Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [110]
He pulled the door open and stepped through, still holding the frame for support.
He was looking out on the deck of a ship. Beyond the rails was a choppy grey sea flecked with white spume. There was no land in sight.
A sailor came around the corner and stopped dead at the sight of Sherlock. He sighed heavily and turned to look behind him.
‘Get Mr Larchmont,’ he yelled. ‘We got ourselves a stowaway!’ Turning back to Sherlock he shook his head. ‘You chose the wrong ship to stow away on, boy.
‘Why?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Where are we going?’
‘This ain’t a pleasure cruise to the Mediterranean,’ the sailor said. He smiled, revealing a handful of tobacco-stained teeth. ‘This is the Gloria Scott, and we’re sailing all the way to China!’
HISTORICAL NOTES
You might think that researching a book set on the same land mass as the one where I live would be easier than researching one set in, oh, say, America or Russia. I certainly thought that before I started work. The strange thing is that it didn’t turn out that way.
I first started thinking about setting a book in Edinburgh when I was staying there for a few days. I was doing a talk at the Edinburgh Festival, and then visiting a couple of schools and talking to the pupils about Sherlock Holmes, and me, and why I wanted to write these books. I was staying in a small hotel in the centre of Edinburgh – just off Princes Street, in fact – and every day, when I left the hotel, I looked to my right and saw the massive volcanic plug of Castle Rock, with Edinburgh Castle sitting on top of it like a solid grey cloud hanging above the city. It all looked so stunning that I couldn’t help but start to picture Sherlock Holmes clambering up Castle Rock, risking his life to save someone. Probably Virginia.
What I should have done, of course, was go to the nearest bookshop and buy as many books on the history of Edinburgh as I could. But I had a lot of stuff in my suitcase, and at the time I was busy writing the previous Young Sherlock Holmes mystery, Black Ice, so I didn’t have time to think about the next book. I filed the images and scenes away in a little locked box in my mind for later. Much later.
Much later comes around faster than you expect. By the time I started to write Fire Storm I was back in Dorset, nearly as far from Edinburgh as it’s possible to get without falling into the sea. Looking around for inspiration, I could only find Michael Fry’s Edinburgh – A History of the City (published by Macmillan – who also publish the Young Sherlock books – in 2009, which means I probably could have got them to send me a free copy rather than buying my own). That book did, however, give me a good sense of how the city had developed and the kinds of people who lived there.
The story of the bodysnatchers Burke and Hare, which Matty tells Sherlock when they are in the tavern off Princes Street, is entirely true. Edinburgh was famed for its medical school, and there was indeed a shortage of bodies. Burke and Hare found the perfect solution to the problem – provide fresh bodies to order, by killing people. Burke was indeed hanged, and then dissected in the very place where so many of his victims had ended up, while Hare did vanish, never to be seen again.
The other story that Matty tells Sherlock – later, when they are coming out of the tenements where they have been questioned by Bryce Scobell – is not true, although it is widely believed.
I ’eard a rumour, last time I was ’ere, that the local authorities was tryin’ to move people out of the tenements. ’Parently they wanted to sell the land off to build factories on, or posh mansions, or somethin’. People I talked to told me that the authorities would start a rumour that some illness, like consumption or the plague, had broken out in a tenement. They’d move everybody out to