Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [102]
‘Do you recognize this?’ he asked, holding the stalk up where Hendricks would see it.
‘Foxglove,’ the gardener said, glancing at the stalk and frowning. ‘Be careful of that, sir. “Dead Man’s Bells” they call that. Just a nibble of one of them leaves can kill you. There’s some as say that just breathing in near the plant can kill you, but I don’t put much stock in that. Been walking these woods for years, I have, and never had a problem.’ He frowned ‘Not seen much foxglove neither. Quite rare round here.’
‘Why would rabbits be eating poisonous plants?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Surely animals avoid poisonous plants.’ He turned the stem in his hand. ‘More to the point, why would someone put a poisonous plant where a rabbit can’t help but find it?’
‘They do say,’ Hendricks said, ‘that rabbits are immune to foxglove.’ His face was contorted, as if he was thinking something through. ‘Don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is . . .’
‘If it is true,’ Sherlock said, his thoughts racing ahead of his voice, ‘then the poison in the foxglove might build up in the rabbit’s meat. That might poison anyone who ate the rabbit!’
He glanced up to meet Hendricks’s gaze. The gardener was staring at him, the frown still darkening his face. The thought occurred to Sherlock that if it was Hendricks who had left the foxglove plants by the burrow, hoping that the rabbits would eat them and the poison would build up in their meat, and if he had then given the rabbit to Aggie Macfarlane, knowing she would prepare it for Sir Benedict to eat, then the gardener had committed a particularly devious murder. He might want to stop Sherlock telling anyone about it. He tensed his muscles, preparing to spring up and run if Hendricks made any move towards him.
But no – if Hendricks was a murderer, then why tell Sherlock what he needed to know to solve the crime?
‘Someone deliberately left the foxglove here, for the rabbits to eat?’ the man asked. ‘So the chances were that if I caught a rabbit, its flesh would already be poisoned?’
Sherlock nodded. ‘How long would it take for the poison to build up?’
‘A week,’ Hendricks said. ‘Perhaps two. But . . . who would do something like this? Something this barbarous?’
Instead of answering, Sherlock glanced at the ground. The earth was hard – too hard to retain any impression of shoes or boots. He might know how the crime had been committed, but that information was useless without knowing who.
He wanted to check the time, but he stopped himself. Knowing how little time he had left wasn’t going to make him think any faster.
His gaze was skittering around the area of the burrows, looking for something, anything that might be important, when he suddenly realized that there was something unusual on the ground. It was brown and dry, and looked a bit like a long, straight worm. He stared at it for a few moments, wondering why a dead worm would be laid out as straight as that, before he realized.
It wasn’t a worm. It was the mark left where someone had spat a mouthful of tobacco and saliva.
He glanced at Hendricks. The gardener had followed Sherlock’s gaze and was staring at the tobacco stain.
‘Do you chew tobacco?’ Sherlock murmured.
‘Can’t say I ever picked the habit up,’ he replied. ‘I don’t chew tobacco and I don’t smoke it. But I know who does.’
Sherlock remembered the butler, back at the house, and his mouthful of tobacco, and also the way he had claimed that the garden and the woods weren’t his area of expertise. If that was true, why had he been out here, all this way from the house?
‘You need to go to the police,’ Sherlock said. ‘Tell them what you found.’
‘What you found,’ the gardener said grudgingly. ‘I should have seen all this, but I didn’t.’
Sherlock shook his head.