Young Sherlock Holmes: Knife Edge (29 page)

‘Hey!’ Crowe shouted up to the driver. ‘Wrong way!’

The driver ignored him. The speed of the
carriage increased as it cleared the turn.

Crowe grabbed at the door handle and tried to turn it. He couldn’t. It was fixed in place. Sherlock tried the handle next to him, but that didn’t move either.

‘Did you see that other carriage?’ he asked breathlessly.

‘We’ve been taken,’ Crowe snapped. ‘They switched carriages on us. Damn it, I should’ve checked out the driver’s face!’

‘It might have been the same driver,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘They might have given him so much money that he went along with their plans.’

‘No.’ Crowe shook his head firmly. ‘They might well have paid off the driver, but it’s a different carriage. The one waitin’ outside the gates was the one we were
supposed to get into. That way, when it gets to Galway it’ll look like a real mystery. The
driver’ll swear blind that we got in, an’ Stone an’ the kid’ll swear blind
that it cantered past them with no problems.’

‘Just like the supposed disappearance of Ambrose Albano,’ Sherlock pointed out grimly.

‘Whoever’s taken us has a sense of humour.’ Crowe’s face showed that he was anything but amused. ‘They’re turnin’ Quintillan and Albano’s tricks
back against them.’ He stood up
and gestured to Sherlock to do the same. Sherlock tried to hang on to the ceiling of the carriage to keep himself upright, while Crowe tore at the padding that
covered the seats at the back, hoping to find some panels that he could tear out so they could escape through the back. Not that jumping from something travelling at the speed they were going would
be a safer option, Sherlock thought.
They could well break bones if they misjudged the jump.

He looked out of the window, but couldn’t see anything apart from bushes and trees rushing past.

‘It’s no good!’ Crowe slammed his fist against the carriage door in frustration.

The carriage came to an abrupt stop, throwing Sherlock and Crowe forward. As they picked themselves up, the door opened. They waited for a long moment,
but nobody appeared.

‘Well, Ah ain’t one to wait around on a promise,’ Crowe said, and got out of the carriage. Sherlock sighed, and followed.

The carriage had stopped in a clearing in the middle of undergrowth and trees. Sherlock could smell the salty tang of the ocean nearby, and he could hear waves. There were probably ten men
standing around the carriage, but it was the two in front
that caught Sherlock’s attention. He felt his mouth fall open in shock.

‘Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us,’ the first man said in a thin, whispery voice that made Sherlock’s hair stand on end.

‘Do you want to introduce me to your friend?’ Crowe asked.

‘Amyus Crowe,’ Sherlock replied, his voice almost as thin and whispery as the man who had spoken. ‘May I introduce Baron
Maupertuis? He works for the Paradol
Chamber.’

Baron Maupertuis was, if possible, even more fragile than he had appeared the last time Sherlock had seen him. That had been two years before, when Maupertuis had been trying
to destroy the British Army with killer bees. Then he had been strapped into an elaborate harness of ropes, cords and wires that had enabled his servants to move him around like a puppet. That,
however, had been on his own ground, in his own manor house. Now, out in the open and surrounded by bodyguards, he looked like an animated skeleton dressed in military uniform. Sherlock could
clearly see the joints of his fingers and his wrists – swellings where the stick-thin bones met and articulated. The gold braid on the front of his black uniform seemed thicker than his
fingers. His face
was a skull papered over with parchment. Prominent veins wormed their way across his scalp, startlingly purple against the white skin. His eyes were the only things about him that
looked alive, and they had enough life for several men. They glared at Sherlock with a maniacal hatred that the boy could feel as a physical force pushing him backwards.

The men standing with him moved so that
they were now surrounding Sherlock and Crowe. They were, with the exception of the giant who was standing directly behind Maupertuis, all armed. They held
various medieval weapons – some had swords, some large axes, and some had pikes or halberds. It looked to Sherlock as if the thugs had scavenged the weapons from some storeroom in the cellars
of the castle.

Maupertuis was clearly unable
to stand unaided, but there he was, with no visible means of support. Sherlock tried to work out what it was that was keeping him up, and then realized with a shock
that Maupertuis was held in some kind of complicated sling attached to the body of the man standing behind him. That man was tall, and wide, and heavily muscled, but he was wearing clothes that
were a dull grey in colour, dappled
in different shades, while the straps attaching Maupertuis to him were of the same colour as the Baron’s uniform. A hood made out of the same material
covered the man’s head, peaking in two horn-like projections above his ears. Two slits had been cut for him to see through. The effect was to make him fade into the background, as if he
wasn’t there at all. Maupertuis stood out in sharp relief,
his head located at the level of his carrier’s chest.

Maupertuis’s arms and legs were attached to the arms and legs of the giant behind him. When the man stepped forward, at some hidden command, the Baron’s legs moved as though they
were actually propelling him forward. When the man raised his arm it was as if the Baron were pointing at Sherlock.

‘You,’ the Baron announced, his voice
barely louder than the wind but still coated with venom, ‘are not Ambrose Albano.’

Now that the trick had failed, Sherlock peeled off his disguise. ‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘but we have met before.’

‘Of course.’ Maupertuis’s features twisted in rage. ‘The boy, Sherlock Holmes. I knew you were at the castle, and I knew you had been interfering with Quintillan’s
plans and exposing his stupid
tricks, but I did not expect you to be here, replacing the psychic. I did not think you would be so foolish!’

‘Ah should have guessed that the Paradol Chamber was involved in this . . . farrago of nonsense,’ Crowe announced, trying to attract the Baron’s rage.

Maupertuis’s thin lips formed a sneer. He didn’t even glance at Crowe as he said: ‘You do not have the wit to understand anything.
I know about you, Amyus Thaddeus Crowe. I
have studied you, ever since you briefly crossed my path in Farnham two years ago. I always make a point of understanding my enemies. I know your secrets and I know your history, from when you were
born to the moment you will die – which will be in a few minutes from now. Your life has not been one of great accomplishment. Few people will mourn your
passing, and fewer still will
remember it in fifty years, but the name of Baron Maupertuis will resound through the centuries! That is what happens when—’

Something about the shape that Baron Maupertuis made in conjunction with the giant standing behind him sparked a thought in Sherlock’s brain. He followed the glinting connection until it
suddenly sparked against a set of other facts
that had been lurking in Sherlock’s memory.

‘The Dark Beast!’ he announced, interrupting the Baron’s rant. ‘
You
are the Dark Beast!’

It seemed so obvious, now that he was staring at Maupertuis. The bulky, misshapen outline of the two attached men . . . Sherlock didn’t know what it was that people had reported seeing
years ago, but he knew now as surely as he knew anything that the recent
sightings of the Dark Beast had actually been sightings of Baron Maupertuis strapped to the chest of his massive carrier,
glimpsed in darkness, or in mist, or in shadows, moving around the castle and its grounds.

‘A stupid legend,’ the Baron said, ‘but one that was useful to me. It kept the local peasants from investigating, and gave me free rein to move around.’

‘To what end?’ Crowe
asked. ‘What exactly is it that you’ve been doin’ here, at Cloon Ard Castle?’

Maupertuis moved his fierce gaze from Sherlock to Amyus Crowe, and the big American took a small step back as he felt the force of Maupertuis’s fanatical willpower. That worried Sherlock.
He’d once seen Crowe stare down an enraged bear just by the force of his own will.

‘You will die without knowing,’ the Baron
said. ‘That is the smallest of the pleasures I will gain from your deaths.’

‘Actually,’ Sherlock said, ‘it’s obvious. It’s been obvious all along. The Paradol Chamber is the invisible sixth bidder. You have been in discussion with Sir
Shadrach Quintillan. What happened? Was he too honourable, in his own way, or did he think that he would get a better price from an open competition?’

‘What Ah don’t understand,’ Crowe said conversationally, ‘is why you wanted him in the first place. Ah mean, the man is a fraud. Young Sherlock here proved that quite
conclusively.’ He glanced at Sherlock. ‘Do you have any theories about that, son? ’Bout why the Paradol Chamber wanted Albano so badly despite the fact he is a fraud?’

For some reason the big American seemed to want to waste
time, to keep Maupertuis talking. Actually, if that was the alternative to Maupertuis killing them both, then Sherlock was happy with
it.

‘I think Albano and Quintillan fooled the Paradol Chamber just like they fooled Herr Holtzbrinck and von Webenau.’

‘So Count Shuvalov wasn’t fooled?’ Crowe nodded. ‘He’s a smart guy. An’ your brother too – he saw through it from the start.’

‘Herr
Holtzbrinck and von Webenau wanted to believe,’ Sherlock pointed out. Fear made him want to talk faster, but he suppressed the impulse. Crowe wanted to slow things down for
some reason, and he needed to go along with the plan. Whatever the plan was. ‘If I’ve learned one thing about confidence tricks it’s that people who already want to believe are
the most easily fooled.’

‘Albano’s powers
are real,’ Maupertuis hissed. ‘And they will be in the service of the Paradol Chamber when we finally take him! He will serve us, and the dead will tell
us their secrets!’

Crowe laughed. ‘Now that’s just plain stupid. Young Sherlock here showed quite clearly that the séances were just flim-flam!’

‘The first two séances, yes.’ Maupertuis’s thin frame shook with the anger he constantly
felt. ‘The psychic was weak, and his powers were unreliable. Stupidly, he
and Quintillan faked the séances to keep interest going. But the tower and the paintings? How could that have been done, if not through communicating with the dead? How?’

Sherlock stared at Maupertuis for a moment, and what he saw wasn’t a psychotic criminal, but a painfully thin human being who, like any human, was
capable of being fooled – if he
wanted to be. In the same way a man could be fooled, then so could a country, if it took the advice of that man. Someone had once described the Paradol Chamber to him as a country without territory
or borders, and it seemed they were just as capable of following bad advice as the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

‘Who did you lose,’ he asked softly, ‘that
you so desperately want to believe is not dead?’

‘It’s not another person,’ Crowe pointed out softly. ‘Look at him. He’s hoverin’ close to death every moment of his existence. He desperately wants to believe
that death ain’t the end; that it’s possible to survive it, an’ keep goin’.’

‘It is possible,’ Maupertuis shrieked, ‘and Ambrose Albano proves it!’

‘Then why did you kill Sir
Shadrach?’ Sherlock stepped forward, towards Maupertuis. He really wanted to know the answer to the question.

‘We met with him, in his rooms.’ The shift in subject had caught Maupertuis off-guard. His trembling subsided somewhat, and his eyes, which had seemed violent enough to make dry
twigs catch fire, became calmer. ‘We offered him money, for him and the psychic to work with us – willing
volunteers are more use than forced slaves – but he argued. He wanted
more money than we were prepared to pay. His death is an annoyance, but one we can live with. Albano is the one with the power.’

‘You lost your temper,’ Sherlock guessed. ‘He went against your will, so you had him killed.’ The casual brutality of it shouldn’t have surprised him – he
knew exactly what the Paradol Chamber
was capable of – but, he reminded himself, the Baron was clearly insane. If his desires were different from those of the Paradol Chamber then he would
follow those personal desires, even if it put the organization’s goals in jeopardy.

‘Why hide the body on top of the tower?’ Crowe asked. Sherlock suspected that he had already worked the answer out himself, but he was still trying to delay
events, to keep
Maupertuis from acting. Waiting for something.

‘That’s easy.’ Sherlock shrugged. ‘It wasn’t Baron Maupertuis who had Sir Shadrach’s body displayed on top of the tower. It didn’t matter to him whether
the body was found or not – he wanted Albano, and was determined to kidnap him when he couldn’t buy him.’

‘You’re not going to tell me it was the spirits of the dead?’
Crowe laughed, but it was a forced laugh. There was a lot of tension in it.

‘No,’ Sherlock confirmed. ‘It was the butler, Silman, along with Ambrose Albano. They knew the way the tower worked, so they hid the body on top with the help of the servants.
Their aim was to keep the body from being found until they could run the auction themselves. They were probably worried that Niamh would search
the castle for her father if he wasn’t in his
rooms. Albano said as much this morning. He clearly knew something had happened – he was edgy and nervous. He just wanted to get the auction over and done with and get under the protection of
whichever international power won. It was sheer bad luck for them that I stumbled across the body while I was exploring.’

‘That explains it.’ Crowe nodded.
‘An’ the servin’ girl you told me about? The one who was discovered dead, with an expression of terror on her face?’

‘She saw something in the castle cellars – probably the Baron, moving around. I presume she had a weak heart and died of fright, but her body had to be moved from the cellars because
the Baron and his men were using them as a base. Of course, her shoes came off during the
move, but nobody noticed.’