Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [101]
He wasn’t going to learn anything here.
‘The rabbit that was poisoned,’ he said. ‘I need to see where it was caught.’
‘That,’ the butler sniffed, ‘is not my area of expertise. My domain is indoors, not out. I will fetch the gardener.’ He walked across to a door that led outside, to the garden, and opened it. He spat the tobacco out of his mouth in a brown stream that hit the ground to one side of the door and called, ‘Hendricks! Come here!’
The butler turned back to Sherlock. ‘Hendricks will answer any more questions you might have. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a new position to seek.’
He walked off, leaving Sherlock alone. Sherlock stood there, in the kitchen doorway, gazing out on the well-tended garden, aware of the dark odour of the tobacco rising up from where the butler had spat it out. He felt slightly sick at the smell. He couldn’t see the point in tobacco – either smoking it or chewing it. They were disgusting habits. He had no intention of doing either when he grew up.
A figure appeared at the end of the path, through a gap in the hedge. He was in his forties, with short salt-and-pepper hair and beard, dressed in a dark green jacket and moleskin trousers. ‘Did someone call?’ His voice was a rich Scottish brogue, completely unlike the butler’s strangled accent.
‘Are you Mr Hendricks?’
‘Just Hendricks will do.’ He glanced at Sherlock’s clothes. ‘Sir,’ he added. ‘What can I do for you?’
Sherlock debated whether to try to explain who he was and what he was doing, but after a moment’s thought he decided just to tell the man what he wanted and leave it at that. ‘The rabbit that you caught – the last one Aggie Macfarlane cooked for Sir Benedict – I need to see where you caught it.’
Hendricks stared at Sherlock for a moment. ‘Fair enough,’ he said eventually. ‘Best come with me then.’
Sherlock checked his watch. This was all taking too long! Time was running short, and the lives of his friends were on the line!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hendricks led the way along the path and through a gap in the hedge. On the other side was the edge of a stretch of woodland, still within the estate’s boundaries. He set off, trudging with easy steps, not looking to see if Sherlock was following.
Sherlock checked his watch again. Coming up to eleven o’clock, and all he was doing was walking in the countryside. He wasn’t going to make it!
The gardener came to a stop by a grassy bank. On the other side of the bank the ground dropped away to a natural depression, roughly circular in shape, that was bereft of trees. Around the edges of the bank Sherlock could see dark holes – rabbit burrows, he presumed.
He had a sudden flash of memory – the rabbit’s head in the burrow, back in Farnham. The thing that had started his journey off. It seemed so long ago now, but it had only been a few days.
‘This is where I laid the traps,’ Hendricks said. He wouldn’t look at Sherlock, but instead gazed into the distance. ‘Used a looped snare attached to a bent sapling. The rabbit puts its head through the snare and triggers it, and the sapling pulls the snare tight and lifts the little critter off the ground. I check the snares every couple of hours.’
Sherlock gazed at where the snare had been, but he wasn’t sure what it could tell him. On a whim, he moved across to the bank where the rabbit burrows were. He bent down to check the nearest one. There was no sign of a rabbit, but he did notice some plant stalks that were lying just inside the mouth of the burrow. For a moment he assumed that they were the remnants of a meal that the rabbits had brought back to the burrow, but then he realized that couldn’t be the explanation.