Young Sherlock Holmes_ Fire Storm - Andrew Lane [88]
‘Look,’ Virginia said. ‘We can sleep there for the night.’
Sherlock followed the direction in which she was pointing. At first he saw nothing, but then he spotted a small stone building in the shadow of the trees. For a second he thought it was someone’s house, but after a moment he noticed how small it was, the absence of glass, and the door-less entrance. It was a hut, built to shelter shepherds from storms.
‘Well spotted,’ he said.
‘Any chance of some food?’ Virginia asked. ‘I’m starved after all that walking.’
Sherlock thought for a moment. He supposed he could safely leave Virginia for a bit while he scouted for mushrooms.
He told her so. She looked sceptically at him. ‘Mushrooms? You tryin’ to poison me?’
‘Trust me – your dad is a good teacher.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘He may be a good teacher, but are you sure he knows what he’s talkin’ about?’
‘Only one way to find out.’
‘Look, why don’t I collect some wood and get a fire going while you get the mushrooms? It’ll save time.’
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right? There are people after us.’
She stared at him, an eyebrow raised. ‘I can look after myself.’
They checked inside the stone shelter. Just one room, and leaves had drifted into the corners, but it seemed secure enough. There was even a small wood-burning brazier, along with a couple of battered saucepans and some metal plates.
‘Are you goin’ to be long?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘As long as it takes. You want dinner, don’t you?’
She smiled. ‘I’ve never had a man actually go an’ gather dinner for me before, ’part from my dad. I kinda like it.’
He couldn’t help himself. ‘What about buy you dinner? Has anyone ever done that? Apart from Mr Crowe, I mean?’
She shook her head. ‘Nope.’
‘Or cook you dinner?’
‘Nope.’
He smiled. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
The trees closed in around him within moments: trunks as thick as his body that erupted from tangles of roots and reached up towards the sky, forming a lacy ceiling with their branches. The thin light of the moon filtered down from above as he walked. Twigs seemed to grope for his face. Trailing strands of moss – or perhaps fine spider webs – brushed his cheeks and forehead, and he kept having to push them away. An owl hooted, and he could dimly make out the occasional sound of something larger – badgers, ferrets, maybe the odd deer – pushing its way through the undergrowth.
Somewhere off in the distance, a twig snapped as if it had been stepped on. Leaves rustled. Was it the wind, or a person?
He tensed, fearing that Scobell’s men had tracked them down, but a moment’s thought convinced him otherwise. He could still hear the owls and the passing animals. If Scobell’s men were around, the wildlife would have been more cautious.
Remembering the Edinburgh tenement, and the faces of dead men that had been staring out at him from the darkened doorways, he began to feel a flutter of panic in his chest. Were there dead men stalking him through the forest? Were they even now clustering around the door of the shepherds’ shelter, ready to burst in and attack Virginia? His heart started to race. He began to turn around, ready to race back to save her, but he stopped and took a deep breath. This was stupid. He put a firm mental hand on the panic in his chest and pushed downward. Dead men did not walk. There were no such things as ghosts. They weren’t logical. They were just superstition. Amyus Crowe had taught Sherlock a lot over the past year, but whatever Sherlock had learned had been built on top of a basic scepticism that was part of his character. There had to be a reason for things happening. There had to be a cause. Things that were dead were dead – they didn’t keep moving. Death was the absence of life. Whatever he had seen back in the tenement, whatever he and Matty had seen in Edinburgh, it wasn’t dead men.
Feeling better, he kept on walking. If he was hearing anything in the woods apart from the breeze then it was scurrying animals. The rest was just his imagination drawing the wrong conclusions