Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [46]
‘So we all eat in here?’ he said.
Virginia nodded. ‘All in together,’ she replied. ‘It was the same on the boat we came out on.’
‘Lords and ladies mixing with industrialists and theatrical impresarios,’ he went on. ‘Very democratic. Nowhere for the hoi oligoi to escape from the hoi polloi.’
‘No cabin service,’ Virginia agreed. ‘People eat here or they don’t eat at all.’
One of the stewards began to set out place cards around the table. Sherlock wondered where Mycroft’s bribe had placed them. Now they were at sea, all bets were off. Despite the payment, they could be seated at the far end of the table, away from the Captain and the doors, and over the engines, and they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it apart from complain. Sherlock presumed they were at the mercy of the purser – a man who had already demonstrated that he could be bribed.
Sherlock stepped back and let the door swing shut. Something moved in the corner of his eye. He glanced sideways, towards where the First Class saloon ended in an alley running between it and the nearest funnel. A figure was just ducking back into the alley. He didn’t recognize it – sailor or passenger, he couldn’t be sure. The only thing he caught was the sun catching a flash of iridescent blue around the figure’s wrist as it withdrew into the shadows. A blue shirt cuff, maybe? He wasn’t sure.
He ran quickly down to the end of the saloon and glanced around the corner, but the alley was clear. A hatch halfway along led down into the depths of the ship. Whoever had been watching them was gone, but Sherlock knew that it wouldn’t be left at that. This was the second time he’d spotted someone watching him from the shadows. Someone on this ship was interested in them, and that could only mean one thing.
The Americans who had kidnapped Matty had someone on the ship.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The daily routine of the voyage to New York was established within the first eighteen hours, as far as Sherlock could tell. Despite the apparently huge size of the ship, the areas where the passengers could walk were pretty restricted. Once a person had walked the deck, taken a meal, checked out the smoking room and the library and had a couple of conversations with other passengers about the unusually calm weather, all the options had been exhausted. Between meals most people seemed to spend their time either alone on deck, reading a book in a comfortable chair, or gathered in small groups at tables in the smoking room or the bar, playing bridge or whist. When the sun went down the ship’s stewards went around the ship turning the oil lamps on, but setting them as low as possible, and everyone headed for their cabins to sleep.
Sherlock had spent the first few hours watching his home country recede away from him until it was just a dark line on the horizon. He missed the moment when it actually vanished. He must have blinked, or turned away to watch something else, but one moment England was there and the next the ship was alone on an endless ocean, heading towards the sunset with the only thing to indicate they were moving being the white wake that stretched away behind them.
He and Amyus Crowe and Virginia had joined the rest of the passengers for dinner, but while Amyus Crowe talked easily with everyone around him Sherlock found that he had nothing to say. He ate his food and watched everyone else, wondering who they were, where they had come from and where they were going. Amyus Crowe had already taught him some of the ways one could tell a person’s occupation – the stains on their sleeves, the patterns of wear on their jackets, the calluses on their hands – and he was pretty sure that he’d already pegged one man as an accountant and two others as horse trainers.
Captain Charles Henry Evans Judkins was a tall man with an impressive set of white whiskers adorning his cheeks. His