Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [16]
The landing ended with a choice of two doors. Sherlock could hear footsteps on the staircase. He considered, wildly, trying to remember the layout of the house as he’d seen it from outside. There had been wisteria growing up to one window, on this side. Was it the left or the right?
He chose the right, more on a whim than anything else. If he left it any longer, trying to work out which door to go through, he’d be dead anyway. He had a fifty-fifty chance.
The door opened under the pressure of his hand. He slipped through the gap and quickly closed the door again. If the man with the gun had to check both bedrooms, that might give Sherlock a few minutes’ grace before he was discovered.
There was a bed in the room, unmade, as if the occupant had just stumbled out of it and got dressed without worrying about tidiness, and no maid had come to straighten the room out. Sherlock assumed that the only people in the house were the man with the gun and his captor/guard. If they were up to no good, hiding from some undefined peril, then a maid would be a risk. Best for the men to keep isolated, avoiding any interest. And that meant they were probably doing all the cooking and cleaning themselves.
And that, Sherlock suddenly thought, probably meant there was a third man at least, if the madman needed constant supervision.
Wary of noises outside, or the sudden movement of the door, Sherlock crept across to the window. As he passed the bed, he noticed a black Gladstone bag on the floor beside it. The top of the bag gaped open, and inside Sherlock could see the gleam of glass and metal. Intrigued, he moved closer and looked in.
A series of vials containing a colourless fluid were strapped into individual compartments on one side of the bag. A collection of medical instruments, scalpels and suchlike, had just been thrown willy-nilly into the bottom. And separate from both of them was a long, flat box that Sherlock recognized. He’d seen boxes like that before, belonging to the doctors who had treated his sister during her periods of illness. They usually contained hypodermic syringes: hollow cylinders of glass ending in plungers and tipped with sharp needles, used for injecting drugs into the bloodstream. For a moment he wasn’t in that bedroom any more, he was in his own home, watching through a gap in the door as the doctors and nurses bustled around his sister’s bed. Needles and syringes fascinated him: the light glinting on them, their grotesque functionality, the way they blurred the boundary between the inside of the body and the outside. The way they made things better. The way they stopped the screams.
He shivered. No time for memories. He had a madman with a gun just a few seconds behind him.
For a moment he thought the window was bolted, or nailed shut. It wouldn’t move as he tugged it upward. It had to, he told himself. If this room had medical equipment scattered around then it wasn’t the madman’s bedroom, and there would be no point in sealing the window.
The madman’s window, he felt sure, would have bars on it.
He threw all his strength into tugging at the window and, with a squeal of wood on wood, it slid upward. Blessedly cool air washed across his face. He squirmed out on to the windowsill and looked around. No sign of Matty in the garden or on the road. No sign of anyone.
He looked down. The wisteria grew all the way down to the flower beds beneath. He could climb down easily.
And then what? If the madman entered the bedroom while he was halfway down then he was a sitting