Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [60]
‘I’m not what you’d call “religious”,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t believe there’s a God-given instruction that “Thou shalt not kill”, but I suppose I believe that society functions better when there are laws and when people can’t just go around killing other people. That’s part of what Plato argues in The Republic, which my brother gave me to read. But the steward was trying to kill me, and if I hadn’t done the same to him then he wouldn’t have stopped. I didn’t choose to kill him. He picked the fight, not me.’
Crowe nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ he said.
‘Was that the right answer?’
‘There is no right answer, son; least, not as far as I can make out. It’s a dilemma – society works because people follow rules an’ don’t go round murdering each other, but if people choose to live outside those rules, what do you do? Let them get away with their behaviour, or fight them with the same weapons they use to fight you? If you follow the former course, they get to take over society, cos they’re always prepared to fight harder and dirtier than you are. If you follow the latter course then how do you stop yourself becomin’ as bad as them?’ He shook his head. ‘In the end, the only advice I can offer is – if you get to the stage where a man’s life don’t matter to you, then you’ve gone too far. As long as death bothers you, as long as you understand it’s your last resort, not your first, then you’re probably on the right side of the line.’
‘Do you think Mycroft knew something like this would happen?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Do you think that’s why he gave me the book?’
‘No,’ Crowe replied, ‘but your brother is a wise man. I think he knew that at some stage you’d be askin’ yourself these questions, an’ he wanted to make sure you had the tools to answer them with.’
CHAPTER TEN
He slept for a while, even though it was only mid-afternoon: a disturbed sleep, full of images of Matty, tied up and helpless in the dark, crying to himself, wondering where his friends were. When Sherlock awoke he found his cheeks were wet with sympathetic tears, and it took him a few moments to remember where he was and what had happened.
His muscles ached and his lungs burned, and he could feel the bruises on his throat from where Grivens had clutched at it. He tried to find some trace of horror inside him over what he’d done, but there wasn’t anything that strong. Regret, yes. He regretted the fact that a man was dead, but that was about as far as it went.
Lying awake and thinking about Grivens, to distract himself from worrying about Matty, Sherlock found himself thinking about the iridescent blue tattoo on the man’s wrist, the one that had first made Sherlock realize that the man had been watching him. If he’d thought of tattoos at all then he’d thought of them as something decorative, but there was obviously more to them than that. They were a means of recognition, of identification. In this case, they’d led him to identify a man who might be watching him on behalf of the fleeing Americans. And, based on what the steward had said, you could recognize a tattooist by his style, just like you could recognize a painting by Vermeer or Rubens. Or, Sherlock thought, remembering the paintings in the hall at Holmes Manor, by Vernet. His mind was filled with the idea of an encyclopedia of tattoos, cross-referenced back to the places they were done and the artists who did them. Would such a thing even be possible?
After a while he decided that lying in bed wasn’t going to accomplish anything. He got up and went outside.
The sun was shining strongly on the deck of the SS Scotia. All around them the horizon was a flat line. It was as if