Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [1]
The newcomer stepped to one side and the sailor pushed past him without looking back.
‘You lose me customer,’ Kai Lung said. He wasn’t scared of the newcomer. He was so old and he had seen so much in his long life that he wasn’t scared of anything much. Death was an old friend by now. ‘I hope you bring me other customer to replace him.’
The man stepped back, out of the way, and another man entered the tiny front room of Kai Lung’s lodgings. This man was smaller and better dressed than his herald, and he was holding a walking stick. A wave of coldness seemed to enter the room with him. A feeling swept over Kai Lung, and it took him a moment to work out what it was.
Fear. It was fear.
‘You want tattoo?’ he said, trying to keep his voice from quavering.
‘I would like a tattoo on my forehead,’ the man said. His accent was American as well. ‘It is a name, a woman’s name.’ His voice was calm and precise. The light from behind him put his face in shadow, but in the meagre illumination from Kai Lung’s oil lamp the head of the walking stick gleamed. Kai Lung thought for a moment that it was a large, rough chunk of solid gold, and he drew his breath in, amazed, but he suddenly realized what it was. The head of the walking stick was carved in the shape of a human skull.
‘You want sweetheart’s name on forehead?’ Kai Lung asked. ‘Most people want sweetheart’s name on arm, or maybe chest – near heart.’
‘The girl is not my “sweetheart”,’ the man said. His voice was still calm, still precise, but there was a tone somewhere deep inside it that made Kai Lung shiver. ‘And yes, I want her name tattooed on my forehead, near to my brain, so that I can remember it. Your work had better be accurate. I do not tolerate mistakes.’
‘I am best tattooist in whole city!’ Kai Lung said proudly.
‘So I have heard. That is why I am here.’
Kai Lung sighed. ‘What is name of girl?’
‘I have written it down. Do you read English?’
‘I read very well.’
The man reached out his left hand. He was holding a piece of paper. Kai Lung took it carefully, trying not to touch the man’s skin. He looked at the name on the scrap. It was printed in a careful hand, and he had no trouble deciphering it.
‘Virginia Crowe,’ he read. ‘Is that right?’
‘That is exactly right.’
‘What colour you want?’ Kai Lung asked. He was expecting the man to say ‘blue’, but he was surprised.
‘Red,’ the man said. ‘I want it in red. The colour of blood.’
CHAPTER ONE
‘Stop it!’ Rufus Stone cried out. ‘You’re killing me!’
Sherlock lifted the bow from the violin strings. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’
‘I’m not being melodramatic – another few seconds of that and my heart would have leaped out of my throat and strangled me just to ensure that it didn’t have to experience that cat-squalling any more!’
Sherlock felt his confidence shrivel up like a dry autumn leaf. ‘I didn’t think it was that bad,’ he protested.
‘That’s the problem,’ Stone said. ‘You don’t know what the problem is. If you don’t know what the problem is, you can’t fix it.’
He rubbed the back of his neck and wandered away, obviously struggling to find a way to explain to Sherlock just what he was doing wrong. He was wearing a loose striped shirt with the sleeves roughly rolled up and a waistcoat that seemed to have come from a decent suit, but his trousers were rough corduroy and his boots were scuffed leather. He swung round to look at Sherlock for a moment, and there was a kind of wild bafflement in his face, along with what Sherlock realized with a sickening twist of his heart was disappointment.
Sherlock turned away, not wanting to see that expression in the face of a man he considered a friend as well as a kind of older brother.
He let his gaze roam around the room they were in – anywhere so that he didn’t have to look at Stone. They were in the attic of an old building in Farnham. Stone rented a room on the floor below, but his landlady had taken a shine to him and let him rehearse and practise his violin – and teach the one music student he had so far taken on – in the expansive attic area.
The space was