Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [56]
‘He knows about Edinburgh,’ Matty pointed out.
‘If they were on the train with us, then they know about Edinburgh as well. That secret is out of the bag, I suspect.’ He paused for a moment. ‘On the other hand, if it’s the Paradol Chamber, then I don’t know what they want with him.’
Sherlock found that the conversation had blunted the sharp edge of his appetite. Thinking of what might be happening to Rufus while they were relaxing in a warm bar and eating well made his stomach lurch.
‘I don’t want to worry you,’ Matty whispered after a while, ‘but have you seen the bloke over there?’ He nodded his head at the opposite wall. ‘In the booth, sitting by himself.’
Sherlock glanced over, trying not to be too obvious about it. He was worried that Matty might have spotted Mr Kyte, but when he saw the unfamiliar thin man sitting alone in the booth he breathed a sigh of relief. A moment more and he started to feel uneasy, however. The man didn’t show any signs of being interested in the two of them, but there was something odd about him, something Sherlock couldn’t quite work out. He was painfully thin, for a start, as if he’d been starved for weeks, and his skin was so white it was almost translucent. His eyes seemed invisible in the dark shadows of his eye sockets, and the bones of his cheeks and his chin pushed out against the tautness of his face so much that Sherlock thought the skin might suddenly split as he watched. There was something strange about the man’s clothes as well: they looked like they might have been his Sunday best, but they were coated in dirt, and there was a green tinge to his shoulders and sleeves. He was staring straight ahead, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything in particular. Nobody was sitting near him, and although he didn’t have a drink in front of him, the barman didn’t seem to want to go across and either take an order or throw him out. The man just sat there doing nothing.
The crowd in the tavern grew larger, and eventually the view of the strange pale-skinned man was blocked by people. Sherlock and Matty finished eating their pies and got ready to leave. As they stood up a gap opened in the crowd. Sherlock looked across. The man had gone.
‘You ever heard of the Resurrectionists?’ Matty asked as they left the tavern. He seemed edgy.
‘I don’t recognize the name,’ Sherlock said.
‘It was two blokes named Burke an’ Hare. Both called William. They was notorious up in this neck of the woods a few years back. I heard about them when me dad was up here, working. Lookin’ at that bloke back there reminded me of ’em. Edinburgh is one of the places doctors come to train, cos of the Edinburgh Medical College, but they’ve got a problem: how do they find out about the ’uman body if they can’t examine ’em, cut ’em up, like, when they’re dead – see where all the organs is, an’ where the blood goes?’
‘I thought medical schools were allowed to use the bodies of executed criminals,’ Sherlock said, frowning.
‘In theory, yeah,’ Matty responded, ‘but there’s always less bodies available than there’s student doctors wantin’ to take a look at ’em. An’ the number of things you can be hanged for has gone down a lot, which means there’s a lot less bodies available for use. Sixty years ago there was over two ’undred different crimes that led to an ’anging. Now there’s only five. So only about two bodies a year came up for use by the College. Which is where Burke an’ Hare came in.’
‘I have a feeling I know where this is going,’ Sherlock said quietly, feeling a shiver down his spine. ‘They dug up corpses and sold them, didn’t they?’
Matty stared at him. ‘Not quite,’ he said, ‘although a lot