Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [69]
He kept shifting his glance between the men and the hole which he had created above, but the men weren’t doing anything apart from moaning and writhing in pain and nobody appeared looking down through the hole.
He pulled the rope from around his ankles. The flesh was swollen where it had bitten in, and he suspected that his neck looked the same way, but he didn’t care. He was free!
He stood up, and immediately collapsed. His legs wouldn’t take his weight. He knew he couldn’t stay there, on the floor, so he tried again. And again. It was just a question of willpower, he told himself. His body would do what he told it to do, not the other way round.
On the fourth attempt his legs stayed more or less straight, apart from a tremor in the muscles. He took a deep breath and staggered across the room towards the stairs. It never even occurred to him to run out of the house. Matty and Rufus Stone were up there, and they were helpless, defenceless. He had to rescue them, no matter what the risk to his own life.
Climbing the stairs was possibly the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. His muscles screamed at the effort, and twice he nearly fainted. When he got to the top he entered the room where he had been tortured with the knife held out in front of him, ready for a fight, but the quiet man had gone. Vanished. It wasn’t clear to Sherlock how he had got out – the window was closed and the only way out was the stairs that Sherlock had just climbed – but he had left. Only Rufus Stone and Matty remained. Matty was still curled up with the sack over his head. Sherlock looked over at Rufus – bloodied, but smiling – and Rufus nodded towards Matty. ‘See to him first, lad,’ he said. His voice sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of walnuts – a result, Sherlock supposed, of the beating he had received. ‘I feel like I’ve gone several rounds with a bare-knuckle pugilist – and believe me, I am more than familiar with that experience – but I’ll keep. The boy’s not moved since he was thrown down there. He might need your help.’ He shook his head admiringly. ‘That was an amazing piece of improvisation, by the way. If I live to be a hundred years old – which, by the way, I have every intention of doing – I doubt that I’ll ever see anything like that again.’
Sherlock went over and knelt beside Matty. Worried about what he might find, he reached out to pull the sack gently from the boy’s head. Matty’s blue-grey eyes stared up at him in amazement.
‘You’re all right,’ Sherlock breathed.
‘I’m always all right,’ Matty replied.
‘I thought . . . you weren’t moving, so . . .’
Matty smiled. ‘I’ve learned that in situations like this, best thing to do is be like a hedgehog – curl up into a ball and wait for everything to settle down. Failing that, be like a badger – attack everything wildly, biting and scratching as much as you can.’
Sherlock pulled Matty to his feet, and together they set about freeing Rufus Stone from his bonds. Sherlock was worried about the amount of blood on Rufus’s hands, face and shirt, but the violinist shrugged it off. ‘I’ve had worse scrapes falling off roofs,’ he said, ‘although I won’t be playing any pizzicato notes on the violin for a while. What happened to those two thugs? Are they likely to come back?’
Sherlock went gingerly over to the hole in the floor, aware that the rest of it might collapse at any moment, and gazed down into the room below. The men were still crumpled on the floor, in the hole that their bodies had made. They were groaning, but they didn’t look like they would be moving at any stage in the near future. ‘I can see them,’ he replied, ‘but I don’t think we need to worry about them. Not just yet, anyway.’
‘Fair enough. Ah, Sherlock, my admiration for you knows no bounds.’
‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked. ‘We lost you at Newcastle.’
Rufus grimaced. ‘They were on to us from Farnham,’ he said. ‘From what I overheard, they found Amyus Crowe’s cottage empty and set someone to watch it in case he came back. It was that fellow with the