Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [14]
‘Please!’ he cried, still trying to pretend that he was an innocent victim, just passing by, ‘just let me go. My ma and pa will be worried about me! They just live down the road!’
The man wouldn’t meet Sherlock’s gaze. Instead, his head kept jerking back and forth like a bird’s, going from window to door, door to window, back and forth.
Sherlock took a moment to look properly at the man. All he had really caught in the doorway was the ruined flesh on the left-hand side of the man’s face, but now he let his gaze roam up and down the man’s body, trying to spot something that might help.
The man’s suit was good cloth, that much Sherlock was sure of. It was black, and quite fine, and the way the jacket and the trousers hung made Sherlock think that it had been made by a tailor who knew what he was doing. It didn’t look like a wool sack with sleeves, which some of the jackets worn around Farnham did. But there was something odd about the cut, something . . . almost foreign. Sherlock found a part of his mind wondering whether you could identify which tailor had made a suit just by the stitching and the cut; or, at the very least, whether the tailor followed a particular style – German, or English, or American.
The man was thin, and his wrist bones and Adam’s apple stood out prominently. From the right side his face was classically handsome, with a prominent moustache and goatee beard, but from the left side it was a wreck. The skin was red and shiny, and cratered like the surface of the moon. The beard on that side was sparse and sickly, poking through the skin like the charred remains of a forest fire, and the eye-socket was just a red-scarred hole in his face.
‘Mister—’ Sherlock started, but the man cut him off with an abrupt gesture.
‘Quiet!’ he commanded. His voice was piercing, but there was a whining tone in it that made Sherlock’s flesh creep. ‘Quiet, you little whoreson whelp!’
His voice was tinged with an accent that wasn’t English. It sounded more like the way Amyus and Virginia Crowe spoke, but it wasn’t quite the same. Perhaps slightly more cultured. And he spoke as if he expected to be listened to. He projected, as if he was on a stage, performing. Sherlock had seen some interminable Shakespeare plays performed in the open air at his mother and father’s manor house in Reigate, and if it wasn’t for the twitching of his head Sherlock would have put this man down as an actor from the way he stood and the way he spoke.
‘How long have we got?’ the man asked abruptly. ‘How long till they’re back?’
‘I don’t—’ Sherlock started to say, but the man stepped towards him and belted him across the face with the back of his hand. Stars and galaxies burst apart in Sherlock’s head. Shocked, he tasted blood.
‘Don’t lie to me, boy. I can smell a lie on the wind. How long have we got?’
‘Maybe an hour . . .’ Sherlock replied. He wasn’t sure what the man wanted, but he was sure the man wasn’t stable. The best thing to do was just to play along.
‘Smoke . . .’ the man said out of nowhere. His head was raised, and he was sniffing. ‘I can smell smoke.’ Abruptly he looked at Sherlock. ‘We need to get away. Back to the Orient. It’s safe there. Too many people looking for me here. Too many eyes. Too many ears.’
‘I could check out back, see if the coast is clear,’ Sherlock offered.
‘The coast!’ The man’s eyes seemed to light up. ‘We get a boat. A ship. We can sail to Hong Kong. Hide out there till it’s safe.’
‘Safe from what?’ Sherlock asked, but the man just glared at him.
‘Don’t pretend you’re not in on it. You’re all in on it. Every last mother’s son.’
Remembering the discussion back at Holmes Manor, Sherlock tried to work out whether this man had it in him to assassinate anyone, let along the President of the United States of America. He was obviously unstable, on the edge of a nervous collapse, but he was American, and maybe whatever he’d been through had driven him to the edge