Young Sherlock Holmes_ Death Cloud - Andrew Lane [58]
‘You were at the warehouse.’ A man’s voice, barely more than a whisper, spoke from the darkness at the other end of the table. There seemed to be a trace of an accent there – the word ‘the’ came out more like ‘zee’ – but Sherlock couldn’t work out which country the speaker hailed from. ‘Why were you at the warehouse?’
‘Who are you?’ Sherlock said firmly, his voice underpinned by a bravado that he didn’t feel.
‘Why were you at the warehouse?’ the voice persisted. Sherlock had to strain to make out the words above the creaking.
‘My uncle will be worried about me,’ Sherlock blustered. ‘There will be search parties out, looking.’ He didn’t know if that was true or not, but it seemed like a good thing to say. It might throw his mysterious interrogator off his stride.
‘I will only ask you once more, and then there will be consequences. Why were you at the warehouse?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Something came flashing out of the darkness, thin and black and uncurling like a striking snake. It caught his right cheek before withdrawing into the dark. He flinched, feeling blood trickling down his skin a moment before the pain blossomed through his flesh.
‘Why were you at the warehouse?’ the voice insisted.
Sherlock touched his hand to his burning cheek, then took it away and looked at it. Blood stained the lines on his palm. ‘You hurt me,’ he said, not quite believing it.
The whip flicked out of the darkness again. This time he caught sight of the tip just as it whistled past his face. There was a knot in the thin leather lace. The crack of the knot hitting its full extent and pulling back coincided with the agony of it slicing through the top of his right ear. He cried out, clapping a hand to the side of his head. This time he could feel blood pooling in his palm and trickling down his wrist.
‘Why—’
‘I followed a man from a house in Farnham!’ Sherlock yelled. ‘He went to the warehouse!’
The voice was silent for a moment, thinking. Then:
‘Why were you following the man from the house?’
Blood from Sherlock’s ear was wet and warm against his neck now. The whole right side of his face throbbed sickeningly. ‘Someone died in that house. I wanted to find out how.’
‘They died from the plague, surely?’ the voice whispered. ‘That’s what people are saying,’
Sherlock bit his tongue before he could say anything about the bee stings, but the whip lashed out of the darkness again and bit into his forehead above his left eye. His head jerked back against the chair, sending waves of agony crashing through his skull. When he tried to open his eye he found it was glued shut by blood dripping down from the cut that had been laid open.
If he kept on like this his head would be slashed to ribbons.
‘He died of bee stings,’ he shouted. ‘Hundreds of bee stings.’
Silence. The pain from the three slashes in Sherlock’s skin flowed together into one red-hot centre of agony that throbbed with the rapid beating of his heart.
‘Who else knows about the bees?’
‘Just me!’ he lied.
Again the whip cracked out of the shadows like a striking serpent, hitting just to the side of his left eye, a hair’s breadth from cutting into the soft jelly of the eyeball itself. Blood flecked his eyelashes: black globules hanging in his field of vision.
‘The next time my whip-master strikes, he will blind you in your left eye,’ the voice said. ‘The time after that he will remove your right ear. Answer my questions fully, and do not lie to me.’
My whip-master? Sherlock thought. That meant whoever was