Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [43]
Sherlock, Matty and Rufus Stone met up at Farnham Station early the next morning. Each of them had a bag of clothes, toiletries and other travelling necessities.
‘This,’ Rufus Stone said with a grim face, ‘is a remarkably bad idea. My initial flush of enthusiasm has dissipated like a rain puddle soaking into the earth. Edinburgh is a big city, with a lot of people in it. What you intend doing is a bit like searching an ant’s nest for one particular ant. It won’t be easy.’
‘Nothing easy is worthwhile,’ Sherlock pointed out.
‘Touché.’ Stone smiled.
Rufus Stone paid for the tickets. He bought them from Farnham to London, on the basis that they could buy the next set of tickets, from London to Edinburgh, once they had arrived, and because it would be embarrassing and potentially dangerous to leave a trail behind them when Amyus Crowe hadn’t. Sherlock offered to use some of the money that Mycroft had sent him, but Stone shrugged. ‘Your brother pays me a regular salary for teaching you the violin,’ he pointed out. ‘One way or the other, it’s his money which is buying the tickets. It doesn’t really matter which one of us hands it over.’
There wasn’t a train for another hour, so Rufus suggested having a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich before they left. The boys agreed enthusiastically. The nearest tea shop was just across the road, but while the three of them were eating Sherlock stared through the shop window and noticed two men standing in front of the station and looking around. One of them had black hair pulled back into a ponytail; the other had smallpox scars across his cheeks and forehead.
‘Are those the two you think are looking for Amyus Crowe?’ Rufus asked, following the direction of Sherlock’s gaze.
Matty nodded.
They watched as the men approached the ticket office and asked the clerk a question. He shook his head. One of the men asked him something else, and slid some money across the counter. The clerk tore two tickets from a strip and passed them over.
‘They’ve bought tickets,’ Rufus pointed out. ‘That means they’ll probably be on the same train as us. Either they know about Edinburgh or they are moving the search to Guildford. Whatever the reason, we need to stay out of their way.’
Finishing their sandwiches and tea, they headed back across the road to the station. A few minutes later the train heaved itself alongside the platform: a behemoth of black iron shrouded in steam and hissing like some biblical demon. The three of them found a compartment to themselves. Sherlock kept an eye out for the two Americans, but he couldn’t see where on the train they got on – if they had got on at all.
Sherlock was used to train journeys by now. For a while he let himself become entranced by the scenery flashing past, but when that grew too boring he waited until they arrived at the next large station – which turned out to be Guildford – and quickly left the train to buy a newspaper from a seller on the platform. It was a London edition of The Times, presumably brought down as part of a large bundle on an early train.
The train was venting steam in a white cloud across the platform when he turned away from the newsvendor’s stall. As he moved back towards the long wooden wall of the train carriages, an errant breeze pushed the steam away and he spotted one of the Americans walking across the platform. It was the taller man, the one with the black hair shot through with grey and the gnarled scar tissue where his right ear should have been. He was coming from the