Stone Cold (11 page)

Lukather smiled. ‘That would be capital,’ he said. ‘I don’t get the opportunity that often to talk with a like mind. There was a man, some time ago – Ferny Weston,
his name was. Big fellow. Very big. Policeman, he was. He stopped coming.’ His face fell, and he looked away. ‘I think I must have bored him.’

‘You won’t bore me,’ Sherlock promised.

Leaving the mortuary and the hospital grounds, Sherlock took the shortest route back to where he knew the river was to be found. He located a bench looking over an attractive
spot and settled down, getting his notebook out to check the dates of the thefts. Perhaps it was the talk he’d had with Charles Dodgson about mathematic sequences of numbers, but he knew
there was a pattern in this one, if only he could see it. He sat there for a long time, while the sun gradually went down and the shadows of the trees on the other side of the river lengthened
across its rippling surface. At one point he became aware that Matty was sitting patiently beside him, but he didn’t remember noticing that his friend had even arrived.

Eventually he looked up. His mouth was dry and tasted funny, and he had a slight headache, but he thought he had it.

‘There is no pattern,’ he said to Matty – the first words he had spoken for several hours. ‘That’s the pattern.’

‘What does that mean?’ Matty asked.

‘Things have been going missing from the local mortuary – parts of bodies. My new tutor, Charles Dodgson, is a potential suspect, and so is one of the students I’m rooming with
– Paul Chippenham. You remember, we saw him being taken away yesterday by the police for questioning. I’ve talked to the pathologist, and I’ve got a list of the dates when the
body parts went missing. I thought I could find a pattern, so I could predict when the next theft will occur, but I can’t.’

‘So that’s it then? You need to find another line of investigation.’

Sherlock shook his head. ‘No – the lack of a pattern is actually a pattern. The thief, whoever it is, has deliberately avoided a theft on the same day of the month, or when the moon
is in the same phase, or with the same number of days between thefts. They’ve done thefts on the same day of the week – they could hardly avoid it, because there are only seven days of
the week, but they won’t do the same day on consecutive thefts. There are no Mondays together, no Tuesdays together—’

‘I get the idea.’

‘They also vary the weather conditions. There’s only one rainy Monday, only one sunny Monday, only one cloudy Monday. In their attempts to avoid setting any kind of pattern,
they’ve set a different pattern.’

Matty scratched his head. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Put it this way: it’s been twenty-two days since the last theft. The thief has already put a twenty-two day space between thefts, so they won’t conduct a theft tonight.
Tomorrow is a possibility, according to the gaps, but not according to the weather. It’s a Thursday tomorrow and there’s bright sunshine forecast, which rules it out because the very
first theft was on a sunny Thursday. If I can figure out all of the variables, I can go through the calendar and work out which days are left.’

Matty nodded slowly. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is real clever thinkin’.’ He paused. ‘Does thinkin’ actually take energy, the same way that runnin’ or
carryin’ boxes does?’

Sherlock considered. ‘I’m starving now, if that means anything.’

‘Let’s go an’ get some food then. I reckon you’re goin’ to need it.’

They ate, and then went their separate ways.

It took Sherlock most of the next day to work out the cycle. He ended up having to buy a large roll of wallpaper and borrow the dining table at Mrs McCrery’s boarding house – with
her permission, of course. He unrolled the wallpaper so that it covered the table, and then with a ruler and a pen he painstakingly set up a calendar for the next three months, with each day marked
separately, and space marked on each day for listing the weather, the phase of the moon and all the other variables that he thought the thief was using, including whether or not they were public
holidays or market days. He then painstakingly annotated the calendar as far as he could. Weather was the problem – the local newspapers only predicted it up to a few days ahead, which at
least told him that the thief was not planning any further ahead than that anyway. It would have been pointless to arrange a robbery for a sunny Monday with a new moon only to find out that, on the
day, it was snowing and he’d already conducted a robbery on a snowy Monday with a new moon. Sherlock would have to do what he assumed the thief was doing, and plan only a few days ahead,
checking the weather and predicting it as far as he could. What he did do, however, was to cross through the days that could be ruled out because their set of characteristics had already been used.
That at least told him which days the next robbery
wouldn’t
occur on. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the combinations had already been used up, and there weren’t that many days left
when a robbery
could
occur.

The next one was three days away, but it depended totally on the weather.

At various times as he worked Mrs McCrery, or her scullery maid, or one of the boys who stoked fires for her, or one of the other students in the house, would pass by the doorway, glance in and
either frown or smile, but there must have been something about the expression on Sherlock’s face that stopped them from coming in and questioning him. Twice a tray of tea and scones appeared
on a side table, although he had no idea how they had got there.

The next two days passed with agonizing slowness. Sherlock went to one more tutorial session with Charles Dodgson, at which they went through Euclidian geometry, attempting to derive it all from
first principles. Sherlock felt stretched and exhausted by the session, but also exhilarated. Dodgson, he felt, was training his mind the way that a sports coach would train an athlete’s
body.

At the end of the tutorial, Dodgson suddenly said, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot – would you wish to see some photographic images of your brother? I found them just the other day, and thought
you might like sight of them.’

‘That would be – fascinating,’ Sherlock said, meaning it.

Dodgson went across his room to a bureau, from which he took a cardboard box. He placed the box on a table and took the lid off. Sherlock joined him, and saw that inside the box was a pile of
pieces of stiff paper. On the top piece was an image in black and white of Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft, sitting at a table beneath a large, overhanging plant. He was staring pensively off to
one side – probably wondering what his next meal would be, Sherlock thought uncharitably. Judging by the relative thinness of his face, the length of his hair and the way his waistcoat
buttons were not straining against the cotton, the picture might have been five or six years old.

Sherlock smiled, despite himself. This was like a window on to the past. This
was
his brother – not an artist’s interpretation, prettied up to please the subject, but the way
Mycroft had actually been on a particular day at a particular time. Even the fact that it was just black and white didn’t worry Sherlock – Mycroft only ever dressed in black or
pinstripe material, his hair was black and his face was pale, so the image looked exactly like him.

‘That,’ he said softly, ‘is quite amazing.’

‘He is looking at a plate of biscuits,’ Dodgson said. ‘I told him that he had to sit there for fifteen minutes without moving while I took the portrait. In fact the process
only took eight minutes, but I was so enjoying seeing him pining for the biscuits that I just left him there to suffer.’ He pulled the paper image out and placed it to one side. Beneath it
was another image. This one had been taken outside, in a garden. It showed Mycroft standing with a group of other people – a large man with broad shoulders and a bowler hat, a pretty woman in
a frilled dress, a boy who looked to have been about nine years old, and an older man with white hair brushed straight back off his forehead.

‘This is your brother again, with some friends,’ Dodgson said. ‘I forget now who they were.’

‘Mycroft had friends?’ Sherlock said, amazed.

‘Yes,’ Dodgson replied quietly. ‘I was one of them.’

Sherlock left Dodgson’s rooms still amazed by this newfangled process of photography, and fascinated by what effects it might have on society.

He read the local newspaper every day, hoping desperately that there would be no reports of any more robberies at the mortuary. If there were, it meant that his entire theory was wrong. He also
kept his ears open as he was going around the town, but nobody mentioned anything to do with robberies. Lots of discussion of other matters of interest, but nothing about bizarre or macabre
thefts.

On the morning of the third day, Sherlock awoke and glanced immediately out of the window. It was cloudy, which was what he wanted, but it didn’t look like rain, which was also what he
wanted. So far, so good.

He went through the day in an agony of expectation. Eventually, as night was approaching, he met up with Matty just outside the hospital gates. Matty was wearing dark clothes as instructed.
Sherlock himself had dressed in the darkest trousers and jacket he had. He only had white shirts, so he had a dark scarf wound around his neck and tucked inside the jacket, hiding the whiteness. He
even had gloves.

‘Ready?’ Matty asked in a hushed voice.

‘As I’ll ever be. I hope I’m right.’

‘You’re right,’ Matty said. ‘You always are.’ He glanced around. ‘So what’s the plan. If we see somethin’, do we interfere, or do we run off
an’ call the peelers?’

‘Neither of those things,’ Sherlock said firmly. ‘If we see anything, then we just observe from a distance, and follow. I want to know where the thief goes and what he does
with these body parts. If he’s arrested here, then he might clam up and I’ll never know.’

‘So this is basically a huge exercise to satisfy your curiosity then.’

Sherlock considered for a moment. ‘I suppose it is,’ he admitted. ‘Do you think I ought to call the police?’

Matty shrugged. ‘I dunno. I’m just followin’ you.’

The gates to the hospital were locked, and there were only a few scattered gas lamps shining from inside the big building. Sherlock and Matty headed around the outside wall, which was set apart
from the trees and bushes surrounding the estate by a ten-foot gap. The wall was ten feet high – and if that wasn’t difficult enough to climb under normal circumstances, the top was set
with broken glass bottles to deter intruders. Sherlock assumed that the hospital had been someone’s home until it was converted, which would explain the security measures. People didn’t
usually break into hospitals: they were usually more keen to get out.

Every now and then they passed a particularly old and large tree whose branches overhung the wall. Matty looked at Sherlock each time, but Sherlock shook his head. He wanted to get closer to
where the mortuary was located in the grounds, and he was also looking for something special.

Up ahead, Matty seemed to be listening for something. Sherlock listened as well, but apart from the sound of night birds waking up, and the occasional screaming of a fox, there was nothing.

‘What are you listening for?’ he asked eventually.

‘Guard dogs,’ Matty said over his shoulder. ‘Can’t hear any barkin’, but I thought I might hear ’em breathin’ as they paced us along the inside of the
wall.’

‘There aren’t any guard dogs.’

‘You sure?’

‘It’s a hospital, not a bank. Why would there be guard dogs? And besides, there’s always the possibility that someone confused on painkilling drugs might get out of bed late
one night and go wandering around outside. The last thing the hospital directors would want was for a patient to get ripped to pieces by a guard dog.’

‘All right then,’ Matty said dubiously, but he still appeared to be listening as they walked.

In the end, Sherlock found the thing he was looking for just as the sun was dipping beneath the horizon. Not too far away from where he estimated the mortuary was, there was a place where the
roots of an unusually large tree had undermined the wall, buckling the bricks upward. Some of the bricks had fallen out, leaving a hole, and the roots themselves had spaces between them, washed out
by rain perhaps, which would allow a person to crawl through. Based on the fact that there were clear marks of spadework, Sherlock assumed that the thief had come through this way as well.

He glanced around nervously. He had planned their expedition so that they would get to the mortuary before the thief, but that was based on an assumption that the thief would operate late at
night. If he was going to conduct this theft at sunset, then he might already be there. That meant he might be watching Sherlock and Matty at that very moment.

Sherlock shivered.

‘Cold?’ Matty asked.

‘No.’

‘Cold feet?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Let’s go then.’

Matty dropped to his knees and then squirmed his way through the gap. His booted feet waved for a moment in the dark space, and then he was gone. Sherlock counted to ten, looked around again,
and followed.

The short tunnel under the wall was damp and smelt of mould, earth and some animal that Sherlock assumed was either a fox or a badger. The thought triggered another one in his mind – what
if Matty, crawling ahead of him, suddenly came across a badger coming the other way? Badgers were notoriously fierce, with sharp teeth and even sharper claws. Matty wouldn’t stand a
chance!

Sherlock speeded up, knowing that it wouldn’t affect Matty’s speed but unable to help himself.

In the end he felt a clean breeze on his face moments before he emerged from the earth inside the hospital grounds. Matty was standing a few feet away, brushing himself off. ‘That was
fun,’ he said, smiling. ‘We should do it again sometime.’

Sherlock decided not to mention badgers. Best not to worry his friend too much.

Together they sprinted across the hospital grounds, going from bush to bush, tree to tree, until the red-brick mortuary was ahead of them. Sherlock caught Matty’s shoulder, holding him
back.