Stone Cold (25 page)

The boy laughed. ‘You’re trying to drive a wedge between us,’ he said. ‘It won’t work. They know I’m going to give them what they want.’

‘They want money,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘It’s not that hard to work out.’

Jude shook his head. ‘That’s not it. Everyone wants something different – but they almost always think that money will get it for them.’ He indicated one of the men, who
was trying to get an apple tree out of the ground. ‘Take Sutton there. He
says
he wants money, but what he actually wants is good health, and an end to the terrible pain he gets from
his rotten teeth. I know that. I can talk to him about it, and take him seriously.’ He pointed to another man, this one patrolling the edge of the orchard. ‘Dillman, over there, also
says he wants money, but he really wants a family who love him – a wife and three kids. I understand that, and he knows that I understand. That’s why they all follow me – I know
their deepest desires.’

‘How can you do that?’ Sherlock asked, intrigued.

‘I can see what people want. I can tell from the way they look off to one side when they speak, or the way they play with their fingers, even the specific words they use. It’s a
talent I’ve always had.’

‘What do I want then?’ Matty asked pugnaciously.

Jude glanced at him. ‘You want a good kicking,’ he snapped.

Matty scowled at him. ‘You know what – I don’t like you.’

‘Imagine the pain that gives me,’ Jude said, looking away. ‘Regardless – your own particular desires and wishes are irrelevant. As of now, what happens to you is what
I
want.’

‘You were a student at the University,’ Sherlock guessed. ‘Allowed in early because of your academic brilliance.’

‘Well deduced. I was a scholarship pupil – I got in on my merits, not because my parents paid. They weren’t rich enough, or of the right social circle.’

‘And you were thrown out.’

Jude nodded. ‘Things went missing. Money was stolen. I was younger then, and I was inexperienced. I hadn’t thought through the implications of what I was doing. I acted impulsively,
rather than thinking things through. So – they got rid of me. The University authorities didn’t have enough evidence to go to the police with, but that didn’t stop them. I stayed
in the area, and I started specializing in high-end robberies – artworks, statues, that kind of thing. There are a lot of rich people with nice rare stuff around Oxford, and there are a lot
of even richer people further away from Oxford who don’t have this nice rare stuff but want it. I decided to act as a middle-man, taking from the rich and giving – well, selling –
to the even richer. It’s funded a very comfortable lifestyle for me, and it has bought the loyalty of these excellent fellows, each of whom is earning the kind of money that an Oxford
lecturer might expect, as well as satisfying their own deepest desires.’

Sherlock remembered something that Ferny Weston had told him, about a gang of art thieves that couldn’t be caught. ‘You kept evading the police,’ he said. ‘You must have
had inside information – not only about the big houses and their art collections, but also about the progress of the police investigation.’

The boy smiled. ‘Inside information is my speciality. It’s what gives me my edge.’

‘Who was it? Who gave you the information about the big houses and the police?’

‘Now that,’ Jude said, laughing, ‘is a step too far. I don’t mind gloating about how clever
I
am, but I’m not going to risk telling you how clever other
people are, especially if they work for me.’

‘Or you work for them.’ Sherlock caught the telltale twitch of Jude’s lip. ‘Yes, you’re not the top dog, are you? You’re not quite as clever as you want us to
think.’

Jude turned to the man with the gun. ‘I’ve had my fun,’ he said curtly. ‘Throw them into a hole, put a tree on top of them, and leave them to starve or
suffocate.’

The man looked at his gun. ‘Why not just shoot them?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘I don’t like them,’ the boy said, staring at Sherlock. ‘This one’s too clever by half. I want them to suffer, and as they lie there, dying, I want them to remember
who it was that bested them.’

He stalked off. Matty looked up at Sherlock and said: ‘’E’s not as bright as ’e thinks ’e is, is ’e?’

‘Like a lot of people,’ Sherlock replied, ‘he’s clever in one direction, but not in others.’

‘Enough talking.’ The man with the gun stepped forward, pointing the gun at Sherlock. ‘Get in the hole.’

‘Or what?’ Sherlock challenged. ‘You’re going to shoot me? Your boss specifically told you not to.’

The man didn’t say anything in reply. He just stepped forward and lashed out at Sherlock with his gun. The barrel caught Sherlock on his forehead. Through the haze of pain, Sherlock felt
himself being pushed by someone’s foot closer and closer to the edge of the nearest hole. He tried desperately to dig his fingers into the soil to stop himself moving, but it was no good. If
he did manage to get a grip, the person moving him just kicked him in the stomach until he let go.

‘There ain’t room for both of them in the same hole!’ someone called.

The man pushing Sherlock responded: ‘It’s not like they’re going to be there forever. The air’ll run out before they get too uncomfortable! Let them squash up – the
other one’s a tiddler anyway!’

‘No, I mean with two of them in the same hole we won’t be able to get the tree back in properly. It’ll stick up, and someone’ll notice.’

A hesitation, then: ‘All right – put the small one in that hole over there. I’ve just about got this one in here.’

Sherlock glanced around desperately, tying to see where Matty was. He got one fragmentary glimpse of the boy over to his right, fighting with his captors, and then Sherlock felt his shoulders
tip over the edge of the hole and into empty space. He tried to roll back, but a firm boot between his shoulderblades dissuaded him. The boot pushed hard, and he was falling, dropping through the
air with a circle of sky getting ever-smaller above him. His shoulders and back smashed into the soil lip around the top of the crate that was buried inside the hole, while his legs fell inside. A
spike of raw agony flared through him. He thought he might have broken his back. The weight of his legs falling into the crate pulled the rest of him over the edge. He tried to get his legs working
beneath him so that he could push himself up and climb back out – although what he intended to do then wasn’t exactly obvious. One step at a time. He could feel his legs, thank heavens,
but they refused to obey his orders, and just gave way like rubber when he tried to put any weight on them.

He glanced up frantically, trying to work out if he’d been left there alone while they dealt with Matty or whether they were all clustered around the edge of the hole, looking at him and
laughing, but all he could see was the rapidly descending lid of the crate as it was thrown in after him. He ducked so that he was completely inside the crate, and the lid banged down on top. It
was partially rotated so that it was caught by the corners but there were gaps all around, through which light still trickled in.

Until they put the barrel containing the apple tree back in the hole.

Light vanished, and soil fell inside the crate from the roots of the tree as it slammed down into the hole, sealing Sherlock in.

All he could smell was damp earth. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing. He tried again to stand up, and found that his legs were working better now. The paralysis had only been
temporary, which meant that his back was all right. That was scant comfort, because the rest of him wasn’t.

Something alive dropped in through one of the gaps from the tree’s roots. He felt it hit his shoulder and run across his neck, hard little legs catching against his skin as it moved. It
was a beetle, he thought. Harmless. More frightened of him than he was of it.

He turned his attention back to standing up. His shoulders and the back of his head hit the lid of the crate – and stopped. There was no movement there at all, no leverage. The weight of
the entire apple tree above him effectively sealed the crate shut.

He was alone, and he was trapped. Those thoughts kept rotating around in his head. There was no way out. Matty was trapped as well, and Maberley was drugged. Nobody else knew where they were,
and the criminals weren’t going to have a last-minute fit of guilt and let them out. This was it. This was the end.

No, this
wasn’t
it. The thought surfaced in the confusion of his mind like something vast and certain breaking the surface of a choppy sea. This was
not
it. He would get out.
Logic would get him out.

He rested on his haunches as he tried to work through everything he had heard about Royalist hiding places, and everything he had thought about when Ferny Weston had been telling the story. He
tried to imagine what the Royalists or the Maberley family would have thought as they were digging the holes and constructing the hiding places. There were so many holes – twenty, thirty,
maybe more. Even if only half of them were occupied, then there would be a lot of people trapped underground waiting for the searchers to go away, and that might take hours. Perhaps even days. Some
of the people hiding might be claustrophobic and would panic. Some would have problems breathing. Others would get hungry. It would make sense to build some kind of escape route for them, perhaps a
set of tunnels
underneath
the crates, so that if there was an emergency then the hiders could get out, even if it was difficult and took time. Yes, that made perfect sense.

Sherlock started feeling around the edges of the crate, looking for signs of hinges or a catch of some kind. In the back of his mind was the unwelcome thought that he was inventing something
that might not – in fact, probably
didn’t
– exist, but he refused to let that thought get more than a small amount of purchase. He had to stay calm, he had to stay sane and
he had to get out. Logic told him that the builders would have put in an escape route, and therefore he would find it. Job done.

Except that he couldn’t feel any hinges or any catch. He had tried the panel in front of him, so he shuffled around to his right and repeated the procedure. Still nothing. He shuffled
again, so that he was facing backwards. Still nothing. One more rotation – he
had
to find the hinges on this side. They
had
to be there.

But they weren’t.

He felt his breath rasping in his throat. His fingers were raw with the effort of scrabbling at the wood of the crate. He could hear a distant moaning sound, and for a second he thought someone
was taking the apple tree away and calling to him, but then he realized that the sound was coming from his own throat. Despite his logic, a part of him was succumbing to panic and despair.

He had tried all four sides, and he knew that the lid above him wouldn’t move.

That still left one direction.

Sherlock’s fingers felt around the bottom of the crate. It was awkward, and he had to keep moving his feet and rotating his body slightly, but he knew that this was his last chance and he
had to do it properly.

His fingertips brushed against something metallic, and then moved on. He scrambled back, trying to find it again. Yes, there it was! He tried to work out in the absolute blackness what it was.
Rectangular, yes, and metallic. It could be a hinge. If it was, then there would be another one, round about . . . there! Yes, there it was. He felt his heart beginning to calm down now, and before
continuing he took several calming breaths. All right, if there was a hinge
there
and a hinge
there
, then there would be a catch on the other side, surely. He flattened his right hand
and brushed it along the base of the crate. Something squirmed beneath his hand – a worm maybe? He swallowed his sudden nausea and kept going.

Yes! There was a metal fixture in the junction between the bottom and the side of the crate. It seemed to Sherlock that the entire bottom of the crate was hinged so that it would open downward,
into another space.

Except that he couldn’t get the fixture to move. It was holding the bottom of the crate shut, but his weight on the wood was jamming it, preventing it from moving. He had a sudden
frustrated flash of imagining the initial designers of the hiding places, two hundred or more years ago, looking at their handiwork and congratulating themselves on its impeccable design without
actually having tried it to see if it worked in practice.

He had to make it work. He had two hinges, a catch and a base that worked like a trapdoor – that was significantly better than he’d had five minutes before.

Sherlock braced his legs against the sides of the crate, taking his weight off the base, and tried again to move the catch with his fingers. This time there was movement, and he put all of his
energy into sliding that bolt sideways. The muscles of his legs felt like they were bathed in acid, and splinters were digging into him all over, but he was going to move that bolt. Despite two
centuries of neglect, despite rust and rot and whatever else nature might have thrown at it, that bolt was between him and freedom, and it was going to move!

The bolt slid calmly sideways as if that had been its plan all along. The bottom of the crate dropped away and Sherlock fell into a narrow and damp space.

Feeling around, he appeared to be at a crossroads. Tunnels led off ahead of him, to either side and behind him. The sides of the tunnels were made of earth, with roots and other organic debris
growing into them. Every foot or so, wooden planks stopped the tunnels collapsing.

Which way to go? One option was to head for the nearest edge of the orchard, which was likely to have a way to the surface, but that would leave Matty trapped and panicking. No, he had to go and
get his friend first.

Which direction? Matty had been off to Sherlock’s right when Sherlock had been thrown into the hole, but Sherlock had made a three-quarters turn inside the crate when he was trying to find
a way out. That meant . . . that meant Matty was behind him.