Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [24]
Within ten minutes the carriage was slowing down, and Sherlock could see the loaf-like shape of a thatched roof rising above a clump of bushes.
‘Come,’ said Mycroft as the carriage stopped outside a gate in a dry stone wall. ‘Mr Crowe is expecting us.’
The cottage door was open. Mycroft knocked, and then entered without waiting for an answer.
Amyus Crowe was sitting in a chair by the hearth, his massive form dwarfing the wooden frame. He was smoking a cigar. ‘Mr Holmes,’ he said equitably, nodding.
‘Mr Crowe,’ Mycroft responded. ‘Thank you for seeing us.’
‘Please, sit yourselves down.’
Mycroft chose the only other comfortable chair in the room. Sherlock sat on a stool near the cold, empty fireplace and looked around. Amyus Crowe’s cottage was as untidy as he remembered. A pile of letters was fastened to the wooden mantelpiece with a knife, and a lone slipper on the floor beside the fireplace contained a bunch of cigars, sticking upward in various directions. And there was a map of the local area attached to a wall with drawing pins. Circles and lines had been drawn on it in some apparently random pattern. Some of the lines continued off on to the plaster of the wall.
Sherlock wondered where Crowe’s daughter Virginia was. There was no sign of her in the cottage, and given her headstrong attitude he wouldn’t expect her to stay in her room meekly while the grown-ups talked. Maybe she was out riding around the countryside, as she seemed to do a lot of the time. He hadn’t seen her horse, Sandia, outside the cottage.
He smiled. Virginia hated being inside. In some ways she was more like an animal than a person.
‘Might I offer you a glass of sherry?’ Crowe asked. ‘Can’t stand the stuff myself – tastes like something’s crawled into the barrel an’ died – but I keep a bottle for visitors.’
‘Thank you, but no,’ Mycroft replied smoothly.
‘Sherlock does not drink, and I prefer a brandy at this time of day.’ He glanced over at Sherlock. ‘America has still not managed to develop a national drink,’ he said. ‘The French have wine and brandy, the Italians grappa, the Germans wheat beer, the Scots whisky and the English ale, but our transatlantic cousins are still in the process of working out their own identity.’
It sounded to Sherlock as if Mycroft wasn’t really talking about drinks at all, but trying to make some other, much more subtle point, but for the life of him he couldn’t work out what it was.
‘The Mexicans have a drink they distil from cacti,’ Crowe said, good-humouredly. ‘Tequila, they call it. Maybe we could adopt that.’
‘What’s a cactus?’ Sherlock asked.
‘It’s a fleshy plant with a thick skin an’ covered with spikes,’ Crowe responded. ‘It grows in the heat an’ the sand of the hot, arid lands in Texas an’ New Mexico an’ California. The thick skin keeps the water from evaporatin’ away, an’ the spikes stop cows an’ horses an’ suchlike from eatin’ it for the water content. Either the cactus is evidence of a Designer who makes things differently for different environments, so they can best survive, or it’s evidence that there’s some force which pushes livin’ organisms to change and develop so as to best survive in whatever place they find themselves, as Mr Charles Darwin contends. You take your money and you make your choice.’
‘Back to the subject at hand, what have you been able to discover?’ Mycroft asked.
Crowe shrugged. ‘I found the house. It’s empty. Looks like the occupants cleared out in a hurry. I talked to a farm worker along the road who saw them leave. He said there were four of them. One looked like he was asleep, one had his head all bandaged up, an’ the other two were scowlin’ like they’d got a long an’ unpleasant journey ahead of them.’
‘The birds have flown.’ Mycroft considered for a moment. ‘Is there any more evidence that the sleeping man was John Wilkes Booth?’
Crowe shrugged. ‘Save what your brother told us, nothin’. It’s instructive