Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [33]
‘All right. I could do with some exercise. My muscles are stiff after yesterday.’
‘What happened yesterday?’
‘I’ll tell you while we cycle.’ Sherlock looked down the road that led past the gates. ‘Did you see someone on a horse ride past here and stop for a while?’
‘Yeah. They went past me and stopped down there.’ He nodded his head towards the point where Sherlock had seen the rider. ‘Seemed like they were looking at something, then they rode away.’
‘Did you recognize them?’
‘I weren’t really paying attention. Does it matter?’
Sherlock shook his head. ‘Probably not.’
They rode together down the road towards Farnham, in the opposite direction to the one that the rider had taken. It had been a while since Sherlock had ridden a bicycle, and he found himself wobbling a lot as he followed Matty, but it only took a few minutes before he got the hang of it and caught up. As they rode, side by side, along shadowed roads where trees bent together to form an arch above their heads and past fields full of bright yellow flowers, he told Matty about what had happened the day before – the man he’d followed away from the house where Matty had seen the strange cloud, the warehouse, the cart stacked with boxes and the fire. Matty kept asking questions, and Sherlock found that he kept going back and telling bits of the story again, going off at a tangent to explain other things and generally not getting to the point. He wasn’t a natural storyteller, and for a moment wished that he had someone who could take the facts in his head and set them out in a way that made sense.
‘You were lucky to get out alive,’ Matty said when Sherlock had finished. ‘I had a job at a bakery, few months back. Burned down. I were lucky to get out alive.’
‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked.
Matty shook his head. ‘The baker, he was a fool. He lit a match for ’is pipe, right when we was openin’ the sacks of flour.’
‘What did that have to do with a fire?’
Matty looked at him strangely. ‘I thought everyone knew that flour, hanging around in the air, is like an explosive. If one grain of flour catches fire then it spreads to the rest within a second, like a spark leaping from one to another.’ He shook his head. ‘The whole bakery was blown to rubble. I was lucky: I was behind a table at the time. Even so, it took a month for my hair to grow back proper.’ Glancing up at Sherlock, he said: ‘Anyway, what are you goin’ to do now?’
‘We should tell the local constable,’ Sherlock said. Even as the words emerged from his mouth they sounded wrong. Two dead bodies, a strange cloud of death, a mysterious yellow powder and a group of thugs setting fire to a warehouse – it was too much like a child’s fantasy game. Even if half of the story could be verified by facts – two men had died, and the blackened, smoking remains of the warehouse would be evident for some time to come – the rest of it was too much like a mass of wild guesses and fantastic assumptions that had been strung together to bridge the gaps.
A look at Matty’s face told him that the boy was thinking exactly the same thing. He felt his mouth twist in frustration. He didn’t know anybody in the area that could help, and the people he knew who might help weren’t in the area. It was a paradox.
And then he remembered the imposing figure of Amyus Crowe, and a feeling of relief swept over him, flushing away the cloud of uncertainty that had gathered around him like cold water scouring dirt and mud from a stone. Crowe seemed like he could talk to young people as if they were adults, and his mind worked logically, using evidence as stepping stones to come to conclusions rather than jumping right to the end of the path. He was the only person who might actually believe them.
‘We’ll tell Amyus Crowe,’ he said.
Matty looked dubious. ‘The big bloke with the funny voice