Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [60]
‘If he’s here at all,’ Matty pointed out. ‘After all, you’ve only got a dead rabbit’s head pointing you here. It’s not much to go on. I still reckon we might have gone off in completely the wrong direction.’
‘Despite Rufus vanishing?’ Sherlock asked.
Matty shrugged. ‘You’ve got a point. The clue was probably a good one, but now that it’s got us here, what do we do? Wait for another one to come along?’
‘Matty,’ Sherlock said slowly, ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – you may not be a genius, but you can bring out the genius in those around you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Amyus Crowe left a clue that would bring us to Edinburgh, if we understood it properly. Why did he do that? We’ve not asked ourselves that question yet.’
‘Because he wanted us to follow him,’ Matty replied.
‘Exactly. He wanted us to follow him. He wasn’t just saying “Goodbye – I’m off to Edinburgh!” He wanted us to know exactly where he was heading, and the only reason for that was because he wanted us to come after him. He wants our help. Now we’re here, he’s not going to leave us dangling. He’ll leave another clue around, one that will lead us right to where he is.’
‘Why couldn’t he do that from the start?’ Matty asked.
‘Because all he knew was that he and Virginia were heading to Edinburgh. Once he was here he would find somewhere to settle down in peace – somewhere he wouldn’t be detected. Not a hotel then. More likely a cottage somewhere outside the town that he could rent. Once he knew his address, he would find a way of letting us know.’
‘But he doesn’t know where we are,’ Matty pointed out.
‘So he would leave a message somewhere that we could see it no matter where in the town we ended up.’ He thought back to the newspaper that he had read on the train. In particular he remembered the page of classified advertisements that had so fascinated him: messages from one person to another, or one person to a group of people, either in plain language or in code. ‘He’ll place a classified advertisement in the local newspaper,’ he said with certainty. ‘He knows that’s one of the places I’ll look.’
‘But what if we missed it? What if he put the message in yesterday?’
Sherlock shook his head. ‘He wouldn’t know what day we were going to be here. If I know Amyus Crowe, he would pay for the advert to be in all week.’
Matty nodded. Either what Sherlock had said made perfect sense to him or he was willing to take it on trust. ‘Then let’s get a local newspaper. Let’s get all of them.’
‘How many are there?’ Sherlock asked, wondering if they were going to have to plough their way through ten or twelve newspapers, or whether Amyus Crowe would have put the advertisement in all of them.
‘Three,’ Matty said. He turned to go, then turned back. ‘You’ll have to read ’em,’ he pointed out, ‘cos I can’t read. And I ain’t got any money on me, so you’ll have to buy ’em as well.’
They found a newspaper vendor just outside the park and bought copies of all three Edinburgh newspapers for that day, then went back into the park and sat on a bench where Sherlock could read them. He couldn’t help but notice that the Edinburgh murder story – the one he’d seen in the copy of The Times on the train – was the front-page story on all three papers. The first one – the Edinburgh Herald – was representative of them all:
Edinburgh police this morning arrested a suspect in the murder by poison of the eccentric businessman Sir Benedict Ventham. Sources close to the police have told us that the suspect in question is a Miss Aggie Macfarlane, cook to the late Sir Benedict and – this newspaper has discovered – sister to the notorious