Young Sherlock Holmes: Knife Edge (10 page)

Tired of sitting and reading, he prowled around the edges of the library. He had heard about secret passages in old castles, sometimes hidden behind bookshelves that would swing out on hidden
hinges, so he pulled experimentally
on a couple of shelves but only succeeded in knocking a few books on to the carpet. He felt silly, and so he stopped. Remembering things that his American tutor
Amyus Crowe had taught him, he turned his attention to looking for small signs, tracks and trails, things that were out of context. If there were hidden doors in the bookshelves, and if they opened
into the library rather than in the
opposite direction, then they might leave some traces of wear on the carpet. He got down on to his hands and knees, looking for any evidence that a bookshelf
might have swung out and rubbed against the carpet, but there was nothing. Again, he just felt silly.

‘What are you doing?’

He glanced up, trying to look casual rather than surprised and embarrassed. Niamh was standing in the open
doorway, gazing down at him with a puzzled smile on her face. ‘I dropped a
coin,’ he said.

‘What did you need a coin for in a library? The books are free.’

‘I couldn’t decide what subject to research next,’ he said smoothly, ‘so I was going to toss a coin.’

‘Oh. All right.’ She put her head on one side and stared at him silently for a long moment, obviously not convinced. ‘I’m bored.
Did you want to go outside and look for
tracks now?’

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’d rather take a look around the inside of the castle first.’ Standing up, he shrugged casually. ‘You live here, so you’re used
to it, but I’ve never been inside a castle before. I’m curious.’

As he suspected, appealing to Niamh’s sense of curiosity worked. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s start at the top and
work our way downward. I’ll give you the
guided tour.’

She led him out into the main hall and then, ignoring the ascending room, raced him up the stone stairway that ran around the edges of the hall, all the way to the top floor. Together they
headed along one of the two corridors that led in opposite directions away from the hall.

The castle, Sherlock remembered, was in the shape
of a rough square, with the tower of the keep located halfway along one of the sides. The sides themselves were formed by the castle walls,
which on the inside had a central corridor and rooms off to either side. The castle’s ‘corners’ were formed by three small towers and one larger one. It took them almost fifteen
minutes to walk all the way around the castle walls and back to the hall again.
Most of the rooms were bedrooms, or storage rooms, or were empty. Nothing startling or intriguing.

‘Can we get out on to the top of the castle walls?’ Sherlock asked. ‘On to the battlements?’

Niamh smiled. ‘Of course,’ she said, and led him to a small doorway off to one side of the hall, from where a stone stairway spiralled upward. It ended in two heavy doors set
opposite each other.
Niamh pushed one of them open and gestured him through.

Sherlock found himself on a long, flat, stone roof, covered with wet moss and edged with battlements that had been worn down by centuries of wind and rain into shapes like rotten teeth. At the
far end of the roof was another tower, with its own heavy door. The wind whistled across the roof, snatching the heat from his body and sending
cold drops of rain splattering against his face. He
could see, from this high vantage point, the Irish countryside extending into the distance: green and brown, undulating gently to form low, wide hills. Undergrowth surrounded the castle, copses of
trees stood out as dark green clumps, and stone walls separated fields. The clouds were low, brushing the tops of the hills.

In the distance,
rising from a clump of trees, he could see a stone tower, a folly of some kind. Apart from the castle it was the only other dominating feature of the landscape, and he made a
mental note to visit it, if he could find it from ground level.

The door slammed shut behind him. He turned, to find himself alone on the roof. Seconds later he heard a metal bolt slam across the inside, locking the
door.

‘I’ll meet you at the other end,’ Niamh called from the other side of the door. ‘I’ll keep the door open for a count of ten seconds. If you don’t get through
in that time, you’re stuck out there!’

Before he could say anything in response, he heard her footsteps running down the stone stairs.

Right now she was preparing to run along the corridor between the keep and the next
tower. He had to match her, or beat her, if he wanted to get out of the cold wind. A flash of annoyance made
his face feel hot. She seemed to like challenging him, and playing games. Well, if that’s what she wanted . . .

He started running along the castle roof, but almost instantly his foot slipped on a patch of moss and he fell sideways, slamming his shoulder into one of the worn battlements.
Sick pain flooded
his body and withdrew, leaving him weak. He climbed back to his feet and set off again, knowing that Niamh was outracing him a floor below.

This time he knew to avoid the patches of moss as he ran, but as a result his progress was marked by strange little dance-steps as he had to move rapidly right or left, or had to jump across
wider areas. The bare stone wasn’t that
much safer, he found – the rain had left it slick and slippery, and the soles of his new shoes were too smooth to get much of a grip. A couple of
times he found himself sliding towards the battlements, and had to use his arms to cushion his approach and bounce off. He thanked heaven that nobody could see him – he must have looked as
though he were mad. Of course, he realized, Niamh could visualize
exactly how he looked. That was why she had shut him out there and made him run. For fun. For her own amusement.

The door ahead of him opened. In the darkness inside he could just see Niamh’s grin, taunting him.

He forced himself to a final burst of speed, ignoring the irregular blotches of moss, trusting to his speed and his weight to get him past them. In his head he counted down the
ten seconds that
Niamh had promised him.

When he got to eight, and he could see her preparing to shut the door, he jumped and let his feet skid on the moss, catapulting him towards the door.

He thudded against it just as she was closing it, pushing it back open and falling into the tiny room at the top of the stairs.

‘What did that prove?’ he gasped, leaning against the stones and
trying to catch his breath.

‘It proved you can run fast,’ she said.

‘Faster than you.’

‘I got here before you, remember.’

He straightened up. ‘But you weren’t running on wet moss and wet stone.’

She twisted her lips in a little moue of disappointment. ‘Well, if you put it that way. All right, you won – this time.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Do you want to explore any
more of
the castle?’

She was challenging him again, waiting for him to back down.

‘Bring it on,’ he said. ‘But I’ve seen enough of the roof now. Let’s try for some lower floors.’

She took him around the second, first and ground floors, but they were much the same as the third floor – rooms of a similar size which were either set out as bedrooms or storerooms. Only
the ballroom which occupied
the ground floor of the other tower was different: a large, empty space lined with curtains with a dais at one end for a small orchestra.

‘I don’t think we’ve ever used the ballroom for anything,’ Niamh said quietly as they stood there. ‘As you can imagine, my father isn’t one for
dancing.’

As they turned to leave, Sherlock had the sudden impression that a curtain twitched at the far
end of the room. For a moment a dark shape, the size of a very large man, was revealed, and then it
vanished again. Sherlock turned back to stare at the curtain, wondering if someone else was in there with them – a servant, maybe – but it didn’t move again.

‘Seen something?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Was it the Dark Beast?’

He laughed. ‘I doubt it. If it was, maybe it’ll stay
for luncheon. He turned away and followed Niamh.

‘What about dungeons?’ he asked as they stood back in the main hall where they had started.

‘We’ve got them,’ she answered. ‘We keep them downstairs.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Mainly they’re used by the servants, and for the cooking. Would you like to see?’

‘I’d be worried about you locking me in a cell. I think I’ll pass.’

She smiled.
‘Probably a good idea. Shall we go outside now?’

‘Yes please.’ He checked the watch which hung from a chain on his waistcoat. ‘What time is luncheon?’

‘At one o’clock.’

‘We’ve got about an hour, then. Less if we get dirty or wet and need to change when we get back.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Afraid of getting a little bit dirty or wet?’

‘Not at all. I’m just afraid of missing
lunch.’ He caught himself, and smiled. ‘I’m beginning to sound like my brother. God forbid.’

‘Do you get on well with him?’

‘That’s simple to ask but not so simple to answer,’ he replied, uncomfortable with the question but wanting to answer it honestly. ‘We’ve been apart for a while
– well, I’ve been away. Abroad. We’ve obviously both changed since I left, and I think we’re both trying
to work out what our relationship is now. I don’t need to rely
on him the way that I did, but he needs to realize that we’re closer to equals now.’ He paused, wanting to change the conversation but unsure how. ‘What about you? Do you have any
brothers or sisters?’

‘Apparently I had an older brother,’ she said, ‘but he died when he was a baby, before I was born.’ Her expression turned serious.
‘Lots of children die as babies
where I come from.’

‘A fair number die as babies where I come from,’ Sherlock said, thinking about cholera, and the various other diseases that ran rife through the poorer areas of the big cities.
‘Not that I’m trying to draw any equivalence between your background and mine. I know I was privileged.’

‘Hey, I grew up in a place of beautiful beaches and
beautiful sunsets where you could just pick your meals off the trees, and I’m now living in a castle. Believe me, I feel like
I’m privileged.’

‘Touché.’

She punched his arm. ‘Come on, let’s take a tour around the outside of the castle. We won’t go too far – we can save that for later.’

He followed her across to the door that led out of the great hall. The doors were half open, and
she slipped between them. Sherlock followed into the central square that lay between the
castle’s walls. In daylight, and facing outward rather than facing towards the doors, as he had been the day before, he could see that it was mainly paved, with scattered patches of grass. In
the centre was a statue of an armoured man on horseback. His arm was upraised, and holding a sword.

Niamh led
the way outside through the entrance arch and crossed the moat quickly, but Sherlock paused to look down, into the moat’s murky water. He couldn’t see more than a foot or
so into it, because of the mud and vegetation in the depths, but there were things swimming in there – sinuous shapes that could be fish or could be eels, he wasn’t sure.

The bulk of the castle shielded them from the wind
that had chilled Sherlock up on the roof. He stared out at the Irish landscape. The low clouds had disappeared inland, and he could see the
same low hills that he had spotted from the battlements. He looked around, trying to place where the tower he’d spotted was located, but he worked out that it must be around the side of the
castle.

Niamh set off in the opposite direction. ‘Let’s look
at the sea,’ she said. ‘I never get tired of it. Back on my island the sea is blue and green, but here it’s
always grey. It’s also always angry, always crashing itself on the shore rather than coming in as gentle waves.’

Sherlock thought about the different ways he had seen the ocean as he’d sailed to China and back. ‘It’s like people,’ he ventured. ‘Despite the fact that we all
look basically
the same – two arms and two legs and a head – there’s an infinite range of personalities. The sea should be just as simple – chemically, it’s not
complicated – but the same stretch of sea can look completely different depending on the weather and the time of day.’

Niamh vanished around the edge of one of the towers, and Sherlock followed. He found her heading across the stretch of grass
that he had seen from the library – the one that separated the
castle from the cliffs. She strode right up to the edge of the cliff and stood there, hair blown back from her face by the wind. He joined her, and together they stared silently out into the
majesty of the Atlantic Ocean. The waves seemed to form momentary mountain ranges, grey and bleak and topped with white. It was only the size
of the gulls that rode the waves that gave away their
true size.

Niamh turned her head and stared at him boldly. He returned her stare, not sure what message he was sending but aware that messages were being exchanged.

Niamh opened her mouth to speak, but Sherlock’s attention had been snagged by something that he saw sticking out from a bush just the other side of her.

It was a foot.
A bare foot.

‘Stop a minute,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

Sherlock gestured at the foot. ‘I think,’ he said grimly, ‘we need to get someone from the castle.’

Niamh took one look at the foot sticking out from the shrubbery, nodded, and ran back towards the castle as fast as she could. Sherlock moved closer to the shrubbery and carefully pushed back
the leaves.

A body was lying
beneath the bush. It was one of the castle servants. She was on her back, staring upward at the sky, and her face was twisted into an expression of pure terror. Sherlock checked
her wrist and her neck for a pulse, but there was nothing. Her skin was cold, and her eyes had a thin coating of dust and pollen on them. She was undoubtedly dead.

This wasn’t the first time that Sherlock had seen
a dead body, but the sight still made him uneasy. He was amazed at how thin the line was between life and death, and how easy it was to
cross. He thought he recognized the girl as well: she was the servant who had dropped the plates and run out of the dining room during breakfast. So quick then, and so still now.