Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [21]
He had entered the woods at a different point to the one he and Crowe had used earlier, and he wasn’t sure where he was. Within a few moments he couldn’t see the house, and he found his bearings were uncertain. He might just as well have been in the middle of the forest as at its edge, and if he wasn’t careful then he might keep walking until he was in the middle. There was no way to check direction, and although he tried to catalogue the shapes of trees that he passed, he found they all ended up looking the same.
Something was drawing him deeper into the woods, something primal that he didn’t understand. Some people talked about towns and cities as if they had their own personalities, and Sherlock had experienced something of that in London, on his occasional visits with his father, and to a lesser extent in Farnham with Matty Arnatt, but he could feel a different kind of personality here. Something timeless and dark. Whatever it was, it had seen the death of the farm worker and it didn’t care, just as it hadn’t cared about any of the hundreds, thousands, millions of animal and human deaths it had witnessed over the millennia.
Shaking off his feelings, he found himself stumbling over the ruts left by the wheelbarrow, and tracked them back to the area of the woods where he had discovered the body. The vegetation which had been crushed beneath the corpse had sprung back now, and there was no trace of where it had been lying. He only knew the exact location by where the wheelbarrow ruts stopped.
Sherlock stared at the ground, not exactly sure what he was looking for. He tried to visualize what the dead man’s last few moments had been like. Had he staggered into the clearing, delirious, and dropped to his knees before collapsing full-length on the ground, or had he been walking, unaware that he was ill, before suddenly passing out and lying unconscious while the boils on his face and hands developed? There ought to be some way of telling from his footsteps. If he had been delirious then they would wander about, whereas if he had been walking normally then they would be in a straight line. It might be useful for the doctor to know how quickly the disease had come on, and if nothing else then he might impress Amyus Crowe with his deductive skills.
Sherlock crouched down and examined the ground closely. The man’s boots had made a distinct impression in the soil – the heel on one foot was worn down compared with the other, and Sherlock found that he could easily distinguish the man’s footprints from his own and from Amyus Crowe’s. He traced them back into the trees. They were odd; sometimes the footprints pointed one way and sometimes another, as if the man had been twirling around. Dancing, perhaps? No, that was stupid. Dizzy? That was more likely. Perhaps the illness – whatever it was – had affected his sense of balance.
Sherlock followed the doodle-like path of the footprints away from the clearing until a point where they suddenly straightened out. From there they led away in a straight line, diverting every now and then around a tree or a fallen trunk, heading away from what he assumed was Holmes Manor. It looked as if whatever had affected him had come on suddenly: one minute he was apparently walking normally, the next staggering in circles as if drunk, and then, shortly afterwards, falling over. And then dying.
Returning to the area where the nature of the footprints changed, Sherlock stood still, looking around in puzzlement. Something about the ground in the vicinity was bothering him. He gazed at the trees, the