Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [41]
The door was bolted, but he slipped the bolt and slowly pulled it open. Someone might notice in the morning that the door had been unlocked, but hopefully they would assume that someone else had got there first.
The door was almost closed when Sherlock remembered the note that he needed to leave, explaining that he had gone out early. He threw his weight against the door, pushing it open again, then slipped back inside and left the note on a small side table in the hall next to the hat-stand where the morning and afternoon post was usually placed awaiting collection.
The air outside was cool and refreshing compared with the stuffiness within the house, and there was the suspicion of a glow above the trees where the darkness was giving way to the blue of the dawn. Sherlock sprinted as quickly as he could across the stones of the drive, hearing them crunch beneath his feet, before hitting the silence of the lawn.
It took ten minutes for him to get to the riverbank, following Matty’s directions. A long black shape lay on the silvery river, moving back and forth as the water undulated. It looked strangely like a long, low hut that had been built on top of a narrow keel. The only gap was at the rear end, where the hut stopped and there was a platform with room for two people to stand, one of them holding the tiller. A rope attached to the front of the boat dipped towards the surface of the water, then rose again to where a horse contentedly ate its way along the grassy banks. Unlike Virginia Crowe’s magnificent black stallion, this appeared to be a heavy, thick-legged creature with a shaggy mane. It glanced once, incuriously, at Sherlock, then went back to eating.
Matty was waiting on the front of the narrowboat, a dark shape against the dawn sky, like the figurehead on a ship or a gargoyle on a cathedral. He was holding a boathook – a long wooden pole with a metal hook on one end.
‘Let’s go,’ he said as Sherlock clambered on to the boat. ‘That’s Albert, by the way.’ He made a clicking noise with his tongue. The horse looked round at him with an expression of regret on its long face, then started walking along the side of the river. The rope running between it and the boat pulled taut, then the boat began to move as Albert dragged it along. Matty used the boathook to push the narrowboat away from the bank so that it didn’t get caught in the reeds.
‘Does he know where he’s going?’ Sherlock asked.
‘What’s to know? He walks along the bank pulling the boat after him. If he comes to an obstruction, he stops and I sort it out. You stay at the back and keep a hand on the tiller. If we start drifting out into the river then steer us back towards the bank. There’s a blanket on the deck, if you get cold. It’s a horse blanket, but it’ll keep you just as warm as a fancy one.’
The narrowboat drifted on. Water lapped against its sides in a regular rhythm that lulled Sherlock into a drowsy, almost hypnotic state. The river was empty of anything apart from the occasional duck or goose drifting past.
‘What did you find out about the man who died?’ Sherlock called forward after a while. ‘The first man. The one in the house.’
‘He was a tailor,’ Matty yelled back. ‘Worked for a company who were making uniforms for the Army in Aldershot. Big order, apparently, so the company were calling in all the local people who could cut cloth or sew the pieces together.’
‘How did you find out?’
Matty laughed. ‘I said I was his son, and that my mam wanted to find out if he had any money coming from an employer. Apparently he’s owed some back wages, but his landlord’s already got his eye on that for rent.’
‘Where was the company based?’ Sherlock called back.
‘They’ve got a main office near the market, but they’ve also got a warehouse on the edge of town where the cove worked. That’s probably the one you burned down!’
Sherlock reflected, as the narrowboat drifted on, pulled by Matty’s horse. The man who died had been a tailor, making uniforms. The warehouse where he had worked had been full of boxes, which the thugs had loaded on to