Part 6 (2/2)

'What about if we start before dawn?' Sherlock asked.

Matty glanced curiously at him. 'Won't your aunt and uncle worry?'

Sherlock's mind was whirring away like a grandfather clock about to strike. 'I can go back for dinner, then tell them I'm going to bed. I can sneak out of the house later, when it's dark and everyone's gone to sleep I'm sure of it. n.o.body ever checks on me. And I can leave a note in the dining room saying that I've got up before breakfast and gone out with Amyus Crowe. They won't find it until the morning. It'll work!'

'The river loops close to your uncle's house,' Matty said. 'I can draw you a map and meet you there. We can be in Guildford for morning, and back before sunset.'

Quickly, Matty scratched a map on a sc.r.a.p of wood that he pulled from the crate he was sitting on, using a sharp stone from the ground. Sherlock suspected that the boy couldn't read or write, but his map was perfect and nearly to scale. Sherlock could visualize exactly where they would meet.

'I need you to do something,' Sherlock said.

'What?'

'Ask around. See if you can find out about the man who died the man whose house you were standing outside. Find out what he did.'

'What do you mean?'

'What he did for a job. Where he earned his money. I've got a feeling that might be important.'

Matty nodded. 'I'll do what I can,' he said, 'but n.o.body usually tells kids anything.'

After that, everything went smoothly. Sherlock rode back to Holmes Manor and arrived just as the family was sitting down for lunch. He tried to think through his plan, testing each step for resilience against unexpected events and checking the details for flaws, but he found that his thoughts kept s.h.i.+fting around to Virginia Crowe. He couldn't get the shape of her face, and her cascading hair, from his mind.

Amyus Crowe arrived after lunch, and spent several hours outside, on the veranda, testing Sherlock's thinking processes with mind games and puzzles. One in particular stuck in Sherlock's mind.

'Let's imagine there's three fellows who decide to split the cost of a hotel room,' Crowe said. 'The room costs thirty s.h.i.+llings a night includin' dinner an' breakfast obviously a prestigious place. So the fellows pay the manager ten s.h.i.+llings each. OK so far?'

Sherlock nodded.

'Good. Next mornin' the manager realizes he's made a grievous error. There's a special rate on the room cos of buildin' work in the hotel. So he sends a bellhop bellboy, I think you call 'em to the fellows' room with five s.h.i.+llings to give back. The fellows are so pleased they decide to keep a s.h.i.+lling each an' tip the bellboy two s.h.i.+llings. So, each of the men ended up payin' nine s.h.i.+llings instead of ten, an' the bellboy made two s.h.i.+llings. Right?'

Sherlock nodded again, but his mind was rus.h.i.+ng to keep up. 'Hang on if each man ended up paying only nine s.h.i.+llings, that's twenty-seven s.h.i.+llings in total. Add that to the two s.h.i.+llings the bellboy got, and you get twenty-nine s.h.i.+llings. There's a s.h.i.+lling missing.'

'That's right,' Crowe said. 'You tell me where it went.'

Sherlock spent the next twenty minutes working it out, first in his mind and then on paper. Eventually he admitted defeat. 'I don't know,' he said. 'The manager gave back five s.h.i.+llings, so he didn't keep it; the bellboy got two s.h.i.+llings, so he didn't get it, and the men each got one s.h.i.+lling back, so they didn't get it.'

'The problem's in the description,' Crowe explained. 'Yep, three times nine s.h.i.+llings does equal twenty-seven s.h.i.+llings, but the tip is already included in that. It makes no sense to add the tip to that to make twenty-nine s.h.i.+llings. If you restructure the problem, you realize that the men paid twenty-five s.h.i.+llings for the room and two s.h.i.+llings for the tip, then got a s.h.i.+lling back each, making thirty s.h.i.+llings. And the upshot is . . . ?'

Sherlock nodded. 'Don't let someone else phrase the problem for you, because they might be misleading you. Take the facts they provide, then rephrase the problem in a logical way that enables you to solve it.'

Amyus Crowe left before dinner, and Sherlock returned to his room to think about what he had learned. He came back down for dinner and ate in silence, while his uncle read and his aunt talked to herself. Mrs Eglantine eyed him suspiciously from the side of the room, but he didn't meet her gaze. The only conversation was when his uncle looked up from the book he was reading and said to the housekeeper: 'Mrs Eglantine, what stocks of food do we have within the Manor House gardens?'

'For vegetables, we grow enough for our needs,' she said, her mouth pinched. 'For fowl and for eggs, likewise. As far as meat and fish are concerned, we can probably manage for a few weeks before we run out, if it is carefully husbanded.'

Uncle Sherrinford nodded. 'I think we must a.s.sume the worst. Prepare to smoke or otherwise preserve as much of the meat as possible. Lay in stocks of essentials. If the plague gets hold of Farnham then we may be isolated for some time. I know that Amyus Crowe is counselling caution, but we should take precautions.' He turned to Sherlock. 'Which reminds me Mr Crowe tells me you haven't spent much time on your Latin and Greek.'

'I know,' Sherlock said. 'Mr Crowe and I have been concentrating on . . . Mathematics.'

'Mr Crowe's time is valuable,' Uncle Sherrinford went on in a calm, measured manner. 'And your brother has gone to some expense to secure his services. You may wish to reflect on that.'

'I will, Uncle.'

'Mr Crowe will return tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps you might do some translation for me.'

Remembering Matty's estimate that they wouldn't be back until dinner time, Sherlock winced. He couldn't tell his uncle that he was going to Guildford, however. He might be forbidden to go. Glancing up, he found that Mrs Eglantine was glaring at him with her small, beady eyes. What did she know?

'I'll be here,' he promised, knowing as he said the words that he was unlikely to make it back in time. He would worry about explaining that when it happened.

Finis.h.i.+ng dinner, he excused himself and pushed open the door to the library. His uncle was still in the dining room, eating, and he had said a day or two back that Sherlock could go in the library if he wished, but still he felt like an intruder in this hushed room, curtains drawn against the sunlight, with the smell of leather and old paper filling every nook and cranny. Sherlock browsed along the shelves, looking for something related to local geography. He found several different sets of encyclopaedias, bound volumes of ecclesiastical periodicals, a myriad books containing collections of sermons from what he presumed were renowned clergymen of the past, and many histories of the Christian Church, and eventually came across several shelves of local history and geography. Choosing a book about the waterways of Surrey and Hamps.h.i.+re, he left the library and returned to his room in the eaves of the house.

For half an hour or so he composed a note explaining that he had gone out early and that he would be back later. His first few attempts were too detailed, specifying various untruths about what he was going to do and where, but he realized after a while that the simpler his note was, and the fewer facts it contained that could be checked, the better. Once he had finished it, he lay on his bed and read the book that he had taken from the library.

Sherlock scanned the book looking for mentions of the River Wey, preferably with a map that he could memorize, but soon found more than he expected. The Wey, for instance, wasn't just a river it was apparently something called a 'navigation'. Rivers tended to wind around the landscape in unpredictable directions, whereas ca.n.a.ls built for purposes of trade between towns were straight where possible and used step-like constructions called 'locks' to raise and lower the level of the water depending on the shape of the land. A navigation, he discovered, was a river that had been made more navigable by the building of weirs and locks converting a natural river into something closer to a ca.n.a.l.

Sherlock's head buzzed with details of the immense feats of engineering that had been required to bend the river to the will of man, and the many years that it had taken. He eventually tried to sleep, knowing that he was going to have a long day ahead of him. Although his mind seethed with ideas, images and facts, he slipped into a dreamless sleep before he knew it. When he woke it was still dark, but a fresh breeze was blowing through the window and the birds were beginning to sing in the trees and bushes. It was four o'clock.

He had lain down dressed, and so within moments he was slipping through the darkened house, out on to the attic landing and down the narrow wooden stairs, making sure that he stepped on the outside of the treads to avoid creaks, then cautiously along the first-floor landing, past the bedroom of his aunt and uncle, past their dressing room, past the bathroom, trying not to breathe too heavily, and then down the main stairs that swept in a curve into the ground-floor hall, hugging close to the wall and sensing the weight of the paintings that hung above him, their ornately carved wooden frames dwarfing the pictures themselves into relative insignificance. The only noise was the ticking of the great clock that stood in the angle where the stairs met the tiled floor.

He paused as he reached the hall. Now he had to cross the expanse of tiled floor towards the front door. No more sliding along the wall he would be exposed, out in the open if anyone happened to come out of a doorway or looked down from the upstairs balcony. He knelt for a moment, trying to see if there was any light under any of the doors, but everything was dark. Eventually he screwed up his courage and crossed the tiles. By the time he reached the front door his heart was hammering twice as fast as the ticking of the clock.

The door was bolted, but he slipped the bolt and slowly pulled it open. Someone might notice in the morning that the door had been unlocked, but hopefully they would a.s.sume that someone else had got there first.

The door was almost closed when Sherlock remembered the note that he needed to leave, explaining that he had gone out early. He threw his weight against the door, pus.h.i.+ng it open again, then slipped back inside and left the note on a small side table in the hall next to the hat-stand where the morning and afternoon post was usually placed awaiting collection.

The air outside was cool and refres.h.i.+ng compared with the stuffiness within the house, and there was the suspicion of a glow above the trees where the darkness was giving way to the blue of the dawn. Sherlock sprinted as quickly as he could across the stones of the drive, hearing them crunch beneath his feet, before hitting the silence of the lawn.

It took ten minutes for him to get to the riverbank, following Matty's directions. A long black shape lay on the silvery river, moving back and forth as the water undulated. It looked strangely like a long, low hut that had been built on top of a narrow keel. The only gap was at the rear end, where the hut stopped and there was a platform with room for two people to stand, one of them holding the tiller. A rope attached to the front of the boat dipped towards the surface of the water, then rose again to where a horse contentedly ate its way along the gra.s.sy banks. Unlike Virginia Crowe's magnificent black stallion, this appeared to be a heavy, thick-legged creature with a s.h.a.ggy mane. It glanced once, incuriously, at Sherlock, then went back to eating.

Matty was waiting on the front of the narrowboat, a dark shape against the dawn sky, like the figurehead on a s.h.i.+p or a gargoyle on a cathedral. He was holding a boathook a long wooden pole with a metal hook on one end.

'Let's go,' he said as Sherlock clambered on to the boat. 'That's Albert, by the way.' He made a clicking noise with his tongue. The horse looked round at him with an expression of regret on its long face, then started walking along the side of the river. The rope running between it and the boat pulled taut, then the boat began to move as Albert dragged it along. Matty used the boathook to push the narrowboat away from the bank so that it didn't get caught in the reeds.

'Does he know where he's going?' Sherlock asked.

'What's to know? He walks along the bank pulling the boat after him. If he comes to an obstruction, he stops and I sort it out. You stay at the back and keep a hand on the tiller. If we start drifting out into the river then steer us back towards the bank. There's a blanket on the deck, if you get cold. It's a horse blanket, but it'll keep you just as warm as a fancy one.'

The narrowboat drifted on. Water lapped against its sides in a regular rhythm that lulled Sherlock into a drowsy, almost hypnotic state. The river was empty of anything apart from the occasional duck or goose drifting past.

'What did you find out about the man who died?' Sherlock called forward after a while. 'The first man. The one in the house.'

'He was a tailor,' Matty yelled back. 'Worked for a company who were making uniforms for the Army in Aldershot. Big order, apparently, so the company were calling in all the local people who could cut cloth or sew the pieces together.'

'How did you find out?'

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