Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [32]
It felt to Sherlock as though lots of jigsaw pieces that had been floating around in his mind had suddenly connected together. The picture wasn’t clear yet – there were still some pieces missing – but it was all beginning to make a strange sort of sense.
Knowing about the factory, the clothes, the Baron and the dead men, Sherlock could make some deductions based on the information he had. It wasn’t quite guesswork, but he could come up with some likely theories. For instance, two men associated with a clothes factory had died, apparently of smallpox or plague. Did that mean the clothes themselves were somehow contaminated? Sherlock had a feeling, picked up by things he had read in his father’s newspapers, that most cloth was manufactured in the mill towns of northern England, Scotland and Ireland, but some, he knew, was imported from abroad – China, if it was silk, and usually India for muslin or cotton. Perhaps a batch arriving at a British port from one of these foreign countries had been contaminated by disease, or was infested with insects that might carry the disease, and the workers at the factory had become infected. It was a possible explanation, and Sherlock felt a pressure, an urgency to tell someone. His immediate thought was that he could tell his uncle, but he dismissed that idea straight away. Sherrinford Holmes might be an adult, but he wasn’t very worldly and he would probably dismiss Sherlock’s theory instantly. Sherlock’s heart fell momentarily. Who else was there?
And then he remembered Mycroft. He could write everything in a letter and send it to his brother. Mycroft worked for the British government. He would know what to do.
He could feel the knot of worry in his chest loosen slightly at the thought of the reliable, dependable Mycroft, but then it occurred to him to wonder what exactly Mycroft was going to do. Abandon his work and rush down to Farnham to take charge of an investigation? Send in the Army? More likely he would just send a telegram to Uncle Sherrinford, which took Sherlock back to square one again.
Sherlock walked out of the house and into the morning light, pausing for a moment to savour the air. He could smell woodsmoke, and new-mown hay, and the faint musty odour of the brewery in Farnham. The sun was just rising above the tops of the trees, catching the leaves and haloing them with gold, casting their long shadows across the lawn towards him like outstretched fingers.
There was another shadow there – a moving one. He traced it back across the lawn to the wall that separated the house and its lands from the road. There, on the other side of the wall, was a figure on a horse. It appeared to be watching him. As he held his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun, the rider spurred the horse on. It trotted away along the road, vanishing behind a high hedge.
Sherlock walked towards the main gates. The rider and the horse were gone, but if he was lucky there might be a hoof print, or something that the rider had dropped, that might enable him to identify them.
There was no hoof print and no dropped item, but Sherlock did find Matty Arnatt sitting by the gates. He had two bicycles with him.
‘Where did you get those from?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Found ’em. Thought you might want to take a ride. It’s easier than walking, and we can go to more places.’
Sherlock gazed at him for a moment. ‘Why?’
Matty shrugged.