Young Sherlock Holmes: Knife Edge (24 page)

‘Agreed,’ Sherlock said.

Albano used his right hand to pull his left sleeve up again,
but this time Sherlock spotted that while his left hand was held up, splayed open, his right hand plucked the rolled-up banknote from
the fold in the sleeve’s material and palmed it. ‘And there is nothing up my left sleeve, as you can plainly see.’

‘Again, agreed, but the sleeves are the misdirection, aren’t they?’

‘Exactly.’ Albano brought his fingers together again, with the right
hand concealing the banknote that he had plucked from his sleeve. He took a corner with his left hand and pulled
the note open. ‘Now do you see?’

‘It’s so simple,’ Sherlock said, ‘that I almost feel cheated.’

‘That is the shameful secret of professional magicians. What we call magic is actually a set of obvious ways of hiding things. The trick is in the way we take your attention away
from the
place where the things are hidden. The first lesson about magic is: if our audience only knew how obvious are the hiding places, and how much effort we go to in order to distract attention from
them, then magic would suddenly lose all its attraction.’

‘But you must already have had that banknote folded and rolled up somewhere, ready to hide in your sleeve. You didn’t know that
I was coming.’

‘You’re right.’ Albano smiled, and this was a natural smile, not a fake, theatrical one. ‘So, the second lesson about magic: always have several prepared tricks in your
pockets, ready to go. Preparation takes time, and you never know when you might get the opportunity to perform a trick.’ He frowned. ‘Now, let me see what else I have to show
you.’ He took his jacket from
the back of the chair and slipped it on, patting the pockets and sliding his hands inside as if looking for something.

Sherlock smiled to himself. He recognized in Albano’s theatrical gestures a typical misdirection. Somehow the man had already started another trick.

‘Oh, that’s a shame. I seem to have lost it.’ Albano took his hands out from inside his jacket, holding them flat, palms
towards Sherlock. ‘Nothing there, you see?’
He closed his right hand into a fist and opened it again, and suddenly he was holding a playing card. ‘Ah, there it is!’ He handed it to Sherlock. It was the eight of clubs. With a
sudden flourish he made the same movement with his left hand, and another card – the nine of diamonds – appeared from thin air. ‘Oh, and another one!’ He handed that to
Sherlock as well.

Sherlock laughed. He couldn’t help himself. There was something so engaging about Albano’s simple pleasure in the tricks. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You were somehow
hiding the cards in your hands, but how?’

‘Watch carefully.’ Albano took one of the cards back. He held it in his right hand, between his thumb and his fingers, then bent his second and third fingers so that
the knuckles
were pressed against the back of the card. He then curled his first and fourth fingers around to grip the edges of the card, and straightened his fingers out again. The card rotated around to the
back of his hand, still held between his first and fourth fingers. He held his hand out to Sherlock, showing how the card was bent between the fingers. From the palm side it was invisible.
‘Lesson Three: this is called a “back palm”, for obvious reasons. It is one of the foundations of card magic. Once you get this right, once you can perform it invisibly, again and
again, you can produce cards from the air to your heart’s content.’

‘Can you show me another trick?’

The man sighed. ‘Always it’s another trick.’ He collected the other card from Sherlock, then reached inside
his jacket and pulled out a full pack. ‘Very well, let me tell
you the story of the four burglars. Sit down.’

Sherlock pulled out a chair and he and Albano sat at opposite sides of the table. Albano shuffled the cards, riffled them open and pulled out the four Jacks. Leaving the rest of the pack face
down on the table, he showed them to Sherlock. ‘There were once four burglars named Jack,
who set out to burgle a house that had been left empty for the evening by the owners.’

‘I don’t need the story,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘Just the trick.’

‘Lesson Four: the story
is
the trick. Or, at least, it is part of the misdirection. Remember, every trick is a performance, and you must entertain the audience as well as amaze
them. You must lead them on a journey that you have pre-planned
for them. Now . . .’ He placed the four Jacks face down on top of the pack. ‘The four burglars all got on to the roof of
the house and lowered themselves down on ropes. The first burglar broke into the basement.’ As he spoke, he took the first card from the top of the pack and inserted it lower down, near the
bottom, pushing it in until it was flush with the rest. ‘The second burglar managed
to get in through a kitchen window.’ He took a second card from the top and inserted it halfway up
the pack. ‘The third burglar broke in through an upstairs window.’ Suiting the words, he took a third card from the top and pushed in into the pack above the first two, just a little
way down from the top. ‘The fourth burglar stayed on top of the house, watching out for trouble.’ He turned
the top card over to show that it was the fourth Jack, and then turned it
back again. Abruptly he rapped his knuckles on top of the pack. ‘After a few minutes the burglar on the roof saw the owners returning to the house, so he called to his friends. They all
quickly ran upstairs, got on to the roof and made their getaway down a drainpipe.’ He slid the top four cards from the pack and turned
them face up. They were, of course, the four Jacks
again, even though Sherlock had thought that three of them had been pushed into the pack lower down and were hidden among the other cards. ‘So, I challenge you: how was the trick
done?’

Sherlock thought for a moment. ‘If the Jacks are on top now, then the three cards you pushed into the deck couldn’t have been Jacks. Therefore they were
something else. So, when you
picked the four Jacks from the pack and showed them to me, you must have had three cards hidden behind them. When you put the Jacks face down on top of the pack, those three cards were on top of
them, and they were the ones you removed and inserted lower down.’ He finished, and took a deep breath. ‘It’s obvious.’

‘Exactly. The trick is in how smoothly you can
pick up seven cards rather than four, and how well you can disguise the three spare ones behind the four Jacks. That depends on never showing
your audience the cards edge on, just front on. The trick is actually over before the story starts, and that is the misdirection.’

‘Can you teach me?’ Sherlock asked quietly.

‘You exposed my . . . unfortunate and ill-conceived tricks,’ Albano pointed
out in a calm voice, ‘and you made it harder for me to convince those here to bid for my services
that I really do have psychic powers. I don’t owe you anything.’

‘No.’ Sherlock nodded. ‘You are right, you don’t owe me anything, but I think you want to show someone your tricks. You want other people to know how clever you are.
Taking money is one thing, but if nobody knows it was a trick
then you don’t feel satisfied. So teach me. Show me the tricks. You know by now that I am probably the only person in this castle
who will properly appreciate them.’ He stared intently at Albano. ‘You’ve already started. You’ve given me four lessons already. You want to pass on your
knowledge.’

Albano nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps I do. It’s the dream of every sorcerer, to have an apprentice.’
He sighed. ‘Very well. Let’s start with the basics of card tricks, as
we happen to have a pack here . . .’

Sherlock stayed with Ambrose Albano for several hours. During that time Albano taught him different ways to hold a pack of cards – the dealer’s grip, the mechanic’s grip and
the biddle grip – and the many ways to cut the cards – including the swing cut and the Charlier cut. After
that they moved on to ways of secretly getting a glimpse of the bottom or the
top card on a deck. Albano then showed Sherlock ways of controlling a card – moving a card from the top or the bottom of the deck to wherever you wanted it to be. ‘This,’ he said,
‘is the essence of card magic – knowing where a particular card is, and then knowing that you can move it anywhere you want.’ Finally he showed
Sherlock the difficult art of
getting a spectator to take what they thought was a card at random but which was actually the card that the magician had already identified and moved. By the time he had finished, Sherlock’s
head was spinning.

‘It’s all just simple trickery,’ Sherlock said, amazed. ‘But it depends so much on being able to handle a pack of cards perfectly, without anyone knowing
what you are
doing.’

‘The real and only secret is practice,’ Albano pointed out. ‘You need to keep handling that pack of cards until you can manipulate it with your eyes shut. Never go anywhere
without it. If you are travelling anywhere, take that park of cards out and just move it through your fingers. Fan them out, rife them, deal them, do anything and everything with them. They need
to
become your best friends.’ He handed the pack of cards across. ‘Keep practising. You never know when you might need these skills.’

‘Thank you.’ Sherlock shook hands with Albano, and left, feeling an unusual spring in his step. He felt revived, refreshed. He felt as if he had been given a glimpse into his own
future. He even felt able to talk with Virginia again, but when he asked a
servant where she was he was told that she had gone riding with ‘the mistress’ – which, he presumed,
meant Niamh Quintillan. It was strange, and rather disturbing, how well those two seemed to be getting on.

He wondered if they were talking about him.

Sherlock found that he needed a breath of fresh air before lunch after the concentration of the past few hours, so he headed outside.
Remembering his walk with Virginia, and his sight of the
mysterious folly that he hadn’t been able to investigate then, he set out to find it again.

It took about twenty minutes before he was emerging from the undergrowth into a clearing at the base of the folly. It was narrower than he had thought: probably ten feet or so across and about
fifty feet high, constructed from a dark grey
stone that felt rough to his fingers when he touched it. He walked around it. The lines where the stones met were so thin as to be almost invisible.
The workmanship was impressive. In the weak sunlight that filtered through the clouds above he could also see that the stones were riddled with tiny holes. There was something about the sight that
provoked a memory, and it took him a few seconds to
realize that the folly was actually built from the same material as the smooth, curved wall that had blocked the tunnel beneath the castle.

He looked in the direction of the castle. How far was it? He tried to estimate the distance. Was it about the same as the distance he had walked in the tunnels underground? Had he gone as far
then as he had now? Was the curved wall that he had found
beneath the ground the same as the curved wall of the folly that he was looking at? It seemed crazy, but he thought that it might just be
true. The trouble was that it added new questions to the list. Why would the tower continue beneath the ground in the same way that it did above the ground? What was the point? Surely a folly like
that would be built on a foundation on flat ground. Why excavate
the ground so that the folly could be extended down as well as up?

The point of follies, he reminded himself, was that they
were
follies. They didn’t necessarily follow any sensible rules. They were things built by the wealthy landowners and had
little rhyme or reason to them other than to show how rich the owners were. Why was he even looking for logic?

Sherlock could see dark spaces
in the wall of the folly: all in a line leading up to the top. They looked like windows. The problem was that he couldn’t see a doorway at ground level. What
was the point of that? What was the architect trying to do?

If he strained his eyes, he thought he could see ramparts, or battlements, around the very top of the folly. The thing looked from below, he thought, like an elongated version
of the piece known
as the ‘rook’, or the ‘castle’, in the game of chess.

He walked around the folly again, this time in the opposite direction. There was definitely no way in from the ground level, but the presence of windows suggested that there were rooms within
the tower, and what was the point of having rooms if you couldn’t get into them?

He stood there for a long while, just
staring at the tower, trying to work out some explanation for the oddities in its construction. Following through the thought that the tower continued below
ground in the same way that it continued above, he moved towards the curved wall and knelt down to examine the point where the tower entered the ground. It was overgrown with grass and small furze
bushes, but he found that he could slide his
fingers down between the side of the tower and the ground. There was a gap.

A little further along he noticed a stone block sticking out of the tower wall. It was lighter in colour than the tower: made of a different stone. He hadn’t seen it before because a small
shrub was growing in front of it. Sherlock could only see it because he was off to one side.

He moved across to take a look.
It was about the size of his body, and it nestled in a hole in the side of the tower, fitting so snugly that there was no space around it. A large iron ring,
battered and crusted with age, was set into the end, for reasons that he couldn’t fathom.

He moved around the tower for a third time and found another three blocks, exactly the same as the first, equally spaced around the circumference.
Based on the position of the sun and the time
of day, they seemed to be oriented along the points of the compass. Was that significant? He wasn’t sure.

He sat back, letting the facts slide around in his mind like pieces in a child’s wooden puzzle, hoping that some coherent picture would emerge, but nothing came.

The only answer, he decided, was to climb the tower and see what was in
the rooms, and what was on top.