Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [1]
None of the other pupils were paying attention. They were either gossiping with the family members who had turned up to collect them or they were eagerly watching the school gates for first sight of the carriage that was going to take them home. Reluctantly, Sherlock swung round to see if the malign finger of fate was pointing his way.
It was. The finger in question belonged in this instance to Mr Tulley, the Latin Master. He had just come round the corner of the school, where Sherlock was standing apart from the other boys. His suit, which was usually covered in chalk dust, had been specially cleaned for the end of term and the inevitable meetings with the fathers who were paying for their boys to be educated, and his mortar board sat straight on his head as if glued there by the Headmaster.
‘Me, sir?’
‘Yes, sir. You, sir,’ Mr Tulley snapped. ‘Get yourself to the Headmaster’s study quam celerrime. Do you remember enough of your Latin to know what that means?’
‘It means ‘straight away’, sir.’
‘Then move yourself.’
Sherlock cast a glance at the school gate. ‘But sir – I’m waiting for my father to pick me up.’
‘I’m sure he won’t leave without you, boy.’
Sherlock made one last, defiant attempt. ‘My luggage . . .’
Mr Tulley glanced disparagingly at Sherlock’s battered wooden trunk – a hand-me-down from his father’s military travels, stained with old dirt and scuffed by the passing years. ‘I can’t see anyone wanting to steal it,’ he said, ‘except perhaps for its historical value. I’ll get a prefect to watch it for you. Now cut along.’
Reluctantly, Sherlock abandoned his belongings – the spare shirts and underclothes, the books of poetry and the notebooks in which he had taken to jotting down ideas, thoughts, speculations and the occasional tune that came into his head – and walked off towards the columned portico at the front of the school building, pushing through the crowd of pupils, parents and siblings while still keeping an eye on the gateway, where a scrum of horses and carriages were all trying to get in and out of the narrow gate at the same time.
The main entrance hall was lined with oak panelling and encircled by marble busts of previous headmasters and patrons, each on its own separate plinth. Shafts of sunlight crossed diagonally from the high windows to the black and white tiled floor, picked out by swirling motes of chalk dust. It smelt of the carbolic that the maids used to clean the tiles every morning. The press of bodies in the hall made it likely that at least one of the busts would be toppled over before long. Some of them already had large cracks marring their pure marble, suggesting that every term saw at least one of them smashed on the floor and subsequently repaired.
He wove in and out of the people, ignored by everyone, and eventually found himself exiting the throng and entering a corridor that led off the entrance hall. The Headmaster’s study was a few yards down. He paused on the threshold, drew a breath, dusted down his lapels and knocked on the door.
‘Enter!’ boomed a theatrically loud voice.
Sherlock twisted the doorknob and pushed the door open, trying to quell the spasm of nervousness that shot through his body like lightning. He had only been in the Headmaster’s study twice before – once with his father, when he first arrived at Deepdene, and once again a year later with a group of other pupils who had been accused of cheating in an examination. The three ringleaders had been caned and expelled; the four or five followers had been caned until their buttocks bled and allowed to stay. Sherlock – whose essays had been the ones copied by the group – had escaped a caning by claiming that he knew nothing about it. In fact, he had known all along, but he had always been something