Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [17]
‘All of them?’
‘Most of them. Then the remaining rabbits would be difficult to find, and they’d probably start hiding.’
‘What would happen then?’
Sherlock shrugged, unsure where this was leading. ‘The foxes would start dying off from starvation, I suppose.’
‘And the rabbits?’
‘They would keep hidden, eating the grass and breeding, so their numbers would start to increase.’ A bright light of understanding seemed to explode inside his head. ‘And then the numbers of foxes would start going up, because they’d be catching more rabbits and eating properly, and breeding. And eventually the number of foxes would be so great that they’d be eating more and more rabbits, and the number of rabbits would start going down again.’
‘And the process would keep repeatin’ itself, like two waves rising and fallin’, one behind the other. Somewhere at the back of all that there’s some mathematics called differential calculus, which you should look out for. It’s strangely useful. You could apply those same equations to criminals and policemen in a city, if you liked.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘The policemen don’t usually eat the criminals, but the fundamentals are the same. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed the mathematics independently, but it was recently developed further by Augustin Cauchy and Bernhard Riemann. Riemann died a few months back – great loss to the world, I believe, although I’m not sure the world has realized that yet.’
Sherlock privately doubted that mathematics would ever be important, and set it to one side. He was happy to ‘stock the lumber room of his mind’ with stuff about art and music, which he found interesting, but equations he could probably do without.
After a while they reached the drystone wall that marked the edge of the Holmes’s estate. Crowe gestured to the right. ‘You go that way – collect as many mushrooms and toadstools as you can carry. I’ll go the other way. Let’s meet back here in half an hour, and I’ll show you how you can tell which ones are poisonous and which ones are not. Don’t sample any before I tell you, mind. It’s a valid analytical technique, to be sure, but it’s liable to be a fatal one.’
Crowe wandered off to the left, moving bushes and clumps of grass to one side with his walking stick and peering underneath. Sherlock went in the opposite direction, scanning the ground for the telltale white, pulpy knuckles of fungus pushing their way up through the bracken.
Within a few moments he was out of sight of Amyus Crowe. He kept moving, but apart from a series of brown, plate-like growths emerging from the side of a tree, which he wasn’t sure whether to collect or not, he could find nothing.
A flash of colour through the trees caught his attention: red spots on a white background. He moved closer, thinking it was a clump of toadstools breaking through the ground, but there was something about the shape that bothered him. It looked like . . .
A cloud of smoke began to rise from the object just as Sherlock recognized it for what it was: a man’s body, lying twisted on the ground. The smoke wafted away, driven by the breeze, but there was no sign of fire. For a moment Sherlock thought the man was lying there smoking a pipe, his face wrapped for some reason in a red-spotted white handkerchief, but as he got closer he realized that the red blotches were neither markings on a toadstool nor spots on a white handkerchief.
They were bloody boils on the face of a corpse.
CHAPTER FOUR
Amyus Crowe pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to Sherlock. From another pocket he took a metal flask, flattened and curved to fit the shape of his body. It had a band of leather around it. He unscrewed the top and poured a brownish liquid on to the handkerchief that Sherlock was holding, soaking it. A nose-prickling, eye-watering smell rose up from the sodden material.
‘Brandy,’ Crowe said in reply to Sherlock’s dubious expression. ‘Just in case whatever killed this man is infectious. We don’t want to catch