Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [41]
‘If Mr Crowe bought two tickets to Edinburgh from the ticket office at Farnham Station,’ he said slowly, ‘then he’d be leaving a trail. If the Americans are chasing him they could just check at the ticket office and find out where he went. It’s not as if he’s inconspicuous.’
‘No,’ Sherlock agreed. ‘So what would he do?’
Matty shrugged. ‘I dunno.’
‘He’d probably buy two tickets to an intermediate station – say, Guildford, but he and Virginia could get off earlier – maybe at Ash Wharf. He could then buy two tickets through to Edinburgh from there. If anyone was following then they’d go from Farnham direct to Guildford, and there they would lose the trail, because nobody at the ticket office in Guildford would remember him.’
‘Clever,’ said Matty approvingly.
‘In fact,’ Sherlock went on, ‘if I were him, I would buy two tickets for Guildford, get off at Ash Wharf, buy two tickets for London, then when I got to London I’d buy two tickets for Edinburgh. That confuses the trail even more.’
‘You’re sure that’s what he’d do?’
Sherlock nodded. ‘He’s a hunter. He knows the kinds of trail that prey can leave, and he’ll be careful not to do the same thing.’
‘So what now?’
‘Now we go to Farnham.’
The two of them rode from the cottage towards the centre of Farnham, not without a twinge of guilt in Sherlock’s mind. He hated leaving the cottage empty and unguarded. Who knew what might happen to it before Amyus Crowe and Virginia came back? They would come back, he was sure of it. He would make sure of it.
The ticket-office clerk at Farnham – a tall elderly man with fluffy white sideburns – confirmed that a bigman in a white suit and hat, accompanied by a girl dressed like a boy, had bought two tickets the day before. Sherlock was pleased to note that the tickets had been bought with Guildford as the destination. So far his deductions were bang on target.
‘Look,’ Matty said, pointing across the road. In a small triangle of field next to a barn a horse was cropping the grass. It was tied by a long halter to a fence.
‘That’s Sandia,’ Matty said.
‘Are you sure?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Very sure.’
‘At least we know he’s all right. Virginia has probably paid someone at the station to keep an eye on him. If she had time to do that, they can’t have been taken forcibly. They must have found out that somebody was after them. If I know Mr Crowe, he will have managed to keep one step ahead of them.’ Suddenly Sherlock felt an awful lot better.
‘Are we going on to Ash Wharf now?’
Sherlock thought for a moment. There was a point at which extra evidence did nothing more than confirm what you already knew. He was confident enough in his deductions. ‘No, let’s go and find Rufus Stone. We need to tell him what we’re going to do, and then we need to talk to my aunt and uncle.’ He remembered the events of earlier that day. ‘I think there’s enough residual goodwill there that they won’t raise any objections to me going away for a few days, especially if they know that Rufus Stone is going with me.
Matty turned to go, but Sherlock reached out a hand and stopped him. Matty turned back enquiringly.
‘What?’
Sherlock hesitated, wondering how to ask the question. Wondering if he should ask the question. ‘That stuff you said earlier, about friendship getting thrown away when times are tight and money is scarce – did you really mean it?’
Matty looked away. His lips tightened for a moment before he answered. ‘I’ve had friends before,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t have them now. They left, one by one, when it suited them. So I learned that’s the way things work.’
‘Not with me,’ Sherlock said. ‘And not with Amyus Crowe or Virginia.’
Matty nodded reluctantly. ‘At least you’ve convinced me they didn’t want to go. That’s a start. Now come on. Time’s slipping away.