Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [11]
The picture on the wall kept attracting his attention. For a minute or two he dismissed it, thinking that it was just the way it was hung at an angle that disturbed his ordered mind, but his thoughts kept circling back to it. It occurred to him that something might have been hidden behind the picture. Gently he eased it away from the wall and turned it so that he could see the back.
Only a pencilled price mark.
He sighed and put the picture back at exactly the same angle he had found it.
Hands on hips, he surveyed the room again. If there was a secret in the room, then it was particularly well kept.
If, in fact, the secret was in the room to start with.
On a whim he crossed over to the narrow window that looked out over the gardens to the back of the house. He couldn’t see anybody, so he was safe from observation. The window was open a crack. He pushed it further open and leaned out.
Something was hanging from a piece of twine that had been wrapped around a nail stuck in the wood of the window frame – a package that dangled a couple of feet below the level of the windowsill. It was small enough that it would have been almost invisible from the garden below, unless someone knew exactly what they were looking for.
Sherlock hauled it in and rested it on the windowsill. The twine was tarred to make it weather-resistant, and the package was wrapped in oilcloth. It left a reddish powdery residue on the windowsill. It looked to Sherlock as if the oilcloth had been rubbed with brick dust to make it even more difficult to see from outside. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to hide this package.
With a momentary hesitation, and a shiver of anticipation, he untied the twine and unwrapped the package.
Inside was a folded mass of paper. Sherlock wiped his hands on a handkerchief before unfolding it carefully, making a mental note of which layers were on the inside and which ones were on the outside. It was bad enough that he was in her room; he certainly didn’t want Mrs Eglantine knowing that he had found her hidden papers and was riffling through them.
The papers unfolded into two large sheets. The top one was a set of plans of Holmes Manor – architect’s drawings showing all the rooms on all the floors, all to scale. Many of the rooms had been crossed off in red ink. Most of them had scribbled notes written in them, or arrows pointing to particular features with question marks attached. One particularly thick wall between the dining room and the reception room had a note written beside it which said: ‘Check for secret compartments in the wall. Could be accessed from either side.’
The second sheet was slightly smaller than the first. It was a set of words and phrases written in the same handwriting as the notes on the architectural plans. They had boxes drawn around them, and the boxes were linked by lines and arrows in a kind of network. It looked as if Mrs Eglantine – assuming it was her – was trying to connect up a series of disparate elements, discoveries or thoughts into a coherent pattern – and failing. Sherlock scanned through some of the notes and found names of members of the Holmes family, as well as names that he didn’t recognize, alongside places that he thought he’d heard of and words that just seemed to be randomly chosen but presumably meant something to Mrs Eglantine. In the centre, like a spider sitting in the middle of its web, the words gold plates had been circled twice in an emphatic hand.
Gold plates? Was that what she was looking for?
Reluctantly Sherlock folded the papers up again, careful to make sure that he used the same fold marks in the same order as he had unwrapped the package. He wished he could keep them for further study, but that would be risky. He couldn’t even copy them – there was too much information there, and it would take too long. He knew more than he had earlier, but he wasn’t sure he was any the wiser.
He wrapped the papers up in the oilcloth, retied them with the twine and