Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [34]
Sherlock nodded decisively. ‘I’m sure.’ Then he felt his face fall and his body deflate. ‘But I don’t know where he lives. We’d have to wait until he turns up at my uncle’s house. Or ask my uncle where he is.’
Matty shook his head. ‘He rents a house at the edge of town,’ he said. ‘Used to be a gamekeeper’s cottage. We can probably cycle there in half an hour.’ At Sherlock’s surprised expression, he added, ‘What? I know where everyone lives, pretty much. It’s part of knowing where I can likely get food at any time of the day. I need to know how a place like this works – where people live, where they work, where the market is, where the grain is stored, where the constable is likely to be morning, noon and night and which orchards are guarded and which ones aren’t. It’s a matter of survival.’
Observation, Sherlock thought, remembering what Amyus Crowe had told him. It all came down to observation in the end. If you had enough facts, you could work almost anything out.
And that was the problem with the two dead bodies and the cloud of death – they just didn’t have enough facts.
The two of them cycled through the town, avoiding the main thoroughfares where lots of people milled around. The journey was almost over before it was begun, and yet Sherlock’s mind was still simmering with a rich stew of facts, suppositions and hypotheses when they pulled up at the stone-walled cottage where Amyus Crowe apparently lived.
Movement to one side attracted Sherlock’s attention. He glanced across, and noticed a stallion cropping grass in a field. A black stallion with a flash of brown across its neck.
The same stallion he had seen twice now, each time with a mysterious figure sitting astride it, watching him.
He felt a chill run through his arms and chest, causing goosebumps to rise beneath his skin. What was going on?
Matty held back, waiting at the gate as Sherlock walked across the front garden. Sherlock turned to glance at him questioningly. The boy’s face was twisted into a scowl. ‘I’ll stay out here,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know this cove. He might not like me.’
‘I’ll tell him you’re all right. That you can be trusted. I’ll tell him that you’re my friend.’
As the word ‘friend’ emerged past his lips, Sherlock felt a sudden flush of surprise. He supposed Matty was a friend, but the thought confused him. He’d never really had any friends before – not at school, certainly, and not even back at the family house – the place he thought of as home. The kids there had tended to avoid the house, belonging as it did to the people they thought of as their social superiors, ‘the landed gentry’, and Sherlock had spent most of his time alone. Even Mycroft hadn’t been much more than a reassuring presence sitting in their father’s library working his way through the vast collection of books that the family had amassed over several generations. Sometimes Sherlock would leave Mycroft there after breakfast and find him still there at dinner time, his position unchanged, the only difference in his surroundings being that the pile of unread books was smaller and the pile of finished books had grown.
‘All the same,’ Matty said, ‘I’ll stay outside.’
A thought occurred to Sherlock. ‘Outside,’ he repeated. ‘You like being out in the open, don’t you? I’ve not seen you inside since I met you.’
Matty’s scowl deepened, and he looked away, not meeting Sherlock’s gaze. ‘Don’t like walls,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t like having nowhere to run but through a doorway when I don’t know who’s on the other side.’
Sherlock nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said softly. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be. Maybe I’ll see you when I come out.’ He glanced back at the door. ‘Assuming anyone is at home to begin with.’ Looking briefly over at the black stallion, which kept on pulling up clumps of grass and chewing them, he knocked firmly on the door.
When he turned his head, Matty had disappeared, along with his bicycle.
The door opened after a few moments. Sherlock was looking slightly upward, expecting Amyus Crowe to