Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [0]
Rest in peace, Dad.
And with grateful acknowledgements to: the lovely people from the Scottish Children’s Book Trust (who kind of gave me the idea of setting a book in Edinburgh without ever actually saying so); the guys from the Book Zone for Boys in Ireland (who probably deserve to have a book set there as well); Helen Palmer for mentioning Mary King’s Close; Polly Nolan for editing so comprehensively and sensitively; Nathan, Jessica and Naomi Gay for being so interested; and to Jessica Dean, who made sure that this series of books got the highest level of visibility.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HISTORICAL NOTES
PROLOGUE
The small Chinaman held the needle in steady fingers and dipped the point in the bottle of ink that sat on the table in front of him. Next to the ink rested the forearm of the sailor who was sitting in a chair on the other side of the table. It was huge – like a ham on a butcher’s slab.
‘You sure you want blue anchor?’ the Chinaman said. His name was Kai Lung. His face was lined with age and the plait of hair that hung down his back was the colour of ash.
‘I told ya,’ the sailor said, ‘I want an anchor! Cos I live on a ship, an’ I work on a ship, right?’
‘I could do a fish,’ Kai Lung said quietly. Anchors were easy. They were also boring. He seemed to spend half his life tattooing blue anchors on the muscular forearms of sailors, sometimes with the name of their sweetheart beneath, inside a nice scroll. The problem was that he seemed to spend the other half of his life turning the tattooed names of former sweethearts into other things – barbed wire, flowers, anything that might disguise the underlying letters. ‘I could do you a nice fish, maybe a goldfish with scales all the colours of a rainbow. You like that idea? Fish tattoo good for sailor, yes?’
‘I want an anchor,’ the man said stubbornly.
‘Fine. Yes. Anchor it is.’ He sighed. ‘You got any special type of anchor in mind, or just the usual?’
The sailor frowned. ‘How many different types of anchor are there?’
‘Usual anchor it is then.’
He prepared to make the first mark with the needle. The ink would flow into the small pinprick in the sailor’s arm and stain the underlying tissue. The skin on the outside of the arm would fade, change and tan over the years, but the ink would always remain there, beneath the skin. With enough small pinpricks and enough different colours of ink he could draw anything – a fish, a dragon, a heart . . . or a blue anchor. Another blue anchor.
The door burst open, pushed hard from the other side. It hit the wall, the handle on the inside leaving a dent in the exposed brickwork. A man stood in the doorway. He was so tall and so wide that there wasn’t much space on either side of him or above his shaven head. His clothes were rough and dirty. They looked as if he’d been travelling in them for some time, and possibly sleeping in them as well.
‘You,’ he growled in an American accent, looking at the sailor, ‘out!’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, just in case the instruction wasn’t clear.
‘Hey! I got an appointment!’ The sailor stood up, clenching his fists ready for a fight. He took a step forward, towards the doorway. The man who had pushed the door open stepped forward. The top of the sailor’s head barely came up to his chin. Without looking away from the sailor’s eyes, the man reached out with his left hand and took hold of the metal handle on the outside of the door. He squeezed. For a moment nothing happened, and then with a sad heart Kai Lung saw that the handle was bending and twisting under the pressure. Within a few seconds it looked more like crumpled paper than metal.
‘Fair enough,’ the sailor said. ‘There’s other tattoo parlours around.