Stone Cold (16 page)

Sherlock glanced at Matty. ‘Are you coming in?’

‘You want me to, or you want me to stay out here an’ stand guard?’

‘I think there’s a bigger risk of someone coming down the corridor and into the room than coming round the corner of the house and seeing the window open.’

‘Fair enough.’

Sherlock climbed over the windowsill and into the room. He looked around at the glass cabinets and gasped.

They were full of bits of bodies.

Sherlock heard a thump on the carpet beside him as Matty entered the room. A few seconds later the boy gasped, and said, ‘Oh my God!’ What is this place?’

Sherlock didn’t know. He was transfixed by the sight of arms, hands, legs, feet, eyes and ears, all carefully placed on purple velvet. All the hands were together in one case, all the ears
in another . . . everything was clustered in groups of similar objects. Seeing them together, and divorced from their bodies, Sherlock was amazed at how different they were from one another. In the
case of hands alone there were big hands, small hands, hairy hands with torn nails, delicate hands . . . all possible variations – and more than could have come from the Oxford mortuary,
Sherlock realized. These thefts were much wider than he had thought.

The hands had been sliced neatly at the wrist, he noticed. There was no blood, no tearing or bruising of the flesh. They all looked as if they should still be attached to their owner.

There were labels beside each hand, he noticed. They were written in a neat copperplate script, and they appeared to relate to the occupation of the person whose hand it was. ‘Manual
labourer’, one said. Another said: ‘Typist’.

In Sherlock’s mind, a theory began to form.

Matty was transfixed by a case of eyeballs. Sherlock moved across to join him. The eyes weren’t as different from one another as the hands were, but each one was a different colour, and
the labels this time read: ‘Short-Sighted’, ‘Long-Sighted’ and ‘Blind’.

‘They’re lookin’ at me,’ Matty whispered hoarsely.

‘It’s your imagination.’

Matty took a step to one side. ‘Nah, they’re definitely lookin’ at me. They’re followin’ me around the room.’

‘It’s an optical illusion. The same thing happens with well-painted portraits – they seem to be looking at you all the time.’

‘Maybe they are as well.’

Actually, Sherlock had to admit that in the flickering gaslight it did look as if the eyes were shifting around slightly on their velvet.

‘How come they’re not, like, decayin’?’ Matty asked. ‘What’s keepin’ them fresh?’

‘I was wondering that.’

‘Are they, like, preserved in alcohol or somethin’?’

‘They’re not in bottles, floating in liquid.’

‘Mummified then, like them blokes in Egypt?’

‘Mummies are shrivelled and brown because of the preservation process. They don’t look this fresh.’

‘Well, what then? Magic?’

Sherlock indicated the hands in their case. ‘Take a look at them. Do you notice anything?’

Matty bent over, not without a twitch of his shoulders. ‘They look too good to be true. An’ there should be some bruisin’ or tearin’ where they were cut away from the
arm, but there’s nothin’.’

‘They’re not real,’ Sherlock announced firmly. ‘Look at the skin – it’s slightly shiny. These are wax models – not real hands at all.’ He turned
and indicated the eyes. ‘If these were real they’d look more like poached eggs, all deflated and discoloured, but they’re perfect. They’re made out of wax as well, I
think.’

Matty stared at Sherlock. ‘So someone steals these things from the mortuary, sends ’em to London, where someone else sends ’em back, an’ by the time they get back here
they’ve turned from flesh to wax? That don’t make any sense!’

‘It does if the box that gets sent back isn’t the one from the latest theft, it’s the one from the theft before that.’ Sherlock thought for a minute.
‘Mycroft’s agent didn’t see what happened to the box while it was inside the house, and he can’t be sure the one he sent was the same one as arrived. Somewhere in that time,
the stolen toe was taken out and something else was put in the box or the box was swapped/exchanged for a similar one.’ He looked around, trying to work out where the burly figure had been
standing when he and Matty had been looking through the window. Yes, it was nearer the corner of the room. He crossed over and quickly scanned the cabinet. Eight fingers were lined up inside, on
velvet. The ends appeared to have been neatly sliced through, showing bone and tissue and fat, but close up Sherlock could see that it was all too perfect. The flesh was the scarlet colour of fresh
blood, not the rust of dried blood, and the shine of the wax made it look wet, not dried. One of the fake fingers was slightly twisted, as if it had been only recently put into the case, and in a
hurry. ‘This one – this is what we saw the man putting in just now. So – a real toe was stolen and a reproduction finger was returned. I guess that next time there’s a
theft, whatever is stolen will be sent to London and a wax toe will be returned. Someone in London is making wax reproductions of these stolen body parts.’

‘What are they doing with the originals?’ Matty wanted to know.

‘Throwing them out,’ Sherlock ventured. ‘Or maybe burning them – if they’ve got any Christian feeling in them.’

Matty looked around again, but he was relaxing now that he knew the body parts weren’t real. ‘So this is – what? – some kind of exhibit? Like in a museum?’

‘It must be. But why? What’s it all for?’

Matty moved across to the door. ‘Maybe there’s other rooms with other stuff in that might tell us.’ Before Sherlock could stop him he had eased the door open a crack and was
looking out into the corridor. Quickly he pulled his head back again and shut the door.

‘What happened?’ Sherlock asked.

‘It was a cat,’ Matty said. ‘It startled me.’

He opened the door again and glanced outside. ‘Okay, it’s gone now,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what’s next door.’ Quickly he slipped outside. With a muffled
curse, Sherlock followed.

The corridor had a door at one end and disappeared around a corner at the other. A cat sat at the far end, licking itself. There were three more doors leading off the corridor’s length.
Matty moved along to the next door and put his ear up against it. Sherlock joined him as quietly as he could. They both listened carefully, but could hear nothing from inside. Eventually Sherlock
took hold of the doorknob and cautiously turned it. There was no reaction from inside the room. He pushed the door open.

A wave of heat wafted out into the corridor, making Sherlock’s eyes water. Matty winced. ‘Someone certainly don’t like the cold,’ he murmured.

They both entered the room and closed the door behind them. This room was a lot darker than the previous one, lit not by gas lamps but by a coal fire that glowed balefully in the chimney place.
There was a smell of something sharp, like vinegar.

Instead of glass cabinets, the room was lined with glass-fronted cases. They were, Sherlock thought, like the kinds of things you might keep fish in, but only a few of them were filled with
water. The others had sand, or earth, or twigs from trees.

For a moment Sherlock’s memory flashed back to the Passmore Edwards Museum in London, where he had once been attacked by a falcon. That had been filled with glass cases as well, and each
case had been made to look like a particular environment – beach, or forest, or field. The inhabitants of those cases had been stuffed animals, made to look as lifelike as possible. Sherlock
had a terrible feeling, based on the intense heat from the fire, that whatever was in these cases was not stuffed.

He moved closer to one of them, feeling a strange mixture of curiosity and repulsion.

This case was half-filled with gravel and pebbles. Sherlock couldn’t see anything else inside. He bent closer, nose almost pressed against the glass.

One of the pebbles suddenly lashed out towards him.

Sherlock jerked backwards. What he had taken to be a large stone was actually some kind of spider. It had unfolded its legs and was poised, angled with its rear end raised. Its body extended at
the back into a long tail which it was waving above its lowered head. A stinger at the end of the tail kept hitting the glass with a clicking noise, leaving viscous smears behind. A pair of sharp
claws waved from the front of the spider, opening and closing with vicious intent. Sherlock had never seen anything like it before.

He moved away, towards the next case, and the spider paralleled his progress until it reached the glass at the far end of its tiny world.

The next case was filled with twigs, branches and leaves. Wary this time, Sherlock held back. He stared through the glass, trying to work out what kind of creature was inside. It took a few
minutes, but he eventually realized that one of the twigs wasn’t a twig at all – it was some kind of insect with a thin body and thinner legs, coloured to almost match the vegetation
that it was hiding among. Its head was larger, its eyes larger still, but they were green, like a leaf.

Sherlock moved to the next case, feeling slightly sick.

This one was filled with water and had sand at the bottom. In the middle of it floated something that looked like a jelly with trailing tendrils that wafted gently in the currents. A handful of
small striped fish were swimming in the tank as well, and Sherlock noticed that they kept well away from the jelly-like thing – all except for one of them, which was investigating the
boundary between the glass and the sand when a tendril happened to brush across it. The fish jerked abruptly, then turned belly-up and began to float towards the surface of the water.

Poison, Sherlock thought. The jelly-like creature had poison in its tendrils. The spider had left trails of something on the glass that might well have been poison. Sherlock had a feeling that
if he had reached inside the case with the twig-like insect and tried to touch it, then he would have discovered it to be poisonous as well.

‘Look at this,’ Matty breathed. Sherlock moved to join him.

The glass case that Matty was staring into with fascination was filled with bright green leaves. On some of the leaves, frogs were sitting, but these were different from the kinds of frogs that
Sherlock was used to seeing in ponds. These were bright red, and no bigger than his thumb.

‘What
is
this place? Some kind of
zoo
?’ Matty asked in awed tones. ‘I still get nightmares about them two big reptile things that attacked us in America! What are
we going to find in the next room? A lion? A couple of crocodiles?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Sherlock gazed around, trying to take it all in. ‘What’s the first thing that occurs to you when you look around?’

‘The first thing that occurs to me is – euch! The second thing is that I want to get out, quickly, an’ have a long bath.’

‘There’s a reason for that,’ Sherlock pointed out.

‘Yeah – the reason is that these things are all horrible an’ they make my skin crawl!’

‘But
why
are they horrible?’ Sherlock asked. ‘
Why
do they make your skin crawl? Look around – the fact is that they’re all poisonous.’ He
pointed at the spider-thing, which had stopped stabbing at the glass with its tail and was now watching them with tiny, glittering black eyes. ‘I think that’s called a scorpion.
It’s got poison in its sting. They have them in Africa, and America, and other places.’ He moved his finger to indicate the frogs. ‘The bright colour of those amphibians is a
warning to birds and other animals not to eat them, because they have poison in their skin. I remember reading somewhere that South American tribes use that poison on their arrows.’ He moved
in front of one of the water-filled tanks. Floating inside was a small fish. Sherlock rapped on the glass with a knuckle. Within a few seconds the fish had swollen to several times its previous
size, and spines had emerged from its skin. ‘This is a puffer fish. It swells up to deter predators, and its spines contain poison. I was told about it when I was in Japan.’

‘I thought you were in China,’ Matty asked.

Sherlock shrugged. ‘On the way back we stopped in Japan for a few weeks.’

‘You never mentioned that before.’

‘There’s a reason,’ Sherlock said darkly. ‘But anyway – this fish is a delicacy in Japan, but the chefs have to be careful to remove the poison sacs first,
otherwise the diners might die.’

Matty indicated the tank with the jelly-like mass floating in it. ‘That’s a jellyfish, right? You get them at the seaside.’

‘Not like that. If I’ve identified it correctly, that’s a box jellyfish. It’s got poison in its tendrils that’s hundreds of times more toxic than snake
venom.’ He looked around again, taking in every tank. ‘Yes, I think
everything
here is poisonous. What with that and the wax body parts, it all makes sense!’

‘It does?’ Matty didn’t seem so sure.

‘If you ask yourself, why would anybody have this kind of collection? What would they
use
it for?’

‘I keep asking myself that.’ Matty looked around dubiously. ‘I can’t think of an answer.’

Sherlock had just opened his mouth, ready to tell his friend what he had worked out, when the side door leading to the next room abruptly opened. A man stood in the doorway – not the big,
scarred man that Sherlock had seen before, but a smaller man wearing a black suit and striped waistcoat. His head was shaved, and his tiny eyes were almost hidden in the flesh of his face. His gaze
snapped instantly from Sherlock to Matty and back, and then he roared, ‘Boss – we got burglars!’

‘Quick,’ Sherlock yelled to Matty, ‘get to the—’

He was interrupted when the man rushed at him, fist raised.

Sherlock backed away, raising his own clenched fists in defence. The man threw a tight punch at Sherlock’s head. Sherlock ducked to the right and brought his own fist up and crashing into
the man’s chin. It was like hitting brickwork. The man took a step back, scowling, while Sherlock nursed his aching knuckles.

The man stepped forward again. Blood dribbled from a split lip. He jabbed with his right fist again, but it was a feint. Sherlock didn’t see his left hand swinging in from the side and it
caught him on the ear. A spike of scarlet pain flashed through his head, and he fell sideways.