Young Sherlock Holmes: Knife Edge (15 page)

No, he told himself, this is stupid. Just be yourself.

When he got to the wreckage he stopped thinking about Virginia and forced himself to consider the pile of wood instead. He knelt down and started sorting through it, uncertain at first what
exactly it was that he was looking for. The wood had been flung in random directions during the fruitless search
for Albano, and after a few minutes Sherlock found that he was unconsciously sorting
it into more ordered piles, trying as best he could to replicate the overall shape of the carriage. Left-hand door over
here
, right-hand rear wheel over
there
, driver’s
platform in front, and luggage rack at the back. Those bits of wood that he couldn’t identify he placed to one side until he could figure
out where they went.

He pulled out a long rod that was almost certainly an axle. There was no way of knowing whether it was the front or the rear axle, of course. The second axle was buried further under the
wreckage, but when he finally managed to excavate it he discovered that it was in several pieces. It must have been broken in the crash. He juggled the lengths for a few seconds, trying
to work out
how they would fit together. The bits where the wheels would have gone were obvious – they were worn and rubbed smooth by the constant rotation – and that gave him a head start on
arranging the other pieces, but as he did so he realized something strange.

The broken ends weren’t broken at all – they looked as though they had been cut.

He stared at the axle for a few moments,
thoughts whirling around his head. The carriage had been deliberately sabotaged. The axle had been sawn through so that it would snap if put under
pressure. Albano had probably given the driver a particular manoeuvre to carry out that would do the trick at exactly the right time.

Sherlock stood up, and sighed. Crowe might think it easy to work out, but Sherlock still didn’t know
how
Albano
had arranged his own disappearance from the carriage. He suspected,
however, that it was also a form of magic trick.

Sherlock headed upstairs to check on his brother, but Mycroft was asleep and Sherlock didn’t want to wake him. He looked pale and weak, lying there in bed with a bandage
around his head. Quintillan had arranged to have a footman – female, of course, given the role-reversal in the Quintillan household – standing outside Mycroft’s room at all times,
making sure that nobody
tried to attack him again. Given Sherlock’s suspicions about the servants, he wasn’t sure whether that was a good idea or not, but apart from Sherlock or Amyus
Crowe standing guard themselves in shifts, night and day, he couldn’t think of an alternative. Besides, if Mycroft
was
attacked again, while a servant was supposedly guarding him,
then suspicion would automatically fall on the castle
staff and therefore Quintillan himself. Presumably Sir Shadrach wanted to avoid that happening if at all possible, which meant that Mycroft was
probably safe. At least, that’s what Sherlock hoped.

‘Has anybody been in to see him, apart from me?’ Sherlock asked the woman standing stiffly to attention outside the bedroom door.

‘The doctor, sir,’ she said, staring somewhere up above Sherlock’s
head. ‘And there was a man – a large man in a white suit. He spoke with an accent.’ Given
her own thick Irish accent, Sherlock found that momentarily amusing.

A big man in a white suit? Almost certainly Amyus Crowe. He had said earlier that he was going to pop in and see Mycroft.

‘Nobody else?’

‘No, sir.’

Sherlock turned to leave, but the woman cleared her throat as if she had
something else to say. He turned back and raised an eyebrow inquiringly.

‘Forgive me, sir, but is it true?’ she asked.

‘Is what true?’

She glanced left and right, checking whether anybody else was within earshot. ‘About the gentleman inside being attacked.’

‘Yes, he
was
attacked.’

‘By the Dark Beast?’ Her gaze momentarily flickered down to meet his. ‘The same one that killed
poor Máire, God rest her. That’s what they’re saying down in
the servants’ area.’

Sherlock couldn’t help laughing. ‘No, he wasn’t attacked by the Dark Beast, and your friend died of a seizure, or a heart attack. That’s all there is to it.’

‘But it’s true that nobody knows who attacked the gentleman?’

‘Yes.’

‘So it
might
have been the Dark Beast.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘But the
Beast has been
seen
. Three of the servants have spotted it, moving around outside the castle.
Máire
saw it, and now she’s dead, God love
her!’

‘Tricks of the light, I think,’ Sherlock said. ‘Maybe some kind of big animal, moving in the mist. That’s all it is.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course.’ There was something in her tone of voice that suggested she didn’t believe him. As Sherlock walked away,
he remembered the shadowy figure that he had
seen in the castle ballroom, moving back behind the curtain. There certainly seemed to be
something
moving around in the shadows, and if it was inside the castle now, then it was unlikely
to be an animal. But it couldn’t be a supernatural beast. That would be against all logic and sense.

It was late afternoon now. Lunch was a distant memory,
and dinner was still a while away. Sherlock wandered back to his room to wash and to change out of clothes that were muddy and crumpled
after his adventures outside. He found an envelope on his pillow. It contained a handwritten note from Sir Shadrach Quintillan stating that dinner would be at eight, and that in the absence of
Ambrose Albano the séance planned for that evening would have to be
postponed. Based on his discussion with Amyus Crowe, Sherlock had his suspicions that Mr Albano would make a surprise
reappearance at dinner so that the séance could go ahead with added excitement and interest, but only time would tell about that.

He wandered downstairs again, feeling at a loss about what to do next. He had examined Albano’s room, and the wreckage of the crashed coach, so
there was nothing more to do there. He
supposed he could sit down somewhere quiet and try to think through how Ambrose Albano had managed his own disappearance, or alternatively he could try to work out how Mycroft had been attacked in
the library.

He decided to take the latter course. That, at least, would require some kind of action – looking for secret entrances and evidence that someone
else had been in the library. He wanted to
be doing something active, not just sit around thinking. That was Mycroft’s forte, not his.

The problem was that he had already searched the library with a view to finding secret passages. Admittedly, he’d done that before Mycroft had been attacked, but he hadn’t found
anything. What was the point of searching again?

He wondered whether it
was worth him pacing out the length and width of the library inside and then pacing out the same space outside, looking for discrepancies, but that would take a lot of
time and be prone to small errors. People would also wonder what he was doing. The thought of trying to trace any secret passages from outside gave rise to a realization, however – a secret
passage had to have two ends. One end
would be in the library, obviously, but the other end would have to be somewhere else in the castle. Maybe, if he looked in all the likely places, he could
trace where the other end came out.

Enthused by the idea, he spent the next half-hour walking through the corridors and the rooms around the library, looking for something that might conceal a secret entrance – a curtain or
wall hanging,
perhaps, a wardrobe or a tall bureau. He didn’t find anything. He ended up back in front of the library door again, hands on hips, frustrated.

Maybe it wasn’t a secret passage. Maybe it was a secret stairway, or a secret ladder. That would require much less space behind the walls.

Upstairs or down? Sherlock considered for a moment, and decided to see what was underneath the library. He
had already spent enough time wandering the corridors of the castle without meeting
anyone, and he knew his luck couldn’t last forever. Heading down into the cellars would hopefully keep him away from people. Besides, he hadn’t seen the lower floors yet, and he was
curious.

He stood in the hall, trying to work out where a stairway leading down to the cellars might be. As he stood there,
he heard a sound behind him, like leather scuffing against stone. He turned
quickly.

Count Shuvalov’s manservant – the burly Russian with the close-cropped hair – was standing in the shadows. He was staring at Sherlock with no expression on his face. When he
saw that he had been spotted he nodded, once, and walked away.

Sherlock watched him go, feeling uneasy. What did the man want?

He shook his head to try to banish the concern. He had other things to think about. He already knew that the main staircase didn’t go below the ground floor, but he had previously noticed
an insignificant door near the bottom. Pushing it open, he discovered a narrow flight of stone steps leading down.

At the bottom Sherlock found a passage that led left and right. A lamp hung from a hook
on the wall, providing a meagre and flickering yellow light, but the two branches of the corridor faded
into darkness after twenty feet or so. The ceiling was low, nearly touching his hair, and the walls were bare stone. He tried to work out where the library was in relation to where he was now, and
decided that it had to be off to the right. He unhooked the lantern and carried it with him
as he headed in that direction, passing a series of arched doorways, some with wooden doors sealing them
and some without. They were obviously storerooms.

Something on the ground, in the doorway of one of the rooms, attracted his attention. He stopped to look.

It was a pair of shoes.

He bent down to examine them. They were women’s shoes, black, and the leather was cracked with age.
They had been well looked after, but they were obviously long past the time when they
should have been replaced. Obviously their owner was poor, and couldn’t afford new shoes, but appearances were important to her, which is why she had taken care of them.

He remembered the dead servant. She had been barefoot. Were these her shoes? If so, did that mean she had died here, down in the cellars,
and that her body had been moved up and left in the
castle grounds? Her shoes might have fallen off as she was dragged away, he supposed, but why would anyone want to hide the place where she had suffered a heart attack but not hide the body? It
didn’t make sense.

Leaving the shoes where they were, he straightened up and moved off. This castle was just full of mysteries.

A wall suddenly
appeared out of the shadows in front, where the corridor made an abrupt right-hand turn. He kept going, aware that he was moving further and further away from the location of the
library but interested to see where the corridor actually led. It turned left, and then right again as he walked, with no obvious reason why.

Within a few minutes, the stone of the walls had been replaced with brickwork,
old and crumbling. The flat ceiling over his head had given way to arches. Patches of green moss had taken hold in
places, and were hanging on for grim life.

A dark ring around the walls appeared within the bubble of lamplight. As Sherlock got closer he saw that moss had spread all the way around the walls and across the ground. He hesitated before
stepping on to it. It was only when he
counted his footsteps and realized that he was now beneath the castle moat, and that the moss was almost certainly growing on the moisture that had seeped
through the bricks, that he felt safe enough to continue.

He kept walking, knowing by now that he was actually outside the boundaries of the castle. The corridor – more properly a tunnel now, he supposed – was leading him out into the
grounds and into . . . where? Into the Irish countryside, he assumed. It was difficult to keep track, what with the way the corridor had twisted several times, but he thought he was heading
parallel to the cliffs.

Other tunnels began to sprout off from the one Sherlock was in. They led into darkness, and Sherlock didn’t feel that he particularly wanted to explore them – not at the moment,
anyway. Following a single tunnel in a straight line, he was unlikely to get lost. If he started turning off on a whim, then he was likely to completely lose his bearings. From some of the tunnels
– usually the ones that led off to the left, towards where he estimated the cliffs to be – he could feel a faint hint of cold air on his skin. He also thought he could detect a slight
downward
slope to those tunnels, but it was difficult to be sure. Did they lead to caves down on the beach? Quite probably.

Next time he came down, he promised himself, he would take some paper and a pen, and make a map as he went along.

It was increasingly apparent to him that this castle had some kind of historic connection to smuggling contraband goods. The smugglers had probably landed their
goods by boat on the beach and
then stored them in the caves. Other people – locals – had then used the tunnels to get to the goods and transfer them inland, possibly keeping them in the dungeons of the castle if
there was any sign that the police were going to search for them. Would the castle’s owners have been involved, or was it more likely that the castle servants had, over many generations,
dug
the tunnels and were running their illegal business from beneath the castle without the owners actually knowing? There was no way of telling.

Sherlock kept walking, heading away from the castle.

The tunnel ended without warning. Suddenly, in the lamplight, Sherlock saw a wall ahead. Why would someone put a wall there? It didn’t make sense, he thought, unless it had been done in a
hurry to disguise the tunnel from outside, to stop anyone getting in.

The wall was odd. For a start, it was built out of a different kind of material from the tunnel walls and ceiling. They had been brick, and this was stone, but not the kind of light,
granite-like stone that the castle was made from. No, this wall was made from blocks of a darker, greyer stone, and it was rougher. Running
his fingers across one of the blocks he could feel a
rasping sensation. Looking closer, he also thought he could see small holes in the stone – natural holes, not created ones. He had never seen anything quite like it.