Stone Cold (29 page)

‘Mycroft—’

‘How is your little friend Matthew?’ Mycroft interrupted.

‘He’s recovering.’ Sherlock winced, thinking about how close Matty had come to dying. Only the quick reaction of Ferny Weston in scrubbing Matty’s hands with charcoal and
injecting him with a drug that counteracted the poison in the frog’s skin had saved him. Once he was stable, Sherlock had moved him to Mrs McCrery’s house, where there was a spare bed.
Mrs McCrery seemed to have taken a shine to Matty, and so he was tucked up warmly there and being fed on an almost hourly basis. Sherlock expected that Matty would have put on a lot of weight by
the time he returned from London.

‘Good. He is a brave and resourceful boy. A world without him in it would be a poorer world.’

‘He wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place if you had been honest with me!’ Sherlock snapped. Annoyed with himself for the emotional reaction, he licked at his ice
cream.

Mycroft sighed heavily – which was, Sherlock reflected, about the only way his brother
could
sigh these days. ‘It is not as if I was deliberately withholding information. I
merely did not wish you to be overburdened by it when you first arrived in Oxford. My intention was to send you a letter after a few weeks mentioning in passing the Mortimer Maberley situation and
suggesting that you take a look as you were in the vicinity. I would have told you about Ferny Weston as well, in the fullness of time. I just—’

‘You just wanted me to think I was a free agent, rather than one of
your
agents, for as long as possible,’ Sherlock said.

‘Indeed.’ Mycroft’s face was unreadable. ‘The best agent is the one who does not even realize he is an agent.’

‘Was Mortimer Maberley the whole reason you sent me to Oxford in the first place?’ Sherlock asked.

‘Absolutely not. Oxford is the best place for you to be at this point in your life. The fact that my attention had been drawn to Mr Maberley’s predicament by an anonymous letter from
Ferny Weston was purely coincidental. What I had not anticipated was that you would be so quick to discover the problem and to solve it. Or that young Matthew would be so badly hurt in the
process.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Sherlock, be assured that if I had sent you to Cambridge instead, there are matters there that beg some investigation as well. In fact, wherever you
might go in England there are questions and mysteries to be solved that the local police force seem incapable of addressing.’

Sherlock shrugged. ‘Then it looks as if the whole of England needs some form of detective who is better informed and more tenacious than the police.’

‘A thought you might do well to bear in mind for the future.’ Mycroft licked his ice cream. ‘Ferny Weston thought he might be that detective, but much as I respect the man, he
does have a policeman’s brain. His thoughts travel in straight lines. It does not handle corners easily, whereas yours does.’

‘What about his wife? What will happen to her?’

‘The more we investigate, the more we find,’ Mycroft said enigmatically.

‘We?’ Sherlock challenged. ‘I thought you were with the Foreign Office, not the police?’

‘Last year an American railway entrepreneur died while eating soup in a very expensive restaurant, the day before he could sign an important business deal. Initially a heart attack was
suspected, but further investigation revealed the presence of a fast-acting poison in his lobster bisque – a poison derived from the box jellyfish. Two days later a Russian company signed the
business deal instead of him. Three months after that a judge in Italy died while drinking a glass of wine, just before he was about to begin presiding over the trial of a Vatican official for bank
fraud. Again, a heart attack was suspected; again it proved to be poison – this time derived from a rattlesnake. The trial subsequently collapsed, as no judge would step into the breach. I
could draw your attention to twenty, perhaps thirty, similar cases around the world in the time since Ferny Weston and his wife suffered their “accident”.’

‘She was supplying poisons to criminals around the world?’ Sherlock was aghast.

‘She was,’ his brother confirmed. ‘Poison is a woman’s weapon. The spread of cases around the world, and the destabilizing effects on politics and on governments, make it
a Foreign Office matter.’

‘She was so nice.’ Sherlock remembered the conversation he’d had with Marie Weston, in her bedroom. ‘And she was pretty.’

‘“One may smile, and smile, and be a villain”,’ Mycroft said softly. ‘Or so William Shakespeare said in
Hamlet
. I have said it before and I will say it
again: the solution to any political problem can be found somewhere in
Hamlet
.’

‘But she couldn’t have been providing the poisons on her own – someone must have been helping her, and I refuse to believe that it was Ferny.’

‘I suspect the servant – George. He is under investigation too. And, to answer your earlier question, I anticipate that nothing at all will happen to Mrs Weston. She is paralysed,
and bedridden and, as you have pointed out, beautiful. Taking such a woman to trial would cause consternation and anger among the general populace. No, she will be sternly warned, and she will be
watched. All post to and from the house will be opened and inspected. Her life will be under constant scrutiny. Worse – her husband will know everything. He will not leave the house, but he
will abandon her in all but geographical terms. A sad end to things.’ Abruptly changing the subject, he went on: ‘But what of this Cavalier treasure? After the boy and his mother spent
so long searching for it, please do not tell me that you have just stumbled across it?’

‘Hardly “stumbled”,’ Sherlock said. ‘I had noticed that the apple trees in the orchard were of different varieties, and it occurred to me that whoever planted them
might have left a clue as to where the treasure was buried – if, for instance, there was only one apple tree of the King Variety, or the Garden Royal. Later on, though, when Matty and I were
going through that maze of tunnels, I realized that there was one tree whose barrelled roots we diverted completely around. The only reason for there to be no tunnels going to or from that tree
would be if nobody had ever hidden there, which meant that it was the perfect location for the treasure.’

‘Ah,’ Mycroft said, ‘of course. How simple.’

‘Simple if you were there,’ Sherlock muttered.

‘What do you think of Charles Dodgson?’ Mycroft continued as if Sherlock had said nothing.

‘His brain works like a corkscrew,’ Sherlock said, smiling. ‘His love of wordplay and of mathematical puzzles is quite amazing. I feel as if I have to run just to stay in one
place with him, mentally at least. It’s a very refreshing feeling.’

‘He thinks a great deal of you,’ Mycroft said. ‘He has written to tell me so. He finds you an excellent student.’ He smiled. ‘I am pleased.’

The military band finished their tune, and the crowd clapped. Sherlock and Mycroft did their best to join in, given that they were both holding ice-cream cones.

‘If you do not like Oxford,’ Mycroft went on, ‘then you can return to London. I would not wish to force you into any course of action you dislike.’

Sherlock thought for a while. ‘No,’ he said eventually, ‘I think I will stay. I’m having fun. And, of course, Matty is in no condition to move at the moment.’

‘Indeed.’ Mycroft was silent for a while. ‘Perhaps I could send him a hamper of food,’ he added. ‘As an apology.’

‘I think he’s getting more than enough food where he is,’ Sherlock answered. He laughed suddenly.

‘What is it?’

‘You could always have his barge repaired and repainted while he’s confined to bed. I think he would appreciate that.’

‘Then I shall do that.’ Mycroft settled back into his deckchair and closed his eyes as the band struck up another tune. ‘Ah,’ he murmured, ‘this is just perfect. I
wish I could capture this moment in time forever. I wish I could capture a portrait of you, as you are now, before you get any older and become a man rather than a boy.’

Sherlock thought back to the time a little while ago, on the banks of the River Isis, with Charles Dodgson taking his photograph. ‘One day,’ he said quietly, ‘we will
all
have little devices the size of a matchbox, with levers on the side, and when we press the levers a glass plate inside the box will record exactly what we have seen and preserve it for
posterity.’

‘How fanciful,’ Mycroft replied, eyes still closed. ‘You might just as well claim that we will have other little boxes that will, at the press of a lever, somehow magically
record this wonderful music that we are listening to for us to replay later, in the convenience of our own homes.’

Sherlock smiled. ‘New things are being developed all the time,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps it will even be the same box.’

Mycroft snorted. ‘Enjoy the moment,’ he said. ‘Enjoy it while you can. It can never be recreated.’

Sherlock shut his eyes and lay back in the deckchair. He knew that his brother was wrong in this respect, and Mycroft’s insistence that the world would always be pretty much the way it was
now worried him. There were changes ahead – big changes – and the world needed to be ready for them.

This book, the seventh in the Young Sherlock Holmes series, is an odd hybrid. At least, that’s the way it’s turned out in my mind. On the one hand it marks a break
with the past: moving Sherlock away from the comforts of having his aunt and uncle’s house as a base (even though he hadn’t actually been there for the past two books) and towards a
future that involves starting a course at university, and also away from his comforting support network of friends like Rufus Stone, Virginia Crowe and Amyus Crowe, and towards a future when he is
on his own. On the other hand it’s a return to the kind of stripped-down, pure version of the books that I managed to hit in
Death Cloud
– Sherlock and Matty working alone
together to solve a crime. What the future holds is anyone’s guess – although I do have a file of notes.

As usual I’ve done a fair amount of research to make sure that the history and the people are more or less accurate. I managed to pull descriptions of the Oxford town and Oxford University
of the time from
Victorian Oxford
by W. R. Ward (Frank Cass and Co. Ltd, 1965), while Charles Dodgson’s eccentric character and history I took from three books:
Lewis Carroll in
Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life
by Robin Wilson (Allen Lane, 2008),
Lewis Carroll and Alice
by Stephanie Lovett Stoffel (Thames and Hudson, 1997) and
In the
Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll
by Karoline Leach (Peter Owen Ltd, 1999). The Victorian attitude towards death and dead bodies was taken from the excellent
Necropolis: London and Its Dead
by Catharine Arnold (Simon and Schuster, 2006), which I have used before in
Fire Storm
. Wikipedia has, of course, been used to fill in the gaps and
answer sudden questions, such as, ‘When were ice-cream cones invented?’ (The answer is that they were first mentioned in the year 1825, where they were said to have been made from
‘little waffles’, so, when Sherlock and Mycroft have their ice creams in the park in the epilogue, it’s all historically accurate.)

The bit when Sherlock has just met his landlady, Mrs McCrery, for the first time, and is introduced to her stuffed cat, Macallistair, really happened to me, by the way. I was in Wigtown, which
is a small town out in Dumfries and Galloway, in Scotland. I was there for a literary festival and I arrived late one night after a long journey up by plane, by train and by car. It was dark, I was
tired and I was hungry. The festival organizers had, very nicely, put me up in a local farmhouse that also did a good line in bed and breakfast. The lovely lady who ran the place ushered me into
her small sitting room and said she’d go and make me a pot of tea and some warm scones. I settled down to relax. There was a cat, curled up by the fire. I went over to stroke it, because I
love cats and I wanted to make friends with it. You can guess the rest. It was, and still is, one of the more bizarre events that has ever happened to me. Perhaps I just lead a sheltered life.

With luck, and a good headwind, I will be starting work on the next book in the series soon. It might be called
Wind Chill
, or it might be called
Night Break
– I’m not
yet sure. I’m pretty sure, however, that Charles Dodgson will play a part, and that it might involve Sherlock returning to his family home to see his mother and his sister. It might also
involve the case of Mr James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.

Until then, take care.

Andrew Lane is the author of the bestselling Young Sherlock Holmes series and of Lost Worlds. Young Sherlock Holmes has been published around the world and is available in
thirty-seven different languages. Not only is Andrew a lifelong fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective, he is also an expert on the books and is the only children’s writer endorsed
by the Sherlock Holmes Conan Doyle estate. Andrew writes other things too, including adult thrillers (under a pseudonym), TV adaptations (including
Doctor Who
) and non-fiction books (about
things as wide-ranging as James Bond and Wallace & Gromit). He lives in Dorset with his wife and son and a vast collection of Sherlock Holmes books, the first of which he found in a jumble sale
over forty years ago.