Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [25]
Sherlock swung a leg over the wall, preparing to lower himself to the ground, but a sudden scuffling made him pull back rapidly. Something dark and fast raced out of the shadows around the building on a blur of legs. Sherlock could see a large, heavily muscled head with tiny ears that were laid back along the skull and a small body covered with bristles. The dog didn’t bark at him, but growled instead – a deep, rasping sound like a saw biting into hard wood. Spittle dripped from its exposed teeth. It skidded to a halt just beneath the spot where Sherlock was lying and proceeded to watch him intently, shuffling from side to side on its stumpy little legs, tail held low.
He had to get into that barn. There was a puzzle here, and Sherlock hated unsolved puzzles. But the dog looked hungry and trained for aggression.
He looked back over the other side of the wall, where he had climbed up. Was there another way in? Improbable, and the dog would just follow him round, now it had his scent. Could he make friends with it? Not likely, certainly not without getting down from the wall, and the penalty for failure was too terrible to contemplate. He could find a loose brick or a large stone and drop it on top of the animal, but that seemed unnecessarily brutal. Could he drug it somehow? He supposed he could run back to Farnham Market and buy a chunk of meat with what little money he had, but then what?
He scanned the ground on both sides of the wall, looking for something that might help. In the corner where the wall met the ground, close to the gates, he spotted something like an abandoned fur hat. It was the dead badger that he’d seen earlier. Quickly he half-jumped and half-fell back down the wall and ran the few steps to where the badger’s body lay curled up. He picked it up. The fur was dry and dusty, and the body weighed almost nothing, as if whatever vital spark had fled when it died had actually had a mass. He could smell something rancid and disgusting. With a muttered apology he bent slightly, extended his arm and pitched the badger over the wall. Its stiff limbs splayed out as it flew, pinwheeling around. It vanished behind the bricks, and Sherlock heard a thump as it hit the ground. Seconds later came the sound he’d been hoping for: the rush of paws on dry earth and snarling as the dog got its teeth into the dead body. Sherlock quickly scrambled up the wall again and glanced over. The dog was holding the badger down with its front paws and was wrestling its body back and forth with its strong jaws, tearing chunks out of it. As he dropped down on to the ground the dog stopped abruptly, glanced suspiciously over at him, and then kept on pulling at the dead creature. Either it had decided Sherlock was its friend for giving it such a great toy to play with, or it was just saving him for later. Sherlock fervently hoped the former explanation was correct.
Quickly, before the dog tore the badger into fragments too small to be of interest, he sprinted across the yard and up to the barn. There was a side door set in one of the walls, and he opened it a crack. Silence and darkness. He pushed the door further open and slipped inside, closing it behind him.
It took a few moments for Sherlock’s eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they had he saw that the space inside the barn was illuminated by skylights. Sunlight shone in through the dirty glass, making diagonal pillars of light that appeared to hold the roof up in an illusory scaffold. The place smelt of old, dry earth and sweat, but underneath those smells was another one – something sweet and flowery. There were piles of boxes and crates in various places around the building, and across on the far side several men were loading them on to a cart. The man he had followed through Farnham was one of them. The canvas sack he’d been carrying had been thrown roughly to the ground nearby. A horse had been attached to the shafts of the cart, and was quietly eating hay from a nosebag