Black Ice ysh-3 Page 9

  The man shrugged, shifting Crowe’s arms slightly. ‘Didn’t go to no house. She went to a museum in Bow. Called the Passmore Edwards, it is. Used to be a big manor house. I waited for a couple of hours, but she never came out again. I don’t know if she lives there, or if there was a way out at the back, but I never saw her again.’

  ‘Anything else? Any other facts you want to impart to us?’

  ‘No – no, I swear!’

  Crowe abruptly released the man, who fell to his knees, choking and holding his throat.

  ‘Ah think we’ve gotten all we can from this fellow,’ Crowe said to Sherlock. ‘If you’re feeling up to it, let’s repair to a coffee house and get some refreshments.’ He cast a critical eye over Sherlock’s mud-stained trousers and boots, and his brick dust-splattered jacket. ‘Maybe we can find a clothes shop first. You’re not going to make a good impression looking like that.’

  Before Sherlock could reply, the small man suddenly surged up from the ground, arm swinging round, spiked knuckleduster slicing towards Amyus Crowe’s face. He was snarling; his face contorted in a mask of fury. ‘Try to choke me, would you?’ he shouted.

  Crowe leaned back out of the way of the spikes. They slashed across in front of his eyes, just a few inches away. As they passed he stepped forward, twisted his body to the left and kicked out with his right foot. His boot made contact with the man’s knee. Sherlock heard something snap. The man crumpled to the ground, screaming.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Crowe said, gesturing to Sherlock. Ah feel there’s a pot of coffee and a cream cake somewhere with my name on it, an’ ah intend findin’ it.’

  He led the way out, with Sherlock following. They left the small thug curled up on the ground, holding his shattered knee.

  ‘Shouldn’t we notify the police?’ Sherlock asked. ‘Shouldn’t they arrest him?’

  Crowe shrugged. ‘If it makes you feel better ah guess we could, but it’s his word against ours, and the only permanent damage was done by me to him. Any self – respectin’ policeman would prob’ly arrest me instead of him. Or arrest both of us until he sorted out what had actually happened.’

  ‘But that’s not fair!’ Sherlock protested.

  ‘Perhaps not, but it’s justice. If you don’t know the difference between the two, you need to learn.’

  Crowe led the way back towards the streets and alleys and archways of the area around Waterloo Station.

  ‘How did you find me?’ Sherlock asked, walking alongside him.

  ‘Simple answer: ah was followin’ you.’

  ‘I didn’t see you,’ Sherlock protested.

  ‘That’s what you can expect when ah follow you. Unlike you, ah can keep myself in the shadows, or in crowds, or around corners.’

  ‘Why were you following me?’

  ‘After ah’d checked out that address on the card – which was false, by the by – ah thought ah’d catch up with you. Ah checked the printers in reverse order – startin’ at the last one on the list and workin’ backwards. Ah saw you leavin’ the second printer ah tried – the third one you tried. Ah was tryin’ to catch up, but you were walkin’ fast. An’ then you stopped an’ started watchin’ a tavern. Ah guessed you were on a trail, an’ ah didn’t want to draw attention to you, so ah just hunkered down in a doorway to see what was goin’ on. After a while you started followin’ that bearded guy, so ah just tagged along for the ride. Saw him corner you in the archway, but you ran off before ah could intervene. Ah spent the next hour workin’ my way around the outside, tryin’ to determine where you might emerge.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sherlock said, mollified. ‘That makes sense.’

  They were at the front of the station by now. Crowe spotted a small tailor’s shop located a few doors away from a cobbler’s. Within ten minutes they had a new pair of trousers, new jacket, new shirt and new boots for Sherlock. Crowe paid without any comment. Sherlock assumed that he would sort it out with Mycroft later – if Mycroft ever got released, that was.

  Leaving the cobbler’s shop, Crowe led the way to an Aerated Bread Company tearoom nearby. They sat at a table in the window. Sherlock felt oddly disconnected from reality. Less than an hour before he had been running for his life through dark tunnels, and now he was sitting in the sunshine waiting for a cake to arrive. Life could be strange, sometimes. Actually, he reflected, life could be strange a lot of the time.

  ‘So, what next?’ he asked once the tray of coffee and cakes had arrived.

  ‘Let’s take stock of what we know’ Crowe took a bite of his sponge cake. ‘There’s at least a double cutout between the person givin’ the orders and the people carryin’ them out.’

  Sherlock frowned. ‘What do you mean, a “double cutout”?’

  ‘Ah mean that the man who killed himself in the Diogenes Club never met the woman in the veil. She hired the man with the beard, an’ he hired the man who was prepared to kill himself so that his family’s financial future could be assured.’

  ‘Maybe the woman was hired by someone else. Maybe there’s a triple cut-out.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Crowe mused. ‘Whoever is organizin’ this is very cautious. They’re makin’ sure that nobody can trace back to them. The only reason we got this far is thanks to two unplanned events – the first bein’ that your printer recognized the man with the beard, an’ the second bein’ that the fellow with the beard was greedy and immoral enough to follow the woman who hired him to this museum he talked about. Never underestimate the value of an unplanned coincidence.’

  ‘But to what end?’ Sherlock asked. ‘What exactly are they trying to achieve?’

  Crowe shrugged. ‘The immediate aim seems to be to discredit your brother, or otherwise get him out of the way. The long-term aim – not sure about that. We need more information.’

  Sherlock sighed. He’d thought he was hungry, after all the running around, but the cakes just didn’t appeal to him. ‘What can we do?’ he asked.

  ‘As ah see it,’ Crowe said, ‘we have three options. First: we could tell the police what we know and return to Farnham, hopin’ that the Diogenes Club solicitor can get Mycroft out of prison and clear his name.’

  ‘What are the odds on that?’ Sherlock asked.

  ‘Slim. The police ain’t goin’ to be inclined to investigate a crime where they’ve got clear evidence against a man already in custody, an’ with the best will in the world our story ain’t exactly easy to believe. An’ our evidence has melted away.’

  ‘But we’ve got the laudanum spray!’

  Crowe shrugged. ‘Could be medicine, like your brother said. An’ we can’t just produce it out of nowhere. We might have bought it at a pharmacist down the street.’

  ‘What’s the second option?’

  ‘We stay in London an’ talk to your brother’s employers in the Foreign Office – get them to take action an’ get him out.’

  Sherlock winced. ‘Even to me, that doesn’t sound likely to succeed.’

  ‘Indeed. There’s a good chance that the Foreign Office will just leave your brother twistin’ in the wind. Last thing they want is embarrassment an’ publicity.’

  ‘Then we follow the third option,’ Sherlock said decisively.

  Crowe smiled. ‘You don’t even know what it is yet.’

  ‘I can guess.’ Sherlock’s gaze met Crowe’s deceptively amiable stare. ‘We amass enough evidence by ourselves to clear Mycroft’s name. We go to this museum in Bow and try to find the woman in the veil.’

  Crowe nodded. ‘That’s about the size of it. An’ frankly, I don’t hold out much of a hope for our chances. It’s a long shot, it really is.’

  ‘Why isn’t there someone we can go to?’ Sherlock exploded. ‘Why isn’t there someone who can investigate things that the police won’t or can’t investigate? Some kind of independent, consulting force of detectives who can set things straight, like the Pinkerton Agency in America that you told me about?’

  ‘It would require someone with a whole set of interesti
n’ qualities, that’s for sure,’ Crowe said with a strange expression on his face. ‘But it’s a career niche that’s currently unoccupied here in England.’ He seemed to pull himself back from wherever his thoughts had taken him. All right, I suggest we secure a hansom cab an’ ask the driver to take us to the museum in Bow.’

  They caught a cab straight away, although Sherlock noticed that Crowe deliberately let two empty cabs go past without hailing them, choosing the third at the last second as it was about to swing past the spot where they were standing.

  ‘Why didn’t you go for the first cab?’ Sherlock asked as they climbed in.

  ‘Because we’re blunderin’ around the edges of a web spun by someone,’ Crowe answered, ‘an’ I wanted to make sure that the cab we got into was our choice, not someone else’s.’

  ‘What was wrong with the second cab, then?’

  Crowe smiled. ‘The horse was lame. Ah doubt it would have made it all the way to Bow. An’ ah didn’t like the driver’s moustache.’

  They settled themselves down in the seats, and the driver’s face appeared in the hatch above them. ‘Where to, gents?’

  ‘Do you know the Passmore Edwards Museum?’ Crowe asked.

  The journey took half an hour or so, and Sherlock spent the time looking out at the slices of real life presented to him: washing lines full of clothes, strung between windows on opposite sides of the street; hard – faced men lounging around on street corners; street vendors with trays of sweets, fruits and flowers; knife grinders wheeling their barrows around and calling out to see if anyone wanted their knives sharpened on the pedal-operated whetstones they were pushing.

  The museum was an orange-brown stone building with built-out corners and an ornately pillared porch. It was set back from the street, separated from the pavement by a strip of grass and a knee-high metal fence. A block of stone set into the wall next to the front door had been carved with the words Passmore Edwards Museum of Natural Curiosities.

  ‘Drive on past,’ Crowe called to the driver. ‘Drop us off on the corner of the street.’

  The cabbie brought his horse to a halt where Crowe had indicated. Crowe paid, and the two of them got down from the cab.

  ‘Don’t look directly at the building,’ Crowe instructed. ‘Just stand here and talk for a few seconds. Let’s absorb any impressions we get.’

  ‘Call me stupid,’ Sherlock said, ‘but I get the impression it is a museum. It doesn’t look like it’s a front for anything.’

  ‘It might just have been a convenient meeting place,’ Crowe mused. ‘Something chosen almost at random, rather than the headquarters of a conspiracy. If so, we’re not going to discover anything here, and we’ve pretty much run out of evidence to follow.’

  ‘The least we can do is look around,’ Sherlock pointed out. ‘We might see something, or hear something, or someone might remember seeing a woman in a veil.’

  ‘Good point, well made,’ Crowe said.

  Crowe led the way towards the front door, to all intents and purposes a father taking his son out for the day.

  They entered an empty lobby from which a stairway led up and then split left and right. It could have been the entrance hall of any reasonably large town house, if not for the huge glass case that filled the centre of the tiled floor. Inside the case was a reasonably accurate representation of a section of woodland, and populating it were various stuffed animals: a fox, several stoats, numerous mice, rats and voles, and one rather tatty otter which looked as if it belonged somewhere else entirely. The animals were posed in positions of startled alertness, as if they had been caught in the middle of investigating an unexpected and loud noise. Their glassy black eyes seemed to be staring in all directions.

  A man in a blue uniform and a blue peaked cap approached them. ‘Would you like two tickets, sir?’ he said. ‘Just tuppence apiece, and you can stay as long as you want. Very quiet at the moment.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Crowe said, handing the man a couple of coins. ‘What can you recommend in the way of exhibits?’

  The man considered for a moment. ‘The small mammal gallery, up and to your right, is often praised for its veracity. Alternatively, the amphibian gallery up and to your left has a number of unusual specimens which the kids seem to love.’

  ‘We’ll split up,’ Crowe said as the man moved off. ‘Ah’ll do amphibians, you do mammals. Meet back here in half an hour and if we haven’t discovered anything of interest then we can move on to another gallery.’

  ‘What counts as something of interest?’

  ‘Like ah said back at the Diogenes Club – anything that doesn’t fit. Anything that stands out.’

  ‘In a museum of stuffed animals?’

  Crowe had the grace to smile. ‘It’s all to do with context. In the street, a dog walking past isn’t unusual. In a museum of stuffed animals, it is.’

  ‘All right,’ Sherlock said dubiously.

  They climbed the first set of marble steps together, then separated where the stairs went left and right. Sherlock went right, Crowe left.

  The stairs led to a balcony that ran around the upper space of the entrance hall. The balcony was edged with a waist-high balustrade of stone. Doors led off to what were presumably different halls of exhibits. A chandelier of cut-glass droplets and candles hung from the centre of the ceiling.

  Sherlock headed through the first door. Beyond, he found himself in a long room which was broken up by a series of glass cabinets so that he couldn’t get a view all the way down. A skylight in the roof let in bright sunlight. He could hear voices somewhere in the room, but he couldn’t see anyone else.

  He set off towards the far end, walking around the cases where he had to and briefly checking each of them out. As the attendant had said, this was the small mammal gallery. A ferret, poised perkily in an arrangement of dried grasses, was in a case next to a large, tan-coloured cat with tufted ears that was sitting on a flat stretch of desert sand. A badger, vividly striped in black and white, emerged tentatively from a burrow just a few feet away from a fox with absurdly large ears padding forever across a landscape of artificial ice and snow. Presumably it all made sense to someone.

  Sherlock stopped beside the badger for a moment. The sight of the animal took him back to Farnham, and the dead badger he had used to distract Baron Maupertuis’s guard dog. At the time that had seemed about as bad as life could get. If only he’d known…

  He passed cases of various rats and mice, cats and miniature dogs before he got to the end. Their emotionless eyes seemed to track him as he passed. The doorway at the end led out into a smaller hall with two doors leading off it. He chose one at random, and went through.

  A figure loomed over him, arms upraised, vicious spikes emerging from its hands. He jerked backwards, nearly falling, before he realized that the figure was in a case and the spikes on the hands were actually claws. It wasn’t the bearded man from Waterloo Station. Straightening up, he brushed at his jacket self-consciously. It was a bear of some kind, with a tangled brown pelt and a muzzle that had been treated in some way to appear wet. It was bigger than Amyus Crowe, and that was saying something.

  The room over which the bear stood guard contained a handful of larger cases. As well as the bear there was an elk with spreading, branch-like antlers, several wild boar with coarse bristles and tusks posed in a family group, and what seemed to be a cow so covered with long brown hair that Sherlock couldn’t even make out its eyes.

  The door at the end led into yet another room. Sherlock was beginning to feel as if he was in a maze of some kind. As well as glass cases along the walls, it had cases in the centre. Each held a bird of some kind, and from what Sherlock could see they were all birds of prey.

  The nearest case contained a lone eagle, set into a noble pose. Its wooden backdrop had been painted to represent a cloudless blue sky and distant mountains.

  Sherlock moved further into the room. He heard something moving – the scrape of a shoe against the floor. Someone wa
s obviously in the room with him, although he couldn’t hear any voices. Maybe it was a lone visitor.

  He passed several cases containing owls of various types. They were sitting on branches – possibly real, possibly made of plaster of Paris; Sherlock couldn’t tell. Their claws encircled the branches: sharp killing weapons wrapped in scaled skin, designed to punch into the body of their prey and lift it up so the birds could fly away to their nests and feast.

  As he went by, he thought he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He quickly turned to look. The birds were all staring at him. Hadn’t their heads been turned towards the door when he entered? Now they were facing into the centre of the room. Or was it something about owls that made it difficult to tell which way they were looking?

  Something fluttered across the other side of the room. Was there a bird, a real bird, trapped in the room? A sparrow, or a pigeon, or something?

  The next few cases contained an assortment of birds of prey. Sherlock spotted hawks, falcons, ospreys and several types of bird that he didn’t even recognize.

  Even though they were dead and stuffed, there was something eerie about the birds, more so than the small mammals or the larger animals. Maybe feathers just looked more realistic than fur when what was underneath was stuffing rather than flesh and bone. Or maybe there was something about the shape of their skulls and the lack of body fat that meant the process of taxidermy left them looking as if they might at any moment just twist their heads and start preening, or stretch their wings to get the kinks out of their muscles. Even though their eyes were made of glass beads too, Sherlock thought he could detect a coldness in them, a dangerousness. The mice and the voles looked at passers-by as predators; the birds in this room looked at passers-by as prey.

  He was imagining things again. It wasn’t helping. They’re just stuffed birds! he told himself. They aren’t real. They can’t move.

  He heard another sudden movement in the far reaches of the room. Footsteps, perhaps. Cloth brushing against the wooden edge of a display case. It didn’t matter: he was bound to come across other visitors at some stage.