Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [24]
There was something strangely familiar about the man. Sherlock had seen him somewhere before. He had a narrow, weasel-like face and prominent teeth that had been stained yellow with tobacco. And then Sherlock remembered – the man had been at Farnham station when he and Matty had been there. He had been loading crates of ice on to a cart.
The man’s path took him from one side of Farnham to the other. Sherlock stayed behind him all the way, ducking into doorways or behind other people if he thought the man was going to turn round. Eventually the stranger turned into a side road that Sherlock recognized. It was the one that he and Matty had been in earlier that day, where they had almost been run down by the carriage containing the strange pink-eyed man.
The man sidled along a high plastered wall, up to the wooden gates from which the carriage had emerged, and knocked – a complicated rhythm that slipped out of Sherlock’s mind even as he tried to memorize it. The gates creaked open and the man slipped inside. The gates closed again before Sherlock had a chance to see what was inside.
He looked around, frustrated. He really wanted to get a look over the walls to see what was inside, but he couldn’t see how. It was all connected together somehow – the two deaths, the moving clouds, the yellow powder – but he couldn’t see the threads that made up that connection. The answers that he wanted could be behind that wall, but they might as well have been in China.
The sun was low and red in the sky. It wouldn’t be long before Sherlock needed to be back at Holmes Manor, getting cleaned up ready for dinner. He didn’t have long. Desperately, he looked around. Behind him, where the wall turned the corner, much of the plaster had crumbled away, battered over the years by passing carts and barrows and further eroded by rain. The rough brick exposed by the missing plaster might just be enough to give Sherlock a foothold, boosting him up on to the wall.
It was worth a try.
Without giving himself time to think, Sherlock slid along to the corner and looked around. Nobody was watching. He reached as high as he could, letting his fingers find a niche between two bricks, then scrabbled with his right foot to find an equivalent purchase. When he thought he was ready, he boosted himself up. The muscles in his legs flared with the sudden activity, but he wasn’t going to give up now. He threw his left hand up as high as it would go, and felt it catch the top of the wall. Holding on as tightly as he could, he brought his left foot up and then dragged it down the wall until it caught on something. He shifted his weight from his right foot to his left, hoping that the brickwork wouldn’t crumble away. It held, and he simultaneously pulled with his left hand and pushed with his left foot. His body scraped up the wall, and then miraculously he found himself lying flat out on the top of the wall, teetering on the edge of falling inside the yard that was revealed beneath him.
CHAPTER FIVE
From his position lying on top of the wall, Sherlock could see the entire yard spread out before him. There was nobody in sight. A single-storey windowless wooden building – more of a barn than anything else – dominated the ground, and the area around it had been left to dirt and weeds. Multiple wheel ruts linked the huge wooden doors at the front of the building to the gates in the wall. Some of them were barely more than scratches in the earth while others were deep and still filled with water from recent rain. Sherlock decided that carts or wagons were arriving at the barn lightly laden, making the shallow ruts, and leaving containing something heavy, causing them to sink deeper into the soft ground. But what was being stored or made in the barn,