved by any blade of grass. Its lower edge was ringed with flat stones and, looking closely at its surface, it was possible to see where Sir Andrew’s men had cut their trench through its centre. Apart from its nakedness, there was nothing to distinguish it from any of the forty or fifty mounds round about. One did not have to be superstitious to find something disturbing in that patch of dead, dark, soil.
I stepped aside while Mr Swain exposed half a dozen plates and then we were back in the trap and returning to the village.
Holmes was still in good spirits over luncheon, so that I queried his mood. “I have every right to be cheerful, Watson. This morning’s excursion gave me the final piece of evidence. Nature has assisted my enquiry, though I made assurance doubly sure and asked Mr Swain for his photographs.”
Mr Swain joined us over coffee, rather nervous and apologetic. “I do not know what has happened, Mr Holmes,” he said. “The general views of the Moor are crystal clear, as they should have been with this morning’s light, but all four plates of the barrow are spoiled. Look,” he said and laid the box of plates on the table.
Holmes took each plate in turn and held it up to the window, passing each to me when he had done with it. Two were fine panoramas of the snowclad Moor but each of the others was just a swirl of fog.
“But this is exactly what Edgar said happened to his plates!” I exclaimed.
“Precisely,” declared Holmes, “and thereby our case is closed. I am deeply grateful to you, Mr Swain.”
The confused photographer took the money that Holmes offered, thanked him and left rapidly, as though he feared my friend would change his mind.
When the coffee was done Holmes drew out his watch. “We might”, he said, “catch the mid-afternoon express to London. Would you be so kind as to ask the boy for our bags and the reckoning?”
On the way back to London Holmes discoursed wittily on anarchists and poisoners, on underworld argot and a dozen different topics, but I heard him with only half an ear for my mind was churning in its attempts to make sense of what Sherlock Holmes evidently regarded as a successful enquiry. At length I could stand it no longer.
“Holmes!” I exclaimed, “I have never been so completely at a loss to understand one of your enquiries. What in Heaven’s name has this all been about?”
He laughed. “Do you recall”, he said, “that when we had not known each other long you took issue with me over my proposition that, by logical deduction, it should be possible to infer the existence of an ocean from a single grain of sand?”
“Well, yes,” I said, “but I was not then so familiar with your remarkable methods.”
“I fear,” he said, “that you are not yet familiar with them. I have been engaged in one