Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [100]
‘What in heaven’s name are you two doing here?’ he hissed. ‘I’ve paid your employer his blood money this week. Get out of here!’
‘Macfarlane wants this kid here to see the place where Sir Benedict died.’
‘This is not a tourist attraction,’ the man said. ‘We do not conduct sightseeing tours.’
‘Are the police here?’
The butler shook his head. ‘They said they already have everything they need.’
‘Then there’s no reason you can’t show us the room where your boss died, and the kitchen where the meal was prepared. Or do you want to explain to my boss that you don’t want to?’
The butler hesitated. He looked at Sherlock. ‘Just the boy, then, and only for a few minutes. No more than that.’
Dunlow looked at Sherlock.
‘That should be enough,’ Sherlock said.
The butler led the way into the house, moving from the servants’ area, where the walls needed painting and the carpet was threadbare, to the main part of the house, where the paint was immaculate and the carpets were so thick and so comfortable it was like walking on clouds. He led Sherlock into the main hall. A grandfather clock was set against one wall. It ticked loudly, counting down the seconds. The butler turned to one side, into a dining room. Sherlock noticed that he was chewing something.
‘This was where Sir Benedict died,’ the butler said. He nodded to a chair at the head of the table. ‘Sitting there, he was.’
The smell of tobacco drifted across to Sherlock as the butler spoke. That explained the swollen cheek – he was chewing tobacco.
‘Who brought the food in?’ Sherlock asked. He already had the cook’s answer, but he wanted to check that she had told him the truth.
‘Aggie Macfarlane.’ The butler’s lips wrinkled. ‘Very close to Sir Benedict, she was. Too close, if you ask me. She came in carrying the plate like everything was normal, but she knew that there was poison in it.’
‘You’re sure she poisoned the food?’ Sherlock asked.
The butler scowled. ‘Who else could have done it?’ he asked.
That was a fair question, and Sherlock was asking himself the same thing. ‘What about the plate?’ he asked. ‘Could the plate have been coated with poison?’
The butler paused before answering, and Sherlock noticed that he was shifting the chewing tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘The cook had strict instructions always to wash the plate just before she dished up the meal,’ he said eventually. ‘Everybody was aware of that. There would be no point in poisoning the plate.’ He paused, thinking. ‘And I was told that the police fed a dog with some of the food – not from the plate, but from the oven dish she’d cooked it in. The dog died. That surely must mean that it was the food that was poisoned, not the plate.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said slowly, ‘but that means the food was poisoned before it was cooked. Why poison the food and then cook it? The poison might be destroyed by the heat of the oven. It makes more sense to put the poison on the food after you’ve served it up.’ He felt a little flutter of excitement in his chest. This was the first real evidence he had that Aggie Macfarlane might actually be innocent. It wasn’t enough to clear her name with the police, but it suggested to Sherlock that he was on the right track.
The clock in the hall made a sudden noise as the cogs and gears inside shifted. Sherlock glanced at its face. He needed to be on the right track.
‘I need to go to the kitchen,’ he said.
‘Follow me.’
As they walked back through to the servants’ area he checked his watch. Ten thirty in the morning. Two and a half hours left – and half an hour of that would be wasted in getting back to Macfarlane’s warehouse. He was running out of time.
The kitchen was almost identical to the one at Holmes Manor – a large